The Earthmen waited in silence while the Ganymeans took in the scene.
Eventually Jassilane said, “It’s quite a size . . . certainly as large as we expected. The general design is definitely a few steps ahead of anything that was flying when we left Minerva. ZORAC, what do you make of it?”
“Toroidal sections protruding from the large cutaway portion three hundred feet along from where you’re standing are almost certainly differential resonance stress inductors to confine focus of the beam point for the main drive,” ZORAC answered. “The large assembly on the floor immediately below you, with the two
Earthmen standing in front of and underneath it is unfamiliar, but suggests an advanced design of an aft compensating reactor. If so, propulsion was probably by means of standard stress-wave propagation. If I am correct, there should be a forward compensating reactor in the ship too. The Earthmen~ at Main have shown me diagrams of a device that looks like one, but to be sure we should make a point of looking inside the nose end to check it firsthand. I would also like an opportunity to view the primary energy-convertor section and its layout.”
“Mmm . . . it could be worse,” Jassilane murmured absently.
“What was that all about, Rog?” Hunt asked him. The Giant half turned and raised an arm toward the ship.
“ZORAC has confirmed my own first impressions,” he said. “Although that ship was built some time after the Shapieron, the basic design doesn’t seem to have altered too much.”
“There’s a good chance it might help you get yours fixed then, huh?” Mills chimed in.
“Hopefully,” Jassilane agreed.
“We’d need to see it close-up to be sure,” Shilohin cautioned. Hunt turned to face the rest of the party and spread his arms with palms upturned. “Well, let’s go on down and do just that,” he said.
They moved away from the viewing window and threaded their way through and between the equipment racks and consoles of the control room to a door on the opposite side to descend to the lower floor. After the door had closed behind the last of the party, one of the duty operators at the consoles half turned to one of his colleagues.
“See Ed, I told ya,” he remarked cheerfully. “They didn’t eat anybody.”
Ed frowned dubiously from his seat a few feet away.
“Maybe they’re just not hungry today,” he muttered.
On the floor of the cavern, immediately below the ‘window, the mixed group of Ganymeans and Earthmen emerged through an airlock and began making their way across the steel-mesh flooring and through the maze of assorted engineering toward the ship.
“It’s quite warm,” Shilohin commented to Hunt as they walked. “And yet there’s no sign of melting on the walls. How come?”
“The air-circulation system’s been carefully designed,” he informed her. “The warmer air is confined down here in the work-
ing area and screened off from the ice by curtains of cold air blowing upward all round the sides to extractors up in the roof. The way the walls are shaped to blend into the roof produces the right flow pattern. The system works quite well.”
“Ingenious,” she murmured.
“What about the explosion risk from dissolved gases being released from the ice?” another Ganymean asked. “I’d have thought there’d be a hazard there.”
“When the excavations were first started it was a problem,” Hunt answered. “That was when most of the melting was being done. Everybody had to work in suits down here then. They were using an argon atmosphere for exactly the reason you just mentioned. Now that the ventilation’s been improved there’s not really a big risk anymore so we can be a bit more comfortable. The cold-air curtains help a lot too; they keep the rate of gas-escape down pretty well to zero and what little there is gets swept away upward. The chances of a bang down here are probably less than the base up top getting clobbered by a stray meteorite.”
“Well, here we are,” Mills announced from the front. They were standing at the foot of a broad, shallow metal ramp that rose from the floor and disappeared through a mass of cabling up into a large aperture cut in the hull. Above them, the bulging contour of the ship’s side soared in a monstrous curve that swept over and out of sight toward the roof. Suddenly they were like mice staring up at the underside of a garden roller.