“Maybe,” agreed Baird, using the communicator. “Is that stuff about falling into the sun correct?”
“It seems so,” said Diane composedly. “I’m checking again. So far, the best course I can get means we graze the sun’s photosphere in fourteen days six hours, allowing for acceleration by the sun’s gravity.”
“And you and I,” said Baird wryly, “have been acting as professional associates only, when—”
“Don’t say it!” said Diane shakily. “It’s terrible!”
He put the communicator back in his pocket. The Plumie had watched him. He had a peculiarly gallant air, this small figure in golden space armor with its high-crested helmet.
They reached the engine room. And there was the giant drive shaft of the Niccola, once wrapped with yard-thick coils which could induce an incredible density of magnetic flux in the metal. Even the return magnetic field, through the ship’s cobalt-steel hull, was many times higher than saturation. Now the coils were sagging: mostly melted. There were places where re-solidified metal smoked noisomely against nonmetallic floor or wall-covering. Engineers labored doggedly in the trivial gravity to clean up the mess.
“It’s past repair,” said Baird, to the ship’s first engineer.
“It’s junk,” said that individual dourly. “Give us six months and a place to set up a wire-drawing mill and an insulator synthesizer, and we could rebuild it. But nothing less will be any good.”
The Plumie stared at the drive. He examined the shaft from every angle. He inspected the melted, and partly-melted, and merely burned-out sections of the drive coils. He was plainly unable to understand in any fashion the principle of the magnetronic drive. Baird was tempted to try to explain, because there was surely no secret about a ship drive, but he could imagine no diagrams or gestures which would convey the theory of what happened in cobalt-steel when it was magnetized beyond one hundred thousand Gauss’ flux-density. And without that theory one simply couldn’t explain a magnetronic drive.
They left the engine room. They visited the rocket batteries. The generator room was burned out, like the drive, by the inconceivable lightning bolt which had passed between the ships on contact. The Plumie was again puzzled. Baird made it clear that the generator-room supplied electric current for the ship’s normal lighting-system and services. The Plumie could grasp that idea. They examined the crew’s quarters, and the mess room, and the Plumie walked confidently among the members of the human crew, who a little while since had tried so painstakingly to destroy his vessel. He made a good impression.