had, of course, long ago tailored his Archer to fit that shrunken right
leg. Then they just sat around in the big locker room, trying to get
used to being enclosed like this, much of the time, checking to see that
everything was functioning right, listening to the muffled voices that
still reached them from beyond their protecting encasement. They could
still have conversed, by direct sound or by helmet-radio, but the
devil-killer seemed to subdue the impulse, and for a while caused a
dreaminess that shortened the long wait...
"Okay--time to move!"
Heavy with their Archies, they filed out into desert sun-glare that
their darkened helmets made feeble. They arose in the long climb of the
gantry elevator and split into two groups, for the two rockets,
according to their GO numbers. It didn't seem to matter, now, who went
with whom. Each man had his own private sweating party. The padded
passenger compartments were above the blastoff drum freight sections.
"Helmets secure? Air-restorer systems on? Phones working? Answer roll
call if you hear me. Baines, George?"
"Here!" Two-and-Two responded, loud and plain in Frank Nelsen's phone,
from the other rocket.
"Hines, Walter?"
One by one the names were called... "Kuzak, Arthur?... Kuzak,
Joseph?..."
"Okay--the Mystic Nine, eh? Lash down!"
They lay on their backs on the padded floors, and fastened the straps.
Gimp Hines, next to Frank, seemed to have discarded his crutches,
somewhere.
The inspector swaggered around among them, jerking straps, and tapping
shoulders and buttocks straight on the floor padding with a boot toe.
"All right--not good, not too bad. Ease off--shut your eyes, maybe. The
next twenty minutes are ours. The rest are yours, except for orders. I
hope you remember your jump procedures. Also that there are a lot of
wooden nickels Upstairs--in orbit, on the Moon, anyplace. We'll call
some of your shots from the ground. Good luck--and Glory help you..."
The growl in their phones died away with the muffled footsteps. Doors
closed on their gaskets and were dogged, automatically.
Then it was like waiting five minutes more, inside a cannon barrel.
There was a buzzing whisper of nuclear exciters. The roar of power cut
in. A soft lurch told that the rockets were off the ground--fireborne.
The pressure of acceleration mounted. You closed your eyes to make the
blackness seem natural, instead of a blackout in your optic nerves, and
the threadiness of your mind seem like sleep. But you felt smothered,
just the same. Somebody grunted. Somebody gave a thick cry.
Frank Nelsen had the strange thought that, by his body's mounting
velocity, enough kinetic energy was being pumped into it to burn it to
vapor in an instant, if it ever hit the air. But it was the energy of
freedom from gravity, from the Earth, from home--_for_ adventure.
Freedom to wander the solar system, at last! He tried, still, to believe
in the magnificence of it, as the thrust of rocket power ended, and the
weightlessness of orbital flight came dizzily.
He didn't consciously hear the order to leave the orbiting GO-12, which
was moving only about five hundred feet from it's companion, GO-11. But,
like most of the others, he worked his way with dogged purpose through
what seemed a fuzzy nightmare.
The doors of the passenger compartments had opened; likewise the
blastoff drums had been ejected automatically, and were orbiting free.
Maybe it was Gimp who moved ahead of him. Looking out, Frank saw what
was certainly Ramos, already straddling a drum marked with a huge red
M.R., riding it like a jaunty troll on a seahorse. He saw the Kuzaks
dive for their initialled drums, big men not yet as apt in this new game
as in football, but grimly determined to learn fast. The motion was all
as silent as a shadow.
Then Frank jumped for his own drum, and found himself turning slowly
end-over-end, seeing first the pearl-mist curve that was the Earth, then
the brown-black, chalk-smeared sky, with the bright needle points and
the corona-winged sun in it. Instinct made him grab futilely outward,
for the sense of weightlessness was the same as endless fall. He _was_
falling, around the Earth, his forward motion exactly balancing his
downward motion, in a locked ellipse, a closed trajectory.
His mind cleared very fast--that must have been another phase of the
devil-killer shot coming into action. Controlling panic, he relocated
his drum, marked by a splashed red F.N., set his tiny shoulder ionic in
operation, and reached back to move its flexible guide, first to stop
his spin, then to produce forward motion. He got to the drum, and just
clung to it for a moment.
But in the next instant he was looking into the embarrassed, anguished
face of a person, who, like a drowning man, had come to hang onto it for
dear life, too.
"Frank, I--I even dirtied myself..."
"So what? Over there is your gear, Two-and-Two--go get it!" Frank
shouted into his phone, the receiver of which was now full of sounds--a
moaning grunt, a vast hiccuping, shouts, exhortations.
"Easy, Les," Reynolds was saying. "Can you reach a pill from the rack
inside your chest plate, and swallow it? Just float quietly--nothing'll
happen. We've got work to do for a few minutes... We'll look after you
later... Cripes, Mitch--he can't take it. Jab the knockout needle right
through the sleeve of his Archer, like we read in the manuals. The
interwall gum will seal the puncture..."
Just then the order came, maddeningly calm and hard above the other
sounds in Frank's phone: "All novices disembarked from GOs-11 and -12
must clear four-hundred mile take-off orbital zone for other traffic
within two hours."
At once Frank was furiously busy, working the darkened stellene of his
bubb from the drum, letting it spread like a long wisp of silvery cobweb
against the stars, letting it inflate from the air-flasks to a firm and
beautiful circle, attaching the rigging, the fine, radial
spokewires--for which the blastoff drum itself now formed the hub. To
the latter he now attached his full-size, sun-powered ionic motor. Then
he crept through the double sealing flaps of the airlock, to install the
air-restorer and the moisture-reclaimer in the circular, tunnel-like
interior that would now be his habitation.
He wasn't racing anything except time, but he had worked as fast as he
could. Still, Gimp Hines had finished rigging his bubb, minutes ahead of
Frank, or anybody else. On second thought, maybe this was natural
enough. Here, where there was no weight, his useless leg made no
difference--as the space-fitness examiners must have known. Besides,
Gimp had talented fingers and a keen mechanical sense, and had always
tried harder than anybody.
Ramos was almost as quick. Frank wasn't much farther behind. The Kuzaks
were likewise doing all right. Two-and-Two was trailing some, but not
very badly.
"Spin 'em!" Gimp shouted. "Don't forget to spin 'em for
centrifuge-gravity and stability!"
And so they did, each gripping the rigging at their bubb rims, and using
the minute but accumulative thrust of the shoulder ionics of their
Archers, to provide the push. The inflated rings turned like wheels with
perfect bearings. In the all but frictionless void, they could go on
turning for decades, without additional impetus.
"We've made it--we're Out Here--we're all right!" Ramos was shouting
with a fierce exultation.
"Shut up, Ramos!" Frank Nelsen yelled back. "Don't ever say that, too
soon. Look around you!"
Storey and Reynolds were still struggling with their bubbs. They had
been delayed by trying to quiet Dave Lester, who now floated in a
drugged stupor, lashed to his blastoff drum.
Slowly, pushed by their shoulder ionics, Gimp, Ramos and Frank Nelsen
drifted over to see what they could do for Lester.
He was vaguely conscious, his eyes were glassy, his mouth drooled watery
vomit.
"What do you want us to do, Les?" Frank asked gently. "We could put you
back in one of the rockets. You'd be brought back to the spaceport, when
they are guided back by remote control."
"I don't know!" Lester wailed in a hoarse voice. "Fellas--I don't know!
A little falling is all right... But it goes on all the time. I can't
stand it! But if I'm sent back--I can't ever live with myself!..."
Frank felt the intense anguish of trying to decide somebody else's
quandary that might be a life or death matter which would surely involve
them all. Damn, weak-kneed kid! How had he ever gotten so far?
"We should have set up his bubb first, put him inside, and spun it to
kill that sense of fall!" Gimp said. "We'll do it, now! He should be all
right. He _did_ pass his space-fitness tests, and the experts ought to
know."
With the three of them at it, and with the Kuzaks joining them in a
moment, the job was quickly finished.
Meanwhile, the sharp, commanding voice of Ground Control sounded in
their phones, again: "GOs-11 and -12 returning to port. Is all in order
among delivered passengers? Sound out if true. Baines, George?..."
David Lester's name was called just before Frank Nelsen's, and he
managed to say, "In order!" almost firmly, creating a damnable illusion,
Frank thought. But for a moment, mixed with his anger, Frank felt a
strange, almost paternal gentleness, too.
At the end of the roll call, the doors of the GO rockets closed. Stubby
wings, useful for the ticklish operation of skip-glide deceleration and
re-entry into the atmosphere, slid out of their sheaths. Little, lateral
jets turned the vehicles around. Their main engines flamed lightly;
losing speed, they dipped in their paths, beginning to fall.
Watching the rockets leave created a tingling sense of being left all
alone, at an empty, breathless height from which you could never get
down--a height full of dazzling, unnatural sunshine, that in moments
would become the dreadful darkness of Earth's shadow.
"Hey--our spare drum--it'll drift off!" Ramos shouted.
The Kuzaks dived to retrieve the cylinder. Others followed. But there
was a peculiar circumstance. The friction cover at one of its ends hung
open. There was a trailing wisp of stellene--part of the bubb packed
inside--and a thin, angry face with rather hysterical eyes, within the
helmet of an Archer Five.
"Shhh--it ain't safe for me to come out yet," Glen Tiflin hissed
threateningly. "Damn you all--if you dare queer me...!"
"Cripes--another Jonah!" Charlie Reynolds growled.
Frank Nelsen looked at the Kuzaks, floating near.
"Well--what could we do?" Joe Kuzak, the gentler twin, whispered. "He
came back to Jarviston, to our rooming house, one night. We promised to
help him a little. What are you going to do with a character nuts enough
about space to armor up and stuff himself inside a blastoff drum? Of
course he didn't come that way from home. There's that electronic check
of drum contents at the gate of the port. But he was there on a
visitor's pass, waiting--having hitchhiked all the way to here. After
the electronic check, he figured on stowing away, while the drums were
waiting to be loaded. The only thing we did to help was to take a little
of the stuff out of the spare drum and stow it in our two drums, to
leave him some room. We thought sure he'd be caught, quick. But you can
see how he got away with it. Those U.S.S.F. boys at the port don't
really give a damn who gets Out Here."
"Okay--I'll buy it," Reynolds sighed heavily. "Good luck with the stunt,
Tif."
Tiflin only gave him a poisonous glare, as the nine fragile, gleaming
rings, the drifting men and the spare drum, orbited on into the Earth's
shadow, not nearly as dark as it might have been because the Moon was
brilliant.
"We'd better rig the parabolic mirrors of the ionics to catch the first
sunshine in about forty minutes, so we can start moving out of orbit,"
Ramos said. "We'll have to think of food, sometime, too."
"Food, yet--ugh!" Art Kuzak grunted.
Frank felt the fingers of spasm taking hold of his stomach. Most
everybody was getting fall-sick, now, their insides not finding any up
or down direction. But the guys wavered back to their bubbs. The
shoulder ionics of their Archers, though normally sun-energized, could
draw power from the small nuclear batteries of the armor during the rare
moments when there could be darkness anywhere in solar space.
The Planet Strappers stood in the rigging of their fragile vehicles,
setting the full-sized ionics to produce increased acceleration which
would gradually push the craft beyond orbit. Joe Kuzak ran a steel wire
from a pivot bolt at the hub of his ring, to tow Tiflin and his drum.
Then everybody crawled into their respective bubbs, most of them needing
the centrifugal gravity to help straighten out their fall-sickness.
"My neck is swelling, too," Frank Nelsen heard Charlie Reynolds say.
"Lymphatic glands sometimes bog down in the absence of weight. Don't
worry if it happens to some of you. We know that it straightens out."
For a few minutes it seemed that they had a small respite in their
struggle for adjustment to a fantastic environment.
"Well--I got cleaned up, some--that's better," Two-and-Two said. "But
look at the fuzzy lights down on Earth. Hell, is it right for a fella to
be looking down on the lights of Paris, Moscow, Cairo, and Rangoon--when
he hasn't ever been any farther than Minneapolis?" Two-and-Two sounded
fabulously befuddled.
David Lester started screaming again. They had left him alone and
apparently unconscious, inside his ring, because all ionics, including
his, had had to be set. Then, in the pressure of events, they had almost
forgotten him.
"I'll go look," Frank Nelsen said.
Mitch Storey was there ahead of him. Mitch's helmet was off; his dark
face was all planes and hollows in the moonlight coming through the
thin, transparent walls of the vehicle. "Should we call the U.S.S.F.
patrol, Frank?" he asked anxiously. "Have them take him off? 'Cause he
sure can't stand another devil-killer."
"We'd better," Frank answered quickly.
But now Tiflin, having deserted his blastoff drum, was coming through
the airlock flaps, too. He stepped forward gingerly, along the spinning,
ring-shaped tunnel.
"Poor bookworm," he growled in a tone curiously soft for Glen Tiflin.
"Think I don't understand how it is? And how do you know if he _wants_
to get sent back?"
Mitch had removed Lester's helmet, too. Tiflin knelt. His arm moved with
savage quickness. There was the crack of knuckles, in a rubberized
steel-fabric space glove, against Lester's jaw. His hysterical eyes
glazed and closed; his face relaxed.
For a second of intolerable fury, Frank wanted to tear Tiflin apart.
But Mitch half-grinned. "That might be an answer," he said.
They plopped where they were, and tried to rest until the orbiting
cluster of rings emerged from Earth's shadow into blazing sunshine,
again. Then Mitch and Frank returned to their own bubbs to check on the
acceleration.
It was soon plain that Joe Kuzak's bubb, towing Tiflin's drum, would
lag.
"Hell!" Art Kuzak snapped. "Get that character out here to help us
inflate and rig his own equipment! We did enough for him! So if the
Force notices that there are ten bubbs instead of nine, the extra is
still just our spare... Hey--Tiflin!"
"Nuts--I'm looking after Pantywaist," Tiflin growled back.
"Awright," Art returned. "So we just cast your junk adrift! Come on,
boy!" There was no kidding in the dry tone.
Tiflin snarled but obeyed.
Ions jetting from the Earthward hub-ends of the rotating rings, yielded
their steady few pounds of thrust. The gradual outward spiral began.
"Cripes--I'm not sure I can even astrogate to the Moon," Two-and-Two was
heard to complain.
"I'll check your ionic setting for you, Two-and-Two," Gimp answered him.
"After that the acceleration should continue properly without much
attention. So how about you and me taking first watch, while the others
ease off a little...?"
Frank Nelsen crept carefully back into his own rotating ring, still half
afraid that an armored knee or elbow might go right through the thin,
yielding stellene. Prone, and with his helmet still sealed, he slipped
into the fog which the tranquilizer now induced in his brain, while the
universe of stars, Moon, sun and Earth tumbled regularly around him.
He dreamed of yelling in endless fall, and of climbing over metal-veined
chunks of a broken world, where once there had been air, sea, desert and
forest, and minds not unlike those of men, but in bodies that were far
different. Gurgling thickly, he awoke, and snapped on his helmet phone
to kill the utter silence.
Someone muttered a prayer in a foreign tongue:
"... _Nuestra Dama de Guadalupe--te pido, por favor... Tengo miedo_--I'm
scared... _Pero pienso mas en ella_--I think more of her. _Mi chula, mi
linda_... My beautiful Eileen... Keep her--"
The prayer broke off, as if a switch was turned. It had been brash
Ramos... Now there were only some fragments of harmonica music...
Frank slipped into the blur, again, awakening at last with Two-and-Two
shaking his shoulder. "Hey, Frankie--we're five hours out, by the
chronometers--look how small the Earth has got...! We're all gonna have
brunch in Ramos' vehicle... Know what that goof ball Mex was doing,
before? Stripped down to his shorts, and with the spin stopped for
zero-G, he was bouncing back and forth from wall to wall inside his
bubb! The sun makes it nice and warm in there. Think I might try it,
myself, sometime. Shucks, I feel pretty good, now... Frankie, ain't you
hungry?"
Frank felt limp as a rag, but he felt much better than before, and he
could stand some nourishment. "Lead on, Two-and-Two," he said.
Ramos' bubb was spinning once more, but he was wearing just dungarees.
The Bunch--the Planet Strappers--with only their helmets off, were
crouched, evenly spaced, around the circular interior of the ring. Dave
Lester was there, too--staring, but fairly calm, now. In this curious
place, there was a delicious and improbable aroma of coffee--cooked by
mirror-reflected sunlight on a tiny solar stove.
"So that's the way it goes," Charlie Reynolds commented profoundly. "We
reach out for strangeness. Then we try to make it as familiar as home."
"Stew, warmed in the cans, too," Ramos declared. "Enough for a light
one-time-around. I brought the stew along. Hope you birds remember.
Then we're back on dehydrates. Hell, except for that weight problem and
consequent cost of stuff from Earth, we'd have it made, Out Here. The
Big Vacuum ain't so tough--no storms in it, even, to tear our bubbs
apart. I guess we won't ever have a bigger adventure than finding out
for ourselves that we can get along with space."
"If we had a beef roast, we'd put it in a sealed container of clear
plastic," Gimp laughed. "Set it turning, outside the bubb, on a swiveled
tether wire. It would rotate for hours like on a spit--almost no
friction. Rig some mirrors to concentrate the sun's heat. Space Force
men do things like that."
"Shut up--I'm getting _hong_-gry!" Art Kuzak roared.
Ramos poured the coffee in the thin magnesium cups that each of the
Bunch had brought. Their squeeze bottles, for zero-G drinking, were not
necessary, here. Their skimpy portions of stew were spooned on magnesium
plates. Knife and fork combinations were brought out. An apple purée
which had been powder, followed the stew. Brunch was soon over.
"That's all for now, folks," Ramos said ruefully.
Tiflin snaked a cigarette out from inside the collar of his Archer.
"Hey!" Reynolds said mildly. "Oxygen, remember? Shouldn't you ask our
host, first?"
Ramos had eased up on ribbing Tiflin months ago. "It's okay," he said.
"The air-restorers are new."
But Tiflin's explosive nerves, under strain for a long time, didn't take
it. He threw down the unlighted fag. He snicked his switch blade from a
thigh pocket. For an instant it seemed that he would attack Reynolds.
Then the knife flew, and penetrated the thin, taut wall, to its handle.
There was a frightening hiss, until the sealing gum between the double
layers, cut off the leak.
The Kuzaks had Tiflin helpless and snarling, at once.
"Get a patch, somebody--fix up the hole," Joe, the mild one, growled.
"Tiflin--me and my brother helped you. Now we're gonna sit on you--just
to make sure your funny business doesn't kill us all. Try anything just
_once_, and we'll feed you all that vacuum--without an Archer. If you're
a good boy, maybe you'll live to get dumped on the Moon as we pass by."
"Nuts--let's give this sick rat to the Space Force right now." Art Kuzak
hissed. "Here comes their patrol bubb."
The glinting, transparent ring with the barred white star was passing at
a distance.
"All is well with you novices?" The enquiring voice was a gruff drawl,
mingled with crunching sounds of eating--perhaps a candy bar.
"No!" Tiflin whispered, pleading. "I'll watch myself!"
The United Nations patrol was out, too, farther off. Another, darker
bubb, with other markings, passed by, quite close. It had foreign lines,
more than a bit sinister to the Bunch's first, startled view. It was a
Tovie vehicle, representing the other side of the still--for the most
part--passively opposed forces, on Earth, and far beyond. But through
the darkened transparency of stellene, the armored figures--again
somewhat sinister--only raised their hands in greeting.
In a minute, Frank Nelsen emerged from Ramos' ring. Floating free, he
stabilized himself, fussed with the radio antenna of his helmet-phone
for a moment, making its transmission and reception directional. On the
misty, shrinking Earth, North America was visible.
"Frank Nelsen to Paul Hendricks," he said. "Frank Nelsen to Paul
Hendricks..."
Paul was waiting, all right. "Hello, Frankie. Some of the guys talked
already--said you were asleep."
"Hi, Paul--yeah! Terra still looks big and beautiful. We're okay.
Amazing, isn't it, how just a few watts of power, beamed out in a thin
thread, will reach this far, and lots farther? Hey--will you open and
shut your front door? Let's hear the old customer's bell jingle... Best
to you, to J. John, to Nance Codiss, Miss Parks--everybody..."
The squeak of hinges and the jingling came through, clear and
nostalgically.
"Come on, Frank," Two-and-Two urged. "Other guys would like to talk to
Paul... Hey, Paul--maybe you could get my folks down to the store to say
hello to me on your transmitter. And I guess Les would appreciate it if
you got his mother..."
When the talk got private, Frank went to Mitch Storey's bubb.
"I wanted to show you," Mitch said. "I brought seeds, and these little
plastic tubes with holes in them, that you can string around inside a
bubb. The weight is next to nothing. Put the seeds in the tubes, and
water with plant food in solution. The plants come up through the holes.
Hydroponics. Gotta almost do it, if I'm going way out to Mars without
much supplies. Maybe, before I get there, I'll have even ripe tomatoes!
'Cause, with sun all the time, the stuff grows like fury, they say. I'll
have string beans and onions and flowers, anyhow! Helps keep the air
oxygen-fresh, too. Wish I had a few bumble bees! 'Cause now I'll have to
pollenate by hand..."
Nope--Mitch couldn't get away from vegetation, even in space.
The Planet Strappers soon established a routine for their journey out as
far as the Moon. There were watches, to be sure that none of the bubbs
veered, while somebody was asleep or inattentive. Always at hand were
loaded rifles, because you never knew what kind of space-soured men--who
might once have been as tame as neighbors going for a drive on Sundays
with their families--might be around, even here.
Neither Kuzak slept, if the other wasn't awake. They were watching
Tiflin, whose bubb rode a little ahead of the others. He was ostracized,
more or less.
Everybody took to Ramos' kind of exercise, bouncing around inside a
bubb--even Lester, who was calmer, now, but obviously strained by the
vast novelty and uncertainty ahead.
"I gave you guys a hard time--I'm sorry," he apologized. "But I hope
there won't be any more of that. The Bunch will be breaking up, soon, I
guess--going here and there. And if I get a job at Serenitatis Base, I
think I'll be okay."
Frank Nelsen hoped that he could escape any further part of Lester, but
he wasn't sure that he had the guts to desert him.
It wasn't long before the ionics were shut off. Enough velocity had been
attained. Soon, the thrust would be needed in reverse, for braking
action, near the end of the sixty hour journey into a circumlunar orbit.