Colin Kapp - The Unorthodox Engineers

Two kilometres away from the Dark they came across the crushed path that their own crawler had made on its way in, and this they followed gratefully. Shortly they found the second crawler, abandoned, and with its engine stalled and cold. The third crawler was patrolling a broad front along a road about three kilometres radius from the Dark perimeter. They were hailed and taken aboard for the last part of the journey through the growing light and finally out into the unbearably bright gold sunset of an Ithican evening.

Courtney was there to greet them. His team had spent the day re-running exploratory tests, but this time with particular reference to the onset-time of negation. His results amply confirmed van Noon’s experience. There was a time-lag on the introduction of any energy phenomenon to the Dark or the Pen before negative effects set in. The exact period of the lag varied with the type of phenomenon, but was greatest for applied physical force.

The party rode with raised spirits back to New Bedlam where work on the next phase of Fritz’s plans against the Dark were just about to begin.

‘A tunnel?’ said Jacko.

‘Strictly speaking,’ said van Noon, ‘I had in mind something more in the nature of a horizontal well, but I think a tunnel is a fair description.’

‘And just how do you propose to sink a horizontal well into the Dark?’

‘Frankly, I don’t see much difficulty. We take an ordinary iron pipe of sufficient dimension to permit the passage of a man—and just knock it in.’

‘Crazy like a fox!’ said Jacko. ‘We’re talking about the Dark —the great energy negator. In the name of Moses, how do you just knock a pipe into that?’

‘I thought I’d already demonstrated that,’ said Fritz. ‘There’s a time-lag before the onset of negation.

Apply a pile driver or something to your pipe and hit it once and it will penetrate the Dark just a little before the detection, analysis, and opposite synthesis has a chance to stop it. Then the negation will be applied and stop the tube going in any farther, and the system will reach stasis. The anti-force obviously cannot continue to be applied after the original force has ceased to operate, so the force anti-force balance will then relax.’

‘So?’

‘So then you hit your pipe again and drive it in a little more. And so on. And providing you work on a completely random and non-predictable basis there’s no chance of the anti-force being applied in anticipation. I suspect that only if we set up a standard repetition rate will we meet with complete and instantaneous negation of the force that we apply.’

‘So we knock in our tube. Then what?’

‘It depends on what we find. The Dark may be a solid or it may be a thin-wall phenomenon. If it’s a solid we shall not gain much except for a little knowledge. But if it’s thin-wall, then we might have a chance to look inside.’

‘From which you’re assuming that the Dark effect won’t penetrate inside the pipe.’

‘I think it may to some extent, but take any physical phenomenon and place an inch of steel in front of it and you always get some modification or attenuation, if not a complete shutoff. I don’t see that the situation should be materially different for anti-physical phenomena. With a bit of luck we should be able to get through.’

‘What do you think’s inside there, Fritz?’

‘As I see it, Jacko, some form of intelligence, but I wouldn’t like to guess any closer than that. Whether the Dark is some cosmic amoeba or has inside it a complex of little green men is something I intend to find out. Are you with me?’

‘I’m right behind you,’ said Jacko. ‘But don’t ask me to be the first man through that damned pipe.’

By the time that Courtney returned to the base camp a few days later van Noon’s plans were fairly well advanced. Fritz described the scheme briefly. Courtney was intrigued but doubtful.

‘I don’t see,’ he said, ‘how you’re going to drive a pipe of that diameter into the Dark—remembering that the driving has to be done in the deep Pen area where the anti-momentum is killing. You’d never get a horizontal pile-driver to work under those conditions.’

‘No. We’ve already taken care of that point by taking a new line entirely. We’re going to fire it in.’

‘Fire it?’

‘Yes. Attach the free end of the pipe to what is effectively a large-bore gun or reaction chamber with an open muzzle pointing away from the Dark. In the gun we fire a high-explosive charge and let the recoil of the apparatus drive the pipe against the Dark. According to my calculations, a series of explosive shocks should have the right sort of driving characteristics for the job. How does it sound as an idea?’

‘It could work,’ admitted Courtney. ‘Unless we’re up against something we don’t know about yet. How far have you got with the project.’

‘We’ve managed to get the lengths of pipe into the Dark area, and the gun chamber is there also. There’s trouble keeping handling equipment working so far into the Pen, but we’ve managed somehow. We should be ready to start firing sometime tomorrow. Have you been able to get the extra stuff I asked for?’

‘Most of it’s outside on the carriers, and the generators will arrive in the morning. Here’s the wide-band radiation monitor, trolley-mounted as specified. I only hope it fits into the pipe.’

‘I’ll try it out,’ said van Noon. ‘I can run it through our test length and if it doesn’t fit we can modify it before it goes into the Pen.’

He wheeled the small apparatus-laden trolley to the length of pipe that ran down the workshop where they had been fabricating the gun chamber. The trolley fitted easily into the interior of the pipe and, to give himself a little practice, he crawled in after it and pushed it before him. The iron confines of the pipe returned the sound of the small rollers with a noise like a train speeding through a tunnel. When van Noon reached the far end he found that Jacko had returned and was peering anxiously down the pipe.

‘Why the sound effects, Fritz?’

‘Eh? Oh, this? It’s the radiation detector. It’s obvious that even the iron of the pipe can’t do more than attenuate some wave lengths of the electromagnetic spectrum—and the same presumably applies to the negative spectrum. So just to be on the safe side Courtney has knocked up a combined range monitor which should cover anything likely to be dangerous but not detectable by our own senses. I don’t expect that we’ll encounter any such radiation, but it’s better to be safe than sterile.’

‘Agreed,’ said Jacko. ‘We’re taking enough chances with the unknown already. I’ve just come back out of the Pen, and we’re right on schedule. The first firing can take place at mid-day tomorrow.’

‘I’ll be there,’ said Fritz. ‘I’m particularly interested in knowing what happens to the core which we leave in the pipe. If the Dark is true radiation-type phenomena, there won’t be any core material. But if it’s something else, we may have to think again.’

The null-pressure suits obtained from Space Command were far more suitable for working under deep Pen conditions than the expeditionary clothing had been. Specifically designed for work on asteroids and similar bodies under a pressure dome but exposed to extremes of stellar heat and cold, the suits were the finest flexible radiation foils that had yet been devised. In the Pen, of course, no pressurized dome was needed, but the suits ensured that the searching fingers of negative-heat were no longer a danger or of major discomfort to the UE squad.

But the drag of the anti-momentum was not so easily avoided. Close to the wall of the Dark it exhibited an almost treacle-like resistance to movement which was common to both men and machines alike. The adaptations of technique needed for working in an environment possessing such a high quasi-viscosity were numerous, but the combined ingenuity of the Unorthodox Engineering squad was equal to the challenge. Somehow the impossible had been accomplished, and the structural components of van Noon’s tunnel had been patiently swung into place ready for the projected penetration of the Dark.