Then Rip forgot the cruiser. His suit ventilator was whining in the terrific heat, and his whole body was now bathed in perspiration. The sun was getting them. It would be only a short time until the ventilator overloaded and burned out. They had to reach the asteroid before then. The trouble was that there was nothing further he could do about it. He had only air bottles left, and their blast was so weak that the effect wouldn’t speed him up much. Nevertheless, he called to Santos and directed him to use his bottles.
Santos spoke up. “Sir, we’re going to make it.”
In the same instant, Rip saw that they would land on the dark side. The asteroid was turning over and over. For a second he had the impression that he was looking at a turning globe of the earth, the kind used in elementary school back home. But this gray planet was scarcely bigger than the giant globe at the Space Council building on Terra.
He knew he was going to hit hard. The way to keep from being hurt was to turn the vertical energy of his arrival into motion in another direction. As he swept down to the metal surface he started running, his legs pumping wildly in space. He hit with a bone-jarring thud, lost his footing and fell sideways, both hands cradling his helmet. He got to his feet instantly and looked for Santos.
“You all right, sir?” Santos called anxiously. “I think the others are over there.” He pointed.
“We’ll find them,” Rip said. His hip hurt like fury from smashing against the unyielding metal, and the worst part was that he couldn’t rub it. The blow had been strong enough to hurt through the heavy fabric and air pressure, but his hand wasn’t strong enough to compress the suit. Just the same, he tried.
And while he was trying, he found himself in direct sunlight!
He had forgotten to run. Standing still on the asteroid meant turning with it, from darkness into sunlight and back again. He yelled at Santos and legged it out of there, moving in long, gliding steps. He regained the shadow and kept going.
The first order of business was to stop the rock from turning. Otherwise they couldn’t live on it.
Rip knew that they had only one means of stopping the spin. That was to use the tubes of rocket fuel left over from correcting the course. They had three tubes left, but he didn’t know if that was enough to do the job.
Moving rapidly, he and Santos caught up to Koa and the Planeteers.
The Connie prisoners were pretty well bunched up, gliding along like a herd of fantastic sheep. Their shepherds were Pederson, Nunez, and Dowst. The three Planeteers had a pistol in each hand. The spares were probably those taken from prisoners.
The Planeteers were loaded down with equipment. A few Connie prisoners carried equipment, too.
Trudeau had the rocket launcher and the remaining rockets. Kemp had his torch and two tanks of oxygen. Bradshaw had tied his safety line to the squat containers of chemical fuel for the torch and was towing them behind like strange balloons. The only trouble with that system, Rip thought, was that Bradshaw could stop, but the fuel would have a tendency to keep going. Unless the Englishman was skillful, his burden would drag him off his feet.
Dominico had a tube of rocket fuel under each arm. The Italian was small, and the tubes were bulky. Each was about ten feet long and two feet in diameter. With any gravity or air resistance at all, the Italian couldn’t have carried even one.
Santos took the radiation detection instruments and the case with the astrogation equipment from Koa. Rip greeted his men briefly, then took his computing board and began figuring. He knew the men were glad he and Santos had made it. But they kept their greetings short. A spinning asteroid was no place for long and sentimental speeches.
He remembered the dimensions of the asteroid and its mass. He computed its inertia, then figured out what it would take to overcome the inertia of the spin.
The mathematics would have been simpler under normal conditions, but doing them on the run, trying to watch his step at the same time, made things a little complicated. He had to hold the board under his arm, run alongside Santos while the new sergeant held the case open, select the book he wanted, open it and try to read the tables by his belt light, and then transfer the data to the board.
His ventilator had quieted down once he got into the darkness, but now it started whining slightly again because he was sweating profusely. Finally he figured out the thrust needed to stop the spin. Now all he had to do was compute how much fuel it would take.
He had figures on the amount of thrust given by the kind of rocket fuel in the tubes. He also knew how much fuel each tube contained. But the figures were not in his head. They were on reference sheets.
He collected the data on the fly, slowing down now and then to read something, until a yell from Santos or Koa warned that the sun line was creeping close. When he had all data noted on the board, he started his mathematics. He was right in the middle of a laborious equation when he stumbled over a thorium crystal. He went headlong, shooting like a rocket three feet above the ground. His board flew away at a tangent. His stylus sped out of his glove like a miniature projectile, and the slide rule clanged against his bubble.
It happened so fast that neither Koa nor Santos had time to grab him. The action had given him extra speed, and he saw with horror that he was going to crash into Trudeau. He yelled, “Frenchy! Watch out!” Then he put both hands before him to protect his helmet. His hands caught the French Planeteer between the shoulders.
CHAPTER 17
Visitors!
Trudeau held tight to the launcher, but the rocket racks opened and spilled attack rockets into space. They flew in a dozen different directions. Trudeau gave vent to his feelings in colorful French.
Koa and Santos laughed so hard they had trouble collecting the scattered equipment. Rip, slowed by his crash with Trudeau, got his feet under him again.
When the asteroid turned into the sun, they still had not collected Rip’s stylus and five of the attack rockets. The space pencil was the only thing that could write on the computing board. It had to be found. “Next time around,” Rip called to the others. He then led the way full speed ahead until they reached the safety of shadow again.
Rip suspected the stylus was somewhere above the rock and probably wouldn’t return to the surface for some minutes. While he was wondering what to do, there was a chorus of yells. A rocket sped between the Planeteers and shot off into space.
“Our own rockets are after us,” Trudeau gasped. There hadn’t been time to collect them all after Rip’s unwilling attack on the Frenchman had scattered them. Now the sun was setting them off. Another flashed past, fortunately over their heads. The sun’s heat was causing them to fire unevenly.
“Three more to go,” Koa called. “Watch out!”
Only two went, and they were far enough away to offer no danger.
Santos had been fishing around in the instrument case. Suddenly he produced another stylus. “It was under the sextant,” he explained triumphantly.
“If we get through this, I’ll propose you for ten more stripes,” Rip vowed. “We’ll make you the highest ranking sergeant that ever made a private’s life miserable.”
Working slowly but more safely, Rip figured that slightly more than two and a half tubes would do the trick.
Now to fire them. That meant finding a thorium crystal properly placed and big enough. There were plenty of crystals, so that was no problem. The next step was for Kemp to cut holes with his torch, so that the thrust of the rocket fuel would be counter to the direction in which the asteroid was spinning.
Rip explained to all hands what had to be done. The burden would fall on Kemp, who would need a helper. Rip took that job himself. He took one oxygen tank from Kemp. Koa took the other, leaving the torchman with only his torch.
Then Rip took a container of chemical fuel from Bradshaw. Working while running, he lashed the two containers together with his safety line. Then he improvised a rope sling so they could hang on his back.
Kemp, meanwhile, assembled his torch and
put the proper cutting nozzle in place. When he was ready, he moved over to Rip’s side and connected the torch hoses to the tanks the lieutenant carried. Kemp had the torch mechanism strapped to his own back. It was essentially a high-pressure pump that drew oxygen and fuel from the tanks and forced them through the nozzle, under terrific pressure.
When he had finished, he pressed the trigger that started the cutting torch going. The fuel ignited about a half inch in front of the nozzle. The nozzle had two holes in it, one for oxygen and the other for fuel. The holes were placed and angled to keep the flame always a half inch away, otherwise the nozzle itself would melt.
“How do we work this?” Kemp asked.
“We’ll get ahead of the others,” Rip explained. “Keep up speed until we’re running at the forward sun line. Then, when the crystal we want comes around into the shadow, we stop running and work until it spins back into the sunshine again.”
Rip estimated the axis on which the asteroid was spinning and selected a crystal in the right position. He had to be careful, otherwise their counterblast might do nothing more than start the gray planet wobbling.
He and Kemp ran ahead of the others. The Planeteers and their prisoners were running at a speed that kept them right in the middle of the dark area.
It was like running on a treadmill. The Planeteers were making good speed, but were actually staying in the same place relative to the sun’s position, keeping the turning asteroid between them and the sun.
Rip and Kemp ran forward until they were right at the sun line. Then they slowed down, holding position and waiting for the crystal they had chosen to reach them. As it came across the sun line into darkness, they stopped running and rode the crystal through the shadow until it reached the sun again. Then the two Planeteers ran back across the dark zone to meet the crystal as it came around again. There was only a few minutes’ working time each revolution.
Kemp worked fast, and the first hole deepened. Rip helped as best he could by pushing away the chunks of thorium that Kemp cut free, but it was essentially a one-man job.
As Kemp neared the bottom of the first hole, Rip reviewed his plan and realized he had overlooked something. These weren’t nuclear bombs; they were simple tubes of chemical fuel. The tubes wouldn’t destroy the hole Kemp was cutting.
He reached a quick decision and called Koa to join them. Koa appeared as Kemp pulled his torch from the hole and started running again to avoid the sun. Rip and Koa ran right along with him, crossing the dark zone to meet the crystal as it came around again.
“There’s no reason to drill three holes,” Rip explained as they ran. “We’ll use one hole for all three charges. They don’t have to be fired all at once.”
“How do we fire them?” Koa asked.
“Electrically. Who has the igniters and the hand dynamo?”
“Dowst has the igniters. One of the Connies is carrying the dynamo.”
Speaking of the Connies—Rip hadn’t seen the Consops cruiser recently. He looked up, searching for its exhaust, and finally found it, some distance away.
The Connie commander was stalemated for the time being. He couldn’t land his cruiser on a spinning asteroid, and he had no more boats. Rip thought he probably was just waiting around for any opportunity that might present itself.
The Federation cruisers should be arriving. He studied his chronometer. No, the nearest one, the Sagittarius from Mercury, wasn’t due for another ten minutes or so. He turned up his helmet communicator and ordered all hands to watch for the exhaust of a nuclear drive cruiser, then turned it down again and gave Koa instructions.
“Have Trudeau turn his load over to a Connie and collect the igniters and the dynamo. We’ll need wire, too. Who has that?”
“Another Connie.”
“Get a reel. Cut off a few hundred feet and connect the dynamo to one end and an igniter to the other.”
The crystal came around again, and Kemp got to work. Rip stood by, again reviewing all steps. They couldn’t afford to make a mistake. He had no margin for error.
Kemp finished the hole a few seconds before the crystal turned into the sunlight again. Rip told him to keep the torch going. There might be some last minute cutting to do. Then the lieutenant hurried off at an angle to where Dominico was plodding along with the fuel tubes.
Koa had turned the tube he carried over to a Connie. Rip got it and told Dominico to follow him. Then he angled back across the asteroid to where Kemp was holding position.
The asteroid turned twice before Koa arrived. He had a coil of wire slung over his arm, and he carried the dynamo in one hand and an igniter in the other, the two connected by the wire.
Rip took the igniter. “Uncoil the wire,” he directed. “Go to its full length at right angles to the hole. We have to time this exactly right. When the crystal comes around again, I’ll shove the tube into the hole, then scurry for cover. When I’m clear I’ll yell, and you pump the dynamo. Dominico and Kemp stay with Koa. Make sure no one is in the way of the blast.”
Koa unreeled the wire, moving away from Rip. The lieutenant pushed the igniter into one end of the fuel tube and crimped it tightly with his gloved hand.
Koa and the others were as far away as they could get now, the wire stretching between them and Rip. Kemp had made sure no one was running near the line of blast.
Rip watched for the crystal. It would be coming around any second now. He held the tube with the igniter projecting behind him, ready for the hole to appear.
Koa’s voice echoed in his helmet. “All set, Lieutenant.”
The crystal appeared across the sun line and moved toward him. He met it, slowed his speed, put the end of the tube into the hole, and shoved. Kemp had allowed enough clearance. The tube slid into place. Rip turned and angled off as fast as he could glide. When he was far enough away from the blast line he called, “Fire!”
Koa squeezed the dynamo handle. The machine whined, and current shot through the wire. A column of orange fire spurted from the crystal.
Rip watched the stars instead of the exhaust. He kept running as it burned soundlessly. In air, the noise would have deafened him. In airless space, there was nothing to carry the sound.
The apparent motion of the stars was definitely slowing. The spinning wouldn’t cease entirely, but it would slow down enough to give them more time to work.
The tube reached Brennschluss, and Rip called orders. “Same process. Get ready to repeat.”
While Koa was connecting another igniter to the wire, Rip took a tube from Dominico. “Take your space knife and saw through the tube you have left. We’ll need about three-fifths of it. Keep both pieces.”
Dominico pulled his knife, pressed the release, and the gas capsule shot the blade out. He got to work.
Koa called that he was ready. Rip took the wired igniter from him and thrust it into the tube Dominico had given him.
As the crystal came around again, the process was repeated. The hole was undamaged.
There was more time to get clear because of the asteroid’s slower speed. The second tube slowed the rock even more, so that they had to wait long minutes while the crystal came around again.
Rip did some estimating. He wanted to be sure the next charge would do nothing more than slow the asteroid to a stop. If the charge were too heavy, it would reverse the spin. He didn’t want to make a career of running on the asteroid. He was tired, and he knew his men were getting weary, too. He could see it in their strides.
He decided it would be best to use a little less fuel rather than a little more. If the asteroid failed to stop its spin completely, they could always set off a small charge or two.
“Hold it,” he ordered. “We’ll use the small end of Dominico’s tube and save the big one.”
The fuel was a solid mass, so cutting the tube in two sections caused no difficulty. Rip pushed the igniter into the small section, seated it in the hole, and hurried to cover. As he watched the fuel burn, he wondered why the last nuclear cha
rge had started the spin. He had made a mistake somewhere. The earlier blasts had been set so they wouldn’t cause a spin. He made a mental note to look at the place where the charge had exploded.
The rocket fuel slowed the asteroid down to a point where it was barely turning, and Rip was glad he had been cautious. The heavier charge would have reversed it a little. He directed the placing of a very small charge and was moving away from it so Koa could set it off when Santos suddenly yelled, “Sir! The Connie is coming!”
Rip called, “Fire the charge, Koa,” then looked up. The Consops cruiser was moving slowly toward them. The canny Connie had been waiting for something to happen on the asteroid, Rip guessed. When the spinning slowed and then stopped, the Connie probably had decided that now was the time for a final try.
“Where is the communicator?” Rip asked the sergeant major.
“One of the Connies has it.”
“Get it. I’ll notify Terra base of what happened.”
Koa found the Connie with the communicator, tested it to be sure the prisoner hadn’t sabotaged it, and brought it to Rip.
“This is Foster to Terra base. Over.”
“Come in, Foster.”
Rip explained briefly what had happened and asked, “How is our orbit? I haven’t had time to take sightings.”
“You’re free of the sun,” Terra base answered. “Your orbit will have to be corrected sometime within the next few hours. The last blast pushed you off course.”
“That’s a small matter,” Rip stated. “Unless we can think of something fast, this will be a Connie asteroid by then. The Consops cruiser is moving in on us. He’s careful, because he isn’t sure of the situation. But even at his present speed he’ll be here in ten minutes.”
“Stand by.” Terra base was silent for a few moments, then the voice replied, “I think we have an answer for you, Foster. Terra base off. Go ahead, MacFife.”
A Scottish burr thick enough to saw boards came out of the communicator. “Foster, this is MacFife, commander on the Aquila. Y’can’t see me on account of I’m on yer sunny side. But, lad, I’m closer to ye than the Connie. We did it this way to keep the asteroid between us and him. Also, lad, if ye’ll take a look up at Gemini, ye’ll see somethin’ ye’ll like. Look at Alhena, in the Twins’ feet. Then, lad, if ye’ll be patient the while, ye’ll have a grandstand seat for a real big show.”
The Tom Corbett Space Cadet Megapack: 10 Classic Young Adult Sci-Fi Novels Page 129
