The Scarlet Lake Mystery Part 27

Consciousness began to slip from him, and he fought against it. He had to remain alive! He was going to!

For a brief moment he succeeded, then the grayness moved in like an all-encompa.s.sing curtain.

Pegasus climbed into the blue sky, arrow-straight, still accelerating.

The seconds ticked away. For an instant, the accelerometer hovered at twelve G, and slipped toward thirteen.

Rick was five feet, ten inches tall, and his weight was a constant hundred and sixty pounds. The rocket reached maximum acceleration, 12.6g, and for that instant Rick weighed 2,016 pounds--slightly over one ton!

Then . . . all burnt, fuel exhausted, the first-stage motor stopped.

The explosive bolts went into action. There was an explosion that made itself felt in the skin of the rocket, and the grinding of metal as the first stage detached.

Rick's battered brains swam back to consciousness. For an instant he couldn't recall what had happened, then he realized he had survived the first-stage acceleration. He was in bad shape, he knew. The salt taste in his mouth was blood, and he was breathing bubbles of blood through internal damage in his nose or lungs. But there wasn't time for inventory. The aching silence was lost as the second stage fired.

Acceleration built again. This time Rick slipped into the enveloping grayness almost at once. The acceleration was less, and the time of burning was less. Had he not been put through the torture of first-stage acceleration he could have taken the second stage without more than great discomfort. But now he had little resistance left.

He came back to consciousness again as the second stage cut off. In the welcome silence he found time to be thankful he was still alive, even though it might be a temporary thing. He looked up at Prince Machiavelli through bloodshot eyes and couldn't see the little monk. For a terrible instant he thought he was blind, then he saw a glimmer of light through the port. It was the sun. The rocket was in the wrong position to catch it directly, however, and the atmosphere was far too thin to scatter light.

He heard the second stage explode off and tried to brace himself for the final acceleration. He made himself think. He was in a spot, a very bad spot. The Earthman had sabotaged the flight. But how? The first two stages had worked. Even if the third-stage motor never fired, the rocket was high enough to prove out the project objective.

There was only one answer. Even to his fogged brain it was clear that the drone control had been sabotaged by the Earthman. Otherwise cutting the signal wire would have kept the board from showing green. Somehow, the signal wire had been bypa.s.sed, to keep the operators from knowing the drone control was inoperative.

The final stage fired and acceleration began once more. Rick fought it.

He tried to ignore the pain of the crushing, distorting weight and tried to keep his mind on the problem. He failed.

Pegasus was no longer traveling straight out from earth now. The gimbaled rocket motor swung slightly to one side and the rocket's trajectory flattened. As it swung on the new course, sunlight glanced in through the open port and into Rick's open, sightless eyes.

It was raw sunlight, unfiltered by the atmosphere. It was sunlight no human had ever seen before. Even in his semiconscious state Rick realized the danger and managed to shut his eyes. The sunlight seemed to burn through the lids, to scorch the insides of his head. Then the rocket moved along its new trajectory slightly and the merciless beam shifted, blazed on the sketch of a knight in armor impaling Pegasus with his lance.

Rick realized dimly that the terrible light was gone. He opened his eyes and saw the s.p.a.cemonk. It was as though someone had drawn layer after layer of gauze between the boy and the marmoset, but he understood that Prince Machiavelli was still alive, and in far better shape than he was.

The vibrating, paralyzing scream of the rocket suddenly cut off. Silence flooded in.

End of burning for stage three!

Pegasus had altered course slightly, in response to its pre-set mechanisms. Now it was on a course that would take it to the maximum point into s.p.a.ce, but at the same time would keep it over Scarlet Lake.

For a few minutes more it would coast on its momentum, slowing constantly until it reached maximum alt.i.tude. Then, briefly, it would hesitate.

Momentum used up, earth's gravity would again a.s.sume control. The rocket would slip back, tail first, slowly, slowly, then faster and faster, beginning the long, final plunge to the ground.

CHAPTER XVIII

Out of Control!

Rick came back to painful consciousness. He realized that the acceleration was at an end. The torture of G forces was over, and whatever happened from here on wouldn't compare with the past few minutes.

He tried to sit up, and strained muscles reacted. He groaned with pain and lay down again. Suddenly he realized he was no longer on the floor!

He hung in the air, as though by some weird magic, and tried to figure out what had happened to him. Of course he was weightless! The rocket was now in free flight, its inertia counteracting gravitational pull. He would continue weightless until gravity took over again.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Rick hung in the air, as though suspended by some weird magic_]

It was comfortable, after the racking acceleration. He could have gone to sleep easily, and almost did. Then the s.p.a.cemonk chirruped at him uneasily. The marmoset was feeling the odd weightlessness, too.

The chirrup brought Rick back to his senses. He wasn't in some marvelous bed, he was in s.p.a.ce! But natural forces still bound him to earth, and mother earth would reclaim him with crushing, final impact within a very few minutes.

He tasted blood. The Earthman had done this! His death would be on the Earthman's head. He knew the drone control couldn't function, but he didn't know why. He was only sure of one thing. The Earthman was a member of the electronics department. Only someone who knew the drone system intimately could have bypa.s.sed the control by wiring it so the board showed green even when the control wasn't working.

Rising anger stirred him. With one trembling hand he reached out and managed to hook the channel on which the marmoset's chair was hung. He pulled himself erect. He had forgotten he was weightless. He kept right on going until his head banged painfully on the bottom of the nose-cone radar unit. The shock of pain, unlike the throbbing from the acceleration, cleared his head and made him angrier.

Carefully now, he hauled himself down again. He patted the s.p.a.cemonk as he went by, an absent-minded, comradely gesture. He was intent on the drone control in the center of the floor. The Earthman hadn't had much time. Whatever he had done to sabotage the control must have been done in a very few minutes.

Rick got into position, kneeling on the deck, steadying himself with one hand. With the other he searched for his flashlight and found it hanging from his belt. His head sagged, and had it not been for the weightlessness he would have fallen forward onto the drone control. He was in worse shape than he realized. Then, some inner warning signal sounded, and he came back to consciousness with a start.

The startled reaction was enough to move him away from the drone control and break his loose grip. He slid through the air back against the bulkhead wall and felt the warmth that had not yet drained off into s.p.a.ce. It was the heat of rapid pa.s.sage through the atmosphere.

He thought grimly that the heat would be much worse when the rocket re-entered the atmosphere. Unless Jerry Lipton could somehow get control, the plunging rocket would flame like a meteor.

He moved back to the drone control, using his hands as paddles. His wrists were limp and his control was poor, but he made it. He had the flashlight now, and he shot its beam into the maze of wiring.

The cut wire dangled, its end gleaming redly in the light beam. Cutting the wire should have broken the circuit, but it hadn't. Why?

If the cut wire hadn't interrupted the circuit, that meant the circuit had been bypa.s.sed. Rick was sure a signal had gotten to the blockhouse somehow, showing that the drone control was operating.

He had it. Look for other cut wires. It didn't matter whether he found the bypa.s.s circuit or not. The signal to the blockhouse wasn't important for the moment, but getting the control back into operation was. He knew the board must still show green down where Earle and Gould were sitting, almost three hundred miles below.

Tracing the visible wires wasn't easy. There were dozens of them, and they all looked alike. His head wasn't working and his eyes kept seeing gray fog. Why, he knew this gadget by heart! He'd practically built most of it, and he'd checked it out half a dozen times.

Something was wrong inside the control box, but he couldn't put his finger on it.

He checked carefully, tracing the wiring with blurred eyes. Then, in a moment of clarity, he saw it! Someone had put an alligator clip in the box. It was clamping a wire to a terminal post. He shook his head.

Pretty sloppy work. It made no sense at all to use a clip on a permanent wiring job. Who had done it? Didn't he know the clip was apt to vibrate off during the flight?

The grayness slipped away again and he recognized the circuit. Of course! He had found the bypa.s.s. The wire ran from the main, incoming signal circuit into the master control circuit. The Earthman had done this! What he had done was to feed the signal from the blockhouse right back to the blockhouse over the check-signal circuit, completely bypa.s.sing the drone control, which was still in operating condition but which now could not get the signals to activate it.

Rick studied the control carefully. He had to restore the circuit, but he couldn't for the life of him figure how to do it. Normally, before the crushing acceleration, he would have recognized the difficulty in a flash. Now his confused mind had to labor through steps that sometimes took him off on a wild tangent.

The rocket was slowing rapidly now. It reached maximum alt.i.tude and hesitated briefly.

One side of the rocket was brilliant with sunlight--raw, unfiltered light not meant for human eyes. The other side was black. On the sunny side, the rocket was heating from absorbed solar energy. On the dark side, the heat was radiating off. But the radiation was less than the absorption of energy, and the rocket was growing appreciably warmer.

For an instant the rocket paused, nearly three hundred miles above the earth. The s.p.a.ce frontier was below--almost halfway back to earth. Out here was the vacuum of s.p.a.ce.

Rick wasn't conscious of this. He wouldn't have cared. His whole attention was focused on the problem of the drone control. He didn't even realize the rocket had started the downward trip until he found himself floating upward. Then, frantically, he hauled himself back down to the control box, ignoring the stabbing pain in his stomach as he bent over again, one leg wrapped around the small pedestal that supported the control.