Listen, I’m serious. It had happened before. Although any piece of junk that would satisfy the Squeem and let me get out of there would do for me.
The low buildings gaped in the double shadows of the moonlight. The buttlebot scurried into dark places. I ran my hand over the edge of a doorway, and came away with a fine groove in a glove finger. The famous Xeelee construction materiaclass="underline" a proton’s width thick, about as dense as glass wool, and as strong as Life itself. And no one had a clue how to make or cut it. Nothing new; a familiar miracle.
The buttlebot buzzed past excitedly, empty-handed. The vacant place was soulless; there was nothing to evoke the people who had so recently lived here. The thorough Xeelee had even evacuated their ghosts.
“Squeem, this is a waste of time.”
“I estimate some minutes before you should ascend. Please proceed; I am monitoring the star.”
“I feel so secure knowing that.” I tried a few more doorways. The flashlight laser probed emptiness. — Until, in the fourth or fifth building, I found something.
The artifact, dropped in a corner, was a little like a flower. Six angular petals, which looked as if they were made of Xeelee sheeting, were fixed to a small cylindrical base; the whole thing was about the size of my open hand. An ornament? The readings from my data desk — physical dimensions, internal structure — didn’t change as I played with the toy in the light of the flashlight laser. Half the base clicked off in my hand. Nothing exciting happened. Well, whatever it was, maybe it would make the Squeem happy and I could get out.
I took it out into the moonlight. “Squeem, are you copying?” I held it in the laser beam, and twisted the base on or off.
The Squeem jabbered excitedly. “Jones! Please repeat the actions performed by your opposable thumb, and observe the data desk. This may be significant.”
“Really.” I clicked the base on and off, and inspected the exposed underside in the laser light. No features. But a readout trembled on the data desk; the mass was changing.
I experimented. I took away the torch: the change in mass, a slow rise, stopped. Shine the torch, and the mass crept up. And when I replaced the base, no change with or without the torch. “Hey, Squeem,” I said slowly, “are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Jones, this may be a major find.”
I watched the mass of the little flower creep up in the light of the torch. It wasn’t much — about an ounce per second, to be exact — but it was there. “Energy to mass, right? Direct conversion of the radiant energy of the beam.” And the damn thing wasn’t even warm in my hand.
I clicked the base back into place; the flower’s growth stopped. Evidently, the base was a key; remove it to make the flower work. The Squeem didn’t remark on this; for some reason, I didn’t point it out. Well, I wasn’t asked.
“Jones, return to the flitter at once. Take no further risks in the return of the artifact.”
That was what I wanted to hear. I ran through the skull-like town, clutching the flower. The buttlebot scurried ahead. I gasped out, “Hey, this must be what they use to manufacture their construction material. Just stick it out in the sunlight, and let it grow.” Presumably the petals, as well as being the end product, were the main receptors of the radiant energy. In which case, the area growth would be exponential. The more area you grow, the more energy you receive; and the more energy you receive, the more area you grow, and…
I thought of experiments to check this out. Listen, I had in my hand a genuine piece of Xeelee magic; it caught my imagination. Of course, the Squeem would be taking the profits. I considered ways to steal the flower…
My feet itched; they were too close to a nova. I had other priorities at that point. I stopped thinking and ran.
We bundled into the flitter; I let the buttlebot lift us off, and stored the Xeelee flower carefully in a locker.
The lift was bumpy: high winds in the stratosphere. A spectacular aurora shivered over us. “Squeem, are you sure you’ve done your sums right?”
“There is an inherent uncertainty in the behavior of novae,” the Squeem replied reassuringly. We reached orbit; the main ship swam towards us. “After all,” the Squeem lectured on, “a nova is by definition an instability. However I am confident we have at least five minutes before—”
At once, three events.
The moons blazed with light.
The Squeem shut up.
The main ship turned from a nearby cylinder into an arrow of light, pointing at the safety of the stars.
“Five minutes? You dumb fish.”
The buttlebot worked the controls frantically, unable to comprehend the abrupt departure of the Squeem. The nova had come ahead of schedule; the twin moons reflected its sick glory. We were still over the dark side of the planet, over which screamed a wind that came straight from the furnaces of a medieval hell. On the day side, half the atmosphere must already have been blasted away.
The flitter was a flimsy toy. I estimated we had about ten minutes to sunrise.
My recollection of the first five of those minutes is not clear. I do not pretend to be a strong man. I remember an image of the walls of the flitter peeling back like burnt flesh, the soft interior scoured out…
Leaving one object, one remnant, spinning in a cloud of metal droplets.
I realized I had an idea.
I grabbed the Xeelee flower from its locker, and wasted a few more seconds staring at it. The only substance within a million miles capable — maybe — of resisting the nova, and it was the size of my palm. I had to grow it, and fast. But how?
My brain chugged on. Right. One way. But would there be time? The flower’s activating base came off, and went into a suit pocket.
The buttlebot was still at the controls, trying to complete its rendezvous with a vanished ship. If there’d been time, I might have found this touching; as things were, I knocked it aside and began entering an emergency sequence. My thinking was fuzzy, my gloved fingers clumsy, and it took three tries to get it right. You can imagine the effect on my composure.
Now I had about a minute to get to the back of the vessel. I snapped closed my visor and de-cycled the airlock. I failed to observe the mandatory safety routines, thus voiding the manufacturer’s guarantees. The buttlebot clucked nervously about the cabin.
Clutching the Xeelee flower, I pulled into space and set off one-handed.
I couldn’t help looking down at the stricken planet. Around the curve of the world, the air rushing from the day side was gathering into a cyclone to end all cyclones; clouds swarmed like maggots, fleeing the boiling oceans. A vicious light spread over the horizon.
Followed by the confused buttlebot, I made it to the reactor dump hatch. In about thirty seconds, the safety procedure I had set up should funnel all the flitter’s residual fusion energy out through the hatch into space, in one mighty squirt. Except, the energy pulse wasn’t going to reach free space; it would all hit the Xeelee flower, which I was going to fix into place over the hatch.
Right. Fix it. With what? I fumbled in my suit pockets for tape. A piece of string. Chewing gum. My mind emptied. The buttlebot scuttled past, intent on some vital task.
I grabbed it, and wrapped the flower in one of its pseudopodia. “Listen,” I screamed at it, “stay right here. Got it? Hold it for five seconds, please, that’s all I ask.”
No more time. I scrambled to the far side of the flitter.
Five seconds isn’t long. But that five seconds was long enough for me to notice the brightening of the encroaching horizon. Long enough to note that I was gambling my life on a few more or less unfounded assumptions about the Xeelee flower.