The Unorthodox Engineers

Book 433: Gateway Essentials

by Colin Kapp

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

The Unorthodox Engineers are a misfit bunch of engineers, commanded by maverick engineer Fritz van Noon and including, amongst others, a convicted bank robber as quartermaster (on the entirely-sound grounds that he was likely to be the most capable person for the job). They solve problems of alien technology and weird planets in the future. The Unorthodox Engineers contains: The Railways Up on Cannis (1959) The Subways of Tazoo (1964) The Pen and the Dark (1966) Getaway from Getawehi (1969) The Black Hole of Negrav (1975)

Release date: October 2, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 210

Sample

‘Colonel Ivan Nash to see you, Sir.’

Colonel Belling frowned. ‘Ivan Nash? I thought he was on Cannis with the occupation force. Anyway, show him in.’

‘Too late!’ said Nash from the doorway. ‘I’m already in. Can’t wait on ceremony, you know. I’ve got a place to run.’

‘Good to see you, Ivan! What brings you to Terra?’

‘Briefly,’ said Nash, ‘it’s the railways up on Cannis.’

Belling waved his visitor into a chair and issued him with a drink.

‘I fear I’m a little out of touch,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think railways were quite in your line.’

‘No?’ Nash filled his pipe carefully. ‘How much do you know about Cannis anyway?’

‘Not much. Gravity, atmosphere and climate roughly earth-normal. Population rated human equivalent on the Manneschen scale. Oh yes—and volcanoes!’

‘Precisely,’ said Nash dryly. ‘Let us not forget the volcanoes. Cannis-four is a young world with a very thin crust. Volcanic activity is widespread and generally severe. Fire-blowholes about a dozen metres in diameter can force up anywhere at any time. They raise sharp-edged slag cases from ten to a hundred metres in height. That’s why there are no roads on Cannis.’

‘Quite a place,’ commented Belling, refilling the glasses.

‘Quite a place and quite a people.’ Nash studied the ceiling reflectively. ‘Tough as nails and as perverse and changeable as the hell-hole that spawned them. Considering there’s not a two-hundred metre diameter of flat space anywhere on the whole damned planet it’s highly remarkable that any form of civilization ever managed to evolve, let alone one that managed to kick itself into space.’

‘I had wondered about that.’

‘Well you might. The Canians are an extremely clever race. They’re craftsmen, hobbyists and gadgeteers of the highest calibre. They built up a highly effective mechanical culture by trial and error and empirical method. But they have no true science as such.’

‘So?’

Ivan Nash paused. ‘So we blasted the hell out of Cannis during the war and now they don’t have sufficient continuity of technology to get back on their own feet. If you knock a cockeyed culture like that to pieces how, in the name of Thunder, do you get it together again?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Belling, quite honestly.

‘And neither do I. They’re a heck of a nice people when you get to know them. The fact that they picked on Sirates to colonize when we were already there was just bad luck. That’s why our presence on Cannis is more of a rehabilitation job than an occupation proper. If we let them down we throw them back a thousand years.’

Belling whistled. ‘As bad as that, eh?’

‘Worse. With their present production and distributing capacity they’d have difficulty in maintaining more than twenty per cent of their population at a minimum survival level without our help. And help all the way from Terra is a mighty expensive item. We have to stand them on their own feet fast.’

‘So you want reconstruction engineers?’ asked Belling.

‘No, I already have engineers. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. Advanced technology is not very suited to patching up a string and hairpin culture. The gulf between our technology and their technique is too great. What I need are specialists with a peculiar kind of skill. That’s why I came to you.’

‘The entire engineering reserve is at your disposal,’ said Belling. ‘You name ’em, I’ve got ’em. What do you want?’

‘My main concern is with the railways. With no roads or airstrips, the railways alone give cohesion and life to their scattered society. Without it they cannot survive.’

‘So you want railway engineers?’

‘No,’ said Nash sadly, ‘they wouldn’t be a molecule of use.’

‘How come?’

‘Man’ said Nash in a voice of awe and wonder. ‘Did you ever see the railways up on Cannis? It’s a shunter’s nightmare, a plate-layer’s conception of hell. From an engineer’s point of view it’s a complete and utter impossibility.’

‘Somebody must have constructed it originally.’

‘Yes, a myriad crazy, bug-brained innovators, each working on a separate part to an entirely different specification and for conflicting reasons. It’s a completely lunatic system which breaks every known law of elementary railway technique.’

‘Then,’ said Belling wearily, ‘if you don’t want engineers what do you want?’

‘I want to borrow the UE squad,’ said Nash steadily.

Belling winced. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Deadly.’

‘You realize what the UE squad could do to a situation like this?’

‘I realize it’s a dangerous thing to try, but desperate ills need desperate remedies. It’s the last chance we have to save Cannis.’

‘If I were you,’ said Belling sadly, ‘I’d resign.’

Lieutenant Fritz Van Noon of the UE squad faced his superior warily.

‘I’ve got news for you,’ said Colonel Belling. ‘As you know I was against the formation of the UE squad right from the start. I may be wrong but I don’t recant. The whole subject of Unorthodox Engineering has never sat very easily on my conscience. However, I think you’ve won your point.’

‘You mean that Operation Hyperon is going through?’

‘Just that, but there is a proviso. You have to keep the squad in operational trim until Hyperon is ready by accepting assignments outside this reserve. Colonel Nash has already made a specific request for your services.’

‘I’m grateful,’ said Fritz warily, ‘but there’s a distinct odour of an ulterior motive here somewhere.’

Belling smiled wolfishly. ‘There is indeed. Tell me, Fritz, do you know anything about railways?’

‘No, sir, not a blessed thing.’

‘Then you’d better get yourself a book or something. You’ve just been appointed controller of public railways on Cannis-four. UE goes with you.’

‘Cannis-four? Where in Jupiter is that?’

‘It’s the only habitable planet in the Cannis sector. It’s the closest approximation to Hell I’ve been able to locate.’

‘I thank you for the sentiment, sir.’

‘And I appreciate your tact, Fritz. You know, it’s no easy task running a specialist engineering reserve. Always you get the one engineer in a thousand who should never have got out of kindergarten, let alone graduated. With a reserve strength like ours it’s inevitable that we should have collected more than our fair quota of screwballs. The problem has always been to place them in positions where they aren’t actively dangerous. Now I don’t have to worry. Anybody who engages UE does so at their own risk.’

‘Which statement reveals a deplorable lack of insight,’ said Fritz Van Noon. ‘I devised UE to provide an outlet for those engineers whose imagination carried them beyond the ordinary.’

‘I know,’ said Belling dryly. ‘I’ve seen some of your extraordinary engineering. I can only assume that taking you to Cannis to rehabilitate what was recently enemy territory is some ingenious form of war reparation. And Fritz—’

‘Sir?’

‘Take it easy on Ivan Nash. He’s a friend of mine, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Try pulling some of those stunts you’ve pulled on me and you’ll probably spend the rest of your career in a Canian jail—in irons.’

‘You can trust me, sir. After all, UE has a reputation to maintain.’

‘That’s precisely what I was afraid of. Now get the hell out of here. I’m going to have a ball!’

The landing at Hellsport Base did nothing to endear Fritz to the planet. The transfer ferry entered the guiding radio-cage at a tangent, failed to equalize, and bucked and ricocheted from beam to beam until the crew abandoned the automatics and dropped her to the ground under manual control. The ferry touched down with the motors out of synchronization, spun crazily, and overheated the landing pit before it finally swayed to rest. That meant two hours of waiting whilst the water jets strove to cool the hull and bed-rock of the base.

Jacko Hine, his second in command, met him at the space-port bar. Jacko and a small contingent of UE had been sent ahead to make a preliminary survey of the position. The summary of the reconnaissance was proclaimed by Jacko’s crestfallen attitude and by the way his hair began to grey.

‘How does it look?’ asked Fritz.

Jacko looked at him seriously for a second or two. ‘Grim,’ he said. ‘If I’d tried to figure out an assignment which would prove UE to be a bunch of useless, incompetent, layabouts I couldn’t have made a better choice.’

‘I thought that was it!’ said Fritz. ‘Friend Belling was too sugar-sweet on handing out this offering. Anyway this gives us a chance to prove him wrong once and for all.’

‘Does it? Open your pretty shell-like ear and I’ll pour in a few home truths about Cannis railways. Item: no part of the system has been in operation for at least five years. Those parts of the installation which survived the Terran ’verter bombs during the war have either fallen down of their own accord or else suffered from volcanoes.’

Fritz choked on his drink and had to be patted on the back.

‘Volcanoes?’ he queried finally.

‘Sure. Small ones. They keep on coming all the time. Even at the heyday of the Cannis railway approximately one fifth of the total rail length was always out of commission due to volcanic activity. After five years without maintenance or repair the damage and confusion is simply catastrophic. Nash’s engineers rebuilt five kilometres of new track and suspension last year and two volcanoes ruined it within a week.’

‘Go on,’ said Fritz grimly.

‘Item:’ said Jacko. ‘All the new steel has to come from Terra. Delivery delay is a little under two years and a ship can’t deliver more than a hundred tons at a time. The Canians have a good malleable iron but it won’t harden. It’s all right for rails and short supports but the tensile strength is too low to allow its use for major engineering projects.’

‘Enough!’ said Fritz. ‘The rest of the misery I will discover for myself. All this weeping is playing havoc with the flavour of the beer. I’m seeing Colonel Nash this afternoon, and after that I want to see some railway.’

‘In that case,’ said Jacko, ‘you’ll need another drink.’

Colonel Nash was waiting for him at Cannis HQ. There was a certain air of reserve between the two officers which Fritz found vaguely familiar.

‘I take it you’ve read the dossier on Cannis,’ said Nash. ‘How does it strike you as a job?’

Fritz shrugged. ‘That depends on the type of co-operation we get.’

‘You get whatever you want. This is a last-ditch stand. The rehabilitation is costing us infinitely more than did the war. We can’t afford to play conquering heroes.’

‘What I want,’ said Fritz, ‘is simple. I just want that we should be left alone—very much alone.’

‘How do you mean? Discipline, administration, or what?’

‘Everything. Just set us down at a rail point about a hundred kilometres out and then forget us.’

‘This is damned irregular,’ said Nash. ‘After all, you are an army unit. What about supplies, for instance?’

‘We’ll find our own.’

‘And steel—you can’t build a railway without steel.’

‘Lack of essentials never yet troubled an unorthodox engineer.’

‘But this is ridiculous!’ said Nash. ‘I didn’t fetch you out from Terra just so you could go play cards in the wilderness.’

‘Look,’ said Fritz quietly, ‘you want a railway. You’ve proven that orthodox methods can’t provide it. Now do I get a crack at it the unorthodox way or do you return to Terra and admit the job has you beaten?’

‘Get out!’ said Nash angrily. ‘Get out of my sight as quickly as possible. I’ll leave you alone, but I promise you one thing … the next time you enter Hellsport it had better be on a train, else I’ll nail you for insubordination and bust you so low you’ll have to say “Sir” to a private.’

‘Thank you!’ said Fritz Van Noon. ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’

They came across the structure silhouetted against the orange-yellow sky. It reminded Fritz of nothing so much as a rotting seaside pier propped awkwardly on random legs clear of the broken terrain below. Jacko had a rope ladder tied to the structure, since the original sling and hoist access had rotted beyond repair. The two climbed gingerly to the platform overhead, brushing the rusting piles and girders, and being showered with dirt from the gaps in the dark decking.

Above the decks the desolation grew. It was a crumbling, grotesque parody of a structure whose impotence in style and form was rendered more alien and yet artistic by the vagaries of slow corrosion. It was like a surrealistic film-set for a comedy of horrors which nobody dared to make. And on the far side, characteristically askew, was a sign board in Canian characters, and after, scrawled in chalk in Terran hand, the legend: ‘Hellsport Terminus. The end of the line.’

‘It reminds me,’ said Jacko, ‘of a card house set in a sea of rusty spaghetti.’

Fritz frowned and mooched dismally through the festoons of rusty iron and threadbare cable. ‘What hit it?’ he asked at last.

‘Nothing.’ Jacko guided him away from a bed-plate which had rusted to an extent where an uncautious foot might easily penetrate into the depths below. He pointed to a slag cone, now cold, which had burst through the tracks at mid-point across the terminus, ruining two tracks completely and half filling the remainder of the terminus with light volcanic ash. ‘Apart from the inquisitive volcano everything is just as it was when the last trains went north in the war. Believe me, they’d be using this installation now—only the trains never came back.’

‘Can’t say I blame the trains,’ said Fritz moodily. ‘You mean to tell me this rotting junk heap is still in functional order?’

‘By Canian standards, yes.’

‘Tell me,’ said Fritz testily, ‘did they have remarkably small trains or is this multiple-rail stuff some sort of gimmick?’

‘I asked about that. Seems that each branch line had its own gauge and some had several according to who built them. At a terminus like this you have to accommodate anything which comes, so you run one track inside another nice and tidily. One snag though—you should see what it does to the points.’

Fritz shuddered visibly despite the warm afternoon air. ‘I’d better see the worst, I suppose.’

They walked out from the terminus to the huge switching grid which served to integrate the various branch lines entering the terminus. There was nearly a kilometre of patch-work mechanical desolation, overhued with rust and complex beyond belief. Gantries and galleries were solid with cranks and levers, bars and linkages, rods, and handwound helical springs. Cloth-covered cables and solenoids had dropped their sickly bitumen under the coercion of many summers’ suns, and now lay bleached white and ugly across the rotting spans like the bones of some alien skeleton.

Fritz viewed the scene with increasing dismay. Jacko leaned heavily on a stanchion and eyed his discomfort with a perverse humour.

‘We’re doing fine,’ said Fritz. ‘We’ve got ourselves a station complete with a volcano, a marshalling yard which shouldn’t exist outside of a bad dream, six branch lines which don’t go anywhere, and no trains to try out anyway. Add the fact that we can’t get any steel and the probability that anything we do build will be ruined by more volcanoes within six months, and I surmise we are well and truly up a gum tree. I don’t know whether to blow the whole lot up and start again or to leave it as an object lesson on how not to build a railway.’

‘Now who’s being conventional?’ chided Jacko. ‘I should have thought that this morass of mechanical ingenuity would have gladdened your heart no end.’

‘No,’ said Fritz, ‘and I’ll tell you why. You see, its builders paid no attention to basics. There is a certain idiot futility about building something destined for sure destruction. Even a bodger must work to the principle of the greatest return for the very minimum of effort. That is why the Cannis railway is not only unsound but also needlessly complicated.

‘Take this switching grid, for instance. It’s not only vulnerable but it’s largely unnecessary. It’s designed to be completely automatic, self-routing, self-isolating, self-signalling and probably foolproof. Even Terran cyber-controlled railways have nothing to match this except in theory. But the faults result from limited vision. We could have done the whole thing with about a tenth of the parts and twice the reliability.’

‘We may have to,’ said Jacko. He pointed outwards across the tracks to where thick motes of dust and cinder were dancing in the sun. ‘Unless I miss my guess there’s another volcano coming through down there.’

‘I want,’ said Fritz Van Noon, ‘to start about a hundred kilometres out on something nice and simple. We should have both engines and the necessary technique by the time we get back to Hellsport. What type of. . .