his first visit, though. When they moved about the planet’s surface, staying briefly in each of the climatic zones from polar to tropical in order to assess the habitability of each, they had chosen their landing-sites more or less randomly within each zone.
There was much less variety here than on Earth, one had to concede that, even though the total effect was un-Earthly. For instance, their base island was hexagonal and spined with ridges radiating from a central peak;the contours on the chart he held made it look like an X-ray photograph of an Earthly sea-star.
But so was that island yonder, whose appearance he had just glanced up to verify. The lines suggested by the ridges of one could be traced across the seabed to the termini of others like them on another island. There was a web of wrinkles all over the planet, and wherever you went you found much the same physical features shading gradually from one area to another. Under the sea, of course, one inevitably found a geology more like Earth’s. But men were surface-living creatures. They could learn from their submarine survey remotes that the equivalent of continents existed on Asgard; with their own eyes and the touch of their bare hands, however, they could detect only a sort of vast Pacific. There was not even an Australia to provide contrast; the largest island on the whole planet was smaller than Britain.
Now, he realised, he was getting somewhere with his meditations. It was a wonderful thing to conquer a whole new world under an alien sun by the pure power of reason—analysing, testing, drawing conclusions, and acting on them—but for him at least the mere solving of problems was not enough justification to stay alive. When all the factors were known before you committed yourself, no external influence could surprise you. He remembered Kitty Minakis rising at their first monthly progress meeting, the only one they had held inside the ship, to answer some questions about the weather the colony would have to contend with. She had said something to the effect that the temperature of Asgard was not actually higher than Earth’s, in the sense that its distance from the sun gave it a comparable quantity of solar radiation. But owing to the seasonal nature of the icecaps, less heat was reflected from snow and ice, and the annual melting produced little more than an aberration in the ocean temperature—it didn’t give rise to huge cold currents like the polar waters of Earth.
What was the image she used? “The typical polarphenomenon here is not snow, as it is at home, but merely fog.”
There was something definite about snow: water after a change of state, abruptly differentiated into white flakes. But fog was merely a clammy nuisance.
Somewhere in there was—
The boat changed course abruptly, snatching him out of his brown study and back to awareness. Instantly he was alert to danger, one hand slapping down to the pocket where he kept his bolt-gun, the other poised to hit the emergency manual controls. There was no need. All that had happened was that the sonar had detected a large water-creature surfacing from the bottom—here, there was a channel nearly five hundred feet deep—and swerved to miss it.
Excited, he saw it as it broke amid a vast bubble, a burp of stored air which it had used to go gathering its food on the lowermost slopes of the submarine mountains among which it roved. He had seen such a beast before, though only once, and swung his camera for Yoko to catch a few seconds of it before it had drawn a fresh breath and vanished.
Now if only I were a xenobiologist … I can’t imagine Yoko losing her interest in this world before she’s very old.
Why were there air-breathing herbivores in the oceans of this watery world? During what glacial period had their ancestors abandoned gills for lung-equivalents, and what upheaval had subsequently driven them back, like Earthly whales, to browse with their enormous comb-like lips on the
There was much less variety here than on Earth, one had to concede that, even though the total effect was un-Earthly. For instance, their base island was hexagonal and spined with ridges radiating from a central peak;the contours on the chart he held made it look like an X-ray photograph of an Earthly sea-star.
But so was that island yonder, whose appearance he had just glanced up to verify. The lines suggested by the ridges of one could be traced across the seabed to the termini of others like them on another island. There was a web of wrinkles all over the planet, and wherever you went you found much the same physical features shading gradually from one area to another. Under the sea, of course, one inevitably found a geology more like Earth’s. But men were surface-living creatures. They could learn from their submarine survey remotes that the equivalent of continents existed on Asgard; with their own eyes and the touch of their bare hands, however, they could detect only a sort of vast Pacific. There was not even an Australia to provide contrast; the largest island on the whole planet was smaller than Britain.
Now, he realised, he was getting somewhere with his meditations. It was a wonderful thing to conquer a whole new world under an alien sun by the pure power of reason—analysing, testing, drawing conclusions, and acting on them—but for him at least the mere solving of problems was not enough justification to stay alive. When all the factors were known before you committed yourself, no external influence could surprise you. He remembered Kitty Minakis rising at their first monthly progress meeting, the only one they had held inside the ship, to answer some questions about the weather the colony would have to contend with. She had said something to the effect that the temperature of Asgard was not actually higher than Earth’s, in the sense that its distance from the sun gave it a comparable quantity of solar radiation. But owing to the seasonal nature of the icecaps, less heat was reflected from snow and ice, and the annual melting produced little more than an aberration in the ocean temperature—it didn’t give rise to huge cold currents like the polar waters of Earth.
What was the image she used? “The typical polarphenomenon here is not snow, as it is at home, but merely fog.”
There was something definite about snow: water after a change of state, abruptly differentiated into white flakes. But fog was merely a clammy nuisance.
Somewhere in there was—
The boat changed course abruptly, snatching him out of his brown study and back to awareness. Instantly he was alert to danger, one hand slapping down to the pocket where he kept his bolt-gun, the other poised to hit the emergency manual controls. There was no need. All that had happened was that the sonar had detected a large water-creature surfacing from the bottom—here, there was a channel nearly five hundred feet deep—and swerved to miss it.
Excited, he saw it as it broke amid a vast bubble, a burp of stored air which it had used to go gathering its food on the lowermost slopes of the submarine mountains among which it roved. He had seen such a beast before, though only once, and swung his camera for Yoko to catch a few seconds of it before it had drawn a fresh breath and vanished.
Now if only I were a xenobiologist … I can’t imagine Yoko losing her interest in this world before she’s very old.
Why were there air-breathing herbivores in the oceans of this watery world? During what glacial period had their ancestors abandoned gills for lung-equivalents, and what upheaval had subsequently driven them back, like Earthly whales, to browse with their enormous comb-like lips on the
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