Rare Science Fiction

by Ivan Howatd (ed. )

  Yatagawa watched, arms folded, as the Calypso came down. “I wonder if they’ve bothered with thermocouple readings,” he said softly as the spaceship dropped. “What do you mean?” Talbridge asked.

  The rest of the Andromeda survivors were rushing from the wrecked ship now, running out into the icy plateau where Yatagawa, Helmot, and Talbridge had been standing. Quietly, Yatagawa said to Talbridge: “You don’t think they’re going to be able to rescue us, do you?” He sounded quietly resigned.

  Hotly, Talbridge said: “Why not? Are you keeping something back from us, Commander? If you are—”

  “I’m merely postponing the inevitable. The people on that ship think they’re coming down to rescue us—but I’m afraid it may have to be the other way round.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Watch,” Yatagawa said.

  The Calypso’s jets continued to blast down. The ship would be landing on an upswept, ice-covered shelf which was about a mile from the wrecked hyperliner. Already, the approaching jetwash had begun to melt the ice beneath; a dark spreading stain over the gleaming surface indicated the area being weakened.

  Talbridge gasped. “You mean they’re not going to be able to land?”

  “It’s much worse than that,” Yatagawa said with a calmness that belied his words. “They’ll make a perfect landing. But I wonder how deep the ice is over there.”

  “Won’t the jets melt it?”

  “The jets will vaporize the ice in the direct blast, and liquify whatever’s tangential to the area. Only—”

  There was no need for Yatagawa to continue the explanation. Talbridge could plainly see what was happening.

  The Calypso hung for a moment on the bright pillar of its jetwash, then lowered itself to the ground. Talbridge saw the tailfins hang for a fraction of an instant, an inch above the swirling cloud of vapor.

  Then the Calypso, cutting its jets, entered the pit the jets had blasted. The slim sleek vessel came to rest finally on the rock shelf beneath the ice-sheath.

  “Look!” Talbridge yelled.

  There was no need for Yatagawa to look. He had seen it coming since the jet had made its appearance—and had known there was no way to prevent it from happening.

  In a temperature of minus three-thirty, melted ice refreezes instantly upon melting, give or take a few microseconds. A few microseconds had been all that was necessary. No sooner had the Calypso settled in its pit than an unexpected vise of frozen liquid clamped back around it. The water created by the jets had refrozen the instant the jets had been cut off.

  Perhaps the crew of the Calypso had expected the water to stay liquid indefinitely; perhaps they had fully expected to set down in a small lake. Perhaps they had thought their jets would not melt the ice sheath. Perhaps—and this seemed most likely to Yatagawa, Talbridge, and the other horrified onlookers from the Andromeda—they had not thought at all.

  It hardly mattered now. Conjectures were unimportant; facts remained. And the fact was that the hundred-foot length of the Calypso was now almost entirely under ice, frozen in an unbreakable grip, having slid into the temporary lake as easily as a blade into clay…a clay that hardened within microseconds.

  Only the snout of the rescue ship was visible above the flat icy wastes, sticking out like a periscope from an ocean’s waves.

  Talbridge gasped. Yatagawa merely frowned unhappily. None of the twelve could evaluate the immediate situation too clearly, but all could see one indisputable verity: the rescue ship was trapped.

  Yatagawa, moving quickly on his short, wiry legs, got there first, closely followed by the other eleven. He paused, testing the ice, before approaching the ship itself.

  The ice held; it was solid. Very solid. The shortlived lake had refrozen into a clear sheet of ice that nestled snug against the ship. The ice displaced by the bulk of the Calypso fanned out around it in all directions.

  Yatagawa climbed out over the ice and looked down. Visible just a few feet below the transparent surface was a single port; and staring upward out of the window was the face of a sad-looking jetman.

  Yatagawa waved to him; the man waved back, then tapped the port with an expression of gloomy desperation on his face. A second man appeared behind him, and the two peered upward through the ice like animals in a cage—which, in a sense, they were.

  Yatagawa gestured at the throat of his thermal suit, indicating the suit-radio, and after a few moments of that one of the men inside caught the idea and donned a pickup.

  “Welcome to our shores,” the Commander said dryly, when contact was established. “It was a beautiful landing.”

  “Thanks,” said the mournful voice from beneath the ice. “Of all the stupid, harebrained, needleheaded—” “No time for recriminations now,” Yatagawa said. “We’ll have to get you out in a hurry. I’m Yatagawa, the Andromeda’s Commander.”

  “Werner. Captain of the Calypso—and the biggest fool unhung.”

  “Please, Captain. Who could expect you to prognosticate such an unlikely event?”

  “You’re just being kind, Commander—but thanks, anyway. I never dealt with one of these snowball planets before. I guess I should have known the ice wouldn’t stay melted more than an instant, but I never figured I’d get frozen in like this.”

  A little more forcefully, Yatagawa said, “There is little time for discussion, Captain Werner.”

  “Just how little, Commander?”

  Yatagawa smiled sadly. “I estimate our thermal suits will short out within eight hours, with a possible margin of thirty minutes.”

  ’Then we’ll have to move fast,” Werner said. His face, clearly visible despite the feet of clear ice that coverd it, was red with embarrassment. “But—how?” Helmot said, “I’ve sent Sacher and Foymill back to the Andromeda for picks and shovels. We’ve got a lot of digging to do.”

  Yatagawa’s sad look remained. He said indulgently, “Dorvain, just how long do you think it will take twelve men to dig a hundred-foot hole in solid ice?”

  The Kollimimi was silent a moment. Then, in a hollowsounding voice, he said, “It’ll take…days, maybe.”

  “Yes,” Yatagawa said.

  “You sure of that?” Werner asked.

  “We can always try it,” said Talbridge.

  “Very well,” the Commander said. Sacher and Foymill arrived bearing picks; Yatagawa, stepping back, indicated that they should go to work.

  The picks rose and fell. Over the audio network linking the suits came the sound of rhythmical grunting. Yatagawa allowed the demonstration to continue for exactly two minutes.

  In that time, the two crewmen had succeded in digging a cavity four inches deep and six inches broad. A little heap of powdered ice lay to one side.

  Stooping, Yatagawa inserted a gloved hand to measure the depth. “At this rate,” he said, “it would take centuries.”

  “Then what are we going to do?” Heimot asked.

  “A very good question.” The Commander kicked the little heap of ice away, and shrugged. Even under the bulk of the thermal suit, the shrug was eloquent.

  Aboard the Calypso, Captain Werner and Communications Tech Mariksboorg regarded each other bleakly. A thin beam of light trickled through the blanket of ice, through the one fore-ship port, and into the cabin. It was light from the yellow Sol-type companion star; unfortunately, it afforded little warmth.

  “Minus threethirty outside,” Werner said. “And we knew it.”

  “Easy, Captain.” Markiksboorg was sincerely worried that Werner’s contriteness would prove fatal. He wondered how Yatagawa, up there, might react had he'd done what Werner had. Certainly two thousand years ago Yatagawa would immediately have disembowelled himself. Hara-kiri was a millenia obsolete, but Werner seemed to be considering it quite seriously.

  “Whoever heard of a spaceship geting icebound?”

  “It’s over, Vroi. Forget about it!”

  “Easy enough, forgetting; but we’re still stuck here. And how can I forget, when I do
n’t even dare leave my cabin and face my own crewmen?”

  “The boys aren’t angry,” Mariksboorg insisted. “They’re all very sorry it happened.”

  “Sorry!” Werner wheeled and jabbed an index finger sharply in the Communications Tech’s direction. “What good is being sorry? This is serious, Diem; we’re trapped.”

  “We’ll get out,” Mariksboorg said soothingly.

  “Yeah? Listen: if we’re not out of here in eight hours, those twelve guys outside are going to freeze to death.

  Their ship’s got no air left, and there damned sure isn’t any on this accursed planet. Okay. So they die; too bad for them. But who’s going to get us out?”

  “Oh,” Mariksboorg said in a small voice.

  “By my figuring we’ve got four days* food. When Central Control asked us to make this pickup, they said they couldn’t get another ship here in less than a week. That’s not even counting the time it would take for another ship to find us once it got here—and we can’t help it much in that department.”

  Mariksboorg moisted his lips. “I guess we’d better get out,” he said. “Fast.”

  “Uh-huh. Faster, even.”

  From outside came the crackling voice of Commander Yatagawa. “We’ve attempted to dig you out; it can’t be done in time.”

  “Of course not,” Werner said. “Nothing’s going to work in time,” he added under his breath.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” Werner said.

  There came a pause. Then: “This is Dorvain Helmot, the Andromeda’s First Officer.”

  “Hello, Helmot.”

  “Our ship’s still in pretty good order, unless you count the hole in the skin that let all the air out. Do you think we can make use of any of our equipment to get you free?”

  “Got a hydraulic drill?”

  “We have no digging equipment whatever,” Commander Yatagawa said crisply.

  Werner studied his fingertips for an instant. Above, anxious faces peered down at him—separated by a thin but durable plastic window, and a thick and equally durable window of ice.

  “How about starting up your jets?” Talbridge suggested. “You could run them on low power—just enough to melt the ice around you and free the ship.”

  Werner smiled; it was pleasant to find a bigger fool than himself on the planet. “If we start the jets, it’ll be like firing a pistol that’s plugged at the business end. You know what happens?”

  “The barrel would explode, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Werner agreed. “Only in this case, the barrel happens to be us. Sorry, but we’d blow up the works if we fired the jets. Besides,” he added, glad of the chance to show that he wasn’t an utter fool, “Even if we did melt the ice, we’d have to have some way of pumping away the fluid around us before we could blast off. Do you have any sort of pump?”

  “A small one. It might do the job, but I doubt it.”

  “Couldn’t you,” Talbridge offered undismayedly, “heat the inside of the ship? You could get into thermal suits and turn the heating-system way up. That ought to heat the hull and—”

  “No,” Werner said; “the hull wouldn’t heat.”

  “Hold it,” Commander Yatagawa interrupted suddenly. “How come? Suppose you could get the jets started—wouldn’t they heat up the tail, at least?”

  “No. How much do you know about jets?”

  “Not too much,” Yatagawa admitted; “I’m pretty much a warp-ship man.”

  “The hull’s a polymerized bonded-molecule plastic,” Werner said. “It affords pretty near perfect inside-outside heat shielding. It keeps us from cooking when we pass through an atmosphere—and from freezing on places like this one.”

  “You mean even the jets are shielded, and the tail-assembly won’t heat up when you’re blasting, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  Up above, Yatagawa nodded inside his thermal suit. After a moment’s silence the Commander said, “We’ll be back in a little while, Werner; I think you’ve given me an idea.”

  “I hope so,” Werner said fervently.

  The shattered corpse of the hyperliner Andromeda lay on its side in a shallow depression on the ice. A furrowed gash ran the length of the ship, attesting to the force with which it had dropped to the ground.

  Twelve figures gathered about the ship, bulky in their cumbersome thermal suits, moving with jerky rapidity. All around, blue-white snow wastes spread to the horizon. Here and there, an outcropping of rock gave evidence of the stone shelf that underlay the frozen atmosphere—and, a little further away, an even stranger outcropping thrust from the ice: the dull-green snout of the Calypso. “Polymerized plastic hull,” Yatagawa repeated, half to himself. “That means—if no heat gets conducted from inside to outside—”

  “It ought to work the other way too,” Helmot completed.

  “Exactly.”

  Yatagawa mounted one fin of the Andromeda and clambered inside, followed by his First Officer. Together, they headed down the narrow companionway.

  Bodies lay scattered randomly in the hulk. The bac-terialess frigidity of Valdon’s World assured that they would remain preserved indefinitely; there was always time to bury them later. More urgent affairs beckoned now.

  Yatagawa tapped an unbroken helium tank. “Could we use this? Helium ought to be liquid in this temperature.”

  “You mean as a superconductor? Darned if 1 know how.”

  Yatagawa shrugged. “It was just an idea, anyway.”

  They kept going, past the passenger compartments, down the dropshaft to the drive room. To Yatagawa’s surprise, a tear quivered suddenly in his eye. He scowled irritatedly; a thermal suit did not come equipped with tearwipers—furthermore, this sort of emotional display seemed excessive to him. Yet the sight of the maze of controls that once had governed his ship moved him.

  “Here we are,” he said somewhat harshly. He looked around. “Pity there’s no time to explore the place and figure out what went wrong.”

  “There’ll be time for that later,” Helmot said. “They’ll work it out during the inquiry.”

  “Of course.” Yatagawa shut his eyes for a second thinking of the gruelling inquiry that was sure to follow, if he ever got off Valdon’s World. Then he picked up a heavy spool of copper wire and handed it to the Kollimuni.

  Helmot grabbed the spool and staggered with it back to the bulkhead door. Yatagawa, continuing to prowl through the shattered drive room, hauled forth another spool, and a third.

  “There’s three thousand feet,” he said. “That enough?”

  “Better get another one,” Helmot advised. “We won’t want to set up our generator too close to the Calypso”

  “Right.”

  He reached into a strange-hold and yanked forth another spool. “That should do it,” he said. He glanced at the chronometer set in the wrist of his thermal suit. “Seven hours left. We should just about make it. I hope Werner was right about his hull; if he wasn’t he’ll be cooked for sure.”

  “Can you see what they’re doing?” Werner asked. Mariksboorg craned his neck to try to peer through the port. “They’re wrapping wire around the nose of the ship. 1 guess they’re covering the entire exposed area with it.”

  Werner paced the cabin gloomily. The light of the yellow primary was fading, and time was moving along quickly. The men of the Andromeda had but a few hours in which to spring the trap.

  “Here we are,” he said bitterly. “We’re the rescuers, and they’re the rescued—and they’re breaking their necks to save us!”

  From outside, came Yatagawa’s voice. “Werner?”

  “What are you guys up to?” Werner demanded. “We’ve wrapped a coil of wire around the snout of your ship. It’s hooked to an ultronic generator we’ve salvaged from the Andromeda. Can you see it from where you are?”

  “No. I can’t see anything.”

  “We’re a few thousand feet from the ship. The generator’s a medium-sized one, because the big on
e’s gone dead. But this one will do; it’ll give us ten million volts in a pinch. Not that we’ll need that much, of course.”

  “Hey, hold on, Yatagawa! What are you going to do?” “We’re going to roast your hull. I figure that if we generate enough heat in the wire, your hull will heat up and the ice’ll melt around you.”

  Werner gulped. “What about us? We’re inside.”

  “The heat won’t get above a thousand centigrade. Your hull can handle that—and you won’t feel a thing, I hope. You have thermal suits?”

  “Yes,” Werner said hoarsely.

  “I’d suggest you put them on; just in case, that is.”

  “Sure. Just in case.”

  “I’ll wait for your signal before we send the current through. Meantime—”

  Struck by a sudden idea Werner asked, “What are you going to do with the melted ice? It’s only going to freeze again as soon as the current’s off. My hull’s not a heat-retainer.”

  “We’ve thought of that. We’ve dug up our small pump and some tubing. As the stuff liquefies, we’re going to siphon it off down the hill.”

  “And what happens then?”

  “We’ll get into the ship and leave,” Yatagawa said.

  “How? You won’t be able to get a bridge across the ice—and our airlock’s pretty far down the hull.”

  There was silence at the other end for a moment “There must be some way—”

  Werner frowned thoughtfully. “We’re on bedrock right now, aren’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s simple, then, but pretty screwball. Clear away about a thirty-foot diameter of ice and we should settle into an upright position on the rock below. We’ll blast off the usual way; then we’ll come back, and swing into a narrow orbit about thirty feet off the ground. We can drop ropes for you from our airlock. It’s a crazy way to make a pickup from a spaceship, but it’s worth a try. Otherwise, I’m afraid, there’ll be some trouble.”

  Commander Yatagawa stood by the hooded bulk of the ultronic generator, leaning affectionately against it, and stared at the gleaming red-brown wires stretching over the ice to the buried Calypso.