Anti-Grav Unlimited
Page 7
Once we’d gained his promise, we drove the van into the barn. He looked at it and then at us as if we were crazy. I smiled as the little wheels started to move in his head. He tilted his head to listen to the constant whirl of the engine. “What the…” He walked around the van. Nikki was driving so I got out.
I motioned to the open door. “Get in.”
He handed me his crutches, backed into the passenger’s seat, and pulled himself into place.
Nikki flew him around the inside of the barn.
“I can’t believe it. I must be dreaming,” was all he said when he settled back on the floor and hopped from the van.
After a moment of thought, he put a huge “Closed” sign on the front door, locked up, and almost without another word we started assembling everything we would be needing for our trip.
We stopped for a quick lunch and then worked well into the night. About every fifteen minutes Jake would say, ” I can’t believe it. I must be dreaming.”
First we made a big pile of everything we needed, then we started figuring the lift potential as well as trying to figure how to store everything in the van. I could see it was going to be one tight fit. At best we’d be like a bunch of soso’s stuffed into a vacuum-packed can. At worst, Jake would have to stay behind. And I wasn’t so sure he would agree to that.
Jake was a big help. He knew a lot of little things that we hadn’t thought of which could easily have gotten us killed before we ever even got to the Moon. Things like the need for a radiant heater as well as a cooling system. And which Moon bases would be easiest for us to settle in without being detected.
By midnight he and Nikki had hammered out the lift potentials and possible rates of acceleration the van could achieve and we’d figured out—more or less—how to fit three people and all the gear they’d need for a short trip through space into the van.
Nikki got the computers out of the van and jacked them into the Net, while Jake got a stack of dusty reference books out; the two of them sat at the table in the small living quarters Jake had set up in a lean-to on the old barn. They started plotting various orbits that might take us to the Moon. Time after time, they came up with too long a trip for the supplies we could carry or which wouldn’t quite get us there. Added to the problems was the fact that the van had to make the first leg of its journey following a rocket flight (to keep us from being detected) even though the van was capable of nearly constant acceleration/deceleration unlike a rocket. I sat at the table a while and then quietly sneaked out when I realized that the conversation was way over my head.
I reentered the barn and studied the van which was in the center of one of the bright spots, looking like an exhibit in a museum. It certainly didn’t look like a space craft. If I had been forced to choose between it and the cow that jumped over the moon, I would have chosen the cow ever time as the most likely candidate. The van looked like the most unlikely way to get into space.
The thought was the proverbial mind boggler.
I also felt… Jealous. Seeing Jake and Nikki hitting it off so well together didn’t seem to go over well with me. Mentally, I didn’t see anything to be jealous about. Emotionally, I felt jealous.
Unfortunately, the heart wins out over the brain when it comes to feelings.
So I moped around in the shadows of the barn thinking I might well be the most childish man on the planet. Finally, I started exploring the barn and ended up in the hay loft. There, I opened an old wooden door leading to the outside and stood staring at the rising Moon, not quite full tonight, as it rose in the East.
“There you are.”
I turned to see Nikki coming up the ladder.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Baying at the Moon.”
Nikki looked at the Moon a moment. ” It’s hard to believe. But I think we’ve figured out a way to really do it. The figures are there and we have the vehicle. All we have to do is go. We might be standing on the lunar surface in a few days.” She looked at my face. “Why do you look so sad?”
“Well, I guess it’s a little bit of a let down, somehow. Part of me is excited and part of me would like to be sitting on a sofa watching the 3V.”
“Even if bag ladies try to zap you?”
“Maybe we could skip that part. Come on, it’s my dream. Don’t throw in your bag ladies.”
Silence for a bit longer. Nikki reached out and gave my hand a squeeze. “Listen, Phil. I know that… Well, don’t rush things. It’s going to be a while before I get over Craig. He may be a mess, but he was my mess. All I ever had. Give me time.”
I wasn’t sure I understood. But enough to be quiet. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and pulled me toward the ladder. “Come on, Phil. Jake’s so charged up he’ll start flying around the room if there isn’t someone to keep him grounded.”
We spent the next few hours listening to Jake spin his tales about his times in space and what the Moon was really like. As he told his stories, a bond was woven between the three dreamers who were hoping to claim a chunk of the moon for themselves.
Chapter 9
The next morning, Nikki and I slept late. Jake was up welding an extra storage bay to the top of the van. It looked like the dickens, but gave us the extra space we needed. By the time things were rounded up and we were ready to go, the day was half gone. Jake’s nephew, Mark, had arrived and was to take over the business while Jake was “out of town” as he put it.
Nikki left her jewelry and the industrial laser for Mark to sell if he needed cash to pay Jake’s bills. Jake didn’t want to sell any of his surplus gear until we had taken our maiden flight and returned with a better idea of what we’d be needing for future trips.
With the sun overhead, we drove the van into the hot, Texas daylight and waited for Jake to climb in. He jumped into the old business chair that he’d welded just behind the two front seats of the van. I hoped his welds were good; I didn’t relish the thought of him dinging about inside the van like some piece of loose bagging at some critical moment in our flight.
We drove through the slums of Galveston and up to Highway 45 which led directly to the Houston rocket port. Because of the poor condition of the road and the number of vehicles that had been abandoned on it, we didn’t reach our destination until nightfall. Fortunately the rioting going on in Texas City had diverted the hi-pees into that area; that left us free to fire at highwaymen and weren’t stopped as we slowly made our way toward Houston.
Arriving at dusk was perfect for our plans since we were going to follow a rocket into space, again under the cover of the night. If all went well, once in space, we’d alter our course and then depart for the Moon. While we wouldn’t remain hidden from radar detection once the rocket started its arch back to its destination halfway around the world, there would be little chance of being “seen” and—if we were located—the fact that our speed and directional changes would be so different from those of conventional spacecraft would probably make an Earth-side watcher think we were a gremlin rather than an actual spacecraft. Too, we’d be headed out so that, even if they wanted to, it would be impossible to intercept us.
Now as we sat in the dark outside the rocket port, Jake bled most of the air out of the van’s tires so they didn’t pop when we got into space. Then the three of us slipped into our space suits and connected them into the support system powered by the car’s generator, leaving our helmets off so that we could talk freely.
Jake sat behind us; Nikki was in the passenger seat and I sat behind the wheel of my van.
Jake’s balding head somehow looked ridiculous without his NASA cap. “According to the schedule we picked off the Net, the Paris-bound rocket should be launched in a couple of minutes,” Nikki said.
“Okay then,” I said. “Everyone get buckled up.”
Jake reached forward and gave my hand a shake that threatened to crack some bones, “Good luck, Captain Hunter.”
“Where’d you get this ‘Captain’ stuff? ‘Major H
unter’ to you, mister.”
Nikki and Jake laughed.
Nikki leaned back and gave Jake a quick kiss. Now I really felt jealous.
I lifted the van off the pavement and floated over the fence and onto the rocket field, the force of the anti-grav rods sagging the fence nearly to the ground as we crossed, leaving it looking as if an elephant had crawled over it.
Right on schedule, the nighttime sky glowed red and I waited for Nikki to double check to be sure we were following the right rocket. She studied the computer/radar tie in that we’d improvised from Jake’s surplus equipment while the surplus radio picked up transmissions from the port and made a garbled sound that Nikki seemed to be able to decipher.
“That’s it,” she announced.
I hit the “auto” button on the dash and leaned back, hoping that the computer would follow the radar blip of the rocket rather than a flock of gulls. One malfunction was all we needed to have a major catastrophe. After vowing never to ride a machine-controlled rocket, I was now hurtling through the atmosphere chasing a rocket controlled by a machine in a van controlled by a computer. I whispered a silent prayer to ask forgiveness for my stupidity.
I also wished that we’d had room for three parachutes.
“Phil,” Nikki said.
“Uh.”
“Your helmet. Or are you planning on holding your breath for the round trip.”
The choice wasn’t hard to make. I got my helmet off the floor and turned it the proper direction.
“Phil, just a minute.”
As I turned to look, Nikki leaned over and gave me a long, passionate kiss, then pulled on her bubble helmet before I had time to try for a second kiss. I wished I could see her face in the dark van; Nikki was an enigma wrapped in a space suit. All that showed on her mirrored helmet was the reflection of the lights from the dash panel and the various odds and ends of instrument lights on the equipment we’d added to the van.
Satisfied my helmet was fastened, I sat back for our ride as our van accelerated upward, following the directions fed to it by our computers. Jake gave a long yelp for joy that threatened to ruin our suits’ communications gear as we started our journey toward the Moon. And after Nikki’s kiss, I felt like I could have flown to the moon without the van.
Chapter 10
Although we were hurtling around the Earth at orbital speed, the blue and white globe below us looked like it was only slowly meandering by while we hung in space. We had followed the passenger rocket up through the atmosphere and then passed it from a distance as it stopped its acceleration and started its downward descent back toward the ground. We continued to accelerate as we headed on around the Earth picking up more velocity to jump free of the Earth’s gravity and commence our jump across space into the gravitational field of the Moon. Soon, the sun sank behind us and we spiraled over the nighttime sky, through the Earth’s cold shadow and outward, toward the Moon.
That sounds exciting. It was. For a few hours. Then we discovered the boredom of space flight in cramped quarters. We did little during our flight. We sat and talked, tried to get the pasty food through the intake port of our suits (Jake was the only one who was very successful at this), and tried to discreetly use the waste disposal system in the suits with a minimum of fuss. (After having a pint bottle of urine escape my grasp and nearly vanish into the back of the van—save for the fast action of Jake in grabbing it—I was not too impressed with the freedom enjoyed by the glamorous astronauts of the 3V shows. And there is nothing like a plastic sack of excreta sitting in a pouch on your suit to take the romance out of things.) We didn’t suffer having to be totally weightless. While we weren’t under anything approaching zero G, Nikki and Jake had plotted our course with an eye toward maximum speed since the van didn’t have to worry about expending its motivating energy. Because of this, we had almost constant “gravity” as the van pushed ahead and our bodies tried to stay behind. About the only time we were in micro-gravity to the point of being weightless was for the few moments when the computer maneuvered the van about—so we wouldn’t feel like we were hanging on our heads—to start pushing against the Moon’s gravity as the lunar gravity overcame that of the Earth.
I was thankful for the lack of weightlessness; after the few moments of weightlessness there was little doubt in my mind that I would have endured space sickness while Nikki and Jake sat beside me perfectly blissful of my sufferings. Whining about stomach ailments is not a good way to impress either an attractive member of the opposite sex or an old space pirate.
So about the only major problem was cramped muscles; you can’t just stop and step out to stretch when you’re hurtling through space. It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been.
During the first few hours of our flight, Nikki was quite busy with an electronic astrolabe and a computer file which gave the correct coordinates that we needed to take. After a while she became convinced that the computer was doing a perfect job of flying us and only made an occasional sighting in for my peace of mind. (And I noticed that once she didn’t even bother to turn the astrolabe on, thus proving it was only being done for my benefit; talk about trying to soothe the pilot’s nerves… Nikki knew all the navigator tricks.) We orbited the Moon one time to allow the computer to adjust our speed and then located our first destination. Our whole trip took less than 24 hours—considerably less than the three days taken by conventional rocket flights to the moon.
Our computer dropped us quite close to the airless surface of the Moon; I tried not to scream as we dropped through space. We skimmed across the barren, pock-marked gray land whose lack of atmosphere made it hard to judge distances. After the computer made one last, stomach-wrenching adjustment and burped a warning in our helmets’ radios, we found ourselves hanging over the Copernicus Mining Base a little off the Equator of the Moon in the Carpathian Mountain range between the Oceanus Procellarum and the Mare Imbrium, east of Kepler Crater.
It had happened. The computer had flown us flawlessly to our destination on the Moon.
“Well, you and Jake did a perfect job in calculating and programming our flight,” I announced needlessly.
Jake gave a grunt that a frog would have recognized as meaning “thanks.”
Nikki, a bit more conventional, spoke English, “It’s nice to have a new type of problem for a change. I’m afraid rocket-flight navigation made me a little rusty at figuring orbits. Ready to go down for a landing?”
“Yeah. Now or never, right? I hope I can do as well as you guys did in programming the computer.” I wiped my hands against my legs, even though the sweat remained on my palms thanks to the fact that they were wrapped in heavy space gloves. “Everyone ready?”
“Take her down, Captain,” Jake’s voice said in my helmet’s speaker.
I flipped the turn signal out of its hover position and we slowly fell downward. Though there was really nothing to worry about, it seemed a bit anti-climactic after the long, computerized trip to get to where we were going with a flip of a turn signal. Hardly first class. I decided to have Jake get us some flashing lights to wire into the van’s dashboard before we took anyone we really wanted to impress on a flight.
The mining base was dwarfed by the sheer size of the Copernicus crater. The one-sixth gravity of the Moon made for spectacular contrasts of heights with the scraggly, un-weathered crater walls jutting up unlike any mountain range on Earth. Because of the greater curvature of the Moon, the far side of the crater walls dropped almost out of sight as we neared the rough floor where a giant meteor had impacted on the Moon before mankind had even started chipping away at flint knives.
The rocket sled ramp soon came into sight and the artificial smoothness of man’s handiwork showed on the rock around it. The ramp stretched down toward the base which was nestled in the northern end of the crater. Though the sled had been designed to launch the metal ingots mined and processed on the Moon, Jake said that the base had been closed just before it had gotten ready for automate
d production. (And the question none of us could answer sprang up to puzzle my mind again. Why had the base been closed down? Earth needed the resources. The best guess among the three of us was that the powers-that-be on Earth just couldn’t make enough money at it. It was easier to let people starve on Earth, perhaps. Who knows? ) After an eternity, we reached the floor of the crater and I carefully steered the van to land on the smooth field built for supply rockets. It was nestled among the huge boulders that jutted from the lunar dust that had filtered in around them. Beside it was the small, solar-powered beacon that had allowed our computer to home in on the base.
A slight jolt marked the end of our descent. I looked over at Nikki. “We made it.”
I could barely see a smile on her face inside the mirrored bubble helmet, “Yes. We’re really here.”
Then it sank in, in the peanut gallery: “We’re here!” Jake yelled.
I jumped when he yelled and would have bumped my head if my seat belt hadn’t held me down. “Jake, let’s try not to rupture our eardrums again.”
“Sorry.”
“How about a little stroll?” Nikki asked unfastening her seat belt, soundlessly since there was no air in the van.
“Don’t mind if we do,” I unbuckled my harness and popped the door of the van open. I sat a moment looked at the Earth which was the one splotch of color in the gray and black lunar landscape. Then I studied the ground and tossed myself from the van with what I had aimed to be the proverbial “one small step.” I banged the back of my helmet on the van roof, fell out the door, bounced off the dust, somersaulted, and landed on shaky legs. Lucky for me, there were no sharp rocks about and the lunar gravity is not too great. Nikki hadn’t seen my acrobatics so I tried to act like nothing had happened.
“Everything OK?” Jake asked.