Produced by Greg Weeks, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Space Science Fiction, February and March, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
ULLR UPRISING
A STORY IN TWO PARTS
BY H. BEAM PIPER
ILLUSTRATED BY ORBAN
"The heathen geeks, they wear no breeks," the Terrans sang. But on a crazy world like Ullr, clothes didn't make the fighting man. There both red and yellow meant danger--and blood!
* * * * *
I
The big armor-tender vibrated, gently and not unpleasantly, as thecontragravity field alternated on and off. Sometimes it rockedslightly, like a boat on the water, and, in the big screen whichserved in lieu of a window at the front of the control-cabin, thedingy-yellow landscape would seem to tilt a little. The air wasfaintly yellow, the sky was yellow with a greenish cast, and theclouds were green-gray.
No human had ever set foot on the surface, or breathed the air, ofNiflheim. To have done so would have been instant death; the air was amixture of free fluorine and fluoride gasses, the soil was metallicfluorides, damp with acid rains, and the river was pure hydrofluoricacid. Even the ordinary spacesuit would have been no protection; theglass and rubber and plastic would have disintegrated in a matter ofminutes. People came to Niflheim, and worked the mines and uraniumrefineries and chemical plants, but they did so inside power-drivenand contragravity-lifted armor, and they lived on artificialsatellites two thousand miles off-planet. Niflheim was worse thanairless; much worse.
The chief engineer sat at his controls, making the minor lateraladjustments in the vehicle's position which were not possible to theautomatic controls. At his own panel of instruments, a small man withgrizzled black hair around a bald crown, and a grizzled beard, chewednervously at the stump of a dead cigar and listened intently. A large,plump-faced, young man in soiled khaki shirt and shorts, withextremely hairy legs, was doodling on his notepad and eating candy outof a bag. And a black-haired girl in a suit of coveralls three sizestoo big for her, and, apparently, not much of anything else, loungedwith one knee hooked over her chair-arm, staring into the screen atthe distant horizon.
"I can see them," the girl said, lifting a hand in front of her. "Attwo o'clock, about one of my hand's-breaths above the horizon. Butonly four of them."
The man with the grizzled beard put his face into the fur around theeyepiece of the telescopic-'visor and twisted a dial. "You have goodeyes, Miss Quinton," he complimented. "The fifth's inside the handlingmachine. One of the Ullrans. Gorkrink."
* * * * *
The largest of the specks that had appeared on the horizon resolveditself into a handling-machine, a thing like an oversizedcontragravity-tank, with a bull-dozer-blade, a stubby derrick-boominstead of a gun, and jointed, claw-tipped, arms at the sides. Thesmaller dots grew into personal armor--egg-shaped things that sproutedarms and grab-hooks and pushers in all directions. The man with thegrizzled beard began talking rapidly into his hand-phone, then hung itup. There was a series of bumps, and the armor-tender, weightless oncontragravity, shook as the handling-machine came aboard.
"You ever see any nuclear bombing, Miss Quinton?" the young man withthe hairy legs asked, offering her his candybag.
"Only by telecast, back Solside," Paula Quinton replied, helpingherself. "Test-shots at the Federation Navy proving-ground on Mars. Inever even heard of nuclear bombs being used for mining till I camehere, though."
"It'll be something to see," he promised. "These volcanoes have beendormant for, oh, maybe as long as a thousand years; there ought to bea pretty good head of gas down there. The volcanoes we shot threemonths ago yielded a fine flow of lava with all sorts ofmetals--nickel, beryllium, vanadium, chromium, iridium, as well ascopper and iron."
"What sort of gas were you speaking about?" she asked.
"Hydrogen. That's what's going to make the fireworks; it combinesexplosively with fluorine. The hydrogen-fluorine combination is whatpasses for combustion here: the result is hydrofluoric acid, the localequivalent of water. The subsurface hydrogen is produced when the acidfilters down through the rock, combines with pure metals underneath."
The door at the rear of the control-cabin opened, and Juan Murillo,the seismologist, entered, followed by an assistant, who was nothuman. He was a biped, vaguely humanoid, but he had four arms and aface like a lizard's, and, except for some equipment on belt, he wasentirely naked.
He spoke rapidly to Murillo, in a squeaking jabber. Murillo turned.
"Yes, if you wish, Gorkrink," he said, in Lingua Terra. Then he turnedback to Gomes as the Ullran sat down in a chair by the door.
"Well, she's all yours, Lourenco; shoot the works."
Gomes stabbed the radio-detonator button in front of him.
* * * * *
Out on the rolling skyline, fifty miles away, a lancelike ray ofblue-white light shot up into the gathering dusk--a clump of fiverays, really, from five deep shafts in an irregular pentagon half amile across, blended into one by the distance. An instant later, therewas a blinding flash, like sheet-lightning, and a huge ball ofvaricolored fire belched upward, leaving a series of smoke-rings tofloat more slowly after it. The fireball flattened, then spread toform the mushroom-head of a column of incandescent gas that mounted toovertake it, engorging the smoke-rings as it rose, twisting, writhing,changing shape, turning to dark smoke in one moment and belching flameand crackling with lightning the next.
"In about half an hour," the large young man told Paula Quinton, "thereal fireworks should be starting. What's coming up now is just smalldebris from the nuclear blast. When the shock-waves get down farenough to crack things open, the gas'll come up, and then steam andash, and then magma."
"Well, even this was worth staying over for," the girl said, watchingthe screen.
"You going on to Ullr on the _City of Canberra_?" Lourenco Gomesasked. "I wish I were; I have to stay over and make another shot, in amonth or so, and I've had about all of Niflheim I can take, now."
"When are you going to Terra?" the girl asked him.
"Terra? I don't know; a year, two years. But I'm going to Ullr on thenext ship--the _City of Pretoria_--if we get the next blast off intime. They want me to design some improvements on a couple ofpower-reactors at Keegark so I'll probably see you when I get there."
"Here she comes!" the chief engineer called. "Watch the base of thecolumn!"
The pillar of fiery smoke and dust, still boiling up from where thebombs had gone off far underground, was being violently agitated atthe bottom. A series of new flashes broke out, lifting and spreadingthe incandescent radioactive gasses, and then a great gush of flamerose. A column of pure hydrogen must have rushed up into the vacuumcreated by the explosion; the next blast of flame, in a lateral sheet,came at nearly ten thousand feet above the ground. Then geysers of hotash and molten rock spouted upward; some of the white-hot debrislanded almost at the acid river, half-way to the armor-tender.
"We've started a first-class earthquake, too," Murillo said, lookingat the instruments.
"About six big cracks opening in the rock-structure. You know, whenthis quiets down and cools off, we'll have more ore on the surfacethan we can handle in ten years, and more than we could have mined byordinary means in fifty."
"Well, tha
t finishes our work," the large young man said, going to akit-bag in the corner of the cabin and getting out a bottle. "Get someof those plastic cups, over there, somebody; this one calls for adrink."
The Ullran, in the background, rose quickly and squeakedapologetically. Murillo nodded. "Yes, of course, Gorkrink. No need foryou to stay here." The Ullran went out, closing the door behind him.
"That taboo against Ullrans and Terrans watching each other eat anddrink," Paula Quinton commented. "But you were speaking to him inLingua Terra; I didn't know any of them understood it."
"Gorkrink does," Murillo said, uncorking the bottle and pouring intothe plastic cups. "None of them can speak it, of course, because ofthe structure of their vocal organs, any more than we can speak theirlanguages without artificial aids. But I can talk to him in LinguaTerra without having to put one of those damn gags in my mouth, and hecan pass my instructions on to the others. He's been a big help; I'llbe sorry to lose him."
"Lose him?"
"Yes, his year's up; he's going back to Ullr on the _Canberra_. He'sfrom Keegark; claims to be a prince, or something. But he's a damngood worker. Very smart; picks things up the first time you tell him.I'll recommend him unqualifiedly for any kind of work withcontragravity or mechanized equipment."
They all had drinks, now, except the chief engineer, who wanted arain-check on his.
"Well, here's to us," Murillo said. "The first A-bomb miners inhistory...."