"It can't just be fixed?"
"Fixed? How?" He pointed a finger at the rotor's shaft. Even Ganny, whose many fields of expertise and knowledge did not include matters mechanical, could see that it was badly worn.
"I'd have to remove it, first. That could be done, although it'd take a while. That's the easy part. Then I'd have to add metal to it, using welding equipment we don't have, so I'd have to design and build the welding equipment which I could probably do with the odds and ends we have on this rustbucket of a so-called starship but you're looking at weeks of work, Ganny. Might be as much as two or three months. Then I'd have to turn it back down to specs using metal-shaping equipment which we also don't have. The so-called 'machine shop' on this piece of crap is a joke and you can tell that cheapskate Walter Imbesi I said so. There's no way in God's green earth I could possibly build a modern computerized machining center. And even if I could, who'd design the program? You're probably the closest we've got to a real programmer and . . ."
He cocked an inquisitive eye up at her. Ganny shook her head. "I'm not really that good a programmer and what little skill I do have runs entirely toward financial stuff. There's no way I could design a program to do what you want, Andrew."
He nodded. "What I figured. So that means I'd have to build an old-style lathe."
"A . . . what?"
He grinned. "And you claim to be the old-timer here! A 'lathe' is an antique piece of equipment, Ganny, used to cut metal. More or less contemporaneous, I think, to ox-drawn plows. Still, it'd do the trick although it'd take a lot longer than modern equipment. Fortunately, we've got a pretty good suite of measuring instruments so I could probably manage to get the shaft back to specs using a micrometer."
"A . . . what?"
"A micrometer's an ancient type of measuring tool, Ganny. Definitely contemporaneous to ox-drawn plows. Well, yardsticks anyway."
"What's a 'yardstick'?" piped up Ed Hartman. He and his two buddies had been watching the process with great interest from close up. As close up as Andrew would let them come, anyway. He was deeply suspicious of their claims to being crispy clean.
"A stick to measure a yard, what d'you think?"
"So what's a 'yard'?" asked Brice Miller.
Artlett scowled. "Ganny, is this a consultation over critical repair issues or a remedial history class?"
She smiled, and made shooing motions at the three teenagers. "Give your uncle some breathing room, kids. I'll explain to you what a yard is later."
She looked back down at Andrew. "And how long would it take to make this . . . 'lathe,' you called it?"
"At least as long as it took me to make the welding equipment. Even though it'll have to be a primitive as they come, since I've got no way to make a lead screw. Fortunately I can probably jury-rig an electromagnetic actuator of some kind."
"What's a 'lead'—never mind. Again, in other words, you're talking about weeks."
"Might even be months. There's really no way to know ahead of time. The bottom line is this, Ganny. Unless we replace the worn out parts now, this equipment is likely to go out completely once we put any real stress on it. At that point, we're dead in the water. We'd still have power, so it wouldn't be immediately life-threatening. We could probably survive for at least a year. But we'd just be drifting in space until I could fix it. And, like I said, that could take anywhere up to half a year."
She nodded. "All right, then. I'll just have to tap into what funds we've got. Write up what you need, Andrew, and I'll transmit it down to the surface as soon as we've been given customs clearance. That shouldn't take long. This is our third visit. The Mesans are being downright gracious now that they figure we're repeat business."
Chapter Forty-Nine
Yana came into the kitchen, brushing a light sprinkling of snow off her shoulders. "I hope your plans for a fast getaway don't include antique wheeled ground vehicles squealing around corners. It's pretty slick out there. And the people who are out don't seem to know a damned thing about how to get around in it."
She shook her head in disgust, and Victor and Anton grinned. Despite the fact that Yana had spent most of her adult life in one city or another, she'd spent her girlhood on the planet of Kilimanjaro. Winters there weren't quite as long as on the Star Kingdom's Sphinx, but they were definitely in the same league. She was inclined to look down her nose at the weather complaints voice by effete scions of milder planets, and her opinion of Torch's tropilca and sub-tropical climate was normally summed up with a snort of magnificent contempt.
Her special scorn, however, was reserved for watching people who obviously had no idea what to do with snow trying to cope with it, and it was obvious her morning stroll had given her ample fuel for that response. Mesans, it would appear, were even more clueless than most—in her humble opinion, of course—when it came to dealing with frozen atmospheric water vapor.
Perhaps that was because the planet enjoyed mild and pleasant climatic conditions. Even the dead of winter, except in the polar regions, was no worse than a mild winter day on Haven. It didn't even begin to compare with the ferocious winter conditions of Zilwicki's native Gryphon, andthe hypothermia of a Sphinxian winter would have clear-cut the planetary population like one of Old Earth's Final War bio-weapons.
Mesa's summers were probably tougher on human beings than its winters—but the summers weren't bad either. The planet's sun was a G2 star virtually identical to Sol, and Mesa itself was almost a twin of Earth. Not quite. The gravity was almost identical, but Mesa had slightly more land surface. That might have made the climate more extreme than Earth's, with less of the ameliorative effect of oceans. But Mesa was about 40 light-seconds closer to the system primary and had a much smaller axial tilt—only nine degrees, in contrast to the home planet's twenty-three and a half. So the average temperature was somewhat higher and the seasonal variations quite a bit smaller.
On most of the planet's surface, in fact, winter never brought any snow at all. But the planet had taken the name of "Mesa" from the high, tableland mesa near the center of its largest continent where the survey party placed its initial base camp on the planetary surface. What eventually became the planet's capital city had developed there, for the same largely accidental reasons that most cities on most worlds came into existence. Being at a greater altitude than most of the planet, and with a definitely continental effect, the weather in the capital was probably worse than almost anywhere else on Mesa.
That wasn't saying much. In truth, Mesa was one of the most pleasant worlds Anton or Victor had ever visited. That made it even more disgusting that it had become the center for what both of them considered one of the foulest political systems ever produced by the human species—which had produced plenty of foul political systems, since the pharaoh Khufu erected his great pyramid with the use of slave labor more than six and half millennia in the past.
Anton and Victor now knew a lot more about the true nature of Mesa's political system than they had when they landed on the planet, or than any other Manticorans or Havenites still knew. Jack McBryde had been cagey about imparting information to them, in each of the secret meetings they'd had since the initial contact. He'd peeled off that data much like the onion he used to depict the centuries-old strategy of the shadowy conspiracy he'd introduced to them as "the Alignment." Being as sparing as possible, each time, in the hopes of bargaining for a better deal.