Jack Williamson - Nitrogen Plus.pdf

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Nitrogen Plus
by Jack Williamson
We are delighted to have a new story by Jack Williamson. In his ninety-third
year, Mr. Williamson continues to produce remarkable work. A recent
novella, “The Ultimate Earth” ( Analog , December 2000), is currently a Hugo
finalist, and his latest novel, Terraforming Earth , has just been released by
Tor Books.
Some optimist in the Star Survey christened the planet New Earth. It was
warmed by a Sun-like star. The mass and gravity were only slightly less than Earth’s,
the day very slightly longer. The oceans were water, and water ice capped the poles.
The surface air pressure was near Earth normal.
* * * *
“A perfect world!” my uncle boasted. “Except for one odd feature. The
atmosphere is nearly pure nitrogen, with a whiff of carbon dioxide but hardly a trace
of oxygen. A survey lander discovered that, and never returned. Tough luck for the
crew, but good news for me. I got the planet for a song.”
He wanted me to terraform it.
“A slice of apple pie,” he scoffed when I shrank from the problems. “Just
sow the seas with engineered algae spores. Wait for photosynthesis to release
oxygen out of the water.”
“How long would that take?”
“What’s time?” His pudgy fingers snapped the years away. “Fly home for a
holiday and back there again. Ninety-seven light-years each way. Two centuries for
the spores to work. Only a weekend for you, what with the relativistic time
contraction. You’ll have a paradise planet ready to welcome our colonists and get
home again with your own ticket to immortality.”
Immortality? I wanted to strangle him.
He is immortal, with his own imperial sense of time, but the members of his
tight little fellowship are jealous of their secrets and slow to admit outsiders. Not that
I’d longed to become his eternal handyman or abandon my own place and time for a
life of interstellar adventure.
Yet he is my uncle. He’s a legendary interstellar tycoon, enormously wealthy.
His enemies like to paint him as a devouring octopus with a thousand arms writhing
though the galaxy. As a child I had dreaded his sudden fits of rage when some
unlucky flunky failed to please him. Yet I had learned to tolerate him.
Hard enough to love, he’s a short, shrewd, dynamic man with a round baby
face. His fat cheeks are pink and hairless from the precious micro-machines in his
 
blood, which sharpen his wits and preserve him from illness or age. He can seem
genial and generous enough, so long as you please him.
My father, two years younger, had been the unlucky brother. A disappointed
idealist, a failed artist, an ill-starred lover. When my uncle offered him a chance at
immortality, he refused it because he thought people should be equal. His
avant-garde art found no buyers. My mother left him for another eternal. He vanished
from Earth the year I was five. My uncle adopted me, sent me though expensive
schools, promised me a fine future in his companies. When he named me his
personal agent on New Earth, I knew I had to go.
* * *
I found a crew at the Skipper’s Club. That’s an ancient building inhabited by
ancient starmen who run a sort of hiring hall and retirement home for skipship crews.
Long halls in the basement crypt are lined with cold lockers labeled with the fading
names of men and women who had planned to be back after decades or centuries to
open them again.
The pilot I hired was Buzz Bates, a lanky, bald, and ageless veteran of half a
hundred flights. His copilot was an anxious young apprentice who had never been
beyond the solar system. I spent an evening with them in the bar, listening to his tales
of desperate adventure on far-off worlds, and even here on Earth.
Home from his first voyage on the eve of the great New England disaster, he
barely got off again before the impact. His birth city, ancient New York, was gone
when he got back again, Atlantica standing on the site. The apprentice listened
uneasily and drank too much until Bates finally had to help him up to his room.
I rented a cold crypt box for myself and left a few documents and holos I
didn’t want to lose. We took off in a little quantum-wave cruiser with a load of
engineered algae spores and gear for their dispersal. Our staff biologist was Elena
Queler. A lively brunette with a wry wit and a voice I liked. She laughed at my regrets
at having to abandon all I had known.
“No grief for me! My own life had gone sour. Wrong guy living with me.
Research funds dried up. Thumbs turned down on my nano-nurse project. Nitrogen
or spitrogen, New Earth has got to be better than the hell I’ve had here.”
We scanned the planet from space.
“Another Eden!” Excitement lit her piquant face. “Waiting to be created.”
The seas were a pure and brilliant blue, the two great continents rimmed with
bare earth in many different shades, but never a hint of green chlorophyll. Most of
the land shone with a strange and brilliant white.
“Snow?” I wondered.
“In the tropics?” She laughed at the question and turned serious. “The
 
spectrometer boggles me. Odd signatures of silicon and carbon. Not a trace of free
oxygen. I want a closer look.”
As we dropped closer, Pilot Bates discovered a tiny satellite in low orbit. It
turned out to be the lost lander. The copilot got into space gear to go aboard. He
was gone a long time.
“All dead.”
Back at last, peeling off his gear, he looked sick and shaken.
“The crew. The automatics. Everything.” He shivered and stood silent till
Bates made him go on. “I got through the lock with a laser torch. No air inside. The
bodies are freeze-dried mummies, brittle as glass. I found a quarter-ton of some
queer crystal stuff they’d loaded in the cargo bay. It must have killed them.”
“How?”
“Just a hunch.” He shrugged and went silent for an instant. “If you’d seen the
bodies! Mouths gaping open. Oxygen masks still in their hands, but I think they died
fighting for breath.
“I found these.”
He tossed a plastic bag that rattled when the pilot caught it.
“Don’t ask where they got them.” He shivered. “Bait, I imagine, to tempt them
out of their wits.”
The bag held half a kilo of diamonds. Perfect white octahedral crystals
weighing up to a dozen carats, they glittered like a shattered rainbow when he let us
see them. The pilot goggled at them and battered him with questions.
“I never touched the white stuff,” he said. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t
want to. I did look for records, a logbook, anything. Not a clue. I think all they
thought about was how to get away alive. My own luck was better, but I don’t want
to stretch it.”
* * *
“We have to land,” Bates told me. “If we don’t, your uncle would only send
us back.”
The diamonds had captured Elena.
“So many!” She stirred a handful of the great gems with a finely tapered
forefinger, her own eyes shining. “So big! So perfect. All almost identical. I’ve got
to know how they came to be.”
She wanted to see that strange white stuff for herself. The copilot was still
fighting his funk. Bates was cautious, but he set us down on the western shore of a
 
narrow mountain peninsula that ran south across the equator from the largest
continent. She ran tests and pronounced the nitrogen harmless, so long as we didn’t
try to breathe it.
With oxypacks and breathing masks, we cycled out of the air lock. A breeze
off the sea felt warm enough for T-shirts, but the white sand beach sloped up to
what looked like banks of snow. Dark cliffs stood beyond them, cut with a
sheer-walled canyon that came down from a mountain ridge. The cliffs were topped
with something white.
We had come prepared for work outside, with nuclear power for the oxygen
generators. To sow the algae, we had brought four light rocket-driven drones. The
pilots went to work at once, assembling them. I climbed down to a tidal pool for a
sample of the native sea water when Elena wanted to test the spores in it and
tramped with her up the beach for a closer look at the white stuff.
“Frost!” She knelt with a pocket lens to study films of it on the rocks. The
mask muffled her voice. “But growing like something alive.”
Under the sun, it did glitter like frost.
“Hexagonal crystals,” she said. “Like snowflakes, but—” She leaned closer.
“Each one has a bright point at the center. Something that glints like a tiny
diamond.”
Higher up the beach it had grown thicker, finally into something like crystal
fur, ankle deep. Fascinated with it, she was still disappointed.
“I had a glimpse of something taller, farther inland, as we came down. I’d like
to see it.”
“I don’t want you to kill yourself.”
“Not with all these riddles around us!” Dark eyes shining, she shrugged
danger away. “I could work here forever.”
* * *
In the months we stayed to watch the spores at work, I came to love her.
Back on Earth, I’d begun a very modest academic career, planning a historical
monograph on my uncle’s interstellar enterprises. No woman had ever held me long,
but her fascination with the exotic mysteries of the planet gave Elena herself a bit of
its hazardous allure. Perhaps I gave her an escape from too much strangeness. She
began to share her cabin with me.
The copilot was jealous; he had dated her before we left Earth. To fend him
off, she announced that we were engaged. We made a little ceremony of it. The pilot
had brought wine. I had no ring. Instead, I gave her a keepsake coin. A farewell gift
from my father before he went away, it was a worn silver dollar minted in ancient
America. He told me to carry it for luck, though it had brought no luck to him.
 
Cheerfully enough, the copilot lifted his glass to us and the future of New
Earth.
* * *
That did look bright. Testing sea water, Elena found free oxygen. She planted
seed in a patch of dry silt by the stream, had us dig an irrigation ditch, took holos for
my uncle as they sprouted and grew. She served us a feast of ripe red tomatoes and
golden cantaloupe and fresh green corn, and begged the pilots to move our ship
farther inland.
The copilot hunched to something like a shudder. “If you’d seen those
mummies in the survey craft—”
“Let’s leave that till later,” the pilot urged her, more tactfully. “A skipship’s
not a taxi. We need a level spot like this beach for any safe landing, not any sort of
forest. We should have an oxygen atmosphere by the time we get back, and vehicles
for surface exploration.”
She wanted to study the planet in its native state, before the liberated oxygen
could change it. If we couldn’t move the ship, she was going inland on foot.
“Up those cliffs?” The pilot shook his head. “With your gear to carry? I
wouldn’t try.”
“Give me a chance,” she urged him. “I had a glimpse as we came down.
Something—” We were off the ship, standing in our camp on the beach. She
stopped to shake her head at the banks of snow white crystals above us. “I can’t
imagine what, but it’s not too far. The oxypack should last to get me up there and
back again, with time enough to spare.”
She had told me she was pregnant. I begged her to think of the child, but the
challenge of the planet meant more to her than anything. She showed the pilot a letter
of authority from my uncle. He agreed to wait for her, with a warning that he could
mount no rescue effort if she ran into trouble.
She thanked him, hugged me, and tramped away across the silicon frost,
stumbling sometimes under the weight of the oxypack on her back. We watched till
she was finally gone beyond a bend in the canyon wall. After a sleepless night, I told
the pilot I wanted to follow.
“Forget it.” He set his gray-stubbled jaw, scowling at me. “Your responsibility
is to your uncle. And, if you’ll excuse me, she’s more fit than you are. She knows
the hazards. The best we can do is hope she gets back on her own.”
She didn’t. We waited till her oxypack was surely dead. The pilot said we had
to go. Whatever the copilot had felt for her, he seemed happy enough at the final
feast he made us out of her garden. The pilot poured what was left of the wine.
“Don’t blame yourself.” He tried to ease my self-reproach. “We all tried to
 

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