Uller Uprising | Page 5

F | | | | | | --C--C--C-- + F-{2} --> --C--C--C-- + HF | | | | | | F
F F F F F
resulting in a teflon boned and shelled organism. He's going to be tough
to do much with. Diatoms leave strata of powdered teflon. The main
energy reaction is:
H H H | | | --C--C--C-- ... + F-{2} --> CF-{4} + HF | | | F F F
The blood catalyst metal is titanium, which results in colorless arterial

blood and violet veinous, as the titanium flips back and forth between
tri and tetra-valent states.
7. EFFECT ON INTRUDING ITEMS
Water decomposes into oxygen and hydrofluoric acid. All organic
matter (earth type) converts into oxygen, carbon tetrafluoride,
hydrofluoric acid, etc., with more or less speed. A rubber gas mask
lasts about an hour. Glass first frosts and then disappears. Plastics act
like rubber, only a little slower. The heavy metals, iron, nickel, copper,
monel, etc., stand up well, forming an insoluble coat of fluorides at first
and then doing nothing else.
8. WHY GO THERE?
Large natural crystals of fluorides, such as calcium difluoride, titanium
tetrafluoride, zirconium tetrafluoride, are extremely useful in optical
instruments of various forms. Uranium appears as uranium
hexafluoride, all ready for the diffusion process. Compounds of such
non-metals as boron are obtainable from the atmosphere in high purity
with very little trouble. All metallurgy must be electrical. There are
considerable deposits of beryllium, and they occur in high
concentration in its ores.

PROLOGUE
On Satan's Footstool
The big armor-tender vibrated, gently and not unpleasantly, as the
contragravity field alternated on and off, occasionally varying its
normal rate of five hundred to the second when some thermal updraft
lifted the vehicle and the automatic radar-altimeter control acted to alter
the frequency and lower it again. Sometimes it rocked slightly, like a
boat on the water, and, in the big screen which served in lieu of a
window at the front of the control cabin, the dingy-yellow landscape
would seem to tilt a little. If unshielded human eyes could have
endured the rays of Nu Pupis, Niflheim's primary, the whole scene

would have appeared a vivid Saint Patrick's Day green, the effect of the
blue-predominant light on the yellow atmosphere. The outside
'visor-pickup, however, was fitted with filters which blocked out the
gamma-rays and X-rays and most of the ultra-violet-rays, and added the
longer light-waves of red and orange which were absent, so that things
looked much as they would have under the light of a G0-type star like
Sol. The air was faintly yellow, the sky was yellow with a greenish cast,
and the clouds were green-gray.
A thousand feet below, the local equivalent of a forest grew, the trees,
topped with huge ragged leaves, looking like hundred-foot stalks of
celery. There would be animal life down there, too--little round things,
four inches across, like eight-legged crabs, gnawing at the vegetation,
and bigger things, two feet long, with articulated shell-armor and
sixteen legs, which fed on the smaller herbivores. Beyond, in the
middleground, was open grassland, if one could so call a mat of
wormlike colorless or pastel-tinted sprouts, and a river meandered
through it. On the skyline, fifty miles away, was a range of low dunes
and hills, none more than a thousand feet high.
No human had ever set foot on the surface, or breathed the air, of
Niflheim. To have done so would have been instant death; the air was a
mixture of free fluorine and fluoride gasses, the soil was metallic
fluorides, damp with acid rains, and the river was pure hydrofluoric
acid. Even the ordinary spacesuit would have been no protection; the
glass and rubber and plastic would have disintegrated in a matter of
minutes. People came to Niflheim, and worked the mines and uranium
refineries and chemical plants, but they did so inside power-driven and
contragravity-lifted armor, and they lived on artificial satellites two
thousand miles off-planet. This vehicle, for instance, was built and
protected as no spaceship ever had to be, completely insulated and
entered only through a triple airlock--an outer lock, which would be
evacuated outward after it was closed, a middle lock kept evacuated at
all times, and an inner lock, evacuated into the interior of the vehicle
before the middle lock could be opened. Niflheim was worse than
airless, much worse.

The chief engineer sat at his controls, making the minor lateral
adjustments in the vehicle's position which were not possible to the
automatic controls. One of the radiomen was receiving from the orbital
base; the other was saying, over and over, in an exasperatedly patient
voice: "Dr. Murillo. Dr. Murillo. Please come in, Dr. Murillo." At his
own panel of instruments, a small man with grizzled black hair around
a bald crown,