The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 05

by Anthology

  H{2}O was, anywhere on the planet, a whitish, crystalline mineral suitable for building material. The atmosphere was similar to that of Jupiter, although the proportions of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen were different because of the lower gravitational potential of the planet. It had managed to retain a great deal more hydrogen in its atmosphere than Earth had because of the fact that the average thermal velocity of the molecules was much lower. Since oxygen-releasing life had never developed on the frigid surface of the planet, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. It was all tied up in combination with the hydrogen of the ice and the surface rocks of the planet.

  The Space Service ship that had discovered the planet, fifteen years before, had given it the name Eisberg, thus commemorating the name of a spaceman second class who happened to have the luck to be (a) named Robert Eisberg, (b) a member of the crew of the ship to discover the planet, and (c) under the command of a fun-loving captain.

  Eisberg had been picked as the planet to transfer the potentially dangerous Snookums to for two reasons. In the first place, if Snookums actually did solve the problem of the total-annihilation bomb, the worst he could do was destroy a planet that wasn't much good, anyway. And, in the second place, the same energy requirements applied on Eisberg as did on Chilblains Base. It was easier to cool the helium bath of the brain if it only had to be lowered 175 degrees or so.

  It was a great place for cold-work labs, but not worth anything for colonization.

  * * * * *

  Chief Powerman's Mate Multhaus looked gloomily at the figures on the landing sheet.

  Mike the Angel watched the expression on the chief's face and said: "What's the matter, Multhaus? No like?"

  Multhaus grimaced. "Well, sir, I don't like it, no. But I can't say I dislike it, either."

  He stared at the landing sheet, pursing his lips. He looked as though he were valiantly restraining himself from asking questions about the other night's escapade--which he was.

  He said: "I just don't like to land without jets, sir; that's all."

  "Hell, neither do I," admitted Mike. "But we're not going to get down any other way. We managed to take off without jets; we'll manage to land without them."

  "Yessir," said Multhaus, "but we took off with the grain of Earth's magnetic field. We're landing across the grain."

  "Sure," said Mike. "So what? If we overlook the motors, that's okay. We may never be able to get off the planet with this ship again, but we aren't supposed to anyway.

  "Come on, Multhaus, don't worry about it. I know you hate to burn up a ship, but this one is supposed to be expendable. You may never have another chance like this."

  Multhaus tried to keep from grinning, but he couldn't. "Awright, Commander. You have appealed to my baser instincts. My subconscious desire to wreck a spaceship has been brought to the surface. I can't resist it. Am I nutty, maybe?"

  "Not now, you're not," Mike said, grinning back.

  "We'll have a bitch of a job getting through the plasmasphere, though," said the chief. "That fraction of a second will--"

  "It'll jolt us," Mike agreed, interrupting. "But it won't wreck us. Let's get going."

  "Aye, sir," said Multhaus.

  * * * * *

  The seas of Eisberg were liquid methane containing dissolved ammonia. Near the equator, they were liquid; farther north, the seas became slushy with crystallized ammonia.

  The site picked for the new labs of the Computer Corporation of Earth was in the northern hemisphere, at 40° north latitude, about the same distance from the equator as New York or Madrid, Spain, would be on Earth. The Brainchild would be dropping through Eisberg's magnetic field at an angle, but it wouldn't be the ninety-degree angle of the equator. It would have been nice if the base could have been built at one of the poles, but that would have put the labs in an uncomfortable position, since there was no solid land at either pole.

  Mike the Angel didn't like the idea of having to land on Eisberg without jets any more than Multhaus did, but he was almost certain that the ship would take the strain.

  He took the companionway up to the Control Bridge, went in, and handed the landing sheet to Black Bart. The captain scowled at it, shrugged, and put it on his desk.

  "Will we make it, sir?" Mike said. "Any word from the Fireball?"

  Black Bart nodded. "She's orbiting outside the atmosphere. Captain Wurster will send down a ship to pick us up as soon as we've finished our business here."

  The Fireball, being much faster than the clumsy Brainchild, had left Earth later than the slower ship, and had arrived earlier.

  "Now hear this! Now hear this! Third Warning! Landing orbit begins in one minute! Landing begins in one minute!"

  Sixty seconds later the Brainchild began her long, logarithmic drop toward the surface of Eisberg.

  Landing a ship on her jets isn't an easy job, but at least an ion rocket is built for the job. Maybe someday the Translation drive will be modified for planetary landings, but so far such a landing has been, as someone put it, "50 per cent raw energy and 50 per cent prayer." The landing was worse than the take-off, a truism which has held since the first glider took off from the surface of Earth in the nineteenth century. What goes up doesn't necessarily have to come down, but when it does, the job is a lot rougher than getting up was.

  The plasmasphere of Eisberg differed from that of Earth in two ways. First, the ionizing source of radiation--the primary star--was farther away from Eisberg than Sol was from Earth, which tended to reduce the total ionization. Second, the upper atmosphere of Eisberg was pretty much pure hydrogen, which is somewhat easier to ionize than oxygen or nitrogen. And, since there was no ozonosphere to block out the UV radiation from the primary, the thickness of the ionosphere beneath the plasmasphere was greater.

  Not until the Brainchild hit the bare fringes of the upper atmosphere did she act any differently than she had in space.

  But when she hit the outer fringes of the ionosphere--that upper layer of rarified protons, the rapidly moving current of high velocity ions known as the plasmasphere--she bucked like 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.

  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 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.

  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 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 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 HNO{3}, 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 Brainchildwere 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 theforemost--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 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 H{2} 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 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.

  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 Sp
ace 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.