"Somebody check it!" snapped Joe. "Make sure! It might amuse him to
watch us die while he knew we could get back in if we were as smart as
he is."
There were clankings on the hull. Men moved, unfastening the lines which
held them to the hull to get freedom of movement, but not breaking the
links which bound them to each other. Joe saw Haney go grimly back to
the task of throwing away the stuff that they had brought out for the
purpose. Then Mike's voice, brittle and cagey: "Haney! Quit it!"
Sanford's voice again, horribly amused. "By all means! Don't throw away
our garbage! We may need it!"
A voice snapped, "This lock's fastened." Another voice: "And this...."
Other voices, with increasing desperation, verified that every airlock
was implacably sealed fast by the presence of air pressure inside the
lock itself.
Time was passing. Joe had never noticed, before, the minute noises of
the air pressure apparatus strapped to his back. His exhaled breath went
to a tiny pump that forced it through a hygroscopic filter which at once
extracted excess moisture and removed carbon dioxide. The same pump
carefully measured a volume of oxygen equal to the removed CO_2 and
added it to the air it released. The pump made very small sounds indeed,
and the valves were almost noiseless, but Joe could hear their
clickings.
Something burned him. He had been standing perfectly still while trying
to concentrate on a way out. Sunshine had shone uninterruptedly on one
side of his space suit for as long as five minutes. Despite the
insulation inside, that was too long. He turned quickly to expose
another part of himself to the sunlight. He knew abstractedly that the
metal underfoot would sear bare flesh that touched it. A few yards away,
in the shadow, the metal of the hull would be cold enough to freeze
hydrogen. But here it was fiercely hot. It would melt solder. It might--
Mike was fumbling tin cans out of the net bag from which Haney had been
throwing them away. He was a singular small figure, standing on shining
steel, looking at one tin can after another and impatiently putting them
aside.
He found one that seemed to suit him. It was a large can. He knelt with
it, pressing a part of it to the hot metal of the satellite's hull. A
moment later he was ripping it apart. The solder had softened. He
unrolled a sort of cylinder, then bent again, using the curved inner
surface to concentrate the intolerable sunshine.
Joe caught his breath at the implication. Concentrated sunshine can be
incredibly hot. Starting with unshielded, empty-space sunshine,
practically any imaginable temperature is possible with a large enough
mirror. Mike didn't have a concave mirror. He had only a cylindrical
one. He couldn't reflect light to a point, but only to a line. Mike
couldn't hope to do more than double or triple the temperature of a
given spot. But considering what he wore on his back--!
Joe made his way clumsily to the spot where Mike now gesticulated to
Haney, trying to convey his meaning by gestures since Sanford would
overhear any spoken word.
"I get it, Mike," said Joe. "I'll help." He added: "Chief! You watch
Sanford. The rest of you try to flatten out some tin cans or find some
with flat round ends!"
He reached the spot where Mike bent over the plating. His hand moved to
cast a shadow where the light had played.
"I need more reflectors," Mike said brusquely, "but we can do it!"
Joe beckoned. There were more, hurried clankings. Space-suited figures
gathered about.
The Platform rolled on through space. Where it was bright it was very,
very bright, and where it was dark it was blackness. Off in emptiness
the many-colored mass of Earth shone hugely, rolling past. Innumerable
incurious stars looked on. The sun flamed malevolently. The moon floated
abstractedly far away.
Mike was bent above a small round airlock door. He had a distorted
half-cylinder of sheet tin between his space-gloved hands. It reflected
a line of intensified sunlight to the edge of the airlock seal. Haney
ripped fiercely at other tin cans. Joe held another strip of polished
metal. It focused crudely--very crudely--on top of Mike's line of
reflected sunshine. Someone else held the end of a tin can to reflect
more sunshine. Someone else had a larger disk of tin.
They stood carefully still. It looked completely foolish. There were six
men in frozen attitudes, trying to reflect sunshine down to a single
blindingly-bright spot on an airlock door. They seemed breathlessly
tense. They ignored the glories of the firmament. They were utterly
absorbed in trying to make a spot of unbearable brightness glow more
brightly still.
Mike moved his hand to cast a shadow. The steel was a little more than
red-hot for the space of an inch. It would not melt, of course. It could
not. And they had no tools to bend or pierce the presumably softened
metal. But Mike said fiercely:
"Keep it hot!"
He squirmed. His space suit was fabric, like the rest, but it had been
cut down to permit him to use it. It was bulkier on him than the suits
of the others. He shifted his shoulder pack. The brass valve-nipple by
which the oxygen tank was filled....
He jammed a ragged fragment of tin in place. He pressed down fiercely. A
blazing jet of fierce, scintillating, streaking sparks leaped up from
the spot where the metal glowed brightly. A hollow in the metal plate
appeared. The metal disintegrated in gushing flecks of light....
White-hot iron in pure oxygen happens to be inflammable. Iron is not
incombustible at all. Powdered steel, ground fine enough, will burn if
simply exposed to air. Really fine steel wool will make an excellent
blaze if a match is touched to it. White-hot iron, with a jet of oxygen
played upon it, explodes to steaming sparks. Technically, Mike had used
the perfectly well-known trick of an oxygen lance to pierce the airlock
door, let the air out of the lock, and so allow the outer door to be
opened.
There was a rush of vapor. The door was drilled through. Haney picked
Mike up bodily, Joe heaved the door open, and Haney climbed into it,
practically carrying Mike by the scruff of the neck. Joe panted, "Plug
the hole from the inside. Sit on it if you have to!" and slammed the
door shut.
They waited. Sanford's voice came in the ear-phones. It was higher in
pitch than it had been.
"You fools!" he raged. "It's useless! It's stupid to do useless things!
It's stupid to do anything at all--"
There were sudden scuffling clankings. Joe swung about. The Chief and
Sanford were struggling. Sanford flailed his arms about, trying to break
the Chief's faceplate while he screamed furious things about futility.
The Chief got exactly the hold he wanted. He lifted Sanford from the
metal deck. He could have thrown him away to emptiness, then, but he did
not.
He set Sanford in mid-space as if upon a shelf. The raging man hung in
the void an exact man-height above the Platform's surface. The Chief
drew back and left him there, Sanford could writhe there for a century
before the Platform's infinitesimal gravity brought him down.
"Huh!" said the Chief wrathfully. "How's Haney and Mike making out?"
Almost on the instant, twenty yards away, a tiny airlock door thrust out
from the surface of glittering metal, and helmet and antenna appeared.
"You guys can come in now," said Haney's voice in Joe's headphones.
"It's all okay. Mike's pumping out the other locks too, so you can come
in at any of 'em."
The space-suited figures clumped loudly to airlock doors. There were a
dozen or more small airlocks in various parts of the hull, besides the
great door to admit supply ships. The Chief growled and moved toward
Sanford now raging like the madman his helplessness made him.
"No," said Joe shortly. "He'd fight again. Go inside. That's an order,
Chief."
The Chief grunted and obeyed. Joe went to the nearest airlock and
entered the great steel hull.
Sanford floated in emptiness, two yards from the Space Platform he would
have turned into a derelict. He did not move farther away. He did not
fall toward it. There was nobody to listen to him. He cried out in
blood-curdling fury because other men were smarter than he was. Other
men had solved problems he could not solve. Other men were his
superiors. He screamed his rage.
Presently the Platform revolved slowly beneath him. It was turned, of
course, by the monster gyros which in turn were controlled by the pilot
gyros Joe and Haney and the Chief and Mike had repaired when saboteurs
smashed them.
The Platform rotated sedately. A great gap appeared in it. The door of
the supply ship lock moved until Sanford, floating helplessly, was
opposite its mouth.
A rod with a rounded object at its end appeared past the docked supply
ship. It reached out and touched Sanford's helmet. It was the magnetic
grapple which drew space ships into their dock.
It drew Sanford, squirming and streaming, into the great lock. The outer
doors closed. Before air was admitted to the inside, Sanford went
suddenly still.
When they took him out of his suit he was apparently unconscious. He
could not be roused. Freed, he drew his knees up to his chin in the
position in which primitive peoples bury their dead. He seemed to sleep.
Brent examined him carefully.
"Catatonia," he said distastefully. "He spent his life thinking he was
smarter than anybody else--smarter, probably, than all the universe. He
believed it. He couldn't face the fact that he was wrong. He couldn't
stay conscious and not know it. So he's blacked out. He refuses to be
anything unless he can be smartest. We'll have to do artificial feeding
and all that until we can get him down to Earth to a hospital." He
shrugged.
"We'd better report this down to Earth," Joe said. "By the way, better
not describe our screen of tin cans on radio waves. Not even microwaves.
It might leak. And we want to see if it works."
Just forty-two hours later they found out that it did work. A single
rocket came climbing furiously out from Earth. It came from the
night-side, and they could not see where it was launched, though they
could make excellent guesses. They got a single guided missile ready to
crash it if necessary.
It wasn't necessary. The bomb from Earth detonated 300 miles below the
artificial satellite. Its proximity fuse, sending out small radar-type
waves, had them reflected back by an empty sardine can thrown away from
the Platform by Mike Scandia forty-some hours ago. The sardine can had
been traveling in its own private orbit ever since. The effect of Mike's
muscles had not been to send it back to Earth, but to change the center
of the circular orbit in which it floated. Sometimes it floated above
the Platform--that was on one side of Earth--and sometimes below it. It
was about 300 miles under the Platform when it reflected urgent,
squealing radar frequency waves to a complex proximity fuse in the
climbing rocket. The rocket couldn't tell the difference between a
sardine can and a Space Platform.
It exploded with a blast of pure brightness like that of the sun.
The Platform went on its monotonous round about the planet from which it
had risen only weeks before. Sanford was strapped in a bunk and fed
through a tube, and on occasion massaged and variously tended to keep
him alive. The men on the Platform worked. They made telephoto maps of
Earth. They took highly magnified, long-exposure photographs of Mars,
pictures that could not possibly be made with such distinctness from the
bottom of Earth's turbulent ocean of air.
There was a great deal of official business to be done. Weather
observations of the form and distribution of cloud masses were an
important matter. The Platform could make much more precise measurements
of the solar constant than could be obtained below. The flickering radar
was gathering information for studies of the frequency and size of
meteoric particles outside the atmosphere. There was the extremely
important project for securing and sealing in really good vacua in
various electronic devices brought up by Joe and his crew in the supply
ship.
But sometimes Joe managed to talk to Sally.
It was very satisfying to see her on the television screen in personal
conversation. Their talk couldn't be exactly private, because it could
be picked up elsewhere. It probably was. But she told Joe how she felt,
and she wanted to read him the newspaper stories based on the reports
Brent had sent down. Brent was in command of the Platform now that
Sanford lay in a resolute coma in his bunk. But Joe discouraged such
waste of time.
"How's the food?" asked Sally. "Are you people getting any fresh
vegetables from the hydroponic garden?"
They were, and Joe told her so. The huge chamber in which sun-lamps
glowed for a measured number of hours in each twenty-four produced
incredibly luxuriant vegetation. It kept the air of the ship breathable.
It even changed the smell of it from time to time, so that there was no
feeling of staleness.
"And the cooking system's really good?" she wanted to know. Sally was
partly responsible for that, too. "And how about the bunks?"
"I sleep now," Joe admitted.
That had been difficult. It was possible to get used to weightlessness
while awake. One would slip, sometimes, and find himself suddenly tense
and panicky because he'd abruptly noticed all over again that he was
falling. But--and yet again Sally was partly responsible--the bunks were
designed to help in that difficulty. Each bunk had an inflatable top
blanket. One crawled in and settled down, and turned the petcock that
inflated the cover. Then it held one quite gently but reassuringly in
place. It was possible to stir and to turn over, but the feeling of
being held fast was very comforting. With a little care about what one
thought of before going to sleep, one could get a refreshing eight
hours' rest. The bunks were luxury.
Sally said: "The date and time's a secret, of course, because it might
be overheard, but there'll be another ship up before too long. It's
bringing landing rockets for you to come back with."
"That's good!" said Joe. It would feel good to set foot on solid ground
again. He looked at Sally and said eagerly, "We've got a date the
evening I get back?"
"We've got a date," she said, nodding.
But it couldn't very well be a definite date. There were people with
ideas that ran counter to plans for Joe to get back to Earth and a date
with Sally Holt. The Space Platform was not admired uniformly by all the
nations of Earth. The United States had built it because the United
Nations couldn't, and one of the attractions of the idea had been that
once it got out to space and was armed, peace must reign upon Earth
because it could smack down anybody who made war.
The trouble was that it wasn't armed well enough. Six guided missiles
couldn't defend it indefinitely. It looked as helpless as isolated
Berlin did before the first airlift proved what men and planes could do
in the way of transport. And the Platform's enemies didn't intend for it
to be saved by a rocketlift. They would try to smash it before such a
lift could get started.
A week after Joe got to it with the guided missiles, three rockets
attacked. They went up from somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. One
blew up 250 miles below the Platform. Another detonated 190 miles away.
For safety's sake the third was crashed--at the cost of one guided
missile--when it had come within 50 miles.
The screen of tin cans worked, but it wasn't thick enough. The occupants
of the Platform went about hunting for sheet metal that could be spared.
They pulled out minor partitions here and there, and went out on the
surface and threw away thousands of small glittering scraps of metal in
all directions.
Two weeks later, there was another attack. It could be calculated that
Joe couldn't have carried up more than six guided missiles. There might
be as few as two of them left. So eight rockets came up together--and
the first of them went off 400 miles from the Platform. Only one got as
close as 200 miles. No guided missiles were expended in defense.
The Platform's enemies tried once more. This time the rockets arched up
above the Platform's orbit and dived on the satellite from above. There
were two of them. They went off at 180 and 270 miles from the Platform.
Joe's trash screen would not work on Earth, but in space it was an
adequate defense against anything equipped with proximity fuses. It
could be assumed that in a full-scale space-war nuts, bolts, rusty nails
and beer bottle caps would become essential military equipment.
Three days after this last attack, a second supply ship took off from
Earth. Lieutenant Commander Brown was a passenger. Its start was just
like the one Joe's ship had made. Pushpots lifted it, jatos hurled it
on, and then the furious, flaming take-off rockets drove it valiantly
out toward the stars.
Joe's ship had been moved out of the landing lock and was moored against
the Platform's hull. The second ship made contact in two hours and
seventeen minutes from take-off. It arrived with its own landing rockets
intact, and it brought a set of forty-foot metal tubes for Joe's ship to
get back to Earth with. But those landing rockets and Lieutenant
Commander Brown constituted all its payload. It couldn't bring up
anything else.
And Lieutenant Commander Brown called a very formal meeting in the huge
living space at the Platform's center. He stood up grandly in full
uniform--and had to hook his feet around a chair leg to keep from
floating absurdly in mid-air. This detracted slightly from the dignity
of his stance, but not from the official voice with which he read two
documents aloud.
The first paper detached Lieutenant Commander Brown from his regular
naval duties and assigned him pro tem to service with the Space
Exploration Project. The second was an order directing him to take
command and assume direction of the Space Platform.
Having read his orders, he cleared his throat and said cordially, "I am
honored to serve here with you. Frankly, I expect to learn much from you
and to have very few orders to give. I expect merely to exercise such
authority as experience at sea has taught me is necessary for a tight
and happy ship. I trust this will be one."
He beamed. Nobody was impressed. It was perfectly obvious that he'd
simply been sent up to acquire experience in space for later naval use,
and that he'd been placed in command because it was unthinkable that he
serve under anyone without official rank and authority. And he quite
honestly believed that his coming, with experience in command, was a
blessing to the Platform. In fact, there was no danger that this
commander of the Platform would crack up under stress as Sanford had.
But it was too bad that he hadn't brought some long-range guided
missiles with him.
Joe's ship had brought up twenty tons of cargo and twenty tons of
landing rockets. The second ship brought up twenty tons of landing
rockets for Joe, and twenty tons of landing rockets for itself. That was
all. The second trip out to the Space Platform was a rescue mission and
nothing else. Arithmetic wouldn't let it be anything else. And there
couldn't be any idea of noble self-sacrifice and staying out at the
Platform, either, because only four ships like Joe's had been begun, and
only two were even near completion. Joe's had taken off the instant it
was finished. The second had done the same. The second pair of
spaceships wouldn't be ready for two months or more. The ships that
could be used had to be used.
So, only thirty-six hours after the arrival of the second rocketship at
the Platform, the two of them took off together to return to Earth.
Joe's ship left the airlock first. Sanford was loaded in the cabin of
the other ship as cargo. Lieutenant Commander Brown stayed out at the
Platform to replace him.
Obviously, in order to get back to Earth they headed away from it in
fleet formation. They pointed their rounded noses toward the Milky Way.
The upward course was an application of the principle that made the
screen of tin cans and oddments remain about the Platform. Each of
those small objects had had the Platform's own velocity and orbit.
Thrown away from it, the centers of their orbits changed. In theory,
the center of the Platform's orbit was the center of Earth. But the
centers of the orbits of the thrown-away objects were pushed a few
miles--twenty--fifty--a hundred--away from the center of Earth.
The returning space ships also had the orbit and speed of the Platform.
They wanted to shift the centers of their orbits by very nearly 4,000
miles, so that at one point they would just barely graze Earth's
atmosphere, lose some speed to it, and then bounce out to empty space
again before they melted. Cooled off, they'd make another grazing
bounce. After eight such bounces they'd stay in the air, and the stubby
fins would give them a sort of gliding angle and controllability, while
the landing rockets would let them down to solid ground. Or so it was
hoped.
Meanwhile they headed out instead of in toward Earth. They went out on
their steering-rockets only, using the liquid fuel that had not been
needed for course correction on the way out. At 4,000 miles up, the
force of gravity is just one-fourth of that at the Earth's surface. It
still exists; it is merely canceled out in an orbit. The ships could
move outward at less cost in fuel than they could move in.
So they went out and out on parallel courses, and the Platform dwindled
behind them. Night flowed below until the hull of the artificial
satellite shone brightly against a background of seeming sheer
nothingness.
The twilight zone of Earth's shadow reached the Platform. It glowed
redly, glowed crimson, glowed the deepest possible color that could be
seen, and winked out. The ships climbed on, using their tiny steering
rockets.
Nothing happened. The ships drew away from each other for safety. They
were 50, then 60 miles apart. One glowed red and vanished in the shadow
of the Earth. The other was extinguished in the same way. Then they went
hurtling through the blackness of the night side of Earth. Microwaves
from the ground played upon them--radar used by friend and foe
alike--and the friendly radar guided tight-beam communicator waves to
them with comforting assurance that their joint course and height and
speed were exactly the calculated optimum. But they could not be seen at
all.
When they appeared again they were still farther out from Earth than the
Platform's orbit, but no farther from each other. And they were
descending. The centers of their orbits had been displaced very, very
far indeed.
Going out, naturally, the ships had lost angular speed as they gained
in height. Descending, they gained in angular velocity as they lost
height. They were not quite 30 miles apart as they sped with increasing,
headlong speed and rushed toward the edge of the world's disk. When they
were only 2,000 miles high, the Earth's surface under them moved much
faster than it had on the way up. When they were only 1,000 miles high,
the seas and continents seemed to flow past like a rushing river. At 500
miles, mountains and plains were just distinguishable as they raced past
underneath. At 200 miles there was merely a churning, hurtling surface
on which one could not focus one's eyes because of the speed of its
movement.
They missed the solid surface of Earth by barely 40 miles. They were
moving at a completely impossible speed. The energy of their position
4,000 miles high had been transformed into kinetic energy of motion. And
at 40 miles there is something very close to a vacuum, compared to
sea-level. But compared to true emptiness, and at the speed of meteors,
the thin air had a violent effect.
A thin humming sound began. It grew louder. The substance of the ship
was responding to the impact of the thin air upon it. The sound rose to
a roar, to a bellow, to a thunderous tumult. The ship quivered and
trembled. It shook. A violent vibration set up and grew more and more
savage. The whole ship shook with a dreadful persistence, each vibration
more monstrous, more straining, more ominous than before.
The four in the space ship cabin knew torture. Weight returned to them,
weight more violent than the six gravities they had known for a bare
fourteen seconds at take-off. But that, at least, had been smoothly
applied. This was deceleration at a higher figure yet, and accompanied
by the shaking of bodies which weighed seven times as much as ever
before--and bodies, too, which for weeks past had been subject to no
weight at all.
They endured. Nothing at all could be done. At so many miles per second
no possible human action could be determined upon and attempted in time
to have any effect upon the course of the ship. Joe could see out a
quartzite port. The ground 40 miles below was merely a blur. There was
a black sky overhead, which did not seem to stir. But cloud-masses
rushed at express-train speed below him, and his body weighed more than
half a ton, and the ship made the sound of innumerable thunders and
shook, and shook and shook....
And then, when it seemed that it must fly utterly to pieces, the thunder
diminished gradually to a bellow, and the bellow to a roar, and the
roaring.... And the unthinkable weight oppressing him grew less.
The Earth was farther away and moving farther still. They were 100 miles
high. They were 200 miles high....
There was no longer any sound at all, except their gaspings for breath.
Their muscles had refused to lift their chests at all during the most
brutal of the deceleration period.
Presently Joe croaked a question. He looked at the hull-temperature
indicators. They were very, very high. He found that he was bruised
where he had strapped himself in. The places where each strap had held
his heavy body against the ship's vibrations were deeply black-and-blue.
The Chief said thickly: "Joe, somehow I don't think this is going to
work. When do we hit again?"
"Three hours plus or minus something," said Joe, dry-throated. "We'll
hear from the ground."
Mike said in a cracked voice: "Radar reports we went a little bit too
low. They think we weren't tilted up far enough. We didn't bounce as
soon as we should."
Joe unstrapped himself.
"How about the other ship?"
"It did better than we did," said Mike. "It's a good 200 miles ahead.
Down at the Shed, they're recalculating for us. We'll have to land with
six grazes instead of eight. We lost too much speed."
Joe went staggering, again weightless, to look out a port for the other
ship. He should have known better. One does not spot an eighty-foot
space ship with the naked eye when it is 200 miles away.
But he saw something, though for seconds he didn't know what it was.
Now the little ship was 300 miles high and still rising. Joe was dazed
and battered by the vibration of the ship in the graze just past. The
sister space ship hadn't lost speed so fast. It would be traveling
faster. It would be leaving him farther behind every second. It was
rising more sharply. It would rise higher.
Joe stared numbly out of a port, thinking confusedly that his hull would
be dull red on its outer surface, though the heating had been so fast
that the inner surfaces of the plating might still be cold. He saw the
vast area which was the curve of the edge of the world. He saw the
sunlight upon clouds below and glimpses of the surface of the Earth
itself.
And he saw something rising out of the mists at the far horizon. It was
a thread of white vapor. The other rocketship was a speck, a mote,
invisible because of its size and distance. This thread of vapor was
already 100 miles long, and it expanded to a column of whiteness half a
mile across before it seemed to dissipate. It rose and rose, as if
following something which sped upward. It was a rocket trail. The
violence of its writhings proved the fury with which the rocket climbed.
It was on its way to meet the other space ship.
It did. Joe saw the thread of vapor extend and grow until it was higher
than he was. He never saw the other ship, which was too small. But he
saw the burst of flame, bright as the sun itself, which was the
explosion of a proximity fuse bomb. He knew, then, that nothing but
incandescent, radioactive gas remained of the other ship and its crew.
Then he saw the trail of the second rocket. It was rising to meet him.
5
The four of them watched through the ports as the thread of vapor sped
upward. They hated the rocket and the people who had built it. Joe said
between his teeth, "We could spend our landing-rockets and make it
chase us, but it'll have fuel for that!"
The Chief muttered in Mohawk. The words sounded as if they ought to have
blue fire at their edges and smell of sulphur. Mike the midget said
crackling things in his small voice. Haney stared, his eyes burning.
Their ship was a little over 400 miles up, now. The rocket was 100 or
better. The rendezvous would be probably 200 miles ahead and
correspondingly higher. The rocket was accelerating furiously. It had
farther to travel, but its rate of climb was already enormous and it
increased every second.
The ship could swing to right or left on steering rockets, but the war
rocket could swerve also. It was controlled from the ground. It did not
need to crash the small ship from space. Within a limited number of
miles the blast of its atomic warhead would vaporize any substance that
could exist. And of course the ship could not turn back. Even the
expenditure of all its landing-rockets could not bring twenty tons of
ship to a halt. They could speed it up, so it would pass the calculated
meeting place ahead of the war rocket. But the bomb would simply follow
in a stern chase. In any case, the ship could not stop.
But neither could the rocket.
Joe never knew how he saw the significance of that fact. On land or sea,
of course, an automobile or a ship moves in the direction in which it is
pointed. Even an airplane needs to make only minor corrections for air
currents which affect it. But an object in space moves on a course which
is the sum of all its previous speeds and courses. Joe's ship was moving
eastward above the Earth at so many miles per second. If he drove
north--at a right angle to his present course--the ship would not cease
to move to the east. It would simply move northward in addition to
moving east. If the rocket from Earth turned north or east it would
continue to move up and merely add the other motion to its vertical
rise.
Joe stared at the uncoiling thread of vapor which was the murder
rocket's trail. He hated it so fiercely that he wanted to escape it
even at the cost of destruction, merely to foil its makers. At one
moment, he was hardly aware of anything but his own fury and the frantic
desire to frustrate the rocket at any cost. The next instant, somehow,
he was not angry at all. Because somehow his brain had dredged up the
fact that the war rocket could no more turn back than he could--and he
saw its meaning.
"Mike!" he snapped sharply. "Get set! Report what we do! Everybody set
for acceleration! Steering rockets ready, Chief! Get set to help, Haney!
I don't know whether we'll get out of this alive, but we'd better get
into our space suits."
Then he literally dived back to his acceleration chair and strapped in
in feverish haste. The ship was then a quarter of the way to the meeting
place and the rocket had very much farther to go. But it was rising
faster.
The ship's gyros whined and squealed as Joe jammed on their controls.
The little ship spun in emptiness. Its bow turned and pointed down. The
steering rockets made their roarings.
Joe found himself panting. "The--rocket's rising faster--than we are.
It's been gaining--altitude maybe--two minutes. It's lighter than
when--it started but--it can't stop--less than a minute, anyhow so we
duck under it----"
He did not make computations. There was no time. The war rocket might
have started at four or five gravities acceleration, but it would speed
up as its fuel burned. It might be accelerating at fifteen gravities
now, and have an attained velocity of four miles a second and still
increasing. If the little ship ducked under it, it could not kill that
rate-of-climb in time to follow in a stern chase.
"Haney!" panted Joe. "Watch out the port! Are we going to make it?"
Haney crawled forward. Joe had forgotten the radar because he'd seen the
rocket with his own eyes. It seemed to need eyes to watch it. Mike spoke
curtly into the microphone broadcasting to ground. He was reporting each
action and order as it took place and was given. There was no time to
explain anything. But Mike thought of the radar. He watched it.
It showed the vast curve of Earth's surface, 400 miles down. It showed a
moving pip, much too much nearer, which was the war rocket. Mike made a
dot on the screen with a grease pencil where the pip showed. It moved.
He made another dot. The pip continued to move. He made other dots.
They formed a curving line--curved because the rocket was
accelerating--which moved inexorably toward the center of the radar
screen. The curve would cut the screen's exact center. That meant
collision.
"Too close, Joe!" said Mike shrilly. "We may miss it, but not enough!"
"Then hold fast," yelled Joe. "Landing rockets firing, three--two--one!"
The bellowing of the landing-rockets smote their ears. Weight seized
upon them, three gravities of acceleration toward the rushing flood of
clouds and solidity which was the Earth. The ship plunged downward with
all its power. It was intolerable--and ten times worse because they had
been weightless so long and were still shaken and sore and bruised from
the air-graze only minutes back.
Mike took acceleration better than the others, but his voice was thin
when he gasped, "Looks--like this does it, Joe!" Seconds later he gasped
again, "Right! The rocket's above us and still going away!"
The gyros squealed again. The ship plunged into vapor which was the
trail of the enemy rocket. For an instant the flowing confusion which
was Earth was blotted out. Then it was visible again. The ship was
plunging downward, but its sidewise speed was undiminished and much
greater than its rate of fall.
"Mike," panted Joe. "Get the news out. What we did--and why. I'm--going
to turn the ship's head back on our--course. We can't slow enough
but--I'd rather crash on Earth than let them blast us----"
The ship turned again. It pointed back in the direction from which it
had come. With the brutal sternward pressure produced by the
landing-rockets, it felt as if it were speeding madly back where it had
come from. It was the sensation they'd felt when the ship took off from
Earth, so long before. But then the cloud masses and the earth beneath
had flowed toward the ship and under it. Now they flowed away. The
appearance was that of an unthinkably swift wake left behind by a ship
at sea. The Earth's surface fled away and fled away from them.
"Crazy, this!" Joe muttered thickly. "If the ship were lighter--or we
had more power--we could land! I'm sorry, but I'd rather----"
Haney turned his head from where he clung near the bow-ports. His
features changed slowly as he talked because of acceleration-driven
blood engorging his lips and bloating his cheeks. After one instant he
closed his eyes fiercely. They felt as if they would pop out of his
head. He gasped, "Yes! Get down to air-resistance. A chance--not good
but a chance--ejection seats--with space suits--might make it...."
He began to let himself back toward his acceleration chair. He could not
possibly have climbed forward. It was a horrible task to let himself
down, with triple his normal weight pulling at him and after the beating
taken a little while ago.
Sweat stood out on his skin as he lowered himself sternward. Once his
grip on a hand-line slipped and he had to sustain the drag of nearly six
hundred pounds by a single hand and arm. It would not be a good idea to
fall at three gravities.
The landing rockets roared and roared, and Joe tilted the bow down a
little farther, so that the streaming flood of clouds drew nearer.
Haney got to his acceleration chair. He let himself into it and his eyes
closed.