Hal Clement - Sunspot

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SUNSPOT

Ron Sacco's hand reached gently toward his switch, and paused. He glanced over at the

commander, saw the latter's eyes on him, and took a quick look at the clock. Welland turned his own

face away—to hide a smile?—and Sacco almost angrily thumbed the switch.

Only one of the watchers could follow the consequences in real detail. To most, the closing of the

circuit was marked a split second later by a meaningless pattern on an oscilloscope screen; to "Grumpy"

Ries, who had built and. installed the instrument, a great deal more occurred between the two events. His

mind's eye could see the snapping of relays, the pulsing of electrical energy into the transducers in the ice

outside and the hurrying sound waves radiating out through the frozen material; he could visualize their

trip, and the equally hasty return as they echoed back from the vacuum that bounded the flying iceberg.

He could follow them step-by step back through the electronic gear, and interpret the oscilloscope

picture almost as well as Sacco. He saw it, and turned away. The others kept their eyes on the physicist.

Sacco said nothing for a moment. He had moved several manual pointers to the limits of the weird

shadow on the screen, and was using his slide rule on the resulting numbers. Several seconds passed

before he nodded and put the instrument back in its case.

"Well?" sounded several voices at once.

"We're not boiling off uniformly. The maximum loss is at the south pole, as you'd expect; it's about

sixty centimeters since the last reading. It decreases almost uniformly to zero at about fifteen degrees

north; any loss north of that has been too small for this gear to measure. You'll have to go out and use

one of Grumpy's stakes if you want a reading there."

No one answered this directly; the dozen scientists drifting in the air of the instrument room had

already started arguments with each other. Most of them bristled with the phrase "I told you—" The

commander was listening intently now; it was this sort of thing which had led him, days before, to

schedule the radius measurements only once in twelve hours. He had been tempted to stop them

altogether, but realized that it would be both impolite and impractical. Men riding a snowball into a blast

furnace may not be any better off for knowing how fast the snowball is melting, but being men they have

to know.

Sacco turned from his panel and called across the room.

"What are the odds now?"

"Just what they were before," snapped Ries. "How could they have changed? We've buried

ourselves, changed the orbit of this overgrown ice cake until the astronomers were happy, and then spent

our time shoveling snow until the exhaust tunnels were full so that we couldn't change course again if we

wanted to. Our chances have been nailed down ever since the last second the motors operated, and you

know it as well as I do."

"I stand… pardon me, float… corrected. May I ask what our knowledge of the odds is now?" Ries

grimaced, and jerked his head toward the commander.

"Probably classified information. You'd better ask the chief executive of Earth's first manned comet

how long he expects his command to last."

Welland managed to maintain his unperturbed expression, though this was as close to outright

insolence as Ries had come yet. The instrument man was a malcontent by nature, at least as far as speech

went; Welland, who was something of a psychologist, was fairly sure that the matter went no deeper. He

was rather glad of Ries' presence, which served to bring into the open a lot of worrying which might

otherwise have simmered under cover, but that didn't mean that he liked the fellow; few people, did.

"Grumpy" Ries had earned his nickname well. Welland, on the present occasion, didn't wait for Sacco to

repeat the question; he answered it as though Ries had asked him directly—and politely.

"We'll make it," he said calmly. "We knew that long ago, and none of the measures have changed the

fact. This comet is over two miles in diameter, and even after our using a good deal of it for reaction mass

it still contains over thirty billion tons of ice. I may be no physicist, but I can integrate, and I know how

much radiant heat this iceberg is going to intercept in the next week. It's not enough, by a good big factor,

to boil off any thirty billion tons of the stuff around us. You all know that—you've been wasting time

making a book on how much we'd still have around us after perihelion, and not one of you has figured

that we lose more than three or four hundred meters from the outside. If that's not a safe margin, I don't

know what is."

"You don't know, and neither do I," retorted Ries. "We're supposed to pass something like a

hundred thousand miles from the photosphere. You know as well as I do that the only comet ever to do

that came away from the sun as two comets. Nobody ever claimed that it boiled away."

"You knew that when you signed up. No one blackmailed you. No one would—at least, no one

who's here now." The commander regretted that remark the instant he had made it, but saw no way to

retract it. He was afraid for a moment that Ries might make a retort which he couldn't possibly ignore,

and was relieved when the instrument man reached for a handhold and propelled himself out of the room.

A moment later he forgot the whole incident as a physicist at one of the panels suddenly called out.

"On your toes, all of you! X-ray count is going up—maybe a flare. Anyone who cares, get his gear

grinding!" For a moment there was a scene of confusion. Some of the men were drifting free, out of reach

of handholds; it took these some seconds to get swimming. Others, more skilled in weightless

maneuvering, had kicked off from the nearest wall in the direction of whatever piece of recording

machinery they most cherished, but not all of these had made due allowance for the traffic. By the time

everyone was strapped in his proper place, Ries was back in the room, his face as expressionless as

though nothing had been said a few moments before. His eyes kept swiveling from one station to another;

if anyone had been looking at him, they would have supposed he was just waiting for something to break

down. He was.

To his surprise, nothing did. The flare ran its course, with instruments humming and clicking serenely

and no word of complaint from their attendants. Ries seemed almost disappointed; at least Pawlak, the

power plant engineer who was about the only man on board who really liked the instrument specialist,

suspected that he was.

"C'mon, Grump," was this individual's remark when everything seemed to have settled down once

more. "Let's go outside and bring in the magazine from the monitor camera. Maybe something will have

gone wrong with it; you said you didn't trust that remote-control system.''

Ries almost brightened.

"All right. These astronomers will probably be howling for pictures in five minutes anyway, so they

can tell each other they predicted everything correctly. Suit up." They left the room together with no one

but the commander noting their departure.

There was little space outside the ship's air lock. The rocket had been brought as close to the center

of the comet as measurement would permit, through a tunnel just barely big enough for the purpose. Five

more smaller tunnels had been drilled, along three mutually perpendicular axes, to let out the exhaust of

the fusion-powered reaction motors which were to use the comet's own mass to change its course. One

other passageway, deliberately and carefully zigzagged, had been cut for personnel. Once the sunward

course had been established all the tunnels except the last had been filled with "snow"—crushed comet

material from near the ship. The cavern left by the removal of this and the exhaust mass was the only

open space near the vessel, and even that was not too near. No one had dared weaken the structure of

the big iceberg too close to the rocket; after all, one comet had been seen to divide as it passed the sun.

The monitor camera was some distance from the mouth of the tunnel—necessarily; the passage had

been located very carefully. It opened in the "northern" hemisphere, as determined by direction of

rotation, so that the camera could be placed at its mouth during perihelion passage and get continuous

coverage. This meant, however, that in the comet's present orbital position the sun did not rise at all at the

tunnel mouth. Since pictures had to be taken anyway, the camera was at the moment in the southern

hemisphere, about a mile from the tunnel mouth.

Some care was needed in reaching it. A space-suited man with a mass of two hundred fifty pounds

weighed something like a quarter of an ounce at the comet's surface, and could step away at several

times the local escape velocity if he wished—or, for that matter, if he merely forgot himself. A dropped

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Hal Clement - Sunspot

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