The Unorthodox Engineers

by Colin Kapp

  Their instinctive reaction was to turn and run down the monstrous incline in front of them. With rare presence of mind Van Noon caught Jacko’s arm and forced him to run a diagonal path which took them barely clear of the rolling bulk as the rogue spacecraft rolled a deep trail in the ash-soil. The wisdom of Van Noon’s diagonal path of escape was soon apparent. The rolling ship rapidly achieved a velocity which would have fatally outstripped a running man.

  Then the angle of the terrain began to flatten again and the intolerable gravity lessened. The ferry rolled to a cumbersome halt as the incline down which it was moving became insufficient to support its motion. Finally the two unorthodox engineers trudged ironically up a slight incline after their errant vessel, approaching it from tail-on in case it took it upon itself to roll again.

  ‘Lesson one,’ said Jacko. ‘First catch your spaceship.’

  ‘We seem to be luckier than Wooley’s ground crew. At least it hasn’t dissolved on us.’

  ‘There’s still time,’ said Jacko miserably. ‘The hatch is on the side. Dare we go in?’

  Van Noon cast a wary look at the unstable skyline. ‘Not for very long. We don’t know how often Getawehi goes in for a big pull like that. It’d be fatal to be trapped inside if it rolled again. What we really need is explosives to dig a real big ditch alongside. Once we got her into that we could work inside fairly safely.’

  ‘There’s explosives in the tool hold.’

  ‘Do you know exactly where?’

  ‘I stowed them there myself.’

  Fritz had been attempting to time the apparent rotation of the highest point of the skyline. Its movement was highly erratic, but there was a certain degree of progression. The coming angle was one soon to place the ship in a position to slip only noseward if it moved at all.

  ‘When I give the word, you try to get in there and out again with the explosives in about seven minutes flat. If you hit trouble, get out without the explosives. But whatever you do, keep inside seven minutes.’

  Jacko nodded. When Fritz gave the signal he climbed swiftly to the hatch, fought the cover open, and disappeared inside. Van Noon spent an agonizing few minutes which lengthened into eight before a flurry of activity in the hatchway deposited a dozen packets of plastic mining explosive at his feet, followed by a box of detonators. It was ten minutes before Jacko himself got clear, having miscalculated the intricacies of manoeuvring in a space cabin with the gravitational attraction sideways on.

  Van Noon was watching the shifting angle cautiously. He waved Jacko away urgently, but although the terrain began to slope in a direction which could have set the ferry rolling again, the angle did not become acute enough to bring the vessel into motion. Fritz was quick to seize the opportunity. Mentally estimating the circumference of the vessel, he paced out the distance through which the hull needed to rotate in order to leave the hatch at the top.

  They placed a chain of explosives across this distance line, with a one-minute detonator at the end. Priming the detonator, they ran across-hill to a safe distance and waited. The explosion ripped a long, deep trough in the soft ash, the edge of which reached almost to the ferry’s hull. The shock of the explosion was just sufficient to overcome the forces which kept the great vessel from moving down the incline.

  Ponderously it rolled into the crater and settled, almost a third of its bulk below ground level.

  Now they were able to work on the ferry with the minimum of risk, although the uncertainties of exactly what was “up” were peculiarly unsettling within the confines of the fallen ship. Time and again they were disturbed by the sudden fear that the hull was beginning to roll again, as some sudden change in gravitic direction or intensity made the “floor” apparently shift under them.

  It took two hours to cut the cabin liners into sections suitable for two sleds. The shapes they obtained could scarcely have been more suitable for the purpose had they been custom designed. The only brake they could devise was a crude foot-operated device like a ploughshare bolted on to angle brackets at the rear of the sections. On test the brakes proved savagely effective, but the failing light made them put away thoughts of starting their journey before morning.

  Very few of the services in the ferry still worked. From the growing acridness of the atmosphere inside, it was obvious that the chemical powerplant had been damaged. For this reason Van Noon decided they would be safer sleeping in the open. They spent the remaining time before darkness removing from the ship various tools and such few items of provisions as could be carried on the sleds.

  Night came with explosive suddenness. The night sky was the first tangible reminder of their peculiar extragalactic location. Part of the sky was strangely dark and lacking in stars, while the rest was aglow with the enormous spread of the Milky Way.

  They scuffed shallow grooves in the ash-soil in which to settle their sleeping pods, then climbed in, anxious to get some rest to meet the demands of the coming day. Such was their trust in the ecological and atmospheric climate of Getawehi that neither thought to place their face visors over their pods to ward off precipitation or biological attack. Their only inconvenience seemed to be the shifting gravity, which imparted to the pods the feeling of movement, as if lodged in the branches of a vast and slowly-swaying tree.

  It was two hours after Geta had set that Van Noon was awakened by a startled cry from Jacko.

  ‘Fritz!’

  ‘What the devil’s the matter?’

  ‘Look at the mountains—they’re burning!’

  Van Noon roused himself and followed the indicated line. Surely enough, whole sections of the ranks of distant hills were lit with a red glow of such intensity that the sky was saturated with a blood-red cast.

  ‘What the hell is it?’

  ‘Damned if I know, Jacko. That range is best part of thirty kilometres away. It would need to be one heck of a fire to be clearly visible from here.’

  As they watched, the burning mountains seemed to shift and change with running patterns and pulsations, forming a spectacle more absorbing than the species-long pastime of watching the flickering heart of a home-fire.

  ‘It doesn’t look right,’ said Van Noon after a while. ‘Those currents in the flame are moving too fast and too regularly to be true. A fire is a set of small burning nuclei—individual conflagrations. But the way the flame out there flickers, it looks as if the mountain is burning en masse.’

  ‘Could it be volcanic?’

  ‘Not the kind of volcanism we’re familiar with. Anyway, there was nothing in the reports about any sort of volcanic action.’

  ‘So what’s happening over there, then? Don’t tell me the whole mountain is made up of paraffin wax?’

  ‘Nothing about this place would surprise me,’ said Van Noon moodily. ‘But there’s one thing that worries me.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘There’s too much power about. Those burning mountains are a pretty powerful display of something— so is the radio output and the mixed-up gravity. They’re all power manifestations of considerable magnitude. But it’s always output, with never a sign of the origin. It’s as if there’s a very much larger force at work—a force so large that it can afford to spill over a few billion kilowatts as side effects and never notice the loss.’

  ‘I had the same idea. None of the demonstrations we’ve seen so far seem lacking for a few billion ergs. I’m not keen on the implications. If there is a large power source around, I like to know where it is and what it is. It helps to know if you have to get out from under in a hurry.’

  Getawehi swung “up” sideways, momentarily exerted a gravitational pull which almost broke their backs, then reduced its attraction to such an extent that their pods almost left the surface. There was another twist in gravitational angle, then the burning mountains, which had so far seemed to be up a slight gradient, slipped to the bottom of a racing slope of one-in-two. Then, as if to complete the performance, the burning mountains went out—like the turning-off of a lamp
.

  ‘You know, Fritz,’ said Jacko as he sank back into his pod, ‘Colonel Nash was right. There is no place in space quite like Getawehi.’

  Four

  At first light the next morning they had a trial run of the sleds. By reasonable guesswork their present position from the base camp was about fifty kilometres—an uncomfortable journey if made on foot over the soft ash. For direction they had only to follow the valley floor between the two mountain shoulders to a point where the mountains succumbed to the broad and rocky steppe, the edge of which had been the scene of the disastrous first landing by the construction crew.

  To their delight the sleds ran easily over the ashy soil, even when presented with only slight gravitational gradients. The vehicles were prone, however, to come to an unexpected halt on meeting patches of the purple fern which clustered the landscape. A few outcropping rocks were an additional hazard which required careful negotiation. There was no way of steering the flat-bottomed sleds. Wherever obstacles were encountered, it was necessary to halt and manually drag the sled to a new position. Occasionally the gravitational angle produced slopes insufficient to support their motion, and these had to be borne in patient immobility, as did the passing of all slopes other than the one leading in the required direction.

  After a survival-ration breakfast they secured to the sleds such items of tools and provisions as they were able to make fast. Then, waiting for the terrain to slope in a suitable direction, they set off. The air was crystal clear and inhabited with a crisp coolness and a heather-honeyed perfume which was decidedly pleasant. Far to their right the burning mountains, now quiescent, stood up glassy and apparently untouched by the conflagration of the night. Nearer and to their left, a vast outcropping of grey-white striated rock formed, with the burning mountains, the shoulders of the valley, some forty kilometres across, through which lay their route.

  Their mode of transport proved both exhilarating and predictably hazardous. Swooping down an apparent slope of one-in-three, the ground reared suddenly upwards before them. Fritz managed to drive to a halt, but the momentum of Jacko’s sled ploughed it a metre depth into the ash soil before it came to rest. Climbing out from the ditch which he had dug, Jacko’s look of murderous reproach threw Fritz into fits of laughter.

  However, it was Van Noon who nearly became the first casualty. Driving down a deep slope, where the sled velocity must have been nearing fifty kilometres an hour, the progress of Fritz’s sled was suddenly arrested by a patch of fern. Fritz parted company with the sled and proceeded without visible means of support for a considerable distance before he made a spread-eagled landing. He got up, shaken, but miraculously unhurt. Nevertheless much of the equipment he had been carrying on the sled was lost in the ash and could not be recovered.

  Despite these and similar incidents and frequent halts while their intended direction lay sullenly uphill or across, they made very good progress. By tacking across their general course they found they could make use of nearly half of the available angles. The mountain shoulders gave them an easy sense of direction without reckoning and at last they reached the end of the broad valley. Before them now began one of the great steppes of Getawehi, a spotted, rock-strewn desert, completely without vegetation. It continued as far as the eye could see—monotonous and inhospitable.

  Jacko viewed the prospect critically.

  ‘We could never cross that on the sleds, Fritz. Too many rocks. There’s less than a hundred metre straight run anywhere.’

  ‘It’s fortunate that we don’t have to. By my calculation the construction team ditched somewhere between the steppe and the end of the grey-white mountain. If so, we should be nearly within sighting range by now.’

  They scanned the area anxiously, but found no sign of the base camp.

  ‘Have you got any distress rockets or anything similar in those bits and pieces of yours, Jacko?’

  ‘No. But I’ve got some plastic explosive left, and a few detonators. We could at least make a big bang.’

  ‘That should do the trick. If we can only get some sort of answering signal to guide us we should be able to locate them fairly easily from here. They should be on the lookout anyway, because they must have seen our ferry fall.’

  They arranged three explosions, separated by a one minute and then a thirty-second interval. After what seemed like a ten minute wait a slight column of smoke rose up near the grey-white mountain’s end at about five kilometres distance.

  ‘That appears to be them,’ said Van Noon. ‘Let’s go over and meet the troops.’

  By a fortunate coincidence of angle and direction they covered the distance in record time. Swooping from the heights of a big slope they came suddenly across a string of a dozen men labouring on foot up an ashen trail. The party was encumbered with axes, ropes, and miscellaneous rescue equipment. As Van Noon and Jacko braked to a halt, the file of men dropped their loads, and, with a loud cheer, came dashing to greet them.

  The teamleader was the first to arrive.

  ‘My name’s Wooley. We saw your fire-bucket come down behind the mountains somewhere, but nightfall beat us to it. We were just on our way to find you. Frankly we didn’t expect any survivors, from the angle she was making when she hit.’

  ‘We were lucky,’ said Van Noon. ‘We managed to get out before she toppled.’ He had the distinct impression that Wooley was not too enthusiastic about their arrival.

  ‘Just the two of you aboard?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m afraid we lost the ship. She’ll never make space again. But there’s a lot of useful stores and equipment in her if you can get them out.’

  ‘We’ll get them out somehow,’ said Wooley. ‘As for losing the ship, that was a foregone conclusion. The spacecraft isn’t yet made which can land undamaged on Getawehi. I don’t wish to seem critical, but just what did you hope to achieve by joining the suicide club?’

  ‘I’m Van Noon,’ said Fritz. ‘By some mischance I seem to have finished up with the responsibility for this little lot.’

  ‘Van Noon?’ Wooley screwed up his face. ‘Weren’t you mixed up in that affair on Tazoo?’

  ‘For my sins, yes,’ said Fritz ruefully. ‘But by all accounts Getawehi has Tazoo beaten by several orders of magnitude. Jacko and I decided that if we didn’t want to spend the next five years driving computers neurotic we’d better get down here and get the feel of it ourselves.’

  ‘Then welcome to Getawehi!’ said Wooley sadly. ‘But believe me, you’re in for a whole lot more surprises yet.’

  In the meantime, a few of the construction team had borrowed Jacko’s sled and had been making short experimental trips across the terrain whenever the opportunity presented itself. Wooley had watched these antics without much enthusiasm, but one particularly successful run captured his interest. He examined Fritz’s sled more closely.

  ‘Did you come all the way on this?’

  ‘About fifty kilometres since sunrise.’

  Wooley turned and clasped Fritz’s hand in a sudden handshake. ‘Sorry, Fritz! I knew I was being replaced as head of team, but I thought we’d merely get a new boy who’d be making all the same mistakes until he wound up six weeks later in the same situation as I’m in. I hadn’t stopped to think of the unorthodox angle. You know, if we’d been at the wreck and wanted cabin liners back at the base camp… Dammit, we’d have carried the bloody things!’

  ‘Forget it!’ said Fritz. ‘You’re not being replaced. It’s simply that the overall control for the entire project has transferred itself from its lofty orbital heights to the place where things actually happen.’

  ‘You mean they’ve given you control of the whole lot?’ Wooley was incredulous.

  ‘Just that. The veritable hot potato.’

  ‘No potato that,’ said Wooley sadly shaking his head. ‘What they dumped on you was a small mountain. Come back to base and I’ll try to explain.’

  ‘I’d appreciate that,’ said Fritz. ‘It’s about time somebody gave me a rational expl
anation of why a group of experienced engineers can’t assemble a kit of prefabricated parts.’

  For a moment Wooley’s eyes looked haunted. ‘I didn’t say I’d give you a rational explanation… I only said I’d try to explain.’

  The base camp was a camp in little more than name only. Originally the site of a single space-drop of heavy equipment, it had become the focal point of the endeavours of the construction team solely because there was no incentive to go elsewhere. Behind the site lay the grey-white mountain chain. In front lay the vast mottled steppe. On the ashy no-man’s-land between the two, were gathered various space-drop capsules, some of which had obviously contained parts for the Ixion project. Also there were capsules from later drops, clearly marked as having contained emergency survival supplies.

  Living quarters, such as there were, had been constructed from well-entrenched girderwork “borrowed” from the abandoned assembly project, overtopped by parachute material from the space-drop canopies. All the men seemed fit, but it was obvious that the prolonged period of enforced grounding on Getawehi, coupled with strict rationing, was beginning to have its effect. The most disquieting aspect was the look of resignation which rested in their eyes.

  Fritz looked out over the broad steppe, something about the configuration of ferns and rocks stirring a thread of memory.

  ‘Isn’t this the place where your first ferry sank?’

  ’Sank!’ Wooley was incensed. ‘It didn’t sink… it was melted.’

  ‘You have to be joking!’

  ‘Do I just! You watch this!’

  Wooley turned, seized a crowbar from an abandoned tool-kit, and tossed it out on to the rock-strewn desert. One end struck the grey sand, while the other touched a protruding rock. There was a blue spark as it touched. For seconds it seemed as if nothing was going to happen. Then to Fritz and Jacko’s astonishment the tool began to glow a visible cherry red. Its temperature continued to increase through white heat to a point where the iron bent and fused into a pool of molten iron. The incandescent metal dribbled into a thread and ran apart. The arc which struck as the curious circuit broke was more in the nature of an explosion, and the watching trio ran for their lives as the area was deluged with droplets of red-hot iron and warm sand.