Complete Short Fiction, page 187
A good meal helps, too, and Hoerwitz prepared himself one when he woke up—one of his fancier breakfasts. With that disposed of, there were seven hours to go before perigee.
He went to check the controls, pointedly ignoring the thief on duty outside his quarters and the second one in the control room. Everything about the converters was going well, as usual, but this time the fact didn’t annoy him. For all he cared, all those loads of explosives could cook themselves to completion.
They hadn’t been ordered properly, but there would be no trouble finding customers for them later on.
He checked in time his impulse to go to the dome for a look outside. Smith’s order had been very clear, so it would be necessary to trust the clocks without the help of a look at Earth. No matter. He trusted them.
Six hours to perigee. Four and a half to action time. He hated leaving things so late, since there was doubt about Smith’s reaction to the key question and time might be needed to influence the fellow. Still, starting too soon would be even more dangerous.
A show killed three of the hours, but he never remembered afterward which show he had picked.
Another meal helped. After all, it might be quite a long time before he would eat anything but tube-mush, if things went right. If they went wrong, he had the right to make his last meal a good one. It brought him almost up to the deadline. He thought briefly of not bothering to clean the dishes, but decided that this was no time to change his habits. Smith was suspicious enough by nature without giving him handles for it.
Now a final check of the controls, which mustn’t look as though it were final. Normal, as usual. Robinson and Brown were in the control room—the latter had accompanied the manager from his quarters—and when the check was finished the old man turned to them.
“Where is your boss?”
Robinson shrugged. “Asleep, I suppose. Why?”
“When you first came, he said it would be all right for me to walk outside, once you’d jimmied the transmitter in my suit. I like to watch Earth as we go by perigee, but I suppose I’d better make sure he still doesn’t object.”
“Why can’t you watch from the dome?”
“Partly because he told me to keep away from there, and partly because in the hour and a half around perigee Earth shifts from one side of this place to the other. You can see only the first part from the dome. I like to go to the North Pole and watch it swing around the horizon—you get a real sense of motion. Whoever Smith sends with me, if he lets me go at all, will enjoy it. Maybe he’d like to go himself.”
Robinson was doubtful. “I suppose he won’t shoot anyone for asking. I take it this happens pretty soon.” Hoerwitz was glad of the chance to look at a clock without arousing suspicion.
“Very soon. There won’t be much more than enough time to check our suits. Remember, there’s no such thing as fast walking, outside.”
“Don’t I know it. All right, I’ll ask him. You stay here with Mr. Brown.”
“You’re sure you didn’t damage anything in my suit except the radio?”
“Positive. Make a regular checkout; I stand by the result.”
“As long as I don’t fall by it.” Robinson shrugged and left. “Mr. Brown, in view of what your friend just said, how about coming with me up to the lock so I can start that suit check early?”
Brown shook his head negatively, and nodded toward the controls.
“Smith said to keep it guarded.” Hoerwitz decided that debate was useless, and waited for the leader. It was not really as long a wait as it seemed.
Smith was accompanied by Robinson, as the manager had expected, and also by Jones, who, Hoerwitz had assumed, must be on guard at the dome. He hadn’t stopped to figure out the arithmetic of three men on watch at once out of a total strength of four.
Smith wasted no time.
“All right, Mr. Hoerwitz, let’s take this walk. Have you checked your suit?”
“I’ve had no chance.”
“All right, let’s get to it. Tell me what you expect to see as we go up. With your suit radio out you won’t be able to give a proper guide’s talk outside.”
The manager obeyed, repeating what he had told Robinson and Brown a few minutes before. The recital lasted to the equipment chamber inside the airlock, where the old man fell silent as he started to make the meticulous checkout which was routine for people who have survived much experience in spacesuits. He was especially careful of the nuclear-powered air-recycling equipment and the reserve tanks which made up for its unavoidable slight inefficiency. He was hoping to depend on them for quite a while.
Satisfied, he looked up and spoke once more.
“I mentioned only the North Pole walk,” he said, “because I assume you’d disapprove of something else I often do. At the place where Earth is overhead at perigee, right opposite the radiators, I have a six-foot optical flat with a central hole. You probably know the old distress-mirror trick. I have friends at several places on Earth, and sometimes at perigee I stand there and flash sunlight at them. The beam from the mirror is only about twelve or fifteen miles wide at a thousand miles, and if I aim it right it looks brighter than Venus from the other end—they can spot in full daylight without much trouble. Naturally the mirror has to be in sunlight itself, and as I remember it won’t be this time, but I thought I’d better mention it in ease you came across the mirror as we wandered around and got the idea that I was up to something.”
“That was very wise of you, Mr. Hoerwitz. Actually, I doubt that there will be any random wandering. Mr. Jones will remain very close to you at all times, and unless you yourself approach the mirror he is unlikely to. I trust you will have a pleasant walk and am sure that there is no point in reminding you of the impossibility of finding a man drifting in space.”
“One chance in ten thousand isn’t exactly impossible, but I’d rather not depend on it,” admitted the manager. “But aren’t you coming?”
“No. Possibly some other time. Enjoy yourself.”
Mac wondered briefly whether he had made some mistake. He had told only two lies since bringing up the subject of the walk and felt pretty sure that if Smith had detected either of them the fact would now be obvious.
But he had expected to get out only by interesting Smith himself in the trip. If Smith didn’t want to go, why was he permitting it at all? Out of kindheartedness?
No. Obviously not.
For a moment Hoerwitz wished he hadn’t eaten that last meal. It threatened to come back on him as he saw what must be Smith’s reason. Then he decided he might as well enjoy the memory of it while he could. After that, almost in a spirit of bravado, he made a final remark.
“Jones, I don’t pretend to care what happens to you outside, but you might remember one thing.”
“What?” The fellow paused with his helmet almost in place.
“If I do anything that you think calls for shooting me, be sure you are holding on to something tightly or that your line of fire is upward.”
“Why?”
“Well, as Mr. Smith pointed out some time ago, the escape velocity of this asteroid is about one foot a second. I don’t know too much about guns, but I seem to recall that an ordinary pistol shot will provide a space-suited man with a recoil velocity of around a third of that. You wouldn’t be kicked entirely into space, but you’d be some time coming down; and just think of the embarrassment if your first shot had missed me. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
He clamped down his own helmet without waiting for an answer from either man. Then he wished he’d mentioned something about the danger to a spacesuit from ricochet, but decided that it would be an anticlimax.
He would have liked to hear the remarks passed between them, but he had already discovered that Robinson hadn’t wasted time cutting out his transmitter but avoiding the receiver. He had simply depowered the whole unit, and Mac could neither transmit nor receive.
He stepped—using the word loosely—in the inner lock door, hit the switch that opened it and stepped through. Turning to see whether Jones was with him, he was surprised to discover that the latter still had not donned his helmet and was engaged in an animated discussion with Smith.
Hoerwitz sometimes spoke on impulse, but it had been well over fifty years since he had performed an important action on that basis; the mental machinery concerned was rather corroded. It might be possible to get the inner lock door closed and the air pumps started before either of the two men could reach the inner switch; if he could do that, it would give him nearly two minutes’ start—quite long enough to disappear on the irregular, harshly lit surface of the asteroid. On the other hand, if they stopped the cycle before the inner door was closed and the inside switch out of circuit, they would presumably shoot him on the spot.
His spacesuit had the usual provisions for sealing small leaks, but it was by no means bulletproof. He wished he had taken the time to make that remark about ricochet; it would apply well to the metal-walled chambers they were all standing in. Unfortunately the thieves might not think of that in time.
Hoerwitz might, if given another minute or two to mull it over, have taken the chance on that much data; but before he made up his mind the conversation ended. Jones donned his helmet, safetied its clamps and looked toward the airlock. At that same moment all three men suddenly realized that Smith and Jones were both out of touch with pushoff points. They were “standing” on the floor, of course, since they had been in the room for some time and weighed several grams each, but that weight would not supply anything like the traction needed to get them to the switch quickly. An experienced spaceman would have jumped hard, in any direction, and trusted to the next wall collision to provide steerage; but it had become perfectly evident in the last couple of days that these men were not experienced spacemen. Hoerwitz’s impulses broke free with an almost audible screech of metal on rust, and he slapped the cycling control.
VII
Jones had drawn his gun. He might have fired, but the action of drawing had spoiled his stance. Hoerwitz thought he had fired, but that the sound failed to get through his suit; the bullet, if any, must have gone bouncing around the equipment room. The inner door was shut, and the red light indicated pump cycling before any really interesting details could be observed.
The pumps took fifty seconds to get the pressure down, and the motors ten more to get the outer door open. Hoerwitz would have been outside almost on the instant, but his low-gravity reflexes took over.
One simply does not move rapidly in a place where the effort which would lift a man half a millimeter on Earth will give him escape velocity. This is true even when someone can be counted on to be shooting at you in the next minute or so; a person drifting helplessly out of touch with pushoff mass is a remarkably easy target. The idea was to get out of sight, rather than far away.
The asteroid was not exactly porous—no one has found a porous body made of lava yet—but it was highly irregular from a few hundred million years of random collisions out beyond Mars. There were explosion pits and crevices from this source, and quite a few holes made by men in the days when the material of the body itself had been used for conversion mass.
There were plenty of nice, dark cracks and holes to hide in. Hoerwitz maneuvered himself into one of the former five yards from the airlock and vanished:
He didn’t bother to look behind him. He neither knew nor cared whether they would follow. All things considered, they might not even try. However, they would very probably send out at least two men, one to hunt for the fictitious mirror and the other to guard the spaceship—not that they could guess, the old man hoped, what he intended to do about the latter.
Both places—sub-Earth and its antipodes—were just where Hoerwitz wanted them to be; they were the spots where an unwarned space-walker would be in the greatest danger.
However, the ship would be a refuge, if it were still there, and Hoerwitz wanted to get there before any possible guard. He therefore set out at the highest speed he could manage, climbing across the asteroid.
It was like chimney work in Earthly rock-climbing, simpler in one way because there was no significant weight. The manager was not really good at it, but presumably he was better than the others.
Earth was overhead and slightly to the west—about as far as it ever got that way, seen from near the airlock. That meant that time was growing short. When the planet started eastward again the asteroid was within a hundred degrees or so of perigee—an arc which it would cover in little over three-quarters of an hour, at this end of its grossly eccentric orbit.
Travel grew more complicated, and rather more dangerous, as the planet sank behind him. Roche’s limit for a body of this density was at around twelve thousand miles from Earth’s center, and the tidal bulge—invisible, imponderable, a mere mathematical quirk of earth’s potential field—was not only swinging around but growing stronger. With Earth, now spanning more than thirty degrees of sky, on the horizon behind him he was safe, but as it sank he knew he was traveling to meet the bulge, and it was coming to meet him. He had to get to the ship before the field had been working on that area too long.
The last thousand feet should have been the hardest, with his weight turning definitely negative; physically, it turned out to be the easiest, though the reason shocked him. He discovered, by the simple expedient of running into it, that the thieves had strung a cable between their ship and the airlock.
With its aid, they would travel much faster than he could. There might be a guard there already. Mac, terrified almost out of his senses, pulled himself along the cable with reckless haste until he reached a point where he could see the base of the ship a few hundred feet away.
No spacesuits were in sight, but the bottom of the globe was in black shadow. There was no way to be sure—except by waiting. That would eventually make one thing certain. The old man almost hurled himself along the cable toward the ship, expecting every second to be his last, but trying to convince himself that no one was there.
He was lucky. No one was.
The ship was already off the “ground” by a foot or so; the tide was rising at this part of the asteroid and weight had turned negative. Hoerwitz crammed himself into the space between the spherical hull and the ground and heaved upward for all he was worth.
At a guess, his thrust amounted to some fifty pounds. This gave him something over a minute before the vessel was too high for further pushing. In this time it had acquired a speed of perhaps two inches a second relative to the asteroid; but this was still increasing, very slowly, under tidal thrust.
The hull was of course covered with handholds. Hoerwitz seized two of these and rode upward with the vessel. It was quite true that a man drifting in space was an almost hopeless proposition as far as search-and-rescue was concerned; but a ship was a very different matter. If he and it got far enough away before any of the others arrived, he was safe.
Altitude increased with agonizing slowness. Earth’s bulk gradually came into view all around the planetoid’s jagged outline. At first, the small body showed almost against the center of the greater one; then, as the ship in its larger, slower orbit began to fall behind, the asteroid appeared to drift toward one side of the blue-and-white streaked disk. Hoerwitz watched with interest and appreciation—it was a beautiful sight—but didn’t neglect the point where the cable came around the rocks.
He was perhaps five hundred feet up when a space-suited figure appeared, pulling itself along with little appearance of haste. It was not yet close enough for the ship’s former site to be above the “horizon.” Mac waited with interest to see what the reaction to the discovery would be.
It was impressive, even under circumstances which prevented good observation. The thief was surprised enough to lose grip on the cable.
He was probably traveling above escape velocity, or what would have been escape velocity, even if the tide had been out. As it was, any speed would have been too great. For a moment, Hoerwitz thought the fellow was doomed.
Maybe it was Robinson, though; at least, he reacted promptly and sensibly. He drew a gun and began firing away from the asteroid. Each shot produced only a tiny velocity change in his drifting body, but those few inches a second were enough. He collided with one of the structures at the base of a radiator, kicked himself off and downward as he hit it, touched the surface, and clutched frantically at some handhold Hoerwitz couldn’t see. Then he began looking around and promptly discovered the ship.
The manager was quite sure the fellow wouldn’t try a jump. He wished, once again, that his radio receiver was working—the man might be saying something interesting, though he must be out of radio reach of the others. It would be nice to know whether the thief could see Hoerwitz’s clinging figure on the ship’s hull. It was possible, since the lower side of the sphere was illuminated by Earthlight, but far from certain, since the man’s line of sight extended quite close to the sun. He wasn’t shooting. But it was more than likely that his gun was empty anyway.
It was disappointing in a way, but Hoerwitz was able to make up for himself a story of what the fellow was thinking, and this was probably more fun than the real facts. Eventually the figure worked its way back to the cable and started along it toward the airlock. The old man watched it out of sight. Then feeling almost secure, he resumed his favorite state of relaxation after fastening himself to a couple of holds with the snap-rings on his suit, and relaxed.
There was nothing more to do. The drifting vessel would be spotted in the next hour or so, if it hadn’t been already, and someone would be along. In a way, it was a disappointing ending.
He spent some of the time wondering what Shakespeare would have done to avoid the anticlimax. He might have learned, if he had stayed awake, but he slept through the interesting part.
