The Cold Equations (27 page)

Again, luck had been with them. The little truck was unharmed but for a crumpled fender. Some of its bright red enamel had been knocked off by the fall of the diamond drill rods but the diamond drill, itself, seemed untouched.

"And that covers the important things in our end of the ship," Blake said. "Let's see what luck the others had."

* * *

Wilfred was just descending from the broken elevator shaft, carrying a load of food and cooking utensils. "We'll camp out for a while, it looks like," he said. "With the new floors knee deep in wreckage and the doors six feet to ten feet up on the walls, living in the ship would be just a little inconvenient."

"We'll have to cut a passageway along the bottom side of the ship's hull," Blake said. "We can dodge the girders and just cut through the old flooring."

"How did it look up there?" Cooke asked. "What about the transmitter?"

"We won't send any SOS," Wilfred said flatly. "The transmitter tubes are smashed to fragments."

"I was afraid they would be," Blake said. "Do the others need help with their loads?"

"They could use some help, all right," Wilfred said, climbing down with his own.

They crossed the gap and met Lenson and Taylor in the elevator shaft, each with a burden of sleeping bags and various other things needed for a comfortable night outside. Blake and Cooke relieved them of part of their loads and the four of them carried their burdens to the clean, sandy spot near one of the trees where Wilfred had set up their "kitchen."

Blake dropped his load and spoke to Taylor. "So the transmitter is ruined?" he asked.

"The final power stage is," Taylor replied. "The drive stage took the fall pretty well and we could couple that in,
except—
"

"Except what?"

"In normal space that would give us a range of around a billion miles—no more than halfway to our sun's yellow companion. Useless."

"Oh—so we don't even get the chance to use our little driver stage in hyperspace?"

"The space-shift signal transformers are complete wreckage. Any signal we sent, even if we had our final power stage intact, would take three lifetimes to reach the nearest outpost through normal space. We could send a signal through hyperspace, with our drive stage, for sixty thousand billion miles—but the hyperspace transformers are broken and smashed and we could never, with our resources, replace them. So that brings up the question—what now?"

"Our space-shift units in the drive room seem to be undamaged and it wouldn't be difficult to change the rocket fuel chambers again so that we can lift the ship with an uranium fuel," Blake answered. "And we do have to lift the ship to make the jump into hyperspace under any circumstances. If uranium is to be found, we'll only have the one big problem to solve—and it's really big—how to produce enough power to activate the space-shift units. If necessity forced us to, I have an idea we might even make another converter. Of course, our success would be an uncertain thing and it would require years of work as well as luck, but it would be better than just giving up—at least, we would be trying."

He glanced toward the nearby canyon mouth. "Uranium is the vital essential, no matter what we do. I'm going to take a little walk while Wilfred fixes something to eat—I want to see what the formations look like, and if they offer any encouragement."

"And then we'll talk over our plans after we eat," Taylor said. "A man takes a more optimistic view of his circumstances when is stomach is full, anyway."

* * *

Blake walked until he came to the first bank of rock and gravel, then examined what he found with considerable muttering. The formations represented by the rocks that had washed down out of the canyon were almost like those of any Earth-type planet, with one incredible exception; every rock, whether near-granite, near-rhyolite, near-andesite, whether high or low in silica content, contained almost the same high percentage of diamond crystal inclusions. In the coarse-grained rocks, such as the near-granites, the diamond crystals were as large as the end of his little finger, while the fine-grained near-rhyolites contained the diamonds as minute inclusions. But, whether the rock was fine- or coarse-grained, the diamond was present in all in approximately the same high percentage.

He had just come upon his first specimen of Aurora's animal life when he heard the distant call of Wilfred announcing dinner. He ignored the call for a moment, walking closer to the small, brown-furred animal. It was about the size of a squirrel, with a round, dark-eyed face and a fat little stomach that it scratched in an absent manner as it solemnly watched his approach. It let him reach within six inches of it before it scampered a few feet farther away from him, to stop and resume its solemn staring.

Wilfred called again and he turned back toward camp, the little animal staring after him as he went. Apparently they would have no ferocious carnivora to contend with on Aurora—the little animal had been without fear of him, or virtually so. It had not behaved in the manner of an animal accustomed to the law of "Run—or be eaten!"

* * *

Dishes were scrubbed with a generous amount of sand and a small amount of water after the meal was over, then Taylor began the discussion of their circumstances.

"Our simplest solution would have been to send out an SOS," he said. "We could have contacted a ship easily enough on the emergency band—possibly one no more than a day or so from here."

"A day or so by hyperspace—two hundred years or more in normal space," Cooke commented. "A man doesn't really realize how great galactic distances are until he gets stuck thirty thousand light-years from home, does he?"

Lenson sighed and gave the broken ship a dark look. "I'm already beginning to acquire an unpleasant comprehension of the true magnitude of galactic distances."

"It seems to me that we have only two alternatives," Blake said. "We have to get either our ship or an SOS into hyperspace. We have the power to send the SOS through hyperspace, but the space-shift transformer that would send our signal into hyperspace is broken. The space-shift units that would send our ship into hyperspace are undamaged—but we haven't the power they would have to have. Which do we want to try to do—build a nuclear converter and take our ship back, or make a space-shift transformer for the transmission of an SOS?"

"We would not only have to make the transformer that would send our signal into hyperspace, we'd also have to replace the broken power stage of the transmitter," Taylor said. "The driver stage, even in hyperspace, would have a range so limited that it wouldn't reach the nearest outpost. Unless a ship happened to wander within its range, its signals would never be picked up. And Space being the size it is, that might not occur within our lifetimes."

"You think it would be useless to attempt to duplicate the space-shift signal transformer and the transmitter tubes?" Wilfred asked.

"I'm convinced that their duplication is beyond us," Taylor said. "They require special alloys as well as rare gases. They require delicate precision assembly; in fact, the machines that assemble them would require years of labor to build."

"We already have the means of putting our ship into hyperspace," Blake said. "All we need is the power. It seems to me we could more easily figure out a method of accumulating that power than we could build precision electronic equipment. After all, all we need is a tremendous store of energy to power our jump into hyperspace—a lot of energy for a short period. The drop back into normal space doesn't require but a fraction of that power."

"If there is no hope of sending an SOS, then we haven't any choice but to do that, have we?" Wilfred asked.

"I think we can safely say that the hope of sending an SOS is nil," Taylor said.

None of the others voiced any disagreement and Blake said:

"If we can find uranium, we won't have much trouble changing the fuel chambers to suit the fuel. We probably will have to spend more time making the ship—or the stern half of it—air-tight again than anything else. At any rate, the whole thing is hopeless unless we do rig up an atomic drive. We have to lift our ship into space to slip it into hyperspace and there's no use conjecturing on how we're going to take the second step until we know we can take the first step."

No one spoke for a few seconds, then Taylor said, "I suppose we agree on that, then. Now, the important thing is; can we find the uranium?" He looked at Blake. "How about it—what do you think of the possibilities?"

"I couldn't say," Blake answered. "I haven't seen any of this country, yet. I saw no evidence of metallic ores in the rocks washed down out of that canyon, but we could hardly expect to discover uranium that easily."

"What
did
you find?" Cooke asked.

"These rock formations are similar to Earth-type formations, and the silica content is about normal—if a person discounts the diamond present. The diamond is present in all formations, whether high or low in silica, usually as small to minute crystals. The larger crystals we saw must have come from pegmatitic formations."

"Which are—?" Cooke asked.

"Extremely coarse-grained bodies of rock. Minerals in pegmatitic form as unusually large crystals. On Charon we found a perfect quartz crystal that weighed a thousand pounds in a pegmatitic formation. Cummings—an old white-haired fellow who had been born on Old Earth—said that crystals much larger than that had been found on Old Earth in the past.

"There's something else about pegmatites," he added. "Pitchblende is sometimes found in pegmatitic formations. So, it may possibly be that the uranium ore we find—if we find any—will be in the same formation that these diamond boulders come from."

"Another thing—" Taylor said, thoughtfully. "We'll have to have cadmium. Cadmium and uranium—if we can find the two ores and refine them, we can alter the drive."

"Which will take how long—just as a wild guess?" Lenson asked.

Taylor smiled. "That's like asking how high is up. But, just as an optimistic guess, I'd say from one to two years."

Wilfred nodded his head in agreement. "I'd say that was about right—not less than one and not more than two years. We're lucky in that we have a lathe and other tools to work with, a truck to use for prospecting and all the mining equipment we need to mine the ore after we find it."

"The first thing will be to fix up a place to live," Taylor said, pulling up his pants leg to rub a skinned and bruised knee. "Climbing in and out of those rooms as we did this afternoon is hard work, and painful."

"Red suggested cutting a passageway along the bottom of the hull—using the bottom of the hull as the floor," Wilfred said. "That shouldn't take long. We can rearrange everything to accommodate the new floor and we'll certainly have to take the lathe down off the wall and set it up again on the floor."

* * *

Their first Aurorian sunset stopped all talk of future operations a few minutes later. The sun was invisible behind some distant range, its last rays throwing lances of ruby, emerald and gold across the scintillating rainbow field that was the western sky. The lances shifted as they watched, widening and quivering with the splendor of their ever-changing colors until they rippled across the sky like the banners of some celestial fairyland.

Lenson was the first to speak, after the colors began to fade. "I never saw anything like that," he said, almost awe in his voice.

"Nor I," Cooke said, sprawling back against his sleeping bag. "That looks exactly the way my mother used to tell me heaven would look—before she decided I'd never go there, anyway."

"Probably caused by several different layers of air currents, traveling at different speeds and carrying varying amounts of dust and water vapor," Wilfred offered.

"Huh!" Cooke snorted. "Do you always have to be so pragmatic and practical?"

"Oh, it was impressive, I'll admit, but there was a simple, everyday reason for its beauty—the one I suggested, likely. Beautiful sunsets on Earth-type planets are due to water vapor and impurities in the atmosphere."

"Then, so long as we're stuck here, let's be grateful that our atmosphere does contain these beautiful-sunset producing impurities," Lenson said.

* * *

The afterglow faded from the sky and the Thousand Suns revealed themselves; a field of bright points of light shining through the haze with sufficient brilliance to throw dim shadows along the ground.

"We'll have to make observations," Taylor remarked. "I'll start making daily observations of our sun and its companion. We know the days here are about twenty-four hours long, but we don't know whether it's spring or summer—or possibly this world has no seasonal inclination of the poles."

"I think it's spring," Blake said. "The higher peaks we saw through the haze were covered with snow. Of course, that's not very conclusive evidence."

"Let's hope it's spring," Taylor said. "We know that our year is about six Earth-years in length and, with luck, we may be able to get away from here before winter comes."

There was a little more talk of their plans; then, one by one, they spread out their sleeping bags and crawled in. Blake, the last to retire, sat for a while watching the golden field the Thousand Suns made of the haze, reaching from the western horizon halfway to the zenith. To the east the sky was dead black, with no star to relieve it. There were none in that direction; not for a long, long way. Aurora had recently passed the farthest point from the Thousand Suns in her orbit; a straight line would pass from her to her sun, to close by the blue-white sun's yellow companion, then on into the Thousand Suns.

Blake remarked, just before he went to sleep, "You'll see what utter darkness is before morning—after the Thousand Suns go down and before the sun comes up."

* * *

It required fifteen days to get the ship even partly in condition for living. There was the passage to be cut, doors to be fitted to keep out the fine dust stirred up by the afternoon winds, the ship's water tank to be equipped with sediment filters, the tables and chairs to be unbolted from their incongruous positions on what had become the walls, the truck to be lowered out of the ship—an endless number of things to be done.