While the idea of stasis is used in many stories - to freeze people when they travel between stars or far off planets, or till time the medical state of the art can cure them of something terminal, or just as somebody's practical joke, I haven't yet seen a stasis story of this class. Very thoughtful, though I am not sure of practicality.Story summary.
Narrator, along with Jerome Glass & Sammy Cross, has traveled to Pluto on an exploration mission when Pluto was closest to earth. About 18 months one way trip.
Sammy will stay in orbit; narrator with Jerome goes down in a landing craft.
Something goes wrong after landing. I didn't quite catch all the details of accident, but the two are now marooned. No way to go back to orbiting return vehicle.
Sammy quickly commits suicide - by removing his helmet, & quickly freezing to death.
Narrator does something similar but doesn't die. He is now in a semi-stasis. Comes alive with very sluggish metabolism & thoughts during night; is pretty much dead during the day.
Story is told by this frozen narrator for whom the time has all but stopped. And he is awaiting rescue which will surely come some day!
Fact sheet.
Wait It Out, short story, review
First published: "The Future Unbound Program Book", 1968
Rating: B
See also.
- Very good illustration to accompany the story, by Joe Bergeron.
If I remember correctly, the metal of their ship's landing legs was attacked by a living ooze laying out enjoying the sunlight (A few degrees difference between sunlight & shadow).
ReplyDeleteIt ate the legs on one side and the ship toppled over into a puddle and then was mired and being eaten, uninhabitable even to get survival gear, within minutes. Two guys in their suits, thousands of hours from help, dead one way or another before the signals they're able to send get to the nearest recipient.
So after his buddy takes off his helmet, he waits until anoxia took him unconscious, and strips off his suit entirely with his last wisp of oxygen and stood there giving in on fighting the cold which immediately stripped him of any ability to move -even twitch except for one movement to take half a step and cock his shoulders and neck to look like a statue.
Some time later, he realizes that he's seeing the Sun sweeping across the sky,m over and over, in a long series of periods with no interval between suet and sunrise. The Sun warms him enough for some residual neuronal energy to trickle through and he sees the Sun moving fairly slowly across the sky -only a little energy gets through, and his perception is slowed down so he's processing thoughts taking 150+ hours, but seem like seconds to him.
Eventually, he becomes aware that something is edging past his shoulder tracking the Sun towards the equatorial horizon as the Sun continues it's yearly 118 degree march past either pole.
He's discovered the first known form of life that moves in such cold, taking a few of his hours to disappear ahead of him.
No, the living ooze (Helium-II based life) slid up against the narrator after he'd been frozen.
ReplyDeleteThe ship was damaged because they landed on an icy plain, and the landing engine melted some of it into a slush. As a result, the ship's landing skirt sank into the slush, which then re-froze when the engine was cut off after touchdown.
They tried to re-melt the ice by re-igniting the rocket engine, but as the entire engine nozzle was embedded in ice, the hot exhaust had nowhere to escape, and the resulting temperature difference between cold ice and hot rocket damaged or cracked something, destroying the engine.
The summary states that Sammy commits suicide, but Sammy was still in orbit and ultimately returns to Earth. Jerome is the one who, after being exposed to a fatal dose of radiation while examining the failed engine, decides on a clean end instead of a slow death.
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