The ship lurched slightly. In the outside screens, the lights around,
the crowd that was waving good-bye, and the floor of the crater began
receding. The sound pickups were full of cheering, and the boom of a
big gun at one of the top batteries, and the recorded and amplified
music of a band playing the traditional "Spacemen's Hymn."
"It's been a long time since I heard that played in earnest,"
Jacquemont said. "Well, we're off to see the Wizard."
The lights dwindled and merged into a tiny circle in the darkness of
the crater. The music died away; the cannon shots became a faint
throbbing. Finally, there was silence, and only the stars above and
the dark land and the starlit sea below. After a long while a sunset
glow, six hours past on Barathrum, appeared in the west, behind the
now appreciable curvature of the planet.
"Stand by for shift to vertical," Captain Nichols called, his voice
echoing from PA-outlets through the ship.
"Ready for shift, Captain Nichols," Jacquemont reported from the
duplicate-control panel.
Conn went to the after bulkhead, leaning his back against it. "Ready
here, Captain," he said.
Other voices took it up. Lights winked on the control panels.
"Shifting over," Nichols said. "Your ship now, Captain Jacquemont."
"Thank you, Mr. Nichols."
The deck began to tilt, and then he was lying on his back, his feet
against the side of the control room, which had altered its shape and
dimensions. There was a jar as the drive went on in line with the new
direction of the lift and the ship began accelerating. He got to his
feet, and he and Charley Gatworth went to the astrogational computer
and began checking the data and setting the course for the point in
space at which Koshchei would be in a hundred and sixty hours.
"Course set, Captain," he reported to Jacquemont, after a while.
A couple of lights winked on the control panel. There was nothing more
to do but watch Poictesme dwindle behind, and listen to the newscasts,
and take turns talking to friends on the planet.
They approached the halfway point; the acceleration rate decreased,
and the gravity indicator dropped, little by little. Everybody was
enjoying the new sense of lightness, romping and skylarking like newly
landed tourists on Luna. It was fun, as long as they landed on their
feet at each jump, and the food and liquids stayed on plates and in
glasses and cups. Yves Jacquemont began posting signs in conspicuous
places:
WEIGHT IS WHAT YOU LIFT, MASS IS WHAT HURTS
WHEN IT HITS YOU.
WEIGHT DEPENDS ON GRAVITY; MASS IS ALWAYS CONSTANT.
His father came on-screen from his office in Storisende. By then,
there was a 30-second time lag in communication between the ship and
Poictesme.
"My private detectives found out about the _Andromeda_," he said.
"She's going to Panurge, in the Gamma System. They have a couple of
computermen with them, one they hired from the Stock Exchange, and one
they practically shanghaied away from the Government. And some of the
people who chartered the ship are members of a family that were
interested in a positronic-equipment plant on Panurge at the time of
the War."
"That's all right, then; we don't need to worry about that any more.
They're just hunting for Merlin."
Some of his companions were looking at him curiously. A little later,
Piet Ludvyckson, the electromagnetics engineer, said: "I thought you
were looking for Merlin, Conn."
"Not on Koschchei. We're looking for something to build a hypership
out of. If I had Merlin in my hip pocket right now, I'd trade it for
one good ship like the _City of Asgard_ or the _City of Nefertiti_,
and give a keg of brandy and a box of cigars to boot. If we had a ship
of our own, we'd be selling lots of both, and not for Storisende
Spaceport prices, either."
"But don't you think Merlin's important?" Charley Gatworth, who had
overheard him, asked.
"Sure. If we find Merlin, we can run it for President. It would make a
better one than Jake Vyckhoven."
He let it go at that. Plenty of opportunities later to expand the
theme.
The gravitation gauge dropped to zero. Now they were in free fall, and
it lasted twice as long as Yves Jacquemont had predicted. There were a
few misadventures, none serious and most of them comic--For example,
when Jerry Rivas opened a bottle of beer, everybody was chasing the
amber globules and catching them in cups, and those who were splashed
were glad it hadn't been hot coffee.
They made their second, 180-degree turnover while weightless. Then
they began decelerating and approached Koshchei stern-on, and the
gravity gauge began climbing slowly up again, and things began
staying put, and they were walking instead of floating. Koshchei grew
larger and larger ahead; the polar icecaps, and the faint dappling of
clouds, and the dark wiggling lines on the otherwise uniform red-brown
surface which were mountain ranges became visible. Finally they began
to see, first with the telescopic screens and then without
magnification, the little dots and specks that were cities and
industrial centers.
Then they were in atmosphere, and Jacquemont made the final shift, to
horizontal position, and turned the ship over to Nichols.
For a moment, the scout-boat tumbled away from the ship and Conn was
back in free fall. Then he got on the lift-and-drive and steadied it,
and pressed the trigger button, firing a green smoke bomb. Beside him,
Yves Jacquemont put on the radio and the screen pickups. He could see
the ship circling far above, and the manipulator-boat, with its
claw-arms and grapples, breaking away from it. Then he looked down on
the endless desert of iron oxide that stretched in all directions to
the horizon, until he saw a spot, optically the size of a
five-centisol piece, that was the shipbuilding city of Port Carpenter.
He turned the boat toward it, firing four more green smokes at
three-second intervals. The manipulator-boat started to follow, and
the _Harriet Barne_, now a distant speck in the sky, began coming
closer.
Below, as he cut speed and altitude, he could see the pock-marks of
open-pit mines and the glint of sunlight on bright metal and
armor-glass roofs, the blunt conical stacks of nuclear furnaces and
the twisted slag-flows, like the ancient lava-flows of Barathrum. And,
he reflected, he was an influential non-office-holding stockholder in
every bit of it, as soon as they could screen Storisende and get
claims filed.
A high tower rose out of the middle of Port Carpenter, with a
glass-domed mushroom top. That would be the telecast station; the
administrative buildings were directly below it and around its base.
He came in slowly over the city, above a spaceport with its empty
landing pits in a double circle around a traffic-control building,
and airship docks and warehouses beyond. More steel mills. Factories,
either hemispherical domes or long buildings with rounded tops.
Ship-construction yards and docks; for the most part, these were
empty, but on some of them the landing-stands of spaceships, like
eight-and ten-legged spiders, waiting for forty years for hulls to be
built on them. A few spherical skeletons of ships, a few with some of
the outer skin on. It wasn't until he was passing close to them that
he realized how huge they were. And stacks of material--sheet steel,
deckplate, girders--and contragravity lifters and construction
machines, all left on jobs that were never finished, the bright
rustless metal dulled by forty years of rain and windblown red dust.
They must have been working here to the very last, and then, when the
evacuation elsewhere was completed, they had dropped whatever they
were doing, piled into such ships as were completed, and lifted away.
The mushroom-topped tower rose from the middle of a circular building
piled level on level, almost half a mile across. He circled over it,
saw an airship dock, and called the _Harriet Barne_ while Jacquemont
talked to Jerry Rivas, piloting the manipulator-boat. Rivas came in
and joined them in the air; they hovered over the dock and helped the
ship down when she came in, nudging her into place.
By the time Conn and Jacquemont and Rivas and Anse Dawes and Roddell
and Youtsko and Karanja were out on the dock in oxygen helmets, the
ship's airlock was opening and Nichols and Vibart and the others were
coming out, towing a couple of small lifters loaded with equipment.
The airlocked door into the building, at the end of the dock, was
closed; when somebody pulled the handle, it refused to open. That
meant it was powered from the central power plant, wherever that was.
There was a plug socket beside it, with the required voltage marked
over it. They used an extension line from a power unit on one of the
lifters to get it open, and did the same with the inner door; when it
was open, they passed into a dim room that stretched away ahead of
them and on either side.
It looked like a freight-shipping room; there were a few piles of
boxes and cases here and there, and a litter of packing material
everywhere. A long counter-desk, and a bank of robo-clerks behind it.
According to the air-analyzer, the oxygen content inside was safely
high. They all pulled off their fishbowl helmets and slung them.
"Well, we can bunk inside here tonight," somebody said. "It won't be
so crowded here."
"We'll bunk here after we find the power plant and get the ventilator
fans going," Jacquemont said.
Anse Dawes held up the cigarette he had lighted; that was all the
air-analyzer he needed.
"That looks like enough oxygen," he said.
"Yes, it makes its own ventilation; convection," Jacquemont said. "But
you go to sleep in here, and you'll smother in a big puddle of your
own exhaled CO_2. Just watch what the smoke from that cigarette's
doing."
The smoke was hanging motionless a few inches from the hot ash on the
end of the cigarette.
"We'll have to find the power plant, then," Matsui, the power-engineer
said. "Down at the bottom and in the middle, I suppose, and anybody's
guess how deep this place goes."
"We'll find plans of the building," Jerry Rivas said. "Any big dig
I've ever been on, you could always find plans. The troubleshooters
always had them; security officer, and maintenance engineer."
There were inside-use vehicles in the big room; they loaded what they
had with them onto a couple of freight-skids and piled on, starting
down a passage toward the center of the building. The passageways were
well marked with direction-signs, and they found the administrative
area at the top and center, around the base of the telecast-tower. The
security offices, from which police, military guard, fire protection
and other emergency services were handled, had a fine set of plans and
maps, not only for the building itself but for everything else in Port
Carpenter. The power plant, as Matsui had surmised, was at the very
bottom, directly below.
The only trouble, after they found it, was that it was completely
dead. The reactors wouldn't react, the converters wouldn't convert,
and no matter how many switches they shoved in, there was no power
output. The inside telemetered equipment, of course, was self-powered.
Some of them were dead, too, but from those which still worked
Mohammed Matsui got a uniformly disheartening story.
"You know what happened?" he said. "When this gang bugged out, back in
854, they left the power on. Now the conversion mass is all gone, and
the plutonium's all spent. We'll have to find more plutonium, and tear
this whole thing down and refuel it, and repack the mass-conversion
chambers--provided nothing's eaten holes in itself after the mass
inside was all converted."
"How long will it take?" Conn asked.
"If we can find plutonium, and if we can find robots to do the work
inside, and if there's been no structural damage, and if we keep at
it--a couple of days."
"All right; let's get at it. I don't know where we'll find shipyards
like these anywhere else, and if we do, things'll probably be as bad
there. We came here to fix things up and start them, didn't we?"