by Jerry
Merrill frowned.
Jerry Slidell’s voice interrupted, rattling abruptly through the inter-office call-box. “We’ve found Bob Ord. Get ready to give him his shots.”
Instantly the nurse thrust personal matters aside.
Merrill felt better. Slidell wasn’t giving him the runaround after all. But now he had a different worry.
He had let Bob handle a few splits, those critical moments when Doughnut and boosted spaceship parted company; and although Bob looked more promising than any of the other men sent to him for training, he hadn’t yet quite got the feel. This was going to be a tough boost; and it had to be good—or else. He only hoped Bob could hold the trajectory skew below the limit that meant aborting the flight.
Slidell’s voice came again, tinny through the speaker. “Walter, better get your suit on.”
Automatically Merrill answered. “On my way!”
He turned to the nurse as the connection snapped off. “How’d he know I was here?” he demanded.
She smiled, half tenderly and half teasingly. “Everyone around here knows how long and painted and gray-furred your ears are. And since that front-office blonde—”
“She did not!” he retorted indignantly. “And I never made a pass at her, anyhow.”
“Okay. So you didn’t, and she didn’t.” Bubsy pulled that infuriating feminine trick of refusing to argue.
There were eighteen zippers and twenty-seven adjustment straps on the suit, and he checked each one personally while the two dressers made the suit-to-boots, suit-to-gloves, suit-to-helmet and helmet-to-face-mask hook-ups. Then he lumbered stiffly across the room and plugged in to the test modulator.
The over-all inflation went on, squeezing his body equally from all directions. He jiggled the manual control—in flight the pressure would compensate automatically with acceleration—and it responded perfectly.
He cut in the sectional controls, and felt the familiar yet eerie rippling sensations as a multitude of tiny compartments in the suit began rhythmic fluctuations in response to his body’s needs as reported by built-in blood pressure and pulse and respiration meters. The suit’s action had been patterned after the peristaltic movements of a digestive system, using the same idea of progressive, serially applied pressures, and his fingertips and toes tingled as the blood was hurried along.
In tree-dwelling days the human race had developed a reflex response to short-duration, one-G falls. Veins and arteries constricted; blood pressure shot up; and major changes took place in the action of the heart valves. This automatic reaction had minimized the injuries of many a falling man, and it was still right for its original purpose.
But under the hours-long, multi-G strains of space-light, it became a peril instead of a protection, putting strains on the body that meant permanent damage. Gravinol short-circuited the reflex, but if used alone under heavy acceleration, it would bring blood circulation—and the pilot’s life—to a dead stop. The answer, worked out at heavy cost in lives and health, was Gravinol plus a circulation suit.
The suit felt right, almost as though it were alive and part of his body. He nodded okay, unplugged, then loosened his face-mask for comfort. Then he turned heavily at a sound behind him.
“Hiya, Bob,” said Merrill friendly enough. This finagling wasn’t Ord’s fault.
Ord squinted. He was having difficulty focusing his eyes. “Neo?” Merrill asked.
“Yeah. I still itch.”
Merrill’s lips tightened. Neogravinol for Ord meant that Slidell was still scheming.
“What’d Jerry tell you?” he demanded challengingly. “Nothing. Said get the dope from you.”
Merrill made a face. That smelled like an attempt to appeal to his “better nature.” Nuts to that!
He was just a bit sick with disappointment. All the while he had handled the Doughnuts, he had dreamed of his first real command, dreamed the day of his first deep space blastoff up into quite an event. Now those dreams had gone bust, and he felt sour and blue, cheated of the exhilaration he had anticipated.
Slidell’s voice buzzed through the speaker. “You pilots hurry up! We don’t want to recalculate.”
Merrill was on his feet at once, anxious to give Slidell a hot earful and then climb into Fireball. After this flight, he’d see about a job with Chesapeake on the Venus run.
The pick-up car was waiting, the driver goosing his engine, and as Merrill climbed aboard, the operations manager thrust both autocontrol tapes into his gloved hands. There was no question which was which, for Doughnut’s tape was much wider than Fireball’s. Still, no tape could handle all the unpredictable variables. That was what made a pilot. Merrill skimmed the visual sheets and trajectory graphs, while Ord peered over his shoulder.
“What’s the orders?” he asked truculently.
“Get it out hot and in line,” Slidell said.
“But—”
“You know the situation and what’s needed. I wash my hands of it.” Slidell sounded thoroughly disgusted.
“But—”
Bubsy leaned across the car door and kissed him. “That’s for luck,” she whispered.
Then she drew back. “Don’t forget your teeth,” she said aloud.
“Listen here, Jerry,” Merrill began, ignoring the girl for more important matters.
Slidell jerked a thumb at the driver, and in a second the car was streaking toward the blast pit.
“Damn him!” Merrill growled, handing Doughnut’s graph sheets to his companion.
Ord whistled, then looked pained.
“You don’t have to rub it in,” he said, still irritable from his shots.
“Huh?” Merrill’s eyes widened. Bob had nothing to gripe about. Either way, this day’s work would get him a Senior Pilot rating, and Interplanet never downgraded a man without very good cause.
“Damn! This break would have to come now, on an off-standard boost and before I was ready for it!” the junior pilot said bitterly.
“You mean you actually want—” Merrill demanded incredulously.
“Why the hell do you think I requested tryout assignment on Doughnut?” Ord snapped.
Merrill took that idea for what it was worth.
“Well, okay. If you think you can boost me anywhere near trajectory, I’ll take Fireball. Be glad to.”
Ord looked grateful but uncertain as the car began to slow, and Merrill wasn’t entirely happy either . . .
Doughnut’s jets were humming and the snoring nimble of Fireball’s five big nozzles reverberated deep in the pit. The heat of the idling drivers sent a stinging breeze against Merrill’s uncovered face.
Doughnut was nothing but a huge power ring fitting snugly around the middle of Fireball, designed to feed a maximum of fuel through her drivers in a minimum time. Her range was short, but she had a theoretical acceleration, minus ship, of better than forty gravities—which Merrill had never been so suicidal as to test.
Her thirty-six jets were fixed-mounted four degrees radially outward to save the aft half of the boosted ship from blast effect, and three of them were movable plus or minus one degree annularly for rotation correction. There were no vane deflectors, no full-swing jets, no heavy axial stabilizing gyros, no extras whatsoever; and control was accomplished entirely with the fractional throttles. Even turnovers were made without sidethrust or braking rockets, and with the inherently unstable ring design of Doughnut, that took handling. She was an ugly and ungraceful machine, strictly functional, a tug rather than a ship; and with her tremendous power she could easily break the neck of any pilot who made a single wrong move.
The pick-up car stopped beside the ground trap, and within seconds the two warm-up mechanics emerged from the tunnel.
“Fireball’s ready. Everything’s normal,” one reported. The other acted uneasy. “Two, five and eleven—” he began. “Tell Bob too,” Merrill interrupted.
“Two, five and eleven overheating, eleven the worst. Seventeen running incomplete shift as far as I dared try
her, but may clear at full throttle. Thirty-two still sputtering as if the nozzle field is out of phase.”
He turned back to Merrill. “That’s the one you reported, sir. We were going to yank the tube, but didn’t get time.”
“It adds up how?” Merrill demanded.
“She’ll be hell to balance.”
“But she’ll lift?”
“Yes. The dynes come up.”
Merrill’s face hardened. “Then we don’t cancel. Well, Bob?”
Ord’s face was pale. “That ties the ribbons on it,” he said slowly. “Guess I’m plain scared. You’re senior man; you call it.”
But Merrill knew it was the thought of what a sour lift here would mean on Mars, rather than the chances of a crash, that had Bob Ord frightened. He sighed, feeling as harried as Jerry Slidell usually looked, but admiring Ord’s honesty.
“Here’s your tape, Bob,” he said. “Luck!”
Together they ducked into the tunnel leading to the ships. The mechanics tugged the counterweighted trapdoor shut behind them, and ran for the car.
Around the spaceport perimeter the sirens shrieked their warning to take cover or take the consequences.
Merrill crowded clumsily into the pilot chair, plugged in his suit, cinched the safety straps, tightened his face-mask,then cursed petulantly as he had to loosen it again to remove his bridgework. He slipped the tape into the robot, threaded the end through the drive sprockets, clipped the visual sheets into the holder where they’d be in sight for reference. He swung his chair back until he lay supine with reference to blast axis, for sitting up during initial acceleration was how pilots got ruptured intervertebral cartilage disks and pinched spinal cords. The control panel on which everything was crowded within fingertip-reach swung with him.
“Ready?” he asked. The hull-to-hull contact phone carried his words.
“Set.”
He cut in the master intercontrol, and after a momentary pause to run through his mental check-list, he thumbed the Big Red Button. Relays clacked, and the tape hooked in the timers. They were on the roller coaster now—unless they canceled immediately.
He heard a faint click as the external feed lines that had been replacing the fuel burned during warm-up disconnected and retracted.
“Last chance,” Merrill announced quickly.
“Clear to lift,” the answer came back.
Slidell pulled the cobalt glass screen down across the slanting blast-proof window of his office. Conversation was impossible through the uproar of the sirens, so he glanced at the chronometer, he tapped the nurse’s shoulder and held up five fingers.
Involuntarily she winced. Then even through the heavy purple shield the glare filled the room with blistering radiance. Around the pit a flattened sphere of flame more deadly than the heat of any blast furnace ballooned and burst. A shrieking cyclone of superheated gas bombarded the low, solid building with dust and gravel.
A few seconds later a second sun was rapidly fading overhead. The din of the sirens lowered and died.
“Was it—” she asked.
“It was very, very smooth—so far.”
“But was it—”
Slidell shrugged. He raised the shield and stared unseeingly at the thermal dust-devils still dancing over the field. “But which one?” she insisted.
Slidell turned impatiently. “Don’t you think I want to know too?”
“Sorry, boss.”
“Mr. Slidell? Radar Plot,” the intercom rasped suddenly.
Jerry gripped the speaker box as though to squeeze information from it. Haskell-Jenkins interference made direct radio contact impossible even on microwave, but three radar eyes were following the Doughnut-Fireball combination while a mechanical brain compared their findings with the theoretical flight path.
“How bad?” he demanded.
“Not too much deflection, sir, but a nasty gyration on the longitudinal axis.”
“Power output?”
“Full.”
Slidell exhaled gently. At least, the flight wasn’t aborting—yet.
“Keep me posted,” he ordered unnecessarily.
He slumped behind his desk, and from the workings of his face muscles the nurse knew that in spirit he was riding a control chair again, his body heavy under the acceleration stresses, watching the spots of light on the meter faces swing, and punching studs to steady them.
After a few minutes he snapped out of it and used his dictating machine to record a pungent memorandum on changes in medical procedure to prevent other virus carriers from getting aboard any spaceship.
Radar reports during the next hours were poor but maddeningly inconclusive. It was impossible to tell from them whether Doughnut was running well and being erratically piloted, or whether someone was really hand-riding a set of surging, unsteady jets. The data grew steadily less intelligible as the Earth turned, and the probing beams pierced the atmosphere at an increasingly oblique angle.
Finally the intercom spoke again. “Below horizon. Contact broken.”
Honolulu would take over the tracking, and then Guam.
The nurse returned to the spaceport after a night of dream-haunted naps and headed directly for Slidell’s office. He was already there, and the drawn, gray look on his face made it obvious he had slept no better than she. The current flight graphs were strewn across his desk.
He shoved the power output chart toward her. It was full of irregular sawtoothed peaks and valleys, and although she was not an engineer, she knew they signified jet malfunction. But Slidell was smiling faintly.
“They’re still pretty close to plotted trajectory,” he told her. “We’ll know soon now.”
The radiophone buzzed, and as Slidell snatched the handset, Bubsy leaned over to eavesdrop shamelessly.
“Guam? Reduced power on which unit?”
He listened a moment. “Damn your foul driver emission meters! Why don’t you get something sensitive?”
The radio sputtered indignantly.
“Okay, okay. Yes. I’ll see the directors about an appropriation to develop one,” he promised, and broke contact. “They’ve split, but whether it’s line-out or back-out we can’t be certain until Doughnut and Fireball are far enough apart to read their power impulses separately,” he explained.
They waited what seemed like ages before Guam called again, and then Slidell picked up the phone as though it might bite.
“Continuing steady full? Good! Other on intermittent low bursts? Thanks!”
That was Merrill’s trademark, the signature of a smooth pilot, rocking Doughnut into turnover with minimum throttle settings to save his body and ship from the jarring shocks of suddenly applied power.
Bubsy knew it as well as Slidell did, for more than once Walter had diagrammed it for her on restaurant tablecloths. She grinned, and the operations manager grinned back. Then, suddenly and irrationally, she wanted to cry. She knew the intensity of Merrill’s desires, but with a mutant virus loose in Mars Colony, the surest way had been the only decent way. Bob Ord might have flown a successful full-power boost, but then Slidell looked years younger as he switched his interphone into the public address system.
“All hands! Fireball is lined out!” he announced. “Hot, straight and normal!”
For a minute he leaned back and relaxed, then spoke. “Sit down, Miss Thomas.”
She jerked around, startled by the unaccustomed formality, then saw the twinkle in his eyes.
“Are you a sufficiently loyal employee to enter into a private conspiracy for the good of the company?” he asked seriously.
“Just what are you talking about?” she demanded.
“This is off the record yet, but I’m slated to get myself heavily doped and ride deadhead to Marsport for some special development work. The new operations manager here—I just picked him—has guts enough so once he’s stuck with this job, he’ll hang tight and ride it.
“But he’s going to beef and yank and kick at the traces—unless someone helps k
eep him contented.”
Bubsy understood, and smiled as she nodded.
“But it’s just for dear, old Interplanet, you understand.” Slidell raised one eyebrow quizzically but said nothing. “Oh, you go to the devil!” she blurted, and blushed for the first time since her high-school days.
The yellow car actually paused at the gate.
“Checking out.”
“Okay, Mr. Merrill, Miss Thomas.”
It was one of those crystal nights that come occasionally to foggy Puget Sound, moonless and with a sky full of stars. South of the zenith, the faint pink dot of Mars twinkled invitingly.
Merrill sighed. “That scheming fox! Eighteen months before I get another chance, but I’ll get there yet—if Van Zwaluvenberg’s new emission meters and Doughnut III plans don’t land me in the nuthatch first.”
The girl let one hand slide along his arm. This was no night for talking shop.
“But they should have some decent transient facilities ready by then, as well as the fuel plant,” he continued. “Might even be a good spot for a honeymoon.”
“Eighteen months? Second honeymoon,” she corrected firmly.
AMOEBA ’ROID
Charles Recour
John and Grace didn’t mind adventure, in fact they sought it out—but the events on this particular asteroid were too much!
THE three-dimensional astro-chart projected into the darkness of the control room winked its multi-colored eyes intermittently as John fed the key to it. Flipping his fingers over the keyboard rapidly, John saw the orange light wink again.
“That’s where it should be. Why isn’t it?” he muttered half aloud.
Grace had watched him go through the charts a hundred times if she had watched once, but she had said nothing for the last half hour.
“Darling,” she said at last, “calm down. Let’s be logical about it. We know it’s here somewhere. The chart can’t be wrong. Dad was here. He wasn’t any great shakes as a navigator but he knew enough about astronomy not to mis-plot a B-2 chart!”
“I know you’re right, but I can’t help but think there’s an error somewhere. We should have hit it before. The chart shows a four hundred thousand ton nickel asteroid at these coordinates. Why isn’t it here?” John’s face was small-boy crest-fallen.