The Trouble with Telstar by John Berryman (the best novels to read .TXT) 📗

told her honestly. "I'm scared to death. What if I have a queasy stomach? They say a good half of the men who have been in orbit have chucked up or gotten dizzy or something. What if they go to all this trouble and I get spacesick?"

"What if you drift away and can't get back?" she said. "It isn't like swimming back to shore."

"There's always a way," I said, my stomach tightening as I thought of what she said.

That was the night she kissed me good night. It wasn't much of a kiss, because we were standing in the lobby of her apartment house, and she wasn't going to invite me up, because she never did. But she said: "Hurry back."

"Just you know it, Shouff," I said, bitter inside.

I'd have been a lot more bitter if I had known what was in store for me at the Cape. COMCORP flew me down in one of our private prop-jets, with only Paul Cleary for company. He introduced me to the brass, and we sat through a couple conferences while the idea was spelled out to a group of sure-enough spacemen. Then they turned that mob loose on me.

I was emotionally unprepared. First off, Cleary and Fred had been building me up all through the three months, and I had actually gotten to the point where I thought I knew what I was doing. These space-jockeys spent most of their time deflating my ego.

My tormentor-in-chief was a wise punk from Brooklyn named Sid Stein. "How have you made out in your centrifuge tests?" he asked me at breakfast the first morning after I had reached the Cape.

"I have never done any of that stuff, Mr. Stein," I said.

"Well, how many gees can you pull?"

I shrugged. "Same as you, I suppose. How many is that?"

"Brother!"

The space medic wasn't any better. The mission chief insisted that it wasn't safe to put anybody in a satellite who couldn't pass the physical. I guess you know that about one man in a thousand can qualify. This was supposed to wash me out.

"Remarkable shape." The space medic kept saying. "You must take considerable exercise, doctor."

"Oh, no," I said. "Just jog a mile or so before breakfast. Nothing spectacular."

"No other formal activity?"

"Well," I snarled, "just swimming, fencing and weight lifting. I've given up the boxing and handball."

"Kept in excellent shape, nevertheless," he said. "You'll be a disappointment to them."

"Look," Stein said to me after a week of tests and countertests. "Don't be deceived by these tests. All they show is that your heart is still beating. The big thing is emotional. Doc, I think you should reconsider this idea of flopping around out there in the void. We've got experienced men here, and none of them is ready to try it."

"Fools rush in, eh, Mr. Stein."

"Precisely."

In the meantime I got a daily phone call from Paul Cleary. That I could have snarled off, but Sylvia always came on the line first, and there was a minute or so of chit-chat before she cut her boss in on the line. I'm sure she listened to all the calls. But her first words were deadly. For example:

"Mike! Hi, Mike. Mr. Cleary wants to see how you're doing."

"Good. Put him on."

"In a minute. I think it's so wonderful you passed the final physical, Mike. You're really so deceptive. I never had imagined you had such a steely physique."

"Clean living," I said. "No girls."

"There'd better not be!"

"Don't worry. How could I get to see any girls down here? Every time I look away from my work all I can see is Bikini swim suits."

"Cut that out!" she snickered, and put Cleary on the line.

There came a final day when the mission chief called me in to his office.

"Come in, Mike. Come in," he said shortly. "Sit down." He leaned back against his desk and started talking to me, like they say, straight from the shoulder:

"I'll give it to you straight, Mike. We've tried every legal way to wash you out of this mission. There isn't a one of us here at the Cape that wants any part of taking an armchair theorist and slapping him into space—into the kind of a mission you've cooked up. Somebody's going to get hurt out there, because you aren't fit for the job. Now, physically, yes, you have the capacity. But emotionally and environmentally, you simply don't add up. You're looking at this thing as an extension of your laboratory, and instead it is an enormous physical and mental hazard that you are undertaking. This country has never lost a man in space—and you'll be the cause of our first casualty, as well as being one yourself. I'm asking you man to man to disqualify yourself."

"And put an end to this mission?"

"We'll train one of our men," he said.

"In two or three years your best man might be barely capable," I said. "I don't think COMCORP is prepared to waste that much time. After all," I said ingratiatingly, "all you have to do is refuse the mission. Say I'm a built-in hazard and let it go at that." I grinned at him. I was learning from Paul Cleary. I figured how space-jockeys would react to that.

He told me: "Do you think any of these men would admit they are not up to a mission a mere technician is ready to try? No! I can't get them to beg off, either!"

"When do we go?" I asked.

Sid Stein was assigned as my pilot. He had made the trip into orbit and back four times with the Dyna-Soar rocket, and was considered the best risk to get me there and get me back. He was also the least convinced I had any right to sit beside him in the cabin.

His final briefing was a beaut: "This is a spaceship, doctor," he said frigidly. "And I want you to remember the 'ship' part of it. I'm in command, and my every word, my every belch, has got to be law. Do you understand that? This is my mission, and I'll tell you where to put your feet."

"Sure," I said. "Who wants it?"

"Can't figure out why you do!"

"I'm just paying somebody back," I said. "Is it tomorrow?"

The start was a drag. Eighteen hours before blast-off Sid and I went into a tank so that we would get rid of our nitrogen. We breathed the standard helium-oxygen mix at normal pressure until about four hours before H-hour. They wouldn't even let me smoke. Then we suited up and were lifted by a crane and stuck in the control room of Nelly Bly, as I had named our Dyna-Soar rocket-glider. The hatch stayed open, but we were buttoned up tight in our suits. They had a couple of mods that were supposed to fit them better for the mission. Instead of the usual metal helmet with face plate, we had full-vision bubble helmets of clear plastic. The necks were large enough so that we could, in theory, drag our arms out of our suits and clean the inside of the bubbles. That was in case I sicked up out in space, which all experience said was a real enough hazard. They figured that filling me full of motion sickness pills was partial prevention.

These space-jockeys have their own vocabulary, and their own oh, so cool way of playing it during the countdown. I'm pretty familiar with complex components, but they were checking off equipment I never heard of. We had gyros—hell, our gyros had gyros. And we had tanks, and pressures and temperatures and voltages and who-stuck-John. It was all very impressive.

There were suited men up on the gantry unplugging our air feed and closing our hatch. Sid was straining up from where he lay on his back to dog it down tight.

"Roger," Sid was saying to somebody, as he had been all morning.

The white vapor from our umbilical stopped, which let me know our tanks had been topped off and sealed, and that we were about to blast off.

"This is it, Seaman," Sid Stein said. "Now for Pete's sake don't move, don't speak, just lie there. I've got the con."

That was a bunch of baloney. He really had nothing to do until we were in orbit. The delicate accelerometers and inertial guidance components did all the piloting until the second stage kicked us loose. But I kept my mouth shut. He'd have some work to do before the ride was over, and I might need him.

When the lift-off came, it was gentle as a dove's wing. But as we burned off fuel, the twenty-million pound thrust of our Apollo booster began to tell, and my vision started to go black. The gee-meter said we were pulling about ten gees when I could no longer read it, and I learned later we peaked out at eleven gees in the final seconds before first-stage burn-out. I didn't like it a little bit.

The liquid hydrogen second stage kicked in like a hopped up mule, and we pulled ten gees, right at the limit of my vision, for its whole four minutes of burning. My earphones were talking now as Sid gave it the A-OK and Roger bit all the way. This was the stuff, kid!

Our Dyna-Soar had been modified to some degree for this mission. It's essentially a big delta-winged glider with a squarish fuselage in the center. The mods had consisted of tying a third rocket stage out behind, so that Sid could move us around the orbit from one Telstar to the next if my work on the first one proved out. The retro-rockets had several times their normal complement of fuel, so that he could stop after he got started. The same was true of our steering jets.

The ship was not pressurized on the lift off. Cabin pressure fell rather quickly, as we could feel from the inflation of our suits, to their three and a half-pound pressure. No bends for either of us, because of the helium substitution for nitrogen. Because there were two of us, we could chuck and unchuck airtanks for each other as we needed fresh supplies. We had enough air and water for forty-eight hours. Together with our low-residue diet for the final week, they figured we could sweat it out in our suits for two days. We had suit radios, of course, and could talk with each other for a distance of a mile or so.

Burnout of the second stage came suddenly, and we heaved slightly against our belts as the springs in our seats pushed back out. And then I got my first taste of free fall. Each veteran astronaut I had talked to at the Cape had a different way of trying to scare me with the idea of falling endlessly, and each had different ideas about how to lick it. In spite of all the talk, I grabbed the arms of my seat to keep from falling. I turned my head and in the glow from our instruments could see Sid sneering across at me through his transparent bubble helmet.

"How you like them apples?" his voice came from my earphone.

"That first step is a killer, Sid," I said, trying to sound chipper. I felt horrible.

"Let me know when you've had enough," he suggested. "I've got things to do."

I knew he did. We had dry-run it a hundred times. If we had been inserted correctly in orbit, the Nelly Bly was right in the path that three of the Telstars were now following, and catching up with Number One at several hundred miles an hour. On the ground, radars all around the world were taking fixes on us, and Sid was talking shop over his long-range radio with the radar crews.

By the time my stomach had made up its mind that it would stick with me, he had a report.

"It could be worse," he said. "We've got a lot more velocity than I'd like, but we're on course. Our orbit would differ quite some, Seaman. Because of this speed we'd be somewhat more eccentric—maybe swing out a hundred miles beyond the birds we're chasing. Are you making it?"

"Easy, Sid. Do we slow down yet?"

"I'll fire the retros and retard us to the speed of what we're chasing," he said. "That will equalize our orbits very nearly. Get busy on that scope if you're up to it. I'll compute my retro."

They had made an amateur radar operator out of me, because it was easy to do, and gave Sid more time for actual rocket valving. My belt cut me hard as he braked for several seconds.

"There," Sid's voice said in my ear. "We should still be catching up about fifty miles an hour. Let's not ram that thing. See any blip?"

"Not yet.