Swiftly Tuck packed the great pressure-sealed bag that was to be taken back to the colony, impatient for the conference to end. He was eager to move, anxious to get out of the ship, to get his feet on the ground of this strange world. What would the colony be like, how could the people live under a plastic bubble?
An idea struck him suddenly, and he hurried aft and poked his nose into the control room. The pilot was sitting at his desk, working on a pile of reports; he looked up and grinned when he saw Tuck. “Looking for something?”
“Well—maybe. I just had an idea. Do we have pressure suits for the outside here on the ship?”
“Of course. Specially made for the surface of Titan, with built-in heaters.”
“How about letting me go outside for a while? I’d like to go up on the ridge and see if I can see the colony.”
The pilot shrugged. “No harm in that.” He stepped into the corridor, broke open one of the storage bins hanging from the overhead. The suit was bulky, well-padded, with the heating element and compressed oxygen tanks built into a compact unit on the back. “Ever been in one of these things?”
“Oh, sure, I went out with the crew when we had to repair that sprung hull plate, on the way out here.”
“That’s right. Well, then you know how to handle the palm controls for heat and air conditioning and all. Just remember, though—the oxygen supply will last for eight hours, but you’ll probably get cold long before that. Keep an eye on the peripheral circulation gauge, and when it says your feet are getting cold, come in! It means your feet are getting cold, whether they feel cold or not. And don’t hesitate to let out a loud yowl if something happens. If you rip that suit on the rocks, clamp down the section sealer, and scream bloody murder.”
Tuck clambered into the clumsy suit, adjusting his fingertips to the row of buttons on the palm, and made sure he could work the joints with ease. On the surface of Titan the suits were more necessary to keep out the cold and the poisonous atmosphere than to regulate body pressures, but without some care in handling the joints of the suit, he would soon be spread-eagled and helpless. Once securely inside, with the oxygen flow adjusted, he lumbered down the corridor into the lock, waved to the pilot, and dogged down the pressure hatches. The pumps whirred until the pressure registered “even” with the atmospheric pressure of the planetoid’s surface; then he opened the outer hatch, and stepped onto the crane.
When he stepped off onto the ground, a wonderful feeling of excitement struck him. For the first time, he was setting foot on another world, a world so alien to the warm, comfortable Earth he knew that it seemed impossible that the two could be in the same universe. This was a cruel, cold world, yet just five miles away was a little nucleus of the same warm Earth that he had left behind, a single oasis in a barren wilderness. Man could not live with the hostile cold of Titan’s surface, but they could do the next best thing: adapt part of the surface to conditions they could live with. Slowly Tuck walked out on the flat crater floor, turned and looked back at the ship, standing like a slender silver finger against the dark blue sky. The white powder crunched under his feet as he walked, and rose in little whirlwinds around his legs, and though it was only two inches deep, he could feel the unearthly chill under his feet. Glancing down, he saw the frost already forming knee-high on the legs of his suit. But close to the skin of his feet he could feel the soft pads of the thermocouples, constantly registering the temperature of his feet. If the blood flow to his feet slowed below a critical level, the thermocouple would register a danger signal, the signal that all spacemen knew too well, which meant that they must return to the warmth of their ships or their feet would be frozen. Tuck shivered, even in the warmth of his suit. He’d wait until he had a half-track before he strayed too far.
The floor of the crater was covered with small, jagged rocks; he carefully picked his way between them, moving off in the direction of the worn path of the half-track. Perhaps up over the first ridge he would be able to see the colony, if the terrain were smooth enough. The going was rough, but by following the ruts, he was able to make good time. These ruts had been worn by the heavy tread of the half-tracks for the past hundred and fifty years, ever since the colony was built, and since the first of the semiannual supply ships had selected this crater as the closest landing place to the colony that would be safe. How could the colonists dare to close down the mines, even to make such threats, if their food and other living necessities must come by such a precarious pipe line from Earth? It seemed incredible to Tuck, as he clambered up the rugged pathway, but he had heard Anson Torm’s words, and he had seen the paleness of his fathers face. Whatever the answer, the mines were in danger of closing. And that, above all, they had to prevent.
He had almost reached the top of the ridge when he suddenly froze in his tracks, staring at the large black rock in the path before him. Frantically he shook his head, then looked again, and his skin broke into a sweat. But there was no question about what he had seen. Just as he had started to pass it, the black rock had moved—
Panic rose up in Tuck’s throat, but he stood steady. Then it moved again, and Tuck recoiled in horror. It looked just like all the rest of the black rocks, but it slowly changed shape, and slithered down the grade a few inches, then stopped and lay motionless, like a black rock again. Even as Tuck watched it, he saw the bit of rock that lay under the thing dissolve away, and suck up into it, like ink into a sponge—
And then Tuck remembered the paragraph on one of the microfilms he had read, describing these strange black creatures, an incredible sort of half-living thing with a silicon-based metabolism. The report had called them “clordelkus” and said they were quite harmless, but could dissolve away and suck up almost any kind of silicon rock. Tuck shuddered, starting up in the opposite direction from the creature. Harmless or not, it had given him a horrible start. For the first time he realized, almost with a shock, the true strangeness and desolation of the place. This was a harsh world—what could it mean to live here, actually live under a plastic bubble, with a cruel, barren, frozen world on all sides, just waiting for the seal to break? These colonists—how could they feel? How could anyone help but hate a life on such a wasteland, in an outpost so remote that contact with Earth could come but once or twice a year? How could anyone live here, and not become desperate after a while? Suddenly Tuck felt terribly alone. There were so many dangers, so many pitfalls, so many ways they might simply disappear on a world like this—
He had started on toward the ridge again when the whine of a motor came to his ear. Suddenly, from over the ridge there was a flash of silver, and a tiny jet plane swooped in, extremely low, skimming through the thin atmosphere with an angry squeal. Tuck stared open-mouthed at the plane as it swung up, barely missing the ship, then made a great whining arc, and settled smoothly in, dropping like a graceful bird onto the smooth floor of the crater not fifteen yards from the crane. Almost immediately the cockpit swung open, and a space-suited figure clambered out, started swiftly for the crane of the Earth ship. Tuck turned and started back for the ship in alarm, moving as fast as his clumsy suit would allow. The plane was a curious-looking thing, hardly twenty feet long from air-scoop to jet, and was shaped short and squat, for all the world like a rocket lifeboat which had been clumsily rebuilt by an inexpert hand. Tuck stared at it in amazement. The exhaust had been so fragile and pencil-thin that he had hardly believed his eyes when it had slid into a landing—Tuck was thoroughly acquainted with small jets back home, and he’d never seen an exhaust cone like that! He longed to stop and inspect this ship more closely, but the stranger was already at the outer lock of the ship. Quickly Tuck moved to the crane, started up, and then waited for the lock to empty and open again, a hard core of fear in his mind. Finally the door swung open; in a moment he stepped into the corridor of the ship, and then stopped short in surprise.