handle a vessel of the Karella’s class. He wondered whether or not this was considered safe practice on a foreign planet; but a careful look around as he walked the short distance from ship to dome revealed no defensive armament, and suggested that those manning the station had no anxiety about attack. If, as had been suggested, the post had been here for twenty years, they probably should know.
The interior of the dome was comfortable enough, though Ken’s conductor made constant apology for the lack of facilities. They had a meal for which no apology was required, and Ken was shown private quarters at least as good as were provided by the average Sarrian hotel. Laj Drai took him on a brief tour of the station, and made clear the facilities which the scientist could use in his assigned job.
With his “real” job usually in mind, Ken kept constant watch for any scrap of evidence that might suggest the presence of the narcotic he sought. He was reasonably certain, after the tour, that there was no complex chemical processing plant anywhere around; but if the drug were a natural product, there might not have to be. He could name more than one such substance that was horribly effective in the form in which it was found in nature — a vegetable product some primitive tribes on his own world still used to poison their arrows, for example.
The “trading” equipment, however, proved more promising, as might have been foreseen by anyone who had considered the planet with which the trading was done. There were many remote-control torpedoes, each divided into two main sections. One of these contained the driving and control machinery and was equipped with temperature control apparatus designed to keep it near normal; the other was mostly storage space and refrigeration machinery. Neither section was particularly well insulated, either from the other or the surrounding medium. Ken examined one of the machines minutely for some time, and then began asking questions.
“I don’t see any vision transmitter; how do you see to control the thing on the planet’s surface?”
“There is none,” a technician who had been assisting Drai in the exposition replied. “They all originally had them, of course, but none has survived the trip to Three yet. We took them out, finally — it was too expensive. The optical apparatus has to be exposed to the planet’s conditions at least partly, which means we must either run the whole machine at that temperature or have a terrific temperature difference between the optical and electrical elements. We have not been able to devise a system that would stand either situation — something goes completely haywire in the electrical part under those freezing conditions, or else the optical section shatters between the hot and cold sections.”
“But how do you see to control?”
“We don’t. There is a reflection altimeter installed, and a homing transmitter that was set up long ago on the planet. We simply send the torpedo down, land it, and let the natives come to it.”
“And you have never brought any physical samples from the surface of the planet?”
“We can’t see to pick up anything. The torpedo doesn’t stay airtight at that temperature, so we never get a significant amount of the atmosphere back; and nothing seems to stick to the outer hull. Maybe it lands on a solid metal or rock surface — we wouldn’t know.”