The Cold Equations (28 page)

Blake and Cooke left on the morning of the sixteenth day, leaving the other three to continue the work on and in the ship. They watched Blake and Cooke depart with a certain wistfulness and Cooke remarked, as they ground away through the sand, "I think all would have liked to go with us. They'll have nothing but hard work while we're out enjoying the fresh air and new scenery."

"You may change your mind about 'enjoying' it," Blake said. "Walking can be hard work when you do it all day."

"What's this truck for?" Cooke wanted to know.

"To haul our stuff. We won't use it any more than we have to—we can make new shoes by hand but we can't make a new truck."

"Do you think the diamond dust will be that bad?"

"I hope we find diamond dust and sand are the exceptions rather than the rule, but all evidence shows the diamond to be present everywhere. If so, we'll have to use the truck as little as possible—if we find the ores we want, then the truck will be indispensable for hauling them to the ship. Whatever we have to have for refining the ores will have to be at the ship—or we'll have to haul a good deal of material and equipment to the ore. Either way, we'll have to have this truck, so we'd better take care of it."

"I can see your point," Cooke agreed, "but I doubt that we'll wear it out very fast. After all, this thing was made to use in country where there was silica sand, and diamond is less than fifty per cent harder than silica."

"If you were correct in that surmise, I wouldn't be worried," Blake said.

"What do you mean—'if'?" Cooke demanded. "Quartz has a hardness of seven and diamond has a hardness of ten. That's less than fifty per cent harder, isn't it?"

Blake sighed. "The true and unpleasant facts are these: Diamond is said to have a hardness of ten because it's the only thing harder than corundum's nine. A mineralogist named Woodell, a long time ago and back on Old Earth, determined the true hardness of diamond in comparison with quartz's seven and corundum's nine. The actual hardness of diamond ranges from a fraction over thirty-six to a fraction over forty-two."

"Oh." Cooke was thoughtfully silent for a while. "Then we can count on this diamond sand and dust being six times harder than the sand and dust this truck was made to resist."

"Six times harder, and also tougher."

* * *

They lurched across a small gulch and onto a silty flat, winding to avoid the thorn bushes that were scattered across it. The morning air was still and the dust they raised followed them in a dense cloud, coating their faces and clothing an iridescent gray, gritting harshly wherever two parts of metal moved together, such as the driving controls. They had traveled an hour, enclosed in the cloud of destructive dust, when Blake said, "I wonder—"

"You wonder what?" Cooke asked, his black eyes made blacker by the gray dust that covered his face.

"I wonder if this diamond dust hasn't got us behind an eight-ball—a big, shiny eight-ball named Aurora."

They worked their way along the southern foot of the mountain, toward the high plateau to the east where the creek might have its headwaters. They prospected the canyons one by one, both by carrying back samples of the bedrock gravels to the truck, to pan for particles of the heavy uranium and cadmium ores they sought, and by use of the Geiger counters they each carried. Cooke ran the gauntlet from his first feeling of carefree adventure to a condition of sore, aching legs and blistered hands. Their picks and shovels wore away with amazing rapidity, even from digging in the comparatively loose gravels of the canyon beds, and they found nothing.

They reached the eastern end of the range, a high, bleak plateau where the creek had its headwaters and where the nights were chilly with the breezes from the slowly melting snowbanks. There was nothing there but barren flow rocks and the inevitable diamond so they turned and worked their way back down the northern side of the range. Cooke's soft muscles hardened and his habitual optimism returned, undaunted by the lack of heavy-metal concentrates in the samples they panned or by the Geiger counters that remained silent but for the intermittent clicking of the natural background count.

Twice they found veins of soft iron oxide and once they found a narrow vein of low-grade copper ore but the mountain seemed devoid of any uranium or of any lead-zinc ore that might contain the cadmium they needed.

Blake cared for the little truck with painstaking attention, doing everything possible to keep the diamond dust out of its moving parts. But no way could be devised to keep the dust out of such moving parts as the brake drums, the ball and socket of the front-wheel drive, the control-lever linkage, the winch they were forced to use so many times, and many other moving parts. The air filter caused him more worry than anything else. He knew a certain amount of the fine dust was getting past the filter and into the motor, and there was nothing he could do about it. It was a good filter, made to protect an engine against silica dust; any silica dust fine enough to get past the filter would be too fine to cause any damage before it was reduced to an impalpable powder. But the diamond dust it admitted was six times harder than silica, as well as tougher—the diamond dust would refuse to be reduced to a harmless, impalpable powder.

They rounded the west end of the range early on the thirtieth day and saw the green line of the creek a mile away. The truck labored noisily as Blake turned it up a gentle grade toward the mouth of a narrow canyon and he shifted into a lower gear.

"It's a good thing we're only five miles from camp," Cooke said. "You're about three gears lower than you would be if this truck was in the same condition it was in when we left camp thirty days ago."

"I'm afraid this will be its last trip—I've tried to baby it along and keep the dust out of it, but you just can't enclose a machine in a dust-proof wrapper."

* * *

They left the truck on the smooth alluvial fan just outside the canyon's narrow portal and began the by now repetitious process of prospecting the canyon. It was late in the afternoon when they found their first cadmium; a thin gray seam of metallic sulfide in a rock washed down from higher on the canyon's wall.

"The gray sulfide is lead and zinc," Blake said. "Those little yellowish-orange spots in it are cadmium sulfide."

Cooke shook his head. "The percentage of cadmium is so slight—and the lead and zinc is only a thin seam."

"It might have wider portions where it's in place," Blake said, looking up the steeply sloping canyon's side. "It shouldn't be hard to find."

They located it in place an hour later, halfway up the canyon's side, but it was only a short, narrow seam. Blake tried unsuccessfully to dig into it with his prospector's pick, the point of which had long since been worn to a blunt stub. Cooke, pounding vainly at the tight-grained formation beside him, stopped to light a cigarette and wipe the sweat from his face.

"We have acids and glycerin," he said. "If we only had a few holes drilled in this rock, we could fill them with nitroglycerine."

"There's a chance in a thousand that it might get wider at a greater depth," Blake said, ceasing his own futile pounding. "But how do we drill holes in it?"

"The diamond drill—" Cooke began, then his voice trailed off.

"Exactly," Blake said, seeing what was suddenly in Cooke's mind. "How do we drill diamond-bearing rock with a diamond drill?"

"How did we intend to drill holes for mining when we started out thirty days ago? I won't argue about the diamond drill—I can't see how it could drill through diamond-bearing rock—but why didn't we think of all that before?"

"We didn't know for sure that all formations carried the same high percentage of diamond," Blake pointed out. "We hoped such wouldn't be the case, remember?"

"What a world to live on!" Cooke sighed. "Everything we try to do is foiled by diamonds. How can a superabundance of just one element manage to cause so much grief?"

"Well"—Blake shook his empty canteen and glanced to the west where the sun had disappeared behind the canyon wall—"we can't do any more here, now, so we might as well get on back to the truck and have something to eat before dark."

Cooke led the way to the bed of the canyon, his blithe spirits returned sufficiently for him to be whistling by the time they reached it. They were halfway to the canyon's portal when it became suddenly darker, as though a heavy cloud had covered the sun. It grew darker, although Blake's watch said the sun was not quite ready to set, and when they were almost to the portal's cliffs, where the canyon suddenly opened out upon the desert, he became aware of a low roar above the crunching of his footsteps in the diamond sand. It came from the desert beyond the portal; a sound like a distant waterfall.

Cooke, two hundred feet ahead of him, was still whistling cheerily and had obviously not heard it. Blake increased his pace and was almost up with him when Cooke stepped beyond the cliffs that still hid the desert from Blake.

Cooke stopped, then, a look of amazement on his face, staring in the direction of their truck and the desert beyond. Then he wheeled to shout back at Blake, "
What is it?
"

Blake was beside him a few seconds later and he saw the source of the sound he had heard.

It was a mile away; a great, high black wall rushing toward them, its towering crest lost in the atmospheric haze. It was racing toward them at perhaps fifty miles an hour, roaring with a deep, sustained roar and the sheer front of it seething and boiling.

"What—?" Cooke began, but Blake cut him off with a terse, "Come on!" He ran toward the truck, estimating the distance they must cover before the black wall reached them. The truck was not far—but the wall was traveling at least fifty miles an hour.

"Is it—" Cooke began again, then gave up as a gust of wind whipped sand in his mouth and devoted his full attention to keeping up with the fleet Blake.

They reached the truck with the black wall looming almost upon them and jumped inside, slamming the doors. "Sandstorm," Blake said, as Cooke started to ask again. A harder gust of wind lashed at the truck, stinging their faces with sand. "Close your window," Blake said as he cranked up his own. "Those baby zephyrs are the advance guard. I think we're in for a real one."

* * *

The black wall struck a moment later with a thunderous roaring and screaming, smashing at the little truck with savage blows and enveloping them in darkness. Sand and gravel slashed against the windows with a sharp, dry hiss and, above the roar of the wind, Blake could hear a violent thumping as the wind found an empty and unfastened water can in the bed of the truck and slammed it back and forth. The pounding ceased abruptly and Blake had a mental vision of their water can going in kangaroo leaps across the mountainside.

" . . . long do you think?" Cooke shouted through the darkness.

"What?" Blake asked, shouting, himself, to be heard above the howl and roar of the storm.

"How long do you think this will last?"

"Don't know. Sometimes a sandstorm will last an hour, sometimes ten hours."

He felt inside the utility box under the dash and found a flashlight. Its beam had the appearance of a three-dimensional cone in the dust-filled air of the cab.

"How did that get in here so quick?" Cooke demanded.

"It comes in every little crack and crevice," Blake answered, flashing the light through the windshield. The light revealed the dust and sand flowing past them with incredible speed. There were bright gleams in the torrent of air and sand as larger pieces of diamond reflected the light for a microsecond and bits of dead vegetation were being carried along.

Blake shut off the light and made himself as comfortable as possible in his half of the small cab. "You might as well try to make your mind a contented blank for an indefinite number of hours," he advised.

Cooke followed his advice, grumbling at the lack of leg room. He was asleep within fifteen minutes; a fact Blake confirmed by a quick flash of the light. Blake sighed enviously and composed himself for the hours of futile thinking and worrying that would be his own lot until sleep came. There was, in the genial Cooke's philosophy, a blithe unconcern for "Unborn Tomorrow and Dead Yesterday." But, while he envied Cooke for his carefree attitude, he wondered if it would be of sufficient stability to survive the eventual recognition of a not-so-remote possibility—that all their efforts to leave their shining prison might prove to be futile.

The wind was shaking the truck and roaring with undiminished fury when he finally went to sleep, still worrying about the diamond dust that was being driven into every tiny crack about the truck wherever two parts of metal moved against each other. Silica, over a period of time, would ruin machinery. This was diamond, not silica; this had a hardness of forty-two, not seven—

He awoke at dawn, stiff and cramped, with Cooke's snoring loud in the silence that had replaced the storm. He jabbed an ungentle elbow into Cooke's ribs. "Wake up—the storm is over."

"Huh?" Cooke blinked and straightened with a moan. "My leg's been asleep so long it—Hey! What happened to our windows?"

"We now have frosted glass all around," Blake said, rolling down the opaque window on his own side. "Diamond sand is really tough on glass."

He stepped out of the truck into the calm morning air and looked at the damage. Cooke came around from the other side and stared open-mouthed at the bright, gleaming metal side of the truck where, before, there had been a thick coat of hard red enamel.

"It looks like we need a new paint job," he said at last. "And we'll have to knock a hole in the windshield to see how to drive to camp."

Blake lifted the motor cover and ran a finger through the blanket of diamond dust that covered every part of the motor. It was heaped on more thickly where there had been grease or oil to hold it.

"What do we do about that?" Cooke asked.

"Nothing. If we should try to wipe it off, it would cause it to work in deeper. We can only let it stay and hope the grease will keep most of it from getting any deeper into the moving parts."