In the same instant, Rip saw that they would land on the dark side. The
asteroid was turning over and over. For a second he had the impression
that he was looking at a turning globe of the earth, the kind used in
elementary school back home. But this gray planet was scarcely bigger
than the giant globe at the Space Council building on Terra.
He knew he was going to hit hard. The way to keep from being hurt was to
turn the vertical energy of his arrival into motion in another direction.
As he swept down to the metal surface he started running, his legs
pumping wildly in space. He hit with a bone-jarring thud, lost his
footing and fell sideways, both hands cradling his helmet. He got to his
feet instantly and looked for Santos.
"You all right, sir?" Santos called anxiously. "I think the others are
over there." He pointed.
"We'll find them," Rip said. His hip hurt like fury from smashing against
the unyielding metal, and the worst part was that he couldn't rub it. The
blow had been strong enough to hurt through the heavy fabric and air
pressure, but his hand wasn't strong enough to compress the suit. Just
the same, he tried.
And while he was trying, he found himself in direct sunlight!
He had forgotten to run. Standing still on the asteroid meant turning
with it, from darkness into sunlight and back again. He yelled at Santos
and legged it out of there, moving in long, gliding steps. He regained
the shadow and kept going.
The first order of business was to stop the rock from turning. Otherwise
they couldn't live on it.
Rip knew that they had only one means of stopping the spin. That was to
use the tubes of rocket fuel left over from correcting the course. They
had three tubes left, but he didn't know if that was enough to do the
job.
Moving rapidly, he and Santos caught up to Koa and the Planeteers.
The Connie prisoners were pretty well bunched up, gliding along like a
herd of fantastic sheep. Their shepherds were Pederson, Nunez, and Dowst.
The three Planeteers had a pistol in each hand. The spares were probably
those taken from prisoners.
The Planeteers were loaded down with equipment. A few Connie prisoners
carried equipment, too.
Trudeau had the rocket launcher and the remaining rockets. Kemp had his
torch and two tanks of oxygen. Bradshaw had tied his safety line to the
squat containers of chemical fuel for the torch and was towing them
behind like strange balloons. The only trouble with that system, Rip
thought, was that Bradshaw could stop, but the fuel would have a tendency
to keep going. Unless the Englishman was skillful, his burden would drag
him off his feet.
Dominico had a tube of rocket fuel under each arm. The Italian was small,
and the tubes were bulky. Each was about ten feet long and two feet in
diameter. With any gravity or air resistance at all, the Italian couldn't
have carried even one.
Santos took the radiation detection instruments and the case with the
astrogation equipment from Koa. Rip greeted his men briefly, then took
his computing board and began figuring. He knew the men were glad he and
Santos had made it. But they kept their greetings short. A spinning
asteroid was no place for long and sentimental speeches.
He remembered the dimensions of the asteroid and its mass. He computed
its inertia, then figured out what it would take to overcome the inertia
of the spin.
The mathematics would have been simpler under normal conditions, but
doing them on the run, trying to watch his step at the same time, made
things a little complicated. He had to hold the board under his arm, run
alongside Santos while the new sergeant held the case open, select the
book he wanted, open it and try to read the tables by his belt light, and
then transfer the data to the board.
His ventilator had quieted down once he got into the darkness, but now it
started whining slightly again because he was sweating profusely. Finally
he figured out the thrust needed to stop the spin. Now all he had to do
was compute how much fuel it would take.
He had figures on the amount of thrust given by the kind of rocket fuel
in the tubes. He also knew how much fuel each tube contained. But the
figures were not in his head. They were on reference sheets.
He collected the data on the fly, slowing down now and then to read
something, until a yell from Santos or Koa warned that the sun line was
creeping close. When he had all data noted on the board, he started his
mathematics. He was right in the middle of a laborious equation when he
stumbled over a thorium crystal. He went headlong, shooting like a rocket
three feet above the ground. His board flew away at a tangent. His stylus
sped out of his glove like a miniature projectile, and the slide rule
clanged against his bubble.
It happened so fast that neither Koa nor Santos had time to grab him. The
action had given him extra speed, and he saw with horror that he was
going to crash into Trudeau. He yelled, "Frenchy! Watch out!" Then he put
both hands before him to protect his helmet. His hands caught the French
Planeteer between the shoulders.