But he knew better. He'd won his pilot's license as a reward for his work on the station, but all his experience with the little space taxis that operated between rocket and station was still too little. He'd needed the cramming and education badly, if he was to prove adequate for the job of guiding one of the bigger Moon rockets!
They swung around a maze of buildings and onto the rocket field. Ahead, the big, three-stage rocket was waiting, rising over 260 feet from its finned base. Tankers were finishing fueling it with hydrazine, nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide. Mark glanced at his watch, braked to a screeching halt beside the rocket, and motioned for Jim to follow him toward the waiting elevator crane. The platform began to rise at once, lifting them up to the airlock near the top of the ship.
Lee Yeng and Hank Andrucci, copilot and radar-man, were already buckled into their seats in front of their screens, and the automatic pilot machines were humming over the course tapes. Jim fastened himself down, mentally bracing himself for the acceleration of takeoff. Then Mark reached for the starting button as the chronometer hand moved to the zero mark.
From below, there was the muffled thunder of the first stage blasting out. The ship seemed to shake and lift slowly. Then speed began building up, and the pressure of acceleration shoved Jim back into the seat. Now he seemed to weigh triple his normal poundage as the ship roared up and began to turn.
Abruptly, the pressure dropped as the first big stage broke away and started falling back toward the sea, now twenty-five miles below them. The second stage with its lighter load began blasting almost at once. Two minutes later, it also dropped away, leaving only the winged final stage that carried the men and freight to their destination. Its motor went on for another minute and a half, driving them to their maximum speed of eighteen thousand miles an hour.
When the final stage's motors cut off, they were coasting free, heading out into space. They would continue to slow as the Earth pulled back on them, but their momentum would carry them out to the station.
Jim breathed deeply in relief as the crushing pressure ended. With the ship coasting, there was no feeling of the gravity that was pulling back on the rocket and the men equally; gravity could be felt only when there was a resistance to keep whatever it acted on from being drawn toward the attracting mass. He waited, wondering if the long months had ruined his adaptation to lack of weight. There was a slight feeling of uneasiness for a second as his sense of balance tried to adjust. Then his sight took over the job that the feeling of up and down could no longer perform. He sighed again and relaxed. He could still take it.
"How's it feel?" Mark asked.
Jim grinned back, stretching. "As if I'd inherited a million dollars," he said. He hadn't realized how much he'd grown to hate the constant pull of gravity on Earth. He'd grown up to take it for granted, until his first trip back from the station. But once free—or partially free, after the spin of the station gave it an apparent one-third gravity pull—it was hard to return to full weight. Here the body relaxed completely. It was like lying in a pool of buoyant water, without the temperature change or wetness.
The pumps began operating, changing the air in the rocket to match what they would find at the station. The pressure dropped slowly to three pounds as pure oxygen replaced the mixture of oxygen and helium. He heard Andrucci's voice, humming a current tune; he'd almost forgotten how the bass sounds thinned out in the lower pressure. Then his ears adjusted.
The gyroscopes began turning the ship around, getting it into position to match orbits with the station. Here, without air to aid in steering or hinder free motion, gyroscopic control was the simplest and cheapest. Every ounce of weight carried up counted for more than ten pounds of fuel at takeoff, so that even the men's hair was clipped before the trip, and the method requiring least weight was always the cheapest.
There was nothing to do while they drifted upward, with their speed dropping to less than fifteen thousand miles an hour. During the fifty minutes of free flight, the talk was mostly about unimportant things. Mark examined the tiny microfilms and reading device Jim was bringing with him to continue his studies, and nodded at the selection.
"You'll be ready enough for the big jump," he decided. "That is, if they ever make it."
"If?" Jim stared at him, feeling his doubts grow again. "I thought it was all settled."
"Is anything ever settled?" Mark asked. He grimaced. "After the mess of troubles you had with the station, you should know better. There are plenty of people who don't want the Moon trip—aren't even happy about the station."
There was certainly enough truth in that. In a few years the station would pay for itself in accurate weather predictions, as well as the scientific work being done, even without the value of its position as a base for military uses. But the first fire of enthusiasm had worn thin in a few months after it was finished. Now people seemed uncertain and worried, scared by the knowledge that guided missiles from the station could reach any place on Earth.
There were plenty of men who wanted to see man reach the Moon, too. But if it came to a test of which side held the power, Jim wasn't sure who would win.
He'd taken it for granted that it was settled. Jonas had told him that Major Electric had contracts to build the ships for the trip. It was naturally still a secret project, so there could be no news in the papers of any progress. He'd expected that the work would be going on while he studied. Now, apparently, Mark had nearly given up hope—and as one of the men who would bring up the materials, Mark should know as well as anyone.
They reached the top of their orbit, and Mark set the controls for the brief blast that would bring them up to the speed and orbit of the station. The rocket motors went on for fifteen seconds, and then they were drifting a quarter mile from the station.
It looked good to Jim. Shaped like a great metal-clad doughnut, except for a hub and two spokes, it glistened in the sun as it swung around the immense globe of the Earth. The construction crew was gone, but the staff of eighty had taken over the quarters throughout its nearly eight hundred feet of circumference.
The little sausage-shaped space taxi Jim had piloted so long was already coming out to meet the rocket. It turned and drifted against the airlock, its siliconerubber front forming an airtight seal. Mark and Jim released the seals of their lock and stepped into the smaller ship.
Jim's old friend, Terry Rodriguez, was piloting the taxi, but Jim had barely time to nod to him and make a quick grab for his hand before an older man in military uniform was beside him. Colonel Halpern's face was both worried and relieved as he saw Jim.
"Sorry to yank you back," he began at once. "And thanks for coming. You're technically not under my command, but I knew I could count on you. How long before you can take off for the relay station?"
Jim shrugged, disregarding the apology. Major Electric and the Army had worked together well enough that no question of command was involved. "I slept on the plane, sir," he answered. "I can take off at once."
"Good!" The colonel sighed and finally managed a smile. "I wouldn't ask it if it were just that fool kid of mine. But the packing crate he hid in was supposed to contain material they need out there. Grab a cup of coffee in the commissary, and I'll have your orbit figured at once."
They settled against the entrance to the hub of the station, and the airlock hissed open quickly. Jim stepped out, breathing in the air that had grown sweeter to him than anything Earth could offer. He had the feeling of having come home from a long trip, and he realized again that anyone who had grown used to space could never feel completely at ease on any normal world again.
Then he gasped, and the sweetness of his homecoming was suddenly gone.
From a quartz window in the hub he could look back toward the pile of supplies for the Moon ships. There were no ships being built there. There wasn't even the beginning of the first framework. In fact, as he studied it, he couldn't see that there was any increase in the amount of material there since he'd last seen it.
Chapter 2 two u □ crowd
J
he relay station was being built a little over 22,000 miles above Earth's surface—the furthest men had yet gone in space. At that distance it would circle around the Earth once each twenty-four hours. And since Earth revolved in the same period of time, the same spot on the map would always be turned to face it.
The idea had been mentioned often, but not taken too seriously until the big station had been completed. Then the television and high frequency radio networks had realized how valuable it would be. Those frequencies had been limited to a little more than a hundred miles, since they traveled in straight lines, while the surface of the planet was curved. The networks had been forced to depend on many stations, spaced close together and linked by expensive cables and relays. But from a single station, such radio waves could be sent
up through Earth's atmosphere to the station, which would beam them back—with the assurance that they would reach every section of the hemisphere. The energy for the rebroadcast would come from the sun, using solar batteries invented in the early fifties, and only a tiny crew would be needed. It meant a huge saving, particularly since the South American Republics were contributing for the use of channels in Spanish, and the United States was officially behind the plan as a help in official informational broadcasting. Unlike the original station or the planned trip to the Moon, everyone was in favor of this.
The relay station had been barely started when Jim left, but he'd made a few trips up as pilot of the ferry. The little ship was about four times the size of a taxi. There was a sphere in front for the pilot, and a bank of rocket motors behind. Between was mostly open space, with big nylon tanks for the fuel and a section of heavy netting to hold cargo. Up here, beyond the atmosphere, no streamlining was needed.
Nor did the little ship need heavy acceleration. Jim cut on the blast easily, building up speed gradually. The big station rotated around Earth at a speed of 15,840 miles an hour, and he needed less than an additional mile a second to reach the relay station. As the ferry built up speed, he began pulling ahead of the main station and outward. After a few minutes, he cut off the blast. The ferry would continue on until it was time several hours later to match orbits at the top of its climb.
Below him, the Earth filled most of his field of view. It was an unusually clear day, apparently. Most of Africa could be recognized, though Europe was partly hazed over. Jim studied the planet for a few minutes, and then pulled out the viewer and began going over the engineering microfilms.
For a moment he wondered how Nora Prescott was doing with her studies at the Florida Rocket School. She had been a nurse on the station, but during the so-called mutiny she had become his assistant with the taxi, and had been offered a berth as his assistant pilot on the Moon ship. He had taken some courses in space piloting before coming to the station, but this was her first formal education on rockets. It must be a tough grind for her.
The ship drifted on, and he buried his nose in the viewer, until the timer warned him he was nearing apogee—the furthest distance from Earth.
He looked out of the dome of the ferry then. At twenty-two thousand miles up, space consisted almost entirely of nothing. In a billion cubic miles, there might have been a speck of dust or a pinhead-sized meteorite —though probably not—in addition to the few undetectable molecules in even such a vacuum as this. The stars were tiny hot points, too far away to consider. The Moon was still nearly the same. But Earth had shrunk. It was still forty times the apparent size of the Moon, but it no longer seemed to fill half the heavens.
Nothing else v/as visible on the screens. Then the radar spotted the relay station, and Jim brought it into view. He whistled. When he had seen it before, it had been a pile of junk and girders lying free in space. Now it was a sphere thirty feet across, with a huge net being built below it. This would be the antenna, and was the trickiest part of the construction.
His piloting had been better than he had expected. He opened the rocket motors carefully a few seconds, but matching course this time was easy. A minute later, he was within a few hundred feet of the relay station.
Before he was completely in his space suit he heard a thumping on die airlock. With a grin, he released the lock and stuck out a hand to help the two figures inside.
Through the plastic-faced helmets, he could see the grinning faces of his former foreman, Dan Bailey, and the project engineer, Thorndyke.
"Forget your cargo," Thomdyke's voice sounded in his earphones. "I've got men coming out to unload you. Come on over for a chance to talk."
Jim nodded, more than willing. The two men jumped out into space, and Jim followed. Once such a feat had seemed almost miraculous to him, but now he was used to it. He sighted on the relay station lock and kicked off, almost without thinking, to drift after them until his momentum carried him the few hundred feet and he could reach the handholds.
Inside, the completed sphere was packed with sleeping bags, but Bailey led the way through them, shucking off his suit as he went. He pointed to the confusion, grinning. "Not like the big station, lad. Getting a hundred men in here is a bit crowded. But we're managing. Lack of gravity helps, now that we're all used to it. Here, let me have a look at you."
They made their way to the tiny section of nylon sheets that served as an office, where Dan's wife already had plastic bottles of coffee waiting for them. "Sit down, boy," Dan said. "It's good to see you again."
"Good to be back," Jim told him. And then somehow there was nothing to say. He could see their progress, and there didn't seem to be anything about his schooling worth mentioning. He watched the others silently for a moment, before realizing that something was wrong. They had the same vaguely worried look he'd seen in his brief stay at the main station.
But it was Thorndyke who brought it up. "Notice anything odd on your way up, Jim?" he asked.
Jim shook his head. "Such as?"
The engineer shrugged, and Dan fidgeted with his coffee before answering. Then the foreman blurted it out. "Another relay station being built, maybe!"
"We've spotted something," Thorndyke amplified quickly. "We have a small scope here—big enough to see the station. Lately we've seen something going on. We can't see details, but when the station's over the South Pole, we see a bright spot at the same height over the North Pole. We sent down a note to Halpern, but got nothing but silence from him. Any rumors down below?"
Jim shook his head again. "Nothing like that. But why should we build another station?" Then he stopped, staring at them. "You mean the Combine's trying it?"
Dan shrugged doubtfully. "We don't know, Jim. But who else?"
The Combine was the big union of European and Asiatic nations which had given some of the trouble with the building of the station. Combine scientists had even managed to get an atomic-powered rocket up briefly before it exploded. Jim and Mark Emmett had rescued the men on it, and after that the hostility had seemed to fade somewhat. But lately, debating at the World Congress indicated it was picking up again. It was mostly because of potential danger from the Combine that the United States was forced to use the station as a military base.
"But I thought we proved they couldn't do it," Jim protested. "When we picked up their wrecked men, we showed that we could protect ourselves. No other orbit would be safe from ours. Mr. Thorndyke, they wouldn't dare risk building another station. And we couldn't let them."
With two stations, things would be worse than ever. True, their own station could reach any part of the Earth with missiles before a war could get a full start. But if the Combine had its own station up there, war couldn't be prevented; striking at the danger on Earth would do no good if the Combine station could then send its missiles against the United States.
"Sure. Sure, I guess you're right," Thorndyke agreed slowly. But Jim could see he wasn't convinced. "Up here, one is company and two's
a crowd we couldn't permit. All the same, there's something there!"
Then he glanced at the clock and jumped up, catching a handhold to prevent overshooting. "Hey, it's almost time for departure, and you haven't picked up your passenger. I've got the kid strapped into a sleeping bag. I wouldn't mind his being up here, but I figure I'd better make his stay unpleasant enough that he won't try tricks again. Want to take over now?"
They moved through the crowded sphere again, putting on their suits. Jim could see that most of the work here was finished, and that the relay station was almost ready to operate. Dan Bailey saw his glances and read them correctly. "Almost done," he admitted, and there was more worry on his face. "Dunno what we do then. We were counting on working on the Moon ships, but... Oh, well, I suppose we can learn to live on Earth again, if we have to."
Thorndyke threw a warning glance at Dan, but Jim had heard enough to know that the men here had also given up hopes of any immediate trip to the Moon. And he remembered that he was in the same fix for the future. He was being carried on Major Electric's books under its contract to build ships for the trip to the Moon. If that were canceled . . .
They found Freddy Halpern then. The boy was a slightly built, thin-featured kid who looked two years younger than his age. He scowled at Thorndyke, and then spotted Jim. "You taking me back to Dad?" he asked.
Jim nodded. "That's orders."
"Good. I'm sick of being tied up here!" Then the boy grinned. "I showed them, though, didn't I? Dad wouldn't let me go, but I got here!"
"Yeah," Jim admitted. "You got here—and almost cost your father his command."
Yet he still couldn't dislike Freddy. The motherless boy had been brought to the main station, where he was surrounded by busy scientists and military men, too excited over their work to bother with a youngster. He'd been spoiled by a grandmother on Earth, but there wasn't anything mean about him. And while he often talked and acted younger than his age, Jim knew there was nothing wrong with his intelligence.
Mission to the Moon Page 2