Hal Clement - Natives of Space

The engineers finally straightened and stood back from their work. The breech was once more in place, this time without the error in alignment which had caused the discovery of the seal.

Clamped to the center of the dome, just where the fuel feed tube merged with its surface, was the control which had been pieced together from articles found in the tool cabinets. It was little more than a coil whose field was supposed to be strong enough to replace that of the interior solenoid through the metal of the breech.

Preble had gone outside, and now returned to report that the slight downward tilt of the end of the ship in which they were working would cause the blast from this particular tube to strike the ground fifty or sixty yards to the rear. This was far enough for safety from splash, and probably close enough so that the intensity of the blast would not be greatly diminished.

Cray reported that the assembly, as nearly as he could tell, should work.

“Then I suggest that you and anyone you need to help you remain here and start it in a few moments, while the rest of us go outside to observe results. We’ll keep well clear of the stern, so don’t worry about us,” said Grant. “We’re on the night side of the asteroid now, and, as I remember, the Mizar was outward and counter-clockwise ofthis asteroid’s position twenty-four hours ago — by heaven, I’ve just realized that all this has occurred in less than twenty, hours. She should be able to sight the flare at twenty million miles, if this tube carries half the pep that one of ours would.”

Cray nodded. “I can start it alone,” he said. “The rest of you go on out. I’ll give you a couple of minutes, then turn it on for just a moment. I’ll give you time to send someone in if anything is wrong.”

Grant nodded approval, and led the other five men along the main corridor and out the air lock.

They leaped to a position perhaps a hundred and fifty yards to one side of the ship, and waited.

The tube in question was one of the lowest in the bank of those parallel to the ship’s longitudinal axis. For several moments after the men had reached their position it remained lifeless; then a silent, barely visible ghost of flame jetted from its lip. This changed to a track of dazzling incandescence at the point where it first contacted the rock of the asteroid; and the watchers automatically snapped the glare shields into place on their helmets. These were all in place before anyone realized that the tube was still firing, cutting a glowing canyon into the granite and hurling a cloud of boiling silica into space. Grant stared for a moment, leaped for the air lock, and disappeared inside. As he entered the control room from the front, Cray burst in from the opposite end, making fully as good time as the captain. He didn’t even pause, but called out as he came:

“She wouldn’t cut off, and the fuel flow is increasing. I can’t stop it. Get out before the breech gives — I didn’t take time to close the engine-room door!”

Grant was in midair when the engineer spoke, but he grasped a stanchion that supported the catwalk, swung around it like a comet, and reversed his direction of flight before the other man caught up to him. They burst out of the air lock at practically the same instant.

By the time they reached the others, the tube fields had gone far out of balance. The lips of the jet tube were glowing blue-white and vanishing as the stream caught them; and the process accelerated as the men watched. The bank of stern tubes glowed brightly, began to drip, and boiled rapidly away; the walls of the engine room radiated a bright red, then yellow, and suddenly slumped inward. That was the last straw for the tortured disintegrator; its own supremely resistant substance yielded to the lack of external cooling, and the device ceased to exist. The wreckage of the alien ^hip, glowing red now for nearly its entire length, gradually cooled as the source of energy ceased generating; but it would have taken supernatural intervention to reconstruct anything useful from the rubbish which had been its intricate mechanism. The men, who had seen the same thing happen to their own ship not twenty hours before, did not even try to do so.

The abruptness with which the accident had occurred left the men stunned. Not a word was spoken, while the incandescence faded slowly from the hull. There was nothing to say. They were two hundred million miles from Earth, the asteroid would be eighteen months in reaching its nearest point to the orbit of Mars — and Mars would not be there at the time. A search party might eventually find them, since the asteroid was charted and would be known to have been in their neighborhood at the time of their disappearance. That would do them little good.

Rocket jets of the ion type are not easily visible unless matter is in the way — matter either gaseous or solid. Since the planetoid was airless and the Mizar did not actually land, not even the usually alert Preble saw her approach. The first inkling of her presence was the voiceof her commander, echoing through the earphones of the seven castaways.

“Hello, down there. What’s been going on? We saw a flare about twenty hours ago on this body that looked as though an atomic had misbehaved, and headed this way. We circled the asteroid for an hour or so, and finally did sight your ship — just as she did go up. Will you please tell us what the other flare could have been? Or didn’t you see it?”

It was the last question that proved too much for the men. They were still laughing hysterically when the Mizar settled beside the wreck and took them aboard. Cray alone was silent and bitter.

“In less than a day,” he said to his colleague on the rescue ship, “I wrecked two ships — and I haven’t the faintest idea how I wrecked either one of them. As a technician, I’d be a better ground-car mechanic. That second ship was just lying there waiting to teach me more about shop technique than I’d have learned in the rest of my life; and some little technical slip ruined it all.”

But whose was the error in technique?

Boss ducked back from the outer lock as a whir of wings became audible outside. The warning came barely in time; a five-foot silvery body shot through the opening, checked its speed instantly, and settled to the floor of the lock chamber. It was one of the crew, evidently badly winded. His four legs seemed to sag under the weight of the compact body, and his wings drooped almost to the floor. Flight, or any other severe exertion, was a serious undertaking in the gravity of this world; even accelerine, which speeded up normal metabolism to compensate for the increased demand, was not perfect.

Boss was not accustomed to getting out of anyone’s way, least of all in the case of his own underlings. His temper, normally short enough, came dangerously near the boiling point; the wave of thought that poured from his mind to that of the weary flier was vitriolic.

“All right, make it good. Why do I have to dodge out of the path of every idiotic spacehand who comes tearing back here as though the planet was full of devils? Why? What’s the rush, anyway?

This is the first time 1 ever saw you in a hurry, except when I told you to hop!”

“But you told me this time, Boss,” was the plaintive answer. “You said that the moment that creature you were after turned into the path leading here, I was to get word to you. It’s on the way now.”

“That’s different. Get out of sight. Tell Second to make sure everybody’s in his quarters, and that all the doors along the central hall are locked. Turn out all lights, except for one at each end of the hall. No one is to be visible from that hallway, and no other part of the ship is to be accessible from it. Is that understood?”