"You're probably right, Mike," he agreed, without any particular heat.
"But a rather just one. I think you'll admit you've been paid off in
your own coin. All you had to do was beg off."
"In front of her? You knew I wouldn't."
"I _figured_ you wouldn't. That's one of the advantages of being
older. You know more about how the young will behave. Come on," he
said, getting up to put on his coat again. "We have to see a man."
"One thing," I said, as I got up, "while we're being so just."
"Yes?"
"I had thought of asking your Sylvia for a date. But she was so snippy
the other night I decided to forget it. Now, she got me into this, and
she'll have to pay and pay! How do I get to her? It'll be quite a
while before I'm an astronaut."
He took his pipe from between his teeth. "This calls for the wisdom of
a Solomon," he decided. "But you might try oysters."
* * * * *
It was pretty good advice. I hung behind him long enough to tell
Sylvia about the Chincoteague oysters they put in the stew at Grand
Central Terminal, and got a dinner date. That was all, just the date,
because Cleary was itching to take me to see a man.
Politics must be an awfully large part of business. The man we went to
see was the government side of COMCORP, and I guess he had had to do
as much explaining about Telstar failures to a Senate Committee as
Paul Cleary had had to do to the Western. He wanted an out just as bad
as Paul did.
There were a good many conferences before a sufficient number of
people decided the cheapest way out was to send a man to fix the
Telstars that had broken down. The question was whether it was
possible.
We went at it from two directions. They got a team assigned to
figuring out if the Dyna-Soar rocket could be modified to make the
three contacts around the orbit, carry two men and enough air and fuel
for the job, and at COMCORP we appointed a crew to figure out what it
meant to make the repair in orbit.
Cleary put me in charge of our crew. They gave me a full-size Telstar
satellite for my lab, and I went to work.
Fancy electronic equipment consists of millions of parts, and Telstar
is no exception. One of the bonuses America got from its poor rocket
booster performance, as compared with the Russians, was a forced-draft
course in miniaturization. Our engineers have learned how to make
almost anything about one-tenth the size you'd think it ought to be,
and still work. To get all these tiny parts into a total system, they
are assembled in racks. In the Telstar each of these long skinny
sticks of perforated magnesium alloy is hinged to the main framework
so that it can be swung out for testing or for replacement of parts,
which is why the engineers call each component a "gate."
I spent several weeks learning how to take each suspected component
out of the gate. Most of the time I needed a screwdriver. Sometimes I
had to drill out a soft aluminium rivet. The hard part was that some
of the components were so deep inside, even with a couple gates swung
out the way, that I needed all kinds of extension tools.
Of course, I had to visualize what it would be like doing all this out
in space. I'd be in a spacesuit, wearing thick gloves, and when I
removed a screw that would have looked good in a Swiss watch, there'd
be no work bench on which to place it while I took out the next one.
Worse yet, I would have to put it back in.
The longer I worked with the parts, the harder it looked. There
wouldn't be a prayer of just turning the parts loose in space. In
theory they'd follow along in orbit. In practice you can't bring your
hand to a halt and release a tiny part without imparting a small
proper motion to it. And even worse, you couldn't handle the little
wretches when you tried to put them back in. With a solid floor to lie
on, with gravity to give things a position orientation, I kept losing
tiny screws. Magnets didn't help, because the screws were nonmagnetic
for what seemed pretty good reasons. Some were made of dural for
lightness. Some were silicon bronze. None of them was steel.
That put us back in the lab to find out what would happen if we used
steel screws. The answer was, surprisingly, nothing important. So
there was one solid achievement. I had a few thousand of each of the
thirty-four different sizes of fasteners machined from steel, and
magnetized a fly-tier's tweezers. The result was that I could get
screws back into their holes without dropping them, especially when I
put little pads of Alnico on the point of each tweezer to give me a
really potent magnet. Then we had to cook up an offset screwdriver
with a ratchet that would let me reach in about a yard and still run
a number 0-80 machine screw up tight. That called for a kind of
torque-limit clutch and other snivies.
It was the fanciest and most expensive screwdriver you ever saw. The
handle was a good two feet long. The problem then became that of
seeing what you were doing, and one of the boys faked up a kind of
binocular jeweler's loupe with long focus, so that I could lie back a
yard from the screw and focus on it with about ten diameters
magnification. The trouble was that the long focal length gave a field
of vision about six times the diameter of the screw-head, which meant
that every time my heart beat my head moved enough to throw the field
of vision off the work.
* * * * *
By that time I was working in a simulated spacesuit--the actual number
was still being made to fit an accurate plaster cast of my body. So
the boys figured out a clamp that would hold my helmet firmly to the
gate, and a chin rack inside the helmet against which I could press
and hold my head steady enough to keep my binoculars focused where
they had to be focused. At a certain point I went back to Paul Cleary
and said I thought I could make the necessary tests, dismount what I
had to dismount, and replace any affected part.
"All worked out, eh?" he said, reaching for his pipe.
"Not by a county mile, Mr. Cleary. But I know what the problems are,
and the shop can figure out sensible answers. Some of the hardest
parts turned out to be the easiest."
"Name any three," he suggested.
"Well, the screws. As I take them out, I'll discard them into space. I
have to use magnetic screws on reassembly, so there is no point saving
what I take out. Doug Folley has doped out something like a motorman's
change-dispenser that will dispense one screw at a time into my
tweezers, and I'll carry a supply of all thirty-four kinds at my
waist."
"That's one," he counted on a hairy forefinger.
"We can use something like a double-faced pressure-sensitive tape to
hold other parts," I said. "We'll draw a diagram on it, stick it to
some unopened part of the satellite near where I'm working, and as I
pull pieces out, I'll just press them against the other sticky face,
in the correct place in the diagram, and they'll be there to pull
loose when I want them."
"At absolute zero?" he scoffed. "That sticky face will be hard as
glass."
"We'll face the bird around to the sun," I said. "And warm it up. If
we have to, we'll put wiring in the tape, connect it to Telstar's
battery supply, and keep it warm."
"Might work," he grumped. "That's two. How about the spacesuit part?"
That had been tougher. Some forty or fifty men had made the ride into
space and back from Cape Canaveral by this time, and there had been
rendezvous in space in preparation for flights to the moon. But so far
no one had done any free maneuvering in space in a suit.
[Illustration]
They had put me in a swimming pool in a concentrated salt solution
that gave me just zero buoyancy, and I had practiced a kind of
skin-diving in a spacesuit. The problem was one of mobility, and the
one thing we could not reproduce, of course, was frictionless motion.
No matter how I moved, the viscosity of the solution quickly slowed me
down. Out in space I'd have to learn on the first try how to get
around where every force imparted a motion that would continue
indefinitely until an equal and opposite force had been applied.
The force part had been worked out in theory long before. To my
spacesuit they had fixed two tiny rockets. One aimed out from the
small of my back, the other straight out from my belly. Two
pressurized containers contained hydrazine and nitric acid, which
could be released in tiny streams into peanut rocket chambers by a
single valve-release. They were self-igniting, and spurted out a
needle-fine jet of fire that imparted a few dynes of force as long as
the valve was held open. It only had two positions--full open, or
closed, so that navigation would consist of triggering the valve
briefly open until a little push had been imparted, and drifting until
you triggered the opposite rocket for braking.
The airtanks on my back were right off a scuba outfit.
Really, they spent more time on the gloves than anything else. At
first we thought of the problem as a heat problem, but it was tougher
than that. Heat loss was not much, out there in a vacuum, and they
made arrangements to warm the handles of my tools so that I wouldn't
bleed heat through my gloves to them and thus freeze my fingers. No,
the problem was to get a glove that stood up to a pressure difference
of three or four pounds per square inch and could still be flexed with
any accuracy by my fingers. We could make a glove that was pretty
thin, but it stiffened out under pressure and made delicate work
really tough. It was a lot like trying to do brain surgery in mittens.
They eventually gave me a porous glove that leaked air when you flexed
your fingers. Air, they said, could always be gotten from the
Dyna-Soar rocket that would be hanging close at hand in space. Well,
we hoped it would work. I could do pretty fair work with the leaky
gloves, and all we could hope was that the vapor would be dry enough
as it seeped out through the gloves to prevent formation of a foggy
cloud all around me, or the formation of frost on the gloves. That we
could not test under any conditions easy to simulate.
Each team spent ninety days. They tell me that's right quick work for
pointing up a launch. But at the end of three months I had assembled
enough stuff to do the job, and still well within the weight limit
they had to set. I wasn't a walking machine shop, but there was a lot
I could do if I had to.
* * * * *
Ninety days had been enough for several dates with Sylvia. Out of the
office she wasn't quite the protective harpy about Paul Cleary that
she had been in the office, although the thought was never far from
her mind.
We spent my final night in New York before leaving for the Cape at
Sweets, a real old fashioned seafood house down on Fulton street.
After the obligatory oysters, we had broiled bluefish, and otherwise
lived it up. They serve a good piece of apple pie, and we had that
with our coffee.
"Are you scared?" Sylvia asked me.
"Of what?" I lied innocently.
"Of being out in space--just floating around?"
"Yes," I told her honestly. "I'm scared to death. What if I have a
queasy stomach? They say a good half of the men who have been in orbit
have chucked up or gotten dizzy or something. What if they go to all
this trouble and I get spacesick?"
"What if you drift away and can't get back?" she said. "It isn't like
swimming back to shore."
"There's always a way," I said, my stomach tightening as I thought of
what she said.
That was the night she kissed me good night. It wasn't much of a kiss,
because we were standing in the lobby of her apartment house, and she
wasn't going to invite me up, because she never did. But she said:
"Hurry back."
"Just you know it, Shouff," I said, bitter inside.
I'd have been a lot more bitter if I had known what was in store for
me at the Cape. COMCORP flew me down in one of our private prop-jets,
with only Paul Cleary for company. He introduced me to the brass, and
we sat through a couple conferences while the idea was spelled out to
a group of sure-enough spacemen. Then they turned that mob loose on
me.
I was emotionally unprepared. First off, Cleary and Fred had been
building me up all through the three months, and I had actually gotten
to the point where I thought I knew what I was doing. These
space-jockeys spent most of their time deflating my ego.
My tormentor-in-chief was a wise punk from Brooklyn named Sid Stein.
"How have you made out in your centrifuge tests?" he asked me at
breakfast the first morning after I had reached the Cape.
"I have never done any of that stuff, Mr. Stein," I said.
"Well, how many gees can you pull?"