Treadmore, looking like a tortured bloodhound, said: “But we’ll make it, won’t we?”
Everyone nodded dismally.
Mike the Angel had a job he emphatically didn’t like. He was supposed to convert the power plant of the Brainchild from a spaceship driver into a stationary generator. The conversion job itself wasn’t tedious; in principle, it was similar to taking the engine out of an automobile and converting it to a power plant for an electric generator. In fact, it was somewhat simpler, in theory, since the engines of the Brainchild were already equipped for heavy drainage to run the electrical systems aboard ship, and to power and refrigerate Snookums’ gigantic brain, which was no mean task in itself.
But Michael Raphael Gabriel, head of one of the foremost—if not the foremost—power design corporations in the known Galaxy, did not like degrading something. To convert the Brainchild’s plant from a spaceship drive to an electric power plant seemed to him to be on the same order as using a turboelectric generator to power a flashlight. A waste.
To make things worse, the small percentage of hydrogen in the atmosphere got sneaky sometimes. It could insinuate itself into places where neither the methane nor the ammonia could get. Someone once called hydrogen the “cockroach element,” since, like that antediluvian insect, the molecules of H2 can insidiously infiltrate themselves into places where they are not only unwelcome, but shouldn’t even be able to go. At red heat, the little molecules can squeeze themselves through the crystalline interstices of quartz and steel.
Granted, the temperature of Eisberg is a long way from red hot, but normal sealing still won’t keep out hydrogen. Add to that the fact that hydrogen and methane are both colorless, odorless, and tasteless, and you have the beginnings of an explosive situation.
The only reason that no one died is because the Space Service is what it is.
Unlike the land, sea, and air forces of Earth, the Space Service does not have a long history of fighting other human beings. There has never been a space war, and, the way things stand, there is no likelihood of one in the foreseeable future.
But the Space Service does fight, in its own way. It fights the airlessness of space and the unfriendly atmospheres of exotic planets, using machines, intelligence, knowledge, and human courage as its weapons. Some battles have been lost; others have been won. And the war is still going on. It is an unending war, one which has no victory in sight.