Where I Wasn't Going Part 14

"Now," he said, "let us see what we have really got here."

As they worked, time progressed. The empty racks around the Confusor slowly filled with more test instruments both borrowed and devised; and the formerly unoccupied corner of the section of panels took on more and more the look of a complete installation, in the center of which the Confusor still churkled quietly, pitting its strength against the mighty monster to which it was so firmly tied.

Two hours were spent in testing circuits, each one exhaustively. Then Ishie turned to Mike.

"We need still yet another test that we have not provided. A strain gauge to find out how much thrust a mosquito puts out. There's one in the physics lab. I'll run get it."

"You will _not_," said Mike. "Genius you may be, but proton-proof you're not. We can rig that right here."

Walking over to the spare parts locker, Mike brought back a complete readout display panel, a spare from one of the Cow's bridge consoles; and quickly connected it in to the data link on which the vocoder operated. Then, carefully instructing the computer as to the required display, he settled back.

"That'll do it," he said. "The Cow can tell us all we need to know right on that panel--about acceleration, lack of it, or change of it that we may cause by changing the parameters of our experiment. Those racks were checked out to stand up under eighty gees," he added.

"Typical overspecification. They never said what would happen to the personnel under those conditions."

Ishie turned the Confusor off and then back on, and watched the display gauge rise to the six hundred forty mark, and then show the fraction above it .12128. Then carefully, ever so infinitesimally, he adjusted a k.n.o.b on the device. The readout sank back towards zero, coming to rest reading 441.3971.

"We'll have to put a vernier control on this phase circuit," Ishie said to himself. "It jumped thirty per-cent, and I scarcely breathed on it."

After a few more checks on the operation of the phase control, he turned to the power control for the magnetic field. Carefully, Ishie lowered the field strength, eye on the readout panel. As the field strength lowered, the reading increased.

The indication was that by lowering the field strength only ten per cent, he had increased the thrust to sixteen hundred pounds--which, he felt, was close to the tolerance of the machine structure.

Carefully he increased the field strength again. Faithfully the reading followed it down the scale.

Then he had another thought. Running the field strength down and the pressure up, and again arriving at sixteen hundred pounds, he turned off the Confusor, waited a few moments, and turned it back on.

The reading remained zero.

Apparently, then a decrease in field strength would cause an increase in thrust; but the original field strength was necessary in order to initiate the thrust field.

Carefully he nudged the field strength back up, and suddenly there were seven hundred ten pounds indicated thrust.

Thrust could apparently be initiated by a field strength a few per cent lower, but not much lower, than the original operating point.

Captain Naylor Andersen arrived on the bridge with an accusing air, but feeling refreshed. He had slept longer than he intended--and though he had asked Bessie to call him when she came back on duty two hours earlier, he had not been called.

"You needed the sleep, captain," she told him unrepentant. "I checked with the Cow. The flare's predicted to continue for another eight hours. We're simply in standby."

However, various observatories on Earth had not been asleep. Within fifteen minutes of the time he reached the bridge, a message from U.N.

Headquarters chattered in over the teletype.

"Tracking stations report your orbital discontinuity too great to have been achieved by jet action of nitrogen escaping from Hot Rod. Hot Rod pressures insufficient to achieve your present apparent acceleration.

Please explain discrepancy between these reports and your own summation of ten hours previous. Suggest close and continual observation of Project Hot Rod. Suspect, repeat strongly suspect, possibility of sabotage. End message."

Nails Andersen stared at the sheet that the com officer had placed in his hands. Then he pressed the intercom to the morgue.

"Dr. Kimball. Please report to the bridge. Dr. P.E.R. Kimball. Please report to the bridge immediately."

Then he turned to Bessie. "Ask the Cow for an orbit computation from the time of the ... er ... meteor last night."

Under Bessie's practiced, computer-minded fingers, the answer wanted came quickly--a displayed string of figures, each to three decimal places, accompanied by a second display on the captain's console showing the old equatorial orbit across a grid projection of the Earth's surface to a point of departure over the mid-Atlantic where it began curving ever farther north, up across the tip of South America, very slightly off course.

The captain glanced at the display of Hot Rod and its taut-cable, and realized with a sickening sense of unreality that no jet action on Hot Rod could have caused it to lead the station in this northerly direction; and that instead it was placidly trailing behind. It was now farther south of the s.p.a.ce Lab than its original position; but their orbit had been displaced to the north.

Perk appeared beside the console, but the captain ignored the astronomer for a moment longer, while he leaned back thinking.

What could be the answer? A leak in the s.p.a.ce Lab itself? That would give acceleration; minor, not to have triggered an alarm--it should have triggered an alarm--but acceleration. Sufficient for the off-orbit shown? He did a brief calculation in his head. It wouldn't take much. Very little, for the time that had pa.s.sed--Very well, then.

He put down a leak in his mind as a possibility. Now, water or air? It could be either, if his reasoning this far were correct. He looked up.

"Have the Cow display barometric readings for each section of the rim and for each compartment in the central hub," he said briefly to Bessie; and to the astronomer, "Dr. Kimball, take that side seat at the computer console and check our progress on this...o...b..tal deviation," and he gestured at the display on his screen.

Perk moved to the post with only a nod.

The barometric displays held constant, with only fractional deviations that might have been imposed by the spin of the big wheel, or error in the instruments themselves. Balanced against temperature readings, they worked out to possible fractions of gain or loss so small as to be insignificant, indicating only the inaccuracies of measurement that inevitably occur in comparing the readings of a number of instruments.

The captain had hardly digested the readings displayed by the computer when Perk looked up with a puzzled frown.

"The computer records a continuous acceleration over the past eleven hours and forty-three minutes," he said, "and attributes it," he looked even more puzzled, "to a magneto-ionic effect?" There was a definite question in his voice.

"It's only about six hundred forty pounds," he added. "It must be an external effect caused by the flare."

"Please investigate the effect as thoroughly as possible," the captain told Perk, then dictated a message to the com officer.

"'To U.N. Headquarters, Earth, from Captain Naylor Andersen, commanding s.p.a.ce Lab One. Original a.s.sumption that disaster was attributable to meteoric impact on Project Hot Rod appears mistaken.

Investigation indicates we are under acceleration from an external magneto-ionic effect which is exerting about--'" he called to Perk.

"Did you say six hundred forty pounds?"

The astronomer nodded, and the captain continued, "'Which is exerting about six hundred forty pound pressure against this satellite. We are now working out corrective measures and will inform you immediately they are prepared. If your observatories can give us any advice, please message at once. End.'"

Then the captain depressed his intercom switch to the morgue. "Dr.

Chi. Please report to the bridge. Repeat. Dr. Chi Tung. Please report to the bridge at once."

His own intercom hummed, and a voice came on. "Dr. Chi Tung is not in the morgue. He left with Mr. Blackhawk some time ago."

The captain frowned, but pushed the engineering room intercom. "Is Dr.

Chi with you, Mr. Blackhawk?" he asked, and when Mike's voice answered, "Yes, sir," he said, "Will you both report to the bridge at once, please?"

When the two arrived, only a little tardily, on the bridge, the captain addressed Ishie.

"You heard of the disaster last night?" The physicist nodded. "We a.s.sumed then," the captain told him, "that a meteor had caused the disturbance. That it had gone through the balloon making a hole through which the balloon's nitrogen was escaping, making a jet action and accelerating the ship.

"It seems, however, that we are under acceleration, and that the acceleration is too great to be such jet action, since Hot Rod does not have sufficient pressure.