Dondragmer had redonned his airsuit during the last part of the operation and gone out on the hull again, where he hooted a number of orders. Everyone else outside obediently headed for the main lock to start transferring the life support equipment; the captain himself reented the bridge to get back in radio contact with Benj and Stakendee.
The boy had said nothing during the lowering-away, which had been carried out in view of the bridge communicator. What he could see required no explanation. He was a little unhappy at the disappearance of the crew afterward, for, of course, Dondragmer had been right; Benj did not like the idea of the entire group being diverted to the abandon-ship operation. However, the emergency of two Mesklinites with a power box gave him something to watch besides Stakendee’s upstream crawl on the adjacent screen.
Benj did not know which of the two was Borndender, but wasn’t worried. Their actions were of more interest. And their troubles with the radiator made interesting watching.
The wire was rigid enough to have held its shape fairly well as it was moved, and now lay flat on the ice in much the same form it had had when attached to the hull — that is, rather like a long, narrow hairpin near the center where it outlined the helicopter lock, and the cut ends some two feet apart. The original vertical component of its curvature which had been impressed by the shape of the hull had flattened out under gravity. The unit had been turned over during the lowering so that the prongs which had attached it to the plastic were now pointing upward; hence there was good contact with the ice for practically its entire length.
The Mesklinites spent a few minutes trying to straighten it out; Benj got the impression that they wanted to run it around the side of the hull as closely as possible. However, it finally appeared to dawn on them that the free ends would have to be close together in order to go into the same power box, so they left the wire along and dragged the power unit aft. One of them examined the holes in the box and the ends of the wire carefully, while the other stood by.
Benj could not see the box very well, since its image on the screen was very small, but he was familiar with similar machines. It was a standard piece of equipment which had needed very little modification to render it usable on Dhrawn. There were several kinds of power takeoff on it besides the rotating field used for mechanical drive. The direct electrical current which Borndender wanted could be drawn from any of several places; there were contact plates on opposite sides of the box which could be energized, several different sizes of jack-type bipolar sockets, and simple unipolar sockets at opposite ends of the box. The platters would have been easiest, but the Mesklinites, as Benj learned later, had dismissed them as too dangerous; they chose to use the end sockets. This meant that one end of the “hairpin” had to go into one end of the unit, and the other into the other end. Borndender already knew that the wire was a little large for the holes and would have to be filed down, and had brought the appropriate tools with him; this was no problem. Bending the ends, however, so that short lengths of them pointed toward each other, was a different matter. While he was still working on this problem, the rest of the crew emerged from the main lock with their burden of hydroponic tanks, pumps, lights and power units, and headed northward toward the side of the valley. Borndender ignored them, except for a brief glance while he was wondering wheter he could commandeer some assistance.
The two ninety-degree bends he had to make were not entirely a matter of strength. The metal was of semicircular cross section, about a quarter of an inch in radius — Benj thought of it as heavy wire, while to the Mesklinites it was bar stock. The alloy was reasonably tough even at a hundred and seventy degrees Kelvin, so there was no risk of breaking; and Mesklinite strength was certainly equal to the task. What the two scientists lacked, which made the bending an operation instead of an incident, was traction.
The ice under them was fairly pure water with a modest percentage of ammonia, not so far either below its melting point or from the ideal ice crystal structure to have lost its slipperiness. The small area of the Mesklinite extremities caused them to dig in in normal walking, and this, combined with their low structure and multiplicity of legs, prevented slipping in ordinary walking around the frozen — in Kwembly. Now, however, Borndender and his assistant were trying to apply a strong side — wise force, and their twenty pounds of weight simply did not give enough dig for their claws. The metal refused to bend, and the long bodies lashed about on the ice with Newton’s Third Law in complete control of the situation. The sigh was enough to make Benj chuckle in spite of his worry, a reaction which was shard my Seumas McDevitt, who had just come down from the weather lab.
Borndender finally solved his engineering problem by going back into the Kwembly and bring out drilling equipment. With this he sank half a dozen foot-deep holes in the ice, and by standing lengthwise of drill-tower support rod in these he was able to provide anchorage for the Mesklinite muscles. The metal was finally changed from hairpin to caliper shape.
Fitting the ends into the appropriate holes was comparatively easy after the filing was finished. It involved a modest lifting job to get the wire up to the two-inch height of the socket holes, but this gave no problem either for strength or traction and was done in half a minute. With some hesitation, visible even to the human watchers, Borndender approached the controls of the power unit. The watchers were at least as tense; Dondragmer was not entirely sure that the operation was safe for his shi[, having only the words of the human beings about this particular situation, and Benj and McDevitt had doubts about the efficacy of the jury-rigged heater.
The last were speedily settled. The safety devices built into the unit acted properly as far as the machine’s own protection was concerned; they were not, however, capable of analyzing the exterior load in detail. They permitted the unit to deliver a current — not a voltage — up to a limit determined by the manual control setting. Borndender had, of course, set this at the lowest available value. The resistor lasted for several seconds, and might have held up indefinitely if the ends had not been off the ice.
For most of the length of the loop, all went well. A cl0ud of microscopic ice crystals began to rise the moment the power came on, as water boiled away from around the wire and froze again in the dense frigid air. It hid the sight of the wire singing into the surface ice, but no one doubted that this was happening.
The last foot or so at each end of the loop, however, was not protected by the high specific and latent heats of water. Those inches of metal showed no sign of the load they were carrying for perhaps three seconds; then they began to glow. The resistance of the wire naturally increased with its temperature, and in the effort to maintain constant current the power box applied more voltage. The additional heat developed was concentrated almost entirely in the already overheated sections. For a long moment a red, and then a white, glow illuminated the rising cloud, causing Dondragmer to retreat involuntarily to the other end of the bridge while Borndender and his companion flattened themselves against the ice.
The human watches cried out — Benj wordlessly, McDevitt protestingly, “It can’t blow!” their reactions were, of course, far too late to be meaningful. By the time the picture reached the station, one end of the wire loop had melted through had the unit had shut down automatically. Borndender, rather surprised to find himself alive, supplemented the automatic control with the manual one, and without taking time to report to the captain set about figuring what had happened.