Free Half Life by Hal Clement

material which had been collected to protect the station.
    Most of the group, including Ginger, were listening to the analyses of the local area which Maria was numbering, tabulating, and locating on a large-scale map which now usurped part of everyone’s screen, and trying to make sense out of them. Belvew was the only exception. His attention was aimed more narrowly.
    The crumpled form of Oceanus showed a few hundred meters from her sister jet and much closer to the strange patch, and he was trying to see why it had fallen. If the cause was actually turbulence there would probably be no evidence, but he still found this hard to believe.
    “Art, could you spare a lab to sample right around the wreck?” he asked at length.
    “We’ll get there pretty soon anyway. Any reason for special haste?”
    “Well, Ginger landed hot, but there’ll be a couple of seconds after liftoff when she’ll be as slow as I was. It might be worth at least a check. Maybe the ground was warmer, or colder, for some reason, and grew verticals.”
    “How could it be?” The question, from Peter, was ignored by all but Barn.
    “We’re looking for chemical action,” he pointed out, “and there’s the methyl alcohol to explain.”
    “All right,” admitted Goodall. “Two labs on the way. Tell me where you want your samples, Gene.”
    Belvew went back to the view provided by Theia’s eyes, and strained his own looking for points of special interest on and about the wreck. It would be a few minutes before the slow-moving labs reached the spot.
    Several of Theia’s cameras covered the remains, and he ordered Status to process their images with interferometric routines to produce the best possible resolution. He didn’t think of asking for a stereo image. For some time he concentrated on the ground plowed up by Oceanus , but he could detect nothing special, and finally shifted to the jet itself. The labs had arrived and without anyone’s specific instructions were starting to scrape dirt samples with their iridium-coated hoes before he saw the interrupted white ridge along the leading edge of the uplifted right wing. Some of the material, especially toward the tip, had not been shaken off by the crash. He pointed it out to the others.
    “That shouldn’t be there! How do you get wing ice on Titan?”

5
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SORTIE
    “How do you know it’s ice?” asked Barn reasonably.
    “I don’t, but it’s where you pick up wing ice in Earth’s atmosphere, and it had the same effect!”
    “You’re blaming it for what happened?” came Maria’s quiet voice.
    “Well, not yet.” GO6 was sometimes soft-pedaled, but it was seldom completely ignored. “Can you get a lab up there, Art?”
    “I doubt it. They weren’t designed to climb a smooth surface.”
    “That skin’s hardly smooth anymore.”
    “All right. I’ll try.” The colonel followed up the words with action, and for over fifteen minutes sent one of his devices rolling and clawing its way along various upward-leading wrinkles in the crumpled fuselage.
    Each, sooner or later, narrowed enough to spoil his grip and let the machine topple back to the ground, undamaged in Titanian gravity but ineffective.
    Goodall finally gave up. Belvew, less skilled but more anxious, tried from some time himself, with no better luck.
    “It looks as though some of the stuff has fallen off,” Inger pointed out at last. “There should be bits of it on the ground.”
    “If there are, I can’t see them,” replied Belvew. “I suppose we can just do lots and lots of tests all around the wreck, but how will we be sure that any offbeat result can be blamed on the white stuff?”
    “We can be quicker than that,” Ginger assured them. “How?” asked Gene.
    “Very simply.” Several of the listeners guessed what was coming but kept their mouths shut; there was nothing they could do about it, and objectively Xalco was being smart. She was economizing on her suit time.
    Those who failed to read the