space. I want every one of you to picture himself going inert accidentally. You might
take a tangent course or higher—but you might not, too. And it wouldn’t only kill the one
who did it. It wouldn’t only spoil our record. It could very easily kill us all and make a
crater full of boiling metal out of our whole installation. So BE CAREFUL! Also bear in
mind that one piece, however small, of this planet’s material, accidentally brought
aboard, might wreck the Dauntless. Any questions?”
“If the fundamental characteristics—constants—of this space are so different,
how do you know that the stuff will work here?”
“Well, the stuff we built here before worked. The Arisians told Kit Kinnison that
two of the fundamentals, mass and length, are about normal. Time is a lot different, so
that we can’t compute power-to-mass ratios and so on, but we’ll have enough power,
anyway, to get any speed we can use.” “I see. We miss the really fancy stuff?” “Yes.
Well, the quicker we get started the quicker we’ll get done. Let’s go.”
The planet was airless, waterless, desolate; a chaotic jumble of huge and jagged
fragments of various metals in a non-metallic continuous phase. It was as though some
playful child-giant of space had poured dipperfuis of silver, of iron, of copper, and of
other granulated pure metals into a tank of something else—and then, tired of play, had
thrown the whole mess away!
Neither the metals nor the non-metallic substances were either hot or cold. They
had no apparent temperature, to thermometers or to the “feelers” of the suits. The
machines which these men had built so long before had not changed in any particular.
They still functioned perfectly: no spot of rust or corrosion or erosion marred any part.
This, at least, was good news.
Inertialess machines, extravagantly equipped with devices to keep them
inertialess, were taken “ashore”; nor were any of these ever to be returned to the ship.
Kinnison had ordered and reiterated that no unnecessary chances were to be taken of
getting any particle of Nth-space stuff aboard Space Laboratory Twelve, and none were
taken.
Since men cannot work indefinitely in space-suits, each man had periodically to
be relieved; but each such relief amounted almost to an operation. Before he left the
planet his suit was scrubbed, rinsed, and dried. In the vessel’s airlock it was air-blasted
again before the outer port was closed. He unshelled in the lock and left his suit
there—everything which had come into contact with Nth-space matter either would be
left on the planet’s surface or would be jettisoned before the vessel was again inerted.
Unnecessary precautions? Perhaps—but Thorndyke and his crew returned unharmed
to normal space in undamaged ships.
Finally the Bergenholm was done;.by dint of what improvisation, substitutions
and artifice only “Thorny” Thorndyke ever knew; at what strain and cost was evidenced
by the gaunt bodies and haggard faces of his overworked and under-slept crew. To
those experts and particularly to Thorndyke, the thing was not a good job. It was not
quiet, nor smooth. It was not in balance, statically, dynamically, or electrically. The Chief
Technician, to whom a meter-jump of one and a half thousandths had always been a
matter of grave concern, swore feelingly in all the planetary languages he knew when
he saw what those meters were doing.
He scowled morosely. There might have been poorer machines built sometime,
somewhere, he supposed—but damned if he had ever seen any!
But the improvised Berg ran, and kept on running. The planet became inertialess
and remained that way. For hours, then, Thorndyke climbed over and around and
through the Brobdingnagian fabrication, testing and checking the operation of every
part. Finally he climbed down and reported to his waiting crew.
“QX, fellows, a nice job. A hell of a good job, in fact, considering—even though
we all know that it isn’t what any of us would call a good machine. Part of that meter-
jump, of course, is due to the fact that nothing about the heap is true or balanced, but
most of it must be due to this cockeyed ether. Anyway, none of it is due to the usual
causes—loose bars and faulty insulation. So my best guess is that she’ll keep on doing
her stuff while we do ours. One sure thing, she isn’t going to fall apart, even under that
ungodly knocking; and I don’t think she’ll shake herself off of the planet.”
After Thorndyke’s somewhat less than enthusiastic approval of his brain-child,
the adventurers into that fantastic region attacked the second phase of their project. The
planetary Bergenholm was landed and set up. Its meters jumped, too, but the engineers
were no longer worried about that. That machine would run indefinitely. Pits were dug.
Atomic blasts and other engines were installed; as were many exceedingly complex
instruments and mechanisms. A few tons of foreign matter on the planet’s surface would
now make no difference; but there was no relaxation of the extreme precautions against
the transfer of any matter whatever from the planet to the space-ship.
When the job was done, but before the clean-up, Thorndyke called his crew into
conference.
“Fellows, I know just what a God-awful shellacking you’ve been taking. We all
feel as though we’d been on a Delgonian clambake. Nevertheless, I’ve got to tell you
something. Kinnison said that if we could get this one fixed up without too much trouble,
it’d be a mighty good idea to have two of them. What do you say? Did we have too
much trouble?”
He got exactly the reaction he had expected.
“Lead us to it!”
“Pick out the one you want!”
“Trouble? Hell, no! If this scrap-heap we built held together this long, she’ll run for
years. We can tow her on a tractor-pressor combo, match intrinsics with clamp-on
drivers, and mount her anywhere!”
Another metal-studded, barren, lifeless world was therefore found and prepared;
and no real argument arose until Thorndyke broached the matter of selecting the two
men who were to stay with him and Henderson in the two lifeboats which were to
remain for a time near the two loose planets after Space Laboratory Twelve had
returned to normal space. Everybody wanted to stay. Each one was going to stay, too,
by all the gods of space, if he had to pull rank to do it!
“Hold it!” Thorndyke commanded. “We’ll do the same as we did before, then, by
drawing lots. Quartermaster Allerdyce . . .”
“Not by a damn sight!” Uhlenhuth, formerly Atomic Technician 1/c, objected
vigorously, and was supported by several others. “He’s too clever with his fingers—look
what he did to the original draw! We’re not squawking about that one, you
understand—a little fixing was QX back there— but this one’s got to be on the level.”
“Now that you mention it, I do remember hearing about the laws of chance being
jimmied a bit ” Thorndyke grinned broadly. “So you hold the pot yourself, Uhly, and
Hank and I will each pull out one name.”
So it was. Henderson drew Uhlenhuth, to that burly admiral’s loud delight, and
Thorndyke drew Nelson, the erstwhile chief communications officer. The two lifeboats
disembarked, each near one of the newly “loosened” planets. Two men would stay on
or near each of those planets, to be sure that all the machinery functioned perfectly.
They would stay there until the atomic blasts went into action and it became clear that
the Arisians would need no help in navigating those tremendous globes through Nth
space to the points at which two hyper-spatial tubes were soon to appear.
Long before the advance scouts of Grand Fleet were within surveying distance of
Floor, Kit and his sisters had spread a completely detailed chart of its defenses in the
tactical tank. A white star represented Floor’s sun; a white sphere the planet itself; white
Ryerson string-lights marked a portion of the planetary orbit. Points of white light,
practically all of which were connected to the white sphere by red string-lights, marked
the directions of neighboring stars and the existence of sunbeams, installed and ready.
Pink globes were loose planets; purple ones negaspheres; red points of light were, as
before, Boskonian task-force fleets. Blues were mobile fortresses; bands of canary
yellow and amber luminescence showed the locations and emplacements of sunbeam
grids and deflectors.
Layer after layer of pinks, purples, and blues almost hid the brilliant white sphere
from sight. More layers of the same colors, not quite as dense, surrounded the entire
solar system. Yellow and amber bands were everywhere.
Kinnison studied the thing briefly, whistling unmelodiously through his teeth. The
picture was familiar enough, since it duplicated in practically every respect the chart of
the neighborhood of the Patrol’s own Ultra Prime, around Klovia. Those defenses simply
could not be cracked by any concentration possible of any mobile devices theretofore
employed in war.
“Just about what we expected,” Kinnison thought to the group at large. “Some