Colin Kapp - The Unorthodox Engineers

‘Organization,’ said Fritz, ‘is the last refuge of a tired mind. It’s a bumbling, mechanical substitute for initiative. I can’t wait twenty months for Terran steel even if it is cut to size and neatly drilled to specification. If I haven’t got steel then I’ll use something else, anything else.’

‘I regard that as a very foolish and unnecessary attitude.’

‘That foolish attitude of creation out of necessity,’ said Fritz heatedly, ‘is the power and the reason that placed Mankind above the animals. Without it we’d still be scratching fleas off each other’s backs. You’re wasting your time here.’

‘Very well,’ said Eldrick, ‘but if necessity is the mother of invention then you are in for a highly creative time. I’ve had a look at your constructions here, and if you think you can get a line through to Hellsport inside ten years you’re either a genius or a fool.’

Was that wise,’ asked Jacko, watching the helicopter lift off for Hellsport. ‘I mean, throwing him out like that.’

‘Maybe not,’ said Fritz. ‘But I can tell you it felt good! These damned pen-pushers make my blood boil. Civilization runs at a quarter pace because of the blind dictum that everything must be organized according to the book. Ticked off box by box.’

‘I suppose it has its virtues, though.’ Jacko was thoughtful. ‘After all, look at these people,’ he jerked a thumb towards the town. ‘They can’t muster a sufficiently collective effort to repair their own railways.’

Van Noon nodded absently. ‘And for why? Because they’re running on the wrong philosophy. They can’t do it because they’re trying to reinstate the railways as they used to be. That’s not the right attitude. There is no logic in believing a problem has to be solved in the same way now as it was done previously. This railway was a product of its own time—and times change. If you haven’t the means to do what the other fellow did, then forget it and try something else.’

‘That’s what I like about you,’ said Jacko. ‘You consistently move in the opposite direction to everyone else. I seem to remember you were about to show us how to build a volcano-proof trestle without actually using any steel.’

Fritz smiled mischievously. ‘Suppose we forget about trestles. Can you salvage enough scrap to manage the spans and the rails?’

‘Sure. That I can find, but if it’s not a rude question how do you figure to hold them up? Will power?’

‘Not really. These miniature volcanoes all form cones of approximately the same height, and we can adjust that without too much hassle to even them out. So what does that leave us? Natural pillars of rock which will last a lifetime. Strap on a yoke, sling the spans between them and you have your railway.’

‘Crazy like a fox!’ said Jacko. ‘It would work, of course —over a very short section, but I suppose that tired little brain of yours didn’t also figure out how to manoeuvre a string of volcanoes into a straight line roughly approximating the way we want to go? Or do we build a crazy zig-zag track and use triangular trains?’

‘No,’ said Fritz, ‘although the idea did occur to me. Also a proverb about Mohammed and the mountain.’

‘Now I know you’re nuts,’ said Jacko. ‘If you haven’t got volcanoes then you haven’t got any, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘Is that so? Then I think you have something yet to learn. This may not be one of the most brilliant moments of my career but it may well prove to be the most spectacular.’

At the end of the line, where the next trestle ought to have been, Harris, and Fanning, the UE geologist, had the mobile drilling rig assembled. Fanning was taking core samples from the drill and shaking his head sadly.

‘I don’t like this, Fritz. We’ve penetrated to forty metres and the stuff is coming up hotter than hell. I should hate the drill to break into a high pressure region. We’d all be very dead, very quickly.’

‘How near are we to a molten layer?’

‘Can’t tell exactly, but the ground-penetrating radar puts it at about seventy metres, plus or minus ten.’

‘Near enough,’ said Fritz. ‘If the stuff the drill is picking up is fusible then I think we can stop right here.’

Fanning breathed a sigh of relief and began to withdraw the drill. When it was out they collapsed the drilling rig, and the bulldozer hauled it from the site.

Then Harris returned dragging a trolley bearing several metal cylinders. He looked a little nervous. Fritz waved everyone away from the drilling, pulled the pin from the safety-disarm and heaved one of the cylinders end-first down the well. Nothing happened except that after about a minute thick yellow smoke began to issue from the hole. Fritz cursed and, approaching warily, dropped another cylinder after the first.

He scarcely got away in time. There was a crack like the voice of thunder, and a ball of violent, sparking incandescence screamed into the sky. Then flames jetted up, a scorching burst of fire leaping from the soil like some demented blow-torch. Molten magma, entrained in the superheated gases, was hurled high in the air and descended as a scatter of singeing hail driven on the light cross-winds.

The onlookers fled in confusion. By the time that Fritz reached shelter his uniform was smouldering in a dozen places and his face and hands were red from exposure to the heat and covered with superficial burns from the searing fall-out. Jacko had fared little better, having waited to make sure that Fritz was able to escape. They sat down on a broken slag-case, dabbing balm from a first-aid pack on their burns and watching the hectic blast as it roared into the sky.

Slowly the cone began to form as lava congealed around the flaming throat, and the fiery torch rode up with slow magnificence as the cone became a candle and then a tower with a bright and angry beacon at the top.

‘Voila!’ said Fritz. ‘I give you a volcano.’

‘Hell, I’ll give you volcanoes!’ said Jacko, dabbing at his burns. ‘Next time you try this Guy Fawkes stunt you’re strictly on your own. What the heck did you drop down that hole?’

Fritz smiled. ‘A thermite bomb—and a cylinder of oxygen for luck. The intense heat generated by the bomb just above a bed of active igneous magma was more than sufficient to trigger an eruption. This time the process was channelled by the bore-hole, so we got a cone instead of a puddle. We’ll have to adjust the thermite charge to tailor the height of the resultant cone, but that’s not difficult.’

’Per ardua ad asbestos!’ said Jacko ruefully. ‘Are you seriously suggesting we do this all the way to Hellsport?’

‘Only where we have to,’ said Fritz. ‘And even that will take more thermite bombs than we can come by honestly. Fortunately there’s a way round that. Up on the Juara shelf is the Command weapon stores.

They’ve more munitions there than we’re ever likely to need.’

‘But will they let us have them?’

‘No,’ said Fritz, ‘but that’s never stopped Harris before.’

Several days later the new volcano was extinct. A crazy scaffold was set up round the cone and the top neatly truncated with power chisels and pneumatic drills. As a structure it stood supremely suited for its job. The siliceous rock had set like concrete, and had it been cast deliberately by hand it could not have stood more straight or firm. The yoke was placed around the cone top and secured by hooks into the narrow crater. Prefabricated spans were trimmed to length and joined up to the existing structure. The result was the finest trestle that Cannis IV had ever possessed.

For UE it was an hour of jubilation. The forgotten gimmicks and the half-formed innovations suddenly leaped to new promise now it was certain the line was going through. At the end of a three week burst of energy the last rail of the Juara line was bolted into place. The locomotive returned to Callin with improvised rolling-stock and two days later chugged triumphantly through to Juara with the first load of the finest bean harvest for years.