Spacehounds of IPC Part 7

"All x, Nadia--luck is perched right on our banner. Freedom, air, water, power, and coal! Now as you suggested, we'll go places and do things!"

"Suppose it's safe?" Her first eagerness to explore their surroundings had abated noticeably. "You aren't armed, are you?"

"No, and I don't believe that there was a gun of any kind aboard the _Arcturus_. That kind of thing went out quite a while ago, you know.

We'll take a look, anyway--we've got to find out about that coal before we decide to settle down here. Remember this half-gravity stuff, and control your leg-muscles accordingly."

Leaping lightly to the ground, they saw that the severed section of fifty-inch armor, which was the rim of their conveyance, almost blocked the entrance to the narrow canyon which they had selected for their retreat. Upon one side that wall of steel actually touched the almost perpendicular wall or rock; upon the other side there was left only a narrow pa.s.sage. They stepped through it, so that they could see the waterfall and the gorge, and stopped silent. The sun, now fairly high, was in no sense the familiar orb of day, but was a pale, insipid thing, only one-fifth the diameter of the sun to which they were accustomed, and which could almost be studied with the uns.h.i.+elded eye. From their feet a gra.s.sy meadow a few hundred feet wide sloped gently down to the river, from whose farther bank a precipice sprang upward for perhaps a thousand feet--merging into towering hills whose rugged grandeur was reminiscent of the topography of the moon. At their backs the wall of the gorge was steep, but not precipitous, and was covered with shrubs and trees--some of which leaned out over the little canyon, completely screening it, and among whose branches birds could now and then be seen flitting about. In that direction no mountains were visible, indicating that upon their side of the river there was an upland plateau or bench.

To their right the river, the gorge, and the strip of meadow extended for a mile or more, then curved away and were lost to sight. To their left, almost too close for comfort, was the stupendous cataract, towering above them to a terror-inspiring height. Nadia studied it with awe, which changed to puzzled wonder.

"What's the matter with it, Steve? It looks like a picture in slow motion, like the kind they take of your dives--or am I seeing things?"

"No, it's really slow, compared to what we're used to. Remember that one-half gravity stuff!"

"Oh, that's right, but it certainly does look funny. It gives me the creeps."

"You'll get used to it pretty quick--just as you'll get used to all the rest of the things having only half their earthly weight and falling only half as fast as they ought to when you drop them. Well, I don't see anything that looks dangerous yet--let's go up toward the falls a few meters and prospect that outcrop."

With a few brisk strokes of an improvised shovel he cleared the outcrop of detritus and broke off several samples of the black substance, with which they went back to the "Forlorn Hope."

"It's real coal," Stevens announced after a series of tests. "I've seen better, but on the other hand, there's lots worse. It'll make good gas, and a kind of a c.o.ke. Not so hot, but it'll do. Now we'd better get organized old partner, for a long campaign."

"Go ahead and organize--I'm only the cheap help in this enterprise."

"Cheap help! You're apt to be the life of the party. Can you make and shoot a bow and arrow?"

"I'll say I can--I've belonged to an archery club for five years."

"What did I tell you? You're a life saver! Here's the dope--we've got to save our own supplies as much as possible until we know exactly what we're up against, and to do that, we've got to live off the country.

I'll fake up something to knock over some of those birds and small game, then we can make real bow-strings and feathered arrows and I'll forge some steel arrow-heads while you're making yourself a real bow. We'd better make me about a hundred-pound war bow, too...."

"A _hundred_!" interrupted Nadia. "That's a lot of bow, big boy--think you can bend 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 a.s.sured 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 acc.u.mulators 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 s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.sing 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 back-swing, 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 acc.u.mulators, 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'm 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 part.i.tions out of this s.h.i.+p 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 n.o.body 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, fas.h.i.+oning 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 acc.u.mulator cells for arrows. They won't fly true, of course, but with their ma.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ning."

"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 s.p.a.ce-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."