“Take that up with a higher authority. All I can tell you is that none of the neighborhood rocks are limestone or gypsum or anything reasonable like that. They’re universally based on strontium. It must be vastly more common here.”

  “Well, can’t strontium substitute for calcium? In human bones, I’ve heard—”

  “Yes, there is chemical similarity. But not that close. Strontium carbonate won’t burn to the oxide at any temperature we can get with available equipment. And even if it did, the oxide won’t set to mortar. Nor, for that matter, will strontium sulfate make plaster of paris.” Fulgosi regarded the construction chief for a moment. “Must we actually have a massive concrete foundation for the ’caster?”

  “Hell, yes!” Ocampo said. “The thing won’t work unless it’s properly anchored to the planet. Reaction forces would tear it apart otherwise. Without a strong, weatherproof setting—Ah, Lind. What brings you here?”

  “I was after the latest analysis, myself,” the electronician said.

  Sweat glistened behind Fulgosi’s faceplate. “I’ll sure be glad when we do get our materials together, if we ever do,” he said. “Right now, Gilruth, Riese, and I are the only ones working, and we’re working our tails off. The rest of you sit and feel sorry for yourselves…No, my friend, we haven’t turned up any bismuth for you.”

  “But I have been working,” Lind answered. “With references and my slipstick and—How about antimony? Found some antimony?”

  “Why, uh, yes. Quite a bit of stibnite. What do you want it for?”

  “Whew! I’m glad to hear that. You see, the tuning circuit calls for a large piece of bismuth, as being diamagnetic. But antimony is almost as good in that respect, and I’ve calculated we can substitute it.” Lind turned to Ocampo. “While I was at it, I checked some other possibilities. You need zinc for galvanizing, and we haven’t found any decent deposits, right? Well, cadmium will do the same job. You put it on by a different process, but it works fine.”

  Fulgosi snatched a piece of paper off the bench. “Here,” he said with sudden excitement. “A list. What we’ve found in extractable form and quantity so far. Plenty of cadmium.”

  “Plenty of gold, silver, platinum, manganese,” Ocampo said. His bitterness had not left him. “So we can make busbars of silver instead of copper—but we’d counted on that anyway. So manganese is a good structural metal—but in a moist oxygen atmosphere, it’ll crumble to oxide almost as fast as we can cast our members. Where’s the iron coming from for the foundation and framework? Not the ship. Barely enough iron in her for your circuits, Lind. Show me how to make concrete without calcium, and several tons of ribs and girders without iron, and a few such items, and I’ll kiss you.”

  “Ugh,” said Lind. He studied the engineer’s miserable countenance. “You’ve let this get to you,” he said. “Your brain’s tramping in circles. Me, I dunno, maybe that anesthesia jag I went on cleared my head somehow. But seems obvious to me, we’ll do best to find substitutes for the stuff we can’t get.”

  “I think that’s obvious even to a dolt like me,” Ocampo snorted. “Name a few.”

  “I did. Antimony and cadmium. And then—Hm-m-m.” Lind went to the window and stared out. The volcano lifted sheer before him. They’d landed here because they couldn’t prospect an entire world and a plutonic region was likeliest to have a wide assortment of easily refinable minerals. Which this area did, to be sure; only they were the wrong minerals. Lind’s forefinger doodled on a dusty pane. “Why steel?” he murmured. “I mean, for the framework supporting the ’caster on its foundation. You only want mechanical strength there. Why not stone?”

  “No boulders are big enough, around here anyway, and we can’t assemble small ones into a frame because we can’t make mortar.”

  “But that lava up yonder. We should be able to cast it and machine it to shape. Don’t you think so?”

  “Well, I’ll be—” Ocampo stood silent a while. Fulgosi gulped. Hope had come like a blow.

  “Y-yes,” Ocampo said at length, quite softly. “For beams, as you say, and bed-plates, and so forth. But not for the foundation. We’re not set up to cast that big a piece of material with a high melting point; and, as I told you, without mortar—”

  “So what else might serve?” Lind swung back. Inside his suit, he quivered. “Let’s use our imaginations. Let’s ask Gilruth what he’s noticed on his exploring trips.”

  A teakettle whine cut through the sky. “Speaking about devils,” Fulgosi said. The expedition’s single aircraft, a hover job with considerable range and carrying capacity, bounced to a halt on the field. The three men hurried from the shack.

  Gilruth was climbing out. “What’d you find?” Ocampo shouted.

  “Brought home some assorted rocks for testing,” the pilot said, working hard at imperturbability. “Doubt if they’ll be any use, though. What spot checks I carried out, neutron activation and so forth, showed the same bloody distribution of elements upriver as here. No iron, no calcium, no copper, no nothing.”

  “Never mind, never mind.” Lind seized his arm and dragged him away. “We want something different from you.”

  Gilruth looked alarmed. “Have you left your helmet off again?”

  Ocampo explained. Gilruth had landed on the volcano some days ago, near the peak. Well, did the lava beds look mineable? And what else might he have noticed, paying no special heed at the time because what he saw hadn’t been what he hoped to see? The conference lasted an hour, and all four returned to the spaceship still chattering into each other’s mouth.

  They cycled through the personnel lock, racked their suits, and encountered emptiness. Everyone must be outside, performing the jobs that had to be done before actual construction could start. No—a noise below decks—Ocampo’s party squeezed down the companionway.

  Now that most of the machinery had been unloaded, the holds were echoing caverns. Riese had taken one of them over for a workshop. He stood at a bench, a laser torch glaring in his hand, making a boxlike assembly.

  “Hey, Joe!” Lind cried. “Listen! Good news.”

  “I’m glad somebody has some,” the biochemist grumbled. He switched off his torch, wiped his face, and sat down on the bench. It sagged under his weight, being little more than some cobbled-together alumalloy sheeting which wasn’t needed elsewhere at the moment. He swore and stood again. “What’s happened?”

  “We’ve hit on the answer to our problem,” Lind said. “For the native materials we need but don’t find, we use ersatz.”

  “You’ve taken this long to realize that?”

  “Oh, yes, the principle is obvious,” Ocampo said, “but we didn’t fully accept it until today. We kept hoping we’d be able to proceed according to the book. This afternoon, though, we took a hard look at the possibilities of using what we’ve actually got on Guinevere. And they seem very hopeful.”

  “Fine.” Riese stared at the apparatus he was making and clicked his tongue. “Maybe I’d better turn this project over to one of you geniuses.”

  “What’s the matter?” The question jerked from Gilruth. “Not working properly?”

  “Not yet, anyhow. The basic idea is simple enough. Assuming that one or more of the trace gases, the bio-compounds, in the atmosphere are responsible for anesthetizing us: how do we get them out? They’re organic. So, in theory, we blow air through an electric arc energetic enough to break them down into CO2, and such-like, and bubble the resulting gas through water. What comes out the other end should be good, pure air.”

  “It had better be,” Gilruth said. “Once we’ve removed the iron from the ship’s electrical system…well, I somehow can’t visualize us, drunk, or dopey or unconscious, completing that matter gate. Can you?”

  “No.” Riese scowled. “My problem is this: Apparently, whatever compounds affect us need only be present in micro quantities. Probably they act by inhibiting certain enzymes. Therefore, my purifier has to work perfectly. So it has to be continuously monitored by spectrographic and chromatographic instruments. Now designing such circuits is not easy.” He looked at Lind. “I think, if you can be spared, you’d better devote full time to helping me.”

  “I guess I’d better,” Lind said in a small voice.

  The others had too much to do to worry about whether they would have air fit to breathe toward the end of their tasks. That “too much” included, especially, worrying about every other problem. For their food supply, however rationed, was little more than sufficient to carry them through a set of standardized procedures evolved on familiar kinds of planet. Now they must invent a whole new set of ways to install a mattercaster. And a starving man can continue to work for a while, after a fashion, but he can’t continue to produce bright ideas, or tinker with the thing he has built until it does what it is supposed to do.

  Thus time was precious and the labor schedule brutal.

  They did talk a little. Tamping an explosive charge into a lava bed, Fulgosi growled, “Nussbaum’s sure got a soft touch.”

  “What’s he doing?” Deschamps leaned wearily on his pick.

  “Making glass epoxy out of silicates and organics. Solder substitute.”

  “Well, we’ve got to have that, too, and if Nussbaum’s the only one of us who can cook up a batch—One man can’t carry all human knowledge in his head.”

  “Not even in his own specialty,” Fulgosi sighed. “I suspect that’s Joe Riese’s problem. If he had the right reference works, he could probably find out in ten minutes what’s wrong with the atmosphere and what to do about it. But no one thought to supply him with the one obscure bit of information he needs.” He straightened and looked around. Rockfields tilted dark, up beyond snows and glaciers to where the mountain lifted a skyward smoke plume. “O.K., let’s get back to the aircraft. When this charge blows, it could touch off an avalanche.”

  Down in the valley, after nightfall, Gilruth shepherded a truckload of logs to the construction site. A stone-crushing mill thudded, a wood-pulping machine yelled, a chemical vat seethed—improvised, most of it, one way or another. Beyond the lamp posts ringing the field could be seen the stars, cold and strangely constellated and terribly remote.

  “How much more timber will you need?” he asked Ocampo. “Robot help or no, lumberjacking is hardly a sinecure.”

  “Piloting is?” the engineer replied. “I think two more loads should end this job. We had to run quite a series of tests, but we seem to have found the right mixture now.”

  “Some concrete, eh? Vegetable fiber and asbestos-like rock, bound together with molten sulfur and poured to make your foundation!”

  “Well, it serves. In fact, it should be just as good as the ordinary cement-based kind.”

  “What about reinforcing rods and conductive tie beams?”

  “Haven’t you heard? No, I guess you’ve been in the outback too much. Alagau.”

  “Alagau to you, too. Or was that a death rattle?”

  Ocampo laughed a little. Some distance away, an arc furnace was uncovered, and the light glared off his faceplate. “Aluminum-silver-gold alloy,” he explained. “Nussbaum suggested it, and it seems to be hard and tough enough for our purposes, in spite of having a mauve color. Al, Ag, Au, see?”

  After a moment, he added, “In fact, by now we have an astonishing collection of assorted ersatzes. Beryllium, titanium, lithium, magnesium, thorium, they’re more versatile than you’d think, in their different alloys. Then there are organics, plastics, tars—”

  Gilruth slumped wearily in the cab and stared at the fire-trickle where molten metal ran into casting forms. “Won’t do us a lot of good if we can’t get pure air,” he said. “How’re Riese and Lind coming on that?”

  “All right, I guess.”

  “I was thinking. Suppose they fail. What then? Couldn’t we get oxygen by roasting ores?”

  “Um-m-m…possibly. That’d be such a huge job, though. Only imagine what equipment we’d have to build, to operate on the scale necessary. We could easily starve to death before we finished. No, I think our friends have plain got to succeed.”

  And a few mornings later, in Widsith’s hold, Riese and Lind beamed at each other. On the bench before them stood a cylinder, fantastically piped and wired. A fan whined at the open end. Inside, arcs sizzled and water gurgled. At the farther end, attached instruments certified that clean atmosphere, free of any organic taint except a normal amount of carbon dioxide, was being compressed into a bottle.

  “The damned thing is finally in shape,” Lind breathed.

  “I was beginning to think it never would be,” Riese said.

  “Maybe now you understand why engineers draw high pay.” Lind yawned and stretched. “Me for some sleep, before Akbik puts me in one of the labor gangs!”

  “Uh—” Riese hesitated. “A final test.”

  “What?”

  The biochemist took the bottle off the hose and attached it to the shoulder pack of an airsuit. “Take a few lungfuls,” he said. “Just to make sure.”

  “But…I mean…oh, all right.” Lind grumbled his way into the suit, sealed the helmet, and cracked the valve on the bottle.

  “Well?” asked Riese anxiously.

  “Seems O.K. The stink is certainly gone.” Lind inhaled again, and again. “Yep, jus’ fine.” A wide and foolish grin spread over his features. “Won’erful. Great. What a team we are, you know ’at? C’mon, le’s dance.”

  He walked out, alone, into darkness. Under a dim red moon, the valley dews, the stream, and the far snowpeaks glimmered. Somewhere an animal hooted. His footfalls made a hollow thudding.

  He felt cold and tired. But sleep escaped him. Everyone else was sacked out, exhausted. Lind envied them. For the moment, they were free of the knowledge that their labor had been for naught and that Guinevere would never let them go.

  They’d driven themselves as no one would dare drive a mule. (Of course, no one would care overly much if a mule didn’t come home.) Now time was hideously short. There simply weren’t enough man-days left to build the oxygen-producing furnace which Gilruth had proposed. The food was practically gone. You could live a while, empty-bellied; but some of that while must go to completing and adjusting the space gate whose framework bulked yonder in the shadows of the field. Already Lind’s stomach complained of underemployment.

  Earth-prime ribs, baked potatoes smothered in sour cream and chives, apple pie a la mode…No, damn it, before he thought about such things he must think how to return to them.

  Basic problem: Find a way to get the anesthetic factor out of Guinevere’s atmosphere. The way must needs be simple, the apparatus easy to build and operate. Thereafter everything else would be simple—shutting down the ship’s oxy renewer, dismantling the electrical system, installing the needed iron parts in the mattercaster circuits, adding the parts hauled from Bellegarde, tuning and activating the gate and making one stride across the light-years to home.

  Well, then, Billy Lind, solve the basic problem. It must have a perfectly easy solution. Given it as a question on an exam, not so long ago in college, you’d likely have seen the answer inside of five minutes.

  But the situation was different here. Here, everybody had worked too hard. Their brains were numb. He and Riese were the only men who’d been spared much physical labor—because their comrades trusted them to provide the air—and now their failure seemed to have stunned Riese into apathy.

  Therefore, Billy Lind, the responsibility is yours. Certainly you’re tired. Certainly you’re also in a state of mild shock. But you’re not too stupefied to think. Are you?

  So. What are the facts? It had been obvious that organic compounds were acting as snooze gases. What else could? And yet…Guineverean air processed until sensitive instruments swore it was pure, kept right on kicking the human mind out of orbit. Therefore the taken-for-granted fact had not been a fact after all. So what other possible fact(or) was there?

  Lind couldn’t imagine. The noble gases? But they were inert! You could breathe oxyhelium without noticing any difference except that your voice sounded squeaky. Oh, yes, you could force one or two other members of that family to take on fluorine atoms or whatever, but they did it grudgingly, under very special laboratory conditions. How could—Lind cursed in the dark. Unfair to demand that he think. He was too tired, too hungry, even in his airsuit too cold.

  Cold!

  Hello, Earth. Hello, everybody. Whoops!

  William J. Lind again. Call me Billy. Call me anything. Bee-cause by th’ time you receive me on Bellegarde, I’ll’ve been five years home an’ inna diff’rent job an’ you can’t fire me ’cause I’ll long’ve been in some other line uh work an’ so to Guinevere wi’ you.

  Or else I’ll be rich. Might be. Gotta lotta (hey, that rhymes!) gotta lotta new techniques here. Sure to be other planets like this’n. Hey? Hey-hey. Maybe we can patent ’em. At leas’ we can write a book. Bes’ seller. “I Was Pumpin’ On Guinevere.” How’s ’at sound? Thought so.

  I was, y’ know. Distillin’, anyway. An’ then pumpin’ the oxy an’ the nitro into bottles. My idea. Very simple. You jus’ liquefy your air. We’d enough stuff lyin’ ’roun’ to make an air liquefaction unit. Then we did fractional distillation. Which, muh frien’s an’ fellow citizens o’ the gr-r-reat World Federation, is not distillin’ fractions. What an image, though. Li’l numerators an’ denominators boilin’ off. But all we did was liquid air. I mean to say, now hear this, all we did was distill liquid air. After we’d made it inna firs’ place. See? No sweat. Mos’ abs’lutely no sweat, at minus 107 point one degrees Celsius.

  Tha’s the boilin’ point o’ xenon. Guilty party. We foun’ out by tryin’ different fractions on ourselves. Yep, xenon. Fine anesthetic. Oh, you knew that already, didja? But you gotta big fat shelf uh references handy. So why didn’ you tell us? Huh? Answer me that.

  Guess we should’a thought o’ it before. But so much else to do. An’ whole situation complicated. So natur’lly we ’spected anesthesia problem ’ud be complicated, too. Wasted lotta time, we did, lookin’ for complicated answer ’fore we hit on simple one. I did. Me. William J. Lind. I’m simple-minded. Ta-ra-la-la-i-tu! I gloat! Hear me!