his results. As Roger Wing could have told him, they were quite a sight!
9
Some of the little pots were full; most of these appeared to be unchanged. Others, however, were not. The contents of most of these were easy to find, but Ken could see that they were going to be hard to identify.
A white powder was literally over everything, as Roger had already seen. The yellow flecks of sodium peroxide were turning grayish as they decomposed in the heat. The gold crucible had been pulled from its base, but was otherwise unchanged; the iron had turned black; sodium, magnesium and titanium had disappeared, though the residue in each crucible gave promise that some of the scattered dust could be identified. There was still carbon in the container devoted to that substance, but much less of it than there had been.
All these things, however, interesting and important as they might be, only held the attention of Feth and Ken for a moment; for just inside the cargo door, imprinted clearly in the layer of dust, was a mark utterly unlike anything either had ever seen.
“Feth, dig up a camera somewhere. I’m going to get Drai.” Ken was gone almost before the words had left his diaphragm, and for once Feth had nothing to say. His eyes were stall fixed on the mark.
There was nothing exactly weird or terrifying about it; but he was utterly unable to keep his mind from the fascinating problem of what had made it. To a creature which had never seen anything even remotely like a human being, a hand print is apt to present difficulties in interpretation. For all he could tell, the creature might have been standing, sitting, or leaning on the spot, or sprawled out in the manner the Sarrians substituted for the second of those choices. There was simply no telling; the native might be the size of a Sarrian foot, making the mark with his body — or he might have been too big to get more than a single appendage into the compartment. Feth shook his head to clear it — even he began to realize that his thoughts were beginning to go in circles. He went to look for a camera.
Sallman Ken burst into the observatory without warning, but gave Drai no chance to explode. He was bursting himself with the news of the discovery — a little too much, in fact, since he kept up the talk all the way back to the shop. By the time they got there, the actual sight of the print was something of an anticlimax to Drai. He expressed polite interest, but little more. To him, of course, the physical appearance of Earth’s natives meant nothing whatever. His attention went to another aspect of the compartment.
“What’s all that white stuff?”
“I don’t know yet,” Ken admitted. “The torpedo just got back. It’s whatever Planet Three’s atmosphere does to the samples I sent down.”
“Then you’ll know what the atmosphere is before long? That will be a help. There are some caverns near the dark hemisphere that we’ve known about for years, which we could easily seal off and fill with whatever you say. Let us know when you find out anything.” He drifted casually out of the shop, leaving Ken rather disappointed. It had been such a fascinating discovery.
He shrugged the feeling off, collected what he could of his samples without disturbing the print, and bore them across the room to the bench on which a makeshift chemical laboratory had been set up. As he himself had admitted, he was not an expert analyst; but compounds formed by combustion were seldom extremely complex, and he felt that he could get a pretty good idea of the nature of these. After all, he knew the metals involved — there could be no metallic gases except hydrogen in Planet Three’s atmosphere. Even mercury would be a liquid, and no other metal had a really high vapor pressure even at Sarrian temperature. With this idea firmly in mind like a guiding star, Ken set blithely to work.
To a chemist, the work or a description of it would be interesting. To anyone else, it would be a boringly repetitious routine of heating and cooling, checking for boiling points and melting points, fractionating and filtering. Ken would have been quicker had he started with no preconceived notions; but finally even he was convinced. Once convinced, he wondered why he had not seen it before.
Feth Allmer had returned long since, and photographed the hand print from half a dozen angles. Now, seeing that Ken had stopped working, he roused himself from the rack on which he had found repose and approached the work bench.
“Have you got it, or are you stumped?” he queried.
“I have it, I guess. I should have guessed long ago. It’s oxygen.”
“What’s so obvious about that? Or, for that matter, why shouldn’t it be?”
“To the latter question, no reason. I simply rejected it as a possibility at first because it’s so active. I never stopped to think that it’s little if any more active at that temperature than sulfur is at ours. It’s perfectly possible to have it free in an atmosphere — provided there’s a process constantly replacing what goes into combination. You need the same for sulfur. Blast it, the two elements are so much alike! I should have thought of that right away!”
“What do you mean — a replacement process?”
“You know we breath sulfur and form sulfides with our metabolic processes. Mineral-eating life such as most plants, on the other hand, breaks down the sulfides and releases free sulfur, using solar energy for the purpose. Probably there is a similar division of life forms on this planet — one forming oxides and the other breaking them down. Now that I think of it, I believe there are some micro-organisms on Sarr that use oxygen instead of sulfur.”
“Is it pure oxygen?”
“No — only about a fifth or less. You remember how quickly the sodium and magnesium went out, and what the pressure drop was with them.”
“No, I don’t, and I can’t say that it means much to me anyway, but I’ll take your word for it. What else is there in the atmosphere? The titanium took about all of it, I do remember.”
“Right. It’s either nitrogen or some of its oxides — I can’t tell which without better controlled samples for quantity measurement. The only titanium compounds I could find in that mess were oxides and nitrides, though. The carbon oxidized, I guess — the reason there was no pressure change except that due to heat was that the principal oxide of carbon has two atoms of oxygen, and there
“I’ll have to take your word for that, too, I guess. All we have to do, then, is cook up a four-to-one mixture of nitrogen and oxygen and fill the caves the boss mentioned to about two-thirds normal pressure with it?”
“That may be a little oversimplified, but it should be close enough to the real thing to let this tofacco stuff grow — if you can get specimens here alive, to start things off. It would be a good idea to get some soil, too — I don’t suppose that powdering the local rock would help much. I may add in passing that I refuse even to attempt analyzing that soil. You’ll have to get enough to use.” Feth stared.
“But that’s ridiculous! We need tons, for a decent-sized plantation!” Sallman Ken shrugged.
“I know it. I tell you clearly that it will be easier to get those tons than to get an accurate soil analysis out of me. I simply don’t know enough about it, and I doubt if Sarr’s best chemist could hazard a prediction about the chemicals likely to be present in the solid state on that planet. At that temperature, I’ll bet organic compounds could exist without either fluorine or silicon.”
“I think we’d better get Drai back here to listen to that. I’m sure he was planning to have you synthesize both atmosphere and soil, so that we could set up the plantation entirely on our own.”
“Perhaps you’d better. I told him my limitations at the beginning; if he still expects that, he has no idea whatever of the nature of the problem.” Feth left, looking worried, though Ken was unable to understand what particular difference it made to the mechanic. Later he was to find out.
The worried expression was still more evident when Feth returned.
“He’s busy now. He says he’ll talk it over with you after that suit comes back, so that any alternatives can be considered, too. He wants me to take you out to the caves so you can see for yourself what he has in mind for making them usable.”
“How do we get there? They must be some distance from here.”
“Ordon Lee will take us around in the ship. It’s about two thousand miles. Let’s get into our suits.”
Ken heroically swallowed the impulse to ask why the whole subject should have come up so suddenly in the
