Rip turned the volume of his communicator down a little and spoke in a
normal voice. "I hear you. Am I clear?"
"Yessir. All men dressed and ready."
Rip made a final check. He counted his men, then personally inspected
their suits. The boats were next. They were typical landing craft, shaped
like rectangular boxes. There was no need for streamlining in the vacuum
of space. They were not pressurized. Only men in space suits rode in the
ungainly boxes.
He checked all blast tubes to make sure they were clear. There were small
single tubes on each side of the craft. A clogged one could explode and
blow the boat up.
Koa, he knew, had checked everything, but the final responsibility was
his. In space, no officer or sergeant took anyone’s word for anything that
might mean lives. Each checked every detail personally.
Rip looked around and saw the Planeteers watching him. There was approval
on the faces behind the clear helmets, and he knew they were satisfied
with his thoroughness.
At last, certain that everything was in good order, he said quietly,
"Pilots, man your boats."
Dowst got into one and a spaceman into the other. Dowst’s boat would stay
with them on the asteroid. The spaceman would bring the other to the ship.
Commander O’Brine stepped through the valve into the boat lock. A spaceman
handed him a hand communicator. He spoke into it. Rip couldn’t have heard
him through the helmet otherwise. "All set, Foster?"
"Ready, sir."
"Good. The long-range screen picked up a blip a few minutes ago. It’s
probably that Connie cruiser."
Rip swallowed. The Planeteers froze, waiting for the commander’s next
words.
"Our screens are a little better than theirs, so there’s a slim chance
they haven’t picked us up yet. We’ll drop you and get out of here. But
don’t worry. We have your orbit fixed and we’ll find you when the screens
are clear."
"Suppose they find us while you’re gone?" Rip asked.
"It’s a chance," O’Brine admitted. "You’ll have to take spaceman’s luck on
that one. But we won’t be far away. We’ll duck behind Vesta or another of
the big asteroids and hide so their screens won’t pick up our motion.
Every now and then we’ll sneak out for a look, if the screen seems clear.
If those high-vack vermin do find you, get on the landing boat radio and
yell for help. We’ll come blasting."
He waved a hand, thumb and forefinger held together in the ancient symbol
for "everything right," then ordered, "Get flaming." He stepped through
the valve.
"Clear the lock," Rip ordered. "Open outer valve when ready."
[Illustration: "Get Flaming, Foster!"]
"Get Flaming, Foster!"
He took a quick final look around. The pilots were in the boats. His
Planeteers were standing by, safety lines already attached to the boats
and their belts. He moved into position and snapped his own line to a ring
on Dowst’s boat. The spacemen vanished through the valve and the massive
door slid closed. The overhead lights flicked out. Rip snapped on his belt
light and the others followed suit.
In front of the boxlike landing boats a great door slid open and air from
the lock rushed out. Rip knew it was only imagination, but he felt for a
moment as though the bitter cold of space, near absolute zero, had
penetrated his suit. Beyond the lights from their belts he saw stars, and
recognized the constellation for which the space cruiser was named. A
superstitious spaceman would have taken that as a good sign. Rip admitted
that it was nice to see.
"Float ’em," he ordered.
The Planeteers gripped handholds at the entrance with one hand and
launching rails on the boats with the other and heaved. The boats slid
into space. As the safety lines tightened, the Planeteers were pulled
after the boat.
Rip left his feet with a little spring and shot through the door. Directly
below him the asteroid gleamed darkly in the light of the tiny sun. His
first reaction was, "Great Cosmos! What a little chunk of rock!" But that
was because he was used to looking from the space platform at the great
curve of Terra or at the big ball of the moon. Actually the asteroid was
fair-sized when compared with most of its kind.
The Planeteers hauled themselves into the boats by their safety lines. Rip
waited until all were in, then pulled himself along his own line to the
black square o£ the door. Koa was waiting to give him a hand into the
craft.
The Planeteers were standing, except for Dowst. Rip had never seen an
old-type railroad or he might have likened the landing boat to a railroad
box car. It was about the same size and shape, but it had huge "windows"
on both sides and in front of the pilot—windows that were not enclosed.
The space-suited men needed no protection.
"Blast," Rip ordered.
A pulse of fire spurted from the top of each boat, driving them
bottom-first toward the asteroid.
"Land at will," Rip said.
The asteroid loomed large as he looked through an opening. It was rocky,
but there were plenty of smooth places.
Dowst picked one. He was an expert pilot and Rip watched him with
pleasure. The exhaust from the top lessened and fire spurted soundlessly
from the bottom. Dowst balanced the opposite thrusts of the top and bottom
blasts with the delicacy of a man threading a needle. In a few moments the
boat was hovering a foot above the asteroid. Dowst cut the exhausts and
Rip stepped out onto the tiny planet.
The Planeteers knew what to do. Corporal Pederson produced hardened steel
spikes with ring tops. Private Trudeau had a sledge. Driving the first
spike would be the hardest, because the action of swinging the hammer
would propel the Planeteer like a rocket exhaust. In space, the law that
every action has an equal and opposite reaction had to be remembered every
moment.
Rip watched, interested in how his men would tackle the problem. He didn’t
know the answer himself, because he had never driven a spike on an
airless, almost gravityless world and no one had ever mentioned it to him.
Pederson searched the gray metal with his torch and found a slender spur
of thorium perhaps two feet high a short distance from the boat. "Here’s a
hold," he said. "Come on, Frenchy. You, too, Bradshaw."
Trudeau, carrying the sledge, walked up to the spur of rock and stood with
his heels against it. Pederson sat down on the ground with the spur
between his legs. He stretched, hooking his heels around Trudeau’s ankles,
anchoring him. With his gloves he grabbed the seat of the Frenchman’s
space suit.
Bradshaw took a spike and held it against the gray metal ground. The
Frenchman swung, his hammer noiseless as it drove the tough spike in. A
few inches into the metal was enough. Bradshaw took a wrench from his
belt, put it on the head of the spike and turned it. Below the surface,
teeth on the spike bit into the metal. It would hold.
The rest was easy. The spike was used to anchor Trudeau while he drove
another, at his longest reach. Then the second spike became his anchor,
and so on, until enough spikes had been set to lace the boat down against
any sudden shock.
The boat piloted by the spaceman was tied to the one that would remain and
the Planeteers floated its supplies through a window. It took only a few
moments, with Planeteers forming a chain from inside the boat to a spot a
little distance away. Even the heaviest crates weighed almost nothing.
They passed them from one to the other like balloons.
"All clear, sir," Koa called.
Rip stepped inside and made a quick inspection. The box was empty except
for the spaceman pilot. He put a hand on the pilot’s shoulder. "On your
way, Rocky. Thanks."
"You’re welcome, sir." The pilot added, "Watch out for high vack."
Rip and Koa stepped out and walked a little distance away. Santos and
Pederson cast the landing boat adrift and shoved it away from the anchored
boat. In a moment fire spurted from the bottom tube, spreading over the
dull metal and licking at the feet of the Planeteers.
Rip watched the boat rise upward to the great, sleek, dark bulk of the
_Scorpius_. The landing boat maneuvered into the air lock with brief
flares from its exhausts. In a few moments the sparkling blast of
auxiliary rocket tubes moved the spaceship away. O’Brine was putting a
little distance between his ship and the asteroid before turning on the
nuclear drive. The ship decreased in size until Rip saw it only as a dark,
oval silhouette against the Milky Way, then the exhaust of the nuclear
drive grew into a mighty column of glowing blue and the ship flamed into
space.
For a moment Rip had a wild impulse to yell for the ship to come back. He
had been in vacuum before, but only as a cadet, with an officer in charge.
Now, suddenly, he was the one responsible. The job was his. He stiffened.
Planeteer officers didn’t worry about things like that. He forced his mind
to the job in hand.
The next step was to establish a base. The base would have to be on the
dark side of the asteroid, once it was in its new orbit. That meant a
temporary base now and a better one later, when they had blasted the
little planet onto its new course. He estimated roughly the approximate
positions where he would place his charges, using the sun and the star
Canopus as visual guides.
"This will do for a temporary base," he announced. "Rig the boat
compartment. While two of you are doing that, the rest break out the
rocket launcher and rocket racks and assemble the cutting torch. Koa will
make assignments."
While the sergeant-major translated Rip’s general instructions into
specific orders for each man, the young lieutenant walked to the edge of
the sun belt. There was no atmosphere, so the edge was a sharp line
between dark and light. There wasn’t much light, either. They were too far
from the sun for that. But as they neared the sun, the darkness would be
their protection. They would get so close to Sol that the metal on the sun
side would get soft as butter.
He bent close to the uneven surface. It was clean metal, not oxidized at
all. The thorium had never been exposed to oxygen. Here and there,
pyramids of metal thrust up from the asteroid, sometimes singly, sometimes
in clusters. They were metal crystal formations. He guessed that once,
long ages ago, the asteroid had been a part of something much bigger,
perhaps a planet. One theory said the asteroids were formed when a planet
exploded. This asteroid might have been a pocket of pure thorium in the
planet.
There would be plenty to do in a short while, but meanwhile he enjoyed the
sensation of being on a tiny world in space with only a handful of
Planeteers for company. He smiled. "King Foster," he said to himself.
"Monarch of a thorium space speck." It was a rather nice feeling, even
though he laughed at himself for thinking it. Since he was in command of
the detachment, he could in all truth say this was his own personal
planet. It would be a good bit of space humor to spring on the folks back
on Terra.
"Yep, I was boss of a whole world, once. Made myself king. Emperor of all
the metal molecules and king of the thorium spurs. And my subjects obeyed
my every command." He added, "Thanks to Planeteer discipline. The
detachment commander is boss."
He reminded himself that he’d better stop gathering spacedust and start
acting like a detachment commander. He walked back to the landing boat,
stepping with care. With such low gravity a false step could send him high
above the asteroid. Of course that would not be dangerous, since the space
suits were equipped with six small compressed air bottles for emergency
propulsion. But it would be embarrassing.
Inside the boat, Dowst and Nunez were setting up the compartment. Sections
of the rear wall swung out and locked into place against airtight seals,
forming a box at the rear end of the boat. Equipment sealed in the stern
next to the rocket tube supplied light, heat, and air. It was a simple but
necessary arrangement. Without it, the Planeteers could not have eaten.
There was no air lock for the compartment. The half of the detachment not
on duty would walk in, seal it up, turn on the equipment, and wait until
the gauges registered sufficient air and heat, then remove their space
suits. When it was time to leave again, they would don suits, open the
door and walk out, and the next shift would enter and repeat the process.
Earlier models had permanent compartments, but they took up too much room
in craft designed for carrying as many men and as much equipment as
possible. They were strictly work boats, and hard experience had showed
the best design.
The rocket launcher was already set up near the boat. It was a simple
affair, with four adjustable legs bolted to ground spikes. The legs held a
movable cradle in which the rocket racks were placed. High-geared hand
controls enabled the gunner to swing the cradle at high speed in any
direction except straight down. A simple, illuminated optical sight was
all the gunner needed. Since there was no gravity and no atmosphere in
space, the missiles flashed out in a straight line, continuing on into
infinity if they missed their targets. Proximity fuses made this a remote
possibility. If the rocket got anywhere near the target, the shell would
explode.
Rip found his astrogation instruments set carefully to one side. He took
the data sheets from his case and examined them. Now came the work of
finding the exact spots in which to place his atomic charges. Since the
computer aboard ship had done all the mathematics necessary, he needed
only to take sights to determine the precise positions.
He took a transit-like instrument from the case, pulled out the legs of
its self-contained tripod, then carried it to a spot near where he had
estimated the first charge would be placed. The instrument was equipped
with three movable rings to be set for the celestial equator, for the zero
meridian, and for the right ascension of any convenient star. Using a
regular level would have been much simpler. The instrument had one, but
with so little gravity to activate it, the thing was useless.
The sights were specially designed for use in space and his bubble was no
obstacle in taking observations. He merely put the clear plastic against
the curved sight and looked into it much as he would have looked through a
telescope on earth.
As he did so, a hint of pale pink light caught the corner of his eye. He
backed away from the instrument and turned his head quickly, looking at
the colorimeter-type radiation detector at the side of his helmet. It was
glowing.
An icy chill sent a shiver through him. Great, gorgeous galaxies! He had
forgotten ... had Koa and the others? He turned so fast he lost balance
and floated above the surface like a captive balloon. Santos, who had been
standing near by to help if requested, hooked a toe on a ground spike,
caught him, and set him upright on the ground again.
"Get me the radiation detection instruments," he ordered.
Koa sensed the urgency in his voice and got the instruments himself. Rip
switched them on and read the illuminated dial on the alpha counter.
Plenty high, as was natural. But no danger there—alpha particles couldn’t
penetrate the space suits. Then, his hand clammy inside the space glove,
he switched on the other meter. The gamma count was far below the alpha,
but there were too many of the rays around for comfort. Inside the helmet,
his face turned pale.
There was no immediate danger. It would take many days to build up a dose
of gamma that could hurt them. But gamma was not the only radiation. They
were in space, fully exposed to equally dangerous cosmic radiation.
The Planeteers had gathered while he read the instruments. Now they stood
watching him. They knew the significance of what he had found.
"I ought to be busted to recruit," he told them. "I knew this asteroid was
thorium, and that thorium is radioactive. If I had used my head, I would
have added nuclite shielding to the list of supplies the _Scorpius_
provided. We could have had enough of it to protect us while around our
base, even if we couldn’t be protected while working on the charges. That
would at least have kept our dosage down enough for safety."
"No one else thought of it, either, sir," Koa reminded.
"It was my job to think of it, and I didn’t. So I’ve put us in a time
squeeze. If the _Scorpius_ gets back soon, we can get the shielding before
our radiation dosage has built up very high. If the ship doesn’t come
back, the dosage will mount."
He looked at them grimly. "It won’t kill us, and it won’t even make us
very sick. I’ll have the ship take us off before we build up that much
dosage."