Space Lash

by Hal Clement

  It seemed, then, that the Trojan point was the best place for him. He could find it easily enough; getting the centers of the stars sixty degrees apart would put him at the right distance. He could find the proper plane by moving around until the two suns appeared to move across each other in straight lines. It would not take long; by varying his distance from the system he could, in a few minutes, observe it through half a revolution.

  It took him, in fact, less than an hour to find the orbital plane of the suns. It took him five and a half hours of first-order acceleration at one gravity to get rid of the hundred and twenty mile per second velocity difference between Sol and this system — fortunately, the chart had mentioned the high relative velocity, or La Roque would never have thought of such a thing. In a way, he didn't mind the necessity; it was good to have weight for the first time in nearly a month. He was, of course, a little worried at the amount of time consumed; he wished he had not wasted so much of the commodity in putting Sol so far behind.

  He cut the first-order drive the instant his clock told him the speeds should be equal, headed for the twin suns, and hopped for his Trojan point. Since moving bodies were involved, he had to make five legs out of the short trip — he failed to allow for the short period of the system and the fact that he started the first leg several light-hours from his goal.

  He got there eventually, however. He suddenly realized that he would have to use first-order power again, to give his ship something like the proper orbital velocity; but even he was able to understand the proper magnitude and direction of this new vector; the only unjustified assumption he had to make was that the suns were of equal masses, and this happened to be nearly the case. He wasn't too worried; he understood that in a Trojan orbit such small variations are opposed, not helped, by the gravity of the primary bodies. He was quite right.

  He cut all his power except the detector relay currents, which did not radiate appreciably. To these he connected an alarm, and set them to synchronize with the low-frequency waves which form the “wake” of a vessel cruising at second-order speeds. Then, abruptly feeling the reaction of the past days, he drifted over to a “bunk,” moored himself, and was instantly asleep.

  It is impossible to say just how long he slept; he was exhausted mentally and emotionally, and when weightless the human body can approach a condition near to suspended animation, if given the chance. It couldn't have been for very many hours, but the alarm rang for minutes before its sound penetrated to his consciousness. When it did, he had to wait several moments before he could move a muscle.

  Recovered at last, he unmoored himself and kicked his body across the narrow cabin to the instrument board, and cut the alarm, cursing. He had forgotten that the bell would radiate, and was not sure that the hull would shield its waves. The detectors were reacting violently, the needles wobbling rapidly from positive to negative limits. He knew that a ship had driven past in second-order flight, but that was as far as he could interpret the readings. It would have required an expert to compute the speed, type, and distance of the ship creating the disturbance.

  After a few minutes, the needles quieted. La Roque remained at the board, judging that the ship had not left for good. He was right. The disturbances started again half an hour later, and kept up for hours thereafter — sometimes so feeble as to cause a barely visible quiver of the needles, sometimes slamming them against the stop pins with audible clicks. La Roque was incapable of reading any meaning except changing distance into this phenomenon.

  The “wake” of a ship in straight-line, second-order flight consists of a few low-frequency electromagnetic waves, the wave-front being, as can easily be seen, coneshaped, with the ship at the apex. The cone expands radially at the speed of light, and its tip moves forward with the ship — in the case of a military craft, at anywhere up to something like a million light velocities.

  If the ship is not in straight-line flight, but cutting its fields and changing direction every few minutes or seconds, the shape of the wave front becomes rather complex. A standard search path spirals around the surface of a torus, and after a few hours the traces of such a flight would be the despair of a competent mathematician, let alone an amateur at a comparatively fixed observation post. The space for billions of miles around that binary sun was quivering with crisscrossing wave fronts. Each set the needles of La Roque's detectors quivering in tune as it passed him, and each quiver brought beads of sweat to the runaway's brow. His own ship, he realized, had left similar fronts; and he had shaved his margin of escape much too fine. Had they been given a week, or even three or four days, for expansion at the speed of light, he could have ceased to worry about their being used to trail him.

  He wondered just what the searchers would do. They must have trailed him directly to this system, as he had expected. They might try to find an inactive ship in space, but La Roque doubted that such a search would be practical unless there existed detection instruments unknown to the general public.

  He wondered if the system contained any planets, to add to the searchers' difficulties. He himself had seen none, and none was listed on the chart; but they would have been nearly invisible in the dim light of the twin suns, and La Roque's faith in the chart had dropped a long way. If there were any, they would be a real help; they would have to be searched mile by square mile.

  But the question of prime importance was, how long would the pursuers stay? Certainly, if they had the patience they could outwait him, for their food supply would outlast his; but for all they knew he might have met with a fatal accident, or encountered an organized outlaw base — either could easily happen. If he refrained from radiating long enough, they might decide further search futile. He could do that; the darkness didn't bother him particularly, and the ship was warm enough — a little too warm, in fact. Evidently his figures had not been exact.

  Eventually the detectors stopped reacting, and La Roque started waiting. He was still perspiring, less from worry now than from actual warmth. The ship was becoming uncomfortable. He removed his outer clothing and felt better for a while.

  Time crawled on — rapidly decelerating, in La Roque's opinion. He had nothing to do except notice his own discomfort, which was on the increase. He cursed the ship's builders for failure to insulate it properly, and the men who had computed the tables he had used to obtain the probable temperature at this distance from the suns. He didn't bother to curse his own arithmetic.

  Once he was almost on the point of driving farther out, hoping the pursuing ship had gone; but a flicker from one of the detectors made him change his mind. He hung and sweated; and the temperature mounted.

  It must have been a hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit when he finally gave in. He could have stood more in the open — anyone could — but the air-conditioning apparatus had been stopped along with everything else, and the air in the ship was approaching saturation. With that fact considered, he held out remarkably well; but eventually his will power gave out. He kicked his way feebly back to the board and snapped on the vision plates.

  He lacked the energy to curse. For moments he could only stare in shocked horror at the plates — and realize how misdirected his previous denunciations had been. There was nothing wrong with his ship's insulation; the wonder was that it had held out so well. One of the suns — he never knew which — completely filled the front, top, and port plates with a blaze of sooty crimson; he must have been within thirty or forty thousand miles of its surface. His hand darted toward the activating switch of the second-order drivers, and was as quickly checked. They would only send him straight forward, into the inferno revealed by the front plate. The ship must be turned.

  He started the gyros, careless now of any radiation that might result. The control knobs were hot to the touch; and a smell of burning oil reached his nostrils as the gyros wound up to speed. The ship abruptly shuddered and began to gyrate slowly, as one of them seized in its bearings. He watched tensely as the vessel went through a full rotation, his hand
hovering over the board; but not once was the glow in the forward plate replaced by the friendly darkness of space. The ship was spinning on its longitudinal axis.

  The other gyros were working. He tried to turn the vessel with them. The result was to shift the axis of spin about thirty degrees — and increase its rate tenfold as another of the heavy wheels, spinning at full speed, jammed abruptly. Centrifugal force snatched him away from the board and against one wall; he shrieked as his flesh touched hot metal, and kicked violently. His body shot across the room, reaching the other side at about the same time his previous point of contact was carried around by the ship's rotation.

  The specks of carbon cirrus on the front plate were describing circles now — circles whose size was visibly increasing. For part of each turn the nose was now pointing into space; La Roque tried to fight his way back to the board to take advantage of one of those moments.

  He might have made it, in spite of the agony of his burns, but the overstrained insulation had done its best. It failed; and failed, of all places, over the water tanks that lined part of the hull. The tanks themselves offered only token resistance as steam pressure suddenly built up in them. La Roque never knew when scalding water shorted the control board, for a jet of superheated steam had caught him just before he reached it.

  On the enforcement cruiser, a man straightened up from a plotting board.

  “That does it, I think,” he said. “He was using heavy current for a while, probably trying to turn out with his gyros; then there was a flash of S.H.F., and everything stopped. That must have taken out his second-order, and he'd have had to use about sixty gravities of first-order to pull out of that spot. I wonder what he was doing so close to those suns.”

  “Could have been hiding,” suggested a second pilot. “He might have thought the suns would mask most of his radiation. I wonder how he expected to stay there any length of time, though.”

  “I know what I'd have done in his place,” replied the first man. “I'd have put my ship into a Trojan position and waited the business out. He could have lasted indefinitely there. I wonder why he didn't try that.”

  “He probably did.” The speaker was a navigator, who had kept silent up to this point. “If a smart man like you would do it, a fellow like that couldn't be expected to know any better. Have you ever seen a planet in the Trojan points of any double sun? I'll bet you haven't. That Trojan solution works fine for Sol and Jupiter — Sol is a thousand times the more massive. It would work for Earth and Luna, since one has about eighty times the mass of the other. But I have never seen a binary star where the mass ratio was anywhere near twenty-five to one; and if it's less, the Trojan solution to the three-body problem doesn't work. Don't ask me why; I couldn't show you the math; but I know it's true — the stability function breaks, with surprising sharpness, right about the twenty-five-to-one mass ratio. Our elusive friend didn't know that, any more than you did, and parked — his ship right in the path of a rapidly moving sun.” He shrugged his shoulders, and turned away. “Live and learn, they say,” he finished, “but the difficulty seems to lie in living while you learn.”

  Fireproof

  Hart waited a full hour after the last sounds had died away before cautiously opening the cover of his refuge. Even then he did not feel secure for some minutes, until he had made a thorough search of the storage chamber; then a smile of contempt curled his lips.

  “The fools!” he muttered. “They do not examine their shipments at all. How do they expect to maintain their zone controls with such incompetents in charge?” He glanced at the analyzers in the forearm of his spacesuit, and revised his opinion a trifle — the air in the chamber was pure carbon dioxide; any man attempting to come as Hart had, but without his own air supply, would not have survived the experiment. Still, the agent felt, they should have searched.

  There was, however, no real time for analyzing the actions of others. He had a job to do, and not too long in which to do it. However slack the organization of this launching station might be, there was no chance whatever of reaching any of its vital parts unchallenged; and after the first challenge, success and death would be running a frightfully close race.

  He glided back to the crate which had barely contained his doubled-up body, carefully replaced and resealed the cover, and then rearranged the contents of the chamber to minimize the chance of that crate's being opened first. The containers were bulky, but nothing in the free-falling station had any weight, and the job-did not take long even for a man unaccustomed to a total lack of apparent gravity. Satisfied with these precautions, Hart approached the door of the storeroom; but before opening it, he stopped to review his plan.

  He must, of course, be near the outer shell of the station. Central Intelligence had been unable to obtain plans of this launcher — a fact which should have given him food for thought — but there was no doubt about its general design. Storage and living quarters would be just inside the surface of the sphere; then would come a level of machine shops and control systems; and at the heart, within the shielding that represented most of the station's mass, would be the “hot” section — the chambers containing the fission piles and power plants, the extractors and the remote-controlled machinery that loaded the war heads of the torpedoes which were the main reason for the station's existence.

  There were many of these structures circling Earth; every nation on the globe maintained at least one, and usually several. Hart had visited one of those belonging to his own country, partly for technical familiarity and partly to accustom himself to weightlessness. He had studied its plans with care, and scientists had carefully explained to him the functions of each part, and the ways in which the launchers of the Western Alliance were likely to differ. Most important, they had described to him several ways by which such structures might be destroyed. Hart's smile was wolfish as he thought of that; these people who preferred the pleasures of personal liberty to those of efficiency would see what efficiency could do.

  But this delay was not efficient. He had made his plans long before, and it was more than time to set about their execution. He must be reasonably near a store of rocket fuel; and some at least of the air in this station must contain a breathable percentage of oxygen. Without further deliberation, he opened the door and floated out into the corridor.

  He did not go blindly. Tiny detectors built into the wrists of his suit reacted to the infrared radiations, the water vapor and carbon dioxide and even the breathing sounds that would herald the approach of a human being — unless he were wearing a nonmetallic suit similar to Hart's own. Apparently the personnel of the base did not normally wear these, however, for twice in the first ten minutes the saboteur was warned into shelter by the indications of the tiny instruments. In that ten minutes he covered a good deal of the outer zone.

  He learned quickly that the area in which a carbon dioxide atmosphere was maintained was quite limited in extent, and probably constituted either a quarantine zone for newly arrived supplies, or a food storage area. It was surrounded by an uninterrupted corridor lined on one side with airtight doors leading into the COs rooms, and on the other by flimsier portals closing off other storage spaces. Hart wondered briefly at the reason for such a vast amount of storage room; then his attention was taken by another matter. He had been about to launch himself in another long, weightless glide down the corridor in search of branch passages which might lead to the rocket fuel stores, when a tiny spot on one wall caught his eye.

  He instantly went to examine it more closely, and as quickly recognized a photoelectric eye. There appeared to be no lens, which suggested a beam-interruption unit; but the beam itself was not visible, nor could he find any projector. That meant a rather interesting and vital problem lay in avoiding the ray. He stopped to think.

  In the scanning room on the second level, Dr. Bruce Mayhew chuckled aloud.

  “It's wonderful what a superiority complex can do. He's stopped for the first time — didn't seem to have any doubts of his sa
fety until he spotted that eye. The old oil about `decadent democracies' seems to have taken deep hold somewhere, at least. He must be a military agent rather than a scientist.”

  Warren Floyd nodded. “Let's not pull the same boner, though,” he suggested. “Scientist or not, no stupid man would have been chosen for such a job. Do you think he's carrying explosives? One man could hardly have chemicals enough to make a significant number of breaches in the outer shell.”

  “He may be hoping to get into the core, to set off a war head,” replied the older man, “though I don't for the life of me see how he expects to do it. There's a rocket fuel in his neighborhood, of course, but it's just n.v. for the torpedoes — harmless, as far as we're concerned.”

  “A fire could be quite embarrassing, even if it weren't an explosion,” pointed out his assistant, “particularly since the whole joint is nearly pure magnesium. I know it's sinfully expensive to transport mass away from Earth, but I wish they had built this place out of something a little less responsive to heat and oxygen.”

  “I shouldn't worry about that,” replied Mayhew. “He won't get a fire started.”

  Floyd glanced at the flanking screens which showed armored men keeping pace with the agent in parallel corridors, and nodded. “I suppose not — provided Ben and his crew aren't too slow closing in when we give the signal.”

  “You mean when I give the signal,” returned the other man. “I have reasons for wanting him free as long as possible. The longer he's free, the lower the opinion he'll have of us; when we do take him, he'll be less ready to commit suicide, and the sudden letdown of his self-confidence will make interrogation easier.”