Sectret of The Marauder Satellite (v1.0)

by Unknown Author

  Then I waited.

  As I waited, watching the distant twinkle of the Station,

  I wondered. I wondered if I’d make it back, if I could pull the whole operation off. It was so chancy—so incredibly * chancy...

  I wondered, too, about the black satellite that had attacked and killed my tug. Where had it come from? Why was it here? Why was it preying upon our spacecraft?

  If it was indeed the instrument of the Russian capsule’s destruction, that meant it had been roaming over Earth for the last twenty-one years. That’s a long time. Yet it had never been spotted before.. .or, had it? I thought about the mission we mysteriously lost in the late sixties, and I wondered if other tugs like mine had gone out on missions, never to return. What had happened? Had their mission Controls simply assumed a mistake on their parts—and a fiery plunge into Earth’s atmosphere? Or had searches been conducted, and the dead men and their tugs found, enigmas as puzzling as the Russian capsule? How much hadn’t we been told about the mysteries of space?

  But I was letting my imagination run away with me. I was being paranoic. It was highly unlikely that there had been a series of previous losses to the black marauder. Once its presence was discovered, it would be hunted down and destroyed.

  If it could be destroyed, that was.

  I tried to think of the behavior characteristics of the craft. It could apparently move in any direction, abruptly, and almost at random. It appeared to zero in on any spacecraft in close proximity, and to suck the actual energy from it. Could this be its source of power?

  But what was its purpose? Why did it do this?

  That one I couldn’t answer.

  All right then; why hadn’t it picked off more missions? Perhaps because space—even that globe of space within the immediate vicinity of Earth—was large. There was a fantastic volume of area Jo be covered. Did it sense other spacecraft from any real distance, or did it simply count on eventually crossing their orbits with its own? I favored the latter explanation; it made more sense, and explained why we’d seen so little of it.

  When it had scooted off from the tug, it was following a new path, though. Was that deliberate, or at random?

  These were questions I could only ask; I had no real answers. I tried to order my mind by grouping the questions logically, and setting up plausible answers, but my mind kept straying, back to a more elemental question:

  Would I make it?

  Fear would claw up through my guts, and then I would lay it to rest again by diverting my mind to thoughts of the marauder satellite, and my speculation over its origin and purpose.

  Vainly.

  My thoughts kept tumbling back, away from the abstract, and back to the subjectively real: me.

  I tried to channel my thinking into a more constructive vein. Assume I did get back. Would I step into the old patterns?

  Just what was my basic problem?

  People—getting along with people.

  Why?

  It was like a session with Bix, with me supplying his questions as well as my own answers. I had to pry myself into a state of total honesty with myself. I had to solve these questions now, or admit defeat. This lone journey through space marked a turning point for me; I knew that. The remaining question was, would I take a turning for the better, or for the worse?

  Why couldn’t I get along with people?

  "The answer, Dr. Williams, is a simple one; you gave it yourself, only half an hour ago: you never had the chance.

  Sure, blame it all on your parents, fella.

  Well, why not? They didn’t love me!

  That’s a handicap others have faced.

  How?

  By overcoming their early environmental pressures. By going out, beyond their defenses. By meeting other people, and by offering something of value to them.

  Yeah? Buying their love?'

  You can’t buy another’s love. Nor friendship or respect. You earn it.

  How?

  It’s the golden rule, fella; I thought you knew that. You give unto others that which you’d have them give unto you. You want others to care about you, you gotta care a little about them. Stop looking at other people as faceless enemies. Drop your guard occasionally. Get to know a few.

  I do, of course.

  Sure, and it’s been pretty rewarding, hasn’t it?

  Well, yes...

  How about the way you felt when you thought you’d goofed in taking Mary into that park? That was real, Paul-buddy. You were thinking about another human being; not just your own skin.

  That’s true...

  And Bix. He bugs you sometimes, but what if he moved out of your room and left you to yourself?

  I’d miss him.

  Why?

  He’s somebody I can talk to; I know I’m not boring him. He digs what Fm saying.

  He cares, right?

  Umm, yeah.

  Go thou and do likewise.

  For a long time it had seemed the star I thought was the Station had not moved, and was no closer than ever. I blinked my eyes, and wondered if I’d lost it amid the real stars.

  I checked my chronometer. I’d been out here about five and a half hours; I had only another hour and a half remaining.

  Then, with a suddenness that was startling, the tiny pip of light began to swell, and I was horrifyingly afraid that in my miscalculations I would be passed by, the Tin Can hurtling past at something between one hundred and one thousand miles an hour. I clung to my control arms, the nails on my fingers all but tearing through the tough gloves of my suit.

  Then, miraculously, I was hanging in space, not half a mile from the Station.

  It was still moving overhead, but slowly now. I knew I could reach it.

  I gave a quick touch to my jets to align me, and a longer blast to increase my velocity and lift me up directly into the Station’s orbit.

  The jets gave me a quick acceleration, but soon sputtered and quit.

  I tested the controls again, gingerly. Nothing. The jets were dead. Their fuel was exhausted. Had I miscalculated somehow? I’d figured on another two minutes’ worth yet.

  The Station was growing closer every minute. I could see the sun screens of the solar power batteries cleanly etched by sunlight on the spinning barrel surface. The north pole—the docking station—was close overhead. I tried to figure my collision angles.

  Not so good. I was not directly headed for my destination. Instead, continuing on my present course, figuring the movement of the Station, I would contact the north end somewhere near the rim.

  That was no good. I couldn’t tell if there were handholds, but even if there were, I would have a hard time grabbing onto one as it spun by, and the centrifugal force of the spin would probably throw me off again. Not so good at all.

  I had to change my direction. I needed to be able to maneuver. I needed my jets.

  I almost cried out of pure rage and frustration. I was so close! Fd lucked my way over the hardest part of the trip, and here I was within sight of home base.

  And it was still beyond reach.

  I felt like calling down the curses of all the gods of humanity upon this situation, and my rotten luck. Those jets—! The fuel gauge must’ve been inaccurate. It had cheated me, cheated me of those necessary drops of fuel which I so badly needed to complete my epic journey. I felt like tearing off the backpack, and throwing it as far away from me as I could, just for the pleasure of knowing it would briefly wink into flame as a falling star. I wanted to ruin my fists upon it, battering it, and me, into quiescent exhaustion.

  Then my mind cleared a little.

  The backpack—it had considerable mass. On Earth, it would weigh close to one hundred fifty pounds. It was compactly built, but it had a lot of weight built in.

  When last on Earth, I’d weighed one hundred and seventy-five pounds. That was not so different from the mass weight of my backpack. If I took the backpack off, and threw it away from me, Newton’s Second Law should give me quite a boost. If I picke
d the right vector for it, the opposite and nearly equal reaction should propel me in the direction I wanted!

  But there was a drawback. Once I’d selected my course, and kicked away the backpack, that was it. There’d be no last-minute corrections possible. The only remaining items I could throw away were my exhausted air tanks.

  My air tanks...

  Maybe there was another way.

  Fortunately, they’d had the sense to put my air gauges out on the control arms of the backpack, where I could see them. These gauges applied only to the tanks on the backpack, of course. The suit tanks had a direct connection. But I knew that the tanks were empty.

  The backpack carried four compact, squared-off air tanks. My gauges showed two were empty. Of the two remaining, one was full and the other three quarters empty. That one was good for another fifteen minutes or so. I figured it would be long enough for my purposes.

  The next problem was to get at the full tank.

  I couldn’t even see it, much less put my hands on it, with the backpack on. I would have to take the big thing off again. And time was not standing still. The Station was getting closer, and I could see more clearly that my present course would not take me to the docking port, or even close to it.

  Sweat rolled down my face, partially clouding my face plate, as I struggled with close concentration to swing the backpack off without losing it.

  I thought of combining operations: of kicking away the backpack, and then using the air tank for control. But granting I somehow made it, I could imagine what they’d say about losing a backpack. The things cost NASA about as much as / did. I’d save jettisoning the backpack for an emergency—if there could be any emergency greater than this one.

  The air tank wasn’t designed to be removed with gloves. The knurled screws were small and set almost flush. I lost a lot of sweat over them before the tank came loose.

  Now I had it: my new jet. I set it in space, next to me, while I struggled the backpack back on. It traveled along with me; I picked it up again as though it had been on a shelf.

  The Station was getting very close.

  Angling the air tank around in front of me, I twisted open the valve.

  A jet of highly pressurized air shot out of the nozzle. The tank kicked me in the stomach, and I almost lost it. It wanted to squirm out of my hands. Quickly, I cut the flow off.

  Had it worked? I waited, and watched, clutching the tank firmly, my right hand on its valve.

  Yes, I was swinging around, toward the docking port! I re-aimed the tank, and gave a couple more quick blasts. The thing had a lot more power than I’d bargained on-.

  In moments, I was clutching the docking collar firmly with both hands. I was laughing, almost hysterically, and tears were rolling down my cheeks. I was still like that when they discovered me and took me in, minutes later.

  They put me in the infirmary. I told them there was nothing wrong with me, and they told me I was still hysterical, and in a light state of shock. They took my blood pressure, my pulse, and tested my retinal reflexes. Then they gave me a couple of pills, and put me in a bunk, where I quickly drifted into a sleep that was close to oblivion.

  * * *

  O.K., you knew it all along. Dead men don’t write books. You knew that I, Horatio Alger-like, would Win Through. You probably figured it out: with my native brilliance, and through NASA training, I was bound to come up with the right answers. O.K.; you knew.

  I didn’t. I didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. I had absolutely no way of knowing whether I would succeed. It was touch-and-go right up to the last minute, for me. It was an elemental situation; one in which I’d struggled for my life, and not just my physical existence, but for a quality of meaning, for some understanding of who I was, and what I was here for.

  I’ve set it down very imperfectly. I’ve mixed up a lot of my current observations with the ones I made then. It’s hard to sort things out. When I look back on the thoughts that darted through my mind during that fantastic three or four hours, it is impossible for me to recount them without adding to them the thoughts they spark within me now: the additional insights and understandings that experience has brought me since.

  So let me clear it up for you.

  Bix tells me that while I was out there, hanging in space, waiting, I underwent what he says Jung calls “the dark night of the soul." This, as I understand it, is that time when one is stripped naked before one’s own eyes, and an honest evaluation is forced. It usually occurs only during times of great stress. Bix says that in the book he read on the subject, many of the case histories involved men in times of war—real, front-line combat, where one’s life was a very fragile thing and easily lost. He says that many apparent cases of heroic bravery are really cases of men undergoing this “dark night of the soul”—forced by desperation into saving their lives and those of their buddies by extreme heroism. A real confrontation, Bix says, with Death will change a man. He says it changed me. I agree.

  Sometimes I look back on it all with a sort of dumb wonderment, and I wonder if my life could be so closely ordered by the Creator; whether, sensing that this was a time when I was ready for such a confrontation and Change, He did not bring it about for just that purpose. I dunno. Bix laughs when I mention the idea, and tells me I’ve gone a little nutty on the subject of mysticism. But then he admits that his favorite hero, Dr. Jung, was a bit of a mystic himself.

  Naturally, my preoccupation with the salvation of my soul—if that is what it was—was of no concern to the Station personnel. And when they brought me in, I was not in condition to do much more than shudder and babble about my luck in getting back.

  But the next day people came in to see me: Commander Davidson, Chief Staff Psychiatrist Speer, Dr. Cramer, and, quietly sitting back and taking notes in an incredibly fast shorthand, Mary. She had one of those magic slates that winds up like a scroll, and she used nearly all of it.

  “Paul,” Commander Davidson said, as soon as everyone had settled down, “yesterday, when you came back, there was a strong sentiment to have you shipped back down to Earth, on the first shuttle.” He held up his hand to stifle my protest.

  “Today,” he continued, “you’re a Hero, with a capital ‘H.’ We’ve recovered your tug, and it was pretty much as you’d said it was: powerless. Somehow, you accomplished a feat of navigation and space voyage that is still all but unimaginable. I’d like you to tell us, if you can, exactly what happened.”

  Chapter 14

  I DON’T THINK they wanted to believe me, at first. Sure, something had happened to my radio and to the power batteries on the tug, but it would be a great deal more comfortable to believe in a freak accident.

  I wouldn’t let them.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said quietly. “It was definitely a spacecraft of some kind, and I am not imagining it.”

  “Ummm, Williams.” It was Dr. Speer. “The human mind is capable of strange things when exposed to unusual stress. You were out there for five or six hours, totally cut off from your Station environment, your last link, the radio, severed.

  “We’ve conducted tests—you may have heard of them—with volunteers who have allowed themselves to become environmentally isolated, in situations very much like yours: floating, all senses blanked out, totally dependent upon their inner selves. The results have been most • interesting.”

  “I’m sure they have been,” I said, a little coldly. “But I can’t see that any of that applies to me. I was not environmentally isolated. My eyes were wide open, and I had full use of my body. I had things to do and to plan. It wasn’t the same at all.”

  He had a bland, midwestem face, with small eyes and sandy hair. He blinked at me. "Young man, I believe I am more familiar with this sort of thing—”

  “Excuse me, sir,” I cut in. “Have you ever been outside the Station in nothing more than a spacesuit?” “Why, no, I haven’t, but—’’

  “Then I think you’ll have to agree that you don’t know what you’re
talking about at all.” I was starting to get angry, and I paused, a little astonished at my temerity.

  The commander coughed. "Ummm, Speer, I think the young man has a good point.”

  Speer opened his mouth, and then clamped it shut again. His eyes tracked back and forth between the commander and me. “Well,” he said at last, “well, I can see this is not a situation in which I am needed.” And with that he turned on his heel and went through the door. Unfortunately, his exit was somewhat spoiled by the fact that he had forgotten where he was. The infirmary was up on Level G, just inside the tan area, and he weighed something like a third of his Earth-normal. He bounded out, tripping over his feet, like a confused rabbit.

  There was a short silence after his departure, which I broke with, “I guess I did it again.”

  Dr. Cramer laughed heartily. “Nonsense, Paul. That officious idiot has needed it for years. You’ve done us all a good turn.”

  I looked at the commander. His eyes twinkled as he nodded. Then he pulled the discussion back to the real topic at hand.

  “I’m afraid that all this talk about whether or not you were imagining things ignores the central point: something put your radio out of commission and drained all the power from the tug. Occam’s razor suggests that we accept your explanation. It is certainly no more difficult to accept than any other I can think of.”

  “Thank you, sir. I, umm.. .1 wonder if I might ask a question, sir.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Why wasn’t I picked up within half an hour after my radio went dead?”

  Commander Davidson sighed and shook his head. “Sheer blundering, Williams; sheer bureaucratic blundering, and the most inexcusable sort. Your Control monitor forgot to log you out.”

  “Sir?”

  "Eh? Oh, I forgot. You aren’t familiar with the Control room procedures. We’ll have to remedy that, of course. Normally when anyone goes out, and is being monitored, his Control monitor makes a record of it on the Orders of the Day record, which is kept posted. He logs it. He logs the time you go out, your mission, the computer-control index, and anything else pertinent to the mission.