Hogan, James P Giants 2 The Gentle Giants of Ganymede

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I am correct, there should be a forward compensating reactor in the ship too. The Earthmen~ at Main
have shown me diagrams of a device that looks like one, but to be sure we should make a point of
looking inside the nose end to check it firsthand. I would also like an opportunity to view the primary
energy-convertor section and its layout."
"Mmm . . . it could be worse," Jassilane murmured absently.
"What was that all about, Rog?" Hunt asked him. The Giant half turned and raised an arm toward the
ship.
"ZORAC has confirmed my own first impressions," he said. "Although that ship was built some time after
the Shapieron, the basic design doesn't seem to have altered too much."
"There's a good chance it might help you get yours fixed then, huh?" Mills chimed in.
"Hopefully," Jassilane agreed.
"We'd need to see it close-up to be sure," Shilohin cautioned. Hunt turned to face the rest of the party
and spread his arms with palms upturned. "Well, let's go on down and do just that," he said.
They moved away from the viewing window and threaded their way through and between the equipment
racks and consoles of the control room to a door on the opposite side to descend to the lower floor.
After the door had closed behind the last of the party, one of the duty operators at the consoles half
turned to one of his colleagues.
"See Ed, I told ya," he remarked cheerfully. "They didn't eat anybody."
Ed frowned dubiously from his seat a few feet away.
"Maybe they're just not hungry today," he muttered.
On the floor of the cavern, immediately below the 'window, the mixed group of Ganymeans and
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Earthmen emerged through an airlock and began making their way across the steel-mesh flooring and
through the maze of assorted engineering toward the ship.
"It's quite warm," Shilohin commented to Hunt as they walked. "And yet there's no sign of melting on the
walls. How come?"
"The air-circulation system's been carefully designed," he informed her. "The warmer air is confined
down here in the work-
ing area and screened off from the ice by curtains of cold air blowing upward all round the sides to
extractors up in the roof. The way the walls are shaped to blend into the roof produces the right flow
pattern. The system works quite well."
"Ingenious," she murmured.
"What about the explosion risk from dissolved gases being released from the ice?" another Ganymean
asked. "I'd have thought there'd be a hazard there."
"When the excavations were first started it was a problem," Hunt answered. "That was when most of the
melting was being done. Everybody had to work in suits down here then. They were using an argon
atmosphere for exactly the reason you just mentioned. Now that the ventilation's been improved there's
not really a big risk anymore so we can be a bit more comfortable. The cold-air curtains help a lot too;
they keep the rate of gas-escape down pretty well to zero and what little there is gets swept away
upward. The chances of a bang down here are probably less than the base up top getting clobbered by a
stray meteorite."
"Well, here we are," Mills announced from the front. They were standing at the foot of a broad, shallow
metal ramp that rose from the floor and disappeared through a mass of cabling up into a large aperture
cut in the hull. Above them, the bulging contour of the ship's side soared in a monstrous curve that swept
over and out of sight toward the roof. Suddenly they were like mice staring up at the underside of a
garden roller.
"Let's go in then," Hunt said.
For the next two hours they walked every inch of the labyrinth of footways and catwalks that had been
built inside the craft, which had come to rest on its side and offered few horizontal surfaces of its own
upon which it was possible to move easily. The Giants followed the cable-runs and the ducting with eyes
that obviously knew what they were looking for. Every now and then they stopped to dismantle an item
of particular interest with sure and practiced fingers or to trace the connections to a device or
component. They absorbed every detail of the plans supplied by UNSA scientists, which showed as
much as the Earthmen could deduce of the vessel's design and structure.
After a long dialogue with ZORAC to analyze the results of these observations, Jassilane announced,
"We are optimistic. The chances of restoring the Shapieron to a fully functional condition
seem good. We'd like to conduct a far more detailed study of certain parts of this ship, however-one
that would involve more of our technical experts from Main. Could you accommodate a small group of
our people here for, say, two or three weeks?" He addressed these last words to Mills. The commander
shrugged and opened his hands.
"Whatever you want. Consider it done," he replied.
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Within an hour of the party's return to the surface for a meal, another UNSA transporter was on its way
north from Main bringing more Ganymeans and the necessary tools and instruments from the Shapieron.
Later on, they went to the biological laboratories section of the base and admired Danchekker's indoor
garden. They confirmed that the plants he had cultivated were familiar to them and represented types that
were widespread in the equatorial regions of the Minerva they had known. At the professor's insistence
they accepted some cuttings to be taken back to the Shapieron and grown there as mementoes of their
home. The gesture seemed to affect them deeply.
Danchekker then led the party down into a large storage room excavated out of the solid ice below the
biological labs. They emerged into a spacious, well-lit area, the walls of which were lined with shelving
that carried a miscellany of supplies and instruments; there were rows of closed storage cupboards all
painted a uniform green, unrecognizable machines draped in dustcovers, and in places stacks of
unopened packing cases reaching almost to the ceiling. But the sight that immediately captured every eye
was that of the beast towering before them about twenty feet from the doorway.
It stood over eighteen feet high at the shoulder on four treetrunklike legs, its massive body tapering at the
front into a long sturdy neck to carry its relatively small but ruggedly formed head high and well forward.
Its skin was grayish and appeared rough and leathery, twisting into deep, heavy wrinkles that girded the
base of its neck and the underside of its head below its short, erect ears. Over two enormous flared
nostrils and a yawning parrotbeaklike mouth, the eyes were wide and staring. They were accentuated by
thick folds of skin above, and directed straight down to stare at the door.
"This is one of my favorites," Danchekker informed them breezily as he walked forward at the head of
the party to pat the beast fondly on the front of one of its massive forelegs.
"Baluchitherium-a late-Oligocene to early-Miocene Asian ancestor of modem rhinoceroses. In this
species the front feet have already lost their fourth toe and adopted a three-toed structure similar to the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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