by James White
Gregg shut up.
It really was hopeless. Gregg admitted that now. Any hopes he had had stemmed solely from his own ignorance of the workings of the ship. The crew were just as anxious to live as he was, but unlike him, they knew when they were beaten.
This was such a stupid sort of disaster. Ships had crashed, blown up, and sometimes torn themselves apart through uncontrolled acceleration—with the gory demise of all hands. But here nobody—with the exception of Captain Ferguson—had been hurt. No bodies smashed flat by acceleration, or burst open by explosive decompression. All were sound in wind and limb. And all were as good as dead already.
Gregg felt anger growing in him again, rebellious anger. Some crazy fate must have ordained that he perish in a space-wreck, and it was going to the most fantastic lengths to make sure he did just that. When he had barely escaped with his life from the old Allendyne, he'd sworn that he was through with space travel. That insane fate must have gnashed its teeth and frothed at the mouth then —-but not for long. If Gregg—either through injury or sheer yellow cowardice, or both—would have nothing further to do with spaceships, then fate would have to maneuver things so that he would have to take another trip, so that it could take another crack at him.
And the second time it wouldn't miss.
With great cunning it arranged an understanding medical officer on Mars station, a company representative on the planet itself who was a real nice guy, and a construction job on the new Mars station which was to be hollowed out of the rock of Deimos. That last bit hadn't been hard, because a lot of people were needed for construction. But it had gone to a lot of trouble to see that Gregg made a good showing in his job, and gained rapid promotion. After several occasions when Gregg's—or Fate's— quick thinking saved the company a fair-sized fortune in material when someone miscalculated heights and velocities while moving structural members, he suddenly found himself second-in-charge of the project, and then heading it. He liked the work, he did well at it, and the company liked a man who never seemed to want Earth-leave.
When the new Mars station was completed, Gregg was an important man. So important that other jobs were mentioned. Would Mr. Gregg like to take charge of the proposed new station on Titan? Certainly he would, it was a wonderful opportunity. Would Mr. Gregg then present himself on Earth for a top-level conference on the matter?
Mr. Gregg wouldn't.
But the understanding M.O. and the nice guy who had once been Gregg's boss ganged up on him and told him not to be a fool. He was throwing away the chance of a lifetime over a silly neurosis. Besides, the Wallaby was the safest thing in space. Fate rubbed its hands and beamed with glee. It began twisting and stretching the laws of probability to utterly fantastic lengths. This time it wouldn't miss.
And when Gregg ventured out into space again— smack!
The eyes of all the crew watching him made Gregg abruptly aware that he was talking to himself, and in a not particularly low undertone. Embarrassed, he wondered how long that had been going on, but Allerton relieved the situation by drawing the attention away from him.
"I suppose," the second pilot said, "we should tell the passengers." He sounded doubtful about it.
An argument started about whether or not to tell the passengers, but it was a dispirited thing. Time dragged by, the way it does when there's nothing whatever to do. Like jail, Gregg thought, or being buried alive, which was a closer simile—buried in a great big complicated coffin that had cost more than a pyramid, with company. It was a great pity about the company, some of them were real nice people.
He thought about the girl with the blue eyes and mussed hair who was still probably mad at him. She didn't deserve this. Or that nice old lady who had spouted higher mathematics at him when he'd expected hysterics . , . Gregg laughed softly in spite of himself.
He had to tell the crewman beside him what he'd found to laugh about.
"Oh, that's Dr. Townsley," the man explained, "the Dr. Townsley. She was chief astronomer at Luna Observatory for a while. A mathematical genius, a quiz kid who kept on getting better as she grew up. She's a very nice sort, personally, though."
"You know," Gregg mused, "if we knew our time of collision, our velocity, mass and so on with complete accuracy, we should be able to land by dead reckoning alone—"
"We do not know those things with fair accuracy," the other interrupted. "But it wouldn't work. You're forgetting stratospheric winds—which are completely unpredictable —and the surface of the Earth itself. We'd smash into a mountain top, or come to rest a couple of thousand feet above an ocean." He shook his head. "It's hopeless. What you need to land a ship is constant and accurate information on mass, thrust, air resistance, velocity, and distance from the surface, and for that," he ended grimly, "you need a full set of landing instruments. We haven't any."
Velocity, mass, distance. Gregg felt himself sweating again. The other's words were repeating themselves over and over inside his head, louder and louder with each repetition. His skull felt as if it would come apart any second with the sheer, thundering volume of those three words. Desperately he willed himself to stop, to go back to the sharing of the crew's despair and quiet resignation. If he didn't do that, Gregg knew, then the idea lying behind those three words would come fully formed to his mind. He didn't want that to happen. He couldn't go through that again!
It was a solution of sorts, a way out of this mess for himself and everyone else. But he couldn't tell them about it. He'd bite his tongue out first, he'd . . .
He was two people; Gregg, and somebody else. He was fighting with all the power he had to keep his mouth shut tight. But somebody else with a will just a little stronger than his was forcing it open, and forcing his lips into forming words that he did not want to say:
"I... I've got an idea."
Shut up! Gregg screamed silently at that hateful other inhabitant of his mind. Do you want to be stuck in a suit for days on end, with acceleration and your own stink tying your inside into knots? It would kill you. I know it, because I've been through it once....
But the stupid and suicidal other part of his mind would not shut up. Haltingly, he heard his voice begin to tell the men in the control room about his job on Deimos, and the abilities needed for it. And about the time a temporary structure had collapsed and he'd been able to escape from the slowly falling wreckage through his ability to judge distances and rates of fall of the loose pieces. This was different, of course, but not much.
Gregg tried desperately to choke off those words before it would be too late, but it was no good. He might as well give up the struggle, stop trying. But surprisingly, that decision when it came brought a feeling more of relief than of despair—as if it was what he'd been wanting to do all along. He listened to his own voice expanding on his idea, and even trying to sell the idea to the crewmen in the room!
"You," said the man beside him when he'd finished talking, "are mad." But a rising inflection on the last syllable made it more a question than a statement, and there was a growing brightness in the man's eyes.
Mercer said dazedly: "It might work at that. But are you sure you can do it?"
"No," Gregg said, "but is there an alternative?"
There wasn't.
Finally Allerton spoke: "We've no choice but to try it," he said, and he looked peculiarly at Gregg. "But do you know what this means, what you're letting yourself in for?"
"Yes." Gregg knew exactly what he was letting himself in for, stupid fool that he was.
The second pilot hesitated. For a moment it looked as if he might say something uncharacteristic—something warm and human that he would probably be ashamed of later. But the hesitation passed:
"In that case there's no time to waste. Peterson, Williamson, Mercer: Get suited up! And somebody dig me out a plan of the ship, quick! We've less than three hours. .."
There had been disagreement at first whether Gregg or one of the crew should do the job, but that had been settled when Allerton pointed ou
t that any chance they had depended on the crew being at their stations. Then the matter of telling or not telling the passengers came up again. It was decided that they be kept in the dark; it would be kinder that way if the worst should happen. The decisions had been made while Peterson and another man removed a section of hull plating near the stern to make an observation niche, and Mercer ran a communications line from it direct to the control room. Not a second was wasted.
Finally, after the radio-medic had given him an emetic and cautioned him to drink as sparingly as possible, Gregg had been—installed. Three minutes later the ship began deceleration.
The second time wasn't nearly as bad as his memory of the first time had lead him to expect—nothing could be as horrible as that, Gregg realized now, because his fear-neurosis had blown that memory up out of all proportion. It was bad enough, though. He had to take two-and-a-half G's for nearly sixty hours, in an upright, standing position. He was sore and stiff and he could feel his blood being forced through each swollen, distended vein in his legs. He wondered if his two-and a-half times normal weight would cause them to rupture. The thought of bleeding to death from burst varicose veins wasn't pleasant; he tried to forget his legs. Occasionally he managed to sleep, or maybe it was that he simply blacked out. Time was stretched out to its ultimate elastic limit, but it did pass eventually.
When the ship was less than a planetary diameter out from Earth the A-Drive shut down. Gregg ordered several short bursts from the chemical motors to convert their direct approach course into a grazing ellipse, then the gyros nosed the ship over for entry into the atmosphere.
Allerton stammered something then about him being a hero; it made Gregg feel horribly embarrassed. He was, after all, trying to save his own life as well as everyone else's. Peterson, in a bellow that nearly overloaded Gregg's phones, yelled, "Ride 'em, cowboy!" and they slid into air.
Frictional heating began at once. The leading edges of their wings glowed red, then orange, then almost white hot—the vertical stabilizers, too. He could imagine what their anything-but-streamlined hull looked like all too well, though it was outside his angle of vision. The heating would be bad, he knew, because the ship was about as streamlined as a screw-nail. He hoped his suit would stand it.
He said: "Altitude about seventy miles. Speed Mach Five or Six. Heading West Nor'west. New Zealand way over on the right."
The ship dipped lower. The air screaming past became a solid thing that threatened to shake the ship apart. It tore at buckled and weakened plates, peeled them back, and ripped them off. It reached iron-clad fingers of supersonic turbulence into Gregg's observation niche and tried to pluck him out. It tried very hard. But Gregg was lashed —tightly—with chains and steel cable to one of the main longerons that ran the length of the ship. He stayed put.
His idea had been simply that he, Gregg, should become the ship's eyes, and he had managed to convince Allerton and the others that there was a good chance of landing the ship by "talking it" down. He now lay parallel with the long axis of the ship, just above the stern stabilizers. In the Wallaby's present position he had a good view straight down toward the planetary surface, and a reasonably good one sternwards for the coming tail-down landing. If the ship got anywhere near the surface in one piece, that was. In a landing of this type the Wallaby operated as a supersonic glider, everything depended on it retaining its aerodynamic stability. But if the collision had warped just one of the flying surfaces out of true, they would be flung into a spin that would pull them apart in seconds—with fatal results, naturally, to all concerned.
Abruptly a more immediate problem forced that thought out of his mind. The plates around his observation niche were glowing red. So were the chains binding him. His suit was getting hotter, and hotter__
"The heat will expand—and probably loosen—the chains slightly, but they should hold all right." Allerton's voice was harsh with strain, but he tried to sound reassuring. "It's mostly your imagination about the suit. It will heat up—but it's well insulated and will be livable . . ." the pilot's voice wavered, then went on: ". . . for as long as will be necessary to land the ship. You must have known that, Mr. Gregg."
Gregg grunted. The shoulder piece of his suit—the only part of it that he could see—was turning red. That wasn't imagination. Then it hit him. "You must have known that, Mr. Gregg!" Known what?
Suddenly, Gregg knew what.
They were crossing the sunrise line. The Indian Ocean below them was a deep blue-green shading almost into purple, and stippled with the bright orange spots of highflying alto-cumulus. Madagascar was a dun-colored shadow on the horizon, still lost in the haze of dawn. It was very, Very beautiful. Gregg barely noticed it.
So that was the reason for Allerton's peculiar look when Gregg had first told him about this idea, and the second pilot's asking him whether he knew exactly what he was doing. It explained why the crew started calling him "Mr." as if they really meant it, and their awkwardness toward the end. He'd only thought he had known what he was doing. He was a stupid, blind fool. And because of that utter stupidity, he was really going to be a hero.
The posthumous award sort.
If, or when the ship landed, Gregg now knew, his insulated suit would then be nearly as hot inside as it was outside now, and because that insulation was an extremely bad conductor of heat, it would retain that heat long after landing. He would be roasted in his own personal oven long before the crew—opening the airlock, lowering themselves on ropes, and cutting him free— could get him out. But on the other hand, if the shock of landing snapped his heat-weakened fastenings and threw him to the ground, the same thing would happen. If the impact with hard-baked earth didn't kill him outright, then the rocket's exhaust would fry him to a crisp. Gregg cursed himself silently. He should have kept his big mouth shut and his ideas to himself. He would at least have died comfortably that way; death from radiation poisoning was an easy way to go, he had heard.
Relatively, of course.
A voice crackled suddenly from his phones, startling him.
"We're banking right, I tell you! I feel it. Straighten up! Straighten up, quick!"
"Flying straight and level," Gregg contradicted. He added viciously: "I can see. You can't."
Allerton's voice sounded, sharply rebuking the offender; then, "Sorry about that, Mr. Gregg."
Gregg understood. The strain of flying a ship with nothing but a voice that said the ship was flying level, and going so fast, and with an altitude of such and such, must be killing to men used to the accurate readings on a panel full of instruments. Gregg felt sorry for them.
But he felt sorrier for himself.
Central Africa slid beneath them, then the outline of the West Coast. They were north of the equator now, almost paralleling it. The Atlantic, cloud-covered, was a sea of dirty gray cotton wool; there was no moon. South America passed below, then their glide took them south again into the Pacific.
After one of his periodic height and velocity reports, Gregg said: "We'll have to land next time round—my suit's getting too hot." There must have been something in his voice, Allerton didn't even try to argue.
"Right. Can we make Woomera or anywhere in Australia? The passengers—"
"No. Changing direction at this speed would pull our wings off. We want a big flat uninhabited spot. The Sahara looks the best bet, it's right in our line of flight and it should be light enough to—"
An involuntary cry of pain cut the sentence off as a scalding jet of steam erupted into his face. The unused water in his suit's canteen, vaporized by the increasing heat, had blown out the valve of his drinking tube. Eyelids pressed tightly shut and choking on a lung-searing mixture of steam and air, Gregg wondered if he was blind. Then he thought, what difference did blindness make to him now? He opened his eyes.
Allerton's voice was a panicky squeaking in his phones, wanting to know what had happened and calling for height and velocity reports. Gregg coughed a couple of times and was surprised when he
found that he could talk.
"But can you see?" Allerton asked, his voice harsh with urgency. "Can you see at all?"
"Yes," Gregg lied. He could see all right, but only as far as the face-plate of his helmet. The visor was completely fogged, and the drying chemicals in his helmet— which were meant only to neutralize the water content of his breath—might not be able to handle it.
The Earth below was a gray, featureless shadow that showed neither shape nor distance.
Continuous transsonic buffeting threatened to shake the ship to pieces, and Gregg didn't know whether they were heading north, south, or straight down. He sensed changes in direction several times but didn't report them; he had to trust the inherent stability of the ship until he could see again. Gradually the sting went out of his scalded face and for a man who was going to die he didn't feel too badly.
The gray mist on his visor became the gray of clouds whipping past close below him-—very close below him.
Through gaps he saw ground that wasn't particularly flat, but ahead there seemed to be few if any gaps to see through at all. They'd have to land. Now.
"Height about three miles. Velocity Mach One point Five. Start pulling her up!"
Slowly, heavily, the great ship pointed her nose up in a climb. The climb steepened, became vertical. Speed fell away to nothing as the ship stalled. It began to drop tail first—still held vertical by straining gyros—toward the cloud blanket below.
One gap in the clouds showed a flat, grayish-blue something that could be anything, another the dull brown of sand, and "yet another showed a section of jagged and rock-strewn mountainside. But there were a few houses clinging to that mountainside; they helped him judge his height and rate of fall with more accuracy than was possible with clouds.
"Thirty-five thousand feet. Fire motors!" Gregg kept calling altitude figures as the now pink-tinged clouds rushed up at them. But they were falling too fast.