"Haven't you got men on Mercury?"
"Darned right, and a darned good crew, too. So something must be fouled up, or they'd have shut it off themselves. So--work hard, gentlemen!"
"Wait. If the transmitter is on Mercury what's all this equipment we've got to fix?"
"Briefly, this is the hygrometric integrating averager and primary servomechanistic feedback control originating device."
"Huh?"
"You asked for it. I'll explain it after we get dried out." Phil snorted derisively. "We mustn't let our billionth visitor get his dainty feet damp, must we?"
He turned on his heel and left the senatorial group spluttering.
At the door he was halted by a cry from Senator Longacre. "But, Doctor Watson, this man is the janitor of this station!"
Phil Watson turned with a laugh. "That's okay. I consider all of you gentlemen unskilled labor."
He got into the car and closed the door; it was opened again almost immediately and Louise got in. "Maybe I can help?"
"Maybe. But--"
"But what?" she asked.
He shook his head. "I'd like the company," he said. "Normally there might be a fuss about taking unauthorized persons on a jaunt like this, but I think it will probably be overlooked because this is an emergency. And you might be able to help."
"I hope so," she said soberly.
* * * *
III
The trek was not as bad as the original run from the apartment to the station. The station's fast little spaceship stood on the field a couple of hundred yards away, and the jeep-wagon made it in a matter of a minute or so through the blinding rain. The rough part was getting the spacelock open; it did not flip open, but moved ponderously. Phil was completely wet even under his poncho by the time the door swung wide; Louise suffered less because she waited in the car until she could run for it.
And then, for the first time in hours, the roar of the rain and the rumble of the thunder was muted. The dome of the ship was a blind-running river, but Phil did not care. All he was going was straight up, and there was nothing flying that night.
He touched the console buttons, and they rose through the blackness and the rain.
"What was all that string of long words you used?" Louise asked after a moment.
"Doubletalk. They wouldn't have understood the real name, either, so why bother?"
"But if the matter transmitter is on Mercury, what is your station?"
"Primary control," he said. "Simply and easily, it measures the amount of surface water on Mars, and sends out signals accordingly to control the input. You see, Louise, Mars is as dry as a sponge. This guff about drying sea-bottoms and so on is so much food for the birds. Mars never had enough water to begin with. So the boys computed how much water Mars would soak up, and came up with a rather staggering figure. It couldn't possibly be fed in all at once. It's got to go in very, very slowly, otherwise we have a recurrence of this evening's floods. Furthermore, the additional mass of the added water is changing the Martian year and the Martian day ever so slightly, because the angular momentum of the water is not exactly equal to the factor of Mars."
Phil stretched in his pilot's chair as Sol burst out from behind Mars.
He watched the course integrator trace its line around the planet and towards Mercury. Satisfied, Phil relaxed again and went on:
"To top this all off--there are some places where the water soaks in faster than others, so we have to make allowances. All over Mars there are hygrometers. Some are on the surface, some are buried deep. From each and every one comes information about the water seepage and how it progresses. These signals are all combined, added up, divided down, multiplied by a bugger-factor, and compared to readings of yesterday and the day before so that an all-comprehensive sigma curve can be drawn.
The result of all these shenanigans is that the control station sends forth a signal to Mercury, who then delivers water according to the need."
"But where does the water come out of?"
"The receiving end of the matter transmitter is on Phobos. Phobos points one face to Mars all the time, you know, so the water sprays out of the face of the receiving plane right at Mars, like a gigantic water sprinkler. It falleth like a gentle rain from heaven upon that place beneath in a finely divided mist... Ah!"
"Ah!--what?"
"We're on course at last. Now we make feet. This is going to darned near burn out the drivers, and the power-pile is going to diminish like the proverbial snowball in hell:" Phil shoved a lever all the way home, and the ship surged beneath them. "I've always wanted the opportunity to try a spacecraft on emergency drive. It's tough that we have to have a catastrophe to make it possible, but unless there's good reason for using the emergency power, it's verboten. Costs too much per hour, gets the guy involved in a board of investigation, where he had better be darned well prepared to give good and sufficient reason for depleting a pile. M'lady, can you brew coffee?"
"That I can."
"Then go brew. We make Mercury in two hours!"
* * * *
The place where the water came from had never been, nor would it ever be, a vacationland. The best that man had been able to produce in the way of redesigning the Solar System had not gone far towards humanizing the cosmic hell that was the planet Mercury. Maybe the complete humanization of the planet would never take place simply because Mercury might better remain the way it was--with certain minor improvements. Mercury was an economically sound proposition; there is nothing in human history that suggests that an economically sound proposition has to be even remotely acceptable from the comfort standpoint. Mercury had its important imports and its important exports, and it was necessary. Perhaps a necessary evil, but there it was.
Someone, writing in a sensational vein, had once compared the Solar System to a large apartment, and had called Mercury the boiler room.
He had not been too far off the trolley. Mars, for one, is not a warm planet. Mercury is. So the water that went to Mars carried heat. The result--Mercury is the boiler room for the Solar System. Thirty, end of statement.
Above the landing spaceship, Sol hung in the sky like an incandescent washtub. Below them was a roiling floor of mist, white mist that made the boiler room of the Solar System look as though the main steam pipe had sprung a rather gaudy leak.
It was into this misty maelstrom that Phil Watson dropped his ship, flying by the seat of his pants because the radio beacon was non-functional. There was no beacon, and probably for the same reason that Mars was now having a first-class cloudburst. Something had more than blown a fuse.
The cloud layer was not as thick as it had seemed from above. The sun still shone through, redly, fiendishly hot. Below, the cloud layer parted and thinned, until finally Phil and Louise could look down and see the source of the water that was being delivered to Mars.
"Down there should be the terminal of the Mercury Canal," said Phil.
Instead was a roiling lake which filled the rock-rimmed valley and spilled over the edges into the valley next, where the water boiled away against the hot rocks and produced the clouds of vapor.
The Mercury Canal was not properly a canal; a real canal is a channel cut out of the face of a planet by man. Nor was the Mercury Canal a natural waterway, for if Mercury had ever had any water, it had boiled away and gone elsewhere sometime within a few minutes after the first day of creation. Instead, the Mercury Canal meandered along what might have been a natural waterway, following a couple of thousand miles of normal declivities in the rocky surface of Mercury. It collected in broad pools here and there, and dropped magnificently in a couple of waterfalls, spreading out to collect the heat from Sol as it flowed from Inlet to Outlet.
Here at Outlet Station it should have been a pleasant sight.
The rim of the canal had been cooled by the water, just as the water had been heated by the planet and the sun. So the combination of water and sun and the general hardiness of life in general had produced a rather lus
h rain-forest growth along this end of the Mercury Canal. None of this was visible now. The Outlet Station was immersed completely, too, in the vast lake that churned and tossed.
The tropical sea in a typhoon, or the North Atlantic lashing at the rock-bound coast of Maine in a Nor'easter, or the Mississippi on a rampage were nearly as violent as this lake below.
"What," said Phil tonelessly, "do we do now?"
Louise pointed over to one side. There were men and a line of parked trucks which looked very puny against the elemental violence. Phil slid the spaceship sideways and landed on the ridge near them.
* * * *
Tom Britton came running with the rest of his crew behind him.
"Phil!" cried Britton. "God--"
Britton looked exhausted. The rest of them were all the same; weariness and fear were in every face, in every step.
"What happened," he asked gently.
They all began to talk at once. "Flood--control circuits shot to hell--overload--water spilled over the ridge--cool water on hot rock--earthquake--lost the spacecraft--station covered--can't get to it unless--"
Phil held up a hand. "I get it. Okay, fellows. Let's--"
An ear-splitting crash came from more than a mile away along the ridge. They turned to look, fear in every face.
The water had risen to the level of the ridge; through a little rill, an uncertain pseudopodium of water had trickled, wavering back and forth with the rise and fall of the waves, steaming briskly as it advanced onto the uncooled rock, reinforced as it was thrust back by the rising water behind it.
It rose until it crossed the ridge and started to spill down the decline on the far side, hissing and steaming as it poured over.
Then the meeting of three cross-chop waves at the rill sent a twenty-foot curler over the ridge into the valley beyond. The water plunged down the decline in a torrent, and there was the shrill-pitched chatter of tearing glass as the ridge divided and opened to let the waters pour from the Mercury Canal into the hot valley beyond. Ton after ton of water poured through the crevasse, and the sound on the hot rock was like the feeling of walking on sugar. The fault line spread, and the next table of rock slowly uptilted and turned over, sinking like a raft capsizing. It slid into a glare of magma, with the water behind it, and the resulting explosion hurled rock and lava into the sky with a planet-shattering roar.
"Krakatoa," muttered Phil, awed.
The blackness billowed upward in a mighty column.
Their own ridge trembled.
"Inside" snapped Phil. They made it in a scramble, and the spaceship rose just as the ridge they left split into three uncertain blocks that gutted steam and incandescent gas after them.
"We've got to stop it," said Phil.
They looked down at the mud-churning water and nodded. Tom Britton tried to speak, but only a croak came from his dry throat.
"We'll go in," said Phil flatly.
"In there?" cried Louise.
"No other way. Cross your fingers and deliver us a prayer. Strap down, fellows. This is going to be rough!"
* * * *
With a flip of his hand on the lever, Phil dropped the spaceship into the angry water. The torrent caught the hull and slapped it back and forth, turned it over, and rolled it sidewise. Phil fought the levers and righted his ship, only to lose control again as the flood changed in flow and skirled around like the maelstrom that it was.
Far down at the bottom of that lake there was an outlet; the system was no more than the washbowl of a titan, and the Outlet Station was its drain.
"Careful," said Britton. "You don't want to follow this flow into the transmitter-plane."
"I won't. I have no intention of returning to Mars through this pipe, and raining down out of the sky in a hodgepodge of my component molecules and junk aluminum and iron and stuff, all neatly divided molecularly."
"Ain't funny," grunted Britton.
"I wish we could see," complained Louise. The murky water pressed against the dome of the ship; it was a terrifying thing to see.
"We've got radar," grunted Phil. "But sonar gear is something that spacecraft don't pack, for obvious reasons. And radar is no good under water. I think--yeow!"
A girder had probed for their glass dome; a large jagged thing as wide as a desk-top, which would have poked through the dome with the ease of a needle piercing a toy balloon. The result would have been as fast and as deadly.
From below there came a shout: "Phil--up! Up, goddammit! The plane--"
Watson jockeyed the lever; then he moved the ship to one side, slowly. And out of the murk there appeared the edge of a building of concrete.
"We were low," said Phil in a dry-throated voice.
Terrifyingly close below them was a broad plane of force that shone like a perfect mirror, if seen in the daylight. Above this plane, now, was a madness of angry water falling into it and falling out of a similar plane laid face-flat on Phobos. It was the down-drain of this monstrous washbowl.
Below the plane was a room, cylindrical and dry. The plane filled the metal-lined cylinder from wall to wall, and there was no pressure because the plane did not attempt to hold the water but let it pass through, frictionless and free. In this cylindrical room, protected from the water by the matter-transmitting plane, was the equipment that generated the twin planes that delivered this torrent of water to Mars.
It must be shut off.
First they had to find the pathway to that room below the plane.
It was somewhere up on the top of the building, a tall castlement rising like a turret above the building itself. The word "building" is not essentially correct, for Outlet Station was like no other building in the Solar System. It was more like a well-proportioned and nicely machined lunar crater perhaps a mile in diameter. Or maybe a squat angel's-food cake, much flatter and much wider across the hollow center. Normally, the water from the Mercury Canal flowed across the top of this "building" and fell in a Niagara-dwarfing circle upon the plane of the matter transmitter to be hurled upon Mars as a mist from the sky, while the entrance to the underwater equipment rose above the flowing waters like a tall, squat chimney.
They found it now, covered completely by the rise of the water.
"Ram it," said Britton. "Ram the door and let the water in--it'll ruin the damned gear below."
"Not if we can save it," said Phil.
"But how?"
"I can get down there through the watertight doors, and turn the transmitter off."
"You turn it off and that water will drop on you and--"
"I'll turn it low."
"Ram it and bust the watertights," snarled Britton.
"Let me try it my way. Can you hang on to this crate? Keep it against this casement?"
"I can try."
"You can't just try. You've got to do it, Tom."
Louise looked frightened. "You're going out into this horror?"
"I've got to."
"But--"
"Just have a couple of prayers on tap, snooky. I'll be back."
"You're sure?"
He nodded. "We got a date to finish."
He left. He did not hear Louise complain to Britton that "a date" was all she represented to Phil Watson.
* * * *
IV
Down below, Phil donned a spacesuit. Hugson stood by, alternately shaking his head and suggesting that Phil bust the watertights and let the whole damned thing go down the drain. Phil went on stolidly.
He blew up the spacesuit until he was spread-eagled in the spacelock. Hugson closed the inner door and Phil was alone.
Gingerly, Phil opened the scuttlebutt, and the water lanced in. It drove across the room and spattered against the inner wall and broke into a dashing spray. It ran down the airlock into a puddle on the floor which rose until the scuttlebutt was covered. The water churned in a furrow as Phil opened the valve wider. The room filled until a small space of air was left at the top, and equilibrium of pressure had been reached.
; Hugson pressed the outer lock control, and the big door swung inward, sending little churning currents around its edge. Phil went outside.
The water tore at him, whipped him about, and he was thankful for the line that held him fast to the ship. He fumbled over the wall of the casement, found the watertight door, and opened it; he went inside and closed the outer door until the rushing flow of water was only a trickle.
Here Phil pondered a problem that he had not anticipated. Before he could enter the building, he must free himself of the safety-line, so that the outer watertight could be closed. But--if he did that, how could he return to the spaceship afterwards?
Chance--hope and chance.
He cut his line, and let the rushing water pull it out of the door. He closed the door, cutting himself from the outside world.
The pump began to force the water out of the lock, and, after a few moments, Phil went into the building.
He walked easily now. The weights he had left in the airlock, his space helmet he flipped back over his shoulder.
He knew the station well. Here was the safety circuit and here was the control circuit, and above his head, stretching out and away from the slight curve of the cylindrical wall, was the mirror perfection of the matter-transmitting plane. The trouble here was the local safety control. Too much pressure would destroy the plane, and sometimes the Mercury Canal delivered a bit more than expected; Mars always got a mild rain when the safety circuit took the extra load.
This time it was a prolonged rainstorm, because something had gone hell, west, and crooked, and deluged the matter transmitter. The thing was only doing its job--like the gismo that the sorcerer's apprentice started and couldn't shut off.
Phil turned off the safety circuit. He shut the admittance of the transmitter down, too, almost to zero.
The mirror surface above his head bowed down until the center touched the concrete floor. The very center vanished into the stone, and Phil knew that the corresponding surface out on Phobos was bending in the opposite direction, and that there was a bit of a dusty rain falling on Phobos from the underside of the receiver plane as the Mercury transmitter plane pushed its way through the concrete.
The Worlds of George O Page 6