Larry Niven - Wait It Out

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WAIT IT OUT

Night on Pluto. Sharp and distinct, the horizon line cuts across my field of vision. Below that

broken line is the dim gray-white of snow seen by starlight. Above, space-blackness and

spacebright stars. From behind a jagged row of frozen mountains the stars pour up in singletons

and clusters and streamers of cold white dots. Slowly they move, but visibly, just fast enough for a

steady eye to capture their motion.

Something wrong there. Pluto's rotation period is long: 6.39 days. Time must have slowed for me.

It should have stopped.

I wonder if I may have made a mistake.

The planet's small size brings the horizon close. It seems even closer without a haze of atmosphere to

fog the distances. Two sharp peaks protrude into the star swarm like the filed front teeth of a cannibal

warrior. In the cleft between those peaks shines a sudden bright point.

I recognize the Sun, though it shows no more disk than any other, dimmer star. The Sun shines as a cold

point between the frozen peaks; it pulls free of the rocks and shines in my eyes . . .

The Sun is gone, the starfield has shifted. I must have passed out.

It figures.

Have I made a mistake? It won't kill me if I have. It could drive me mad, though . . .

I don't feel mad. I don't feel anything, not pain, not loss, not regret, not fear. Not even pity. Just: what a

situation.

Gray-white against gray-white: the landing craft, short and wide and conical, stands half-submerged in

an icy plain below the level of my eyes. Here I stand, looking east, waiting.

Take a lesson: this is what comes of not wanting to die.

Pluto was not the most distant planet. It had stopped being that in 1979, ten years ago. Now Pluto was at

perihelion, as close to the Sun-and to Earth-as it would ever get. To ignore such an opportunity would have

been sheer waste.

And so we came, Jerome and Sammy and 1, in an inflated plastic bubble poised on an ion jet. We'd spent a

year and a half in that bubble. After so long together, with so little privacy, perhaps we should have hated

each other. We didn't. The UN psycho team must have chosen well.

But-just to be out of sight of the others, even for a few minutes. Just to have something to do, something that

was not predictable. A new world could hold infinite surprises. As a matter of fact, so could our laboratory-

tested hardware. I don't think any of us really trusted the Nerva-K under our landing craft.

Think it through. For long trips in space, you use an ion jet giving low thrust over long periods of time. The

ion motor on our own craft had been decades in use. Where gravity is materially lower than Earth's, you land

on dependable chemical rockets. For landings on Earth and Venus, you use heat shields and the braking

power of the atmosphere. For landing on the gas giants-but who would want to?

The Nerva-class fission rockets are used only for takeoff from Earth, where thrust and efficiency count.

Responsiveness and maneuverability count for too much during a powered landing. And a heavy planet will

always have an atmosphere for braking.

Pluto didn't.

For Pluto, the chemical jets to take us down and bring us back up were too heavy to carry all that way. We

needed a highly maneuverable Nerva-type atomic rocket motor using hydrogen for reaction mass.

And we had it. But we didn't trust it.

Jerome Glass and I went down, leaving Sammy Cross in orbit. He griped about that, of course. He'd started

that back at the Cape and kept it up for a year and a half. But someone had to stay. Someone had to be aboard

the Earth-return vehicle, to fix anything that went wrong, to relay communications to Earth, and to fire the

bombs that would solve Pluto's one genuine mystery.

We never did solve that one. Where does Pluto get all that mass? The planet's a dozen times as dense as it has

any right to be. We could have solved that with the bombs, the same way they solved the mystery of the

makeup of the Earth, sometime in the last century. They mapped the patterns of earthquake ripples moving

through the Earth's bulk. But those ripples were from natural causes, like the Krakatoa eruption. On Pluto the

bombs would have done it better.

A bright star-sun blazes suddenly between two fangs of mountain. I wonder if they'll know the answers, when

my vigil ends.

The sky jumps and steadies, and-

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Larry Niven - Wait It Out

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