Half Life Read Free

worrisome moments the tension and airspeed mounted as Gene’s elbows stayed sore.
    Then ram flow resumed simultaneously in both pipes and the speed of his dive abruptly increased with the restored thrust. Still reflexively he pulled out of the dive, very carefully to avoid a secondary stall.
    In level flight at last, with fully a hundred meters of air still below him, he put his nose—his own, not the ramjet’s—more deeply into the face cup of his suit and moved his head slightly. This ran the screen through its preset half dozen most-likely-useful vision frequencies. He was already pretty sure what had caused the stall, but pilot’s common sense agreed with basic scientific-military procedure in demanding that he check.
    Yes, he was still in the updraft; the screen displayed the appropriate false colors all around him, and the waldo, which was also an environment suit, and therefore had been designed not to interfere with his own breathing system by using olfactory codes, was reporting the excess methane and consequent lowered air density as a set of musical tones. As usual, there had been no one but himself to blame.
    He’d been driving just a little too slowly, trying to get a good look below while filling the mass tanks, and a perfectly ordinary but random and mathematically unpredictable drop in the density of the rising air had raised the impact pressure needed by the jets. He could have seen it coming, but if the waldo hadn’t been backing up the interrupted visual sensors he’d have learned too late and with probably much less than a hundred meters leeway.
    No point thinking about that.
    “What happened, Sarge? Or shouldn’t I ask?” Barn Inger, Belvew’s co-ranker and usual flying partner, didn’t bother to identify himself; only twenty-one people were left of the original crew, and there were no strange voices. As Belvew’s copilot, a task fitted in among many other demands on his attention, one of Inger’s regular duties was to check with Gene vocally or in any other way appropriate whenever something unexpected occurred in flight; the “shouldn’t I ask” was merely a standard courtesy. Few people enjoyed admitting mistakes, however important they might be as data. The terminally ill people who formed a much larger fraction of the Titan crew than of Earth’s rapidly shrinking population were often quite touchy about such things.
    “I rode too close to stall. It’s all right now,” Belvew answered.
    “Use anything from the tanks?” The question also was pure courtesy; like everyone else, Inger had repeaters for Oceanus’s instrument output in his own quarters. Nearly anyone could have taken over control of the jet within seconds of realizing the need. Inger was trying to make the slip look like an everyday incident, to be passed over casually.
    “Nothing to use. There was enough room to dive-start.” Belvew did not mention just how little spare altitude he had had, and Inger didn’t really need to ask. Because of the constant possibility of having to start flying with no notice, everyone kept as conscious as other duties allowed of current aerial activities.
    “You’re still over Carver. You could have put down and tanked up from the lake.” This was quite true, but neither speaker mentioned why that option had been passed without conscious thought. Both knew perfectly well; Inger’s stress on the “could” had been as close to being specific about it as either cared to go. He changed to a neutral subject.
    “You seem to have the fourth leg about done.”
    Belvew made no answer for a moment; he was spiraling upward to start another pass through the droplet-rich updraft, at a safer altitude this time. Mass was needed in his tanks as soon as possible, and he was now prepared to accept the lower concentration to be found higher up, and to budget the time to get there and make the extra run or two that would be needed. Haste hadn’t paid, and had almost presented a very large bill.