Critical Difference
Murray Leinster
I
Massy waked that morning when the only partly opened port of his sleeping-cabin closed of itself and the room-warmer began to whir. He found himself burrowed deep under his covering, and when he got his head out of it the already bright room was bitterly cold and his breath made a fog about him.
He thought uneasily, it's colder than yesterday! But a Colonial Survey officer is not supposed to let himself seem disturbed in public, and the only way to follow that rule is to follow it in private, too. So Massy composed his features, while gloom filled him. When one has just received senior service rating and is on one's very first independent survey of a new colonial installation, the unexpected can be appalling. The unexpected was definitely here, on Lani III.
He'd been a Survey Candidate on Khali II and Taret and Arepo I, all of which were tropical, and a junior officer on Menes Ill and Thotmes—one a semiarid planet and the other temperate-volcanic—and he'd done an assistant job on Saril's solitary world, which was nine-tenths water. But this first independent survey on his own was another matter. Everything was wholly unfamiliar. An ice planet with a minus point one habitability rating was upsetting in its peculiarites. He knew what the books said about glacial-world conditions, but that was all.
The denseness of the fog his breath made seemed to grow less as the room-warmer whirred and whirred. When by the thinness of the mist he guessed the ternperature to be not much under freezing, he climbed out of his bunk and went to the port to look out. His cabin, of course, was in one of the drone-hulls that had brought the colony's equipment to Lani III. The other emptied hulls were precisely ranged in order outside. They were duly connected by tubular galleries, and very painstakingly leveled. They gave an impression of impassioned tidiness among the upheaved, ice-coated mountains all about.
He gazed down the long valley in which the colony lay. There were monstrous slanting peaks on either side. They partly framed the morning sun. Their sides were ice. The flanks of every mountain in view were ice. The sky was pale. The sun had four sun-dogs placed geometrically about it. It shone coldly upon this far-out world. Normal post-midnight temperatures in this valley ranged around ten below zero—and this was technically summer. But it was colder than ten below zero now. At noon there were normally tiny trickling rills of surface thaw running down the sunlit sides of the mountains—but they froze again at night and the frost replaced itself after sunset. And this was a sheltered valley—warmer than most of the planet's surface. Thee sun had its sundogs every day on rising. There were nights when the brighter planets had star-pups, too.
The phone-plate lighted and dimmed and lighted and dimmed. They did themselves well on Lani III—but the parent world was in this same solar system. That was rare. Massy stood before the plate and it cleared. Herndon's face peered unhappily out of it. He was even younger than Massy, and inclined to lean heavily on the supposedly vast experience of a Senior Officer of the Colonial Survey.
"Well?" said Massy—and suddenly felt very undignified in his sleeping-garments.
"We're picking up a beam from home," said Herndon anxiously, "but we can't make it out."
Because the third planet of the sun Lani was being colonized from the second inhabited world, communication with the colony's base was possible. A tight beam could span a distance which was only light-minutes across at conjunction, and not much over a light-hour at opposition—as now. But the beam communication had been broken br the past few weeks, and shouldn't be possible again for some weeks more. The sun lay between. One couldn't expect normal sound-and-picture transmission until the parent planet had moved past the scrambler-fields of Lani. But something had come through. It would be reasonable for it to be pretty well hashed when it arrived.
"They aren't sending words or pictures," said Herndon uneasily. "The beam is wabbly and we don't know what to make of it. It's a signal, all right, and on the regular frequency. But there are all sorts of stray noises, and still in the midst of it there's some sort of signal we can't make out. It's like a whine, only it stutters. It's a broken-up sound of one pitch."
Massy rubbed his chin reflectively. He remembered a course in information theory just before he'd graduated from the Service Academy. Signals made by pulses, and pitch-changes and frequency-variations. Information was what couldn't be predicted without information. And he remembered with gratitude a seminar on the history of communication, just before he'd gone out on his first field job as a Survey Candidate.
"Hm-m-m," he said with a trace of self-consciousness. "Those noises—the stuttering ones. Would they be, on the whole, of no more than two different durations? Like—bzzzzz bzz bzz bzzzzzz bzz?"
He felt that he lost dignity by making such ribald sounds. But Herndon's face brightened.
"That's it!" he said relievedly. "That's it! Only they're high-pitched like—" His voice went falsetto…"Bzz bzz bzz bzzzzz bzz bzz"
It occurred to Massy that they sounded like two idiots. He said with dignity: "Record everything you get, and I'll try to decode it." He added: "Before there was voice communication there were signals by light and sounds in groups of long and short units. They came in groups, to stand for letters, and things were spelled out. Of course there were larger groups, which, were words. Very crude system, but it worked when there was great interference, as in the early days. If there's some emergency, your home world might try to get through the sun's scrambler-field that way."
"Undoubtedly!" said Herndon, with even greater relief. "No questiçn, that's it!" He regarded Massy with great respect as he clicked off. His image faded. The plate was clear.
He thinks I'm wonderful, thought Massy wryly. Because I'm Colonial Survey. But all I know is what's been taught me. It's bound to show up sooner or later. Damn!
He dressed. From time to time he looked out the port again. The intolerable cold of Lani III had intensified, lately. There was some idea that sunspots were somehow the cause. He couldn't make out sunspots with the naked eye, but the sun did look pale, with its accompanying sun-dogs. Massy was annoyed by them. They were the result of microscopic ice-crystals suspended in the air. There was no dust on this planet, but there was plenty of ice! It was in the air and on the ground and even under it. To be sure, the drills for the foundation of the great landing-grid had brought up cores of frozen humus along with frozen clay, so there must have been a time when this world had known clouds and seas and vegetation. But it was millions, maybe hundreds of millions of years ago. Right now, though, it was only warm enough to have an atmosphere and very slight and partial thawings in direct sunlight, in sheltered spots, at midday. It couldn't support life, because life is always dependent on other life, and there is a temperature below which a neutral ecological system can't maintain itself. The past few weeks, the climate had been such that even human-supplied life looked dubious.
Massy slipped on his Colonial Survey uniform with its palm-tree insignia. Nothing could be much more inappropriate than palm-tree symbols on a planet with sixty feet of permafrost, Massy, reflected wryly. The construction gang calls it a blast, instead of a tree, because we blow up when they try to dodge specifications. But specifications have to be met! You can't bet the lives of a colony or even a ship's crew on half-built facilities!
He marched down the corridor from his sleeping room, with the dignity he painstakingly tried to maintain for the sake of the Colonial Survey. It was a pretty lonely business, being dignified all the time. If Herndon didn't look so respectful, it would have been pleasant to be more friendly. But Herndon revered him. Even his sister Riki—but Massy put her firmly out of his mind. He was on Lani III to check and approve the colony installations. There was the giant landing-grid for spaceships, which took power from the ionosphere to bring heavily loaded space-vessels gently to the ground, and in between times took power from the same source to supply the colony's needs. It also lifted visiting spacecraft the necessary five planetary diameters out when they took off again. There was power-storage in the remote event of disaster to that giant device. There was a food-reserve and the necessary resources for its indefinite stretching in case of need. That usually meant hydroponic installations. There was a reason for the colony, which would make it self-supporting—here a mine. All these things had had to be finished and operable and inspected by a duly qualified Colonial Survey officer before the colony could be licensed for unlimited use. It was all very normal and official, but Massy was the newest Senior Survey Officer on the list, and this was the first of his independent operations. He felt inadequate, sometimes.