“I will be glad to con while…”
“I’ll do it!” Charley cut in. Joe made no attempt to argue; Molly would have been surprised if he had. She was a little startled at Charley—not at his willingness to interrupt, which all were getting used to, but at the strength of the feeling that seemed to have prompted the interruption.
“It might be better,” suggested Carol, “that we finish setting out the wind-robots as planned; then Molly, and Charley, if he wants to help her, can take a really close look at the short-wave region.”
“There is certainly little point in all of us being there; the originally scheduled work should go on as far as possible,” agreed Joe.
“And none of you will be very happy with no clouds between you and even that companion star,” added Molly. “All right, we’ll do it that way. I can look for Jenny’s life as well as for my ice—though, of course, Jenny’s idea may mean that the ice is less likely—I’ll have to think about that.”
“If you see any, sample it!” said Jenny. “Of course. Also any off-colored surface areas.” “What would you consider off-color?” asked Joe pointedly.
“Well, the sand is practically white to me by daylight-it’s mostly ammonium salts, Jenny says. The hard rock has all been darker, and I suppose that would be silicates with heavy metals. This part of space seems to have been through more stellar life cycles even than mine. The School planets run pretty high in heavy metals, don’t they, except for the way-out common ones like Sink?”
“Even the dust in those is iron-rich,” Jenny confirmed.
“Thanks. It goes along with the brand-new stars and nebulosity here at Eta Carinae, after all. Let me know when you finish some of those rock analyses, please, Jen. I guess anything that isn’t either practically white or practically black will need a closer look. There’s no point in trying to put other color words through the translators; we respond too differently to various wavelength mixtures. Two samples that looked alike to me might be very different to some or all of you, and conversely.”
“Any further thoughts?” Joe was still asking the key questions. No one said anything, and the boring aspect of the flight was resumed.
Molly spent much of the time wondering who would be next to make a dangerous or ridiculous mistake, and suspected that Charley was thinking along the same lines. The difference between them, she reflected, was that the Kantrick was probably hoping for it to happen—to someone else, of course. His sense of humor seemed to work best in situations that made him look better than others—though to do him justice, as Molly suddenly realized, he had never displayed it in a really serious situation like the present one. At parties, on picnics—if an outing where everyone wore environmental armor could be given such a name—even in class, he could be objectionable; in the lab he had been different, and he might well be so in the field. She’d give him the benefit of the doubt until something did happen.
Disappointingly, the surface showed nothing surprising or encouraging to Molly’s eyes, and only the regular samples were taken at the three sites where robots were left in open starlight. Jenny’s enthusiasm waned visibly.
As had been predicted, the sun was almost gone when they got back to the tent, though it took long-wave sensors to prove it.
Charley had decided entirely on his own, as both Nethneen and Human had been very careful not to say anything that might have been taken as a suggestion, that he would also accompany Molly to the heavily clouded arctic. He gave no special reason, but suddenly broached the idea toward the end of the search around the other pole. This area had proved to be mostly bare rock; there were no lakes or rivers, and very little loose sand or dust, but a very irregular, mountainous topography. Molly suspected that something about this fact had set the Kantrick thinking, and the report certainly bothered Carol. She couldn’t see why there should be mountains.
Molly herself spent some of the unloading time rigging a hood around her conning screen, and now she lifted the boat and headed it north, still hoping for something that looked more or less like a natural landscape instead of the dim orange-red patterns of which her eyes were so tired. She had not completely forgotten Charley’s prediction about the boat, but if he was willing to ride in it, she saw no reason to worry.
Molly had never seen Earth except from a distance, of course, being far short of retirement age. However, she was familiar enough with holograms and other images of what was technically her home world, as well as of many others. This was not exactly like any of them, but not wholly new, either.
The dunes in the region where they had landed were too light in color to be any sand she knew, but not light enough to be snow. Where these ceased, as they did before the boat had gone a hundred kilometers, the surface texture remained about the same for a while. Then increasing areas of bare solid that might be rock—it couldn’t be ice; it was far too dark—began to show. It was not really black in color. There were dark browns, traces of what to Human eyes looked reddish brown and occasionally a real red, and sometimes there showed bits of what she suspected might have been greenish or even lighter yellow patches if the light getting through the clouds had been bright enough to give her more confidence in her color sense.
Several times she was tempted to land for samples, but reflected that if she did this every time the surface tint changed she would never cover ten percent of the planet. For the present job, it would be best to wait until liquid could be seen—unless, of course, some unmistakable ice showed up.
Neither did, for hundreds of kilometers. She was flying slowly, to get a good look at the ground below, in spite of her desire to reach daylight, and time had shifted to a slow crawl.
She herself was still interested in the endlessly varying landscape below; Charley, who was taking seriously his duty of looking where they were going, was getting bored and was quite willing to say so. There were clouds and dust devils and real sandstorms, sometimes above their flight level and sometimes below, but he didn’t find their patterns at all interesting.
Conversation with the three back at the tent did not help, as all were too busy to say much. Joe had started his robots; the slaves had lifted to their assigned altitudes, and everything was obediently moving slowly upwind, whatever the local wind might be, according to the monitors. A worldwide map of air currents at five altitudes was under construction, but since no robot was yet more than ten kilometers from its starting point little could be read from it so far.
Jenny was deeply buried in chemical analysis but had not yet reported evidence either of the prelife compounds she had originally hoped or the photosynthetic life more recently inferred. Carol was equally silent; Molly supposed she was doing more with the radar maps or the data they had picked up around the “craters,” or perhaps just brooding about the arctic mountains. Joe of course said nothing and Molly herself did not like to interrupt with questions. Some of Joe’s ethical code had rubbed off on her. She regretted it slightly; chattering during lab work seemed more comfortable, but with Joe actually present she felt a little uneasy about unessential talk. It was certainly not that she disliked or feared the little Nethneen; somehow she just didn’t want to merit his disapproval. She wished something would appear on her own screen that would give excuse for a report—a real report, not just a periodic statement that the boat was still all right, as Charley was making.