CATALYSIS
BY POUL ANDERSON
Man is a kind of turtle. Wherever
he goes, he will always carry a
shell holding warmth and air—and
with them his human failings....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
When you looked outside, it was into darkness.
Going out yourself, you could let your eyes accommodate. At high noon,the sun was a sharp spark in a dusky heaven, and its light amounted toabout one-ninth of one percent of what Earth gets. The great fieldsof ice and frozen gases reflected enough to help vision, but upthrustcrags and cliffs of naked rock were like blackened teeth.
Seventy hours later, when Triton was on the other side of the primarythat it always faced, there was a midnight thick enough to choke you.The stars flashed and glittered, a steely twinkle through a gauntatmosphere mostly hydrogen—strange, to see the old lost constellationsof Earth, here on the edge of the deep. Neptune was at the full, agiant sprawling across eight degrees of sky, bluish gray and smokybanded, but it caught so little sunlight that men groped in blindness.They set up floodlights, or had lamps glaring from their tracs, to workat all.
But nearly everything went on indoors. Tunnels connected the variousbuildings on the Hill, instruments were of necessity designed tooperate in the open without needing human care, men rarely had occasionto go out any more. Which was just as well, for it takes considerablepower and insulation to keep a man alive when the temperature hoversaround 60 degrees Kelvin.
And so you stood at a meter-thick port of insulglas, and looked out,and saw only night.
Thomas Gilchrist turned away from the view with a shudder. He hadalways hated cold, and it was as if the bitterness beyond the lab-domehad seeped in to touch him. The cluttered gleam of instruments in theroom, desk piled high with papers and microspools, the subdued chatterof a computer chewing a problem, were comforting.
He remembered his purpose and went with a long low-gravity stride tocheck the mineralogical unit. It was busily breaking down materialsfetched in by the robosamplers, stones never found on Earth—becauseEarth is not the Mercury-sized satellite of an outer planet, nor hasit seen some mysterious catastrophe in an unknown time back nearthe beginning of things. Recording meters wavered needles acrosstheir dials, data tapes clicked out, he would soon have the basicinformation. Then he would try to figure out how the mineral could havebeen formed, and give his hypothesis to the computer for mathematicalanalysis of possibility, and start on some other sample.
For a while Gilchrist stood watching the machine. A cigaret smolderedforgotten between his fingers. He was a short, pudgy young man,with unkempt hair above homely features. Pale-blue eyes blinkednearsightedly behind contact lenses, his myopia was not enough tojustify surgery. Tunic and slacks were rumpled beneath the gray smock.
Behold the bold pioneer! he thought. His self-deprecating sarcasmwas mildly nonsane, he knew, but he couldn't stop—it was like bitingan aching tooth. Only a dentist could fix the tooth in an hour, whilea scarred soul took years to heal. It was like his eyes, the troublewasn't bad enough to require long expensive repair, so he limpedthrough life.
Rafael Alemán came in, small and dark and cheerful. "'Allo," he said."