The Unorthodox Engineers

enormous spread of the Milky Way.

They scuffed shallow grooves in the ash-soil in which to settle their sleeping pods, then climbed in, anxious to get some rest to meet the demands of the coming day. Such was their trust in the ecological and atmospheric climate of Getawehi that neither thought to place their face visors over their pods to ward off precipitation or biological attack. Their only inconvenience seemed to be the shifting gravity, which imparted to the pods the feeling of movement, as if lodged in the branches of a vast and slowly-swaying tree.

It was two hours after Geta had set that Van Noon was awakened by a startled cry from Jacko.

‘Fritz!’

‘What the devil’s the matter?’

‘Look at the mountains—they’re burning!’

Van Noon roused himself and followed the indicated line. Surely enough, whole sections of the ranks of distant hills were lit with a red glow of such intensity that the sky was saturated with a blood-red cast.

‘What the hell is it?’

‘Damned if I know, Jacko. That range is best part of thirty kilometres away. It would need to be one heck of a fire to be clearly visible from here.’

As they watched, the burning mountains seemed to shift and change with running patterns and pulsations, forming a spectacle more absorbing than the species-long pastime of watching the flickering heart of a home- fire.

‘It doesn’t look right,’ said Van Noon after a while. ‘Those currents in the flame are moving too fast and too regularly to be true. A fire is a set of small burning nuclei—individual conflagrations. But the way the flame out there flickers, it looks as if the mountain is burning en masse.’

‘Could it be volcanic?’

‘Not the kind of volcanism we’re familiar with. Anyway, there was nothing in the reports about any sort of volcanic action.’

‘So what’s happening over there, then? Don’t tell me the whole mountain is made up of paraffin wax?’

‘Nothing about this place would surprise me,’ said Van Noon moodily. ‘But there’s one thing that worries me.’

‘What’s that?’

‘There’s too much power about. Those burning mountains are a pretty powerful display of something— so is the radio output and the mixed-up gravity. They’re all power manifestations of considerable magnitude. But it’s always output, with never a sign of the origin. It’s as if there’s a very much larger force at work—a force so large that it can afford to spill over a few billion kilowatts as side effects and never notice the loss.’

‘I had the same idea. None of the demonstrations we’ve seen so far seem lacking for a few billion ergs. I’m not keen on the implications. If there is a large power source around, I like to know where it is and what it is. It helps to know if you have to get out from under in a hurry.’

Getawehi swung “up” sideways, momentarily exerted a gravitational pull which almost broke their backs, then reduced its attraction to such an extent that their pods almost left the surface. There was another twist in gravitational angle, then the burning mountains, which had so far seemed to be up a slight gradient, slipped to the bottom of a racing slope of one-in-two. Then, as if to complete the performance, the burning mountains went out—like the turning-off of a lamp.

‘You know, Fritz,’ said Jacko as he sank back into his pod, ‘Colonel Nash was right. There is no place in space quite like Getawehi.’

Four

At first light the next morning they had a trial run of the sleds. By reasonable guesswork their present position from the base camp was about fifty kilometres—an uncomfortable journey if made on foot over the soft ash. For direction they had only to follow the valley floor between the two mountain shoulders to a point where the mountains succumbed to the broad and rocky steppe, the edge of which had been the scene of the disastrous first landing by the construction crew.

To their delight the sleds ran easily over the ashy soil, even when presented with only slight gravitational gradients. The vehicles were prone, however, to come to an unexpected halt on meeting patches of the purple fern which clustered the landscape. A few outcropping rocks were an additional hazard which required careful negotiation. There was no way of steering the flat-bottomed sleds. Wherever obstacles were encountered, it was necessary to halt and manually drag the sled to a new position. Occasionally the gravitational angle produced slopes insufficient to support their motion, and these had to be borne in patient immobility, as did the passing of all slopes other than the one leading in the required direction.

After a survival-ration breakfast they secured to the sleds such items of tools and provisions as they were able to make fast. Then, waiting for the terrain to slope in a suitable direction, they set off. The air was crystal clear and inhabited with a crisp coolness and a heather-honeyed perfume which was decidedly pleasant. Far to their right the burning mountains, now quiescent, stood up glassy and apparently untouched by the conflagration of the night. Nearer and to their left, a vast outcropping of grey-white striated rock formed, with the burning mountains, the shoulders of the valley, some forty kilometres across, through which lay their route.

Their mode of transport proved both exhilarating and predictably hazardous. Swooping down an apparent slope of one-in-three, the ground reared suddenly upwards before them. Fritz managed to drive to a halt, but the momentum of Jacko’s sled ploughed it a metre depth into the ash soil before it came to rest. Climbing out from the ditch which he had dug, Jacko’s look of murderous reproach threw Fritz into fits of laughter.

However, it was Van Noon who nearly became the first casualty. Driving down a deep slope, where the sled velocity must have been nearing fifty kilometres an hour, the progress of Fritz’s sled was suddenly arrested by a patch of fern. Fritz parted company with the sled and proceeded without visible means of support for a considerable distance before he made a spread-eagled landing. He got up, shaken, but miraculously unhurt. Nevertheless much of the equipment he had been carrying on the sled was lost in the ash and could not be recovered.

Despite these and similar incidents and frequent halts while their intended direction lay sullenly uphill or across, they made very good progress. By tacking across their general course they found they could make use of nearly half of the available angles. The mountain shoulders gave them an easy sense of direction without reckoning and at last they reached the end of the broad valley. Before them now began one of the great steppes of Getawehi, a spotted, rock-strewn desert, completely without vegetation. It continued as far as the eye could see —monotonous and inhospitable.

Jacko viewed the prospect critically.

‘We could never cross that on the sleds, Fritz. Too many rocks. There’s less than a hundred metre straight run anywhere.’

‘It’s fortunate that we don’t have to. By my calculation the construction team ditched somewhere between the steppe and the end of the grey-white mountain. If so, we should be nearly within sighting range by now.’

They scanned the area anxiously, but found no sign of the base camp.

‘Have you got any distress rockets or anything similar in those bits and pieces of yours, Jacko?’

‘No. But I’ve got some plastic explosive left, and a few detonators. We could at least make a big bang.’

‘That should do the trick. If we can only get some sort of answering signal to guide us we should be able to locate them fairly easily from here. They should be on the lookout anyway, because they must have seen our ferry fall.’

They arranged three explosions, separated by a one minute and then a thirty-second interval. After what seemed like a ten minute wait a slight column of smoke rose up near the grey-white mountain’s end at about five kilometres distance.

‘That appears to be them,’ said Van Noon. ‘Let’s go over and meet the troops.’

By a fortunate coincidence of angle and direction they covered the distance in record time. Swooping from the heights of a big slope they came suddenly across a string of a dozen men labouring on foot up an ashen trail.