The Ranger Boys in Space

by Hal Clement

  "One minute." The boys hardly recognized the voice, but if the strain in it bothered the pilots they gave no sign. The seconds crawled by, with Bowen frantically checking his list, the instruments, the actions of the pilots, and anything else that might serve to keep his mind from the frightful sensations he was enduring. The boys had said it was easy—all right, so he was falling; what difference did it make? So was the moon; so was the earth, and they never hit anything. His mind knew he was safe, but his body didn't believe it. For forty-five years his nerves had been set to sound a general alarm to his body when those sensations came in, even if they were caused merely by stepping off an unexpected curbstone. Never before—except in his three previous experiences of free fall—had the sensations lasted so long; something must be seriously wrong, his emotions said.

  "Two minutes. Twenty seconds stops us." The clock brought his mind back to business for a moment. "Screen Two is positioned. Stop all spin with Rigel on its center line. The star is in the field now—you have about twelve seconds to correct. Too much; ease off the torque a trifle—that's it—Dart, on your toes!" The last words were almost screamed as the pilot in front of the younger brother suddenly jerked his hands from the switches, moaned, and gropingly brought to his mouth the pill which had been held to his control panel by a tiny piece of adhesive tape. Dart responded instantly; his mind and eyes had been following the pilot's actions throughout the maneuver, and while he held on with his left hand his right flew over the unconscious man's shoulder to the vernier dial which needed adjusting.

  The other pilot glanced up for an instant, and Peter thought that he would also have to take over; he remembered how the sight of one person's becoming airsick usually was enough to set several others going. It did not work that way this time, however; the pilot claimed afterward that the incident had distracted him from his own troubles just in time to save him.

  The whole thing was over in less than five seconds.

  Screen Two showed the blazing, blue-white dot of Rigel almost exactly on the micrometer line, and motionless; Bowen was in no mood to make the fractional degree correction needed to center it exactly.

  "Main drive—one G!" he ordered, and the pilot cut in another master switch and spun his main vernier dial up to the indicated amount. As he did so, weight came back, and with a groan of relief Bowen settled into his chair, to which only the safety straps had held him.

  Bart looked at him with a triumphant grin.

  "You made it, Uncle Jim! You didn't have to—"

  "I'm afraid you're not quite right, Bart." Bowen interrupted in a tired voice. "I made it, in one sense, but maybe I shouldn't have tried. I'm afraid it's the wheel chair again for me; this room won't stand still."

  Thirty minutes later, the score was in. Bowen and both pilots were out of action, with their sense of balance gone—even the man who had taken his pill just before the end had apparently done it too late. In addition, six other members of the station crew were unable to walk, in spite of having slept through the period of changing weight. These hard-hit men were the ones, it turned out, who had done the most experimenting with ways to get used to the sensation, in the first days after the launching of the station. Apparently their nervous systems had gotten used to the feeling, but in the wrong way; they now responded even when the men concerned were unconscious. This was not quite certain, since no one can tell just how deeply or for how long a given amount of drug will affect a man, but the station doctor worried as he thought of the other end of the trip.

  At any rate, there would be three and a half hours of normal weight before that problem had to be faced. Bowen, characteristically, did not wait that long to face it; it occurred to him that if no one cared just how the station's "poles" were pointed when they put spin on it at the other end of the flight, it should be possible to shift gradually from one kind of acceleration to the other, so that the only inconvenience would be the gradual change of the "down" direction from the flat face of the great drum to its outer edge. There would not have to be a turnover, as had been needed with the Polaris; there were full-sized motors in both faces of the station, and they simply would shift from one set to the other when acceleration had to be reversed. He was quite happy with this idea, and set to work calculating just when and how power would have to be applied to perform this trick.

  In the meantime, the boys were sent out to practice "landings" on the "upper" side of the station, as the best substitute for an actual gravity field. They couldn't actually land on the drum, since their rocket exhaust would have burned through its hull in a few moments; but they tried stopping at the same "level" a hundred yards or so to one side, which called for all the same maneuvers except the final cutting of power.

  Unfortunately, Bowen's plan didn't work perfectly. No one had cared much about the precise shape of the orbit which the station would take up around the moon; that was why—or partly why—Bowen had not bothered to put Rigel exactly in its planned position on the screen. No one expected to make, any corrections; the station would simply pass the moon, and as it reached its closest point, cut off main power. If things were planned right, it would have a speed about right to make it circle the moon as it had the earth.

  Unfortunately, observation showed that if this plan were followed out, the station would actually strike the moon—that Bowen should have taken the time to make that last correction. As a result, another short spell of weightlessness had to be suffered toward the middle of the flight while a hasty correction was being made; when the station was finally set in its path about the moon, spinning as it should and ready to serve as a base for search operations, the men on board it were practically hospital cases.

  Some staggered as they walked; some could not walk. Some could not sleep without nightmares. Several could not eat—or, if they did, could not control their stomachs sufficiently to keep the food down. It was the first time the boys had really appreciated their own luck, and Peter admitted that if he had realized clearly at the beginning what the disturbing of his weight could do to a strong and intelligent man, he would never have dared participate in his own idea, or even suggest it.

  Bowen heard this remark, and nodded ruefully from his improvised wheel chair.

  "I never had much faith in it, but it was something worth trying. Now it turns out to be right. The only catch is that a certain number of boys your age are going to be scatterbrains like Tumble, and if we don't find him, which we probably won't, who's going to let us start a training program for teenagers? It's up to you fellows—not so much to find him as to do such a good job of looking that you'll offset any ideas which his own nonsense may start in people's minds."

  The boys saw this, and nodded soberly; the four settled down to plan the search.

  18

  THREE RANGERS

  THE station was provided with photographic mapping equipment, which had been intended for use in meteorology observations of the earth. This was put in service the moment the moon was within range; by the time the new orbit was established, enough finished maps were on hand to permit planning the search, or at least the beginning of it.

  The approach to the moon had been over its north pole, as Tumble's had been. This was not luck, of course; Bowen and everyone else aboard had known where the boy would try to land. While no one expected that he might have succeeded, the Mountains of Light offered at least as good a center as any other from which to start searching. They planned accordingly.

  Naturally, half the moon was in darkness and the region of night reached very close to the pole. Of the daylit portion, well over half had been known and mapped for many years by telescopes on Earth; the rest had never been seen by human eyes until now. The last fact would have been exciting at any other moment, even though the photographs showed that the hidden side was no different from the one already known.

  Both parts were rough. Even the floors of the great walled plains such as Shackleton and Scoresby, which appeared smooth from a distance, were seamed with cracks
and irregularities quite deep enough to hide the TumMesauce or her wreckage. To make the search by eye would mean spiraling outward from the north pole at a height of not more than two thousand feet, traveling at not more than fifty miles an hour or so. It would be impossible to coast along such a path; the search ships would have to "hang" on their rockets, at a cost in fuel which would have drained the tanks of any old-style chemical-powered rocket in a few minutes. The Phoenix reactors could last much longer of course, but the time needed to cover the surface of the moon by such a method with three searchers came out to about fifteen months by Bowen's arithmetic. Searching by eye did not seem such a good idea.

  An alternative would be to modify the regular radar equipment in the small rockets so that it could be used for "sweeping" the moon's surface. Similar sweeps could, of course, be made from the station itself, but it would take nearly two weeks even that way to cover the surface without changing the orbit. Working from the small rockets was very decidedly better.

  The alterations were commenced the moment this was realized, and more than six hours were spent at the job. The boys were ordered to sleep the greater part of this time, and even Dart realized that this was the wise thing to do. They went to their rooms and were awakened only when the technicians reported that the radar would be ready in about another hour.

  Still chewing the last of a hasty meal, they appeared at the main control room, which Bowen had been using as an office, and found the man in an extremely serious mood.

  "Sit down, boys."

  "But hadn't we better get going?"

  "Soon, but I have something to say first.

  "I realize that all three of you have a good deal of common sense; if I didn't know it, I wouldn't have agreed to any of this business. I know that there are a lot of things that can tempt you, though, as they did Tumble; I want you to realize that if you yield to any impulse to depart from the planned search line, for any reason whatever, it may mean that men will never get into space as they should. You are the pioneers—the vanguard. If Columbus hadn't come back from his voyage, it would have been a long, long time before anyone else would have ventured west on the Atlantic. The same is true here. I'm not saying much about what will happen to the people who let you go, if you don't come back; in that case, I wouldn't much care about myself. What I am worried about is your own safety, and the future of space exploration. You're the scouts—the eyes —the leaders."

  "You might almost call us the Rangers," Dart said with a grin. His uncle smiled also.

  "In a way, I suppose you might—although that would seem to leave Pete out, wouldn't it?"

  "I don't know about that," Peter himself said. "I'm practically one of the family, anyway. If you're going to make puns on the name, I guess I have a right to get in on it too."

  "Then Rangers we are," said Bart.

  "Good enough." Bowen was willing to devote a little time to side issues, but not much. "Whatever you call yourselves, though, we all need you—alive. Don't get the idea that you can prove yourselves brave by ignoring safety rules. You're doing something I can't, and probably never can; I admit that, and if you want to consider yourselves better than I am, I can't blame you. However, I'd be extremely cautious if I were in your shoes."

  "How does our being able to overcome space sickness prove we're better men?" asked Peter in genuine surprise. "Any ten-year-old can crawl through the Needle's Eye on Mount Monadnock, and I can't, but that doesn't make him better than I. You're still the head, Uncle Jim; as you say, we're a set of eyes. We'll try to be good ones. In the old days, it wasn't the rangers or the scouts who were leaders of the parties going west; the leaders stayed with the main group, while the scouts came back and reported. That's us."

  "Three Musketeers," remarked Dart. The older boys made simultaneous grimaces of disagreement.

  "Three Rangers, if you like," amended his brother, "but who ever heard of the Musketeers exploring? Besides.... " He stopped suddenly.

  "Besides, there were really four of them," Peter finished for him, softly.

  "Yeah. Let's go." Bart's voice was husky, and Dart's expression unusually sober. Bowen knew better than to say anything as they made their way to the launching racks.

  Five minutes later the boys were in their space suits, and the air locks had closed behind them. Bowen and the technicians left the launching chambers and sealed their inner doors, and one by one the three little rockets dropped away from the station.

  There was no question of velocity or acceleration errors this time; every second of the search flights had been computed by the machines in the station. Seen from the great drum, the rockets appeared to drop behind as the boys applied power; actually they cut downward, killing the station's speed around the moon as they went in a single smooth curve that brought the three of them to a point twenty miles above the north pole of the bleak world just as the last of their velocity was lost.

  The station's orbit was far enough out so that it would still be some time going below the horizon and out of radio range.

  The three rockets swung tail downward and applied enough drive to hold them where they were against the moon's weak gravity.

  "All set, Pete?" Ashburn heard Bart's voice over his radio.

  "All set. We're holding our height, unless this radar altimeter is crazy. As soon as the search antennae are out, we can start spiraling. I'm extending mine now." Peter suited action to the word, touching the switch that would open a tiny hatch in the skin of the rocket and send out a mechanical arm carrying the modified antenna at its end. Bart checked on his brother's progress while this was going on; Dart was having no trouble.

  "All right, Uncle Jim. We're in position, and the radars are registering—though the moon certainly doesn't look much like the moon on the radar screen, I must say. How will we recognize the ship if it is around?"

  "It's metal," replied Bowen. "Even if it's in small pieces, as it probably is, it will reflect radar waves better than any of the rock. It should show up as a bright spot on your screen. The technicians set the contrast to help you as much as possible. You can start your search pattern whenever you're ready."

  "We're ready."

  The rockets began to move outward, each in its own direction. They were still hanging tail downward, tilting ever so slightly in the direction of travel—the thrust of the motors was being used mostly for support.

  When the required speed was reached, the little ships straightened up again and coasted onward, tilting a trifle from time to time in one direction or another to correct course, but generally keeping their noses straight away from the moon. Peter was reminded of a group of sea horses he had once seen in an aquarium.

  The motion straight away from the pole lasted a short time; then each ship began to swing to one side so as to travel along a spiral course—a course which would let their radar beams cover every square foot of the moon's surface as they wound slowly toward the equator.

  They held a height of twenty miles, and the circle covered by the beams on the ground was about the same diameter. It took, therefore, several turns of the spiral before the Tumblesauce, some eighty-five miles from the pole, was reached; but it had not taken very long to make those turns, and neither the boys nor Bowen were able to believe that the search could be over so quickly.

  "There must be free metal on the surface of the moon," the man said when Dart reported the glow on his screen. "After all, there's no oxygen to rust it."

  "That may be true," replied Peter, from his own position, "but we can't take it for granted. Shall the rest of us continue the pattern while Dart goes down to see, or should we go over to keep an eye on him?"

  "Why not try to get Tumble on the radio?" asked Dart.

  "He'd have heard us long ago if he'd been able to receive," pointed out his brother.

  "I think you boys had better go over and stand by while Dart goes down," said Bowen, ignoring the interruption. "Dart, hold where you are until they get to you; then ease down until you can see the surf
ace clearly enough to tell what's showing on your screen."

  "We're a hundred miles from him and each other," pointed out Peter. "He'll have to keep his transmitter putting out a carrier wave until we get there, so we can use the radio compasses. Otherwise we'd be a sweet time finding him."

  "Right enough. Dart, do that. Tell me when you're together again. While you're waiting for them, Dart, give us the location of that spot on your map as well as you can—I know it's hard to identify map features on the radar screen, but you can tell about where you are by sight, I should think."

  "All right, Uncle Jim."

  It took some time for the boys to get together, even with the radio compasses, since it was extremely hard to recognize the rockets by sight even at a half mile's distance, against the star-sprinkled darkness. They finally managed it, however; and under Bowen's direction, all three eased off their motors a trifle for a moment and began to settle toward the surface. All the boys wanted to look downward as they went, but could not; they had to keep their places at their control boards and watch the instruments with care. All three of the radar screens now showed the spot Dart had found, and there was no trouble keeping over it, but no one got a direct look until Bowen told them to hold their height at half a mile from the ground. Dart, faster or more careless than the others, was the first to switch his attention from the controls after stopping his descent, and it was he who first spotted the source of the radar reflection.