the general. "But the satellite watching stations will pick up your
signal in any case. The main thing is to make a straight orbit.
Anything short of a full twenty-four-thousand-mile course will cost you
an impossible amount of fuel."
"Yes, sir," said McCauley. "I'm aware of it, sir."
It was one of the paradoxes of the flight that it would take much
more fuel to make a shorter flight than a longer one. A course around
the northern hemisphere, for example, not crossing the equator and
the antipodes, would be extravagant in terms of the fuel required
simply to stay aloft. But if McCauley established a proper orbit, he'd
use fuel only to take off and to land. Landing would be as tricky a
job as taking off, or even trickier. But McCauley had tried all the
alternative landing processes in the training mock-up. His orders
permitted him to choose the landing process himself, but it was not
likely that he'd have any actual choice. The decision would be made by
events.
Meanwhile there was nothing to do. McCauley stood around and watched
as the general was doing. Figures moved here and there about the
ship a hundred yards away. Men came up to a truck parked near it and
handed in completed checklists and were given other lists to check.
Once there was earnest discussion and a jeep went rushing away to the
base and came rushing back, and a man took a small object over to the
ship, where somebody had evidently decided that something had better
be replaced. Furness avoided McCauley's eye. The whole process grew
tedious. The officers, including the two who would presently fly the
ship, simply stood at a distance to be out of the way and vigilantly
watched men who knew what they were doing. The general had an air of
vast satisfaction as matters progressed with no delays and no lack of
decision at the proper level. When something is well-prepared, the
commanding officer's job is finished when the action starts. The
general in command of Quartermain Base had prepared things well.
The men around the ship moved away from it. They piled into personnel
trucks and rolled off toward the base buildings. Other trucks came
out with men in fueling suits. They took their places briskly. The
hydrazine truck came up. It rolled into place as if on a railroad
track, so great was its precision. The fueling crew briskly and deftly
loaded the ship with its full portion of hydrazine. The tanks topped
off. The truck coiled its hose and moved away.
"We'll move the ship a couple of hundred yards," said the general
curtly, "before loading the nitric."
This was precaution carried to an extreme. Surely nothing could be
spilled on the ground here! But to fuel the nitric from an entirely new
site would make assurance doubly sure. The ship's position was shifted.
The group of officers moved with it. The nitric truck came out, with a
fresh crew of fuelers who loaded the nitric tank.
"Now," said the general, "you and Furness can get into your flight
suits, McCauley. Then I give no more orders. You'll be on your own."
"Yes, sir," said McCauley.
A jeep came up and stopped. McCauley got in the front seat. Furness
got silently into the back. The jeep raced toward the base. Crunching
pebbles and raising dust, it created an extraordinary effect of
self-importance and busyness.
The flight suits were in the building behind the flagpole. There
were noncoms to help them don the clumsy, tight, intricately
gadgeted outfits which provided protection against the effects of
high acceleration, abrupt decompression, heat, cold--everything but
sudden death. There were helmets. There were oxygen bottles and
parachute-packs and mikes and headphones. When the two of them were
completely outfitted, they looked like oversized robots.
Furness did not speak on the way back to the ship. McCauley made one
half-hearted attempt to end the constraint between them.
"Isn't your wife coming out to watch the take-off?" he asked.
"She'll know when we go," said Furness without expression.
He said no more. McCauley carefully did not shrug his shoulders. But
now the immediate problems of the take-off had to be thought over for
the thousandth time, and he could spare no more thought for Furness'
injured dignity.
They reached the standing group of officers. The ship's fuel was all
aboard. The jatos were mounted. Now one man was working alone at the
very tail of the ship. He was bleeding the air out of the fuel lines
between the tanks and the rocket engine. He came away with a small
bucket. Unlike a more normal rocket which would stand nose up and
have its fuel tanks vertically above the motor, in the X-21 a certain
amount of fuel had to come through the lines almost to the engine, to
make certain that the pumps would deliver the two fuel elements at
absolutely the same instant for self-ignition, the instant the rocket
motor was turned on.
"Take that stuff," ordered the general, "and carry it well away from
the ship."
A noncom ran to get the bucket. It might be nitric or it might be
hydrazine. He carried it away a hundred yards or so. The lone man by
the ship now stripped off his plastic coverall, including the gloves.
He walked twenty yards from the ship, put on a fresh outfit, and went
back to the ship. Presently he came away with another small bucket.
"Get that out of the way, too," commanded the general. He turned to
McCauley. "Now, McCauley, it's all yours."
"I'd like," said McCauley, "to give the engine a one-second run. Just
to make sure. I'd like everybody else away."
The general nodded. McCauley lumbered clumsily across the several
hundred yards between the general and the ship. Furness started to
follow, but the general said briskly:
"McCauley's right, Furness. Only one man's needed. Come along."
The general and the others moved to a position less directly in line
with the body of the ship. It was a completely sensible thing to do. If
he did not notice that the small buckets of bled-away fuel were closer
to him and the other officers than they'd been before, he could be
excused for it.
McCauley reached the ship and climbed up. He carefully inspected the
instruments. Then he set the rocket timer for a one-second blast, threw
off the safety, and pressed the firing button.
There was an instant, horrible bellow of a thousand dragons. The ship
stirred, rolled forward--and the timer cut off the fuel supply to the
rocket engine. The engine died. The ship rolled, crunching, to a stop.
McCauley nodded tensely to himself. He waited.
His ears were a bit numbed by the sound, but after a time he turned to
look back under the belly of the ship. There was confusion back there;
the group of officers seemed agitated. There was a vast upsweep of
yellow dust. And there was a hole, a crater, in the sun-baked plain.
The dust was thicker and yellower above it.
Furness came trudging out to the ship. It was a good two minutes before
he arrived. He climbed heavily upward and swung to close the pressure
door and dog it. He settled in his seat with a thud, and then reached
forward and flipped the communicator switch.
"Furness reporting, X-21 to control," he said into his microphone.
"X-21 set to take off. Over."
McCauley saw that his face was ashen white.
"What's the matter, Furness?" he demanded sharply. "Anything wrong?"
"All those precautions were no good," said Furness harshly. "The stuff
that bled out of the fuel lines turned over when the rocket blast hit
it. It blew. It made a hole in the ground and pebbles flew every which
way like bullets. One of them ripped the side of the general's cap
clean off. For a moment I thought the ship had gone."
A tinny voice sounded from a speaker overhead.
"_Control to X-21. Scheduled take-off time is now thirty-four seconds
off. I will count down for time of take-off only._" A long pause.
"_Twenty seconds._" Another pause. "_Fifteen._" A silence which seemed
ages long. McCauley settled himself. Furness held one hand oddly
against his side. McCauley held his finger over the jato button.
"_Ten_," said the tinny voice. "_Nine ... eight ... seven ... six ...
five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... take-off-ti-._"
The last syllable was never completed. McCauley hit the jato button
and the Mark Twenty jatos flamed, instantly and together. The jolt
of the one-second blast before had been severe. This was punishment.
McCauley was slammed back into his acceleration chair with intolerable
violence. For two--five--seven seconds there was no world but weight
and bellowings. There was nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard,
nothing to be felt but the unbearable sound and intolerable pressure of
the ship's acceleration.
On the outside, of course, more detailed impressions were possible.
From absolute immobility, the ship suddenly rushed forward with
mountainous masses of jato fumes swirling and mushrooming behind it.
The noise was deafening even at half a mile. Then the ship lifted,
flying steadily and gaining velocity at a preposterous rate. Then that
rate increased.
McCauley knew when it happened. For six out of their life of fourteen
seconds, the jatos pushed the ship ahead at an acceleration of eight
gravities; in effect, McCauley was pushed back against his chair with
a force of twelve hundred pounds. Then the ramjets caught. The ship
was clear of the ground, with only inertia and air resistance to hold
it back. The ramjets howled, and the whole ship jerked--a little to
one side as well as ahead--and then the acceleration was ten gees.
The difference was that between the unbearable and the unendurable.
McCauley clamped his teeth fiercely and strained to survive this
monstrous assault upon his consciousness and his life.
The jatos burned out and dropped off. The ship swept on smoothly,
and there were only two gees acceleration. But McCauley had to work
swiftly, in spite of feeling that flatirons were attached to his
fingers. He shook his head and panted, and swept his eyes around the
horizon. It was level. He grasped the stick, unlocked it, and pulled
it back. The horizon dipped downward before him and the ship rose
tumultuously toward the sky.
He heard Furness' voice as a faint murmur above the overwhelming noise
from the ramjets.
"X-21 reporting. Take-off complete. Everything functioning normally.
Rate of ascent...."
His voice went on. There was a strange note in it, though. Even in his
desperate absorption in the task at hand, McCauley noted it. But he
could not spare a look at Furness.
The ship was airborne and already two thousand feet high. McCauley put
it into a gigantic climbing sweep around a circle fully twenty miles
across. It flew with the grace and precision of a garbage scow. Now and
again it tended to wallow in flight, and he balanced it tensely, and
then delicately as he confirmed the calculated feel of its controls.
The earth spread out below, wider and wider as the ship rose, and the
ramjets thundered a message of the flight to the empty plain and all
the rolling ground beyond it.
Furness' voice was barely audible. He talked steadily, reading off
instrument indications into a microphone. There were telemeterings of
all these data in transmission that were being recorded down at the
base, but when the ship reached the limit to which the ramjets could
carry it and began its rocket-powered flight, continuous reception of
microwaves would be dubious. A longer wave length for a voice broadcast
was necessary if the full value of the flight was to be realized.
The X-21 was eighteen thousand feet up when it passed Quartermain
Base on its first circle. Half the atmosphere was already beneath
it. Furness read off the fuel consumption of the ramjet.... The air
speed.... The altitude. His face was as gray as when he entered the
cabin. He kept his left hand pressed stiffly against the left side of
his abdomen. McCauley was aware of it, but could not spare the time to
think about it.
The eastward-flowing jetstream rushed invisibly overhead. That river
of racing air, pouring west to east at three hundred miles an hour
and better, was lower than ordinary today. The ship should hit it at
twenty-eight thousand feet. McCauley had to get into it without risking
the sheering stresses the bottom part of it might exert. He had to get
into it like a man stepping onto a moving sidewalk. He adjusted the
rate of climb. At twenty thousand feet the ramjets were more effective.
The ship climbed more steeply. There was a difference in the bellowing
of the ramjets. The noise was still monstrous, but it was thinner. It
did not have the substance of thunder at ground level. But the sound
was still so tremendous that it seemed to fill all of McCauley's
consciousness. It required an effort of will to see, when he was so
battered and hammered at by sound. It was difficult to think. His
hands were heavy, and movements of which he would ordinarily have been
unconscious now required almost painful effort.
Twenty-five thousand feet. McCauley glanced at the gyrocompass,
computed swiftly in his head, added together his known air speed and
the reported wind direction at this height, and deduced an actual
course. Then he had to guess at the angle at which to hit the jetstream
so that when its direction and speed were added to the ship's, the
result of the several forces would be a course around the globe as
nearly as possible the right one. It should pass over the most closely
placed tracking stations, and it should not be immoderately far from
the wide-spaced Navy ships which had been alerted for the flight and a
possible unscheduled descent.
He swung the ship from its circling. He aimed it up and up, south-east
by a half east. The ship climbed.
There was a logy wallowing when it penetrated the bottom of the
jetstream. But it kept on, and presently a clock assured McCauley
that he'd been in the stream long enough to gain all the extra speed
it could give him. He aimed the ship's nose still higher and gave the
ramjets every particle of fuel they could consume.
The sky grew dark. Dark purple. Faint twinklings appeared here and
there. They were the stars, visible in daylight. The ramjets' tumult
was still thinner now. And little by little the rate of climb grew less.
Presently the ship did not climb at all. It was as high as the ramjets
could take it. Now the sunshine on its aluminum body was painfully
bright, but the sky was almost black. Had there been time, he could
have traced the constellations--the same constellations that people
down below would not see for months, until this part of the heavens
shone down on Earth's dark side.
In the pressurized cabin, Furness' voice was more nearly audible. But
this was the first of two moments of truth. Here and now McCauley
had to perform, as the act of a man, what highly complicated machines
would later compute he should have done. He had to get the X-21 into a
three-dimensional relationship to the gravitational field of Earth. He
had to point the ship not only laterally but vertically in the exact
direction that the exact timing of rocket thrust would convert into an
orbit. An error of half a degree would immediately be fatal. An even
smaller error could make the ship's course so eccentric that when he
got back into air it would be with a velocity that would burn ship and
men together as a meteor some fifty miles high.
He sweated, in absolute absorption in his task. Not only did the ship
have to point exactly when he fired the rocket engine, but it had to be
stationary, so it would not move past that point. It had to be settled
dead center on an imaginary optimum or the rocket thrust would change
direction as the ship's nose turned.
He flung his hand against a switch. The ramjets died. There was a vast,
furry stillness--the deafness produced by the past din. McCauley spoke
and barely heard his own voice. He shouted to Furness:
"Settle back for rocket fire!"
Furness nodded. He looked cadaverous. His eyes seemed filled with a
peculiar, tragic despair. But his lips moved. McCauley knew that he was
saying:
"Ramjets off. Maneuvering for course prior to rocket firing. Over."
But he did not stir in his seat. His left hand stayed pressed against
his side.
The ship would be coasting downward now. Its wings still gave some
support, and its wingtips had some effect, but not enough. Now was
the time to use the steam-jets on the fins. McCauley played them
tensely as if they were a musical instrument. He struck balances of
opposing thrusts as if they were chords. The nose of the ship steadied,
steadied, steadied....
The timer button was set at one minute. He struck the rocket-firing
button.
He was hurled back in his seat with a sort of vicious and unreasonable
violence. He was caught in a vise of twelve gravities pressure which
held him motionless against the seat back and tried to flatten out
his legs and body and prevent his breathing. But his flight suit was
designed to prevent exactly this. It squeezed also. His legs were
tightened unbearably. His arms were constricted past endurance. His
chest, his stomach--he was confined in the most horrible of strait
jackets. He felt his tongue curling back down his throat to strangle
him. With an utterly herculean effort he managed to turn his head to
one side. Then he could breathe, and the grav-pressure air protected
his chest from collapse, and he endured and endured and endured.
The minute of the rocket thrust lasted for centuries. Then the engine
cut off, and his head was pure anguish from the blood spurted through
it by his still-laboring heart. He was blinded by the pain. But it went
away.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, his sound-deadened ears regained their
sensitiveness. He heard Furness gasping:
"--minute rocket-blast ended. Checking course now. Over."
McCauley said absorbedly:
"There was a goof. A twelve-gee thrust with full fuel tanks is a whale
of a lot more when they're nearly empty!"
It was true, of course. The ferocity of a rocket thrust that would
accelerate a fully loaded ship at three hundred fifty-odd feet per
second per second would accelerate much more a ship weighing half as
much. Toward the end, McCauley and Furness had taken acceleration that
no man could live through for more than a very short time. But a man
can endure briefly a stress that would kill him if long-continued.
McCauley plunged into the desperately necessary task of this moment. He
had to determine his present course and speed. He could not take the
time to look out of the ports at the immensity of Earth below him. Men
in capsules, orbiting, had been as high as this, but they did not have
to compute their height or guide their vehicles. McCauley had to do
both.
The height was relatively simple. A radar screen, reduced to a vertical
slot for economy of space and weight, told him the distance to whatever
was below. A Doppler-effect velocity indicator would read off the
change in frequency of a crystal-controlled radio signal which his
speed produced. This substantially resembled the way an automobile
horn changes pitch when two cars pass each other; the pitch drops
swiftly at the moment of passing. But there was an observation which
was simpler and more direct.
He spotted a bright star near the horizon ahead. He read off its
angular distance from the world's edge. Looking aft, under the belly of
the ship, he read another angle from the world's edge to another star.
Minutes later, he repeated the observations. The star ahead was higher,
the one behind was lower. If one star rose faster than the other sank,
he would be gaining height. If one sank faster than the other rose, he
would be falling. If one rose exactly as fast as the other dropped, he
would be in a perfect circular orbit, neither rising nor falling. That
was too good to be expected. But from even two sets of observations he
could tell the line the ship was following, and hence its speed.
The ship did not have quite the speed necessary for a complete orbit.
It needed more. He could guess how much.
He said curtly to Furness:
"We've got to have a two-second push, anyhow. Maybe more later. Get
set."
Furness did not reply, but McCauley heard him reporting.
There was singularly little exultation in the small cabin. Furness'
face was drawn and colorless behind his helmet plate. McCauley was busy.
Presently, after a warning gesture, he set the rocket timer and
pressed the firing button. All the ghastly impact of high acceleration
repeated itself. But, lasting only two seconds, it was not much worse
than--say--falling from a second-story window down on a hard mattress.
It lasted longer, but there was not much other difference. It did not
build up to the torture of continued rocket thrust.
Then the ship floated on. There was utter silence. The vertical-slot
altimeter indicated a height which seemed absolutely steady. The
Doppler-effect velocity meter gave a reasonably satisfactory if not too
precise message. McCauley was working intensively on his course when
Furness said, with an effort:
"Ground says satellite-watching stations picking up our signal report
a good course. It could be a little more to the south."
McCauley flipped on his own microphone-to-ground switch.
"I figure I'm still a little short on velocity," he said crisply. "I'll
have to blast again for about a second. Figure me an angle of heading
for ten minutes from now, for a one-second blast. I'll report my
figures for checking."
He did not bother with the ship controls now, of course. The ship was
in orbit, like the numerous satellites circling Earth west to east and
north and south. It did not matter which way it pointed. There was no
air to impede its progress. As a matter of fact, a trace of rotating
motion had been produced by a slight off-centering of the rocket
thrust. The ship's center of mass had changed slightly because of fuel
consumption.
There was silence. McCauley worked on busily. From time to time Furness
spoke as if with great effort. He relayed the altitude from the slot
radar. He relayed the velocity from the Doppler gauge. He relayed
hull temperature, cosmic frequency, ultraviolet intensity. He did not
report any physical sensations, but once he spoke as if in answer to a
question:
"It must be out of order if it says that."
He might be referring to the telemetering apparatus which relayed the
pulse and respiration and blood pressure readings of the two men in the
ship.
In eight minutes McCauley reported the bearing he considered the
ship should point to so that a one-second rocket thrust, adding its
effect to all previous courses and speeds--plus a correction for the
diminished weight of fuel in the tanks--would produce an exactly
perfect orbit for the ship. Furness repeated it while McCauley took
more horizon-to-star observations to check the present line of motion.
"Ground checks your figures," said Furness. "They say congratulations
on perfect astrogation under service conditions. It's right."
"Okay," McCauley said absently.
He went on with his work. The ship was two hundred eighty miles--plus
or minus half a mile--above the surface of the earth. An orbit required
a speed and rate of downward curvature just fixed so the ship would
go downward as the surface curved down, like a glider coasting down
a curving hillside and always being the same distance from solidity.
Since the earth was a globe, one could coast forever and be always
falling, without ever touching the circled world. That is an orbit.
McCauley set the rocket timer and said:
"Here we go."
The rockets blasted. The ship flung itself forward. Again there was the
sensation of falling an uncomfortable distance onto a hard mattress.
But a one-second blast was a thousand times more endurable than a
one-minute one.
The ship had now been aloft for something like thirty minutes, of
which ten was airborne flight and twenty free fall in orbit, plus two
corrections of course and speed. McCauley had had no time to gaze down
at the vastness below him. He knew it only as a huge expanse of mottled
tawny-green or blue with many white specks upon it. The specks, which
were clouds, were closer together toward the horizon, and at any given
moment the rim of the world was a ring of plain white.