Runaway World

Damage Assessment

     He got a grip on himself. He was still alive, and there was no telling how bad the damage to the rover was yet. If they could get it back to the surface they might be able to simply drive away. Only one way to find out. "I'm going to check the service level," he said. "One of you needs to go outside and take a look at the wheels and the hull."

     "I'll get suited up," said Cheval. He turned to Windsor. "You okay?"

     "My ankle," said Windsor, looking down at it. "Twisted or broken, not sure which. And this." He showed him the bloodstained rag. "And just as I was recovering from my last head wound. At this rate I'll have suffered major brain damage by the time this is all over."

     "Tie a bandage around it. Can your foot wait a little while?"

     "Yeah, I think so."

     "Okay. You rest for a bit. Me and Birch'll check things out."

     Windsor nodded and moved back against the side of the corridor as the other two men squeezed their way past him.

☆☆☆

     Andrew went to the living room, where he rolled up the rug that covered the floor and lifted up the hatch that had been hidden underneath.

     The strong smell of ozone wafted up as he lowered himself down into the darkness. The service level of the rover was almost entirely filled with machinery with very little room for a man to squeeze between it all. The ceiling was also low, so that Andrew had to stoop to move around. Lights came on automatically as his feet touched the bare metal floor.

     The first thing he did was pick up the geiger counter sitting on a shelf beside the hatch. An alarm was supposed to sound in the cockpit in the event of a radiation leak, but any accident that damaged the atomic generator might also damage the radiation sensors so Andrew had made sure to have an independent way of making sure that it was safe to be down there.

     To his relief the geiger counter showed only the normal background radiation, so he turned it off and put it back on its shelf. Then he took a real look around. To his relief he saw that his biggest worry was unfounded. None of the thirty centimetre H-girders that gave the rover most of its structural strength were bent. If they had been, that would have been a fatal injury that would have left the rover fit for nothing but being scrapped for parts. A quick inspection showed that none of the joins, where horizontal H-girders were joined to vertical ones by massive nuts and bolts, had been compromised either. Structurally, the main body of the rover was still sound. He continued his inspection, therefore.

     The floor had been dented upwards in several places. That probably meant that the outer hull had been penetrated in places and the insulation torn away. That wouldn't normally be a problem as the vacuum that normally surrounded the rover was the best insulator of all, but Andrew thought it very likely that there was compacted ice beneath them, in direct contact with the inner hull. It was definitely cold down there, which pretty much confirmed his suspicions. He had to find the places where the rover was losing heat and warm them.

     There was a pair of thermal goggles beside the geiger counter. He put them on and looked around. All the machinery in the service deck was raised up on thick rubber pillars, giving him an unobstructed view of the floor, and he saw that some of the dents were definitely cold, and getting colder even as he watched.

     There was a cabinet standing against the wall. He opened it and took out a heat pad which he plugged into a wall socket by means of a long cable. Then he walked across the room, squeezing between the warm radiator fins of the atomic generator and the massive, humming bulk of the primary transformer, stepping across the bundle of fat cables that connected them. Then he placed the pad, which was already growing warm in his hand, in the middle of the cold spot on the floor. His thermal goggles showed a patch of less intense cold spreading out from the pad. It was only a temporary fix until the ice touching the hull could be cleared away and a layer of insulating foam applied, but it would, hopefully, keep the machinery from suffering cold damage. The rubber pillars that supported everything were particularly vulnerable, since below a certain temperature they became brittle and liable to shatter with the slightest movement.