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built them? Or was there transfer of material over Titan's surface in ways no
one had yet figured out? Could any of this stuff evaporate?
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Surely not in significant amounts at this temperature. He thought all this
aloud;
Status would store the words, and speculations were always starting points.
And he would't have time to fall in love with these.
Was subsurface transport of solutions possible? More would have to be done to
keep proper track of factory roots when the new ones were planted.
Those few minutes while he waited for the next set of results raised thoughts
that came closer than had any of his friends' arguments to making Goodall
change his plans and persuading him to climb back aboard
Crius.
There was so much still to do!
But the places where he was pressed, however lightly, by his suit made their
own counterarguments.
Yes, there was a lot to do, but he simply wouldn't be able to do it.
He heard the report that here, too, the liquid part of the gel was probably
vinyl alcohol probably; don't jump to conclusions, you old idiot; once is more
than enough took it as a fitting summary of what he'd done so far, and started
back toward the lake.
Crius was still there, of course; he would have heard the departure if anyone
had decided to take her off.
For just an instant he panicked; had he plugged the takeover jack back in?
Then he remembered that with no one in the coffin there was no need, and it
had already flown without him.
He looked the jet over carefully there was no hurry about the final
experiment and noted that there was no frozen hydrocarbon on the wings. He
should have checked that earlier; it would have been more likely on his own
landing. Had he been merely lucky, or had Ginger's talk-down been designed to
keep a little extra speed? No, he had been frighteningly close to wing stall
those last few seconds, he recalled.
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Your mind is wandering, old fellow. You're doing the right thing. Do it now.
He took the seismic cans and drove them firmly into the surface, one midway
between lake and tar patch and the other a quarter of the way around the lake
to the north. He wished he had thought to bring at least one of them over to
the crater wall, and briefly wondered about doing so now did he have enough
time in the suit for such a trip? Probably, but he couldn't spend it for that.
He was burning up.
One lab unit he set down a meter from the edge of the lake, another just in
the liquid, positioning both carefully. He watched for a minute or two to make
sure that the latter wouldn't roll there was no way of telling the slope of
the lake bottom, since the liquid was not very clear. He pointed the latter
fact out to Peter. The remaining lab units he set down on areas which had been
scorched, or seared, or melted, by the rocket exhausts of the two landings and
one takeoff. This didn't matter much, since the devices were mobile anyway,
but it would be nice to see for them to see what chemical effects there might
be from brief warmings of the ninety-K surface. Maybe the earlier landings had
already caused contamination, especially
Oceanus's.
No, don't think of that.
And now there was only one thing left to do. No, two. He repeated the order
releasing the detailed crater information to Status's regular files. Then he
took one more look around the crater, clearly enough visible in the faint
sunlight filtering through the smog. He looked at the lake, the parked
aircraft, noted happily that he felt neither pain nor temptation for the
moment, and walked out on the patch.
"Arthur ," came a faint, distressed female voice.
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"Be sure you don't miss any readings from here for Status," he answered.
"Here's where I'm betting the changes will be."
He turned off his suit heaters I remembered this time, he approved himself and
waited a few minutes.
The suit insulation is really good, he reflected.
Then the cold did begin to creep in. It was not at all painful. He should have
tried this before; he couldn't feel much of anything, for the first time in
years.
But he couldn't enjoy it for long. His personal enzymes would need access to
the tar, or vice versa, and if he waited too long he wouldn't be able to move.
His hand went to his faceplate release as he knelt down and leaned forward.
But nothing happened to the plate. The outside pressure was far higher, and
the plate wouldn't open. It was held against its gasket by Titanian air. He
gasped in surprise, and for a few seconds actually worried. Was this all
wasted? Would he just lie here, accomplishing nothing, while the tar
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