Earthbound (Winston Science Fiction Book 1)

by Milton Lesser

  He felt something in his leg, a sudden jolt, as if the other magnet had caught and held the hull of Garr’s ship. It could have been his imagination; he could do nothing except wait. Mostly, it was the silence which got him. By one hand he held himself to the magnet which in turn gripped the hull of the ship. All around him, space looked on, cold, implacable, silent, bleak, for all its myriads of unblinking stars.

  He could only wait —

  Something tugged at his foot — and again!

  Vaguely, he could feel the magnet moving under his fingers, sliding along the hull. Sliding. . . .

  The motion in his leg became rhythmic, up and down, up and down. That had to be Garr on the rope; it could be nothing else.

  Waiting became a torment. The motion had belonged to him always, and always would continue. Up and down. Up and down.

  Then, something else. .A new sensation. Rhythmic no longer, but jerky, irregular. He could not bear the suspense. He whirled and looked.

  Garr was there!

  Garr, holding his leg with one gauntleted band, the coil of rope wrapped around his other arm while he fastened its magnet to one of Pete’s boots. He could see Garr’s face through the fish-bowl helmet. He could see Garr smile weakly. Pete kicked back toward the ship, felt his foot land and hold. Then he was sliding along toward the airlock, and Garr was with him.

  They went inside. They closed the lock behind them. They took off their spacesuits and their helmets. They looked at each other.

  Finally Garr said, “It’s about time you got here!”

  It was a long while before they stopped laughing and pounding each other on the back.

  A day in late autumn. The sun shining down brightly, despite a chill in the air telling of winter’s coming. The trees were losing their last withered leaves to a brisk wind from the north.

  The auditorium at the Cadet Academy was crowded and all eyes were on Marshal Mahoney as he spoke in clear, strident tones.

  “Mankind is a cocky breed,” he was saying. “We pushed back the barriers of space and accepted the challenge. It is new and much of it is still unknown, but because certain individuals among us can, at certain times in their lives, assume an unheralded initiative, space is ours!

  “It is the job of this Academy to turn out men like that, but in the final analysis, it is up to the men themselves. For, out there in the wild unknown, orders must often be ignored. Each spaceman is on his mettle, and on each depends the hopes and dreams of men.

  “In general terms, that sums up the story of Peter Hodges. It is a wonderful story, and we all know it. I will not repeat it now. I am quite sure that Pete has a lot of other things he would like to be doing!

  “Instead, I am going to turn this platform over to someone you all know — to Peter Hodges, Sr.”

  More applause. Big Pete strode briskly down the aisle in his old uniform, in the uniform that had been with him on Mars and out among the Jovian moons. He reached the platform and in steady hands took from Marshal Mahoney the bright rocket emblem. Pete stood up very tall and very straight as his father pinned the rockets to his tunic.

  Marshal Mahoney cleared his throat. “Spaceman Hodges,” he said “you have some special talents, I hear. I’m referring to the way you can plot orbits in your head without resorting to reams of paper work. I have a hunch that talent will be needed when our first expedition starts out for Saturn and its moons.”

  He shook hands quite solemnly with Pete, and then, from somewhere back in the great hall, the Graduate Cadets were singing. It was too loud and it was a little off key, but it did not matter.

  “We’ll thunder off to Io,

  Out in the Jovian Moons.

  We’ll feast our eyes and seek the skies

  And plunder Martian ruins!

  “Ho! for the void and far away!

  We’ll chase the stars and race old Mars

  And maybe land one day —

  Ho-ho Ho! for the void and far away!”

  Glossary

  Acceleration: refers to a change in speed or direction of travel. Any change will produce acceleration, but tremendous speed in a straight line will not. It’s only when you change the direction or increase the speed that the pressure of acceleration is felt. When speed is decreased, it is felt again, but this time it is called deceleration.

  Airlock: entering or leaving a spaceship in deep space, you can’t simply walk through a door, for there is neither air nor pressure outside, and both air and pressure would escape from the ship if you did. Instead, you use an airlock, a device consisting of two doors with a small tunnel in between. Upon leaving the ship, the inner door is shut before the outer one is opened, and the reverse is true upon entering. That way, air and pressure are sealed within the ship.

  Artifacts: products or tools of human workmanship, particularly of primitive crafts.

  Asteroid: One of thousands of “miniature planets” revolving about the sun, primarily between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroids vary in size from chunks of rock or metal several feet across to small worlds several hundred miles in diameter. They are also called planetoids.

  Astrogator: an astrogator is to space travel what a navigator is to air or sea travel. In other words, he directs the ship upon its course.

  Blast-off: that moment at the beginning of a spaceship’s flight when it has built up sufficient power to leave the ground. Blasting pits are a likely development to prevent the escape of lethal radioactive exhaust.

  Dome-city: a city built on an airless world or a world with a nonbreathable atmosphere, too little or too much pressure, temperatures too high or too low. A hemisphere of tough, transparent plastic covers the city, maintaining earth-normal conditions within it. Entrance must be through an airlock.

  Jovian Moons; satellites of the fifth planet, Jupiter. There are four large ones — two of which are bigger than the planet Mercury (Ganymede and Callisto) and two comparable in size to our own moon. Seven others are very small.

  Meteor: a speck of spatial debris, varying in size from dust-grain diameters to chunks of rock and/or metal several yards across. Many billions of them hurtle through space in the solar system, and it is estimated that a hundred million fall into the Earth’s atmosphere every day, but virtually all of these are destroyed by the heat generated by their rapid passage through the air. Meteors don’t follow regular orbits as the asteroids do, and generally they are much smaller.

  Nebulae: vast clouds of gas hanging in space. They are extremely remote, extremely tenuous, and some of them shine by reflected starlight.

  Orbit: the path a planet follows around the sun is its orbit. All planetary orbits are elliptical, which means they are slightly elongated circles. Similarly, the path of a spaceship in flight from one planet to another is an orbit — and, again, elliptical orbits are employed because they are the most economical.

  Solidograms: full-color pictures which, using the theory of polarization of light, appear to be perfectly three-dimensional. Today, a stereoscopic viewer gives roughly the same effect.

  If you enjoyed this book, look for others like it at Thunderchild Publishing: http://www.ourworlds.net/thunderchild/