The Trouble with Telstar by John Berryman (ereader ebook .txt) 📖

How close are we supposed to be?"

He lit the cabin light and tapped at the calculator that he swung out from its rack. "Still got a hundred miles to go, I'd judge." He moved awkwardly in his suit to finger a switch on his neck and I heard him speaking to the ground again, and heard in my earphones the answer that came up from Woomera. We had eighty miles to go, and were now a little below the orbit of the bird we were chasing.

"Can't have both ends of the stick, Mike," Sid explained, calling me by name for the first time. "As soon as we slowed down we had to drop lower." He fooled around with the steering jets, which were hydrazine-nitric acid rockets much like the tiny motors on my suit, and re-oriented Nelly Bly. A little burst from the nose, and I got my first blip.

"There!" I said, putting a finger on the PPI. "Turn out the light, Sid, so I can see the 'scope'."

He switched off the cabin light and followed my directions with tiny shoves, sometimes from the rockets, sometimes from the steering jets, while I conned us closer.

Our radar would only read within about half a mile. When we got that close I got the searchlight going and took my first real look through the forward port out into space.

It's black. Nothing—nothing you have ever seen will persuade you how dark it is out there. That was my first big shock. Oh, I had practiced in the dark, with only my helmet light to guide my tests and assemblies, but this was a different kind of dark. Our light had no visible beam—you couldn't even tell it was working. At first I had the idea we'd see the satellite occulting some stars, but a little mental arithmetic told me that an object six or eight feet in section would not subtend much of an angle of vision at half a mile.

We had chosen, I decided, much too narrow a beam of light for the searchlight, but just at that moment I got a flash from out in space, and worked the light back on to our objective.

"Got it," I said.

"Yoicks!" Sid said, and went back to the fine controls. After a long time, and lots of patience, we were hanging about fifty feet out from our bird. We were farther out in space so that the dark bulk of the satellite was silhouetted against the crescent light of Earth. I turned off the spot and switched on the floodlight.

"Here goes nothing, Sid," I said, and undid the dogs that held the canopy above our heads.

My earphone spoke to me: "This is Cleary. Do you read me, Mike?"

I fumbled around to find the right jack and plugged myself into the radio. "Yes, Paul. Loud and clear."

"Watch yourself. Think first. You've got all the time in the world."

"Sure."

"Sylvia would miss you," he added.

I hoped he was right.

Clinging carefully to the handholds that had been specially provided on the outside of Nelly Bly, I clambered through the hatch and hung in the darkness, looking down at South America. The world was turning visibly under me, although I knew that in fact we were skimming rapidly about three thousand miles over its surface. I got myself lined up nice and straight with the bird and did my first bit of non-thinking. I pushed off good and proper with my feet, the way you'd dive into a swimming pool. It was a fool stunt for my first act. I was doing a good five or six feet a second. You may not think that is very fast, but before I could gulp twice I had zipped past that bird and was headed for Buenos Aires.

I know I screamed. That was the first time I realized I really was falling. Earth looked awfully close, and seemed to be rushing up to meet me.

My orientation was all wrong for stopping. By diving head first I had neither my back nor my belly rocket lined up to stop me.

My training failed completely. I tried to squirm straight, and by proper swinging of my arms out to full length, and kicking the same way with my feet, I got turned around to where my belly was facing the floodlight on Nelly Bly. That's not how I was supposed to do it.

The glider had disappeared—all I could see was the floodlight. It was still by far the brightest thing in the sky, but if I drifted much longer, I would have to use radio direction-finding to get back. I triggered the motor on my back and felt its gentle push against my spine.

"Sid!" I called.

"Roger, Mike!"

"Light the tip lights. I've got to get a fix on my velocity. I went way past and I'm trying to get back."

Two new stars winked into being, on either side of the floodlight. This had been some bright guy's idea, and it was paying off. I kept watching the apparent distance between them shrink as I continued my trip toward Earth. Memory and a little calculating told me that my acceleration of three inches per second per second would take twenty seconds of blast to slow me to a stop. I counted them off, aloud: "Mississippi one, Mississippi two, Mississippi three," as I had been taught to measure seconds. When I got to Mississippi twenty my visual measurement said I was about stationary with regard to Nelly Bly.

I used a little more blast and let a couple minutes go by while I drifted closer to the Telstar. I started squirming again, until I remembered to use the deflection plate they had given me to hold in my belly blast, and that got me lined up. But finally I was within touching distance of the bird, which was rotating with a certain slow majesty on its long axis.

The leisurely spin was there to make sure one side didn't face the sun too long and heat up. My plan called for stopping the bird's spin so that I could get reasonable solar heating of the part I was working on. The trouble was there was nothing to grab as the satellite turned. But we had worked on that part, too, and I went into my act of backing off the right distance, accelerating with my back rocket until I drifted close by the bird at its translational speed. I got one end of my sticky webbing stuck to it by pressure and decelerated so that the bird turned under me while I paid off the web. In a moment I had it girdled, and snapped the nifty sort of buckle they had made for me. Then drawing the webbing tight was no trouble, and I was spinning with the bird. My added weight slowed its spin down some.

Next came the trick of getting some special equipment loose from my right leg. This was a little rocket canister which had just enough poof, the slide-rule boys had said, to stop the rotation of the bird. I fastened the canister to the webbing, pushed softly with one finger to get me a few feet away, and drifted while waiting for the delayed fuse to fire the antispin rocket. It lanced out a flame for a few seconds, and sputtered dead. The bird hung virtually motionless beneath me—or above me—or beside me—or whatever you want to call it when there is no up or down.

Our light was dimming as we passed the terminator and pulled over Earth's dark side. The sun was still visible, however, although soon to be eclipsed by Earth. I jetted softly back to the bird and lit my helmet light. I had to find the right face of the twelve-sided thing so that I could open the right gate. The markings were there. They were just hard to read from inside a helmet. Then the sun was eclipsed, and my headlamp gave me the kind of light I was used to working with. The sector I wanted was on the satellite's dark side. I had to clamp on to the girdle and jet quite a while to turn it halfway round, and then decelerate just as long to bring it to a stop. I fooled around several minutes getting the sector to face where the sun would soon rise.

My earphone spoke.

"Mike!"

"Roger, Sid. What's up."

"Take it easy on your steering fuel. You're getting low."

"Roger."

I had to wait for the sun before I could start work. When it came up, heating seemed quick. First a test with a thermocouple showed that Telstar's surface was warming nicely and would soon support the pressure-sensitive mat I was going to stick to some of her solar generators. When the 'couple said Telstar had reached zero centigrade, I pulled the mat loose from where it was stuck to my left leg and plastered it above the gate I was going to open. I say above, because it was closer to one pole—the "North" pole of the satellite—than the gate.

It was time to go to work on my first screw. And there I got my next lesson. It was a real big screw, as they go, a 4-40 flat head machine screw with a length of about three-quarters of an inch. I would have to give it thirty turns to back it out. I never gave it the first turn. The head snapped off as soon as I applied a few inch-pounds of torque.

Yes, the surface had heated up nicely, but the shank of the screw was about two hundred below zero centigrade, and far brittler than glass.

I cussed some and reported to Sid what had happened.

"Have to drill it out," I said.

My drill was a cutie. It was a modified dentists' drill, the kind that's run by a little air turbine at about two hundred thousand r.p.m.'s. I really mean that. They turn like mad.

I'd been taught to use it with care. When a dentist drills your teeth, he blows olive oil and water through the turbine, and the mixture cools the tooth—and the drill—while the cutting is going on. We couldn't afford any cloud of vapor—or the shorting out that ice would cause—so I had only the pressurized mixture of oxygen and helium in the tanks on my back to run the drill. And that meant light and intermittent pressures on the number 43 wire gauge drill—the one that's the right size to drill out a 4-40. It took me about fifteen minutes and I was down to my last number 43 drill bit when she broke free.

From then on I had to heat each screw before I went to work on it. I had something like a soldering iron that I could press against the screw-head. Heat would flow through the highly conductive alloy and make it less brittle. I flicked each screw I removed out into space and at last carefully hinged the gate wide open.

The gate was the length of the sector—about two feet. It was four inches wide and about an inch thick and had parts strung along it like kernels on an ear of corn.

At this stage I readjusted the position of my webbing girdle until I could clamp my head in position and begin the testing. It was slow work. The first sad thing was to learn that the solenoid M1537 was as good as new. When I put enough voltage across its terminals, the actuator clicked down through the core.

I swore a blue streak.

"What is it Mike?" Sid's voice came in my ear.

"Trouble," I said. "What did we expect?"

"Roger," he said in that toneless unexcited astronauts' voice. "Return to ship, Mike."

"Not now," I said. "I've just got the oyster opened."

His voice cut like my drill-bit. "I ordered you to return to ship. Your air supply is about shot."

"I haven't been out that long," I protested, not feeling too sure about the lapse of time.

"Your drill chewed it up pretty fast. Quit talking and start moving."

I was thankful for the experience of moving in close to the bird. The same tricks worked much more smoothly as I used my deflection plate in front of my belly blast to turn me to face the floodlight, and then followed up with a light shove or two in the spine to start me drifting toward Nelly Bly. There didn't seem any rush, and I drifted slowly over, using only a couple triggered bursts of deceleration to slow me down as I approached the open hatch.

Inside we went through the drill. My ears popped a little as Sid unchucked my spent tanks, and popped again as the new ones came on with a hiss.

"Take it easy on that steering fuel, Mike," he said again. "You're getting awfully low."

"Sure," I said and let myself drift out the