Spacehounds of IPC

E >> Edward Elmer Smith >> Spacehounds of IPC

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"Gosh!" he yawned mightily as he joined the girl at breakfast. "I don't
know when I've had such a gorgeous sleep. How do you get by on so
little?"

"I don't. I sleep a lot, but I do it every night, instead of working for
four days and nights on end and then trying to make up all those four
nights' sleep at once. I'm going to break you of that, too, Steve, if
it's the last thing I ever do."

"There might be certain advantages in it, at that," he conceded, "but
sometimes you've got to do work when it's got to be done, instead of
just between sleeps. However, I'll try to do better. Certainly it is
a wonderful relief to get out of that mess, isn't it?"

"I'll say it is! But I wish that those folks were more like people.
They're nice, I think, really, but they're so ... so ... well, so
ghastly that it simply gives me the blue shivers just to look at one
of them!"

"They're pretty gruesome, no fooling," he agreed, "but you get used to
things like that. I just about threw a fit the first time I ever saw
a Martian, and the Venerians are even worse in some ways--they're so
clammy and dead-looking--but now I've got real friends on both planets.
One thing, though, gives me the pip. I read a story a while ago--the
latest best-seller thing of Thornton's named 'Interstellar Slush' or
some such tr...."

"Cleophora--An Interstellar Romance," she corrected him. "I thought it
was wonderful!"

"I didn't. It's fundamentally unsound. Look at our nearest neighbors,
who probably came from the same original stock we did. A Tellurian
can admire, respect, or like a Venerian, yes. But for _loving_ one of
them--wow! Beauty is purely relative, you know. For instance, I think
that you are the most perfectly beautiful thing I ever saw; but no
Venerian would think so. Far from it. Any Martian that hadn't seen many
of us would have to go rest his eyes after taking one good look at
you. Considering what love means, it doesn't stand to reason that any
Tellurian woman could possibly fall in love with any man not of her own
breed. Any writer is wrong who indulges in interplanetary love affairs
and mad passions. They simply don't exist. They _can't_ exist--they're
against all human instincts."

"Inter-planetary--in this solar system--yes. But the Dacrovos were just
like us, only nicer."

"That's what gives me the pip. If our own cousins of the same solar
system are so repulsive to us, how would we be affected by entirely
alien forms of intelligence?"

"May be you're right, of course--but you may be wrong, too," she
insisted. "The Universe is big enough, so that people like the Dacrovos
may possibly exist in it somewhere. May be the Big Three will discover a
means of interstellar travel--then I'll get to see them myself, perhaps."

"Yes, and _if_ we do, and _if_ you ever see any such people, I'll bet
that the sight of them will make your hair curl right up into a ball,
too! But about Barkovis--remember how diplomatic the thoughts were that
he sent us? He described our structure as being 'compact,' but I got the
undertone of his real thoughts, as well. Didn't you?"

"Yes, now that you mention it, I did. He really thought that we were
white-hot, under-sized, overpowered, warty, hairy, hideously opaque and
generally repulsive little monstrosities--thoroughly unpleasant and
distasteful. But he was friendly, just the same. Heavens, Steve! Do you
suppose that he read our real thoughts, too?"

"Sure he did; but he is intelligent enough to make allowances, the same
as we are doing. He isn't any more insulted than we are. He knows that
such feelings are ingrained and cannot be changed."

* * * * *

Breakfast over, they experienced a new sensation. For the first time in
months they had nothing to do! Used as they were to being surrounded by
pressing tasks, they enjoyed their holiday immensely for a few hours.
Sitting idly at the communicator plate, they scanned the sparkling
heavens with keen interest. Beneath them Jupiter was a brilliant
crescent not far from the sun in appearance, which latter had already
grown perceptibly smaller and less bright. Above them, and to their
right, Saturn shone refulgently, his spectacular rings plainly visible.
All about them were the glories of the firmament, which never fail to
awe the most seasoned observer. But idleness soon became irksome to
those two active spirits, and Stevens prowled restlessly about their
narrow quarters.

"I'm going to go to work before I go dippy," he soon declared. "They've
got lots of power, and we can rig up a transmitter unit to send it over
here to our receptor. Then I can start welding the old _Hope_ together
without waiting until we get to Titan to start it. Think I'll signal
Barkovis to come over, and see what he thinks about it."

The Titanian commander approved the idea, and the transmitting field was
quickly installed. Nadia insisted that she, too, needed to work, and
that she was altogether too good a mechanic to waste; therefore the two
again labored mightily together, day after day. But the girl limited
rigidly their hours of work to those of the working day; and evening
after evening Barkovis visited with them for hours. Dressed in his heavy
space-suit and supported by a tractor beam well out of range of what
seemed to him terrific heat radiated by the bodies of the Terrestrials,
he floated along unconcernedly; while over the multiplex cable of the
thought-exchanger he conversed with the man and woman seated just inside
the open outer door of their air-lock. The Titanian's appetite for
information was insatiable--particularly did he relish everything
pertaining to the earth and to the other inner planets, forever barred
to him and to his kind. In return Stevens and Nadia came gradually to
know the story of the humanity of Titan.

"I am glad beyond measure to have known you," Barkovis mused, one night.
"Your existence proves that there is truth in mythology, as some of
us have always believed. Your visit to Titan will create a furor in
scientific circles, for you are impossibility incarnate--personifications
of the preposterous. In you, wildest fancy had become commonplace.
According to many of our scientists, it is utterly impossible for you
to exist. Yet you say, and it must be, that there are millions upon
millions of similar beings. Think of it! Venerians, Tellurians,
Martians, the satellite dwellers of the lost space-ship, and us--so
similar mentally, yet physically how different!"

"But where does the mythology come in?" thought Nadia.

"We have unthinkably ancient legends which say that once Titan was
extremely hot, and that our remote ancestors were beings of fire, in
whose veins ran molten water instead of blood. Since our recorded
history goes back some tens of thousands of Saturnian years, and since
in that long period there has been no measurable change in us, few
of us have believed in the legends at all. They have been thought the
surviving figments of a barbarous, prehistoric worship of the sun.
However, such a condition is not in conflict with the known facts of
cosmogony, and since there actually exists such a humanity as yours--a
humanity whose bodily tissues actually _are_ composed largely of molten
water--those ancient legends must indeed have been based upon truth.

"What an evolution! Century after century of slowly decreasing
temperature--one continuous struggle to adapt the physique to a
constantly changing environment. First they must have tried to maintain
their high temperature by covering and heating their cities.--Then,
as vegetation died, they must have bred into their plants the ability
to use as sap purely chemical liquids, such as our present natural
fluids--which also may have been partly synthetic then--instead of the
molten water to which they had been accustomed. They must have modified
similarly the outer atmosphere; must have made it more reactive, to
compensate for the lowered temperature at which metabolism must take
place. As Titan grew colder and colder they probably dug their cities
deeper and ever deeper; until humanity came finally to realize that it
must itself change completely or perish utterly.

"Then we may picture them as aiding evolution in changing their body
chemistry. For thousands, and thousands of years there must have gone
on the gradual adaptation of blood stream and tissue to more and more
volatile liquids, and to lower and still lower temperatures. This must
have continued until Titan arrived at the condition which has now
obtained for ages--a condition of thermal equilibrium with space upon
one hand and upon the other the sun, which changes appreciably only in
millions upon millions of years. In equilibrium at last--with our bodily
and atmospheric temperatures finally constant at their present values,
which seem as low to you as yours appear high to us. Truly, an evolution
astounding to contemplate!"

"But how about power?" asked Stevens. "You seem to have all you want,
and yet it doesn't stand to reason that there could be very much
generated upon a satellite so old and so cold."

"You are right. For ages there has been but little power produced
upon Titan. Many cycles ago, however, our scientists had developed
rocket-driven space-ships, with which they explored our neighboring
satellites, and even Saturn itself. It is from power plants upon Saturn
that we draw energy. Their construction was difficult in the extreme,
since the pioneers had to work in braces because of the enormous force
of gravity. Then, too, they had to be protected from the overwhelming
pressure and poisonous qualities of the air, and insulated from a
temperature far above the melting point of water. In such awful heat,
of course, our customary building material, water, could not be
employed...."

"But all our instruments have indicated that Saturn is _cold_!" Stevens
interrupted.

"Its surface temperature, as read from afar, would be low," conceded
Barkovis, "but the actual surface of the planet is extremely hot, and
is highly volcanic. Practically none of its heat is radiated because of
the great density and depth of its atmosphere, which extends for many
hundreds of your kilometers. It required many thousands of lives and
many years of time to build and install those automatic power plants,
but once they were in operation, we were assured of power for many tens
of thousands of years to come."

"Our system of power transmission is more or less like yours, but we
haven't anything like your range. Suppose you'd be willing to teach me
the computation of your fields?"

"Yes, we shall be glad to give you the formulae. Being an older race, it
is perhaps natural that we should have developed certain refinements as
yet unknown to you. But I am, I perceived, detaining you from your time
of rest--goodbye," and Barkovis was wafted back toward his mirrored
globe.

"What do you make of this chemical solution blood of theirs, Steve?"
asked Nadia, watching the placidly floating form of the Titanian
captain.

"Not much. I may have mentioned before that there are one or two, or
perhaps even three men who are better chemists than I am. I gathered
that it is something like a polyhydric alcohol and something like a
substituted hydrocarbon, and yet different from either in that it
contains flourin in loose combination. I think it is something that our
Tellurian chemists haven't got yet; but they've got so many organic
compounds now that they may have synthesized it, at that. You see,
Titan's atmosphere isn't nearly as dense as ours, but what there is
of it is pure dynamite. Ours is a little oxygen, mixed with a lot of
inert ingredients. Theirs is oxygen, heavily laced with flourin. It's
_reactive_, no fooling! However, something pretty violent must be
necessary to carry on body reactions at such a temperature as theirs."

"Probably; but I know even less about that kind of thing than you do.
Funny, isn't it, the way he thinks 'water' when he means ice, and always
thinks of our real water as being molten?"

"Reasonable enough when you think about it. Temperature differences are
logarithmic, you know, not arithmetic--the effective difference between
his body temperature and ours is perhaps even greater than that between
ours and that of melted iron. We never think of iron as being a liquid,
you know."

"That's right, too. Well, good night, Steve dear."

"'Bye, little queen of space--see you at breakfast," and the _Forlorn
Hope_ became dark and silent.

* * * * *

Day after day the brilliant sphere flew toward distant Saturn, with the
wreckage of the _Forlorn Hope_ in tow. Piece by piece that wreckage was
brought together and held in place by the Titanian tractors; and slowly
but steadily, under Stevens' terrific welding projector, the stubborn
steel flowed together, once more to become a seamless, spaceworthy
structure. And Nadia, the electrician, followed close behind the welder.
Wielding torch, pliers and spanner with practised hand, she repaired or
cut out of circuit the damaged accumulator cells and reunited the ends
of each severed power lead. Understanding Nadia's work thoroughly, the
Titanians were not particularly interested in it; but whenever Stevens
made his way along an outside seam, he had a large and thrillingly
horrified gallery. Everyone who could possibly secure permission to
leave the sphere did so, each upon his own pencil of force, and went
over to watch the welder. They did not come close to him--to venture
within fifty feet of that slow moving spot of scintillating brilliance,
even in a space-suit, meant death--but, poised around him in space, they
watched with shuddering, incredulous amazement, the monstrous human
being in whose veins ran molten water instead of blood; whose body was
already so fiercely hot that it could exist unharmed while working
practically without protection, upon _liquefied_ metal!

Finally the welding was done. The insulating space was evacuated and
held its vacuum--outer and inner shells were bottle-tight. The two
mechanics heaved deep sighs of relief as they discarded their cumbersome
armor and began to repair what few of their machine tools had been
damaged by the slashing plane of force which had so neatly sliced the
_Forlorn Hope_ into sections.

"Say, big fellow, you're the guy that slings the ink, ain't you?" Nadia
extinguished her torch and swaggered up to Stevens, hands on hips, her
walk an exaggerated roll. "Write me out a long walk. This job's all
played out, so I think I'll get me a good job on Titan. I said give me
my time, you big stiff!"

"You didn't say nothing!" growled Stevens in his deepest bass, playing
up to her lead as he always did. "Bounce back, cub, you've struck a
rubber fence! You signed on for duration and you'll stick--see?"

Arm in arm they went over to the nearest communicator plate. Flipping
the switch, Stevens turned the dial and Titan shone upon the screen; so
close, that it no longer resembled a moon, but was a world toward which
they were falling with an immense velocity.

"Not close enough to make out much detail yet--let's take another
look at Saturn," and Stevens projected the visiray beam out toward the
mighty planet. It was now an enormous full moon, almost five degrees in
apparent diameter,[1] its visible surface an expanse of what they knew
to be billowing cloud, shining brilliantly white in the pale sunlight,
broken only by a dark equatorial band.

[Footnote 1: The moon subtends an angle of about one-half of a degree.]

"Those rings were _such_ a gorgeous spectacle a little while ago!" Nadia
mourned. "It's a shame that Titan has to be right in their plane, isn't
it? Think of living this close to one of the most wonderful sights in
the Solar System, and never being able to see it. Think they know what
they're missing, Steve?"

"We'll have to ask Barkovis," Stevens replied. He swung the communicator
beam back toward Titan, and Nadia shuddered.

"Oh, it's hideous!" she exclaimed. "I thought that it would improve as
we got closer, but the plainer we can see it, the worse it gets. Just to
think of human beings, even such cold-blooded ones as those over there,
living upon such a horrible moon and _liking_ it, gives mi the blue
shivers!"

"It's pretty bleak, no fooling," he admitted, and peered through the
eyepiece of the visiray telescope, studying minutely the forbidding
surface of the satellite they were so rapidly approaching.

Larger and larger it loomed, a cratered, jagged globe of desolation
indescribable; of sheer, bitter cold incarnate and palpable; of stark,
sharp contrasts. Gigantic craters, in whose yawning depths no spark of
warmth had been generated for countless cycles of time, were surrounded
by vast plains eroded to the dead level of a windless sea. Every lofty
object cast a sharply outlined shade of impenetrable blackness, beside
which the weak light of the sun became a dazzling glare. The ground was
either a brilliant white or an intense black, unrelieved by half-tones.

"I can't hand it much, either, Nadia, but it's all in the way you've
been brought up, you know. This is home to them, and just to look at
Tellus would give them the pip. Ha! Here's something you'll like, even
if it does look so cold that it makes me feel like hugging a couple of
heater coils. It's Barkovis' city the one we're heading for, I think.
It's close enough now so that we can get it on the plate," and he set
the communicator beam upon the metropolis of Titan.

"Why, I don't see a thing, Steve--where and what is it?" They were
dropping vertically downward toward the center of a vast plain of white,
featureless and desolate; and Nadia stared in disappointment.

"You'll see directly--it's too good to spoil by telling you what to look
for or wh...."

"Oh, there it is!" she cried. "It _is_ beautiful, Steve, but how
frightfully, utterly cold!"

* * * * *

A flash of prismatic color had caught the girl's eye, and, one
transparent structure thus revealed to her sight, there had burst into
view a city of crystal. Low buildings of hexagonal shape, arranged
in irregularly variant hexagonal patterns, extended mile upon mile.
From the roofs of the structures lacy spires soared heavenward;
inter-connected by long, slim cantilever bridges whose prodigious
spans seemed out of all proportion to the gossamer delicacy of their
construction. Buildings, spires, and bridges formed fantastic
geometrical designs, at which Nadia exclaimed in delight.

"I've just thought of what that reminds me of--it's snowflakes!"

"Sure--I knew it was something familiar. Snowflakes--no two are ever
exactly alike, and yet every one is symmetrical and hexagonal. We're
going to land on the public square--see the crowds? Let's put on our
suits and go out."

The _Forlorn Hope_ lay in a hexagonal park, and near it the Titanian
globe had also come to rest. All about the little plot towered the
glittering buildings of crystal, and in its center played a fountain;
a series of clear and sparkling cascades of liquid jewels. Under foot
there spread a thick, soft carpet of whitely brilliant vegetation.
Throngs of the grotesque citizens of Titania were massed to greet the
space-ships; throngs clustering close about the globular vessel, but
maintaining a respectful distance from the fiercely radiant Terrestrial
wedge. All were shouting greetings and congratulations--shouts which
Stevens found as intelligible as his own native tongue.

"Why, I can understand every word they say, Steve!" Nadia exclaimed, in
surprise. "How come, do you suppose?"

"I can, too. Don't know--must be from using that thought telephone of
theirs so much, I guess. Here comes Barkovis--I'll ask him."

The Titanian commander had been in earnest conversation with a group of
fellow-creatures and was now walking toward the Terrestrials, carrying
the multiple headsets. Placing them upon the white sward, he backed
away, motioning the two visitors to pick them up.

"It may not be necessary, Barkovis," Stevens said, slowly and clearly.
"We do not know why, but we can understand what your people are saying,
and it may be that you can now understand us."

"Oh, yes, I can understand your English perfectly. A surprising
development, but perhaps, after all, one that should have been expected,
from the very nature of the device we have been using. I wanted to tell
you that I have just received grave news, which makes it impossible for
us to help you immediately, as I promised. While we were gone, one of
our two power-plants upon Saturn failed. In consequence, Titan's power
has been cut to a minimum, since maintaining our beam at that great
distance required a large fraction of the output of the other plant.
Because of this lack, the Sedlor walls were weakened to such a point
that in spite of the Guardian's assurances, I think trouble is
inevitable. At all events, it is of the utmost importance that we begin
repairing the damaged unit, for that is to be a task indeed."

"Yes, it will take time," agreed Stevens, remembering what the
Titanian captain had told him concerning the construction of those
plants--generators which had been in continuous and automatic operation
for thousands of Saturnian years.

"It will take more than time--it will take lives," replied Barkovis,
gravely. "Scores, perhaps hundreds, of us will never again breathe the
clear, pure air of Titan. In spite of all precaution and all possible
bracing and insulation, man after man after man will be crushed by
his own weight, volatilized by the awful heat, poisoned by the foul
atmosphere, or will burst into unthinkable flames at the touch of some
flying spark from the inconceivably hot metals with which we shall have
to work. A horrible fate, but we shall not lack for volunteers."

"Sure not; and of course you yourself would go. And I never thought of
the effect a spark would have on you--your tissues would probably be
wildly inflammable. But say, I just had a thought. Just how hot is the
air at those plants and just what is the actual pressure?"

"According to the records, the temperature is some forty of your
centigrade degrees above the melting-point of water, and the pressure
is not far short of two of your meters of mercury. I find it almost
impossible to think of mercury as a liquid, however."

"You find it impossible, since you use it as a metal, for wires in coils
and so on. But plus forty, while pretty warm, isn't impossible, by any
means; and we could stand double our air pressure for quite a while.
Both my partner and I are pretty fair mechanics and we've got quite a
line of machine tools, such as you could not possibly have here. We'll
give it a whirl, since we owe you something already. Lead us to it,
ace--but wait a minute! We can't see through the fog, so couldn't find
the plants, and probably your wiring diagrams would explode if I touched
them."

"I never thought of your helping us," mused Barkovis. "The idea of any
living being existing in that inferno has always been unthinkable, but
the difficulties you mention are slight. We have already built in our
vessel communicators similar to yours, and radio sets. With these we can
guide you and explain the plants to you as you work, and our tractor
beams will be of assistance to you in moving heavy objects, even at such
distances from the surface as we Titanians shall have to maintain. If
you will set out a flask of your atmosphere, we will analyze it, for the
thought has come to me that perhaps, being planet-dwellers yourselves,
the air of Saturn might not be as poisonous to you as it is to us."

"That's a thought, too," and, the news broadcast, it was not long until
the two ships leaped into the air, to the accompaniment of the cheers
and plaudits of a watching multitude.

* * * * *

In a wide curve they sped toward Saturn. Passing so close to the
enormous rings that the individual meteoric fragments could almost be
seen with the unaided eye, they flashed on and on, slowing down long
before they approached the upper surface of the envelope of cloud.
The spherical space-ship stopped and Stevens, staring into his useless
screen, drove the _Forlorn Hope_ downward mile after mile, solely under
Barkovis' direction, changing course and power from time to time as the
Titanian's voice came from the speaker at his elbow. Slower and slower
became the descent, until finally, almost upon the broad, flat roof
of the power-plant, Stevens saw it in his plate. Breathing deeply in
relief, he dropped quickly down upon a flat pavement, neutralized his
controls, and turned to Nadia.

"Well, old golf-shootist, we're here at last--now we'll go out and see
what's gone screwy with the works. Remember that gravity is about double
normal here, and conduct yourself accordingly."

"But it's supposed to be only about nine-tenths," she objected.

"That's at the outer surface of the atmosphere," he replied. "And it's
_some_ atmosphere--not like the thin layer we've got on Tellus."

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