Hal Clement - Halo

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HALO

Galaxy, October 1952

"You disappoint me," the class superintendent said with some feel-ing. "I have a personal as well as a professional

dislike of wastefully run farms, and you seem to have furnished a prime example." He paused briefly, watching in

silence as the spheroidal forcing beds drifted smoothly about their central radiator. "Of course, I would be much

more sympathetic with you if your own ill-advised actions were not so largely respon-sible for this situation." He

checked his young listener's half-uttered pro-test. "Oh, I realize that youngsters have to learn, and experiment is

the only source of knowledge; but why not use the results of other people's experiments? This sort of thing has

happened before, I think you'll find."

"I didn't know." The answer was sullen despite the grudging respect. "How was I supposed to?"

"Did you get an education or not?" There was some heat in the query. "I can't imagine what the primary teachers

do these days. Even though you are so young, I understood that you had some qualifications and even a bit of

promise in agriculture. That's why I thought you could be trusted without supervision for a few years. Am I to

assume that you became dissatisfied with the yield of this farm?"

"Of course. Why else study agriculture?"

"Until you can answer that for yourself, I won't try to. Tell me in detail what you did. Did you try to step up the

output of the central ra-diator?"

"What do you think I am?" The younger being's indignation flared abruptly.

The other remained calm and exhibited faint traces of amusement, permitting the feeling to show in his answer

rather more plainly than was strictly tactful.

"Don't boil your crust off. You might not be able to spare it next time you go in to harvest. People still do try the

stunt I mentioned, you know.

Every now and then it works for someone after a fashion, so the rest feel it's still worth trying. If it wasn't that, just

what did you do? You're miss-ing a culture unit, if I remember this solar system correctly."

The student took a moment to find just the right words. "One of the lots seemed to be practically ideal. When it

first solidified, it was just far enough from the radiator and just large enough to retain a thin surface film of light

elements; and it responded beautifully to culturing with water-base growths. On the colder ones, by the way, I had

good luck with am-monia cultures."

"Quite possible, in that sort of bed. I noticed a couple of them were bare, though. Was that another result of this

experiment of yours?"

"Indirectly, yes." The young farmer looked a trifle apprehensive. "There was another plot, a good deal farther out

and colder than my ideal one. But it was too hot for ammonia growths and too small to furnish the pressure they

seem to need—at least the ones I'm familiar with." The addition was made hastily.

"I judged that it should have a good supply of food elements, cool-ing where it did; and since it wasn't doing well

where it was, I thought it would be a good idea to move it farther in."

The listener's manner lost some of its amused aspect.

"Just how did you decide to go about that? The energy involved would have demanded several times the mass of

your own body, even with total conversion—which I can't believe you've mastered."

"I don't suppose I have. It seemed to me that the unit itself could furnish the mass without serious loss, though."

"I see." The comment was grim. "Go on."

"Well, I went in and set up a conversion reaction. I touched it off as well as I could on the forward side of the unit,

though that was a little hard to arrange—the thing was spinning like mad, as most of them do. Maybe that was the

reason I let a little too much mass get involved, or maybe the globe wasn't as massive as I had thought."

"You mean you were uncertain of its mass? Is something wrong with your perceptive faculties as well as your

judgment? Just how old are you, anyway?"

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"Fifteen." The sullenness, which had began to depart from the youngster's tone as he warmed to his narrative,

returned in full strength. The questioner noted it and realized that he was not being as tactful as he might be; but

under the circumstances he felt entitled to a little emotion.

"Fifteen years on what scale?"

"Local—this furnace, around the mass-center of the system."

"Hmph. Continue."

"Most of the sphere was volatilized, and most of what wasn't was blown completely out of the system's

gravitational influence. The rest—well, it's still circling the furnace in quite a wide variety of orbits but it's not

much good to anyone."

There was a pause while the nearly useless outermost unit swung beneath the two speakers, then on to the far side

of the glowing sphere of gas that held it with unbreakable fingers of gravity. The supervisor was not actually

boiling—that would be difficult even for a body composed largely of methane, oxygen, and similar solids when it

is at a temperature of about half a degree absolute—but his temper was simmering. After a moment he spoke again.

"Let me get this straight. You sent a slave with a message that your farm had gotten out of hand and that you

would like advice. Am I to understand that you spent so much time ruining one of your units that some of the

others developed culture variations whose taste didn't appeal to you? I'm afraid my sympathy grows rapidly less."

"It's not that I don't like the stuff; it's that I can't eat it." The young-ster must have been angry, too; there was no

other imaginable reason why he should have made a statement at once so true in fact and so mislead-ing in

implication. The superintendent, swallowing the implication whole, permitted the remains of his temper to

evaporate completely.

"You can't eat it? That is really too bad. Pardon me while I go to sample some of this repulsive chemical—or

perhaps you would like to come along and show me what you have been eating. There is hardly enough drift in

this area to support you, particularly with a decent-sized crew of slaves. What have you been feeding them?

Perhaps you ought to let someone else take over this farm and get yourself a research job out in one of the drift

clouds, soaking up your nourishment from a haze of free atoms ten parsecs across for a few years. You

youngsters!"

"I've been eating from the ammonia units. So have the slaves."

"Very well, then I shall look over your water culture, which by elimi-nation must be the one that's been giving

trouble. On second thought, you needn't come along. It's the third plot from the furnace. I can find my way." He

moved off abruptly, not even waiting for an answer.

And the student, with no slightest shadow of an excuse, simply because of his own childish loss of temper, let him

go without a word of warning.

It might, of course, have made no difference if he had spoken. The superintendent was annoyed, too, and might

understandably have cho-sen to ignore his junior. His attention, as he permitted himself to fall toward the central

radiator, was divided between his own irritation and the condition of the various plots. Only gradually did the

latter feeling predominate.

He had to admit the outermost was too cold for much chemical ac-tion except actual life processes which were too

slow to be useful. The fact that the youngster he had left above had induced anything at all to grow there was at

least one point to his credit. It swung past only once while he was falling by its orbit. Though his gravity-given

speed was slow, its speed was slower—and it had farther to go.

The next two he had noted earlier were bare of useful growths. He remembered now that the student had admitted

this fact to be an indi-rect result of his experiment. The superintendent could not see the con-nection. The plots

themselves, on closer inspection, seemed physically undamaged, and the student himself could not possibly have

eaten them both clean, no matter what his hunger. Of course, a crowd of slaves might—but he was not going to

accuse anybody yet of letting slaves get that far out from under control. They were not even allowed to approach a

culture plot in person, being fed from its produce by their master.

The plots themselves were large bodies, though not the largest in the system, with their solid bulks veiled under

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mile after mile of hydrogen compounds. The superintendent's senses probed in vain for the enor-mously complex

compounds that were the preferred food of his kind. Several much smaller bodies were gravitating about each of

these plots, but none was large enough to hold the light elements in the liquid or gaseous form necessary for food

culture.

The next unit had the merit of interesting appearance, if nothing else. In addition to the more or less standard quota

of bodies circling it, it possessed a regular halo of minute particles traveling in a solidly interwo-ven maze of

orbits just outside the atmosphere. On the surface, and even in the atmosphere itself, its cultures were flourishing.

The superintendent paused to take a sample, and had to admit that once again the young-ster had not done too

badly.

His temper cooling, he rode the farm plot most of the way around its orbit, taking an occasional taste and growing

calmer by the moment. By the time he left the limits of its atmosphere, he was almost his normal self.

This, however, did not last long enough even for him to get rid of the globe's orbital speed, to say nothing of

resuming his drop toward the sun. He had slanted some distance inward and fallen well behind the ringed sphere

when his attention was drawn to another, much smaller object well to one side of his line of flight.

Physically, there was little remarkable about it. It was less massive even than his own body, though a short period

of observation disclosed that it was in an orbit about the central furnace, just as the farm plots were. Sometimes its

outline was clear, at others it blurred oddly. Its bright-ness flickered in an apparently meaningless pattern. Merely

on its physi-cal description, there was nothing remarkable about it, but it seized and held the superintendent's

puzzled attention. Off his planned course though it was, he swung toward it, wondering. The student had

mentioned no friends or co-workers

Gradually, details grew clearer and the superintendent's feelings grew grimmer. He did not like to believe what he

saw, but the evidence was crowding in.

"Help! Please help! Master!"

The bubble of horror burst, and one of anger grew in its place. Not one of his own kind, injured or dying and an

object of terror and revul-sion thereby; this thing was a slave. A slave, moreover, well within the limits of the

farm, where it had no business to be without supervision; a slave who dared call on him for help!

"What are you doing here?" The superintendent sent the question crackling along a tight beam toward the

apparently helpless creature. "Did you enter this region without orders?"

"No, Master. I was...ordered."

"By whom? What happened to you? Speak more clearly!"

"By—I cannot, Master. Help me!" The irregular flickering of the slave's auroral halo brightened fitfully with the

effort of radiating speech.

Unsympathetic as the superintendent normally was to such beings, he realized that help must be given if he were

to learn anything. Con-quering a distinct feeling of repugnance, he moved up beside the slave to investigate its

injuries. He expected, naturally, to find the visible results of a thorough ion-lashing, that being the principal

occupational hazard faced by the slaves; but what he actually saw almost made him forget his anger.

The unfortunate creature's outer crust was pitted—dotted and cratered with a pattern of circular holes which

resembled nothing the superinten-dent had ever encountered. He knew the long, shallow scars of an ion-lashing

and the broad, smoothed areas which showed on the crust of one of his people when close exposure to a sun had

boiled away portions of his mass. These marks, however, looked almost as though the slave had been exposed to a

pelting by granules of solid matter!

A ridiculous thought, of course. The stupidest slave could detect and avoid the occasional bits of rock and metal

which were encountered in the interstellar void. After all, they had the same sensory equipment and physical

powers as the masters. An unprejudiced judge might even have said they were of the same species as the masters.

Whatever had caused the creature's injury, there was little that could be done for it. Grudgingly, inspired far more

by curiosity than by sympa-thy, the superintendent did that little, supplying hydrocarbons and other organic matter

lately skimmed from the ringed planet.

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Hal Clement - Halo

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