Runaway World

The Barbecue

     It took a week to melt and remove all the water ice covering LaSalle's research centre.

     The nitrogen ice above it was far quicker and easier to remove. It only had to be warmed by a couple of dozen degrees for it to sublime and float away, a process that took just a few hours, but the water ice below had to be warmed thirty times as much to have the same effect. A pipe was lowered into the deepening crater to pump the luke warm water up to the surface and deposit it on the other side of a low ridge, where it formed a spreading sheet of material that no-one from the twenty first century would have recognised. Ice, but spongy and foamy where it was frozen in the act of boiling. David took great delight in running across it and feeling it crunching under his feet, the closest thing in his world to walking through freshly fallen snow.

     Finally, though, a rectangular, fifty metre long area of ground had been completely laid bare, surrounded on all sides by twenty metre high cliffs of blue nitrogen ice on top of white water ice. At the bottom lay the crushed remains of the buildings that had once stood there. The walls were still standing, for the most part, but nowhere had the ceiling survived. Every room, every corridor, had been laid bare so that Andrew, standing at the top of the ice cliff, could see the building's layout as if it were a floor plan printed on a sheet of paper.

     It allowed them to immediately identify the part of the building they were interested in, and they planted explosive charges to destroy the walls around it. Then, that entire part of the building reduced to rubble, they sent the fork lift truck in to clear it, its fork replaced by a bulldozer shovel. It pushed the rubble into piles, picked it up one scoop at a time and carried it up a ramp they'd left in the side of the ice cliff to a wide, empty area where they could spread it out and sort through it.

     Andrew was in the machine shop, using steel and other metals they'd scavenged on site as raw materials to make the tools they'd need later, when Susan came in looking excited. She was carrying something in her hand. A transparent plastic container in which a small ingot of silvery metal was sitting. She held up up triumphantly as if it were a trophy.

     "Is that..." said Andrew, leaving the lathe to go take a closer look at it.

     "Dysprosium," said Susan, grinning manically. "There's hundreds of them. Nearly three hundred kilos in all, just sitting there in a sealed cabinet. Nearly a tenth of what we need, all picked up in one go."

    Andrew took the container from her and lifted it up to look at it. The ingot had a slightly greenish tinge to it, probably where it had become exposed to the air at some point and become slightly tarnished. "Be nice if it were all like that. Ready made into ingots ready for us to just take away."

     "Unfortunately, most of it's in the form of dysprosium titanate. More than enough for what we need but it'll be a long process refining out the pure metal. How long before we've got the refinery up and running?"

     "Not long," said Andrew, looking back at the component he'd been working on. "This time tomorrow?"

     She nodded. "That'll give us time to get a good stockpile up here, ready to chuck into it." She grinned happily. "If there are no problems, we should be heading back to the city with a cargo rover full of pure dysprosium within the month..."

     She was interrupted by Joe and Jasmine as they came dashing in, grinning with excitement. "You'll never guess what we found," said Joe, almost hopping on the spot as if the news he was carrying was trying to physically escape from his body.

     "What?" asked Andrew, grinning back at them. Seeing his daughter happy was one of the great joys of his life.

     "A cow!" said Jasmine, the word bursting from her mouth as if she'd been trying to hold it captive and had failed.