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before we blew your machine into the lake?”
    “Some more numerical stuff. Nothing structural, and we don’t have the samples anymore, either.”
    Inger pondered for a moment, then suggested, “Maybe we can find it. The lab should be all right, at least. The exhaust cools pretty quickly, and the data were coming by beam to the plane. That would have been thrown off line when the lab was pushed. Tell the lab to broadcast, and Gene can make some low passes back along the track; maybe we can get its signals.”
    “What if it reached the lake? It must have been blown that way, and it’s mostly downhill.”
    “So much the better. We could use a reading on the composition of that juice. Maybe we could find out something about its depth, too. If anything’s certain, the liquid’s not exactly like what we get from the clouds. Look at the bright side, Chief.”
    The answer was a grunt which might have meant anything up to “You look at it.” Barn’s instruments, however, showed that Goodall had indeed sent the broadcast command to the lab; whether he was waiting more eagerly for resumption of data flow or for a chance to go on complaining was anyone’s guess. He would have denied the latter, of course, probably pointing out that griping was much less effective than useful work at keeping pain out of his mind. Everyone knew this already.
    Gene had been listening, even with most of his attention on piloting. In spite of his sympathy for the colonel’s feelings, he went up to a little over a kilometer, steered out over the lake to the rainstorm, and replaced the reaction mass he had just used. Then he increased thrust and nosed down—he was actually as impatient as any of the others for the lab data and more optimistic about the unit’s survival than most of them—and headed back toward shore and the landing site.
    He was down to fifty meters by the time the glassy patch showed ahead. He eased back thrust, allowing the jet to slow to ram stall plus twenty, and made four passes over the area at that speed, first following and then paralleling the line of the landing and takeoff.
    Nothing from the lab registered. With a grim expression which no one could see, and some muttered remarks which he took care no one could hear, he reset the wing camber, closed the ramjet intakes, and went back to rocket mode; but two more passes at a bare fifteen meters altitude and just above wing stall—neither Goodall nor anyone else was going to say he hadn’t tried, whatever they might think of his flying judgment—still produced no signals. Either the lab had been wrecked, though that still seemed to Belvew to be rather unlikely, or it was too deep in the lake for its signals to be picked up. Nobody, curiously, thought of its being deep in anything else; after all, it was far lighter than the ramjet.
    The presumably nonpolar liquid shouldn’t interfere seriously with radio frequencies, but in broadcast mode any great depth certainly would. Titan was a weird place by human standards, but the inverse square law and rules of optical absorption still applied there.
    There was no basis yet even for guesses at the depths of the numerous lakes. That would depend on details of the still hypothetical methane cycle as well as tectonics. There seemed, for example, to be practically no major rivers either to feed lakes or to fill them with sediment, though each liquid body was usually supplied by a number of small brooks.
    Such items of information detail had a low priority in the early part of the program, though they would all be faced eventually.
    “Sorry, Art,” Belvew said at last as he increased thrust, returned to ramjet mode when speed sufficed, and began to climb back toward the thunderhead. “I had hopes too, but I guess we’ve lost it. Have you any ideas what could produce a gel here?”
    “I have enough trouble guessing what could produce methanol.”
    “Why?” retorted Belvew. “The makings are all there. Ice and methane could