by Paul Preuss
He did not call her, she called him, from her rented villa on the Isle du Levant. She informed him that after their last conversation she had made it her business to check up on him and the members of Star Queen’s crew. She praised Pavlakis for his measures to safeguard the integrity of Star Queen during the refitting; he could hardly be blamed for Wycherly’s private difficulties. Her London solicitors had given her very full briefs on pilot Peter Grant and engineer Angus McNeil. In view of what she had learned, she had personally contacted the Board of Space Control and submitted an amicus brief on behalf of Pavlakis Lines’s application for a waiver of the crew-of-three rule, citing her faith in the integrity of the firm and overriding economic considerations. She had also contacted Lloyd’s, urging that insurance not be withdrawn. According to Sylvester’s best information, the waiver was sure to be granted. Star Queen would launch with two men aboard, carrying sufficient cargo for a profitable voyage.
When Pavlakis signed off the phonelink he was giddy with elation.
Sylvester’s best information proved correct, and Peter Grant was promoted to commander of a two-man crew. Two days later heavy tugs moved Star Queen into launch orbit, beyond the Van Allen belts. The atomic motor erupted in a stream of white light. Under steady acceleration the ship began a five-week hyperbolic dive toward Venus.
PART
3
BREAKING STRAIN
9
Peter Grant rather enjoyed command. He was as relaxed as a working man can be—lying weightless, loosely strapped into the command pilot’s couch on Star Queen’s flight deck, dictating the ship’s log between puffs of a rich Turkish cigarette—when a skullcracker slammed into the hull.
For the second or two that it took Grant to crush his cigarette and reset the switches, red lights glared and sirens hooted hysterically. “Assess and report!” he barked. He yanked an emergency air mask from the console and jammed it over his nose and mouth, and abruptly all was silent again. He waited an eternity as the console graphics rapidly shifted shape and color—thirty more seconds at least—while the computer assessed the damage.
“We have experienced severe overpressure in the southeast quadrant of the life support deck,” the computer announced in its matter-of-fact contralto. “Number two fuel cell has been ruptured. Automatic switchover to number one and number three fuel cells has occurred. Gas lines from oxygen supply one and two have been sheared. Emergency air supply valves have been opened”—Grant knew that; he was breathing the stuff now. But what the hell happened?—“Sensors have recorded supersonic airflows at exterior hull panel L-43. Loss of pressure on the life support deck was total within twenty-three seconds. The deck has been sealed and is now in vacuum. There has been no further systemic or structural damage. There has been no further loss of atmospheric pressure in the connecting passages or in any other part of the crew module”—hearing which, Grant took the mask from his face and let it withdraw into the console panel. “This concludes damage assessment. Are there further queries?” the computer asked.
Yes, damn it all, what the hell happened? The computer didn’t answer questions like that unless it knew the answer, unambiguously. “No further queries,” Grant said, and keyed the comm: “McNeil, are you all right?”
No answer.
He tried the hi-band. “McNeil, Grant here. I want you on the flight deck.”
No answer. McNeil was out of touch, possibly hurt. After a moment’s thought Grant decided to steal just a couple of seconds more in an attempt to learn the cause of their predicament. With a few flicks of his fingertips he sent one of the external monitor eyes scurrying over the command module hull toward panel L-43, on the lowest part of the sphere.
The image on the videoplate was a racing blur until the robot eye halted over the designated panel. Then there it was, fixed and plain on Grant’s screen: a black dot in the upper right quadrant of the white-painted steel panel as neat as a pellet hole in a paper target. “Meteoroid,” Grant whispered. He flicked grids over the monitor image and read the hole at just under a millimeter in diameter. “Big one.”
Where the devil was McNeil? He’d been down in the pressurized hold checking the humidifiers. Simple enough, so what was the problem?—the meteoroid hadn’t penetrated the holds… Grant slipped out of his straps and dived into the central corridor.
His feet had hardly cleared the deck when he grabbed a ladder rung and yanked himself to a halt. Immediately below the flight deck was the house-keeping deck. Unlike the curtains of the other two cabins, the curtain that partitioned McNeil’s private cabin from the common areas stood open. And inside was McNeil, doubled up and turned toward the bulkhead, his face hidden, his fists knotted around the bulkhead grips.
“What’s the matter, McNeil? Are you sick?”
The engineer shook his head. Grant noticed the little beads of moisture that broke away from his head and went glittering across the room. He took them for sweat, until he realized that McNeil was sobbing. Tears.
The sight repulsed him. Indeed. Grant was surprised at the strength of his own emotion; immediately he suppressed his reaction as unworthy. “Angus, pull out of it,” he urged. “We’ve got to put our heads together.” But McNeil didn’t move, nor did Grant move to comfort him, or even touch him.
After a moment’s hesitation Grant viciously yanked the curtain closed, veiling his mate’s display of cowardice.
In a quick tour of the lower decks and the hold access corridor, Grant assured himself that whatever the damage to the life support deck the integrity of the crew’s living and working quarters was not threatened. With a single bound he leaped through the center of the ship back to the flight deck, not even glancing at McNeil’s cabin as he passed, and hooked himself into the command couch. He studied the graphics.
Oxygen supply one: flat. Oxygen supply two: flat. Grant gazed at the silent graphs as a man in ancient London, returning home one evening at the time of the plague, might have stared at a rough cross newly scrawled on his door. He tapped keys and the graphs bounced, but the fundamental equation that produced a flat curve did not yield to his coaxing. Grant could hardly doubt the message: news that is sufficiently bad somehow carries its own guarantee of truth, and only good reports need confirmation.
“Grant, I’m sorry.”
Grant swung around to see McNeil floating by the ladder, his face flushed, the pouches under his eyes swollen from weeping. Even at a range of over a meter Grant could smell the “medicinal” brandy on his breath.
“What was it, a meteoroid?” McNeil seemed determined to be cheerful, to make up for the lapse, and when Grant nodded yes, McNeil even assayed a faint attempt at humor. “They say a ship this size could get hit once a century. We seem to have jumped the gun with ninety-nine point nine years still to go.”
“Worse luck. Look at this”—Grant waved at the videoplate showing the damaged panel. “Where we were holed, the damned thing had to be coming in at practically right angles to us. Any other approach and it couldn’t have hit anything vital.” Grant swung around, facing the console and the wide flight deck windows that looked out on the starry night. For a moment he was silent, collecting his thoughts. What had happened was serious—deadly serious—but it need not be fatal. After all, the voyage was forty percent over. “You up to helping out?” he asked. “We should run some numbers.”
“That I am.” McNeil made for the engineer’s work station.
“Then give me figures for total reserves, best and worst cases. Air in Hold A. Emergency reserves. Don’t forget what’s in the suit tanks and portable O-two packs.”
“Right,” said McNeil.
“I’ll work on the mass ratios. See if we can gain anything by jettisoning the holds and making a run for it.”
McNeil hesitated and muttered, “Uh…”
Grant paused. But whatever McNeil had been about to say, he thought better of it. Grant took a deep breath. He was in command here, and he already understood the obvious—that dumping the cargo w
ould put the owners out of business, even with insurance, and put the insurance underwriters into the poor house, most likely. But after all, if it came to a matter of two human lives versus a few tonnes of dead weight, there really wasn’t much question about it.
Grant’s command of the ship at this moment was somewhat firmer than his command of himself. He was as much angry as he was frightened—angry with McNeil for breaking down, angry with the designers of the ship for assuming that a billion-to-one chance meant the same as impossible and therefore failing to provide additional meteor shielding in the soft underbelly of the command module. But the deadline for oxygen reserves was at least a couple of weeks away, and a lot could happen before then. The thought helped, for a moment anyway, to keep his fears at arm’s length.
This was an emergency beyond doubt—but it was one of those peculiarly protracted emergencies, once characteristic of the sea, these days more typical of space—one of those emergencies where there was plenty of time to think. Perhaps too much time.
Grant was reminded of an old Cretan sailor he had met at the Pavlakis hangar in Heathrow, some ancient relative-of-a-relative of the old man’s, there on a courtesy invitation, who had held an audience of clerks and mechanics in thrall as he recited the tale of a disastrous voyage he had worked as a young man, on a tramp steamer through the Red Sea. The captain of the vessel had inexplicably failed to provide his ship with sufficient fresh water against emergencies. The radio broke down, and then the engines. The ship drifted for weeks before attracting the attention of passing traffic, by which time the crew had been reduced to stretching the fresh water with salt. The old Cretan was among the survivors who merely spent a few weeks in hospital. Others were not so lucky; they had already died horribly of thirst and salt poisoning.
Slow disasters are like that: one unlikely thing happens, and that’s complicated by a second unlikely event, and a third puts paid to somebody’s life.
McNeil had grossly oversimplified matters when he said that the Star Queen might expect to be hit by a meteoroid once in a century. The answer depended on so many factors that three generations of statisticians and their computers had done little but lay down rules so vague that the insurance companies still shivered with apprehension when the great meteoroid swarms went sweeping like gales through the orbits of the inner worlds. Otherwise desirable interplanetary trajectories were put out of bounds by the insurors if they required a ship to intersect the orbit of the Leonids, say, at the peak of a shower—although even then the real chance of a ship and a meteoroid intersecting was, at worst, remote.
Much depends on one’s subjective notion of what the words meteor and meteorite and meteoroid mean, of course. Each lump of cosmic slag that reaches the surface of the Earth—thus earning the moniker “meteorite”—has a million smaller brethren that perish utterly in the no-man’s-land where the atmosphere has not quite ended and space has yet to begin, that ghostly region where Aurora walks by night. These are meteors—manifestations of the upper air, the original meaning of the word—the familiar shooting stars, which are seldom larger than a pin’s head. And these in turn are outnumbered a millionfold again by particles too small to leave any visible trace of their dying as they drift down from the sky. All of them, the countless specks of dust, the rare boulders and even the wandering mountains that Earth encounters perhaps every dozen million years—all of them, flying free in space, are meteoroids.
For the purposes of space flight a meteoroid is only of interest if, on striking the hull, the resulting explosion interdicts vital functions, or produces destructive over-pressures, or puts a hole in a pressurized compartment too big to prevent the rapid loss of atmosphere. These are matters both of size and relative speed. The efforts of the statisticians had resulted in tables showing approximate collision probabilities at various radiuses from the sun for meteoroids down to masses of a few milligrams. At the radius of Earth’s orbit, for example, one might expect any given cubic kilometer of space to be traversed by a one-gram meteoroid, travelling toward the sun at perhaps forty kilometers per second, just once every three days. The likelihood of a spacecraft occupying the same cubic kilometer of space (except very near Earth itself) was much lower, and so was the calculated incidence of larger meteoroids—so that McNeil’s “once in a century” collision estimate was in fact absurdly high.
The meteoroid which had struck Star Queen was big—likely a gram’s worth of concreted dust and ice the size of a ball bearing. And it had somehow managed to avoid striking either the upper hemisphere of the crew module or the large cylindrical cargo holds below, in its nearly perpendicular angle of attack on the life support deck. The virtual certainty that such an occurrence would not happen again in the course of human history gave Grant and McNeil very little consolation.
Still, things might have been worse. Star Queen was fourteen days into her trajectory and had twenty-one days still to go to reach Port Hesperus. Thanks to her upgraded engines she was travelling much faster than the slow freighters, the tramp steamers of the space-ways who were restricted to Hohmann ellipses, those long tangential flight paths that expended minimum energy by just kissing the orbits of Earth and Venus on opposite sides of the sun. Passenger ships equipped with even more powerful gaseous-core reactors, or fast cutters using the still-new fusion drives, could slice across from planet to planet in as little as a fortnight, given favorable planetary alignments—and given a profit margin that allowed them to spend an order of magnitude more on fuel—but Star Queen was stuck in the middle of the equation. Her optimal acceleration and deceleration determined both her launch window and her time of arrival.
Surprising how long it takes to execute a simple computer program when your life depends on the outcome. Grant entered the pertinent numbers a dozen different ways before he gave up hoping that the bottom line would change.
He turned to McNeil, still hunched over the engineering console across the circular room. “Looks like we can shave the ETA by almost half a day,” he said. “Assuming we blow all the holds within the next hour or so.”
For a second or two McNeil didn’t reply. When at last he straightened and turned to face Grant his expression was calm and sober. “It appears the oxygen will last us eighteen days in the best case—fifteen in the worst. Seems we’re a few days short.”
The men regarded each other with a trancelike calmness that would have been remarkable had it not been obvious what was racing through their minds: there must be a way out!
Make oxygen!
Grow plants, for example—but there was nothing green aboard, not even a packet of grass seeds—and even if there were, despite the tall tales, when the entire energy cycle is taken into account, land plants are not efficient oxygen producers on much less than the scale of a small world. The only good it would have done them to have those pine seedlings aboard would have been the greater volume of air in the pressurized hold.
Electrolyze water then, reversing the fuel-cell cycle, getting from it elemental hydrogen and oxygen—but there was not enough water in the undamaged fuel cells or in the water tanks, or even in the two men’s bodies, to keep them breathing for an additional seven days. At least not past their deaths from dehydration.
Extra oxygen was not to be had. Which left that last standby of space opera, the deus ex machina of a passing spaceship—one that conveniently happened to be matching one’s course and velocity exactly.
There were no such ships, of course. Almost by definition, the spaceship that “happened to be passing” was impossible. Even if other freighters already were skidding toward Venus on the same trajectory—and Grant and McNeil would have known if there were—then by the laws that governed their movements, the very laws propounded by Newton, they must keep their original separations without a heroic sacrifice of mass and a possibly fatal squandering of fuel. Any ship passing at a significantly greater velocity—a passing liner, say—would be pursuing its own hyperbolic trajectory and would likely be as inaccessible as Pluto. Bu
t a fully provisioned cutter, if it started now from Venus…
“What’s docked at Port Hesperus?” McNeil inquired, as if his thoughts had been on the same trajectory as Grant’s.
Grant waited a moment, consulting the computer, before he replied. “A couple of old Hohmann freighters, according to Lloyd’s Register—and the usual litter of launches and tugs.” He laughed abruptly. “Couple of solar yachts. No help there.”
“Seems we’re drawing a blank,” McNeil observed. “P’raps we should have a word with the controllers on Earth and Venus.”
“I was about to do just that,” Grant said irritably, “as soon as I’ve decided how to phrase the query.” He took a swift breath. “Look, you’ve been a great help here. You could do us another favor and do a personal check on possible air leaks in the system. All right with you, then?”
“Certainly, that’s all right.” McNeil’s voice was quiet.
Grant watched McNeil sidelong as he unbuckled his loose straps and swam down, off the flight deck. The engineer was probably going to give him trouble in the days that lay ahead, Grant mused. That shameful business, breaking down like a child… Until now they had got on well enough—like most men of substantial girth, McNeil was good-natured and easy-going—but now Grant realized that McNeil lacked fiber. Obviously he had become flabby, physically and mentally, through living too long in space.
10
The parabolic antenna on the communications boom was aimed at the gleaming arc lamp of Venus, less than twenty million kilometers away and moving on a converging path with the ship. A tone sounded on the console, indicating that a signal from Port Hesperus had been acquired.
The physical convergence would not occur for a month, but the three-millimeter waves from the ship’s transmitter would make the trip in under a minute. How nice, at this moment, to be a radio wave.