by John Wyndham
The man in charge of the disposal squad was reporting tonelessly to the Captain who had been conducting a detailed examination of cargo and stores.
‘Thirty complete bodies, sir. Seventeen of those identified. Here’s the list of them, sir.’
Captain Belford held out his hand and took it slowly. No one spoke for a minute or more. Only thirty complete bodies - and there had been eighty passengers and crew….
The Captain carefully put the list away in a pocket. Then he stepped over to a window and stood a moment looking at a thousand suns flaring in their bed of black. I felt he was trying to see them in all their pitilessness as the men on the Excelsis had seen them. His space-suit made a grotesque giant of him. Then with a scarcely audible sigh, he began to recite the prayer for those who have died in space.
The clearing up of the Excelsis was regular routine work. Only two of her fuel tanks had leaked, and the first thing we did was to fill our own from those which hadn’t leaked—it’s axiomatic to fill your tanks when you can in space. You never know when you are going to need just that extra bit of power.
There was a little food, just a few unopened tins of biscuits. The poor devils had made the food last longer than the water, for those tanks were dry to the last drop. The gold was intact in the strong room; we checked it over. The ganywood was still safely clamped down in the hold. One of the drums of patchatal oil had been broken open—we reckoned some poor thirst-crazy chap had tried to drink it. The rest were intact, and so were the bales of tillfer fibre.
The personal belongings we left in the cabins where we found them, just fastening any loose things down for safety. When we got the ship in, someone would go through them with the passenger list and return them to the next of kin.
All that is the lighter part of salvage work. A bit depressing, of course, but easy because once the air purifiers have got going you can dispense with space-suits.
Next came the outside work, and the first thing was to get a wide mesh net round the part of the ship we were going to work on. You can’t cling on to the polished hull and you must have something to give you purchase when you’re handling tools, so the answer is the net. You can climb about on it and hook yourself into it when necessary. When we’d got that fixed we began fixing ringbolts in the side.
It’s a tedious job, but it has to be done and it has to be done well. There’s only one way of easing the fall of a derelict or a ship out of control—that is by use of parachutes. And the attachment of parachutes is going to depend in the last stage upon the firm fixing of those ringbolts. The strength of the Parachutes’ fabric, the braking effect of their area, the tensile strength of their steel hawsers; all that can be worked out mathematically on paper, but the fixing of the bolts is different; it must be trusted to the skill, care and conscientious workmanship of the men doing the job. There must be no botching or covering up of bad work. Luckily, it’s a job that seldom has to be hurried.
The Excelsis was a big ship. To make as sure of her as possible we were going to attach every parachute we carried and that meant a lot of work. Nevertheless we had more than three-quarters of the bolts in place before we began to decelerate. That meant we’d plenty of time, for our rate of deceleration was the same as our acceleration and would therefore take longer. We had to lose, you see, not only the speed we had worked up, but also the speed the wreck was travelling when we found her, in order to ease her close to Earth at a slow a rate as possible. It meant several weeks of slowing up.
It’s no good my being too technical, but I must give you some idea of the ticklish job it is to land a wreck successfully. There are a hundred things which can go wrong. Dozens of calculations to make, and a slip in any of them is likely to mean failure.
The first stage is to attain a state of equilibrium between the Earth and the Moon where one is stationary—again I speak relatively as one must do in space, actually one is moving round the Earth, but at a constant distance from it. There the final preparations for descent are made.
The salvage ship again refills her fuel tanks and any surplus fuel from the derelict is jettisoned for safety. Much wreckage has already been cut away in the first clearing up, now the empty fuel tanks are cut out and set adrift with an impulse in the direction of the Moon. The hulk is made as light as possible for it is intended to drop her in the sea and it is hoped that she may float. We had little hope of the Excelsis floating, seeing the weight of gold and ganywood she carried, but on general principles we saw to it that she was as light as she could be.
Then the ship is sealed up, the main coupling hawsers which have bound the two together are cast off leaving only the magnets and their hawsers as links, and the parachutes are made fast to the ringbolts. The practical work for the crew is finished; the rest depends upon the captain’s calculations and his consequent manoeuvres. He and the first officer get down to figuring and checking one another’s results.
This is no light work. The captain knows the approximate spot where he intends to drop the derelict and he has got to get her into such a position that she will fall there or there-abouts. He knows the load his magnets will hold and that, with his estimated weight of his salvage, tells him how much pull and steerage effect he will be able to exert. He must work out the balancing of forces—the pull of the Moon, of the Sun, of the Earth, and the rotation of the spot he aims at, relatively to the Moon. Everything which can be used to slow or shorten the final descent must be employed. Finally, he must find out by radio as much as he can about weather conditions on Earth and make allowance for them at the last possible moment.
In general, we were feeling that we were near the end of a profitable and not too onerous piece of work. From the salvagers’ point of view the Excelsis was as straightforward a job as one could hope for, except for the heavy cargo. It simplifies tasks a great deal when the air has been held; you don’t have to build new pieces of double wall or fit automatically-closing valves to take in air as she drops.
Seeing that the Plume Line yards were in North Ireland, Captain Belford aimed to drop her a bit out in the Atlantic and make it a short tow by sea. He informed the Salvage Register Office that he was aiming at the neighbourhood of 51° North by 12° West and received their approval. He and the First Officer verified the chronometer’s reading and went ahead with the calculations. They checked and re-checked one another’s figures with care before they announced to us the exact minute of action. With some eight hours to go before that time came we all turned in for a while.
CHAPTER FOUR
FALL OF THE EXCELSIS
Half an hour before we were due to start, Captain Belford had already fastened himself into his chair and was firing short bursts on the side tubes to obtain the right inclination. We all strapped on our safety-belts and waited, watching the minute-hand on the chronometer.
On the correct second the Dido began to throb gently as her tubes fired. We felt a slight tug a moment later as the hawsers on the magnets took up. We moved gradually Earthward. Behind us came the Excelsis, started on her long last fall.
The First Officer and I were making continuous observations, reporting our angles and distances to the Captain. He verified them on a table he had drawn up and pinned on a board in front of him, correcting the slightest deviation from his planned time-course by a short burst on one or another of the bunches of rocket tubes.
This manoeuvre, known technically as a ‘linked fall,’ would go on for a long time yet. It should last, in fact, until we were within four or five thousand miles of the Earth’s surface when we would cast off and look to our landing while the Excelsis fell free.
But all the first part was a time of constant watch and correction. We were falling together, but the Dido’s was no dead fall. All the time she was moving laterally, now this way and now that, tugging and altering the course of the larger vessel, trimming her to hit a calculated spot on the surface of Earth which grew all the time larger and nearer. As delicate a job as any there is, for the disabled ship mu
st be urged to one side or another with the utmost nicety and precision; there must be no jerks or sudden bursts of power which might detach the magnets from her hull. Their hold was the limiting factor of our power over her, but used by an expert it was enough.
The radio operator looked up quickly and reported.
‘North-westerly wind rising rapidly to gale force, west of Ireland, sir,’ he said.
Captain Belford, hunched in front of his chart, grunted.
‘Tell them I’ll try to compensate.’ He altered the position of some of his controls, muttering more to himself than us: ‘Gale, and they gave it as twenty-four hours fair prospect. I suppose they’ll learn something about weather, one day.’
He steered the Dido round to the other side of the Excelsis and in that moment the thing, which was to spoil the rest of his life, happened.
He fired on his tail rockets and I say it now, again, as I said it in evidence before, no man could have handled them with better judgment. There was no jerk. I was looking out of the window directly facing the Excelsis and I saw the magnet float away from her side. To this day I cannot say why—it may be that the cable kinked and broke, that there was a short somewhere; I can’t tell, but I know that that magnet was loose before our cable to the other magnet drew taut.
Instinctively and instantaneously I shouted a warning, but it came too late. Captain Belford’s judgment had been based on the hold of two magnets. Before he had time to reach the controls the second magnet had pulled off and came skimming towards us as though the wire rope which held it had been elastic.
I had never known the Captain to lose his head, and he kept it now. A burst on the side tubes jumped us out of the way, so that the heavy magnet just missed us and went past with its 200 yards of cable looping behind it.
‘Cast off,’ he ordered.
A man leaned over and pulled a switch. An automatic jaw severed the cable and the magnet sped away into space with the rope curling like a slowly moving snake behind it.
It was a nasty half-minute. That second magnet had sprung back at us with a force which might have holed us if it had hit: at best, we should have got some nasty dents. With that danger past we looked again at the Excelsis.
The distance between us had widened and she was falling free. I saw Captain Belford frown, but there was only one possible decision. Even had it been possible to close with her we should not have time to manoeuvre her after the delay of recoupling. The course he took, and to my mind the only useful course, was to check our own fall and to hope for the best as far as she was concerned. There was nothing to be gained by running the risk of losing both ships.
He made up his mind in a few seconds. First, he cut free the other magnet, then a touch of the side tubes turned our stern to Earth, and the main rockets began to fire. It felt as if strong brakes had suddenly been applied. The Excelsis with her unopened parachutes tied about her in bundles, seemed to shoot down from our level towards the growing Earth beneath. She dwindled to a silver shell, a shining bullet, a point of light and then suddenly was gone.
The Captain spoke to the radio operator.
‘Inform the Salvage Register Office that the Excelsis has been lost and is now in free fall. Confirm that her intended descent was to be at 51 ° North, 12° West and that it is not possible at this distance to predict her degree of deviation.
‘Get the weather report from the Caledonian Yard and tell them that we are coming in.’
And that’s the plain truth about the Excelsis. That and nothing more. A simple accident and not a Machiavellian scheme. Things like that are bound to happen from time to time, and they may happen to anyone. Sometimes no harm is done, at others the wreck may be lost altogether, and then the captain of the salvage ship will have to account for all his actions before the regular official board of inquiry. There is no doubt that had such a routine investigation taken place Captain Belford would have been exonerated from all blame by a body of men as conversant with the hazards of space as he himself. Instead, he was called upon to face fantastic accusations thrown at him by men who were grossly ignorant of the possibilities and impossibilities of spacemanship.
The first hint of the trouble occurred about an hour after we had landed.
We were in the Yard clubroom drinking a welcome whisky while officials went over the Dido. It was always a tedious wait. Before we could get the all-clear and be allowed to go our ways, the Excise men had to search the ship for dutiable goods, the police for prohibited articles, and the Company’s officers had to check up on equipment, stores, fuel and so on.
We were glad enough to be back, but we didn’t talk a lot. The main question for all of us was whether we should see any return for our work on the Excelsis, or whether she was utterly lost and our salvage money with her. The Captain, with this weight of responsibility upon him, stared gloomily into hisglass most of the time, and, except when it needed refilling, seldom opened his mouth to speak.
We had been there close on a couple of hours and were beginning to feel that our clearance papers were about due when the door opened and the head of the Caledonian Rocket Yard Police came in. We all looked at him hopefully. Inspector Macraig was as popular with spacemen as any policeman was likely to be. He was a man of integrity, a stickler for the spirit of the law, but no fusser about its letter. He’d done spacework himself and he knew how it felt. This time, however, he did not give us his usual cheery greeting. He was frowning slightly and there was a troubled look in his eyes. He nodded abstractedly to the rest of us and made his way straight to Captain Belford. At his expression, the Captain checked his natural invitation to a drink and waited. ‘William Belford, Wilfred Sinderton, James Fearon,’ he said, ‘it is my duty to place you under arrest.’
No one spoke for a moment. My own first reaction, and the First Officer’s too, he told me afterwards, was to wonder which of us on the Dido had been smuggling or running dope—and how it had been done, for on that trip we had called nowhere but at the Moon, and there’s precious little chance of getting hold of prohibited drugs or anything else there.
The Captain looked stunned for a moment, then he rose to his feet, overtopping the inspector by a good nine inches. ‘And the charge?’ he asked.;
‘Criminal negligence,’ said the Inspector quietly.
His expression changed as he looked into the Captain’s incredulous face.
‘I’m sorry, Belford. Direct ’phone orders from London.’ ‘Negligence of what?’ the Captain demanded.
‘They didn’t say. No details were given officially.’
‘But unofficially?’
‘Well, information has just been received here that the Excelsis came down somewhere in Germany and blew half a town to hell.’
We all stared at him.
‘But that’s impossible,’ I broke in.
‘Absurd,’ said Sinderton. ‘Why I supervised the cutting away of her tanks myself. There wasn’t an ounce of explosive on her.’
We both looked at the Captain.
‘There’s a mistake somewhere,’ he said. ‘I made an inspection of the ship with Mr. Sinderton and Mr. Fearon. All fuel that had not been taken on to the Dido was jettisoned.’
The Inspector looked unhappy.
‘I know you, and I know that there must be a mistake. But my orders were clear. I am to send you to London under arrest as soon as possible. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault, Macraig, of course. There’s some official muddle somewhere. The sooner we can get to London and clear it up, the better for everyone. When can we start?’
‘At once, I imagine. I told them to get a rocket-’plane ready. It ought to be waiting by now.’
‘All right.’ The Captain tipped down the last of his whisky. ‘Let’s go,’ he added, and led the way purposefully to the door.
CHAPTER FIVE
DISASTER EXTRAORDINARY
We could not tell what had happened to cause the misunderstanding, but all of us suspected mere exaggeration. It was
possible that the ship had disintegrated as it hit: in that case hurried reports might easily have represented a severe impact as an explosion. There would be no difficulty, we thought, in clearing ourselves of an explosion charge; every man of the Dido’s company would testify that the wreck had been cleared out of fuel to the last ounce. There might be a charge of inefficiency in fixing the cables, but we all had good records our workmanship and every incentive to bring the Excelsis
down safely if we could.
We made the trip to London less in a state of worry than irritation at misrepresentation.
An official police-car was waiting for us on King’s Cross landing-roof and in it we were carried swiftly to Scotland Yard. Inside the building we were conducted without delay to the office of the Deputy Assitant Commissioner of the Special Branch. We did not know which he was at first, for three men apparently of equal rank awaited us. The manner in which they received us was curious, it seemed an odd blend of formality and sympathy. Certainly, it did not suggest that they considered us to be criminally negligent.
First, we received the customary warning. They wished to question us, but we were legally within our rights in refusing to answer.
Captain Belford waved that aside. He had a clear conscience and was willing to give all the help he could. He was sure he could say the same for his two officers. We agreed and settled down to answer a series of questions.