“Your scientists will have to contain themselves a little longer,” Barlennan interjected. “You seem to have overlooked something.”
“What?”
“Not one of the instruments you want me to put before the lens of your vision set is within seven feet of the ground; and all are inside metal walls which I suspect would be rather hard for us to remove by brute force, soft as your metals seem to be.”
“Blast it, you’re right, of course. The second part is easy; most of the surface skin is composed of quick-remove access plates that we can show you how to handle without much trouble. For the rest — hmm. You have nothing like ladders, and couldn’t use them if you had. Your elevator has the slight disadvantage of needing at least an installation crew at the top of its travel before you can use it. Offhand, I’m afraid I’m stuck for the moment. We’ll think of something, though; we’ve come too far to be stumped now.”
“I would suggest that you spend from now until my sailor gets here from the lookout in thought. If by that time you have no better idea, we will use mine.”
“What? You have an idea?”
“Certainly. We got to the top of that boulder from which we saw your rocket; what is wrong with using the same method here?” Rosten was silent for fully half a minute; Lackland suspected he was kicking himself mentally. “I can only see one point,” he said at last. “You will have a much larger job of rock-piling than you did before. The rocket is more than three times as high as the boulder where you built the ramp, and you’ll have to build up all around it instead of on one side, I suspect.”
“Why can we not simply make a ramp on one side up to the lowest level containing the machines you are interested in? It should then be possible to get up the rest of the way inside, as you do in the other rockets.”
“For two principal reasons. The more important one is that you won’t be able to climb around inside; the rocket was not built to carry living crews, and has no communication between decks. All the machinery was built to be reached from outside the hull, at the appropriate level. The other point is that you cannot start at the lower levels; granted that you could get the access covers off, I seriously doubt that you could lift them back in place when you finished with a particular section. That would mean that you’d have the covers off all around the hull before you built up to the next level; and I’m rather afraid that such a situation would not leave enough metal in place below to support the sections above. The top of the cone would — or at least might — collapse. Those access ports occupy the greater part of the skin, and are thick enough to take a lot of vertical load. Maybe it was bad design, but remember we expected to open them only in space, with no weight at all. “What you will have to do, I fear, is bury the rocket completely to the highest level containing apparatus and then dig your way down, level by level. It may even be advisable to remove the machinery from each section as you finish with it; that will bring the load to an absolute minimum. After all, there’ll only be a rather frail-looking skeleton when you have all those plates off, and I don’t like to picture what would happen to it with a full equipment load times seven hundred, nearly.”
“I see.” Barlennan took his turn at a spell of silent thought. “You yourself can think of no alternative to this plan? It involves, as you rightly point out, much labor.”
“None so far. We will follow your recommendation, and think until your other man comes from the observation point. I suspect we work under a grave disadvantage, though — we are unlikely to think of any solution which does not involve machinery we couldn’t get to you.”