Short Fiction by Poul Anderson (free ebook novel .txt) 📕

“You do not understand!” he shrieked. “Come here!”

They followed him into his laboratory. He mumbled words about having checked a hunch, but it was his hands they watched. Those picked up a Geiger counter and brought it over to a wall and traced the path of a buried heating pipe.

The clicking roared out.

“Beta emission,” said Gilchrist. His mouth felt cottony.

“How intense?” whispered Catherine.

Gilchrist set up an integrating counter and let it run for a while. “Low,” he said. “But the dosage is cumulative. A week of this, and we’ll begin to show the effects. A month, and we’re dead.”

“There’s always some small beta emission from the pipes,” said the girl. “A little tritium gets formed down in the pile room. It’s⁠ ⁠… never been enough to matter.”

“Somehow, the pile’s beginning to make more H-3, then.” Gilchrist sat down on a bench and stared blankly at the floor.

“The laws of nature⁠—” Alemán had calmed down a bit, but his eyes were rimmed with white.

“Yes?” asked Catherine when he stopped. She spoke mostly to fend off the silence.

“I ’ave sometimes thought⁠ ⁠… what we know in science is so leetle. It may be the whole universe, it has been in a⁠ ⁠… a most improbable state for the past few billion years.” Alemán met her gaze as if pleading to be called a liar. “It may be that what we thought to be the laws of nature, those were only a leetle statistical fluctuation.”

“And now we’re going back onto the probability curve?” muttered Gilchrist. He shook himself. “No, damn it. I won’t accept that till I must. There’s got to be some rational explanation.”

“Leakage in the pipes?” ventured Catherine.

“We’d know that. Nor does it account for the radiation. No, it’s⁠—” His voice twisted up on him, and he groped out a cigarette. “It’s something natural.”

“What is natural?” said Alemán. “How do we know, leetle creeping things as we are, living only by the grace of God? We ’ave come one long way from home.” His vision strayed to the viewport with a kind of horror.

Yes, thought Gilchrist in the chilled darkness of his mind, yes, we have come far. Four and a half billion kilometers further out from the sun. The planet-sized moon of a world which could swallow ours whole without noticing. A thin hydrogen atmosphere, glaciers of nitrogen which turn to rivers when it warms up, ammonia snow, and a temperature not far above absolute zero. What do we know? What is this arrogance of ours which insists that the truth on Earth is also the truth on the rim of space?

No!

He stood up, shuddering with cold, and said slowly: “We’d better go see Dr. Vesey. He has to know, and maybe they haven’t thought to check the radiation. And then⁠—”

Catherine stood waiting.

“Then we have to think our way out of this mess,” he finished lamely. “Let’s, uh, start from the beginning. Think back how th-th-the heating plant works.”

Down in the bowels of the Hill was a great man-made cave. It had been carved out of the native iron, with rough pillars left to support the roof; walls and ceiling were lined with impermeable metal, but the floor was in its native state⁠—who cared if there was seepage downward?

The pile sat there, heart and life of the station.

It was not a big one, just sufficient to maintain man on Triton. Part of its energy was diverted to the mercury-vapor turbines which furnished electricity. The rest went to heat the domes above.

Now travel across trans-Jovian spaces is long and costly; even the smallest saving means much. Very heavy insulation against the haze of neutrons which the pile emitted could scarcely be hauled from Earth, nor had there been any reason to spend time and labor manufacturing it on Triton.

Instead, pumps sucked in the hydrogen air and compressed it to about 600 atmospheres. There is no better shield against high-energy neutrons; they bounce off the light molecules and slow down to a speed which makes them perfectly harmless laggards which don’t travel far before decaying into hydrogen themselves. This, as well as the direct radiation of the pile, turned the room hot⁠—some 500 degrees.

So what was more natural than that the same hydrogen should be circulated through pipes of chrome-vanadium steel, which is relatively impenetrable even at such temperatures, and heat the domes?

There was, of course, considerable loss of energy as the compressed gas seeped through the Hill and back into the satellite’s atmosphere. But the pumps maintained the pressure. It was not the most efficient system which could have been devised; it would have been ludicrous on Earth. But on Triton, terminal of nowhere, men had necessarily sacrificed some engineering excellence to the stiff requirements of transportation and labor.

And after all, it had worked without a hitch for many years on Saturn’s largest moon. It had worked for two years on Neptune’s⁠—

Samuel Vesey drummed on his desk with nervous fingers. His dark countenance was already haggard, the eyes sunken and feverish.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it was news to me.”

Jahangir put down the counter. The office was very quiet for a while.

“Don’t spread the word,” said Vesey. “We’ll confine it to the engineers. Conditions are bad enough without a riot breaking loose. We can take several days of this radiation without harm, but you know how some people are about it.”

“You’ve not been very candid so far,” snapped Catherine. “Just exactly what have you learned?”

Jahangir shrugged. There was a white frost rimming his beard. “There’ve been no bulletins because there’s no news,” he replied. “We checked the pile. It’s still putting out as it should. The neutron flux density is the same as ever. It’s the gas there and in our pipes which has gotten cold and⁠ ⁠… radioactive.”

“Have you looked directly in the pile room⁠—actually entered?” demanded Alemán.

Jahangir lifted his shoulders again. “My dear old chap,” he murmured. “At a temperature of 500 and a pressure of 600?” After a moment, he frowned. “I do have some men modifying a trac so it could be driven