Dead Men Flying

by Bill Patterson

  “Well, there's always world domination, but that's just plain stupid. The Moon, if the newspapers are to be believed, is doing a damn good job of trashing a lot of real estate. Sure, from inside Perseus, we could hold the world hostage, but so what? So we sit in the sky, but they sure as hell can't launch to get to us before whatever they are sending up gets shredded. So that's out.”

  “Go on.” Roger folded is hands on his desk.

  “Arming the Moon, but that's even more stupid. Why send us the thorium when they've got the thorium mine and a better industrial plant than we do? No, that's dumb, too. That leaves one last purpose.”

  “And?” asked Roger.

  “Orion.”

  Roger looked steadily at Jeff.

  Jeff looked back. “You know, Roger, failing to say it's nuts means that you are actually considering this.”

  “Humor me. Tell me about this Orion and why it's crazy.”

  “Orion was a concept in the very early days of NASA. You build a spaceship on a really thick steel plate and a bunch of shock absorbers. You open a door in this plate, throw out a nuke, and slam the door before it goes off. Bang. The detonation wave moves you—irresistibly. Then when you start slowing down, you open the door and throw out another bomb. And another. Over and over. Of course, you're trashing the launch pad and about a hundred square kilometers around it with blast and heat and radioactivity. Still, if I were stranded... heeeeyyy!”

  “No, they're not using Orion to launch. They've got the new Flinger.”

  “That's a relief. Wait—that means they thought about it. Which means they mentioned the idea to you. And you're going to use it to move Perseus down to Earth.”

  “Not entirely. We're still going to be using Eighty-two for a lot of the in-flight corrections and such.”

  “What do you mean, not entirely?” said Jeff, his voice rising. “Are we going to be sitting three kilometers from a goddamn nuke?”

  “Yes.”

  The bare monosyllable hung in the air like the Sword of Damocles. Roger looked steadily at him.

  Thoughts blurred through Jeff's brain. Mushroom clouds, sudden thrust, radiation sleeting through his body. Fallout, pollution, deformed children. The dark red forest surrounding Chernobyl, with silent, invisible death in the soil. The unstoppable vomiting of the four revived men from the sudden start of radiation sickness, and the dozens upon dozens more that were in the hibernation cells. Skin falling off like a discarded coat. The Cerenkov blue glow that surrounded the submerged fuel rods of the ancient style nuclear reactors, still deadly after all these years.

  “I can't believe it,” said Jeff. “Nukes?”

  Roger stood up, which was quite a feat in microgravity. “Jeff, I am going to do something I have not done in the three years that I've been running this show. I am going to give you an unambiguous direct order. Do you understand?”

  Jeff grabbed his gibbering monkey brain and gave it a shake. “Yes, sir. Order away.”

  “I order you not to say a word about this to anyone. I want to arrange a meeting, you and Scott with Ivan, Niall, and Duane. Can you hold off until then? Going to be a half-day at most.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jeff. “I'm sorry, I got a bit carried away, I think. I'll keep everything quiet until you order me back here, I am guessing.”

  “Right. Does anyone else know? Did you talk about your sleuthing?”

  “No, Roger. I don't think a lot of these guys would follow what I've had to learn. Nuclear fuels, half-lives, capture cross-sections, critical masses. I've said nothing, and I don't think anyone's the wiser.”

  “Thank goodness for that. At present, all four of the people we woke up know, as well as Duane, Commander Standish, and myself. As well as some of the senior members of the Collins crew.”

  “Seven folks. And I make eight. That's half. When were you going to let me in on the secret?”

  “About the time that Perseus cooled down enough for us to start outfitting. The mechanisms required would be so obvious that there would be no point trying to keep a secret any longer. I should have guessed that you'd figure it out, Jeff. One of those great qualities you have is intense intellectual curiosity.”

  “Well, I should have come to you earlier, Roger, but damn, I didn't want to sound unhinged.”

  “Let me go round them up. Like I said, should be a few hours.”

  ***

  Mickey, on the other hand, had figured it out a long time ago but kept his mouth shut. Every time Ragesh tried to sound him out about how they were going to get the hunk of iron on the way back to Earth, Mickey deflected him. Lots of people feel funny about nukes. You just have to respect that kind of power, that's all.

  He watched the bolometer creep ever upward as the sunlight poured onto the dark-colored asteroid. As the temperature ticked up, the asteroid did some strange things. It was mostly iron and nickel, of course, but not all of it was one big metal shard. There were the deposits that had settled on it with the minute gravity it possessed. Every couple of hours, flurries of stones found themselves lofted away from the surface by the sublimating ices underneath them.

  Sometimes, that was gentle, other times, like the one earlier, a small explosion was the result. The mirror began to take impacts from these hangers-on. But the area of damage, compared to the size of the mirror, was insignificant. However, these impacts did impart momentum to the mirror apparatus.

  The station-keeping program activated the thrusters more and more to hold the position of the structure in the optimal position. The thruster tanks started running dry.

  Mickey found himself outside the ship once more as he and Lima took a pair of broomsticks to the mirrors. Mickey offered to take the far side of the thrusters and Lima the near side.

  The operation was simple. Call operations to take a thruster offline. Coast up to the thruster. Fill it from your big supply tank, courtesy of a hose that looked and acted just like an airhose from an ancient gasoline station. Back off laterally, ask operations to bring the thruster back online and test. Repeat the process until you run out of mirror or LOX.

  The first couple of thrusters were interesting, but the job quickly became just another boring detail. Mickey shook himself. This was exactly how accidents happened. He turned around to look back at Lima. The man appeared to be concentrating on his work.

  “Lima,” he called.

  “What's up, Mickey?”

  “Just had a feeling. I was getting bored, and that's how accidents happen, and I thought I'd tell you.”

  “Thanks for the warning. The worst thing that I was thinking could happen would be for a high-speed projectile to hole my supply tank and throw me across the sky.”

  “Wow, you really have a vivid imagination,” said Mickey. “I was thinking more like flying into the focus of the mirror.”

  “Can't do that, Mickey—that's on the other side of the foam.”

  Mickey connected his hose to the thruster in front of him and hit the trigger to begin the fill. “Good point. Oh, by the way, make sure you stay on this side. I looked at the asteroid, and it reminded me of opening my grandfather's coal furnace when I was a kid. If you stuck your head above the mirror, it would be the equivalent of getting a face full of six hundred degrees. The suit could take it for a minute or so, then the hoses would melt through. Don't chance it.”

  “Roger. We better keep going, otherwise, we're just tempting fate.”

  “Another good point, Lima. Good thing nobody's keeping score.”

  ***

  Mickey took a look at the bolometer when he came in from outside. Even the short exposure to the asteroid at close range left his face feeling like he had been sunburned. He wanted to know just how hot it was.

  1521 K. Three hundred degrees Celsius away from its melting point. Amazing. Well, at least the steam explosions from hidden pockets of ices were over. At that temperature, there was nothing left to vaporize.

  It was going to be very fascinating to watch the engineers stick a pip
e into that sullen glowing mass and try to blow it up like a blob of glass.

  ***

  Jeff was waiting for the call from the Commander when he stole a look at the bolometer. Oddly, he did so at the same time as Mickey did, one level up. He wondered just how this glass blowing project was going to work out.

  A light glowed on his board. “Come on up, Jeff,” said Roger. “We're all here.”

  Jeff had a complex feeling as he floated through the ship to the Commander's office, one level up. On the one hand, he was joining a semi-secret group, and that was as a big deal. On the other hand, so many other people were already in the know that he felt bypassed.

  He resolved to keep his feelings out of the matter and go in looking for data and ways he could assist.

  ***

  “Roger,” he said, as he entered the office. He nodded to the other people in the office. Scott shared his bafflement at the summons, though.

  “Gentlemen. I have called you all together because we need to expand the circle of knowing to include our Engineers. As the asteroid continues to heat up, the time before departure grows shorter and shorter. Fairly soon, we'd have to tell Jeff and Scott anyway, since we require their help when we begin outfitting Perseus.

  “Jeff, Scott, you know everyone here. I selected the four newly woken workers because of the special knowledge they had, as well as the other, secret knowledge they possessed. Ivan, for instance, possesses a knowledge of ancient nuclear reactor design. This is true. However, he also possesses detailed knowledge about the construction of nuclear bombs.”

  Jeff nodded to Ivan, who bowed back slightly. Scott was puzzled.

  “Niall is a physicist, and is helping us optimize our reactors to prefer U-233 production over all other isotopes.”

  Niall nodded. He seemed, well, eager but in a restrained way to Jeff. This guy, a mad bomber?

  “Duane, you already know. He has similar knowledge, though not as deeply as the other two. His great usefulness is his encyclopedic knowledge of the thorium salt reactors we’re using. He knows more about these reactors than almost anyone else alive.”

  Duane looked down for a moment.

  “Jeff, you and I have talked, and I ordered you to remain quiet. Scott, Jeff has gone through a lot of trouble to uncover something that you will learn for free. When we start out for Earth, Perseus will become the first space vehicle to be powered by a nuclear bomb.”

  Glass Blowing

  Aboard 'Eighty-Two', July 12 2084, 1302 GMT

  The asteroid was a long, semi-solid blob, slowly rotating under the unrelenting glare of focused sunlight. It glowed a warm orange-red, except for the area immediately under the rectangle of sunlight, where it briefly became yellow. The bolometers scattered around the mirror reported on the remarkably similar temperature of seventeen hundred kelvin.

  “Better get to it,” said Jeff. “Otherwise, surface tension is going to start pulling this thing into a ball, and nobody wants that.”

  Commander Standish nodded agreement. “Ready for some real engineering, Jeff? Let's get the crew out there.”

  During the entire warming process, the awake crew was fabricating a specialized shelter for this moment. The box-like affair was untethered from the surface of Eighty-two. Inside, Lima manipulated the pilot controls to bring the shelter to a rest only three hundred meters from the hypnotically spinning end of the asteroid.

  “You know, steel workers did this day after day, all year long. Winter, summer, didn't matter.” Harlan reminisced. “My grandfather took me to a continuous-casting rolling mill out near Staten Island. He worked there in the forties, back when they were mining the Fresh Kills landfill. Same kind of thing. Giant hanging masses of red hot metal.”

  “Done,” said Lima. “Station-keeping systems will only alarm on drifting towards the mass. Thrusters safed.”

  “All right. Let's get the string put together.” At the bottom of the shelter, Ragesh screwed together fifty-meter-long sections of steel pipe to form a long horizontal string. The only reason he had to be outside was because he was the expert in the waldos—remotely operated handling machinery—that he used to work with the heavy, unwieldy steel pipe, fifty meters per section.

  Working with a pair of hand controllers, he picked up a pipe section from a stack behind the shelter, screwed it onto the ever-growing string, and pushed it forward. The pipe was a special high-strength, high-temperature alloy of steel that could withstand temperatures up to nineteen hundred degrees without substantial loss of tensile or compressive strength. As the pipe string came together, the near end of the string remained behind an aluminized panel, remaining cool, while the back end of the string stretched out behind, eventually reaching five hundred meters.

  “Okay, I'm at the limit of travel,” said Ragesh. “I've got the rhythm now.” Ragesh, although technically performing extra-vehicular activity, was not afraid. Inside the shelter, inside the ship, it was all the same to him. Floating free with just a spacesuit between him and death, that was terrifying.

  “H2?” asked Jeff.

  “Ready, sir.”

  “All right. First, let's get the mirrors out of the way,” said Jeff. “Commander Standish, move the mirrors back one kilometer.”

  The gas blasting from the mirrors' thrusters was no longer white, but tinged with red as it picked up the glow from the asteroid. Ponderously, with several worrisome flexings of the entire structure, the mirrors floated away from the asteroid. As they moved, they pivoted up, no longer intercepting the sun's rays, eliminating the danger of an unseen focused hotspot.

  “Good move, Commander. I should have thought of turning the mirrors,” said Jeff. “Ready for the needle valve.”

  Commander Standish laughed. “I haven't heard that in years. But you're right—it's just like pumping up a football.”

  “Go Ragesh. Report on the pipe temperature, Harlan, every thirty seconds, until we can start flow.”

  Ragesh reached up on his small control panel and flicked a circuit breaker. “Circuits energized, engaging pipe jaws. Thermal shield down, we're going in!”

  The pipe moved forward quickly as the motors drove the knurled wheels beneath the shelter. The pipe moved forward two hundred fifty meters and stopped.

  “Problem?” asked Jeff.

  “No, sir. Sticking on more segments. I figured that the pipe would get less heat here than inside. Time me.”

  Ragesh's hands blurred inside the waldo gear. He added another five segments to the pipe string.

  “Three minutes. All right, let's go.”

  “Inner pipe wall is at nine hundred Kelvin and rising,” said Harlan. “Bolometer reads sixteen-fifty.”

  “Keep it moving, men,” said Roger. “We can't lose the blowpipe.”

  The insertion of the pipe caused the shelter to move backwards, until decisive thruster application by Lima poked the pipe further into the mass. Ragesh was able to insert three hundred meters of pipe, but after that, the pipe was stuck.

  “Pipe walls at eleven hundred,” said Harlan.

  “I can't push it in any further,” said Ragesh. “Even under full thruster, we can't get the thing to move.”

  “Can we pull it out?”

  “Twelve hundred Kelvin.”

  “Pipe jaws retracting,” said Ragesh just as the shelter jolted forward towards the orange glowing iron.

  “Lock your controls, Ragesh,” shouted Lima. “We're going to have to use thrusters anyway.” Lima spun the thrusters to push the shelter away from the asteroid. The thrusters applied a slow, steady rise in power, but the pipe remained stuck inside the mass.

  “Thirteen fifty,” called Harlan. “Getting near the plastic limit—we're going to lose the pipe!”

  Lima abandoned the slow-and-steady in favor of a series of sudden bursts, jerking the pipe, and finally wrenched the pipe free of the molten mass.

  “How did it do, Harlan?” asked Jeff.

  “Temp peaked at one thousand five hundred, right at the bottom
of the strain weakening curve. Dodged a bullet.”

  “Sure did,” said Ragesh. “We've only got about ninety of these pipes. Melt too many, and it's game over.”

  “All right, guys, we're done for now. Back the shelter off about a kilometer, Lima, and let's call for some broomsticks to take us back.”

  ***

  “The problem, as I see it, is molten asteroidal iron sticking on the outside of the pipes,” said Lima. “If we can just get some separation between the pipe and the inside of the asteroid, then we could move better.”

  “That would work, I just don't know how to do that,” said Jeff. “If we just blow a small bubble at the end of the pipe, then move the pipe inward, what's to prevent the bubble from collapsing and allowing the iron to stick to the pipe again?”

  “Maybe if we pumped in water instead of gas,” said Ragesh. “That will push the iron out of the way real fast.”

  “And we'll have a pressure problem that will throw the pipe right back at us,” said Jeff. “No, the real problem is the same reason you can't fight on ice skates.”

  The men looked at each other and shrugged.

  “No, really,” said Jeff. “Ever watch a hockey game? There will always be a fight. As soon as one of the players throws a punch, what happens? They move backward as their fist moves forward. It's even worse when they connect. Then they’re both really thrown back.”

  “I see,” said Ragesh. “We can't stand on anything, so our efforts at pushing the pipe in will never be any better than the best force that thrusters can provide.”

  “Right,” said Jeff. “If only we could grab hold of the asteroid, like a hockey player grabbing hold of the other player's jersey.”

  They fell silent as they started doodling on their pads.

  “Rivets,” said Lima.

  “Rivets? Those went out a hundred years ago.”

  Lima chuckled. “Maybe molly bolts would be a better description. Check this out.” He sketched a single piece of pipe. “Take this pipe, score the end of it so it's in eighths. Bury it into the end of the asteroid, then pull the cap back along the pipe. The weakened pipe can't take the compressive load, and the pipe breaks along the scores and folds back into the semi-molten mass. Then, we pump something in there to freeze the iron. Water, cooler gas, whatever you want.