"Brot_her_!"
The space medic wasn't any better. The mission chief insisted that it
wasn't safe to put anybody in a satellite who couldn't pass the
physical. I guess you know that about one man in a thousand can
qualify. This was supposed to wash me out.
"Remarkable shape." The space medic kept saying. "You must take
considerable exercise, doctor."
"Oh, no," I said. "Just jog a mile or so before breakfast. Nothing
spectacular."
"No other formal activity?"
"Well," I snarled, "just swimming, fencing and weight lifting. I've
given up the boxing and handball."
"Kept in excellent shape, nevertheless," he said. "You'll be a
disappointment to them."
"Look," Stein said to me after a week of tests and countertests.
"Don't be deceived by these tests. All they show is that your heart is
still beating. The big thing is emotional. Doc, I think you should
reconsider this idea of flopping around out there in the void. We've
got experienced men here, and none of them is ready to try it."
"Fools rush in, eh, Mr. Stein."
"Precisely."
In the meantime I got a daily phone call from Paul Cleary. That I
could have snarled off, but Sylvia always came on the line first, and
there was a minute or so of chit-chat before she cut her boss in on
the line. I'm sure she listened to all the calls. But her first words
were deadly. For example:
"Mike! Hi, Mike. Mr. Cleary wants to see how you're doing."
"Good. Put him on."
"In a minute. I think it's so wonderful you passed the final physical,
Mike. You're really so deceptive. I never had imagined you had such a
steely physique."
"Clean living," I said. "No girls."
"There'd better not be!"
"Don't worry. How could I get to see any girls down here? Every time I
look away from my work all I can see is Bikini swim suits."
"Cut that out!" she snickered, and put Cleary on the line.
* * * * *
There came a final day when the mission chief called me in to his
office.
"Come in, Mike. Come in," he said shortly. "Sit down." He leaned back
against his desk and started talking to me, like they say, straight
from the shoulder:
"I'll give it to you straight, Mike. We've tried every legal way to
wash you out of this mission. There isn't a one of us here at the Cape
that wants any part of taking an armchair theorist and slapping him
into space--into the kind of a mission you've cooked up. Somebody's
going to get hurt out there, because you aren't fit for the job. Now,
physically, yes, you have the capacity. But emotionally and
environmentally, you simply don't add up. You're looking at this thing
as an extension of your laboratory, and instead it is an enormous
physical and mental hazard that you are undertaking. This country has
never lost a man in space--and you'll be the cause of our first
casualty, as well as being one yourself. I'm asking you man to man to
disqualify yourself."
"And put an end to this mission?"
"We'll train one of our men," he said.
"In two or three years your best man might be barely capable," I said.
"I don't think COMCORP is prepared to waste that much time. After
all," I said ingratiatingly, "all you have to do is refuse the
mission. Say I'm a built-in hazard and let it go at that." I grinned
at him. I was learning from Paul Cleary. I _figured_ how space-jockeys
would react to that.
He told me: "Do you think any of these men would admit they are not up
to a mission a mere technician is ready to try? No! I can't get them
to beg off, either!"
"When do we go?" I asked.
Sid Stein was assigned as my pilot. He had made the trip into orbit
and back four times with the Dyna-Soar rocket, and was considered the
best risk to get me there and get me back. He was also the least
convinced I had any right to sit beside him in the cabin.
His final briefing was a beaut: "This is a spaceship, doctor," he said
frigidly. "And I want you to remember the 'ship' part of it. I'm in
command, and my every word, my every _belch_, has got to be law. Do
you understand that? This is my mission, and I'll tell you where to
put your feet."
"Sure," I said. "Who wants it?"
"Can't figure out why you do!"
"I'm just paying somebody back," I said. "Is it tomorrow?"
* * * * *
The start was a drag. Eighteen hours before blast-off Sid and I went
into a tank so that we would get rid of our nitrogen. We breathed the
standard helium-oxygen mix at normal pressure until about four hours
before H-hour. They wouldn't even let me smoke. Then we suited up and
were lifted by a crane and stuck in the control room of _Nelly Bly_,
as I had named our Dyna-Soar rocket-glider. The hatch stayed open, but
we were buttoned up tight in our suits. They had a couple of mods that
were supposed to fit them better for the mission. Instead of the usual
metal helmet with face plate, we had full-vision bubble helmets of
clear plastic. The necks were large enough so that we could, in
theory, drag our arms out of our suits and clean the inside of the
bubbles. That was in case I sicked up out in space, which all
experience said was a real enough hazard. They figured that filling me
full of motion sickness pills was partial prevention.
These space-jockeys have their own vocabulary, and their own oh, so
cool way of playing it during the countdown. I'm pretty familiar with
complex components, but they were checking off equipment I never heard
of. We had gyros--hell, our _gyros_ had gyros. And we had tanks, and
pressures and temperatures and voltages and who-stuck-John. It was all
very impressive.
There were suited men up on the gantry unplugging our air feed and
closing our hatch. Sid was straining up from where he lay on his back
to dog it down tight.
"Roger," Sid was saying to somebody, as he had been all morning.
The white vapor from our umbilical stopped, which let me know our
tanks had been topped off and sealed, and that we were about to blast
off.
"This is it, Seaman," Sid Stein said. "Now for Pete's sake don't move,
don't speak, just lie there. I've got the con."
That was a bunch of baloney. He really had nothing to do until we were
in orbit. The delicate accelerometers and inertial guidance components
did all the piloting until the second stage kicked us loose. But I
kept my mouth shut. He'd have some work to do before the ride was
over, and I might need him.
* * * * *
When the lift-off came, it was gentle as a dove's wing. But as we
burned off fuel, the twenty-million pound thrust of our Apollo booster
began to tell, and my vision started to go black. The gee-meter said
we were pulling about ten gees when I could no longer read it, and I
learned later we peaked out at eleven gees in the final seconds before
first-stage burn-out. I didn't like it a little bit.
The liquid hydrogen second stage kicked in like a hopped up mule, and
we pulled ten gees, right at the limit of my vision, for its whole
four minutes of burning. My earphones were talking now as Sid gave it
the A-OK and Roger bit all the way. This was the stuff, kid!
Our Dyna-Soar had been modified to some degree for this mission. It's
essentially a big delta-winged glider with a squarish fuselage in the
center. The mods had consisted of tying a third rocket stage out
behind, so that Sid could move us around the orbit from one Telstar to
the next if my work on the first one proved out. The retro-rockets had
several times their normal complement of fuel, so that he could stop
after he got started. The same was true of our steering jets.
The ship was not pressurized on the lift off. Cabin pressure fell
rather quickly, as we could feel from the inflation of our suits, to
their three and a half-pound pressure. No bends for either of us,
because of the helium substitution for nitrogen. Because there were
two of us, we could chuck and unchuck airtanks for each other as we
needed fresh supplies. We had enough air and water for forty-eight
hours. Together with our low-residue diet for the final week, they
figured we could sweat it out in our suits for two days. We had suit
radios, of course, and could talk with each other for a distance of a
mile or so.
Burnout of the second stage came suddenly, and we heaved slightly
against our belts as the springs in our seats pushed back out. And
then I got my first taste of free fall. Each veteran astronaut I had
talked to at the Cape had a different way of trying to scare me with
the idea of falling endlessly, and each had different ideas about how
to lick it. In spite of all the talk, I grabbed the arms of my seat to
keep from falling. I turned my head and in the glow from our
instruments could see Sid sneering across at me through his
transparent bubble helmet.
"How you like them apples?" his voice came from my earphone.
"That first step is a killer, Sid," I said, trying to sound chipper. I
felt horrible.
"Let me know when you've had enough," he suggested. "I've got things
to do."
I knew he did. We had dry-run it a hundred times. If we had been
inserted correctly in orbit, the _Nelly Bly_ was right in the path
that three of the Telstars were now following, and catching up with
Number One at several hundred miles an hour. On the ground, radars all
around the world were taking fixes on us, and Sid was talking shop
over his long-range radio with the radar crews.
By the time my stomach had made up its mind that it would stick with
me, he had a report.
"It could be worse," he said. "We've got a lot more velocity than I'd
like, but we're on course. Our orbit would differ quite some, Seaman.
Because of this speed we'd be somewhat more eccentric--maybe swing out
a hundred miles beyond the birds we're chasing. Are you making it?"
"Easy, Sid. Do we slow down yet?"
"I'll fire the retros and retard us to the speed of what we're
chasing," he said. "That will equalize our orbits very nearly. Get
busy on that scope if you're up to it. I'll compute my retro."
* * * * *
They had made an amateur radar operator out of me, because it was easy
to do, and gave Sid more time for actual rocket valving. My belt cut
me hard as he braked for several seconds.
"There," Sid's voice said in my ear. "We should still be catching up
about fifty miles an hour. Let's not ram that thing. See any blip?"
"Not yet. How close are we supposed to be?"
He lit the cabin light and tapped at the calculator that he swung out
from its rack. "Still got a hundred miles to go, I'd judge." He moved
awkwardly in his suit to finger a switch on his neck and I heard him
speaking to the ground again, and heard in my earphones the answer
that came up from Woomera. We had eighty miles to go, and were now a
little below the orbit of the bird we were chasing.
"Can't have both ends of the stick, Mike," Sid explained, calling me
by name for the first time. "As soon as we slowed down we had to drop
lower." He fooled around with the steering jets, which were
hydrazine-nitric acid rockets much like the tiny motors on my suit,
and re-oriented _Nelly Bly_. A little burst from the nose, and I got
my first blip.
"There!" I said, putting a finger on the PPI. "Turn out the light,
Sid, so I can see the 'scope'."
He switched off the cabin light and followed my directions with tiny
shoves, sometimes from the rockets, sometimes from the steering jets,
while I conned us closer.
Our radar would only read within about half a mile. When we got that
close I got the searchlight going and took my first real look through
the forward port out into space.
It's black. Nothing--nothing you have ever seen will persuade you how
dark it is out there. That was my first big shock. Oh, I had practiced
in the dark, with only my helmet light to guide my tests and
assemblies, but this was a different kind of dark. Our light had no
visible beam--you couldn't even tell it was working. At first I had
the idea we'd see the satellite occulting some stars, but a little
mental arithmetic told me that an object six or eight feet in section
would not subtend much of an angle of vision at half a mile.
We had chosen, I decided, much too narrow a beam of light for the
searchlight, but just at that moment I got a flash from out in space,
and worked the light back on to our objective.
"Got it," I said.
"Yoicks!" Sid said, and went back to the fine controls. After a long
time, and lots of patience, we were hanging about fifty feet out from
our bird. We were farther out in space so that the dark bulk of the
satellite was silhouetted against the crescent light of Earth. I
turned off the spot and switched on the floodlight.
"Here goes nothing, Sid," I said, and undid the dogs that held the
canopy above our heads.