Out of Control!
Rick came back to painful consciousness. He realized that the
acceleration was at an end. The torture of G forces was over, and
whatever happened from here on wouldn't compare with the past few
minutes.
He tried to sit up, and strained muscles reacted. He groaned with pain
and lay down again. Suddenly he realized he was no longer on the floor!
He hung in the air, as though by some weird magic, and tried to figure
out what had happened to him. Of course he was weightless! The rocket
was now in free flight, its inertia counteracting gravitational pull. He
would continue weightless until gravity took over again.
[Illustration: _Rick hung in the air, as though suspended by some weird
magic_]
It was comfortable, after the racking acceleration. He could have gone
to sleep easily, and almost did. Then the spacemonk chirruped at him
uneasily. The marmoset was feeling the odd weightlessness, too.
The chirrup brought Rick back to his senses. He wasn't in some marvelous
bed, he was in space! But natural forces still bound him to earth, and
mother earth would reclaim him with crushing, final impact within a very
few minutes.
He tasted blood. The Earthman had done this! His death would be on the
Earthman's head. He knew the drone control couldn't function, but he
didn't know why. He was only sure of one thing. The Earthman was a
member of the electronics department. Only someone who knew the drone
system intimately could have bypassed the control by wiring it so the
board showed green even when the control wasn't working.
Rising anger stirred him. With one trembling hand he reached out and
managed to hook the channel on which the marmoset's chair was hung. He
pulled himself erect. He had forgotten he was weightless. He kept right
on going until his head banged painfully on the bottom of the nose-cone
radar unit. The shock of pain, unlike the throbbing from the
acceleration, cleared his head and made him angrier.
Carefully now, he hauled himself down again. He patted the spacemonk as
he went by, an absent-minded, comradely gesture. He was intent on the
drone control in the center of the floor. The Earthman hadn't had much
time. Whatever he had done to sabotage the control must have been done
in a very few minutes.
Rick got into position, kneeling on the deck, steadying himself with one
hand. With the other he searched for his flashlight and found it hanging
from his belt. His head sagged, and had it not been for the
weightlessness he would have fallen forward onto the drone control. He
was in worse shape than he realized. Then, some inner warning signal
sounded, and he came back to consciousness with a start.
The startled reaction was enough to move him away from the drone control
and break his loose grip. He slid through the air back against the
bulkhead wall and felt the warmth that had not yet drained off into
space. It was the heat of rapid passage through the atmosphere.
He thought grimly that the heat would be much worse when the rocket
re-entered the atmosphere. Unless Jerry Lipton could somehow get
control, the plunging rocket would flame like a meteor.
He moved back to the drone control, using his hands as paddles. His
wrists were limp and his control was poor, but he made it. He had the
flashlight now, and he shot its beam into the maze of wiring.
The cut wire dangled, its end gleaming redly in the light beam. Cutting
the wire should have broken the circuit, but it hadn't. Why?
If the cut wire hadn't interrupted the circuit, that meant the circuit
had been bypassed. Rick was sure a signal had gotten to the blockhouse
somehow, showing that the drone control was operating.
He had it. Look for other cut wires. It didn't matter whether he found
the bypass circuit or not. The signal to the blockhouse wasn't important
for the moment, but getting the control back into operation was. He knew
the board must still show green down where Earle and Gould were sitting,
almost three hundred miles below.
Tracing the visible wires wasn't easy. There were dozens of them, and
they all looked alike. His head wasn't working and his eyes kept seeing
gray fog. Why, he knew this gadget by heart! He'd practically built most
of it, and he'd checked it out half a dozen times.
Something was wrong inside the control box, but he couldn't put his
finger on it.
He checked carefully, tracing the wiring with blurred eyes. Then, in a
moment of clarity, he saw it! Someone had put an alligator clip in the
box. It was clamping a wire to a terminal post. He shook his head.
Pretty sloppy work. It made no sense at all to use a clip on a permanent
wiring job. Who had done it? Didn't he know the clip was apt to vibrate
off during the flight?
The grayness slipped away again and he recognized the circuit. Of
course! He had found the bypass. The wire ran from the main, incoming
signal circuit into the master control circuit. The Earthman had done
this! What he had done was to feed the signal from the blockhouse right
back to the blockhouse over the check-signal circuit, completely
bypassing the drone control, which was still in operating condition but
which now could not get the signals to activate it.
Rick studied the control carefully. He had to restore the circuit, but
he couldn't for the life of him figure how to do it. Normally, before
the crushing acceleration, he would have recognized the difficulty in a
flash. Now his confused mind had to labor through steps that sometimes
took him off on a wild tangent.
The rocket was slowing rapidly now. It reached maximum altitude and
hesitated briefly.
One side of the rocket was brilliant with sunlight--raw, unfiltered
light not meant for human eyes. The other side was black. On the sunny
side, the rocket was heating from absorbed solar energy. On the dark
side, the heat was radiating off. But the radiation was less than the
absorption of energy, and the rocket was growing appreciably warmer.
For an instant the rocket paused, nearly three hundred miles above the
earth. The space frontier was below--almost halfway back to earth. Out
here was the vacuum of space.
Rick wasn't conscious of this. He wouldn't have cared. His whole
attention was focused on the problem of the drone control. He didn't
even realize the rocket had started the downward trip until he found
himself floating upward. Then, frantically, he hauled himself back down
to the control box, ignoring the stabbing pain in his stomach as he bent
over again, one leg wrapped around the small pedestal that supported the
control.
Strength was coming back to him slowly, his normal resilience overcoming
to some extent the beating his body had taken. The grayness had thinned
somewhat. He was less inclined to slip off into semiconsciousness.
Again he examined the circuit. The essential wire that fed the drone
control the signals from the blockhouse was clipped to the terminal
post. All he had to do was unclip it and reconnect it to the
drone-control input.
He couldn't control his fingers accurately yet, and he made several
attempts to pull the alligator clip off the terminal post. Finally he
made it, and sank back exhausted from the physical effort.
Far below, in the blockhouse, the indicator light on the control panel
changed from green to red. Circuit not operating! Those in the
blockhouse had no way of knowing that it had been out of operation since
before the take-off. To them, the sudden switch in signal meant
something had gone wrong in flight.
Rick vaguely realized that the light must have changed, but he didn't
think about it. Now he had to find the proper terminal for the input
wire. He should know where it was. He had wired this circuit himself.
But try as he would, he could not find the contact.
The rocket was accelerating rapidly now, and its flight pattern was
changing slowly. Instead of dropping tail first, it was canting to one
side. In less than a minute it would be entering the outer fringes of
the atmosphere, in the region where friction against air molecules and
atoms would start heating the rocket.
Rick's flashlight beam probed the innards of the drone control. The
place from which the input wire had been ripped must be within easy
reach. Otherwise, the Earthman couldn't have disconnected it in what
must have been a short time. For another thing, it had to be within the
length of loose wire, because the Earthman had simply disconnected it,
then reconnected it in another place.
He was thinking more clearly now. He poked the loose wire around,
careless of possible shorts, and his luck held. A dozen times the bare
wire tip brushed within a tiny space of terminals that would have
shorted out the whole control.
He found the terminal.
The wire had been soldered into place. The Earthman must have used a
pair of needle-nose pliers to reach in and jerk it loose. There was a
channel in the solder where the tip had rested.
Rick tried to replace the wire, but the area was too small for his hand.
When he had wired the contact originally, the chassis had been sitting
in the open on his workbench. Now it was encased in aluminum, except on
the top where he had removed the cover plate.
He was conscious suddenly of a faint hiss. It was so faint that he
didn't even notice it at first. Then, with sudden horror, he realized
what it was. The rocket was striking the atmosphere! There wasn't yet
enough air to act on the control surfaces. But soon the rocket would
enter the denser layers of air and the airfoils would take hold. The
rocket would turn over and plunge nose-down.
With the renewed energy of fear, Rick started to work again. He thrust
his hand into the box, tearing the skin on the metal edge. He couldn't
reach the terminal.
If he could only open the box in some way. But he couldn't do it with
his bare hands. He needed a tool of some kind. He started to search his
pockets and his hand brushed the kit at his belt. The pliers! He had
completely forgotten them. He shook his head, and sweat ran down the
sides of his face.
The rocket continued its rapidly accelerating fall, and heat built up,
even from the thin air at a hundred and twenty miles. At the rocket's
velocity of fall, Rick had less than two minutes to live. Pegasus was
approaching dense air that would heat its skin to incandescence.
With the pliers he tore at the side of the box and managed to chew out a
piece of the thin aluminum. Then he bent back the jagged edges and tried
again. The wire touched the terminal.
Now to hold it in place!
He searched through the tool kit again, but found nothing that was
useful for this purpose. The wire had to be locked in place fairly
tightly, or it would tear loose just from vibration.
Again he flashed the light around, noting absently that he could see
better. Light was diffusing into the cabin now that Pegasus had reached
lower altitude.
The light fell on Prince Machiavelli. The spacemonk was taped tightly.
Instruments were held to his shaven skin by surgical tape. Rick pulled
himself to the monk's side and found an end of tape. It held the
stethoscope. He pulled it free and the monk chattered at him excitedly.
"Sorry, boy," Rick muttered. The side-cutting pliers weren't the best
tools, but he managed to chew off a piece of the tape. It was ragged,
but it would have to do. Holding the piece of tape in the pliers, he
pressed it down against the wire, forcing the wire tip into its tiny
groove. Then he rubbed it with the blunt end of the pliers, trying to
get a good bond between the tape and the solder of the junction.
He drew back and waited. The connection was made. He knew that the rush
of air outside was louder, and he suddenly realized that the cabin was
very hot. Jerry Lipton would have taken over control long ago! Why
wasn't the control responding?
Rick fought down the fear that gripped at his throat and made breathing
hard. He couldn't panic! There must be something still wrong. But what
was it?
The flashlight beam moved over the maze of wiring, then stopped on the
coppery gleam of a cut wire.
Of course! When he had pulled the alligator clip, the board had showed
red. Jerry didn't know the controls were working!
Rick tried to reconnect the wire he had cut. The ends barely touched;
the wire had been tight. He couldn't hold contact.
Jerry had to understand that the controls were working. If only he had a
microphone, a key--anything with which to signal.
The heat was increasing rapidly. The temperature must surely be over a
hundred. Pegasus had reached the air again, and was falling out of
control!