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them.
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"Now, this is for exploration purposes. But these auxiliary craft are also capable of landing on rockets
alone. When the time has come to establish a beam-relay station, some airless lifeless satellite is chosen,
to avoid the necessity of quarantine. The craft shuttle back and forth, carrying the ship's disman-tled
transceiver. This is reassembled on the surface. Thereby the satellite's own mass becomes available to the
matterbank, and any amount of material can be reconstructed according to the signals from the home
station. The first things sent through are usually the parts for a much larger transceiver station, which can
handle many tons of mass at a time."
"Well, good," said Maclaren. "That was more or less what I thought. Let's land and oh, oh."
Ryerson felt a smile tugging his lips, though it was not a happy one. "You see?" he murmured.
Maclaren regarded him closely. "You don't seem too discour-aged," he said. "There must be an
answer."
Ryerson nodded. "I've already spoken with Seiichi about it, while you were busy determining the exact
characteristics of the planet. It's not going to be fun, but Well, let him tell you."
Maclaren said slowly: "I had hoped, it was at least possible, that any planet we found would have a
surviving satellite, small enough to land the whole ship on, or lay alongside, if you want to consider it that
way. It would have been the best thing for us. But I'm sure now that this lump has no companion of any
kind. So we'll have to get our germanium down there."
"Which we could also have done, had we been fortunate enough to locate the planet sooner," Nakamura
told him. "We can take aircraft down to the surface even now. But we would have to transship all the
mining and separating equipment, establish a working space and an airdome It is too much work for
three men to do before our three weeks of supplies are eaten up, and then the actual mining would still
remain."
Maclaren nodded. "I should have thought of this myself," he said. "I wonder how sane and sensible we
are how can we measure rationality, when we are all the human race we know for tens of light-years?
Well. So I didn't think and you didn't talk. Nevertheless, I gather there's a way out of our dilemma."
"Yes," said the pilot. "A riskful way, but any other is certain death. We can take the ship down, and use
her for our ready-made workshop and airdome."
"TheCross? But . . . well, of course the gravitation here is no problem to her, nor the magnetism now
that the drive is shielded but we can't make a tail landing. We'd crumple the web, and . . . hell's
clanging bells, she can't land at all! She's not designed for it! Not maneuverable enough, why, it takes half
an hour just to swing her clear around on gyros."
Nakamura said calmly, "I have made calculations for some time now, preparing for this eventuality.
There was nothing we could do before knowing what we would actually find, but I do have some plans
drawn up. We have six knocked-down auxiliary craft. Yes? It will not take long to assemble their
non-ionic rocket drives, which are very simple devices, clamp these to the outside hull, and run their
control systems through the ship's console. I think if we all work hard we can have it assembled, tested,
and functioning in two or three days. Each pair of rockets should be so mounted as to form a couple
which will rotate the ship around one of the three orthogonal space axes. No? Thus the spaceship will
become most highly respon-sive to piloting. Furthermore, we shall cut up the aircraft hulls, as well as
whatever else we may need and can spare for this purpose, such as interior fittings. From this, we shall
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construct a tripod enclosing and protecting the stern assem-bly. It will be clumsy and unbalanced, of
course but I trust my poor maneuverings can compensate for that and it will be comparatively
weak but with the help of radar and our pow-erful ion-blast, the ship can be landed very gently."
"Hm-m-m." Maclaren rubbed his chin. His eyes flickered between the other two faces. "It shouldn't be
hard to fix those rocket motors in place, as you say. But a tripod more than a hundred meters long, for a
thing as massive as this ship I don't know. If nothing else, how about the servos for it?"
"Please." Nakamura waved his words aside. "I realize we have not time to do this properly. My plan
does not envision anything with self-adjusting legs. A simple, rigid structure must suffice. We can use the
radar to select a nearly level landing place."
"All places are, down there," said Maclaren. "That iron was boiling once, and nothing has weathered it
since. Of course, there are doubtless minor irregularities, which would topple us on our tripod with a
thousand tons of mass to hit the ground!" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]