The daily calls, no longer a nagging worry but a pleasure, continued. It was a week later that Dr. Stone concluded by saying, “Hold on, dear. A friend of yours wants to speak with you.”
“Okay, darling. Love and stuff—good-by.”
“Roger Dodger?” came a bass voice.
“Van! You squareheaded bay window! I knew you were too mean to die.”
“Alive and kicking, thanks to your wonderful wife. But no longer with a bay window; I haven’t had time to regrow it yet.”
“You will.”
“No doubt. But I was asking the good doctor about something and she couldn’t give me much data. Your department. Rog, how did this speed run leave you for single-H? Could you use some go-juice?”
Captain Stone considered it. “Have you any surplus, Captain?”
“A little. Not much for this wagon, but it might be quite a lot for a kiddie cart like yours.”
“We had to jettison, did you know?”
“I know—and I’m sorry. I’ll see that a claim is pushed through promptly. I’d advance it myself, Captain, if alimony on three planets left me anything to advance.”
“Maybe it won’t be necessary.” He explained about the radar reflector. “If we could nudge back into the old groove we just might get together with our belongings.”
Vandenbergh chuckled. “I want to meet those kids of yours again; they appear to have grown up a bit in the last seven years.”
“Don’t. They’ll steal your bridgework. Now about this single-H: how much can you spare?”
“Enough, enough, I’m sure. This caper is worth trying, just for the sport. I’m sure it has never been done before. Never.”
The two ships, perfectly matched to eye and almost so by instrument, nevertheless had drifted a couple of miles apart while the epidemic in the liner raged and died out. The undetectable gravitational attraction between them gave them mutual escape velocity much less than their tiny residual relative motion. Up to now nothing had been done about it since they were still in the easiest of phone range. But now it was necessary to pump reactive mass from one to the other.
Roger Stone threw a weight fastened to a light messenger line as straight and as far as he could heave. By the time it was slowed to a crawl by the drag of the line a crewman from the War God came out after it on his suit jet. In due course the messenger line brought over a heavier line which was fastened to the smaller ship. Hand power alone took a strain on the line. While the mass of Rolling Stone was enormous by human muscle standards, the vector involved was too small to handle by jet and friction was nil. In warping in a space ship the lack of brakes is a consideration more important than power, as numerous dents to ships and space stations testify.
As a result of that gentle tug, two and a half days later the ships were close enough to permit a fuel hose to be connected between them. Roger and Hazel touched the hose only with wrench and space-suit gauntlet, not enough contact to affect the quarantine even by Dr. Stone’s standards. Twenty minutes later even that connection was broken and the Stone had a fresh supply of jet juice.
And not too soon. Mars was a ruddy gibbous moon, bulging ever bigger in the sky; it was time to prepare to maneuver.
“There it is!” Pollux was standing watch on the radar screen; his yelp brought his grandmother floating over.
“More likely a flock of geese,” she commented. “Where?”
“Right there. Can’t you see it?”
Hazel grudgingly conceded that the blip might be real. The next several hours were spent in measuring distance, bearing, and relative motion by radar and doppler and in calculating the cheapest maneuver to let them match with the errant bicycles, baggage, and books. Roger Stone took it as easily as he could, being hurried somewhat by the growing nearness of Mars. He finally settled them almost dead in space relative to the floating junk pile, with a slight drift which would bring them within three hundred yards of the mass—so he calculated—at closest approach a few hours hence.
They spent the waiting time figuring the maneuvers to rendezvous with Mars. The Rolling Stone would not, of course, land on Mars but at the port on Phobos. First they must assume an almost circular ellipse around Mars matching with Phobos, then as a final maneuver they must settle the ship on the tiny moon—simple maneuvers made fussy by one thing only; Phobos has a period of about ten hours; the Stone would have to arrive not only at the right place with the right speed and direction, but also at the right time. After the bicycles were taken aboard the ship would have to be nursed along while still fairly far out if she were to fall to an exact rendezvous.
Everybody worked on it but Buster, Meade working under Hazel’s tutelage. Pollux continued to check by radar their approach to their cargo. Roger Stone had run through and discarded two trial solutions and was roughing out another which, at last, seemed to be making sense when Pollux announced that his latest angulation of the radar data showed that they were nearly as close as they would get.
His father unstrapped himself and floated to a port. “Where is it? Good heavens, we’re practically sitting on it. Let’s get busy, boys.”
“I’m coming, too,” announced Hazel.
“Me, too!” agreed Lowell.
Meade reached out and snagged him. “That’s what you think, Buster. You and Sis are going to play a wonderful game called, ‘What’s for dinner?’ Have fun, folks.” She headed aft, towing the infant against his opposition.
Outside the bicycles looked considerably farther away. Cas glanced at the mass and said, “Maybe I ought to go across on my suit jet, Dad? It would save time.”
“I strongly doubt it. Try the heaving line, Pol.”
Pollux snapped the light messenger line to a padeye. Near the weighted end had been fastened a half a dozen large hooks fashioned of 6-gauge wire. His first heave seemed to be strong enough but it missed the cluster by a considerable margin.
“Let me have it, Pol,” Castor demanded.
“Let him be,” ordered their father. “So help me, this is the last time I’m going into space without a proper line-throwing gun. Make note of that, Cas. Put it on the shopping list when we go inside.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The second throw was seen to hit the mass, but when Pol heaved in the line came away, the hooks having failed to catch. He tried again. This time the floating line came taut.
“Easy, now!” his father cautioned. “We don’t want a bunch of bikes in our lap. There—’vast heaving. She’s started.” They waited.
Castor became impatient and suggested that they give the line another tug. His father shook his head. Hazel added, “I saw a green hand at the space station try to hurry a load that way. Steel plate, it was.”
“What happened?”
“He had started it with a pull; he thought he could stop it with a shove. They had to amputate both legs but they saved his life.” Castor shut up.
A few minutes later the disorderly mass touched down, bending a handlebar of one bike that got pinched but with no other damage. The twins and Hazel swarmed over the mass, working free on their safety lines and clicking on with their boots only to pass bicycles into the hold, where Roger Stone stowed them according to his careful mass distribution schedule.
Presently Pollux came across Castor’s “Not for Salvage” warning. “Hey, Cas! Here’s your notice.”
“It’s no good now.” Nevertheless he accepted it and glanced at it. Then his eyes snapped wider.
An endorsement had been added at the bottom:
“Sez you!
“The Galactic Overlord.”
Captain Stone came out to investigate the delay, took the paper and read it. He looked at his mother. “Hazel!”
“Me? Why, I’ve been right here in plain sight the whole time. How could I have done it?”
Stone crumpled the paper. “I do not believe in ghosts, inside straights, nor ‘Galactic Overlords.’”
If Hazel did it, no one saw her and she never admitted it. She pers
isted in the theory that the Galactic Overlord wasn’t really dead after all. To prove it, she revived him in her next episode.
CHAPTER TEN
PHOBOS PORT
MARS HAS TWO READY-MADE
space stations, her two tiny, close-in moons—Phobos and Deimos, the dogs of the War God, Fear and Panic. Deimos is a jagged, ragged mass of rock; a skipper would be hard put to find a place to put down a ship. Phobos was almost spherical and fairly smooth as we found her; atomic power has manicured her into one big landing field all around her equator—a tidying-up that may have been over-hasty; by one very plausible theory the Martian ancients used her themselves as a space station. The proof, if such there be, may lie buried under the slag of Phobos port.
The Rolling Stone slid inside the orbit of Deimos, blasted as she approached the orbit of Phobos and was matched in with Phobos, following an almost identical orbit around Mars only a scant five miles from that moon. She was falling now, falling around Mars but falling toward Phobos, for no vector had been included as yet to prevent that. The fall could not be described as a headlong plunge; at this distance, one radius of Phobos, the moon attracted the tiny mass of the spaceship with a force of less than three ten-thousandths of one Earth-surface gravity. Captain Stone had ample time in which to calculate a vector which would let him land; it would take the better part of an hour for the Stone to sink to the surface of the satellite.
However he had chosen to do it the easy way, through outside help. The jet of the Rolling Stone, capable of blasting at six gravities, was almost too much of a tool for the thin gravity field of a ten-mile rock—like swatting a fly with a pile-driver. A few minutes after they had ceased blasting, a small scooter rocket up from Phobos matched with them and anchored to their airlock.
The spacesuited figure who swam in removed his helmet and said, “Permission to board, sir? Jason Thomas, port pilot—you asked for pilot-and-tow?”
“That’s right, Captain Thomas.”
“Just call me Jay. Got your mass schedule ready?”
Roger Stone gave it to him; he looked it over while they looked him over. Meade thought privately that he looked more like a bookkeeper than a dashing spaceman—certainly nothing like the characters in Hazel’s show. Lowell stared at him gravely and said, “Are you a Martian, Mister?”
The port pilot answered him with equal gravity. “Sort of, son.”
“Then where’s your other leg?”
Thomas looked startled, but recovered. “I guess I’m a cut-rate Martian.”
Lowell seemed doubtful but did not pursue the point. The port official returned the schedule and said, “Okay, Captain. Where are your outside control-circuit jacks?”
“Just forward of the lock. The inner terminals are here on the board.”
“Be a few minutes.” He went back outside, moving very rapidly. He was back inside in less than ten minutes.
“That’s all the time it took you to mount auxiliary rockets?” Roger Stone asked incredulously.
“Done it a good many times. Gets to be a routine. Besides, I’ve got good boys working with me.” Quickly he plugged a small portable control board to the jacks pointed out to him earlier, and tested his controls. “All set.” He glanced at the radar screen. “Nothing to do but loaf for a bit. You folks immigrating?”
“Not exactly. It’s more of a pleasure trip.”
“Now ain’t that nice! Though it beats me what pleasure you expect to find on Mars.” He glanced out the port where the reddish curve of Mars pushed up into the black.
“We’ll do some sightseeing I expect.”
“More to see in the State of Vermont than on this whole planet. I know.” He looked around. “This your whole family?”
“All but my wife.” Roger Stone explained the situation.
“Oh, yes! Read about it in the daily War Cry. They got the name of your ship wrong, though.”
Hazel snorted in disgust. “Newspapers!”
“Yes, mum. I put the War God down just four hours ago. Berths 32 & 33. She’s in quarantine, though.” He pulled out a pipe. “You folks got static precipitation?”
“Yes,” agreed Hazel. “Go ahead and smoke, young man.”
“Thanks on both counts.” He made almost a career of getting it lighted; Pollux began to wonder when he intended to figure his ballistic.
But Jason Thomas did not bother even to glance at the radar screen; instead he started a long and meandering story about his brother-in-law back Earthside. It seemed that this connection of his had tried to train a parrot to act as an alarm clock.
The twins knew nothing of parrots and cared less. Castor began to get worried. Was this moron going to crash the Stone? He began to doubt that Thomas was a pilot of any sort. The story ambled on and on. Thomas interrupted himself to say, “Better hang on, everybody. And somebody ought to hold the baby.”
“I’m not a baby,” Lowell protested.
“I wish I was one, youngster.” His hand sought his control panel as Hazel gathered Lowell in. “But the joke of the whole thing was—” A deafening rumble shook the ship, a sound somehow more earsplitting than their own jet. It continued for seconds only; as it died Thomas continued triumphantly: “—the bird never did learn to tell time. Thanks, folks. The office’ll bill you.” He stood up with a catlike motion, slid across the floor without lifting his feet. “Glad to have met you. G’bye!”
They were down on Phobos.
Pollux got up from where he had sprawled on the deck-plates—and bumped his head on the overhead. After that he tried to walk like Jason Thomas. He had weight, real weight, for the first time since Luna, but it amounted to only two ounces in his clothes. “I wonder how high I can jump here?” he said.
“Don’t try it,” Hazel advised. “Remember the escape velocity of this piece of real estate is only sixty-six feet a second.”
“I don’t think a man could jump that fast.”
“There was Ole Gunderson. He dived right around Phobos—a free circular orbit thirty-five miles long. Took him eighty-five minutes. He’d have been traveling yet if they hadn’t grabbed as he came back around.”
“Yes, but wasn’t he an Olympic jumper or something? And didn’t he have to have a special rack or some such to take off from?”
“You wouldn’t have to jump,” Castor put in. “Sixty-six feet a second is forty-five miles an hour, so the circular speed comes out a bit more than thirty miles an hour. A man can run twenty miles an hour back home, easy. He could certainly get up to forty-five here.”
Pollux shook his head. “No traction.”
“Special spiked shoes—and maybe a tangent launching ramp for the last hundred yards—then woosh! off the end and you’re gone for good.”
“Okay, you try it, Grandpa. I’ll wave good-by to you.”
Roger Stone whistled loudly. “Quiet, please! If you armchair athletes are quite through, I have an announcement to make.”
“Do we go groundside now, Dad?”
“Not if you don’t quit interrupting me. I’m going over to the War God. Anyone who wants to come along, or wishes to take a stroll outside, may do so—just as long as you settle the custody of Buster among you. Wear your boots; I understand they have steel strip walkways for the benefit of transients.”
Pollux was the first one suited up and into the lock, where he was surprised to find the rope ladder still rolled up. He wondered about Jason Thomas and decided that he must have jumped…a hundred-odd feet of drop wouldn’t hurt a man’s arches here. But when he opened the outer door he discovered that it was quite practical to walk straight down the side of the ship like a fly on a wall. He had heard of this but had not quite believed it, not on a planet… well, a moon.
The others followed him, Hazel carrying Lowell. Roger Stone stopped when they were down and looked around. “I could have sworn,” he said with a puzzled air, “that I spotted the War God not very far east of us just before we landed.”
“There is something sticking up over th
ere,” Castor said, pointing north. The object was a rounded dome swelling up above the extremely near horizon—an horizon only two hundred yards away for Castor’s height of eye. The dome looked enormous but it grew rapidly smaller as they approached it and finally got it entirely above the horizon. The sharp curvature of the little globe played tricks on them; it was so small that it was possible to see that it was curved, but the habit of thinking of anything over the horizon as distant stayed with them.
Before they reached the dome they encountered one of the steel walking strips running across their path, and on it a man. He was spacesuited as they were and was carrying with ease a large coil of steel line, a hand-powered winch, and a ground anchor with big horns. Roger Stone stopped him. “Excuse me, friend, but could you tell me the way to the R.S. War God? Berths thirty-two and -three, I believe she is.”
“Off east there. Just follow this strip about five miles; you’ll raise her. Say, are you from the Rolling Stone?”
“Yes. I’m her master. My name’s Stone, too.”
“Glad to know you, Captain. I’m just on my way out to respot your ship. You’ll find her in berth thirteen, west of here when you come back.”
The twins looked curiously at the equipment he was carrying. “Just with that?” asked Castor, thinking of the ticklish problem it had been to move the Stone on Luna.
“Did you leave your gyros running?” asked the port jockey.
“Yes,” answered Captain Stone.
“I won’t have any trouble. See you around.” He headed out to the ship. The family party turned east along the strip; the traction afforded by their boot magnets against steel made much easier walking. Hazel put Lowell down and let him run.
They were walking toward Mars, a great arc of which filled much of the eastern horizon. The planet rose appreciably as they progressed; like Earth in the Lunar sky Mars never rose nor set for any particular point of the satellite’s surface—but they were moving over the curve of Phobos so rapidly that their own walking made it rise. About a mile farther along Meade spotted the bow of the War God silhouetted against the orange-red face of Mars. They hurried, but it was another three miles before they had her in sight down to her fins.