CHAPTER XVIII
Out of Control!
Rick came back to painful consciousness. He realized that theacceleration was at an end. The torture of G forces was over, andwhatever happened from here on wouldn't compare with the past fewminutes.
He tried to sit up, and strained muscles reacted. He groaned with painand lay down again. Suddenly he realized he was no longer on the floor!
He hung in the air, as though by some weird magic, and tried to figureout what had happened to him. Of course he was weightless! The rocketwas now in free flight, its inertia counteracting gravitational pull. Hewould continue weightless until gravity took over again.
_Rick hung in the air, as though suspended by some weirdmagic_]
It was comfortable, after the racking acceleration. He could have goneto sleep easily, and almost did. Then the spacemonk chirruped at himuneasily. The marmoset was feeling the odd weightlessness, too.
The chirrup brought Rick back to his senses. He wasn't in some marvelousbed, he was in space! But natural forces still bound him to earth, andmother earth would reclaim him with crushing, final impact within a veryfew minutes.
He tasted blood. The Earthman had done this! His death would be on theEarthman's head. He knew the drone control couldn't function, but hedidn't know why. He was only sure of one thing. The Earthman was amember of the electronics department. Only someone who knew the dronesystem intimately could have bypassed the control by wiring it so theboard showed green even when the control wasn't working.
Rising anger stirred him. With one trembling hand he reached out andmanaged to hook the channel on which the marmoset's chair was hung. Hepulled himself erect. He had forgotten he was weightless. He kept righton going until his head banged painfully on the bottom of the nose-coneradar unit. The shock of pain, unlike the throbbing from theacceleration, cleared his head and made him angrier.
Carefully now, he hauled himself down again. He patted the spacemonk ashe went by, an absent-minded, comradely gesture. He was intent on thedrone control in the center of the floor. The Earthman hadn't had muchtime. Whatever he had done to sabotage the control must have been donein a very few minutes.
Rick got into position, kneeling on the deck, steadying himself with onehand. With the other he searched for his flashlight and found it hangingfrom his belt. His head sagged, and had it not been for theweightlessness he would have fallen forward onto the drone control. Hewas in worse shape than he realized. Then, some inner warning signalsounded, and he came back to consciousness with a start.
The startled reaction was enough to move him away from the drone controland break his loose grip. He slid through the air back against thebulkhead wall and felt the warmth that had not yet drained off intospace. It was the heat of rapid passage through the atmosphere.
He thought grimly that the heat would be much worse when the rocketre-entered the atmosphere. Unless Jerry Lipton could somehow getcontrol, the plunging rocket would flame like a meteor.
He moved back to the drone control, using his hands as paddles. Hiswrists were limp and his control was poor, but he made it. He had theflashlight now, and he shot its beam into the maze of wiring.
The cut wire dangled, its end gleaming redly in the light beam. Cuttingthe wire should have broken the circuit, but it hadn't. Why?
If the cut wire hadn't interrupted the circuit, that meant the circuithad been bypassed. Rick was sure a signal had gotten to the blockhousesomehow, showing that the drone control was operating.
He had it. Look for other cut wires. It didn't matter whether he foundthe bypass circuit or not. The signal to the blockhouse wasn't importantfor the moment, but getting the control back into operation was. He knewthe board must still show green down where Earle and Gould were sitting,almost three hundred miles below.
Tracing the visible wires wasn't easy. There were dozens of them, andthey all looked alike. His head wasn't working and his eyes kept seeinggray fog. Why, he knew this gadget by heart! He'd practically built mostof it, and he'd checked it out half a dozen times.
Something was wrong inside the control box, but he couldn't put hisfinger on it.
He checked carefully, tracing the wiring with blurred eyes. Then, in amoment of clarity, he saw it! Someone had put an alligator clip in thebox. It was clamping a wire to a terminal post. He shook his head.Pretty sloppy work. It made no sense at all to use a clip on a permanentwiring job. Who had done it? Didn't he know the clip was apt to vibrateoff during the flight?
The grayness slipped away again and he recognized the circuit. Ofcourse! He had found the bypass. The wire ran from the main, incomingsignal circuit into the master control circuit. The Earthman had donethis! What he had done was to feed the signal from the blockhouse rightback to the blockhouse over the check-signal circuit, completelybypassing the drone control, which was still in operating condition butwhich now could not get the signals to activate it.
Rick studied the control carefully. He had to restore the circuit, buthe couldn't for the life of him figure how to do it. Normally, beforethe crushing acceleration, he would have recognized the difficulty in aflash. Now his confused mind had to labor through steps that sometimestook him off on a wild tangent.
The rocket was slowing rapidly now. It reached maximum altitude andhesitated briefly.
One side of the rocket was brilliant with sunlight--raw, unfilteredlight not meant for human eyes. The other side was black. On the sunnyside, the rocket was heating from absorbed solar energy. On the darkside, the heat was radiating off. But the radiation was less than theabsorption of energy, and the rocket was growing appreciably warmer.
For an instant the rocket paused, nearly three hundred miles above theearth. The space frontier was below--almost halfway back to earth. Outhere was the vacuum of space.
Rick wasn't conscious of this. He wouldn't have cared. His wholeattention was focused on the problem of the drone control. He didn'teven realize the rocket had started the downward trip until he foundhimself floating upward. Then, frantically, he hauled himself back downto the control box, ignoring the stabbing pain in his stomach as he bentover again, one leg wrapped around the small pedestal that supported thecontrol.
Strength was coming back to him slowly, his normal resilience overcomingto some extent the beating his body had taken. The grayness had thinnedsomewhat. He was less inclined to slip off into semiconsciousness.
Again he examined the circuit. The essential wire that fed the dronecontrol the signals from the blockhouse was clipped to the terminalpost. All he had to do was unclip it and reconnect it to thedrone-control input.
He couldn't control his fingers accurately yet, and he made severalattempts to pull the alligator clip off the terminal post. Finally hemade it, and sank back exhausted from the physical effort.
Far below, in the blockhouse, the indicator light on the control panelchanged from green to red. Circuit not operating! Those in theblockhouse had no way of knowing that it had been out of operation sincebefore the take-off. To them, the sudden switch in signal meantsomething had gone wrong in flight.
Rick vaguely realized that the light must have changed, but he didn'tthink about it. Now he had to find the proper terminal for the inputwire. He should know where it was. He had wired this circuit himself.But try as he would, he could not find the contact.
The rocket was accelerating rapidly now, and its flight pattern waschanging slowly. Instead of dropping tail first, it was canting to oneside. In less than a minute it would be entering the outer fringes ofthe atmosphere, in the region where friction against air molecules andatoms would start heating the rocket.
Rick's flashlight beam probed the innards of the drone control. Theplace from which the input wire had been ripped must be within easyreach. Otherwise, the Earthman couldn't have disconnected it in whatmust have been a short time. For another thing, it had to be within thelength of loose wire, because the Earthman had simply disconnected it,then reconnected it in another place.
He was thinking m
ore clearly now. He poked the loose wire around,careless of possible shorts, and his luck held. A dozen times the barewire tip brushed within a tiny space of terminals that would haveshorted out the whole control.
He found the terminal.
The wire had been soldered into place. The Earthman must have used apair of needle-nose pliers to reach in and jerk it loose. There was achannel in the solder where the tip had rested.
Rick tried to replace the wire, but the area was too small for his hand.When he had wired the contact originally, the chassis had been sittingin the open on his workbench. Now it was encased in aluminum, except onthe top where he had removed the cover plate.
He was conscious suddenly of a faint hiss. It was so faint that hedidn't even notice it at first. Then, with sudden horror, he realizedwhat it was. The rocket was striking the atmosphere! There wasn't yetenough air to act on the control surfaces. But soon the rocket wouldenter the denser layers of air and the airfoils would take hold. Therocket would turn over and plunge nose-down.
With the renewed energy of fear, Rick started to work again. He thrusthis hand into the box, tearing the skin on the metal edge. He couldn'treach the terminal.
If he could only open the box in some way. But he couldn't do it withhis bare hands. He needed a tool of some kind. He started to search hispockets and his hand brushed the kit at his belt. The pliers! He hadcompletely forgotten them. He shook his head, and sweat ran down thesides of his face.
The rocket continued its rapidly accelerating fall, and heat built up,even from the thin air at a hundred and twenty miles. At the rocket'svelocity of fall, Rick had less than two minutes to live. Pegasus wasapproaching dense air that would heat its skin to incandescence.
With the pliers he tore at the side of the box and managed to chew out apiece of the thin aluminum. Then he bent back the jagged edges and triedagain. The wire touched the terminal.
Now to hold it in place!
He searched through the tool kit again, but found nothing that wasuseful for this purpose. The wire had to be locked in place fairlytightly, or it would tear loose just from vibration.
Again he flashed the light around, noting absently that he could seebetter. Light was diffusing into the cabin now that Pegasus had reachedlower altitude.
The light fell on Prince Machiavelli. The spacemonk was taped tightly.Instruments were held to his shaven skin by surgical tape. Rick pulledhimself to the monk's side and found an end of tape. It held thestethoscope. He pulled it free and the monk chattered at him excitedly.
"Sorry, boy," Rick muttered. The side-cutting pliers weren't the besttools, but he managed to chew off a piece of the tape. It was ragged,but it would have to do. Holding the piece of tape in the pliers, hepressed it down against the wire, forcing the wire tip into its tinygroove. Then he rubbed it with the blunt end of the pliers, trying toget a good bond between the tape and the solder of the junction.
He drew back and waited. The connection was made. He knew that the rushof air outside was louder, and he suddenly realized that the cabin wasvery hot. Jerry Lipton would have taken over control long ago! Whywasn't the control responding?
Rick fought down the fear that gripped at his throat and made breathinghard. He couldn't panic! There must be something still wrong. But whatwas it?
The flashlight beam moved over the maze of wiring, then stopped on thecoppery gleam of a cut wire.
Of course! When he had pulled the alligator clip, the board had showedred. Jerry didn't know the controls were working!
Rick tried to reconnect the wire he had cut. The ends barely touched;the wire had been tight. He couldn't hold contact.
Jerry had to understand that the controls were working. If only he had amicrophone, a key--anything with which to signal.
The heat was increasing rapidly. The temperature must surely be over ahundred. Pegasus had reached the air again, and was falling out ofcontrol!