by Hal Clement
“Jones, I don’t pretend to care what happens to you outside, but you might remember one thing.”
“What?” The fellow paused with his helmet almost in place.
“If I do anything that you think calls for shooting me, be sure you are holding on to something tightly or that your line of fire is upward.”
“Why?”
“Well, as Mr. Smith pointed out some time ago, the escape velocity of this asteroid is about one foot a second. I don’t know too much about guns, but I seem to recall that an ordinary pistol shot will provide a space-suited man with a recoil velocity of around a third of that. You wouldn’t be kicked entirely into space, but you’d be some time coming down; and just think of the embarrassment if your first shot had missed me. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
He clamped down his own helmet without waiting for an answer from either man. Then he wished he’d mentioned something about the danger to a spacesuit from ricochet, but decided that it would be an anticlimax.
He would have liked to hear the remarks passed between them, but he had already discovered that Robinson hadn’t wasted time cutting out his transmitter but avoiding the receiver. He had simply depowered the whole unit, and Mac could neither transmit nor receive.
He stepped—using the word loosely—in the inner lock door, hit the switch that opened it and stepped through. Turning to see whether Jones was with him, he was surprised to discover that the latter still had not donned his helmet and was engaged in an animated discussion with Smith.
Hoerwitz sometimes spoke on impulse, but it had been well over fifty years since he had performed an important action on that basis; the mental machinery concerned was rather corroded. It might be possible to get the inner lock door closed and the air pumps started before either of the two men could reach the inner switch; if he could do that, it would give him nearly two minutes’ start—quite long enough to disappear on the irregular, harshly lit surface of the asteroid. On the other hand, if they stopped the cycle before the inner door was closed and the inside switch out of circuit, they would presumably shoot him on the spot.
His spacesuit had the usual provisions for sealing small leaks, but it was by no means bulletproof. He wished he had taken the time to make that remark about ricochet; it would apply well to the metal-walled chambers they were all standing in. Unfortunately the thieves might not think of that in time.
Hoerwitz might, if given another minute or two to mull it over, have taken the chance on that much data; but before he made up his mind the conversation ended. Jones donned his helmet, safetied its clamps and looked toward the airlock. At that same moment all three men suddenly realized that Smith and Jones were both out of touch with pushoff points. They were “standing” on the floor, of course, since they had been in the room for some time and weighed several grams each, but that weight would not supply anything like the traction needed to get them to the switch quickly. An experienced spaceman would have jumped hard, in any direction, and trusted to the next wall collision to provide steerage; but it had become perfectly evident in the last couple of days that these men were not experienced spacemen. Hoerwitz’s impulses broke free with an almost audible screech of metal on rust, and he slapped the cycling control.
VII
Jones had drawn his gun. He might have fired, but the action of drawing had spoiled his stance. Hoerwitz thought he had fired, but that the sound failed to get through his suit; the bullet, if any, must have gone bouncing around the equipment room. The inner door was shut, and the red light indicated pump cycling before any really interesting details could be observed.
The pumps took fifty seconds to get the pressure down, and the motors ten more to get the outer door open. Hoerwitz would have been outside almost on the instant, but his low-gravity reflexes took over.
One simply does not move rapidly in a place where the effort which would lift a man half a millimeter on Earth will give him escape velocity. This is true even when someone can be counted on to be shooting at you in the next minute or so; a person drifting helplessly out of touch with pushoff mass is a remarkably easy target. The idea was to get out of sight, rather than far away.
The asteroid was not exactly porous—no one has found a porous body made of lava yet—but it was highly irregular from a few hundred million years of random collisions out beyond Mars. There were explosion pits and crevices from this source, and quite a few holes made by men in the days when the material of the body itself had been used for conversion mass.
There were plenty of nice, dark cracks and holes to hide in. Hoerwitz maneuvered himself into one of the former five yards from the airlock and vanished:
He didn’t bother to look behind him. He neither knew nor cared whether they would follow. All things considered, they might not even try. However, they would very probably send out at least two men, one to hunt for the fictitious mirror and the other to guard the spaceship—not that they could guess, the old man hoped, what he intended to do about the latter.
Both places—sub-Earth and its antipodes—were just where Hoerwitz wanted them to be; they were the spots where an unwarned space-walker would be in the greatest danger.
However, the ship would be a refuge, if it were still there, and Hoerwitz wanted to get there before any possible guard. He therefore set out at the highest speed he could manage, climbing across the asteroid.
It was like chimney work in Earthly rock-climbing, simpler in one way because there was no significant weight. The manager was not really good at it, but presumably he was better than the others.
Earth was overhead and slightly to the west—about as far as it ever got that way, seen from near the airlock. That meant that time was growing short. When the planet started eastward again the asteroid was within a hundred degrees or so of perigee—an arc which it would cover in little over three-quarters of an hour, at this end of its grossly eccentric orbit.
Travel grew more complicated, and rather more dangerous, as the planet sank behind him. Roche’s limit for a body of this density was at around twelve thousand miles from Earth’s center, and the tidal bulge—invisible, imponderable, a mere mathematical quirk of earth’s potential field—was not only swinging around but growing stronger. With Earth, now spanning more than thirty degrees of sky, on the horizon behind him he was safe, but as it sank he knew he was traveling to meet the bulge, and it was coming to meet him. He had to get to the ship before the field had been working on that area too long.
The last thousand feet should have been the hardest, with his weight turning definitely negative; physically, it turned out to be the easiest, though the reason shocked him. He discovered, by the simple expedient of running into it, that the thieves had strung a cable between their ship and the airlock.
With its aid, they would travel much faster than he could. There might be a guard there already. Mac, terrified almost out of his senses, pulled himself along the cable with reckless haste until he reached a point where he could see the base of the ship a few hundred feet away.
No spacesuits were in sight, but the bottom of the globe was in black shadow. There was no way to be sure—except by waiting. That would eventually make one thing certain. The old man almost hurled himself along the cable toward the ship, expecting every second to be his last, but trying to convince himself that no one was there.
He was lucky. No one was.
The ship was already off the “ground” by a foot or so; the tide was rising at this part of the asteroid and weight had turned negative. Hoerwitz crammed himself into the space between the spherical hull and the ground and heaved upward for all he was worth.
At a guess, his thrust amounted to some fifty pounds. This gave him something over a minute before the vessel was too high for further pushing. In this time it had acquired a speed of perhaps two inches a second relative to the asteroid; but this was still increasing, very slowly, under tidal thrust.
The hull was of course covered with handholds. Hoerwitz seized two of these and ro
de upward with the vessel. It was quite true that a man drifting in space was an almost hopeless proposition as far as search-and-rescue was concerned; but a ship was a very different matter. If he and it got far enough away before any of the others arrived, he was safe.
Altitude increased with agonizing slowness. Earth’s bulk gradually came into view all around the planetoid’s jagged outline. At first, the small body showed almost against the center of the greater one; then, as the ship in its larger, slower orbit began to fall behind, the asteroid appeared to drift toward one side of the blue-and-white streaked disk. Hoerwitz watched with interest and appreciation—it was a beautiful sight—but didn’t neglect the point where the cable came around the rocks.
He was perhaps five hundred feet up when a space-suited figure appeared, pulling itself along with little appearance of haste. It was not yet close enough for the ship’s former site to be above the “horizon.” Mac waited with interest to see what the reaction to the discovery would be.
It was impressive, even under circumstances which prevented good observation. The thief was surprised enough to lose grip on the cable.
He was probably traveling above escape velocity, or what would have been escape velocity, even if the tide had been out. As it was, any speed would have been too great. For a moment, Hoerwitz thought the fellow was doomed.
Maybe it was Robinson, though; at least, he reacted promptly and sensibly. He drew a gun and began firing away from the asteroid. Each shot produced only a tiny velocity change in his drifting body, but those few inches a second were enough. He collided with one of the structures at the base of a radiator, kicked himself off and downward as he hit it, touched the surface, and clutched frantically at some handhold Hoerwitz couldn’t see. Then he began looking around and promptly discovered the ship.
The manager was quite sure the fellow wouldn’t try a jump. He wished, once again, that his radio receiver was working—the man might be saying something interesting, though he must be out of radio reach of the others. It would be nice to know whether the thief could see Hoerwitz’s clinging figure on the ship’s hull. It was possible, since the lower side of the sphere was illuminated by Earthlight, but far from certain, since the man’s line of sight extended quite close to the sun. He wasn’t shooting. But it was more than likely that his gun was empty anyway.
It was disappointing in a way, but Hoerwitz was able to make up for himself a story of what the fellow was thinking, and this was probably more fun than the real facts. Eventually the figure worked its way back to the cable and started along it toward the airlock. The old man watched it out of sight. Then feeling almost secure, he resumed his favorite state of relaxation after fastening himself to a couple of holds with the snap-rings on his suit, and relaxed.
There was nothing more to do. The drifting vessel would be spotted in the next hour or so, if it hadn’t been already, and someone would be along. In a way, it was a disappointing ending.
He spent some of the time wondering what Shakespeare would have done to avoid the anticlimax. He might have learned, if he had stayed awake, but he slept through the interesting part.
Smith, upon hearing that the ship was drifting away, had made the best possible time to the radiator site. Knowing that there was no other hope, he jumped; and not being a lightning calculator able to make all the necessary allowances for the local quirks in the potential field, he naturally went slightly off course.
He used all but one of his bullets in attempted corrections and wound up drifting at a velocity very well matched with that of the ship, but about fifty yards away from it. He could see Hoerwitz plainly.
Up to that time he had had no intention either of harming the old man fatally or blowing up the station; but the realization that the manager had had a part in the loss of his ship changed his attitude drastically. When the police ship arrived, he was still trying to decide whether to fire his last bullet at Hoerwitz, or in the opposite direction. Hoerwitz himself, of course, was asleep.
END
1970
STARLIGHT
First of Four Parts. Barlennan, hero of “Mission of Gravity,” is back—on a “low-gravity” planet. Only 40 G’s, a mere tenth of his native 400 G’s! But since no other intelligent race known could have studied that vicious planet—the Mesklinites were hired to do it.
I
Beetchermarlf felt the vibrations die out as his vehicle came to a halt, but instinctively looked outside before releasing the Kwembly’s helm. It was wasted effort, of course. The sun—or rather, the body he was trying to think of as the sun—had set nearly twenty hours before. The sky was still too bright for stars to be seen, but not bright enough to show details on the almost featureless dust “snowfield” around him. Behind, which was the only direction he could not see from the center of the bridge, the Kwembly’s trail might have provided some visual reference; but from his post at the helm there was no clue to his speed.
The captain, stretched out on his platform above and behind the helmsman, interpreted correctly the latter’s raised head. If he was amused, he concealed the fact. With nearly two human lifetimes spent on Mesklin’s unpredictable oceans he had never learned to like uncertainty—merely to live with it. Commanding a “vessel” he did not fully understand, traveling on land instead of sea, and knowing that his home world was over three parsecs away did nothing to bolster his own self-confidence, and he sympathized fully with the youngster’s lack of it.
“We’re stopped, Helmsman. Secure, and start your hundred-hour maintenance check. We’ll stay here for ten hours.”
“Yes, sir.” Beetchermarlf slipped the helm into its locking notch. A glance at the clock told him that over an hour of his watch remained, so he began checking the cables which connected the steering bar with the Kwembly’s forward trucks.
The lines were visible enough, since no effort had been made to conceal essential machinery behind walls. The builders of the huge vehicle and her eleven sister “ships” had not been concerned with appearance. It took only a few seconds to make sure that the few inches of cable above the bridge deck were still free of wear. The helmsman gestured an “all well” to the captain, rapped on the deck for clearance, waited for acknowledgment from below, opened the starboard trap and vanished down the ramp to continue his inspection.
Dondragmer watched him go with no great concern. His worries were elsewhere, and the helmsman was a dependable sailor. He put the steering problem from his mind for the moment, and reared the front portion of his eighteen-inch body upward until his head was level with the speaking tubes. A sirenlike wail which could have been heard over one of Mesklin’s typhoons and was almost ridiculous in the silence of Dhrawn’s snowfield secured the attention of the rest of the crew.
“This is the captain. Ten hours halt for maintenance check, watch on duty get started. Research personnel follow your usual routine, being sure to check with the bridge before going outside. No flying until the scouts have been overhauled. Power distribution acknowledge.”
“Power checking.” The voice from the speaking tube was a little deeper than Dondragmer’s.
“Life support acknowledge.”
“Life support checking.”
“Communication acknowledge.”
“Checking.”
“Kervenser to the bridge for standby. I’m going outside. Research, give me outside conditions.”
“One moment, Captain.” The pause was brief before the voice resumed, “Temperature 77; pressure 26.1; wind from 21, steady at 200 cables per hour; oxygen fraction standard at 0.0122.”
“Thanks. Not too bad.”
“No. With your permission, I’ll come out with you to get surface samples. May we set up the drill? We can get cores to a fair depth in less than ten hours.”
“That will be all right. I may be outside before you get to the lock, if you take time to collect the drill gear, but you are cleared outside when ready. Tell Kervenser the number of your party, for the log.”
“T
hank you, Captain. We’ll be there right away.”
Dondragmer relaxed at his station; he would not, of course, leave the bridge until his relief appeared, even with the engines stopped. Kervenser would be some minutes in arriving, since he would have to turn his current duties over to a relief of his own. The wait was not bothersome, however, since there was plenty to think about. Dondragmer was not the worrying type—the Mesklinite nervous system does not react to uncertainty in that way—but he did like to think situations out before he lived them.
The fact that he was some ten or twelve thousand miles from help, if the Kwembly were ever crippled, was merely background, not a special problem. It did not differ essentially from the situation he had faced for most of his life on Mesklin’s vast seas. The principal ripple on his normally placid self-confidence was stirred up by the machine he commanded. It resembled in no way the flexible assemblage of rafts which was his idea of a ship. He had been assured that it would float if occasion arose; it actually had floated during tests on distant Mesklin where it had been built. Since then, however, it had been disassembled, loaded into shuttle craft and lifted into orbit around its world of origin, transferred in space to an interstellar flier, shifted back to another and very different shuttle after the three-parsec jump, and brought to Dhrawn’s surface before being reassembled. Dondragmer had personally supervised the disassembly and reconstruction of the Kwembly and her sister machines, but the intervening steps had not been carried out under his own eye. This formed the principal reason for his wanting to go outside now; high as was his opinion of Beetchermarlf and the rest of his picked crew, he liked first-hand knowledge.
He did not, of course, mention this to Kervenser when the latter reached the bridge. It was something which went without saying. Anyway, the first officer presumably felt the same himself.