Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet Part 27

He swiveled his head quickly, searching for Santos, and saw the Filipino a dozen rods away, still holding fast to his tube.

From the far horizon of the asteroid the incandescent fire of the nuclear blast stretched into s.p.a.ce, turning from silver to orange to red as it cooled.

Rip knew they had escaped the heat and blast of the explosion, but there was a question of how much of the prompt radiation they had absorbed.

During the first few seconds, a nuclear blast vomited gamma radiation and neutrons in all directions. He and Santos certainly had gotten plenty. But how much? Putting their dosimeters into a measuring meter aboard a cruiser would tell them. His low-level colorimeter had long since reached maximum red, and his high-level dosimeter could be read only on a measuring device.

Meanwhile, he had other worries. Radiation had no immediate effect. At worst, it would be a few hours before he felt any symptoms.

As he sized up his position and that of the asteroid, he let out a yell of triumph. His gamble would succeed! He had estimated that going into the direct gravity pull of the sun at the proper moment, and lighting off their last tubes, would put them into a landing position. The asteroid was swerving rapidly, moving into a new orbit that would intersect the course he and Santos were on. He had planned on the asteroid's change of orbit.

In a minute at most they would be back on the rock.

His propulsion tube flared out and he released it. It would travel along with him, but his hands would be free. He watched closely as the asteroid drew nearer and estimated they would land with plenty of room to spare.

Then he saw something else. The blast had started the asteroid turning!

He reacted instantly. Turning up his communicator he yelled, "Koa! The rock is spinning! Cut the prisoners loose, grab the equipment, and run for it! You'll have to keep running to stay in the shadow. If sunlight hits those fuel tanks or the tubes of rocket fuel, they'll explode!"

Koa replied tersely, "Got it. We're moving."

The Planeteers and their prisoners would have to move fast, running to stay out of direct sunlight. A moment or two in the sun wouldn't hurt the men, but the chemical fuels in the cutting tanks and rocket tubes would explode in a matter of seconds.

At least the Connie cruiser couldn't harm them now, Rip thought grimly. He looked for the cruiser and failed to find it for several seconds. It had moved. He finally saw its exhausts some distance away.

He forgot his own predicament in a grin. The Connie cruiser had moved, but not because its commander had wanted to. It had been right in the path of the nuclear blast, although some distance from it. The Connie had been literally shoved away.

Then Rip forgot the cruiser. His suit ventilator was whining under the terrific heat and his whole body was bathed in perspiration. The sun was getting them. It was only a short time until the ventilator overloaded and burned out. They had to reach the asteroid before then. The trouble was, there was nothing further he could do about it. He had only air bottles left, and their blast was so weak that the effect wouldn't speed him up much. Nevertheless, he called to Santos and directed him to use his bottles. Then he did the same.

Santos spoke up. "Sir, we're going to make it."

In the same instant, Rip saw that they would land on the dark side. The asteroid was turning over and over, and for a second he had the impression he was looking at a turning globe of the earth, the kind used in elementary school back home. But this gray planet was scarcely bigger than the giant globe at the entrance of the s.p.a.ce Council building on Terra.

The gray metal world suddenly leaped into sharp focus and seemed to rush toward him. It was an optical illusion. The ability of the eyes to perceive depth sharply-the faculty known as depth perception-didn't appear to operate normally until the eyes were within a certain distance of an object.

He knew he was going to hit hard. The way to keep from being hurt was to turn the vertical energy of his arrival into motion in another direction.

As he swept down to the metal surface he started running, his legs pumping wildly in s.p.a.ce. He hit with a bone-jarring thud, lost his footing and fell sideways, both hands cradling his helmet. He got to his feet instantly and looked for Santos. A good thing his equipment was shock-mounted, he thought. Otherwise the communicator would be knocked for a line of galaxies.

"You all right, sir?" Santos called anxiously.

"Yes. Are you?"

"I'm fine. I think the others are over there." He pointed.

"We'll find them," Rip said. His hip hurt like fury from smashing against the unyielding metal, and the worst part was that he couldn't rub it. The blow had been strong enough to hurt through the heavy fabric and air pressure, but his hand wasn't strong enough to compress the suit. Just the same, he tried.

And while he was trying, he found himself in direct sunlight!

He had forgotten to run. Standing still on the asteroid meant turning with it, from darkness into sunlight and back again. He yelled at Santos and legged it out of there, moving in long, gliding steps. He regained the shadow and kept going.

The first order of business was to stop the rock from turning. Otherwise they couldn't live on it.

Rip knew that they had only one means of stopping the spin. That was to use the tubes of rocket fuel left over from correcting the course. They had three tubes left, but he didn't know if that was enough to do the job.

Moving rapidly, he and Santos caught up to Koa and the Planeteers.

The Connie prisoners were pretty well bunched up, gliding along like a herd of fantastic sheep. Their shepherds were Pederson, Nunez, and Dowst.

The three Planeteers had a pistol in each hand. The spares were probably those taken from prisoners.

The Planeteers were loaded down with equipment. A few Connie prisoners carried equipment, too.

Trudeau had the rocket launcher and the remaining rockets. Kemp had his torch and two tanks of oxygen. Bradshaw had tied his safety line to the squat containers of chemical fuel for the torch and was towing them behind like strange balloons. The only trouble with that system, Rip thought, was that Bradshaw could stop, but the containers would have a tendency to keep going. Unless the English Planeteer were skillful, his burdens would drag him right off his feet.

Dominico had a tube of rocket fuel under each arm. The Italian was small and the tubes were bulky. Each was about ten feet long and two feet in diameter. With any gravity or air resistance at all, the Italian couldn't have carried even one.

Rip smiled as Dominico glided along. He looked as though the tubes were floating him over the asteroid, instead of the other way around.

Santos took the radiation detection instruments and the case with the astrogation equipment from Koa. Rip greeted his men briefly, then took his computing board and began figuring. He knew the men were glad he and Santos had made it. But they kept their greetings short. A spinning asteroid was no place for long and sentimental speeches.

He remembered the dimensions of the asteroid and its ma.s.s. He computed its inertia, then figured out what it would take to overcome the inertia of the spin.

The mathematics would have been simple under normal conditions, but doing them on the run, trying to watch his step at the same time, made things a little complicated. He had to hold the board under his arm, run alongside Santos while the new sergeant held the case open, select the book he wanted, open it and try to read the tables by his belt light and then transfer the data to the board.

His ventilator had quieted down once he got into the darkness, but now it started whining slightly again because he was sweating profusely. Finally he figured out the thrust needed to stop the spin. Now all he had to do was compute how much fuel it would take.

He had figures on the amount of thrust given by the kind of rocket fuel in the tubes. He also knew how much fuel each tube contained. But the figures were not in his head. They were on reference sheets.

He collected the data on the fly, slowing down now and then to read something, until a yell from Santos or Koa warned that the sun line was creeping close. When he had all data noted on the board, he started his mathematics. He was right in the middle of a laborious equation when he stumbled over a thorium crystal. He went headlong, shooting like a rocket three feet above the ground. His board flew away at a tangent. His stylus sped out of his glove like a miniature projectile, and the slide rule clanged against his bubble.

It happened so fast neither Koa nor Santos had time to grab him. The action had given him extra speed and he saw with horror that he was going to crash into Trudeau. He yelled, "Frenchy! Watch out!" Then put both hands before him to protect his helmet. His hands caught the French Planeteer between the shoulders with a bone-jarring thud.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - THE ARCHER AND THE EAGLE

Trudeau held tight to the launcher, but the rocket racks opened and spilled attack rockets into s.p.a.ce. They flew in a dozen different directions. Trudeau gave vent to his feelings in colorful French.

Koa and Santos laughed so hard they had trouble collecting the scattered equipment. Rip, slowed by his crash with Trudeau, got his feet under him again.

The asteroid had turned into the sun before they collected everything but Rip's stylus and five attack rockets. The s.p.a.ce-pencil was the only thing that could write on the computing board. It had to be found.

"Next time around," Rip called to the others, and led the way full speed ahead until they regained the safety of shadow.

Rip suspected the stylus was somewhere above the rock and probably wouldn't return to the surface for some minutes. While he was wondering what to do, there was a chorus of yells. A rocket sped between the Planeteers and shot off into s.p.a.ce.

"Our own rockets are after us," Trudeau gasped. There hadn't been time to collect them all after Rip's unwilling attack on the Frenchman scattered them. Now the sun was setting them off. Another flashed past, fortunately over their heads. The sun's heat was causing them to fire unevenly. Rip hoped they would all go off soon and get it over with.