Complete Short Fiction, page 102
Barlennan outlined this idea to the group. Dondragmer pointed out that on the basis of past experience they might even so go too far to one side, since there would be no way of making fixes as the Earthmen had done to correct cumulative errors; the fact that the watcher’s voice did not sound from directly opposite the sun at any time would mean nothing in this echo-rich neighborhood. He admitted, however, that it was the best idea so far, and did stand a good chance of bringing them within sight of the rocket. A sailor was chosen, therefore, to man the observation post, and the trip was resumed in the new direction.
For a short distance the post itself remained in sight, and it was possible to judge the error that had crept into their course each time the sailor’s voice was heard. Presently, however, the rock on which he was standing was lost behind others of equal size, and navigation settled down to the task of making sure they were heading as closely as possible toward the sun each time the echoing hoot sounded in their ears. The sound grew weaker as the days passed, but with no other sounds on the lifeless plateau to cover it there was never any doubt of what they heard.
None of them even yet considered themselves experienced enough in land travel to estimate accurately the distance covered, and all were used to arriving much later than original hopes called for; so the group was pleasantly surprised when finally the monotony of the desert of stone was broken by a change in the landscape. It was not exactly the change that had been expected, but it attracted attention for all that.
It was almost directly ahead of them, and for a moment several of the group wondered whether they had in some incomprehensible way traveled in a circle. A long slope of mixed dirt and pebbles showed between the boulders. It was about as high as the one they had built to the observation station; but as they approached they saw it extended much farther to each side—as far, in fact, as anyone could see. It lapped around large boulders like an ocean wave frozen in midmotion; even the Mesklinites, totally unused to explosion or meteor craters, could see that the material had been hurled outward from some point beyond the slope. Barlennan, who had seen rockets from Toorey land more than once, had a pretty good idea of the cause and of what he was going to see even before the party topped the rise. He was right in general, if not in detail.
The rocket stood in the center of the bowl-shaped indentation that had been blasted by the fierce wash of her supporting jets. Barlennan could remember the way snow had swirled out of the way when the cargo rocket landed near Lackland’s “Hill.” He could appreciate the fact that the lifting power used here must have been far mightier in order to ease the bulk of this machine down, smaller though it was. There were no large boulders near it, though a few reared up near the sides of the bowl. The ground inside was bare of pebbles; the soil itself had been scooped out so that only four or five of the projectile’s twenty feet of height rose above the general run of rocks covering the plain.
Its base diameter was almost as great as its height, and remained so for perhaps a third of the way upward. This, Lackland explained when the vision set had been brought to bear on the interior of the blast crater, was the part housing the driving power. He went on to say things about iron-hydrogen clathrate slugs which meant nothing whatever to his Mesklinite listeners and very little to himself, since he was not a physical chemist.
The upper part of the machine narrowed rapidly to a blunt point, and this housed the apparatus which represented such a tremendous investment in time, intellectual effort, and money on the part of so many worlds. A number of openings existed in this part, as no effort had been made to render the compartments airtight. Such apparatus as required either vacuum or special atmosphere in which to function was individually sealed.
“You said once, after the explosion in your tank that wrecked it so completely, that something of the sort must have happened here,” Barlennan said. “I see no signs of it; and if the holes I see were open when you landed it, how could enough of your oxygen still be there to cause an explosion? You told me that beyond and between worlds there was no air, and what you had would leak out through any opening.”
Rosten cut in before Lackland could answer. He and the rest of the group had been examining the rocket on their own screen.
“Barl is quite right. Whatever caused the trouble was not an oxygen blast. I don’t know what it was, but I’m glad it happened.”
“Why?” Lackland wanted to know. “I’m not sorry to have met Barlennan and his people, but it’s held us up a year and a half.”
“If that machine had tried to blast off when we sent the signal, there’d have been nothing to salvage. You saw that ship in space before it was landed; you must remember the metal legs that were projecting among the tubes to keep her above ground and the tube mouths clear. There must have been two hundred of them. You can see for yourself that the thing has settled into the ground clear to—and I should say somewhat past—the nozzles. I know hydroferron is a directional explosive, but you can’t make me believe she’d have held together if the tubes had fired in that situation.” Lackland looked startled, realizing for the first time that his chief was right. “Some engineers are going to have a lot of explaining to do,” Rosten added. “Those legs were supposed to hold the ship on any reasonably hard ground up to two thousand gravities—three times what they actually had to take. Someone missed a decimal point, which won’t help his earning capacity for a few years.”
“Was there any sort of automatic safety which would prevent the tubes from firing in such an event?” asked Lackland. “That would account for her failure to start.”
“There was not, to my knowledge. We’ll just have to keep our eyes open when we go inside, in the hope of finding the trouble—not that it will matter much by then, except to people who want to build another of these things. I’d say we might as well get to work; I have a horde of physicists on my neck simply quivering for information. It’s lucky they put a biologist in charge of this expedition; from now on there won’t be a physicist fit to approach.”
“Your scientists will have to contain themselves a little longer,” Barlennan interjected. “You seem to have overlooked something.”
“What?”
“Not one of the instruments you want me to put before the lens of your vision set is within seven feet of the ground; and all are inside metal walls which I suspect would be rather hard for us to remove by brute force, soft as your metals seem to be.”
“Blast it, you’re right, of course. The second part is easy; most of the surface skin is composed of quick-remove access plates that we can show you how to handle without much trouble. For the rest—hm-m-m. You have nothing like ladders, and couldn’t use them if you had. Your elevator has the slight disadvantage of needing at least an installation crew at the top of its travel before you can use it. Offhand, I’m afraid I’m stuck for the moment. We’ll think of something, though; we’ve come too far to be stumped now.”
“I would suggest that you spend from now until my sailor gets here from the lookout in thought. If by that time you have no better idea, we will use mine.”
“What? You have an idea?”
“Certainly. We got to the top of that boulder from which we saw your rocket; what is wrong with using the same method here?”
Rosten was silent for fully half a minute; Lackland suspected he was kicking himself mentally.
“I can only see one point,” he said at last. “You will have a much larger job of rock-piling than you did before. The rocket is more than three times as high as the boulder where you built the ramp, and you’ll have to build up all around it instead of on one side, I suspect.”
“Why can we not simply make a ramp on one side up to the lowest level containing the machines you are interested in? It should then be possible to get up the rest of the way inside, as you do in the other rockets.”
“For two principal reasons. The more important one is that you won’t be able to climb around inside; the rocket was not built to carry living crews, and has no communication between decks. All the machinery was built to be reached from outside the hull, at the appropriate level. The other point is that you cannot start at the lower levels; granted that you could get the access covers off, I seriously doubt that you could lift them back in place when you finished with a particular section. That would mean that you’d have the covers off all around the hull before you built up to the next level; and I’m rather afraid that such a situation would not leave enough metal in place below to support the sections above. The top of the cone would—or at least might—collapse. Those access ports occupy the greater part of the skin, and are thick enough to take a lot of vertical load. Maybe it was bad design, but remember we expected to open them only in space, with no weight at all.
“What you will have to do, I fear, is bury the rocket completely to the highest level containing apparatus and then dig your way down, level by level. It may even be advisable to remove the machinery from each section as you finish with it; that will bring the load to an absolute minimum. After all, there’ll only be a rather fraillooking skeleton when you have all those plates off, and I don’t like to picture what would happen to it with a full equipment load times seven hundred, nearly.”
“I see.” Barlennan took his turn at a spell of silent thought. “You yourself can think of no alternative to this plan? It involves, as you rightly point out, much labor.”
“None so far. We will follow your recommendation, and think until your other man comes from the observation point. I suspect we work under a grave disadvantage, though—we are unlikely to think of any solution which does not involve machinery we couldn’t get to you.”
“That I had long since noticed.”
It was impossible to tell whether the Mesklinite made the statement as one of simple fact or a vehicle for sarcasm. No one attempted to ask; only Rosten so much as raised his eyebrows, and that was a harmless gesture since Barlennan had no vision receiver. The native’s remark was undoubtedly true, whatever he had meant by it.
The sun continued to circle the sky at a shade better than twenty degrees a minute. A call had long since gone echoing out to the observation platform to let the guide know his work was done; he was presumably on the way in. The sailors did nothing except rest and amuse themselves; all, at one time or another, descended the easy slope of the pit the blasts had dug to examine the rocket at close quarters. All of them were too intelligent to put its operation down to magic, but it awed them nonetheless. They understood nothing of its principle of operation, though that could easily have been made clear if Lackland had stopped to wonder how a race that did not breathe could nevertheless speak aloud. The Mesklinites possessed in well developed form the siphon arrangement, similar to that of Earthly cephalopods, which their amphibious ancestors bad used for high speed swimming; they used it as the bellows for a very Earthly set of vocal cords, but were still able to put it to its original function. They were well suited by nature to understand the rocket principle.
Their lack of understanding was not all that aroused the sailors’ respect. Their race built cities, and they had regarded themselves as good engineers; but the highest walls they ever constructed reached perhaps three inches from the ground. Multistoried buildings, even roofs other than a flap of fabric, conflicted too violently with their almost instinctive fear of solid material overhead. The experiences of this group had done something to change the attitude from one of unreasoning fear to one of intelligent respect for weight, but the habit clung nevertheless. The rocket was some eighty times the height of any artificial structure their race had ever produced; awe at the sight of such a thing was inevitable.
The arrival of the lookout sent Barlennan back to the radio, but there was no better idea than his own to be had. This did not surprise him at all. He brushed Rosten’s apologies aside, and set to work along with his crew. Not even then did any of the watchers above think of the possibility of their agent’s having ideas of his own about the rocket. Curiously enough, such a suspicion by then would have come much too late—too late to have any foundation.
Strangely, the work was not as much harder or longer as everyone had expected. The reason was simple; the rock and earth blown out by the jets was relatively loose, since there was no weather in the thin air of the plateau to pack it down as it had been before. A human being, of course, wearing the gravity nullifier the scientists hoped to develop from the knowledge concealed in the rocket, could not have pushed a shovel into it, for the gravity was a pretty good packing agent; it was loose only by Mesklinite standards. Loads of it were being pushed down the gentle inner slope of the pit to the growing pile around the tubes; pebbles were being worked clear of the soil and set rolling the same way, with a hooted warning beforehand. The warning was needed; once free and started, they moved too fast for the human eye to follow, and usually buried themselves completely in the pile of freshly moved earth.
It became evident to the watchers that this could go on indefinitely; at considerably less than the steepest slope the sailors seemed willing to tolerate, the heaped-up ring around the crater would provide ample material for the mound. Even the most pessimistic of the watchers began to feel that no more setbacks could possibly occur, in spite of the number of times they had started to unpack shelved apparatus and then had to put it away again. They watched now with mounting glee as the shining metal of the research projectile sank lower and lower in the heap of rock and earth, and finally vanished entirely except for a foot-high cone that marked the highest level in which machinery had been installed.
At this point the Mesklinites ceased work, and most of them retreated from the mound. The vision set had been brought up and was now facing the projecting tip of metal, where part of the thin line marking an access port could be seen. Barlennan sprawled alone in front of the entrance, apparently waiting for instructions on the method of opening it; and Rosten, watching as tensely as everyone else, explained to him. There were four quick-disconnect fasteners, one on each corner of the trapezoidal plate. The upper two were about on a level with Barlennan’s eyes; the others some six inches below the present level of the mound. Normally they were released by pushing in and making a quarter turn with a broad-bladed screwdriver; it seemed likely that Mesklinite pincers could perform the same function. Barlennan, turning to the plate, found that they could. The broad, slotted heads turned with little effort and popped outward, but the plate did not move otherwise.
“You had better fasten ropes to one or both of those heads, so you can pull the plate outward from a safe distance when you’ve dug down to the others and unfastened them,” Rosten pointed out. “You don’t want that piece of hardware falling on top of anyone; it’s a quarter of an inch thick. The lower ones are a darned sight thicker, I might add.”
The suggestion was followed, and the earth scraped rapidly away until the lower edge of the plate was uncovered. The fasteners here proved no more troublesome than their fellows, and moments later a hard pull on the ropes unseated the plate from its place in the rocket’s skin. For the first fraction of an inch of its outward motion it could be seen; then it vanished abruptly, and reappeared lying horizontally while an almost riflelike report reached the ears of the watchers. The sun, shining into the newly opened hull, showed clearly the single piece of apparatus inside; and a cheer went up from the men in the screen room and the observing rocket.
“That did it, Barl! We owe you more than we can say. If you’ll stand back and let us photograph that as it is, we’ll start giving you directions for taking out the record and getting it to the lens.” Barlennan did not answer at once; his actions spoke some time before he did.
He did not get out of the way of the eye. Instead he crawled toward it and pushed the entire set around until it no longer covered the nose of the rocket.
“There are some matters we must discuss first,” he said quietly.
XIX.
Dead silence reigned in the screen room. The head of the tiny Mesklinite filled the screen, but no one could interpret the expression on the completely unhuman “face.” No one could think of anything to say; asking Barlennan what he meant would be a waste of words, since he obviously planned to tell anyway. He waited for long moments before resuming his speech; and when he did, he used better English than even Lackland realized he had acquired.
“Dr. Rosten, a few moments ago you said that you owed us more than you could hope to repay. I realize that your words were perfectly sincere in one way—I do not doubt the actuality of your gratitude for a moment—but in another they were merely rhetorical. You had no intention of giving us any more than you had already agreed to supply—weather information, guidance across new seas, possibly the material aid Charles mentioned some time ago in the matter of spice collecting. I realize fully that by your moral code I am entitled to no more; I made an agreement and should adhere to it, particularly since your side of the bargain has largely been fulfilled already.
“However, I want more; and since I have come to value the opinions of some, at least, of your people I want to explain why I am doing this—I want to justify myself, if possible. I tell you now, though, that whether I succeed in gaining your sympathy or not, I will do exactly as I planned.
“I am a merchant, as you well know, primarily interested in exchanging goods for what profit I can get. You recognized that fact, offering me every material you could think of in return for my help; it was not your fault that none of it was of use to me. Your machines you said would not function in the gravity and pressure of my world; your metals I cannot use—and would not need if I could; they lie free on the surface in many parts of Mesklin. Some people use them for ornaments; but I know from talk with Charles that they cannot be fashioned into really intricate forms without great machines, or at least more heat than we can easily produce. We do know the thing you call fire, by the way, in ways more manageable than the flame cloud; I am sorry to have deceived Charles in that matter, but it seemed best to me at the time.
