Saxtorph decided his party had better plant an antenna and relay inconspicuously up there. Any messages ought to be on a number of simultaneous bands, at least one of which could blanket a Tertian hemisphere, but the signal would be tenuous and these depths might screen it out altogether. He walked carefully from the arrowhead of the boat to the right-hand side and started downslope, looking for safe routes to the top. Lateral ravines appeared to offer them.
Abruptly he halted. What the flapping hellfire? He stooped and stared. Could it be? No, some freak of nature. He wasn't qualified to identify a fossil.
He went on. By the time he had tentatively found the path he wanted, he was so near the glacier that he continued. It lifted high, not grimy like its counterparts on terrestroid planets but clear, polished glassy-smooth, a cold and mysterious blue. Whatever mineral grains once lay on it had sunken to the bottom, and Saxtorph stood moveless. The time was long before he breathed, “Oh. My. God.”
From within the ice, the top half of a skull stared at him. It could only be that, unhuman though it was. And other bones were scattered behind, and shaped stones, and pieces of what was most surely earthenware. Chill possessed him from within. How old were those remnants? Big Tertia must in its youth have had a still denser atmosphere than now, greenhouse effect, heat from a contracting interior, and… those molecules that are the kernel from which life grows, perhaps evolved not here but in interstellar space, organics which the wan sun did not destroy as they drifted inward… Life arose. It liberated oxygen. It gave birth to beings that made tools and dreams. But meanwhile the planetary core congealed and chilled, the oceans began to freeze, plants died, nothing replaced the oxygen that surface rocks bound fast… Without copper, tin, gold, iron, any metal they could know for what it was, the dwellers had never gone beyond their late stone age, never had a chance to develop the science that might have saved them or at least have let them understand what was happening…
Saxtorph shuddered. He turned and hastened back to the boat.
Unsure what kind of surface awaited them, Carita and Yoshii descended on the polarizer and made a feather-soft landing. They were poised to spring instantly back upward. All they felt was a slight resilience, more on their instruments than in their bones. It damped out and Fido rested quiet.
“Elastic?” Yoshii wondered. “Or viscous, or what?”
“Never mind, we'll investigate later, right now we're down safe,” Carita replied. She wiped her brow. “Hoo, but I need a stiff drink and a hot shower!”
Yoshii leered at her. “In the opposite order, please.” She cuffed him lightly. The horseplay turned into mutual unharnessing and a hug. “Hey-y,” she purred, “you really do want to celebrate, don't you? Later, we'll share that shower.”
His arms dropped. She released him in her turn and he made a stumbling backward step. “I'm sorry, I didn't intend— Well, we should take a good look outside, shouldn't we?”
The jinxian was briefly silent before she smiled wryly and shrugged. “Okay. I'll forgive you this time if you'll fix dinner. Your yakitori tacos are always consoling. You're right, anyway.”
They turned off the fluoros and peered forth. As their eyes adapted, they saw well enough through airlessness, by the thronging stars and the cold rush of the Milky Way. Bowl-shaped, the dell in which they were parked curved some 50 meters wide to heights twice as far above the bottom. Fido sat close to one side; direct sunlight would only touch her for a small part of the day, weeks hence. Every edge and lump was rounded off by the covering of the planet. In this illumination it appeared pale gray.
“What is the stuff?” Carita muttered.
“I've hit on an idea,” Yoshii said. “I do not warrant that it is right. It may not even make sense.”
Her teeth flashed white in the darkness. “The universe is not under obligation to make sense. Speak your piece.” She switched cabin illumination back on. Radiance made the ports blank.
“I think it must be organic-carbon-based,” Yoshii said. “It doesn't remotely match any mineral I've ever seen or heard of or imagined, whereas it does resemble any number of plastics.”
“Hm, yeah, I had the same thought, but discarded it. Where would the chemistry come from? Life can't have started in the short time Prima hung onto its atmosphere, can it? Whatever carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen are left must be locked up in solid-state materials. At most we might find hydrates or something.”
“This could have come from space.”
“What?” She gaped at him. “If that's a joke, it's too deep for me.”
“There is matter in space, in the nebulae and even in the emptiest stretches between. It includes organic compounds, some of them fairly complex.”
“Not quite concentrated enough for soup.”
“Sure, the densest nebula is still a pretty hard vacuum by Terrestrial standards. However, this system has had time to pass through many. Between them, too — yes, between galaxies — gravity has found atoms and molecules to draw in. During any single year, hardly a measurable amount. But it's been fifteen billion years, Carita.”
“Um'h,” she uttered, almost as if punched in the stomach.
“The sun doesn't give off any ultraviolet to speak of,” Yoshii pursued. “Its wind is puny. Carbon-based molecules land intact. The sun does maintain a day time temperature at which they can react with each other. I daresay cosmic radiation energizes the chemistry, too. Fine grains of sand and dust — crumbled off rocks, together with meteoroid powder — provide colloidal surfaces where the stuff can cluster till there's a fairly high concentration and complicated exchanges become possible. Unsaturated bonds grab the free atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, anything included in the down drift except noble gases, and incorporate them. Maybe, here and there, some such growing patch 'learns' how to take stuff from surface rocks. It's a slow, slow process — or set of processes — but it's had time. Eventually patches meet as they expand. What happens then depends on just what their compositions happen to be. I'd expect some weird interactions while they join. Those could be going on yet. That would explain why we saw differently colored areas. But it's only the terminal reactions.”
Yoshii's words had come faster and faster. He was developing his idea as he described it. Excitement turned into awe and he whispered, “A polymer. A single multiplex molecule, the size of this planet.”
Carita was mute for a whole minute before she murmured, “Whew! But why isn't the same stuff on every airless body?… No wait. Stupid of me to ask. This is the only one where conditions have been right.”
Yoshii nodded. “I suspect that what yellows the rest is a carbon compound, too, but something formed in space. You get some fairly complicated ones there, you know. If that particular one can't react with the organics I was talking about — too cold — then they are a minor part of the down drift compared to it. We haven't noticed the same thing in other planetary systems because they are all too young, and maybe because none of them have made repeated passages through nebulae.”
“You missed your calling,” Carita said tenderly. “Should've been a scientist. Is it too late? We can go out, take samples, put'em through our analyzers. When we get home, you can write a paper that'll have scholarships piled around you up to your bellybutton. Though I hope you'll keep on with the poetry. I like what you—”
A quiver went through the boat. “What the Finagle!” she exclaimed.
“A quake?” Yoshii asked.
“The prof's told us these planets are as far beyond quakes as a mummy is beyond hopscotch,” Carita snapped.
Another tremor made slight noises throughout the hull. Yoshii reached for the searchlight switch. Carita caught his arm. “Hold that,” she said. “The kzinti—”