Collected Short Fiction, page 457
“A disappointing lot,” he told Ann O’Banion, back at the office. “But they’re the best I can find.”
“Then I’m going along, to help,” she quietly announced.
“No you aren’t.” Drake made a shocked protest. “We’ll be left on the rock, while Rob is gone to Pallasport. If a fire storm comes, we’ll just have to take it.”
“Can’t I take it?” Her tanned face was determined. “I can handle a dirigible suit as well as anybody, and the men in dad’s mines taught me how to run a drill when I was twelve years old.” She added, gayly triumphant: “I’m a partner, now—I must take care of my investment.”
Drake suggested that her father wouldn’t let her go. But she had long ago learned how to deal with Bruce O’Banion’s stubborn statesmanship, and she reminded Drake that she was now of age. Drake yielded at last, uneasily—remembering how Evadne had died in dirigible armor on another airless rock.
Small and blue, in the long golden spindle of the misty zodiacal light, the Sun hurried down the somber sky, came up and dropped again—the day of Obania was only four hours long; all clocks kept standard Earth-time, of the Panama City meridian.
They were almost ready. The shabby crew had straggled aboard, grimy space bags shouldered. Rob McGee had moved the pipes and pajamas out of his tiny cabin, under the pilothouse, to make a place for Ann. The lower hold was filled with the mining machinery and drums of water. Under the profane supervision of Mike Moran, the men were loading fuel-uranium from an Interplanet delivery truck—heavy costly ingots of the stable concentrate, ten percent U-235, sealed in cadmium cans because uranium has a vigorous chemical appetite. Ann had just gone up the ladder, boyish and capable in space breeches, when a man in uniform asked for Drake.
“The subaltern’s greetings, Mr. Drake. You and Captain McGee are requested to call at his office—right away.”
Drake tried to conceal his puzzled alarm. He called up the ladder well to Rob McGee. They crossed the convex field to the big six-sided building beyond the tall war cruiser. Although Commander von Sudenhorst spoke carefully unaccented English, his manner betrayed the smug, deep-grained arrogance and the precise efficiency encouraged by Martian military training. He received Drake and McGee with a stiff curtsy, which scarcely veiled his contempt for civilians and, particularly, native asterites.
“Be seated, gentlemen.” The austere metal room rang to his domineering voice. They sat uncomfortably on hard metal chairs, while he searched them with slatelike eyes. “I am told that you are preparing for a mining expedition. All ship movements must be reported. Where are you going?”
McGee answered innocently:
“Our papers are quite in order, sir. They have already been stamped by your field officer. We are clearing for an unnamed rock, HSM T-89-AK-44.”
“Thank you, captain.” The Martian’s dull, shallow eyes came back to Drake, and his hard voice rapped, “And what is your object?”
Drake tried not to hesitate. He refused to lie, but he knew that it was sheer disaster to tell all the truth. “Call it prospecting,” he said. “According to the ‘Ephemeris,’ that rock is going to make a fairly close approach. Business is dull, and there’s a chance we may find it valuable.”
“Valuable?” the officer echoed harshly. “It’s nickel-iron!”
“That’s the ‘Ephemeris’ listing,” Drake agreed. “Based on instrument readings of specific mass and albedo. Possibly a surface survey will reveal something more.”
The stubby hands of von Sudenhorst rattled a paper on his immaculate metal desk. “I have here a list of your crew, equipment and supplies.” His blank eyes looked suddenly accusing. “An elaborate list, for a prospecting trip!”
Drake felt an unpleasant sensation in his middle. “We’re taking men and equipment to work a prospect hole,” he said desperately. “The government has not yet outlawed prospecting.”
“I’m aware of that.” Von Sudenhorst rose, a black-uniformed automaton. “Thank you for calling, gentlemen. I have no right to delay you. However I advise you to keep in mind that the restricted license of your craft does not include mining, salvage or towing operations. Good day.”
As they hurried back to the ship, McGee’s leather face was furrowed with apprehension. “We aren’t planning any mining, salvage or towing—not exactly. Do you think he’ll make us trouble?”
“He’s not exactly cordial.” The giant’s bent shoulders shrugged away the High Space Guard. “The Jane is ready to go.”
V.
Nine people were too many for the little space tug, but it was only twenty hours to Freedonia. Mike Moran and the ex-guardsman, named Biggs, swung their hammocks in the midships drive room. The rest of the crew slept in the holds, and played dominoes endlessly in the narrow wardroom.
Fifteen hours out, they struck the first ominous whiff of contraterrene dust. A dozen particles strafed the hull, clanging like rifle bullets. Drake, in the pilothouse, heard a scream of fear from the ladder well. Sounds of a scuffle; Mike Moran cursing. Then Ann’s head came up the ladder, unfrightened.
“Mutiny.” Her voice was calm. “Better come down, Seetee.”
Mike Moran was leaning on the ladder in the tiny wardroom, holding back the others with his lifted crutch. Biggs stood before the two old miners and the frightened Venusian. He was flushed with alcohol, threatening.
“Turn ’er around!” he blustered up at Drake. “We ain’t drivin’ into no bloody fire storm—not in this rusty old can. We signed to work a prospect—not to be burned alive!” His red-eyed glare shifted to Mike Moran. “Make him put down that damn crutch, and give me back my bottle.”
Drake dropped down the ladder, beside Moran. With a deep and patient voice, he tried to stop the panic that a few microscopic grains of seetee dust had roused.
“Listen, men. You’re being paid to do a dangerous job, and you’ll get a bonus when it’s done. But it’s not unreasonably dangerous—not unless you lose your heads, and make it so yourselves. Perhaps the ship is old, but she’s spaceworthy. Let me tell you about our protection—”
Krrrang!
At that loud reverberation, the Venusian turned pasty-yellow. One of the miners squalled a curse; the other dropped on his knees, clutching a crucifix, silently praying.
“Turn ’er around,” shouted Biggs, “before we do it for you.”
“That was an alarming sound,” Drake admitted patiently. “But the particle that made it was smaller than the head of a pin. It struck three inches of good steel. We have a layer of lead, to absorb the gamma ray, and a seal of compressed plastifoam, to save the air if one comes through.”
The faces still were white and ominous.
“Only the particles with freak velocities can touch us,” Drake went on. “We have up a negative safety-field, that will stop everything under ten kilometers a second, and deflect a good deal of the rest.”
The ugly face of Biggs showed a stubborn disbelief, and he tried to explain: “You can feel the peegee field, here in the ship, that holds you against the deck and keeps you from being space-sick? Well, there’s a similar field around the hull, pushing away—you couldn’t hit us with a rifle, from fifty meters.”
Trying to relax the dangerous tension, he added casually: “Men lifted the first ships off Earth, two hundred years ago, with that same negative field—and shut it off, midway of the voyage, to fall toward the destination. That was before our directional peegee drive, which reacts against the constant force of cosmic repulsion.”
“Cut the lecture, mister!” snarled the drunken guardsman. “Suppose a big rock gets through your safety-field?”
“We’ve got another gadget, for the big ones,” Drake assured him. “The heat radiation of anything larger than a pea will trip the thermalarm relays, in time for the pilot-robot to change our course.”
“Satisfied, brother?” Mike Moran rapped his crutch on the deck. “Better be!”
Biggs retreated. Sullenly, he accepted Moran’s profane challenge to a game of dominoes. Drake went back to the pilothouse. A few more explosive contraterrene atoms smashed against the hull; but Biggs soon dropped into an alcoholic sleep, and the one-legged foreman kept the two old miners, Hale and Galloway, busy with the dominoes. Five hours later, they came to Freedonia.
Drake studied it through the periscope. Slowly rolling against the mighty panorama of open space—against the empty, illimitable darkness, the silver dust and ghostly green of nebulae remote beyond man’s imagination, the hard hot points of many-colored stars that sometimes seemed near enough to be scooped up in a glittering handful—Freedonia was a jagged black cube, like a monstrous rolling die of iron.
Ann O’Banion came up into the pilothouse, eager to see the new world she had named. Drake gave her his place at the periscope. For a little time she was silent, breathless. She turned from the black hood, with a faint shudder.
“So that thing would strike Obania?”
“It would,” Drake assured her. “I’ve just been checking the orbit, to have it on paper for the claims office—and it is a collision orbit, actual as well as legal.”
“Freedonia seems a strange name for it.” She managed a hopeful smile. “It’s so far from Obania, just a nudge ought to be enough to turn it aside.”
“Some five billion tons of iron isn’t easy to move,” Drake told her. “And the legal definition of a collision orbit is a good deal broader than necessary—especially if von Sudenhorst is going to be judge. We’ll have to swing it pretty wide.”
They slowly circled the asteroid, while Drake studied its dark, forbidding contours. At last he turned back to Rob and Ann, with a frown gathering around his hollow eyes.
“The shape is unusually compact,” he said. “That makes it very suitable for the laboratory site. But the tunnel will have to be a good deal deeper than I estimated, to reach the center of gravity. I’m afraid it will be hard to get it finished in time.”
He had selected a camp site—a shallow, iron-walled depression, near the south pole, which would afford some slight protection from meteoric drift. Rob McGee dropped the ship to a perfect landing, and made fast with the paragravity anchor.
All hands, except McGee, donned dirigible armor. These suits, intended for heavy work under dangerous open space conditions, were of steel, lined with lead and plastifoam, and equipped with small peegee drive units, which propelled them like miniature ships.
Leaving the others to set up the camp, Drake set out with a transit and Ann O’Banion for his flagman, to make a quick survey of the nickel-iron mass. After an hour they came to the abrupt rim of a steep black chasm that Drake had seen from above.
“What’s this?” As he faced Ann, the photocells above the lenses of his bucket-shaped helmet picked up the red flicker of the photophone light on the crown of hers. Her voice was slow with wonder. “It’s a weird-looking pit!”
She moved back from the brink of it, awed with the evidence of some flaming cataclysm. All about the lip of it, fused iron had congealed again in grotesque snaky gouts. Lower, streaks and traces of other minerals burned with lurid phosphorescence.
“This is where that seetee fragment struck,” Drake told her. “Quite a little atomic blowup—that glow is from temporary radioactivity, from the absorbed radiation.” His awe gave way to eager purpose. “But this is the spot we’re looking for—the bottom of this pit is already burned nearly halfway to the center of gravity.”
By the time they returned to the little polar cup, the shelters were pitched—igloo shapes of woven metal, lined with lead foil and self-sealing plastic, fastened down with cables welded to the living iron, and inflated with oxyhelium. Small cylindrical air locks gave entrance. Standing at the end of a short taut cable, above the crown of each shelter, was a small peegee unit. Set to negative polarity, these provided a comfortable pressure against the floor, and some protection against meteor drift. When they were turned on, it was necessary to climb to the shelters against their repulsion. A small uranium motor-generator, in the mess tent, supplied light, heat and paragravity power. There was a common shelter for the crew, beyond the smaller silver-painted igloos for Drake and Ann.
They moved the ship to the edge of that black, phosphorescent chasm, to unload the drilling equipment—which had to be secured with nets and cables, for the natural gravity of Freedonia was too weak to hold it safely. Then the air lock closed again. The ship’s photophone, like a small searchlight above the stubby bow, swung down to Drake and Ann, standing in their armor like clumsy robots beside the antiquated machinery.
“Luck,” said Rob McGee. “Back as soon as I can.”
“Buy the peegee unit first,” Drake warned him. “Don’t talk—and don’t file the notice till you’re ready to start back. Something might go wrong.” He added, trying to hide the catch in his voice: “You’ll see Rick. Tell him . . . tell him we’re all doing fine.”
“Right,” said Rob McGee. “Good luck.”
Biggs, the guardsman, had called the two old miners around behind the ship. Now he led them back, his helmet photophone flashing red—the suits all looked alike, but their names were stenciled on them with green-glowing fluorescent paint.
“Let us back aboard!” Biggs was frightened and truculent; his glaring lenses swung to Mike Moran. “Are you going to stay here, marooned—and maybe get trapped in a fire storm?”
“I am—and so are you,” retorted the one-legged driller. “You signed a contract to work here two weeks. It’s my job to see you do it.” Lifting a steel-gloved hand to shield his helmet lamp from Ann, he added a few emphatic comments.
Biggs swung on Drake, lifting steel-mailed fists. “To hell with your contract!” he blustered. “Tell McGee to open that valve—or we’ll smash the lenses out of your damn helmet!”
“Wait, Biggs.” Drake could understand the fear of space, of its dark and fiery monotony of danger, of its cold, unbounded vastness that shrank the human ego. He knew that the danger here was real enough, but it was necessary for the ship to leave them. Patiently, he began to explain the situation. “Listen, men—”
Mike Moran, however, took the matter out of his hands. Agile as a fish in the dirigible suit, he needed no crutch now. When Biggs advanced again, with threatening fists, Moran dived at him and hauled him away by the neck strap of his armor.
Ann waved a troubled farewell; and the Good-by Jane lifted, silent as a shadow, for the long voyage to Pallasport. Rust-red in the glancing Sun, it dwindled and was swiftly lost in the dark chasm of space. They were alone.
VI.
Drake shook off a brief unease. He still could feel the sullen, fearful hostility of the man Biggs; but he was used to facing the dangers of space as they appeared, and he expected others to do the same. After all, they had safety devices. And any meteor miner had to take his share of seetee when it fell.
Patiently he tried to explain that to the uneasy men, and then they began to set up the drill. The battered old machine had a mass of twenty tons. Hauling on cables, they pulled it over the pit, and let it slowly sink between the dark, fire-streaked walls of iron. Ann swam to it, and opened the thick lead hood over the uranium motor-generator.
“Better keep clear.” Drake’s head lamp flashed the warning. “The machine seems light, here, but it has the same mass as always. It might catch you against the walls.”
“I’m no baby, Seetee.” Her clumsy, bright-painted suit stood up, on the side of the floating machine, and he could imagine her making a childish face of protest. “I was just going to heat the separator manifold.” And her voice challenged: “Just see if I don’t know how to run the drill?”
She pointed with a confident armored hand.
“You pump water into that little seetee refiner, to get oxygen and hydrogen. They burn again, in the cutter-head—till the iron gets hot, and you turn off part of the hydrogen. Those gears turn the cutter around a core of iron. When you have cut a four-meter section, you take it out with the section-head and the magnetic hoist. And then you go down with the cutter again, and take another bite. Isn’t that right?”
Drake nodded, though his massive helmet didn’t yield to nods. He heard the admiring voice of Mike Moran, for once unprofane, “Ma’am, I take you for a real hard-rock man!”
The machine was leveled, in the rounded bottom of that fire-streaked pit, and welded into place. Ann began to prove her skill, starting the little uranium motor. At last the drill began to turn. Airless space, like an ocean of cotton wool, muffled all sound of machinery, but Drake could feel the vibration of the gears through his boots. Moving points of blinding incandescence cut a slow one-meter circle into the hard black iron.
“Now I feel like it’s Freedonia!” Ann’s small voice held elation. “I feel like it’s ours.”
Drake said nothing to discourage her. On the driller’s seat, turning with the slow spiral movement of the cutter-head, he moved heavily to adjust the economy screens, which collected the particles of ice and iron oxides blown back from the cutting flames—oxides were precious, on this iron world, and they had brought the very minimum of water. He didn’t want to depress her spirits, but he knew that Freedonia was far indeed from safely won.
When the drill was running smoothly he divided the party into two shifts. Drake, with Ann and old Galloway, stayed with the drill. Mike Moran took Biggs and Hale back to camp, to rest for the second shift.
“Very good!” On that first twelve-hour shift they had hoisted out four thick four-meter cores, and Ann was jubilant. “At sixteen meters a shift, we’ll have the foundation ready by the time Cap’n Rob gets back.”
The second shift, however, failed to keep up that rate of progress. Biggs had inspired old Hale with his grumbling resentment. Drake refused to suspect them of deliberate sabotage; he thought they merely lacked the knack of calling the last impossible dunce of service from worn-out equipment. But somehow Biggs let the separator manifold freeze, on the uranium engine—which happened at about 1850° C. That cost hours of delay. In all the shift, they cut only two “bites.”
