The big armor-tender vibrated, gently and not unpleasantly, as the
contragravity field alternated on and off, occasionally varying its
normal rate of five hundred to the second when some thermal updraft
lifted the vehicle and the automatic radar-altimeter control acted to
alter the frequency and lower it again. Sometimes it rocked slightly,
like a boat on the water, and, in the big screen which served in lieu
of a window at the front of the control cabin, the dingy-yellow
landscape would seem to tilt a little. If unshielded human eyes could
have endured the rays of Nu Puppis, Niflheim's primary, the whole scene
would have appeared a vivid Saint Patrick's Day green, the effect of
the blue-predominant light on the yellow atmosphere. The outside
'visor-pickup, however, was fitted with filters which blocked out the
gamma-rays and X-rays and most of the ultra-violet-rays, and added the
longer light-waves of red and orange which were absent, so that things
looked much as they would have under the light of a G0-type star like
Sol. The air was faintly yellow, the sky was yellow with a greenish
cast, and the clouds were green-gray.
A thousand feet below, the local equivalent of a forest grew, the
trees, topped with huge ragged leaves, looking like hundred-foot
stalks of celery. There would be animal life down there, too--little
round things, four inches across, like eight-legged crabs, gnawing at
the vegetation, and bigger things, two feet long, with articulated
shell-armor and sixteen legs, which fed on the smaller herbivores.
Beyond, in the middleground, was open grassland, if one could so call
a mat of wormlike colorless or pastel-tinted sprouts, and a river
meandered through it. On the skyline, fifty miles away, was a range of
low dunes and hills, none more than a thousand feet high.
No human had ever set foot on the surface, or breathed the air, of
Niflheim. To have done so would have been instant death; the air was a
mixture of free fluorine and fluoride gasses, the soil was metallic
fluorides, damp with acid rains, and the river was pure hydrofluoric
acid. Even the ordinary spacesuit would have been no protection; the
glass and rubber and plastic would have disintegrated in a matter of
minutes. People came to Niflheim, and worked the mines and uranium
refineries and chemical plants, but they did so inside power-driven
and contragravity-lifted armor, and they lived on artificial
satellites two thousand miles off-planet. This vehicle, for instance,
was built and protected as no spaceship ever had to be, completely
insulated and entered only through a triple airlock--an outer lock,
which would be evacuated outward after it was closed, a middle lock
kept evacuated at all times, and an inner lock, evacuated into the
interior of the vehicle before the middle lock could be opened.
Niflheim was worse than airless, much worse.
The chief engineer sat at his controls, making the minor lateral
adjustments in the vehicle's position which were not possible to the
automatic controls. One of the radiomen was receiving from the orbital
base; the other was saying, over and over, in an exasperatedly
patient voice: "Dr. Murillo. Dr. Murillo. Please come in, Dr.
Murillo." At his own panel of instruments, a small man with grizzled
black hair around a bald crown, and a grizzled beard, chewed nervously
at the stump of a dead cigar and listened intently to what was--or for
what wasn't--coming in to his headset receiver. A couple of assistants
checked dials and refreshed their memories from notebooks and peered
anxiously into the big screen. A large, plump-faced, young man in
soiled khaki shirt and shorts, with extremely hairy legs, was doodling
on his notepad and eating candy out of a bag. And a black-haired girl
in a suit of coveralls three sizes too big for her, and, apparently,
not much of anything else, lounged with one knee hooked over her
chair-arm, staring into the screen at the distant horizon.
"Dr. Murillo. Dr. Mur--" The radioman broke off in mid-syllable and
listened for a moment. "I hear you, doctor, go ahead." Then, a moment
later "What's your position, now, doctor?"
"I can see them," the girl said, lifting a hand in front of her. "At
two o'clock, about one of my hand's-breadths above the horizon."
The man with the grizzled beard put his face into the fur around the
eyepiece of the telescopic-'visor and twisted a dial. "You have good
eyes, Miss Quinton," he complimented. "Only four personal armors;
Ahmed, ask him where the fifth is."
"We only see four of your personal-armors," the radioman said. "Who's
missing, and why?" He waited for a moment, then lowered the hand-phone
and turned. "The fifth one's inside the handling-machine. One of the
Ullerans. Gorkrink."
The larger of the specks that had appeared on the horizon resolved
itself into a handling-machine, a thing like an oversized
contragravity-tank, with a bulldozer-blade, a stubby derrick-boom
instead of a gun, and jointed, claw-tipped arms to the sides. The
smaller dots grew into personal armor--egg-shaped things that sprouted
arms and grab-hooks and pushers in all directions. The man with the
grizzled beard began talking rapidly into his hand-phone, then hung it
up. There was a series of bumps, and the armor-tender, weightless on
contragravity, shook as the handling-machine came aboard.
"You ever see any nuclear bombing, Miss Quinton?" the young man with
the hairy legs asked, offering her his candy bag.
"Only by telecast, back Sol-side," she replied, helping herself.
"Test-shots at the Federation Navy proving-ground on Mars. I never
even heard of nuclear bombs being used for mining till I came here,
though."
"Well, if this turns out as well as the other job, three months ago,
it'll be something to see," he promised. "These volcanoes have been
dormant for, oh, maybe as long as a thousand years; there ought to be
a pretty good head of gas down there. And the magma'll be thick,
viscous stuff, like basalt on Terra. Of course, this won't be anything
like basalt in composition--it'll be intensely compressed metallic
fluorides, with a very high metal-content. The volcanoes we shot three
months ago yielded a fine flow of lava with all sorts of
metals--nickel, beryllium, vanadium, chromium, indium, as well as
copper and iron."
"What sort of gas were you speaking about?" she asked.
"Hydrogen. That's what's going to make the fireworks; it combines
explosively with fluorine. The hydrogen-fluorine combination is what
passes for combustion here; the result is hydrofluoric acid, the
local equivalent of water. See, the metallic core of this planet is
covered, much less thickly than that of Terra, with fluoride
rock--fluorspar, and that sort of thing. There's nothing like granite
here, for instance. That's why those big dunes, out there, are the
best Niflheim has in the way of mountains. The subsurface hydrogen is
produced when the acid filters down through the rock, combines with
pure metals underneath."
"Dr. Murillo's inside, now," the radioman said. "Just came out of the
inner airlock. He'll be up as soon as he gets out of his
pressure-suit."
"As soon as he gets here, I'll touch it off," the bearded man said.
"Everything set, de Jong?"
"Everything ready, Dr. Gomes," one of his assistants assured him.
The door at the rear of the control-cabin opened, and Juan Murillo,
the seismologist, entered, followed by an assistant. Murillo was a big
man, copper-skinned, barrel-chested; he looked like a third-or
fourth-generation Martian, of Andes Indian ancestry. He came forward
and stood behind Gomes' chair, looking down at the instruments. His
assistant stopped at the door. This assistant was not human. He was a
biped, vaguely humanoid, but he had four arms and a face like a
lizard's, and, except for some equipment on a belt, he was entirely
naked.
He spoke rapidly to Murillo, in a squeaking jabber. Murillo turned.
"Yes, if you wish, Gorkrink," he said, in the
English-Spanish-Afrikaans-Portuguese mixture that was Sixth Century,
A.E., Lingua Terra. Then he turned back to Gomes as the Ulleran sat
down in a chair by the door.
"Well, she's all yours, Lourenço, shoot the works."
Gomes stabbed the radio-detonator button in front of him. A voice came
out of the PA-speaker overhead: "In sixty seconds, the bombs will be
detonated ... thirty seconds ... fifteen seconds ... ten seconds ...
five seconds, four seconds, three seconds, two seconds, one
second...."
Out on the rolling skyline, fifty miles away, a lancelike ray of
blue-white light shot up into the gathering dusk--a clump of five
rays, really, from five deep shafts in an irregular pentagon half a
mile across, blended into one by the distance. An instant later, there
was a blinding flash, like sheet-lightning, and a huge ball of
varicolored fire belched upward, leaving a series of smoke-rings to
float more slowly after it. That fireball flattened, then spread to
form the mushroom-head of a column of incandescent gas that mounted to
overtake it, engorging the smoke-rings as it rose, twisting, writhing,
changing shape, turning to dark smoke in one moment and belching flame
and crackling with lightning the next. The armor-tender began to pitch
and roll; it was all the engineer and one of the assistants could do,
together, to keep it level.
"In about half an hour," the large young man told the girl, "the real
fireworks should be starting. What's coming up now is just small
debris from the nuclear blast. When the shockwaves get down far enough
to crack things open, the gas'll come up, and then steam and ash, and
then the magma. This one ought to be twice as good as the one we shot
three months ago; it ought to be every bit as good as Krakatoa, on
Terra, in 59 Pre-Atomic."
"Well, even this much was worth staying over for," the girl said,
watching the screen.
"You going on to Uller on the _City of Canberra_?" Lourenço Gomes
asked. "I wish I were; I have to stay over and make another shot, in a
month or so, and I've had about all of Niflheim I can take, now. The
sooner I get onto a planet where they don't ration the air, the better
I'll like it."
"Well, what do you know!" the large young man with the hairy legs
mock-marveled. "He doesn't like our nice planet!"
"Nice planet!" Gomes muttered something. "They call Terra God's
Footstool; well, I'll give you one guess who uses this thing to prop
his cloven hoofs on."
"When are you going to Terra?" the girl asked him.
"Terra? I don't know, a year, two years. But I'm going to Uller on the
next ship--the _City of Pretoria_--if we get the next blast off in
time. They want me to design some improvements on a couple of
power-reactors, so I'll probably see you when I get there."
"Here she comes!" the chief engineer called. "Watch the base of the
column!"
The pillar of fiery smoke and dust, still boiling up from where the
bombs had gone off far underground, was being violently agitated at
the bottom. A series of new flashes broke out, lifting and spreading
the incandescent radioactive gasses, and then a great gush of flame
rose. A column of pure hydrogen must have rushed up into the vacuum
created by the explosion; the next blast of flame, in a lateral sheet,
came at nearly ten thousand feet above the ground, and great rags of
fire, changing from red to violet and back through the spectrum to red
again, went soaring away to dissipate in the upper atmosphere. Then
geysers of hot ash and molten rock spouted upward; some of the
white-hot debris landed almost at the acid river, half-way to the
armor-tender.
"We've started a first-class earthquake, too," the Hispano-Indian
Martian Murillo said, looking at the instruments. "About six big
cracks opening in the rock-structure. You know, when this quiets down
and cools off, we'll have more ore on the surface than we can handle
in ten years, and more than we could have mined by ordinary means in
fifty."
About four miles from the original blast, another eruption began with
a terrific gas-explosion.
"Well, that finishes our work," the large young man said, going to a
kitbag in the corner of the cabin and getting out a bottle. "Get some
of those plastic cups, over there, somebody; this one calls for a
drink."
"That's right," Gomes said. "You do something once, it may be an
accident; you repeat the performance, and it's a success." He began
pushing papers aside on his desk, and the girl in the too-ample
coveralls brought drinking cups.
The Ulleran, in the background, rose quickly and squeaked
apologetically. Murillo nodded. "Yes, of course, Gorkrink. No need for
you to stay here." The Ulleran went out, closing the door behind him.
"That taboo against Ullerans and Terrans watching each other eat and
drink," Murillo said. "What is that, part of their religion?"
"No, it's their version of modesty," the girl replied. "Like some of
our sex-inhibitions, which they can't even begin to understand.... But
you were speaking to him in Lingua Terra; I didn't know any of them
understood it."
"Gorkrink does," Murillo said, uncorking the bottle and pouring into
the plastic cups. "None of them can speak it, of course, because of
the structure of their vocal organs, any more than we can speak their
languages without artificial aids. But I can talk to him in Lingua
Terra without having to put one of those damn gags in my mouth, and he
can pass my instructions on to the others. He's been a big help; I'll
be sorry to lose him."
"Lose him?"
"Yes, his year's up; he's going back to Uller on the _Canberra_. You
know, it's impossible to keep some trace of fluorine from the air in
the handling-machines, or even out on the orbiters, and it plays the
devil with their lungs. He wanted to stay on another three months, to
help with the next shot, but the medics wouldn't hear of it.... He's
from Keegark, wherever on Uller that is; claims to be a prince, or
something. I know all the other geeks kowtow to him. But he's a damn
good worker. Very smart; picks things up the first time you tell him.
I'll recommend him unqualifiedly for any kind of work with
contragravity or mechanized equipment."
They all had drinks, now, except the chief engineer, who wanted a
rain-check on his.
"Well, here's to us," Murillo said. "The first A-bomb miners in
history...."