The Inosculation Syndrome

by D. B. Reynolds-Moreton

  He put her mind to rest by telling her that he did understand the main purpose behind the experiment, and was in favour of it, but a little shy. She gave her version of a smile and lowered her head a little, but whether she believed him or not was another matter.

  More of the ore hunters returned, but with little ore. Small deposits had been found, but not enough to make it worthwhile mining.

  It was looking as though they would have to make do without steel, which was a pity, as Kal had in mind so many things he would have liked to try out. The one place which they hadn’t checked out was the further end of the black mountain range, and Kal thought it may well be worth a try, and when the last of the search teams returned. He would organize it.

  Distant communications was one thing which was still missing, and Kal remembered the piezoelectric crystals which they had retrieved from the old mine workings in the black mountains.

  His understanding of electronics was limited to the modern usage, with plug in units and a very rudimentary knowledge of the individual components, as most of it now consisted of subassemblies which were usually non repairable, and were discarded when defunct.

  The very basic data was omitted in the early days of the academy, which only goes to illustrate the fact that if only the top end of a subject is fully understood, the ability to improvise at the lower end becomes somewhat limited.

  They had very little chance of making anything too sophisticated, as their efforts would be limited by the components which they could manufacture with the restricted materials and tools to hand.

  But if the crystals could make a spark, he didn’t see why they couldn’t make something which would pick up the radiation generated, and so be able to make a crude form of radio link.

  A new team was brought together, and the basic principles of electromagnetic radiation were explained, along with the details of how a resistor, a capacitor and a few other components worked, and were usually made. Kal thought it wouldn’t be too long before they came up with something.

  He was not too surprised to get a visit from one of the team a couple of days later, who was trying his hardest not to show his excitement. Kal was presented with a box with a rod sticking out of the top, and a hole alongside it.

  Next to the hole was a switch. The little chap leaned forward and tap tapped the switch, a few seconds later a series of tap tap taps came out of the hole in the top of the box, and Kal saw the first real grin from the little people.

  It looked as if his mouth would split open, so pleased was he. Kal took him by the hand and shook it vigorously, and that started another fashionable thing to do.

  It was not long before the ‘radio’ was working over a good distance, and simple messages could be sent and received by using an agreed upon series of ‘taps’.

  The electronics team intimated that they were working on something else, but would not say what it was. He could wait, and it would be worth waiting for, he felt sure.

  The final team returned from the iron ore hunt, and brought back samples of many things, but not iron ore. They showed their disappointment, but cheered up when Kal told them of the black mountain quest he had planned.

  They would use the new super steam wagon which Kal had been waiting to put to use ever since it had been built.

  Two days later they were off on the ore quest at the far end of the black mountain range. The new wagon made good speed and was much more comfortable to ride in than its original model.

  Maps which had been made on the early sketch slates, and later on boards of crude paper, had all to be transferred to the new paper sheets and were backed with a fine cloth, which made life a little easier, as the whole journey could be seen on one sheet.

  They bypassed all the more unpleasant places they had visited on the first journey and it was only a few days before they reached their destination, and stopped at the foot of the mountain range just before it sloped down to the plains.

  The team equipped themselves with a good selection of weapons and mining tools, and set off for the rift in the rock face which led to the summit of the lower section of the range.

  The glaze makers back at the pottery had come to the aid of the metal makers in an unusual way. Metal oxides added to glazes often give a colour to the glaze, as copper will give green through to a blue, depending on the type of glaze. Iron will colour a pale yellow through to brown and almost red, and cobalt gives a brilliant blue, like no other metal.

  This helped the metal makers identify which ores were which, as they had no other method of doing so at the moment.

  As well as looking for the main ore, iron, the team would also be collecting anything else which looked of value, as this was the only way they had of obtaining new materials that could be identified, and added to their stocks.

  There was very little evidence of ores on the surface of the rocks they passed on their way up to the plateau.

  Either the ores had been collected already, or were only to be found deep within the mountain, as weathering of the outer rocks had not been sufficient to expose them.

  This meant going into caves and tunnels, or making their own, and they were not equipped for tunnelling, so the former option was the only one they had.

  On the way up the slope, several small caves were explored, but produced nothing of value. Near the top they had better luck, as a square hole had been cut into the wall of rock, and they stopped to survey it.

  It was not a natural opening, and had been cut into the solid rock with a precision which made them wonder what kind of machinery or cutting tools had been used.

  It looked safe enough, and the lamps were lit to see what lay inside the tunnel. Who, or whatever had made this opening, had gone in dead straight and level for nearly half a kilometre, and had left no debris on the outside.

  ‘And that must have taken some doing’, thought Kal.

  There were no signs of tool marks on the walls or floor of the tunnel, except at the end, which they had now reached.

  It was blocked off with huge blocks of stone which looked as if their edges had been fused together.

  There was no way past this barrier that they could see, and certainly no way of moving it. It looked like a dead end, and a lot of travelling for nothing, but Kal was not one to give up easily.

  He asked for some of the spears to be lashed together, forming a crude climbing frame, and sent one of the smallest members of the team up to see if there was a gap at the top, which he thought there might be, but which they couldn’t see from ground level because of the low light level from their lamps.

  He had been right, there was a block of stone that was not fused into the rest of the mass, and with a bit of effort, it could be moved.

  It took a long time to lever the stone out of its hole, but they did it, and one of them crawled through to see what was on the other side. A lamp was lowered on a rope, and the tunnel seemed to carry on as before.

  One by one, the team climbed the poles, went through the hole and down the other side on ropes. Kal found it a bit of a struggle to get through the hole, and had to be pulled through in the end.

  There were only two good reasons to have made such a good job of sealing the tunnel up, and that was to keep something in, or others out. As nobody could make up their mind as to which it was, they were all very careful as they went along.

  Another half kilometre brought them to a large cavern, in the middle of which was a machine, or so they supposed, as it looked as though it had been made rather than grown.

  It was only when they got enough light on it that they realized it was the tunnel maker itself, as it was about the same size in width as the passage they had just come down.

  The worrying question was, why had it been abandoned instead of being removed for future use, as it must have been an expensive machine to make, also why block up the tunnel so firmly, and part way in?

  Something had caused whoever it was that had been here, to be somewhere else a bit sharpish, and that d
idn’t look good for the team.

  The machine was just a huge block of some metallic material sitting on the ground, with a square frame-like device at what they assumed to be the front end.

  There was a control panel mounted in a recess at the top of the box like section, and Kal climbed into it. No sooner had he done so, when a soft humming noise filled the air, and he felt the machine move slightly. It had risen a few millimetres above the ground, and was now floating free.

  Kal told the others to stay well behind the machine, as he was going to try the controls to see if he could make it work.

  In front of him there was a panel of shiny metal plates set in a black frame, but there were no directions or symbols as to what did what.

  He touched the top most plate very lightly and the gentle hum increased in volume, while the machine slowly slid forward. Pressing the plate a little harder and the speed increased a little, but no more than a good fast walking pace.

  The plates just below and to either side caused the device to turn left or right, and the one below that pair put it into reverse, as he soon found out.

  ‘So far, so good.’ thought Kal, ‘That was straight forward enough.’ Besides the main touch plates, there several others, but a little smaller, and he assumed that they would control the cutting action of the machine, or whatever else it did.

  Telling the others what he was about to do, he edged the tunnelling machine up to the wall of the cavern, and tried the smaller touch plates in turn, but nothing happened.

  He continued to fiddle with the plates, frustration mounting by the minute, and then a small panel slid to one side at the top of the control unit. Beneath it there was another set of plates, and he began to touch these in turn.

  All of a sudden the whole place was bathed in a pale red tinged glow. He had found the light switch! He touched the plate again, and the light went out, leaving everyone in the dull glow of their oil lamps.

  With the lights back on, Kal tried to see where the light was coming from, but there was no specific place, it just flowed out from all surfaces of the machine, and bathed the cavern in its pale glow.

  Kal tried touching two plates at a time, systematically perming one against the others, and that did the trick.

  The gentle hum had changed. A deep whine was now coming from the tunneller, and a touch plate at the top of the new panel lit up with a dull red light.

  Kal then moved the machine up to the cavern wall such that the square frame in the front was just touching the rock, and then put one finger onto the glowing plate.

  A section of the wall just disappeared, no dust, no falling rocks, it just wasn’t there anymore. He edged the machine forward slightly while touching the glowing plate and the tunneller ate its way into the rock.

  He stopped just as he was about to draw level with the new tunnel he had created, and backed the machine out again.

  Kal had had enough of the alien technology for the time being, and trembling slightly, got down to confer with the others as to what they should now do.

  So far there didn’t seem to be any dangers in the cavern, and the tunneller worked. They could escape from the cavern if anything threatened them, as long as it didn’t move too fast, although the last in line through the hole in the barrier wall would be at a disadvantage.

  The options were, to try making some new tunnels of their own to see what they could find, leave everything as it was, and return to the outside world, or they could use the machine to remove the barrier they had crawled through, but that would leave the cavern open to whatever the previous users of the machine had tried to close it from.

  It was finally decided to go around the sides of the cavern and see if any tunnels had been made by the previous operators of the machine, and if none were found, then it was unlikely that anything too unpleasant was going to come out of the stonework and attack them.

  If all was well, they could experiment with the tunneller and make some more openings in the cavern wall to see what the mountain might contain.

  After a close search around the cavern, no openings were found, except the shallow one which Kal had made. So, the machine had made its way in here, had been abandoned, and the entrance tunnel sealed up.

  But why? It didn’t make sense to any of them, and they felt that there was something else which they had missed.

  The only place that they could not explore was the roof of the cavern, as it was too high for their oil lights to reveal. Maybe if there was a threat, it was up there.

  In the end, after much discussion via the sketch blocks and copious arm waving, they decided to make a few exploratory tunnels, and if nothing was found, then they would exit the cavern the way they had come in, block up the hole temporarily, and one day come back to retrieve the machine when they could rebuild the barrier wall properly.

  Kal mounted the machine once more, and drove it towards the cavern wall. He had penetrated the rock for only fifty metres or so when the tunneller broke into another cavern, but this one was very different.

  The walls glowed with a pale yellow green light which was somehow different to that given off from the lichens, and then he knew why the whole project had been abandoned. It was radioactive, and the glow on the cavern walls was probably due to a radioactive isotope.

  Kal yelled a warning to the rest of the team who were following up behind the machine, and backed it out of the tunnel he had made as fast as he could.

  They had no means of telling if he or the others had received a lethal dose of radiation, but it was a very unhealthy place to be in, even for a few seconds.

  What he couldn’t understand was the fact that the original tunnellers could build a machine like this, and yet could not protect themselves from radiation.

  That didn’t make sense to him, and he tried to explain it to the others. There was no need to discuss what to do next, Kal put the machine back in the main cavern, and they all ran for the exit as fast as they could.

  They would return one day and retrieve the tunneller, but would be protected by lead shielding.

  Once out in the open air, the dangers of the cavern seemed a little less somehow to Kal, but he did understand the silent dangers of radiation, and would be on the lookout for signs of damage to himself and the others.

  It had been interesting and informative, but disappointing with regard to the iron ore which they were seeking. They carried on up to the top of the incline to find that it levelled out into a small plateau.

  In the distance, the rocks continued on up to form the next stage of the mountain range, and it was thought that it might be worth a visit as they were up here, to check out the next level of the mountain for the iron ore they wanted so badly.

  The next two days were spent searching for the elusive ore in among the gullies and small natural caves which formed this part of the range, but none was found. They did have a very nice collection of coloured crystals, and some samples of what might be metal ores, and had to settle for that.

  As they couldn’t get the steam wagon any higher up the mountain, the only thing to do was to go down again and try somewhere else. The journey down was uneventful, except for the occasional steep section, and that was more of a thrill than anything else, as the wagon picked up speed and the steering had to be very accurate to avoid a crash into the rocks lining the track.

  Having reached the plains, they travelled north again along the mountain chain, looking for caves to explore in the hope that they would find the elusive iron ore. Several stops and searches later produced nothing of any significance, except a few lumps of ore which Kal couldn’t identify, but hoped the metal workers could.

  They hadn’t realized just how far north they had travelled, until the lonely mass of the Clump Trees hove into sight.

  Kal suggested they pay the trees another visit, and gently overrode the reluctance of the crew, who were not too keen on the idea, remembering the last time they were here.

  There seemed to be a change in the trunks s
ince their last visit, several of the outer ones had died, or looked dead, as far as they could tell.

  Having parked the wagon a safe distance away from the clump, Kal went over to the nearest trunk and found that the outer skin had shrivelled and split, and on hitting the column, produced a dull ringing note.

  If it really was wood, and it looked as if it was, then it would make a very dense charcoal indeed, and they could use it for their iron smelting, that’s if they could find the iron ore in large enough quantities in the first place.

  It was worth a try, anyway, and a long rope was attached to the dead trunk. After hitching the other end to the wagon, Kal gave the signal to pull, and the wagon inched forward.

  There was a series of loud snapping noises as the roots gave way, and the huge trunk tottered, and then fell to the ground with an earth shattering crash. Again, there was that strange dull ringing note, which confirmed Kal’s idea that it was not only hard but very dense.

  It wasn’t until it was lying on the ground, that they realized just how large the trunk was. Kal thought the wagon could pull it home, but they would need to find some extra fuel due to the increased resistance the huge bulk would put on the wagon’s pulling power.

  It was with difficulty that they pulled the giant tree well clear of the main clump, and Kal realized that they would have to attach more than one rope to drag their prize home.

  Also, the end of the trunk was tending to dig into the ground as they pulled it along, and as it was too heavy to lift the end up onto the back of the wagon, they would have to try and shape the end a little so that it behaved like the bow of a ship, and didn’t try to bury itself.

  The wood proved to be a lot harder than expected, and by the time the crew had sawn and axed the end to shape, blunting the tools, they were ready for a rest.

  Some of the wood they had removed from the end of the tree was fed into the firebox, and it burned brightly, sending a shower of fine sparks up into the air from the smoke funnel.