Unwise Child by Randall Garrett (world best books to read TXT) 📗

a kicked horse. From deep within her vitals, the throb began, a strumming, thrumming sound with a somewhat higher note imposed upon it, making a sound like that of a bass viol being plucked rapidly on its lowest string.

It was not the intensity of the ionosphere that cracked the drive of the Brainchild; it was the duration. The layer of ionization was too thick; the ship couldn’t make it through the layer fast enough, in spite of her high velocity.

A man can hold a red-hot bit of steel in his hand for a fraction of a second without even feeling it. But if he has to hold a hot baked potato for thirty seconds, he’s likely to get a bad burn.

So it was with the Brainchild. The passage through Earth’s ionosphere during take-off had been measured in fractions of a second. The Brainchild had reacted, but the exposure to the field had been too short to hurt her.

The ionosphere of Eisberg was much deeper and, although the intensity was less, the duration was much longer.

[176] The drumming increased as she fell, a low-frequency, high-energy sine wave that shook the ship more violently than had the out-of-phase beat that had pummeled the ship shortly after her take-off.

Dr. Morris Fitzhugh, the roboticist, screamed imprecations into the intercom, but Captain Sir Henry Quill cut him off before anyone took notice and let the scientist rave into a dead pickup.

“How’s she coming?”

The voice came over the intercom to the Power Section, and Mike the Angel knew that the question was meant for him.

“She’ll make it, Captain,” he said. “She’ll make it. I designed this thing for a 500 per cent overload. She’ll make it.”

“Good,” said Black Bart, snapping off the intercom.

Mike exhaled gustily. His eyes were still on the needles that kept creeping higher and higher along the calibrated periphery of the meters. Many of them had long since passed the red lines that marked the allowable overload point. Mike the Angel knew that those points had been set low, but he also knew that they were approaching the real overload point.

He took another deep breath and held it.

Point for point, the continent of Antarctica, Earth, is one of the most deadly areas ever found on a planet that is supposedly non-inimical to man. Earth is a nice, comfortable planet, most of the time, but Antarctica just doesn’t cater to Man at all.

Still, it just happens to be the worst spot on the best planet in the known Galaxy.

Eisberg is different. At its best, it has the continent of[177] Antarctica beat four thousand ways from a week ago last Candlemas. At its worst, it is sudden death; at its best, it is somewhat less than sudden.

Not that Eisberg is a really mean planet; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune can kill a man faster and with less pain. No, Eisberg isn’t mean—it’s torturous. A man without clothes, placed suddenly on the surface of Eisberg—anywhere on the surface—would die. But the trouble is that he’d live long enough for it to hurt.

Man can survive, all right, but it takes equipment and intelligence to do it.

When the interstellar ship Brainchild blew a tube—just one tube—of the external field that fought the ship’s mass against the space-strain of the planet’s gravitational field, the ship went off orbit. The tube blew when she was some ninety miles above the surface. She dropped too fast, jerked up, dropped again.

When the engines compensated for the lost tube, the descent was more leisurely, and the ship settled gently—well, not exactly gently—on the surface of Eisberg.

Captain Quill’s voice came over the intercom.

“We are nearly a hundred miles from the base, Mister Gabriel. Any excuse?”

“No excuse, sir,” said Mike the Angel.

[178]

20

If you ignite a jet of oxygen-nitrogen in an atmosphere of hydrogen-methane, you get a flame that doesn’t differ much from the flame from a hydrogen-methane jet in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. A flame doesn’t particularly care which way the electrons jump, just so long as they jump.

All of which was due to give Mike the Angel more headaches than he already had, which was 100 per cent too many.

Three days after the Brainchild landed, the scout group arrived from the base that had been built on Eisberg to take care of Snookums. The leader, a heavy-set engineer named Treadmore, who had unkempt brownish hair and a sad look in his eyes, informed Captain Quill that there was a great deal of work to be done. And his countenance became even sadder.

Mike, who had, perforce, been called in to take part in the conference, listened in silence while the engineer talked.

The officers’ wardroom, of which Mike the Angel was becoming heartily sick, seemed like a tomb which echoed and re-echoed the lugubrious voice of Engineer Treadmore.

“We were warned, of course,” he said, in a normally dismal [179] tone, “that it would be extremely difficult to set down the ship which carried Snookums, and that we could expect the final base to be anywhere from ten to thirty miles from the original, temporary base.” He looked round at everyone, giving the impression of a collie which had just been kicked by Albert Payson Terhune.

“We understand, naturally, that you could not help landing so far from our original base,” he said, giving them absolution with faint damns, “but it will entail a great deal of extra labor. A hundred and nine miles is a great distance to carry equipment, and, actually, the distance is a great deal more, considering the configuration of the terrain. The....”

The upshot of the whole thing was that only part of the crew could possibly be spared to go home on the Fireball, which was orbiting high above the atmosphere. And, since there was no point in sending a small load home at extra expense when the Fireball could wait for the others, it meant that nobody could go home at all for four more weeks. The extra help was needed to get the new base established.

It was obviously impossible to try to move the Brainchild a hundred miles. With nothing to power her but the Translation drive, she was as helpless as a submarine on the Sahara. Especially now that her drive was shot.

The Eisberg base had to be built around Snookums, who was, after all, the only reason for the base’s existence. And, too, the power plant of the Brainchild had been destined to be the source of power for the permanent base.

It wasn’t too bad, really. A little extra time, but not much.

The advance base, commanded by Treadmore, was fairly well equipped. For transportation, they had one jet-powered [180] aircraft, a couple of ’copters, and fifteen ground-crawlers with fat tires, plus all kinds of powered construction machinery. All of them were fueled with liquid HNO3, which makes a pretty good fuel in an atmosphere that is predominantly methane. Like the gasoline-air engines of a century before, they were spark-started reciprocating engines, except for the turbine-powered aircraft.

The only trouble with the whole project was that the materials had to be toted across a hundred miles of exceedingly hostile territory.

Treadmore, looking like a tortured bloodhound, said: “But we’ll make it, won’t we?”

Everyone nodded dismally.

Mike the Angel had a job he emphatically didn’t like. He was supposed to convert the power plant of the Brainchild from a spaceship driver into a stationary generator. The conversion job itself wasn’t tedious; in principle, it was similar to taking the engine out of an automobile and converting it to a power plant for an electric generator. In fact, it was somewhat simpler, in theory, since the engines of the Brainchild were already equipped for heavy drainage to run the electrical systems aboard ship, and to power and refrigerate Snookums’ gigantic brain, which was no mean task in itself.

But Michael Raphael Gabriel, head of one of the foremost—if not the foremost—power design corporations in the known Galaxy, did not like degrading something. To convert the Brainchild’s plant from a spaceship drive to an electric power plant seemed to him to be on the same order as using a turboelectric generator to power a flashlight. A waste.

To make things worse, the small percentage of hydrogen [181] in the atmosphere got sneaky sometimes. It could insinuate itself into places where neither the methane nor the ammonia could get. Someone once called hydrogen the “cockroach element,” since, like that antediluvian insect, the molecules of H2 can insidiously infiltrate themselves into places where they are not only unwelcome, but shouldn’t even be able to go. At red heat, the little molecules can squeeze themselves through the crystalline interstices of quartz and steel.

Granted, the temperature of Eisberg is a long way from red hot, but normal sealing still won’t keep out hydrogen. Add to that the fact that hydrogen and methane are both colorless, odorless, and tasteless, and you have the beginnings of an explosive situation.

The only reason that no one died is because the Space Service is what it is.

Unlike the land, sea, and air forces of Earth, the Space Service does not have a long history of fighting other human beings. There has never been a space war, and, the way things stand, there is no likelihood of one in the foreseeable future.

But the Space Service does fight, in its own way. It fights the airlessness of space and the unfriendly atmospheres of exotic planets, using machines, intelligence, knowledge, and human courage as its weapons. Some battles have been lost; others have been won. And the war is still going on. It is an unending war, one which has no victory in sight.

It is, as far as we can tell, the only war in human history in which Mankind is fully justified as the invading aggressor.

It is not a defensive war; neither space nor other planets have attacked Man. Man has invaded space “simply because [182] it is there.” It is war of a different sort, true, but it is nonetheless a war.

The Space Service was used to the kind of battle it waged on Eisberg. It was prepared to lose men, but even more prepared to save them.

[183]

21

Mike the Angel stepped into the cargo air lock of the Brainchild, stood morosely in the center of the cubicle, and watched the outer door close. Eight other men, clad, like himself, in regulation Space Service spacesuits, also looked wearily at the closing door.

Chief Multhaus, one of the eight, turned his head to look at Mike the Angel. “I wish that thing would close as fast as my eyes are going to in about fifteen minutes, Commander.” His voice rumbled deeply in Mike’s earphones.

“Yeah,” said Mike, too tired to make decent conversation.

Eight hours—all of them spent tearing down the spaceship and making it a part of the new base—had not been exactly exhilarating to any of them.

The door closed, and the pumps began to work. The men were wearing Space Service Suit Three. For every environment, for every conceivable emergency, a suit had been built—if, of course, a suit could be built for it. Nobody had yet built a suit for walking about in the middle of a sun, but, then, nobody had ever volunteered to try anything like that.

They were all called “spacesuits” because most of them [184] could be worn in the vacuum of space, but most of them weren’t designed for that type of work. Suit One—a light, easily manipulated, almost skin-tight covering, was the real spacesuit. It was perfect for work in interstellar space, where there was a microscopic amount of radiation incident to the suit, no air, and almost nil gravity. For exterior repairs on the outside of a ship in free fall a long way from any star, Spacesuit One was the proper garb.

But, a suit that worked fine in space didn’t necessarily work on other planets, unless it worked fine on the planet it was used on.

A Moon Suit isn’t a Mars Suit isn’t a Venus Suit isn’t a Triton Suit isn’t a....

Carry it on from there.

Number Three was insulated against a frigid but relatively non-corrosive atmosphere. When the pumps in the air lock began pulling out the methane-laden atmosphere, they began to bulge slightly, but not excessively. Then nitrogen, extracted from the ammonia snow that was so plentiful, filled the room, diluting the remaining inflammable gases to a harmless concentration.

Then that mixture was pumped out, to be replaced by a mixture of approximately 20 per cent oxygen and 80 per cent nitrogen—common, or garden-variety, air.

Mike the Angel cracked his helmet and sniffed. “Guk,” he said. “If I ever faint and someone gives me smelling salts, I’ll flay him alive with a coarse rasp.”

“Yessir,” said Chief Multhaus, as he began to shuck his suit. “But if I had my druthers, I’d druther you’d figure out some way to get all