I felt pretty clever about everything myself, three hours later, when we landed on the surface of an asteroid that could only be (719)-Albert. It had taken only one minor course correction to get us here. Which meant that my rule-of-thumb astrogation had been pretty good.
We donned breathing-suits and clambered out of the ship to inspect our landfall. (719)-Albert wasn’t very impressive. The landscape was mostly jagged upthrusts of a dark basalt-like rock. But the view was tremendous—a great backdrop of darkness, speckled with stars, and, much closer, the orbiting fragments of other lumps of rock. Albert’s horizon was on the foreshortened side, dipping away almost before it began. Gravitational attraction was so meager it hardly counted. A healthy jump was likely to continue indefinitely upward, as I made clear to Erna right at the start. I didn’t want her indulging in the usual hijinks that greenhorns are fond of when on a low-gravity planetoid such as this. I could visualize only too well the scene as she vanished into the void as the result of an overenthusiastic leap.
We surveyed our holdings and found that there was enough food for two people for sixteen days—so we would make it with some to spare. The air supply was less abundant, but there was enough so we didn’t need to begin worrying just yet.
We set about building the raft.
Erna dragged the logs out of the cargo hold—their weight didn’t amount to anything, here, though I had to caution her about throwing them around carelessly; mass and weight aren’t synonymous, and those logs were sturdy enough to knock me for a loop regardless of how little they seemed to weigh. She fetched, and I assembled. We used the thirteen longest logs for the body of the raft, and trussed a couple across the bottom, and a couple more at the top. To make blastoff a little easier, we built the raft propped up against a rock outcropping, at a 45° angle.
I unshipped the smallest rocket engine and fastened it securely to the rear of the raft. I strapped down as many fuel tanks as the raft would hold.
Then—chuckling to myself—I asked Erna to help me haul the cannon out.
“The cannon? Whatever for?”
“To mount at the front of the raft.”
“Are you figuring on meeting space pirates?”
“I’m figuring on using the cannon as a brake,” I told her. We fastened it at the front of the raft, strapped down the supply of cannonballs and powder nearby it. The cannon would make an ideal brake. All we needed was something that would eject mass in a forwardly direction, pushing us back by courtesy of Newton’s Third Law. Why waste fuel when cannonballs would achieve the same purpose?
It took us forty-eight standard Earthtime hours to build the raft. I don’t know how many thousands of (719)-Albert days that was, but the little asteroid spun on its axis like a yo-yo, and it seemed that the sun was rising or setting every time we took a breath.
After I had bound the last thong around the rocket engine, Erna grinned and dashed into the ship. She returned, a few moments later, waving a red flag with some sort of blue-and-white design on it.
“What’s that?”
“The flag that flew over Tangay’s cabin,” she explained. “It’s a rebel flag, and we’re not strictly insurrectionists, but we ought to have some kind of flag on our ship.”
I was agreeable, so she mounted the flag just fore of the rocket engine. Then we returned to the ship to wait.
We waited for three days, Earthtime—maybe several centuries by (719)-Albert reckoning. And in case you’re wondering how we passed the time on the barren asteroid for three days, just one reasonably virile ferry pilot and one nubile museum curator, the answer is no. We didn’t. I have an inflexible rule about making passes at passengers, even when we’re stranded on places like (719)-Albert and when the passengers are as pretty as this one is.
That isn’t to say I didn’t feel temptation. Erna’s breathing-suit was of the plastic kind that looked as though it was force-molded to her body. I didn’t have to do much imagining. But I staunchly told Satan to get behind me, and—to my own amazement—he did. I resisted temptation and resisted it manfully.
Meanwhile Jupiter swelled bigger and bigger as (719)-Albert plunged madly along its track toward its rendezvous with Jove. If luck rode with us—translated, if my math had been right—we would find Ganymede midway in her seven-plus day orbit round the big planet.
Time came when the mass detectors in my ship informed me that Jupiter had stopped getting closer and was now getting farther away. That meant that (719)-Albert had passed its point of aphelion and was heading back toward Earth. It was time to get moving.
“All aboard,” I told Erna. “Make sure everything we’re taking is strapped down tight—food, fuel, air tanks, cannonballs, flags.”
She checked off as if we were running down meters and gauges at a spaceport. “Food. Fuel. Air tanks. Cannonballs. Flag. All set to blast, Captain.”
“Okay. Get yourself flattened out and hang onto the raft while we blast.”
Blastoff was a joke. I had computed the escape velocity of (719)-Albert at approximately .0015 miles/sec. We could have shoved off with a good rearward kick.
But we had fuel to burn. “Allons!” I cried, slamming the rocket engine into action. A burst of flame hurled us upward into the night. “A la belle étoile!” I shouted. “To the stars!”
The raft soared off into space. Erna laughed with delight. As (719)-Albert slowly sank into the sunset, we plunged forward toward giant Jupiter. The only thing missing was soft music in the background.
We rode the raft for three days at constant acceleration. Jupiter grew, and grew, and grew, and gleaming Ganymede became visible peeking around the edge of the great planet. Erna became worried when she saw it.
“Shouldn’t we head the raft over toward Ganymede?” she asked. “We’re pointed much too far forward.”
I sighed. “We aren’t going to reach Ganymede for another couple of days,” I said. “We want to head for where Ganymede’s going to be then, not where it happens to be right now. Isn’t that obvious?”
“I suppose so,” she said, pouting.
We were right on course. Two days later we were heading downward toward the surface of Ganymede. It was like riding a magic carpet. I controlled our landing with the rockets, while Erna gleefully fired ball after ball to provide the needed deceleration. If Ganymede had had an atmosphere, of course, we’d have been whiffed to cinders in a moment—but there was no atmosphere to contend with. We made a perfect no-point landing, flat on the glistening blue-white ice. Lord knows what we must have looked like approaching from space.
We had landed a hundred miles or so from the nearest entrance to the Ganymede Dome. I was dourly considering the prospect of trekking on foot, but Erna was certain we had been seen, and, sure enough, a snowcrawler manned by three incredulous colonists came out to fetch us. I never saw human eyes bulge the way those six eyes bulged at the sight of our raft.
Part of the service I offer is guaranteed delivery, and so, a couple of weeks later, I rented a ship and made a return journey to (719)-Albert to pick up the remaining historical relics we had been forced to leave behind—some tattered uniforms and a few boxes of pamphlets. A week after that, a repair ship was despatched to pick up my ferry, and she was hauled to the dockyard on Ganymede and put back in operating condition at a trifling cost of a few thousand megabucks.
These days I run a ferry service between the colonized moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and Erna is head curator of the Ganymede Museum. But I don’t take kindly toward getting employment, because it means I have to spend time away from home—and Erna. We were married a while back, you see.
It’s a funny thing about General Tangay’s log cabin. Despite Erna’s careful diagram, the cabin never got put back together. It seems that the people of Ganymede decided it was of no great value to display the cabin of some Venusian rebel.
So they wouldn’t let Erna take the raft apart, and I had to buy myself a new rocket engine. You can see the raft in the museum on Ganymede, any time you hap
pen to be in the neighborhood. If the curator’s around, she won’t mind answering questions. But don’t try to get playful with her. I’m awfully touchy about guys who make passes at my wife.
To Be Continued - 1953–58 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume One Page 45