Uller Uprising | Page 7

the radio-detonator button in front of him. A voice
came out of the PA-speaker overhead: "In sixty seconds, the bombs
will be detonated ... thirty seconds ... fifteen seconds ... ten seconds ...
five seconds, four seconds, three seconds, two seconds, one second...."
Out on the rolling skyline, fifty miles away, a lancelike ray of
blue-white light shot up into the gathering dusk--a clump of five rays,
really, from five deep shafts in an irregular pentagon half a mile across,
blended into one by the distance. An instant later, there was a blinding
flash, like sheet-lightning, and a huge ball of varicolored fire belched
upward, leaving a series of smoke-rings to float more slowly after it.
That fireball flattened, then spread to form the mushroom-head of a
column of incandescent gas that mounted to overtake it, engorging the
smoke-rings as it rose, twisting, writhing, changing shape, turning to
dark smoke in one moment and belching flame and crackling with

lightning the next. The armor-tender began to pitch and roll; it was all
the engineer and one of the assistants could do, together, to keep it
level.
"In about half an hour," the large young man told the girl, "the real
fireworks should be starting. What's coming up now is just small debris
from the nuclear blast. When the shockwaves get down far enough to
crack things open, the gas'll come up, and then steam and ash, and then
the magma. This one ought to be twice as good as the one we shot three
months ago; it ought to be every bit as good as Krakatoa, on Terra, in
59 Pre-Atomic."
"Well, even this much was worth staying over for," the girl said,
watching the screen.
"You going on to Uller on the City of Canberra?" Lourenço Gomes
asked. "I wish I were; I have to stay over and make another shot, in a
month or so, and I've had about all of Niflheim I can take, now. The
sooner I get onto a planet where they don't ration the air, the better I'll
like it."
"Well, what do you know!" the large young man with the hairy legs
mock-marveled. "He doesn't like our nice planet!"
"Nice planet!" Gomes muttered something. "They call Terra God's
Footstool; well, I'll give you one guess who uses this thing to prop his
cloven hoofs on."
"When are you going to Terra?" the girl asked him.
"Terra? I don't know, a year, two years. But I'm going to Uller on the
next ship--the City of Pretoria--if we get the next blast off in time.
They want me to design some improvements on a couple of
power-reactors, so I'll probably see you when I get there."
"Here she comes!" the chief engineer called. "Watch the base of the
column!"

The pillar of fiery smoke and dust, still boiling up from where the
bombs had gone off far underground, was being violently agitated at
the bottom. A series of new flashes broke out, lifting and spreading the
incandescent radioactive gasses, and then a great gush of flame rose. A
column of pure hydrogen must have rushed up into the vacuum created
by the explosion; the next blast of flame, in a lateral sheet, came at
nearly ten thousand feet above the ground, and great rags of fire,
changing from red to violet and back through the spectrum to red again,
went soaring away to dissipate in the upper atmosphere. Then geysers
of hot ash and molten rock spouted upward; some of the white-hot
debris landed almost at the acid river, half-way to the armor-tender.
"We've started a first-class earthquake, too," the Hispano-Indian
Martian Murillo said, looking at the instruments. "About six big cracks
opening in the rock-structure. You know, when this quiets down and
cools off, we'll have more ore on the surface than we can handle in ten
years, and more than we could have mined by ordinary means in fifty."
About four miles from the original blast, another eruption began with a
terrific gas-explosion.
"Well, that finishes our work," the large young man said, going to a
kitbag in the corner of the cabin and getting out a bottle. "Get some of
those plastic cups, over there, somebody; this one calls for a drink."
"That's right," Gomes said. "You do something once, it may be an
accident; you repeat the performance, and it's a success." He began
pushing papers aside on his desk, and the girl in the too-ample
coveralls brought drinking cups.
The Ulleran, in the background, rose quickly and squeaked
apologetically. Murillo nodded. "Yes, of course, Gorkrink. No need for
you to stay here." The Ulleran went out, closing the door behind him.
"That taboo against Ullerans and Terrans watching each other eat and
drink," Murillo said. "What is that, part of their religion?"