The Trouble with Telstar Part 8

"But then I won't be able to come after you if anything goes wrong,"

he pointed out. "No dice."

"You're grasping, Stein," I growled. "At this stage I'm in charge around here. I'll take my chances on getting back."

With the cabin light on I went as far as possible in dismounting both our tanks. After a couple rehearsals to make sure that at least one of us would always have a glove on a handhold, we both climbed out the hatch and I made the switch. Just as Sid suspected, we spilled a few drops. They vaporized, and again as we had feared, combined in what would have been an explosion in a confined s.p.a.ce. The soundless flash, dim but real, said we had released quite a little energy uniformly all around us. I never felt a thing except a faint warmth from infrared through my helmet.

Best of all, my jets worked. We both climbed back aboard _Nelly_, dogged the hatch, and started after Telstar Two.

The second bird was about fifteen thousand miles ahead of us. I slept most of the time, for after Sid gave us a jolt of added velocity, we had to settle down to about six hours of drifting. I woke up as the belt cut me when he fired the retros. We went through the radar and searchlight bit, and had the devil's own time finding our bird. But at last I got the flash of reflection and went to work.

I won't say the second job was any easier, except for the fact that I removed only one part to make room to do my bit with the insulation, and thus had very few screws to replace. My navigating in s.p.a.ce was a lot better, and I didn't use steering fuel as wastefully as the first time. Still, when we dogged down to chase after the final bird, the cabin gauge said that I had less than half my load of steering fuel left. Equally glum, _Nelly_ herself was even lower on steering fuel.

Neither Sid nor I had been as expert as we were supposed to be.

Nevertheless, we took off after the third bird, and found it glistening in bright sunlight without the help of the searchlight. I thought that was a good omen. But from there on nothing seemed to work right.

We had been aloft about thirty-six hours, and fatigue was setting in.

I was clumsy on the steering and had quite a time making contact.

The repair went according to Hoyle, but after I had put the spin back on the bird I found that I had no more steering fuel. I hung about ten or fifteen feet from Telstar Three and maybe eighty feet from _Nelly_, drifting slowly from both.

"Sid!"

"Roger, Mike."

"This one will have to make it with the girdle on."

"Can't you get it off?"

"I can't get back to it. Steering fuel gone."

"Oh, no!"

"No sweat, Sid. It occludes a small share of the solar generators, but not enough to hurt anything."

"That's not what I meant," he said quietly into my ear. "_Nelly's_ out of steering fuel, too. I can't pick you up!"

I gulped on that one.

"Canaveral Control!" I heard him call.

"Cut that out," I said. "They can't help. Shut up and let me think."

But he didn't, and I couldn't. I had no fuel with which to move. Sid had only the retros and stern rockets, no good for swinging or turning. I was out of touching range of the bird, and couldn't shove against it to build up a little drift. Just as Sylvia said, it's not like swimming back to sh.o.r.e.

There was a lot of excited chatter in my earphones, in which I did not partic.i.p.ate. n.o.body made any sense, and Sid shut the thing down.

"Mike!"

"Yeah." Disgusted.

"Whatever you dope out, make it quick. You don't have all the air in the world." Sid warned me.

"How much?"

"Ten minutes or so."

"All right," I said. "It ought to be enough. Keep your eye on me. You may have to reach out an arm or leg for me to grab as I go by."

"How are you going to move?"

"I've got a lifesaver," I said.

I writhed and squirmed and made every use of the law of conservation of angular momentum until I had my back to _Nelly_. Then I wound up and threw my fancy screwdriver as hard as I could heave it away from me. I didn't get the zip on it I would have liked, but because it was sort of like a throwing stick, I got a little more on it than you might expect, maybe fifty or sixty feet a second. And the thing weighed about four pounds, with its fancy ratchet and torque clutch.

Since in my suit I weighed just about a hundred times as much, I started toward _Nelly_ at just one-one-hundredth of the velocity I had imparted to the screwdriver. In a couple minutes I was drifting pretty close, but tumbling. I had forgotten that part.

Throwing the screwdriver had given my body the correct vector and some velocity, but I had set up quite a tumbling moment, since I had thrown from the shoulder and not from my center of gravity.

I chucked a couple lighter tools away to correct my drift, and Sid snagged me as I drifted by the hatch.

"Come to Papa," he said, and drew me inside. We didn't horse around congratulating ourselves. My air tanks were no longer hissing, and we made a quick swap.

Sid let me dog down the hatch while he figured position. He used the iron compa.s.s method, just taking a close look at Earth, which was more or less dead ahead of us. That was a good place for it, because we had no steering fuel.

The re-entry was a mess, from Sid's point of view. We came in at a weird angle and heated up to beat h.e.l.l before there was enough atmosphere for our rudder to swing us around straight. He bounced us off twice after that as we slowed down, but the creak of heating metal was all about us each time we dropped in. He cussed me plenty all the way.

The trick, of course, was to slow down to the point where he could spiral us down to Muroc Dry Lake. _Nelly_ was a sort of glider. Her performance at about Mach 10 and two hundred thousand feet was quite respectable, but the lower and slower we went, the more she flew like the proverbial kitchen sink. Sid only had one bright spot: Our big fuel supply gave him plenty of rocket and retro when he wanted it, and allowed him to get us back over Muroc.

I can't say he made the landing look easy, because he didn't. It looked like plain h.e.l.l to me, for we scorched in at something over four hundred miles an hour.

When _Nelly_ screeched to a stop, we just sat there. There was none of this romantic business about snapping open face plates and exchanging witty remarks. Bubble helmets don't have face plates, and besides, I didn't have anything I wanted to say to Sid. I was as tired of him as he was of me. I was just plain tired, if you want to know the truth.

They didn't let us alone, of course. While the crash trucks were still kicking up a dust trail tearing out to get us, there were guys on the radio with those cool voices, and Sid was tiredly saying "Roger," to all their questions. And we didn't do any moving about. You'd be surprised how weighing four hundred pounds makes you willing to wait for the crane to lift you from your seat. All at once I almost wanted to be back in s.p.a.ce again, where I didn't weigh anything at all.

Almost.

They flew us back to Canaveral for the de-briefing, both asleep. The whole mob was there to greet us, Paul Cleary, Fred Stone, and even Sylvia. They met us at the plane and Sylvia was the first to grab me as I came down the steps.

"Mike!" she squealed. "Are you all right?"

"Better now," I said, kind of untangling from her. "How did you manage this?" I looked up. "Hi, Paul," I said to his sleepy old grin, and knew how.

"Dinner tonight?" she insisted.

"I don't know," I said, looking over at Paul. "I think there's a de-briefing or something before they turn me loose."