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 Belling 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 integrate 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.’

‘We may have to,’ said Jacko. He pointed outwards across the tracks to where thick motes of dust and cinder were dancing in the sun. ‘Unless I miss my guess there’s magma pushing up from down there.’

‘I want,’ said Fritz van Noon, ‘to start at least fifty klicks out on something nice and simple. We should have worked out the necessary technique by the time we get back to Hellsport. What type of engines did they use, anyway?’

Jacko drew a deep breath. ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ He sounded depressed, ‘But the engines were even stranger than the tracks. A locomotive designed in the town of Juara, about a hundred klicks from here, was a steam-engine run on dried resins. Two locos from Manin, down by the coast, were sort of battery-electric jobs. One from a place called Nath came home on some kind of super gyroscope, and there was one using an internal-combustion engine run on alcohol made by fermenting bean husks. I’ve no idea who made that one. There are others so weird no-one has a clue how they operated at all.’

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me!’ said Fritz dryly. ‘These people may be able to beat us at our own game, Jacko. Talk about unorthodox engineering! We’re a set of ruddy amateurs compared to them.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Jacko. ‘In my youth I thought I was the world’s worst crackpot screwball. Then I met up with you and found that, in comparison, I was merely a sane, sensible, hard-working engineer. I never got over the disappointment of that hour of realization. I have a feeling these people will find themselves in a similar predicament. Under the heavy hand of Fritz van Noon the Cannis railway will never be the same again.’

‘Thank you for that sly vote of confidence,’ said Fritz. ‘Now this is what I propose to do. I want you to take a helicopter to the Callin area, find the loco and bring it back to there—’ He stabbed his finger on the map. ‘There’s a two kilometre break in the track that will suit us just fine. I’m taking the rest of UE to that point and we’ll repair the break - if we can. It will give us a workable area down as far as Juara. I want to complete that run before the Callin bean harvest is ripe. That gives us about two months.’

‘Two kilometres of new track in two months? You’re off your rocker!’

‘Naturally,’ said Fritz. ‘Else I wouldn’t be running UE…’

The town of Juara lay on a crest of sullen rock. The shelf of granite had reduced the volcanic activity of the region to a tolerable level, and made habitation possible at the expense of the fertility of the soil. The railhead was untouched, but as the line swung again north-west and then north of the plateau it entered a low basin where the slag-cases, dunned with vegetation, stood up thick and tall like armless trees in some fantastic petrified forest.

This was a bad point for the rail. From the air it was obvious by the tortuous twisting of the route that the line had been diverted from disaster and rebuilt at least a dozen times. Occasional sections were completely isolated from the remains of the existing track and lay as forlorn crescents of rotting railway awaiting trains that could never come.

Six kilometres out from Juara was the break. The railway had literally been shaken to pieces. For nearly two kilometres the remnants of twisted girderwork and trestles sprawled on the broken ground, tied together with the soft iron of the rails. North again by over forty kilometres lay Callin and the fertile mountains of Cansoun.

In the centre of the break, the cargo aero-sleds rendezvoused to drop the heavier equipment. The fragile, alloy Knudsen huts were hastily assembled and staggered, two by two, between the tall mini-volcano spires. Prefabricated workshops were completed in record time as soon as a bulldozer had cleared a sufficient site. The packaged forge and the rolling mill were moved on air cushions to key points on the site.

Working feverishly and without obvious direction, the engineers of UE carved themselves a base on the alien territory and settled themselves in. By nightfall a new functional township had arisen beneath the dark towers of Cannis.

Fritz was well pleased with the achievement: Its success was marked by a subtlety which would have passed all but the keenest of observers. For UE was not a team as such; it was a collection of individuals. Nobody planned or directed, except in the very broadest way, but each engineer was trained to analyse the salient points of an operation and to guide his own activities to achieve the maximum effect. It was the myth of anarchy on a practical, productive scale—and it worked! The patient genius of Fritz van Noon had wrought a philosophic miracle.

At the crack of dawn the following day, a skinny, brown-skinned humanoid walked in from the desert.

Fritz had heard that the local population was inquisitive to a fault, and a casual inspection of any work in progress was slways part of the scheme of things. After poking and probing into every conceivable crevice, the native he went from hut to hut harrying the occupants with atrocious pidgin English. He found nobody who could understand him until he came across Harris, who had a flair for languages. Harris realized the worth of the contact and hurried him off to meet Fritz van Noon.

‘His name is Malu,’ said Harris. ‘I think he’s local engineer. He seems to want to help with the railways.’

Fritz smiled quizzically. ‘Can he find me any local labour?’

Heated discussion followed. Finally Harris turned back to Fritz. ‘If I understand him correctly, there is plenty of local labour but they won’t work in gangs under direction. They’re strictly independent buggers, sir.’

‘Well,’ said Fritz. ‘Point out that it’s their harvest we’re trying to get to Juara. It’s no skin off our nose if it doesn’t go through. Also they obviously don’t have the skill or the ability to do the job themselves else they’d have done it already.’

‘I think I already said that, but it’s no dice. They won’t play. I reckon they’d sooner starve than take orders from off-worlders.’

‘Come to think of it,’ said Fritz, meeting the native’s frank stare, ‘so would we I guess. Hell, I’ll take a chance! Get as many as you can. It may never look like a railway but I guarantee it’ll be a bloody lot of fun trying.’

By this time Malu had wandered off to examine, with great interest, one of the Knudsen huts. He was obviously worried by the alloy hulks, and came back for a long and excited argument with Harris.

‘He doesn’t like the huts, sir,’ said Harris. ‘Says we mustn’t build directly on the ground.’

‘Oh? Why not? There’s no danger of flooding hereabouts and the site is reasonably level.’

More gabbling and arm-waving..

‘No, sir. I think the lichen is temperature sensitive. It turns brown where a hot-spot is developing. It gives about a ten hour indication of when to move house. I suppose he means that the huts prevent us seeing the lichen underneath.’

Fritz relaxed. ‘We already thought of that. Between each pair of huts we have a thermocouple buried. They’ll wake the dead if the temperature rises too much. More reliable than any local plant, for sure. Anyway you can’t put a Knudsen hut on stilts—it’d fall to bits.’

Harris spoke with Malu, who shrugged resignedly and walked away wagging his head from side to side.

‘He says it won’t work,’ said Harris. ‘He’s not staying around to see the action.’’

‘Bloody hell! That’s all I need.’ said Fritz van Noon.

Curiously enough the combination of local and UE personnel worked rather well. The natives knew their own limitations and did not attempt to handle unfamiliar tools until they were sure of their competence. The UE squad became the lead team, breaking new ground, and the local workforce seconded in careful emulation of their instructors. They proved to be even better at picking up languages than Harris, and communication improved rapidly.

By the end of the fourth day a huge stretch of track had been cleared, the rails returned to the rolling mill for straightening, and trestles and undamaged span girders stacked ready for reassembly. Ingots of malleable iron were manhandled down the line from Juara, and the forge and rolling mill worked continuous shifts to shape the soft metal which had to serve instead of steel.

The UE metallurgist was going quietly nuts trying to figure out why the Cannis IV iron refused to harden. He finally decided it was due to the perverse allotropic form of the native carbon, and broke down an electrolytic refining cell of Terran origin to gain a less temperamental sample of the element. Two pounds of this steel prepared in the laboratory exhibited a cold-short brittleness of such degree that it could be broken apart by a few taps of a hammer. Increasing the silicon and carbon content he obtained a steel of similar tensile strength to lead. At this point he broke down and wept bitterly, then went out and got drunk. Fritz didn’t have the heart to put him on a charge.

A week passed and Fritz was awakened by the babble of voices outside his door. He dragged himself from his bunk, opened the door and stepped out. He immediately fell over Jacko who was prostrate on his stomach in front of the threshold probing the ground with the aid of a spot lamp. Malu and two other natives were watching the proceedings from a discreet distance.

‘Jacko!’ said Fritz. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

Jacko rolled over and looked up at him. ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘is an apt description of our destination if we don’t leave this spot pronto. Your hut is nicely located on a hot-spot.’

‘What?’ Fritz felt a sudden tremor of the ground beneath his feet and caught a wisp of the sulphurous fumes issuing from widening fissures in the ground. He pulled Jacko to his feet and they backed off rapidly. They had scarcely covered twenty metres before the Knudsen disintegrated in a plume of gas and smoke, shot through with streaks of fire. At a safe distance they turned and watched the miniature volcano erupt at the very spot where Fritz had been sleeping barely four minutes earlier.

‘One up to Cannis IV!’ said Fritz grimly.

Jacko surveyed the furious gout of fire before him. ‘What happened to the thermocouple alarms?’

‘Useless,’ said Fritz. ‘Platinum, platinum-rhodium couples at three metres depth. But the hot sulphur and silicates and god-knows-what-else are corroding them away at a ridiculous rate. It must have gone open-circuit before it could operate the alarm. Useless. The rest of the Knudsens will have to be jacked up somehow, so we can see what’s happening underneath.’

‘Can we afford the time? asked Jacko. ‘The bean harvest won’t wait and you know the old saying: civilization is only ever three meals away from a revolution! Can’t we simply use another type of thermocouple?’

‘No, this damned soil is too corrosive, and a shielded couple isn’t sufficiently sensitive. Either we find a way to raise the huts or we risk frying in our beds. I don’t fancy waking in the morning and finding myself well done on both sides. And we’re still putting this railway through to Juara on time even if it’s over your dead body.’

‘Thanks a lot, boss’ muttered Jacko. ‘By the way, I’ve got you an engine. As a locomotive it would make a very good potting-shed, but the fuel is simply superb.’

‘I know,’ said Fritz. ‘I can smell it on your breath.’

Much of the track itself was recoverable since the low speeds and traffic density of the line would make no great demands on the quality of the rail. A great deal of the girderwork from the spans was likewise capable of reclamation. Only the trestles had suffered badly. Four out of five were a total write-off and, due to the great allowances needed by reason of the poor quality of the metal, rebuilding ate deeply into the available stocks of iron. As the work progressed it became painfully obvious that no more than half of the break could be completed because of the lack of trestles.

Fritz refused to be disheartened, and laid his advance plans with a quiet precision and a secrecy which involved the confidence only of Harris and Malu, who both disappeared on special missions Fritz wouldn’t talk about. Everyone else grew despondent, and even Jacko’s customary pessimism seemed justified when the next hot-spot appeared.

Where is it?’ asked Fritz.

‘Sod’s law,’ said Jacko, ‘It’s right where it will do the most damage. Under our new track and right in the centre of a span. Three days and the whole lot will be down again. How the hell can you build a railway under these terms?’

‘You can’t,’ agreed Fritz. ‘That’s why we’re going to alter the terms. Take my advice, Jacko, never try to buck the system. If it’s big enough to break you, try helping it on its way.’

‘Fine in theory,’ said Jacko. ‘But you can’t stop a volcano.’

‘Can’t I? Cannis IV and I have a lot in common. We both think the same way—mean and underhand. It’s a policy of kicking the enemy while he’s down. That way you get the greatest results for the least effort. This is getting personal, and no bitch of a planet is going to put one over on Fritz van Noon.’

Jacko shook his head sadly. ‘Let’s face it, Fritz. We’re licked. We can’t go any further without Terran steel and we can’t even hold on to what we’ve already done. There’s no disgrace in folding up before a physical impossibility.’

‘I’ve told you before,’ said Fritz sternly, ‘there’s no such thing as a physical impossibility. A limitation is a state of mind not a question of fact. An aeroplane was a physical impossibility until men’s minds learned how to tame the concept.’

‘Is lack of steel and a surplus of volcanoes also a state of mind?’

‘Certainly—if you regard them as limitations?

‘Very well,’ said Jacko, ‘come and prove your point.’

By the time they arrived at the span the hot-spot was beginning to break. Even as they watched, the ground lurched and broke as the angry pressures blew the topsoil apart. Then came a heavier explosion, the ground cracked into a fissure and a column of fire spurted irregularly through a spray of liquid, incandescent magma, which congealed around the blowhole to form the foundations of the cone. About fifteen metres above, the span appeared to dance in the stream of heated gases, and was soon blackened and scorched . It’s demise was inevitable.

Ensign Harris came over at a run, pulling and old-fashioned mortar on a trolley, and was followed by Malu and two engineers carrying a rack of mortar bombs. They set up the mortar at a reasonable distance and proceeded to prime the bombs.

‘Are you crazy?’ asked Jacko.

‘Yes,’ said Fritz. ‘That’s my forte. I want to see what happens if we put a mortar bomb smack inside that crater. You’re the weapons expert. Can you do that without damage to the trestles?’

Jacko estimated the position silently. ‘With a couple of ranging shots I can pin the hole all right, but the trestles will be in the hands of the gods.’

The result was even more spectacular than anticipated. The first shot fell short, and the mortar was adjusted slightly to lower the trajectory a fraction. The second bomb rose in a brief arc and fell with careful precision into the mouth of the flaming cone. A split second’s pause and then Hell itself was unleashed. The pyramid of toffee magma split wide with a murderous roar; gouts of flame and incandescent lava boiled and foamed high into the air and collapsed into a storm of white-hot cinders and writhing jets of burning gas. At the base, where the cone had stood, the blowhole angrily vomited a widening pool of boiling lava like some grotesque festering sore.

‘Another?’ asked Jacko.

Fritz nodded. ‘We might as well be fried sheep as roast lambs.’

The third bomb, too, was accurately placed. This time the lava rose like a living wall and plunged outward, splashing and streaming its magnificent debris up to thirty metres from the seething well. A sheet of roaring flame rose up with frenzied fingers and enveloped the protesting members of the rail-span overhead.

The blast of heat and awesome fury sent the watchers scurrying for shelter, with Harris fearing for the safety of his remaining munitions. Only Fritz stayed put, his clothes smouldering, shielding his eyes with his hands and overcome with the enormity of the havoc he had wrought. Then the flaming torches died and the white-hot spume grew less. The lava pool became a darkening puddle of red toffee, shot with occasional bursts of recalescent heat and overhung with the will-o’-the-wisp of burning sulphur.

‘One up to me,’ said Fritz van Noon.

By morning the remains of the volcano held no visible sign of life. The lava had spread into a vast rippled puddle of rock, still hot but solid enough to bear a man’s weight. Already the lichen was beginning its assault on the cooler regions, eager to begin the symbiosis with the grass to follow.

Jacko had the calculations finished by the time that Fritz was ready to inspect.

‘Fritz, you’re a ruddy genius! There’s enough material in this puddle to make two average-sized volcanoes in this district. That means we’ve cleared it out completely. With a bit of luck they won’t have another volcano here for the next sixty years or so. Unless an eruption happens right under a trestle leg we can treat it the same as this one. That simplifies life no end.’

‘Precisely,’ said Fritz. ‘But it’s the trestle legs I’m worried about. Pile-driving those base supports makes the trestles rather vulnerable. What happens to your railway if your trestles suffer a high mortality rate?’

‘I think we quit,’ said Jacko candidly.

‘Not on your life,’ said Fritz. ‘We’ve got enemies. If UE goes home with it’s collective tail between it’s legs they’ll try and break us for sure. We’ve got the largest collection of screwballs and technical malcontents in the whole army. Not one of them would be happy about returning to honest engineering while they can stay with us and play forsaken children’s games under the minimum of effectual supervision. As officers, we have a responsibility to these guys. We can’t just let them be pissed on from a great height. Besides which, there’s more than the Cannis railway at stake here.’

‘I guess you’re right,’ said Jacko. ‘But look at the problem. We can’t put a straight track run on the ground because of the cones in the way. Even if we could it would take years to level up the site. Therefore we build on trestles and spans over the rocks and smaller cones. That makes sense even if it looks grotesque. But you can’t stop a volcano which comes up under a trestle. That’s what has been killing this railway since it was invented.’

‘I can,’ said Fritz slowly. ‘But it’s a dangerous thing to try. You see, there is one place on Cannis where a volcano never rises.’

‘I doubt it.’

Fritz grinned. ‘Oh ye of little faith.’ He waved an arm in the general direction of the desert. ‘An old and weathered volcano will eventually crumble and be replaced by another one, but a new eruption never rises where an previous one still stands. Pressure difference, I suppose.’

He broke off suddenly with a puzzled frown.

‘I thought I heard a chopper. Are we expecting any visitors?’

Jacko found a pair of field glasses and studied the helicopter rapidly growing larger in the lens.

‘Trouble!’ he said. ‘Looks like Admin has found out where we are. That’s a deputation from Hellsport unless I’m very much mistaken.’

‘Shit!’ said Fritz. ‘Can’t you head them off. I’ve got work to do. I bet it’s that lousy planning group come to foul things up.’

There were two Terran civilians in the helicopter. The taller of the two was clearly a classic, pompous pen-pusher, whilst his companion seemed to be some kind of technical consultant. On the way down from the landing raft they made a rather pointed inspection of the piles of girders and miscellaneous metalwork which littered the camp, and the short man took it upon himself to explain to his companion certain niceties of railway construction which Fritz appeared to have overlooked. By the time they reached the office they were clearly in the mood for business.

‘I’m Eldrick, Planning and Co-ordination,’ said the tall civilian. ‘I think you would be Mr Noon.’

‘Lieutenant van Noon,’ corrected Fritz wearily. He was proud of his Dutch heritage. ‘I thought Colonel Nash agreed not to waste resources sending Admin out here to count the paperclips.’

Eldrick smiled tolerantly. ‘I think you misunderstand our purpose. We are the group which co-ordinates the efforts of all units on Cannis IV to ensure that the maximum effort is concentrated in the right direction. We are here to help you.’

‘When UE needs help,’ said Fritz, ‘it helps itself. I haven’t come across an administrator yet who even knows what a spanner is. We’re independent, uncoordinated, unorthodox, and generally fireproof—and what’s more I have a certificate to prove it.’

Eldrick was unmoved. ‘I still think you’re making a mistake, Lieutenant…’

‘Listen,’ Fritz broke in. ‘The whole Cannis IV episode is a mistake. This misbegotten planet is some kind of cosmological joke. If you think you can create order out of chaos with a ruler and a pencil-sharpener then you have no idea of the complexities involved.’

‘Have you?’ asked Eldrick pointedly. ‘What about steel! You’re supposed to be recreating this railway system. But you can’t build a railway without steel. There are priorities to be arranged, specifications to be agreed, orders to be placed on Terra. Delivery charges… Organization is essential to the well-being of any major endeavour.’

‘Organization,’ said Fritz, ‘is the last refuge of a tired mind. It’s a bumbling, mechanical substitute for initiative. I can’t wait twenty months for Terran steel even if it is cut to size and neatly drilled to specification. If I haven’t got steel then I’ll use something else, anything else.’

‘I regard that as a very foolish and unnecessary attitude.’

‘That foolish attitude of creation out of necessity,’ said Fritz heatedly, ‘is the power and the reason that placed Mankind above the animals. Without it we’d still be scratching fleas off each other’s backs. You’re wasting your time here.’

‘Very well,’ said Eldrick, ‘but if necessity is the mother of invention then you are in for a highly creative time. I’ve had a look at your constructions here, and if you think you can get a line through to Hellsport inside ten years you’re either a genius or a fool.’

Was that wise,’ asked Jacko, watching the helicopter lift off for Hellsport. ‘I mean, throwing him out like that.’

‘Maybe not,’ said Fritz. ‘But I can tell you it felt good! These damned pen-pushers make my blood boil. Civilization runs at a quarter pace because of the blind dictum that everything must be organized according to the book. Ticked off box by box.’

‘I suppose it has its virtues, though.’ Jacko was thoughtful. ‘After all, look at these people,’ he jerked a thumb towards the town. ‘They can’t muster a sufficiently collective effort to repair their own railways.’

Van Noon nodded absently. ‘And for why? Because they’re running on the wrong philosophy. They can’t do it because they’re trying to reinstate the railways as they used to be. That’s not the right attitude. There is no logic in believing a problem has to be solved in the same way now as it was done previously. This railway was a product of its own time—and times change. If you haven’t the means to do what the other fellow did, then forget it and try something else.’

‘That’s what I like about you,’ said Jacko. ‘You consistently move in the opposite direction to everyone else. I seem to remember you were about to show us how to build a volcano-proof trestle without actually using any steel.’

Fritz smiled mischievously. ‘Suppose we forget about trestles. Can you salvage enough scrap to manage the spans and the rails?’

‘Sure. That I can find, but if it’s not a rude question how do you figure to hold them up? Will power?’

‘Not really. These miniature volcanoes all form cones of approximately the same height, and we can adjust that without too much hassle to even them out. So what does that leave us? Natural pillars of rock which will last a lifetime. Strap on a yoke, sling the spans between them and you have your railway.’

‘Crazy like a fox!’ said Jacko. ‘It would work, of course —over a very short section, but I suppose that tired little brain of yours didn’t also figure out how to manoeuvre a string of volcanoes into a straight line roughly approximating the way we want to go? Or do we build a crazy zig-zag track and use triangular trains?’

‘No,’ said Fritz, ‘although the idea did occur to me. Also a proverb about Mohammed and the mountain.’

‘Now I know you’re nuts,’ said Jacko. ‘If you haven’t got volcanoes then you haven’t got any, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘Is that so? Then I think you have something yet to learn. This may not be one of the most brilliant moments of my career but it may well prove to be the most spectacular.’

At the end of the line, where the next trestle ought to have been, Harris, and Fanning, the UE geologist, had the mobile drilling rig assembled. Fanning was taking core samples from the drill and shaking his head sadly.

‘I don’t like this, Fritz. We’ve penetrated to forty metres and the stuff is coming up hotter than hell. I should hate the drill to break into a high pressure region. We’d all be very dead, very quickly.’

‘How near are we to a molten layer?’

‘Can’t tell exactly, but the ground-penetrating radar puts it at about seventy metres, plus or minus ten.’

‘Near enough,’ said Fritz. ‘If the stuff the drill is picking up is fusible then I think we can stop right here.’

Fanning breathed a sigh of relief and began to withdraw the drill. When it was out they collapsed the drilling rig, and the bulldozer hauled it from the site.

Then Harris returned dragging a trolley bearing several metal cylinders. He looked a little nervous. Fritz waved everyone away from the drilling, pulled the pin from the safety-disarm and heaved one of the cylinders end-first down the well. Nothing happened except that after about a minute thick yellow smoke began to issue from the hole. Fritz cursed and, approaching warily, dropped another cylinder after the first.

He scarcely got away in time. There was a crack like the voice of thunder, and a ball of violent, sparking incandescence screamed into the sky. Then flames jetted up, a scorching burst of fire leaping from the soil like some demented blow-torch. Molten magma, entrained in the superheated gases, was hurled high in the air and descended as a scatter of singeing hail driven on the light cross-winds.

The onlookers fled in confusion. By the time that Fritz reached shelter his uniform was smouldering in a dozen places and his face and hands were red from exposure to the heat and covered with superficial burns from the searing fall-out. Jacko had fared little better, having waited to make sure that Fritz was able to escape. They sat down on a broken slag-case, dabbing balm from a first-aid pack on their burns and watching the hectic blast as it roared into the sky.

Slowly the cone began to form as lava congealed around the flaming throat, and the fiery torch rode up with slow magnificence as the cone became a candle and then a tower with a bright and angry beacon at the top.

‘Voila!’ said Fritz. ‘I give you a volcano.’

‘Hell, I’ll give you volcanoes!’ said Jacko, dabbing at his burns. ‘Next time you try this Guy Fawkes stunt you’re strictly on your own. What the heck did you drop down that hole?’

Fritz smiled. ‘A thermite bomb—and a cylinder of oxygen for luck. The intense heat generated by the bomb just above a bed of active igneous magma was more than sufficient to trigger an eruption. This time the process was channelled by the bore-hole, so we got a cone instead of a puddle. We’ll have to adjust the thermite charge to tailor the height of the resultant cone, but that’s not difficult.’

’Per ardua ad asbestos!’ said Jacko ruefully. ‘Are you seriously suggesting we do this all the way to Hellsport?’

‘Only where we have to,’ said Fritz. ‘And even that will take more thermite bombs than we can come by honestly. Fortunately there’s a way round that. Up on the Juara shelf is the Command weapon stores.

They’ve more munitions there than we’re ever likely to need.’

‘But will they let us have them?’

‘No,’ said Fritz, ‘but that’s never stopped Harris before.’

Several days later the new volcano was extinct. A crazy scaffold was set up round the cone and the top neatly truncated with power chisels and pneumatic drills. As a structure it stood supremely suited for its job. The siliceous rock had set like concrete, and had it been cast deliberately by hand it could not have stood more straight or firm. The yoke was placed around the cone top and secured by hooks into the narrow crater. Prefabricated spans were trimmed to length and joined up to the existing structure. The result was the finest trestle that Cannis IV had ever possessed.

For UE it was an hour of jubilation. The forgotten gimmicks and the half-formed innovations suddenly leaped to new promise now it was certain the line was going through. At the end of a three week burst of energy the last rail of the Juara line was bolted into place. The locomotive returned to Callin with improvised rolling-stock and two days later chugged triumphantly through to Juara with the first load of the finest bean harvest for years.

Then it blew itself to bits.

‘And something else,’ said Jacko. ‘They’ve just arrested Harris at the Command weapons store. So we won’t be using thermite bombs any more.’

It was summer in Hellsport. Flies and dust thickened the air, whilst the humid heat was relentless and intolerable. Even in the air-conditioned sanctuary of the Command HQ the fine dust crept through the filters and the humidity defied the monitors to hold the moisture content and the pressure down.

Sweltering in the heat, Colonel Ivan Nash was about ready to chew bricks anyway. So when the shouting began, he emerged from his office in a thoroughly bad mood. ‘What the fuck is going on out here? He yelled at no-one in particular’

One of the native helpers said with sly humour, ‘It is said that a train comes in from Juara bearing the greatest man on Cannis.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Nash irritably. ‘There are no trains left on the Juara-Callin line.’

‘That may be true,’ the native answered smugly, ‘but something is coming down the line. Look, you can see it for yourself.’

Nash fetched his field glasses and scanned the railway, which seemed to be dancing in the slow heat-haze. Something was coming down the Juara line, but the distance and the dust conspired to make identification impossible. Only when it grew nearer were the details of the vehicle displayed.

Nash choked and closed his eyes. ‘That bloody man!’

The ‘train’ bore a curious resemblance to an army cargo helicopter, minus rotors, and slung on a low truck, the wheels of which were broad grooved rollers. Various items of machinery were slung about the outside of the strange assembly, and on the front, perched awkwardly and in imminent danger of falling off, was Malu. He was waving a large red flag…

The train entered the terminus, reversed to another rail, then shuttled back and forwards just to show the proficiency of its roller wheels in manoeuvring on any gauge of line. The local workers went wild with enthusiasm, and shouted and cheered until Nash thought his head was going to split. He was still staring from his office window when Fritz van Noon came into the room.

The Colonel weighed him up silently. ‘All right, Fritz, you win—so far. I never thought you’d really make it. Too bad you had to step out of line to do it.’

‘You didn’t exactly help,’ said Fritz. ‘I thought we were finished when you had Ensign Harris arrested for stealing the thermite bombs. Fortunately Malu, our tame local genius, cooked us up a substitute using what I believe might be rocket fuel.’

‘Well,’ said Nash. ‘A very worthy effort. Too bad I have to throw the book at you. Unorthodox engineering I could learn to stand, but stealing government property is a very different matter.’

‘Is it?’ asked Fritz. ‘I have a warrant here authorizing the release of Ensign Harris. It’s neatly signed, sealed and counter-signed by Terran GenCom.’

‘No dice!’ said Nash. ‘I mean to court-martial Harris good and proper. Even GenCom can’t dictate to me on the internal administration of my own sector. With any luck Harris will still be in jail when the sun freezes over. And as soon as I can get evidence of complicity you’ll be up beside him. Besides which—’ he said accusingly, ‘—you haven’t had time to get GenCom confirmation on a release warrant.’

‘No need,’ said Fritz complacently. ‘I always have a release warrant for Ensign Harris filed away. We usually need it somewhere along the way.’

Nash stared at him grimly. ‘You mean to say that this man’s conduct is officially condoned?’

‘Condoned?’ Fritz chuckled. ‘As far as I am aware the only crime Harris committed was to get caught. For that I will personally reprimand him.’

‘But this is preposterous!’ said Nash. The man’s a thief ‘Well, yes. But that’s his speciality. It took us a long time to find someone of his calibre. He’s the man who obtained the suitcase nuke the navy used to end the rebel war. You wouldn’t believe who’s private arms cache it came from!’

‘Jesus! This gets worse and worse,’ said Nash, his voice rising with disbelief. ‘Do you mean to say you employ a known criminal because of his prowess at breaking and entering? What sort of trade classification do you call that?’

‘Quartermaster,’ said Fritz, with obvious enjoyment. ‘We want equipment and supplies, and Ensign Harris gets them for us.’ He shrugged. ‘We don’t ask too many questions, and anyway, it’s a point of honour that he never comes by anything through the proper channels.’

‘But… he… why?’ Nash sensed he was losing ground.

‘It’s part of the fundamental philosophy behind Unorthodox Engineering.’

Nash chewed his moustache nervously. ‘I’ve been warned about getting into an argument with you.’ He returned to the desk and poured himself a drink. On second thoughts he offered it to Fritz and poured himself another.

‘I don’t doubt you can explain,’ he said heavily. ‘I don’t doubt your ability to talk your way out of anything. I’m just warning you it’d better be good. If I’m not convinced I’ll have every man-jack of yours in irons before the morning.’

‘I think not,’ said Fritz. ‘I’m afraid you’ve been the victim of a slight deception. That crazy gang of bodgers of mine is not quite what it seems. This may be unethical, but if you attempted to take any action against us you’d be out of the army so fast you wouldn’t have time to change your hat.’

‘I warn you…’ ground out Nash.

Hear me out first,’ said Fritz. ‘Have you heard of Operation Hyperon.’

Nash nodded. ‘The deep-space penetration project. Exploring inward towards the galactic core.’

‘Precisely. Well, UE is the lead team that’s going.’

I don’t think I understand. Is this some sort of joke?’

‘No, sir, very far from it. You see, in a deep-space expedition you can’t afford to carry anything but men and the very minimum of equipment which will ensure survival. There are no supply ships, no machine shops, and no reference libraries in between the stars.

‘So what type of men do you send? Physicists who are lost without a laboratory? Engineers who can’t obtain any steel? No, you send the men who can make a plough out of a tree-trunk, a stone and a length of creeper. You send the men who have made a lifetime’s habit of turning anything they could lay their hands on to their own peculiar advantage.’

‘And that’s the philosophical concept behind UE?’

‘Just that,’ said Fritz. ‘Ours is an age of highly complex technology. Specialization and standardization are the key-words of our civilization. But as the starships spread us further across space the strings which tie us to the centres of order and knowledge tend to become a bit tenuous. You can only take a certain amount of technology with you. Things come unknit.’

‘A masterpiece of understatement,’ said Nash. ‘Even on Cannis IV we created a technological monster. We tried to apply Terran know-how without having the facilities to back us. It didn’t work.’

‘Just so,’ said Fritz, ‘hence UE. This is an experimental team chosen to a pattern decided after years of psycho-research. It’s a completely flexible approach with no precepts sacred except that the endjustifies the means. We have built a team which can construct the nucleus of a functional civilization out of bits of string and matchsticks if necessary. Our coming to Cannis IVwas simply an exercise.’

Nash picked up the phone and dialled a number.

‘Bring Ensign Harris to my office immediately—and forget the guards. I’m ordering his immediate release. That’s right, you idiot, I said “release”!’

He looked up at van Noon and slowly shook his head. From his desk drawer he extracted two glasses. ‘You got any Scotch tucked away somewhere, Fritz?’

‘Oh yes, I think I can manage that,’ said Fritz van Noon with a straight face.

‘I thought you might.’