The Randall Garrett Megapack

by Randall Garrett

  * * * *

  It took better than an hour to get the ship straightened out. For the main job, emergency rockets were set off at the appropriate spots around the hull to counteract the rotation. The final trimming was done with carbon dioxide fire extinguishers, which Smith and Jayjay Kelvin used as jets.

  Getting a fix on Pluto was easy enough; the lighthouse station at Styx broadcast a strong beep sunward every ten seconds. They could also pick up the radio lighthouses on Eros, Ceres, Luna, and Mimas. Evidently, the one on Titan was behind the Jovian bulk.

  They were ready to send their distress call.

  “It’s simple,” Smith said as he opened the red panel in the wall of the control room. “First we turn on the receiver.” He pushed a button marked R. “Then we turn these two wheels here until the pip on that little screen is centered. That’s the signal from Pluto. It comes in strong every ten seconds, see?”

  Jayjay watched with interest. He’d heard about screamers and had seen them, but he’d never had the opportunity of observing one in action.

  Like flares or bombs, they were intended for one-time use. The instructions were printed plainly on the inside of the red door, and Smith was simply reading off what was printed there.

  “These wheels,” he was saying, “line up the parabolic reflector with the Pluto signal, you see. There. Now we’ve got it centered. Now, all we have to do is make one small correction and we’re all set. These things are built so that they’re fool-proof; a kid could operate it. Watch.”

  Facing each other across a small gap were a pair of tapered screw plugs, one male and one female. The male was an average of half an inch in diameter; the female was larger and bored to fit the male.

  “The female plug,” Smith said, “leads to two tanks of high-pressure gas inside this cabinet on the left. One tank of oxygen, one of hydrogen. See how this male plug telescopes out to fit into the female? All we have to do is thread them together, and everything is automatic.”

  Jayjay was aware that Smith’s explanations were meant to give Jeffry Hull something to think about instead of his fears. Hull was basically an Earth-hugger, and free fall did nothing to keep him calm. Evidently his subconscious knew that he had to latch on to something to keep his mental equilibrium, because he showed a tremendous amount of interest in what should have been a routine operation.

  “How do you mean, it’s all automatic?” he asked. “What happens?”

  “Well, you can’t see into the female plug, but look here at the male. See those concentric tubes leading into the interior of the cabinet on the right? The outer one leads in the oxygen, the inner leads in the hydrogen. We need twice as much hydrogen as oxygen, so the inner tube has twice the volume delivery as the outer. See?”

  “Yes. But what is the solid silver bar in the center of the inner tube?”

  “That’s the electrical connection for the starter battery. There’s a small, short-lived chemical battery, like the ones in an ordinary pocket radio, except that they’re built to deliver a high-voltage, high-amperage current for about a tenth of a second. That activates the H-O cell, you see. Also, that silver stud depresses the corresponding stud in the female plug, which turns on the gas flow before it makes the connection with the starter battery. Follow?”

  Hull didn’t look as though he did, but he nodded gamely. “Then what happens?”

  “Then the hydrogen and the oxygen come together in the fuel cell and, instead of generating heat, they generate electric current. That current is fed into the radio unit, and the signal is sent to Pluto. Real simple.”

  “I see,” Hull said. “Well…go ahead.”

  Smith telescoped the two leads together and began turning the collar on the female plug.

  He screwed it up as far as it would go.

  And nothing happened.

  “What the hell?” asked Smith of no one in particular. He tried to twist it a little harder. Nothing happened. The threads had gone as far as they would go.

  “What’s the matter?” Jayjay asked.

  “Damfino. No connection. Nothing’s happening. And it’s as tight as it will go.”

  “Are the gases flowing?” Jayjay asked.

  “I don’t know. These things aren’t equipped with meters. They’re supposed to work automatically.”

  Jayjay pushed Smith aside. “Let me take a look.”

  Smith frowned as though he resented an ordinary passenger shoving him around, but Jayjay ignored him. He cocked his head to one side and looked at the connection. “Hm-m-m.” He touched it with a finger. Then he wet the finger with his tongue and touched the connection again. “There’s no gas flow, Smith.”

  “How do you know?” Smith was still frowning.

  “There’s a gap there. That tapered thread isn’t in tight. If there were any gas flowing, it would be leaking out.” Before Smith could say anything Jayjay began unscrewing the coupling. When it came apart, it looked just the same as it had before Smith had put it together.

  In the dim glow from the emergency lights, it was difficult to see anything.

  “Got an electric torch?” Jayjay asked.

  Smith pushed himself away from the screamer panel and came back after a moment with a flashlight. “Let me take a look,” he said, edging Jayjay aside. He looked over the halves of the coupling very carefully, then said: “I don’t see anything wrong. I’ll try it again.”

  “Hold on a second,” Jayjay said quietly. “Let me take a look, will you?”

  Smith handed him the torch. “Go ahead, but there’s nothing wrong.”

  * * * *

  Jayjay took the light and looked the connections over again. Then he screwed his head around so that he could look into the female plug.

  “Hm-m-m. Hard to count. Gap’s too small. Anybody got a toothpick?”

  Nobody did.

  Jayjay turned to Jeffry Hull. “Mr. Hull, would you mind going to the lounge? I think there’s some toothpicks in the snack refrigerator.”

  “Sure,” said Hull. “Sure.”

  He pushed himself across the control room and disappeared through the stairwell.

  “Get several of them,” Jayjay called after him.

  Captain Al-Amin said: “What’s the trouble, Mr. Kelvin?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Jayjay answered. “When did you last have the screamer units inspected?”

  “Just before we took off from Jove Station,” Al-Amin said. “That’s the law. All emergency equipment has to be checked before takeoff. Why? What’s the matter?”

  “Did they check this unit?” Jayjay asked doggedly.

  “Certainly. I watched them check it myself. I—” He brought himself up short and said: “Give me that torch, will you? I want to take a look at the thing.”

  Jayjay handed him the flashlight and grasped the captain’s belt. With one arm in a splint, Al-Amin couldn’t hold the flashlight and hold on to anything solid at the same time.

  “I don’t see anything wrong,” he said after a minute.

  “Neither do I,” Jayjay admitted. “But the way it acts—”

  “I got the toothpicks!” Jeffry Hull propelled himself across the room toward the three men who were clustered around the screamer.

  Jayjay took the toothpicks, selected one, and inserted it into the female plug. “Hard to see those threads with all the tubes blocking that plug,” he said offhandedly.

  Hull said: “Captain, did you know that the refrigerator is off?”

  “Yes,” said Atef Al-Amin absently. “It isn’t connected to the emergency circuits. Wastes too much energy. What do you find, Mr. Kelvin?”

  After a second’s silence, Jayjay said: “Let me check once more.” He was running the tip of the toothpick across the threads in the female plug, counting as he did so. “Uh-huh,” he said finally, “just as I thought. There’s one less thread in the female plug. The male plug is stopped before it can make contact. There’s a gap of about a tenth of an inch when the coupling is screwed up tight.”
r />   “Let me see,” Smith said. He took the toothpick and went through the same operation. “You’re right,” he said ruefully, “the female plug is faulty. We’ll have to use one of the other screamers.”

  “Right,” said Jayjay.

  Wrong, said Fate. Or the Powers That Be, or the Fallibility of Man, whatever you want to call it.

  Every screamer unit suffered from the same defect.

  * * * *

  “I don’t understand it!” A pause. “It’s impossible! Those units were tested!”

  For the first time in his life, Captain Atef Abdullah Al-Amin allowed his voice to betray him.

  Arabic is normally spoken about half an octave above the normal tone used for English. And, unlike American English, it tends to waver up and down the scale. Usually, the captain spoke English in the flat, un-accented tones of the Midwest American accent, and spoke Arabic in the ululating tones of the Egyptian.

  But now he was speaking English with an Egyptian waver, not realizing that he was doing it.

  “How could it happen? It’s ridiculous!”

  The captain, his maintenance officer, and Jeffry Hull were clustered around the screamer unit in the lounge. Off to one side, Jayjay Kelvin held a deck of cards in his hands and played a game of patience called “transportation solitaire.” His eyes didn’t miss a play, just as his ears didn’t miss a word.

  He pulled an ace from the back of the deck and flipped it to the front.

  “You said the screamers had been checked,” Jeffry Hull said accusingly. “How come they weren’t checked?”

  “They were!” Al-Amin said sharply.

  “Sure they were,” Smith added. “I watched the check-off. There was nothing wrong then.”

  “Meanwhile,” Hull said, the acid bite of fear in his voice, “we have to sit here and wait for the Interplanetary Police to find us by pure luck.”

  The captain should have let Hull cling to the idea that the IP could find the Persephone, even if no signal was sent. But the captain was almost as angry and flustered as Hull was.

  “Find us?” he snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous! We won’t even be missed until we’re due at Styx, on Pluto, nine days from now. By that time, we’ll be close to two billion miles beyond the orbit of Pluto. We’ll never be found if we wait ’til then. Something has to be done now!” He looked at his Maintenance Officer. “Smith, isn’t there some way to make contact between those two plugs?”

  “Sure,” Smith said bitterly. “If we had the tools, it would be duck soup. All we’d have to do is trim down the male plug to fit the female, and we’d have it. But we don’t have the tools. We’ve got a couple of files and a quarter-horsepower electric drill with one bit. Everything else was in the tool compartment—which is long gone, with the engine room.”

  “Can’t you…uh, what do you call it? Uh…jury-something—” Hull’s voice sounded as though he were forcing it to be calm.

  “Jury-rig?” Smith said. “Yeah? With what? Dammit, we haven’t got any tools, and we haven’t got any materials to work with!”

  “Can’t you just use a wrench to tighten them more?” Hull asked helplessly.

  Smith said a dirty word and pushed himself away from the screamer unit to glower at an unresisting wall.

  “No, Mr. Hull, we couldn’t,” said Captain Al-Amin with restrained patience. “That would strip the threads. If the electrical contact were made at the same time, the high-pressure oxygen-hydrogen flow would spark off, and we’d get a big explosion that would wreck everything—including us.” Then he muttered to himself: “I still don’t see how it could happen.”

  Jayjay Kelvin pulled a nine of spades from the back of the deck to the front. It matched the four of spades that had come three cards before. Jayjay discarded the two cards between the spades. “You don’t?” he asked. “Didn’t you ever hear that the total is greater than the sum of its parts?”

  “What?” Captain Al-Amin sounded as though he’d been insulted—in Arabic. “What are you talking about, Mr. Kelvin?”

  “I’m talking about the idiocy of the checking system,” Jayjay said flatly. “Don’t you see what they did? Don’t you see what happened? Each part of a screamer has to be checked separately, right?”

  Al-Amin nodded.

  “Why? Because the things burn out if you check them as a complete unit. It’s like checking a .50 caliber cartridge. The only way you can check a cartridge is to shoot it in a gun. If it works, then you know it works. Period. The only trouble is that you’ve wasted the cartridge. You know that that one is good, but you’ve ruined it.

  “Same way with a screamer. If you test it as a unit, you’ll ruin it. So you test it a part at a time. All the parts check out nicely because the test mechanisms are built to check each part.”

  Smith squinted. “Well, sure. If you check out the whole screamer, you’ll ruin it. So what?”

  “So suppose you were going to check out a cartridge,” Jayjay said. “You don’t fire it; you check each part separately. You check the brass case. It’s all right; the tests show that it won’t burst under firing pressure. You check the primer; the tests show that it will explode when hit by the gun’s hammer. You check the powder; the tests show that the powder will burn nicely when the flame from the primer hits it. You check the bullet; the tests show that the slug will be expelled at the proper velocity when the powder is ignited.

  “So you assume that the cartridge will function when fired.

  “But will it?”

  “Why wouldn’t it?” Smith asked.

  “Because the flame from the exploding primer can’t reach the powder, that’s why!” Jayjay snapped. “Some jerk has redesigned the primer so that the flame misses the propellant!”

  “How could that happen?” Hull asked blankly.

  “How? Because Designer A decided that the male plug on the screamer should have one more turn on its threads, but he forgot to tell Designer B, who designs the female plug, that the two should match. The testing equipment is designed to test each part, so each part tests out fine. The only trouble is that the thing doesn’t test out as a whole.”

  * * * *

  Captain Al-Amin nodded slowly. “That’s right. The test showed that the oxyhydrogen section worked fine. It showed that the starter worked fine. It showed that the radiowave broadcaster worked fine. But it didn’t show that they’d work together.”

  Smith said a short, five-letter word. It was French; the Anglo-Saxon equivalent has only four letters. “What good does all this theorizing do us?” he added. “The question is: How do we fix the thing?”

  “Well, can’t you put another turn on the thread?” Hull asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Smith said sarcastically. “You give me a lathe and the proper tools, and I’ll make you all the connections you want. Hell, if I had the proper tools, I could turn us out a new spaceship, and we could all go home in comfort.”

  “Couldn’t you drill out the metal with that drill?” Hull asked plaintively.

  “No!” Smith said harshly. “How do you expect me to get a quarter-inch bit into a space less than a sixteenth of an inch in diameter?”

  Hull wasn’t used to machinist’s terms. “How big is an inch?”

  “Two point five four oh oh oh five centimeters,” Smith said in a nasty tone of voice. “Does that help you any?”

  “I’m just trying to help!” Hull snapped. “You’ve got no call to get sarcastic with me!”

  Smith said the French word again.

  “Enough!” the captain barked. “Smith, control your tongue! That sort of thing won’t help us.” He jerked his head around. “Mr. Kelvin, do you have any suggestions?”

  Jayjay played another card. “No. Not yet. I’m thinking.”

  “Smith? Any ideas?” The tone of the Arab’s voice left no doubt that he meant business.

  “No, sir. Without a properly equipped machine shop, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “How so?”

  “Because that’s a pre
cision job, sir. The threads are tapered so that the fit will be gas-tight. That’s why the threads have a ten-thousandth of an inch of soft polyethylene covering the hard steel, so that when the threads are tight, the polyethylene will act as a seal. Everything in that connection is a precision fitted job. The ends of the tubes are made to be slightly mashed together, so that the seals will be tight—they’re coated with polyethylene, too. If the oxygen and hydrogen mix, the efficiency of the fuel cell goes down to zero, and you run the chance of an explosion.”

  “Show me,” Al-Amin said.

  Smith took a pencil out of his pocket and began drawing a cross section of the connection on the top of the nearby table.

  “Look here, captain, this is the way the two are supposed to fit. But they don’t, because the male plug can’t get far enough into the female socket to make the connection. Like this, see?”

  The captain nodded.

  “Well,” Smith continued, “there’s a thirty-second of an inch clearance there. If the female had one more turn of thread, the fit would be prefect. As it is, we get no connection. So the screamer doesn’t function.”

  Al-Amin looked at the drawing. “Odd that there’s never been any complaint about this error before.”

  Jayjay turned another ace. “Not so odd, really.”

  All heads turned toward Jayjay.

  “What does that mean?” Smith asked.

  “Just what I said.” Jayjay turned another card. “A screamer is supposed to call for help, isn’t it? It’s only used in a dire emergency. Then the only test of the whole unit comes when the occupants of the spaceship are in danger—as we are. If the things don’t work, how could there be any complaint? If we can’t get ours to work, will we complain? To whom?

  “How many ships have been reported missing in the past year or so? All of them presumed lost because of meteor strikes, eh? If a ship is lost and doesn’t signal, we presume that it was totally destroyed. If it wasn’t, they’d have signaled. As Mister Smith says: See?”

  There was a long silence.