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errors, time, is the one thing that is most lacking.
TheCruiser John hit that one chance in countless many, and it made a final landing, for it would never lift
off a planetary surface again.
That it had landed essentially intact was itself a near miracle. The five were given life for some years at
least. Beyond that, only the blundering arrival of another ship could help, but no one expected that. They
had had their life's share of coincidences, they knew, and all had been bad.
That was that. And the key word was ammonia. With the surface spiraling upward, and death
(mercifully quick) facing them at considerably better than even odds, Chou somehow had time to note the
absorption spectrograph, which was registering raggedly.
Ammonia, he cried out. The others heard but there was no time to pay attention. There was only the
wrenching fight against a quick death for the sake of a slow one.
When they landed finally, on sandy ground with sparse bluish (bluish?) vegetation; reedy grass; stunted
treelike objects with blue bark and no leaves; no sign of animal life; and with a greenish (greenish?)
cloud-streaked sky above-the word came back to haunt them.
Ammonia? said Petersen heavily. Chou said, Four per cent.
Impossible, said Petersen. But it wasn't. The books didn't say impossible. What the Galactic Corps
had discovered was that a planet of a certain mass and volume and a certain temperature was an ocean
planet and had one of two atmospheres: nitrogen/ oxygen or nitrogen/ carbon dioxide. In the former case,
life was advanced; in the latter, it was primitive.
No one checked beyond mass, volume, and temperature any longer. One took the atmosphere (one or
the other of them) for granted. But the books didn't say it had to be so; just that it always was so. Other
atmospheres were thermodynamically possible, but extremely unlikely, so they weren't found in actual
practice.
Until now. The men of theCruiser John had found one and were bathed for the rest of such life as they
could eke out by a nitrogen/carbon dioxide/ammonia atmosphere.
The men converted their ship into an underground bubble of Earth-type surroundings. They could not lift
off the surface, nor could they drive a communicating beam through hyperspace, but all else was
salvageable. To make up for inefficiencies in the cycling system, they could even tap the planet's own
water and air supply, within limits; provided, of course, they subtracted the ammonia.
They organized exploring parties since their suits were in excellent condition and it passed the time. The
planet was harmless; no animal life; sparse plant life everywhere. Blue, always blue; ammoniated
chlorophyll; ammoniated protein.
They set up laboratories, analyzed the plant components, studied microscopic sections, compiled vast
volumes of findings. They tried growing native plants in ammonia-free atmosphere and failed. They made
themselves into geologists and studied the planet's crust; astronomers, and studied the spectrum of the
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planet's sun.
Barrère would say sometimes, Eventually, the Corps will reach this planet again and we'll leave a legacy
of knowledge for them. It's a unique planet after all. There might not be another Earth-type with ammonia
in all the Milky Way.
Great, said Sandropoulos bitterly. What luck for us.
Sandropoulos worked out the thermodynamics of the situation. A metastable system, he said. The
ammonia disappears steadily through geochemical oxidation that forms nitrogen; the plants utilize nitrogen
and re-form ammonia, adapting themselves to the presence of ammonia. If the rate of plant formation of
ammonia dropped two per cent, a declining spiral would set in. Plant life would wither, reducing the
ammonia still further, and so on.
You mean if we killed enough plant life, said Vlassov, we could wipe out the ammonia.
If we had air sleds and wide-angle blasters, and a year to work in, we might, said Sandropoulos, but
we haven't and there's a better way. If we could get our own plants going, the formation of oxygen
through photosynthesis would increase the rate of ammonia oxidation. Even a small localized rise would
lower the ammonia in the region, stimulate Earth-plant growth further and inhibit the native growth, drop
the ammonia further, and so on.
They became gardeners through all the growing season. That was, after all, routine for the Galactic
Corps. Life on Earth-type planets was usually of the water/protein type, but variation was infinite and
other-world food was rarely nourishing and even more rarely palatable. One had to try Earth plants of
different sorts. It often happened (not always, but often) that some types of Earth plants would overrun
and drown out the native flora. With the native flora held down, other Earth plants could take root.
Dozens of planets had been converted into new Earths in this fashion. In the process Earthly plants
developed hundreds of hardy varieties that flourished under extreme conditions. All the better with
which to seed the next planet.
The ammonia would kill any Earth plant, but the seeds at the disposal of theCruiser John were not true
Earth plants but otherworld mutations of these plants. They fought hard but not well enough. Some
varieties grew in a feeble, sickly manner and then died.
At that they did better than did microscopic life. The planet's bacterioids were far more flourishing than
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