Rocket Jockey

by Philip St John

  "What about you?" Jerry wanted to know. There was no sign of lead shielding to protect him in the simple coveralls he wore.

  "Me—I'm radiation immune." He saw Jerry's doubtful expression, and nodded emphatically. "It's a fact. The scientists have found a few of us. Me, I found it out when I lost a bet and had to get a guy out of an explosion, back on Earth. Stuff killed him, but it never touched me."

  He swung out and up the ladder into the Last Hope, with Jerry behind him. In the ship, he moved down the shaft and was gone a few minutes. He came back shaking his head.

  "Enough there to kill a man in a day, I'd say. Good thing you two stayed out of there. Mostly alpha particles, of course, but it's not good medicine. You can't go on without a new plate."

  Tod had come in, and he listened to the verdict glumly. He already knew that Mercury had no supplies of lead. If it meant running on to Venus without a man in the engine room, anything might happen. They'd already left things alone much too long.

  "What's all the stuff about lead in rivers out there?" he asked, pointing out toward the hot side of the planet. "Don't you ever collect any of that?"

  "Too far out," the mayor answered. "And we don't need lead here. We go in for the precious stuff that's close by. If we didn't, we'd never be able to afford the prices you Earthmen charged us for building those three racers for us! The tractors can't work out far enough to find molten lead."

  "Do you know where there is any?" Jerry asked.

  He nodded. "Sure. There's a whole lake of it about three hundred miles from here. I've seen it from the sky when I crossed to the domes on the other side, and it doesn't look like tin to me. Must be lead."

  The idea that had crossed Jerry's mind seemed too fantastic, and yet Tod was nodding at him. "You're as crazy as I am," he told his engineer.

  The old man chuckled. "We need lead, and there's plenty of it out there. Think we can rig a scoop of some sort onto the Last Hope?"

  Maybe it was catching, he thought. Either he'd caught the nonsense from the mayor, or else the things that had happened had dulled his sense of caution. Apparently, for once, it had affected Tod the same way.

  "Take a couple hours," the engineer answered.

  The mayor cocked his head at them, and his grin broadened. "Looks like you two men are applying for citizenship here. Or burial. You re crazy enough to pass. Come on out to the shack."

  In the little portable dome, he explained the idea to some of the men. There was some discussion of the impurity of the lead they'd find—it would dissolve other metals, of course. But that didn't matter for their purposes. In the back of the little dome, a group of them began drawing cards out of a deck. The mayor went back, and chose one. He and another man held up aces.

  "Looks like you've got your scoops, boys," he told the two Earthmen. "Me—and this poor character. Wait'll we get our heavy suits and some hot side tackle to fasten on with, and we'll go for a ride."

  The two men slipped out before Jerry could fully realize that they were volunteering to ride outside the Last Hope and drag up the lead in buckets somehow. He had heard no discussion of it. They seemed to act as a single man.

  When they came back, they were dressed in big metal outfits, something like the old pictures of space suits he'd seen in a museum. The metal gleamed brightly, and from its thickness he knew it must be heavily insulated against the heat. Big metal-mesh straps were fastened to the suits.

  Jerry tried to protest, but they signaled that they couldn't hear. One of the men handed him a small case and plugged it into the suits.

  The mayor's voice came out of the instrument, "Well, you ready?"

  Jerry repeated his protests. This wasn't like piloting a rocket in space—it meant fighting against the pull of gravity where only a few feet might spell disaster, and where it would require constant effort to keep upright. In the ship, they would be fairly safe; the big tube would kick any molten metal out of the way, if they turned it on full blast. But the men on the outside had no chance, in such a case. Also, they'd be slapped around too roughly if full acceleration had to be used.

  "Can't hear a thing," the mayor stated. "You ready?"

  He was swinging a huge metal pan that was attached to a long length of metal rope, and there was a block and tackle affair on his belt. He grinned impudently out of the thick helmet and swung out toward the ship.

  Other men sprang to buckle him to the handholds, lacing his back down against the ship, and fastening the block and tackle affair to other grips. The second man was receiving the same treatment on the other side. The wire from the big suit was strung up expertly along the side, and up to the control room, leaving the communication box in front of the pilot's seat. At the port, they'd cut it and installed a small gadget on each side, to relay the sound through the quartz.

  Tod sat down beside Jerry. "The durned fools want to do it," he said. "They're all crazy here I"

  "Absolutely. But dunk of the fun we'll have bragging about it to our grandchildren after we get out," the mayor's voice said from the box.

  "If you get out," Jerry amended it. He was sick of the whole thing now. It struck him as a senseless risk of men's lives, and he began to wonder how anybody managed to live for more than a few days here. Probably, though, it took men with a complete lack of fear and sense to get by out in the hotlands on the tiny tractors.

  The crowd outside seemed happy about the whole thing. He reached out reluctantly and threw power into the big rocket, lifting upward as gently as he could. From the box, a baritone voice began singing: "Rock-a-bye baby, on the ship's side, when the kid shakes, the rocket will slide, when the kid breaks, the rocket will drop . .

  Jerry grunted and hit the control a little harder.

  "Woops," the voice commented. "Rough sea. That all the power this can handles?"

  He gave up. They could needle him better than he could hand back. He followed their directions, heading upward in a long parabola, and drifting back down. So far, everything had been easy. Below him, the lake they had mentioned appeared, with a thick scum over part of it. Where it was clear, it looked like a mirror, except for the glowing red of the shores around it. He lowered carefully. Somehow, it wouldn't have seemed so hard to settle, if he'd meant to land. But knowing he was balancing indefinitely made it tough.

  The ship swayed a little, and he corrected it with gentle taps of the side rockets. It came down until the big blast seemed to be touching the surface.

  "Down fifty feet and hold her," the voice from the box ordered. Jerry eased down slowly, hoping he could hold the ship up without having to use flame enough from the rocket to splash metal up at them.

  "Woops, up a bit—good boy." The words were light enough, but the voice was serious now. "You okay, Jake? Get your shovel down. It won't sink in lead, but see if you can—right, hold it on edge. Kid."

  "Right," Jerry answered.

  "Give her tail a quick twist north. Gotta jerk these scoops into the stuff."

  Jerry hesitated, trying to figure out a way of kicking on the side rockets without tilting the ship. There was none. He hit the steering controls sharply, and cut them off at once. The ship jerked, and he threw in the big rocket and began lifting as he straightened out.

  The mayor's voice sounded quite happy, between the jerks as the erratic motion of the ship cut off his speech. "Beat you, Jake. I got a full scoop. Oof! This stuff weighs, even with the tackle. Okay, kid, go on home."

  Jerry mopped the sweat from his face. The lake of lead looked peaceful and calm as he rose higher. Jake, who had been silent, began to discuss the idea of changing some of their little ships over for metal fishing. Apparently their only reaction to it all was that it was less fun than tractor mining—safe enough for old women—but faster. "Get a couple of grapple poles on the outside, and we'd rake in a fortune, Bill."

  The mayor seemed to think the same. Jerry wasn't sure whether they were kidding him or whether they really meant it. For all he knew, tractor mining might very well be more
dangerous. The surface of Mercury looked evil enough to make it seem quite probable.

  He came down smoothly on the little rocket field again, careful to set down without more than a faint bump. He didn't want to seem any more of an amateur than he had to before these men.

  They were being unfastened as he came down the ladder, and were heading into the portable dome, to change back to their normal lightweight space clothes. Jerry saw that there was more than enough lead in the two scoops. It had cooled on the return trip, and looked solid now, though he knew it was still too hot to touch.

  Tod seemed to have lost his voice somewhere out there. The old man had always considered the miners in the asteroids to be the roughest and toughest men alive, but these crazy fools made the meteor miners seem almost tame.

  The mayor went back into the ship, to return with the cracked plate. Even under the quarter gravity pull of Mercury, the plate was all he could carry, but he obviously considered it his job. As one of the almost mythical men who seemed to be able to repair his tissues faster than radiation could harm them, he was the logical man for it, too.

  Tod went along to supervise the casting of a new plate, using the old one for a mold. It was routine work for any shop, of course, even the makeshift one here. Jerry tried to pry more information about the race out of the people, but without any luck. He knew he'd be better off for not knowing, but he couldn't keep from trying to discover how far behind he was.

  They apparently didn't know anything more than he did. The planet was so close to the sun that solar radiation played havoc with the beamed interplanet radio communications, and they only got snatches most of the time. He found that five of the ships had already touched Mercury, but he had no way of knowing whether it was on the last lap or the first.

  Several of the men brought back the new plate later, but again it was the mayor who carried it down into the engine room and placed it in position. He came up for the Geiger counter, went back, and reported that it was safe now. The alpha rays were unlike neutrons; they created very little secondary radioactivity in the material they struck.

  Tod seemed satisfied with their ability. He let the men shoo him away, and joined Jerry in the dome, where a rude meal was prepared. The food was rough and simple, though well prepared. But after the steady diet from cans, it tasted good to them.

  They were finished when the mayor returned. "Reckon you two will be shoving straight off," he told them. "Drop in again sometime. We've had more fun than a barrel of monkeys. And that new idea of mining may come in handy."

  There was no formality, but the whole crowd stood by as Jerry lifted the ship again, just eight hours after the landing. They'd made much better time in getting repairs than he had hoped for.

  Tod shook his head at the crazy world below. "You know, lad," he announced, "maybe I will go back there some time."

  Jerry grinned. He'd been thinking the same.

  Chapter 13 Council of War

  nsttnctively, Jerry looked for Venus. It lay in an orbit that was only thirty-one million miles beyond that of Mercury, and it should have been easily visible against the black of space. But there was no sign of it.

  Then he realized he was making another mistake out of sheer habit of thought. Even more than two centuries after the beginning of space travel, men automatically thought of the planets as being straight out from the sun. He knew Venus was now approaching the opposite side of old Sol from that of Mercury.

  He checked it against the charts, and located it. Then he whistled. It was almost exactly across the face

  of the sun from him—the hardest place of all to reach. It meant he'd have to go out in a great circle, constantly changing the angle of the big rocket, to cut around the sun and come up on the planet from behind. Instead of a mere thirty million miles, it would be closer to a hundred million—and he'd never be able to build up full speed, because of the circular course he'd have to take.

  It would all be easy enough, if the sun weren't right in the way. Then he could cut across. He might even make up a little of the lost time from Dick's schedule. As it was, he'd lose at least another full day.

  He tried to convince himself that he could afford the extra day, but he knew he didn't believe it. Dick had figured on an impossibly tight schedule of less than nineteen days—but he'd been right in saying that each Classic broke the record set by the last one. Jerry knew he was probably only fooling himself in thinking he still had any chance. An extra day of lost time would almost surely prove fatal.

  He began figuring new orbits frantically, but the best he could do wasn't good enough. He picked up the phone and called for Tod to come up. This time he wasn't going to try anything foolish without finding out the facts and getting the old engineer's consent.

  "Tod," he asked, "how close can we shave the sun?"

  Tod screwed up his face and picked the paper off a new stick of Venus gum. He scowled as he got it working. "I dunno, lad. Maybe we can take it as close as fifteen million miles."

  It was worse than Dick's stories of pilots had led

  Jerry to believe. "But didn't Tom Malone get down to about six million miles?"

  "Yep. And when they boarded his ship on the other side, the instrument records were right useful to the scientists, I guess. Tom left a nice young widow, I understand."

  "But men have come closer to the sun than fifteen million miles and lived," Jerry insisted.

  "A lot closer. They've got sun-shields now—stuff that costs six fortunes and a government budget, but really throws back the heat. Get too close, and you'll melt the hide off this ship, Jerry. Mercury got kind of hot, but she's a lot farther away."

  Yeah, Jerry thought. It would have been nice to have the sun-shields; he'd been taught that men had been within three million miles of the surface of the sun and come through—though he preferred Tod's accounts to what he remembered from the books.

  He threw down his orbits in disgust. They had to skirt closer than he dared if they were to save any real time on this leg of the trip. In Dick's original orbit, they had expected to make the jump from Venus to Mercury more than four days earlier, when conditions were somewhat more favorable.

  He began figuring again. They'd be making a speed of close to four million miles an hour when they came opposite the sun, counting on the pull of the sun plus every bit of energy they could safely squeeze from the rocket. He calculated the length of time carefully from different distances. There'd be only a short period when they were directly beside the sun.

  The other men hadn't been equipped with a fuel that could handle such power or build up such speeds. It was the one factor in the whole race that was on his side, and he wanted to make use of that speed whenever he could.

  "Suppose we were to move from about twelve million miles to five and out to twelve again in less than three hours—could we take that, Tod?"

  The engineer shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know, Jerry. Honest I don't. You'd probably melt down one side of the ship, though. Look, you're the captain here. After what we've been through, and after those fools on Mercury, I don't much care what you figure up!"

  He went down to the galley, where Jerry heard him trying to prepare a meal that would be different but ready to cook when they were hungry. Tod seemed as fond of experimenting in the galley as he was of crooning over the engines.

  But it left things squarely up to Jerry. He consulted the handbook of engineering and the one on navigation, but they gave him little help.

  With the best calculation he could make, the result would be about what Tod had suggested; they'd simply melt off the hull on one side of the ship.

  It made a beautiful orbit, though. They could have headed close to the sun, using the immense pull of that start to add to their speed. It would turn their course without any help from constant corrections-just as a rope tied to a stake will force a lunging dog to turn aside. By the time they began to pull away, they'd be on a course headed almost exactly for where Venus would be. And the total t
ime would be little more than heading straight across, if there had been no sun. It would even take less time than Dick had allowed for the run from Venus to Mercury.

  But there was no point in destroying die ship, or in raising the inside temperature so high that they'd be cooked.

  There had to be some way. No other course gave them the same advantage of not having to force themselves into a circle of awkward size and hard maneuvering.

  "We could spin the ship," Tod shouted up, suddenly. "Help some, though you'd have a deuce of a time doing any steering."

  Dick had always spoken with contempt of men who let their ships get into a spin—but it would keep one side from overheating. Effectively, it would cut the heating effect in half.

  He tried to imagine steering from a rotating ship, but it was something that would have to be tried. He could see that it wouldn't be easy.

  But it still didn't solve the problem of the overheating inside the ship. A vacuum and metallic reflectors inside the walls provided the most nearly perfect insulation possible, outside of the impossible sun-shields. There was no way of improving on that.

  The ship had some degree of refrigeration, of course —without it, there would have been enough heat from the big rocket to cook them slowly. But it couldn't be raised too far; perhaps it could take care of a hundred extra degrees, but no more.

  Then Jerry thought of the refrigeration devices built into the space suits to cool them, or by reversing the controls, to warm them. The suits could stand a fairly high temperature without letting a man roast. They could wear the suits inside during the critical period.

  He called Tod up again, and began reeling off his new ideas. He expected the man to turn them down, but the engineer shook his head in slow thought.

  "I dunno. Maybe it could be done, for a short while, like you say, Jerry. I just don't know. You must want to win this race pretty bad for a boy who didn't want to come along!"