by John Burke
I nodded.
“You will arrange the engines on the surface,” he said. “We will fire them four hours later, and the asteroid will change orbit... so...” He tapped the keys, and the light pattern changed. I watched the sweep of die new path, gently arching in to the Moon. “You will observe its speed relative to the Moon is quite low, and that it is only visible from Farside. The radar stations on Nearside can’t track it. You appreciate the importance of that?”
I appreciated it, all right. If one of those little detector boys down there got a flicker of our baby, we’d all be in jail the moment we got back.
“After a three-day interval,” said Whitsun, “during which time the asteroid will have come to within approximately ten thousand miles of the Moon, we return to it, take new measurements, reset the engines and fire them again. Fire them for landing. And the asteroid lands on the Moon.”
It all sounded so simple. Bang bang bang, and a quiet little crunch, and there was a solid fortune chipping a small hole in Farside.
“On course,” warned Dmitri at my elbow. “Engines cutting in... in five seconds. Wait for it.”
Instinctively I reached out and got a hold on a stanchion. The seconds dropped swiftly away, and all at once the trembling and shuddering of the ship stopped and there was utter silence.
I hadn’t thought to say a word to Whitsun. After years in space you made your movements automatically, and forgot that not everybody else was used to it. Whitsun was floating several inches off the floor. He turned slowly in mid-air, and he looked indignant.
“We’ve just gone weightless,” I explained. “Hold on to something.”
“I didn’t expect you on course and speed that quickly.”
“Us amateurs are just lucky,” I said.
He’d sooner argue than take orders. He was about to say something else, but found himself doing a contortion that would have given the asteroid the jitters. He finished up drifting around me upside-down, popping his lips like a goldfish.
I tilted my head so that we could be reasonably sociable. “I did say hold on.”
He groped for the back of my chair and managed to get himself right way up. For a minute or so he was like a baby learning to walk; making careful little lunges across the cabin and clinging to anything that might help his progress.
But he caught on fast—in every sense of the word. And in no time at all he was back at the orbitograph. And then studying the control panel and asking questions; and you could almost hear the chink of the answers dropping into the appropriate slots in his tidy mind. I wondered—just vaguely, uneasily wondered—if he had any idea of kicking us off the asteroid once we’d done our bit of the job, and piloting Moon Zero Two back to base on his own.
No. That would take too much explaining. No doubt Whitsun’s smooth talk and Hubbard’s smooth flow of money would help with the explanations—but it would really be worth the trouble and the risk.
Whitsun went below to see that Harry was all right. We hoped he would stay there, but he was back in no time at all, ready to play some more counterpoint on his computer.
“May as well employ the time usefully,” he said. “I’m trying a prediction of our approach velocity and the asteroid’s gravitational pull. A body as compact as that won’t fit into normal mass category. If we can get the relationship right before we track in, we might get in phase immediately.”
“That’d be nice,” observed Dmitri.
Whitsun meditated and tapped.
“How long did the man say?” Dmitri asked.
“Forty-five hours,” I said.
Whitsun did not even look up from his computer, but said: “Now precisely forty-four hours, thirty-eight minutes, ten seconds.”
Dmitri stared unhappily at the panel lights.
“It’s going to seem longer,” he said under his breath.
5
TIME DIDN’T WORK normally out in space. The clock showed its hours and days, but although you accepted its figures as a working basis you didn’t really believe them. Between blast-off and reentry there was a weightless, timeless suspension in nothingness. The ship didn’t seem to move. You went through regular checks and routines, but there was no sensation of their having any effect on anything. Some of the pioneers went a bit odd after months of it—months on a set course, without any feeling that they were getting anywhere, sometimes panicking from the conviction that the ship had stopped, the stars in their courses weren’t on course any more, nothing was happening or would ever happen again. And me... old pioneer Kemp... had I gone a few degrees off orbit in my old, old age?
Well, my middle age...
Well...
I found I was getting a whole lot more irritable than I used to be. One word could set me off. The mere presence of other people on board rasped on my nerves. It wasn’t the silence—I’d coped with the silence a long while ago, in the past, and learned how to conquer it—but the fidgetings and mutterings and mannerisms of other men in this confined area: that was what scratched at me.
Even Dmitri. We went through our usual joking rituals because they were just unreal enough to stop us taking each other too seriously. We’d learned the roles that you need as much out in space as you need space suits. As a rule we managed fine. But on this trip I was finding his tuneless whistle as exasperating as an unidentifiable whine inside a control deck. The repeated snatches of familiar songs dinned in on me, amplified from a whisper to a bellow.
Oh, if it is a daughter dress her up in lace,
And if it is a son, send the so-’n-so into space;
Oh, arc me over, arc me over...
Better the complete, eternal silence, when you could lie back and drowse, and think.
Halfway out, Whitsun and Harry started an argument about something crazily trivial on the passenger deck. I stood it for ten minutes, then yelled down to them to shut up. Harry yelled back, and they went on. I shinned down through the hatch and said I was in charge of this ship, I wasn’t going to have dissension, mutiny, or any kind of uproar: it was bad for me. If they kept on, I’d have them walking the plank.
Whitsun laughed. Harry glowered. But they quietened down, and I had that bit of silence in which to think.
Not that there was anything very special to think about.
I wondered, abstractedly, how Miss Taplin was getting on and whether her brother had shown up. Should be a convoy in from Farside by now. Bringing brother or bringing news.
I hoped she didn’t fall for any offer to give her a lift out there. Women were scarce on the Moon, and scarcest of all around Farside. I wouldn’t put it past some frustrated claim-basher to add a girl like that to his list of essential stores.
A bit irresponsible, that brother of hers. Letting her come up here and making no arrangements to meet her or have her met Typical of the wild, feckless, Moon-mad crowd you got out back there.
Irresponsible... ? I could just see the twitch of Liz Murphy’s mouth. Me calling some man irresponsible?
Thinking of Liz, I got a distant echo of her parting threat. Because it had been a threat, all right. So I have to ask around... And when Liz started asking, she didn’t stop till she had a big fat dossier of answers.
Sooner or later she’d get to Joe Mercer. And when she put two and two together, she’d get four engines.
She’d have a lot more to ask me when we got back.
I sighed.
Dmitri began to chant to himself. It might have been some ancient Slav folksong. On the other hand, it might have been a Martian lament.
I said: “Can’t you stop making that godawful row?” “So,” he said, “it is like that, is it?”
We both sulked for the rest of... well, the rest of what? Some hours that must fit somewhere into what you might loosely call a day.
And in spite of everything, the hours piled up. We got closer. It was like waking from a sleep. Not a long, rich, reviving sleep, but a disturbed afternoon doze. Awake with a bad temper and a lousy taste in your mouth.
>
But better to be awake, all the same. Better to have something to do.
“Contact!” cried Dmitri, and it was like an alarm clock going off.
Whitsun and Harry were below. I bent over, and said: “Firing in thirty seconds. Using main engines for final approach. Get strapped down.”
I made sure they were settled, and then swung back into my chair.
“Eight miles,” said Dmitri. “Relative speed, three hundred miles per hour.”
We actually went so far as to grin at each other.
I pushed up the throttles, and everything in the place shuddered. The engines fired forward, and once more we knew that we were alive and that things were happening—in here and outside.
“Six miles,” said Dmitri. “Relative about two hundred. Keep her coming.”
I found his voice quite musical again. Different sort of music, mark you. He sounded like a psalmist now. Nice cadences as he counted down—down through the flickering, vanishing miles, until we were braced for the zero.
“Go to one G... thousand yards... five hundred... three... two... give her the works... Cut?'
We jolted to another silence as I killed the engines. Whitsun called something from below, but I paid no attention. I allowed five minutes for drift, checked the meters, and then unbuckled my seat belt. As I slid to the floor, Whitsun got up from the couch and climbed up the ladder. He was a bit impatient, and came through the hatchway fast enough to bang his head on the ceiling. I took hold of his left ankle and gently maneuvered him into position. He nodded his thanks: he wasn’t going to go as far as putting them into words.
I pressed the switch to roll away the porthole mask.
And there it was. Closer than I’d have thought. I felt proud of myself. Whitsun, I imagined, was feeling proud of his computer.
Six thousand tons of sapphire, hanging motionless twenty yards away. A huge chunk of what might have been blue glass, but wasn’t. There were thousands of jagged little crystalline edges, and through the dust you got a glimpse of pinpoints of light, hard little sparkles of reflection.
“A six-thousand-ton jewel,” said Dmitri dreamily. “I’d hate to meet the woman who could wear that around her neck.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What about that dame you picked up at Cape Kennedy a couple of years—”
“She picked me! Anyway, it was the daughter I was after. You know that.”
Whitsun’s voice was as cold and tingling as those sapphire ice slivers out there. “Are you ready to do some work now?”
The only answer was a dignified silence. And work.
I supervised the unloading of the engines. Whitsun wanted me outside, doing the shoving and tugging, but this was one thing where I intended to stay in charge. I knew those engines and I knew the dimensions of my cargo deck and I knew how to get freight out of that hatch without taking lumps off the ship.
We got one engine out, and followed it with Harry. He didn’t look too cheerful when he found himself drifting out there in the void, but provided he didn’t panic he was safe enough.
Dmitri paid out a line, and Harry floated down with it to the asteroid. He did some hammering and chipping away to make a secure hold for the line, and I could almost feel Whitsun wince: he hated to think of even a few slices of that sapphire fortune getting sawn off.
When the line was fast, Harry came back up, working harder than he needed to. When he closed in on the poised, waiting engine I said through the helmet radio: “Don’t wear yourself out. You want to move, fire your reaction pistol—blow yourself along.”
Then I realized he hadn’t got a pistol. We’d taken his gun off him back on Moon base, and we hadn’t replaced it with a reaction job. We hauled him in and I handed one over. He handled it with a satisfaction I didn’t like: it was as though it gave him fresh confidence and made him a big bully-boy again. Harry was better when he was humble.
He set off again, hooking the engine to the line, experimentally firing the pistol, and then drifting down the straight course to the asteroid.
Dmitri hefted the next engine into position by the hatchway. I gave him a hand with the third, and then decided it was time to go down and make sure the organization down on the asteroid was all right.
Harry made the return trip briskly, and you could see he was beginning to think of himself as a great hero. It was all so easy and so exhilarating once you got the knack. I only hoped he wasn’t going to get space-happy and do something stupid out there.
“You can manage?” I said to Dmitri.
He made a grotesque face inside the helmet. He didn’t risk answering, because the others would have heard him in their helmet radios, and maybe he wanted to spare their feelings.
I made sure the next two engines were lined up for easy extraction, and then went down to the asteroid. Whitsun followed. I thought at first he was chasing me, but he had a theodolite under his arm and set to work at once with that same infuriating, soulless calm.
When Harry got the third engine down, I kept him on the surface for half an hour, securing ring bolts in the sapphire. We paid out lengths of line and wove them into a tight symmetrical pattern. I didn’t want that hunk of rock to go careering off toward Arcturus. Mr. Hubbard wouldn’t like it. He might want his money back; and he might not keep his promise to pay up for a new ship.
We positioned the engines according to Whitsun’s instructions. And when I say instructions, I mean orders. But he knew what he was doing. I wondered if he found this more exciting than juggling Mr. Hubbard’s profit and loss account. From his drab, expressionless face you wouldn’t think so.
“Where do we want Number Three?” I asked.
He had it all figured out. He might have been counting the sapphire stalagmites by the hundred, left to right, he’d got it so exact
“Line it up with me,” he said as Harry lugged it into position—lugging it not because it was heavy, but because if you went too energetically about it you overshot the mark.
Harry- stabilized the engine. Instead of securing it at once, he kicked idly at a tall plume of green stone. It cracked and came away.
“Solid jewelry!” Harry picked it up. “Wonder how much it’s worth?”
He tossed it gloatingly into the air. It went up. And it didn’t come down. Harry stared after it
“Not a thing now,” I said. “Six thousand tons doesn’t make any gravity worth counting. Thought you’d noticed that.”
“Harry”—Whitsun’s voice crackled thinly in our ears— “line that thing up, will you?”
Harry looked at me and shrugged, as though we were pals and Whitsun somehow didn’t belong.
Half an hour later he went off for the last engine, and floated back with it at a hell of a rate. He stopped himself with a long, blazing blast from his reaction pistol, wasting it just for the hell of it He was getting showy.
“Over there!” said Whitsun.
I had already prepared the space in the pattern of hawser lines, and I was waiting.
Harry twisted himself around with a flourish, got a grip on the engine, and fired his pistol. Again he got going too fast. Drifting past me, he was only a few feet above the surface but rising, ready to shoot off the asteroid altogether. He twisted again, pointed his pistol out into space, and fired.
It gave a brief puff, and he and the engine went sailing on.
There was a great blast of anguish in the radio. “My pistol! It’s gone empty!”
My lifeline was tied to one of the ground lines. I knew that, and was thankful for it, when I kicked myself off and upward, letting it whip out behind me. I was a few yards behind Harry, and catching up, when I was jolted to a stop. The line had paid out to its full extent, and I was anchored.
“Harry—my pistol!”
He curled over on himself, waving a despairing arm. I aimed the gun like a dart and hurled it. It went off with maddening, terrifying slowness. For a second it looked as though it would match Harry’s speed... and stay just that impossible, unbr
idgeable distance behind him. Then I saw that it was drifting gradually nearer to his outstretched, groping hand.
His glove closed on it. He twisted back, and I heard him grunt. It would serve him right if he wrenched his back or ruptured his spleen, or something.
The pistol spat into space. Harry and the engine slowed and came to a halt. He fired again, and began to drift back toward us.
He landed with a cushioning backward burst of the pistol.
I hauled myself down on the safety line, and bumped to my feet close beside him. I unclipped Harry’s line from the engine and snapped it onto a ground line.
“Not many people get a chance to make that mistake twice,” I snarled, and hoped the rasp in their earholes would do them good. “Don’t waste your pistol charge on acrobatics—and keep tied down! When you’re towing a valuable engine, anyway.”
Crestfallen, Harry bent over the engine and coaxed it along like a kid with an outsize, inflated balloon.
I saw the numberplate on the side. Of course. It just had to be that one! Good old, crooked old Number Four.
I said: “Treat it gently. That one’s as liable to fire early as late.”
We secured it with bracing bars, taking a bit longer over it than we had done over the others. I wanted no last-minute troubles with this one. I checked everything three times, then had another look. Maybe if I stroked it and said soothing words, it’d respond. But I didn’t care to face the expression inside Whitsun’s helmet.
I sent Harry up to fetch the firing gear from Dmitri. This was the absolutely final stage. We hadn’t brought the blast-box down until now because... well, because. I didn’t trust Whitsun, I didn’t trust Harry, and I didn’t trust Number Four. Or the patron saint of space explorers, whoever he might be. St. Jude, maybe: patron of lost causes.
“Plug in?” I said.
Whitsun thumbed a coda on his little computer, nodded agreement, and began to pack up his theodolite.
I plugged in.
Whitsun said: “If the engines are each set for 100,000 pounds thrust, then we fire in...” He consulted his little answering service. “Three minutes,” he said, “nine seconds. And then, for exactly one hour, eighteen minutes—”
