Free Half Life by Hal Clement Page B

tar-patch stuff.” She moved a few gliding steps farther and squatted down. A lab moved slowly toward the kicked boulder, guided from above, but the oldster said nothing aloud. Of course this would be ice, too.
    “Give!” came mingled voices. Ginger’s suit had no camera.
    “It looks and feels through my gloves like black glass; it could still be the melted and refrozen tar someone suggested. I can’t scratch it with a glove claw. Labs, please.”
    “Already there, as you should have noticed,” answered the colonel. “Analysis so far matches the other one; it’s a methanol gel, basically. I’m still working on the polymers.”
    He would be, Belvew thought. Arthur, of all the group, was the most optimistic about finding prebiotic material on Titan, though Seichi Yakama was a close second. The colonel had also informed himself most extensively from Status’s encyclopedia on autocatalysis and other phenomena presumably involved with the chemical evolution stages supposed to precede actual life. He was the only one whose training had actually included more than the standard educated adult’s basic chemistry.
    He was also hoping desperately, his companions knew, to find a key piece of the biological jigsaw puzzle while he still lived, even if that piece failed to provide a cure for his particular ailment. He was as close to being a pure idealist as anyone in the group—a scientific Nathan Hale, though none were tactless enough or historically informed enough to make the comparison either aloud or silently.
    The screen brought Belvew’s attention back from its brief side trip. Ginger had started to rise from her squatting position and was putting on a rather grotesque show.
    She had been slightly off balance as she straightened her knees, and reached vertical with her center of gravity a little outside the support area outlined by her feet. There is a normal human response to this situation, usually acquired during the first year or so after birth: one picks up the foot nearest the direction of tilt and moves it farther in that direction to extend the support area, but not so far as to make reaction initiate a fall the other way.
    The reflex, of course, is normally acquired in Earth gravity, and one or two of the watchers wondered very briefly whether she would overcontrol, but they never found out. The major started to pick up the appropriate foot, the right one, but it refused to pick up. The couple resulting from pull on this one and third-law push on the other tilted her even farther to her right. By the time she reached thirty degrees all eyes were on their screens, and at least three hypotheses were being developed.
    “You’ve melted yourself in!” cried Martucci. Inger, whose idea involved close contact between soles and surface plus Titan’s high air pressure, said nothing but thought furiously. Goodall, already wondering how simple the chemistry for a thermotropic reaction could possibly be, called, “See whether it’s pulling in around your boots or if you’re just sinking!”
    Major Xalco was moved to answer this. “Just sinking? I’m stuck , you old idiot! What do I do?”
    “Find out why,” the colonel replied calmly from the safety and freedom from immediate responsibility of a seven-hundred-kilometer-high orbit.
    “Try to tilt and slide one boot at a time,” proffered Inger.
    “Can anyone guess how much jet exhaust a suit will take from, say, twenty meters?” asked Belvew. “I assume no one knows .”
    While the woman tried unsuccessfully to implement Barn’s suggestion, and then less enthusiatically to follow Goodall’s instruction, Gene, already in his waldo suit, silently preflighted Theia , which he could now control. Xalco had filled the tanks conscientiously on the way down, apparently without melting her wing “ice”—that would have to be discussed sometime—and the landing had depleted them only a little; there was much more than enough juice for a takeoff.
    Keeping