The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF (29 page)

“Jorgenson didn’t come through, but the kid had an idea, and they’re out there working on it.” Doc tried to sound more hopeful than he felt. “I was thinking you might as well bring Jorgenson in here; he’s still unconscious, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about. Where’s Brown? She’ll probably want to know what’s up, if she isn’t asleep.”

“Asleep when the kid isn’t? Uh-huh. Mother complex, has to worry about him.” Blake grinned. “She got a look at him running out with Hoke tagging at his heels, and hiked out after him, so she probably knows everything now. Wish Anne’d chase me that way, just once – Jenkins, the wonder boy! Well, it’s out of my line; I don’t intend to start worrying until they pass out the order. O.K., Doc, I’ll have Jorgenson out here in a couple of minutes, so you grab yourself a cot and get some shut-eye.”

Doc grunted, looking curiously at the refinements and well-equipped interior of the field tent. “I’ve already prescribed that, Blake, but the patient can’t seem to take it. I think I’ll hunt up Brown, so give me a call over the public speaker if anything turns up.”

He headed toward the center of action, knowing that he’d been wanting to do it all along, but hadn’t been sure of not being a nuisance. Well, if Brown could look on, there was no reason why he couldn’t. He passed the machine shop, noting the excited flurry of activity going on, and went past No. 2, where other men were busily ripping out long sections of big piping and various other devices. There was a rope fence barring his way, well beyond No. 3, and he followed along the edge, looking for Palmer or Brown.

She saw him first. “Hi, Dr. Ferrel, over here in the truck. I thought you’d be coming soon. From up here we can get a look over the heads of all these other people, and we won’t be tramped on.” She stuck down a hand to help him up, smiled faintly as he disregarded it and mounted more briskly than his muscles wanted to. He wasn’t so old that a girl had to help him yet.

“Know what’s going on?” he asked, sinking down onto the plank across the truck body, facing out across the men below toward the converter. There seemed to be a dozen different centers of activity, all crossing each other in complete confusion, and the general pattern was meaningless.

“No more than you do. I haven’t seen my husband, though Mr. Palmer took time enough to chase me here out of the way.”

Doc centered his attention on the ’copters, unloading, rising, and coming in with more loads, and he guessed that those boxes must contain the little thermodyne bombs. It was the one thing he could understand, and consequently the least interesting. Other men were assembling the big sections of piping he’d seen before, connecting them up in almost endless order, while some of the tanks hooked on and snaked them off in the direction of the small river that ran off beyond the plant.

“Those must be the exhaust blowers, I guess,” he told Brown, pointing them out. “Though I don’t know what any of the rest of the stuff hooked on is.”

“I know – I’ve been inside the plant Bob’s father had.” She lifted an inquiring eyebrow at him, went on as he nodded. “The pipes are for exhaust gases, all right, and those big square things are the motors and fans – they put in one at each five hundred feet or less of piping. The things they’re wrapping around the pipe must be the heaters to keep the gases hot. Are they going to try to suck all that out?”

Doc didn’t know, though it was the only thing he could see. But he wondered how they’d get around the problem of moving in close enough to do any good. “I heard your husband order some thermodyne bombs, so they’ll probably try to gassify the magma; then they’re pumping it down the river.”

As he spoke, there was a flurry of motion at one side, and his eyes swung over instantly, to see one of the cranes laboring with a long framework stuck from its front, holding up a section of pipe with a nozzle on the end. It tilted precariously, even though heavy bags were piled everywhere to add weight, but an inch at a time it lifted its load, and began forcing its way forward, carrying the nozzle out in front and rather high.

Below the main exhaust pipe was another smaller one. As it drew near the outskirts of the danger zone, a small object ejaculated from the little pipe, hit the ground, and was a sudden blazing inferno of glaring blue-white light, far brighter than it seemed, judging by the effect on the eyes. Doc shielded his, just as someone below put something into his hands.

“Put ’em on. Palmer says the light’s actinic.”

He heard Brown fussing beside him, then his vision cleared, and he looked back through the goggles again to see a glowing cloud spring up from the magma, spread out near the ground, narrowing down higher up, until it sucked into the nozzle above, and disappeared. Another bomb slid from the tube, and erupted with blazing heat. A sideways glance showed another crane being fitted, and a group of men near it wrapping what might have been oiled rags around the small bombs; probably no tubing fitted them exactly, and they were padding them so pressure could blow them forward and out. Three more dropped from the tube, one at a time, and the fans roared and groaned, pulling the cloud that rose into the pipe and feeding it down toward the river.

Then the crane inched back out carefully as men uncoupled its piping from the main line, and a second went in to replace it. The heat generated must be too great for the machine to stand steadily without the pipe fusing, Doc decided; though they couldn’t have kept a man inside the heavily armoured cab for any length of time, if the metal had been impervious. Now another crane was ready, and went in from another place; it settled down to a routine of ingoing and outcoming cranes, and men feeding materials in, coupling and uncoupling the pipes and replacing the others who came from the cabs. Doc began to feel like a man at a tennis match, watching the ball without knowing the rules.

Brown must have had the same idea, for she caught Ferrel’s arm and indicated a little leather case that came from her handbag. “Doc, do you play chess? We might as well fill our time with that as sitting here on edge, just watching. It’s supposed to be good for nerves.”

He seized on it gratefully, without explaining that he’d been city champion three years running; he’d take it easy, watch her game, handicap himself just enough to make it interesting by the deliberate loss of a rook, bishop or knight, as was needed to even the odds—Suppose they got all the magma out and into the river; how did that solve the problem? It removed it from the plant, but far less than the fifty-mile minimum danger limit.

“Check,” Brown announced. He castled, and looked up at the half-dozen cranes that were now operating. “Check! Checkmate!”

He looked back again hastily, then, to see her queen guarding all possible moves, a bishop checking him. Then his eye followed down toward her end. “Umm. Did you know you’ve been in check for the last half-dozen moves? Because I didn’t.”

She frowned, shook her head, and began setting the men up again. Doc moved out the queen’s pawn, looked out at the worker’s, and then brought out the king’s bishop, to see her take it with her king’s pawn. He hadn’t watched her move it out, and had counted on her queen’s to block his. Things would require more careful watching on this little portable set. The men were moving steadily and there was a growing clear space, but as they went forward, the violent action of the thermodyne had pitted the ground, carefully as it had been used, and going became more uncertain. Time was slipping by rapidly now.

“Checkmate!” He found himself in a hole, started to nod; but she caught herself this time. “Sorry, I’ve been playing my king for a queen. Doctor, let’s see if we can play at least one game right.”

Before it was half finished, it became obvious that they couldn’t. Neither had chess very much on the mind, and the pawns and men did fearful and wonderful things, while the knights were as likely to jump six squares as their normal L. They gave it up, just as one of the cranes lost its precarious balance and toppled forward, dropping the long extended pipe into the bubbling mass below. Tanks were in instantly, hitching on and tugging backward until it came down with a thump as the pipe fused, releasing the extreme forward load. It backed out on its own power, while another went in. The driver, by sheer good luck, hobbled from the cab, waving an armored hand to indicate he was all right. Things settled back to an excited routine again that seemed to go on endlessly, though seconds were dropping off too rapidly, turning into minutes that threatened to be hours far too soon.

“Uh!” Brown had been staring for some time, but her little feet suddenly came down with a bang and she straightened up, her hand to her mouth. “Doctor, I just thought; it won’t do any good – all this!”

“Why?” She couldn’t know anything, but he felt the faint hopes he had go downward sharply. His nerves were dulled, but still ready to jump at the slightest warning.

“The stuff they were making was a superheavy – it’ll sink as soon as it hits the water, and all pile up right there! It won’t float down river!”

Obvious, Ferrel thought; too obvious. Maybe that was why the engineers hadn’t thought of it. He started from the plank, just as Palmer stepped up, but the manager’s hand on his shoulder forced him back.

“Easy, Doc, it’s O.K. Ummm, so they teach women
some
science nowadays, eh, Mrs Jenkins . . . Sue . . . Dr. Brown, whatever your name is? Don’t worry about it, though – the old principle of Brownian movement will keep any colloid suspended, if it’s fine enough to be a real colloid. We’re sucking it out and keeping it pretty hot until it reaches the water – then it cools off so fast it hasn’t time to collect in particles big enough to sink. Some of the dust that floats around in the air is heavier than water, too. I’m joining the bystanders, if you don’t mind; the men have everything under control, and I can see better here than I could down there, if anything does come up.”

Doc’s momentary despair reacted to leave him feeling more sure of things than was justified. He pushed over on the plank, making room for Palmer to drop down beside him. “What’s to keep it from blowing up anyway, Palmer?”

“Nothing! Got a match?” He sucked in on the cigarette heavily, relaxing as much as he could. “No use trying to fool you, Doc, at this stage of the game. We’re gambling, and I’d say the odds are even; Jenkins thinks they’re ninety to ten in his favor, but he has to think so. What we’re hoping is that by lifting it out in a gas, thus breaking it down at once from full concentration to the finest possible form, and letting it settle in the water in colloidal particles, there won’t be a concentration at any one place sufficient to set it all off at once. The big problem is making sure we get every bit of it cleaned out here, or there may be enough left to take care of us and the nearby city! At least, since the last change, it’s stopped spitting, so all the men have to worry about is burn!”

“How much damage, even if it doesn’t go off all at once?”

“Possibly none. If you can keep it burning slowly, a million tons of dynamite wouldn’t be any worse than the same amount of wood, but a stick going off at once will kill you. Why the dickens didn’t Jenkins tell me he wanted to go into atomics? We could have fixed all that – it’s hard enough to get good men as it is!”

Brown perked up, forgetting the whole trouble beyond them, and went into the story with enthusiasm, while Ferrel only partly listened. He could see the spot of magma growing steadily smaller, but the watch on his wrist went on ticking off minutes remorselessly, and the time was growing limited. He hadn’t realized before how long he’d been sitting there. Now three of the crane nozzles were almost touching, and around them stretched the burned-out ground, with no sign of converter, masonry, or anything else; the heat from the thermodyne had gassified everything indiscriminately.

“Palmer!” The portable ultrawave set around the manager’s neck came to life suddenly. “Hey, Palmer, those blowers are about shot; the pipe’s pitting already. We’ve been doing everything we can to replace them, but that stuff eats faster than we can fix. Can’t hold up more’n fifteen minutes more.”

“Check, Briggs. Keep ’em going the best you can.” Palmer flipped a switch and looked out toward the tank standing by behind the cranes. “Jenkins, you get that?”

“Yeah. Surprised they held out this long. How much time till deadline?” The boy’s voice was completely toneless, neither hope nor nerves showing up, only the complete weariness of a man almost at his limit.

Palmer looked and whistled. “Twelve minutes, according to the minimum estimate Hoke made! How much left?”

“We’re just burning around now, trying to make sure there’s no pocket left; I hope we’ve got the whole works, but I’m not promising. Might as well send out all the I-231 you have and we’ll boil it down the pipes to clear out any deposits on them. All the old treads and parts that contacted the R gone into the pile?”

“You melted the last, and your cranes haven’t touched the stuff directly. Nice pile of money’s gone down that pipe – converter, machinery, everything!”

Jenkins made a sound that was expressive of his worry about that. “I’m coming in now and starting the clearing of the pipe. What’ve you been paying insurance for?”

“At a lovely rate, too! O.K., come on in, kid; and if you’re interested, you can start sticking A. E. after the M. D., anytime you want. Your wife’s been giving me your qualifications, and I think you’ve passed the final test, so you’re now an atomic engineer, duly graduated from National!”

Brown’s breath caught, and her eyes seemed to glow, even through the goggles, but Jenkin’s voice was flat. “O.K., I expected you to give me one if we don’t blow up. But you’ll have to see Dr. Ferrel about it; he’s got a contract with me for medical practice. Be there shortly.”