"You always told me I was a little too skinny, Captain Brooks, sir!"
Gramps scowled darkly. "Aw, you two kids are just making fun of the
Karden, that's all. So what if we ain't got any gravity to speak of?"
The Karden had been built before each ship had its own little gravity
unit, and no one had ever bothered to refit her. Clair had set up the
guide-ropes right after acceleration, and now we floated around the
crammed little cabin of the ship if we weren't careful. I had to admit
Gramps was right, however. A little inconvenience like this didn't
really matter, and the important thing was the fact that I could look
out the port and see all the little motes of the thousand other ships
gleaming in the sunlight like tiny space-born fireflies. The Karden was
definitely holding its own.
"She's built for speed," Gramps told us. "In the old days there was no
such thing as gravity-equalizers anyhow. This soft new generation...."
I winked at Clair and said, "Go on. Go play your fiddle, Gramps, and
leave astrogation to the soft new generation."
"It's a banjo," he said. "I mean a _gui_-tar!"
Through the fore-port there was a haze of milky white which in a few
hours would separate out into the thousands of little planetoids, each
a tiny mote following its predestined course around the sun. Actually,
some weren't so small. There was the big bulk of Ceres, with a diameter
close to five-hundred miles, Vesta, and some of the other big babies,
but for the most part the asteroids were tiny cosmic specks, less than
a mile across.
"Okay," Clair said, "which one?"
That was a good question. You had to consider several things. First,
some ships sped through space faster than our Karden, and they'd claim
the really first-rate asteroids before we even reached the Belt. Of the
second-raters, you had to consider what sort of mineral deposits they
had, which would be the simplest to mine, and so forth.
"How's about 4270?" I said.
She checked the charts. "Ummm-m. Diameter, half a mile. Eccentricity
of orbit, .17. Tilted to the ecliptic, .08. Two deserted mining domes,
excellent condition. High-grade copper ore, no power tools needed.
Sounds swell, Jerry."
Gramps stopped tuning his guitar. "Copper? Did I hear you say copper?"
He snorted. "In my day men went prospecting for diamonds and other
precious stones. Or for gold or pitchblend...."
"Ever find any?" I wanted to know.
"Well, no. But that doesn't mean I couldn't have. I was just too busy
with the women on the outworlds--"
* * * * *
I looked at Clair and Clair looked at me. "4270," we said together, and
when Clair checked the charts again she found that its present orbital
position was just a few degrees off to the left.
"Two hours," I grunted. "Maybe three. If we're lucky, she'll be
deserted...."
Clair smiled. "Two domes there, Jerry. Hah--a winter home and a summer
home."
"Ain't no seasons on an asteroid," Gramps said very seriously. "Of
course, if you two kids want, you can have one dome and I can have the
other. Might be a good idea at that."
Clair told him not to be silly, that we couldn't get along without his
guitar playing anyway, and then I was busy turning us the few degrees
which would bring us into orbital conjunction with 4270. Ahead and all
around us the little sparks which were spaceships fanned out in all
directions, hurtling for their homesteads out here beyond Mars. It was
nice to know that in just a few hours--if luck held--we'd be setting up
home, living in our own place instead of the crowded barracks they set
up for transient workers back on Earth. Nice? Hell, that's all we'd
been thinking about since the announcement came through six months ago.
You really feel a small turn in an old Karden Cruiser rocketing
outward at top speed. I could feel the gravity slamming me back down
against the right-hand cushions of the pilot-chair, and I heard Gramps
muttering something under his breath. With Clair, he had remained out
of his bunk so that he could watch us blast in toward the asteroid, and
now I could picture each of them grasping stanchions for all they were
worth, peering out of the port.
I couldn't turn around to watch, of course. This landing on a tiny
asteroid is tricky business. You can't just come in and set her down
as easy as all that, floating in on the cushion of a five-hundred mile
atmosphere.
The Karden came in slowly, at right angles to the orbit, and I saw that
4270 was an amorphous hunk of greenish rock, craggy and mountainous, if
you call a ponderously turning rough-hewn slab of stone less than three
thousand feet across mountainous.
* * * * *
I worked the studs slowly, feeling the breath go out of my lungs with
each one, and soon we had executed a turn of almost ninety degrees,
with 4270 tumbling along parallel to us now, just a few miles off in
the void. You could feel its weak gravity, tugging like a child's
fingers might tug at your overcoat as you ran in another direction.
I pulled up all the studs together, and I could breathe again. For a
moment it seemed that 4270 wouldn't be strong enough to grab us and
hold us, to reel us in slowly like a fisherman with a whopper at the
end of his line. But her distance didn't increase, either--and we went
spinning along through the void with her like a lopsided dumbbell, the
tiny planetoid and the smaller Karden.
Soon 4270 grew in the fore-port, and quite suddenly she wasn't
alongside us any longer, but down below. Every time you come in
for planet-fall you get that sensation, but it never ceases to be
strange--one moment you're heading toward something which is in front
of you, the next you're hurtling down upon it headfirst.
Only with 4270's light gravity, we didn't exactly hurtle. It was more
like floating, slowly at first and then faster, and then I decided I'd
better give one short blast from our forerockets to brake the fall.
I pressed the stud and waited. There was nothing. Momentarily, the
fore-tubes had jammed. Of all the times....
I heard Clair calling my name, "Jerry, Jerry!" and then 4270's jagged
tumbling surface expanded up all around us and the planetoid didn't
look so small any more. It looked huge, it could have been Jupiter.
There came a grinding bump, and I thought I could hear my safety strap
snapping. The black-light dials of the instrument panel zoomed up at
me from someplace far beyond 4270, it seemed, and I met them head first
with a hundred rocket tubes snorting inside my skull.
* * * * *
"Good morning," Clair said cheerfully.
"Good _what_?" I answered, not so cheerful.
"You slept for twelve hours, so now it's morning."
"And durn you," Gramps chimed in. "You made one hell of a mess out of
that instrument board. Why don't you be a mite careful...."
"Hey!" I sat up suddenly, and the pinwheels began to go around in my
head like at the Martian Fair. Only bigger. Brighter. "After that
crash, did the chronometer radio our landing here to Vesta?"
Clair nodded. "I thought of that. I radioed Vesta for confirmation, and
it came. But right after that the radio went blooie, so now any music
we hear will have to come from Gramps."
"I can oblige," Gramps said, running for his guitar, but I shook my
head.
"Hold it! We've got a lot of work to do."
"Yeah, sure," said Gramps. "Only what did you think we was doing while
you slept peaceful like a baby? We wasn't playing or singing, I'll tell
you that."
Clair explained, "We were exploring, Jerry, after we made sure you were
all right. We're less than a hundred yards from one of the domes here,
and it looks darned good. Of course, I don't know yet if it can be
pressurized or if there'll be any leaks, but I think we can answer yes
to the first question and no to the second."
"What about the second dome?"
"Just about like this one, half a mile around the planet. Living
quarters in both, plenty of abandoned equipment. You also can do open
pit mining until you burrow clean through the planet. Rich lode, too,
I'd say."
"Good," I told her, and I stood up a bit shakily and took her in my
arms. I kissed her soundly.
"Jerry. Come on, stop. How can we get any work done this way, Jerry?...
Ooo, Jerry...."
A few moments later, we all donned our spacesuits.
* * * * *
Effortlessly, we carried great stacks of supplies across 4270's
crumbled, broken surface. The light gravity seemed hardly to exist
at all, and I think I could have lifted the Karden Cruiser bodily
if I desired. We made exactly two trips from the ship to the dome's
airlock, our grav-plates clomping up and down soundlessly under the
space-boots--ordinarily it'd have taken us a whole day to unload the
Karden.
The horizon was a crazy distorted thing no more than three hundred feet
away, where the planetoid's surface bent away almost at right angles,
and right on the crest against the blackness of the sky rested our
Karden. It looked pretty good on a place which Gramps told me Clair
had called ghastly when they first stepped outside to explore, but the
dome looked even better.
We stood within the lock now, and with a little squeal of delight which
I picked up over our suit intercoms, Clair ran for one of the dull
metal structures.
"Look in here," she called back over her shoulder, and I entered
through the doorway just in time to see her unscrewing her helmet.
I yelled something loud over the intercom, I don't remember what, and
then I flicked off the grav-plate button in the glove of my left hand
and dove at Clair.
I caught her just above the mid-section and we went down in a heap. I
switched on my grav-plates again.
"Just to show me how strong you are," she pouted, "you don't have to
come flying through the air and landing on my belly. Lucky you weigh
less than a pound without the grav-plates. Only quit trying to be
funny."
"Who's trying to be funny? There's only two things wrong with taking
your helmet off now. First, we haven't warmed this place, and you'd
have frozen your pretty little head off in half a minute. Second,
there's less air here than in a vacuum tube, and even after we turn on
the air generators I want to examine the dome for possible leaks before
you go around taking off your helmet. See?"
"Y-yes." She suddenly looked frightened. "It's just that the place
looks so warm and homey, Jerry."
It did. We were standing in a foyer and I could see a couple of
bedrooms off on the left, comfortable, all metal and metal fibre
construction. Further down the hall there was a pantry and when Clair
opened the door we found it to be full of canned goods, all glued to
the shelf lightly against the tricks which could be played by the
negligible gravity. Beyond that, we found a first-class, compact
kitchen unit, and you should have seen Clair's eyes light up. If
there's anything that makes a girl sparkle all over, it's the first
sight of a good kitchen over which she's to have domain. You can be
anywhere--New York or here on 4270 or out on Pluto, it wouldn't matter.
She hardly heard a word I said for the next ten minutes, as I patiently
lined up the things we must do first. Three things, primarily. We had
to start the heating units within the dome, do the same for the air
generators, and check the dome itself for any leakage.
* * * * *
Gramps took care of items one and two, and I felt an urge to take off
my helmet without checking further. But that was silly. We had played
the game right thus far, and it would be pointless to get into serious
trouble over a thing like that.
So for the next fifteen minutes, Clair and I just knocked off our
grav-plates and swarmed all over the inside of the dome like a couple
of trained houseflies. From this height I could see almost half way
around my side of the little planet, and Clair's line of vision
probably came close to meeting mine someplace around the equator. And
after a time I was satisfied that my side of the dome couldn't lose as
much as a molecule of air.
"Tight as a thermos bottle," I called over the intercom. "How's yours,
Clair?"
Her answer was a scream. It jarred me from my precarious hold on the
under surface of the dome, and I went floating to the ground as light
as a feather.
Clair still clung up on top yelling so loud that the intercom only
reproduced the sound as garbled noise and static. And I couldn't do
anything but float down slowly, with Gramps motioning me down with his
arms, as if I could do anything to hurry.
Clair scrambled down her side of the dome and waited there next to
Gramps, hands on hips, looking up at me like a vexed mistress might
look at her lap dog when he didn't come to her call soon enough. But
she looked more composed now, and she took off her helmet. The air
situation, then, was all right, and I unscrewed my own fishbowl and let
it float down beside me.
The air was a bit musty, but otherwise good, and I judged the
temperature to be about fifty degrees now. Ever strip in mid air? I
peeled off my spacesuit and watched it float down too, agonizingly
slow, and finally I alighted in my leather jumper.