Spectrum 5 - [Anthology]

by Kingsley Amis

The ship shot into view, leaping high enough in the air that they could see it above the trees that surrounded them. A gout of blue-white flame was lashing from a hole torn in its stern, then the flame vanished and the ship poised motionlessly for a moment; a great, metal monster halted in mid-flight and pinned against the background of hazy sky. Then the nose dropped, the tail went up, and it fell. It fell in a horizontal position, its impact hidden from them by the trees but the sound of it loud and terrible to hear; the muffled scream of rending metal shrill above the ground-jarring thud of the impact.

  Blake ran past the others, toward the ship. He was vaguely aware of someone yelling, “What—” then he broke through the concealing trees and stopped, appalled by the sight that met his eyes.

  Spaceships were made to withstand the pull of gravity when at rest on their tail fins; to withstand the thrust of the drive which, whether accelerating or decelerating, was only the equivalent of gravitic attraction from the stern. They were constructed to possess great longitudinal strength, with no great cross-sectional strength needed. They were not constructed to withstand a horizontal drop.

  The Star Scout was broken in two.

  Taylor stopped beside him, white and shaken.

  “What . . . what was it?” someone asked. “What happened . . . how could it happen?”

  “The converter blew up,” Blake said, his lips feelings oddly stiff and numb. “It was my fault—I should have had brains enough to think about it before it was too late.”

  “What do you mean?” Cooke demanded.

  “I left the blower going, driving cool air into the drive room. The air was loaded with the dust we stirred up when we landed, and that dust was mainly diamond dust.”

  “Oh!” Cooke’s eyes were fixed on Blake. “So that was it. Diamond dust—carbon—catalyst!”

  “But how?” Taylor asked. “How could the diamond dust have gotten into the converter?”

  “I don’t know.” Blake shook his head. “Maybe the inspection crew forgot to put the cover back on the fuel inlet—maybe the clamps broke while we were en route. Anyway, it happened—somehow enough of the dust got into the fuel inlet to put the amount of catalyst past a critical percentage and the converter exploded. I shouldn’t have started the blower until I first went in and made a check of the fuel inlet.”

  “Why?” Cooke asked. “Did you ever hear of anything like this ever happening before?”

  “No.”

  “Then why should you have checked? You had no reason to think the fuel inlet might be open, and neither did you discover this was diamond dust until about a minute before the explosion. You couldn’t have done anything about it in only one minute.”

  “I suppose not,” Blake agreed, “but I can’t help feeling I should have been more careful. But that’s all water under the bridge; here we are among our diamonds with no way of getting home—not for a long time at best, I’m afraid. So let’s see just how long that may be, just how great the damage to the ship is.”

  “From here,” Cooke observed as they walked toward the ship, “the situation looks hopeless. Our ship looks exactly like an overripe watermelon that’s had a bad fall. It’s not only broken in two, with a few girders holding the broken halves together, it’s also sort of flattened now, rather than round like it once was.”

  “And gaping open at every seam,” Wilfred added.

  * * *

  They passed the stern of the ship, where the rim of the ragged hole still glowed redly with half-molten metal, and Blake motioned toward the deep furrow blasted in the ground where the ship had stood. “The blast was directional,” he said. “If it hadn’t been, it would have destroyed the lower half of the ship.”

  “It didn’t make such a big hole in the stern,” Cooke remarked with a return of his characteristic optimism. We could patch it.”

  “Of course,” he added bleakly, “we’d only have half a ship to drive, and no converter to power our drive—if we have a drive left.”

  They entered the ship by the gap where it had broken apart, climbing through the bent and broken steel. The elevator shaft, now a horizontal passageway, was accessible by climbing up the ragged, torn sheet metal and girders. Blake made a suggestion to the older Taylor before they climbed up into the elevator shaft.

  “I’d like to look at the drive room and the repair shop. So, suppose Cooke and I do that while you and the others see what the damage is in the forward half of the ship?”

  “Anything you say, Red,” Taylor answered. “I have an idea we’ll find nothing but wreckage either way.”

  “First, I’ll get some lights for you,” Blake said.

  He climbed up into the elevator shaft and made his way to the supply level of the ship. The door to the room he entered opened with considerable difficulty and the scene inside, as revealed by his pocket lighter, was utter confusion and chaos. He found the locker that held the emergency lights under a mass of miscellaneous supplies, equipment and broken containers and took five lights from it.

  He went back to the gap in the ship and tossed three of the lights to the others. They began to climb up into their own section of the ship and Cooke scrambled up to where he stood.

  “How did it look where you were?” Cooke asked.

  “Just a little untidy,” he answered, leading the way to the drive room.

  They forced the now-horizontal drive room door open and a gush of warm air struck them. The drive room was fairly well lighted by the hole the converter’s explosion had produced and they appraised the damage, not caring to drop the ten feet to the new floor.

  “That shapeless gob over there by the hole—that’s all that remains of our converter,” Blake said. “The explosion was directional, all right, and the converter was working at minimum output—if it had been up to as much as quarter output, it couldn’t have remained directional and at a quarter output the entire ship would have vanished in a blaze of glory.”

  He flashed his light down into the shadowy corners of the room and found what he sought. “Look—see that square metal thing?” he asked. “That’s the fuel inlet cover. Sure enough, it wasn’t in place—they must have forgotten to tighten down the clamps.”

  “And we paid them to do that?” Cooke asked bitterly, flashing his own light over the cover.

  * * *

  Blake moved his light slowly over the drive assembly. Originally equipped with the old Harding atomic drive, the transformation to the hyperspace drive had—for financial reasons—been confined to the installation of the space-shift units and the installation of the nuclear converter to supply the enormous energy required by the hyperspace units to wrench the ship from normal space into hyperspace. Although a modern drive would have been preferred, their limited capital had forced them to compromise by leaving the atomic rocket drive intact and modifying its fuel chambers to accept the tailor-made fuel prepared for it by the converter.

  “How does it look?” Cooke asked. “I can’t see where the blast did any damage to it. Am I right?”

  “I think you are—the directional blast missed it and its construction was rugged enough that the fall didn’t affect it. This is more than I had dared hope for—we can alter those fuel chambers back to the way they were and we have a rocket drive again.

  “If,” he added, “we can find uranium.”

  “And then what? Won’t we be a little bit old and feeble by the time we get home through normal space, thirty thousand years from now?”

  “Well, I don’t know of any outpost of civilization we can reach in less than two hundred years,” Blake said, “which would be too far to do us any good. However, to get anywhere in hyperspace, we still have to have a drive, you know. We have to have a drive to get off this planet so we can get in hyperspace in the first place.”

  “Once we fix up our drive and get away from here—how do we get into hyperspace with no converter to power the space-shift units?” Cooke asked.

  “That is the question, and I don’t know the answer. But I was taki
ng first things first. If we can find uranium—and we surely can—we can soon solve every problem but that one.”

  He passed his light over the squat generator that had served to supply the ship with electrical power before the installation of the converter. It hung by two of its mounting bolts from the vertical floor, but it seemed undamaged.

  “There’s our power—if we had some way to store it,” he said. “If we could devise a perfect condenser of unlimited capacity, we could accumulate enough power to give the space-shift units the wallop that would jump us into hyperspace. Anyway, whatever we do, we’re going to need that generator. We’re going to need electrical power for operating the lathe—if it isn’t smashed beyond repair—welding, perhaps even for refining metals with some sort of an electric furnace.”

  “How do we power the generator?” Cooke asked.

  “That can be done,” Blake said. “Provided we have a lathe to build what we want.”

  He turned away from the drive room without further explanation and Cooke followed him to the repair shop. As with all other rooms in the ship’s new position, the door was horizontal, but the repair shop was smaller than the drive room and it was no more than a six-foot drop to the new floor. Blake saw, with a sense of vast relief, that the lathe was still solidly bolted to the vertical floor. The other equipment was a jumbled mass on the floor and they poked into it curiously for a few minutes.

  “Not much in the way of broken stuff here,” Cooke said. “Steel tools seem to stand up pretty good when a ship does a belly-whopper. I hope the transmitter fared as well.”

  “That’s something we’re all hoping, but you’re the first one to speak out loud about it,” Blake said. “I don’t see how it could have survived—a transmitter is big, heavy and fragile.”

  “Neither do I. I suppose that’s why no one dared even say he hoped it wouldn’t be smashed.”

  “Let’s see about our truck,” Blake said. “If the transmitter is smashed beyond repair, we’ll have to try to find uranium and we’ll stand little chance of prospecting these ranges on foot.”

  Again, luck had been with them. The little truck was unharmed but for a crumpled fender. Some of its bright red enamel had been knocked off by the fall of the diamond drill rods but the diamond drill, itself, seemed untouched.

  “And that covers the important things in our end of the ship,” Blake said. “Let’s see what luck the others had.”

  * * *

  Wilfred was just descending from the broken elevator shaft, carrying a load of food and cooking utensils. “We’ll camp out for a while, it looks like,” he said. “With the new floors knee deep in wreckage and the doors six feet to ten feet up on the walls, living in the ship would be just a little inconvenient.”

  “We’ll have to cut a passageway along the bottom side of the ship’s hull,” Blake said. “We can dodge the girders and just cut through the old flooring.”

  “How did it look up there?” Cooke asked. “What about the transmitter?”

  “We won’t send any SOS,” Wilfred said flatly. “The transmitter tubes are smashed to fragments.”

  “I was afraid they would be,” Blake said. “Do the others need help with their loads?”

  “They could use some help, all right,” Wilfred said, climbing down with his own.

  They crossed the gap and met Lenson and Taylor in the elevator shaft, each with a burden of sleeping bags and various other things needed for a comfortable night outside. Blake and Cooke relieved them of part of their loads and the four of them carried their burdens to the clean, sandy spot near one of the trees where Wilfred had set up their “kitchen.”

  Blake dropped his load and spoke to Taylor. “So the transmitter is ruined?” he asked.

  “The final power stage is,” Taylor replied. “The drive stage took the fall pretty well and we could couple that in, except—”

  “Except what?”

  “In normal space that would give us a range of around a billion miles—no more than halfway to our sun’s yellow companion. Useless.”

  “Oh—so we don’t even get the chance to use our little driver stage in hyperspace?”

  “The space-shift signal transformers are complete wreckage. Any signal we sent, even if we had our final power stage intact, would take three lifetimes to reach the nearest outpost through normal space. We could send a signal through hyperspace, with our drive stage, for sixty thousand billion miles—but the hyperspace transformers are broken and smashed and we could never, with our resources, replace them. So that brings up the question—what now?”

  “Our space-shift units in the drive room seem to be undamaged and it wouldn’t be difficult to change the rocket fuel chambers again so that we can lift the ship with an uranium fuel,” Blake answered. “And we do have to lift the ship to make the jump into hyperspace under any circumstances. If uranium is to be found, we’ll only have the one big problem to solve—and it’s really big—how to produce enough power to activate the space-shift units. If necessity forced us to, I have an idea we might even make another converter. Of course, our success would be an uncertain thing and it would require years of work as well as luck, but it would be better than just giving up—at least, we would be trying.”

  He glanced toward the nearby canyon mouth. “Uranium is the vital essential, no matter what we do. I’m going to take a little walk while Wilfred fixes something to eat—I want to see what the formations look like, and if they offer any encouragement.”

  “And then we’ll talk over our plans after we eat,” Taylor said. “A man takes a more optimistic view of his circumstances when is stomach is full, anyway.”

  * * *

  Blake walked until he came to the first bank of rock and gravel, then examined what he found with considerable muttering. The formations represented by the rocks that had washed down out of the canyon were almost like those of any Earth-type planet, with one incredible exception; every rock, whether near-granite, near-rhyolite, near-andesite, whether high or low in silica content, contained almost the same high percentage of diamond crystal inclusions. In the coarse-grained rocks, such as the near-granites, the diamond crystals were as large as the end of his little finger, while the fine-grained near-rhyolites contained the diamonds as minute inclusions. But, whether the rock was fine- or coarse-grained, the diamond was present in all in approximately the same high percentage.

  He had just come upon his first specimen of Aurora’s animal life when he heard the distant call of Wilfred announcing dinner. He ignored the call for a moment, walking closer to the small, brown-furred animal. It was about the size of a squirrel, with a round, dark-eyed face and a fat little stomach that it scratched in an absent manner as it solemnly watched his approach. It let him reach within six inches of it before it scampered a few feet farther away from him, to stop and resume its solemn staring.

  Wilfred called again and he turned back toward camp, the little animal staring after him as he went. Apparently they would have no ferocious carnivora to contend with on Aurora—the little animal had been without fear of him, or virtually so. It had not behaved in the manner of an animal accustomed to the law of “Run—or be eaten!”

  * * *

  Dishes were scrubbed with a generous amount of sand and a small amount of water after the meal was over, then Taylor began the discussion of their circumstances.

  “Our simplest solution would have been to send out an SOS,” he said. “We could have contacted a ship easily enough on the emergency band—possibly one no more than a day or so from here.”

  “A day or so by hyperspace—two hundred years or more in normal space,” Cooke commented. “A man doesn’t really realize how great galactic distances are until he gets stuck thirty thousand light-years from home, does he?”

  Lenson sighed and gave the broken ship a dark look. “I’m already beginning to acquire an unpleasant comprehension of the true magnitude of galactic distances.”

  “It seems to me that we have only two alternatives,
” Blake said. “We have to get either our ship or an SOS into hyperspace. We have the power to send the SOS through hyperspace, but the space-shift transformer that would send our signal into hyperspace is broken. The space-shift units that would send our ship into hyperspace are undamaged—but we haven’t the power they would have to have. Which do we want to try to do—build a nuclear converter and take our ship back, or make a space-shift transformer for the transmission of an SOS?”

  “We would not only have to make the transformer that would send our signal into hyperspace, we’d also have to replace the broken power stage of the transmitter,” Taylor said. “The driver stage, even in hyperspace, would have a range so limited that it wouldn’t reach the nearest outpost. Unless a ship happened to wander within its range, its signals would never be picked up. And Space being the size it is, that might not occur within our lifetimes.”

  “You think it would be useless to attempt to duplicate the space-shift signal transformer and the transmitter tubes?” Wilfred asked.