by John Wyndham
Of course, there wasn’t the organisation about it that there is today. That didn’t happen till the Dutch got their salvage and towing service fixed—funny, isn’t it, how they develop the best space tugs, just as they did the best sea-going tugs?__ but there was a lot of work done, a Central Salvage Register Office and all that. Trouble was rivalry between the lines, if we’d only co-operated then, maybe the Dutchmen would never have got a look in.
Well, I was telling you about the old Dido. I don’t know why she was called Dido ’cept that the line named all its ships after women and would have them end in ‘o,’ which made the choice pretty narrow when you come to think of it—perhaps that’s why they went out of business a few years later; couldn’t find any more women ending in ‘o,’ so couldn’t have any more ships. Anyway, she was a forty-eight tube ship, less than half the size of a modern Dutch tug, carrying eleven of us all told, well found and, for those days, not too tricky to handle. At least Captain Belford could handle her as well as they manage nowadays with all their modern improvements.
The First Officer was a man called Sinderton. He was a silent sort of chap but good at his job. The crew of eight were all experienced men—there was no room for greenhorns on a salvage ship.
The trip when the trouble occurred started as usual. We took off from the Caledonian Rocket Yard and called in at the Moon to refuel, the same way the tugs do nowadays—-a tug, you know, still can’t carry enough fuel to get her away from Earth and do her job in space without replenishing somewhere.
When that was done we set out on a course which paralleled but lay to one side of the traffic lane to Jupiter—or rather to the moons of Jupiter, for no one had at that time made a successful landing on the giant himself.
Life on a salvage ship consisted, and probably still does, of spells of complete inaction and rushes of exacting work with no telling how long each is likely to last. It was one of the harder things to get used to and one of the main reasons why a seasoned crew was necessary.
This time we began placidly enough. For over two weeks (Earth-time) we coasted along with the rocket tubes shut off; just being on hand if anyone should need us. But it seemed that nobody did. At regular intervals we would call up all our ships on the Company’s lightband wave and ask how things were, and all of them would give us an okay. We began to wish something would happen—and when it did we should wish we had been left in peace. That’s the way of it. But just at present nobody was burning out tubes, developing air leaks, getting holed by meteorites or doing any of the hundred and one convenient things they so often did do.
It was not until the sixteenth reckoned day that we got a message which started our tubes roaring again and sent us scurrying across space. The liner Sappho, homeward bound from Ganymede with a cargo of high-yield pitchblende had sighted a presumed derelict. It was a good, clear direction, giving the positioning of the derelict at the time and her speed direction, with confidence. We acknowledged, altered course and started up in a few minutes.
Time meant a lot on such jobs. We had got to reach the derelict before anyone else spotted her. The ruling was the salvage rights could be claimed by the first ship to establish contact with the wreck. Immediately that was done, the office back on Earth was informed, the claim was then checked and registered, and an announcement of its validity broadcast. The principle seemed fair enough, though more than once two or even three salvage ships informed of the chance at more or less the same time had pelted across space, half-killing their crew with acceleration in their efforts to make the claim. On this occasion there was no one else in on it so far as we knew, but it was always risky to waste time.
Two days later, close on the position we had calculated the wreck to have reached, we were decelerating as violently as we had speeded up. Captain Belford was at the controls while the First Officer and I were swivelling telescopes from one point of light to another, desperately searching the star-pricked blackness for the one little gleam which was a rocket-ship. Of course, that was no way to find her, but there was just the several-millions-to-one chance that we might catch a glimpse of her: it is said to have been done once or twice.
Belford called Sinderton away from his telescope and handed over the controls to him. While we were still decelerating he set up the sensitive screens ready for use when we should come to a stop. On the screens, as you probably know, moving bodies trace lines of light and though all the bodies in the heavens are moving, those which are closest appear to travel fastest. In our position there could be nothing nearer than the derelict—except the unlikely presence of a second derelict—so that it was necessary for us to scan each section of space for the fastest moving line of light. If we could find it among the rest—no easy task in itself—we should have found the ship. Well, we did: it took us a good twelve hours of screen studying before we located her, but that wasn’t bad. It might easily have taken three days or more. I’ve known it do that.
CHAPTER TWO
WRECK OF A TREASURE SHIP
As soon as we’d made certain of the derelict we turned and steadied the Dido on her side tubes, then one brief burst on the main propeller tubes was enough to send us sliding in her direction. As we closed, another short burst on the forward rockets brought us to rest within a couple of hundred yards of her. (When I say ‘brought us to rest’ I use the term figuratively, of course, to mean that we and she were travelling in the same direction at the same speed.)
Captain Belford picked up his telephone and spoke to two men already wearing space-suits and waiting in the air-lock.
‘All right. Let ’em go,’ he said.
We watched from the windows as the men heaved out an electro-magnet. We couldn’t see the men, of course, but we saw the magnet float out slowly and deliberately with its leads and cable looping behind it in slow-motion. A few seconds later another followed it. The Captain waited, hands on two rheostats, until they were over half-way to the wreck.
‘Make connection and stand by,’ he told the radio operator, then he turned the knob.
It’s a fascinating thing to watch coupling-magnets come to life, so to speak. One moment they are drifting idly along, the next they appear to awake and suddenly discover a purpose. They veer a little and surge gently forward towards the nearest mass of metal while the looping lines which hold them gradually straighten out. The Captain gave them a minute’s power to pull them towards the derelict, and then shut off and waited. As the first magnet made gentle contact with the hull he switched on again and it glued itself to the metal side. A moment later the second magnet gripped.
‘Make the claim,’ he told the operator.
Two space-suited figures left our ship, pulling themselves along the magnet cables to the other at great speed. The Captain took up a microwave headset and listened. One of the men in space-suits reached the wreck and pushed himself off the magnet so that he floated round to her bow.
‘Excelsis,’ said the Captain suddenly. ‘Tell the Register Office.’
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ acknowledged the operator.
‘Haul in,’ ordered the Captain, putting down the microwave set.
A small motor began to whirr and the cables between two ships started to tighten.
‘Cut,’ said Captain Belford as we started to drift together. ‘ We waited while the two ships slowly approached one another.
It began to be possible to get a better idea of the Excelsis’s size. The proportion of our space-suited men against her had told us she was big, but we did not fully realise how big until we came closer alongside. She’d have made ten of the old Dido. ‘Excelsis, that’ll be a Three Star ship,’ murmured the Captain. ‘I seem to remember something about her, but I can’t recall it at the moment.’
‘Third of three sister ships on the Three Star service, sir,’ said the First Officer. ‘Supposed to be the last word in safety in their day. She and the Isis were both lost. The other, the-Artemis, was broken up several years ago. I’m afraid I can’t remember anything else offh
and. It’ll be in the book, sir.’ ‘Never mind, we’ll know soon enough.’
A minute or two later the operator announced:
‘Claim of Captain Belford of the Dido, to salvage of Excelsis, Captain Whitter, registered and approved subject to confirmation. Work may proceed. Excelsis, 250 tubes, lost in space 12 years ago, homeward bound from Ganymede. Reported serious damage to propeller tubes. Unnavigable. Search
vessels unable to find her. 60 passengers. 20 officers and crew, mixed cargo. Gold, patchatal oil, tillfer fibre, ganywood, 3 bags of mail. Property of Plume Line, successors to Three Star Line, yards at Lough Swilly, Ireland.’
The Captain looked half-elated, half-dubious as he listened to the radio operator’s message. If the cargo mentioned was in any quantity it looked as if we should net something like a record salvage payment—if we could get it home.
‘Gold,’ he muttered, ‘and ganywood. The two heaviest things they could find. There’s some sense in ganywood, at least it’s useful. But gold, what’s the good of that? You can’t use it for anything.’
‘Except money,’ I said.
He looked at me contemptuously.
‘Nobody’s used gold as money for God knows how long. You never see it except in jewellery. It’s pretty near useless, and yet they’re forever digging it out of mines all over the system. And: what for? Just to take it to Earth and bury it somewhere where no one ever sees it. Then they all look bright and pleased and say their credit’s gone up. Damned nonsense, all it. Trying to get gold from one planet to another has cost more lives and money than anything else in spacework.’
‘And yet,’ said I, ‘if everybody wants it, that means it has a value.’
‘Fictitious value,’ he snorted.
‘Fictitious or not, it’ll mean a lot to you and to us if we get it back all right,’ I said.
‘Maybe, but I still say it’s not worth the fuss they make about it. It might as well be lying about out there,’—he pointed to the starry blackness beyond the window—‘just floating around in space as locked up in a vault on Earth. If I had my way that’s where it would be, and a lot of good space sailors who are going to lose their lives handling it would keep them. There’s some heavy stuff you’ve got to handle, but it’s not gold.’
All the time he was talking the two ships were slowly coming together. I was paying more attention to them than I was to the Captain. The ‘gold menace’ was one of his hobby-horses. I’d heard it all before and a lot more. And however he felt about it the fact remained that he’d do his damnedest to get it safely to Earth and we should all be rewarded for assisting him.
As the two ships gently touched he resumed his official manner.
‘Mr. Fearon, you will attend to the grappling and conduct a preliminary survey of the ship, please.’
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ I said.
I had put on my space-suit in readiness. It did not take long to add the helmet and with two of the crew I passed out of the air-lock.
We three, with the help of the two men already on the Excelsis, manoeuvred with cables until we had brought the two locks conveniently close, and then made fast. I reported over the microwave, there came a gentle flare from the Dido’s stern tubes, and as the two ships started to move we turned our attention to examining our capture.
I find that Worldsmen often find it difficult to grasp space conditions, so it may help if I explain a little.
It must be understood that a derelict in space is never stationary. Very often she is travelling at a considerable speed and quite possibly in an altogether different direction from the one the salvage ship intends her to take. The first thing to be done after making fast is therefore to ease her gently on to the right course, for it is easy to see that as long as she is allowed to continue on her own, time which cannot be made up is being wasted.
It is a ticklish bit of work this, for, however strong your steel coupling hawsers, the strain must come on them gradually and not too intensely at any time. Set on the right course the tug begins to apply a cautious acceleration, perhaps of not more than a few feet per second, if a big ship is in tow. This means time is being saved, but causes no inconvenience to men working on the derelict. In space there is no subjective difference between travelling at seven miles a second or at one mile an hour; acceleration is what you feel and an increase of a few feet per second is negligible in practice.
The only risk is of a man losing his hold and being left behind, and that is slight; for one thing he should be using a lifeline, but even if he is not, the recoil from a shot or two with a hand pistol should easily enable him to catch up.
When we saw the rockets start, all five of us clipped lifelines to our belts and began our preliminary survey, reporting back on the microwave as we went.
It was clear enough pretty quickly what had happened. Something had struck the Excelsis’s tail, carrying away three quarters of her tubes and mangling the rest. The stern was just a mess but the rest of her seemed intact. I heard the Captain grunt as I reported, and though he made no comment I knew what he was thinking.
It was going to be a nasty business. It is better, far, far better to find a derelict which has been finished off quickly. When a meteorite has knocked away part of the habitable quarters, or when it has gone right through and the air has rushed out, you know it was all over quickly. Death is never too good to look at, though if it’s sudden it’s usually pretty clean. But when the living quarters are undamaged and the people in them have had to wait and see death come slowly, you’ll find that some pretty horrible things have happened before the end. I could tell you some things—but I shan’t; I don’t care to think of them even now.
‘Have to cut into her?’ the Captain asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘All right. I’ll put the stuff out.’
Cutting into a ship is a tedious business. First you attach a large metal cup to the side and weld it on all round the edge and it looks as if the ship had developed a boil. Then a man gets into the cup by a small door in the top of it.
A cutter is handed in after him. He shuts the door from his side, for it’s made to resist outward and not inward pressure, and gets to work with the cutter. The object of the cup is of course, to prevent the escape of any air.
First, the man cuts away a circle of the outer hull, making a hole large enough for him to crawl through. If he is satisfied that the inner hull is intact, he reopens the door of the cup and gets rid of the circle he has cut by pushing it outside. Then, after shutting the door again, he turns his attention to the inner hull. He trains his cutter steadily on a single point and watches carefully.
This is the part of the job which needs most judgment. The moment the area under the flame of his cutter begins to bulge, he switches off. His object is to let the air come as gently as possible into the evacuated space between the inner and outer hulls. If he lets it come with a rush he may have an extremely unpleasant time of it. More than that, if it so happens that the welding-on of the cup was imperfect, he and it may be shot off into space and the air from the wreck irretrievably lost.
Therefore, he makes the smallest hole he can and keeps a careful watch on his pressure gauge as the air comes through. Not until the needle has ceased to move can he go any further. When that has happened, however, and the pressure in his cup ceases to rise, he cuts a circle through the inner hull as he did through the outer, and at last he is able to get into the ship. Straightaway he reports and makes his way to the air-lock. There he gets ready to operate the lever which opens the outer door.
It would, of course, be much simpler if someone could devise a satisfactory method of opening the outer door from outside, but for several reasons—the main one being the superheating of outer shell in an atmosphere—no reliable mechanism has yet been made.
CHAPTER THREE
SALVAGE IN SPACE
With the Excelsis, it took several hours’ work before the cutter was able to report that we could come aboard.
‘
All right. Open up,’ Captain Belford directed.
The rest of us who had retired on board the Dido to wait looked at him expectantly. He chose the boarding party and we hurried into our suits. While we dressed he talked to the man on the other ship.
‘How is it?’
‘Pretty grim, sir.’
We were all wearing microwave sets in preparation for the job, and we could follow both sides of the conversation.
‘Air pressure?’ asked the Captain.
‘Thirteen point seven pounds, sir. Seems to have held it perfectly. Releasing it into the double hull seems just about to account for the drop from normal.’
‘Breathable?’
‘Pretty bad, sir, by the look of things. I didn’t risk trying.’ ‘Don’t then. Got the lock open yet?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘All right. We’re coming now.’
From our own lock we pushed off and floated across to the open door of the other. We took little with us but welding arcs and some batteries to start up the air purifiers.
I’m not going to tell you what the Excelsis was like inside; it’s not decent to try. All I’ll say is that some of the passengers and crew had contrived to last a pretty long time. I felt pretty green and wondered if I was going to be sick. I had to take a hold on myself: being sick in a space-suit’s a dangerous as well as an unpleasant business.
I was detailed, with the help of one of the hands, to weld up the recently made cut and to pump the air back from between the hulls. I think both of us were pretty glad to leave the clearing up operations to the rest.
Since space travel began it has been the practice to leave its victims out in space. And in my opinion it is a good thing, too. Certainly it could be no consolation to relatives to see the poor things which have to be thrust out of a wreck’s air-lock to drift slowly astern. And that’s another reason for keeping up some acceleration while salvage work is going on. If you don’t, you can’t lose those bodies. They just keep on drifting round, gravitating gradually to the mass of the ship. It’s bad for the nerves to see dead men floating past the windows all the time. When we’d finished our welding and pumping we found that the rest were nearly through with the nastiest part of the job.