“Sure,” said Mike. “So what? If we overlook the motors, that’s okay. We may never be able to get off the planet with this ship again, but we aren’t supposed to anyway.
“Come on, Multhaus, don’t worry about it. I know you hate to burn up a ship, but this one is supposed to be expendable. You may never have another chance like this.”
Multhaus tried to keep from grinning, but he couldn’t. “Awright, Commander. You have appealed to my baser instincts. My subconscious desire to wreck a spaceship has been brought to the surface. I can’t resist it. Am I nutty, maybe?”
“Not now, you’re not,” Mike said, grinning back.
“We’ll have a bitch of a job getting through the plasmasphere, though,” said the chief. “That fraction of a second will—”
“It’ll jolt us,” Mike agreed, interrupting. “But it won’t wreck us. Let’s get going.”
“Aye, sir,” said Multhaus.
The seas of Eisberg were liquid methane containing dissolved ammonia. Near the equator, they were liquid; farther north, the seas became slushy with crystallized ammonia.
The site picked for the new labs of the Computer Corporation of Earth was in the northern hemisphere, at 40° north latitude, about the same distance from the equator as New York or Madrid, Spain, would be on Earth. The Brainchild would be dropping through Eisberg’s magnetic field at an angle, but it wouldn’t be the ninety-degree angle of the equator. It would have been nice if the base could have been built at one of the poles, but that would have put the labs in an uncomfortable position, since there was no solid land at either pole.