straddled against the sky. It’s dark, I can’t see much except stars. Let me unlimber my flashlight… A-a-ah!” she nearly screamed.
He half rose in his seat. “What happened? Carita, dear, are you there?”
“Yes. A nasty shock, that sight. Listen, the Number Three leg is off the ground. The bottom end sticks up— ragged, holes in it—like a badly corroded thing that got so weak it tore apart when it came under stress… But Juan, this is melded steel and titanium alloy. What could’ve eaten it?”
“We can guess,” Yoshii said between his teeth. “Come back.”
“No, I need to see the rest. Don’t worry, I’ll creep down the curve like a cat burglar… I’m at the socket of Number Two. I’m shining my light along it. Yes. Nothing left of the foot. Seems to be sort of absorbed into the ground. Number One—more yet is missing, and, yes, that’s the unit which pulled partly loose from its mounting and made the hole in the engine compartment. I can see the skin ripped and buckled—”
The boat swayed. Her nose twisted about and lifted a few degrees as her tail sank. Groans went through the hull.
“I’m okay, mate. Well anchored. But holy Finagle! The stuff is going wild underneath. Has it come to a boil?”
Yoshii could not see that where he was, but he did spy the quickening and thickening of the wave fronts farther off. Understanding blasted him. “Douse your flash!” he yelled. “Get back inside!” He grabbed for the searchlight switch as for the throat of a foeman.
“Hey, what is this?” Carita called.
“Douse your flash, I said. Can’t you see, bright light is what causes the trouble? Find your way by the stars.” He clutched his shoulders and shivered in the dark. The boat shivered with him, diminuendo.
“I read you,” Carita said faintly.
Yoshii darkened the cabin as well. “Let’s meet in my stateroom,” he proposed. The sarcastically named cubbyhole did not give on the outside. He groped till he found it. When again he dared grant himself vision, he bent above the locker where a bottle was, shook his head, straightened, and stood looking at a photograph of Laurinda on the bulkhead.
Carita entered. Her coverall was wet and pungent. Sweat glistened on the dark face. “Haven’t you poured me a drink?” she asked hoarsely.
“I decided that would be unwise.”
“Maybe for you, sonny boy. Not for me.” The Jinxian helped herself, tossed off two mouthfuls, and sighed. “That’s better. Thank you very much.”
Yoshii gestured at his bunk. It was roughly horizontal, that being how the polarizer field was ordinarily set in flight. They sat down on it, side by side. Her bravado dwindled. “So you know what’s happened to us?” she murmured.
“I have a guess,” Yoshii replied with care. “It depends on my idea of the supermolecule being correct.”
“Say on.”
“Well, you see, it grew. Or rather, I think, different ones grew till they met and linked up. There must have been all possible combinations, permutations of radicals and bases and every kind of chemical unit. Cosmic radiation drives that kind of change. So does quantum mechanics, random effects; that was probably dominant in intergalactic space. So the chemistry… mutated. Whatever structure was better at assimilating fresh material would be favored. It would grow at the expense of the rest.”
Carita whistled. “Natural selection, evolution? You mean the stuffs alive?”
“No, not like you and me or bacteria or even viruses. But it would develop components which could grab onto new atoms, and other components that are catalytic, and—and I think ways of passing an atom on from ring to ring until it’s gone as far as there are receptors for it. That would leave room for taking up more at the near end. Because I think finally the molecule evolved beyond the point of depending on whatever fell its way from the skies. I think it began extracting matter from the planet, whenever it spread to where there was a suitable substance. Breaking down carbonates and silicates and—and incorporating metallic atoms too. Clathrate formation would promote growth, as well as chemical combination. But of course metal is ultra-scarce here, so the molecule became highly efficient at stealing it.”
“At eating things.” Carita stared before her. “That’s close enough to life for me.”
“The normal environment is low-energy,” Yoshii said. “Things must go faster during the day. Not that there is much action then, either; nothing much to act on, any more. But we set down on our metal landing gear, and pumped out light-frequency quanta.”
“And it… woke.”
Yoshii grimaced but stayed clear of semantic argument. “It must be strongly bound to the underlying rock. It was quick to knit the feet of our landing jacks into that structure.”
“And gnaw its way upward, till I—”
He caught her hand. “You couldn’t have known. I didn’t.”
The deck swayed underfoot. The liquor sloshed in Carita’s glass. “But we’re blacked out now,” she protested, as if to the devourer.
“We’re radiating infrared,” Yoshii answered. “The boat’s warmer on the outside than her surroundings. Energy supply. The chemistry goes on, though slower. We can’t stop it, not unless we want to freeze to death.”
“How long have we got?” she whispered.
He bit his lip. “I don’t know. If we last till sunrise we’ll dissolve entirely soon after, like spooks in an ancient folk tale.”
“That’s more than a month away.”
“I’d estimate that well before then, the hull will be eaten open. No more air.”
“Our suits recycle. We can jury-rig other things to keep us alive.”
“But the hull will weaken and collapse. Do you want to be tossed down into… that?” Yoshii sat straight. Resolution stiffened his tone. “I’m afraid we have no choice except to throw ourselves on the mercy of the kzinti. They must have arrived.”
Carita ripped forth a string of oaths and obscenities, knocked back her drink, and rose. “Shep is still on the loose,” she said.
Yoshii winced. “Man the control cabin. I’m going to suit up and get back into the engine compartment.”
“What for?”
“Isn’t it obvious? The energy boxes are stored there.”
“Oh. Yes. You’re thinking we’ll have to take orbit under our own power and let the kzinti pick us up? I’m not keen on that.”
“No! But I don’t imagine they’ll be keen on landing here.” He rejoined her an hour later. By starlight she saw how he trembled. “I was too late,” dragged from him. “Maybe if I hadn’t had to operate the airlock hydraulics manually. What I found was a seething mass of—of—The entire locker where the boxes were is gone.”
“That fast?” she wondered, stunned, though they had been in communication until he passed through into the after section. And then, slowly: “Well, the capacitors in those boxes are—were fully charged. Energy concentrated like the stuff’s never known before. Too bad so much didn’t poison it. Instead, it got a kick in the chemistry making it able to eat everything in three gulps. We’re lucky the life-support batteries weren’t there, too.”
“Let’s hope the kzinti want us enough to come down for us.”
Shielding a flashlight with a clipboard, they activated the radio, standard-band broadcast. Yoshii spoke. “SOS. SOS. Two humans aboard a boat, marooned,” he said dully. “We are sinking into a—solvent—the macromolecule— You doubtless know about it. Rescue requested.
“We can’t lift by ourselves. The drive units in our spacesuits have only partial charge, insufficient to reach orbital speed in this field. We can’t recharge. That equipment is gone. So are all the reserve energy boxes. We can flit a goodly distance around the planet or rise to a goodly height, but we can’t escape.
“Please take us off. Please inform. We will keep our receiver open on this band, and continue transmission so you can locate us.”
Having recorded his words, he set them to repeat directly on the carrier wave and leaned back. “Not the most eloquent speech ever made,” he admitted. “But they won’t care.”
She took his hand. Heaven stood gleamful above them. Time passed.
