Hal Clement - Iceworld

The branch came away easily enough. There was no trouble about that. However, before he had time to raise it to his eyes a puff of smoke spurted from the point where the handler was touching it, and the tissue in the immediate neighborhood of the metal began to turn black. The memories aroused by this phenomenon caused Ken to drop the branch, and he would undoubtedly have taken a step backward had the armor been less cumbersome. As it was, he remembered almost instantly that no gas could penetrate his metal defenses, and once more picked up the bit of vegetation.

The smoke reappeared and grew thicker as he lifted it toward his face port, but he had several seconds to examine its structure before the smoldering wood burst into flame. Although this startled him almost as much as the earlier phenomenon had, he retained his hold on the fragment. He watched with interest as the main branch curled, blackened, glowed, and flamed away, the drier leaves following suit while the green ones merely browned slightly. He made an effort to capture some of the traces of ash that remained when the process was completed, but all he was able to save were some bits of charcoal from the less completely burned portions. This he also stowed in the torpedo, Feth guiding the little vessel over to him in response to spoken directions.

A bit of soil, scraped up from beneath the plant, smoked but did not burn. Ken obtained a number of airtight cans from the cargo compartment of the torpedo and spent some time scooping bits of soil up in these. He also compressed some of the air into a cylinder, using a small piston-type pump from which Feth had carefully removed all traces of lubricant. It leaked a trifle, but its moving parts moved, which was a pleasant surprise.

“There,” said Ken, when the task was completed. “If there are any seeds in that earth, we should be able to build a little vivarium and find out at least something about this life and its needs.”

“Do you have a balance between makers and eaters?” asked Feth. “Suppose these plants are all — what would you call them? oxidizers? — and you don’t have the corresponding reducers. I should think you’d need a balance of some sort, with any sort of life — otherwise you’d have perpetual motion.”

“I can’t tell that, of course, until we try. Still, I might go down this mountain a little farther and try to pick up a wider variety. There are still some empty cans.”

“Another point — I don’t recall your making any arrangement to keep them at the proper temperature. I know they’re almost as cold as outer space, but there’s a difference between almost and all the way.”

“We’ll leave the cans in the torpedo until we get back to One. With no air, they’ll change temperature very slowly, and we can leave the torpedo somewhere on the twilight zone of One where it’ll stay about the right temperature until we can build a chamber with thermostats and a refrigerator — it won’t be very large; I have only a couple of cubic yards of air.”

“All right, I guess you win. If it doesn’t work, it will be small loss anyway. Are your feet getting cold yet?”

“Not so far — and believe me, I’m looking for it!”

“I’m not sure I believe you. I have a pretty good idea of where most of your attention is. Have you seen any animal life? I’ve heard the old buzzing once or twice.”

“Have you? I hadn’t noticed it. All I can hear comes from the mike in the torpedo, so I should get anything you do.”

“I told you where your attention was. Well, I’ll call you if I hear it again.” He fell silent, and Ken resumed his laborious journey downhill. With frequent rests, he finally succeeded in filling and sealing all his containers and depositing them in the cargo space of the torpedo. He was interrupted once by Feth, who reported that the buzzing was again audible; but even though Ken himself could hear it when he listened, he was unable to find the source. Flies are not very large creatures, and the light was very dim anyway by Sarrian standards. Since there was nothing very appetizing even for a fly in the cargo compartment above which the microphone was located, the buzzing presently ceased.

Ken took a final look at the landscape, describing everything as completely as he could so that the record being made far above would be useful. The peaks stood out far more prominently now, since some of them were higher than he was. By ignoring the vegetation with which their slopes were clothed and imagining that it was sunset just after a particularly good dust storm, he was even able to find something almost homelike in the scene — there were times when even Sarr’s blue-white sun could look as dull as the luminary of this icy world. At such times, of course, there was always a wind which would put Earth’s wildest hurricane to shame, and the silence around him was out of place on that score; but for just a moment his imagination was able to carry him across two hundred parsecs of emptiness to a world of warmth and life.

He came to himself with a little start. This place was nothing like home — it wasn’t exactly dead, but it should be; dead as the vacuum of space it so greatly resembled. Its cold was beginning to creep into him, mentally in the form of a return of the horror he had felt the first time he had seen the planet and physically by a slight ache in his feet. Even the engineering miracle he was wearing could not keep out the fingers of the cold indefinitely. He started to call Feth, to have the torpedo lifted so that he could get at the chains and clamps; but the request was not uttered.

As suddenly as it had done a few days before, a human voice cut sharply through the stillness of the Planet of Ice.

It was not, in the end, his own discouragement which caused the cessation of Roger’s nocturnal watchings. The night on which the Sarrians tested the armor was, indeed, the last of these journeys; but this was owing to reasons beyond the boy’s control. When he descended in the morning, his father met him and accompanied him outside. There he pointed out certain footprints. Then they went up to Roger’s room together, and the rope came to light. Mr. Wing concluded the proceedings with a request for an explanation.

“Don’t get the idea that anyone tattled,” he added. “I don’t know whether you have anyone in your confidence, even. Both your mother and I saw that you were getting most of your sleep done daytimes. Well, what’s the story?”

Roger never even thought of lying. The family custom of proving questionable statements on challenge had taught him, as it had the other children, to recognize evidence and forego useless denial. The only question in his mind was whether to tell or not. He knew there would be no punishment if he refused; but also, there would be no help from his father on a problem that was decidedly beyond his own abilities, and there would most certainly be no more night journeys in search of landing torpedoes. He told what had happened, with all the detail the near-eidetic memory of childhood could evoke. His father was silent for a minute or two when he had finished.

“We’ll say nothing about your following Don and me,” he said at last. “You were never told in so many words not to, and curiosity is a healthy trait. Of course you let yourself get caught in the woods at night without food, water or light, and that is a more serious matter in view of the fact that you’re supposed to know better. However, the story being as interesting as it is, I guess we’ll suspend sentence on that offense.” Roger grinned.

“What would the sentence have been?”

“The logical one would be restriction to the half-mile circle for a week or two. You certainly behaved like a six-year-old. Let’s consider that that’s hanging over your head, and go on to more immediate matters. I suppose Edie knows all about this?”