Planets of Adventure [сборник]

"Queer," he said. "You think of the damage leaked ship-fuel can do. Setting off the rest of the store and all. Even by itself it rates some thousands of tons of TNT. I wonder what TNT was, before it became a ton-measure of energy? You think of it exploding in one place, and it's appalling! But think of all that same amount of energy applied to square miles of upside-down swamp. Hundreds or thousands of miles of upside-down swamp. D'you know, Lieutenant, on Soris II we pumped a ship-fuel solution onto a swamp we wanted to drain? Flooded it, and let it soak until a day came with a nice, strong, steady wind."

"Yes, sir," said Barnes respectfully.

"Then we detonated it. We didn't have a one per cent solution. It was more like a thousandth of one per cent solution. Nobody's ever measured the speed of propagation of an explosion in ship-fuel, dry. But it's been measured in dilute solution. It isn't the speed of sound. It's lower. It's purely a temperature-phenomenon. In water, at any dilution, ship-fuel goes off just barely below the boiling-point of water. It doesn't detonate from shock when it's diluted enough to be ionized, but that takes a hell of a lot of dilution. Have you got some more coffee?"

"Yes, sir," said Barnes. "Coming up."

"We floated ship-fuel solution over that swamp, Barnes, and let it stand. It has a high diffusion-rate. It went down into the mud. . . . And there came a day when the wind was right. I dumped a red-hot iron bar into the swamp-water that had ship-fuel in solution. It was the damnedest sight you ever saw!"

Barnes served him more coffee: Bordman sipped it, and it burned his tongue.

"It went up in steam," he said. "The swamp-water that had the ship-fuel dissolved in it. It didn't explode, as a mass. They told me later that it propagated at hundreds of feet per second only. They could see the wall of steam go marching across the swamp. Not even high-pressure steam. There was a woosh! and a cloud of steam half a mile high that the wind carried away. And all the surface-water in the swamp was gone, and all the poisonous swamp-vegetation parboiled and dead. So—" He yawned suddenly—"we had a ten-mile by fifty-mile stretch of arable ground ready for the coming colonists."

He tried the coffee again. He added reflectively:

"That trick, it didn't explode the ship-fuel, in a way. It burned it. In water. It applied the energy of the fuel to the boiling-away of water. Powerful stuff! We got rid of two feet of water on an average, counting what came out of the mud. It cost—hm—a fraction of a gram per square yard."

He gulped the coffee down. There were men looking at him solicitously. They seemed very glad to see him awake again. Outside a monstrous bank of cloud-stuff was visible piling up in the sky. He suddenly blinked at that.

"Hello! How long did I sleep, Barnes?"

Barnes told him. Bordman shook his head to clear it.

"We'll go see Sandringham," said Bordman. "I'd like to postpone firing as long as I can, short of having the stuff start draining into the sea to leeward."

Several mud-stained men were standing around the place where Bordman had slept. When he went, still groggy, out to the bolster-truck young Barnes had waiting, they regarded Bordman in a very respectful manner. Somebody grunted, "Good to have worked with you, sir," which is about as much of admiration as anybody would want to hear expressed. These associates of Bordman in the mopping-up of leaked ship's fuel would be able to brag of the job at all times and in all places hereafter.

Then the truck went trundling away in search of Sandringham. It found him on the cliffs to the windward side of the island. The sea was no longer a cerulean blue. It was slaty-color. There were occasional flecks of white foam on the water four thousand feet below. There were dark clouds, by then covering practically all the sky. Far out to sea, there were small craft heading for the ends of the island, to go around it and ride out the coming storm in its lee.

Sandringham greeted Bordman with relief. Werner stood close by, opening and closing his hands jerkily.

"Bordman!" said the Sector Chief cordially. "We're having a disagreement, Werner and I. He's confident that the turning of the irrigation systems hind end to—making them surface-draining systems, in effect—will take care of the whole situation. Adding the brine underground, he thinks, will have done a good deal more. He says it'll be bad, psychologically, for anything more to be done. He didn't speak of it, and it would injure public confidence in the Survey."

Bordman said curtly:

"The only thing that will make a permanent difference on this island is for the water-fresheners to be a little less efficient. Barnes has the figures. He computed them from some measurements I had him make. If the water-freshener plants don't take all the sea-minerals out; if they don't make the irrigation water so infernally soft and suitable for hair-washing and the like; if they turn out hard water for irrigation, this won't happen again. But there's too much water underground now. We've got to get it out, because a little more's going underground from this storm, surface-drainage systems or no surface-drainage systems."