I was going to say some more, but just then he broke in, angry and so
loud it made my helmet ring, with, “Joseph! Did you hear anything then?”
A pause, then, “Well, clean the wax out of your ears, stupid, because I
did! I think we got an enemy out there!”
Another and longer pause, while my blood curdled a bit thicker, then,
“Well, okay, Joseph, I’ll go along with you this time. But if I hear the
enemy once more, I’m going to suit up and take a rifle and sit in the
airlock door until I’ve potted him.”
I tongued the radio off quick, fearful I’d sneeze or something. I had
only one faint consolation: Joseph seemed to be a bit on my side, or
maybe he was just lazy.
I thought some more, a mite frantic-like now, and after a while I said
to myself, _Been going five minutes now, so I’m doing about a quarter of
a mile a second—that’s fifteen miles a minute, wow!—but out here
velocities are purely relative. My suit does a little better than a
quarter G full on. Okay. I’ll jet to the ship._
No sooner said than acted on—I was beginning to rely too much on impulse
now. The suit jet killed my false weight at once and I was off, mighty
careful to aim myself along my line or a little outside it, so as not to
wander over into the beam.
Pretty soon the tail and Trompled Love were getting noticeably bigger.
Then a lot bigger.
Then my suit fuel ran out.
* * * * *
I’d built up enough velocity so that I was still gaining on the ship for
a few seconds. In fact, I almost made it. My gauntlet was about to close
on Trompled Love when the ship started slowly to pull away. Oh, it was
frustrating!
I remembered then what I should have a lot earlier, and grabbed for the
ship-end of my line so as not to lose the distance I’d gained—and in my
haste I knocked it away from me. The only good thing was that I didn’t
knock it out of the notch.
Now I was losing space to the ship faster and faster. Yet all I could do
was reel in the me-end of the line as fast as I could. Suddenly the
whole line straightened and gave me a bigger jerk than I’d intended. I
could see Trompled Love crumple a little. And I was swinging just a bit,
like a pendulum.
I used a glove-friction to spread the rest of the jerk, but still I was
at the end of my line and Trompled Love had crumpled a bit more before I
was coasting along with the ship again.
My side of Trompled Love was bent back maybe twenty degrees. The eye of
the beam shone at me from the tail like a pale blue moon. For quite a
while it brightened and dimmed as I tick-tock swung.
Meanwhile I was beating my skull for not having thought earlier of the
obvious slow-but-safe way of doing it, instead of that lunatic
suit-jetting. I once heard a psychologist say we’re mental slaves to
power-machinery and I guess he had something.
Clearly all I had to do was climb hand-over-hand up the line to the
ship. At moon gravity that would be easy. If I should get tired I only
had to clamp on and rest.
So I waited for my emotions to settle a bit, and then I reached along
the line and gave a smooth, medium-strength heave.
Maybe there is something to ESP—at least in a devilish sort of
way—because I picked the exact moment when Jeff decided to feed the beam
more juice.
There was a _big_ jerk and I saw Trompled Love crumple a lot, so that it
was pointing more than forty-five degrees aft.
Now there was a steady pull on the line like I was hanging from a cliff
on Mars. And the eye of the beam was a blue moon not so pale—in fact
more like a sizzling blue sun seen through a light fog.
After that I just didn’t have the heart to try the climb again. Once I
started to draw myself up, very cautious, but on the first handhold I
seemed to feel along the line Trompled Love crumpling some more and I
quit for good.
I figured that at this boost Jeff would be up to proper speed for
Shaula-near in less than two hours. Well, I had suit-oxy and
refrigeration for longer than that.
Of course if Jeff decided not to cut the beam on schedule, maybe with
the idea of eloping with Joseph to the next solar system—well, I’d
discover then whether suit-oxy running out would stimulate me to try the
climb again alongside the beam.
(Or I could wait until he got her up near the speed of light, when by
the General Theory of Relativity the line ought to be shortened enough
so that I could hop aboard if I were sudden enough about it.... _No, Joe
Hansen, you quit that_, I told myself, _you don’t want to die with the
gears in your head all stripped_.)
Thinking about the beam got me wondering exactly how close I was to it.
I unshipped my suit-antenna and pulled it out to full length—about eight
feet—and fished around with it in the direction of the beam.
Nothing seemed to happen to it. It didn’t glow or anything; but I
suddenly got a little electric shock, and when I drew it back I could
see three inches of the tip were gone and the next couple inches were
pitted. So much for curiosity.
Next I reattached the antenna to my suit—which turned out to be a lot
more troublesome job than unshipping it—and tongued on the radio with
the idea of listening in on Jeff.
* * * * *
Right away I heard him say, “Wake up, Joseph! I’m going to tell you your
faults again. I got a new way of cataloguing them—chronologically. Begin
with childhood. You hitched sled-rides on airplanes. That was bad,
Joseph, that was against the law. If the man had caught you doing it, if
he’d seen you whizzing along there back of him, he’d have had every
right to shoot you down in cold blood. Life is hard, Joseph, life is
merciless....”
Right then I felt a tickle in my throat.
I tried quick to shut off the radio, but it is remarkably difficult to
tongue anything when you have a cough coming. It came out finally in a
series of squeaky glubs.
“Snap to, Joseph, and listen hard,” I heard Jeff say. “It’s started
again. Animal noises this time. You know if they make spacesuits for
black panthers, Joseph?”