Colin Kapp - The Unorthodox Engineers

The teamleader was the first to arrive.

‘My name’s Wooley. We saw your fire-bucket come down behind the mountains somewhere, but nightfall beat us to it. We were just on our way to find you. Frankly we didn’t expect any survivors, from the angle she was making when she hit.’

‘We were lucky,’ said Van Noon. ‘We managed to get out before she toppled.’ He had the distinct impression that Wooley was not too enthusiastic about their arrival.

‘Just the two of you aboard?’

‘Yes, but I’m afraid we lost the ship. She’ll never make space again. But there’s a lot of useful stores and equipment in her if you can get them out.’

‘We’ll get them out somehow,’ said Wooley. ‘As for losing the ship, that was a foregone conclusion. The spacecraft isn’t yet made which can land undamaged on Getawehi. I don’t wish to seem critical, but just what did you hope to achieve by joining the suicide club?’

‘I’m Van Noon,’ said Fritz. ‘By some mischance I seem to have finished up with the responsibility for this little lot.’

‘Van Noon?’ Wooley screwed up his face. ‘Weren’t you mixed up in that affair on Tazoo?’

‘For my sins, yes,’ said Fritz ruefully. ‘But by all accounts Getawehi has Tazoo beaten by several orders of magnitude. Jacko and I decided that if we didn’t want to spend the next five years driving computers neurotic we’d better get down here and get the feel of it ourselves.’

‘Then welcome to Getawehi!’ said Wooley sadly. ‘But believe me, you’re in for a whole lot more surprises yet.’

In the meantime, a few of the construction team had borrowed Jacko’s sled and had been making short experimental trips across the terrain whenever the opportunity presented itself. Wooley had watched these antics without much enthusiasm, but one particularly successful run captured his interest. He examined Fritz’s sled more closely.

‘Did you come all the way on this?’

‘About fifty kilometres since sunrise.’

Wooley turned and clasped Fritz’s hand in a sudden handshake. ‘Sorry, Fritz! I knew I was being replaced as head of team, but I thought we’d merely get a new boy who’d be making all the same mistakes until he wound up six weeks later in the same situation as I’m in. I hadn’t stopped to think of the unorthodox angle. You know, if we’d been at the wreck and wanted cabin liners back at the base camp… Dammit, we’d have carried the bloody things!’

‘Forget it!’ said Fritz. ‘You’re not being replaced. It’s simply that the overall control for the entire project has transferred itself from its lofty orbital heights to the place where things actually happen.’

‘You mean they’ve given you control of the whole lot?’ Wooley was incredulous.

‘Just that. The veritable hot potato.’

‘No potato that,’ said Wooley sadly shaking his head. ‘What they dumped on you was a small mountain. Come back to base and I’ll try to explain.’

‘I’d appreciate that,’ said Fritz. ‘It’s about time somebody gave me a rational explanation of why a group of experienced engineers can’t assemble a kit of prefabricated parts.’

For a moment Wooley’s eyes looked haunted. ‘I didn’t say I’d give you a rational explanation… I only said I’d try to explain.’

The base camp was a camp in little more than name only. Originally the site of a single space-drop of heavy equipment, it had become the focal point of the endeavours of the construction team solely because there was no incentive to go elsewhere. Behind the site lay the grey-white mountain chain. In front lay the vast mottled steppe. On the ashy no-man’s-land between the two, were gathered various space-drop capsules, some of which had obviously contained parts for the Ixion project. Also there were capsules from later drops, clearly marked as having contained emergency survival supplies.

Living quarters, such as there were, had been constructed from well-entrenched girderwork “borrowed” from the abandoned assembly project, overtopped by parachute material from the space-drop canopies. All the men seemed fit, but it was obvious that the prolonged period of enforced grounding on Getawehi, coupled with strict rationing, was beginning to have its effect. The most disquieting aspect was the look of resignation which rested in their eyes.

Fritz looked out over the broad steppe, something about the configuration of ferns and rocks stirring a thread of memory.

‘Isn’t this the place where your first ferry sank?’

’Sank!’ Wooley was incensed. ‘It didn’t sink… it was melted .’

‘You have to be joking!’

‘Do I just! You watch this!’

Wooley turned, seized a crowbar from an abandoned tool-kit, and tossed it out on to the rock-strewn desert. One end struck the grey sand, while the other touched a protruding rock. There was a blue spark as it touched. For seconds it seemed as if nothing was going to happen. Then to Fritz and Jacko’s astonishment the tool began to glow a visible cherry red. Its temperature continued to increase through white heat to a point where the iron bent and fused into a pool of molten iron. The incandescent metal dribbled into a thread and ran apart. The arc which struck as the curious circuit broke was more in the nature of an explosion, and the watching trio ran for their lives as the area was deluged with droplets of red-hot iron and warm sand.

‘Convinced?’ asked Wooley, when they had retreated to a safe distance.

‘Convinced,’ agreed Van Noon weakly. ‘It must have taken a couple of thousand amps to melt a bar like that.’

‘It must have taken many millions of amps to melt our ship,’ said Wooley gloomily, ‘but it did it somehow.’

‘But this is ridiculous, Fritz!’ said Jacko. ‘How can you have an electrified desert?’

‘Not too ridiculous really. Even on Terra you can find a surprising amount of electrical currents in the earth if you go looking for them. On Terra the source is usually electro-chemical—minute differences in electrode potential between regions containing different concentrations of mineral substances. But I don’t know of any natural source capable of producing some dozens of volts at many millions of amps—or why the system doesn’t discharge itself.’

‘We’ve done some investigating,’ said Wooley. ‘The grey rocks you can ignore, but we call the black rocks “terminals”. Actually they aren’t simple rocks at all, but columnar graphite structures presumably reaching down to the bedrock. They have an insulating sheath, a sort of lacerated asbestos, which we theorize came to be deposited by electrophoresis of the soil silicates. But however it came about, it’s damned effective in insulating the columns from the rest of the plain.

‘The remaining bulk of the desert is merely a minerised silicate-base earth, not unlike Terran clay.

Average potential difference between the terminal columns and the base land is about twenty-seven volts.

But it varies pretty widely and can touch a couple of hundred volts in the high season.’

‘AC or DC?’ asked Jacko.

Wooley began to look rather haggard and turned away for a moment.

‘You aren’t going to believe this,’ he said. ‘Generally it’s DC with the terminals positive with respect to the base-land. But sometimes you get AC—especially on Tuesday and Sunday mornings.’

‘And if you think that’s mad,’ said Wooley, ‘wait until you start on the Ixion project.’

‘You know, Fritz, I’m beginning to get sorry I came.’ Jacko looked at Van Noon appealingly. ‘Can’t I just go home and sleep it off?’

‘Try closing your eyes, Jacko. Maybe it’ll go away.’