Collected Short Fiction, page 459
“It’s the Theseid Swarm.” His voice was too quiet. “The one that destroyed the liner Theseus, back before Jim invented the blinker. It contains many large fragments of drift, as well as dust. One of the worst in the system. It will be here in two hours.”
Ann glanced at Drake’s bowed, unmoving head. It was strange to be reminded that an invention of his had saved so many lives, that he had been a giant among the mighty race of spatial engineers, when now he seemed so futile and so broken. She looked away again.
“Suppose another big fragment hits Freedonia?” Her dry voice tightened with a desperate hope. “Wouldn’t that carry us off the collision orbit?”
“Not likely,” said McGee. “There aren’t so many as big as the one that hit before, and space gives them lots of room to miss.” He shook his head, adding softly: “Wouldn’t help us, if that happened. We have no legal claim to Freedonia, unless we change the orbit ourselves.”
Her tanned hands clenched with a futile tension. “Then I guess there’s no more use—”
It surprised her into silence when Drake stood up. The tears were gone. His haggard face was stiff and strange. He stalked awkwardly to the periscope. Turning from it, he began to question Rob McGee about the relative motions of Freedonia and the approaching cloud of contraterrene drift. His voice was dull and low, as if disaster had drained him of all emotion.
“Only ninety-three meters a second, but that’s plenty for seetee.” Little McGee answered very softly, at first. “The blinker itself will miss Freedonia, by twenty-one kilometers. But the front covers a wide area. Von Sudenhorst is right—we ought to take off pretty soon if we’re going to get out of the path—”
Something happened, then. Something made McGee catch his breath. For once his voice was startled and high, protesting:
“You’re crazy, Jim—you can’t do that!”
Tense with wonder, Ann turned to old Jim Drake. Something had happened to him. Still his haggard face was set and gray, but his hollow eyes were burning. Despair had turned to some grim purpose. What it was, she couldn’t tell. But McGee had read it from Drake’s questions—and she could see that he was frightened.
“What is it, Seetee?” She caught at Drake’s gaunt arm. “What are you going to do?”
But he didn’t seem to hear. His hollow eyes were far away. She could almost see the strength of this new purpose growing in him, lifting his head, filling out his shrunken frame, making him once more gigantic. Again he had become the spatial engineer, boldly shaping hostile forces with brain and brawn and daring, rebuilding the foreign world of space to fit the needs of men.
“Don’t try it, Jim!” McGee was urging softly. “You know it’s all theory, paper work—you never had a lab. You know the spacemen are right—the stuff is hell in chunks. You know a man can’t live outside, in the fire storm that’s coming. You were nearly killed by one gamma burn—isn’t that enough?”
Drake smiled a little. Now he was a calm and patient giant, unvanquishable, sure of the power of his brain and his hands. McGee yielded to the conquering purpose in his slow brown smile.
“Good luck, Jim,” he said softly. “What do you want me to do?”
“Get the shaft ready for me.” Drake’s voice was deep and confident again. “Drag the derrick and the cables out of the way—so I can get in without touching anything. We’ll need two or three of the cores—tow them down and leave them ready by the shaft. Then I’ll want you to take me out to meet the drift.”
“Done, Jim,” said Rob McGee.
Ann wanted to know what he meant to do, and she was pretty well accustomed to getting what she wanted. But the mighty purpose visible in Drake had inspired a kind of awe in her, so that she didn’t ask again. She noticed that McGee was answering the buzzing photophone again.
“The subaltern.” He had covered the receiver with his hand. “The final warning, he says. He demands that we come along out of the drift front—or else let him evacuate the men and Ann.”
“The men must go,” Drake said instantly. “Call Moran, and tell him to take the cook; the others are already aboard.” He looked gravely at Ann. “You had better go—this won’t be any picnic.”
“Not with Kurt von Sudenhorst,” she said. “Besides, I want to stay and help—with whatever you’re going to do.”
To her relief, Drake seemed to understand about von Sudenhorst. “We’re going to move Freedoms,” he said grimly. “Tell von Sudenhorst to wait for the other men—Ann isn’t coming. And tell him to watch us change the orbit!”
McGee told him—very gently. Ann heard an ungentle metal rasping in the receiver before he hung up. She made a pleased little face, and then turned quickly to listen to Drake.
“You can help.” His voice was quick and vibrant now, powerful. “You’re a good mechanic. I want you to tear the batteries out of four of those spare suits and make them into a pack that I can carry. Connect them in parallel—I want amperage, for a magnet. Wire in the best rheostat you can find—I’ve got to have control, on that magnet! You’ve about an hour for the job.”
She asked no questions. “Let me at it!”
The beginning of the fire storm was no more spectacular or alarming than any of the previous falls of contraterrene dust. It was only a scattered shower of incandescent splashes, tiny and silent. In the deserted mess shelter, busy with pliers and parts of the dismantled suits, Ann scarcely noticed the beginning.
All the other falls, however, had quickly passed. This steadily increased. It became a rain and a terrible hail of fire. The shelter was struck a dozen times. Escaping oxyhelium made a thin slow hissing, from some hole not completely sealed. Across the inside of the thick inflated fabric, ominous blue letters began to stand out, spelling DANGER.
The warning fluorescence of those stenciled signs meant that deadly gamma rays were leaking through the fabric. Ann left her task to put on her dirigible armor—leaving the gloves detached, so that her hands would be free to work the pliers. She meant to marry, some day—though not von Sudenhorst; and she didn’t want to bear any rayshaped monstrosities. She paused a moment, by a tiny peephole, to watch the inferno outside.
Hot blue splashes were dancing all across the shallow iron depression, except where the low black cliffs stopped the slanting fall. She saw a wide rent in the shelter the men had used, though the stiff fabric had not collapsed. It was fortunate that they had gone with the cruiser.
Larger fragments were falling now. She saw a dark, jagged boulder strike glancingly. It made a steak of searing, intolerable fire, everywhere it touched the iron. It skittered across the crater, bounding on the cushion of its own fury somewhat like a water droplet on a red-hot stove, and finally dissolved in a vast curtain of silent, blinding fire against the farther cliffs.
She hurried back to her task. The shelter seemed dark to her dazzled eyes, and she was numbed with an icy dread. Twisting feverishly at the wires, she vaguely wondered again what Drake meant to do. She didn’t see how even such a capable giant as he could do anything at all, in the midst of this storm of consuming fire.
In a few minutes more the heavy little power pack was done. She put on her gloves and fastened the face plate of her helmet. Carrying the pack, she scrambled out through the air lock and lifted the suit across the flame-spattered crags of iron, toward the shaft.
A particle struck the back of her helmet with a sudden dazing force that set her to spinning wildly. But it must have been a very small one, for she lived. She kept her grasp on the power pack. She righted her flying armor and went on.
When she came in view of the black-walled pit, the stubby little Good-by Jane was dropping into it. Rob McGee was moving the iron cores, as Drake had asked. He opened the air lock for her. She gasped with relief to escape that fall of deadly fire—though she knew there was danger yet, even to the ship.
Now that her own effort was ended she felt chilled and shaken. Inside the valves, she opened her face plate and clung to the foot of the ladder, too exhausted even to hail Rob McGee. In a few minutes Drake came through the lock and pushed up his own face plate.
“You aren’t hurt?” His voice was quick and anxious. “Better keep your armor on. This drift looks pretty thick, even for the Jane.” His voice went deep again, with driving purpose. “You have the battery pack?”
She nodded breathlessly, and then saw the gadget that he had brought. He had cut the powerful little electromagnet off the magnetic hoist they had used to lift the cores from the shaft and welded a convenient handle to it. She helped him connect the power leads, and strap the rheostat in his glove, and secure the batteries to the shoulders of his armor.
“Finished, Rob?” his deep voice pealed up the ladder well. “Then take us out to meet that blinker.”
IX.
Contraterrene drift flowed about the battered little space tub, a black and silent rain of danger. The repulsion of the safety field stopped most of the dust. The thermalarm relays snatched the ship aside, again and again, in random mechanical efforts to escape some fragment on a stationary collision bearing. Little Rob McGee used the best of his curious skill. Although the old hull rang, time and again, to the crash of debris, he tool: Drake out to meet the blinker.
Drake was waiting by the valves at the bottom of the ladder well. A gigantic robot, in the silver-painted armor, he was busy getting the feel of the rheostat strapped under his steel-gloved thumb.
Ann O’Banion stood beside him, and she felt a sense of awe. He was going into frightful danger, but he didn’t seem afraid. She was still with a new respect for human greatness, for the human might it took to conquer these frontiers, that were never planned for men.
Still he hadn’t told her the thing he was going to do—not in words. But she could see the terrible outline of it, in his preparations. She felt cold and ill with dread. But she could see that he was not afraid, and that queer awe stopped any protest.
McGee’s quiet voice came down the ladder well:
“Ready, Jim? Here’s a bit of seetee that fits all your specifications. Nearly pure nickel-iron, from the color. It will fit into a one-meter shaft, with twenty centimeters to spare.”
“Ready,” answered Drake.
“One minute,” called McGee. “I have to match velocity, and then I’ll cut the safety field.” That was a necessary precaution, Drake knew; the negative field would have hurled him away from the ship, as impartially as if he had been another meteor. But the drift was not so dangerous, now that the ship was moving with it. “All ready, Jim.” McGee’s voice was very soft. “Good luck.”
Ann gulped. A throbbing ache in her throat wouldn’t let her speak. Chilled and trembling, she helped that serene and awkward giant close the inner valve behind him. She lifted her glove against the thick little window in a tense, hopeful gesture.
Drake emerged from the air lock into the still, dark splendor of open space. He saw the blinker—a tiny, spidery wheel, spinning eternally against a bright Galactic star cloud, flashing its hurried, tireless warning. It was only a few kilometers away; this was the swarm’s very heart.
In a moment he discovered the contraterrene meter that McGee had chosen for him, not a hundred meters distant. Even without his partner’s mathematical eye he could see that it was well selected—its black, rugged mass was long, compact, narrow enough to slide easily down the shaft.
With teeth set on the plastic-cushioned helmet stick of his armor—for the magnet and its rheostat occupied both his hands—Drake made two or three preliminary practice circles. He approached the dark chunk of contraterrene iron, gingerly.
Collision with it might not be instancy fatal. But he knew that a fending arm could be swallowed into flame and nothingness. He knew that the tissue-burning gamma rays of that matterconsuming reaction could leak even through his unharmed suit, to kill with an ugly, lingering death. Cramped in the armor, his bad knee gave another monitory twinge.
He swam up cautiously behind that dark and deadly ingot, and brought the case of the magnet carefully within a few inches of it. Slowly he moved the rheostat, to energize the magnet and draw the meteor toward him. Carefully, at the same time, he pushed up the control stick with his teeth, to draw away from danger.
The meteor followed. He fled, and it pursued. The flight required a nerve-draining precision of control. The inverse-square law became almost an edict of death. If he drew the magnet an inch too far away, its force snapped like a rotten string; if he let it slip too near, its attraction was instantly redoubled, jerking him toward that pursuing deadly mass. Again and again he had to stop the current, with a convulsive jerk of his thumb. And twice, for all his care, the case of the magnet touched a point of the meteor, with blinding silent fire.
Rob McGee was helpful. He followed close—still with the little tug’s safety field recklessly off, so that its unequal thrust would not impede Drake’s exacting task. On the ship’s photophone, he gave soft-voiced directions—he always, knew exactly how far ahead Freedonia was, and exactly how much of that ninety-three meters a second of relative velocity remained for Drake to conquer.
As they slowed toward Freedonia’s pace, the remainder of the drift began to move about them again, with an increasing threat. McGee came to the rescue, holding the ship for a shield between Drake and that deadly rain. In spite of that, a few small stray particles struck his armor, their jolting, unexpected impacts increasing the peril of his task.
Yet Drake remained the spatial engineer. Even during those most desperate moments, a part of his trained mind was detached from the task that seemed to call for every faculty—busy trying to design a new relay, that would somehow circumvent the inverse-square law.
At last he saw the black and jagged cube of Freedonia, rolling against the field of stars ahead. Still the fire storm raged against it, for he could see the unending dance of hot blue points against the crags of naked iron. The photophone brought a final gentle word from Rob McGee:
“Here we are, Jim. Now, ignoring rotation, your velocity is matched exactly with the rock. I guess the rest is up to you.”
With the helmet stick in his teeth, Drake didn’t try to speak. He merely bobbed the suit. The little tug slipped silently away. Now McGee could use the safety field again, and even take shelter from the drift in Freedonia’s lee. Drake knew the rest was up to him—and it was the trickiest part of a ticklish job.
Swimming underneath the seetee meteor, he tugged it gently downward, hastening the acceleration of Freedonia’s tiny gravity. With a gentle pull to overtake the asteroid’s rotation, he drew it over the dimly glowing pit where they had drilled the shaft.
He tipped the meteor upright, upon its longest axis. Tugging at projecting knobs, he imparted a slow spin that would help to hold it there. He let it continue to fall—and steered it carefully into the one-meter shaft that they had drilled.
He had to follow it.
That necessity was the reason he had not tried to explain his plan in words, to Ann and Rob McGee. Very soon that shaft was going to become a volcano, erupting frightful atomic fire. He thought he would have time to get out before that happened; but his understanding of the seetee reaction was based on paper work—he had never had a laboratory. He had not dared to trust them, to let him take the chance.
He had to go down with the meteor, because of Freedonia’s axial spin. Rotation would tend to fling the falling meteor continually against the forward side of the shaft as it approached the center of gravity. He had seen that it could stand a few accidental knocks, without catastrophe. But that steady thrust, he knew, would be enough to precipitate the full explosive reaction, long before it fell to the bottom of the shaft.
He swam down close behind it, headforemost, with his photophone head lamp snapped on for illumination. He thrust the magnet far down on the sunset side of the pit, to hold the slowly turning meteor off the opposite wall.
Several times, in spite of Drake’s cautious tugs, some jagged point of it came against the smooth dark walls—with a silent burst of terrible flame. But he managed to keep those accidental nudges gentle enough to avoid catastrophe, and he was relieved to see that the meteor rebounded from the wall.
That effect he was not quite prepared to explain—perhaps the reaction had a temperature factor. But he had observed it before—he had seen seetee pebbles skittering across terrene matter, like droplets of water riding their cushions of steam across hot metal. He had counted on it to save his life.
The narrow walls of iron came up about him endlessly. His gaunt body was cold with the sweat of nervous strain. His knee ached. A dull discomfort in his middle became an uneasy threat of spaceman’s colic.
And still the meteor fell.
He couldn’t see beyond it. He couldn’t see the bottom of the shaft. But the broken drill stem burned with a white and warning fury when the meteor touched it. He managed to check his own descent, just short of death.
The meteor rebounded a little from the bottom of the shaft. The magnet grazed it with a flash of searing light. But Drake was still alive, and the magnet wasn’t ruined. He tried to steady the meteor, scarcely daring to leave it.
It hung in the bottom of the shaft, the dark tons of it moving in a slow and ominous dance, supported upon the incandescent fury of its own dissolution. The reaction, as yet, was slow. Here, near the center of gravity, there was only a tiny pull upon it. But the rebounds might swiftly increase. Of course the temperature was swiftly rising, and, when it melted, things would happen.
In his stiff and bulky armor, Drake was too big to turn in the shaft. He fled heels uppermost, elbows striking harmless sparks from the iron. The glare beneath him dwindled to a small, intolerable point.
At the top of the shaft—but still in the iron funnel of that larger pit, still in the path of the coming blast—he slammed the magnet recklessly against one of the great iron cores that Rob McGee had placed ready for him.
