Space Tug by Murray Leinster (you can read anyone .TXT) 📖

way out. Sunshine had shone uninterruptedly on one side of his space suit for as long as five minutes. Despite the insulation inside, that was too long. He turned quickly to expose another part of himself to the sunlight. He knew abstractedly that the metal underfoot would sear bare flesh that touched it. A few yards away, in the shadow, the metal of the hull would be cold enough to freeze hydrogen. But here it was fiercely hot. It would melt solder. It might—

Mike was fumbling tin cans out of the net bag from which Haney had been throwing them away. He was a singular small figure, standing on shining steel, looking at one tin can after another and impatiently putting them aside.

He found one that seemed to suit him. It was a large can.[Pg 56] He knelt with it, pressing a part of it to the hot metal of the satellite's hull. A moment later he was ripping it apart. The solder had softened. He unrolled a sort of cylinder, then bent again, using the curved inner surface to concentrate the intolerable sunshine.

Joe caught his breath at the implication. Concentrated sunshine can be incredibly hot. Starting with unshielded, empty-space sunshine, practically any imaginable temperature is possible with a large enough mirror. Mike didn't have a concave mirror. He had only a cylindrical one. He couldn't reflect light to a point, but only to a line. Mike couldn't hope to do more than double or triple the temperature of a given spot. But considering what he wore on his back—!

Joe made his way clumsily to the spot where Mike now gesticulated to Haney, trying to convey his meaning by gestures since Sanford would overhear any spoken word.

"I get it, Mike," said Joe. "I'll help." He added: "Chief! You watch Sanford. The rest of you try to flatten out some tin cans or find some with flat round ends!"

He reached the spot where Mike bent over the plating. His hand moved to cast a shadow where the light had played.

"I need more reflectors," Mike said brusquely, "but we can do it!"

Joe beckoned. There were more, hurried clankings. Space-suited figures gathered about.

The Platform rolled on through space. Where it was bright it was very, very bright, and where it was dark it was blackness. Off in emptiness the many-colored mass of Earth shone hugely, rolling past. Innumerable incurious stars looked on. The sun flamed malevolently. The moon floated abstractedly far away.

Mike was bent above a small round airlock door. He had a distorted half-cylinder of sheet tin between his space-gloved hands. It reflected a line of intensified sunlight to the edge of the airlock seal. Haney ripped fiercely at other tin cans. Joe held another strip of polished metal. It focused crudely—very crudely—on top of Mike's line of reflected sunshine. Someone else held the end of a tin can to reflect[Pg 57] more sunshine. Someone else had a larger disk of tin.

They stood carefully still. It looked completely foolish. There were six men in frozen attitudes, trying to reflect sunshine down to a single blindingly-bright spot on an airlock door. They seemed breathlessly tense. They ignored the glories of the firmament. They were utterly absorbed in trying to make a spot of unbearable brightness glow more brightly still.

Mike moved his hand to cast a shadow. The steel was a little more than red-hot for the space of an inch. It would not melt, of course. It could not. And they had no tools to bend or pierce the presumably softened metal. But Mike said fiercely:

"Keep it hot!"

He squirmed. His space suit was fabric, like the rest, but it had been cut down to permit him to use it. It was bulkier on him than the suits of the others. He shifted his shoulder pack. The brass valve-nipple by which the oxygen tank was filled....

He jammed a ragged fragment of tin in place. He pressed down fiercely. A blazing jet of fierce, scintillating, streaking sparks leaped up from the spot where the metal glowed brightly. A hollow in the metal plate appeared. The metal disintegrated in gushing flecks of light....

White-hot iron in pure oxygen happens to be inflammable. Iron is not incombustible at all. Powdered steel, ground fine enough, will burn if simply exposed to air. Really fine steel wool will make an excellent blaze if a match is touched to it. White-hot iron, with a jet of oxygen played upon it, explodes to steaming sparks. Technically, Mike had used the perfectly well-known trick of an oxygen lance to pierce the airlock door, let the air out of the lock, and so allow the outer door to be opened.

There was a rush of vapor. The door was drilled through. Haney picked Mike up bodily, Joe heaved the door open, and Haney climbed into it, practically carrying Mike by the scruff of the neck. Joe panted, "Plug the hole from the inside. Sit on it if you have to!" and slammed the door shut.[Pg 58]

They waited. Sanford's voice came in the ear-phones. It was higher in pitch than it had been.

"You fools!" he raged. "It's useless! It's stupid to do useless things! It's stupid to do anything at all—"

There were sudden scuffling clankings. Joe swung about. The Chief and Sanford were struggling. Sanford flailed his arms about, trying to break the Chief's faceplate while he screamed furious things about futility.

The Chief got exactly the hold he wanted. He lifted Sanford from the metal deck. He could have thrown him away to emptiness, then, but he did not.

He set Sanford in mid-space as if upon a shelf. The raging man hung in the void an exact man-height above the Platform's surface. The Chief drew back and left him there, Sanford could writhe there for a century before the Platform's infinitesimal gravity brought him down.

"Huh!" said the Chief wrathfully. "How's Haney and Mike making out?"

Almost on the instant, twenty yards away, a tiny airlock door thrust out from the surface of glittering metal, and helmet and antenna appeared.

"You guys can come in now," said Haney's voice in Joe's headphones. "It's all okay. Mike's pumping out the other locks too, so you can come in at any of 'em."

The space-suited figures clumped loudly to airlock doors. There were a dozen or more small airlocks in various parts of the hull, besides the great door to admit supply ships. The Chief growled and moved toward Sanford now raging like the madman his helplessness made him.

"No," said Joe shortly. "He'd fight again. Go inside. That's an order, Chief."

The Chief grunted and obeyed. Joe went to the nearest airlock and entered the great steel hull.

Sanford floated in emptiness, two yards from the Space Platform he would have turned into a derelict. He did not move farther away. He did not fall toward it. There was nobody to listen to him. He cried out in blood-curdling fury because other men were smarter than he was. Other men had[Pg 59] solved problems he could not solve. Other men were his superiors. He screamed his rage.

Presently the Platform revolved slowly beneath him. It was turned, of course, by the monster gyros which in turn were controlled by the pilot gyros Joe and Haney and the Chief and Mike had repaired when saboteurs smashed them.

The Platform rotated sedately. A great gap appeared in it. The door of the supply ship lock moved until Sanford, floating helplessly, was opposite its mouth.

A rod with a rounded object at its end appeared past the docked supply ship. It reached out and touched Sanford's helmet. It was the magnetic grapple which drew space ships into their dock.

It drew Sanford, squirming and streaming, into the great lock. The outer doors closed. Before air was admitted to the inside, Sanford went suddenly still.

When they took him out of his suit he was apparently unconscious. He could not be roused. Freed, he drew his knees up to his chin in the position in which primitive peoples bury their dead. He seemed to sleep. Brent examined him carefully.

"Catatonia," he said distastefully. "He spent his life thinking he was smarter than anybody else—smarter, probably, than all the universe. He believed it. He couldn't face the fact that he was wrong. He couldn't stay conscious and not know it. So he's blacked out. He refuses to be anything unless he can be smartest. We'll have to do artificial feeding and all that until we can get him down to Earth to a hospital." He shrugged.

"We'd better report this down to Earth," Joe said. "By the way, better not describe our screen of tin cans on radio waves. Not even microwaves. It might leak. And we want to see if it works."

Just forty-two hours later they found out that it did work. A single rocket came climbing furiously out from Earth. It came from the night-side, and they could not see where it was launched, though they could make excellent guesses. They got a single guided missile ready to crash it if necessary.[Pg 60]

It wasn't necessary. The bomb from Earth detonated 300 miles below the artificial satellite. Its proximity fuse, sending out small radar-type waves, had them reflected back by an empty sardine can thrown away from the Platform by Mike Scandia forty-some hours ago. The sardine can had been traveling in its own private orbit ever since. The effect of Mike's muscles had not been to send it back to Earth, but to change the center of the circular orbit in which it floated. Sometimes it floated above the Platform—that was on one side of Earth—and sometimes below it. It was about 300 miles under the Platform when it reflected urgent, squealing radar frequency waves to a complex proximity fuse in the climbing rocket. The rocket couldn't tell the difference between a sardine can and a Space Platform.

It exploded with a blast of pure brightness like that of the sun.

The Platform went on its monotonous round about the planet from which it had risen only weeks before. Sanford was strapped in a bunk and fed through a tube, and on occasion massaged and variously tended to keep him alive. The men on the Platform worked. They made telephoto maps of Earth. They took highly magnified, long-exposure photographs of Mars, pictures that could not possibly be made with such distinctness from the bottom of Earth's turbulent ocean of air.

There was a great deal of official business to be done. Weather observations of the form and distribution of cloud masses were an important matter. The Platform could make much more precise measurements of the solar constant than could be obtained below. The flickering radar was gathering information for studies of the frequency and size of meteoric particles outside the atmosphere. There was the extremely important project for securing and sealing in really good vacua in various electronic devices brought up by Joe and his crew in the supply ship.

But sometimes Joe managed to talk to Sally.

It was very satisfying to see her on the television screen in personal conversation. Their talk couldn't be exactly private, because it could be picked up elsewhere. It probably[Pg 61] was. But she told Joe how she felt, and she wanted to read him the newspaper stories based on the reports Brent had sent down. Brent was in command of the Platform now that Sanford lay in a resolute coma in his bunk. But Joe discouraged such waste of time.

"How's the food?" asked Sally. "Are you people getting any fresh vegetables from the hydroponic garden?"

They were, and Joe told her so. The huge chamber in which sun-lamps glowed for a measured number of hours in each twenty-four produced incredibly luxuriant vegetation. It kept the air of the ship breathable. It even changed the smell of it from time to time, so that there was no feeling of staleness.

"And the cooking system's really good?" she wanted to know. Sally was partly responsible for that, too. "And how about the bunks?"

"I sleep now," Joe admitted.

That had been difficult. It was possible to get used to weightlessness while awake. One would slip, sometimes, and find himself suddenly tense and panicky because he'd abruptly noticed all over again that he was falling. But—and yet again Sally was partly responsible—the bunks were designed to help in that difficulty. Each bunk had an inflatable top blanket. One crawled in and settled down, and turned the petcock that inflated the cover. Then it held one quite gently but reassuringly in place. It was possible to stir and to turn over, but the feeling of being held fast was very comforting. With a little care about what one thought of before going to sleep, one could get a refreshing eight hours' rest. The bunks were luxury.

Sally said: "The date and time's a secret, of course, because it might be overheard, but there'll be another ship up before too long. It's bringing landing rockets for you to come back with."

"That's good!" said Joe. It would feel good to set foot on solid ground again. He looked at Sally and said