Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

“I’m tired of playing games,” Candle said, no longer grinning. “The boy and I have work to do. You two are in the way. You’ll only take up time if I have to work with you and show you what to do. I want you and your ship out of here in half an hour.”

“Who’s going to make us?” Bullard asked with great originality.

“I am.”

Everybody turned around to see who else had entered the conversation. It was Hansen. “I’m going to give you fifteen minutes, not thirty,” Hansen said. “Then I’m going to turn the grid power on at full intensity. You can either use it to take off, or sit around and roast alive inside your ship.” Candle turned and looked at Hansen with new respect. “Okay… Let’s go back to your place. I’ve still got some things to figure out.”

Quemos was on the verge of hysteria. “You’re bluffing! You wouldn’t dare. I’ll report this!”

Fifteen minutes later, the ship headed for space.

Back in Hansen’s room, the two men ate a quick lunch, then sat at the table and talked about Candle’s plans for opening the reluctant door. “The way I figure it,” Candle said, “I think that we can handle the whole thing by radio. Which reminds me, one of these days I’m going to build a telescreen that will transmit and receive through pseudo-met. Not too difficult really if you approach the problem—”

“I better get Fromer for you,” Hansen said hurriedly.

“Fromer here,” said the bass voice.

“This is Candle. Let me talk to one of your so-called engineering officers.”

“Who the hell—”

“Shut up and go get ’em,” Candle growled back. “And one more yelp out of you and you’ll stay in that ship till you rot.”

There was a pause, then Fromer again, a meek Fromer. “My chief engineering officer is with me.”

“Okay. Now get this. Come to think of it, you’d better record it. Number one: By now you know which component is a worm gear. You will notice, I’m quite certain, that it engages a large notched wheel. The reason that the door will not move is because at the point where the two gears meet, some of the metal has oxidized. For possible use in future emergencies, I offer this explanation. The entire mechanism is subject to periodic vacuum, when the airlock door is operated. In between times, the mechanism is in the ship’s atmosphere. A condition of lower oxygen content thus obtains around the sealed off area, and such an area is anodic—in other words, corrodible with respect to the surrounding areas in which oxygen has free access. Now, since this door has opened and closed successfully for about five hundred years, it appears that there’s a special reason why it suddenly refuses to function. At a guess, you would experience this condition of intense corrosion only when the aluminum in the wheel gear is exposed to something like sodium hydroxide, and only at the point where it controls the worm gear. Now, has this ship landed recently within such an atmosphere?”

“Three weeks ago on Ghortin IV,” said the weak voice of the engineer. “We landed to get some pictures of the cloud formations for souvenirs. We dropped on the edge of a large body of water because the view was better—”

Candle shook his head sadly and said, “You could have avoided trouble by coming in over the land instead of the water. The heat from the ship boiled the water which undoubtedly contained sodium carbonate and calcium hydroxide; presto, and the air was filled with clouds of sodium hydroxide.

“I suggest that you steer away from all such wicked places in the future. Of course, if you’d learn how to mine ore, smelt metal, machine components—”

“First they’d have to discover fire,” Hansen said out of the corner of his mouth.

“You’re catching on, son,” Candle said, out of the corner of his mouth. “Now, gentlemen, to open the door it will be necessary to break the corroded area apart. This is a large heavy mechanism, as such things go. Since you have no tools heavy enough to batter the corroded area apart, you’ll have to make some.”

“How can we?”

Candle sighed. “I wish I had time to teach you to think, but instead, you’ll have to do as I tell you to do. I think you can probably make a battering ram out of water. You just—don’t interrupt—find or make a long cylindrical container, fill it with water and quick-freeze it in your refrigerator—”

“But they put R’thagna Bar in the refrigerator again—”

“Then I suggest you get him the hell out,” Candle said.

An hour later ten men smashed a half-ton cylinder of ice against the corroded junction of the two gears. Following Candle’s instructions, they next applied the ram to the door itself, which smoothly swung open. “You’ll find,” Candle explained, “that the only damage will be the two missing teeth on the aluminum gear. Since only two teeth are ever in contact at any time, you can simply slide the gear forward and engage it at a point where the teeth are intact. You’ll find, I’m quite sure, that your door will function properly. Also, Captain, don’t pull out of here until I’m aboard. I think I’d like to bring an assistant along, too.”

“An assistant?” Hansen asked.

Candle twirled the ends of his long white moustache. “You, my lad, if you’d like to go along.” He pulled a letter from his pocket and fanned the air with it. “I’m in complete command of this expedition—at least until His Exalted Excellency gets home to plant his seed.”

Hansen’s face glowed. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do. Let’s get a couple of messages off to Sector Headquarters and get on board ship.”

“It may not be any joy ride,” Candle said thoughtfully. “You probably haven’t heard about it, but there’ve been a number of ship emergencies in the past few weeks.”

“Door failures?”

“No. At least none that I’ve heard of. But at least two Hegler drives have stopped working in mid space.”

“But, but there’s nothing to stop working—”

Candle’s eyes twinkled. “No moving parts, eh?”

Hansen reddened. “I hope I’ve outgrown that silly notion.”

Candle peered into Hansen’s eyes. “I’m sure you have. I’m sure that you will find out a lot more things for yourself. You’re the kind. And we’re going to need a lot of your kind, because failures—failures of so-called perfect mechanisms—are becoming more and more commonplace.” Candle pointed to the emergency light on the traffic control panel. “That light will be flashing with more and more frequency in the months to come. But not just to signal trouble in space. If I were a superstitious man, I’d think that the age of the perfect machine is about to be superseded by the age of the perfect failure—mechanical failures that can’t be explained on any level. I have several friends who’ve been in touch with me recently about—”

“You think that it’s time for a change?”

Candle smiled quickly. “That’s the idea. And the truth of the matter is that I am a superstitious man. I really believe, childishly, that the mechanics and motions of the galaxy may turn themselves upsidedown just to snap man out of his apathy and give him some work to do.”

Upsidedown turned out to be a good word. They boarded the big ship an hour later and were respectfully ushered into the presence of Captain Fromer and his staff.

“We’re underway,” Captain Fromer said. “We’ll be landing in nine days to deliver R’thagna Bar home.”

“How is he?” Hansen asked.

Fromer shrugged. “He’s been thawed out, frozen, and thawed out so many times, it’s anybody’s guess. Take a look for yourself.”