He stopped cold in his tracks, and stared at the little ship below him, stared at the suited and helmeted figure now climbing out of the cockpit and waving at him.
Nobody?
He was Tuck Benedict, an Earthman—and that was David Torm, a Titan miner’s son and a colonist, a rebel, a traitor, a sneak, a murderer, by everything Tuck had ever been taught—and they were working together for something they both wanted badly—
And they were friends, and they trusted each other—
Suddenly a great weight lifted from Tuck’s chest. Nobody? He hoisted up the gas bottle and started for the ship as fast as he could go, his heart tearing in his chest, his pulse pounding. They were somebody, and somehow, insidiously, without even giving it a thought, they had succeeded in doing the unheard of, the very thing that had never been achieved since the earliest days of the Titan colony. He reached the ship, gasping for breath just as David got to the ground, took the bottle and set it alongside the others. “Not bad up there,” he said. “There’s a lot of outside tearing, but if we can seal up the cockpit and the engines, it might just work.” David grinned at Tuck. “How about it? Ready to start?”
Tuck grinned back, feeling happier than he had ever felt in his life. “Ready? Buddy, we re going to make this wreck run like it never ran before. And when we have it running, you and I have a job to do!”
“You mean—”
“I mean we re going to teach our respective fathers the facts of life, or know the reason why!”
Chapter 10
The Wreck of the Snooper
For the next ten minutes the boys inspected the wreckage at close hand. It looked almost hopeless to Tuck, at first, but much of the more obvious damage involved ripped siding, which could be easily replaced. The cockpit was almost intact, except for the long crack in the plastic hood, and the shattered control board. Tuck worked away at the paneling, and finally broke it loose, revealing the masses of wires leading to the pressure, fuel, speed and altitude controls. With a few minutes’ work he had straightened or repaired the broken wires, and the panel was replaced, ready for seal-welding.
But the engines were another story. The rear end of the jet was smashed almost closed; a long crack ran clear back to the engine, and a whole section of wiring had been ripped from its moorings. The two started to work, with crowbar and hammer, slowly breaking and wrenching the little ship from its bed of rock, talking very little as they worked. From time to time Tuck stopped to stare at the engine and the wiring that were exposed. They didn’t look at all right, for some reason, and the more he looked the more puzzled he became. And then it dawned on him—the whole area where the fuel tanks belonged was filled with large gas bottles, painted green, without the familiar insulating pad around them. Tuck looked up at David, hardly believing his eyes. “Say, what kind of engine have you got in this thing?”
David stopped prying at the crowbar long enough to grin. “Ordinary jet combustion chamber. Torm modification.”
Tuck looked suspicious. “But those are oxygen bottles in there—”
“That’s right. That’s the Torm modification.”
“But what do you use for fuel?”
“Oxygen.” David grinned at his friend’s consternation, then burst out laughing. “It’s really very simple. When the jet is flying, it doesn’t take air into the intakes, the way you’re used to. It couldn’t—there isn’t any air. It takes methane into the air-scoop. So why use a lot of expensive fuel and oxidizer, when all the fuel you could possibly use is free for the asking, all around you?”
“You mean you use atmospheric methane for your fuel?”
“Of course. The pumps just feed in a tiny stream of liquid oxygen from those tanks there into the center of the intake of methane. Makes a funny-looking exhaust—just a pencil-thin flame—but it works, delivers plenty of thrust. And all I have to carry is priming fuel and oxygen—”
Tuck examined the setup excitedly. “You must have been all over the planet with this!”
“It’s been handy. Some other guys here in the colony worked with me on it. We taught ourselves mapping and topography from some books my dad has. We’ve had a lot of fun, just snooping around with it, and we’ve made our own maps of the topography within a couple hundred square miles of the colony. Better than Security Patrol maps, too.” David stood up from the crowbar and started rolling a large green oxygen bottle over toward the damaged jet. “Let me show you another little trick with oxygen,” he said.
He had been working for a quarter of an hour, driving a wedge into the opening, gradually forcing the squashed tube open again, revealing a long rip in the heavy metal of the exhaust tube. Now he fished in the small bag of little tools and came out with a bit of metal that looked like a small brass hose nozzle, which he carefully fitted to a long aluminum mesh tube that stretched from the neck of the oxygen bottle.
“What are you going to do?”
“Have to weld, for a while.”
“Weld! What do you use for a generator?”
“Oh, I don’t mean arc-weld. That isn’t necessary, and we’ve got a better method here.” He reached for the control gauge at the top of the green bottle, and brought a small automatic flint up near the nozzle; then he carefully opened the gauge until there was the slightest hiss from the nozzle, and struck a spark. To Tuck’s amazement a bright white flame sprang from the nozzle of the hose, giving off a brilliant shower of white snow. The snow scattered and drifted to the ground, for all the world like the snow from a carbon-dioxide fire extinguisher. Tuck stood frozen for a moment, then jumped back, his heart pounding. “Are you crazy? That’s oxygen in that tank!”
“I know.”
“But it’s burning—won’t it explode in this atmosphere?”
“Not as long as I keep the gas flowing from the tank.” David began pulling the flaming nozzle down toward the metal of the jet, and started heating the edges of the open tear. “There won’t be an explosion as long as there’s plenty of room for the burning to take place, and the flame can consume the oxygen as fast as it comes out of the tank. Makes a nice hot flame, too.” The lips of the rent were beginning to turn pinkish already. “There’s no danger at all of welding with oxygen out here—the real danger of explosion is in a confined space, like a mining tunnel. There, if the tunnel springs a leak somewhere, a lot of methane can squeeze in before anyone realizes it, and any little spark can send up the whole works. It’s a real hazard in the tunnels. We even have special detecting equipment to set off an alarm as soon as a leak breaks loose.”
“What can they do in the tunnel once the methane gets in?”
David grinned. “Run in circles, scream and shout. Seal off the leak as fast as they can, close off the tunnel from the rest of the colony, and pump for dear life. So far they’ve been lucky.”
He bent over, applying the torch to the hot metal of the jet, as though unwilling to think about such horrible possibilities. The metal was white-hot now; David handed the torch to Tuck, had him hold it nearby, bathing the metal in the stream of white flame, while David began hammering, sending up a shower of sparks. The snow that streamed from the torch formed a little pile on the ground; some lit on the hot metal, hissed, and burst into clouds of steam that promptly became snow again as soon as it got away from the heat of the metal. David brought a long strip of gray-looking metal from the supply bag, applied it to the lips of the torn metal, and the boys watched it heat and soften, and then flow as David skillfully applied it down the tear, hammering steadily to smooth out the edge as the rent was filled. In a short while the jet began to take a round, even appearance again, until David finally straightened up, glancing at the sun. “Got another couple of hours—if we can fix that wiring and siding, and pound the landing skid back into place, we might give it a test before dark—”