Spectrum 5 - [Anthology]

by Kingsley Amis

  “I’m convinced that their duplication is beyond us,” Taylor said. “They require special alloys as well as rare gases. They require delicate precision assembly; in fact, the machines that assemble them would require years of labor to build.”

  “We already have the means of putting our ship into hyperspace,” Blake said. “All we need is the power. It seems to me we could more easily figure out a method of accumulating that power than we could build precision electronic equipment. After all, all we need is a tremendous store of energy to power our jump into hyperspace—a lot of energy for a short period. The drop back into normal space doesn’t require but a fraction of that power.”

  “If there is no hope of sending an SOS, then we haven’t any choice but to do that, have we?” Wilfred asked.

  “I think we can safely say that the hope of sending an SOS is nil,” Taylor said.

  None of the others voiced any disagreement and Blake said:

  “If we can find uranium, we won’t have much trouble changing the fuel chambers to suit the fuel. We probably will have to spend more time making the ship—or the stern half of it—air-tight again than anything else. At any rate, the whole thing is hopeless unless we do rig up an atomic drive. We have to lift our ship into space to slip it into hyperspace and there’s no use conjecturing on how we’re going to take the second step until we know we can take the first step.”

  No one spoke for a few seconds, then Taylor said, “I suppose we agree on that, then. Now, the important thing is; can we find the uranium?” He looked at Blake. “How about it—what do you think of the possibilities?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Blake answered. “I haven’t seen any of this country, yet. I saw no evidence of metallic ores in the rocks washed down out of that canyon, but we could hardly expect to discover uranium that easily.”

  “What did you find?” Cooke asked.

  “These rock formations are similar to Earth-type formations, and the silica content is about normal—if a person discounts the diamond present. The diamond is present in all formations, whether high or low in silica, usually as small to minute crystals. The larger crystals we saw must have come from pegmatitic formations.”

  “Which are—?” Cooke asked.

  “Extremely coarse-grained bodies of rock. Minerals in pegmatitic form as unusually large crystals. On Charon we found a perfect quartz crystal that weighed a thousand pounds in a pegmatitic formation. Cummings—an old white-haired fellow who had been born on Old Earth—said that crystals much larger than that had been found on Old Earth in the past.

  “There’s something else about pegmatites,” he added. “Pitchblende is sometimes found in pegmatitic formations. So, it may possibly be that the uranium ore we find—if we find any—will be in the same formation that these diamond boulders come from.”

  “Another thing—” Taylor said, thoughtfully. “We’ll have to have cadmium. Cadmium and uranium—if we can find the two ores and refine them, we can alter the drive.”

  “Which will take how long—just as a wild guess?” Lenson asked.

  Taylor smiled. “That’s like asking how high is up. But, just as an optimistic guess, I’d say from one to two years.”

  Wilfred nodded his head in agreement. “I’d say that was about right—not less than one and not more than two years. We’re lucky in that we have a lathe and other tools to work with, a truck to use for prospecting and all the mining equipment we need to mine the ore after we find it.”

  “The first thing will be to fix up a place to live,” Taylor said, pulling up his pants leg to rub a skinned and bruised knee. “Climbing in and out of those rooms as we did this afternoon is hard work, and painful.”

  “Red suggested cutting a passageway along the bottom of the hull—using the bottom of the hull as the floor,” Wilfred said. “That shouldn’t take long. We can rearrange everything to accommodate the new floor and we’ll certainly have to take the lathe down off the wall and set it up again on the floor.”

  * * *

  Their first Aurorian sunset stopped all talk of future operations a few minutes later. The sun was invisible behind some distant range, its last rays throwing lances of ruby, emerald and gold across the scintillating rainbow field that was the western sky. The lances shifted as they watched, widening and quivering with the splendor of their ever-changing colors until they rippled across the sky like the banners of some celestial fairyland.

  Lenson was the first to speak, after the colors began to fade. “I never saw anything like that,” he said, almost awe in his voice.

  “Nor I,” Cooke said, sprawling back against his sleeping bag. “That looks exactly the way my mother used to tell me heaven would look—before she decided I’d never go there, anyway.”

  “Probably caused by several different layers of air currents, traveling at different speeds and carrying varying amounts of dust and water vapor,” Wilfred offered.

  “Huh!” Cooke snorted. “Do you always have to be so pragmatic and practical?”

  “Oh, it was impressive, I’ll admit, but there was a simple, everyday reason for its beauty—the one I suggested, likely. Beautiful sunsets on Earth-type planets are due to water vapor and impurities in the atmosphere.”

  “Then, so long as we’re stuck here, let’s be grateful that our atmosphere does contain these beautiful-sunset producing impurities,” Lenson said.

  * * *

  The afterglow faded from the sky and the Thousand Suns revealed themselves; a field of bright points of light shining through the haze with sufficient brilliance to throw dim shadows along the ground.

  “We’ll have to make observations,” Taylor remarked. “I’ll start making daily observations of our sun and its companion. We know the days here are about twenty-four hours long, but we don’t know whether it’s spring or summer—or possibly this world has no seasonal inclination of the poles.”

  “I think it’s spring,” Blake said. “The higher peaks we saw through the haze were covered with snow. Of course, that’s not very conclusive evidence.”

  “Let’s hope it’s spring,” Taylor said. “We know that our year is about six Earth-years in length and, with luck, we may be able to get away from here before winter comes.”

  There was a little more talk of their plans; then, one by one, they spread out their sleeping bags and crawled in. Blake, the last to retire, sat for a while watching the golden field the Thousand Suns made of the haze, reaching from the western horizon halfway to the zenith. To the east the sky was dead black, with no star to relieve it. There were none in that direction; not for a long, long way. Aurora had recently passed the farthest point from the Thousand Suns in her orbit; a straight line would pass from her to her sun, to close by the blue-white sun’s yellow companion, then on into the Thousand Suns.

  Blake remarked, just before he went to sleep, “You’ll see what utter darkness is before morning—after the Thousand Suns go down and before the sun comes up.”

  * * *

  It required fifteen days to get the ship even partly in condition for living. There was the passage to be cut, doors to be fitted to keep out the fine dust stirred up by the afternoon winds, the ship’s water tank to be equipped with sediment filters, the tables and chairs to be unbolted from their incongruous positions on what had become the walls, the truck to be lowered out of the ship—an endless number of things to be done.

  Blake and Cooke left on the morning of the sixteenth day, leaving the other three to continue the work on and in the ship. They watched Blake and Cooke depart with a certain wistfulness and Cooke remarked, as they ground away through the sand, “I think all would have liked to go with us. They’ll have nothing but hard work while we’re out enjoying the fresh air and new scenery.”

  “You may change your mind about ‘enjoying’ it,” Blake said. “Walking can be hard work when you do it all day.”

  “What’s this truck for?” Cooke wanted to know.

  “To haul our stuff. We won’t use it any mor
e than we have to—we can make new shoes by hand but we can’t make a new truck.”

  “Do you think the diamond dust will be that bad?”

  “I hope we find diamond dust and sand are the exceptions rather than the rule, but all evidence shows the diamond to be present everywhere. If so, we’ll have to use the truck as little as possible—if we find the ores we want, then the truck will be indispensable for hauling them to the ship. Whatever we have to have for refining the ores will have to be at the ship—or we’ll have to haul a good deal of material and equipment to the ore. Either way, we’ll have to have this truck, so we’d better take care of it.”

  “I can see your point,” Cooke agreed, “but I doubt that we’ll wear it out very fast. After all, this thing was made to use in country where there was silica sand, and diamond is less than fifty per cent harder than silica.”

  “If you were correct in that surmise, I wouldn’t be worried,” Blake said.

  “What do you mean—’if’?” Cooke demanded. “Quartz has a hardness of seven and diamond has a hardness of ten. That’s less than fifty per cent harder, isn’t it?”

  Blake sighed. “The true and unpleasant facts are these: Diamond is said to have a hardness of ten because it’s the only thing harder than corundum’s nine. A mineralogist named Woodell, a long time ago and back on Old Earth, determined the true hardness of diamond in comparison with quartz’s seven and corundum’s nine. The actual hardness of diamond ranges from a fraction over thirty-six to a fraction over forty-two.”

  “Oh.” Cooke was thoughtfully silent for a while. “Then we can count on this diamond sand and dust being six times harder than the sand and dust this truck was made to resist.”

  “Six times harder, and also tougher.”

  * * *

  They lurched across a small gulch and onto a silty flat, winding to avoid the thorn bushes that were scattered across it. The morning air was still and the dust they raised followed them in a dense cloud, coating their faces and clothing an iridescent gray, gritting harshly wherever two parts of metal moved together, such as the driving controls. They had traveled an hour, enclosed in the cloud of destructive dust, when Blake said, “I wonder—”

  “You wonder what?” Cooke asked, his black eyes made blacker by the gray dust that covered his face.

  “I wonder if this diamond dust hasn’t got us behind an eight-ball—a big, shiny eight-ball named Aurora.”

  They worked their way along the southern foot of the mountain, toward the high plateau to the east where the creek might have its headwaters. They prospected the canyons one by one, both by carrying back samples of the bedrock gravels to the truck, to pan for particles of the heavy uranium and cadmium ores they sought, and by use of the Geiger counters they each carried. Cooke ran the gauntlet from his first feeling of carefree adventure to a condition of sore, aching legs and blistered hands. Their picks and shovels wore away with amazing rapidity, even from digging in the comparatively loose gravels of the canyon beds, and they found nothing.

  They reached the eastern end of the range, a high, bleak plateau where the creek had its headwaters and where the nights were chilly with the breezes from the slowly melting snowbanks. There was nothing there but barren flow rocks and the inevitable diamond so they turned and worked their way back down the northern side of the range. Cooke’s soft muscles hardened and his habitual optimism returned, undaunted by the lack of heavy-metal concentrates in the samples they panned or by the Geiger counters that remained silent but for the intermittent clicking of the natural background count.

  Twice they found veins of soft iron oxide and once they found a narrow vein of low-grade copper ore but the mountain seemed devoid of any uranium or of any lead-zinc ore that might contain the cadmium they needed.

  Blake cared for the little truck with painstaking attention, doing everything possible to keep the diamond dust out of its moving parts. But no way could be devised to keep the dust out of such moving parts as the brake drums, the ball and socket of the front-wheel drive, the control-lever linkage, the winch they were forced to use so many times, and many other moving parts. The air filter caused him more worry than anything else. He knew a certain amount of the fine dust was getting past the filter and into the motor, and there was nothing he could do about it. It was a good filter, made to protect an engine against silica dust; any silica dust fine enough to get past the filter would be too fine to cause any damage before it was reduced to an impalpable powder. But the diamond dust it admitted was six times harder than silica, as well as tougher—the diamond dust would refuse to be reduced to a harmless, impalpable powder.

  They rounded the west end of the range early on the thirtieth day and saw the green line of the creek a mile away. The truck labored noisily as Blake turned it up a gentle grade toward the mouth of a narrow canyon and he shifted into a lower gear.

  “It’s a good thing we’re only five miles from camp,” Cooke said. “You’re about three gears lower than you would be if this truck was in the same condition it was in when we left camp thirty days ago.”

  “I’m afraid this will be its last trip—I’ve tried to baby it along and keep the dust out of it, but you just can’t enclose a machine in a dust-proof wrapper.”

  * * *

  They left the truck on the smooth alluvial fan just outside the canyon’s narrow portal and began the by now repetitious process of prospecting the canyon. It was late in the afternoon when they found their first cadmium; a thin gray seam of metallic sulfide in a rock washed down from higher on the canyon’s wall.

  “The gray sulfide is lead and zinc,” Blake said. “Those little yellowish-orange spots in it are cadmium sulfide.”

  Cooke shook his head. “The percentage of cadmium is so slight—and the lead and zinc is only a thin seam.”

  “It might have wider portions where it’s in place,” Blake said, looking up the steeply sloping canyon’s side. “It shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  They located it in place an hour later, halfway up the canyon’s side, but it was only a short, narrow seam. Blake tried unsuccessfully to dig into it with his prospector’s pick, the point of which had long since been worn to a blunt stub. Cooke, pounding vainly at the tight-grained formation beside him, stopped to light a cigarette and wipe the sweat from his face.

  “We have acids and glycerin,” he said. “If we only had a few holes drilled in this rock, we could fill them with nitroglycerine.”

  “There’s a chance in a thousand that it might get wider at a greater depth,” Blake said, ceasing his own futile pounding. “But how do we drill holes in it?”

  “The diamond drill—” Cooke began, then his voice trailed off.

  “Exactly,” Blake said, seeing what was suddenly in Cooke’s mind. “How do we drill diamond-bearing rock with a diamond drill?”

  “How did we intend to drill holes for mining when we started out thirty days ago? I won’t argue about the diamond drill—I can’t see how it could drill through diamond-bearing rock—but why didn’t we think of all that before?”

  “We didn’t know for sure that all formations carried the same high percentage of diamond,” Blake pointed out. “We hoped such wouldn’t be the case, remember?”

  “What a world to live on!” Cooke sighed. “Everything we try to do is foiled by diamonds. How can a superabundance of just one element manage to cause so much grief?”

  “Well”—Blake shook his empty canteen and glanced to the west where the sun had disappeared behind the canyon wall—”we can’t do any more here, now, so we might as well get on back to the truck and have something to eat before dark.”

  Cooke led the way to the bed of the canyon, his blithe spirits returned sufficiently for him to be whistling by the time they reached it. They were halfway to the canyon’s portal when it became suddenly darker, as though a heavy cloud had covered the sun. It grew darker, although Blake’s watch said the sun was not quite ready to set, and when they were almost to the portal’s cliffs, wher
e the canyon suddenly opened out upon the desert, he became aware of a low roar above the crunching of his footsteps in the diamond sand. It came from the desert beyond the portal; a sound like a distant waterfall.

  Cooke, two hundred feet ahead of him, was still whistling cheerily and had obviously not heard it. Blake increased his pace and was almost up with him when Cooke stepped beyond the cliffs that still hid the desert from Blake.

  Cooke stopped, then, a look of amazement on his face, staring in the direction of their truck and the desert beyond. Then he wheeled to shout back at Blake, “What is it?”

  Blake was beside him a few seconds later and he saw the source of the sound he had heard.

  It was a mile away; a great, high black wall rushing toward them, its towering crest lost in the atmospheric haze. It was racing toward them at perhaps fifty miles an hour, roaring with a deep, sustained roar and the sheer front of it seething and boiling.