"How to run 'em, sir?"
'Not to worry. Fragonard," Brim chuckled darkly. "It isn't clear I shall ever discover anything to tell you about the subject."
"Sir?"
"Nothing," Brim said as he got up to stretch. "But you'd better get our friend Barbousse up here with us. We'll all three of us see if we can't learn how this fool thing operates—together."
"Aye, sir," Fragonard said as he scrambled back down the ladder. He presently returned with Barbousse in tow, and the two were soon breathing over Brim's shoulder, watching his every move.
As he scanned the readouts, he brought himself up short, peering at the resonance chokes in utter disbelief. The thrice- xaxtdamned zero reading! He snapped his fingers in angry comprehension.
Somewhere in the system, a heavy-duty demodulator kept the whole radiation mechanism safe. And chances were that if the resonance choke was off, so was that demodulator! He felt sweat beading on his forehead. The whole subsystem might already be far beyond the limits of safety. He frantically scanned his readouts searching for... There! He breathed a sigh of relief. He found it, and it was on.
He glanced nervously at the CL-2 intensity. Universe! Now that was all the way up to fourteen hundred. He gritted his teeth, doing a desperate conversion from milli-ROGEN to something he could work with. Then he shook his head and relaxed. Certainly. Fouteen hundred milli-ROGEN was all right in this sort of system (it had no local storage capacity). In fact, the reading was just a hair under normal.
Getting a firmer grip on himself, he watched the CL-2 climb into the operational range, then switched the choke to "on" and squinted tensely at the readout. It was just beginning to register. Presently, a great plume of vapor sighed from the cooling mechanism behind the cabin and the gravity-defraction transmitter came on line. The big vehicle automatically righted, lifting smoothly to about eight irals above the ground, where it hovered quietly, at last on an even keel.
"That's the way, Lieutenant!" Barbousse cheered in an awe-struck voice.
Brim could hear more cheering from the ground. He leaned his head against the chair's high back for a moment and took a deep breath. He really had started the xaxtdamned thing.
"All right, Barbousse, Fragonard," he said. "You were both watching. Think you can show the others how to do that?"
"Yes, sir, Lieutenant," Barbousse declared immediately.
"I think I could, too," Fragonard said after frowning once more at the control panel.
"You only think you could?" Brim asked pointedly.
"No, sir," Fragonard declared with a grin. "I could."
"That's better," Brim said, grinning at the two ratings. "Get bopping, then, both of you. You've seven more to fire up while I try to get this oversized ore hauler moving next." Walking to the hatch, he listened to the deep, steady growl coming through the logic lenses from the gravity-refraction transmitter, then peered down at the small crowd of ratings gathered below. "Stand clear, down there," he yelled, then made his way back to the front of the cab and took his seat at the controls.
Buckling himself firmly to the seat, he looked at the pulse limiter and shook his head. Its setting of three-quarters conductance was simply too high. The thumb wheel, however, was mounted in an incredibly awkward place, and he found himself hard pressed to move it. Eventually, he prevailed (with a few skinned knuckles) and changed the reading to fifty percent. Now he gingerly reached out and opened the phase converter itself, gating raw energy into the pulse limiter. The machine sounds behind him changed subtly, becoming deeper and more damped as he listened. He bit his lip nervously, considering everything he had done. So far, it all checked CL-2 intensity normal (a little on the high side, but not enough to worry about), phase converter at "open" and set to approximately fifty percent, cooling on, gyros lighted, hull trimmed level. He checked the ground in front of him. It was clear. His previous audience of spectators had mostly disappeared, but here and there he caught a face peering out from behind the protection of a tree or a large rock.
He laughed. He certainly couldn't blame anybody for that!
Shrugging, he acknowledged the vehicle was as ready as he could make it, and retarded the pulse limiter. The sounds in the power compartment increased precipitately, and the big machine began to vibrate. But nothing else happened.
Brim frowned, opening the pulse limiter still farther. Now a great, discordant roar came from the shuddering traction machinery, but he was moving, albeit in palsied jerks and hops. Trouble was, the movement was nowhere near what it ought to be, considering the tremendous power he was gating to the deflection transmitter. He opened the pulse limiter a little farther still, and his forward progress did improve, but the increased speed was accompanied by intolerable levels of roaring from the traction machinery plus an alarming cycle of repetitive shuddering now coming from beneath his feet. Outside, the few stragglers who persisted in watching the big vehicle move were running panic-stricken for the nearest shelter. Behind him, a huge cloud of steam was blasting from the cooling unit as brightly glowing fins stripped vapor from A'zurn's moist air. The cabin air was blue with the acrid smell of red-hot metal.
Suddenly, he pounded his fist on the instrument panel. The thrust sink! That's what was doing it. On its highest setting, it was recycling all the energy back to the coolers. No wonder the traction machinery was tearing itself to pieces. He grabbed at the slide, then bit his lip. "Easy, Brim!" he yelled as he moved it gently to the center of its slot.
The rasping noise faded immediately—although the cooling system continued to race. His face flushed and sweating, Brim suspected it would continue to do that for quite awhile to come.
He was picking up speed smartly now. Tentatively, he pushed one of the rudder pedals. The vehicle lumbered around clumsily but steered well enough to provide at least a modicum of control. It wasn't built for much manual steering anyway—only enough to maneuver to and from the ubiquitous cableways installed wherever the League held sway. Near any one of these, automatic devices in the hull of the fieldpiece could take over and "follow the wire," as the expression went. Typical, he considered, of a civilization that discouraged any sort of free thinking outside a small ruling class. He could see the thick cable he would soon follow himself disappear around the trees at the far end of the field.
Those trees! For some reason, he was still picking up speed—a lot of it. Already he was running a great deal faster than he should if he were to negotiate a turnaround. He had to stop the big machine.
And soon!
Frantically, he smashed the thrust-sink slide back to the top of its slot—the rasping noise resumed immediately, along with the shuddering, which quickly turned into a bone-jarring series of grinding jolts.
Everything loose in the control cabin cascaded to the deck, where it added its own distinctive clatter to the rattling of every plate in the hull.
And that hadn't stopped it! If anything, he was moving even faster—toward the trees, which now looked like a green wall of solid stone. What had gone wrong?
In something closely related to panic, Brim suddenly realized his mistake—the thumb wheel on the phase converter. It was supposed to retard energy flow instead of increase it—so when he'd changed the setting from three-quarters (retardation!) to one-half, he'd actually doubled the device's output. No wonder the thrust sink wouldn't do its job! In horror, he visualized the big machine smashing itself farther and farther into the thick forest ahead until one of the trees was simply too big. He shuddered. In sudden desperation, he awkwardly jammed his fingers onto the little wheel and painfully moved it back close to its original position.