The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Trouble with Telstar, by John Berryman
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Title: The Trouble with Telstar
Author: John Berryman
Illustrator: John Schoenherr
Release Date: December 14, 2009 [EBook #30679]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TROUBLE WITH TELSTAR ***
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Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction June 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.
THE TROUBLE WITH TELSTAR
The real trouble with communications satellites is
the enormous difficulty of repairing
even the simplest little trouble.
You need such a loooong screwdriver.
by JOHN BERRYMAN
ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN SCHOENHERR
* * * * *
Doc Stone made sure I wouldn't give him the "too busy" routine. He
sent Millie to get me.
"Okay, Millie," I said to Stone's secretary. "I'll be right with you."
I cleared the restricted notes and plans from my desk and locked them
in the file cabinet, per regulations, and walked beside Millie to
Stone's office.
"It's a reflex mechanism, Mike," Dr. Stone said as Millie showed me
in. "Every type knows how to fight for survival." He took one
thoughtful puff on his pipe. "The old fud," he added.
"The solenoid again, Doc?" I asked.
"What else, Mike?" he said, raising his pale eyebrows. "It's Paul
Cleary's baby, and after all these years with the company, he doesn't
figure to go down without a fight."
So I was in the middle of it. I had no business to be there, either.
The design of that solenoid certainly hadn't been mine. All I had ever
done was find out how to destroy it. And after all, that's part of
what my lab does, and what I do, for a living.
"Quit staring out the window, Mike," Doc said behind me. "Here, sit
down."
I took the chair beside the desk and watched him go through the
business of unloading his pipe, taking the carefully air-tight top off
the humidor we had machined for him down in the lab, and loading up
with the cheapest Burley you can buy. So much for air-tight
containers. Doc got it going, which took two wooden matches, because
the stuff was wringing wet--thanks again to an air-tight container.
"I just left Cleary's office, Mike," he explained. "He won't admit
that there's any significance to the failures you have introduced in
his solenoid. He insists that your test procedures affected
performance more than design did, and he wants to talk with you."
"Great," I said glumly. "Can I count on you to give me a good
recommendation for my next employer?"
"Cut it out, Mike," he said, coming as near to a snap as his careful
voice could manage. He blew smoke out around the stem of his pipe. I
think sometimes it's a part of his act, like the slightly-out-of-press
sports jacket and flannel trousers. It says he is a sure enough Ph.D.
If you ask me, he's a comer. You can't rate him for lack of brains. He
knows an awful lot about solid-state physics, and for a physicist, he
sure learned enough about micro-assemblies of electronic components. I
guess that's why he was in charge of final assembly of the Telstar
satellites for COMCORP.
"Don't worry about what Paul Cleary can do _to_ you, Mike," he
suggested. "Think a little bit more about what Fred Stone can do _for_
you. Cleary is only a year or so from retirement, and you know it."
"He could make that an awful tough year, Doc." I said. "You told me he
won't hear of design bugs in that solenoid. He'll insist something
went wrong in assembly."
Doc Stone smiled thinly at me and brushed at his blond crew cut. "It
is a tough spot, Mike," he agreed. "Because I won't hear any talk of
faulty assembly. You'll have to choose, I guess. If you think you can
make your bed by playing footsie with an old fud who has only a year
to go, try it. Just remember that I've got another thirty years to go,
and I'll breathe down your neck every minute of them if you let me
down!"
"Sure," I said. "When do I see him?"
"Now."
* * * * *
Doc Stone got someone named Sylvia on the phone and then told me to go
right up. After I got there, I had to sit and wait in Cleary's outer
office.
I shared it with a small, intense girl named Sylvia Shouff, if you
believed the little plastic sign on her desk. There was barely room
for it in the welter of paper, files, notebooks, phones, calendars and
other junk she had squirreled. She was much too busy banging at a
typewriter and handling the phone to pay any attention to me. Her
pert, lively manner said she hadn't taken any wooden nickels lately.
But I had. The last series of tests in my lab had put me in the middle
of a hell of a scrap. It had all started a couple years back, when the
final design had been approved for a whole sky-full of communications
satellites. Well, eighteen, to be exact. One of the parts in the
design had been a solenoid, part No. M1537, which handled a switching
operation too potent for a solid-state switch. That solenoid was one
of the few moving parts in the Telstars, and it had been designed for
skeighty-eight million cycles before it got sloppy or quit.
In practice, out in space, the switching operation simply hadn't
worked. After about a hundred hours of use in Telstar One, it failed.
Unfortunately, this had not been discovered until the first six
satellites had been launched. Further launchings were postponed while
they ran accelerated switching tests on satellites Two through Six out
in space. The same kind of failure took place on each bird.
There were two schools of thought on licking the bug. Doc Stone, of
course, insisted that solenoid M1537 had failed, which was one
possible interpretation of the telemetry. And Paul Cleary, who had
been in charge of design, insisted that faulty assembly was to blame.
Well, somebody would make up his mind pretty soon, and my evidence
would have a lot to do with it. I had done the appraisal tests of the
circuit in the test lab once the bug had been detected, and now Cleary
was going to smoke it out of me.
"Mr. Seaman," Sylvia Shouff said to me, kind of waking me up. "Mr.
Cleary will see you now. Have you ever met?" she added, as I came
toward her desk.
I shook my head. "I'm a working stiff," I said, "I never get to meet
the brass."
"You are also somewhat insolent," she said tartly. "Better wash out
your mouth before you try that on Paul Cleary. He eats wise young
laboratory technicians for breakfast."
"Yes, _mam_!" I said, feeling my ears burn. She led me to the door,
opened it, and introduced me to Paul Cleary. He lumbered out around
his desk and shook my hand with his rather gnarled and boney paw.
"Hello, Seaman. I'm glad to meet you, young man. Come in. We have a
lot to talk about," he said.
* * * * *
Considering that Cleary was a wheel, and had thirty years of service
with Western Electric behind him, his office wasn't especially large.
Maybe that's because Communications Corporation is owned half by the
government and half by AT&T. The government half makes us watch our
pennies.
"Have a seat, Mike," Cleary said, going around to lower himself
carefully into a tall swivel chair. He learned back and rocked slowly,
like an old woman on the front porch of a resort hotel. His pipe was
still smoking in a rather large ashtray. He picked it up, showing it
to be a curve-stemmed old-man's style, and puffed contentedly at it.
On him it didn't look like an act.
"Well," he said, pulling big shaggy eyebrows down so they shaded his
pale blue eyes. "You've become something of a celebrity around here,
Mike."
This was an unexpected approach. "Nobody told _me_," I complained.
"Does this kind of fame show up in the paycheck?"
"Not always," Cleary said, scowling a little. "I just meant that your
name gets bandied about. Every time I talk to Fred Stone he says, 'Dr.
Seaman says this,' or 'Dr. Seaman says that.' I just had to see what
this doctor looked like."
"You can forget the doctor part," I said uncomfortably. I had heard
that Cleary was sensitive about having no advanced degree. When he
went to work for the Western, college was plenty. You did your
post-graduate work on the job. He sure had--and he had a string of
patents as long as your arm to prove it.
"That's good," he said. "I'd hate to think I was competing with you in
the field of knowledge where you are the world's specialist."
I grinned at him a little sickly. "COMCORP has never made any use of
my specialty," I conceded. "You already had about ten guys around here
who had learned twice as much as I had simply by doing it every day
for a living. They could have written rings around my thesis."
"Sure," he said contentedly, puffing more smoke. "So we made a testing
engineer out of you. And you may amount to something, to hear Fred
Stone tell it."
"Thanks," I said.
"Now let me hear what you've been doing for Fred," Cleary suggested,
in a sort of avuncular tone. "I'd like to measure you myself."
"You mean the tests I ran on the switching gate?" I asked.
"Why, yes, we can start there," he nodded, squinting his blue eyes
more and blowing a real screen up between us.
* * * * *
"When Telstar One packed up, they sent me down the whole gate from
that sector," I said. "Dr. Stone asked me to run destruct tests on the
whole assembly, which I did. The only failures I have induced so far
are failures in M1537, the solenoid that all the shouting is about."
"What kind of failures did you get?"
"Armature froze on the field," I said. "I guess the bearings really
went. When there was enough load on them, they couldn't maintain
concentricity."
"What kind of loads?" he growled, sinking down lower in his chair. He
put his elbows on the arm and laced hairy-backed fingers together
under his chin.
"I put the whole gate on the centrifuge and swung it up to twelve
gees" I said. "Switching was normal there for the twenty thousand
cycles I gave the gate. But when I added undamped vibration at twelve
thousand to fifteen thousand cycles per second, I could induce failure
pretty quickly. Say an hour or so."
"You had to apply the vibration throughout the whole test period to
get these failures?"
"Yes, Mr. Cleary."
"Then how do you explain how vibration during no more than six or
eight minutes of blast-off and launch could have the same effect on
the actual installation on M1537 in a satellite, Mr. Seaman?" Smoke
poured from the curve-stem.
"I don't have to explain it," I said, beginning to get a little hot.
"All I have done is find a way to make one part quit. I haven't said
it did quit in use, or that it could be made to quit in use."
"Then what the hell are you good for?" Cleary growled.
I didn't have any answer for that.
He repeated his question, blue eyes glittering. "I asked you what the
hell you were good for, Seaman!" he said, much more loudly.
"For putting in the middle," I snapped back.
"That's how you interpret this affair, then?"
"Yes."
"All right," Cleary said, straightening up. "We'll stop talking about
your work as if it were scientific study and talk about it as a play
in office politics. Is that what you want?"
"I don't want any part of it," I said, hoping I wasn't plaintive. "I
work under orders. The director of assembly asked me to test the part
to destruction. I tested it. I'm sorry that it wasn't a soldered joint
that failed. It wasn't. It was a solenoid. What has that got to do
with me?"
"Nothing, maybe," Cleary conceded, pushing himself up out of his
chair. He went to his window to stare out at the parking lot. "You can
be a test engineer all your life, if that's what you want."
"It isn't."
"And what do you want, Mike?" he said, turning back to face me.
"Your job," I said. "In time."
* * * * *
He nodded. "Well said," he decided. "But if you want it, you'll have
to learn that business is about ninety per cent people and about ten
per cent operations. You know, as you have clearly shown, that Fred
Stone is pushing to get me out of here a little before my time, and
pushing to make sure that he gets this spot, for which there are other
claimants of equal rank in the organization. Oh no," he said, holding
up his hand. "Don't tell me that is none of your affair. Right now you
are in the unusual position of being able to cast a vote that will
decide just how soon Fred Stone can make his move for the top spot.
And as long as you sit there and try that smug line of 'I just test
'em and let the chips fall where they may,' you are really siding with
Fred Stone. I need something else out of you, and you know it. What's
it going to be? Are you a wise enough head at your years to pick a
winner in this scrap? And what if it _isn't_ Fred? I'll have your
hide, young man."
[Illustration]
"That's what your snippy little brunette said," I told him. "She told
me that you'd eat me for breakfast, and she was right." I got to my
feet.
"Where are you going," he growled. He was still standing behind his
chair.
"To look for another job, Mr. Cleary. There must be some place where
the honest result of a test will be assessed as the honest result of a
test rather than a move in a political fight."
"Honest result?" he echoed, and snorted. "_Was_ your test honest? What
_really_ happened out there in space?"
"Nobody asked me," I said hotly. "My assignment was to test that gate
until a part failed."
"A dishonest assignment," Cleary said. "Sit down a minute." We both
calmed down and took our seats. I got a cigar out of my coat, peeled
the wrapper and made counter-smoke. "Here, I'll give you an honest
assignment, Seaman. You're a test engineer. Tell me what happened _out
there in space_. Why did that switching operation fail?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," I said.
"Then find out!"
I chewed my cigar. "Without duplicating the conditions?" I protested.
"And how can we? There's zero gravity--zero pressure--all sorts of
things going on out there we can't duplicate in a lab."
"I really don't care how you do it," he said. "But if it were my job
I'd just light my pipe and sit here and think for a week or so. Why
don't _you_ try it?"
I got up again. "Yes, sir," I said. "I suppose it would help to have
the original telemetry data so that I could evaluate for myself what
went wrong."
"I thought you'd get to that," he said, passing me a fat file-folder.
"Here it is." He stood up, too, and led me to the door. "And other
data you might want?" he asked, now a good deal more kindly. His hand
was on my elbow.
I looked at him. "How about the phone number of the brunette out
there?" I asked without taking the stogey from my teeth.
"Sylvia? That's pretty valuable information," he said, beginning to
grin in a sleepy old fashion. "But she only dates astronauts. If you
haven't made at least three orbits, she won't even have dinner with
you."
[Illustration]
I stopped at Sylvia's desk with half an idea of asking her for a date.
"Well, Dr. Seaman," she demanded as I chewed on my pacifier. "What did
you learn?"
I thought about it. "That a lot depends on knowing where to put your
feet," I said, puffing smoke. "And my name is Mike."
She sniffed. "If you think Paul Cleary hasn't been around long enough
to catch Fred Stone trying to fake him out of position with a
meaningless test," she said, "you have another think coming!"
"He'd never have tried it," I told her, "if he'd known Cleary had you
to look after him." That got me a much louder sniff and toss of the
dark curly head, which broke up my plans to ask her to dinner.
The telemetry results had been decoded, of course, so that a mere
mortal could read them. I didn't have a pipe, which probably meant I'd
be a failure as a physicist, so I chewed cigars ragged for about three
days and did some serious thinking. When I got a result, I looked up
Shouff, Sylvia, Secy./Mgr./Dsgn., in the phone directory, and talked
to my favorite brunette.
"Mr. Cleary's office," she said.
"When would he like to see Mike Seaman?" I tried.
"Probably never," she told me. "But I suppose he'll have to. Isn't
Fred Stone going to run your errand for you?"
"I'm running Fred Stone's errands, isn't that what you really think,
Sylvia?" I asked her.
Sniff! "He can see you at eleven." Click.
Paul Cleary had his coat off and was poring over a large
black-on-white schematic when I was shown in by sniffin' Sylvia.
"Hello, Mike," he growled. "Here, Sylvia. Mike's not supposed to see
this stuff. Drag it away, honey. Drag it away!"
With quick motions she rolled up the drawings, snapped a rubber binder
around them and went out. Cleary wagged his hairy old paw to the chair
beside his desk.
"So you've been thinking?" he asked, reaching for his curve-stemmed
pipe.
"How do you know?"
"My spies tell me you haven't been out in the lab since the other day.
Certainly you were doing something besides sulk in your office."
"Yes."
"Well, what did you come up with? Why did that switching operation
fail out in space."
"I don't know."
His shaggy eyebrows shot up. "You don't know? Is that all COMCORP got
for three days' pay?"
"A confession of ignorance is a hell of a lot more revealing than a
solid error," I snapped. "The honest answer that I get out of the
telemetry data is that something in that gate broke the circuit and
the switching operation failed. I think there are about seven thousand
components in the gate. I don't know which one failed. A few I can
rule out, because they would only cause part of the gate to fail. But
a hundred different breaks could account for the data. So I don't
know."
He lit his pipe and blew smoke around the curved stem before he made
reply. "So we got a philosopher for our money," he said. "A confession
of ignorance, eh? What are you going to do about it?"
"You tell me, Mr. Cleary. You're the old head around here."
"So I am," he said evenly. "So I am. Well, my advice to young pups is
that they should not be ashamed when they don't know. They should say
so. But they should have something else to say along with it."
"For example," I suggested grumpily.
"They should say, 'I don't know, but I know where to find out,'" he
said. "Tell me, Dr. Seaman, do you know where to find out?"
He puffed at me for the two or three minutes I thought about it.
Really, that's a very long time to think. Most ideas come to you the
moment you identify the problem, which is the really hard part of
thinking. But this problem took some thought, and I wanted him to
think I was thinking.
"Yes," I said at last. "I know where to find out."
"Where?"
"Out in space."
* * * * *
This called for a lot more smoke. "You mean, go out there and look at
the satellite, in space?"
"Yes, I can't imagine any other way really to figure it out."
He nodded. "You may be right, Mike. But do you know how much it costs
to send a manned satellite aloft?"
"Oh," I agreed. "There are cheaper ways. We can beef up every part in
that gate, test it much tougher than we already have, and when we get
the gate to where all seven thousand components can stand any
imaginable strain, we can rebuild the twelve Telstars we haven't
launched yet and be pretty sure they won't have switching failures.
But that isn't what you asked me."
"We'd have to fix eighteen of them," he said. "The first six are about
sixty per cent useless. They'd have to be replaced."
"I still think you should consider sending a man to examine the
Telstars in orbit," I suggested.
"Science demands it, eh" he growled.
"No, I was thinking that perhaps a simple repair could be made in
space, and that you wouldn't have to launch six extra birds."
He got out of the chair and went to the clothes tree to put on his
coat. The elbows were shiny from leaning on his desk. "It might be
cheaper at that," he said. "The first six are launched in only two
orbits. Three telstars in each orbit, separated by one hundred and
twenty degrees. Two launches of a repair man might do it, with careful
handling. Is that what you had in mind?"
"Something like that."
"We'd have to send a pretty rare kind of a repair man, Mike," he said,
coming back to sit on the corner of his desk and glower down at me.
That was about his kindest expression.
"Yes," I agreed. "You need somebody who can test and diagnose, and
then make a repair."
"And who is an astronaut, too," he said. "I wonder if there is such a
thing?"
"Make one," I suggested.
He scowled a little more fiercely. "Explain that," he ordered.
"I figure you could take one of our men from my laboratory, who knows
how to test the gate, and a man who is handy enough with miniature
components to cut out the one that failed and replace it, and teach
him how to get around in a spacesuit. That would surer than hell be
quicker than taking one of these hot-shot astronauts and teaching him
solid-state physics."
"Yes," he agreed, looking down his fingers. "That was a pretty sneaky
way to get out from between Fred Stone and me, young man."
I couldn't resist it: "That's what took most of the three days," I
said, just a little too smugly.
"I liked you better in the middle," Cleary grumped. "Well, you have a
thought, and it calls for a conference." He took his coat off again,
hung it on the clothes tree, came back to his desk and got on the
phone.
"Sylvia? Have Fred Stone come up, and you come in with him, eh? That's
a dear."
He racked up the instrument and smiled at me as he stoked his pipe
into more activity. "Relax," he advised me. "It always takes a while
to round up Fred Stone."
He wanted no small talk, so I fidgeted in my chair while Cleary rocked
gently in his. In about ten minutes, curly-headed Sylvia brought Dr.
Stone in with her.
* * * * *
It was, "Hello, Fred," and "Hello there, Paul," when they came in.
Sylvia didn't have anything to say, although she gave me a hot-eyed
glance before pulling out the dictation board on Paul Cleary's desk
and making herself comfortable with her notebook.
Cleary offered Doc Stone some of his tobacco, which was politely
refused. The old man began it:
"Your Dr. Seaman has quite an idea, Fred," he said, in a mild, kindly
voice, with a dumb, guileless look on his face.
"Good, Paul," Doc Stone smiled thinly. "I've told you he's a good
boy."
"Hm-m-m," said Cleary. "He says his tests can't prove what went wrong
with the switching gate on the satellites, and in effect that the
telemetry doesn't make it plain whether we have design or assembly
trouble."
"Well, _well_!" said Fred Stone. I decided to start shopping for a
marker for my grave.
"Yes," Cleary said. "He made quite a suggestion, that we send a man
out in space to look over the Telstars and find out what went wrong.
Even better, he says it might be possible to make a repair at the same
time and get the bird working. You can see the advantages of doing
that, the way they are orbiting."
"Yes, indeed," Doc Stone said, looking at me with slitted eyes. "Quite
a unique adventure for some technician."
"Just what I was thinking," Cleary said. "The problem resolves into:
Who do we send? Now Mike, here, says we should take a man from his lab
who knows the bird and its assembly and teach him how to get around in
a spacesuit--that, he claims, would be quicker than taking one of
these space jockeys and making a technician out of him."
"I think he's right."
"So--there we are. Who do we send?"
"There can hardly be any choice," Dr. Stone said, looking at me with
eyes like granite.
"Hardly," Cleary agreed. "The head of the lab is the best man, beyond
a doubt."
They were talking about me! Try to get out of taking sides, would I?
Cleary wanted me back in the middle. Stone wanted me dead. They were
both likely to get their way, unless I told them off.
I opened my mouth. Cleary cleared his throat loudly.
"Oh, Dr. Seaman!" Sylvia cut in, breaking her careful silence. "What a
thrilling opportunity for you!"
I gaped at her. Well, Cleary had said it. She only went out with
astronauts. She was space-happy.
"There are men in the shop who deserve the chance...." I started.
"Nonsense!" she said quickly. "It's your idea, doctor, and you deserve
the fame!"
"And the promotion this will undoubtedly earn--if you can bring it
off," Cleary added.
"Yes!" Dr. Stone said with relish. He didn't think I could, either.
Well, that made three of us, unless Sylvia made four.
"Thank you very much," I started, as a prelude to backing out.
"Good, that's settled," Cleary said. "That's all, Sylvia."
She got up and left. She had done her dirty work. If I hadn't been so
sick at my stomach, I would have had to admire really great teamwork.
Stone shook my hand with an evil kind of relish and followed her out.
That left Paul Cleary and me alone. "This is a great thing, young
man," he said.
I couldn't stand him any longer. "You are a worm!" I told him.
"You're probably right, Mike," he agreed, without any particular heat.
"But a rather just one. I think you'll admit you've been paid off in
your own coin. All you had to do was beg off."
"In front of her? You knew I wouldn't."
"I _figured_ you wouldn't. That's one of the advantages of being
older. You know more about how the young will behave. Come on," he
said, getting up to put on his coat again. "We have to see a man."
"One thing," I said, as I got up, "while we're being so just."
"Yes?"
"I had thought of asking your Sylvia for a date. But she was so snippy
the other night I decided to forget it. Now, she got me into this, and
she'll have to pay and pay! How do I get to her? It'll be quite a
while before I'm an astronaut."
He took his pipe from between his teeth. "This calls for the wisdom of
a Solomon," he decided. "But you might try oysters."
* * * * *
It was pretty good advice. I hung behind him long enough to tell
Sylvia about the Chincoteague oysters they put in the stew at Grand
Central Terminal, and got a dinner date. That was all, just the date,
because Cleary was itching to take me to see a man.
Politics must be an awfully large part of business. The man we went to
see was the government side of COMCORP, and I guess he had had to do
as much explaining about Telstar failures to a Senate Committee as
Paul Cleary had had to do to the Western. He wanted an out just as bad
as Paul did.
There were a good many conferences before a sufficient number of
people decided the cheapest way out was to send a man to fix the
Telstars that had broken down. The question was whether it was
possible.
We went at it from two directions. They got a team assigned to
figuring out if the Dyna-Soar rocket could be modified to make the
three contacts around the orbit, carry two men and enough air and fuel
for the job, and at COMCORP we appointed a crew to figure out what it
meant to make the repair in orbit.
Cleary put me in charge of our crew. They gave me a full-size Telstar
satellite for my lab, and I went to work.
Fancy electronic equipment consists of millions of parts, and Telstar
is no exception. One of the bonuses America got from its poor rocket
booster performance, as compared with the Russians, was a forced-draft
course in miniaturization. Our engineers have learned how to make
almost anything about one-tenth the size you'd think it ought to be,
and still work. To get all these tiny parts into a total system, they
are assembled in racks. In the Telstar each of these long skinny
sticks of perforated magnesium alloy is hinged to the main framework
so that it can be swung out for testing or for replacement of parts,
which is why the engineers call each component a "gate."
I spent several weeks learning how to take each suspected component
out of the gate. Most of the time I needed a screwdriver. Sometimes I
had to drill out a soft aluminium rivet. The hard part was that some
of the components were so deep inside, even with a couple gates swung
out the way, that I needed all kinds of extension tools.
Of course, I had to visualize what it would be like doing all this out
in space. I'd be in a spacesuit, wearing thick gloves, and when I
removed a screw that would have looked good in a Swiss watch, there'd
be no work bench on which to place it while I took out the next one.
Worse yet, I would have to put it back in.
The longer I worked with the parts, the harder it looked. There
wouldn't be a prayer of just turning the parts loose in space. In
theory they'd follow along in orbit. In practice you can't bring your
hand to a halt and release a tiny part without imparting a small
proper motion to it. And even worse, you couldn't handle the little
wretches when you tried to put them back in. With a solid floor to lie
on, with gravity to give things a position orientation, I kept losing
tiny screws. Magnets didn't help, because the screws were nonmagnetic
for what seemed pretty good reasons. Some were made of dural for
lightness. Some were silicon bronze. None of them was steel.
That put us back in the lab to find out what would happen if we used
steel screws. The answer was, surprisingly, nothing important. So
there was one solid achievement. I had a few thousand of each of the
thirty-four different sizes of fasteners machined from steel, and
magnetized a fly-tier's tweezers. The result was that I could get
screws back into their holes without dropping them, especially when I
put little pads of Alnico on the point of each tweezer to give me a
really potent magnet. Then we had to cook up an offset screwdriver
with a ratchet that would let me reach in about a yard and still run
a number 0-80 machine screw up tight. That called for a kind of
torque-limit clutch and other snivies.
It was the fanciest and most expensive screwdriver you ever saw. The
handle was a good two feet long. The problem then became that of
seeing what you were doing, and one of the boys faked up a kind of
binocular jeweler's loupe with long focus, so that I could lie back a
yard from the screw and focus on it with about ten diameters
magnification. The trouble was that the long focal length gave a field
of vision about six times the diameter of the screw-head, which meant
that every time my heart beat my head moved enough to throw the field
of vision off the work.
* * * * *
By that time I was working in a simulated spacesuit--the actual number
was still being made to fit an accurate plaster cast of my body. So
the boys figured out a clamp that would hold my helmet firmly to the
gate, and a chin rack inside the helmet against which I could press
and hold my head steady enough to keep my binoculars focused where
they had to be focused. At a certain point I went back to Paul Cleary
and said I thought I could make the necessary tests, dismount what I
had to dismount, and replace any affected part.
"All worked out, eh?" he said, reaching for his pipe.
"Not by a county mile, Mr. Cleary. But I know what the problems are,
and the shop can figure out sensible answers. Some of the hardest
parts turned out to be the easiest."
"Name any three," he suggested.
"Well, the screws. As I take them out, I'll discard them into space. I
have to use magnetic screws on reassembly, so there is no point saving
what I take out. Doug Folley has doped out something like a motorman's
change-dispenser that will dispense one screw at a time into my
tweezers, and I'll carry a supply of all thirty-four kinds at my
waist."
"That's one," he counted on a hairy forefinger.
"We can use something like a double-faced pressure-sensitive tape to
hold other parts," I said. "We'll draw a diagram on it, stick it to
some unopened part of the satellite near where I'm working, and as I
pull pieces out, I'll just press them against the other sticky face,
in the correct place in the diagram, and they'll be there to pull
loose when I want them."
"At absolute zero?" he scoffed. "That sticky face will be hard as
glass."
"We'll face the bird around to the sun," I said. "And warm it up. If
we have to, we'll put wiring in the tape, connect it to Telstar's
battery supply, and keep it warm."
"Might work," he grumped. "That's two. How about the spacesuit part?"
That had been tougher. Some forty or fifty men had made the ride into
space and back from Cape Canaveral by this time, and there had been
rendezvous in space in preparation for flights to the moon. But so far
no one had done any free maneuvering in space in a suit.
[Illustration]
They had put me in a swimming pool in a concentrated salt solution
that gave me just zero buoyancy, and I had practiced a kind of
skin-diving in a spacesuit. The problem was one of mobility, and the
one thing we could not reproduce, of course, was frictionless motion.
No matter how I moved, the viscosity of the solution quickly slowed me
down. Out in space I'd have to learn on the first try how to get
around where every force imparted a motion that would continue
indefinitely until an equal and opposite force had been applied.
The force part had been worked out in theory long before. To my
spacesuit they had fixed two tiny rockets. One aimed out from the
small of my back, the other straight out from my belly. Two
pressurized containers contained hydrazine and nitric acid, which
could be released in tiny streams into peanut rocket chambers by a
single valve-release. They were self-igniting, and spurted out a
needle-fine jet of fire that imparted a few dynes of force as long as
the valve was held open. It only had two positions--full open, or
closed, so that navigation would consist of triggering the valve
briefly open until a little push had been imparted, and drifting until
you triggered the opposite rocket for braking.
The airtanks on my back were right off a scuba outfit.
Really, they spent more time on the gloves than anything else. At
first we thought of the problem as a heat problem, but it was tougher
than that. Heat loss was not much, out there in a vacuum, and they
made arrangements to warm the handles of my tools so that I wouldn't
bleed heat through my gloves to them and thus freeze my fingers. No,
the problem was to get a glove that stood up to a pressure difference
of three or four pounds per square inch and could still be flexed with
any accuracy by my fingers. We could make a glove that was pretty
thin, but it stiffened out under pressure and made delicate work
really tough. It was a lot like trying to do brain surgery in mittens.
They eventually gave me a porous glove that leaked air when you flexed
your fingers. Air, they said, could always be gotten from the
Dyna-Soar rocket that would be hanging close at hand in space. Well,
we hoped it would work. I could do pretty fair work with the leaky
gloves, and all we could hope was that the vapor would be dry enough
as it seeped out through the gloves to prevent formation of a foggy
cloud all around me, or the formation of frost on the gloves. That we
could not test under any conditions easy to simulate.
Each team spent ninety days. They tell me that's right quick work for
pointing up a launch. But at the end of three months I had assembled
enough stuff to do the job, and still well within the weight limit
they had to set. I wasn't a walking machine shop, but there was a lot
I could do if I had to.
* * * * *
Ninety days had been enough for several dates with Sylvia. Out of the
office she wasn't quite the protective harpy about Paul Cleary that
she had been in the office, although the thought was never far from
her mind.
We spent my final night in New York before leaving for the Cape at
Sweets, a real old fashioned seafood house down on Fulton street.
After the obligatory oysters, we had broiled bluefish, and otherwise
lived it up. They serve a good piece of apple pie, and we had that
with our coffee.
"Are you scared?" Sylvia asked me.
"Of what?" I lied innocently.
"Of being out in space--just floating around?"
"Yes," I 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?"
"Brot_her_!"
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. How close are we supposed to be?"
He lit the cabin light and tapped at the calculator that he swung out
from its rack. "Still got a hundred miles to go, I'd judge." He moved
awkwardly in his suit to finger a switch on his neck and I heard him
speaking to the ground again, and heard in my earphones the answer
that came up from Woomera. We had eighty miles to go, and were now a
little below the orbit of the bird we were chasing.
"Can't have both ends of the stick, Mike," Sid explained, calling me
by name for the first time. "As soon as we slowed down we had to drop
lower." He fooled around with the steering jets, which were
hydrazine-nitric acid rockets much like the tiny motors on my suit,
and re-oriented _Nelly Bly_. A little burst from the nose, and I got
my first blip.
"There!" I said, putting a finger on the PPI. "Turn out the light,
Sid, so I can see the 'scope'."
He switched off the cabin light and followed my directions with tiny
shoves, sometimes from the rockets, sometimes from the steering jets,
while I conned us closer.
Our radar would only read within about half a mile. When we got that
close I got the searchlight going and took my first real look through
the forward port out into space.
It's black. Nothing--nothing you have ever seen will persuade you how
dark it is out there. That was my first big shock. Oh, I had practiced
in the dark, with only my helmet light to guide my tests and
assemblies, but this was a different kind of dark. Our light had no
visible beam--you couldn't even tell it was working. At first I had
the idea we'd see the satellite occulting some stars, but a little
mental arithmetic told me that an object six or eight feet in section
would not subtend much of an angle of vision at half a mile.
We had chosen, I decided, much too narrow a beam of light for the
searchlight, but just at that moment I got a flash from out in space,
and worked the light back on to our objective.
"Got it," I said.
"Yoicks!" Sid said, and went back to the fine controls. After a long
time, and lots of patience, we were hanging about fifty feet out from
our bird. We were farther out in space so that the dark bulk of the
satellite was silhouetted against the crescent light of Earth. I
turned off the spot and switched on the floodlight.
"Here goes nothing, Sid," I said, and undid the dogs that held the
canopy above our heads.
My earphone spoke to me: "This is Cleary. Do you read me, Mike?"
I fumbled around to find the right jack and plugged myself into the
radio. "Yes, Paul. Loud and clear."
"Watch yourself. Think first. You've got all the time in the world."
"Sure."
"Sylvia would miss you," he added.
I hoped he was right.
* * * * *
Clinging carefully to the handholds that had been specially provided
on the outside of _Nelly Bly_, I clambered through the hatch and hung
in the darkness, looking down at South America. The world was turning
visibly under me, although I knew that in fact we were skimming
rapidly about three thousand miles over its surface. I got myself
lined up nice and straight with the bird and did my first bit of
non-thinking. I pushed off good and proper with my feet, the way you'd
dive into a swimming pool. It was a fool stunt for my first act. I was
doing a good five or six feet a second. You may not think that is very
fast, but before I could gulp twice I had zipped past that bird and
was headed for Buenos Aires.
I know I screamed. That was the first time I realized I really was
falling. Earth looked awfully close, and seemed to be rushing up to
meet me.
My orientation was all wrong for stopping. By diving head first I had
neither my back nor my belly rocket lined up to stop me.
My training failed completely. I tried to squirm straight, and by
proper swinging of my arms out to full length, and kicking the same
way with my feet, I got turned around to where my belly was facing the
floodlight on _Nelly Bly_. That's not how I was supposed to do it.
The glider had disappeared--all I could see was the floodlight. It was
still by far the brightest thing in the sky, but if I drifted much
longer, I would have to use radio direction-finding to get back. I
triggered the motor on my back and felt its gentle push against my
spine.
"Sid!" I called.
"Roger, Mike!"
"Light the tip lights. I've got to get a fix on my velocity. I went
way past and I'm trying to get back."
Two new stars winked into being, on either side of the floodlight.
This had been some bright guy's idea, and it was paying off. I kept
watching the apparent distance between them shrink as I continued my
trip toward Earth. Memory and a little calculating told me that my
acceleration of three inches per second per second would take twenty
seconds of blast to slow me to a stop. I counted them off, aloud:
"Mississippi one, Mississippi two, Mississippi three," as I had been
taught to measure seconds. When I got to Mississippi twenty my visual
measurement said I was about stationary with regard to _Nelly Bly_.
I used a little more blast and let a couple minutes go by while I
drifted closer to the Telstar. I started squirming again, until I
remembered to use the deflection plate they had given me to hold in my
belly blast, and that got me lined up. But finally I was within
touching distance of the bird, which was rotating with a certain slow
majesty on its long axis.
The leisurely spin was there to make sure one side didn't face the sun
too long and heat up. My plan called for stopping the bird's spin so
that I could get reasonable solar heating of the part I was working
on. The trouble was there was nothing to grab as the satellite turned.
But we had worked on that part, too, and I went into my act of backing
off the right distance, accelerating with my back rocket until I
drifted close by the bird at its translational speed. I got one end of
my sticky webbing stuck to it by pressure and decelerated so that the
bird turned under me while I paid off the web. In a moment I had it
girdled, and snapped the nifty sort of buckle they had made for me.
Then drawing the webbing tight was no trouble, and I was spinning with
the bird. My added weight slowed its spin down some.
* * * * *
Next came the trick of getting some special equipment loose from my
right leg. This was a little rocket canister which had just enough
poof, the slide-rule boys had said, to stop the rotation of the bird.
I fastened the canister to the webbing, pushed softly with one finger
to get me a few feet away, and drifted while waiting for the delayed
fuse to fire the antispin rocket. It lanced out a flame for a few
seconds, and sputtered dead. The bird hung virtually motionless
beneath me--or above me--or beside me--or whatever you want to call
it when there is no up or down.
Our light was dimming as we passed the terminator and pulled over
Earth's dark side. The sun was still visible, however, although soon
to be eclipsed by Earth. I jetted softly back to the bird and lit my
helmet light. I had to find the right face of the twelve-sided thing
so that I could open the right gate. The markings were there. They
were just hard to read from inside a helmet. Then the sun was
eclipsed, and my headlamp gave me the kind of light I was used to
working with. The sector I wanted was on the satellite's dark side. I
had to clamp on to the girdle and jet quite a while to turn it halfway
round, and then decelerate just as long to bring it to a stop. I
fooled around several minutes getting the sector to face where the sun
would soon rise.
My earphone spoke.
"Mike!"
"Roger, Sid. What's up."
"Take it easy on your steering fuel. You're getting low."
"Roger."
I had to wait for the sun before I could start work. When it came up,
heating seemed quick. First a test with a thermocouple showed that
Telstar's surface was warming nicely and would soon support the
pressure-sensitive mat I was going to stick to some of her solar
generators. When the 'couple said Telstar had reached zero centigrade,
I pulled the mat loose from where it was stuck to my left leg and
plastered it above the gate I was going to open. I say above, because
it was closer to one pole--the "North" pole of the satellite--than the
gate.
It was time to go to work on my first screw. And there I got my next
lesson. It was a real big screw, as they go, a 4-40 flat head machine
screw with a length of about three-quarters of an inch. I would have
to give it thirty turns to back it out. I never gave it the first
turn. The head snapped off as soon as I applied a few inch-pounds of
torque.
Yes, the surface had heated up nicely, but the shank of the screw was
about two hundred below zero centigrade, and far brittler than glass.
I cussed some and reported to Sid what had happened.
"Have to drill it out," I said.
My drill was a cutie. It was a modified dentists' drill, the kind
that's run by a little air turbine at about two hundred thousand
r.p.m.'s. I really mean that. They turn like mad.
I'd been taught to use it with care. When a dentist drills your teeth,
he blows olive oil and water through the turbine, and the mixture
cools the tooth--and the drill--while the cutting is going on. We
couldn't afford any cloud of vapor--or the shorting out that ice would
cause--so I had only the pressurized mixture of oxygen and helium in
the tanks on my back to run the drill. And that meant light and
intermittent pressures on the number 43 wire gauge drill--the one
that's the right size to drill out a 4-40. It took me about fifteen
minutes and I was down to my last number 43 drill bit when she broke
free.
From then on I had to heat each screw before I went to work on it. I
had something like a soldering iron that I could press against the
screw-head. Heat would flow through the highly conductive alloy and
make it less brittle. I flicked each screw I removed out into space
and at last carefully hinged the gate wide open.
The gate was the length of the sector--about two feet. It was four
inches wide and about an inch thick and had parts strung along it like
kernels on an ear of corn.
At this stage I readjusted the position of my webbing girdle until I
could clamp my head in position and begin the testing. It was slow
work. The first sad thing was to learn that the solenoid M1537 was as
good as new. When I put enough voltage across its terminals, the
actuator clicked down through the core.
I swore a blue streak.
"What is it Mike?" Sid's voice came in my ear.
"Trouble," I said. "What did we expect?"
"Roger," he said in that toneless unexcited astronauts' voice. "Return
to ship, Mike."
"Not now," I said. "I've just got the oyster opened."
His voice cut like my drill-bit. "I ordered you to return to ship.
Your air supply is about shot."
"I haven't been out that long," I protested, not feeling too sure
about the lapse of time.
"Your drill chewed it up pretty fast. Quit talking and start moving."
I was thankful for the experience of moving in close to the bird. The
same tricks worked much more smoothly as I used my deflection plate in
front of my belly blast to turn me to face the floodlight, and then
followed up with a light shove or two in the spine to start me
drifting toward _Nelly Bly_. There didn't seem any rush, and I drifted
slowly over, using only a couple triggered bursts of deceleration to
slow me down as I approached the open hatch.
Inside we went through the drill. My ears popped a little as Sid
unchucked my spent tanks, and popped again as the new ones came on
with a hiss.
"Take it easy on that steering fuel, Mike," he said again. "You're
getting awfully low."
"Sure," I said and let myself drift out the hatch. I had enough sense
to twist so that my back jet wouldn't hit the ship. Then I took a
zig-zag course through the darkness to my bird, got oriented at the
open gate and went back to work. Before I could get started, my
earphones spoke.
"Mike, Cleary here."
"Roger, Paul. What is it?"
"Have you gotten to that solenoid yet?"
"Yes."
"What can you tell me?"
"That you're a fathead. Now shut up. I'm busy."
"Roger, Mike," Paul Cleary acknowledged quite meekly.
So I started again, reaching with my leads from point to point. After
a certain number of tests, I had the area isolated, but not the part.
From here on it would have to be disassembly. Every tiny screw had to
be heated, then teased out with a jeweler's screwdriver. Some took my
patented ratchet extension. The big miracle was that I didn't break
anything.
[Illustration]
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.
* * * * *
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
"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.
The trick, of course, was to slow down to the point where he could
spiral us down to Muroc Dry Lake. _Nelly_ was a sort of glider. Her
performance at about Mach 10 and two hundred thousand feet was quite
respectable, but the lower and slower we went, the more she flew like
the proverbial kitchen sink. Sid only had one bright spot: Our big
fuel supply gave him plenty of rocket and retro when he wanted it, and
allowed him to get us back over Muroc.
I can't say he made the landing look easy, because he didn't. It
looked like plain hell to me, for we scorched in at something over
four hundred miles an hour.
When _Nelly_ screeched to a stop, we just sat there. There was none of
this romantic business about snapping open face plates and exchanging
witty remarks. Bubble helmets don't have face plates, and besides, I
didn't have anything I wanted to say to Sid. I was as tired of him as
he was of me. I was just plain tired, if you want to know the truth.
They didn't let us alone, of course. While the crash trucks were still
kicking up a dust trail tearing out to get us, there were guys on the
radio with those cool voices, and Sid was tiredly saying "Roger," to
all their questions. And we didn't do any moving about. You'd be
surprised how weighing four hundred pounds makes you willing to wait
for the crane to lift you from your seat. All at once I almost wanted
to be back in space again, where I didn't weigh anything at all.
Almost.
* * * * *
They flew us back to Canaveral for the de-briefing, both asleep. The
whole mob was there to greet us, Paul Cleary, Fred Stone, and even
Sylvia. They met us at the plane and Sylvia was the first to grab me
as I came down the steps.
"Mike!" she squealed. "Are you all right?"
"Better now," I said, kind of untangling from her. "How did you manage
this?" I looked up. "Hi, Paul," I said to his sleepy old grin, and
knew how.
"Dinner tonight?" she insisted.
"I don't know," I said, looking over at Paul. "I think there's a
de-briefing or something before they turn me loose."
"Don't be silly," Sylvia said. "It's not as if you were an astronaut
or something."
I was back on the ground, all right.
Well, there was sort of a de-briefing. Cleary and Stone got me alone
for a moment in somebody's office.
"Well, Mike," Paul said, "that was a great performance. What was the
trouble up there?"
I laughed at both of them. "Go jump in the lake," I said. "I'm out of
the middle."
"What do you mean, Mike?" Doc Stone asked, holding his young-man's
pipe at arm's length.
"It wasn't design--because the solenoid worked. And it wasn't
installation. It was materials." I told them about the no-good
insulation.
"Lucky it's only used in a couple points," Paul said, scowling. "I
guess any other point where it broke up wasn't as critical in
dimension and no short resulted."
"Not yet," I grinned. "It may. And I couldn't care less."
"You're a big winner, then, Mike," Paul grinned. "Fred and I have kind
of made up anyway, and you're in solid with Sylvia."
"Not with that noise," I said. "No dame was worth that ride. Let Sid
have her."
* * * * *
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