He went on, “Nitrogen, of course. Dull, isn’t it, the way Nature repeats itself like a three-year-old who knows three lessons, period. Takes the fun away when it turns out that a water world always has an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Makes the whole thing yawn-worthy.”
“What else in the atmosphere?” asked Cimon, irritably. “So far all we have is oxygen, nitrogen, and homely philosophy from kindly Uncle Boris.”
Vernadsky hooked his arm over his seat and said, amiably enough. “What are you? Director or something?”
Cimon, to whom the directorship meant little more than the annoyance of preparing composite reports for the Bureau flushed and said, grimly, “What else in the atmosphere, Dr. Vernadsky?”
Vernadsky said, without looking at his notes, “Under one per cent and over a hundredth of one per cent: hydrogen, helium, and carbon dioxide in that order. Under a hundredth of one per cent and over a ten thousandt h of one per cent: methane, argon, and neon in that order. Under a ten thousandth of one per cent and over a millionth of a per cent : radon, krypton, and xenon in that order.
“The figures aren’t very informative. About all I can get out of them is that Junior is going to be a happy hunting ground for uranium, that it’s low in potassium and that it’s no wonder it’s such a lovely little double ice cap of a world.”
He did that deliberately, so that someone could ask him how he knew, and someone, with gratifying wonder, inevitably did.
Vernadsky smiled blandly and said: “Atmospheric radon is ten to a hundred times as high here as on Earth. So is helium. Both radon and helium are produced as by-products of the radioactive breakdown of uranium and thorium. Conclusion: Uranium and thorium minerals are ten to a hundred times as copious in junior’s crust as in Earth’s.
“Argon, on the other hand, is over a hundred times as low as on Earth. Chances are Junior has none of the argon it originally started with. A planet of this type has only the argon which forms from the breakdown of K40, one of the potassium isotopes. Low argon; low potassium. Simple, kids.”
One of the assembled groups asked, “What about the ice caps?”
Cimon, who knew the answer to that, asked, before Vernadsky could answer the other, “What’s the carbon dioxide content exactly?”
“Zero point zero one six emm emm,” said Vernadsky.
Cimon nodded, and vouchsafed nothing more.
“Well?” asked the inquirer impatiently.
“Carbon dioxide is only about half what it is on Earth, and it’s the carbon dioxide that gives the hothouse effect. It lets the short waves of sunlight pass through to the planet’s surface, but doesn’t allow the long waves of planetary heat to radiate off. When carbon dioxide concentration goes up as a result of volcanic action, the planet heats up a bit and you have a carboniferous age with oceans high and land surface at a minimum. When carbon dioxide goes down as a result of the vegetation refusing to lei a good thing alone, fattening up on the good old see-oh-two and losing its head about it, temperature drops, ice forms, a vicious cycle of glaciation starts, and voilà—”
“Anything else in the atmosphere?” asked Cimon.
“Water vapor and dust. I suppose there are a few million airborne spores of various virulent diseases per cubic centimeter in addition to that.” He said it lightly enough, but there was a stir in the room. More than one of the bystanders looked as though he were holding his breath.
Vernadsky shrugged and said, “Don’t worry about it for now. My analyzer washes out dust and spores quite thoroughly. But then, that’s not my angle. I suggest Rodriguez grow his cultures under glass right away. Good thick glass.”
Mark Annuncio wandered everywhere. His eves shone as he listened, and he pressed himself forward to hear better. The group suffered him to do so with various degrees of reluctance, in accordance with individual personalities and temperaments. None spoke to him.
Sheffield stayed close to Mark. He scarcely spoke, either. He bent all his effort on remaining in the background of Mark’s consciousness. He wanted to refrain from giving Mark the feeling of being haunted by himself; give the boy the illusion of freedom, instead. He wanted to seem to be there, each time, by accident only.
It was a most unsuccessful pretense, he felt, but what could he do? He had to keep the kid from gelling into trouble.
Miguel Antonio Lopez y Rodriguez—microbiologist; small, tawny, with intensely black hair which he wore rather long, and with a reputation which he did nothing to discourage, of being a Latin in the grand style as far as the ladies were concerned—cultured the dust from Vernadsky’s gas-analyzer trap with a combination of precision and respectful delicacy.
“Nothing,” he said, eventually. “What foolish growths I get look harmless.”
It was suggested that Junior’s bacteria need not necessarily look harmful; that toxins and metabolic processes could not be analyzed by eye, even by microscopic eye.
This was met with hot contempt, as almost an invasion of professional function. He said, with an eyebrow lifted, “One gets a feeling for these things. When one has seen as much of the microcosm as I have, one can sense danger—or lack of danger.”
This was an outright lie, and Rodriguez proved it by carefully transferring samples of the various germ colonies into buffered, isotonic media and injecting hamsters with the concentrated result. They did not seem to mind.
Raw atmosphere was trapped in large jars and several specimens of minor animal life from Earth, and other planets were allowed to disport themselves within. None of them seemed to mind, either.
Nevile Fawkes—botanist; a man who appreciated his own handsomeness by modeling his hair style after that I shown on the traditional busts of Alexander the Great, but from whose appearance the presence of a nose, far more aquiline than Alexander ever possessed, noticeably detracted—was gone for two days, by Junior chronology, in one of the Triple G’s atmospheric coasters. He could navigate one like a dream and was, in fact, the only man outside the crew who could navigate one at all, so he was the natural choice for the task. Fawkes did not seem noticeably overjoyed about that.
He returned, completely unharmed and unable to hide a grin of relief. He submitted to irradiation for the sake of sterilizing the exterior of his flexible air-suit—designed to protect men from the deleterious effect of the outer environment where no pressure differential existed; the strength and jointedness of a true spacesuit being obviously unnecessary within an atmosphere as thick as Junior’s. The coaster was subjected to a more extended irradiation, and pinned down under a plastic cover-all.
Fawkes flaunted color photographs in great number. The central valley of the continent was fertile almost beyond Earthly dreams. The rivers were mighty, the mountains rugged and snow-covered—with the usual pyrotechnic solar effects. Under Lagrange II alone, the vegetation looked vaguely repellant, seeming rather dark, like dried blood. Under Lagrange I, however, or under the suns together, the brilliant, flourishing green and the glisten of the numerous lakes—particularly north and south along the dead rims of the departing glaciers—brought an ache of homesickness to the hearts of many.
Fawkes said, “Look at t hese.”
He had skimmed low to take a photochrome of a field of huge flowers, dripping with scarlet. In the high-ultraviolet radiation of Lagrange I, exposure times were of necessity extremely short and despite the motion of the coaster, each blossom stood out as a sharp blotch of strident color.
“I swear,” said Fawkes, “each one of those was six feet across.”
They admired the flowers unrestrainedly.