Quest for the Well of Souls - Jack L. Chalker [85]
"I'm not sure I like that angle," Yulin commented, surveying it from the train. "As it is, we'll have to build to full thrust before taking off, a tremendous danger to us even without other problems."
"You will need to clear sixty-three kilometers within the first minute of flight," their Bozog host responded. "Using information supplied by you and by others, we calculate that you will have nine seconds to spare. The slight angle is to give you maximum high-tech free flight. A perfectly vertical takeoff is impossible with the ship's design, anyway, and you would run the risk of a high-altitude wobble that might take you for a moment over the wrong side of the border. Any power failure during takeoff will result in insufficient speed to break free of the Well's influence before normal rotation takes you over semitech Esewod or nontech Slublika. You of all people should know what that would mean."
Yulin nodded soberly. He and Trelig had escaped New Pompeii in disguise to avoid being murdered by Trelig's former guards and slaves, who, seeing that they were now in an alien sector of space, realized they were dead people because they'd be deprived of their daily sponge supply. Trelig and Yulin had made the same mistake as Mavra Chang had a day earlier—they had flown too low over the Well World, so that the technological limitations of the hexes below had affected them, and they had plunged to the surface.
But Chang's ship had broken up over the South; attempts to recover the sections, particularly the power supply, had been the cause of the wars of the Well. That had ended in failure with the destruction of the engines in a volcanic crater in high Gedemondas.
Yulin's ship, however, was not designed to break up but was a smaller utility craft used mostly for in-system work. It had atmospheric-flight capabilities and collapsible wings, and he and Trelig had brought it intact to a dead-stick landing in nontech Uchjin.
"Are you certain of those figures?" Yulin asked, worried. "I mean, absolutely certain?" Whoever was in that ship would have one crack at it, and one crack only.
"We are," the Bozog assured him. "We have had independent channels of communication. We know as much about that ship as its designer. Only the lack of two key minerals anywhere on the Well World prevents us from constructing our own drive and building our own ships."
"Curious," Mavra put in. "I wonder if the lack was deliberate?"
"Probably. Makes no difference," the Bozog responded. "The fact is that nothing on the Well World so far discovered can power a plant with sufficient initial and sustained thrust to overcome the Well's effects. You might say we know how to build one, we just can't do it."
They were taken to a large square building that proved to have a very conventional airlock. Inside, it contained a suite of comfortable rooms complete with closets, manipulable lights, and an intercom to the Bozog launch control complex, and the project director's office.
It was also filled with a generic Southern atmosphere that was maintained at a temperature of twenty degrees Celsius, comfortable for all concerned.
The atmospheric difference seemed to have no effect on the Bozog.
"We are rather versatile in this department," it explained. "In general, we cannot stand the presence of certain lethal gases, but none of them are present in your atmosphere. You will excuse me if I do not elaborate on which gases and other substances are not to our liking."
They understood. Why give a possible enemy the lethal weapon?
"How do you breathe, then?" Joshi asked, fascinated.
"We don't breathe, not in the sense you mean it," the creature replied. "What gases we require we obtain in our eating. There is as much gas in the rock we consume as in anything else. We just do not require constant respiration."
Left alone shortly afterward, they were thankful to get out of their suits. The Torshind, who had no such problems, left its crystal crab shell and explored rapidly.
"No locks," it reported to them. "Heavily bugged, of course, but I find nothing