Colin Kapp - The Unorthodox Engineers

“Fair enough.” said Fritz. “Later, I want to open up the buildings directly above the station to look for ancillaries.”

Nevill glanced at his sketch map and drew a line through two diagrammatical blocks. “It’s all yours,” he said, “but don’t drive yourself twitchy trying to comprehend too much too fast. You have to absorb alien environments rather than understand them. Sooner or later the pieces fit themselves into place. And Heaven knows there’s enough pieces available for fitting—a jigsaw embracing the life and work of a complete culture.”

“Seems that we’ve just got ourselves a subway,” said Fritz, as he rejoined Jacko at the workings. “We need to make some progress. Lets open up the building here and see what’s inside.”

“Who’s we?” asked Jacko suspiciously.

“You,” said Fritz. “I’m going below again to see if I can trace any control connections running up from below. I want you to go in there and see if you can find anything similar running down. We’ll meet at the end of the shift and compare notes. You know what to look for—cable groupings or isolated wiring; anything which suggests that it might have a control or power function.”

“You’re really set on this idea?” Jacko said. “About using it, I mean.”

“Certainly,” said Fritz. “Let’s face it, if Fritz van Noon can’t restart an alien subway then who the blazes would you expect to do it?”

“That’s what I’ve always respected about you, boss—your modesty,” said Jacko.

An hour later they met again at the portals of the building.

“There’s a sort of power and control complex which appears to come down somewhere near the further end here,” said Fritz.

Jacko nodded. “I’m sure I came across the other end of that,” he said. “There’s a channel running through the basement of the building, and the complex rises into that, and is then split into sections which are fed to the floors above.”

“What’s it like in there?” asked Fritz.

“Weird,” said Jacko. “There’s no other word to describe it. It’s like the epitaph to an insane, overgrown spider with compulsive delusional tendencies.”

Fritz grinned. “I can imagine it all too clearly.”

Jacko’s description of the basement of the building was, if anything, an understatement. The ground floor proved inconceivably worse, and the situation deteriorated rapidly as they ascended to the higher floors.

The subway had possessed the crude simplicity of a functional unit, but the detail and complexity of the levels in the building above defied analysis or description. For a long time no object which they examined provided any sort of clue as to its function, and they traversed the cluttered levels with an increasing sense of dismay and frustration. As with most of the larger buildings only the top storeys had suffered any considerable decay, and the sand and damp had not penetrated into the interiors to any great extent, so that the state of preservation on the levels in which they were interested was impressive.

However, Fritz’s spirits were nearing their lowest ebb as he battled with an ocean of incomprehensibilities. When he wandered into the final gallery, he stopped, groping for form in the alien pattern, then seized a glimpse of illuminated understanding and fanned it into a flame.

“Jacko! Do you know what this is? Don’t you see—electrical control gear.”

Jacko was unimpressed. “If this is their idea of electrical control gear I should hate to see their version of a collection of crazy, twisted maypoles.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Fritz. “The approach may be alien, but the underlying logic is inescapable. Unless I miss my guess this is an automatic switching system, and from its complexity I should think it’s pretty comprehensive. It may even be the only switching system for the whole of the Tazoon subways. You realize what that means?”

“About fifteen years’ circuit analysis,” said Jacko morosely.

“No—well, yes, but look at the condition of this stuff. The preservation is as good here as it is in the subway itself. The chances are it’s still functional. We might only have to re-connect the power to get the whole thing back into operation.”

“Perish the thought!” said Jacko. “I may be a bit naive, but assuming—just for the sake of argument— that what we’ve found is a subway, where would you get the energy to power it? Subways need a lot of power, and if the Tazoons ran out of it where are you going to get more?”

“We’ll worry about that later. It may not be easy, but I have one advantage the Tazoons didn’t have— access to the complete technologies and resources of a scientific culture. And one quite alien to anything here. We could possibly persuade Colonel Nash to bring an MHD oscillating-plasma generator out from Terra, but it would need a lot of shouting. As an unorthodox engineer I’d prefer to locate the original Tazoon power source and see if a completely fresh engineering approach could start it producing again.”

“So what’s the plan?” asked Jacko.

“Hmm, get Harris and a couple of the electrical boys to join me here to try and analyse the circuit logic. Meanwhile you take the rest of the squad below and start dismantling the train. Between us we should discover enough about the way the Tazoons handled electricity and mechanisms to have a fair idea of how to make things work.”

“You think so?” asked Jacko. “I still haven’t forgotten what you did to that damned harp.”

Fritz’s team did indeed manage to isolate a certain amount of circuit logic, and once a few principles were established the work progressed rapidly. They concentrated mainly on the huge switching columns, swiftly realizing that what at first sight could be mistaken for relative crudity was in fact a cunning and sophisticated short-cut technique to solve a highly complex sequence-switching problem. Among other things they discovered that the assembly was probably built to handle alternating current with an efficiency peaking at about ten kilocycles a second, although such periodicity seemed unlikely in practice.

The current handling capacity of the assembly was staggeringly high. Breakdown voltages too were significant, but afforded no real clues as to the normal operating potentials. Safety precautions against unshielded conductors were non-existent, and they were forced to the conclusion that either the equipment was designed to operate unattended or else the physiology of the Tazoons had rendered them immune to electric shocks which would prove lethal to their Terran counterparts.

The apparatus which logically should have been metering equipment, however, made no sense at all.

Somebody was soon at work rigging up a communicator to connect the switching gallery with the subway below. When the line was functional Jacko was the first to make a call.

“Fritz, we’ve run into a snag on this train dismantling project. We can’t get the blasted thing apart. Tell me I’m crazy if you like, but I’d swear the train was cast as a whole and not fabricated—moving parts included.”

“Cast in a pattern of that complexity, in steel?” asked Fritz incredulously.

“Not steel,” said Jacko. “Titanium, unless I judge my metals wrong.”

Fritz van Noon pressed his eyes tightly shut. Every time he thought he was making some progress, the planet whipped the legs from under him. “That only makes it worse,” he said grimly. “Come to think of it, we were being a bit naive expecting a long-extinct culture to leave something which could be dismantled with a hammer and a pair of pliers. Is there no hope at all?”

“We could take a cutting laser and chop it into two-inch slices, but I doubt if Nevill would react favourably to the idea.”