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

turned, and then sharply struck the communicator switch with the heel of his hand. The image on the television screen died. The voice cut off. He said blandly: "Well?"

"I want," said Joe, "to take a garbage-disposal party out on the outside of the Platform. I came to ask for authority."

Sanford looked at him in mocking surprise.

"To be sure it seems as intelligent as anything else the human race has ever done," he observed. "But why does it appeal to you as something you want to do?"

"I think," Joe told him, "that we can make a defense against bombs from Earth with our empty tin cans."

Sanford raised his eyebrows.

"If you happen to have a four-leaf clover with you," he said in fine irony, "I'm told they're good, too."

His eyes were bright and scornful. His manner was feverishly derisive. Joe would have done well to let it go at that. But he was nettled.

"We set off the last bombs," he said doggedly, "by shooting our landing rockets at them. They didn't collide with the[Pg 50] bombs. They simply touched off the bombs' proximity fuses. If we surround the Platform with a cluster of tin cans and such things, they may do as well. Things we throw away won't drop to Earth. Ultimately, they'll actually circle us, like satellites themselves. But if we can get enough of them between us and Earth, any bombs that come up will have their proximity fuses detonated by the floating trash we throw out."

Sanford laughed.

"We might ask for aluminum-foil ribbon to come up in the next supply ship," said Joe. "We could have masses of that, or maybe metallic dust floating around us."

"I much prefer used tin cans," said Sanford humorously. "I'll take the watch here and let everybody go out with you. By all means we must defend ourselves. Forward with the garbage! Go ahead!"

His eyes were almost hysterically scornful as he waited for Joe to leave. Joe did not like it at all, but there was nothing to do but get out.

He found the Chief with a net bag filled with emptied tin cans. Haney had another. There were two more, carried by members of the Platform's four-man crew. They were donning their space suits when Joe came upon them. Mike was grotesque in the cut-down outfit built for him. Actually, the only difference was in the size of the fabric suit and the length of the arms and legs. He could carry a talkie outfit with its batteries, and the oxygen tank for breathing as well as anybody, since out here weight did not count at all. There were plastic ropes, resistant to extremes of temperature.

Joe got into his own space suit. It was no such self-contained space craft in itself as the fantastic story tellers dreamed of. It was not much more than an altitude suit, aluminized to withstand the blazing heat of sunshine in emptiness, and with extravagantly insulated soles to the magnetic boots. In theory, there simply is no temperature in space. In practice, a metal hull heats up in sunshine to very much more than any record-hot-day temperature on Earth. In shadow, too, a metal hull will drop very close to minus 250 degrees Centigrade, which is something like 400 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.[Pg 51] But mainly the space boots were insulated against the almost dull-red-heat temperatures of long-continued sunshine.

A crewman named Corey moved into an airlock with one of the bags of empty tin cans. Brent watched in a routine fashion through a glass in the lock-door. The pumps began to exhaust the air from the airlock. Corey's space suit inflated visibly. Presently the pump stopped. Corey opened the outer door. He went out, paying plastic rope behind him. An instant later he reappeared and removed the rope. He'd made his line fast outside. He closed the outer lock-door. Air surged into the lock and Haney crowded in. Again the pumping. Then Haney went out, and was anchored to the Platform not only by his magnetic boots but by a rope fastened to a hand-hold. Brent went out. Mike. Joe came next.

They stood on the hull of the Space Platform, waiting in the incredible harsh sunshine of emptiness. The bright steel plates of the hull swelled and curved away on every hand. There were myriads of stars and the vast round bulk of Earth seemed farther away to a man in a space suit than to a man looking out a port. Where shadows cut across the Platform's irregular surface, there was utter blackness. Also there was horrible frigidity. Elsewhere it was blindingly bright. The men were specks of humanity standing on a shining metal hull, and all about them there was the desolation of nothingness.

But Joe felt strangely proud. The seventh man came out of the lock-door. They tied their plastic ropes together and spread out in a long line which went almost around the Platform. The man next to the lock was anchored to a steel hand-hold. The third man of the line also anchored himself. The fifth. The seventh. They were a straggling line of figures with impossibly elongated shadows, held together by ropes. They were peculiarly like a party of weirdly costumed mountaineers on a glacier of gleaming silver.

But no mountain climbers ever had a background of ten thousand million stars, peering up from below them as well as from overhead. Nor did any ever have a mottled greenish[Pg 52] planet rolling by 4,000 miles beneath them, nor a blazing sun glaring down at them from a sky such as this.

In particular, perhaps, no other explorers ever set out upon an expedition whose purpose was to throw tin cans and dried refuse at all the shining cosmos.

They set to work. The space suits were inevitably clumsy. It was not easy to throw hard with only magnetism to hold one to his feet. It was actually more practical to throw straight up with an underhand gesture. But even that would send the tin cans an enormous distance, in time. There was no air to slow them.

The tin cans twinkled as they left the Platform's steel expanse. They moved away at a speed of possibly 20 to 30 miles an hour. They floated off in all possible directions. They would never reach Earth, of course. They shared the Platform's orbital speed, and they would circle the Earth with it forever. But when they were thrown away, their orbits were displaced a little. Each can thrown downward just now, for example, would always be between the Platform and the Earth on this side of its orbit. But on the other side of Earth it would be above the Platform. The Platform, in fact, became the center of a swarm, a cluster, a cloud of infinitesimal objects which would always accompany it and always be in motion with regard to it. Together, they should make up a screen no proximity fuse bomb could pierce without exploding.

Joe heard clankings, transmitted to his body through his feet.

"What's that?" he demanded sharply. "It sounds like the airlock!"

Voices mingled in his ears. The other walkie-talkies allowed everybody to speak at once. Most of them did. Then Joe heard someone laugh. It was Sanford's voice.

Sandford's aluminized, space-suited figure came clanking around the curve of the small metal world. The antenna of his walkie-talkie glittered above his head. He seemed to swagger against the background of many-colored stars.

Brent spoke quickly, before anyone else could question[Pg 53] Sanford. His tone was mild and matter of fact, but Joe somehow knew the tension behind it.

"Hello, Sanford. You came out? Was it wise? Shouldn't there be someone inside the Platform?"

Sanford laughed again. "It was very wise. We're going to be killed, as you fellows know perfectly well. It's futile to try to avoid it. So very sensibly I've decided to spare myself the nuisance of waiting to be killed. I came out."

There was silence in the ear-phones of Joe's space suit radio. He heard his own heart beating loudly and steadily in the absolute stillness.

"Incidentally," said Sanford with almost hysterical amusement, "I fixed it so that none of us can get back in. It would be useless, anyhow. Everything's futility. So I've put an end to our troubles for good. I've locked us all out."

He laughed yet again. And Joe knew that in Sanford's madness it was perfectly possible for him to have done exactly what he said.

There were eight human beings on the Platform. All were now outside it, on its outer skin. They wore space suits with from half an hour to an hour's oxygen supply. They had no tools with which to break back into the satellite. And no help could possibly reach them in less than three weeks.

If they couldn't get back inside the Platform, Sanford, laughing proudly, had killed them all.

4

There was a babbling of angry, strained, tense voices in Joe's headphones. Then the Chief roared for silence. It fell, save for Sanford's quiet, hysterical chuckling. Joe found himself rather absurdly thinking that Sanford was not actually insane, except as any man may be who believes only in his own cleverness. Sooner or later it is bound to fail him. On Earth, Sanford's pride in his own intellect had been useful. He had been brilliant because he accepted every problem[Pg 54] and every difficulty as a challenge. But with the Platform's situation seemingly hopeless, he'd been starkly unable to face the fact that he wasn't clever or brilliant or intelligent enough. If Joe's solution to the proximity fuse bombs had been offered before his emotional collapse, he could have accepted it grandly, and in so doing have made it his own. But it was too late for that now. He'd given up and worked up a frantic scorn for the universe he could not cope with. For Joe's trick to work would have made him inferior even to Joe in his own view. And he couldn't have that! Even to die, with the prospect that others would survive him, was an intolerable prospect. He had to be smarter than anybody else.

So he chuckled. The Chief roared wrathfully into his transmitter: "Quiet! This crazy fool's tried to commit suicide for all of us! How about it? Why can't we get back in? How many locks——"

Joe found himself thinking hard. He could be angry later. Now there wasn't time. Thirty or forty minutes of breathing. No tools. A steel hull. The airlocks were naturally arranged for the greatest possible safety under normal conditions. In every airlock it had naturally been arranged so that the door to space and the door to the interior could not be open at the same time. That was to save lives. To save air, it would naturally be arranged that the door to space couldn't be opened until the lock was pumped empty.

That in itself could be an answer. Joe said sharply, "Hold it, Chief! Somebody watch Sanford! All we've got to do is find which lock he came out of. He couldn't get out until he pumped it empty—and that unlocks the outer door!"

But Sanford laughed once more. He sounded like someone in the highest of high good humor.

"Heroic again, eh? But I took a compressed air bottle in the lock with me. When the outer door was open, I opened the stopcock and shut the door. The air bottle filled the lock behind me. Naturally I'd fasten the door after I came out! One must be intelligent!"

Joe heard Brent muttering, "Yes, he'd do that!"

"Somebody check it!" snapped Joe. "Make sure! It might[Pg 55] amuse him to watch us die while he knew we could get back in if we were as smart as he is."

There were clankings on the hull. Men moved, unfastening the lines which held them to the hull to get freedom of movement, but not breaking the links which bound them to each other. Joe saw Haney go grimly back to the task of throwing away the stuff that they had brought out for the purpose. Then Mike's voice, brittle and cagey: "Haney! Quit it!"

Sanford's voice again, horribly amused. "By all means! Don't throw away our garbage! We may need it!"

A voice snapped, "This lock's fastened." Another voice: "And this...." Other voices, with increasing desperation, verified that every airlock was implacably sealed fast by the presence of air pressure inside the lock itself.

Time was passing. Joe had never noticed, before, the minute noises of the air pressure apparatus strapped to his back. His exhaled breath went to a tiny pump that forced it through a hygroscopic filter which at once extracted excess moisture and removed carbon dioxide. The same pump carefully measured a volume of oxygen equal to the removed CO2 and added it to the air it released. The pump made very small sounds indeed, and the valves were almost noiseless, but Joe could hear their clickings.

Something burned him. He had been standing perfectly still while trying to concentrate on a