Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "There!" I said, putting a finger on the PPI. "Turn out the light, Sid, so I can see the 'scope'."

  He switched off the cabin light and followed my directions with tiny shoves, sometimes from the rockets, sometimes from the steering jets, while I conned us closer.

  Our radar would only read within about half a mile. When we got that close I got the searchlight going and took my first real look through the forward port out into space.

  It's black. Nothing--nothing you have ever seen will persuade you how dark it is out there. That was my first big shock. Oh, I had practiced in the dark, with only my helmet light to guide my tests and assemblies, but this was a different kind of dark. Our light had no visible beam--you couldn't even tell it was working. At first I had the idea we'd see the satellite occulting some stars, but a little mental arithmetic told me that an object six or eight feet in section would not subtend much of an angle of vision at half a mile.

  We had chosen, I decided, much too narrow a beam of light for the searchlight, but just at that moment I got a flash from out in space, and worked the light back on to our objective.

  "Got it," I said.

  "Yoicks!" Sid said, and went back to the fine controls. After a long time, and lots of patience, we were hanging about fifty feet out from our bird. We were farther out in space so that the dark bulk of the satellite was silhouetted against the crescent light of Earth. I turned off the spot and switched on the floodlight.

  "Here goes nothing, Sid," I said, and undid the dogs that held the canopy above our heads.

  My earphone spoke to me: "This is Cleary. Do you read me, Mike?"

  I fumbled around to find the right jack and plugged myself into the radio. "Yes, Paul. Loud and clear."

  "Watch yourself. Think first. You've got all the time in the world."

  "Sure."

  "Sylvia would miss you," he added.

  I hoped he was right.

  * * * * *

  Clinging carefully to the handholds that had been specially provided on the outside of Nelly Bly, I clambered through the hatch and hung in the darkness, looking down at South America. The world was turning visibly under me, although I knew that in fact we were skimming rapidly about three thousand miles over its surface. I got myself lined up nice and straight with the bird and did my first bit of non-thinking. I pushed off good and proper with my feet, the way you'd dive into a swimming pool. It was a fool stunt for my first act. I was doing a good five or six feet a second. You may not think that is very fast, but before I could gulp twice I had zipped past that bird and was headed for Buenos Aires.

  I know I screamed. That was the first time I realized I really was falling. Earth looked awfully close, and seemed to be rushing up to meet me.

  My orientation was all wrong for stopping. By diving head first I had neither my back nor my belly rocket lined up to stop me.

  My training failed completely. I tried to squirm straight, and by proper swinging of my arms out to full length, and kicking the same way with my feet, I got turned around to where my belly was facing the floodlight on Nelly Bly. That's not how I was supposed to do it.

  The glider had disappeared--all I could see was the floodlight. It was still by far the brightest thing in the sky, but if I drifted much longer, I would have to use radio direction-finding to get back. I triggered the motor on my back and felt its gentle push against my spine.

  "Sid!" I called.

  "Roger, Mike!"

  "Light the tip lights. I've got to get a fix on my velocity. I went way past and I'm trying to get back."

  Two new stars winked into being, on either side of the floodlight. This had been some bright guy's idea, and it was paying off. I kept watching the apparent distance between them shrink as I continued my trip toward Earth. Memory and a little calculating told me that my acceleration of three inches per second per second would take twenty seconds of blast to slow me to a stop. I counted them off, aloud: "Mississippi one, Mississippi two, Mississippi three," as I had been taught to measure seconds. When I got to Mississippi twenty my visual measurement said I was about stationary with regard to Nelly Bly.

  I used a little more blast and let a couple minutes go by while I drifted closer to the Telstar. I started squirming again, until I remembered to use the deflection plate they had given me to hold in my belly blast, and that got me lined up. But finally I was within touching distance of the bird, which was rotating with a certain slow majesty on its long axis.

  The leisurely spin was there to make sure one side didn't face the sun too long and heat up. My plan called for stopping the bird's spin so that I could get reasonable solar heating of the part I was working on. The trouble was there was nothing to grab as the satellite turned. But we had worked on that part, too, and I went into my act of backing off the right distance, accelerating with my back rocket until I drifted close by the bird at its translational speed. I got one end of my sticky webbing stuck to it by pressure and decelerated so that the bird turned under me while I paid off the web. In a moment I had it girdled, and snapped the nifty sort of buckle they had made for me. Then drawing the webbing tight was no trouble, and I was spinning with the bird. My added weight slowed its spin down some.

  * * * * *

  Next came the trick of getting some special equipment loose from my right leg. This was a little rocket canister which had just enough poof, the slide-rule boys had said, to stop the rotation of the bird. I fastened the canister to the webbing, pushed softly with one finger to get me a few feet away, and drifted while waiting for the delayed fuse to fire the antispin rocket. It lanced out a flame for a few seconds, and sputtered dead. The bird hung virtually motionless beneath me--or above me--or beside me--or whatever you want to call it when there is no up or down.

  Our light was dimming as we passed the terminator and pulled over Earth's dark side. The sun was still visible, however, although soon to be eclipsed by Earth. I jetted softly back to the bird and lit my helmet light. I had to find the right face of the twelve-sided thing so that I could open the right gate. The markings were there. They were just hard to read from inside a helmet. Then the sun was eclipsed, and my headlamp gave me the kind of light I was used to working with. The sector I wanted was on the satellite's dark side. I had to clamp on to the girdle and jet quite a while to turn it halfway round, and then decelerate just as long to bring it to a stop. I fooled around several minutes getting the sector to face where the sun would soon rise.

  My earphone spoke.

  "Mike!"

  "Roger, Sid. What's up."

  "Take it easy on your steering fuel. You're getting low."

  "Roger."

  I had to wait for the sun before I could start work. When it came up, heating seemed quick. First a test with a thermocouple showed that Telstar's surface was warming nicely and would soon support the pressure-sensitive mat I was going to stick to some of her solar generators. When the 'couple said Telstar had reached zero centigrade, I pulled the mat loose from where it was stuck to my left leg and plastered it above the gate I was going to open. I say above, because it was closer to one pole--the "North" pole of the satellite--than the gate.

  It was time to go to work on my first screw. And there I got my next lesson. It was a real big screw, as they go, a 4-40 flat head machine screw with a length of about three-quarters of an inch. I would have to give it thirty turns to back it out. I never gave it the first turn. The head snapped off as soon as I applied a few inch-pounds of torque.

  Yes, the surface had heated up nicely, but the shank of the screw was about two hundred below zero centigrade, and far brittler than glass.

  I cussed some and reported to Sid what had happened.

  "Have to drill it out," I said.

  My drill was a cutie. It was a modified dentists' drill, the kind that's run by a little air turbine at about two hundred thousand r.p.m.'s. I really mean that. They turn like mad.

  I'd been taught to use it with care. When a dentist drills your teeth, he blows olive o
il and water through the turbine, and the mixture cools the tooth--and the drill--while the cutting is going on. We couldn't afford any cloud of vapor--or the shorting out that ice would cause--so I had only the pressurized mixture of oxygen and helium in the tanks on my back to run the drill. And that meant light and intermittent pressures on the number 43 wire gauge drill--the one that's the right size to drill out a 4-40. It took me about fifteen minutes and I was down to my last number 43 drill bit when she broke free.

  From then on I had to heat each screw before I went to work on it. I had something like a soldering iron that I could press against the screw-head. Heat would flow through the highly conductive alloy and make it less brittle. I flicked each screw I removed out into space and at last carefully hinged the gate wide open.

  The gate was the length of the sector--about two feet. It was four inches wide and about an inch thick and had parts strung along it like kernels on an ear of corn.

  At this stage I readjusted the position of my webbing girdle until I could clamp my head in position and begin the testing. It was slow work. The first sad thing was to learn that the solenoid M1537 was as good as new. When I put enough voltage across its terminals, the actuator clicked down through the core.

  I swore a blue streak.

  "What is it Mike?" Sid's voice came in my ear.

  "Trouble," I said. "What did we expect?"

  "Roger," he said in that toneless unexcited astronauts' voice. "Return to ship, Mike."

  "Not now," I said. "I've just got the oyster opened."

  His voice cut like my drill-bit. "I ordered you to return to ship. Your air supply is about shot."

  "I haven't been out that long," I protested, not feeling too sure about the lapse of time.

  "Your drill chewed it up pretty fast. Quit talking and start moving."

  I was thankful for the experience of moving in close to the bird. The same tricks worked much more smoothly as I used my deflection plate in front of my belly blast to turn me to face the floodlight, and then followed up with a light shove or two in the spine to start me drifting toward Nelly Bly. There didn't seem any rush, and I drifted slowly over, using only a couple triggered bursts of deceleration to slow me down as I approached the open hatch.

  Inside we went through the drill. My ears popped a little as Sid unchucked my spent tanks, and popped again as the new ones came on with a hiss.

  "Take it easy on that steering fuel, Mike," he said again. "You're getting awfully low."

  "Sure," I said and let myself drift out the hatch. I had enough sense to twist so that my back jet wouldn't hit the ship. Then I took a zig-zag course through the darkness to my bird, got oriented at the open gate and went back to work. Before I could get started, my earphones spoke.

  "Mike, Cleary here."

  "Roger, Paul. What is it?"

  "Have you gotten to that solenoid yet?"

  "Yes."

  "What can you tell me?"

  "That you're a fathead. Now shut up. I'm busy."

  "Roger, Mike," Paul Cleary acknowledged quite meekly.

  So I started again, reaching with my leads from point to point. After a certain number of tests, I had the area isolated, but not the part. From here on it would have to be disassembly. Every tiny screw had to be heated, then teased out with a jeweler's screwdriver. Some took my patented ratchet extension. The big miracle was that I didn't break anything.

  When I got to it, it was ridiculous. A small length of wire connected one component to another. Space was lacking, and the wire was tight against the metal of the gate. Its insulation was one of these space-age wonders, a form of clear plastic that would remain ductile under zero temperature and pressure. Only it didn't. It had shrunk and cracked, and there was a simple short against the metal of the gate. There were so many forms of circuit-breakers and self-protectors in the machine that the whole gate had been switched off as long as the short was in existence. No wonder telemetry hadn't told us anything.

  As I prepared to fix the trouble, I switched on my radio and had Sid connect me with the ground. "Canaveral Control," one of those emotionless voices said. He could afford to be. He was on the ground.

  "Get me Cleary," I ordered.

  "Cleary here, Mike. What have you found, boy?" He sure was anxious about that solenoid.

  "Not much, Paul. Just that Fred Stone is a fathead, too. Over and out, like they say." I switched off and went back to my work.

  * * * * *

  The one thing I had nothing of was any kind of insulating material. With my screwdriver I hacked a piece loose from the double-faced sticky-tape I had used to keep loose parts from flying around, and teased it under the wire with my tweezers. Perhaps I could have done as well by heating the wire and bending it straight, but there was little room, and I was afraid of melting a solder joint. So I took my time teasing the tape through and finally got it to act as an insulator without breaking the wire. How long it would stay there was anybody's guess. It was held mechanically as well as by its sticky action, but when the bird cooled off enough, the sticky effect would lessen. I hoped the pressure between the wire and the gate could be enough to keep it in place. Certainly no forces would be acting to move it.

  Just as I had figured, the reassembly was the tedious part. I had to move around into about sixteen screwy positions to do all the fixing. Finally it was back in one piece and I swung the gate closed.

  When the final 4-40's were run up as tight as they were supposed to be run, I reported to Paul Cleary. "Try her," I suggested. "I think I found the trouble. No point my coming back down if it doesn't work."

  They made me sweat it out for about ten minutes before Paul said, "Runs like a watch, Mike. Put the spin back on her, boy." At least he was quiet about his solenoid.

  This called for the second rocket canister, which I hooked on to the girdle and, after thinking it out carefully, got headed in the right direction. I eased away with finger pressure, and let the delayed fuse do the firing. Telstar started her slow spin again.

  Getting the girdle off was a lot harder than getting it on, something we hadn't figured on, and in the final stages of the job I found that my steering motors no longer fired.

  "Sid!"

  "Roger, Mike."

  "How much fuel do you read in my steering jets?"

  "You've been out of fuel for about five minutes, by my gauge. But don't worry about it," Sid said. "I'll nurse Nelly over there with my steering jets and pick you up."

  "O.K.," I said doubtfully. "But watch it. Bump this bird and we'll have it all to do over again."

  Sid had more trouble than he had figured. He had steering jets to run him in every direction except fore and aft. For that motion the retro-rockets were considered enough. But one belch out of them was enough to get me screaming into the mike: "Cut those retros!" I yelled, the volume making my earphones crack, as it undoubtedly did his.

  "Roger. What's wrong?"

  "You'll burn the solar generators right off the bird, you fool! Steering jets, do you hear, steering jets!"

  "Roger."

  But it was not that easy. Finally Sid got Nelly within about twenty feet, and pretty near at zero relative velocity.

  "All right, Sid," I said. "Hold it there. I'll push over."

  A gentle shove against the side of Telstar was all it took. I got it straight, which was all that counted. My drift was slow, and I was a good five minutes making the twenty-foot crossing. But a handhold came within reach, and I worked my way back into the cabin and climbed in without shutting the hatch.

  "Don't try that again," I cautioned him. "This thing weighs ten thousand pounds, and that bird half as much. Even at a couple feet a second, you can crush me to jelly between them, even if you don't burn one or the other of us to a crisp."

  "Roger," Sid said, not quite so emotionlessly. "Are we ready to move?"

  "What for?" I asked him. "Until we get me some steering fuel, I'm useless."

  "I thought we'd abort this mission before we were throu
gh," he sneered.

  "Not so fast. You've got the same rig on your suit. All we have to do is put your fuel tanks on my suit."

  "Are you nuts?" he demanded.

  "What's the matter with it? Those tanks aren't welded to you, and I've got tools."

  I could see him shake his head in the dim light from the instrument panel. "You know those fuels ignite on contact with each other," he pointed out. "If we spill a couple drops of each in here, and they vaporize, we'll blow this kite to pieces!"

  "Then we'll get outside to make the switch," I insisted. "It won't hurt anything if a few grams burn up out there, will it, with nothing to confine the expansion."

  "But then I won't be able to come after you if anything goes wrong," he pointed out. "No dice."

  "You're grasping, Stein," I growled. "At this stage I'm in charge around here. I'll take my chances on getting back."

  * * * * *

  With the cabin light on I went as far as possible in dismounting both our tanks. After a couple rehearsals to make sure that at least one of us would always have a glove on a handhold, we both climbed out the hatch and I made the switch. Just as Sid suspected, we spilled a few drops. They vaporized, and again as we had feared, combined in what would have been an explosion in a confined space. The soundless flash, dim but real, said we had released quite a little energy uniformly all around us. I never felt a thing except a faint warmth from infrared through my helmet.

  Best of all, my jets worked. We both climbed back aboard Nelly, dogged the hatch, and started after Telstar Two.

  The second bird was about fifteen thousand miles ahead of us. I slept most of the time, for after Sid gave us a jolt of added velocity, we had to settle down to about six hours of drifting. I woke up as the belt cut me when he fired the retros. We went through the radar and searchlight bit, and had the devil's own time finding our bird. But at last I got the flash of reflection and went to work.

  I won't say the second job was any easier, except for the fact that I removed only one part to make room to do my bit with the insulation, and thus had very few screws to replace. My navigating in space was a lot better, and I didn't use steering fuel as wastefully as the first time. Still, when we dogged down to chase after the final bird, the cabin gauge said that I had less than half my load of steering fuel left. Equally glum, Nelly herself was even lower on steering fuel. Neither Sid nor I had been as expert as we were supposed to be.