"Let me help you, Steve—I'm pretty husky, too, you know."
"Sure you are, ace, but this is a job for a truck-horse, not a tenderly-nurtured maiden of the upper classes. You can help, though, by breaking out that welding outfit and getting it ready while I'm doing this bending to prepare for the welding."
Under the urge of that mighty jack the ends of the broken bus-bar rose into place, while far off in space the Titanians clustered about their visiray screens, watching, in almost unbelieving amazement, the supernatural being who labored in that reeking inferno of heat and poisonous vapor—who labored almost naked and entirely unprotected, refreshing himself from time to time with drafts of molten water!
"All x, Barkovis—that's high, I guess." Stevens flipped perspiration from his hot forehead with a wet finger and straightened his weary back. "Now you can put this jack away where we had it. Then you might trundle me over enough of that spare metal to fill up this hole, and I'll put on my suit and goggles and practice welding on this floor and the roof, to get the feel of the metal before I tackle the bar."
The hole in the floor was filled with scrap and soon sparks were flying wildly as the searing beam of Stevens' welding projector bit viciously into the stubborn alloy of noble metals; fashioning a smooth, solid floor where the yawning aperture had been. Then, lifted with his tools and plates to the roof, the man repaired that hole also.
"Now I know enough about it to do a good job on the bar," he decided, and brick after brick of alloy was fused into the crack, until only a smoothly rounded bulge betrayed that a break had ever existed in that mighty rod of metal.
"Give 'em the signal to draw power, and see if that's all that was the matter," Stevens instructed, as he relaxed in the grateful coolness of their control room. "Whew, that was a warm job, Nadia—and this air of ours does smell good!"
"It was a horrible job, and I'm glad it's done," she declared. "But say, Steve, that thing looks as little like a power-plant as anything I can imagine. How does it work? You said that it worked on heat, but I don't quite see how. But don't draw diagrams and please don't integrate!"
"No ordinary plant such as we use could run for centuries without attention," he replied. "This is a highly advanced heat-engine—something like a thermo-couple, you know. This whole thing is simply the hot end, connected to the cold end on Titan by a beam instead of wires. When it's working, this metal must cool off something fierce. That's what the checkerwork and fins are for—so that it can absorb the maximum amount of heat from the current of hot, moist air I spoke about. It's a sweet system—we'll have to rig up one between Tellus and the moon. Or even between the Equator and the Arctic Circle there'd be enough thermal differential to give us a million kilofranks. We haven't got the all x signal yet, but it's working—look at it sweat as it cools down!"
"I'll say it's sweating—the water is simply streaming off it!" In their plate they saw that moisture was already beginning to condense upon the heat-absorber: moisture running down the fins in streams and creeping over the dull metal floor in sluggish sheets; moisture which, turning into ice in the colder interior of the checkerwork, again became fluid at the inrush of hot, wet Saturnian air.