Kenneth Gantz - Not in Solitude

Yudin had not heard Vining spill out so many words during the entire flight to Mars. Everybody on the spacecraft would end up crazy. No, that wasn’t what he was thinking. He was getting afraid. These high-powered civilians were getting on his nerves. Was it really possible the planet might exert a field that would merge with forces aborning in the generators and cumulate with them to bring about freak mutations? God, they were sitting on a huge bomb! It could let go, like this crazy Dutchman said in his crazy accent, any time he altered the firing piles.

He gave Vining a short good night.

“Life? What is a life?” Vining detained him. “Life can go. There is to a life no urgency. That you live, it is not urgent. It is death that is urgent. Who says ‘no’ to death? You have urgent business for living? Who says ‘yes’? More lives are coming. What is strange about your going? You do not like that thought, Herr Leutnant? You come to me about the drive to see? No, Herr Leutnant, you come about life. And I tell you I have not life for you. So you think I am crazy, when I am only sleepy.”

AT 2400 Captain Spear went to the command post to take over from Major Noel. He began the watch with a check of all guard and alert positions. As he bent his lean body to the ladders, he felt an alert kinesthetic pleasure in the movements, tingeing it consciously with regret that he had now aged to thirty-four years. Not much longer would his muscles take on a fine tone, in spite of exercise. Likely enough, some decline had already set in, hidden from him now but next year or a year or two later to emerge in sagging abdominal bands and slacking stamina in thighs and calves. He rapped on his hard gut, dismissing his rapidly retracting hairline. As long as the old body was in condition, a man looked young and felt young.

He went over the log with the major and got the “good nights” said without more than the usual catalog of admonition the guy always dished out—just like they both didn’t know it all by heart. Noel gone, he ran through the intercom positions and settled down to wait for 0600 hours. Once or twice he thought about home, wondering idly what Alice was doing. What time was it on Earth? In the time zone of the apartment, that is, he corrected himself. Brother, would she be having a running duck if she knew they were stalled on Mars, even if there wasn’t any danger of not getting the thing fixed. Radiation permitting.

Anyway, the thing was reliable. It had had hundreds of tests, and there were enough engineers and rocket boys along to build another one out of the bins full of parts and such junk if they had to. So it took time to find the trouble. Eventually it would be found. The Far Venture was provisioned for at least six months’ good eating. Any major sabotage would have been spotted right away. Like Beloit said, something was out of adjustment and it wasn’t always easy to find. Let him worry about it. That’s what he got paid for. Hell, if they had to take the thing down to bare wire and metal or anything else it had been put together from, they could do it. Still Beloit and his boys had better get their damn drive to frying while the radiation was behaving itself.

At 0200 Major Beloit came up from below for some chow. Spear put an airman at the command-post intercom and went along with him. Beloit sat for a long time on the bench, sipping at his mug of coffee. He looked plain tired. After he had eaten the two sandwiches he had fixed, he stretched out his legs and sighed. “That hit the spot.”

“You getting anywhere yet?” Spear asked him.

Beloit was willing to talk now. “We’re still getting less than twenty per cent power. That means that fission is way down from what it ought to be. We’re checking the generators now, one by one, but we haven’t found anything yet.”

Spear wanted to ask him about Vining, but he didn’t think that it would be a proper question. Colonel Cragg had shown his own suspicions all right, but Beloit was peculiar. Like most of the technicians. Besides, he was outside the command channel. Maybe he hadn’t been briefed on Vining. You couldn’t deny, though, that he gave you a feeling of confidence in him. You didn’t have much doubt that he would eventually find the trouble and repair it. In a way it was a shame that a guy like Beloit, with everything he knew about his specialty and all his experience, couldn’t expect very rapid advancement. He was buried in his rocket drives. Out-side the command line. Forty-five at least and over fifteen years’ service, well known in the Air Force, and only a major. Best he could ever hope for was colonel. Probably he would retire as lieutenant colonel.

“About all I know about a rocket drive is that it works,” Spear said.

“It isn’t very complicated,” Beloit protested amiably. “Maybe the underlying concepts are a little difficult, unless you’re up on atomic theory, but the main idea is pretty simple. It’s a nuclear-fission drive, and in a way it’s like the old internal combustion engine, except that the nuclear explosions exert their energy directly in a battery of rocket exhaust tubes instead of driving pistons down and turning a crankshaft. Fundamentally the drive works from an extremely rapid series of small explosive fissions in each of the forty-one rocket tubes, one at a time and in practically instantaneous rotation. We control the thrust by directing a precise quantum of atoms of one of the radioactive isotopes of iodine into each of the rocket chambers for each explosion. These fission quanta are like the charge of powder in a cartridge, regulated for what the tube can tolerate.”

Spear grinned at him. “You’ve got me a practically full charge already. Or should I say, ‘Whatinhell did you say?’”

“The idea is simple enough. It’s the engineering that really took the doing. For example, the fission explosion is not a critical-mass-type chain reaction but the fission of each nucleus, or practically every nucleus in the quantum, caused by the impact of neutrons in an extremely large and dense beam, which we pass into each explosion chamber simultaneously with the quantum of nuclei it envelops. It’s like turning a fire hose on a teaspoonful of sugar. The neutrons also bear a negative rider charge. The neutron beam is so large and so dense with slow neutrons that a very high percentage of the nuclei, which bear a positive rider, are struck and split. We develop immense thrust in each rocket tube in rapid succession. More important, we control it exactly.”

“It’s as clear as the mud the hop frog jumped into,” Spear told him. “So why don’t you fix whatever needs fixing?” He wished the guy would just say in so many words that everything was okay. Still it was encouraging that he was so cheerful. If he were worried, it would probably show up plain enough.

“That’s what we’re going to do.” Beloit smiled. “But not until we find it. There are hundreds of transistors and relays in the feed devices. Really several complex and synchronized electronic calculators. There’s the extremely critical device for diverting the nuclei and the neutron beams into the successive firing chambers. There are the enervators and the energizers and the accelerators that create the two meson fields. There are the moderators that slow down the neutrons. There are the tubes and the fields that strip the nuclei from the radioactive isotope. And last but not least, there are the 943 neutron generators, each one of which is as delicately balanced a little gadget as you would want to tear into. It takes 943 of them to make a dense beam of neutrons for the fission chambers. We might be looking for a week yet. Maybe it’s even a combination of things and won’t show up right away in any particular one of the components.”