Half Life by Hal Clement Page A

standing and the other two at the edge—one on the side toward the factory, the other on the opposite one. Then grab a sample and get it up here.”
    “But Art—I have hours left in my suit!”
    “I’ll give you five minutes to think of something you can do down there that would be more useful than bringing some of that glop up where we can really study it. I admit it’s probably not alive, but anything squishy at that temperature needs explaining. Think on your feet!”
    “You’ve already grabbed first-landing glory,” remarked Inger. “The first person to walk on Titan.”
    “I wasn’t thinking of that!” the woman snapped back, indignantly but perhaps not quite truthfully. “Anyone willing to face the unforeseens which might keep her from getting back could have done that.”
    “Four minutes.”
    “I—I didn’t have a—all right. I’ll bring one of the ice chunks, too. You were wondering about the carbonates, weren’t you?”
    “Yes, I was going to suggest that. Can you carry both samples? The storage bins in the jets aren’t all that large, and I don’t suppose you took any specimen bags down with you.”
    “I didn’t, I’m afraid.”
    “Good.”
    “Why is that good?”
    “It helps me believe you didn’t premeditate this trick very long or very carefully. Got your specimens?”
    There followed some seconds of silence. The watchers could see the armored figure bent over a glassy boulder, but for some reason it wasn’t moving. Belvew’s worry was the first to reach speech pressure.
    “Something wrong, Ginger? That’s a lot too big for any of the bins.” Goodall didn’t seem to be worried at all.
    “I’m afraid it is,” Ginger finally said as she straightened up. “But it’s interesting. We’ll have to carry personal cameras after this. Do we have any small enough to attach to our suits and built to stand local conditions?”
    “We’ll see,” snapped the commander. “Someone can design and grow one, maybe. Tell us what you have there. Maybe you could bring a piece of it up.”
    “I didn’t foresee needing a pick, either. How do I break off a piece?”
    “Just tell us what it is!”
    “A vug. A geode, if the word can be used on Titan. A cavity in the boulder, about half filled with crystals—well, maybe not crystals; the stuff looks more like mold or absorbent cotton. White and rather fluffy.”
    “Hit it with another rock. Get a piece off somehow!”
    There were plenty of smaller fragments around, presumably relics of the fallen cliff dating from Inger’s first landing. One of these, a rough cube half a meter in each dimension, was no problem to lift even for an ailing human being. Ginger carried it over to the larger fragment, raised it above her helmet, and slammed it down as hard as she could, lifting herself well off the ground in the process but landing on her feet.
    Titan’s gravity was little help, but the ice was brittle. The piece she was using as a tool shattered into dozens of fragments, but her target split only in two, with the vug in the larger part.
    “Lucky you knocked that cliff down, Barn,” she remarked as she sought another hammer.
    “Any time.”
    The third blow produced a fragment bearing some of the “mold” on one of its surfaces and, Ginger judged, small enough to go into sample bin.
    All watched her approach the aircraft, the screens losing bits of her image in the odd patterns the watchers had seen before. No one had thought to have Status save the human figure rather than exclude the plane.
    The ice fragment did indeed fit in a bin. The other specimen would have also, but another problem came up. She couldn’t let go; it was too sticky to detach from her glove.
    “What do I do now?” she asked after several minutes of effort that merely distributed the stuff over both hands.
    “Just bring it back, of course. All the controls are in your suit. Stuff outside won’t interfere with flying.”
    Goodall’s impatience was getting the better