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Ebook has 1672 lines and 106569 words, and 34 pages

CATALYSIS

BY POUL ANDERSON

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 cigaret 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.

Rafael Alem?n 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."

"You didn't have to join the Corps, and you didn't have to volunteer for Triton Station," Gilchrist pointed out.

The little man shrugged, spreading slender hands. "Confidential, I will tell you. I had heard such colorful tales of outpost life. But the only result is that I am now a married man--not that I have anything but praise for my dear Mei-Hua, but it is not the abandonment one had hoped for."

Gilchrist chuckled. Outer-planet stations did have a slightly lurid reputation, and no doubt it had been justified several years ago.

After all--The voyage was so long and costly that it could not be made often. You established a self-sufficient colony of scientists and left it there to carry on its researches for years at a time. But self-sufficiency includes psychic elements, recreation, alcohol, entertainment, the opposite sex. A returning party always took several children home.

Scientists tended to be more objective about morals, or at least more tolerant of the other fellow's, than most; so when a hundred or so people were completely isolated, and ordinary amusements had palled, it followed that there would be a good deal of what some would call sin.

"Not Triton," said Gilchrist. "You forget that there's been another cultural shift in the past generation--more emphasis on the stable family. And I imagine the Old Man picked his gang with an eye to such attitudes. Result--the would-be rounders find themselves so small a minority that it has a dampening effect."

Gilchrist felt his face grow warm. "Research," he answered shortly. "There are a lot of interesting problems connected with Neptune."

Alem?n cocked a mildly skeptical eyebrow but said nothing. Gilchrist wondered how much he guessed.

That was the trouble with being shy. In your youth, you acquired bookish tastes; only a similarly oriented wife would do for you, so you didn't meet many women and didn't know how to behave with them anyhow. Gilchrist, who was honest with himself, admitted he'd had wistful thoughts about encountering the right girl here, under informal conditions where--

He had. And he was still helpless.

Suddenly he grinned. "I'll tell you what," he said. "I also came because I don't like cold weather."

"Sure. On Earth, you can stand even a winter day, so you have to. Here, since the local climate would kill you in a second or two, you're always well protected from it." Gilchrist waved at the viewport. "Only I wish they didn't have that bloody window in my lab. Every time I look out, it reminds me that just beyond the wall nitrogen is a solid."

Gilchrist started with surprise. "You know, somehow I have the same--Just a minute." He went over to a workbench. His inframicrometer had an air thermometer attached to make temperature corrections.

"Some fluctuation, in temperature as in ozone content and humidity," reminded Alem?n. "That is required for optimum health."

"Not this time of day, it shouldn't be varying." Gilchrist was reminded of his cigaret as it nearly burned his fingers. He stubbed it out and took another and inhaled to light it.

"I'm going to raise Jahangir and complain," he said. "This could play merry hell with exact measurements."

Alem?n trotted after him as he went to the door. It was manually operated, and the intercoms were at particular points instead of every room. You had to forego a number of Earthside comforts here.

There was a murmuring around him as he hurried down the corridor. Some doors stood open, showing the various chemical and biological sections. The physicists had their own dome, on the other side of the Hill, and even so were apt to curse the stray fields generated here. If they had come this far to get away from solar radiations, it was only reasonable, as anyone but a chemist could see, that--

The screen stood at the end of the hall, next to the tunnel stairs. Gilchrist checked himself and stood with a swift wild pulse in his throat. Catherine Bardas was using it.

He had often thought that the modern fashion of outbreeding yielded humans more handsome than any pure racial type could be. When a girl was half Greek and half Amerind, and a gifted biosynthesizer on top of it, a man like him could only stare.

Mohammed Jahangir's brown, bearded face registered more annoyance than admiration as he spoke out of the screen. "Yes. Dr. Bardas," he said with strained courtesy. "I know. My office is being swamped with complaints."

"Well, what's the trouble?" asked the girl. Her voice was low and gentle, even at this moment.

"I'm not sure," said the engineer. "The domes' temperature is dropping, that's all. We haven't located the trouble yet, but it can't be serious."

"All I'm asking," said Catherine Bardas patiently, "is how much longer this will go on and how much lower it's going to get. I'm trying to synthesize a cell, and it takes precisely controlled conditions. If the air temperature drops another five degrees, my thermostat won't be able to compensate."

"Oh, well ... I'm sure you can count on repair being complete before that happens."

Jahangir laughed and cut off. The light of fluorotubes slid blue-black off the girl's shoulder-length hair as she turned around. Her face was smooth and dark, with high cheekbones and a lovely molding of lips and nose and chin.

"Oh--hello, Tom," she smiled. "All through here."

"Th-th-th--Never mind," he fumbled. "I was only g-going to ask about it myself."

"Well--" She yawned and stretched with breathtaking effect. "I suppose I'd better get back and--"

"Ah, why so, se?orita?" replied Alem?n. "If the work does not need your personal attention just now, come join me in a leetle drink. It is near dinnertime anyhow."

"All right," she said. "How about you, Tom?"

He merely nodded, for fear of stuttering, and accompanied them down the stairs and into the tunnel. Half of him raged at his own timidity--why hadn't he made that suggestion?

The passages connecting the domes were all alike, straight featureless holes lined with plastic. Behind lay insulation and the pipes of the common heating system, then more insulation, finally the Hill itself. That was mostly porous iron, surprisingly pure though it held small amounts of potassium and aluminum oxides. The entire place was a spongy ferrous outcropping. But then, Triton was full of geological freaks.

"How goes your work?" asked Alem?n sociably.

"Oh, pretty well," said Catherine. "I suppose you know we've synthesized virus which can live outside. Now we're trying to build bacteria to do the same."

On a professional level, Gilchrist was not a bad conversationalist. His trouble was that not everyone likes to talk shop all the time. "Is there any purpose in that, other than pure research to see if you can do it?" he inquired. "I can't imagine any attempt ever being made to colonize this moon."

"Well, you never know," she answered. "If there's ever any reason for it, oxide-reducing germs will be needed."

"As well as a nuclear heating system for the whole world, and--What do your life forms use for energy, though? Hardly enough sunlight, I should think."

"Oh, but there is, for the right biochemistry with the right catalysts--analogous to our own enzymes. It makes a pretty feeble type of life, of course, but I hope to get bacteria which can live off the local ores and frozen gases by exothermic reactions. Don't forget, when it's really cold a thermal engine can have a very high efficiency; and all living organisms are thermal engines of a sort."

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