Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) by Operation: Outer Space Page B

in
committee.
    But there were other griefs. The useless spaceship hulk had to be
emptied of the mining-tools stored in it. This was done by men working
in space-suits. Occupational rules required them to exert not more than
one-fourth of the effort they would have done if working for themselves.
When the ship was empty, air was released in it, and immediately froze
to air-snow. So radiant heaters had to be installed and powered to warm
up the hull to where an atmosphere could exist in it. Its generators had
to be thawed from the metal-ice stage of brittleness and warmed to where
they could be run without breaking themselves to bits.
    But there were good breaks, too. Presently a former
moonship-pilot—grounded to an administrative job on Luna—on his own
free time checked over the ship. Jones arranged it. With rocket-motors
of adamite—the stuff discovered by pure accident in a steel-mill back
on Earth—the propelling apparatus checked out. The fuel-pumps had been
taken over in fullness of design from fire-engine pumps on Earth. They
were all right. The air-regenerating apparatus had been developed from
the aeriating culture-tanks in which antibiotics were grown on Earth. It
needed only reseeding with algae—microscopic plants which when supplied
with ultraviolet light fed avidly on carbon dioxide and yielded oxygen.
The ship was a rather involved combination of essentially simple
devices. It could be put back into such workability as it had once
possessed with practically no trouble.
    It was.
    Jones moved into it, with masses of apparatus from the laboratory in the
Lunar Apennines. He labored lovingly, fanatically. Like most spectacular
discoveries, the Dabney field was basically simple. It was almost
idiotically uncomplicated. In theory it was a condition of the space
just outside one surface of a sheet of metal. It was like that
conduction-layer on the wires of a cross-country power-cable, when
electricity is transmitted in the form of high-frequency alterations and
travels on the skins of many strands of metal, because high-frequency
current simply does not flow inside of wires, but only on their
surfaces. The Dabney field formed on the surface—or infinitesimally
beyond it—of a metal sheet in which eddy-currents were induced in
such-and-such a varying fashion. That was all there was to it.
    So Jones made the exterior forward surface of the abandoned spaceship
into a generator of the Dabney field. It was not only simple, it was too
simple! Having made the bow of the ship into a Dabney field plate, he
immediately arranged that he could, at will, make the rear of the ship
into another Dabney field plate. The two plates, turned on together,
amounted to something that could be contemplated with startled awe, but
Jones planned to start off, at least, in a manner exactly like the
distress-torp test. The job of wiring up for faster-than-light travel,
however, was not much more difficult than wiring a bungalow, when one
knew how it should be done.
    Two freight-rockets came in, picked up by radar and guided to landings
by remote control. The Lunar City beam receiver picked up music aimed up
from Earth and duly relayed it to the dust-heaps which were the
buildings of the city. The colonists and moon-tourists became familiar
with forty-two new tunes dealing with prospective travel to the stars.
One work of genius tied in a just-released film-tape drama titled
"
Child of Hate
" to the Lunar operation, and charmed listeners saw and
heard the latest youthful tenor gently plead, "
Child of Hate, Come to
the Stars and Love.
" The publicity department responsible for the
masterpiece considered itself not far from genius, too.
    There was confusion thrice and four and five times confounded. Cochrane
came in to dispute furiously with Holden whether it was better to have a
psychopathic personality on the space-ship or to have a legal battle in
the courts. Cochrane won. Jones arrived, belligerent, to do battle for
technical devices which