Jerry hadn't realized how much he did want to win, but he nodded. It was a host of things—Dick sick on Mars and counting on him, the tricks Mars had pulled, the feeling that this was his chance to prove himself a man and old Commodore Tenn a fool—a thousand things, including the remarks of the false Martian captain. The Classic would only go on stirring up hatred between the planets as long as it could be won by underhanded tricks. But if it could be won fairly by superior equipment, some of that hatred might die down.
"Are you willing to try it?" he asked the old man.
Tod chewed thoughtfully. "I reckon so, Jerry. I don't say I'm going to like it, but I'll ride along with you. No place else to go, anyhow. Let her rip!"
It wasn't that simple. Jerry had to refine his calculations down to the closest possible course he could figure, and to be sure of his fix. He began setting it up, trying to take everything into account this time.
"Food's going to be spoiled," Tod told him. "Heat will cook it for sure. You'll have broken cans all over the place, bust from the heat."
It didn't matter. They could get new food on Venus, and there was enough dry stuff to live on until they got there—or they could go hungry, for that matter.
"How much water do we have?" he asked, as the calculator clicked along with his figures.
"Couple hundred gallons. Oh! Blow it out into space, eh—let it boil and use up some of the heat, if we have to?" Tod grinned. "We can do the same with some of the fuel; we got more than we need. And then there's the oxygen in the tanks. That'll soak up some heat. I'd better get set to have pipes out to the hull to use it."
He hopped down the shaft, while the calculations came out slowly. But they checked with Jerry's original rough figures. With luck, they'd be on Venus in about fifty hours.
He heard Tod busy down in the other sections of the ship. And a lump came into his throat. The men on Mercury might have more flash to their actions, but Tod was taking a worse chance, and doing it because he was willing to try anything Jerry wanted.
He remembered his idea of letting Dick and Tod down and getting a routine job on a freighter, and it seemed that he must have been another person. Then he gulped. Men were supposed to see their whole life over again before they died—was this some such premonition?
Jerry settled his doubts by swinging the ship about a touch with the steering tubes, and then cutting in the big rocket to even more power. For this run, he'd be using a full two and a quarter gravities. They'd need all the speed they could get as they came near the sun. He considered it again, and changed it to two and a half.
Below, Tod let out a yelp of surprise, but he didn't call up any criticism. He was probably agreeing that they could stand the threat of blowing the tubes better than the risk of not getting to the sun and away fast enough.
Something sounded from the front, and Jerry looked up in surprise. A sheet of shining metal was being slid against the big quartz port on the outside hull. Tod must have gone out between the hulls. Jerry tapped on the glass.
The engineer s head came up in a space helmet. The helmet touched the quartz, and Jerry could just make out the inquiry. He leaned forward and shouted. "Where'd you get them?"
Tod followed his pointing finger, glancing at the metal sections. "Emergency repair for the ports . . . lighter than more quartz. I just sort of polished them up.
The helmet popped down, and more sections came into place, to fit between the hull against both the inner and outer quartz panels. The view of the blazing sun disappeared. From now on, all navigation would have to be done by means of the tele-panels, as was done on some of the newer freighters.
For a while it felt strange, but then it was a relief not to be able to see the sun they were approaching.
Cautiously, he began setting the ship into a spin along its axis. It required tricky work, and combinations of the steering tubes he hadn't tried before. Most of the energy seemed to be wasted in setting up side-sways that had to be corrected.
Tod watched silently when he came in with his work finished. "Be a blamed sight harder to snap out of this than to get into it, too," he warned.
Jerry had been worrying about the same thing. But that was another of the problems he'd have to solve after they got away from the sun, if they did get away.
The sun in the panels seemed larger than ever, whenever Jerry glanced at it. He knew that it was an illusion; his imagination was only playing tricks on him. But he couldn't shake it off. Tod seemed to share his fascination.
"Sure kicking up a commotion down there," he observed, pointing to a long tongue of flame that had seemed to leap out thousands of miles from the sun's surface. "Wonder if he knows we're coming?"
It already seemed warmer, too. Jerry finished one bit of correcting for a bad attempt, then glanced at the thermometer. It registered an even seventy-two degrees, as it should. It felt like ninety. Maybe the humidity control was off? He checked the gauge on that, but found it was where it belonged.
"I guess we'll stop imagining when the real thing starts," he observed.
Tod nodded soberly.
Bit by bit, the ship began to spin. They wouldn't need any rapid rate of turn—once around every five minutes was all Jerry wanted. It wouldn't give them enough rotary speed to throw them sideways toward the outer walls. There'd been talk once in the old days of spinning ships for that purpose—to give them a feeling of weight, and let them walk along the outer walls. That was when ships had blasted up at high acceleration for a few minutes and coasted long months the rest of the way without power, in weightless flight. If it had ever been used, it must have required a terrific rate of spin. He wondered how they'd solved the problem of navigating. Perhaps handling a ship in spin was one of the lost arts.
Finally, Jerry timed it by the tele-panels, and found that it was close enough. There was no apparent error; he couldn't detect anything wrong with the course as a result of his fooling with the steering rockets. Now all they had to do was wait.
Tod brought up the supper and sat down beside Jerry to stare at the spinning image of the sun in the tele-panels.
"It's not too late to back out now, Tod," Jerry told him.
The old man shook his head. "I've seen almost everything else, lad; I'm gonna see this through. And if that mayor thinks he'll have a yarn to spin, he should hear what I'll be saying if we get out of this alive!"
He chewed on, hardly watching his plate as he ate. The sun was a magnet that drew their eyes. Now it was a trifle larger in the panels.
Jerry stood up finally. "Okay, Tod. I gave you your chance. Now I'm ordering you to hit the sack. When we wake up, it will be too late to turn back, and we'll have to get used to the idea. We'll go crazy sitting here!'*
"Don't have far to go," Tod said, and he managed a chuckle. His voice was suddenly approving. "You're all right, Captain. You're getting sense, even if you are a fool. Hitting the sack till we can't change our minds is the best idea you've come up with. Only, Jerry, you get your clothes off this time and wash them out before you turn in. We've still got the water, and you're gonna use it."
Jerry smiled slowly, and put his arm over the old man's shoulder. Tod bristled for a second, and then he chuckled again. For a moment, there were glints in his eyes that might have been tears.
"Darned near raised you, lad. Never had any other kids of my own. And dadgum it, I ain't sorry now!"
He stomped off to his hammock before Jerry could answer, snorting to himself.
Jerry turned to his own hammock quickly, with a lump in his throat. But it felt good, somehow. It cut through his worries and made him feel that all the trouble and danger out there was worth-while, even if they didn't live through it.
Chapter 74 Solar Barbecue
eat woke Jerry up. He lay on the hammock with only a thin cover over him, but he was sweating. He put out his hand to turn the cabin thermometer down, and found that the walls were warmer than the air.
Then it came back to him, and he sat up with a jerk. It w
as too late to turn back, all right. They must be well on their way toward their near meeting with the sun.
Tod was still sleeping, though, and Jerry was careful not to awaken him. He slipped into the galley, conscious of the warmth of the deck under his feet. From the little freezer, he took cold juice. The idea of coffee didn't appeal to him, as a rule, and it was
impossible this morning. He shook his head at the idea. He heated one of the canned waffles, buttered it, and dug out strips of crisp bacon from another heated can.
The control room was changed. Where the panels had shown a circle of the sun against the black of space, they now showed only sections of the great star, with no space on the panel it occupied, and great leaping flames on the adjacent panels.
He found the air-conditioning control, and set it farther up. The cooling of the ship depended on a simple heat pump that sent jets of hot air into a little turbine that cooled it and turned the heat into electricity, while cool air was circulated through the ship. Its cooling action would continue, no matter how hot the air, up to its maximum level. But it wouldn't do much good to cool air at four hundred degrees down to three hundred, Jerry guessed. It would still be too hot.
The air began cooling off a little, with the device working at full power. Without it, it would have already been unbearably hot. From now on, the heat would rise rapidly as they rushed forward, and it would cool off much more slowly.
The terrific radiation of the sun could force the heat in. But space was a vacuum, one of the best possible insulators, and it would take a long time for the ship to lose whatever heat it picked up. It was one of the little things he had overlooked the day before.
At the moment, the feeling that they could no longer change course had made Jerry almost indifferent to the danger. He felt lazy and indolent, without the pressure of responsibility weighing on him, and he nursed the feeling, knowing that the less he exerted himself or tensed up the better he would last later.
He went down to his little cabin and dressed in the wrinkled but clean uniform that no longer showed any signs of ever having come from Space Institute. There they had been expected to be spotless, without a wrinkle. He wondered how well they'd enforce such a rule on a racing ship.
Tod was still sleeping. The air had actually cooled down a little as the heat pump labored to move the warmth into the ship batteries in the form of electricity. It would rise soon enough.
He went back to his breakfast, drawing the last taste of pleasure out of it. Tod came in and joined him, just as he was taking the last mouthful. The old man had automatically used the other half of the cans he had opened. He nodded self-consciously, as if ashamed of his weakness the night before.
Now the thermometer fascinated them more than the panels that showed the sun. It had dropped for a few minutes, but now it was rising again. The air was as warm as it had been when Jerry first awoke, and it seemed to be creeping up steadily.
He snapped out of his mood of relaxation, and began trying to compare the actual temperature with what he had expected at this distance. The pyrometers indicated that the hull was still within the figures he had guessed at, but the air was warming more than he had expected. It was over ninety now, and going up.
The thrust of two and a half times Earth weight against them added to their discomfort, too.
Tod reached out for the wall thermometer, and scowled at it. "One hundred," he announced. He went down the shaft, and came back with the suits. "We might as well put these on now—no sense getting all steamed up until we have to."
Jerry climbed into his with more fondness for the suit than he had ever expected to feel. He pulled down the helmet, and then glanced at the air tanks in surprise. Tod had coupled on an extra one, ready to switch over when the first ran short. They were good for six hours each, and one should have been more than enough. But he let it go.
Inside, the temperature seemed to be normal again.
The panels showed the sun now as a great mottled plain of fire. The spots stood out on it strongly, and every detail of the leaping prominences that sprang up from it were revealed. These were long tongues of thin gases that sometimes went up for a hundred thousand miles from the surface.
It might have been small, as stars go, but the 864,000 mile-diameter globe still made even Jupiter seem totally insignificant. Its pull was enough to reach out through billions of miles and hold Pluto in an orbit, unable to escape.
The thermometer on the wall stood at the top of the column now; it was probably considerably more than the hundred and forty degrees it indicated.
Tod shook his head suddenly, and went down toward the engine room. Jerry heard the muffled sounds of his activity through his helmet, and glanced down to see the old man dragging the whole heat pump outfit into the central shaft. He struggled with it, not quite able to lift it against the thrust of the rocket.
Jerry slid down to help. Together, they could just get it into the shaft. Then Tod hit a lever on the wall of the shaft, and the bottom cover swung shut, sealing the shaft off from the engine room. He set the heat pump on the shaft cover and adjusted it carefully. Then he went up the shaft, closing all the seals, until the whole tube was sealed off from the rest of the ship, except for the control room and the galley. He brought a tank of water out from the galley, and then closed that. Finally, he sealed off the control room.
"All the controls I need to fight the heat are here," he said, pointing to the bottom of the shaft. "I figure we can cool off this litde tube better'n we can the whole ship."
Jerry wondered how he'd get to the controls. Then he realized there was nothing he could do, even if he were there. The ship would have to care for itself. There was nothing more they could do. But he felt lost without any idea of what was going on.
His wrist watch ticked on, sounding loud and slow in the space suit. Fifteen minutes later, Tod dropped water onto the cover of the shaft which was now their deck. It began to dry almost at once. The next time, it boiled. The walls of the shaft had reached over
two hundred degrees, in spite of the laboring of the air-cooling heat pump.
The suits were still taking it. He wondered whether the ship was doing as well.
They must be getting close to their nearest approach—perihelion. The temperature seemed to jump upward with each second. Now the water in the tank began boiling by itself. Tod frowned, and held it so that most of the steam went through one of the smaller openings off the shaft. Heat waves danced in. He threw the water out and closed the lid quickly.
Jerry couldn't take any more of it. He began scrambling up toward the control room. He had to have some idea of how the ship was taking it, of the time, and of how close they were.
The control room was a blaze of heat—hot enough so that it seemed to strike through his helmet as he threw the door open, dashed in, and closed it after him. He took one look at the clock, and another at the sun. They weren't yet at perihelion, though they were getting close. But the hull temperature was higher than it should have been.
He jerked back into the cooler shaft—if cool in any degree could be applied to it—and snapped the control room door behind him. His brief exposure had taxed the cooling ability of his suit to the limit, and he found himself sweating inside it.
He slumped down beside Tod, trying to figure the time by counting the pulse he could feel in his throat. It should be seventy a minute, but he decided to consider it eighty, to make up for the added strain. It didn't work too well, though; he kept getting the ticking of his watch mixed up with it.
For a moment he considered yanking his suit off, grabbing the watch, and closing the suit again. But he wouldn't be able to do it fast enough.
The little turbine on the heat pump was turning furiously, but it was losing the batde. Tod moved over toward the water, fuel and oxygen controls he had installed—long wires that led through tiny holes in the shaft. He pulled them back, starting with the water.
It may have made a difference in the ship as a whole,
but the heat still seemed to go on rising in the shaft. Now sweat was running down Jerry's face, and he was beginning to gasp for breath. Tod's face was turning red, behind the helmet, and his breathing was also coming faster.
Jerry decided that fifteen minutes must have passed. He forced himself up and began climbing to the control room again. Tod's eyes were reproachful. But the heat that leaked into the tube couldn't be helped; it had to be done.
Jerry paused at the door, dreading what must be done. He gritted his teeth, forced the door open, and slipped through. The control room was a furnace. A piece of paper he touched crumbled under his fingers, dried and brittle in the heat. The clock showed that only eight minutes had passed, but the hull was still rising in temperature. It couldn't stand much more.
He reeled against the padded seat, trying to force his mind off his suffering body. The sun wasn't a mere point that could be passed suddenly; it was like a wall almost nine feet wide as seen from a distance of fifty feet. The ship was just creeping across the surface of it, at a distance of five million miles.
Turning the hull faster would do no good, even if he could manipulate it; it simply couldn't radiate the heat as fast as it was being poured in. He blinked the streams of sweat out of his eyes, sipping at the water tube in his suit. If he could reduce the area, or find a better surface . . .
The idea crept in slowly, while his mind spun in the heat. Then it was hard to concentrate. The room kept going around in circles! He caught himself, realizing that the ship was spinning.
He forced his hands to the control board and cut off the thrust of the rocket. Even that little source of heat would have to be stopped. Then he reached the steering controls and hit it. He waited until the ship was turned so that the next steering rocket pointed the same way, and touched that.
The Last Hope heeled over slowly, turning her tail toward the sun. He began delicately touching the steering tubes now to stop the turn.
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