Sectret of The Marauder Satellite (v1.0)

by Unknown Author

  But this time I was wearing a blue jump suit under my space suit. This time I was acting as a full crewman.

  I was very careful, very thorough, working over the tug.

  Chapter 11

  The Titan unit was down a lot closer to Earth—a good hundred miles lower. It was the lowest we’d scavenged. Lee Hoffman told me that scavenging operations had been going on at their present scale for only a few months. In fact, I was the first to be given full-time work at it. Now, of necessity, we were having to scavenge farther afield, into higher and lower orbits, and orbits increasingly removed from our own.

  I was just fastening the grapples to the unit, when something made me pause, and look up. I saw nothing, but as I paused, a sudden stillness descended upon me.

  At first I didn’t place it. Then I did. My earphones— they were dead! The familiar, almost subliminally accepted hum of my radio contact with Station Control was broken. What did this mean?

  I looked up again. Something was wrong—terribly wrong.

  From the corner s of my eyes, I sensed movement—up here, where there was no movement. Yet, I saw nothing.

  There’s an old quotation that Bix delights in throwing at me in inopportune moments. But it fit this one like a glove: “What was the curious thing, Dr. Watson, that the dog did in the night?” Sherlock Holmes’s answer was, it did nothing. And that was the point of his suspicions. As Bix pointed out, every time he quoted the line, sometimes an absence is more suspicious than a presence.

  I saw a little too much nothing. A section of stars about thirty degrees above the horizon of Earth was blotted out. It was a small section—maybe as large as a dime. But it was growing.

  A chill passed over me—and then the thought, Was that an actual temperature drop?

  Dr. Cramer’s voice was loud in my memory as he quoted the words of a dead man: “Radio dead, all instruments dead. Getting very cold...”

  Was it my imagination, or was I getting colder?

  A shadow seemed to be blotting out the heavens. It was getting larger, growing in size, growing—closer?

  Discretion is the better part of valor, I once heard said. With shaking fingers, I unhooked my lifeline to the tug.

  I crouched against the Titan unit, and then jumped, kicking as hard as I could.

  As I fell away, I somersaulted so that I could look back on the tug and the scrap booster. Had I done the right thing? And—had I done it in time?

  The dark area was now the size of a half-dollar, and rapidly increasing in size. I could see nothing within the area, no glimmer of light. No reflection.

  I’d kicked myself up, away from the booster unit, without really thinking about direction. But I was lucky. I was rising, on an upward parabola, away from Earth. I wondered if I should add the thrust of my backpack jets to that of my kick, but on a hunch I did not. I was receding from the unit and the tug at a good pace, anyway. I guessed I’d already traveled a quarter of a mile.

  Then I saw it.

  Or rather—I saw its silhouette. It had moved over the horizon line, and now it was gliding over the brilliant blues and greens of the planet below.

  I could make out no details. It reflected no light; it was as black as the deepest space between the stars. Yet its outline revealed that it wasn’t any stray asteroid, no errant chunk of rock. Its contours were irregular, and yet created.

  That was what made my scalp tingle: the strange object below, still on an apparent collision course with my tug and the Titan unit, was a made object—but not manmade.

  It seemed to have no symmetry, no obvious nose or tail, no apparent means of propulsion. It showed no flare of rockets, nor even an ion beam. It moved.

  I said it wasn’t man-made, and there were those, at first, who doubted me, who couldn’t imagine such a snap judgment. They hadn’t seen it.

  It was alien.

  It’s the way a dog will always recognize another dog, Great Dane or tiny terrier, as a member of his species, but instinctively recognizes that cats are not. On a more sophisticated level, I had my own instinctual, intuitive awarenesses of how man-made things should look. Human beings think in particular ways that are, if only subconsciously, familiar to other human beings. We can sniff each other out.

  This strange black object—it had an alien smell. I looked down on it, and I looked upon the product of thinking that was unhuman, unfamiliar.

  They asked me, back when they were interrogating me and didn’t believe me, how I could expect to recognize something that might be a startling new weapon from one of the Non-aligned Powers. I couldn’t tell them then. I couldn’t put it into words—any better than I can now. I can’t tell you what that thing looked like; only what it did not look like.

  It was not a rocket. It was not a cylinder, a cone, or a sphere. It was not square. It appeared strangely amorphous, full of complex curves, which I could only see by silhouette, their full complexity not suggested until the thing began to turn upon its longitudinal axis. (I have to resort to such a long-winded way of describing it, because the thing seemed not to have any ends, although I automatically thought of the front as being that which pointed the direction it was going. But that was at first, before it began rolling, and then eventually struck off on another course, with a new “front” .. .but I’m digressing, and I’m getting ahead of myself.)

  Even its size was hard to judge. How far away is a two-dimensional object? With only its silhouette to judge by, I could not tell at first whether it was on my side of the tug or the other—whether it was bigger in size, and farther away, or smaller and closer. It wasn’t until I had the two and their relative positions fixed in my mind that I could make an estimate.

  I would guess and say that the thing appeared to be at least three times the size of my tug: sixty to a hundred feet on its longest dimension.

  If its shape was not almost enough to bring a dog-snarl to my lips-^a racial reaction against the unknown—there was also its color.

  Black, as any science freshman can tell you, is not a color. It is an absence of color. Normally a given object absorbs most of the visible spectrum, reflecting only one color, or a simple combination of colors. If it reflects them all equally, it appears white. But if it absorbs them all, reflecting nothing, it appears black. No light returns to us.

  Most ‘‘black” objects reflect some light, some color, especially in a strong light. The blackness is only relative. We’ve never learned to create a black so black that it absorbs the entire visible spectrum of light.

  Somebody else had, though.

  Hanging in space below me, its motion relative to my tug now all but ceased, orbits equalized, separated from the linked tug and Titan by no more than a few feet, the alien object was totally black. No light reflected from its surface. There was not the faintest glimmering—from it.

  But then, suddenly, my tug began to glow.

  At first the phosphorescence was too pale, against the bright backdrop of Earth, for me to catch it. Then the black satellite was below the tug, blocking the earthlight behind it, and I could see the strange glow clearly.

  The tug almost seemed to be shedding sparks. I watched in fascinated horror. There was no doubt in my mind that what I was watching was exactly that which had occurred to the Russian capsule in 1963—over twenty years earlier.

  I was conscious, too, of something else. I myself was surrounded by a pale-blue glow.

  By this time I was well over a mile away from my tug; irrationally, I had thought myself safe, out of harm* s way.

  I was in direct sunlight. Freezing would be no problem. Just the reverse. And my suit power—the batteries' that controlled my servomechs, metered my air, directed the thrust of my backpack jets—what was happening to it?

  Cautiously, I touched my jet controls.

  The kick of the jets, increasing the speed with which I was removing myself from the area of the alien satellite, was a welcome feeling; And 1 noticed also that the blue glow surrounding me was now flickering erraticall
y, and beginning to disappear. It appeared that proximity to the thing below was what counted.

  I returned my attention to the black marauder.

  The tug was losing its halo. The spark-like discharge stopped. The alien object hung, unmoving, for a moment, and then turning on a different axis, began to move away.

  I followed it with my eyes as it crossed over the bright planetscape below, until at last it had diminished to a black dot and was lost amid the confusion of surface details. It had taken a new tack, a different orbit. I wondered where it was going.

  The tug itself was becoming hard to spot when I pulled myself out of my trance. I gave myself a mental shake, like a dog climbing to its feet.

  My earphones were still dead. I played with my radio controls, but they were rudimentary; the thing was tuned to a single frequency. Nothing. I was not going to be able to make a report until I returned to the Station.

  If I returned, that was.

  The first step was to get back to my tug. I reversed my jets and brought myself to an apparent halt. It was hard to tell; there were no handy landmarks for reference purposes . I guessed by the feeling of acceleration: At first I felt the jets overcoming my inertial momentum in slowing me to a halt. Then they were starting me back. I realigned my course—in my higher, but not faster, orbit, I had been losing speed and stability, and was falling back, away from the tug below—and aimed my sight for where I’d last seen the tug, plus a little.

  It took me over half an hour to get back to the tug, and I had gotten a little scared there. For some time I hadn’t seemed to be getting closer, and I’d worried that I was not closing the gap with it. Then it was bigger, and closer, and suddenly I was almost upon it, and wasting fuel braking.

  I’d aimed rather well; I wasn’t but a hundred feet off.

  The tug was dead, stone-cold dead.

  It had no power.

  It is not until you need it and it’s not there that you realize just how important electricity is.

  The computer, of course, depended upon it. But so did the thrusters. Electricity operated the remote controls for everything from ignition to metering of the fuel. Worse, the fuel pumps themselves, which feed the fuel into the thrusters, are electrically operated. The batteries were drained, totally discharged. Dead.

  I toted it all up on the fingers of one hand.

  First, I had no radio—no way to call for help.

  Second, I had no computer—no source of navigation.

  Third, I had no way to operate the tug—no vehicle for return.

  Fourth, my air—a check of the dials showed that I had enough air for about five more hours—I was just lucky the backpack provided extra tanks.

  Fifth—?

  Things did not look good.

  I’d hooked myself onto the seat board of the tug. I stared down through the open framework. I was hanging over Asia. Suddenly, I felt quite homesick—homesick even for a land and a people, still quite hostile toward us, whom I’d never known. Asia, China, India, Tibet—lands and legends from storybooks and history books: part of my vicarious childhood. I felt a hunger for the safety and security of Earth.

  What could I do?

  I had two courses of action.

  The first, the most obvious, was that I should wait. I should sit here, and just wait. It would not take forever—I hoped—for them to decide I’d run into trouble and come running after me.

  Of course, all they had to do was to arrive here any time more than five hours from now ...

  I was scared. I was alone—more alone than I’d ever been in my whole life. I was alone, and helpless, in a totally hostile environment. Right now, riding through airless space on my dead tug, I was in the strong sunlight. The temperature “outside” was well above boiling. But once I entered Earth’s shadow, it would drop to a minus 250 degrees. How had man ever dared to venture out into this terrible place?

  The second course of action scared me even worse. I could try to return to the Station alone, with my backpack.

  It was such a bold idea that it intrigued me as much as it frightened me. I tried to weigh the pros and cons.

  On the minus side was the strongest argument: How would I ever find the Station? This wasn’t a trip on the local subway. I would be dealing in thousands of unmapped and trackless miles.

  Of course I was already traveling in an orbit with a velocity of several thousand miles an hour.

  But if I guessed wrong—if I headed in the wrong direction, if I overshot—it would be a fatal mistake. While they might find me in time aboard the tug, they would never find me in the limitless reaches of space.

  On the other hand, if I was successful, I would have accomplished a feat previously unheard of. The thought had its fascination, I’ll admit it.

  I checked my chronometer. I’d been out here for almost two hours, of which over an hour and a half had been spent in radio silence..If they had become worried by my silence, why hadn’t they come after me already? If I tried returning, there was a slim chance of actually meeting my rescuers en route, unlikely as that sounds at first thought. More important, I just felt the need to be doing something.

  It did not seem physically impossible to get back to the Station. It was in an orbit roughly paralleling that of the Titan unit, around a hundred miles higher. I had come down by using the braking rockets of my tug to slow my orbital velocity and drop me as Earth’s gravity groped for me. To return, it was necessary only that I increase my orbital velocity by the same factor—and hope that the Station would still be in the same position, analogous to the Titan unit. If it wasn’t, I’d never see it.

  I was banking on one helpful factor: the Station’s visibility. I’d remarked before that I’d sighted it from a distance of twenty miles. That gave me a twenty-mile radius of operations. I could do worse.

  Of course, that required we remain in the sunlight, out of Earth’s shadow. I wasn’t sure how many hours it would be until we passed into the nightside.

  I had enough fuel in my backpack for a fairly sustained use of the jets—say ten or fifteen minutes. With even a small thrust, you can build up a remarkable speed, accelerating over that period of time. I wondered if it would be enough.

  I glanced at my chronometer again. Fifteen minutes had passed. The stars stared back at me, cold and steady, scant comfort, poor companions.

  I stared down at the Earth, the planet upon which man was spawned and I had been bom. It looked so close, yet so far away. How easy it would be just to go down ...

  The thought sucked me in for moments.... I could desert the tug, and desert space as well. Space was cruel, inhospitable. I could fly back down, with my backpack, down into the air, down to Earth. Down to home.

  I would, of course, be consumed in incandescence long before I touched ground. I would be entering the atmosphere at a speed that strips the heat shields from space capsules and shuttles, ion by ion, the friction creating an inferno of heat that would turn me into a cinder. y

  It was a good point to remember.

  I looked up, searching for signs of a rescuing tug. I tried to pick out a stationary star against the moving backdrop of stars.

  The sun crept into my helmet, its rays darkening my visor-plate. The stars disappeared.

  I shook my head, and turned away from the sun.

  I stared again at my chronometer. Three minutes, only, since I’d last looked.

  I was sweating, and I felt a new throb, as a servomech discovered the fact when a drop of sweat touched an electrostatic grid and triggered the release of additional cooling oxygen into my suit.

  My nose itched. It felt as if something was crawling up and across the bridge of my nose. Could a bug have gotten into my suit? I tried to focus my eyes, crossing them vainly, to see if there was something on my nose. I only made them ache.

  Then I felt a hundred ants, crawling all over my body, working their way between my jump suit and my skin, across my shoulder blades and up my spine toward the base of my neck; up the inside
of my left calf; under my right arm.

  I felt hungry, and at the same time needed the facilities of a water closet. My skin was crawling, and I was beginning to approach a quiet hysteria: the prelude of panic.

  I looked up again, shielding my visor from the sun with my hand.

  At first I saw nothing. Then I saw it. A star! A star that seemed to be keeping pace with me, as the others swept across the heavens.

  Relief left me slumped on my seat board like a limp sack of grain.

  But fifteen minutes later, I was tensed again. I shielded my face with my hand, and checked the “star’s” progress.

  It was still a faintly glimmering dot, high overhead. It had come no closer.

  It took only about twenty minutes for a tug to drop down to this orbit, I knew. By now, it should’ve been very close; obviously close. Why wasn’t it?

  It took me another ten minutes to figure it out. What I’d sighted was not an approaching rescue tug, but the Tin Can itself. I had the Station within sight!

  Chapter 12

  I MADE UP MY MIND. I would try to get back alone.

  I had only four and a half hours’ air left. If I waited too much longer, I would be stuck; I would have no chance to save myself in the event that I was not rescued.

  That faint star, not much more than a hundred miles overhead, was the Station: home, for me. I had it in sight, and that made my navigation infinitely more certain of success. What I needed now was to remember my math.

  Although the Station was not much more than a hundred miles away, my journey to it would be one of several thousand miles. It was simple math.

  There were solid reasons why I could not simply aim at the Station and let fire my jets. The first, and simplest, was that even if this was a bodies-at-rest problem, I’d never get there. That was one hundred miles straight up. I would be fighting Earth’s not-inconsiderable gravity every step of the way. My backpack jets just didn’t have the stuff to do it.

  Even today’s sophisticated rockets don’t try to climb straight up. It could be done—if you had limitless amounts of fuel for it. You could climb up, out of Earth’s atmosphere, at a steady five mph, if you wanted to, and had the power and the fuel to waste.