Charlie got up suddenly, and pulled his helmet down. He winked at Dick, then started out through the lock of the rapidly moving tractor, while Rogers went on driving it along at a steady clip. The old man appeared on the little ledge outside, and his blaster was in his hands.
“You men back there ain’t sitting pretty,” his voice came over the speaker. “Now if you want to try trading shots with me, why go right ahead. Only I’ve had it tried on me before, you betcha.
Or just take a shot at that wispy, and see what happens.”
“You wouldn’t kill us!”
“Nope! But I’d sure singe you till you wished I had finished the job. I don’t like guys that won’t pay a debt—and you wouldn’t be a-riding on this trip—which is the only hope you got, in case you’ve forgot—if it wasn’t for that wispy. He’s a friend of mine, boys. He sure is. I figger I sort of owe him about thirty years more life. And I don’t let my friends get hurt. Clear enough?”
They grumbled at him, but the old man stood his ground. Rogers smiled wryly, but didn’t interfere. At last the old prospector came back inside, after a final warning about what would happen if any trouble came to the wispy.
“When you believe in something, kid,” he told Dick, “don’t you never stop to wonder. You back it up! Brains are nice things to have, but they’s times when feelings count for more. You betcha. Okay, Bart, I’ll take over the driving now.”
They reached the ship without any trouble. Obviously, the men didn’t like the way Charlie had handled the situation, but they had a healthy respect for his ability, and they took it out only by grumbling among themselves. When they saw the job ahead of them, even that stopped. There was no time for carrying on a feud when the safety of the whole dome depended on their working together.
Rogers had to handle the refueling of the ship by himself, since it was again a matter of knowing how to take all necessary safety measures around atomic power. He went about it at once, with only occasional words to the men regarding the other work.
Dick had begun to work on the control system, trying to find some sense to it. He had recognized the impossibility of getting all the finer instruments to work, but he’d hoped that some of the automatic safety devices and piloting aids could be put into some kind of order. Now, as he dug into their complexities, he doubted it. They were badly damaged, partly by the force of the landing and partly by the wild surge of electricity that must have gone through them.
In many cases it was not just a matter of repairing the mess, but of having to substitute parts which they did not have.
He began to wonder whether even the best mechanic who knew the instruments inside and out could have done much with them.
Fortunately, the main steering devices were tougher. Some of them worked through motors, but the motors were on a different circuit and had not been damaged. Most of them still depended on the old combination of cables and hand power—probably because they were meant to work when everything else failed. Nowadays, most pilots never touched the older controls, but they had to be there for emergencies.
In the hands of a skilled pilot they would have been sufficient. But with rookies trying to guide the ship, it would have been a lot safer to leave some of the work up to the tiny mechanical brains that had been devised.
The steering tubes on one side had all been bent by the force of the landing. And there was no way to get around the need for them. Rogers had studied the situation, and finally told the others flatly that they would have to be fixed in the most direct and most difficult manner.
Dick came out from his hasty work with the controls to find the rest of the men using their picks and digging instruments to work a passage under the ship, until they could get to the tubes. He picked up a pick and started forward, but his father’s voice called him back.
“Leave that to men who’ve worked in the mines long enough to know how, Dick. I’ve got another problem for you.”
It turned out to be equally nasty. The big rocket tube had landed where some of the liquid lead on the surface had run back into it. There, out of the direct radiation from the sun, it had cooled off just enough to turn solid again. Until that was removed, using the tube would have been pure suicide,
Dick groaned, but he knew his father was right. It had to be gotten out, and he was the best man for the job, since the others knew their work better than he would have known it.
It didn’t matter if some of the lead at the outlet of the big rocket remained. But back where the hot gasses first came in, it had to be scraped off by hand, to give it a clear path. Once it had that, it would blow the rest of the lead out by itself.
He crawled back inside, barely able to squeeze in. The light on his helmet helped, but it glared off the round tube walls, and seemed to dazzle him as much as it illuminated the parts where he had to work.
To make matters worse, no tools had been brought along for such work, and there were none that served very well among the tools normally carried on the ship. He finally settled on a big section broken from one of the sharp shovels, together with a knife that Charlie dug up.
It was slow going, and his cramped position didn’t help. The lead was soft enough to cut away, but it had to be scraped right down to the surface of the tube. And the roundness seemed to have been especially designed to make it impossible to get at all the lead.
Dick had to come out several times and give his cramped muscles a chance to relax. Each time, he saw that the men were having harder going with their digging. The lead ran down into the tunnel they were cutting, and they had to install a system of dams around the diggings in order to keep it from filling the hole faster than they could throw it out.
“Never mind,” Rogers told them. “We counted on having tilings go wrong. When I told you we’d finish it today, I was thinking it could be done in three hours at the most. So we have time enough.”
It was a somewhat cheering idea. But it didn’t make the work any easier. Dick wondered how long it would have taken if they’d had to fit the ship to carry the village off to East Twilight, even if they had had sufficient supplies for the job. Weeks, he suspected. All they were trying to do was to get something off the ground that would stay off long enough to get to Twilight. That meant that they had to fix only the strongest and most basic parts of the ship—which naturally were less damaged than most of the rest of it.
He grimaced, as he realized it would probably be about as good a ship when they finished as men had used to reach the moon of Earth on their first flight into space. But conditions were different. Then the men who flew it had been trained for long months, and had had all their plotting done for them before they left. This time, only luck and prayers would keep it up.
He finally finished the job as best he could, and his father inspected it carefully. It seemed to pass satisfactorily.
The men had finished the tunnel under the ship and were just cleaning up around the damaged tube as they came out. Dick watched them, trying to rest himself. But he wasn’t finished, he found. His father signaled for him to follow, and they went down to inspect the damage.
It had been more than Rogers had counted on. The tube was totally useless.
For a second, they stood staring at it. Then Rogers shrugged. “Get some of the men to prying off one of the other steering assemblies—the one we won’t be using,” he ordered into his radio. “Dick, give me a hand in cleaning out this mess.”
They chiseled the damaged tube assembly out of its fastenings, and lined up the holding devices as best they could. When the replacement came down to them, they found that it fitted an entirely different set of holes. More specialization. Dick was beginning to agree with Hotside Charlie. When two things served about the same function but in different places, they should still be made the same.
They drilled out the holes with their biggest drill, and then had to ream them bigger by hand, using whatever would fit. It was slow, backbreaking work. But at last the tube went into position, and they beg
an screwing down the bolts.
It wouldn’t do as a permanent job. More than an hour would probably loosen it. But with luck, it would be used for no more than a minute or so in the trip, since it had to be used only to correct the main steering mechanism. It should last.
“Okay,” Rogers said at last. “That’s all we can do now. We might as well go home and take a break. If the boys who are trying to be pilots are ready, we’ll bring them back in the morning. We all need a good night’s sleep, and so do they, probably.”
Night, of course, was purely a matter of choice here, since Mercury always presented the same face to the sun. Here in the hotlands it was always noon. But men had grown up with night and day a part of their lives for untold generations, and they still kept the same divisions that were natural on Earth. Repeated tests had proved that it was the most efficient way for them to work.
They drove back, each plagued by doubts, since all of them had seen some of the poorness of the makeshift repairs. One of the men looked up at Rogers. “How much chance do you figure, Bart?”
“About one chance in three, I’d guess—and I may be optimistic. I can figure on the troubles with the ship, but I can’t really guess how bad our pilots will be.”
It wasn’t cheerful, but it was obviously a better chance than they had thought. Dick suspected his father was making it sound like an honest statement, but still being optimistic to keep them from knowing how bad it must be.
Sigma was an unhappy place when they reached it and drove the tractor inside. The news that the ship was repaired helped to cheer them up for a few minutes, but it didn’t last long. During the day, most of them had discovered first how little their chosen pilot knew about a ship.
It was Snaith, of all people, who had been given the job. He didn’t look too happy, though his worry seemed to be for the dome, and not just for himself.
“I was up with my brother a few times, and he was a pilot,” he told them. “I guess maybe I handled the controls two or three hours. But it was just a little private ship, a lot different from these big jobs. And then we took off from a tail position. I don’t know anything about taking off from the side, the way you say this ship is.”
The other man who had done a little piloting admitted that it was more than he had done. He’d relieved a friend at the steering of one of the ore- tugs, but had never made any kind of a landing or take-off.
Surprisingly, Charlie turned out to be an asset. He rubbed his bearded chin, and his eyes seemed to turn inward to examine his memory better. “Seems to me I’ve seen ’em take off from the side,” he said. “Used to have to in some places, where they couldn’t land on their tail, because the ground was so uneven. Nothing to it. You get her warmed up, and then you turn on your bottom steering rocket full. When she’s really roaring, you cut on the big tube. Takes you up fast, and you just have time to cut off the steering job. Rough work—but men have done it before.”
Snaith still didn’t look happy about it, but his face cleared up some. “Okay, we’d better get together, and I’ll see what I can figure out from your memory. It may help—and we sure need help.”
They went off, while the committee that had been taking inventory came up. The faces of the men were even longer than the rest of the faces around them.
“We figure we’ve got two weeks to live, if the ship won’t work,” the head of the committee reported to Rogers. “We just hit it at the worst time. Last time we got other supplies instead of uranium slugs. This time we were to get that. But we’ve got about the most contaminated set of slugs in the whole planet right now. If we are lucky—well, then we’ll be alive two weeks from now. And we’ll be getting ready to cook to death the next day!”
Chapter 6 Crack-Up
You would have to live here,” Charlie complained over coffee that next morning. “Now, iffen you lived at Beta dome or even Epsilon, you’d be fixed. Why, we’d just take the tractor and go a-riding right into East Twilight. We’d be there in four-five days, and they’d get a rocket right back to us.”
“But we’re not in those domes, Charlie,” Dick’s mother reminded him. “We’re out in Sigma.”
“Yeah. You betcha.” The old man stopped to swallow, shaking his head. “You’re in Sigma. And it has to be the fool dome right in the middle of nowhere. You can’t go to East Twilight—got the whole belt of canyon country that way, and no tractor would go through it. You can’t make West Twilight, because you’d have to cut way around the Calamity zinc lakes. And you’re way too far south to hit North Twilight, besides which you ain’t fixed to get through Big Lead River. Now if they had a South Twilight, you’d be all fixed. Only they ain’t. Tch!”
It summed up the situation, Dick had to admit. He had been thinking along the same lines as he lay trying to go to sleep, and had been studying the big map of Mercury in the back of one of his Earth-type books.
“You didn’t have to come here, Uncle Charlie,” Ellen reminded him. They’d all given up the pretense of trying to keep things from the children. And, all in all, the younger children seemed to be taking it better than the adults.
“Nope, sure didn’t,” Charlie admitted. “But I got a hankering to see my friends that I hadn’t eat with in a couple years. So I lit out for here. Big mistake. Always knew a man had no business having friends.”
“We’d be in a lot worse spot without you,” Dick’s mother told him. “Stop grumbling, Charlie. You probably like every bit of this. You used to claim trouble made a man come out of his shell.”
Charlie grinned at her and held out his cup for more coffee. But he had nothing more to say, and the rest were ready to take Snaith out to the ship.
Dick wasn’t sure whether he’d be permitted to come along this time, but habit apparently led to their expecting him with them. He climbed into the tractor with Snaith, his father, Charlie, and the doctor. Holmes was supposedly going along only because he wanted to, but everyone knew that he was there in case an accident happened.
That, however, was one thing about which nobody wanted to talk. The choice of men had been made without any mention of the real reasons behind it. And even Holmes seemed to think that he had brought along his black bag because he didn’t know what else to do with it.
Charlie drove the machine out of the big airlock, and Dick watched the people clustered around. He was lucky, he guessed. At least he would see what went on. But they wouldn’t know until the party returned. The radio probably wouldn’t have been able to cover the hundred miles, even if both sets at the ship and in the dome had been working.
Johnny came out and sailed around them a few times. Dick had begun to think he could recognize the pattern on Johnny’s glowing form. But he seemed to have wispy business of his own to attend to, and didn’t try to follow them or to lead them. By now the path was well enough worn that he couldn’t have helped, in any event.
Snaith had never seen the ship, and no amount of telling about it could have given him a clear picture. When they came within sight, his first reaction was one of surprise that it seemed so normal. He must have expected to see bits of its hull strewn over the ground all around. But then he began to realize that the outward harm was a minor thing, and that the real trouble lay inside.
“It—it seems to be bent,” he said.
Rogers nodded. “Maybe it is. I thought that the main girder down the center looked a little warped. But not much. What you see is just the way the hull back there is buckled up. It’s a good thing there’s no air here to need streamlining, because she’s not fixed for that.”
The nearer they came, the more Snaith’s face fell. The ship had buried itself quite a ways into the hard surface, and at first glance it seemed that the big rocket would never work in the position in which it lay. None of them were sure that it would.
Once inside the ship, though, Snaith did another change toward some measure of confidence. Dick suddenly warmed a little to him, realizing the great responsibility that lay on his shoulders. It wasn’t as if
the man were a real native of Sigma dome or of Mercury. Up until three years ago, he’d had his own business on Earth. Then a small depression had ruined that—or so he claimed, though most of the people in the dome suspected it was his rather unpleasant manners.
But he hadn’t questioned their decision to send him. It was partly a matter of saving himself, as well, of course; the only hope he had was to have the rocket reach East Twilight. But for once he seemed to have accepted the community decision as being automatically right.
It couldn’t be pleasant to carry the life and death of seven hundred people on one’s shoulders, in such a hastily and badly patched rocket as this, Dick knew.
“Better show me all the controls,” Snaith suggested to him. ‘‘Let me see how they work. Might help a little in getting the feeling of things. Then give me half an hour to go through the motions.”
It probably did no good, but Dick took him around, showing exactly what was important, and how the controls worked. He started to go out, then, and leave Snaith alone. But the man called him back.
“Rather have someone around. And you have a feel for machines—I have to admit that. I’m what they turn out in schools, but you’ve got it so deep in you that you don’t need schools. You might spot something that looks wrong,”
“I could have used some more formal schooling,” Dick said. If Snaith wanted to be friendly, now would be a bad time to fail to return it. “I wanted to go back to a university and study engineering, but they wouldn’t clear me in North Twilight—said I’d be better off staying here.”
Snaith snorted, feeling the controls carefully. “Must have been four years ago, then, when Full- mark was governor. His boy got the chance to go back—and then flunked out. Fullmark got himself known as a crook even on Earth.”
Battle on Mercury Page 5