“To drive a vehicle those last score padlonglaqs out of the atmosphere, there’s only one available technique. If there isn’t any air to gulp and squirt out, then you have to take along your own gas. We borrowed the idea from certain sea-creatures which come up to the surface, fill their bladders with air, and then rely on diving to compress it to the point where it’s useful. When they let it go, it enables them to pounce on their prey almost as our forebudders must have done.”
“I don’t like to be reminded that our ancestors ate other animals,” Chybee confessed.
“How interesting! I wonder whether that may account for some of the reaction people like your parents display when confronted by the brutal necessity of recycling during a spaceflight … But we can discuss that later. Right now you need to understand that what Hyge has set up for testing is a driver full of two of the most reactive chemicals we’ve ever discovered. When they’re mixed, they combust and force out a mass of hot gas. This propels the cylinder forward at enormous speed. Our idea is to lift such a cylinder—with a payload of adapted spores and seeds—to the greatest altitude a floater can achieve. Then, by using the special star-seekers we’ve developed, we can orient it along the desired flight-path, and from there it will easily reach orbital height and velocity.”
“But scaling it up to carry what we’ll need for actual survival out there is—” Wam began.
“Out of the question!” Ugant conceded in a triumphant tone. “Now will you agree that our best course is to—?”
Hyge cut in. “Scaling up is just a matter of resources. Save your disputes until after we find out whether our new budling works! Don’t look at the jet! Slack down to tornado status! Keep your mandibles and vents wide open! The overpressure from this one will be fierce!”
And, after checking that the cylinder’s course was clear of obstructions and that all the stations from which reports were to be made were functional, she slid back a plank of stiffbark in the control house’s floor and imposed her full weight on something Chybee could not clearly see but which she guessed to be a modified form of mishle, one of the rare secondary growths known as flashplants which, after the passage of a thunderstorm, could kill animal prey by discharging a violent spark, and would then let down tendrils to digest the carcass.
Instantly there was a terrible roaring noise. The cylinder uttered a prong of dazzling flame—”Look that way!” Ugant shouted, and when Chybee proved too fascinated to respond, swung her bodily around and made her gaze along the tree-row—and sped forward on a course that carried it exactly through the center of the wooden rings, clearing the metal plates by less than a clawide.
Almost as soon as it had begun, the test was over bar the echoes it evoked from the hills, and a rousing cheer rang out. But it was barely loud enough to overcome the deafness they were all suffering. Chybee, who had not prepared herself for pressure as great as Hyge had warned of, felt as though she had been beaten from crest to pads.
“Oh, I’m glad we were here to witness that,” said Ugant softly. “Wam, aren’t you impressed?”
“She should be,” Hyge put in caustically, checking the recordimals connected to the incoming nervograps. “That’s the first time our guidimals have kept the cylinder level through every last one of the rings. And if we can repeat that, we’ll have no problem aiming straight up!”
“Are you all right, Chybee?” Ugant demanded as she recovered from her fit of euphoria.
“I—uh…” But pretense was useless. “I wasn’t ready for such a shock. I was still full of questions. Like: what are the metal plates for?”
“Oh, those,” Hyge murmured. “Well, you see, not even the most sensitive of our detectors can respond to signals emitted by the cylinder as it rushes past faster than sound. If you were standing right near the arrival point, you’d be hit by a sonic blast, a wave of air compressed until it’s practically solid. Even this far away it can be painful, can’t it? So we had to find a method of translating the impact into something our normal instruments can read. What we do is compress metal plates against shielded nervograp inputs, compensating for the natural elasticity of the trees, which we developed from a species known to be highly gale-resistant—”