Short Fiction Poul Anderson (reading a book .TXT) 📖

and looking the way he had gone. Carefully, he aimed the tank and gave himself another small blast to correct his path. There was no noise to betray him, the asteroid was a grave where all sound was long buried and frozen.

He flattened, holding his body parallel to the tank in his arms. One hand still gripped the wrench, the other reached to open the blow valve wide.

The surge almost tore him loose. He had a careening lunatic moment of flight in which the roar of escaping gas boiled through his armor and he clung like a troll to a runaway witch’s broom. The sun was blinding on one side of him.

He struck Lundgard with an impact of velocity and inertia which sent him spinning down the hill. Bo hit the ground, recoiled, and sprang after his enemy. Lundgard was still rolling. As Bo approached, he came to a halt, lifted his rifle dazedly, and had it knocked loose with a single blow of the wrench.

Lundgard crawled to his feet while Bo picked up the rifle and threw it off the asteroid. “Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know,” said Bo. “I should just shoot you down, but I want you to surrender.”

Lundgard drew his wrench. “No,” he said.

“All right,” said Bo. “It won’t take long.”

When he got up to the Sirius, using a tank Lundgard would never need, Valeria had armed herself with a kitchen knife. “It wouldn’t have done much good,” he said when he came through the airlock. She fell into his arms, sobbing, and he tried to comfort her. “It’s all over. All taken care of. We can go home now.”

He himself was badly in need of consolation. The inquiry on Earth would clear him, of course, but he would always have to live with the memory of a man stretched dead under a wintery sky. He went aft and replaced the links. When he came back, Valeria had recovered herself, but as she watched his methodical preparations and listened to what he had to tell, there was that in her eyes which he hardly dared believe.

Not him. Not a big dumb slob like him.

Catalysis

When you looked outside, it was into darkness.

Going out yourself, you could let your eyes accommodate. At high noon, the sun was a sharp spark in a dusky heaven, and its light amounted to about one-ninth of one percent of what Earth gets. The great fields of ice and frozen gases reflected enough to help vision, but upthrust crags and cliffs of naked rock were like blackened teeth.

Seventy hours later, when Triton was on the other side of the primary that it always faced, there was a midnight thick enough to choke you. The stars flashed and glittered, a steely twinkle through a gaunt atmosphere mostly hydrogen⁠—strange, to see the old lost constellations of Earth, here on the edge of the deep. Neptune was at the full, a giant sprawling across eight degrees of sky, bluish gray and smoky banded, but it caught so little sunlight that men groped in blindness. They set up floodlights, or had lamps glaring from their tracs, to work at all.

But nearly everything went on indoors. Tunnels connected the various buildings on the Hill, instruments were of necessity designed to operate in the open without needing human care, men rarely had occasion to go out any more. Which was just as well, for it takes considerable power and insulation to keep a man alive when the temperature hovers around 60 degrees Kelvin.

And so you stood at a meter-thick port of insulglas, and looked out, and saw only night.

Thomas Gilchrist turned away from the view with a shudder. He had always hated cold, and it was as if the bitterness beyond the lab-dome had seeped in to touch him. The cluttered gleam of instruments in the room, desk piled high with papers and microspools, the subdued chatter of a computer chewing a problem, were comforting.

He remembered his purpose and went with a long low-gravity stride to check the mineralogical unit. It was busily breaking down materials fetched in by the robosamplers, stones never found on Earth⁠—because Earth is not the Mercury-sized satellite of an outer planet, nor has it seen some mysterious catastrophe in an unknown time back near the beginning of things. Recording meters wavered needles across their dials, data tapes clicked out, he would soon have the basic information. Then he would try to figure out how the mineral could have been formed, and give his hypothesis to the computer for mathematical analysis of possibility, and start on some other sample.

For a while Gilchrist stood watching the machine. A cigarette smoldered forgotten between his fingers. He was a short, pudgy young man, with unkempt hair above homely features. Pale-blue eyes blinked nearsightedly behind contact lenses, his myopia was not enough to justify surgery. Tunic and slacks were rumpled beneath the gray smock.

Behold the bold pioneer! he thought. His self-deprecating sarcasm was mildly nonsane, he knew, but he couldn’t stop⁠—it was like biting an aching tooth. Only a dentist could fix the tooth in an hour, while a scarred soul took years to heal. It was like his eyes, the trouble wasn’t bad enough to require long expensive repair, so he limped through life.

Rafael Alemán came in, small and dark and cheerful. “ ’Allo,” he said. “How goes it?” He was one of the Hill’s organic chemists, as Gilchrist was the chief physical chemist, but his researches into low-temperature properties were turning out so disappointingly that he had plenty of time to annoy others. Nevertheless, Gilchrist liked him, as he liked most people.

“So-so. It takes time.”

“Time we have enough of, mi amigo,” said Alemán. “Two years we ’ave been here, and three years more it will be before the ship comes to relieve us.” He grimaced. “Ah, when I am back to Durango Unit, how fast my savings will disappear!”

“You didn’t have to join the Corps, and you didn’t have