Months passed. Two perfect babies—Theodore Warner Deston and Barbara Bernice Jones—were born, four days apart, in perfectly normal fashion. Adams made out birth certificates which were unusual in only one respect; the times, dates, and places of the births were to be determined later.
A couple of weeks before arrival Adams rushed up to Deston and Jones. “I have it!” he shouted, and began to spout a torrent of higher—very much higher—mathematics.
“Hold it, Doc!” Deston protested. “I read you zero and ten. Can’t you delouse your signal?”
“W-e-l-l.” The scientist looked hurt, but did abandon the high math. “The discharge is catastrophic; energy of the order of magnitude of ten thousand average discharges of lightning. I do not know what it is, but it is virtually certain that we will be able to discharge it, not in the one tremendous blast of contact with the planet, but in successive decrements by the use of long, thin leads extending downward toward a high point of the planet.”
“Wire, you mean? What kind?”
“The material is unimportant except in that it should have sufficient tensile strength to support as many miles as possible of its own length.”
“We’ve got dozens of coils of hook-up wire,” Deston said, “but not too many miles and it’s soft stuff.”
Jones snapped his finger. “Graham wire!”
“Of course,” Deston agreed. “Hundreds of miles of it aboard. We’ll float the senser down on a Hotchkiss... ”
“Tear-out,” Jones objected.
“Bailey it—and spider the Bailey out to eighteen or twenty pads. We can cannibal the whole Middle for metal.”
“Sure. But surges—backlash. We’ll have to remote it.”
“No, problem there; servos all over the place. To Baby Two.”
“Would you mind delousing your signal?” Adams asked caustically.
“ ’Scuse, please, Doc. A guy does talk better in his own lingo, doesn’t he? Graham wire is used for re-wrapping the Grahams, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. What are Grahams?”
“Why, they’re the intermediates between the Wesleys and the Chaytors... okay, okay; Graham wire is one-point-three-millimeter-diameter ultra-high-tensile alloy wire. Used for re-enforcing hollow containers that have to stand terrific pressure.”
“Such wire is exactly what will be required. Note now that our bodies will have to be grounded very thoroughly to the metal of the ship.”
“You’re so right. We’ll wrap up to the eyeballs in silver mesh and run leads as big as my arm to the frame.”
They approached their target planet. It was twice as massive as Earth; its surface was rugged and jagged; its mountain ranges had sharp peaks over forty thousand feet high.
“There’s one more thing we must do,” Adams said. “This zeta field may very well be irreplaceable. We must therefore launch all the lifecraft except Number Two into separate orbits, so that a properly-staffed and properly-equipped force may study that field.”
It was done; and in a few hours the Procyon hung motionless, a thousand miles high, directly above an isolated and sharp mountain peak.
The Bailey boom, with its spider-web-like network of grounding cables and with a large pulley at its end, extended two hundred feet straight out from the Procyon’s side. A twenty-five-mile coil of Graham wire had been mounted on the remote-controlled Hotchkiss reel. The end of the wire had been run out over the pulley; a fifteen-pound weight, to act both as a “senser” and to keep the wire from fouling, had been attached; and the controls had been tested.
Now, in Lifecraft Two—as far away from the “business district” as they could be—the human bodies were grounded and Deston started the reel. The whole coil ran out, as expected, with no action. Then, slowly and carefully, Deston let the big ship float straight downward. Until, suddenly, it happened.
There was a blast beside which the most terrific flash of lightning ever seen on Earth would have seemed like a firecracker. Although she was in what was almost a vacuum, the Procyon was hurled upward like the cork of a champagne bottle. And as for what it felt like—the sensation was utterly indescribable. As Bernice said, long afterward, when she was being pressed by a newsman, “Just tell ’em it was the living end.”
The girls were unwrapped and, after a moment of semi-hysteria and after making sure that the babies were all right, were as good as new. Then Deston aimed his plate and gulped. Without saying a word he waved a hand and the others looked. The sharp tip of the mountain was gone: it had become a seething, flaming lake of incandescent lava.
“And what,” Deston managed, “do you suppose happened to the other side of the ship?”
The boom was gone. So were all twenty of the grounding cables that had fanned out in all directions to anchorages welded to the vessel’s skin and frame. The anchorages, too, were gone; and tons upon tons of steel plating and of structural members for many feet around where each anchorage had been. Many tons of steel had been completely volatilized; other tons had run like water.
“Shall I try the subspace radio now, Doc?” Deston asked.
“By no means. This first blast would of course be the worst, but there will be several more, of decreasing violence.”
There were. The second, while it volatilized the boom and its grounding network, merely fused small portions of the anchorages. The third took only the boom itself; the fourth, only the dangling miles of wire. At the fifth trial nothing—apparently—happened; whereupon the wire was drawn in and a two-hundred-pound mass of steel was lowered into firm contact with solid rock.
“Now you may try your radio,” Adams said.
Deston flipped a switch and spoke into his microphone. “Procyon One to Control Six. Flight eight four nine. Subspace radio test number nine five—I think. How do you read me, Control Six?”
The reply was highly unorthodox. It was a wild yell, followed by words not addressed to Deston at all. “Captain Reamer! Captain French! Captain Holloway! ANYBODY! It’s the Procyon, that was lost over a year ago! IT’S THE PROCYON!”
“Line it up! If it’s some damn fool’s idea of a joke... ” a crisp authoritative voice grew louder as its source approached the distant pickup “... he’ll rot in jail for a hundred years!”
“Procyon One to Control Six,” Deston said again. His voice was not quite steady this time; both girls were crying openly and joyfully. “How do you read me, Frenchy old horse?”
“It is the Procyon—that’s the Runt himself—hi, Babe! I read you nine and one. Survivors?”
“Five. Second Officer Jones, our wives, and Doctor Andrew Adams, a fellow of the College of Study.”
“It can’t be a lifecraft after this long—what shape is the hulk in?”
“Bad. Can’t immerge. The whole Top is an ungodly mess and some of the rest of her won’t hold air—air, hell! Section Fourteen won’t hold shipping crates! The Chaytors are okay, but five of the Wesleys are shot, and all of the Q-converters. Most of the Grahams are leaking like sieves, and... ”
“Hold it, Babe. They want this on a recorder down-stairs, too. The newshawks are knocking the doors down. This marriage bit. The brides—who are they?”
Deston told him. Just that; no more.
“Okay. They want a lot more than that; especially the sobbers, but that can wait. What happened?”