it ?”
“You’d be surprised,” he grinned. “I’m not quite like Robin Hood—I’ve been
known to miss a finger-thick wand at a hundred paces—but I’m not exactly a beginner.”
“Oh, of course—I should have known by your language that you’re an archer,
otherwise you’d never have used such an old-fashioned word as ‘pounds’. I shoot a
thirty-five pound bow ordinarily, but for game I should have the heaviest one I can hold
accurately—about a forty-five, probably.”
“All x. And as soon as I can I’ll make us a couple of suits of fairly heavy steel
armor, so that we’ll have real protection if we should need it. You see; we don’t know
what we are apt to run up against out here. Then, with that much done, it’ll be up to you
to provide, since I’ll have to work tooth and nail at the forges. You’ll have to bring home
the bacon, do the cooking and so on, and see what you can find along the line of edible
roots, grains, fruits, and what-not. Sort of reverse the Indian idea—you be the hunter
and I’ll keep the home fires burning. Can do?”
“What it takes to do that, I’ve got,” Nadia assured him, her eyes sparkling. “Have
you your job planned out as well and as fittingly as you have mine ?”
“And then some. We’ve got just two methods of getting away from here—one is
to get in touch with Brandon, so that he’ll come after us; the other is to recharge our
accumulators and try to make it under our own power. Either course will need power,
and lots of it . . .”
“I never thought of going back in the Hope. Suppose we could ?”
“About as doubtful as the radio—I think that I could build a pair of matched-
frequency auto-dirigible transmitter and receptor units, such as are necessary for space-
ships fed by stationary power-plants, but after I got them built they’d take us less than
half way there. Then we’d have only what power we can carry, and I hate even to think
of what probably would happen to us. We’d certainly have to drift for months before we
could get close enough to any of our plants to radio for help, and we’d be taking awful
chances. You see, we’d have to take a very peculiar orbit, and if we should miss
connections passing the inner planets, what the sun would do to us at the closest point
and where what’s left of us would go on the backswing would be just too bad! Besides, if
we can get hold of the Sirius, they’ll come loaded for bear, and we may be able to do
something about the rest of the folks out here.”
“Oh!” breathed the girl. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could! I thought of course
they’d all be . . .” her voice died away.
“Not necessarily—there’s always a chance. That’s why I’m trying the ultra-radio
first. However, either course will take lots of power, so the first thing I’ve got to do is to
build a power plant. I’m going to run a penstock up those falls, and put in a turbine,
driving a high-tension alternator. Then, while I’m trying to build the ultra-radio, I’ll be
charging our accumulators, so that no time will be lost in case the radio fails. If it does
fail—and remember I’m not counting on its working—of course I’ll tackle the
transmission and receptor units before we start out to drift it.”
“You say it easy, Steve, but how can you build all those things, with nothing to
work with ?”
“It’s going to be a real job—I’ll not try to kid you into thinking it’ll be either easy or
quick. Here’s the way everything will go. Before I can even lay the first length of the
penstock, I’ve got to have the pipe—to make which I’ve got to have flat steel—to get
which I’ll have to cut some of the partitions out of this ship of ours—to do which I’ll have
to have a cutting torch — to make which I’ll have to forge nozzles out of block metal and
to run which I’ll have to have gas—to get which I’ll have to mine coal and build a gas-
plant—to do which . . .”
“Good heavens, Steve, are you going back to the Stone Age? I never thought of
half those things. Why, it’s impossible !”
“Not quite, guy. Things could be a lot worse—that’s why I brought along the
whole Forlorn Hope, instead of just the lifeboat. As it is we’ve got several thousand tons
of spare steel and lots of copper. We’ve got ordinary tools and a few light motors,
blowers, and such stuff. That gives me a great big start — I won’t have to mine the ores
and smelt the metals, as would have been necessary otherwise. However, it’ll be plenty
bad. I’ll have to start out in a pretty crude fashion, and for some of the stuff I’ll need I’ll
have to make, not only the machine that makes the part I want, but also the machine
that makes the machine that makes the machine that makes it—and so on, just how far
down the line I haven’t dared to think.”
“You must be a regular jack-of-all-trades, to think you can get away with such a
program as that?”
“I am; nothing else but. You see, while most of my school training was in
advanced physics and mathematics, I worked my way through by computing and
designing, and I’ve done a lot of truck-horse labor of various kinds, besides. I can
calculate and design almost anything, and I can make a pretty good stab at translating a
design into fabricated material. I wouldn’t wonder if Brandon’s ultra-radio would stop me,
since nobody had even started to build one when I saw him last—but I helped compute
it, know the forces involved as well as he did at that time, and it so happens that I know
more about the design of coils and fields of force than I do about anything else. So I
may be able to work it out eventually. It isn’t going to be not knowing how that will hold
me up—it’ll be the lack of something that I can’t build.”
“And that’s where you will go back and back and back, as you said about building
the penstock ?”
“Back and back is right, if I can find all the necessary raw materials—that’s what’s
probably going to put a lot of monkey-wrenches into the machinery.” And Stevens went
to work upon a weapon of offense, fashioning a crude, but powerful bow from a strip of
spring steel strung with heavy wire.
“How about arrows ? Shall I go see if I can hit a bird with a rock, for feathers, and
see if I can find something to make arrows out of?”
“Not yet—anyway, I’d bet on the birds! I’m going to use pieces of this light brace-
rod off the accumulator cells for arrows. They won’t fly true, of course, but with their
mass I can give them enough projectile force to kill any small animal they hit, no matter
how they hit it.”
After many misses, he finally bagged a small animal, something like a rabbit and
something like a kangaroo, and a couple of round-bodied, plump birds, almost as large
as domestic hens. These they dressed, with considerable distaste and a noticeable lack
of skill.
“We’ll get used to it pretty quick, Diana—also more expert,” he said when the
task was done. “We now have raw material for bowstrings and clothes, as well as food.”
“The word ‘raw’ being heavily accented,” Nadia declared, with a grimace. “But
how do we know that they’re good to eat?”
“We’ll have to eat ’em and see,” he grinned. “I don’t imagine that any flesh is
really poisonous, and we’ll have to arrive at the ones we like best by a process of trial
and error. Well, here’s your job—I’ll get busy on mine. Don’t go more than a few
hundred meters away and yell if you get into a jam.”
“There’s a couple of questions I want to ask you. What makes it so warm here,
when the sun’s so far away and Jupiter isn’t supposed to be radiating any heat ? And
how about time? It’s twelve hours by my watch since sunrise this morning, and it’s still
shining.”
“As for heat, I’ve been wondering about that. It must 1 be due to internal heat,
because even though Jupiter may be warm, or even hot, it certainly isn’t radiating much,
since it has a temperature of minus two hundred at the visible surface, which, of course,
is the top of the atmosphere. Our heat here is probably caused by radioactivity — that’s
the most modern dope, I believe. As for time, it looks as though our days were
something better than thirty hours long, instead of twenty-four. Of course I’ll keep the