The Trouble with Telstar Part 4

"Name any three," he suggested.

"Well, the screws. As I take them out, I'll discard them into s.p.a.ce. I have to use magnetic screws on rea.s.sembly, so there is no point saving what I take out. Doug Folley has doped out something like a motorman's change-dispenser that will dispense one screw at a time into my tweezers, and I'll carry a supply of all thirty-four kinds at my waist."

"That's one," he counted on a hairy forefinger.

"We can use something like a double-faced pressure-sensitive tape to hold other parts," I said. "We'll draw a diagram on it, stick it to some unopened part of the satellite near where I'm working, and as I pull pieces out, I'll just press them against the other sticky face, in the correct place in the diagram, and they'll be there to pull loose when I want them."

"At absolute zero?" he scoffed. "That sticky face will be hard as gla.s.s."

"We'll face the bird around to the sun," I said. "And warm it up. If we have to, we'll put wiring in the tape, connect it to Telstar's battery supply, and keep it warm."

"Might work," he grumped. "That's two. How about the s.p.a.cesuit part?"

That had been tougher. Some forty or fifty men had made the ride into s.p.a.ce and back from Cape Canaveral by this time, and there had been rendezvous in s.p.a.ce in preparation for flights to the moon. But so far no one had done any free maneuvering in s.p.a.ce in a suit.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

They had put me in a swimming pool in a concentrated salt solution that gave me just zero buoyancy, and I had practiced a kind of skin-diving in a s.p.a.cesuit. The problem was one of mobility, and the one thing we could not reproduce, of course, was frictionless motion.

No matter how I moved, the viscosity of the solution quickly slowed me down. Out in s.p.a.ce I'd have to learn on the first try how to get around where every force imparted a motion that would continue indefinitely until an equal and opposite force had been applied.

The force part had been worked out in theory long before. To my s.p.a.cesuit they had fixed two tiny rockets. One aimed out from the small of my back, the other straight out from my belly. Two pressurized containers contained hydrazine and nitric acid, which could be released in tiny streams into peanut rocket chambers by a single valve-release. They were self-igniting, and spurted out a needle-fine jet of fire that imparted a few dynes of force as long as the valve was held open. It only had two positions--full open, or closed, so that navigation would consist of triggering the valve briefly open until a little push had been imparted, and drifting until you triggered the opposite rocket for braking.

The airtanks on my back were right off a scuba outfit.

Really, they spent more time on the gloves than anything else. At first we thought of the problem as a heat problem, but it was tougher than that. Heat loss was not much, out there in a vacuum, and they made arrangements to warm the handles of my tools so that I wouldn't bleed heat through my gloves to them and thus freeze my fingers. No, the problem was to get a glove that stood up to a pressure difference of three or four pounds per square inch and could still be flexed with any accuracy by my fingers. We could make a glove that was pretty thin, but it stiffened out under pressure and made delicate work really tough. It was a lot like trying to do brain surgery in mittens.

They eventually gave me a porous glove that leaked air when you flexed your fingers. Air, they said, could always be gotten from the Dyna-Soar rocket that would be hanging close at hand in s.p.a.ce. Well, we hoped it would work. I could do pretty fair work with the leaky gloves, and all we could hope was that the vapor would be dry enough as it seeped out through the gloves to prevent formation of a foggy cloud all around me, or the formation of frost on the gloves. That we could not test under any conditions easy to simulate.

Each team spent ninety days. They tell me that's right quick work for pointing up a launch. But at the end of three months I had a.s.sembled enough stuff to do the job, and still well within the weight limit they had to set. I wasn't a walking machine shop, but there was a lot I could do if I had to.

Ninety days had been enough for several dates with Sylvia. Out of the office she wasn't quite the protective harpy about Paul Cleary that she had been in the office, although the thought was never far from her mind.

We spent my final night in New York before leaving for the Cape at Sweets, a real old fas.h.i.+oned seafood house down on Fulton street.

After the obligatory oysters, we had broiled bluefish, and otherwise lived it up. They serve a good piece of apple pie, and we had that with our coffee.

"Are you scared?" Sylvia asked me.

"Of what?" I lied innocently.

"Of being out in s.p.a.ce--just floating around?"

"Yes," I told her honestly. "I'm scared to death. What if I have a queasy stomach? They say a good half of the men who have been in orbit have chucked up or gotten dizzy or something. What if they go to all this trouble and I get s.p.a.cesick?"

"What if you drift away and can't get back?" she said. "It isn't like swimming back to sh.o.r.e."

"There's always a way," I said, my stomach tightening as I thought of what she said.

That was the night she kissed me good night. It wasn't much of a kiss, because we were standing in the lobby of her apartment house, and she wasn't going to invite me up, because she never did. But she said: "Hurry back."

"Just you know it, Shouff," I said, bitter inside.

I'd have been a lot more bitter if I had known what was in store for me at the Cape. COMCORP flew me down in one of our private prop-jets, with only Paul Cleary for company. He introduced me to the bra.s.s, and we sat through a couple conferences while the idea was spelled out to a group of sure-enough s.p.a.cemen. Then they turned that mob loose on me.

I was emotionally unprepared. First off, Cleary and Fred had been building me up all through the three months, and I had actually gotten to the point where I thought I knew what I was doing. These s.p.a.ce-jockeys spent most of their time deflating my ego.

My tormentor-in-chief was a wise punk from Brooklyn named Sid Stein.

"How have you made out in your centrifuge tests?" he asked me at breakfast the first morning after I had reached the Cape.

"I have never done any of that stuff, Mr. Stein," I said.

"Well, how many gees can you pull?"

I shrugged. "Same as you, I suppose. How many is that?"

"Brot_her_!"

The s.p.a.ce medic wasn't any better. The mission chief insisted that it wasn't safe to put anybody in a satellite who couldn't pa.s.s the physical. I guess you know that about one man in a thousand can qualify. This was supposed to wash me out.

"Remarkable shape." The s.p.a.ce medic kept saying. "You must take considerable exercise, doctor."

"Oh, no," I said. "Just jog a mile or so before breakfast. Nothing spectacular."

"No other formal activity?"

"Well," I snarled, "just swimming, fencing and weight lifting. I've given up the boxing and handball."

"Kept in excellent shape, nevertheless," he said. "You'll be a disappointment to them."

"Look," Stein said to me after a week of tests and countertests.

"Don't be deceived by these tests. All they show is that your heart is still beating. The big thing is emotional. Doc, I think you should reconsider this idea of flopping around out there in the void. We've got experienced men here, and none of them is ready to try it."

"Fools rush in, eh, Mr. Stein."

"Precisely."

In the meantime I got a daily phone call from Paul Cleary. That I could have snarled off, but Sylvia always came on the line first, and there was a minute or so of chit-chat before she cut her boss in on the line. I'm sure she listened to all the calls. But her first words were deadly. For example:

"Mike! Hi, Mike. Mr. Cleary wants to see how you're doing."

"Good. Put him on."

"In a minute. I think it's so wonderful you pa.s.sed the final physical, Mike. You're really so deceptive. I never had imagined you had such a steely physique."

"Clean living," I said. "No girls."

"There'd better not be!"