Trouble on Titan by Alan E. Nourse

Author:Alan E. Nourse [Nourse, Alan E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-6689-9
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2013-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

10

The Wreck of the Snooper

FOR THE NEXT ten minutes the boys inspected the wreckage at close hand. It looked almost hopeless to Tuck, at first, but much of the more obvious damage involved ripped siding, which could be easily replaced. The cockpit was almost intact, except for the long crack in the plastic hood, and the shattered control board. Tuck worked away at the paneling, and finally broke it loose, revealing the masses of wires leading to the pressure, fuel, speed and altitude controls. With a few minutes’ work he had straightened or repaired the broken wires, and the panel was replaced, ready for seal-welding.

But the engines were another story. The rear end of the jet was smashed almost closed; a long crack ran clear back to the engine, and a whole section of wiring had been ripped from its moorings. The two started to work, with crowbar and hammer, slowly breaking and wrenching the little ship from its bed of rock, talking very little as they worked. From time to time Tuck stopped to stare at the engine and the wiring that were exposed. They didn’t look at all right, for some reason, and the more he looked the more puzzled he became. And then it dawned on him — the whole area where the fuel tanks belonged was filled with large gas bottles, painted green, without the familiar insulating pad around them. Tuck looked up at David, hardly believing his eyes. “Say, what kind of engine have you got in this thing?”

David stopped prying at the crowbar long enough to grin. “Ordinary jet combustion chamber. Torm modification.”

Tuck looked suspicious. “But those are oxygen bottles in there — ”

“That’s right. That’s the Torm modification.”

“But what do you use for fuel?”

“Oxygen.” David grinned at his friend’s consternation, then burst out laughing. “It’s really very simple. When the jet is flying, it doesn’t take air into the intakes, the way you’re used to. It couldn’t — there isn’t any air. It takes methane into the air-scoop. So why use a lot of expensive fuel and oxidizer, when all the fuel you could possibly use is free for the asking, all around you?”

“You mean you use atmospheric methane for your fuel?”

“Of course. The pumps just feed in a tiny stream of liquid oxygen from those tanks there into the center of the intake of methane. Makes a funny-looking exhaust — just a pencil-thin flame — but it works, delivers plenty of thrust. And all I have to carry is priming fuel and oxygen — ”

Tuck examined the setup excitedly. “You must have been all over the planet with this!”

“It’s been handy. Some other guys here in the colony worked with me on it. We taught ourselves mapping and topography from some books my dad has. We’ve had a lot of fun, just snooping around with it, and we’ve made our own maps of the topography within a couple hundred square miles of the colony. Better than Security Patrol maps, too.” David stood up from the crowbar and started rolling a large green oxygen bottle over toward the damaged jet.

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