below him. At its speed, the ship should complete one revolution of the
Earth in ninety minutes, more or less. Its speed was seventeen thousand
two hundred and sixty miles per hour relative to the ground. In twenty
minutes of free-fall flight it had covered something over five thousand
and seven hundred miles, relative to the ground, and crossed eighty
degrees of longitude. The local time down below was something more than
five hours later than the local time at Quartermain Base. Sunset would
be approaching here, as the earth's shadow moved from east to west like
the dawn.
To the right of the floating ship there was only tawny-blue ocean that
seemed much darker than ordinary because McCauley was looking down into
its depths instead of at a sky reflection from its surface. Behind
the ship there was a clumping of the white specks. These cloud masses
would be above and around the Cape Verde Islands, now tens of scores of
miles to the rear. Below and to the left there was an amorphousness,
an indefiniteness peeping up from beneath the cloud cover. That
would be Africa. McCauley could see for enormous distances over the
cloud-hidden land. He knew that he floated over Senegal and British
Guinea and French Guinea and Liberia and the Ivory Coast, all in a
matter of tens of seconds. But he could see only at intervals between
tufts of white-cottony vapor. Ahead, too, the dark-colored sea swept
in, right to left, and in half minutes or less there was no land at all
except behind him. Away ahead there was more of Africa, to be sure,
because the X-21 sped along a line which would mark the limits of the
Gulf of Guinea. The ship would cross the tip of Africa and head down
past it to Antarctica.
But McCauley would not see Africa again. The whiteness which was the
horizon turned dim where the ship's bow aimed, and the dimness spread
to the left. The edge of the round world turned black. It was Earth's
crawling shadow creating night. Darkness sped toward the ship, still
high above the last slightest trace of atmosphere and glittering
intolerably in the unshielded glare of the sun.
"It looks like we're all set, Furness," McCauley said with
satisfaction. "We can relax, now, for all of twenty minutes."
Furness did not answer. There was no sensation of weight, of course.
Nothing weighed anything. Nothing could be considered light or heavy.
The difference between a copper penny and the ship itself was purely
imaginary. They had different masses, but both would weigh the
same--zero. McCauley suddenly turned off the silent air-circulator in
the cabin. He struck a match. The flame flared, but not as a rising
leaf shape. It was a perfect ball of incandescence. But it did not
continue to burn. It went out, and there was a ball of white smokiness
where the flame had been.
"I've heard that'd happen. I wanted to try it," McCauley said amusedly.
A match requires oxygen in which to burn. On the ground, the chemically
fostered first flame of the match-head heats the air, which rises and
is replaced, whereby fresh oxygen reaches the place of combustion and
supports it. But in the X-21, in free fall, hot air was no lighter
than cold. It did not rise. The match exhausted the oxygen around it
and went out. McCauley turned the air-circulator on again lest he and
Furness be similarly surrounded by vitiated air.
"Queer, eh?" said McCauley. Then he looked at Furness. Furness' eyes
seemed filled with suffering. His pallor was deathlike.
"What's the matter?" McCauley asked.
Purely by instinct he raced his eyes across the instruments. They said
nothing they should not.
"Furness!" snapped McCauley. "What's the matter? What's happened to
you?"
With an air of terrible effort--though nothing weighed as much as a
hair--Furness moved his left hand away from his side. It came away
filled with blood. There was an ominous dark-red patch on the flight
suit, and something seemed to be welling slowly out of a puncture in
the cloth. The hole was the size of a bullet hole.
"Just before ... take-off," said Furness thinly, "the rocket fuel that
was ... bled through the fuel pipes ... went off when you tested ...
the engine. It exploded. It threw pebbles like bullets. One ... ripped
the general's hat. One ... hit me."
McCauley swore. He felt a sort of bitter anger. Of all the places where
instant medical attention for an injured man was impossible, the worst
was the close, air-tight cabin of a ship out of atmosphere, traveling
at some thousands of miles per hour and heading into night. Descending
was out of the question. It was impossible to turn back.
"Let's look at that," said McCauley harshly. "Maybe we can check the
bleeding somehow.--Why didn't you report you were hurt? Didn't you know
you were risking your life?"
"I suppose," said Furness weakly, but with irony, "that you aren't
risking yours!"
Then he winced a little as McCauley's finger explored the hole in
the tough cloth. When the rocket fuel exploded on the surface of the
ground, the impact of a pebble would have the effect of a bullet. It
would numb more than it hurt. Furness knew he'd been hit, of course,
but the ship was ready to take off, and the wound might only be
trivial. To delay take-off for examination of what might be entirely
insignificant would earn him McCauley's contempt--or so Furness had
believed. And Furness was in no state of mind to risk that. Nothing
short of absolute inability to hide his injury would have made him
admit that he'd been hurt or even hit. So he'd climbed in the ship, and
done his work steadily until this instant, all the time covering the
wound with his hand lest McCauley discover it.
There was no room in the cabin for much movement. McCauley tried to
enlarge the hole, but the cloth was reinforced with wire and could
not be torn. Furthermore, he had nothing to work with if he could get
at the wound--nothing for bandages, nothing to check the bleeding,
nothing.... He swore deeply.
Then he felt for a familiar iron ring and pulled it. A tiny pilot chute
leaped from his chute-pack. It was designed to pull out his main chute
if he had to jump. He tore at it with his fingers.
"We'll pack it anyhow," he mumbled as he ripped strips from the small
expanse of nylon. "At least check the bleeding."
He rolled up a strip of white cloth. He was irritated by the insistent
feeling that he needed antiseptics he didn't have. He worked at the
recalcitrant opening in the cloth of the flight suit and packed the
wound with nylon. Then he worked more nylon about and over the packing
to make a firm pad. He tore long strips to put around Furness' body to
hold the packing fast and tied them tightly.
It was awkward to work where there was no weight. It seemed unreal to
attempt the preposterous where there was no sound. He worked swiftly.
Suddenly there was a redness in the light reflected all about the cabin
from the sunshine that came in the ports.
He jerked up his head, thinking foolishly of fire. Then he saw the sun.
It lay beyond a vast curved barrier that shut off all the light of all
the stars. The sun was in the act of descending, to be eclipsed by the
edge of Earth, and its light came through hundreds of miles of thick
air which turned it from a burning golden glare to flame-red, and then
crimson, and then ruby-red as he stared. Then its rim was blanked out
and it slid swiftly down to extinction. The light went from gold to
carmine to ruby and the sun was blotted out in less than ten seconds.
Then the ship traveled through purest night. The cosmos outside
its ports was sharply divided. There was a hemisphere filled with
the coruscations of a million million stars. The other half of the
universe was the night side of Earth, but it looked like the abyss of
nothingness from which all things came, and to which it may be that all
things will return.
McCauley reached over and switched on lights. Furness looked at him
through eyes that seemed deep-sunk in his head.
"You tore your pilot chute," he said thinly. "You've no chance to jump,
now."
McCauley scowled. There were various methods by which the ship could be
landed or at least its occupants might escape its crash. There was the
skip process, in which the ship could be settled down into atmosphere
just thick enough to slow it as it bounced out to space again for
another settling, another slowing, another bounce. It was considered
the most practical way for a ship to get back to Earth after an orbital
flight. To choose the final landing place, of course, was out of the
question. Also it was believed that even with the best of luck the
ship's crew might have to take to their chutes and let the ship crash.
But Furness could not make a chute-drop. Nor could McCauley, now.
"Time for a report," said McCauley.
He'd meant to make it, but Furness summoned all his strength. He ran
his eyes along the instruments.
"X-21 reporting," he said as loudly as he could. "Just passed darkness
line. Altitude...."
He went through the list of readings to be given by voice. They might
be picked up by satellite-tracking stations which did not quite pick
up the ship itself. They would almost certainly be picked up by South
African radio amateurs listening for them.
"More comfortable?" McCauley asked gruffly.
Furness moved his head in a fashion that might be considered a nod.
After a long time he said:
"Is there any ... water in the ... survival kit?"
McCauley fumbled. There was. The survival kits were the small parcels
which might conceivably mean the difference between dying and not
dying if a man had to ditch his disabled plane or jump from a burning
one. Together with an inflatable boat, they were included in the
X-21's equipment as a sort of pious wish. It was not to be believed
that this ship would end its career like a mere atmosphere plane. If
the steam-jets didn't work, the most perfect operation of the rocket
engine would never get the ship down into the atmosphere, even for
destruction. If it got down to the atmosphere there were still several
thousand things that could go wrong. It was definitely not likely that
its crew could jump to safety in case of need, or land so serenely on
water that a rubber raft would do them any good. But the survival kits
were there.
McCauley gave Furness water. He did not comment on the complications
Furness' injury added to a landing problem that was already complicated
enough. Instead, he looked at the clock.
"We're close to Antarctica now," he observed. "We ought to run into
moonlight, too."
He peered out of a port. The tiny lighted cabin swam in emptiness,
without sound, without sight of anything but remote and indifferent
stars. It floated above the part of the world where the Indian and
Atlantic Oceans flow together, and where there is unbroken sea all
around the antarctic continent. A wind can blow completely around the
world there, and rather frequently it does; and the gigantic waves that
are engendered are spoken of with aversion by seamen. But McCauley
could not see any waves. There was floating ice below, but as he
thought of it it changed to the massive ice sheet of the bottom of the
world. So the tiny lighted cabin raced over mountains and plains all
buried in snow which had been there since the beginning.
He turned from the sight of a universe divided into stars and
blackness. There was no practical measure to be taken--not now, anyhow.
McCauley might contrive a way to get himself safely down to earth,
letting Furness take his own chance with no strength to help himself.
It seemed improbable in the extreme that Furness could survive a crash
landing, even if no explosion followed. There was very little hope
that the X-21 could be landed save in a crash. But it did not occur
to McCauley that he was relieved of responsibility. A normal landing
was not really hoped for. If McCauley piloted the X-21 into orbit and
out again, he'd have done the unprecedented and the next try might go
better. But he could not imagine himself leaving Furness in a ship
headed for a landing that was bound to be a pile-up....
He couldn't expect to land intact himself, with his pilot chute ripped
out and torn apart.
"I'm sorry you tore up your pilot chute," said Furness. "It about kills
your chance of getting down to the ground in one piece. And it's my
fault. You tore it up for me. But when I came on the ship I didn't
think I was hurt badly."
"I'd have done just what you did," said McCauley. "It would have taken
two broken legs to keep me from walking over as if nothing had happened
to me." Then he remembered. "Report?"
Furness gathered his strength and spoke in an almost natural voice:
"X-21 reporting. We are over Antarctica at the farthest south part of
our orbit. Altitude...."
He went through the list, and then his eyes went to the canteen from
which McCauley had given him water. McCauley gave him another drink.
"That son of mine," said Furness abruptly. "He reveres you. When I was
picked to ride observer with you, he almost went out of his head with
pride. I was--I suspect I was a little bit jealous of you. A man likes
his son to think he's the greatest man on earth. My boy almost believed
it when I was picked for this job. But if I'd backed out...."
McCauley nodded.
"Under the circumstances," he agreed, "you'd walk to the ship and come
aboard if you had to carry your head in your hand. A man wouldn't
disappoint his son."
"He'd have been so proud," said Furness, "if we'd made it! And I've
messed it all up!"
"I'm hanged if I'll compliment you," McCauley said, "but it would
have been disgraceful if you'd done anything else. A man has to set
an example for his son. And we may make out. In any case we're just
thirty-two minutes from some very tricky stuff. I think we'd better
think of cheerier things."
"Sorry," said Furness. He turned his eyes away. He brooded.
Seconds ticked by in the cabin. Frost began to form on the ports. There
was no air outside, so there could not be said to be any temperature.
But the ship radiated heat into empty space and received next to none
in return. If allowed to cool until thermal equilibrium with its
surroundings was reached, the X-21 would go down to some two hundred
and fifty-four degrees below zero centigrade. But that would be in
darkness. In sunlight it would be a different matter, and the ship'd be
out of darkness in minutes.
They were very long minutes. The altitude radar said that the ship was
maintaining the most nearly perfect circular orbit any man-made object
had achieved to date. The X-21 was a lonely mote with yellow light
glowing from its cabin openings. From time to time, invisibly, radio
waves spread out from a stiff metal rod pointed sternward, and some of
them might--with luck--be picked up by somebody. But the ship received
nothing, here.
It passed south of Kerguelen Island in the blackness, and it was
midnight local time, though the ship was only forty-five minutes of
free-fall flight from Quartermain Base. Presently the X-21 headed
northward and crossed the meridian where it was one A.M. something less
than five minutes later. It reached a point south of Australia in under
ten minutes more. It swept above the lowermost part of Australia and
Tasmania together when the clocks on the ground said five A.M.
It was only when the remotest rim of the blackness which was
Earth turned bright--when the dawn could be seen at the farthest
horizon--that McCauley thought to look for the moon. It shone down
coldly, but it was not bright enough to show him any pattern in the
blackness nearly three hundred miles below the ship.
In eight minutes more, however, the sun had rolled up over the edge
of the world and below the ship there was ocean. Away off to the
left McCauley could see spiral arms of cloud, signifying a cyclonic
disturbance moving north across the Coral Sea. Sturdy steamships fought
for their lives in that typhoon, and many human beings would die in it.
The ship sped on, and there came into the headphones of both McCauley
and Furness a beamed message from the naval installation at Guam, which
dimly and fugitively could be sighted under an aggregation of white
clouds more dense than ordinary. The message said:
"_Good work, guys! We're pulling for you!_"
Then the Samoan Islands were far behind and dropping even farther.
And time passed, and McCauley thought intensively and very grimly,
and once again Furness asked for water. There was a clumping of cloud
masses underneath and to the east which was Phoenix Island, and almost
immediately afterward Washington Island and then Palmyra; after that it
seemed barely seconds when a most respectable massing of clouds to the
left was Hawaii.
McCauley could see solid ground there, and he talked curtly and very
urgently into his own throat-mike, flipped into circuit with the voice
transmitter for the occasion. It was not altogether likely that his
message, relayed, would arrive ahead of the ship, but it was his only
chance to do anything practical in the way of warnings to the ground.
He set to work. He did computations from instrument readings he
barely remembered. He included a prayerful hope that the fuel-gauge
instruments had been calibrated through their entire range. There was
so much ramjet fuel, which might or might not do what it was supposed
to do. There was so much rocket fuel, which must be expended to the
last smallest drop before the ship could risk touching ground. And
there was distance to be calculated, in terms of minutes and seconds
instead of miles.
The clock flashed a red light and made a buzzing sound. It was a
reminder that now, according to the figure evolved on the ground
before take-off, McCauley might begin the attempt at skip landing,
the improbable but still least implausible procedure for getting the
ship on to the ground in not more than two or three pieces. It should
begin with a rocket-driven dive into the atmosphere. He was expected
to have enough fuel for that. With downward velocity established, he
should bleed out all the remaining nitric acid to emptiness. After
it had been completely expelled, and not before, he should wait the
number of seconds which would be equivalent to five hundred miles,
and then jettison the hydrazine. By that time the ship should hit the
outermost fringes of air. He should dive into it until the ship's skin
temperature began to rise--a matter of fractions of seconds--and then
let the ship bounce out again. It would have lost some velocity and
would no longer be capable of remaining in an orbit. So it would come
down into the air again, after an interval in which it would cool off,
and again it would bounce out like a stone skipping across the surface
of a pond until it has lost enough speed to settle quietly to the
bottom.
If McCauley attempted such a landing system, his place of entry into
the air for a dead-stick landing would not be less than one thousand
miles from the point of the first bounce, and it might be three
thousand. It could not be calculated. Fractions of seconds and seconds
of arc would apply, so McCauley might start his skip-stop descent
out above the Pacific Ocean, and the X-21 might finally ditch in the
Atlantic somewhere off Newfoundland.
Furness tried to speak.
"Report," he said faintly. "I should report."
McCauley threw the switch for him. Furness summoned what seemed to be
his last reserve of strength.
"X-21 reporting," he said almost naturally. "We are well past Hawaii
and approaching the continent. Altitude...."
He was halfway through when green solid ground with very few clouds lay
directly below, and the Rocky Mountains were a little way ahead. He
could not quite detect their height, but the pattern of the soil was
distinctive. McCauley flipped on his own throat-mike and said:
"I interrupt. Here is the situation. My fuel tanks read...." He snapped
off the readings. "I'm going to swing the ship end for end and burn my
remaining rocket fuel to kill velocity. Then I'll adopt such skip-stop
practices as the situation requires. I doubt it will require them.
We were lucky enough to get a nearly circular orbit. In consequence
our velocity is lower than if we'd had to make an eccentric one. We
saved fuel unexpectedly in getting into space, and I'm going to use it
getting out. Over."
He cut off and made his preparations. His figuring was extremely close.
But there had necessarily been a slight margin of fuel. A circular
orbit does not require nearly the fuel expenditure that an elliptical
one does. But McCauley had made the most efficient possible use of
fuel at the beginning. He'd used one long blast, a two-second blast,
and a one-second rocket thrust to get into nearly a perfect space
trail. He meant to collect for that partly accidental expertness. But
he meant to collect much more for an observation.
The observation was that a one-second blast was not a thousandth
the ordeal that a sixty-second blast was. No man could survive a
long-continued twenty-gravity acceleration. But most men could take
a one-second push--and not only once, but many times. With time for
recovery in between, and a rocket engine that fired infallibly when it
was turned on....
He set the rocket timer.
"This," he said over his shoulder, "may be our last chance to exchange
compliments, Furness. But I think you're the same kind of idiot as I
am. I'd have come on this trip with my insides hanging out rather than
stay behind. So would you. Very nearly, you did. It's nice to have
known you. I hope we survive."
Steam-jets spouted at the ends of the X-21's rear fins. In emptiness,
the ship spun halfway about until the swiftly moving solidity below
ceased to move toward the pointed nose. It fled away. The ship traveled
backward where there was no air.
"And here we go," said McCauley.
The rocket timer was set. He pressed the blast button. A second later
he came out of near-unconsciousness and set it again. There was another
rocket blast. He almost recovered from the effect of it before he set
the timer for a third.
Doggedly he set the timer and pressed the button, and allowed himself
three full breaths and set it and pressed again. The shocks seemed to
become more and more violent and intolerable. They were. With loss of
mass, the acceleration of the lightened ship went up to twenty-two
gees. He cut the blasts to three-quarters of a second. A rocket cannot
be throttled down. It fires full blast or it has no appreciable effect
at all.
* * * * *
Quartermain Base was built on a flat, flat plain that extended miles
in every direction. Its buildings, from a reasonable distance, were
only toy structures, tiny angular objects in the middle of vastness.
Overhead there was a sky of absolute blue. It was empty. Below, there
was flatness to the horizon. It contained nothing. There was no motion
of any sort anywhere. The base lay still and silent under the baking
two-o'clock sun. Nothing happened. Nothing....
No. Something was happening. Specks moved out of the miniature
buildings. Dots rolled out of the infinitesimal garages. The dots and
the specks seemed to mill about uncertainly and then to come to a
restless, not-quite stillness. It seemed that something was expected
to happen. But there was nothing that could. There was only a great
emptiness and a great stillness....
But then there came a faint roaring. It was very faint indeed. It
strengthened, and diminished, and strengthened again.
Then a mote appeared in the sky. It came down and down and down,
bellowing. The bellowing was the unmistakable sound of ramjets. And
the thinnest of high-pitched sounds arose from the specks which were
men outside the buildings at the base. The sounds were howls of
triumph, shrieks of rejoicing, of gladness that the impossible had been
accomplished.
The X-21 came wabbling down out of the sky and leveled off a bare
hundred feet above the pebbly plain. It lowered, and lowered, and
suddenly yellow dust spouted furiously where its wheels had touched.
The roaring cut off. The ship rolled and rolled. Later, it would
develop that less than one quart of ramjet fuel remained to be burned
before it hit ground.
Shouting, swarming men rushed toward it. Dots which were trucks and
cars raced to greet it.
Presently McCauley saluted very formally, standing before a general
whose cap was badly ripped on one side.
"Sir," he said, "it looks like we did it. And I'd like to say, sir,
that I am very proud to have had Major Furness with me. He's hurt, sir,
as I radioed to Hawaii. The ambulance is rushing him to hospital. But
he stuck to his job throughout, sir, and I'll be obliged if you'll tell
his son that he should be very proud of his father."
_3_