[Illustration]
"The heathen geeks, they wear no breeks," the Terrans
sang. But on a crazy world like Ullr, clothes didn't
make the fighting man. There both red and yellow
meant danger--and blood!
* * * * *
I
The big armor-tender vibrated, gently and not unpleasantly, as the
contragravity field alternated on and off. 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. The air was
faintly yellow, the sky was yellow with a greenish cast, and the
clouds were green-gray.
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. 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. 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. 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.
"I can see them," the girl said, lifting a hand in front of her. "At
two o'clock, about one of my hand's-breaths above the horizon. But
only four of them."
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. "The fifth's inside the handling
machine. One of the Ullrans. Gorkrink."
* * * * *
The largest of the specks that had appeared on the horizon resolved
itself into a handling-machine, a thing like an oversized
contragravity-tank, with a bull-dozer-blade, a stubby derrick-boom
instead of a gun, and jointed, claw-tipped, arms at 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 candybag.
"Only by telecast, back Solside," Paula Quinton 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."
"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. The volcanoes we shot three
months ago yielded a fine flow of lava with all sorts of
metals--nickel, beryllium, vanadium, chromium, iridium, 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. The subsurface hydrogen is produced when the acid
filters down through the rock, combines with pure metals underneath."
The door at the rear of the control-cabin opened, and Juan Murillo,
the seismologist, entered, followed by an assistant, who 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 belt, he was
entirely naked.
He spoke rapidly to Murillo, in a squeaking jabber. Murillo turned.
"Yes, if you wish, Gorkrink," he said, in Lingua Terra. Then he turned
back to Gomes as the Ullran 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.
* * * * *
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. The 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.
"In about half an hour," the large young man told Paula Quinton, "the
real fireworks should be starting. What's coming up now is just small
debris from the nuclear blast. When the shock-waves get down far
enough to crack things open, the gas'll come up, and then steam and
ash, and then magma."
"Well, even this was worth staying over for," the girl said, watching
the screen.
"You going on to Ullr 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."
"When are you going to Terra?" the girl asked him.
"Terra? I don't know; a year, two years. But I'm going to Ullr 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 at Keegark 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. 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," 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."
"Well, that finishes our work," the large young man said, going to a
kit-bag 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."
The Ullran, in the background, rose quickly and squeaked
apologetically. Murillo nodded. "Yes, of course, Gorkrink. No need for
you to stay here." The Ullran went out, closing the door behind him.
"That taboo against Ullrans and Terrans watching each other eat and
drink," Paula Quinton commented. "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 Ullr on the _Canberra_. He's
from Keegark; claims to be a prince, or something. 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...."