The Cold Equations (32 page)

* * *

It was on the morning following the failure of X144. They had worked far into the night to complete the assembly of it and it had been devoid of observable results. The others had gone to bed to get a few hours sleep before starting the construction of X145 but Blake had found sleep impossible. The failure of X144 exhausted every possibility but one; the one represented by the to-be-constructed X145. Theoretically, X145 would be successful—but some of the others had been theoretically certain of success until their trial had revealed hitherto unknown factors. After an hour of the futile wondering and conjecturing, Blake had given up the thought of sleep and put on his clothes.

He walked down to the creek, marveling again at the beauty of a world so harsh and barren. The yellow star, now bright enough to cast his shadow before him, was low in the west as he walked up the creek and the eastern sky was being touched with the first emerald glow that preceded the rainbow banners. When the sun came up it would bring another day of heat, and the dry, swirling winds would send the diamond dust along in low-flying clouds. But in the quiet of early dawn it was cool and pleasant along the creek with the trees bordering it making a leafy green corridor along which he walked into the emerald dawn while the fresh scent of green, living things was about him.

He saw the bulk of something red, lying in the sand beside a tree, and he went over to it. It was a small mound of blood-red diamonds, and he saw that someone had selected them for their flawless perfection. He squatted beside them, leaning back against the tree trunk and lighting a cigarette as he wondered idly who had placed them there, and why.

He forgot them as he rested and watched the emerald of the eastern sky glow deeper in color and the first touch of iridescence come to it. Aurora, for all her grimness, was a beautiful world, and along the creek a man could almost imagine he was on New Earth but for the glory of the dawn and the glitter of the diamond sand. The leaves of the tree over him rustled softly, and among the fresh green smells there came the scent of the red flowers that grew along the water's edge; a scent that brought a brief, nostalgic memory of the old-fashioned briar roses in his mother's garden when he was a boy. She had brought the seeds from Old Earth when she was a girl and on Old Earth, she had told him, they grew wild.

It was hard to believe, as he sat beside the creek, that it and the sweet-scented flowers and the leaves rustling overhead were not things of some stable world where they would remain so for uncounted lifetimes to come; where only the slow, slow dying of the sun could at last bring the end.

* * *

Gravel crunched behind him and he turned to see Cooke. "Nice here, isn't it?" Cooke asked, sitting down near him.

Blake nodded, then said, "I thought you were in bed?"

"And I thought you were," Cooke replied. "What do you think of the quality of the diamonds there beside you?"

"You're the one who piled them here?" Blake asked, surprised. "How long has this been going on, and why?"

"Ever since I said we'd unlock that second door. We may have to leave here in a hurry, but we
are
going to leave here. I just did the logical thing of using some of my spare minutes to pile up some of the choicest diamonds where we can get them in short order."

"Do you really believe that, or is this diamond-gathering just to bolster your confidence?" Blake asked, watching him curiously.

"What do you think?" Cooke countered.

Blake studied him, the hard jaw and broken nose, the glittering black eyes, and saw that they were not deceptive, after all. Under ordinary circumstances Cooke was easy-going and genial, but now the mask of good humor had fallen away for the moment and the hard steel core of the man was revealed. Cooke, like the bulldog Wilfred, would be stubbornly defying their fate when Aurora went into the yellow sun.

Yet, though such stubborn faith might prove to be in vain, it had its advantages. Stubborn men die hard—sometimes it takes more than merely impossible difficulties to persuade a stubborn man to die at all.

"I think you have the right idea," Blake said.

There was a silence as Blake returned his attention to the dawn, then Cooke remarked, "We won't have but a few more like that—before we leave here, one sun or the other will be in view all the time. And, by then, the yellow one will be too bright to permit any sunrise effects from the other one."

"Aurora doesn't have many days left."

"What a show that will be!" Cooke mused. "First a nova as Aurora goes into the yellow sun, then the big blue-white sun will go into the nova." Then he sighed and said, "But I sort of hate to see it. I don't care about the suns, but I hate to see Aurora go up in a blaze, no matter how glorious that blaze may be. She's a hard world on humans, but she forced us to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. She's a beautiful little devil and I hate to see her destroyed."

The good die young, Blake thought, watching the dawn flame into vivid, fiery life. Not that Aurora was good. She was cruel and beautiful; she was a splendid, glittering prison taking them with her on her swift, silent flight to extinction.

It was not the way a world should die. The death of a world should come only when the fires of her sun went out. A world should grow old and cold for millennia upon millennia; death should come slowly and quietly like that of an old, old woman. But it would not be so for Aurora; for her death would be quick and violent and she would explode a yellow sun into a nova as she died.

* * *

Two days later they were ready to put X145 to the test. It was similar to the long-past X117 in that the same blue-white diamond swung from the same long thread, but the assembly was of a different form and the steam engine was cold. They had made a battery, a simply storage battery, and X145 would either succeed or fail with the battery's small current.

The tension was far greater than it had ever been at any previous test, and even Cooke had no cheerful smile or remarks. X145 would be
the
test; if it failed all their labors leading up to it had been to a dead-end. And they would have no time to try another approach.

"I guess we're ready," Cooke said. Blake went to the rheostat that controlled the amount of current and the others grouped about the X145 assembly.

"I'll give it the juice gradually," Blake said. "Although if it as much as quivers at full current, we really will have our drive."

Blake watched the diamond as he turned the rheostat's knob. He felt the faint click of it as it made first contact, then flinched involuntarily as something cracked like a pistol shot and the diamond, thread and scale vanished. Something clattered to the floor across the room and Lenson's surprised question was cut off by a shout from Cooke: "Look—the scale!"

He ran to where it had fallen and picked it up, holding it for all to see. There was a hole torn through it.

"How much . . . how much power did you give it?" he demanded of Blake.

"Minimum current," Blake replied.

"Minimum current," Wilfred murmured. "Minimum current—
and it shot the diamond through the scale!
"

The torn scale was passed from hand to hand and the talk it engendered was both voluble and optimistic.

Cooke hurried out after another scale and Blake and Lenson connected another rheostat in series with the first, then added still another when Wilfred gave the results of his calculations on the slide rule.

Cooke returned with the scale, a much larger one, and a block of copper. "Three?" He lifted his eyebrows toward the three rheostats. "If we can budge a pound of copper with full current through three rheostats, then we can lift a thousand ships with our generator."

The copper block was suspended from the scale, to swing down in the field of the X145, and Blake said, "I'll try minimum current again, even though it may not be enough to affect it at all. We can't expect it to do anything spectacular at minimum current, I'm sure."

He turned the rheostat knob a fraction of an inch and felt the faint click, his eyes on the copper block. There was a roar, sharp and deafening in the room, and the copper block vanished as the diamond had. A hard pull of hot air struck him and something ricocheted back down from the roof to strike him painfully on the shoulder, a fragment of metal from the scale. Wilfred was pointing upward, yelling something. "
 . . . Through the roof!
"

Blake looked up and saw what he meant; there was a small hole torn through the hull of the ship over their heads, a hole such as would be made by a one-pound block of copper.

"
Three rheostats,
" Cooke exclaimed. "We not only have the power to lift our ship; we could lift ten thousand of them!"

Cooke began to make rapid calculations and Wilfred followed suit. Blake, curious though he was, saw no reason for three of them to work simultaneously on the same problem so he waited, as did Taylor and Lenson. Taylor was smiling; the first time in many days he had seen the old man smile.

* * *

"The problem of power for the hyperspace drive no longer exists," Lenson said. "We can apply the same principles to its alteration that we just now made use of and we can actually 'slip' through the barrier rather than bulldozing our way through it."

"We have a means of driving our ship and we have a means of slipping her into hyperspace," Blake said. "We've come mighty near to succeeding in our plans—will we have the time to succeed all the way?"

"Time?" Lenson looked surprised. "How much time do you want? We have seven days. Isn't that enough?"

Blake shook his head. "We can't have the ship ready in that short space of time. To leave here within seven days we'll have to—"

"Did I say ten thousand ships?" Cooke's black eyes glittered with exultation. "We could move a world with the power in that generator!"

"We've really reversed the gravitic flow," Wilfred said, as enthused as Cooke. "The only power required to move an object is that for the reversing field—or whatever we should call it. This power requirement is negligible with a capital N."

"Homeward bound!" Cooke said. "Safe and snug beyond the nova's reach in hyperspace!"

"If we want to give up the habit of breathing," Blake pointed out.

The four of them stared at him, and one by one their faces fell as they realized what he referred to; the thing they had forgotten in the intensity of their efforts to devise a drive.

"The ship—" Cooke was the first to express the thought in the minds of all of them. "It leaks like a sieve!"

"How, in seven days, can we finish cutting the two halves of the ship apart, wall in the cut-off end and repair all the broken-apart seams?" Blake asked.

"We can't," Taylor said. He sat down, suddenly old and tired, his former cheerfulness gone. "I don't see how we could make the ship leak-proof in less than four months with the tools and materials we have." He smiled again, but without mirth. "But we came close to succeeding, didn't we?"

"We'll succeed," Blake said. "It's a tough problem, apparently, but I have an idea."

"How about enclosing the ship in a gravitic field large enough to hold its air by plain gravity?" Wilfred asked.

"And how big a field would that have to be?" Lenson asked.

"Big," Blake said. "Even in hyperspace, it will take us six months to get home—or near that. Air has a tendency to leak away and dissipate into space rather easily. I doubt that we could enclose the ship in a field large enough to hold enough air to last us for six months—as I say, it leaks away into space very easily."

"The gradual loss of our air would be an unpleasant way to die," Cooke said. "The ship leaks, we don't have the time to repair it, so what do we do? How do we solve that last little problem?"

"Seven days to do a four months' repair job—" Lenson sat down beside Taylor and sighed. "It looks like we
can't
make our ship leak-proof in the time we have. But surely there is
some
way—"

"There is," Blake said. "We have a perfect method of both getting home and keeping air in our ship. It should be obvious to all of you."

Questioning looks gave way to dawning comprehension. There was a long silence as they considered the plan, then Cooke said, "After all, a fortune was what we set out for."

"We'll have to call them in advance," Wilfred said. "We can't just barge in."

Blake nodded. "Homeward bound, safe and snug in hyperspace—but, as you say, we'll have to radio them in advance. If we just barreled in without giving them a chance to tell us where to park, it could raise merry hell with everything."

* * *

Redmond, control-tower radio operator of Spaceport 1, New Earth, was puzzled. He scratched his thinning hair and leaned closer to the speaker. The voice from it came in distinctly, but faintly.

"Can't you step up your volume?" he asked.

"No," the tiny voice answered. "I told you we had to couple in the driver stage—our power stage is gone."

"How far out are you?" Redmond asked.

"About a billion miles. Did you get what I told you? This is the
Star Scout
and we're just back from beyond the Thousand Suns. We were going to get caught by a nova—"

"I got everything," Redmond interrupted. "Your planet was going into the yellow sun and its high carbon content would create a nova. You learned how to control field-type forces so that you would have a drive for your ship. So you came back to New Earth—or a billion miles out from it. But why do you keep insisting that I have my superiors engage an astrophysicist to tell you where to park your ship? And another thing—you said it would take four months to make your ship leak-proof and you only had seven days. How did you do a four months' job in seven days?"

"We didn't," the thin voice from the speaker answered. "That's what I'm trying to tell you and that's why we'll have to have an astrophysicist define our parking place. We didn't have time to repair our ship, and we couldn't enclose it in a gravitic field large enough to hold air for six months."

Redmond clutched his thinning hair again, feeling suddenly dizzy. "You don't mean—"