“What?” asked Silver as Madame Minchenko trailed off.
“Hm? Oh. I was just having a mental picture of a quaddie in free fall with a twelve-string guitar. If you weren’t squashed into a chair as you are now you could bring that lower hand up…”
It was a trick of the light, perhaps, of Rodeo’s westering sun sinking toward the sawtoothed horizon and sending its red beams through the cabin windows, but Madame Minchenko’s eyes seemed to gleam. “Now arch your fingers, so…”
Fire.
The first problem had been to find enough pure scrap titanium around the Habitat to add to the mass of the ruined vortex mirror to allow for the inevitable losses during refabrication. A forty-percent extra mass margin would have been enough for Leo to feel comfortable with.
There ought to have been titanium storage tanks for nasty corrosive liquids—a single, say, hundred-liter tank would have done the trick—conduits, valves, something. For the first desperate hour of scrounging Leo was convinced his plan would come to grief right there in Step One. Then he found it in, of all places, Nutrition; a cooler full of titanium storage canisters massing a good half-kilo apiece. Their varied contents were hastily dumped into every substitute container Leo and his quaddie raiders could find. “Clean-up,” Leo had called guiltily over his shoulder to the appalled quaddie girl now running Nutrition, “is left as an exercise for the student.”
The second problem had been to find a place to work. Pramod had pointed out one of the abandoned Habitat modules, a cylinder some four meters in diameter. It was the work of another two hours to tear holes in the side for entry and pack one end of it with all the conductive scrap metal mass they could find. The mass was then surfaced with more abandoned Habitat module skin, pounded out and rendered as nearly glass-smooth as they could make it in a shallow concave bowl of carefully calculated arc that spanned the diameter of the module.
Now their mass of scrap titanium hung weightless in the center of the module. The broken-up pieces of the vortex mirror and the flattened-out food canisters were all bound together by a spool of pure titanium wire some brilliant quaddie child had produced for them out of Stores. The dense grey metal glittered and glowed in their work-lights and the reflection from a shaft of hard-edged sunlight falling through one of their entry holes.
Leo glanced around the chamber one last time. Four worksuited quaddies each manned a laser unit braced around the walls, bracketing the titanium mass. Leo’s measuring instruments floated tethered to his belt, ready to his pressure-gloved hands. It was time. Leo touched his helmet control, darkening his faceplate.
“Commence firing,” said Leo into his suit comm. Four beams of laser light lanced out in unison, pouring into the scrap. For the first few minutes, nothing appeared to be happening. Then it began to glow, dark red, bright red, yellow, white—then, visibly, one of the ex-food canisters began to sag, flowing into the jumble. The quaddies continued to pour in the energy.
The mass was beginning to drift slightly, one of Leo’s readouts told him, although the effect was not yet visible to the naked eye. “Unit Four, power-up about ten percent,” Leo instructed. One of the quaddies flashed a lower palm in acknowledgement and touched his control box. The drift stopped. Good, his bracketing was working. Leo had had a horrid vision of the molten mass of metal drifting off into the side wall, or worse, fatally brushing into somebody, but the very beams that melted it seemed enough to control its motion, at least in the absence of stronger sources of momentum.
Now the melt was obvious, the metal becoming a white glowing blob of liquid floating in the vacuum, struggling toward the shape of a perfect sphere. Boy, is that stuff ever going to be pure when we’re done, Leo reflected with satisfaction.
He checked his monitoring devices. Now they were coming up on a moment of critical judgment; when to stop? They must pour in enough energy to achieve an absolutely uniform melt, no funny lumps left in the middle of the gravy. But not too much; even though it was not visible to the eye Leo knew there was metal vapor pouring off that bubble now, part of his calculated loss.
More importantly, looking ahead to the next step—every kilocalorie they dumped into that titanium mass was going to have to be brought back out. Planetside, the shape he was trying to get would have been formed against a copper mold, with lots and lots of water to carry away the heat at the desired rate, in this case rapidly; single-crystal splat-cooling, it was called. Well, at least he’d figured out how to achieve the splat part of it.…
“Cease firing,” Leo ordered.
And there it hung, their sphere of molten metal, blue-white with the violent heat energy contained within it, perfect. Leo checked and re-checked its centered position, and had laser number two give it one more half-second blast not for melt but for momentum’s sake.
“All right,” said Leo into his suit comm. “Now let’s get everything out of this module that’s going out, and double-check everything that’s staying. Last thing we need now is for somebody to drop his wrench in the soup pot, right?”
Leo joined the quaddies in shoving their equipment unceremoniously out the holes torn in the side of the module. Two of his laser operators went with it, two stayed with Leo. Leo checked centering again, and then they all strapped themselves to the walls.
Leo switched channels in his suit comm. “Ready, Zara?” he called.
“Ready, Leo,” the quaddie pilot responded from her pusher, now attached to the gutted module’s stern.
“Now remember, slow and gentle does it. But firm. Pretend your pusher is a scalpel, and you’re just about to operate on one of your friends or something.”
“Right, Leo.” There was a grin in her voice.
Don’t swagger, girl, Leo prayed inwardly. “Go when you’re ready.”
“Going. Hang on up there!” There was at first no perceivable change. Then Leo’s harness straps began to tug gently at him. It was the Habitat module, not the molten ball of titanium, that was moving, Leo reminded himself. The metal did not drift; it was the back wall that moved forward and engulfed it.
It was working, by God it was working! The metal bubble touched the back wall, spread out, and settled into its shallow bowl mold.
“Increase acceleration by the first increment,” Leo called into his comm. The pusher powered up, and the molten titanium circle spread, its edges growing toward the desired diameter some three meters wide, already losing its bright glow. Creating a titanium blank of controlled thickness, ready (after cooling) for explosive molding into its final subtle form. “Steady on. That does it!”
Splat-cooling? Well, not exactly. Leo was uncomfortably aware that they were probably not going to achieve a perfect internal single-crystal freeze. But it would be good, good enough—as long as it was good enough that they didn’t have to melt it down and start all over again, that was the most Leo dared pray for. They might, barely, have time to make one of these suckers. Not two. And when was the threatened response from Rodeo arriving? Soon, surely.
He wondered briefly what the new gravity technology was going to do to fabrication problems in space like this. Revolutionize seemed too mild a term, certainly. Too bad we didn’t have some now, he thought. Still—he grinned, concealed within his helmet—they were doing all right.
He pointed his temperature gauge at the back wall. The piece was cooling almost as rapidly as he had hoped. They were still due for a couple of hours of driving around until it had dumped enough heat to remove from the wall and handle without danger of deformation.