In the same instant, Rip saw that they would land on the dark side. The
asteroid was turning over and over, and for a second he had the impression
he was looking at a turning globe of the earth, the kind used in
elementary school back home. But this gray planet was scarcely bigger than
the giant globe at the entrance of the Space Council building on Terra.
The gray metal world suddenly leaped into sharp focus and seemed to rush
toward him. It was an optical illusion. The ability of the eyes to
perceive depth sharply—the faculty known as depth perception—didn’t appear
to operate normally until the eyes were within a certain distance of an
object.
He knew he was going to hit hard. The way to keep from being hurt was to
turn the vertical energy of his arrival into motion in another direction.
As he swept down to the metal surface he started running, his legs pumping
wildly in space. He hit with a bone-jarring thud, lost his footing and
fell sideways, both hands cradling his helmet. He got to his feet
instantly and looked for Santos. A good thing his equipment was
shock-mounted, he thought. Otherwise the communicator would be knocked for
a line of galaxies.
"You all right, sir?" Santos called anxiously.
"Yes. Are you?"
"I’m fine. I think the others are over there." He pointed.
"We’ll find them," Rip said. His hip hurt like fury from smashing against
the unyielding metal, and the worst part was that he couldn’t rub it. The
blow had been strong enough to hurt through the heavy fabric and air
pressure, but his hand wasn’t strong enough to compress the suit. Just the
same, he tried.
And while he was trying, he found himself in direct sunlight!
He had forgotten to run. Standing still on the asteroid meant turning with
it, from darkness into sunlight and back again. He yelled at Santos and
legged it out of there, moving in long, gliding steps. He regained the
shadow and kept going.
The first order of business was to stop the rock from turning. Otherwise
they couldn’t live on it.
Rip knew that they had only one means of stopping the spin. That was to
use the tubes of rocket fuel left over from correcting the course. They
had three tubes left, but he didn’t know if that was enough to do the job.
Moving rapidly, he and Santos caught up to Koa and the Planeteers.
The Connie prisoners were pretty well bunched up, gliding along like a
herd of fantastic sheep. Their shepherds were Pederson, Nunez, and Dowst.
The three Planeteers had a pistol in each hand. The spares were probably
those taken from prisoners.
The Planeteers were loaded down with equipment. A few Connie prisoners
carried equipment, too.
Trudeau had the rocket launcher and the remaining rockets. Kemp had his
torch and two tanks of oxygen. Bradshaw had tied his safety line to the
squat containers of chemical fuel for the torch and was towing them behind
like strange balloons. The only trouble with that system, Rip thought, was
that Bradshaw could stop, but the containers would have a tendency to keep
going. Unless the English Planeteer were skillful, his burdens would drag
him right off his feet.
Dominico had a tube of rocket fuel under each arm. The Italian was small
and the tubes were bulky. Each was about ten feet long and two feet in
diameter. With any gravity or air resistance at all, the Italian couldn’t
have carried even one.
Rip smiled as Dominico glided along. He looked as though the tubes were
floating him over the asteroid, instead of the other way around.
Santos took the radiation detection instruments and the case with the
astrogation equipment from Koa. Rip greeted his men briefly, then took his
computing board and began figuring. He knew the men were glad he and
Santos had made it. But they kept their greetings short. A spinning
asteroid was no place for long and sentimental speeches.
He remembered the dimensions of the asteroid and its mass. He computed its
inertia, then figured out what it would take to overcome the inertia of
the spin.
The mathematics would have been simple under normal conditions, but doing
them on the run, trying to watch his step at the same time, made things a
little complicated. He had to hold the board under his arm, run alongside
Santos while the new sergeant held the case open, select the book he
wanted, open it and try to read the tables by his belt light and then
transfer the data to the board.
His ventilator had quieted down once he got into the darkness, but now it
started whining slightly again because he was sweating profusely. Finally
he figured out the thrust needed to stop the spin. Now all he had to do
was compute how much fuel it would take.
He had figures on the amount of thrust given by the kind of rocket fuel in
the tubes. He also knew how much fuel each tube contained. But the figures
were not in his head. They were on reference sheets.
He collected the data on the fly, slowing down now and then to read
something, until a yell from Santos or Koa warned that the sun line was
creeping close. When he had all data noted on the board, he started his
mathematics. He was right in the middle of a laborious equation when he
stumbled over a thorium crystal. He went headlong, shooting like a rocket
three feet above the ground. His board flew away at a tangent. His stylus
sped out of his glove like a miniature projectile, and the slide rule
clanged against his bubble.
It happened so fast neither Koa nor Santos had time to grab him. The
action had given him extra speed and he saw with horror that he was going
to crash into Trudeau. He yelled, "Frenchy! Watch out!" Then put both
hands before him to protect his helmet. His hands caught the French
Planeteer between the shoulders with a bone-jarring thud.