The human watches cried out — Benj wordlessly, McDevitt protestingly, “It can’t blow!” their reactions were, of course, far too late to be meaningful. By the time the picture reached the station, one end of the wire loop had melted through had the unit had shut down automatically. Borndender, rather surprised to find himself alive, supplemented the automatic control with the manual one, and without taking time to report to the captain set about figuring what had happened.
This did not take him long; he was an orderly thinker, and had absorbed a great deal more alien than had the helmsmen who were still hoping for a rescue a few yards away. He understood the theory and construction of the power units about as a good high school student understands the theory and construction of a television set — that is, he could not have built one himself, but could make a reasonable deduction about the cause of a gross malfunction. He was more of a chemist than a physicist, as far as specific training went.
While the human beings watched in surprise, and Dondragmer in some uneasiness, the two scientist repeated the bending operation until what was left of the resistor was once again usable. With the drilling equipment they made a pit large enough to hold the power box at one end of the deep groove boiled in the ice by the first few seconds of power. They set the box in the hole, connected the ends once more, and covered everything with chips of ice removed in the digging, leaving only the controls exposed. Then Borndender switched on the power again, this time retreating much more hastily than before.
The white cloud reappeared at once, but this time grew and spread. It enveloped the near side of the Kwembly, including the bridge, blocking the view for Dondragmer and the communicator lens. Illuminated by the outside flood lamps, it caught the attention of the crew, now nearing the edge of the valley, and of Stakendee and his men miles to the west. This time the entire length of the wire was submerged in melted ice, which bubbled away from around it as hot vapor, condensed to a liquid a fraction of a millimeter away, evaporated again much less violently from the surface of the widening pool, and again condensed, this time to ice, in the air above. The streaming pool, some three quarters of the Kwembly’s length and originally some sex feet in width, began to sink below the surrounding ice as its contents were borne away as ice dust by the gentle wind fast than they were replenished by melting.
One side of it reach the cruiser, and Dondragmer, catching a glimpse of it through a momentary break in the swirling fog suddenly had a frightening thought. He donned his airsuit hurriedly and rushed to the inner door of the main lock. Here he hesitated; with the suit’s protection he could not tell by feel wheter the ship was heating dangerously, and there were not internal thermometers except in the lab. For a moment he thought of getting one; then he decided that the time needed might be risk, and opened the up safety valves in the outer lock, which were handled by pull cords from inside reaching down through the liquid trap. He did not know wheter the heat from outside would last long enough to boil ammonia in the lock itself — the Kwembly’s hull was well insulated, and leakage would be slow — but he had no desire to have boiling ammonia confined aboard his command. It was actually an example of a little knowledge causing superfluous worry; the temperature needed to bring ammonia vapor pressure anywhere near the current ambient value would have made an explosion the least of any Mesklinite’s concerns. However, no real harm was by opening the valves, and the captain felt better as a result of the action. He returned hastily to the bridge to see what was going on.
A gentle breeze from the west was providing occasional glimpses by sweeping the ice fog aside, and he could see that the level of the molten pool was lower. Its area had increased greatly, but as the minutes passed he decided that some sort of limit had been reached in that respect. His two men were visible at times, crawling here and there trying to find a good viewpoint. They finally settled down almost under the bridge, with breeze behind them.
For some time even the liquid level seemed to reach a steady state, though none of the watchers could understand why. Later they decided that the spreading pool had melted its way into the still-liquid reservoir under the Kwembly, which took fully fifteen minutes to evaporate. By the end of that time, cobbles from the river bottom began to show their tops above the simmering water, and the problem of turning the power unit off before another length of wire was destroyed suddenly occurred to Dondragmer.
He knew now that there was no danger of the power unit blowing up; however, several inches of the wire had already melted away, and there was going to be trouble restoring the refrigerator to service. This situation should not be allowed to get any worse, which it would if more metal were lost. Now, as the water level reached the cobbles and the wire ceased to follow the melting ice downward, the captain suddenly wondered wheter he could get out to the controls fast enough to prevent the sort of shut-off which had occurred before. He wasted no time mentally blasting the scientists for not attaching a cord to the appropriate control; he hadn’t thought of it in time either.
He donned his suit again and went out through the bridge lock. Here the curve of the hull hid the pool from view, and he began to make his way down the holdfasts as rapidly as he could in the poor visibility. As he went, he hooted urgently to Borndender, “Don’t let the write melt again! Turn off the power!”
An answering, but wordless, bellow told him that he had been heard, but no other information came through the white blankness. He continued to grope his way downward, finally reaching the bottom of the hull curve. Below him, separated from his level by the thickness of the mattress and two thirds the height of the trucks, was the gently steaming surface of the water. It was not, of course, actively boiling at this pressure; but it was hot even by human standards, and the captain had no illusions about the ability of an airsuit to protect him from it. It occurred to him, rather later, that there was an excellent chance that he had just cooked his two missing helmsmen to death, but this was a passing thought; there was work to be done.
The power box lay well aft of his present position, but the nearest surface on which he could walk had to be forward. Either way there was going to be trouble reaching the unit, now presumably well surrounded by hot water; but if jumping were going to be necessary, the hull holdfasts were about the poorest possible takeoff point. Dondragmer went forward.
This brought him into clear air almost at once, and he saw that his two men were gone. Presumably they had started around the far side of the pool in the hope of carrying out his order. The captain continued forward, and in another yard or two found it possible top descend to solid ice. He did so, and hastened on what he hoped was the trail of his men.
He had to slow down almost at once, however, as his course brought him back into the ice fog. He was too close to the edge of the pool to take chances. As he went he called repeatedly, and was reassured to hear each hoot answered by another. At least, his men had not yet fallen in.
He caught up with them almost under the cruise’s stern, having walked entirely around the part of the pool not bounded by the hull. None of them had accomplished anything; the power unit was not only out of reach but out of sigh. Jumping would have been utter lunacy, even if Mesklinites normally tended to think such a thing. Borndender and his assistant had not, and the idea had only occurred to Dondragmer because of his unusual experience in Mesklin’s low-gravity equatorial zone long before.
But there could not be much more time. Looking over the edge of the ice, the three could catch glimpses of the rounded tops of the rocks, separated by water surfaces which narrowed as they watched. The wire must be practically out of water by now; chance alone would not have it settle between the stones to a point much lower than their average height, and the protecting water was already there. The captain had been weighing the various risks for minutes; without further hesitation, and without issuing any orders, he slipped over the edge and dropped two feet to the top of one of the boulders.