The Broken Cycle - A. Bertram Chandler [16]
So, soldering it had to be.
Grimes carried the tray to the little workshop that shared space with the boat's power plant and propulsive units, put it on the bench. He had the Manual open at the proper page, thought that he would be able to patch things up. He was a messy solderer and soon discovered that clothing is worn for protection as well as for adornment or motives of prudery. Una—who was annoyingly amused—applied first aid; then Grimes got into his longjohns before continuing.
When he was finished—a few hours and several burns later—the tray still looked a mess, but Grimes was reasonably confident that the circuits were not anywhere shorted. He carried the tray back to the transceiver—which had been set up in its proper position—and slid it carefully into place. He switched on. The pilot lights lit up. There would be neither transmission nor reception, however, until the antenna was remounted and operational.
They had a hasty meal, then returned to the workshop. The antenna was a metal Moebius Strip, oval rather than circular, on a universal bearing which, in turn, was at the head of a driving shaft. The shaft had been snapped just below the bearing, and the antenna itself had been bent out of its elliptical configuration. Fortunately there was among the motor spares a steel rod of circular section and exactly the right diameter. It had to be shortened by about five centimeters, but with the tools available that was no hardship. The broken shaft was removed from the transceiver, the new one shipped. The antenna—back in shape, Grimes hoped—was, on its bearing, secured to the projecting end of the shaft with a set screw.
"Will it work?" asked Una skeptically. "There's only one way to find out," Grimes told her. He switched on again, set the Direction Finding controls to hunt. In theory (and, hopefully, in practice) the aerial array would now automatically line up on the strongest incoming Carlotti signal.
The shaft began to rotate slowly, the Moebius Strip antenna wobbled on its universal bearing. It seemed to be questing as it turned. Abruptly it steadied, although still turning about its long axis. From the speaker came not the Morse sequence of a Beacon but something that sounded like somebody speaking. It was in no language that either of them knew, and the voice did not sound human. Suddenly it stopped, but Grimes had noted relative bearing and altitude.
He looked at Una, his eyebrows raised. She looked at him dubiously.
"Something . . ." he said slowly.
"Not . . . somebody?"
"All right. Somebody. Somebody capable of constructing—or, at least, using—Deep Space communications equipment."
"Should we put out a call now that this contraption's working?"
"No," he decided. He laughed harshly. "I like to see whom I'm talking to before I talk to them. We'll let the direction finder go on hunting for a while. Maybe it will pick up something a little more promising . . . ."
But it did not.
At intervals of exactly twenty-three minutes and fourteen seconds it steadied on the transmission in the unknown language, on the same relative bearing.
* * *
Grimes remembered an engineer officer in a big ship in which he had served as a junior watchkeeper. He had watched this gentleman while he overhauled the mini-Mannschenn of one of the cruiser's boats. It had been a job requiring both patience and a remarkably steady hand. After a spindle had slipped out of its bearing for the fifteenth time the specialist had sworn, "Damn it all, I'm an engineer, not a bloody watchsmith!" He then went on to say, "The ship's Mannschenn Drive unit, with all its faults, is a machine. This fucking thing's only an instrument!" He told the little story to Una. She said, "That's no excuse. Somebody assembled it once. You can assemble