"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 pa.s.ses 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 a.s.sistants a.s.sured him.
The door at the rear of the control-cabin opened, and Juan Murillo, the seismologist, entered, followed by an a.s.sistant. 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 a.s.sistant stopped at the door. This a.s.sistant 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, Lourenco, shoot the works."
Gomes stabbed the radio-detonator b.u.t.ton 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 a.s.sistants 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_?" Lourenco 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 G.o.d"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 ga.s.ses, 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-cla.s.s 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 s.e.x-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 d.a.m.n gags in my mouth, and he can pa.s.s 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 d.a.m.n 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...."
I.
Commander-in-Chief Front and Center
General Carlos von Schlichten threw his cigarette away, flexed his hands in his gloves, and set his monocle more firmly in his eye, stepping forward as the footsteps on the stairway behind him ceased and the other officers emerged from the squat flint keep--Captain Cazabielle, the post CO; big, chocolate-brown Brigadier-General Themistocles M"zangwe; little Colonel Hideyoshi O"Leary. Far in front of him, to the left, the horizon was lost in the cloudbank over Takkad Sea; directly in front, and to the right, the brown and gray and black flint mountains sawed into the sky until they vanished in the distance. Unseen below, the old caravan-trail climbed one side of the pa.s.s and slid down the other, a sheer five hundred feet below the parapet and the two corner catapult-platforms which now mounted 90-mm guns. On the little hundred-foot-square parade ground in front of the keep, his aircar was parked, and the soldiers were a.s.sembled.
Ten or twelve of them were Terrans--a couple of lieutenants, sergeants, gunners, technicians, the sergeant-driver and corporal-gunner of his own car. The other fifty-odd were Ulleran natives. They stood erect on stumpy legs and broad, six-toed feet.
They had four arms apiece, one pair from true shoulders and the other connected to a pseudo-pelvis midway down the torso. Their skins were slate-gray and rubbery, speckled with pinhead-sized bits of quartz that had been formed from perspiration, for their body-tissues were silicone instead of carbon-hydrogen. Their narrow heads were unpleasantly saurian; they had small, double-lidded red eyes, and slit-like nostrils, and wide mouths filled with opalescent teeth.
Except for their belts and equipment, they were completely naked; the uniform consisted of the emblem of the Chartered Uller Company stencil-painted on chests and backs. Clothing, to them, was unnecessary, either for warmth or modesty. As to the former, they were cold-blooded and could stand a temperature-range of from a hundred and twenty to minus one hundred Centigrade. Von Schlichten had seen them sleeping in the open with their bodies covered with frost or freezing rain; he had also seen them wade through boiling water. As to the second, they had practically no s.e.x-inhibitions; they were all of the same gender, true, functional, hermaphrodites. Any individual among them could bear young, or fertilize the ova of any other individual.
Fifteen years ago, when he had come to Uller as a former Terran Federation captain newly commissioned colonel in the army of the Uller Company, it had taken some time before he had become accustomed to the detailing of a non-com and a couple of privates out of each platoon for baby-sitting duty. At least, though, they didn"t have the squaw-trouble around army posts on Uller that they had on Thor, where he had last been stationed.
An airjeep, coming in out of the sun, circled the crag-top fort and let down onto the terrace next to von Schlichten"s command-car. It carried a bristle of 15-mm machine-guns, and two of the eight 50-mm rocket-tubes on either side were empty and freshly smoke-stained. The duragla.s.s canopy slid back, and the two-man crew--lieutenant-driver and sergeant-gunner--jumped out. Von Schlichten knew them both.
"Lieutenant Kendall; Sergeant Garcia," he greeted. "Good afternoon, gentlemen."
Both saluted, in the informal, h.e.l.l-with-rank-we"re-all-human manner of Terran soldiers on extraterrestrial duty, and returned the greeting.
"How"s the Jeel situation?" he asked, then nodded toward the fired rocket-tubes. "I see you had some shooting."
"Yes, sir," the lieutenant said. "Two bands of them. We sighted the first coming up the eastern side of the mountain about two miles this side of the Blue Springs. We got about half of them with MG-fire, and the rest dived into a big rock-crevice. We had to use two rockets on them, and then had to let down and pot a few of them with our pistols.
We caught the second band in that little punchbowl place about a mile this side of Zortolk"s Old Fort. There were only six of them; they were bunched together, feeding. Off one of their own gang, I"d say; the way we"ve been keeping them up in the high rocks, they"ve been eating inside the family quite a bit, lately. We let them have two rockets. No survivors. Not many very big pieces, in fact. We let down at Zortolk"s for a beer, after that, and Captain Martinelli told us that one of his jeeps caught what he thinks was the same band that was down off the mountain night-before-last and ate those peasants on Prince Neeld.i.n.k"s estate."
"By G.o.d, I"m glad to hear that!" There"d been a perfect h.e.l.l of a flap about that business. Before the Terrans came to Uller, it was a good year when not more than five hundred farm-folk would be killed and eaten by Jeel cannibals. The incident of two nights ago had been the first of its kind in almost six months, but the n.o.bleman whose serfs had been eaten was practically accusing the Company of responsibility for the crime. "I"ll see that Neeld.i.n.k is informed. The more you do for these d.a.m.ned geeks, the more they expect from you.... When you get your vehicle re-ammoed, lieutenant, suppose you buzz back to where you machine-gunned that first gang. If there are any more around, they"ll have moved in for the free meal by now." This breakdown of the Jeels"
taboo against eating fellow-tribesmen was one of the best things he"d heard from the cannibal-extermination project for some time.