Spacehounds of IPC, E. E. Smith [best books to read for students TXT] 📗

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 bow-strings 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 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 chronometer going on I-P time, since we'll probably need it in working out observations; but we might as well let our watches run down and work, eat, and sleep by the sun—not much sense in trying to keep Tellurian time here, as I see it. Check?"

"All x. I'll have supper ready for you at sunset. 'Bye!"

A few evenings later, when Stevens came in after his long day's work, he was surprised to see Nadia dressed in a suit of brown coveralls and high-laced moccasins.

"How do I look?" she asked, pirouetting gayly.

"Neat, but not gaudy," he approved. "That's good mole-skin—smooth, soft, and tough. Where'd you make the raise? I didn't know we had anything like that on board. What did you do for thread? You look like a million dollars—you sure did a good job of fitting."

"I had to have something—what with all the thorns and brush, there was almost more of me exposed than covered, and I was getting scratched up something fierce. So I ripped up one of the space-suits, and found out that there's enough cloth, fur, and leather in one of them to make six ordinary suits, and thread by the kilometer. I was awfully glad to see all that thread—I had an idea that I'd have to unravel my stockings or something, but I didn't. Your clothes are getting pretty tacky, too, and you're getting all burned with those hot coals and things. I'm going to build you a suit out of leather for your blacksmithing activities."

"Fine business, ace! Then we can save what's left of our civilized clothes for the return trip. What do we eat?"

"The eternal question of the hungry laboring man! I've got a roasted bongo, a fried filamaloo bird, and a boiled warple for the meat dishes. For vegetables, mashed hikoderms and pimola greens. Neocorn bread."

"Translate that, please, into terms of food."

"Translate it yourself, after you eat it. I changed the system on you today. I've named all the things, so it'll be easier to keep track of those we like and the ones we don't."

With appetites sharp-set by long hours of hard labor they ate heartily; then, in the deepening twilight, they sat and talked in comradely fashion while Stevens smoked one precious cigarette.

It was not long until Nadia had her work well in hand. Game was plentiful, and the fertile valley and the neighboring upland yielded peculiar, but savory vegetable foods in variety and abundance; so that soon she was able to spend some time with Stevens, helping him as much as she could. Thus she came to realize the true magnitude of the task he faced and the real seriousness of their position.

As Stevens had admitted before the work was started, he had known that he had set himself a gigantic task, but he had not permitted himself to follow, step by step, the difficulties that he knew awaited him. Now, as the days stretched into weeks and on into months, he was forced to take every laborious step, and it was borne in upon him just how nearly impossible that Herculean labor was to prove—just how dependent any given earthly activity is upon a vast number of others. Here he was alone—everything he needed must be manufactured by his own hands, from its original sources. He had known that progress would be slow and he had been prepared for that; but he had not pictured, even to himself, half of the maddening setbacks which occurred time after time because of the crudity of the tools and equipment he was forced to use. All too often a machine or part, the product of many hours of grueling labor, would fail because of the lack of some insignificant thing—some item so common as to be taken for granted in all terrestrial shops, but impossible of fabrication with the means at his disposal. At such times he would set his grim jaw a trifle harder, go back one step farther toward the Stone Age, and begin all over again—to find the necessary raw material or a possible substitute, and then to build the apparatus and machinery necessary to produce the part he required. Thus the heart-breaking task progressed, and Nadia watched her co-laborer become leaner and harder and more desperate day by day, unable in any way to lighten his fearful load.

In the brief period of rest following a noonday meal, Stevens lay prone upon the warm, fragrant grass beside the "Forlorn Hope," but it was evident to Nadia that he was not resting. His burned and blistered hands were locked savagely behind his head, his eyes were closed too tightly, and every tense line of his body was eloquent of a strain even more mental than physical. She studied him for minutes, her fine eyes clouded, then sat down beside him and put her hand upon his shoulder.

"I want to talk to you a minute, Steve," she said gently.

"All x, little fellow—but it might be just as well if you didn't touch me. You see, I'm getting so rabid that I can't trust myself."

"That's exactly what I want to talk to you about." A fiery blush burned through her deep tan, but her low, clear voice did not falter and her eyes held his unflinchingly. "I know you better than you know yourself, as I've said before. You are killing yourself, but it isn't the work, frightfully hard and disheartening as it is, that is doing it—it's your anxiety for me and the uncertainty of everything. You haven't been able to rest because you have been raging and fuming so at unavoidable conditions—you have been fighting facts. And it's all so useless, Steve, between you and me—everything would check out on zero if we'd just come out into the open."

The man's gaunt frame seemed to stiffen even more rigidly.

"You've said altogether too much or else only half enough, Nadia. You know, of course, that I've loved you ever since I got really to know you—and that didn't take long. You know that I love you and you know how I love you—with the real love that a man can feel for only one woman and only once in his life; and you know exactly what we're up against. Now that does tear it—wide open!" he finished bitterly.

"No, it doesn't, at all," she replied, steadily. "Of course I know that you love me, and I glory in it; and since you don't seem to realize that I love you in exactly the same way, I'll tell you so. Love you! Good heavens, Steve, I never dreamed that such a man as you are really existed! But you're fighting too many things at once, and they're killing you. And they're mostly imaginary, at that. Can't you see that there's no need of uncertainty between you and me? That there is no need of you driving yourself to desperation on my account? Whatever must be is all x with me, Steve. If you can build everything you need, all well and good. We'll be engaged until then, and our love will be open and sweet. If worst comes to worst, so that we can neither communicate with Brandon and Westfall nor leave here under our own power—even that is nothing to kill ourselves about. And yes, I do know exactly what we are facing. I have been prepared for it ever since I first saw what a perfectly impossible thing you are attempting. You are trying to go from almost the Age of Bronze clear up to year-after-next in a month or two. Not one man in a million could have done as much in his lifetime as you have done in the last few weeks, and I do not see how even you, with what little you have to work with, can possibly build such things as power-plants,