The Unorthodox Engineers Read online

  The Unorthodox Engineers

  Colin Kapp

  The Unorthodox Engineers are a misfit bunch of engineers, commanded by maverick engineer Fritz van Noon and including, amongst others, a convicted bank robber as quartermaster (on the entirely-sound grounds that he was likely to be the most capable person for the job). They solve problems of alien technology and weird planets in the future.

  The Unorthodox Engineers contains:

  The Railways Up on Cannis (1959)

  The Subways of Tazoo (1964)

  The Pen and the Dark (1966)

  Getaway from Getawehi (1969)

  The Black Hole of Negrav (1975)

  Colin Kapp

  THE UNORTHODOX ENGINEERS

  The Railways Up on Cannis

  ‘Colonel Ivan Nash to see you, Sir.’

  Colonel William Belling frowned. ‘Ivan Nash? I thought he was on Cannis IV with the occupation force. Anyway, show him in.’

  ‘Too late!’ said Nash from the doorway. ‘I’m already in. Can’t wait on ceremony, you know, Bill. I’ve got an operation to run.’

  Good to see you, Ivan! What brings you to Terra?’

  ‘Briefly,’ said Nash, ‘it’s the railways up on Cannis.’

  Belling waved his visitor into a chair and issued him with a drink. ‘I fear I’m a little out of touch,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think railways were quite in your line.’

  ‘No?’ Nash filled his pipe carefully. ‘How much do you know about Cannis IV anyway?’

  ‘Not much. Gravity, atmosphere and climate roughly earth-normal. Population rated human equivalent on the Manneschen scale. Oh yes—and volcanoes!’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Nash dryly. ‘Let us not forget the volcanoes. Cannis IV is a young world with a very thin crust. Plate-tectonic movement is still pretty extreme and the resulting volcanic activity is widespread and generally severe. magma-blowholes about a dozen metres in diameter can force up anywhere at any time. They raise sharp-edged slag cases from ten to a hundred metres in height. That’s why there are no roads on anywhere on Cannis.’

  ‘Quite a place,’ commented Belling, refilling the glasses.

  ‘Quite a place and quite a people.’ Nash studied the ceiling reflectively. ‘Tough as nails and as perverse and changeable as the hell-hole that spawned them. Considering there’s not a two-hundred metre diameter of flat space anywhere on the whole damned planet it’s highly remarkable that any form of civilization ever managed to evolve, let alone one that managed to kick itself into space.’

  ‘I had wondered about that.’

  ‘Well you might. They’re an extremely clever race. They’re craftsmen, hobbyists and gadgeteers of the highest calibre. They built up a highly effective mechanical culture by trial and error and empirical method. But they have no true science as such.’

  ‘So?’

  Ivan Nash paused. ‘So Cannis IV took an accidental kinetic impactor during the war. One of the rebel asteroid-ships ended up there after we knocked out its drive. Now the locals don’t have sufficient continuity of technology to get back on their own feet. If you knock a cockeyed culture like that to pieces how, in hell do you get it together again?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Belling, quite honestly.

  ‘And neither do I. They’re a heck of a nice people when you get to know them. That’s why our presence on Cannis IV is more of a rehabilitation job. If we let them down we throw them back a thousand years.’

  ‘As bad as that, eh?’ Belling muttered morosely.

  ‘Worse. With their present production and distributing capacity they’d have difficulty in maintaining more than twenty per cent of their population at a minimum survival level without our help. And help all the way from Terra is a mighty expensive item. We have to stand them on their own feet fast.’

  ‘So you want reconstruction engineers?’

  ‘No, I already have engineers. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. Advanced technology is not very suited to patching up a string and hairpin culture. The gulf between our technology and their technique is too great. What I need are specialists with a peculiar kind of skill. That’s why I came to you.’

  ‘The entire engineering reserve is at your disposal,’ said Belling. ‘You name ‘em, I’ve got ‘em. What do you want?’

  ‘My main concern is with the railways. With no roads or airstrips, the railways alone give cohesion and life to their scattered society. Without it they can’t survive.’

  ‘So you want railway engineers?’

  ‘No,’ said Nash sadly, ‘they wouldn’t be any use.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Man!’ said Nash in a voice of awe and wonder. ‘Did you ever see the railways up on Cannis? It’s a shunter’s nightmare, a plate-layer’s conception of hell. From an engineer’s point of view it’s a complete and utter impossibility.’

  ‘Somebody must have constructed it originally.’

  ‘Yes, a myriad crazy, bug-brained innovators, each working on a separate part to an entirely different specification and for conflicting reasons. It’s a completely lunatic system which breaks every known law of elementary railway technique.’

  ‘Then,’ said Belling wearily, ‘if you don’t want engineers what do you want?’

  ‘I want to borrow the UE squad,’ said Nash grimly.

  Belling winced. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Deadly.’

  ‘You realize what the UE squad could do to a situation like this?’

  ‘I realize it’s a dangerous thing to try, but desperate ills need desperate remedies. It’s the last chance we have to save the planet from barbarism.’

  ‘If I were you,’ said Belling sadly, ‘I’d resign.’

  Lieutenant Fritz van Noon of the Unorthodox Engineering squad faced his superior warily.

  ‘I’ve got news for you,’ said Colonel Belling. ‘As you know I was against the formation of the UE squad right from the start. The whole subject of Unorthodox Engineering has never sat very easily on my conscience. However, I think you’ve won your point.’

  ‘You mean that Operation Hyperon is going through?’

  ‘Just that, but there is a proviso. You have to keep the squad in operational trim until Hyperon is ready by accepting assignments outside this reserve. Colonel Nash has already made a specific request for your services.’

  ‘I’m grateful,’ said Fritz warily, ‘but there’s a distinct odour of an ulterior motive here somewhere.’

  Belling smiled wolfishly. ‘There is indeed. Tell me, Fritz, do you know anything about railways?’

  ‘No, sir, should I?’

  ‘Then you’d better get yourself a book or something. You’ve just been appointed controller of public railways on Cannis IV. UE goes with you.’

  ‘Cannis IV? Where the fuck is that?’

  Belling winced. ‘It’s the only habitable planet in the Cannis sector. And it’s the closest approximation to Hell I’ve come across so far.’

  ‘I’m grateful you thought of me, sir,’’ said van Noon sardonically.

  ‘And I appreciate your tact, Fritz. You know, it’s no easy task running a specialist engineering reserve. Always you get the one engineer in a thousand who should never have got out of playschool, let alone graduated. With a reserve strength like ours it’s inevitable that we should have collected more than our fair quota of screwballs. The problem has always been to place them in positions where they aren’t actively dangerous. Now I don’t have to worry. The UE squad is a natural home for these guys.’

  ‘Which statement reveals a deplorable lack of insight,’ said Fritz van Noon. ‘I devised UE to provide an outlet for those engineers whose imagination carried them beyond the ordinary.’

  ‘I know,’ said Belli
ng dryly. ‘I’ve seen some of your extraordinary engineering. I can only assume that taking you to Cannis to rehabilitate an entire planet is some glorious form of poetic justice. And Fritz—’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Take it easy on Ivan Nash. He’s a friend of mine, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Try pulling some of those stunts you’ve pulled on me and you’ll probably spend the rest of your career in the deepest and darkest jail he can find.’

  ‘You can trust me, sir. After all, UE has a reputation to maintain.’

  ‘That’s precisely what I’m afraid of. Now get the hell out of here. I have an army to run…’

  The landing at Hellsport Base did nothing to endear Fritz to the planet. The transfer ferry entered the guiding radio-cage at a tangent, failed to equalize, and bucked and ricochetted from beam to beam until the crew abandoned the automatics and dropped her to the ground under manual control. The ferry touched down with the motors out of synchronization, spun crazily, and dug itself a trench in the sand before it finally swayed to rest. That meant two hours of waiting whilst water jets strove to cool the hull.

  Jacko Hine, his second in command, met him at the space-port entrance. Jacko and a small contingent of UE had been sent ahead to make a preliminary survey of the situation. The summary of the reconnaissance was proclaimed by Jacko’s crestfallen attitude and by the way his hair looked as if he’d been grabbing it by handfuls.

  ‘How does it look?’ asked Fritz suspiciously.

  Jacko stared at him for a second or two. ‘Grim,’ he said. ‘If I’d tried to figure out an assignment which would prove UE to be a bunch of useless, incompetent, layabouts I couldn’t have made a better choice.’

  ‘I knew there was a catch!’ said Fritz. ‘Friend Belling was too polite on handing out this offering. Too polite by half. He’s usually cussing as soon as he sees me coming through his office door.’ Fritz grimaced. ‘But this gives us a chance to prove the bastard wrong once and for all.’

  ‘Does it? Open your pretty shell-like ear and I’ll pour in a few home truths about Cannis railways. One: no part of the system has been in operation for at least five years. Those parts of the installation which survived the asteroid impact during the war have either fallen down of their own accord or else torn apart by mini-volcanoes.’

  Fritz choked on his drink. ‘Volcanoes?’ he queried finally.

  ‘Sure. Small ones. The thin crust is easily split by quakes, and magma squeezes through the cracks under pressure to form miniature volcanic eruptions. Even at the heyday of the Cannis railway approximately one fifth of the total rail length was always out of commission due to volcanic activity. After five years without maintenance or repair the damage and confusion is simply catastrophic. Nash’s engineers rebuilt five kilometres of new track and suspension last year and two eruptions ruined it within a week.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Fritz grimly.

  ‘Two:’ said Jacko. ‘All the new steel has to come from Terra. Delivery delay is a little under two years and a ship can’t deliver more than a hundred tons at a time. There is some good malleable iron locally, but it’s not durable enough for high-stress applications. It’s all right for rails and short supports but the tensile strength is too low to allow its use for major engineering projects.’

  ‘Enough!’ said Fritz. ‘The rest of the misery I’ll discover for myself. I’m seeing Colonel Nash this afternoon, and after that I want to see some railway.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Jacko, ‘let’s go to the bar for a drink. We’re going to need it…’

  Colonel Nash was waiting for him in his office. There was a certain air of reserve between the two officers which Fritz found vaguely familiar. The reputation of the Unorthodox Engineers usually preceded them. Tales were legion, and some of them were even true.

  ‘I take it you’ve read the dossier on Cannis IV.’ said Nash. ‘How does it strike you as a job?’

  Fritz shrugged. ‘That depends on the type of co-operation we get.’

  ‘You get whatever you want. This is very much a last-stand project at this point. The Cannis rehabilitation is costing us more than did the war. We can’t afford to mess around here for much longer.’

  ‘What I want,’ said Fritz, ‘is simple. I just want that we should be left alone. We’ll do our own thing, in our own way.’

  ‘How do you mean? Discipline, administration, or what?’

  ‘Everything. Just set us down at a rail point about fifty klicks out and then forget us.’

  ‘This is bloody irregular,’ said Nash. ‘After all, you are an army unit. What about supplies, for instance?’

  ‘We’ll find our own.’

  ‘And steel—you can’t build a railway without steel.’

  ‘Lack of essentials never yet troubled an unorthodox engineer.’

  ‘But this is ridiculous!’ said Nash. ‘I didn’t fetch you out from Terra just so you could go play cards in the wilderness.’

  ‘Look,’ said Fritz quietly, ‘you want a railway. You’ve proven that ordinary methods can’t provide it. Now do I get a crack at it the unorthodox way or do you return to Terra and admit the job has you beat?’

  ‘Get out!’ said Nash angrily. ‘Get out of my sight before I have you cashiered for impersonating an army officer! I’ll leave you alone, but I promise you one thing… the next time you enter Hellsport it had better be on a bloody train, else I’ll nail you for insubordination and bust you so low you’ll have to say “Sir” to the Padre’s dog.’

  ‘Thank you!’ said Fritz van Noon. ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’

  They came across the structure dully silhouetted against the overcast sky. It reminded Fritz of nothing so much as a rotting seaside pier propped awkwardly on random legs clear of the broken terrain below. Jacko had a rope ladder tied to the structure, since the original sling and hoist access had rotted beyond repair. The two climbed gingerly to the platform overhead, brushing the rusting piles and girders, and being showered with dirt from the gaps in the dark decking.

  Above the decks the desolation grew. It was a crumbling, grotesque parody of a structure whose impotence in style and form was rendered more alien and yet artistic by the vagaries of slow corrosion. It was like a surrealistic film-set for a comedy of horrors which nobody dared to make. And on the far side, characteristically askew, was a sign board in local script, and after, scrawled in chalk in English, the legend: ‘Hellsport Terminus. The end of the line.’

  ‘It reminds me,’ said Jacko, ‘of a card house set in a sea of rusty spaghetti.’

  Fritz frowned and mooched dismally through the festoons of rusty iron and threadbare cable. ‘What hit it?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Nothing.’ Jacko guided him away from a bed-plate which had rusted to an extent where an uncautious foot might easily penetrate into the depths below. He pointed to a slag cone, now cold, which had burst through the tracks at mid-point across the terminus, ruining two tracks completely and half filling the remainder of the terminus with light volcanic ash. ‘Apart from the inquisitive volcano everything is just as it was when the last trains went north in the war. Believe me, they’d be using this installation now—only the trains never came back.’

  ‘Can’t say I blame the trains,’ said Fritz moodily. ‘You mean to tell me this rotting junk heap is still in functional order?’

  ‘By local standards, yes.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Fritz testily, ‘did they have remarkably small trains or is this multiple-rail stuff some sort of gimmick?’

  ‘I asked about that. Seems that each branch line had its own gauge and some had several according to who built them. At a terminus like this you have to accommodate anything which comes, so you run one track inside another nice and tidily. One snag though—you should see what it does to the points.’

  Fritz shuddered visibly despite the warm afternoon air. ‘I’d better see the worst, I suppose.’

  They walked out from the terminus to the huge switching grid which served to inte
grate the various branch lines entering the terminus. There was nearly a kilometre of patchwork mechanical desolation, liberally coated with rust and complex beyond belief. Gantries and galleries were solid with cranks and levers, bars and linkages, rods, and handwound helical springs. Cloth-covered cables and solenoids had dropped their sickly bitumen under the coercion of many summers’ suns, and now lay bleached white and ugly across the rotting spans like the bones of some alien skeleton.

  Fritz viewed the scene with increasing dismay. Jacko leaned heavily on a stanchion and eyed his discomfort with a perverse humour.

  ‘We’re doing fine,’ said Fritz. ‘We’ve got ourselves a station complete with a junior volcano, a marshalling yard which shouldn’t exist outside of a bad dream, six branch lines which don’t go anywhere, and no trains to try out anyway. Add the fact that we can’t get any steel and the probability that anything we do build will be ruined by more eruptions within six months, and I surmise we are well and truly screwed. I don’t know whether to blow the whole lot up and start again or to leave it as an object lesson on how not to build a railway.’

  ‘Now who’s being conventional?’ grinned Jacko. ‘I should have thought that this morass of mechanical ingenuity would have gladdened your heart no end.’

  ‘No,’ said Fritz, ‘and I’ll tell you why. You see, its builders paid no attention to basics. There is a certain idiot futility about building something destined for sure destruction. Even a bodger must work to the principle of the greatest return for the minimum of effort. That’s why this damned railway is not only unsound but also needlessly complicated.

  ‘Take this switching grid, for instance. It’s not only vulnerable but it’s largely unnecessary. It’s designed to be completely automatic, self-routing, self-isolating, self-signalling and probably foolproof. Even Terran computer-controlled rail networks have nothing to match this except in theory. But the faults result from limited vision. We could have done the whole thing with about a tenth of the parts and ten times the reliability.’