Frontier of the Dark

by A Bertram Chandler

  “So, gentlemen, just how do you get your ship ready for lift-off? I’ll be generous; I’ll let you have all the power you want. Your hydrogen-fusion plant is still churning out the kilowatts. None of the ship’s machinery, in fact, has been badly damaged.

  “And now I’ll carry on with my stroll while you exercise your tiny minds.”

  It was Falsen who was first to come up with an answer. He suggested that the inertial drive be used, with maximum lateral thrust, to lift the ship bodily and then to turn her through one hundred and eighty degrees.

  “That would work, Mr. Falsen,” said Commander Blivens, “if an inertial-drive unit were capable of exerting maximum thrust in all directions. Unfortunately it is not. Don’t ask me why not. I am not an engineer. There are some matters that must remain eternal mysteries even to me.”

  There was a further period of silence. Some officers busied themselves with pens, paper and pocket calculators. Then two of them — Falsen remembered their names, Li Po and Abdul Fahmi — formed a committee of two and conducted a low-voiced conversation.

  Finally Li Po raised his hand.

  “Yes, Mr. Li?” said Blivens.

  “Sir, am I correct in the assumption that the ship carries tools — spades, mattocks, picks and the like?”

  “The original purpose of your landing, Mr. Li, was to explore, not to start a market garden.”

  “Then, sir, am I allowed to order my artificers to fabricate such implements from materials at hand?”

  “You’re the captain, Mr. Li. You give what orders you please. Whether or not your crew will obey them is another matter.”

  “Then, sir, I have my tools manufactured to my design by my engine-room crew. I have also had baskets constructed, small ones that may be carried on the head. My intention will be to excavate a pit at the stern, under the stern of the spacecraft. Some men will be digging, others will be removing the soil with the baskets. The ship will eventually slide into the pit, stern-first, coming to rest at such a small angle from the vertical that a lift-off will be practicable.”

  “Very ingenious, Mr. Li. But how large is your crew? How many men were employed to build the Great Wall of China? How long did it take? And what is the nature of the soil in which you will be digging your pit? Is there bedrock, and, if so, how far down?” He grinned, and his craggy face was almost pleasant. “But you made a good try, Mr. Li, which is more than can be said to the other young gentlemen.

  “Mr. Fahmi, do you have a contribution to make?”

  “Yes, Commander, sir. Like Mr. Li I intend to use manpower, although in a different way. Also I shall make use of mechanical power. My engineers should be able to make jacks as well as the picks and shovels and all the rest of it. My hole, which I shall dig, will also be under the ship’s stern. The first of the jacks will raise the bows as far as possible. The hole will be filled, and more earth brought in to support the stem. Another jack will raise it some more. And so on. At the finish, one side of the ship will be supported by an artificial hill … ”

  “It could work, Mr. Fahmi, if you were a pharaon — not a mere space captain — with unlimited labor to build your pyramid. But you — and Mr. Li — have a big ship to raise and only a small crew, a crew, moreover, with only a limited life span.

  “But there is a way in which the joy can be done in a short time and without crippling physical effort. It was done, once, by a certain Captain Dalgety. You may have heard of him. He called himself a privateer, flying under the flag of the Duchy of Waldegren, but he was really a pirate. Some time ago he wrote his memoirs. I read the book, in which, among other stories, is the one about how he got off a world called Tahlehn, one with no technology and no spaceport facilities, upon which he had made a clumsy landing. I have urged that this account be included in the Survey Service manuals of spacemanship, but my Lords Commissioner of the Admiralty feel strongly that the Survey Service holds a monopoly on spacemanship and mat anything done by a pirate, a Waldegrenese pirate at that, is not worth bothering with.

  “But this is what Dalgety did … .”

  • • •

  “So this is where you are!” somebody was saying. “I was worried about you … .”

  It was Linda.

  He looked at her. She had come through the wreck without a scratch.

  She said, glumly, “We shall never get off this world.”

  “We shall,” said the Lady Mother, but without conviction. “If the worst comes to the worst, when we do not return to Dorala at the appointed time, another expedition will be sent to rescue us.”

  “And when will that be, Gracious Lady?” asked Prenta sharply. “How many of us will still be alive? If our run of bad luck continues, there will be nobody, except these Jonahs!”

  “That will do, Lady Prenta!” said the captain sharply. “Mr. Falsen, I am your senior in both age and rank — but I believe that your actual space experience exceeds mine. Also, you are the heir to a long tradition of spacefaring. I am not … .”

  “As well ask Pondor for advice,” Prenta muttered.

  The Lady Mother ignored her.

  “Mr. Falsen, you seemed to be deep in cogitation. Do you have any ideas?”

  “I think I do,” he said. Then, “I do.”

  CHAPTER 26

  The ship was battened down for the night, the cargo port sealed tightly against predators. There were those who had urged that some sort of encampment be set up outside the fallen hull. Fabric from the wrecked dirigible’s envelope could be used to contrive shelters, they argued, protected by an electrified wire fence. Sentries, with orders to shoot on sight, could be mounted. But the Lady Mother had been adamant. Only inside the metal shell, she insisted, would there be safety during the hours of darkness.

  Safety there might be; great discomfort there certainly was. Most of the cabins were uninhabitable, and the normal toilet facilities unusable. Some furniture, strongly secured to decks and bulkheads, had remained in position, but what use was a chair or table at ninety degrees from its normal stance? Other things had broken away from their moorings, fallen and been broken. The only food available was from the stock of emergency rations; the spoiled contents of tissue-culture vats and hydroponic tanks had been taken outside just before dark and incinerated by laser fire lest the raw meat attract carnivores.

  The public rooms were now dormitories, with mattresses spread over the curved surface of the inner hull. Airtight hatches, normally closed at all times, had been opened to allow progress between compartments without having to use the axial shaft which now, of course, was an overhead conduit.

  The dull sun was long since down, but not everybody was sleeping or trying to sleep. In a space that had been a minor storeroom from which the contents had been removed, Falsen sat with the Lady Mother, Carlin, Prenta and two of Carlin’s senior assistants. He wished most sincerely that this meeting were taking place outside the ship; he found it hard to think clearly in these conditions. The air, despite the efforts of the chemical purifiers, was stale, carried the taint of unwashed bodies and of body wastes. (The improvised latrines had to be close to overflowing; perhaps at least one of them had already done so.)

  They disposed themselves on cushions that tended to slide down the curvature of the smooth hull lining; Falsen, Prenta and the captain on one side, Carlin and her assistant engineers on the other. Between them was a transparent scale model of the ship, a beautiful toy — but more than a toy. It was standing upright on its vanes until Pondor, who had slunk in unnoticed, batted it with a forepaw. It fell with a muted clatter.

  “Get out of here!” screamed the Lady Mother.

  “Í only did what you did,” replied the cat insolently.

  “Get out!”

  “All right.”

  The animal sauntered away, jumped through an open hatch in the bulkhead/deck.

  One of the engineers reached out to restore the model to its original position. Falsen put a hand out to stop her.

  “Leave it,” he said. “This
is the way that the ship herself is now” — he rose to a squatting position — “on her side, with the access hatch to the inertial-drive room, the hatch that is used, sometimes, during major overhauls in port, down, buried in the mud … .”

  “We are already aware of that,” said Carlin sharply.

  Falsen ignored this, went on studying the model. Through the transparent skin he could see the tube that was the axial shaft and, on its underside, like the nest of a solitary wasp plastered against a very straight twig, the cylinder that represented the inertial-drive room. Here the transverse decks, both ahead and astern of it, were very thick, as they needed to be to take the thrust; and the walls of the tube, too, were thicker than elsewhere.

  “We shall have to cut through the shaft,” said Falsen, “to get the inertial-drive unit up and out.”

  “The shaft is the ship’s backbone,” said the Lady Mother. “The main component of her structural strength.”

  “Not the main component, gracious Lady, but one of the two main components. The other one is the hull itself. The hull, thanks to the nature of the ground on which it fell, is supported evenly along its length. In any case, I do not think that it should be necessary actually to sever the shaft. Just an opening, big enough to allow passage of the largest components of the drive, in what is now its lower wall, and a similar one in the upper wall. I assume that the engine-room equipment in this ship is as it was when she was a Terran vessel … .”

  “Better,” said Carl in.

  “Good. Then, in that case you will have what we call mini-innies — small versatile units that can be used for lifting, fetching and carrying, their control boxes at the ends of long leads.”

  “Ours,” said Carlin, “are radio-controlled.”

  “Better. Well, we have to do some more cutting and burning, through bulkheads that are in the way and through the shell plating itself. Piece by piece, the inertial-drive unit will have to be taken out of the ship and then reassembled on the ground. We shall need a long — a very long — umbilical cable to feed power into it, also a platform of some sort rigged on top of it with a control panel. Then we shall have our tug. Are the towing lugs still in place at the bows of the ship, or have they been removed?”

  “They are still there,” said Prenta.

  “Any towing wires in your stores?”

  “We do have a reel of something heavy. It came with the ship. There’s a certificate somewhere in my office to cover it. If I can find it. But surely, Mr. Falsen, the finest wire rope in the universe would not be able to support the weight of a ship? A big ship.”

  “The weight of the ship will be supported by this planet. At no time will she be clear of the ground.”

  Prenta was stubborn. “Couldn’t we,” she asked, “dig a sort of pit under the bows? Get the reassembled drive unit down into it and then secure it to the stem and push the ship upright?”

  “Such a pit,” said Falsen, “would fill with water in as much time as it would take to dig it. Besides, the way that I propose has already been used. It worked.”

  “It’s a big job,” complained Prenta.

  “Of course it’s a big job,” the Lady Mother told her. “But it has to be done if we’re to get back to Dorala under our own power instead of waiting here until somebody back home gets around to wondering what has happened to us and, later still, decides to mount an expedition to find out.

  “But this has been a long day, and a wearing one. We should all of us get what sleep we can so as to be ready to start work at dawn.”

  She got to her feet, made her way to the hatch, crawled through it. Prenta followed her, and the two engineers.

  “Where are you sleeping, Falsen?” asked Carlin. “You are welcome to share my cabin; fortunately it’s on the down side of the ship and I’ve a mattress on the hull lining.”

  “I’ll find a place,” said Falsen shortly.

  “As you please. Don’t forget, you had the offer. A good night to you.”

  When she was gone Falsen arranged the cushions to form a bed. This compartment would be as good a place as any to sleep. He was in the process of settling down when, as he had known that she would, Linda joined him.

  She looked disdainfully at the model.

  “Are you taking your toys to bed with you?” she asked. “Personally, I’d prefer something more cuddly.”

  “It’s not a toy.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s in the way.” She pushed it away with her foot, settled down beside him. She whispered intently, “Now, what are we doing? This could be our opportunity. Everybody disorganized … ”

  “No,” he said. “No. We want the ship — but until she’s been raised, made space worthy again, she’s no use to anybody.”

  “But we could start reducing their numbers.”

  “The ship is sealed. Nothing, nothing could possibly get inside until the cargo port’s opened again in the morning.”

  He curled up on the deck and she, behind him, fitted her body to his.

  He was almost asleep and thought that she was already sleeping when she whispered, “Nicholas, I’m hungry … .”

  “So am I,” he grunted, “but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Falsen stood with the Lady Mother on the rim of the impact crater, looking down at the dozen crew women who, with shovels fabricated from sheet metal and tubing by Carlin’s artificers, were trying to expose the broken stern vane.

  It was a hopeless task. A persistent, drizzling rain was falling, drifting down from the ruddy sky. The exposed soil, no longer bound by the root-tendrils of the mosslike ground cover, was more liquid than solid. The workers, thought Carlin, looked like little girls playing in mud — but children so engaged would look happy, despite the filthiness of their bodies and clothing; these adults looked thoroughly miserable.

  The Doralan captain said despondently, “Mr. Falsen, this is a hopeless task. If only this cursed rain would let up … ”

  “It won’t,” Falsen told her.

  He did not know how he knew, but he did. He was no meteorologist, but since his marooning on this dismal world, long-dormant ancestral senses had revived. He felt, somehow, that this precipitation would persist for days.

  “There must be a way,” she whispered.

  “Lasers,” he muttered doubtfully. “At low intensity, just to dry the pit out … . It could work. And there’s all the fabric from the envelope of the dirigible, and the frames and struts … a sort of tent.”

  “Yes … ” murmured the Lady Mother. Then, “Yes!”

  She shouted an order into the trench. The workers stopped plying their shovels. She shouted another order and, gratefully, they clambered out of the hole, their chubby feet and bare legs liberally coated with black slime, their once scarlet tunics filthy. The muck was even on their faces and in their hair. They put their shovels down near where Falsen and the Lady Mother were standing, trudged along the ridge to the ladder leading up to the open cargo hatch. They ascended this smartly enough. Even though the interior of the ship was comfortless, even though the air was tainted with the acridity of burning metal, it would be warm and dry. And there would be a respite from the back-breaking labor of ditch-digging.

  Shortly after the last of them was aboard, Prenta emerged from the hull, made her way along the ridge to where Falsen and the Lady Mother were standing. She looked at the Earthman with dislike, then addressed herself to her captain. She spoke in English for Falsen’s benefit.

  “You sent for me, Gracious Lady?”

  “I did, Lady Prenta.”

  “But I am busy, Gracious Lady. You have no idea what it is like. Carlin’s people are running around with their torches like madwomen, cutting and burning. I have to watch them lest they destroy the ship’s internal strength entirely … .”

  “The Lady Carlin is an engineer, Prenta. She knows what she is doing.”

  “Does she? Does she?”

  “She does. And that metal we must have to pat
ch the vane.”

  “If we are ever able to get to work on it, Gracious Lady.” The chief officer stared down into the muddy pond. “Look at it. All morning, and twelve of my women who could have been better employed just wasting their time!”

  “Mr. Falsen has thought of a scheme that should work.”

  “Mr. Falsen. Mr. Falsen. Oh, I do not doubt that the high and mighty Terrans are more used to coping with disasters than we are. Such representatives of the breed as we have here are very disaster-prone. But Jonahs must be used to catastrophes — and standing around to watch their betters cope with them!”

  “I’ll have no more talk of Jonahs, Lady Prenta. And, for your information, during this operation Mr. Falsen is to be regarded as one of my officers, as my aide … .”

  “With all the authority that that implies?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then, Lady Mother, I must register my protest. It is not fitting that personnel of the Pan-Doralan Interstellar Expeditionary Service should take orders from an alien being.”

  “They will take such orders. Lady Prenta. As you will, should the occasion arise.”

  There was what seemed to be a long silence during which the two women glared at each other. The Lady Mother’s face was like steel — and Prenta’s like cast iron, a hard metal but brittle. Suddenly it cracked.

  “Very well, Gracious Lady,” whispered the Doralan officer. “I will accept Mr. Falsen’s … advice. And I give notice that a full report of this affair will be made by me to the Commissariat when we return to Dorala.”

  If you return to Dorala, thought Falsen.

  “And now, Mr. Falsen,” said the captain, “will you advise the Lady Prenta?”

  Falsen explained what would have to be done, what would be needed.

  “But the fabric,” objected Prenta, “is buried under the stores. So are the stowbots. It will be impossible to get it out with the ship as she is.”