“I’m not, but there’s an awfully big step between getting a first hand look at the planet and taking living specimens of tofacco away from it. If you sent a person to make one landing on Sarr, what would be the chance of his landing within sight of a Gree bush? or, if he did, of your finding it out against his wish?”
“The first point isn’t so good; this tofacco might be all over the place like Mekko —the difficulty would be to miss a patch of it. Your second consideration, however, now has weight.” He really smiled, for the first time since Ken had known him. “I see you are a scientist after all. No narcotics agent would care in the least about the planet, under the circumstances. Well, I expect the experiment can be repeated more successfully, though I wouldn’t make the dive myself for anything I can think of.”
“I’ll bet you would — for one thing,” Ken replied. Feth’s smile disappeared.
“Yes — just one,” he agreed soberly. “But I see no chance of that. It would take a competent medical researcher years, even on Sarr with all his facilities. What hope would we have here?”
“I don’t know, but neither of us is senile,” retorted Ken. “It’ll be a few years yet before I give up hope. Let’s look at that suit you fixed, and the one I wore on Four. They may tell us something of what we’ll have to guard against.” This was the first Feth had heard of the sortie on Mars, and he said so. Ken told of his experience in detail, while the mechanic listened carefully.
“In other words,” he said at the end of the tale, “there was no trouble until you actually touched this stuff you have decided was hydrogen oxide. That means it’s either, a terrifically good conductor, has an enormous specific heat, a large heat of vaporization, or two or three of those in combination. Right?” Ken admitted, with some surprise, that that was right. He had not summed up the matter so concisely in his own mind. Feth went on: “There is at the moment no way of telling whether there is much of that stuff on Three, but the chances are there is at least some. It follows that the principal danger on that planet seems to be encountering deposits of this chemical. I am quite certain that I can insulate a suit so that you will not suffer excessive heat loss by conduction or convection in atmospheric gases, whatever they are.”
Ken did not voice his growing suspicion that Feth had been more than a mechanic in his time. He kept to the vein of the conversation.
“That seems right. I’ve seen the stuff, and it’s certainly easy to recognize, so there should be no difficulty in avoiding it.”
“You’ve seen the solid form, which sublimed in a near vacuum. Three has a respectable atmospheric pressure, and there may be a liquid phase of the compound. If you see any pools of any sort of liquid whatever, I would advise keeping clear of them.”
“Sound enough — only, if the planet is anything like Sarr, there isn’t a chance in a thousand of landing near open liquid.”