by Jerry
Another card called Phil back to his desk; he gave it a quick glance and filed it. Now there was work to be done; Mars had to be warned, although New Pitt undoubtedly had received the report.
A quick call to Computing set Fred Holland to work on the exact orbit, and Phil turned to the chart again. The markers on the orbit showed that about twenty-two hours remained—New Pitt, on Mars, would pick up the meteor in roughly an hour. Phil sent a copy of the orbit out to Doris, with instructions to get it on the emergency circuit to Mars.
The preliminaries over, Phil sat behind his desk and began to have his customary regrets. Whenever a big rock struck the space lanes, Phil wondered what he was doing here. Whenever the rock was really big, the chief of SD slashed the arteries of the Solar System with efficiency and finality. The advent of robot freighters had made the job easier, but still each day’s ban cost somebody millions. Phil bit his lip and lit another cigar. The responsibility of his office was not to save millions, but to save lives.
The minute hand crept forward, timing the flight of his message. In just seventeen minutes from the time Phil gave Doris the message, acknowledgment arrived. Doris brought in the spacegram personally.
“Mr. Brownyard—” She hesitated at the door.
“Good, they didn’t waste any time.” Phil reached out and Doris came up to him with the message.
“Mr. Brownyard, can I ask something?”
Phil looked up blankly from the spacegram. “Huh? Oh, sure. What?”
“Well . . . my boy friend is on the North America. I wondered if you could tell me—” She stopped. It was strictly against the rules to give any advance information.
Phil hesitated. The spacegram said that the route outbound from Mars had been changed, and nothing more.
“I’d like to help,” he said, “but I’m afraid we don’t know the situation yet about the Earth-Mars route. Don’t worry, though. We don’t miss on these big ones.”
Twenty-one hours later, he was staring at another spacegram, remembering his comforting words of the day before. The heading was emergency; the spacegram was direct from the Stag Head detector station.
METEOR 842M2055 OUT OF CONTACT. EAST STATION INOPERATIVE, STAG HEAD STATION HORIZONED. LAST ACCURATE ORBIT—
Phil dropped the spacegram and looked back at the chart on the desk. The red line of the meteor’s orbit made a shallow curve that missed the planet by a scant eighty miles. Arcing outward from Mars, the line was dotted. From there on, it was guesswork. Atmospheric drag and the proximity of Deimos combined to make the uncertainty in the orbit dangerous.
Phil buzzed Fred Holland and reached for the standard route-cancellation form. Forcing all misgivings out of his mind, he printed carefully the necessary information and orders.
The Earth-Mars route had to be cut. From now until SD said all clear, no ship would run in these lanes, or anywhere within a spreading truncated cone that represented the danger volume. No ship would move between Earth and Mars except by the long expensive detour out of the ecliptic. Phil sent the form out to Doris, glad to get it out of sight. As an afterthought, he buzzed her.
“You don’t need to worry about your boy friend. He’s taking the long way around.”
“Thanks a lot, Mr. Brownyard. I guess I won’t get his wire for a couple of days, then.” She let him break the connection.
Phil paid no attention to her last words for a moment; then the implication sank in. “A couple of days—?” That could mean the North America was nearing the danger volume. He began to check.
“Terran Lines? Spatial Debris calling. Message number, July 3357-563.
Get the North America off the route, but quick. Never mind, just get her at least eight hundred kilomiles above the ecliptic, or equivalent. This is official. Now get me her position.”
A short verification of his authority followed, then the Terran operator relayed the request to the North America. The wait was almost fourteen minutes, by which time Phil was visualizing a ship, crushed and shattered, being swept through space by the massive meteor. The Terran man reappeared, looking pale.
“I’ll send it over on the writer. We just got the flash from your office, and we’re right smack in the middle. I hope you guys know what you’re talking about.”
“If I were you, I’d hope we didn’t,” Phil said, and cut off.
He looked in the writer and and got the message. The North America would he making an emergency turn by now, he thought. Hope it doesn’t take them into the wrong spot at the wrong time.
Spatial Debris began to hum. Phil had made the first decision; now the rest of the office was busy. A flight on another passenger line was canceled fifteen minutes before take-off—too close! All the robot freight companies were checked and individually warned. On the master chart in Phil’s office, little dots accumulated, making a dense stream along the space route. Eight hundred ships, a quarter of them carrying passengers, were diverted. No more than two hours passed before complaints began to roll in by spacegram and by viser.
“I’ll lose a good prospect if I don’t deliver—”
“Exactly where is this meteor—?”
“Why don’t you jerks leave us alone? I’ve been in space thirty years—”
“How long—” (How long, Phil thought, can seventy million miles he?’)
He stood it for half an hour, then had the public line disconnected and received only official and emergency calls. The next call he got was from Terran Lines. The North America had reported a brief sight on the meteor, but no data on it; the ship was in its emergency turn. Could she go back on course?
Phil told them to hang on a while. He gave the meteor an approximate position, estimating from the position of the Terran ship. The dot lay far above the danger volume.
“Permission refused. Not the same meteor.” Phil switched to video and explained. “It’s probably a small, close one, blastable. You can sit easy, though. Your ship’s out of danger as long as you keep her north.” The Terran agent thanked him, with reservations—canceled reservations, probably.
The meteor’s path clung obstinately to the trade route; its progress was measured not in linear kilomiles, but in days, and the days looked to add up to several weeks. Government blasters took off from Mars trying to locate the rock, while Phil started losing sleep.
A week passed. The blasters had returned four times and had hurtled off again. Somewhere out there a six-mile mote was falling toward the Sun, and while electronic nets were spreading, the system was suffering.
“SD STILL SAYS NO!” said one headline; another gently hinted, “FORTY MILLION DOLLARS SO FAR!” The safety bureau took a beating from all sides. Daily, on the financial pages, a little box appeared giving the space-time coordinates of the meteor. As the weeks wore on, the blasters began taking off from bases on Luna, searching doggedly for a grain of sand in a flour bin. By now the danger volume was an impossible ten trillion cubic miles. The thinning stream of ships was flowing almost Ecliptic North from the Earth as Mars approached conjunction. No ship gleamed along the whole free-flight trade orbit. Well—one.
Planetoid 17321 belonged to Terry Carson by virtue of a claim filed in Big Bay, Mars. Terry’s ship was resting lightly against the half-mile boulder while Terry was “underground” in his pneumatic hut, tight. 17321 was on the chart in Spatial Debris, and its orbit was known exactly. The fact that it was inside the danger volume was of incidental interest. The fact that there was a man in it would have attracted a good deal more attention; however, Terry’s flight plan was crushed somewhere in the works of the crippled East Station.
The tunnel Terry had dug extended forty yards into 17321. The walls were plain rock thirty-six yards of the way, right up to the door of the pneumatic hut. From there on, the pick strokes had flaked off blue-gray chips in isolated spots, spots that came more frequently over the last yard. Terry was sitting inside his rubber-canvas hut, a bottle in one hand and a chunk of pure galena in the other.
“I’m rich,”
he murmured happily. “Hear that, Carson? You’re rich. He’s rich, they say. She’s rich, it’s rich.” He let his head drift down on the sleeping bag and chuckled in his belly.
The vein was ninety feet thick, fifty yards across, pure lead sulphide. Terry had been looking for this rock from the time of the Tompkins strike, eighteen years ago. Eleven fragments of a larger planetoid had been found, each containing a segment of lead ore vein. A topologist friend of Terry’s had pieced the rocks together on paper. He had found a gap in the vein, and 17321 was the missing piece. Soviet Atomic was currently paying two-fifty a pound for lead, correspondingly for ore. Terry did some figuring.
Terry tilted the bottle again. He whispered: “Maybe a million bucks!” He reached for his portable radio.
If Terry had kept up on current events, he would have known that Earth station KWK had switched off its beam for the duration of the emergency. But then, Terry didn’t know there was any emergency. He batted the plastic box, but all that came out was the hiss of the distant stars. The gold leaf showed that the filaments were still active; it indicated that the batteries and electrets were good enough. Terry began to feel uneasy.
He scrambled into his suit, the effect of the alcohol wearing off. Back at the ship, he switched on the long-range radio and fiddled the dial back and forth while the power supply wanned up. Still no KWK. He spun the dial to WLW, and blew out his breath in relief. The familiar reliable time-ticks beeped away, and Terry relaxed and listened. He spun the dial to the MBC—their wide beam inclosed 17321—and he had music. The default of KWK passed quickly from his mind, and he flopped in his bunk and day-dreamed, his fingers twitching now and then as he peeled off a hundred-dollar bill.
At 0645 UT, the news came on. Terry paused in the midst of purchasing an Indo-Venusian palace, sat up gradually, and froze.
“. . . The situation is rapidly becoming serious,” the commentator was saying. “For the last three weeks, trade has been falling off at an increasing rate. Conjunction is only a month away, and passenger lines are straining at the leash. Nobody wants to travel. The Department of Safety remains obstinate—no direct flights until the meteor is gone. One wonders a little—the government has sent over sixty long-range blasters after the meteor, and there hasn’t been one contact. At a time like this, yours truly would be inclined to say, ‘Look before you leap.’ Are you listening, Mr. B?”
At 0700 the co-ordinates of the meteor were broadcast. Terry was startled to hear how large the uncertainty was, and it was with reluctance that he punched the necessary figures into the computer.
“I’m in it!” he despaired. “They can’t do this to me!” But he knew they could. They could send out a blaster after him, leave 17321 unguarded. They could—
If they were coming after him, Terry reasoned, they would have arrived long ago. So, he guessed more or less correctly, his flight plan must have been snarled up in red tape. He chorded, then swallowed his laughter. Sure, he could stay here—but if the meteor hit, by some long chance, he’d lose both his strike and his life. He chortled again, uncontrollably, and then giggled.
In an instant he was through the mid-section hatch fumbling with the air-generator. The increasing numbness of his fingers hindered him, and he had to concentrate to remember which way the valve turned. The oxygen-content meter was up to sixty percent. Deliberately, Terry slowed his breathing, and reluctantly bled the ship, running helium into the ship’s atmosphere until the oxy meter was back to normal. With a start he noticed that the helium tank was nearly exhausted; then he noticed that the hiss of incoming oxygen was still sounding. Terry’s heart wrenched as he stared at the oxygen gauge. He figured quickly—twenty minutes. Twenty minutes! A leak. All the time he had been digging, celebrating, the main air supply had been draining out a puncture. As he watched the gauge needle twitched and came to rest again a fraction of a division from the stop. Terry tapped the dial, watching the needle quiver toward zero. Red flag, air supply gone. He breathed deeply, waited two more minutes, then when he could get no more from his ship’s vanishing atmosphere, donned his suit. Four hours of air remained in its tank and regenerator, maybe twelve hours in the hut. Sixteen hours left to breathe. So Terry did what any old hand would have done. He set the distress signal to WLW, beamed it at Earth, and went to sleep. The signal screamed its hundred-megacycle note down the empty space lane, and was lost.
Peter Hedrick, smuggler by trade, watched a cold Alaskan sky darken, and wrote in his log, “0700. Sky becoming overcast. Take-off in thirty minutes. Consignment, Poppy seed to Big Bay.” He had a fine load, a big fast ship and a space lane all to himself—almost. One meteor was worth chancing. He snapped the log shut and strolled toward the camouflaged ship.
“My dear,” Mrs. Ashton confided to the private telescreen, “I know just how you feel. Now don’t worry a bit. After all, your John always did like to have his little flings, and everyone understands. He’ll be back. And I wouldn’t worry too much. Peter says he has it from a very good source that this whole thing is just another meteor scare.”
The screen babbled back briefly.
“All right,” Mrs. Ashton smiled. “I’ll surely let you know. Bye-bye.” She cut off the screen and let the smile become a smirk. Mrs. Phelps’ superb husband was in his private yacht somewhere between here and Mars, and everyone but Mrs. Phelps knew he had company. For a few moments, Mrs. Ashton considered the dramatic possibilities in Mr. Phelps and his yacht being crushed by the meteor, but not beyond recognition.
Phil Brownyard was beginning to repress all optimism concerning the position of the meteor. The failure of the blasters to locate it gave pretty good odds that it was well out of the volume assigned to it, and that meant out of the shipping lanes. But there was always one chance. Phil merely shoved the other nine hundred ninety-nine out of his consciousness and clung to that one.
He got to the office early the twenty-eighth day after the alert. There was no sense in sitting at home in the dark, so he opened the office at 0725. The reports were still the same—no contact. The black line on the chart extended now from Mars to within two million miles of Earth. Half a day at the most before Luna would pick up whatever was there. Phil gave a nervous yawn.
The clock crept laboriously to 0730. Phil doodled on a pad, drawing daggers and ominous blots. 0731. He got up and looked out the window at the city, noting the beauty of the towers in the early morning light. 0732. Out in the corridor messenger cars whipped back and forth; all the building was alive except for Spatial Debris and a few others. Phil sat in his soundproofed office and bit the end off a cigar. Paper rustled as he propped his elbows on the desk.
At 0734, the telescreen shrieked. Phil jumped, dropping his cigar. Before the automatic dial could switch the call to his home, he flipped the toggle and leaned forward.
“Brownyard?” A switchboard operator stared sleepily at him.
“Yeah, who is it?”
“Mr. Cushing of Terran Lines, collect. Will you accept the call?”
“Go ahead.”
Cushing’s face blurred too close to the pickup lens. “Brownyard, we’ve found your meteor!” He roared. “It just hit the North America.” The screen blanked out.
Instantly it came to life again. An excited young man appeared and stammered, “North Station Luna calling. Meteor 842M2055 detected. Co-ordinates and orbit follow.”
Phil acknowledged automatically, knowing it was too late. Switching to another band, he called the night Safety office. His stomach knotted, and hurt.
“What’s this about the North America?” he asked Jim Shepard.
“Oh . . . you, Phil. Well, she’s hit all right. Taking off for Stag Head. Collided at sixty-eight thousand miles; almost nothing left. The patrols are going after her now.”
“O.K.” Phil started to sign off, then tensed. “Hey . . . hey—!”
“Yeah?” Jim reappeared, his face sympathetic.
“What did you say her distance was?”
“Sixty-eight kilo
miles. Why, do you think—?”
“You bet!” Phil stiffened his aching back and went to work. “That couldn’t have been our baby. I just got a contact report from Luna, and I was still convinced that 842 had got the North America. Let’s get busy—here are the co-ordinates.” Phil dug into the writer and came up with the message card. He stuck it into the slot under the screen, received the acknowledgment, and cut off. His hands were shaking badly.
How many hours to work? Phil retrieved the card and scanned it, then went to the chart and plotted the point. Nine hundred and eighty kilomiles. That left—nine hours. Only nine hours for the blasters to try to match velocities, nine hours to—Phil tightened inside as the curvator started forward to trace a new black line. It swept inside the orbit of the Moon, straight into the green disk that was Earth. The crimson light went on.
He had known it would end this way, for a long time. From the instant he had deciphered the first flash, he had had a funny feeling; he had known that the danger volume would sweep over Earth, but he had hoped for just a little more luck, one little favor from the laws of probability. The invisible fingers of Earth tugged, and the great rock obeyed.
Trembling with tension, Phil called Computing and got them to work. In half an hour the answer returned. The west coast of the European continent would be hit; it would take three hours to pinpoint the spot.
Phil frowned and rubbed his forehead. It was silly to feel this way, of course. He had carried out his duties as well as he could—a thousand ships had been warned, the space lanes had been held clear. But he felt a sense of responsibility that he could not shake.
