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

When I got to it, it was ridiculous. A small length of wire connected one component to another. Space was lacking, and the wire was tight against the metal of the gate. Its insulation was one of these space-age wonders, a form of clear plastic that would remain ductile under zero temperature and pressure. Only it didn't. It had shrunk and cracked, and there was a simple short against the metal of the gate. There were so many forms of circuit-breakers and self-protectors in the machine that the whole gate had been switched off as long as the short was in existence. No wonder telemetry hadn't told us anything.

As I prepared to fix the trouble, I switched on my radio and had Sid connect me with the ground. "Canaveral Control," one of those emotionless voices said. He could afford to be. He was on the ground.

"Get me Cleary," I ordered.

"Cleary here, Mike. What have you found, boy?" He sure was anxious about that solenoid.

"Not much, Paul. Just that Fred Stone is a fathead, too. Over and out, like they say." I switched off and went back to my work.

The one thing I had nothing of was any kind of insulating material. With my screwdriver I hacked a piece loose from the double-faced sticky-tape I had used to keep loose parts from flying around, and teased it under the wire with my tweezers. Perhaps I could have done as well by heating the wire and bending it straight, but there was little room, and I was afraid of melting a solder joint. So I took my time teasing the tape through and finally got it to act as an insulator without breaking the wire. How long it would stay there was anybody's guess. It was held mechanically as well as by its sticky action, but when the bird cooled off enough, the sticky effect would lessen. I hoped the pressure between the wire and the gate could be enough to keep it in place. Certainly no forces would be acting to move it.

Just as I had figured, the reassembly was the tedious part. I had to move around into about sixteen screwy positions to do all the fixing. Finally it was back in one piece and I swung the gate closed.

When the final 4-40's were run up as tight as they were supposed to be run, I reported to Paul Cleary. "Try her," I suggested. "I think I found the trouble. No point my coming back down if it doesn't work."

They made me sweat it out for about ten minutes before Paul said, "Runs like a watch, Mike. Put the spin back on her, boy." At least he was quiet about his solenoid.

This called for the second rocket canister, which I hooked on to the girdle and, after thinking it out carefully, got headed in the right direction. I eased away with finger pressure, and let the delayed fuse do the firing. Telstar started her slow spin again.

Getting the girdle off was a lot harder than getting it on, something we hadn't figured on, and in the final stages of the job I found that my steering motors no longer fired.

"Sid!"

"Roger, Mike."

"How much fuel do you read in my steering jets?"

"You've been out of fuel for about five minutes, by my gauge. But don't worry about it," Sid said. "I'll nurse Nelly over there with my steering jets and pick you up."

"O.K.," I said doubtfully. "But watch it. Bump this bird and we'll have it all to do over again."

Sid had more trouble than he had figured. He had steering jets to run him in every direction except fore and aft. For that motion the retro-rockets were considered enough. But one belch out of them was enough to get me screaming into the mike: "Cut those retros!" I yelled, the volume making my earphones crack, as it undoubtedly did his.

"Roger. What's wrong?"

"You'll burn the solar generators right off the bird, you fool! Steering jets, do you hear, steering jets!"

"Roger."

But it was not that easy. Finally Sid got Nelly within about twenty feet, and pretty near at zero relative velocity.

"All right, Sid," I said. "Hold it there. I'll push over."

A gentle shove against the side of Telstar was all it took. I got it straight, which was all that counted. My drift was slow, and I was a good five minutes making the twenty-foot crossing. But a handhold came within reach, and I worked my way back into the cabin and climbed in without shutting the hatch.

"Don't try that again," I cautioned him. "This thing weighs ten thousand pounds, and that bird half as much. Even at a couple feet a second, you can crush me to jelly between them, even if you don't burn one or the other of us to a crisp."

"Roger," Sid said, not quite so emotionlessly. "Are we ready to move?"

"What for?" I asked him. "Until we get me some steering fuel, I'm useless."

"I thought we'd abort this mission before we were through," he sneered.

"Not so fast. You've got the same rig on your suit. All we have to do is put your fuel tanks on my suit."

"Are you nuts?" he demanded.

"What's the matter with it? Those tanks aren't welded to you, and I've got tools."

I could see him shake his head in the dim light from the instrument panel. "You know those fuels ignite on contact with each other," he pointed out. "If we spill a couple drops of each in here, and they vaporize, we'll blow this kite to pieces!"

"Then we'll get outside to make the switch," I insisted. "It won't hurt anything if a few grams burn up out there, will it, with nothing to confine the expansion."

"But then I won't be able to come after you if anything goes wrong," he pointed out. "No dice."

"You're grasping, Stein," I growled. "At this stage I'm in charge around here. I'll take my chances on getting back."

With the cabin light on I went as far as possible in dismounting both our tanks. After a couple rehearsals to make sure that at least one of us would always have a glove on a handhold, we both climbed out the hatch and I made the switch. Just as Sid suspected, we spilled a few drops. They vaporized, and again as we had feared, combined in what would have been an explosion in a confined space. The soundless flash, dim but real, said we had released quite a little energy uniformly all around us. I never felt a thing except a faint warmth from infrared through my helmet.

Best of all, my jets worked. We both climbed back aboard Nelly, dogged the hatch, and started after Telstar Two.

The second bird was about fifteen thousand miles ahead of us. I slept most of the time, for after Sid gave us a jolt of added velocity, we had to settle down to about six hours of drifting. I woke up as the belt cut me when he fired the retros. We went through the radar and searchlight bit, and had the devil's own time finding our bird. But at last I got the flash of reflection and went to work.

I won't say the second job was any easier, except for the fact that I removed only one part to make room to do my bit with the insulation, and thus had very few screws to replace. My navigating in space was a lot better, and I didn't use steering fuel as wastefully as the first time. Still, when we dogged down to chase after the final bird, the cabin gauge said that I had less than half my load of steering fuel left. Equally glum, Nelly herself was even lower on steering fuel. Neither Sid nor I had been as expert as we were supposed to be.

Nevertheless, we took off after the third bird, and found it glistening in bright sunlight without the help of the searchlight. I thought that was a good omen. But from there on nothing seemed to work right.

We had been aloft about thirty-six hours, and fatigue was setting in. I was clumsy on the steering and had quite a time making contact.

The repair went according to Hoyle, but after I had put the spin back on the bird I found that I had no more steering fuel. I hung about ten or fifteen feet from Telstar Three and maybe eighty feet from Nelly, drifting slowly from both.

"Sid!"

"Roger, Mike."

"This one will have to make it with the girdle on."

"Can't you get it off?"

"I can't get back to it. Steering fuel gone."

"Oh, no!"

"No sweat, Sid. It occludes a small share of the solar generators, but not enough to hurt anything."

"That's not what I meant," he said quietly into my ear. "Nelly's out of steering fuel, too. I can't pick you up!"

I gulped on that one.

"Canaveral Control!" I heard him call.

"Cut that out," I said. "They can't help. Shut up and let me think."

But he didn't, and I couldn't. I had no fuel with which to move. Sid had only the retros and stern rockets, no good for swinging or turning. I was out of touching range of the bird, and couldn't shove against it to build up a little drift. Just as Sylvia said, it's not like swimming back to shore.

There was a lot of excited chatter in my earphones, in which I did not participate. Nobody made any sense, and Sid shut the thing down.

"Mike!"

"Yeah." Disgusted.

"Whatever you dope out, make it quick. You don't have all the air in the world." Sid warned me.

"How much?"

"Ten minutes or so."

"All right," I said. "It ought to be enough. Keep your eye on me. You may have to reach out an arm or leg for me to grab as I go by."

"How are you going to move?"

"I've got a lifesaver," I said.

I writhed and squirmed and made every use of the law of conservation of angular momentum until I had my back to Nelly. Then I wound up and threw my fancy screwdriver as hard as I could heave it away from me. I didn't get the zip on it I would have liked, but because it was sort of like a throwing stick, I got a little more on it than you might expect, maybe fifty or sixty feet a second. And the thing weighed about four pounds, with its fancy ratchet and torque clutch. Since in my suit I weighed just about a hundred times as much, I started toward Nelly at just one-one-hundredth of the velocity I had imparted to the screwdriver. In a couple minutes I was drifting pretty close, but tumbling. I had forgotten that part.

Throwing the screwdriver had given my body the correct vector and some velocity, but I had set up quite a tumbling moment, since I had thrown from the shoulder and not from my center of gravity.

I chucked a couple lighter tools away to correct my drift, and Sid snagged me as I drifted by the hatch.

"Come to Papa," he said, and drew me inside. We didn't horse around congratulating ourselves. My air tanks were no longer hissing, and we made a quick swap.

Sid let me dog down the hatch while he figured position. He used the iron compass method, just taking a close look at Earth, which was more or less dead ahead of us. That was a good place for it, because we had no steering fuel.

The re-entry was a mess, from Sid's point of view. We came in at a weird angle and heated up to beat hell before there was enough atmosphere for our rudder to swing us around straight. He bounced us off twice after that as we slowed down, but the creak of heating metal was all about us each time we dropped in. He cussed me plenty all the way.

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