Half Life by Hal Clement Read Free Book Online Page A

transportation and actual collapse of many travel systems had failed to show the opposite effect.
    Belvew, who liked people, was not a conspiracy believer but was too well informed to feel sure of his own correctness. CPRS—calcium-phosphorus recrystallization syndrome, the ailment which would presumably finish turning his own bones to something like eggshell china in another two or three years—was known to be caused by a virus which would have taken only a little manipulation to produce from a normal human gene.
    Or, of course, a very modest natural mutation.
    An occasional message from Earth suggested that progress was being made in the search for its cure, but this offered Belvew little comfort. The same claims had been current for most forms of cancer for centuries; occasionally, and much less rationally, someone would even claim a cure for cancer in general.
    This might be why most of Belvew’s generation tended to be skeptics who had no real need for GO6.
    If success for CPRS was actually achieved, it was unlikely that the treatment could be duplicated by the Saturn crew’s relatively limited synthesis facilities. Factories could be reprogrammed or even replanned, but this shouldn’t be done for merely personal reasons.
    Gene, sure that Maria was having no trouble with the aircraft, extracted himself from his suit. It could use servicing too. He floated back to his sleeping cell and napped while the waldo’s life support devices were recharged, cleaned, and otherwise readied for further use, and Status ran test programs on the control systems. The suits were not full-cycling, indefinitely lasting affairs; they had been designed mainly as waldoes. They did, of course, have fusers and life support capacity designed for Titan’s environment, but they could keep the wearer comfortable for only thirty hours or so, and alive for perhaps twenty more, on the surface.
    Calcium-phosphorus recrystallization syndrome, while robbing him of energy, also kept Gene from sleeping for very long at a time. He was back with Oceanus sometime before it reached the planned site of the next seismic array, and Maria returned her full attention rather thankfully to her general mapping.
    There was nothing for the pilot to do but watch scenery and, of course, speculate on the causes of its various features. He could see the ground well enough from this height, using frequencies able to pierce the small amount of smog which was below him.
    There were block mountains and rift valleys; there were plains and what looked like volcanoes—these would come early on the investigation schedule once the weather and seismic nets were established; prebiotic chemistry, if it was happening at all, would presumably need a large variety of materials and a source of energy, and volcanic action offered the best hope of both.
    There were lakes large and small. The background surface, the covering of nearly all the more or less horizontal areas, could be the hypothetical tar and ice dust; the factory had been planted on such a surface, but at that time no analysis had been possible. Neither cans nor labs had yet been grown.
    None of the lakes was large enough to be called an ocean, as mapping from orbit had already made clear. However, it now seemed that fully a tenth of the satellite’s surface was occupied by liquid bodies, ranging in size from Carver, about the area of Earth’s Lake Victoria, down to puddles. The Collos patches were neither as numerous nor as a rule anything like as large as the one where Oceanus had just had its mishap, but they were far from rare.
    The locations of the lakes were to some extent controlled by topography, of course; water has many unique properties, but other liquids including methane share its tendency to flow downhill. Nobody, however, had yet found any order or sense in the size, location, or arrangement of the Collos patches.
    Belvew amused himself, as he had done before, by trying to organize patterns out of those he