Life on the pioneer planet Orkol was harsh and lonely. Earth settlers found a civilisation of decay, a frustrating shortage of women, outdated machinery and plagues of vicious rodents. The dawn of the green suns gave only a thin eerie light. And the mineral Orkolite produced vibrations that could destroy a planet or shatter a human brain.
Release date:
September 30, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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There was a strange protesting noise from the engine room of the Hypertron. Safron Wilde leapt up from the antigrav bunk and flung open the engine room door with unnecessary violence. Celeste glanced at him as she plotted a course on the battered old key board of the rumbling computer. Safron stood looking at the engine like a man turned to stone. Celeste looked up with a weary sigh.
“Is it bad?” she called.
“Is it bad!” His voice held a certain amount of anger, resignation and mockery. These were not normal emotions as far as Safron Wilde was concerned. At least they were not normally the emotions which he expressed toward Celeste. But neither Safron nor his wife had managed to snatch more than two hours of consecutive sleep since the Hypertron had come out of the warp and they had prepared for the landing on Orkol.
Back on earth—what seemed like a thousand years ago—the whole prospect had seemed so different. Orkol was a pioneer planet. There were land grants, machinery grants, and there was wild wonderful talk from those who had been there and made furtunes and come back. Nobody knew such people personally, but many claimed to know of them.
Safron Wilde had been a junior research chemist with one of the intergalactic cartels. It had been a frustrating and not particularly rewarding sort of job, in any sense. He had talked it over with Celeste for weeks and months. They had begun to dream; then they had begun to plan. The plan, he thought bitterly, as he looked at the smoking crackling engine that had once powered the Hypertron, had materialized in the form of this ship. She had cost them every penny that they had scraped together, and even then, she had been far cheaper than a ticket, let alone two tickets, on one of the great hyperdrive ships that carried colonists and passengers with speed, facility and safety.
They had not realized just how bad the Hypertron was until they put the ancient craft to the test. Now they knew. Celeste had taken a computer-girl course. Safron Wilde had studied space engineering and astrogation until he had obtained a grade 3 pilot certificate, the lowest qualification which a man needed before being allowed to blast off. Safron’s limited knowledge would have been perfectly adequate if their ship had been new and spaceworthy. Celeste’s computer work would have been satisfactory, if she had been using a computer which had all its valves and relays. But since they lacked experience as they did, the defaulting equipment of the Hypertron had been a challenge which had almost overcome them. This latest engine failure was the last word.
Celeste locked the computer in the intermediate phase position and walked through into the engine room. At sight of the smoking, crackling, main-drive unit, she could feel tears trying to spring to her eyes. Safron had his temper under control again. He put his arm around her waist and squeezed gently.
“Sorry I snarled, honey,” he said.
She squeezed his hand. “It’s all right, darling. I understand.”
“This has been one heck of a trip,” said Safron. He kicked the engine housing savagely with a steel-toed space boot. The clang echoed and reverberated right around the ship. “I really wish you could feel it, you old warhorse,” he snarled at the engine, and brought his fist crashing down onto another part of the housing. “All right; let’s get the thing disconnected and start stripping it down.”
“If, and I only said if,” said Celeste with a brave little smile, “at the seventeenth attempt I have now managed to get the course correct, I think we are in a stable orbit.”
“How far up?” asked Safron.
“Between four and five thousand miles; it’s elliptic,” answered Celeste.
“We must thank the gods of the galaxy for that,” said Wilde.
“We’ve got a little time if we haven’t got much else,” agreed Celeste.
“You had better go and do something about a landing course,” said Safron, “and I’ll see what, if anything, can be done with this glorious mess under here.”
The Hypertron’s toolkit was on a par with the rest of the ship. There were spanners which did not fit, not because they were the wrong size but because they had been bent, forced and strained by a succession of desperate owners who had heaved the engine housing off times without number. There were nuts and bolts holding the housing cover down which were gnarled and blemished until their once octagonal shapes were treacherously slippery crude circles. Within a minute Safron Wilde’s knuckles were bleeding profusely and his temper climbed three octaves. His eyes blazed fire as he sniffed the ozons that still crackled and spat from the defaulting engine.
Two knuckles and half an hour later he had half the housing clear; the rest of it he decided to leave. It was possible to get the unit out through the aperture he had made. He had rigged up a chain and pulley device; it was not of the best and it was by no means safe, but in orbit as they were, he reckoned he could do the job by turning off the Hypertron’s pseudograv to allow the weightlessness of their present orbital course to take the danger out of moving the engine.
Safron also knew that there were dangers in switching off the pseudograv, but he reckoned they were slighter than the perils which would be involved in leaving it on. He got the engine out at last, and saw that a long rewind job was going to be necessary. There was no mechanical rewinder on board the Hypertron. It was one of those semiessential pieces of equipment, which their very limited budget had not permitted them to buy.
Celeste, looking pale and tired, had just finished the computer course. Safron called her through. Resignation had taken the place of the violent outburst of temper which he had displayed earlier. He had put a bandage on his knuckles, and now that the engine was out there was a certain feeling of relief to know that it was only a rewind job.
“Celeste, darling,” he called.
She came and stood beside him. He pointed; she took a deep breath.
“Rewind?” she asked.
“Yes, rewind,” answered Safron.
“Oh dear!”
Two simple little monosyllables, he thought, but how much expression lay behind them, how much tragedy, how much labor and how much misery! He only hoped that Orkol would live up to its name, that it would be a land flowing with milk and honey after this wilderness of space.
It took them nineteen hours to complete the hand rewinding. By the time they had finished, they were ready to drop where they stood. Their hands were raw from the constant passage of the wire; to touch anything was flaming agony. Safron Wilde gritted his teeth and slowly and deliberately got hold of the engine. Inch by inch he lowered it back into its case. He put the housing back and secured it with two of the eighteen bolts. He chose two that were least fouled up: then, with crossed fingers, he put the Hypertron into landing orbit.
They started out of the landing orbit in a long, slow, gentle, gliding descent. At last they could see Orkol below them. The planetary landscape, which swept past through the visiports as they looked, was predominantly blue. There were wide, round, fawn and brown-colored areas that looked as if they might have been some kind of deserts, or perhaps they were expanses of nonchlorophyll vegetation. There were strange black lines, from which round black patches, smaller than the brown patches, budded off at intervals. These black patches with their thin connecting threads looked like small lakes of some dark substance at whose composition Safron and Celeste could only guess.
In the middle of the brown deserts, if they were deserts, there were small bright red areas. Whether these were outcroppings of rock or patches of some peculiar vegetation, the space emigrants had no means of knowing. In the far distance there were pale green and white amorphous fields, without any clear-cut borders or definitive qualities at all. What they were neither Safron nor Celeste was able to decide.
The ship’s radio suddenly crackled into life.
“We have made contact!” shouted Safron.
“This is Orkol Pioneer Landing Authority,” said a voice. It was a rather metalic, voice; it didn’t contain the welcoming note which Safron had hoped it might contain. He and Celeste glanced at one anoth. . .
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