Frederik Pohl, who had succeeded Horace Gold as editor of Galaxy, tried to lure a story out of me in March 1965 by sending me a cover painting he intended to run, and asked me to write a story about it. “You have the cover!” he said, “so it will be easy.”
No, it wasn't. I looked at the cover, which featured a large, sad, space-helmeted face, with several crude crosses in the background, and with a space helmet balanced on each cross. I could make nothing of it. I would have told Fred this, but he was an old friend, and I didn't want to break his heart with the knowledge that there was something I couldn't do. So I made a supreme effort and wrote the following, which appeared in the August 1965 Galaxy.
Founding Father
The original combination of catastrophes had taken place five years ago-five revolutions of this planet, HC12549d by the charts, and nameless otherwise. Six-plus revolutions of Earth, but who was counting-anymore?
If the men back home knew, they might say it was a heroic fight, an epic of the Galactic Corps; five men against a hostile world, holding their bitter own for five (or six-plus) years. And now they were dying, the battle lost after all. Three were in final coma, a fourth had his yellow-tinged eyeballs still open, and a fifth was yet on his feet.
But it was no question of heroism at all. It had been five men fighting off boredom and despair and maintaining their metallic bubble of livability only for the most unheroic reason that there was nothing else to do while life remained.
Ifany of them felt stimulated by the battle, he never mentioned it. After the first year they stopped talking of rescue, and after the second a moratorium descended on the word “Earth.”
But one word remained always present. If unspoken it had to be found in their thoughts: “ammonia.”
It had come first while the landing was being scratched out, against all odds, on limping motors and in a battered space can.
You allow for bad breaks, of course; you expect a certain number-but one at a time. A stellar flare fries out the hypercircuits-that can be repaired, given time. A meteorite disaligns the feeder valves-they can be straightened, given time. A trajectory is miscalculated under tension and a momentarily unbearable acceleration tears out the Jump-antennae and dulls the senses of every man on board-but antennae can be replaced and senses will recover, given time.
The chances are one in countless many that all threewill happen at once; and still less that they will all happen during a particularly tricky landing when the one necessary currency for the correction of all errors, time, is the one thing that is most lacking.
The Cruiser John hit that one chance in countless many, and it made a final landing, for it would never lift off a planetary surface again.
That it had landed essentially intact was itself a near miracle. The five were given life for some years at least. Beyond that, only the blundering arrival of another ship could help, but no one expected that. They had had their life's share of coincidences, they knew, and all had been bad.
That was that. And the key word was “ammonia.” With the surface spiraling upward, and death (mercifully quick) facing them at considerably better than even odds, Chou somehow had time to note the absorption spectrograph, which was registering raggedly.
“Ammonia,” he cried out. The others heard but there was no time to pay attention. There was only the wrenching fight against a quick death for the sake of a slow one.
When they landed finally, on sandy ground with sparse bluish (bluish?) vegetation; reedy grass; stunted treelike objects with blue bark and no leaves; no sign of animal life; and with a greenish (greenish?) cloud-streaked sky above-the word came back to haunt them.
“Ammonia?” said Petersen heavily. Chou said, “Four per cent.”
“Impossible,” said Petersen. But it wasn't. The books didn't say impossible. What the Galactic Corps had discovered was that a planet of a certain mass and volume and a certain temperature was an ocean planet and had one of two atmospheres: nitrogen/ oxygen or nitrogen/ carbon dioxide. In the former case, life was advanced; in the latter, it was primitive.
No one checked beyond mass, volume, and temperature any longer. One took the atmosphere (one or the other of them) for granted. But the books didn't say it had to be so; just that it always was so. Other atmospheres were thermodynamically possible, but extremely unlikely, so they weren't found in actual practice.
Until now. The men of the Cruiser John had found one and were bathed for the rest of such life as they could eke out by a nitrogen/carbon dioxide/ammonia atmosphere.
The men converted their ship into an underground bubble of Earth-type surroundings. They could not lift off the surface, nor could they drive a communicating beam through hyperspace, but all else was salvageable. To make up for inefficiencies in the cycling system, they could even tap the planet's own water and air supply, within limits; provided, of course, they subtracted the ammonia.
They organized exploring parties since their suits were in excellent condition and it passed the time. The planet was harmless; no animal life; sparse plant life everywhere. Blue, always blue; ammoniated chlorophyll; ammoniated protein.
They set up laboratories, analyzed the plant components, studied microscopic sections, compiled vast volumes of findings. They tried growing native plants in ammonia-free atmosphere and failed. They made themselves into geologists and studied the planet's crust; astronomers, and studied the spectrum of the planet's sun.
Barrere would say sometimes, “Eventually, the Corps will reach this planet again and we'll leave a legacy of knowledge for them. It's a unique planet after all. There might not be another Earth-type with ammonia in all the Milky Way.”
“Great,” said Sandropoulos bitterly. “What luck for us.”
Sandropoulos worked out the thermodynamics of the situation. “ A metastable system,” he said. “The ammonia disappears steadily through geochemical oxidation that forms nitrogen; the plants utilize nitrogen and re-form ammonia, adapting themselves to the presence of ammonia. If the rate of plant formation of ammonia dropped two per cent, a declining spiral would set in. Plant life would wither, reducing the ammonia still further, and so on.”
“You mean if we killed enough plant life,” said Vlassov, “we could wipe out the ammonia.”
“If we had air sleds and wide-angle blasters, and a year to work in, we might,” said Sandropoulos, “but we haven't and there's a better way. If we could get our own plants going, the formation of oxygen through photosynthesis would increase the rate of ammonia oxidation. Even a small localized rise would lower the ammonia in the region, stimulate Earth-plant growth further and inhibit the native growth, drop the ammonia further, and so on.”
They became gardeners through all the growing season. That was, after all, routine for the Galactic Corps. Life on Earth-type planets was usually of the water/protein type, but variation was infinite and other-world food was rarely nourishing and even more rarely palatable. One had to try Earth plants of different sorts. It often happened (not always, but often) that some types of Earth plants would overrun and drown out the native flora. With the native flora held down, other Earth plants could take root.
Dozens of planets had been converted into new Earths in this fashion. In the process Earthly plants developed hundreds of hardy varieties that flourished under extreme conditions. -All the better with which to seed the next planet.
The ammonia would kill any Earth plant, but the seeds at the disposal of the Cruiser John were not true Earth plants but otherworld mutations of these plants. They fought hard but not well enough. Some varieties grew in a feeble, sickly manner and then died.