Half Life by Hal Clement Read Free Book Online

do it directly, with release of hydrogen. Maybe some of the prelife catalysts we’re hoping to find are actually here, if you think the reaction would go too slowly at ninety K’s.”
    “Naughty, naughty!” cut in Maria’s gentle voice. “Catalysts wouldn’t help. That reaction’s endothermic by over a hundred kJ.”
    For a moment Gene wanted to kick himself. He knew the woman hadn’t had that datum in her head, but he, too, could have checked quietly with Status before making himself sound silly. Then he saw a way out.
    “The energy could come from local heat,” he said, trying to keep smugness out of his voice.
    “At ninety kelvins?”
    “Sure. I did mention the other product. Hydrogen would leave the scene, so no back reaction—”
    “That would happen only if it could leave the scene.” Goodall had pounced on the hypothesis and was enjoying himself. “That would be at or very near the surface, not deep underground—”
    “Or in or just under a lake,” Ginger cut in. “We’ll have to look for bubbles.”
    “And lower than ordinary temperatures, if it’s happening fast enough to show bubbles from the air,”
    Belvew finished. “All right, we’ll look. Do some planning, you types with imaginations. I’m just an observer. I’m going to hit Line Five. Give me heading and time, Maria.”
    The fifth planned seismic array was a quarter of the way around Titan from Lake Carver, ten or eleven hours flight at standard observing speed and over two even at full ram thrust in the thinner air tens of kilometers up. Belvew set everything on automatic, turned Oceanus over to Maria’s attention, and decided to eat and sleep. He needed the rest. A healthy twenty-year-old might have gone through the last hour casually, but he was neither. Very few human beings now alive were.
    Evolution of disease organisms had gotten further and further ahead of medical research; dozens, counting new variations of older and once solved ailments such as the various leukemias, leprosies, and cancers, were now on the list of major health problems along with AIDS TA, VL, and XL. At least four of these involved sterility, three of them in women. The average age was now barely twenty years in spite of, or more likely because of, the species’ usual reaction to any major threat. STDs shared the increase.
    Belvew and Inger were twenty-eight, quite elderly; Goodall was forty-four, almost unique.
    Suggested explanations among the less panicked survivors were legion, and even ones which seemed worth testing were quite numerous. Satisfactory ones were almost nonexistent, except very briefly. Even supematuralists had had to fall back on Noachian-flood divine wrath aimed at general materialism rather than at specific sins.
    The scientists had done better as far as testable ideas were concerned, but not very much; each virus, prion, genetic warp, and other cause of each given ailment had usually been identified beyond reasonable doubt quickly enough, but the information seldom produced an effective treatment before the disease in question had killed or incapacitated a few million more victims. The basic, general, underlying cause of the whole pattern was simply unknown.
    There were two favored speculations—they showed little sign of graduating to real hypotheses—among scientists. Either new disease organisms had been tailored by people with motives that were unspecified, but presumably unsane by most standards; or the sudden appearance of so many ailments almost simultaneously was merely a statistical event like a baseball hitting streak. Both speculation sets took synergy for granted, and humanity still had many conspiracy fundamentalists to defend the first.
    Those who preferred the second could point out how and why common worldwide travel could bring infective agents to critical concentration, at which hosts could be found and invaded faster than victims died off. They could not, however, explain why drastic restrictions on