“Loop a couple of cables around the 'Can, Harel.”
“Why?”
“Because it's just a hatch handle, and an aluminum one at that, that's holding these doors closed. I don't really want the MoonCan throwing lead casks around when we apply braking thrust.”
Harel bunny-hopped to obey. It was hard, sometimes, to remember that there were two whole ships full of people that were vulnerable to this simple little rocket. It was difficult running the line under the massive MoonCan, but he eventually got everything secured.
“First, we've got to get out to the end of this end of comet,” said Mickey. “I think I know a good way. I'm going to lob a quarrel into the path of end's rotation, and let the spin embed it.”
It took about a dozen attempts, but finally, they had a solid hit with the bolt. Mickey reeled in the line at the end of the shaft and made sure that Harel was looking at him.
“I'm tying off my tether right here, on this last tiedown stake, Harel. I want you to string another cable to a couple of tiedowns, so that if I get thrown off and this tiedown rips free, maybe two of them won't. Then I'm going out to the end of the comet with an armload of those tiedown helices. I'm going to stop about a third of the way out and put down another tiedown, then another third, like that. Two tiedowns at the end, one each for you and me. Only then can we start emplacing the RTGs and thrusters.”
“Do you want me to do the other end?”
“I want you to do nothing yet. Wait for me to finish my end and come back to you. Then you can go out and do your end. That's how we don't get dead—only one man doing something, while the other man stays awake and ready to rescue. No harm in coming loose, as long as you're still tied to the comet. Shit happens, man, just make sure it doesn't happen to you.”
“Got it. Stay here, ready to assist if you call, and we'll swap jobs for the other end.” Harel stood near the tie-down point and looked ready to wait forever.
“Bingo. Now, let me head out, I've spent too much time out here jaw-jacking as it is.” Mickey attached his harness to the last tiedown with a reeled cable. If he got thrown into space, he could always reel himself back to the little planetoid.
Harel watched as Mickey made his way out along the surface of the comet. The mass of the object was so low that there was no gravity to speak of. Every step Mickey took kicked up a bare handful of loose dust, about half of which did not return to the surface of the comet but drifted in freefall around the surface of the main body, slowly drifting off ahead of the icy shape as the pressure of the sun's radiation nudged it further along its orbital path.
“Future meteors,” Harel mumbled.
“Say what?” asked Mickey, pushing the activation stud on one of the holddowns. He turned back to face Harel. “What did you say?”
Harel, startled by the question, had to think back for a few seconds. “Oh, this dust that we're kicking up. The sun's making it move faster than Eighty-two, radiation pressure. It's going to go into a similar, but separate orbit. One of these days, one of these pebbles is going to find itself on a collision course with Earth, and burn up in the atmosphere above the planet.”
“Yeah, I guess,” said Mickey.
“Actually, scientists think a large amount of the water and air on board the Earth was originally delivered by the planet sucking up all of the debris left over after the formation of the planets. In a way, the saliva in your mouth came from water that was boiled off some ancient comet, circling the sun. We're watching this body shed more of the same.”
“I sure hope you're paying attention, Harel, in between your thoughts. I might screw up and go become a meteor all my own. Frankly, I'd rather die in bed and not out in the dark with my lungs filled with the smell of recycled Mickey Donovan.”
“Of course I'm watching, Mickey. Just make sure that you're not standing right over top of the holddowns, because sometimes they will hit a pressurized pocket just under the ice, and the damned thing might just blow off the surface of the comet.”
“Yeah, yeah, Harel. Last set now.” He moved off towards the end of the comet, making sure that he kept the line back to the central holddown tight.
“Weird, Harel. I know there's no gravity on Eighty-two, but I keep feeling like I am abseiling here.”
“You are,” said Harel.
Silence reigned for several seconds. “What do you mean, and when were you going to tell me?”
“Well, first, I thought you already realized what you had to do. You've been very careful to stand on the side of the comet that is 'inside' of the tumbling motion. That way, as you made your way out to the end, the comet would always be pushing you ahead of it as it tumbled. But you're referring to the sensation of falling from the center. That's the centripetal force that you are feeling from the rotation. The same thing kept you pressed against the floor of the Burroughs on the way out is now keeping you wanting to slide across the ground towards the end of the comet.”
“Yeah, okay, so what do I do about it?” Mickey asked. He wasn't quite angry, but he was unhappy to not be on top of the situation.
“Keep doing what you are doing, but realize that as you keep making your way out to the end, the force trying to throw you off the end is just going to get worse. It's quite possible that at the end, there is no possible way to remain standing on this comet. Rotational forces will throw you off.”
“Swell, just swell,” said Mickey as he made his way towards the end of the planetoid. It became harder and harder to remain on his feet, since the rotational forces wanted him to just slide along the surface and off. Mickey tried to imagine what would happen if he had tried to walk along the trail side of the comet. Probably fall right off and get hit by the other end as it swept around. Yeah, that would go over well.
He grimly set his boots on the brittle crunchy ground and walked another step, trying not to let it shove him towards the end—in several senses of the word.
***
They stood together near the end of the comet. The rotation wasn't very fast—the whole chunk rotated once every ninety-seven minutes, give or take, but the effects were quite real. At the centroid, for example, the ground was littered with loose objects like pea gravel and dust. The end, where they stood, looked as if someone had swept the ground clean. In fact, something had: centrifugal force.
“Pay attention!” said Mickey. “I want to get this one thruster emplaced and working before we head over and do yours. Then we can let them blast until this damned thing slows down. Then we'll emplace another on the spin axis, and we'll probably leave the roll axis alone.”
“Gotcha. No more wool-gathering,” promised Harel.
“Right. Now, we've got to work in tandem. I'll blast my laser for a few seconds, then we wait one second for the steam to clear, then you blast. We keep doing the same cycle until I tell you to stop. We're trying to dig a hole for the thruster. So, set your controls for dispersal two, pulse length three seconds.”
“Let me guess, a continuous blast is a bad idea.”
Mickey stuck up his thumb, since nodding would do no good. “Right. The fog from the blast begins to absorb laser light, and you end up just heating up the exhaust cloud instead of the ice underneath. Plus, the laser light presses the cloud into the hole instead of letting it disperse. So, we alternate.”
They began to drill. “And me, two, three, and pause, two, and you, two, three,” called Mickey.
“What we want and we need are sea chanties that help us to keep time and stay on target and we want and we need are sea chanties...” said Harel.
Mickey was about to tell him to knock it off, when he realized that the stressed words counted out the seconds required for the laser drilling.
Mickey joined in on the second repetition, altering it a bit. “...all we need are some dirges of punk rock with loud drums and some bass riffs to keep time so next guy wants and he needs his sea chanties.”
They kept this up for several minutes until Mickey called a halt. He waited for the bubbl
ing ice to cool and the fog that surrounded them to disperse.
“Pretty funny, Harel. We've got to stop for a bit, this fog is screwing up our lasers, and besides, I want to measure the hole.” He looked around for something to stick in the hole. Harel was about to put his arm in it, when Mickey yelled at him to stop.
“Do you want to die? You stick your arm in there, and if the water doesn't freeze around your suit and trap you, then some boiling water will build up pressure and blow you and your arm out of that hole.”
“What?” asked Harel. “Where do you get this stuff?”
“It's true,” said Mickey. “The outside of your suit is well below freezing, even if the inside is very warm. Watch the frost develop on the parts that are mere fabric, and not the metal fittings and such.”
Harel tapped him on the shoulder.
“What the hell now?”
Harel handed him a quarrel from the carrier on his back. “How about this, just for starters? You've also got your crossbow on your back. I'm sure we can use that for something. Otherwise, I could just slide back to the centroid area and find something from the MoonCan we can use. Maybe one of those steel cables is stiff enough to show us how deep the bottom is.”
Mickey grabbed the arrow out of his hand. “Gimme that before you cut yourself.” He reached down and poked it into the hole. It went down past his glove. He laid it across the hole, which was wider than the arrow was long. He racked the arrow and tried the crossbow, which also sank into the hole.
“Nice. Now, let's go for your hole.”
They trooped to the centroid, where they picked up several more tiedown packages and a long aluminum strut from the MoonCan. They made their way to the other end of the comet, setting holddowns, stringing them with cable, and anchoring themselves at the far end of the comet. There, they boiled out a hole in the ice for the other thruster.
This time, the entire strut disappeared. Mickey was pleased. “All right, back to the centroid. Here's where it gets fun.”
He flicked his suit radio to the common band. “We've got two anti-pitch holes to cancel out this tumble. Send down Ivan and Harlan, those slackers, with the RTGs and let's get the holes fitted with thrusters.”
He turned back to Harel. “Finally, we can get some help here. We're going to work on your hole, leave the other one to the second team.”
Between the two teams, they lugged the RTGs, minus the radioactives, out to the thruster holes. It was an extremely tight fit—the laser holes had to get reamed out in order to get the RTG along with its associated anchoring dronelets into the hole. Soon, the dronelets' battery power was exhausted and they stopped.
“All right,” said Mickey. “This is when Ivan earns his pay. Let's fuel up the RTGs.”
The less said about wrestling lead storage casks out of the Mooncan and sliding them carefully down the side of a comet, the better. It was an extremely exhausted crew that finally were able to report their task complete. The RTGs were in place, the decaying actinides furiously spitting out decay particles, warming the ice around them, and their shielded remote controls were alive and working.
“All righty! Let's see what these babies can do!” shouted Mickey as he used his hand thrusters to push away from the comet at sharp ninety degrees from the centroid, with the rest of the astronauts following on an aluminum tether. He carefully maneuvered to the assembly area, where Commander Standish appeared lost in thought. Nick peered into his faceplate and saw he was, in fact, talking into his radio, albeit on some other frequency. He gave the Commander a thumbs-up, reeled in the tether and the rest of the astronauts, and thrust slowly and a bit unsteadily towards his broomstick, where the test and firing controls for the comet's thrusters were waiting for their moment to shine.
“Hold!” called Commander Standish. “Look at yourself, Mickey. You've been out here for over eight hours. Tell me, have you eaten? No? Well, Eighty-two here has been tumbling along his orbit for millennia, we can let him tumble while we get ourselves some rest. That's how accidents happen—through fatigue. Climb aboard, everyone. I'll take you home.”
Mickey was disappointed, but followed orders. He slaved his broomstick controls to the obviously fresher Commander, and enjoyed one of the smoothest broomstick rides ever. He spent his time gazing at the heavens, like most of the other men.
“Glorious, really glorious, Harel,” he said. “I know that this all was the result of a Big Bang, and everything just happened by random chance. There was no reason for it to be beautiful too. Makes you wonder.”
Harel was silent for a beat. “Science doesn't allow for God, Mickey, and I consider myself a scientist. But that's not all I am. If I were, I wouldn't be human. Pure cold science does not allow for love, or loyalty, or beauty, or any of life’s other aesthetics. I try to keep my logic and human sides separate when I’m doing my work, but sometimes, I wonder. Why do sunflowers have such beautiful spirals in their seed distributions? Why does a simple curve like a logarithmic spiral seem beautiful? What does this say about the underlying order in the universe? Is it the fingerprints of a Creator?”
Mickey grunted. “I just like to look at the stars and wonder, Harel. The philosophical stuff is a bit over my head. But, yes, I do believe there is God and we're looking at his handiwork.” Mickey straightened up in his seat. “I also believe that he's not going to wave a wand and we find ourselves back on Earth either. Looks like three minutes until contact with the ships.”
Harel smiled in his suit, unseen by anyone. The stars were beautiful, and he was obscurely pleased that even an unromantic soul like Mickey could sense it.
***
The Commanders conferred and backed the ships off from Eighty-two by two more kilometers. The only safety that would give would be to reduce the angle for any incoming debris—it wasn’t like there was any air to slow down an errant shard of ice emerging from an explosion.
The actual firing was somewhat anticlimactic. The thruster package consisted of a laser that would deepen the chamber with the thruster, a fill mechanism that would move the ice chips, water, and slush to the fuel tank, and the tank itself, with the RTG at the bottom. The RTG used the heat and radioactivity from the decaying nuclear waste that was its fuel to generate electricity and power the heating elements in the steam tank. Filtered water from the comet's ice would be boiled, and the steam shunted down the exhaust pipe to a gimballed engine bell that protruded from the surface of the comet. An arc broke some of the steam down to an electrified plasma, which magnetic coils accelerated, adding momentum to the exiting stream of mass. Along the way, an Archimedes screw fed the sludge from the cometary ice—everything that was not water—back into the exhaust. The idea was to get a decent amount of mass moving as fast as possible, generating thrust and slowing the tumbling of the comet.
The firing of the thruster was a sudden stream of pearly gas exiting the two engine bells, the edges of the stream a perfect continuation of the conic profile of the engine bell.
“Geiger?” asked Commander Standish.
“None detectable at this distance,” said Ragesh.
“How are the strain gages?” Mike asked Scott Acevedo, who was manning the Engineering board.
“Very small elongations, sir, but that's not the point. Ice can flow under conditions of stress, but its failure mode usually is brittle fracture. We won't get any warning at all.”
“Understood,” said the Commander. “How's the tumble?”
Benjamin was staring at his panel, flicking between computer screens full of shifting colors and numbers. “We're talking about a lot of mass, sir. The inertial units are just barely off of zero. This is going to take a while.”
“Understood. What about upping the thrust?” asked Commander Standish.
Scott spoke quickly. “Don't recommend it, sir. Not until we run this setting for an hour. I want to see the performance curve on this setting, as well as assess damage to Eighty-two, after an hour of continuous blasting before I recommend a higher thrust lim
it.”
“I guess we'll just settle back and enjoy the show,” said Standish.
***
The comet was stopped dead in space, with just a small residual spin along its long axis. Men swarmed over it, tying the ships down against its bulk, reorienting the holddowns, and resetting the attitude thrusters.
At the rear of the comet, the thrusters were removed completely, and a debate ensued in the galley of the Burroughs.
“Not a good idea,” said Jeff. “This is ice, and optically clear. Cutting off the back end with a laser might sound like a good thing, but I have a bad feeling about it. Lasers were fine when we were digging thruster holes, but a comm laser is a whole 'nother order of magnitude in power. All you need is a fracture in the ice creating reflection planes, and suddenly you've got multiple uncontrolled laser beams, blasting through who knows what.”
“But the other way will take us forever!” said Duane. “I'm not sure we have that kind of continuous output available from the reactors. The heat exchangers haven't been operated at that output level for extended periods of time, so I won't vouch for their durability.”
“I understand your concern, Duane,” said Jeff. “What about RTG supplementation? Can we make a bunch more and try to take the load off?”
Ivan joined the fray. “Just where are you going to put these RTGs? They're mostly unshielded, remember, and we're talking about really high-level rad waste. Sure, we cut the tail off with a lot of electricity, but then what? It will take months to burn up the rad waste in our reactors, and I'm not keen on leaving the stuff just lying around, and I don't want to hear about stuffing it into the engine exhaust.”
Jeff sighed. “Look, we've got to cut off the tail of this comet for two reasons. First, the ice is rotten back there, and we need to get to the good solid stuff in the core if we ever hope to move this thing. Second, we need a nice large chamber to mount Eighty-two's engine so we can get over to the other asteroid. We need a solution for this, and we need it pretty quick. I, for one, would rather have a lot of rad waste hanging around the back end of this thing than worrying about a stray laser beam blowing a hole in a ship or, worse, one of us.”
Dead Men Flying Page 13