Space Tug Part 12

The odds were worse than that. The ship couldn't land because its momentum was too great for the landing rockets to cancel out. If it had weighed five tons instead of twenty, landing might have been possible.

Haney was saying that if the ship were to be lowered into air while rushing irresistibly sternward despite its rockets, that the rocket flames might be splashed out by the wind. Instead of streaking astern in a lance-like shape, they might be pushed out like a rocket blast when it hits the earth in a guided missile take-off. Such a blast spreads out flat in all directions. Here the rocket flames might be spread by wind until they played upon the hull of the ship. If they did, they might melt it as they melted their own steel cases in firing. And three-fourths or more of the hull might be torn loose from the cabin bow section. So much was unlikely, but it was possible.

The impossible odds were that the four could survive even if the cabin were detached. They were decelerating at three gravities now. If part of the ship burned or melted or was torn away, the rocket thrust might speed the cabin up to almost any figure. And there is a limit to the number of gravities a man can take, even in an acceleration chair.

Nevertheless, that was what Haney proposed. They were due to be killed anyhow. Joe tried it.

He dived into atmosphere. At 60 miles alt.i.tude a thin wailing seemed to develop without reason. At 40 miles, the ship had lost more than two miles per second of its speed since the landing-rockets were ignited, and there was a shuddering in all its fabric--though because of the loss of speed it was not as bad as the atmosphere-graze. At 30 it began to shake and tremble. At 25 miles high there was as horrible a vibration and as deadly a deceleration as at the air-graze. At 12 miles above the surface of the Earth the hull temperature indicators showed the hind part of the hull at red heat. The ship happened to be traveling backward at several times the speed of sound, and air could not move away from before it. It was compressed to white heat at the entering surface, and the metal plating went to bright red heat at that point. But the hull just aft of the rocket mouths was hotter still. There the splashing rocket flames bathed it in intolerable incandescence. Hull plates, braces and beams glared white----

The tip of the tail caved in. The ship's empty cargo s.p.a.ce was instantly filled with air at intolerable pressure and heat.

The hull exploded outward where the rocket flames played. There was a monstrous, incredible jerking of the cabin that remained. That fraction of the ship received the full force of the rocket thrust. They could decelerate it at a rate of fifteen gravities or more.

They did.

Joe lost consciousness as instantly and as peacefully as if he had been hit on the jaw.

An unknown but brief time later, he found himself listening with a peculiar astonishment. The rockets had burned out. They had lasted only seconds after the separation of the ship into two fragments. Radars on the ground are authority for this. Those few seconds were extremely important. The cabin lost an additional half-mile per second of velocity, which was enough to make the difference between the cabin heating up too, and the cabin being not quite destroyed.

The cabin remnant was heavy, of course, but it was an irregular object, some twenty feet across. It was below orbital velocity, and wind-resistance slowed it. Even so, it traveled 47 miles to the east in falling the last 10 miles to Earth. It hit a hillside and dug itself a 70-foot crater in the ground.

But there was n.o.body in it, then. A little over a month before, it had seemed to Joe that ejection seats were the most useless of all possible pieces of equipment to have in a s.p.a.ce ship. He'd been as much mistaken as anybody could be. With an ejection seat, a jet pilot can be shot out of a plane traveling over Mach one, and live to tell about it. This crumpling cabin fell fast, but Joe stuffed Mike in an ejection seat and shot him out. He and the Chief dragged Haney to a seat, and then the Chief shoved Joe off--and the four of them, one by one, were flung out into a screaming stream of air. But the ribbon-parachutes did not burst.

They nearly broke the necks of their pa.s.sengers, but they let them down almost gently.

And it was quite preposterous, but all four landed intact. Mike, being lightest and first to be ejected, came down by himself in a fury because he'd been treated with special favor. The Chief and Joe landed almost together. After a long time, Joe staggered out of his s.p.a.ce suit and harness and tried to help the Chief, and they held each other up as they stumbled off together in search of Haney.

When they found him he was sleeping heavily, exhausted, in a canebrake.

He hadn't even bothered to disengage his parachute harness or take off his suit.

6

A good deal of that landing remained confused in Joe's mind. While it was going on he was much too busy to be absorbing impressions. When he landed, he was as completely exhausted as anybody wants to be. It was only during the next day that he even tried to sort out his recollections.

Then he woke up suddenly, with a m.u.f.fled roaring going on all about him.

He blinked his eyes open and listened. Presently he realized what the noise was, and wondered that he hadn't realized before. It was the roaring of the motors of a multi-engined plane. He knew, without remembering the details at the moment, that he and the other three were on a plane bound across the Pacific for America. He was in a bunk--and he felt extraordinarily heavy. He tried to move, and it was an enormous effort to move his arm. He struggled to turn over, and found straps holding his body down.

He fumbled at them. They had readily releasable clasps, and he loosened them easily. After a bit he struggled to sit upright. He was horribly heavy or horribly weak. He couldn't tell which. And each separate muscle in his whole body ached. Twinges of pain accompanied every movement. He sat up, swaying a little with the slow movements of the plane, and gradually, things came back.

The landing in the ribbon-chute. They'd come down somewhere on the west coast of India, not too far from the sea. He remembered crashing into the edge of a thin jungle and finding the Chief, and the two of them searching out Haney and stumbling to open ground. After laying out a signal for air searchers, they went off into worn-out slumber while they waited.

He remembered that there'd been a patrol of American destroyers in the Arabian Sea, as everywhere under the orbit of the Platform. Their radar had reported the destruction of one s.p.a.ce ship and the frantic diving of the other, its division into two parts, and then the tiny objects, which flew out from the smaller cabin section, which had descended as only ejection-seat parachutes could possibly have done. Two destroyers steamed onward underneath those drifting specks, to pick them up when they should come down. But the other nearby destroyers had other business in hand.

The two trailing destroyers reached Goa harbor within hours of the landing of the four from s.p.a.ce. A helicopter found the first three of them within hours after that. They were twenty miles inland and thirty south from Goa. Mike wasn't located until the next day. He'd been shot out of the ship's cabin earlier and higher; he was lighter, and he'd floated farther.

But things--satisfying things--had happened in the interval. Sitting almost dizzily on the bunk in the swiftly roaring plane while blood began sluggishly to flow through his body, Joe remembered the gleeful, unofficial news pa.s.sed around on the destroyers. They waited for Mike to be brought in. But they rejoiced vengefully.

The report was quite true, but it never reached the newspapers. n.o.body would ever admit it, but the rockets aimed at the returning s.p.a.ce ships had been spotted by Navy radar as they went up from the Arabian Sea. And the ships of the radar patrol couldn't do anything about the rockets, but they could and did converge savagely upon the places from which they had been launched. Planes sped out to spot and bomb. Destroyers arrived.

Somewhere there was a navy department that could write off two modern submarines with rocket-launching equipment, last heard from west of India. American naval men would profess bland ignorance of any such event, but there were acres of dead fish floating on the ocean where depth-bombs had hunted down and killed two shapes much too big to be fish, which didn't float when they were killed and which would never report back how they'd destroyed two s.p.a.ce ships. There'd be seagulls feasting over that area, and there'd be vague tales about the happening in the bazaars of Hadhramaut. But n.o.body would ever admit knowing anything for certain.

But Joe knew. He got to his feet, wobbling a little bit in the soaring plane. He ached everywhere. His muscles protested the strain of holding him erect. He held fast, summoning strength. Before his little ship broke up he'd been shaken intolerably, and his body had weighed half a ton. Where his safety-belt had held him, his body was one wide bruise.

There'd been that killing acceleration when the ship split in two. The others--except Mike--were in as bad a case or worse. Haney and the Chief were like men who'd been rolled down Mount Everest in a barrel. All of them had slept for fourteen hours straight before they even woke up for food. Even now, Joe didn't remember boarding this plane or getting into the bunk. He'd probably been carried in.

Joe stood up, doggedly, until enough strength came to him to justify his sitting down again. He began to dress. It was astonishing how many places about his body were sore to the touch. It was startling how heavy his arms and legs felt, and how much of an effort even sitting erect was. But he began to remember Mike's adventure, and managed to grin feebly. It was the only thing worth a smile in all the things that had happened.

Because Mike's landing had been quite unlike the others. Joe and the Chief landed near the edge of a jungle. Haney landed in a canebrake. But Mike came floating down from the sky, swaying splendidly, into the estate of a minor G.o.dling.

He was relatively unharmed by the shaking-up he'd had. The strength of muscles depends on their cross-section, but their weight depends on their volume. The strength of a man depends on the square of his size, but his weight on the cube. So Mike had taken the deceleration and the murderous vibration almost in his stride. He floated longer and landed more gently than the rest.

Joe grinned painfully at the memory of Mike's tale. He'd come on board the rescue destroyer in a towering, explosive rage. When his ribbon-parachute let him down out of the sky, it deposited him gently on ploughed fields not far from a small and primitive Hindu village. He'd been seen to descend from the heavens. He was a midget--not as other men--and he was dressed in a s.p.a.ce suit with glittering metal harness.

The pagan villagers greeted him with rapture.

When the searching-party found Mike, they were just in time to prevent a ma.s.sacre--by Mike. Adoring natives had seized upon him, conveyed him in high state to a red mud temple, seemingly tried to suffocate him with evidences of their pride and joy at his arrival, and dark-skinned maidens were trying hopefully to win his approval of their dancing. But the rescue-party found him with a club in his hand and blood in his eye, setting out furiously to change the tone of his reception.

Joe still didn't know all the details, but he tried to concentrate on what he did know as he put his uniform on again. He didn't want to think how little it meant, now. The silver s.p.a.ce ship badge didn't mean a thing, any more. There weren't any more s.p.a.ce ships. The Platform wasn't a ship, but a satellite. There'd never been but two ships. Both had ceased to exist.

Joe walked painfully forward in the huge, roaring plane. The motors made a constant, humming thunder in his ears. It was not easy to walk. He held on to handholds as he moved. But he progressed past the bunk s.p.a.ce.

And there was Mike, sitting at a table and stuffing himself with good honest food. There was a gla.s.s port beside him, and Joe caught a glimpse of illimitable distances filled with cloud and sky and sea.

Mike nodded. He didn't offer to help Joe walk. That wouldn't have been practical. He waited until Joe sank into a seat opposite.

"Good sleep?" asked Mike.

"I guess so," said Joe. He added ruefully, "It hurts to nod, and I think it would hurt worse to shake my head. What's the matter with me, Mike? I didn't get banged up in the landing!"

"You got banged up before you landed," said Mike. "Worse than that, you spent better than six weeks out of gravity, where in an average day you took less actual exercise than a guy in bed with two broken legs!"

Joe eased himself back into his chair. He felt about 600 years old.

Somebody poked a head into view and withdrew it. Joe lifted his arm and regarded it.

"Weighty! I guess you're right, Mike."

"I know I'm right!" said Mike. "If you spent six weeks in bed you'd expect to feel wobbly when you tried to walk. Up on the Platform you didn't even use energy to stand up! We didn't realize it, but we were living like invalids! We'll get our strength back, but next time we'll take measures. Huh! Take a trip to Mars in free fall, and by the time a guy got there his muscles'd be so flabby he couldn't stand up in half-gravity! Something's got to be done about that, Joe!"

Joe said sombrely, "Something's got to be done about s.p.a.ce ships before that comes up again!"

Somebody appeared with a tray. There was food on it. Smoking hot food.

Joe looked at it and knew that his appet.i.te, anyhow, was back to Earth normal.

"Thanks!" he mumbled appreciatively, and attacked the food.

Mike drank his coffee. Then he said, "Joe, do you know anything about powder metallurgy?"

Joe shrugged. It hurt. "Powder metallurgy? Yes, I've seen it used, at my father's plant. They've made small precision parts with it. Why?"