Spacehounds of IPC by E. E. Smith (read e book .txt) 📕

Nadia followed suit and the man laughed as she wrinkled her nose in disgust as two faint, but unmistakable odors smote her olfactory nerves.

"I never cared particularly for hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide, either," he assured her, "but they aren't strong enough to hurt us in the short time we'll be here. Those Titanian chemists know their stuff, though."

He opened the outer valves slowly, then opened the door and they stepped down upon the smooth, solid floor, which Stevens examined carefully.

"I thought so, from his story. Solid platinum! This whole plant is built of platinum, iridium, and noble alloys—the only substances known that will literally last forever. Believe me, ace of my bosom, I don't wonder that it cost them lives to build it—with their conditions, I don't see how they ever got it built at all."

Before them rose an immense, flat-topped cone of metal, upon the top of which was situated the power plant. Twelve massive pillars supported a flat roof, but permitted the air to circulate freely throughout the one great room which housed the machinery. They climbed a flight of stairs, passed between two pillars, and stared about them. There was no noise, no motion—there was nothing that could move. Twelve enormous masses of metallic checkerwork, covered with wide cooling fins, almost filled the vast hall. From the center of each mass great leads extended out into a clear space in the middle of the room, there uniting in mid-air to form one enormous bus-bar. This bar, thicker than a man's body, had originally curved upward to the base of an immense parabolic structure of latticed bars. Now, however, it was broken in midspan and the two ends bent toward the floor. Above their heads, a jagged hole gaped in the heavy metal of the roof, and a similar hole had been torn in the floor. The bar had been broken and these holes had been made by some heavy body, probably a meteorite, falling with terrific velocity.

"This is it, all right," Stevens spoke to distant Barkovis. "Sure there's nothing on this beam? If it should be hot and I should short circuit or bridge it with my body, it would be just too bad."

"We have made sure that nothing is connected to it," the Titanian assured him. "Do you think you can do anything?"

"Absolutely. We've got jacks that'll bend heavier stuff than that, and after we get it straightened the welding will be easy, but I'll have to have some metal. Shall I cut a piece off the pavement outside?"

"That will not be necessary. You will find ample stores of spare metal piled at the base of each pillar."

"All x. Now we'll get the jack, Nadia," and they went back to their vessel, finding that upon Saturn, their combined strength was barely sufficient to drag the heavy tool along the floor.

"Stand aside, please. We will place it for you," a calm voice sounded in their ears, and a pale blue tractor beam picked the massive jack lightly from the floor, and as lightly lifted it to its place beneath the broken bus-bar and held it there while Stevens piled blocks and plates of platinum beneath its base.

"Well, here's where I peel down as far as the law allows. This is going to be real work, girl—no fooling. It'd help a lot if this outfit were sending out a few thousand kilo-franks instead of standing idle."

"How would that help?"

"It's a heat-engine, you know—works by absorbing heat. The cold air sinks—I imagine it pretty nearly blows a gale down the side of this cone when it's working—and hot air rushes in to take its place. I could use a little cool breeze right now," and Stevens, stripped to the waist, bent to the lever of the powerful hydraulic jack.

Beads of sweat gathered upon his broad back, uniting to form tiny rivulets, and the girl became highly concerned about him.

"Let me help you, Steve—I'm pretty husky, too, you know."

"Sure you are, ace, but this is a job for a truck-horse, not a tenderly-nurtured maiden of the upper classes. You can help, though, by breaking out that welding outfit and getting it ready while I'm doing this bending to prepare for the welding."

Under the urge of that mighty jack the ends of the broken bus-bar rose into place, while far off in space the Titanians clustered about their visiray screens, watching, in almost unbelieving amazement, the supernatural being who labored in that reeking inferno of heat and poisonous vapor—who labored almost naked and entirely unprotected, refreshing himself from time to time with drafts of molten water!

"All x, Barkovis—that's high, I guess." Stevens flipped perspiration from his hot forehead with a wet finger and straightened his weary back. "Now you can put this jack away where we had it. Then you might trundle me over enough of that spare metal to fill up this hole, and I'll put on my suit and goggles and practice welding on this floor and the roof, to get the feel of the metal before I tackle the bar."

The hole in the floor was filled with scrap and soon sparks were flying wildly as the searing beam of Stevens' welding projector bit viciously into the stubborn alloy of noble metals; fashioning a smooth, solid floor where the yawning aperture had been. Then, lifted with his tools and plates to the roof, the man repaired that hole also.

"Now I know enough about it to do a good job on the bar," he decided, and brick after brick of alloy was fused into the crack, until only a smoothly rounded bulge betrayed that a break had ever existed in that mighty rod of metal.

"Give 'em the signal to draw power, and see if that's all that was the matter," Stevens instructed, as he relaxed in the grateful coolness of their control room. "Whew, that was a warm job, Nadia—and this air of ours does smell good!"

"It was a horrible job, and I'm glad it's done," she declared. "But say, Steve, that thing looks as little like a power-plant as anything I can imagine. How does it work? You said that it worked on heat, but I don't quite see how. But don't draw diagrams and please don't integrate!"

"No ordinary plant such as we use could run for centuries without attention," he replied. "This is a highly advanced heat-engine—something like a thermo-couple, you know. This whole thing is simply the hot end, connected to the cold end on Titan by a beam instead of wires. When it's working, this metal must cool off something fierce. That's what the checkerwork and fins are for—so that it can absorb the maximum amount of heat from the current of hot, moist air I spoke about. It's a sweet system—we'll have to rig up one between Tellus and the moon. Or even between the Equator and the Arctic Circle there'd be enough thermal differential to give us a million kilofranks. We haven't got the all x signal yet, but it's working—look at it sweat as it cools down!"

"I'll say it's sweating—the water is simply streaming off it!" In their plate they saw that moisture was already beginning to condense upon the heat-absorber: moisture running down the fins in streams and creeping over the dull metal floor in sluggish sheets; moisture which, turning into ice in the colder interior of the checkerwork, again became fluid at the inrush of hot, wet Saturnian air.

"There's the signal—all x, Barkovis? By the way it's condensing water, it seems to be functioning again."

"Perfect!" came the Titanian's enthusiastic reply, "You two planet-dwellers have done more in three short hours than the entire force of Titan could have accomplished in months. You have earned, and shall receive, the highest...."

"As you were, ace!" Stevens interrupted, embarrassed. "This job was just like shooting fish down a well, for us. Since you saved our lives, we owe you a lot yet. We're coming out—straight up!"

The Forlorn Hope shot upward, through mile after mile of steaming fog, until at last she broke through into the light, clear outer atmosphere. Stevens located the Titanian space-ship, and the two vessels once more hurtling together through the ether toward Titan, he turned to his companion.

"Take the controls, will you, Nadia? Think I'll finish up the tube. I brought along a piece of platinum from the power plant, and something that I think is tantalum from Barkovis' description of it. With those and the fractions we melted out, I think I can make everything we'll need."

Now that he had comparatively pure metal with which to work, drawing the leads and filaments was relatively a simple task. Working over the hot-bench with torch and welding projector, he made short work of running the leads through the almost plastic glass of the great tube and of sealing them in place. The plates and grids presented more serious problems; but they were solved and, long before Titan was reached, the tube was out in space, supported by a Titanian tractor beam between the two vessels. Stevens came into the shop, holding a modified McLeod gauge which he had just taken from the interior of the tube. When it had come to equilibrium, he read it carefully and yelled.

"Eureka, little fellow! She's down to where I can't read it, even on this big gauge—so hard that it won't need flashing—harder than any vacuum I ever got on Tellus, even with a Rodebush-Michalek super-pump!"

"But how about occluded and absorbed gas in the filaments and so on when they heat up?" demanded Nadia, practically.

"All gone, ace. I out-gassed 'em plenty out there—seven times, almost to fusion. There isn't enough gas left in the whole thing to make a deep breath for a microbe."

He took up his welding projector and a beam carried him back to the tube. There, in the practically absolute vacuum of space, the last openings in the glass were sealed, and man and great transmitting tube were wafted lightly back into the Terrestrial cruiser.

Hour after hour mirrored Titanian sphere and crude-fashioned terrestrial wedge bored serenely on through space, and it was not until Titan loomed large beneath them that the calm was broken by an insistent call from Titan to the sphere.

"Barkodar, attention! Barkodar, attention!" screamed from the speakers, and they heard Barkovis acknowledge the call.

"The Sedlor have broken through and are marching upon Titania. The order has gone out for immediate mobilization of every unit."

"There's that word 'Sedlor' again—what are they, anyway, Steve?" demanded Nadia.

"I don't know. I was going to ask him when he sprung it on us first, but he was pretty busy then and I haven't thought of it since. Something pretty serious, though—they've jumped their acceleration almost to Tellurian gravity, and none of them can live through much of that."

"Tellurians?" came the voice of Barkovis from the speaker. "We have just...."

"All x—we were on your wave and heard it," interrupted Stevens. "We're with you. What are those Sedlor, anyway? Maybe we can help you dope out something."

"Perhaps—but whatever you do, do not use your heat-projector. That would start a conflagration raging over the whole country, and we shall have enough to do without fighting fire. But it may be that you have other weapons, of which we are ignorant, and I can use a little time in explanation before we arrive. The Sedlor are a form of life, something like your..." he paused, searching through his scanty store of Earthly knowledge, then went on, doubtfully, "perhaps some thing like your insects. They developed a sort of intelligence, and because of their fecundity, adapted themselves to their environment as readily as did man; and for ages they threatened man's supremacy upon Titan. They devoured vegetation, crops, animals, and mankind. After a world-wide campaign, however, they were finally exterminated, save in the neighborhood of one great volcanic crater, which they so honeycombed that it is almost impregnable. All around that district we have erected barriers of force, maintained by a corps of men known as 'Guardians of the Sedlor.' These barriers extend so far into the ground and so high into the air that the Sedlor can neither burrow beneath them nor fly over them. They were being advanced as rapidly as possible, and in a few more years the insects would have been destroyed completely—but now they are again at large. They have probably developed an armor or a natural resistance greater than the Guardians thought possible, so that when the walls were weakened, they came through in their millions, underground and undetected. They are now attacking our nearest city—the one you know, and which you have called Titania."

"What do you use—those high-explosive bombs?"

"The bombs were developed principally for use against them, but proved worse than useless, for we found that when a Sedlor was blown to pieces, each piece forthwith developed into a new, complete creature. Our most efficient weapons are our heat rays—not yours remember—and poison gas. I