Atom Drive by Charles L. Fontenay (classic fiction .txt) 📖

in the way the ship[Pg 62] operated. He nosed into every corner of it and asked a hundred questions a day.

"You're as inquisitive as a cadet spaceman, Serj," Jonner told him on the twenty-fifth day out. Everybody knew everyone else well by then, which meant that Jonner and Qoqol, who had served together before, had become acquainted with T'an and Serj.

"There's a lot to see and learn about space, Captain," said Serj. He was a young fellow, with fair hair and an easy grin. "Think I could go outside?"

"If you keep a lifeline hooked on. The suits have magnetic shoes to hold you to the hull of the ship, but you can lose your footing."

"Thanks," said Serj. He touched his hand to his forehead and left the control deck.

Jonner, near the end of his eight-hour duty shift, watched the dials.

The red light showing the inner airlock door was open blinked on. It blinked off, then the outer airlock indicator went on, and off.

A shadow fell across Jonner briefly. He glanced at the port and reached for the microphone.

"Careful and don't step on any of the ports," he warned Serj. "The magnetic soles won't hold on them."

"I'll be careful, sir," answered Serj.

No one but a veteran spaceman would have noticed the faint quiver that ran through the ship, but Jonner felt it. Automatically, he swung his control chair and his eyes swept the bank of dials.

At first he saw nothing. The outer lock light blinked on and off, then the inner lock indicator. That was Serj coming back inside.

Then Jonner noted that the hand on one dial rested on zero. Above the dial was the word: "ACCELERATION."

His eyes snapped to the radio controls. The atomic pile levers were still at their proper calibration. The dials above them said the engines were working properly.

The atomic tug was still accelerating, but passengers and cargo were in free fall.

Swearing Jonner jerked at the levers to pull out the piles aboard the tug.

A blue flash flared across the control board, momentarily blinding him. Jonner recoiled, only his webbed safety belt preventing him from plummeting from the control chair.

He swung back anxiously to the dials, brushing futilely at the spots that swam before his eyes. He breathed a sigh of relief. The radio controls had operated. The atomic engines had ceased firing.

Tentatively, cautiously, he reversed the lever. There was no blue flash this time, but neither did the dials quiver. He swore. Something had burned out in the radio controls. He couldn't reverse the tug.

He punched the general alarm button viciously, and the raucous clangor of the bell sounded through the confines of the ship. One by one, the other crew members popped up to the control deck from below.

He turned the controls over to Qoqol.[Pg 63]

"Take readings on that damn tug," Jonner ordered. "I think our cable broke. T'an, let's go take a look."

When they got outside, they found about a foot of the one-inch cable still attached to the ship. The rest of it, drawn away by the tug before Jonner could cut acceleration, was out of sight.

"Can it be welded, T'an?"

"It can, but it'll take a while," replied the engineer slowly. "First, we'll have to reverse that tug and get the other end of that break."

"Damn, and the radio control's burned out. I tried to reverse it before I sounded the alarm. T'an, how fast can you get those controls repaired?"

"Great space!" exclaimed T'an softly. "Without seeing it, I'd say at least two days, Jonner. Those controls are complicated as hell."

They re-entered the ship. Qoqol was working at his diagrams, and Serj was looking over his shoulder. Jonner took a heat-gun quietly from the rack and pointed it at Serj.

"You'll get below, mister," he commanded grimly. "You'll be handcuffed to your bunk from here on out."

"Sir?... I don't understand," stammered Serj.

"Like hell you don't. You cut that cable," Jonner accused.

Serj started to shrug, but he dropped his eyes.

"They paid me," he said in a low tone. "They paid me a thousand solars."

"What good would a thousand solars do you when you're dead, Serj ... dead of suffocation and drifting forever in space?"

Serj looked up in astonishment.

"Why, you can still reach Earth by radio, easy," he said. "It wouldn't take long for a rescue ship to reach us."

"Chemical rockets have their limitations," said Jonner coldly.

"And you don't realize what speed we've built up with steady acceleration. We'd head straight out of the system, and nothing could intercept us, if that tug had gotten too far before we noticed it was gone."

He jabbed the white-faced doctor with the muzzle of the heat-gun.

"Get below," he ordered. "I'll turn you over to Space Control at Mars."

When Serj had left the control deck, Jonner turned to the others. His face was grave.

"That tug picked up speed before I could shut off the engines, after the cable was cut," he said. "It's moving away from us slowly, and at a tangent. And solar gravity's acting on both bodies now. By the time we get those controls repaired, the drift may be such that we'll waste weeks maneuvering the tug back."

"I could jet out to the tug in a spacesuit, before it gets too far away," said T'an thoughtfully. "But that wouldn't do any good. There's no way of controlling the engines, at the tug. It has to be done by radio."

"If we get out of this, remind me to recommend that atomic ships always carry a spare cable," said[Pg 64] Jonner gloomily. "If we had one, we could splice them and hold the ship to the tug until the controls are repaired."

"Is cable in cargo strong enough, Jonner?" asked Qoqol.

"That's right!" exclaimed Jonner, brightening. "Most of our cargo's cable! That 4,000-ton spool we're hauling back there is 6,000 miles of cable to lay a television network between the Martian cities."

"Television cable?" repeated T'an doubtfully. "Will that be strong enough?"

"It's bound in flonite, that new fluorine compound. It's strong enough to tow this whole cargo at a couple of Gs. There's nothing aboard this ship that would cut off a length of it—a heat-gun at full power wouldn't even scorch it—but we can unwind enough of it, and block the spool. It'll hold the ship to the tug until the controls can be repaired, then we can reverse the tug and weld the cable."

"You mean the whole 6,000 miles of it's in one piece?" demanded T'an in astonishment.

"That's not so much. The cable-laying steamer Dominia carried 3,000 miles in one piece to lay Atlantic cables in the early 20th century."

"But how'll we ever get 4,000 tons in one piece down to Mars?" asked T'an. "No G-boat can carry that load."

Jonner chuckled.

"Same way they got it up from Earth to the ship," he answered. "They attached one end of it to a G-boat and sent it up to orbit, then wound it up on a fast winch. Since the G-boat will be decelerating to Mars, the unwinding will have to be slowed or the cable would tangle itself all over Syrtis."

"Sounds like it's made to order," said T'an, grinning. "I'll get into my spacesuit."

"You'll get to work on the radio controls," contradicted Jonner, getting up. "That's something I can't do, and I can get into a spacesuit and haul a length of cable out to the tug. Qoqol can handle the winch."

Deveet, the Atom-Star Company's representative at Mars City, and Kruger of the Space Control Commission were waiting when the Radiant Hope's G-boat dropped down from the Phobos station and came to rest in a wash of jets. They rode out to the G-boat together in a Commission groundcar. Jonner emerged from the G-boat, following the handcuffed Serj.

"He's all yours," Jonner told Kruger, gesturing at Serj. "You have my radio reports on the cable-cutting, and I'll make my log available to you."

Kruger put his prisoner in the front seat of the groundcar beside him, and Jonner climbed in the back seat with Deveet.

"I brought the crates of dies for the groundcar factory down this time," Jonner told Deveet. "We'll bring down all the loose cargo before shooting the television cable down. While they're unloading the G-boat, I wish you'd get the tanks[Pg 65] refilled with hydrazine and nitric acid. I've got enough to get back up, but not enough for a round trip."

"What do you plan to do?" asked Deveet. He was a dark-skinned, long-faced man with a sardonic twist to his mouth.

"I've got to sign on a new ship's doctor to replace Serj. When the Marsward comes in, Marscorp will have a dozen G-boats working round the clock to unload and reload her. With only one G-boat, we've got to make every hour count. We still have reaction mass to pick up on Phobos."

"Right," agreed Deveet. "You can take the return cargo up in one load, though. It's just twenty tons of Martian relics for the Solar Museum. Mars-to-Earth cargos run light."

At the administration building, Jonner took his leave of Deveet and went up to the Space Control Commission's personnel office on the second floor. He was in luck. On the board as applying for a Mars-Earth run as ship's doctor-psychologist was one name: Lana Elden.

He looked up the name in the Mars City directory and dialed into the city from a nearby telephone booth. A woman's voice answered.

"Is Lana Elden there?" asked Jonner.

"I'm Lana Elden," she said.

Jonner swore under his breath. A woman! But if she weren't qualified, her name would not have been on the Commission board.

The verbal contract was made quickly, and Jonner cut the Commission monitor into the line to make it binding. That was done often when rival ships, even of the same line, were bidding for the services of crewmen.

"Blastoff time is 2100 tonight," he said, ending the interview. "Be here."

Jonner left the personnel office and walked down the hall. At the elevator, Deveet and Kruger hurried out, almost colliding with him.

"Jonner, we've run into trouble!" exclaimed Deveet. "Space Fuels won't sell us any hydrazine and nitric acid to refill the tanks. They say they have a new contract with Marscorp that takes all their supply."

"Contract, hell!" snorted Jonner. "Marscorp owns Space Fuels. What can be done about it, Kruger?"

Kruger shook his head.

"I'm all for you, but Space Control has no jurisdiction," he said. "If a private firm wants to restrict its sales to a franchised line, there's nothing we can do about it. If you had a franchise, we could force them to allot fuel on the basis of cargo handled, since Space Fuels has a monopoly here. But you don't have a franchise yet."

Jonner scratched his grey head thoughtfully.

It was a serious situation. The atom-powered Radiant Hope could no more make a planetary landing than the chemically-powered ships. Its power gave a low, sustained thrust that permitted it to accelerate constantly over long periods of time. To beat the powerful pull of planetary surface gravity, the terrific burst of quick energy from[Pg 66] the streamlined G-boats, the planetary landing craft, was needed.

"We can still handle it," Jonner said at last. "With only twenty tons return cargo, we can take it up this trip. Add some large parachutes to that, Deveet. We'll shoot the end of the cable down by signal rocket, out in the lowlands, and stop the winch when we've made contact, long enough to attach the rest of the cargo to the cable. Pull it down with the cable and, with Mars' low gravity, the parachutes will keep it from being damaged."

But when Jonner got back to the landing field to check on unloading operations, his plan was smashed. As he approached the G-boat, a mechanic wearing an ill-concealed smirk came up to him.

"Captain, looks like you sprung a leak in your fuel line," he said. "All your hydrazine's leaked out in the sand."

Jonner swung from the waist and knocked the man flat. Then he turned on his heel and went back to the administration building to pay the 10-credit fine he would be assessed for assaulting a spaceport employee.

The Space Control Commission's hearing room in Mars City was almost empty. The examiner sat on the bench, resting his chin on his hand as he listened to testimony. In the plaintiff's section sat Jonner, flanked by Deveet and Lana Elden. In the defense box were the Mars Corporation attorney and Captain Russo Baat of the Marsward XVIII. Kruger, seated near the rear of the room, was the only spectator.

The Mars Corporation attorney had succeeded in delaying the final hearing more than a 42-day Martian month by legal maneuvers. Meanwhile, the Marsward XVIII had blasted down to Phobos, and G-boats had been shuttling back and forth unloading the vessel and