The Trouble with Telstar Part 3

"Good, Paul," Doc Stone smiled thinly. "I've told you he's a good boy."

"Hm-m-m," said Cleary. "He says his tests can't prove what went wrong with the switching gate on the satellites, and in effect that the telemetry doesn't make it plain whether we have design or a.s.sembly trouble."

"Well, _well_!" said Fred Stone. I decided to start shopping for a marker for my grave.

"Yes," Cleary said. "He made quite a suggestion, that we send a man out in s.p.a.ce to look over the Telstars and find out what went wrong.

Even better, he says it might be possible to make a repair at the same time and get the bird working. You can see the advantages of doing that, the way they are orbiting."

"Yes, indeed," Doc Stone said, looking at me with slitted eyes. "Quite a unique adventure for some technician."

"Just what I was thinking," Cleary said. "The problem resolves into: Who do we send? Now Mike, here, says we should take a man from his lab who knows the bird and its a.s.sembly and teach him how to get around in a s.p.a.cesuit--that, he claims, would be quicker than taking one of these s.p.a.ce jockeys and making a technician out of him."

"I think he's right."

"So--there we are. Who do we send?"

"There can hardly be any choice," Dr. Stone said, looking at me with eyes like granite.

"Hardly," Cleary agreed. "The head of the lab is the best man, beyond a doubt."

They were talking about me! Try to get out of taking sides, would I?

Cleary wanted me back in the middle. Stone wanted me dead. They were both likely to get their way, unless I told them off.

I opened my mouth. Cleary cleared his throat loudly.

"Oh, Dr. Seaman!" Sylvia cut in, breaking her careful silence. "What a thrilling opportunity for you!"

I gaped at her. Well, Cleary had said it. She only went out with astronauts. She was s.p.a.ce-happy.

"There are men in the shop who deserve the chance...." I started.

"Nonsense!" she said quickly. "It's your idea, doctor, and you deserve the fame!"

"And the promotion this will undoubtedly earn--if you can bring it off," Cleary added.

"Yes!" Dr. Stone said with relish. He didn't think I could, either.

Well, that made three of us, unless Sylvia made four.

"Thank you very much," I started, as a prelude to backing out.

"Good, that's settled," Cleary said. "That's all, Sylvia."

She got up and left. She had done her dirty work. If I hadn't been so sick at my stomach, I would have had to admire really great teamwork.

Stone shook my hand with an evil kind of relish and followed her out.

That left Paul Cleary and me alone. "This is a great thing, young man," he said.

I couldn't stand him any longer. "You are a worm!" I told him.

"You're probably right, Mike," he agreed, without any particular heat.

"But a rather just one. I think you'll admit you've been paid off in your own coin. All you had to do was beg off."

"In front of her? You knew I wouldn't."

"I _figured_ you wouldn't. That's one of the advantages of being older. You know more about how the young will behave. Come on," he said, getting up to put on his coat again. "We have to see a man."

"One thing," I said, as I got up, "while we're being so just."

"Yes?"

"I had thought of asking your Sylvia for a date. But she was so snippy the other night I decided to forget it. Now, she got me into this, and she'll have to pay and pay! How do I get to her? It'll be quite a while before I'm an astronaut."

He took his pipe from between his teeth. "This calls for the wisdom of a Solomon," he decided. "But you might try oysters."

It was pretty good advice. I hung behind him long enough to tell Sylvia about the Chincoteague oysters they put in the stew at Grand Central Terminal, and got a dinner date. That was all, just the date, because Cleary was itching to take me to see a man.

Politics must be an awfully large part of business. The man we went to see was the government side of COMCORP, and I guess he had had to do as much explaining about Telstar failures to a Senate Committee as Paul Cleary had had to do to the Western. He wanted an out just as bad as Paul did.

There were a good many conferences before a sufficient number of people decided the cheapest way out was to send a man to fix the Telstars that had broken down. The question was whether it was possible.

We went at it from two directions. They got a team a.s.signed to figuring out if the Dyna-Soar rocket could be modified to make the three contacts around the orbit, carry two men and enough air and fuel for the job, and at COMCORP we appointed a crew to figure out what it meant to make the repair in orbit.

Cleary put me in charge of our crew. They gave me a full-size Telstar satellite for my lab, and I went to work.

Fancy electronic equipment consists of millions of parts, and Telstar is no exception. One of the bonuses America got from its poor rocket booster performance, as compared with the Russians, was a forced-draft course in miniaturization. Our engineers have learned how to make almost anything about one-tenth the size you'd think it ought to be, and still work. To get all these tiny parts into a total system, they are a.s.sembled in racks. In the Telstar each of these long skinny sticks of perforated magnesium alloy is hinged to the main framework so that it can be swung out for testing or for replacement of parts, which is why the engineers call each component a "gate."

I spent several weeks learning how to take each suspected component out of the gate. Most of the time I needed a screwdriver. Sometimes I had to drill out a soft aluminium rivet. The hard part was that some of the components were so deep inside, even with a couple gates swung out the way, that I needed all kinds of extension tools.

Of course, I had to visualize what it would be like doing all this out in s.p.a.ce. I'd be in a s.p.a.cesuit, wearing thick gloves, and when I removed a screw that would have looked good in a Swiss watch, there'd be no work bench on which to place it while I took out the next one.

Worse yet, I would have to put it back in.

The longer I worked with the parts, the harder it looked. There wouldn't be a prayer of just turning the parts loose in s.p.a.ce. In theory they'd follow along in orbit. In practice you can't bring your hand to a halt and release a tiny part without imparting a small proper motion to it. And even worse, you couldn't handle the little wretches when you tried to put them back in. With a solid floor to lie on, with gravity to give things a position orientation, I kept losing tiny screws. Magnets didn't help, because the screws were nonmagnetic for what seemed pretty good reasons. Some were made of dural for lightness. Some were silicon bronze. None of them was steel.

That put us back in the lab to find out what would happen if we used steel screws. The answer was, surprisingly, nothing important. So there was one solid achievement. I had a few thousand of each of the thirty-four different sizes of fasteners machined from steel, and magnetized a fly-tier's tweezers. The result was that I could get screws back into their holes without dropping them, especially when I put little pads of Alnico on the point of each tweezer to give me a really potent magnet. Then we had to cook up an offset screwdriver with a ratchet that would let me reach in about a yard and still run a number 0-80 machine screw up tight. That called for a kind of torque-limit clutch and other snivies.

It was the fanciest and most expensive screwdriver you ever saw. The handle was a good two feet long. The problem then became that of seeing what you were doing, and one of the boys faked up a kind of binocular jeweler's loupe with long focus, so that I could lie back a yard from the screw and focus on it with about ten diameters magnification. The trouble was that the long focal length gave a field of vision about six times the diameter of the screw-head, which meant that every time my heart beat my head moved enough to throw the field of vision off the work.

By that time I was working in a simulated s.p.a.cesuit--the actual number was still being made to fit an accurate plaster cast of my body. So the boys figured out a clamp that would hold my helmet firmly to the gate, and a chin rack inside the helmet against which I could press and hold my head steady enough to keep my binoculars focused where they had to be focused. At a certain point I went back to Paul Cleary and said I thought I could make the necessary tests, dismount what I had to dismount, and replace any affected part.

"All worked out, eh?" he said, reaching for his pipe.

"Not by a county mile, Mr. Cleary. But I know what the problems are, and the shop can figure out sensible answers. Some of the hardest parts turned out to be the easiest."