Moon of Mutiny by Lester Del Rey

Author:Lester Del Rey [Rey, Lester Del]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-08-30T12:03:27+00:00

charge of the entire mine. They had a few minutes together before some signal from below drew Stanley away. Jonas started after him, but turned back for a moment.

"You'll get a better view from up here, so maybe you'd better look the place over before coming down," he suggested. "I'll be free in half an hour. We can look into things then."

Jonas and Stanley went down a crude elevator. It was suspended from a frail arrangement of metal struts that stuck out over the small cliff. A platform was suspended on a pulley, counterbalanced by a heavy weight, and worked by manpower. It didn't look any too substantial, and Fred saw that the operator at the top of the cliff was busy repairing one of the struts.

Most of what went on was difficult to understand, though he could follow the basic idea of digging out the ore. The tractors were serving as bulldozers, heavy movers, and general power sources. He saw two of them busy moving rubble out of the way to open up a new vein, but the third was not visible.

Then he saw it, at the top of the cliff, further along the ledge on which he stood. The tractor was stopped, but it must have been making a wider break in the sloping walls above it, probably to form a new road for carrying material back to Base. As he looked, he saw the operator and another man moving back from it, making gestures as if they were in some kind of argument. Since they were using direct contact instead of radio, the gestures meant nothing. After a minute more of argument, they both headed toward a group of diggers further away.

Fred joined the elevator operator. "Anything I can do?"

"Not much." The voice was a woman's. In the suits, it was often hard to tell men and women apart. "I don't like the way this shackle is wiggling, but it seems strong enough. I'll have a welder look at it after this shift."

Fred could see nothing wrong, but it was outside his experience. He stared out at the pit again. "What about your source of iron?"

She laughed. "You're looking at it!" Then her voice sobered. "This is one of the few pieces of good luck we've had. The meteor that hit here was a nickel-iron one. We dug in originally to get it, and found the copper ore by lucky accident. By the way, I'm Helva Peterson."

By following the signs Helva pointed out, Fred could just see the shaft down to the meteorite. The presence of such a supply of metal explained how they were able to smelt iron without more power than they seemed to possess. With the pure metal from space, no such smelting would be needed. Still, it must involve a tremendous amount of work. The stuff was a high-grade steel in its natural form—in fact, the first steel men discovered probably came from small meteorites that fell on Earth. This steel would be incredibly hard to cut into sizes that could be forged into usable parts.

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