"Canaveral Control!" I heard him call.
"Cut that out," I said. "They can't help. Shut up and let me think."
But he didn't, and I couldn't. I had no fuel with which to move. Sid
had only the retros and stern rockets, no good for swinging or
turning. I was out of touching range of the bird, and couldn't shove
against it to build up a little drift. Just as Sylvia said, it's not
like swimming back to shore.
There was a lot of excited chatter in my earphones, in which I did not
participate. Nobody made any sense, and Sid shut the thing down.
"Mike!"
"Yeah." Disgusted.
"Whatever you dope out, make it quick. You don't have all the air in
the world." Sid warned me.
"How much?"
"Ten minutes or so."
"All right," I said. "It ought to be enough. Keep your eye on me. You
may have to reach out an arm or leg for me to grab as I go by."
"How are you going to move?"
"I've got a lifesaver," I said.
* * * * *
I writhed and squirmed and made every use of the law of conservation
of angular momentum until I had my back to _Nelly_. Then I wound up
and threw my fancy screwdriver as hard as I could heave it away from
me. I didn't get the zip on it I would have liked, but because it was
sort of like a throwing stick, I got a little more on it than you
might expect, maybe fifty or sixty feet a second. And the thing
weighed about four pounds, with its fancy ratchet and torque clutch.
Since in my suit I weighed just about a hundred times as much, I
started toward _Nelly_ at just one-one-hundredth of the velocity I had
imparted to the screwdriver. In a couple minutes I was drifting pretty
close, but tumbling. I had forgotten that part.
Throwing the screwdriver had given my body the correct vector and some
velocity, but I had set up quite a tumbling moment, since I had thrown
from the shoulder and not from my center of gravity.
I chucked a couple lighter tools away to correct my drift, and Sid
snagged me as I drifted by the hatch.
"Come to Papa," he said, and drew me inside. We didn't horse around
congratulating ourselves. My air tanks were no longer hissing, and we
made a quick swap.
Sid let me dog down the hatch while he figured position. He used the
iron compass method, just taking a close look at Earth, which was more
or less dead ahead of us. That was a good place for it, because we had
no steering fuel.
The re-entry was a mess, from Sid's point of view. We came in at a
weird angle and heated up to beat hell before there was enough
atmosphere for our rudder to swing us around straight. He bounced us
off twice after that as we slowed down, but the creak of heating metal
was all about us each time we dropped in. He cussed me plenty all the
way.
The trick, of course, was to slow down to the point where he could
spiral us down to Muroc Dry Lake. _Nelly_ was a sort of glider. Her
performance at about Mach 10 and two hundred thousand feet was quite
respectable, but the lower and slower we went, the more she flew like
the proverbial kitchen sink. Sid only had one bright spot: Our big
fuel supply gave him plenty of rocket and retro when he wanted it, and
allowed him to get us back over Muroc.
I can't say he made the landing look easy, because he didn't. It
looked like plain hell to me, for we scorched in at something over
four hundred miles an hour.
When _Nelly_ screeched to a stop, we just sat there. There was none of
this romantic business about snapping open face plates and exchanging
witty remarks. Bubble helmets don't have face plates, and besides, I
didn't have anything I wanted to say to Sid. I was as tired of him as
he was of me. I was just plain tired, if you want to know the truth.
They didn't let us alone, of course. While the crash trucks were still
kicking up a dust trail tearing out to get us, there were guys on the
radio with those cool voices, and Sid was tiredly saying "Roger," to
all their questions. And we didn't do any moving about. You'd be
surprised how weighing four hundred pounds makes you willing to wait
for the crane to lift you from your seat. All at once I almost wanted
to be back in space again, where I didn't weigh anything at all.
Almost.
* * * * *
They flew us back to Canaveral for the de-briefing, both asleep. The
whole mob was there to greet us, Paul Cleary, Fred Stone, and even
Sylvia. They met us at the plane and Sylvia was the first to grab me
as I came down the steps.
"Mike!" she squealed. "Are you all right?"
"Better now," I said, kind of untangling from her. "How did you manage
this?" I looked up. "Hi, Paul," I said to his sleepy old grin, and
knew how.
"Dinner tonight?" she insisted.
"I don't know," I said, looking over at Paul. "I think there's a
de-briefing or something before they turn me loose."
"Don't be silly," Sylvia said. "It's not as if you were an astronaut
or something."