Inevitably, the bright arrived when she was summoned to the neurophysical laboratory attached to the space-site, well beyond the city limits. Omber appeared to guide her. There she was welcomed by a tubby, somewhat irascible personage called Scholar Theng, who lost no time in getting down to business.
“Well, young’un,” she boomed, “it seems we have to reconsider our ideas. Yull tells me loss-free circuits are the answer. She brought me a sample—Don’t look so surprised! Turned out a good many of your citizens didn’t care for what Quelf did to Karg, and gifted her with a piece of one, enough to culture a few cells from.”
“You didn’t tell me!” Albumarak cried. “I’d have been here long ago if I’d realized you weren’t going to have to start from scratch! I’ve wasted time trying to reconstruct from memory everything I know about designing the things!”
“So that’s what you’ve been doing, is it?” Theng growled. “I had the impression you were just sight-seeing … Well, come and look at what we’ve got so far.”
If it was true that she had started with “a few cells” she had made remarkable progress. Already a web of thin brownish tendrils stretched back and forth over a patch of heavily fertilized ground under a transparent membrane that gathered winter sunwarmth and protected them from storms.
“But this is wonderful!” Albumarak declared.
“Oh, we can grow them all right, and they seem to perform as advertised. Question is, can we make them do what Yull wants? You’re an expert on sparkforce, they tell me. What do you think?”
The likelihood of putting Yull’s proposal into effect seemed suddenly much greater. Albumarak filled her mantle.
“Omber, it is the case, isn’t it, that one would still have to loft drivers and their fuel, even if one did build a—a launcher capable of replacing gas-globes?”
They had occasionally discussed the matter; she knew the answer would be yes before it came. And went on, “So the next step must be to grow a miniature test version of your cylinders and see whether”—thank you, Karg!—”we can put sufficient charge on it.”
“We can’t,” Theng retorted briskly. “We already went over that with our chief chemist Ewblet. It would destabilize the fuel. Want to see the simulation records?”
Albumarak was minded to clack her mandibles in dismay, but controlled herself and, so far as she could, her exudations. She said in a tone as sharp as Theng’s, “Then let Ewblet find a way of preventing it! My business is loss-free sparkforce circuitry, and I’d like to get on with it!”
Theng looked at her for a long moment. At last she said, “Well spoken. What do you expect to need?”
It was like being on a different planet. Colleagues much older than herself consulted her without being patronizing; others of her own age reported to her the problems they had encountered, described their proposed solutions, and asked for her opinion; in turn, when she swam into a snag they were prompt to offer information and advice. She had already grasped the overall pattern of what the folk here were committed to, but now she was given insight into its minutiae … and the multiplicity of details was frightening. So too, in a sense, was the dedication she discovered. She almost came to believe that there was no one in the whole of Slah, bar a clawful of budlings, who lacked a part to play in converting their vision into reality.
Space-launches using gas-globes were continuing despite the winter storms, along with work on every other aspect of the scheme. The orbits of some of the space-cylinders were decaying; it was essential to send up more reaction mass, using automatic control systems, so they could be forced further out. Everybody, not just Karg, wanted to learn what was happening to the vegetation on the moon; one of the younger scientists proposed crashing a cylinder there which would survive sufficiently intact to gather samples and then emit two or three others much smaller than itself, propelled by a simple explosion on to a course that would bring them to rendezvous with a collector in local orbit, and then recovering the collector in the way designed for Karg. Simulations showed it might well succeed, and the job was promptly put in claw.