The Expert Dreamers (1962) Anthology

by Frederik Pohl (ed. )

  We had trouble with that propulsion system for Nomad. Today they don’t think anything of igniting a whole rack of motors at the same time, but in those days we didn’t know much about it. We didn’t have catalyst propellants, and we considered ourselves mighty lucky to get one chamber going. Getting a fire started in more than one was considered a miracle.

  Those of us with the Rocket Division of the Karlter Ship & Drydock Corporation worked out the multiple start technique for our transoceanic rockets, but the motors would slobber around and waste a couple tons of propellants— liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen—before the system built up enough thrust to get off the ground.

  Then some bright design engineer back in the plant got the brilliant idea that those tons of fuel could be saved if the motors started at full thrust. We got a test directive telling me to work out the details.

  Details, mind you. That meant figuring flow rates, mixture ratios, lag times, ignition delay, and valve timing. Oh, we had a lovely time! We had four blows with single chambers on Test Stand Three before we got an inkling of how to do it. Those were the cut-and-try days; nobody knew very much about what went on inside a rocket motor.

  Then Project Nomad went crash priority. They suddenly wanted that orbital rocket and wanted it bad.

  My crew chief on Test Stand Seven didn’t like it a bit. “Pete, they oughta give us some time to run cold-flow tests with water before we try to light-off all those chambers at once,” he complained to me that day when I told him about it.

  “They didn’t give us any time, Dan,” I had to explain. “Karlter and the boys on Staff want the reduced data by the end of the week. That means we get a starting test off today and a full run tomorrow.”

  “What do them guys want? Miracles?”

  “That’s our specialty.”

  Dan went out on the stand to get things ready while I pushed the morning paperwork over my desk in the field office. Just as,I got around to tackling the silly problem of having to justify an air-conditioning system for our closed control room buried in the mountainside, Jerry Tedder, the controls technician, came in.

  Jerry was a young squirt straight out of I. C. S. who’d been on the stand for about six months. You couldn’t exactly call him a greenhorn at rocket motor testing because you’re not a greenhorn when you’ve gained a deep respect for high-performance rocket engines. But Jerry was still inclined to get panicky at times, so I’d put him under McDougal’s wing until he steadied down and got reliable. He was good; he knew Nomad’s electrical controls; but he was pretty young. He was also impulsive. In fact, he was definitely that way right then.

  “Mr. Edwards, what’s the story Dan’s been giving me about hay-wiring the system for a full-thrust start?”

  I pushed back my chair, lit up a cigarette, and asked him, “What’s the matter, lad? You got troubles? What’s wrong with our revised control wiring?”

  “Mr. Edwards, it’s going to blow all to hell!”

  “Is it, now? What makes you think it’s going to blow?” I said slowly. Jerry had the tendency to get scared blue when we ran a test that had the slightest amount of danger involved. Right then, it irked me more than usual because I’d spent most of the night before going over the calculations, diagrams, and details of the test. As far as I was concerned, figures based on engineering calculations made from valid data didn’t lie.

  “The whole system’s too marginal right now! If we modify it, we can’t expect it to be reliable,” he told me, sitting down on the edge of the desk. “And those pressure regulating valves have a tendency to hang-up on surges.”

  “Look, youngster,” I replied quietly, looking him straight in the eye, “I know what this system will do and what it won’t do. That’s my job. Now get out there with Mac and rig the sequence controls the way I show in the wiring diagram. That’s an order. Understand?”

  “But we’re liable to get into trouble—”

  “Not if you do it right. Let me know when you’re ready to run the functional checks.” I turned back to my desk work, implying that he’d better hop-to if he wanted to remain on the crew. This wasn’t the first time Jerry Tedder had shown he was afraid of that chained monster on the edge of the cliff. The unbridled fury of a rocket motor tied down to a mountainside and shaking the very granite itself is enough to make strong men tremble if they haven’t seen it before. But, since Jerry had been with Project Nomad for six months, I was beginning to suspect that he just didn’t have any guts.

  The functional tests went fine. They checked out to the last wiggly ink line on the charts in the control room. Pressures, valve timing, everything was just as I had figured. I finally straightened up and told Dan, “I’ll buy it. Start loading propellants.”

  Dan had to nudge Jerry, who was staring at the charts with a wooden expression. He was scared blue again. When he snapped back to life, he stepped up to the control console and picked up the public-address mike.

  “Attention, all personnel! We are commencing to load propellants! No smoking in the stand area! All arc welders and torches out! Stand is in yellow condition!”

  I pulled Dan over into a corner behind the instrument recorders. “Put Mac on the control board today,” I instructed him. “Tedder’s so shaky he might abort the run.” My crew chief shook his head. “Can’t. Mac got an upset stomach and a headache, so I had to send him home.” “When did this happen?”

  “Just before the functionals.”

  “Great! We’ll have to leave Jerry where he is then—but you stand next to him and hold his hand, will you?”

  “Sure thing,” Dan replied with a grin, then added a reminder, “Say, don’t forget to call your wife this time.”

  “Judas! I almost forgot!” I went over to the phone and called Doris.

  Ever since Number Seven had been in operation, she’d wanted to bring Bobby down to see his daddy “make smoke.” The little guy was pretty sharp for his four years. Whenever Number Seven would make a run, he’d hear the noise and tear out on the front porch of our house, see the big dust cloud, and jump up and down shouting, “That’s my Daddy making smoke!”

  Doris said she’d be down at the roadblock in time, so I got back to the business at hand. Jerry was a bit steadier now as he operated the banks of switches studding the control console. Looking out through the heavy windows toward the test stand, I could see the frost collecting on the pipes as the tanking progressed. Liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen were flowing down from the storage areas on the mountain behind and into their separate tanks mounted above the motors in the stand.

  When I saw my old green Chevvy pull up at the roadblock a half-mile away, I got on the field phone and had them put Doris on.

  “Hi, baby! How’s Bobby?”

  “Excited,” she told me.

  “I’ll bet. He’s really going to see Daddy making smoke today!”

  “You’re sure we’re not too close. If something happens—”

  “Nothing can happen.”

  “Suppose it explodes?”

  “My dear, sweet wife,” I kidded her, “do you think I’d let you come this close if I thought it was going to blow up? Just stay where you are, and you’ll see a real show. I’ll be down after the run.”

  “Five minutes,” Dan warned me.

  I hung up and got on the job. The control room was quiet the way it always was before a test, a sort of strained silence with an air of tension all around. The instrument technicians were standing by their recorders, and Jerry was behind the firing console with Dan beside him. The youngster was visibly nervous; there was no color in his cheeks. I knew his symptoms pretty well, and I was glad old Dan was standing by to hold him in check.

  Picking up my pear-shaped cut-off switch, I checked the connections. If something did go wrong, Pd have little time to push that switch and shut the motors off. Everybody else in the room had a switch in his hand, too, and I knew they were thinking the same thing.

  Taking up my position in front of the heavy windows where
I could see, I looked out on the test stand silhouetted against the sky, a fantastic lacework of steel beams a yard thick, pipes, tubing, walkways, and the rocket nozzles with their big tanks above them, all rearing up as high as a ten-story building.

  “One minute,” Dan announced.

  “May we have it quiet, please?” I raised my voice over the noise of the recording instruments. A dead hush fell over the room, broken only by the low voices of the instrument men.

  “Energize the cut-off circuit!”

  “Cut-off hot!” Jerry sang out, his voice quavering a bit. The little switch in my hand was armed now.

  “Instruments zero?”

  “Instruments zero!” came the reply from the instrument engineer far back in the control room.

  “Twenty-second warning!” I said quietly to Jerry.

  Outside, an air horn blasted its voice across the hills and desert.

  My hands were sweaty. They always got that way just before a test. I guess it was tension which I never noticed. But

  Jerry’s hands, I could see they were trembling as he poised them over the switches of the console.

  “Flame quench on!” I snapped. A white fountain of water sprang from a pipe and gushed down into the concrete flame pit to protect it from the hell-fire of the rocket flame.

  “Close vents and pressurize!”

  From the back of the room amidst the banks of recording instruments, someone read the tank pressures by percentage as they came up: “Eighty—eighty-five—ninety—ninety-five —pressurized!”

  This was it, the supreme moment of tension and suspense in rocket-motor testing.

  “Charts and cameras on! Fire on count-down!” I sang out.

  The chart recorders started with a groan accompanied by the clack-clack-clack of the timing relays.

  “Three—two—one—FIRE!” Jerry leaned on the firing button. He missed it the first time, but got it on the second try.

  I switched my eyes to the motors on the test stand.

  Nothing happened.

  Nothing. No glow of igniters. No cloud of liquid oxygen or hydrogen. No sudden splash of flame laced with shock diamonds. Nothing.

  “Misfire! Cut!” I yelled at the same time Jerry and Dan did likewise. I bore down on the switch in my palm.

  “No cut-off! No cut-off! It’s still hot!” Jerry yelled back, panicky.

  “Are the valves frozen?” I wanted to know.

  “Valve seat temperatures O.K.!” an instrument man called out.

  A plume of vapor suddenly spurted from one of the tanks. “Relief vents are working,” Dan reported.

  I discovered I was shaking, but managed to pull myself back under control out of sheer necessity. This was no time for me, the test engineer, to lose my head. But it was one of those times when a second stretches out as long as an hour. It seemed to take me forever to move; I was simply rooted to the spot.

  Finally, I got out, “Everybody stay put! Emergency condition! Jerry, stay at the board and watch things!” I backed away from the window until I bumped into the control-sequence recorders. Then I got a look at the ink lines on the paper.

  “Dan! Come here!” I called.

  Stepping away from Jerry’s side, my crew chief looked over my shoulder at the chart. “Something shorted,” he observed. “Looks like the igniter relay stuck.”

  “There’s more than that,” I pointed out. “Instrumentation! What’s the pressure upstream of the gas-generator valve?”

  “No pressure yet,” came the reply.

  “Then the pressure regulator jammed,” Dan concluded.

  My mind ran over the schematic drawings of the electrical and pneumatic control systems of the unit. I came to two conclusions:

  The unit would blow sky-high if (a) the sticking igniter relay decided to work, or (b) the jammed pressure regulating valve suddenly functioned. There wasn’t a chance that they would decide to work at the same time, in which case the unit would run instead of blow.

  I recalled Jerry had said something earlier about the reliability of the electrical controls and the regs having a tendency to jam on surges. Maybe I should have listened to him; maybe he had more savvy than I thought.

  But why couldn’t we shut down the unit right now? That didn’t make sense to me until Jerry spoke up.

  “Mr. Edwards, I think I know where our trouble is.”

  “Where?”

  “Mac put in some jumper wires so we could make our functional checks. He was going to remove them before the test.”

  But Mac had gone home sick, and nobody had remembered the jumpers! If I hadn’t had years of test experience behind me, I would have blown my top over this stupid oversight. But even the most experienced crews pull blunders on occasion; every man has his assigned job, and the tension prior to a run is usually so high that you think of nothing except your specified job as outlined in the “cook book,” the operating procedure manual. You haven’t got time to worry about everyone else’s job.

  Sometimes the blunders are funny—like forgetting to turn the recorders on or neglecting to load the film in the cameras. But it’s not so funny when a man has to go outside to disarm a hot, misfired unit.

  Jerry went on, “Dan, if you’ll take the board here, I’ll go and get us out of trouble.”

  If the misfire had been a shock, this statement from Jerry Tedder completely floored me. Hadn’t he been scared blue a minute before? I was too upset right then to make much of it. Instead, I asked, “What do you think you can do?”

  “I’ll jumper a few things myself. I’ll disarm the igniter relay and safety the system.”

  “That’s half the job. Can you release the regulator?”

  “I’ve never done it, but all you have to do is pound on it with a mallet after you’ve disconnected the line downstream.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got to know where to pound,” I reminded him. With three-thousand pounds-per-square-inch gas pressure on a regulator, you only have to hit it once in the wrong place to get killed very dead. High-pressure is like an explosive; it’s perfectly safe if you know how to handle it, but it can kill you if the tubing bursts.

  “I’ll be careful,” Jerry replied.

  I knew he would, but I didn’t trust him on pneumatic hardware yet. And he couldn’t go out on that stand alone; you can’t expect that much out of a man.

  I don’t know what it was. Perhaps it was the fact that I wanted to show Jerry that I wouldn’t let him do anything his boss refused to do. I must have been crazy, but I said, “Grab your hard hat. You jumper that relay first, and Fll release the regulator. Take the board, Dan, and if anything happens, hit the water deluge quick!”

  Jerry grabbed a few wires with clips on the ends, and I rummaged around in Dan’s tool box until I found a box wrench, a crescent wrench, and a mallet. Thus armed, we walked down the long tunnel cut through the granite of the mountain toward the steel door sealing the far end.

  Our steps echoed from the concrete walls, and we didn’t say a word. I was sweating pretty badly; I could feel the sweat running down my sides under my shirt. And my stomach was tight. It was the old, familiar signal that comes when danger is around. I don’t like it. I didn’t like it then, but somebody had to go out on that test stand, somebody who knew what he was doing.

  Thank God Dan hadn’t volunteered to go! I might have taken him up on it!

  Jerry pulled the door open with a clang and we stepped out into the afternoon sunlight.

  As we approached the stand, I suddenly realized that I no longer had the protection of the control room around me. I was out in the open. If the unit fired now, we’d be shaken up pretty badly; but if it exploded, we were through.

  Test stands had been beautiful things to me until that moment. All at once, that gray mass of steel and concrete was ugly. It had no grace in its lines; it was built to keep the tons of thrust from pushing the motors and tanks toward the sky. It was bulky, massive, solid, forbidding, and I hated it.

  I got one look at t
he bottom of the mountain and saw my green Chevvy and a bunch of people standing around—waiting. Doris and Bobby were down there, and if we had an explosion, they were too close! Sure, I hadn’t expected an explosion; if things had gone right, there wouldn’t have been a chance. But as I thought of the tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen in those tanks—equal to a dozen times the force of a like amount of TNT if they mixed and ignited—I wanted to yell to them to run. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t even walk. I just stood in my tracks.

  Jerry went a few steps ahead of me, then turned to look back. “Come on, Pete,” he urged.

  I was on a crate of mental eggs as we got to the base of the stand and started up the ladder. I was shaking a little, but I rationalized that I was right in the middle of things now; I had to take whatever came.

  We climbed up to the electrical control box, and Jerry plugged in his telephone headset. “O.K., Dan,” he told the crew chief inside the control room, “I’m disarming the igniter circuit.”

  “Careful,” I warned him unnecessarily. “Don’t jar that box, or the relay is liable to function.”

  He nodded and gingerly started to remove the cover. If he had been shaking in the control room because of fear, it wasn’t obvious now; his hands were steady and his movements careful as he lifted off the cover and set it on the steel grating of the walkway. Carefully, he took one of the clip wires from his pocket and connected one end.

  There were lines in his face I had never seen before, and sweat was standing out on his forehead. I think I detected a split-second of hesitation before he connected the other end of the clip wire. But he looked carefully at the maze of wires and connections, then slowly reached in, the clip opened between two fingers.

  He came out of there in a hurry, so fast that I thought something was wrong. I was all ready to hit the deck, useless as it might have been. “Got it!” he snapped. “Igniter disarmed! Hold everything for a minute!” Working rapidly now, he clipped on several more jumpers and removed some that were already there.