But they were hotcakes and they were drowned in maple syrup. It was a ceremony, at the beginning of each working day, held on the sly behind a locked door, lest one of their puritanical friends be offended.
They embarked on a systematic campaign to vandalize each of the other ships for anything at all that might prove useful in outfitting the Astarte. In this, too, they were dependent on the natives; Matt or Tex could pick out what was wanted, but it took the little folk to move anything several miles through swamp and water and unmarked jungle.
They talked of the flight as if they really expected to make it. "You give me radar," Matt told Oscar, "any sort of approach radar, so that I've got a chance to land, and I'll set her down somewhere at South Pole. You can forget about the astrogational junk; it'll be dead reckoning."
They had settled on New Auckland, South Pole, as their nominal destination. North Pole would have been equally reasonable, but Oscar was a southern colonial, which decided it.
Oscar had promised the radar, not knowing quite how he could manage it. The Gary was the only hope; her communications room had been wrecked but Oscar had hopes of salvaging her belly radar. He set about doing it, while swearing at the impossibility of doing delicate work with one arm in a sling.
Little from the jeep was worth salvaging and none of it was entirely intact. Oscar had tried at first to use the radar equipment of the Astarte, but had given up-a century of difference in technology baffled him. Not only were the electronic circuits of the Astarte vastly more complicated and equally less efficient than the gear he had been brought up. with but the nomenclature was different-the markings, for example, on a simple resistor were Greek to him.
As for radio circuits the only sending installation actually fit to operate was a suit walky-talky from the Gary.
Nevertheless there came a morning when they had done what they could do. Tex was dealing out hotcakes. "It looks to me," he said, "as if we were ready to go, if we had some 'go' juice."
"How do you figure that," asked Matt. "The control board isn't even hooked to the jet."
"What of it? I'm going to have to throttle by hand anyhow. I'm going to take that big piece of tubing we pulled out of the Gary and string it from you back to me, at the jet throttle. You can shout down it and if I like it I'll do it."