Colin Kapp - The Unorthodox Engineers

“What the fuck is that?”

“A genuine Tazoon harp in action,” said Fritz modestly. “Don’t you like it?”

“No,” said Nevill, “because it isn’t right. Nobody, however alien, would want more than one of anything that sounds like that. Besides”—he winced as the harp screeched into an entirely new scale—“the Tazoons had very small ear cavities. Their audible range was undoubtedly in the medium ultrasonic. Frankly they could never have heard anything pitched as low as that. Sorry! Try and make it do something else like lighting fires or something.”

And so saying, he was gone, leaving Fritz looking frustrated and trying to avoid Jacko’s eyes. “All right,” he said, “so even I can’t always be right first time.” He turned off the amplifier disconsolately. “I still think it was a good idea.”

“That’s the second of your good ideas that has run off the rails today,” said Jacko, fingering his ears.

“Second?” Fritz looked mildly surprised.

“Yes, I forgot to tell you. Your idea for obtaining pure nitrogen for the cats by fractional distillation in the micro-Linde didn’t solve the problem, it merely transferred it. The blasted Tazoon atmosphere’s eaten the guts out of the Linde compressor.”

“Damnation!” said Fritz. “You’d better get the boys together, Jacko. I want every repairable ground-cat and tractor prepared for operation, and as much heavy lifting and moving tackle as we can acquire.”

“What are you planning, Fritz?”

“Let’s face it, Jacko, we can’t keep enough transport in service to do the daily forty-kilometre round-trips to the new site for very long. If that is a major site they’ve found, there won’t be much point in having a base camp this far distant. The logical thing to do is expend all our resources, moving the whole base to the new site.”

“Jeez,” muttered Jacko. “It’d take months to dismantle this lot and transport it that far.”

“I said nothing about dismantling. A Knudsen hut is a unit structure. It is capable of being moved as a whole with reasonable care. Can you think of any reason why we shouldn’t just attach a cat or tractor to each hut and haul it bodily over the sand to the new site?”

“Yes, Colonel Nash and the base psychiatrist, to name only two. A Knudsen could never stand a belting like that and finish in one piece.”

“Ordinarily, no, but these have been covered with alternate layers of resin and sand to a thickness which has become ridiculous. Dammit, Jacko, you’ve got a metal and sand-filled resin laminate there which must have all of a hundred and fifty times the strength of the original hut.”

“You’re dead right, of course,” said Jacko. “But I’m going to love seeing you try to explain it to Colonel Nash.”

“All right,” said Nash, eventually. “You can start moving the base just as soon as the necessary cables and services have been laid. I don’t need to remind you that everything has to be fully secured by sundown. And I warn you that if anything goes wrong… ”

He leaned back speculatively for a moment.

“You know, Fritz, I must confess I’m disappointed. I’d expected great things from unorthodoxy, but when it comes to the point you can’t even promise to keep a decent transport system in operation.”

“A snowflake,” Fritz protested, “wouldn’t stand much chance in Hell unless you had a ton of refrigeration equipment alongside. The fault is not being in Hell, but in being a snowflake. You’ve got a roughly similar position with your cats on Tazoo. A suitable cat could easily be designed for these conditions, but it would need Terran resources to build it and a long haul to bring it out here. The cost would be astronomical. The limitation is in associating transport with the idea of a ground-cat.”

“I’m perfectly aware of that,” said Nash. “In fact it’s the reason I sent for you. You have the reputation for producing the impossible at very short notice. All right—I challenge you to produce.”

“Miracles we perform immediately,” said Fritz morosely. “The impossible takes a little longer. After all, we’ve only been here a week. “

Nash watched him narrowly for a moment. “Fritz, frankly I don’t believe anybody has the remotest chance of doing what I ask, but I’m calling your bluff. If you have any sort of transport running on Tazoo in three months’ time I’ll be glad to take back all the harsh things I’ve ever said about U.E. If you don’t I’ll have to send you back to Terra. This expedition wasn’t designed to carry any dead weight.”

“It’s a challenge I’ll accept,” said Fritz, “but don’t expect to equate transportation with any vehicular form you’re used to, because the chances are a million to one against it looking like anything you’ve ever seen before.”

Jacko was waiting for him outside the office. “Bad?” he asked.

“Not good,” said Fritz. “We’ve got three months to crack the transport problem or get kicked out as a bunch of no-good layabouts. The honour—even the continuance of U.E. —is very much at stake. Somehow we’ve got to contrive some sort of vehicle, and this in the face of the fact that we have no source of constructional material capable of withstanding the Tazoon environment.”

“So where do we go from here, Fritz?”

“Damned if I know. You go and check the arrangements for the big move. I’m going over to the site to see how friend Nevill is doing. He may have dug up a little inspiration out there—and Heaven knows I could use a little right now.”

Nevill saw the cat drawing across the rouge desert, and came to the edge of the workings to await Fritz’s arrival.

“How’re things going, Philip?”

“Just great! We knew we had a major find, but this—this is paradise! We’re going straight down on a major city by the look of it, and the stuff on the lower levels where the sand is dry is in a perfect state of preservation. Some of the three-storied buildings are so sound that we’ll be able to use them for our own purposes. I tell you, Fritz, Tazoo looks like paying off about two million per cent interest. The complete analysis of the stuff found here will occupy generations.”

Fritz gazed down into the broad quarry which was the site of the workings. On every hand the feverish activity of the archaeological teams pointed a measure of the excitement and enthusiasm which infected everyone concerned. The shifts had been voluntarily lengthened, but even so, the end of the shift period had to be declared a compulsory cessation of work. Even then it was difficult to actually get some folk off the site and into their beds.

Here and there alien towers were already exposed above the sand, unimaginable obelisks of incomprehensible architecture, curiously distorted and decayed by time and the ravages of wind and sand. Some, the sand shored back to greater depths, were firmer on the lower levels, and the architecture was even more marvellously apparent. Occasionally, vertical pits descended at points where logic had decreed there lay something more Intriguing or exciting or simply yielding greater bounty for the effort it entailed.

Fritz was fascinated beyond measure. The sheer otherworldliness drew his imagination on with an inescapable lure. As an engineer he fought to tame the logic of the structures which were being uncovered before him, but something in his soul trapped him in the wonder of the whole. He was the technologist who came for a dispassionate analysis and stayed to gawp.

Nevill watched him in amusement. “I know, it takes us all like that. It’s both wonderful and sad to be uncovering the remains of so great a culture: wonderful because the culture was so great, and sad because we find their city empty of the creatures who created it.”