by T I WADE
Seventy percent of the yellow blob was pure gold, a very pure gold. Inside the blob were large and small broken flakes, lines of silver metals like wires and shards of several rare earth metals.
Included were erbium, osmium, neodymium, and iridium at exactly seven percent each. One percent was palladium. The final one percent of the blob was composed of equal parts of cobalt and platinum. Tungsten was nowhere to be found. and that had been Captain Pete’s mistake, using tungsten as the base metal to figure out how the blue shields worked.
“I have it. I have it! Dr. Messer, we need to get back to Earth immediately,” Captain Pete mumbled, deep in thought.
“You have vhat?” asked Dr. Messer, who was describing her team’s findings. To her, the captain wasn’t a scientist and had led them on a wild goose chase, getting nowhere trying to figure out how the blue shields worked.
“Dr. Messer. The shield boxes don’t need tungsten. There is no tungsten. It is the equal amounts of those four metals that is the answer. They used gold as a cheap material to line their bases. I assume they found it plentiful here on Mars. The new Matts, Ruler Roo’s crowd in space, found the correct four rare earth metals and used platinum because they didn’t have the same access to gold, or they used what they mined for their chests. The original Matts gave them the quantities, but over time the new Matts changed them. That’s why the latest Matt generations couldn’t make new shields. Somewhere along the way, they had forgotten the original recipe. Don’t you see, Dr. Messer? It is all sevens, the proper recipe. Even the gold has a seven and a zero in it.”
The short doctor of physics thought for a while. A light came on in her brain and she began discussing the revelations loudly to herself.
“Looks like you threw a rock at a hornet’s nest,” remarked Saturn to Captain Pete.
“Don’t you see, astronauts?” replied the captain, as happy as if he had just won the lottery. “Thanks to you, we have just discovered the recipe I’ve spent the last two years working on. Just like that!”
“Why do we need to return to Earth?” Mars asked, not understanding why they had to suddenly return.
“You’re right—the most important team working on the shields is right here. We can solve this problem and all we will need are more small Cold Fusion plants to power the shields we make. How many power units do we have here on base?”
“Six in total, Captain Mars,” replied Johnny Walls. “Two on the shuttles, the two we brought which are powering up the two outer shields, the Matt unit working in here and the Matt backup.”
Johnny was in charge of the Cold Fusion power systems and their usage, and had learned his new job on the flight over. It was quite astounding how much one could learn in six months with very little to do. “The two made-in-Australia plants for the shuttles give out 28 megawatts at ninety percent power, the same as the units powering the shields,” continued Johnny. “The forward shield protecting the Matt craft also needs a minimum of 28 megawatts, and that one is fed from this power plant we are using. One of the “build” guys looked over the two Matt energy plants here on base. They are much the same, but like Captain Pete has just said, put together with different metals. The crew who studied Cold Fusion with me on the journey, George, Jenny Burgos and I reckon that with the Matt power systems being larger than the Australian ones and using different metals, they get double, double the power out of their plants. We reckon that the Matt Cold Fusion power plants can produce seven times the amount of the Australian ones.”
There was silence as suddenly twenty years of study, work, and looking at alien systems suddenly became easy to understand, as easy to understand as a Rubik’s Cube. The secret to everything was “seven”.
For the rest of the meeting there was excitement in the air. It was as if the whole crew had found the meaning of life.
“Herr Noble, how much of this hard yellow gold is there?” asked Dr. Messer over a beer later that night. The first brew made on the planet was ready for sampling. Dr. Messer, even though she was tiny, being German, could easily drink all the men under the table. Bets were already made by several whether Jonesy could be drunk under the table by the pint-size doctor when he was awakened in nine years’ time.
There had been bets ever since Dr. Messer had become known by all the astronauts. She had been one of Dr. Petra’s crew, and Ryan had promoted her when the good doctor had died, ten years earlier. She had been promoted in the very room they were drinking in, the base’s canteen on the lowest level. It had taken her several years to rid herself of her shyness around the rest of the crew and show the astronauts that she was the real thing as far as German beer drinkers were concerned.
Mars Noble pondered over the good doctor’s question for as long as it took to drink his mug of beer. It was a difficult question. He worked on all the gold he had seen in The Pig’s Snout to give her and Captain Pete as good an answer as he could.
“How much gold was in the cavern?” he asked the others.
“Lunar said 220 tons, not counting what was taken out before we arrived,” replied Captain Pete. The beer was good, a real luxury, and he enjoyed it as much as the next person.
“Double that amount?” asked Dr. Messer.
“More than that,” replied Mars, hoping that he would get another mug fill. Dr. Messer and again Johnny Walls were in charge of beer rations, and Mars really wanted a third pint. It seemed Johnny Walls was everywhere, and the most enthusiastic crewmember on base. He was also a natural pilot and could drink beer as well as he flew.
Mars’ wish was granted as with the doctor’s nod Johnny refilled Mars’ glass from one of the several wine barrels they had brought from Earth to ferment and hold the fresh beer. Captain Pete and Saturn quickly held out their glasses, and so did several others listening to the discussion. Dr. Nancy looked at her husband, and then at Saturn sternly.
“Dr. Nancy, Mikey is over ten months old. He eats food. I’m not pregnant. Why the look?” Saturn demanded jokingly.
“We don’t need alcoholics in this base like a few others I know,” she stated sternly, and even Dr. Messer now felt a twinge of guilt. The crew on base weren’t going downhill if Dr. Nancy had anything to do with it. She always had a small glass of beer from every new barrel, for medicinal purposes only, she told everyone, and that was that.
“I reckon a hundred times as much seeped out of each of the three holes,” Mars stated, clearing the air. There certainly would be no more beer this day.
“I think Mars is accurate,” added Jenny Burgos, also on her third mug. “I walked on the stuff. It is about fifty to seventy feet long, twenty feet wide at the mouth of each cave and, even though we had a really small piece, it was still quite heavy for the planet’s low gravity. It alone was about four times the size of the ingots we were making in the Sahara.”
“Wow! That is a lot,” added Captain Pete. “Two hundred and twenty tons, times ten, then times three. Wow! We couldn’t take all that back to Earth. You know, we could figure out the distance of the tunnel from the amount of gold. What is the total…say, 6,600 to 7,000 tons?”
“We could work out the length of the tunnel if we knew how thick the insulation of the walls was,” added Dr. Messer.
“One inch thickness,” said Mars. “My father told me that most of the walls he had cut through on DX2017 and in the other Matt bases around the solar system were always exactly the same thickness.
“Now we are getting somewhere,” stated Dr. Messer. She was a whiz at math. Within a few minutes, given the circumference of the tunnel she worked out the answer to be 6,300 meters.
“Sounds about right from the edge of the blast area,” added Mars.
“What is blowing my mind is that my coordinates are still fourteen miles east of the ooze holes,” added Captain Pete. “If there was a door or wall blocking the blast, that means that there could be another nine times the amount of gold and rare earth metals still attached to the tunnel walls. I don’t think Lunar and Pluto Katherine need to go a
steroid mining anymore.”
“Captain Pete, you had better go and tell them,” joked Mars, and the crew all smiled. If Captain Pete left now, it would be an 18-month journey back to Earth. “Dr. Messer, we can melt the gold into bars and take it home in ingots, yes?”
“Ja, we have the metals and materials to get enough heat to melt the gold. We have the correct materials to make an even more powerful kiln and melt the other metals into ingots. We have always needed this amount of heat for our silicon and hydrogen production. Metals ingots are easy. We always planned our equipment to melt tungsten which has one of the highest melting points at over 3,400 Celsius. Sorry, I don’t use Fahrenheit. That is an old system. For example, our nano-silicon glass melts at 2,798 Celsius. It took us a year to find its melting point. Osmium is 3,033 Celsius, iridium 2,446 and the rest of the platinum metals even lower. Gold, as you all know by now, is only 1064 degrees Celsius. We can separate the metals at their melting points. The last metal to melt would be the osmium.”
“So you melt them like we melted the gold and then you pour the melted metal away from the non-melted metal?” asked Mars.
“As clever as your father, Herr Noble,” returned the tiny doctor dryly.
“Do you want to take a train ride?” Mars asked the doctor.
“But there are no trains on dis planet,” replied the doctor, still not smiling.
Once she got the idea that her height had made her the volunteer to head down the tunnel, she seemed excited about the mission. Dr. Messer never seemed to be scared about anything.
“So we should make a train or an engine on rails, of sorts?” asked Captain Pete to Mars.
“The roof of the tunnel is exactly five feet high. The tunnel is four foot wide at the widest part, the floor, and the train rails about two feet wide,” Mars answered.
“We need to know the exact distance between the two tracks,” suggested Captain Pete.
“Not if we can tighten down the distance between the two sets of wheels at the site when we get there,” suggested Roo.
“Good idea,” stated Dr. Messer. “Two feet is a good start. What sort of engine can we use?”
“We have extra side thrusters. They are only about a quarter horsepower each. I’m sure one thruster front and back should give us movement,” stated one of the build crew.
“I can see poor Doctor Messer heading down the track at 100 knots,” joked Saturn, and everybody broke out laughing. It was certainly an interesting get-together. Dr. Messer didn’t yet have a sense of humor.
Roo was the only Matt in the meeting. Jonesy had ruined any Matt ideas about beer being bad in the poor man. Many of the adult Matts were not in on the discussion, as they didn’t drink rocket fuel, as they called any alcoholic beverage. They were not in the canteen and were busy doing other things. Also, to many of the older Matts they felt a bond to the older Martian Matt race and still couldn’t believe that their own kind had attacked them and the base.
For a few weeks, the excited crew worked on a vehicle that would take the good doctor down the tunnel. The rest of the scientists worked on the second shipment of yellow ooze that Mars and Saturn brought back.
The scientists ordered more for testing and smelting, and Mars and Saturn were happy to return to the tunnels, this time with Captain Pete and three of the younger, stronger males in the crew. The captain wanted to prove his theory of a wall on the other side of the holes forcing the blast through the weakest part of the tunnel.
They did find a wall less than 200 feet in on the eastern side from the blast holes. It was a solid yellow blanket of melted gold on the wall at the end of the tunnel that, as Mars suggested, could be hundreds of feet thick.
Captain Pete immediately wanted to burn into the wall, so two of the crew slowly made cuts with their hand lasers into the melted metal and pulled out chunks of gold.
Within two three-hour spacewalk shifts, they had several large foot-thick pieces that had fallen off the wall.
They had brought an engineless trolley, sort of a table on wheels to get the exact width of the tracks, and it came in handy trolleying the pieces to the entrance once the floor had been cleared of dust. The backs of the astronauts were far too sore from all the bending down to carry the blobs of metals.
Dr. Messer was also there, and as she explained to the others back at base, was fitted by the build crew to sit down and trundle through the tunnel.
Since this was the last flight before more fuel was needed, they worked as fast as they could between recharges of all seven suits. The minimum time to recharge a suit was the same amount of time taken on a spacewalk, three hours, so they rested. Since the tunnel was dark inside it didn’t matter if they worked during the dull daylight hours or the dark hours. They worked for three hours, then rested for three. It took them an hour to get everyone out and back to the shuttle.
After two days the work was too grueling. They had cut twenty feet into the yellow tunnel wall and still hadn’t found a metal wall. Mars and Captain Pete decided on shifts of three people instead. With three spacesuits going out at a time and taking over from the three returning crewmembers, one person had six hours off and slept a full eight hours.
They continued for two more days before, during one shift in the dark hours, the laser beam changed color and began burning into something thicker and more solid. By this time, they had burned a door-sized tunnel through 35 feet of yellow matter.
Everybody suited up except Saturn, who had completed a few shifts to give one person a rest but stayed in the shuttle keeping the thrusters on idle.
“We must not burn through the metal wall,” stated Captain Pete as a few of the crew who hadn’t seen the new silver color of the metal took a peek. “There could be an atmosphere on the other side, so we must think out what to do. Any ideas?”
“Ja, you must build a new wall this side, fill it with air and then see what is on the other side. We can build a new wall with a docking port back at base, no?” Dr. Messer replied.
Everybody saw her idea and agreed. Exact measurements were taken and Captain Pete stated that slightly melted gold could be used like putty and seal in any holes between the new wall and the sides of the tunnel.
Since the crew were sick of bending down and kneeling inside, Mars decided to collect as much of the metal as SB-III could carry from the veins outside the tunnel. Since the tracks would not be needed between the blast holes, a section of track a few feet long was dug up and broken off to take back to research the metal breakdown.
For two more days they worked, moving broken and cut-off lumps of gold into the rear cargo hold. By the time Mars and Captain Pete thought that it was more or less equal to four Earth-gravity tons, the hold was solidly packed with dozens of dirty-looking pieces of dull yellow rock. It had taken a week to fill one cargo hold, but when they viewed the remaining gold before takeoff, they had hardly changed the shape of the melted veins of rock outside.
“How is she?” Captain Pete asked Saturn from the jumpseat.
“She feels like she has a real gravitational pull, like back on Earth,” she replied, slowly adding thrust to her shuttle. “Sixty-five percent and we are getting light. Sixty-eight percent and we are starting to bump. Seventy percent and we are off. She seems a little tail heavy, but we aren’t flying far. Seventy-two percent and we are heading through 100 feet.”
“Even more than I’ve seen you use on Earth,” declared Mars.
“We haven’t had much Earth time on these new thrusters. Our fuel tanks are only half full, so we must be really carrying a load,” Saturn replied as she began moving the thrusters forward for forward flight. “She feels like a pregnant cow though, I must admit.”
“We must have gauged the Martian-gravity weight or something wrong,” Captain Pete suggested.
The crew was quite surprised two weeks later to learn that their estimations had been off by a massive fifty percent. The scientists had weighed every piece and done the math between gravity differences, and more li
ke six Earth tons of the dull yellow metal had been returned.
Over the next few weeks, a storm arrived out of the blue. Since no flying was needed, it kept the crew working on melting the metals and building a two-carriage linked system like small flat train carriages for the westward journey on the rails to the blast site. This rail system would take the small doctor and two guards along the rails and was propelled in either direction by a small thruster fitted at the front and back.
Once the western length of the tunnel was checked out, they would place the carriages inside the area next to the eastern wall Once the carriages were in, they planned to seal the area off, then open the silver Matt wall, and the carriages would head in the eastern direction where the ancient Matts could still be alive.
Mars hoped that this wasn’t a long storm, as the excitement was growing as to what they would find on the other side.
For three months the storm raged outside, and then like all storms, one day it was gone. This one had been pretty violent. They could see how strong it had been by the amount of dust and red dirt that covered the flat plateau area around the shields. The dusty remains of the storm was over three feet thick around the shield walls. The Matt ship’s thrusters were first used by Mars to clear the dust of the whole plateau before they could leave.
During the storm, they had produced enough fuel to add another quarter to SB-III’s fuel tanks, and a second water collection flight would be needed. Fetching another load of water would take nearly half of the fuel produced so far. Nothing on Mars was a quick fix. Projects often took ten times longer to achieve results than on Earth.
The second water flight was completed and the crew decided that they could use some fuel for another flight to the tunnel entrances to return with more treasure for the scientists to melt into ingots. That weight, including the ingots already made, would be the maximum they could take back to Earth on the return journey.
The numbers of ingots of all seven of the metals found in the blobs of yellow were growing. Once the first load was turned into organized ingots on pallets, it didn’t look like that much, but even on Mars it was a heavy load.