He had his eye on the star images, steady and perfectly matched, as the jet slammed him into his pads. The force was four gravities, much more than the boost from Luna, but they held it for only slightly more than one minute. Captain Stone kept watching the star images, ready to check her if she started to swing, but the extreme care with which he had balanced his ship in loading was rewarded; she held her attitude.
He heard Hazel shout, “Brennschluss!” just as the noise and pressure dropped off and died. He took a deep breath and said to the mike, “You all right, Edith?”
“Yes, dear,” she answered faintly. “We’re all right.”
“Power room?”
“Okay!” Pollux answered.
“Secure and lock.” There was no need to have the power room stand by, any corrections to course and speed on this leg would be made days or weeks later, after much calculation.
“Aye aye, sir. Say, Dad, what was the chatter about a blip?”
“Pipe down,” Hazel interrupted. “I’ve got a call coming in.” She added, “Rolling Stone, Luna, to Traffic—come in, Traffic.”
There was a whir and a click and a female voice chanted: “Traffic Control to Rolling Stone, Luna—routine traffic precautionary: your plan as filed will bring you moderately close to experimental rocket satellite of Harvard Radiation Laboratory. Hold to flight plan; you will fail contact by ample safe margin. End of message; repeat—” The transcription ran itself through once more and shut off.
“Now they tell us!” Hazel exploded. “Oh, those cushion warmers! Those bureaucrats! I’ll bet that M-S-G has been holding in the tank for the past hour waiting for some idiot to finish discussing his missing laundry.”
She went on fuming: “‘Moderately close!’ ‘Ample safe margin!’ Why, Roger, the consarned thing singed my eyebrows!”
“‘A miss is as good as a mile.’”
“A mile isn’t nearly enough, as you know darn well. It took ten years off my life—and at my age I can’t afford that.”
Roger Stone shrugged. After the strain and excitement he was feeling let down and terribly weary; since blast-off he had been running on stimulants instead of sleep. “I’m going to cork off for the next twelve hours. Get a preliminary check on our vector; if there’s nothing seriously wrong, don’t wake me. I’ll look at it when I turn out.”
“Aye aye, Captain Bligh.”
First check showed nothing wrong with their orbit; Hazel followed him to bed—“bed” in a figurative sense, for Hazel never strapped herself to her bunk in free fall, preferring to float loosely wherever air currents wafted her. She shared a stateroom with Meade. The three boys were assigned to the bunkroom and the twins attempted to turn in—but Lowell was not sleepy. He felt fine and was investigating the wonderful possibilities of free fall. He wanted to play tag. The twins did not want to play tag; Lowell played tag anyhow.
Pollux snagged him by an ankle. “Listen, you! Weren’t you enough trouble by being sick?”
“I was not sick!”
“So? Who was it we had to clean up after? Santa Claus?”
“There ain’t any Santa Claus. I was not sick. You’re a fibber, you’re a fibber, you’re a fibber!”
“Don’t argue with him,” Castor advised. “Just choke him and stuff him out the lock. We can explain and correct the ship’s mass factor tomorrow.”
“I was not sick!”
Pollux said, “Meade had quite a bit of sack time on the leg down. Maybe you can talk her into taking him off our hands?”
“I’ll try.”
Meade was awake; she considered it. “Cash?”
“Sis, don’t be that way!”
“Well…three days’ dishwashing?”
“Skinflint! It’s a deal; come take charge of the body.”
Meade had to use the bunkroom as a nursery; the boys went forward and slept in the control room, each strapping himself loosely to a control couch as required by ship’s regulations to avoid the chance of jostling instruments during sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE MIGHTY ROOM
CAPTAIN STONE HAD ALL HANDS
with the exception of Dr. Stone and Lowell compute their new orbit. They all worked from the same data, using readings supplied by Traffic Control and checked against their own instruments. Roger Stone waited until all had finished before comparing results.
“What do you get, Hazel?”
“As I figure, Captain, you won’t miss Mars by more than a million miles or so.”
“I figure it right on.”
“Well, now that you mention it, so do I.”
“Cas? Pol? Meade?”
The twins were right together to six decimal places and checked with their father and grandmother to five, but Meade’s answer bore no resemblance to any of the others. Her father looked it over curiously. “Baby girl, I can’t figure out how you got this out of the computer. As near as I can tell you have us headed for Proxima Centauri.”
Meade looked at it with interest. “Is that so? Tell you what: let’s use mine and see what happens. It ought to be interesting.”
“But not practical. You have us going faster than light.”
“I thought the figures were a bit large.”
Hazel stuck out a bony forefinger. “That ought to be a minus sign, hon.”
“That’s not all that’s wrong,” announced Pollux. “Look at this—” He held out Meade’s programming sheet.
“That will do, Pol,” his father interrupted. “You are not called on to criticize Meade’s astrogation.”
“But—”
“Stow it.”
“I don’t mind, Daddy,” Meade put in. “I knew I was wrong.” She shrugged. “It’s the first one I’ve ever worked outside of school. Somehow it makes a difference when it’s real.”
“It certainly does—as every astrogator learns. Never mind, Hazel has the median figures. We’ll log hers.”
Hazel shook hands with herself. “The winnah and still champeen!”
Castor said, “Dad, that’s final? No more maneuvers until you calculate your approach to Mars?”
“Of course not. No changes for six months at least. Why?”
“Then Pol and I respectfully request the Captain’s permission to decompress the hold and go outside. We want to get to work on our bikes.”
“Never mind the fake military-vessel phraseology. But I have news for you.” He took a sheet of paper out of his belt pouch. “Just a moment while I make a couple of changes.” He wrote on it, then fastened it to the control room bulletin board. It read:
SHIP’S ROUTINE
0700
Reveille (optional for Edith, Hazel, & Buster)
0745
Breakfast (Meade cooks. Twins wash dishes)
0900
School C & P, math
Meade, astrogation, coached by Hazel
Lowell, reeling, writhing, and fainting in coils—or whatever his mother deems necessary.
1200
End of morning session
1215
Lunch
1300
School C & P, math
Hydroponics chores, Meade
1600
End of afternoon session
1800
Dinner—All Hands initial ship’s maintenance schedule
SATURDAY ROUTINE—turn to after breakfast and clean ship, Hazel in charge. Captain’s inspection at 1100. Personal laundry in afternoon.
SUNDAY ROUTINE—meditation, study, and recreation. Make & Mend in afternoon
Hazel looked it over. “Where are we headed, Rog? Botany Bay? You forgot to set a time to flog the peasants.”
“It seems very reasonable to me.”
“Possibly. Six gets you ten it won’t last a week.”
“Done. Let’s see your money.”
The twins had read it with dismay. Pollux blurted out, “But Dad! You haven’t left us any time to repair our bikes—do you want us to lose our investment?”
“I
’ve assigned thirty hours of study a week. That leaves one hundred and thirty-eight other hours. How you use them is your business as long as you keep our agreement about studying.”
Castor said, “Suppose we want to start math at eight-thirty and again right after lunch? Can we get out of school that much earlier?”
“I see no objection.”
“And suppose we study evenings sometimes? Can we work up some velvet?”
Their father shrugged. “Thirty hours a week—any reasonable variations in the routine will be okay, provided you enter in the log the exact times.”
“Now that that’s settled,” Hazel commenced, “I regret to inform you, Captain, that there is one other little item on that Procrustean program that will have to be canceled, for the time being at least. Much as I would enjoy inducting our little blossom into the mysteries of astrogation I don’t have the time right now. You’ll have to teach her yourself.”
“Why?”
“‘Why’ the man asks? You should know better than anyone. The Scourge of the Spaceways, that’s why. I’ve got to hole up and write like mad for the next three or four weeks; I’ve got to get several months of episodes ahead before we get out of radio range.”
Roger Stone looked at his mother sadly. “I knew it was bound to come, Hazel, but I didn’t expect it to hit you so young. The mental processes dull, the mind tends to wander, the—”
“Whose mind does what? Why you young—”
“Take it easy. If you’ll look over your left shoulder out the starboard port and squint your eyes, you might imagine that you see a glint on the War God. It can’t be much over ten thousand miles away.”
“What’s that got to do with me?” she demanded suspiciously.
“Poor Hazel! We’ll take good care of you. Mother, we’re riding in orbit with several large commercial vessels; every one of them has burners powerful enough to punch through to Earth. We won’t ever be out of radio contact with Earth.”
Hazel stared out the port as if she could actually spot the War God. “Well, I’ll be dogged,” she breathed. “Roger, lead me to my room—that’s a good boy. It’s senile decay, all right. You’d better take back your show; I doubt if I can write it.”
“Huh uh! You let them pick up that option; you’ve got to write it. Speaking of The Scum of the Waste Spaces, I’ve been meaning to ask you a couple of questions about it and this is the first spare moment we’ve had. In the first place, why did you let them sign us up again?”
“Because they waved too much money under my nose, as you know full well. It’s an aroma we Stones have hardly ever been able to resist.”
“I just wanted to make you admit it. You were going to get me off the hook—remember? So you swallowed it yourself.”
“More bait.”
“Surely. Now the other point: I don’t see how you dared to go ahead with it, no matter how much money they offered. The last episode you showed me, while you had killed off the Galactic Overlord you had also left Our Hero in a decidedly untenable position. Sealed in a radioactive sphere, if I remember correctly, at the bottom of an ammonia ocean on Jupiter. The ocean was swarming with methane monsters, whatever they are, each hypnotized by the Overlord’s mind ray to go after John Sterling at the first whiff—and him armed only with his Scout knife. How did you get him out of it?”
“We found a way,” put in Pol. “If you assume—”
“Quiet, infants. Nothing to it, Roger. By dint of superhuman effort Our Hero extricated himself from his predicament and—”
“That’s no answer.”
“You don’t understand. I open the next episode on Ganymede. John Sterling is telling Special Agent Dolores O’Shanahan about his adventure. He’s making light of it, see? He’s noble so he really wouldn’t want to boast to a girl. Just as he is jokingly disparaging his masterly escape the next action starts and it’s so fast and so violent and so bloody that our unseen audience doesn’t have time to think about it until the commercial. And by then they’ve got too much else to think about.”
Roger shook his head. “That’s literary cheating.”
“Who said this was literature? It’s a way to help corporations take tax deductions. I’ve got three new sponsors.”
“Hazel,” asked Pollux, “where have you got them now? What’s the situation?”
Hazel glanced at the chronometer. “Roger, does that schedule take effect today? Or can we start fresh tomorrow?”
He smiled feebly. “Tomorrow, I guess.”
“If this is going to degenerate into a story conference, I’d better get Lowell. I get my best ideas from Lowell; he’s just the mental age of my average audience.”
“If I were Buster, I would resent that.”
“Quiet!” She slithered to the hatch and called out, “Edith! May I borrow your wild animal for a while?”
Meade said, “I’ll get him, Grandmother. But wait for me.”
She returned quickly with the child. Lowell said, “What do you want, Grandma Hazel? Bounce tag?”
She gathered him in an arm. “No, son—blood. Blood and gore. We’re going to kill off some villains.”
“Swell!”
“Now as I recall it—and mind you, I was only there once—I left them lost in the Dark Nebula. Their food is gone and so is the Q-fuel. They’ve made a temporary truce with their Arcturian prisoners and set them free to help—which is safe enough because they are silicon-chemistry people and can’t eat humans. Which is about what they are down to; the real question is—who gets barbecued for lunch? They need the help of the Arcturian prisoners because the Space Entity they captured in the last episode and imprisoned in an empty fuel tank has eaten its way through all but the last bulkhead and it doesn’t have any silly prejudices about body chemistry. Carbon or silicon; it’s all one to it.”
“I don’t believe that’s logical,” commented Roger Stone. “If its own chemistry was based—”
“Out of order,” ruled Hazel. “Helpful suggestions only, please. Pol? You seem to have a gleam in your eye.”
“This Space Entity jigger—can he stand up against radar wave lengths?”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. But we’ve got to complicate it a bit. Well, Meade?”
The twins started moving their bicycles outside the following day. The suits they wore were the same ones they had worn outdoors on the Moon, with the addition of magnetic boots and small rocket motors. These latter were strapped to their backs with the nozzles sticking straight out from their waists. An added pressure bottle to supply the personal rocket motor was mounted on the shoulders of each boy but, being weightless, the additional mass was little handicap.
“Now remember,” their father warned them, “those boost units are strictly for dire emergency. Lifelines at all times. And don’t depend on your boots when you shift lines, snap on the second line before you loose the first.”
“Shucks, Dad, we’ll be careful.”
“No doubt. But you can expect me to make a surprise inspection at any time. One slip on a safety precaution and it’s the rack and thumb screws, plus fifty strokes of bastinado.”
“No boiling oil?”
“Can’t afford it. See here, you think I’m joking. If one of you should happen to get loose and drift away from the ship, don’t expect me to come after you. One of you is a spare anyway.”
“Which one?” asked Pollux. “Cas, maybe?”
“Sometimes I think it’s one, sometimes the other. Strict compliance with ship’s orders will keep me from having to decide at this time.”
The cargo hatch had no air lock; the twins decompressed the entire hold, then opened the door, remembering just in time to snap on their lines as the door opened. They looked out and both hesitated. Despite their lifelong experience with vacuum suits on the face of the Moon this was the first time either one had ever been outside a ship in orbit.
The hatch framed endless cosmic night, blackness made colder and darker by the unwinking diamond stars many light
-years away. They were on the night side of the Stone; there was nothing but stars and the swallowing depths. It was one thing to see it from the safety of Luna or through the strong quartz of a port; it was quite another to see it with nothing at all between one’s frail body and the giddy, cold depths of eternity.
Pollux said, “Cas, I don’t like this.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Then why are my teeth chattering?”
“Go ahead; I’ll keep a tension on your line.”
“You are too good to me, dear brother—a darn sight too good! You go and I’ll keep a tension on your line.”
“Don’t be silly! Get on out there.”
“After you, Grandpa.”
“Oh, well!” Castor grasped the frame of the hatch and swung himself out. He scrambled to click his magnetic boots to the side of the ship but the position was most awkward, the suit was cumbersome, and he had no gravity to help him. Instead, he swung around and his momentum pulled his fingers loose from the smooth frame. His floundering motions bumped the side of the ship and pushed him gently away. He floated out, still floundering, until his line checked him three or four feet from the side. “Pull me in!”
“Put your feet down, clumsy!”
“I can’t. Pull me in, you red-headed moron!”
“Don’t call me ‘red-headed’.” Pollux let out a couple of feet more line.
“Pol, quit fooling. I don’t like this.”
“I thought you were brave, Grandpa?”
Castor’s reply was incoherent. Pollux decided that it had gone far enough; he pulled Castor in and, while holding firmly to a hatch dog himself, he grabbed one of Castor’s boots and set it firmly against the side; it clicked into place. “Snap on your other line,” he ordered.
Castor, still breathing heavily, looked for a padeye in the side of the ship. He found one nearby and walked over to it, picking up his feet as if he walked in sticky mud. He snapped his second line to the ring of the padeye and straightened up. “Catch,” Pollux called out and sent his own second line snaking out to his twin.