Murray Leinster

“ Sandringham said very grimly:
"There's been more damned technical work done with ship-fuel than any other substance since time began. But remember that the stuff can still be set off, even dissolved in water! Its sensitivity goes down, but it's not gone!"
"If it were," said Hardwick drearily, "you could invite in the civilian population to sit on its rump. I've got something like forty tons of ship-fuel in brine solution in this lake I pumped out! But it's in five thousand tons of brine. We don't speak above a whisper when we're around it. ”

“ Hardwick, you've handled swamp-planet situations. What can be done to stop the sliding of the island's soil before it all goes overboard?"
"Not much, offhand," said Hardwick. "Give me time and I'll manage something. But a really bad storm, with high seas and plenty of rain, might wipe out the whole civilian colony. That viscosity figure is close to hopeless—if not quite."
The Sector Chief looked impassive.
"How much time does he have, Werner?"
"None!" said Werner shrilly. "The only possible thing is to try to move as many people as possible to the solid ground in the Arctic! ”

“ The bolster-truck went on.
Hardwick said, frowning:
"They wanted the water to go into the soil. So they arranged it. A little of that did no harm. Plants growing dried it out again. One tree evaporates thousands of gallons a day in a good trade wind. There were some landslides in the early days, especially when storm-swells pounded the cliffs, but on the whole the ground was more firmly anchored when first cultivated than it had been before the colonists came."
"But—irrigation? The sea's not fresh, is it?" ”

“ Hardwick indicated a boat from which something like a wire basket splashed into the water as he gestured.
"A garden boat, sir," said Barnes. "On this side of the island the sea bottom slopes so gradually, sir, that there are sea gardens on the bottom. Shellfish from Earth do not thrive, sir, but there are edible sea plants. The gardeners cultivate them as on land, sir." ”

“ Barnes' forehead wrinkled.
"We could land much quicker on rockets, sir. And ... even when the landing-grid reaches out for us, since we've no gravity-coils, they'll have to handle us very cautiously or they'd break our necks!"
Hardwick nodded. Barnes was thinking straight enough, but it takes young officers a long time to think of thinking straight. They have to obey so many orders unquestioningly that they tend to stop doing anything else. Yet at each rise in grade some slight trace of increased capacity to think is required. ”

“ When Barnes shook his head, Hardwick explained, "Probably for my sins I've had a good deal to do with swamp planets. The mud of a salt swamp is quite different from a fresh-water swamp. The essential trouble with the people ashore is that by their irrigation they've contrived an island-wide swamp which happens to be upside down—the mud at the bottom. So the question is, can it acquire the properties of a salt swamp instead of a fresh-water swamp without killing all the vegetation on the surface? ”

“ It was notable that the steam did not come out as an invisible vapor, and condense in midair. It poured out of the ground in clouds, already condensed but thrust out by more masses of vapor behind it. It was not super-heated steam that came out. It was simply steam. Harmless steam, like the steam out of the spouts of tea kettles. But it rose from individual places everywhere. ”

“ Hardwick said uncomfortably: "Two inches of rain would be a heavy fall, Sandringham tells me. It's the lack of heavy rains that made the civilians start irrigating. When you figure the energy-content of ship-fuel, Werner—an appreciable fraction of the energy in atomic explosive—it's sort of deceptive. Turn it into thermal units and it gets to be enlightening. We turned loose, underground, enough heat to boil away two feet of soil-water under the island's whole surface." ”

“ They dump the heavy brine back overboard and the fresh water's pumped up and distributed through the irrigation systems."
"It's too bad some of the salts weren't stored," said Hardwick. "Could a freshener be started up again?"
Sandringham said with irony:
"Oh, the civilians would love that! No! If any man started up a water-freshener, the civilians would kill him and smash it!" ”

“ It's pure chance that there is a Sector Headquarters. Or else it's Providence. We'll find that out later! But ten days ago it was discovered that an instrument had gone wrong over in the ship-fuel storage area. It didn't register when a tank leaked. And—a tank did leak. You know ship-fuel's harmless when it's refrigerated. You know what it's like when it's not. Dissolved in soil-moisture, it's not only catalyzed to explosive condition, but it's a hell of a corrosive, and it's eaten holes in some other tanks—and can you imagine trying to do anything about that? ”

“ Barnes said distressedly:
"Excuse me, sir, but how the devil did this happen?"
"There's been irrigation," said Hardwick patiently. "The soil here was all ocean-bottom, once—it used to be what is called globigerinous ooze. There's no sand. There are no stones. There's only bedrock and formerly abyssal mud. ”

“ Young Barnes said:
"Excuse me, sir. What are those boats doing?"
"They're towing an oil-slick out to sea," said Hardwick absently, "by towing a floating line of some sort between them. There isn't enough oil to maintain the slick, and it's blown landward. So they tow it out to sea again. It holds down the seas. Every time, of course, they lose some of it."
"But—"
"There are trade winds," said Hardwick, not looking to seaward at all. "They always blow in the same direction, nearly. They blow three-quarters of the way around the planet, and they build up seas as they blow. ”

“ Sector Headquarters had been placed here because it seemed that civilians would not want to colonize so limited a world. But there were civilians, because there was Headquarters. And now every inch of ground was cultivated and there was irrigation and intensive farming and some hydroponic establishments. But Sector Headquarters included a vast reserve area on which a space-fleet might be marshaled in case of need. The overcrowded civilians were bitter because of the great uncultivated area the Survey needed for storage and possible emergency use. ”

“ Heavy winds, sir. The Sector Chief has opened the Reserve Area, sir, to the civilians if they wish to come."
Hardwick computed dizzily on his fingers. A more complex instrument was actually needed, of course. One does not calculate on one's fingers just how long a one per cent solution of ship-fuel in frozen brine has taken to melt, and how completely it has diffused through an upside-down swamp with the pressure of forty feet of soil on top of it, and therefore its effective concentration and dispersal underground. ”

“ The blister-seal broke, and the two halves of the boat cover drew back. There were stars. To Hardwick they were unfamiliarly arranged, but he could have picked out Seton and the Donis cluster in any case, and half a hundred more markers by taking thought of the position of the planet Canna III, on which Colonial Survey Sector Headquarters for this part of the galaxy were established. ”

“ There is a certain exhausting quality in the need to tell other men to do work which may cause them to be killed spectacularly. The fact that one will certainly be killed with them does not lessen the tension.
He went back to his work. And it definitely seemed to be as purposeless as any man's work could possibly be. Down-grade from the now thoroughly deserted area in which ship-fuel tanks had leaked—quite far down-grade—he had commandeered all the refrigeration equipment in the warehouses. Since refrigeration was necessary for fuel-storage, there was a great deal. ”

“ When ship-fuel warms up, or is catalyzed, it goes on one step beyond the process of its manufacture. It goes on to the modification the refrigeration prevented. It changes its molecular configuration. What was stable because it was cold becomes something which is hysterically unstable because of its structure. The touch of a feather can detonate it. A shout can set it off.
It is, indeed, burned only molecule by molecule in a ship's engines, being catalyzed to the unstable state while cold at the very spot where it is to detonate. ”

“ The Survey ship floated away, as seen from the vision ports of the boat. It apparently increased its drive, because the boat swirled and swayed as changing eddy-currents moved it. The ship grew small and vanished. The boat hung in emptiness, turning slowly. The sun Canna came into view. It was very large for a Sol-type sun, and its rim was almost devoid of the prominences and jet streams of flaming gas that older suns of the type display. But even out at the third orbit it provided 0-1 climate—optimum: equivalent to Earth—for the planet below. ”

“ Headquarters, in fact, had been built upon an uninhabited planet. But colonists followed in the wake of Survey personnel. Wives and children, and then storekeepers and agriculturists, and presently civilian technicians and ultimately even politicians arrived as the non-Service population grew. Now Sector Headquarters was resented because it occupied one fourth of the island. It kept too much of the planet's useful surface out of civilian use. And the island was now desperately overcrowded. ”

“ It would be enhanced by vibration, and assuredly the hammering of seas upon the windward cliff should be lessened by any possible means.
But it did not mean that the sound of a rocket-landing would be disastrous, nor that the straining of a landing-grid as it stopped a space-ship in orbit and drew it to ground should produce a landslide. There was something else—though the situation for the island's civilian population was assuredly serious enough. If any really massive movement of the ground did begin, viscous or any other ”

“ Young Barnes followed uncomfortably.
"It seems odd there's no one around. No secretaries, no sentries, nobody at all."
"Why should there be?" asked Hardwick in surprise. "The guards at the gate keep civilians out. And nobody in the Service will bother the Chief without reason. ”

“ I'll try, sir."
"If we had soil-coagulants enough," said Hardwick vexedly, "we could handle that upside-down swamp the civilians have so carefully made, here. But we haven't got it! But the freshened sea water they've been irrigating with is practically mineral-free! I want to know how much mineral content in the water would keep the swamp-mud from acting like wet soap. It's entirely possible that we'd have to make the soil too salty to grow anything, in order to anchor it. ”

“ Werner licked his lips. He said in a voice that was higher-pitched than Hardwick remembered:
"What's happening serves them right! It serves them right!"
Hardwick waited.
"Now," said Sandringham, "they are demanding to be let into Sector Headquarters for safety. They say we haven't irrigated, so the ground we occupy isn't going to slide. They demand that we take them all in here to sit on their rumps until the rest of the island slides into the sea or doesn't. If it doesn't, they want to wait here until the soil becomes stable again because they've quit irrigating." ”

“ It swells with water and fills the space between the soil-particles. In a week or two there's a water-tight barrier, made of soil, going down to bedrock. You might call it a coffer-dam. No water can seep through. On Soris II we knew that if we could get the water out of the mud inside this coffer-dam, we'd have cultivable ground."
Sandringham said skeptically:
"But it called for ten years' pumping, eh? When mud doesn't move, pumping isn't easy!"
"We wanted the soil," said Hardwick. "And we didn't have ten years. The Soris II colony was supposed to relieve population-pressure on another planet. ”

“ But if a junior officer were spurred to the practice of thinking, it might mean that some day he'd be a better senior officer. And Hardwick knew how desperately few men were really adequate for high authority. ”

“ The planet loomed larger. Much larger.
"I think you'd better lose all planetward velocity before we hook on," he observed. "The landing-grid crew might have trouble focusing on us so close if we're moving."
"Yes, sir," said the young officer. "I will, sir."
"There's some sort of merry hell below," said Hardwick wryly. "It looks bad that they won't let a ship come down by grid. It looks worse that they won't let this one land on its rockets." He paused. "I doubt they'll risk lifting us off again."
Young Barnes finished his computations. ”

“ Hardwick said:
"Damn! Has he got plenty of labor?"
"All the labor there is," said Sandringham. "And I'm having a road laid along the cliffs for speed with the trucks. If I dared ... and if I had the pipe ... I'd lay a pipe line."
"Later," said Hardwick tiredly. "If he's got labor to spare, set them to work turning the irrigation systems hind part before. Make them drainage systems. Use pumps. So if rain does come it won't be spread out on the land by all the pretty ditches. ”

“ But then he had the brine-pipe laid around a great circuit, to the Headquarters ground which was upgrade from the now-deserted square mile or so in which the fuel tanks lay deep in the soil. And here, also, he performed excavation without the sound of hammer, shovel, or pick. He thrust pipes into the ground, and they had nozzles at the end which threw part of the water backward. So that when sea water poured into them it thrust them deeper into the ground by the backward jet action. Again the fact that the soil was abyssal mud made it possible. ”

“ And then young Barnes realized that he had defied a Sector Chief, which is something distinctly more improper in a junior officer than merely trying to instruct him in topping off his vacuum-suit tanks.
Twelve hours later, however, Sandringham called for him.
"Barometer's dropping, lieutenant. I'm concerned. I'm issuing a notice of the impending storm. Not everybody will crowd in on us, but a great many will. I'm explaining that the chemicals put into the bottom soil may not quite have finished their work. If Hardwick wakens, tell him."
"Yes, sir," said Barnes. ”