The Cosmic Computer Part 19

They approached the halfway point; the acceleration rate decreased, and the gravity indicator dropped, little by little. Everybody was enjoying the new sense of lightness, romping and skylarking like newly landed tourists on Luna. It was fun, as long as they landed on their feet at each jump, and the food and liquids stayed on plates and in gla.s.ses and cups. Yves Jacquemont began posting signs in conspicuous places:

WEIGHT IS WHAT YOU LIFT, Ma.s.s IS WHAT HURTS WHEN IT HITS YOU.

WEIGHT DEPENDS ON GRAVITY; Ma.s.s IS ALWAYS CONSTANT.

His father came on-screen from his office in Storisende. By then, there was a 30-second time lag in communication between the s.h.i.+p and Poictesme.

"My private detectives found out about the _Andromeda_," he said.

"She's going to Panurge, in the Gamma System. They have a couple of computermen with them, one they hired from the Stock Exchange, and one they practically shanghaied away from the Government. And some of the people who chartered the s.h.i.+p are members of a family that were interested in a positronic-equipment plant on Panurge at the time of the War."

"That's all right, then; we don't need to worry about that any more.

They're just hunting for Merlin."

Some of his companions were looking at him curiously. A little later, Piet Ludvyckson, the electromagnetics engineer, said: "I thought you were looking for Merlin, Conn."

"Not on Koschchei. We're looking for something to build a hypers.h.i.+p out of. If I had Merlin in my hip pocket right now, I'd trade it for one good s.h.i.+p like the _City of Asgard_ or the _City of Nefert.i.ti_, and give a keg of brandy and a box of cigars to boot. If we had a s.h.i.+p of our own, we'd be selling lots of both, and not for Storisende s.p.a.ceport prices, either."

"But don't you think Merlin's important?" Charley Gatworth, who had overheard him, asked.

"Sure. If we find Merlin, we can run it for President. It would make a better one than Jake Vyckhoven."

He let it go at that. Plenty of opportunities later to expand the theme.

The gravitation gauge dropped to zero. Now they were in free fall, and it lasted twice as long as Yves Jacquemont had predicted. There were a few misadventures, none serious and most of them comic--For example, when Jerry Rivas opened a bottle of beer, everybody was chasing the amber globules and catching them in cups, and those who were splashed were glad it hadn't been hot coffee.

They made their second, 180-degree turnover while weightless. Then they began decelerating and approached Koshchei stern-on, and the gravity gauge began climbing slowly up again, and things began staying put, and they were walking instead of floating. Koshchei grew larger and larger ahead; the polar icecaps, and the faint dappling of clouds, and the dark wiggling lines on the otherwise uniform red-brown surface which were mountain ranges became visible. Finally they began to see, first with the telescopic screens and then without magnification, the little dots and specks that were cities and industrial centers.

Then they were in atmosphere, and Jacquemont made the final s.h.i.+ft, to horizontal position, and turned the s.h.i.+p over to Nichols.

For a moment, the scout-boat tumbled away from the s.h.i.+p and Conn was back in free fall. Then he got on the lift-and-drive and steadied it, and pressed the trigger b.u.t.ton, firing a green smoke bomb. Beside him, Yves Jacquemont put on the radio and the screen pickups. He could see the s.h.i.+p circling far above, and the manipulator-boat, with its claw-arms and grapples, breaking away from it. Then he looked down on the endless desert of iron oxide that stretched in all directions to the horizon, until he saw a spot, optically the size of a five-centisol piece, that was the s.h.i.+pbuilding city of Port Carpenter.

He turned the boat toward it, firing four more green smokes at three-second intervals. The manipulator-boat started to follow, and the _Harriet Barne_, now a distant speck in the sky, began coming closer.

Below, as he cut speed and alt.i.tude, he could see the pock-marks of open-pit mines and the glint of sunlight on bright metal and armor-gla.s.s roofs, the blunt conical stacks of nuclear furnaces and the twisted slag-flows, like the ancient lava-flows of Barathrum. And, he reflected, he was an influential non-office-holding stockholder in every bit of it, as soon as they could screen Storisende and get claims filed.

A high tower rose out of the middle of Port Carpenter, with a gla.s.s-domed mushroom top. That would be the telecast station; the administrative buildings were directly below it and around its base.

He came in slowly over the city, above a s.p.a.ceport with its empty landing pits in a double circle around a traffic-control building, and airs.h.i.+p docks and warehouses beyond. More steel mills. Factories, either hemispherical domes or long buildings with rounded tops.

s.h.i.+p-construction yards and docks; for the most part, these were empty, but on some of them the landing-stands of s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps, like eight-and ten-legged spiders, waiting for forty years for hulls to be built on them. A few spherical skeletons of s.h.i.+ps, a few with some of the outer skin on. It wasn't until he was pa.s.sing close to them that he realized how huge they were. And stacks of material--sheet steel, deckplate, girders--and contragravity lifters and construction machines, all left on jobs that were never finished, the bright rustless metal dulled by forty years of rain and windblown red dust.

They must have been working here to the very last, and then, when the evacuation elsewhere was completed, they had dropped whatever they were doing, piled into such s.h.i.+ps as were completed, and lifted away.

The mushroom-topped tower rose from the middle of a circular building piled level on level, almost half a mile across. He circled over it, saw an airs.h.i.+p dock, and called the _Harriet Barne_ while Jacquemont talked to Jerry Rivas, piloting the manipulator-boat. Rivas came in and joined them in the air; they hovered over the dock and helped the s.h.i.+p down when she came in, nudging her into place.

By the time Conn and Jacquemont and Rivas and Anse Dawes and Roddell and Youtsko and Karanja were out on the dock in oxygen helmets, the s.h.i.+p's airlock was opening and Nichols and Vibart and the others were coming out, towing a couple of small lifters loaded with equipment.

The airlocked door into the building, at the end of the dock, was closed; when somebody pulled the handle, it refused to open. That meant it was powered from the central power plant, wherever that was.

There was a plug socket beside it, with the required voltage marked over it. They used an extension line from a power unit on one of the lifters to get it open, and did the same with the inner door; when it was open, they pa.s.sed into a dim room that stretched away ahead of them and on either side.

It looked like a freight-s.h.i.+pping room; there were a few piles of boxes and cases here and there, and a litter of packing material everywhere. A long counter-desk, and a bank of robo-clerks behind it.

According to the air-a.n.a.lyzer, the oxygen content inside was safely high. They all pulled off their fishbowl helmets and slung them.

"Well, we can bunk inside here tonight," somebody said. "It won't be so crowded here."

"We'll bunk here after we find the power plant and get the ventilator fans going," Jacquemont said.

Anse Dawes held up the cigarette he had lighted; that was all the air-a.n.a.lyzer he needed.

"That looks like enough oxygen," he said.

"Yes, it makes its own ventilation; convection," Jacquemont said. "But you go to sleep in here, and you'll smother in a big puddle of your own exhaled CO_2. Just watch what the smoke from that cigarette's doing."

The smoke was hanging motionless a few inches from the hot ash on the end of the cigarette.

"We'll have to find the power plant, then," Matsui, the power-engineer said. "Down at the bottom and in the middle, I suppose, and anybody's guess how deep this place goes."

"We'll find plans of the building," Jerry Rivas said. "Any big dig I've ever been on, you could always find plans. The troubleshooters always had them; security officer, and maintenance engineer."

There were inside-use vehicles in the big room; they loaded what they had with them onto a couple of freight-skids and piled on, starting down a pa.s.sage toward the center of the building. The pa.s.sageways were well marked with direction-signs, and they found the administrative area at the top and center, around the base of the telecast-tower. The security offices, from which police, military guard, fire protection and other emergency services were handled, had a fine set of plans and maps, not only for the building itself but for everything else in Port Carpenter. The power plant, as Matsui had surmised, was at the very bottom, directly below.

The only trouble, after they found it, was that it was completely dead. The reactors wouldn't react, the converters wouldn't convert, and no matter how many switches they shoved in, there was no power output. The inside telemetered equipment, of course, was self-powered.

Some of them were dead, too, but from those which still worked Mohammed Matsui got a uniformly disheartening story.

"You know what happened?" he said. "When this gang bugged out, back in 854, they left the power on. Now the conversion ma.s.s is all gone, and the plutonium's all spent. We'll have to find more plutonium, and tear this whole thing down and refuel it, and repack the ma.s.s-conversion chambers--provided nothing's eaten holes in itself after the ma.s.s inside was all converted."

"How long will it take?" Conn asked.

"If we can find plutonium, and if we can find robots to do the work inside, and if there's been no structural damage, and if we keep at it--a couple of days."

"All right; let's get at it. I don't know where we'll find s.h.i.+pyards like these anywhere else, and if we do, things'll probably be as bad there. We came here to fix things up and start them, didn't we?"

XIV

It didn't take as long as Mohammed Matsui expected. They found the fissionables magazine, and in it plenty of plutonium, each subcritical slug in a five-hundred-pound collapsium canister. There were repair-robots, and they only had to replace the cartridges in the power units of three of them. They sent them inside the collapsium-s.h.i.+elded death-to-people area--transmitter robots, to relay what the others picked up through receptors wire-connected with the outside; foremen-robots, globes a yard in diameter covered with horns and spikes like old-fas.h.i.+oned ocean-navy mines; worker-robots, in a variety of shapes, but mostly looking like many-clawed crabs.

Neither the converter nor the reactor had sustained any damage while the fissionables were burning out. So the robots began tearing out reactor-elements, and removing plutonium slugs no longer capable of sustaining chain reaction but still dangerously radioactive. Nuclear reactors had become simpler and easier to service since the First Day of the Year Zero, when Enrico Fermi put the first one into operation, but the principles remained the same. Work was less back-breaking and muscle-straining, but it called for intense concentration on screens and meters and b.u.t.tons that was no less exhausting.

The air around them began to grow foul. Finally, the air-a.n.a.lyzer squawked and flashed red lights to signal that the oxygen had dropped below the safety margin. They had no mobile fan equipment, or time to hunt any; they put on their fishbowl helmets and went back to work.

After twelve hours, with a few short breaks, they had the reactors going. Jerry Rivas and a couple of others took a heavy-duty lifter and went looking for conversion ma.s.s; they brought back a couple of tons of sc.r.a.p-iron and fed it to the converters. A few seconds after it was in, the pilot lights began coming on all over the panels. They took two more hours to get the oxygen-separator and the ventilator fans going, and for good measure they started the water pumps and the heating system. Then they all went outside to the s.h.i.+p to sleep. The sun was just coming up.

It was sunset when they rose and returned to the building. The airlocks opened at a touch on the operating handles. Inside, the air was fresh and sweet, the temperature was a pleasantly uniform 75 degrees Fahrenheit, the fans were humming softly, and there was running hot and cold water everywhere.

Jerry Rivas, Anse Dawes, and the three tramp freighter fo'c'sle hands took lifters and equipment and went off foraging. The rest of them went to the communications center to get the telecast station, the radio beacon, and the inside-screen system into operation. There were a good many things that had to be turned on manually, and more things that had been left on, forty years ago, and now had to be repowered or replaced. They worked at it most of the night; before morning, almost everything was working, and they were sending a signal across twenty-eight million miles to Storisende, on Poictesme.

It was late evening, Storisende time, but Rodney Maxwell, who must have been camping beside his own screen, came on at once, which is to say five and a half minutes later.

"Well, I see you got in somewhere. Where are you, and how is everything?"

Then he picked up a cigar out of an ashtray in front of him and lit it, waiting.