(When Ed McCauley was still a reasonably young officer, there were many commonplace things that hadn't been done yet. Satellites circled the earth from west to east and across both poles and with other assorted orbits. There were artificial satellites in orbit even around the sun, and every so often somebody put up a new one for some new purpose. There'd been a landing on the moon—by robot—and a robot station there spasmodically reported temperatures and cosmic-ray frequency, and a surprising number of moonquakes.But even so, many things hadn't yet been done. Man had circled the earth in capsules, but not yet had any man lifted his own rocketship from Earth and set himself in orbit. Still less had any man risen into space as the captain of his ship and brought it back to earth. Until such a thing was done, it would be absurd to speak of spaceships. Missiles, yes. Satellites, yes. But a ship had to take off and land on its own before men could say there is such a thing as a spaceship.)
(When Ed McCauley was still a reasonably young officer, there were many commonplace things that hadn't been done yet. Satellites circled the earth from west to east and across both poles and with other assorted orbits. There were artificial satellites in orbit even around the sun, and every so often somebody put up a new one for some new purpose. There'd been a landing on the moon—by robot—and a robot station there spasmodically reported temperatures and cosmic-ray frequency, and a surprising number of moonquakes.
But even so, many things hadn't yet been done. Man had circled the earth in capsules, but not yet had any man lifted his own rocketship from Earth and set himself in orbit. Still less had any man risen into space as the captain of his ship and brought it back to earth. Until such a thing was done, it would be absurd to speak of spaceships. Missiles, yes. Satellites, yes. But a ship had to take off and land on its own before men could say there is such a thing as a spaceship.)
Young Major McCauley arrived at Quartermain Base in an Air Transport ship which stopped briefly to drop him off and toss out a mail sack which was instantly taken in charge by two side-armed noncoms and hauled away. Then the Transport ship bellowed vociferously and took off across the incredibly level pebbly plain, lifted and retracted its wheels, and soared up into the infinitely blue sky of this part of the world. It left McCauley standing in a vast emptiness, except for unimpressive base buildings. He felt singularly lonely.
Nobody paid any attention to him. There was nobody left around. In a way it was a relief, because McCauley had experienced much too much attention once upon a time, and he wanted no more of it. He'd done a job in an Aerobee once, and now he was to try something in an X-21 that a lot of people would have liked to try in his place. He preferred not to be reminded of either thing. So quite uncomplainingly he trudged across the sun-baked flat ground toward the base buildings. All around there was astounding flatness. The low hills that rose at the far side of this dry lakebed were conspicuous here, whereas in more rolling country they'd never be noticed. There was a row of hangars. McCauley picked one out with his eyes and guessed that the new ship might be inside it.
He reached the building behind the flagpole and shifted his bag from one hand to the other. He went in, mopping his forehead as the door closed behind him and the sharp chill of air conditioning hit him.
He went to report in. The CO wasn't around. He was over in Laurelton, the town where most of the men went when they got a pass. The OD was off somewhere. But quarters had been assigned to Major McCauley. The noncom in charge of the CO's office obligingly got up to show him the way.
"Any orders for me?" asked McCauley. "I don't suppose I'm supposed to sit and twiddle my thumbs."
The noncom looked at a file and said there weren't any.
"It doesn't look too lively around here," said McCauley, "I'm supposed to have an interest in the X-21. Could I take a look at her?"
The noncom did a double take.
"Oh," he said politely. "You're that Major McCauley! I should have realized it, sir. The X-21, sir, is in the big hangar down that way. Number seven. If you tell the sentry who you are he'll pass you in, sir. Of course. Take-off's tomorrow noon, sir, and everything's ready. But I'd better show you your quarters first, sir."
McCauley blinked. He felt embarrassed, and he felt a distinct sense of shock. He was embarrassed because he'd had to mention the X-21 and who he was, as if he were pushing his weight around. The shock was the take-off for tomorrow. He'd known nothing about it.
He picked up his bag and waited to be shown his quarters. He followed the noncom down silent halls with specklessly polished floors. He entered the room assigned to him. It had tan plasterboard walls and an iron bunk, and Venetian blinds to shut out the desolate outer world. It was exactly like all other bachelor officers' quarters everywhere in the world. McCauley should have felt at home. He didn't.
"Just a minute," he said carefully, as the noncom was about to leave. "You said take-off's tomorrow?"
"Yes, sir," said the noncom. "I believe it was slated for later, sir, but something came up and I understand that Major Furness—he's the general's aide, sir, besides being your observer—Major Furness assured the general that an earlier take-off would be quite all right, so the ship was checked out yesterday for fueling. The general likes things done ahead of time, sir. He says that if you do today all the things you could put off until tomorrow, you can take tomorrow off."
"Major Furness," repeated McCauley, "okayed the earlier take-off time."
"Yes, sir," said the noncom.
When the noncom closed the door behind him, McCauley burned. There can be trivial things about the feel of a ship that nobody can realize but the pilot. Certainly he should decide when an experimental ship is right to take up. He'd been denied this right. Take-off was tomorrow.
But on the other hand, he was vulnerable. He'd had a lot of publicity from that Aerobee ride he'd taken. There were a bunch of people waiting for him to put on a grand air. If he protested anything, they'd say he was putting on an act out of self-importance. So that, short of something glaringly wrong, he had to go along with a decision he hadn't made or subscribed to. He was always in danger of seeming to have a swelled head and an inflated ego and other undesirable symptoms. He needed to avoid them carefully. Right now he smoked a cigarette to kill time lest he seem overanxious to look at the X-21.
He didn't expect to be surprised by the ship. Most of the time she was building he'd been sweating out the details of the job of flying her. In Dayton there'd been a mock-up with instruments and controls in a cabin which exactly matched the ship that was not yet completed. An elaborate simulator-trainer controlled the controls and dials. When he got into the mock-up and worked it, the instrument readings, sounds, vibrations, and sensations were exactly what painstaking calculation foretold for the actual ship. It was an adaptation of the training devices that equip submarine crews to function like well-oiled machines the instant they're transferred from training to active service. It was much, much better than the dual-control planes they used to use for teaching fledgling pilots. The mock-up supplied not only the instrument readings of actual flight, but the feel of it. And not only that, it convincingly presented hair-raising emergencies. A man could experience all the griefs of a lifetime of flying in a few hours in such a mock-up. McCauley'd had them.
In the nature of things, the X-21 couldn't be given a test flight. It couldn't be tucked under a bomber's wing and lifted aloft to see how it behaved. Nothing could be done with it but take off and try to ride it where no other pilot-controlled ship had ever been, and then try to get it back down again.... If possible! If everything went well, it would be a very good job to have done. If anything went wrong, it would be too bad. Period.
McCauley smoked a second cigarette to kill time. Then he went out of his room and found his way outdoors. Squinting in the glaring sunshine, he located Hangar Seven.
Ten minutes later he was inside, taking a look at his ship. He'd hardly seen a soul along the line of hangars. Inside one he'd heard a tapping where some flight mechanic was working at something or other. From another he'd heard voices—tranquil lazy tones indicating that whoever was within had no very urgent work on hand. It appeared that practically all the base had been given a pass on the day before the shoot. Which bespoke a way of running things that meant either absolutely top management or something he'd rather not imagine.
He looked at the ship, the X-21. It was huge. It was sleek. It was impressive. It looked slightly insane, because it was built to accomplish something that most people weren't even thinking about yet. Naturally it looked improbable, like the generality of things designed to achieve the preposterous.
For one thing, the pilot's cabin was in the nose, and it hung down so the pilot could look directly behind him underneath the belly of the ship. That meant an imbalance in the wind resistance when the ship was in flight. But the balance was restored by wings above the fuselage top. Then there were enormous ramjets built into the wings well away from the body; they threw the balance off again until it was restored a second time by the wind resistance of the wheels, which did not retract. And near the tail with its triple fins there were brackets for Mark Twenty jatos, and behind them a very familiar conical bore, the exhaust nozzle of the rocket engine.
McCauley recognized everything from his preparations for flying just this ship. She would take off on jato thrust which would get her off the ground and traveling fast enough for the ramjets in the wings to catch. The ramjets would take her up to the very edge of the atmosphere. When there wasn't enough air left for even ramjets to work with, the rocket should take over. In theory the ship might be called a three-stage design, but in fact it didn't fit into any category. It did, though, have one standard property of a hydrazine-nitric rocket. If it made other than a feather-light landing with any rocket fuel remaining, it would almost certainly blow itself to blazes.
But the point was that if—if—everything went all right, McCauley ought to get up into space with a full load of rocket fuel and a few hundred miles an hour eastward velocity. On the way up he'd try to hit the jetstream at thirty thousand feet or so and pick up some speed from that. And when he started his rocket engine he was supposed to put the ship in orbit.
That was the trick. That was what had never been done before. Men had orbited in missiles and gotten down again. There was a man on the moon—or so it was believed—though he was dead before he arrived there. There were satellites circling Earth in all directions, some of them as much as ten years aloft. But nobody had ever yet sent a ship up under its pilot's control, its pilot achieving an orbit and then bringing the ship down to the surface of the earth again. When that was accomplished, it could be said that a spaceship existed. Until then, there were only missiles.
McCauley worked his way thoughtfully around the monster, whistling soundlessly as he looked it over, checking everything he saw with what he knew, and thereby getting more information than was seemingly possible. Presently he went in the cabin and worked the controls. They felt just like the mock-up.
He was back in his quarters, thinking somberly, when there was a knock on the door. When he answered, the door was pushed open and the remarkably personable Major Furness appeared.
"Hi," he said. "They tell me you got here."
"Yes," agreed McCauley. "I did."
"They tell me you looked over the ship," said Furness exuberantly. "Good, eh?"
"It looks good," agreed McCauley.
"Were you surprised when you heard take-off's tomorrow?"
McCauley nodded reservedly.
"That's my doing," said Furness proudly. "I told the general we'd be ready. He was cussing a blue streak. An intelligence report had come through, saying that—um—there's to be an attempt abroad to lift a rocket up and set it down again on its own tail. Lift and land. No rocket's ever landed unsmashed, you know."
"I know," said McCauley.
Furness grinned. Engagingly.
"So it won't look good if us Americans get our eye wiped by somebody else doing something with a rocket that we can't do. The general made the air blue. So I said, 'General, McCauley's been training for our job for months, off there in Dayton. He's all set to do his stuff. The ship's practically ready to go. We could get it ready to take off the day after McCauley gets here. Why not do it?' And the General said, 'Furness, if we could....' And I said, 'General, we can!' So he began to give orders right and left. And that's it. Tomorrow noon. Twelve hundred. Get it over with, eh?"
McCauley opened his mouth. He closed it. Anger swept over him and he opened it a second time.
Then he shut up. For him to protest anything short of plain suicide would be considered pomposity and self-importance. But he should have had a chance to look over the ship before take-off. He'd had a glance at it, hardly more. Yet he couldn't afford to stand on his dignity or his rights because too many people envied him.
Furness looked at him and flushed a little. The cordiality that should exist between two men who are going to risk their necks together was totally missing. Furness felt it. His expression grew almost defiant.
"Look here!" he said. "That was all right, wasn't it?"
"I don't know," said McCauley. "Anyhow it's done."
Furness stared at him.
"What else was there to do?"
"I wouldn't know," said McCauley. "The ship can't be test-flown, of course—not in any ordinary sense of the word. You can't test-fly a hydrazine rocket, and among other things that's what this ship is. You just have to take it up. But—hm—how were the tests on the rocket motor?"
"They gave four per cent over the maximum expected thrust," said Furness, exuberant again. "Nothing wrong there!"
"They were cut in and out frequently?" asked McCauley.
That was one of the tricky items. A rocket motor is cut off, in a ballistic rocket, and cut in again after a pause in its firing. It isn't a sensible thing to do ordinarily, but it would be necessary in flying the X-21. It was a point about which McCauley had certain reservations. A rocket motor is very nearly a device for producing a continuous explosion, the recoil from the explosion constituting the thrust. Rocket motor design is pretty well worked out, but there are occasional failures, as in any high-precision apparatus. And the motor of the X-21 would need to cut in and out, often. It would burn fuel at the rate of more than two thousand gallons per minute. It would have to start instantly, with full pressure and full flow of two dissimilar liquids, and they would have to meet at exactly the proper spot in the rocket motor cavity and burn completely on contact. When the rocket was cut off, the fuel would have to stop flowing instantly, without the fraction of a fraction of one per cent of either liquid left unburned, or there would be trouble when the motor started again. The bare fact that the X-21's motor would have to fire and stop and fire again meant that absolute perfection was needed in all sorts of auxiliary equipment. The pumps. The fuel flow lines. There was the possibility of hydraulic hammer. There could be turbulence in the tanks because of intermittent flow. Decidedly the motor should be tested intensively for flaws in cut-in and cut-out operation, and it should be tested in the ship and not merely in a static-thrust frame.
Furness frowned.
"I don't know what the tests were," he said with a trace of impatience. "They tested everything. They say everything's all right. I'm no reaction motor technician! I'm a pilot! They give me a ship and I fly it! I leave the other stuff to the slide-rule boys!"
"Who are plenty good," agreed McCauley, "and since the take-off's scheduled, that's that. We take off at 1200 hours tomorrow."
He had complete confidence in the adequacy of his training in the mock-up back in Dayton, but it did assume that the ship would function according to its design. He'd have preferred to verify the point he'd raised. The record of rocket shoot failures includes at least one rocket that didn't leave the launching pad because a certain valve closed three one-thousandths of a second late. It took two months to repair the damage so the rocket could be tried again. Then it worked perfectly.
Everything might have been—should have been—almost certainly had been—foreseen. But the chance of trouble was certainly greatest in the cut-in and cut-out feature that was necessary if the X-21 was to make its flight successfully.
"I'm sorry," Furness said elaborately, "that I was more concerned about meeting a situation that bothered the brass than guessing at questions you might raise. I told the general we'd be ready to take off. I'll tell him I was mistaken, that you're not ready."
McCauley grew impatient.
"Confound it, man!" he protested. "There are patrol ships taking position! The monitor stations will be alerted! There've been too many shoots called off or postponed! This one can't be postponed! I asked a question. You can't answer it. The answer would almost certainly be that there were plenty of cut-out trials. I withdraw the question. It's canceled! But it wasn't unreasonable to ask!"
Furness bit his lip.
"Just the same," Furness said sourly, "you're not satisfied that I said we'd be ready to go without asking you first. Look here! Would you rather have somebody else fly observer with you?"
"I didn't suggest such a thing," said McCauley angrily, "and it's ridiculous to think of it. No! Forget the whole business!"
"It looks to me as if you resent my action," Furness said stiffly. "I shouldn't have spoken for you without written authority. I'll try to remember, hereafter, that you're the pilot and I'm only the observer."
McCauley controlled his temper with difficulty.
"This is lunacy!" he said shortly. "The thing's settled. We take off at noon tomorrow. I'm told the ship will fly. I'm ordered to fly it. You're ordered to fly with me. That's that, so far as I'm concerned!"
Furness said as stiffly as before:
"That's quite all right with me too. I should tell you, though, that my wife wanted me to invite you for dinner tonight. The general was to be there too, for a private talk over the prospects and so on. And I've got a son who's been fairly jumping with excitement over the prospect of meeting Major McCauley, the first man ever to take off in a pure rocket and get down to ground again. But you'll hardly accept that invitation, feeling as you do. I'll say you declined because you want to get some extra sleep tonight since you intend to watch the fuel-up tomorrow."
McCauley blinked at him in amazement. Furness went out.
When he'd gone, McCauley swore to himself. This was more of the attitude he disliked, expecting him to feel self-important. It was one of the penalties of having done something that got publicity. But there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
Certainly it had been reasonable to mention the one thing that bothered him! The X-21 would take off on jatos, ride to the limit of the atmosphere on ramjets, and have the rocket motor take over there. To get the exact course and speed he needed, he'd undoubtedly have to use the rocket engine in a series of bursts after the original acceleration run. He'd have to turn it off between times. And while an alcohol-lox rocket motor had been turned off and on in flight, no hydrazine-nitric rocket ever had been. Nobody had ever needed to. McCauley would. And the idea was hair-raising.
Rocket fuel is tricky stuff at best. In the earlier X-series ships, alcohol and lox—liquid oxygen—and in one or two cases ammonia and lox, were used in the engines. They could be jettisoned in case a dead-stick landing was necessary. But nobody in his senses would think of jettisoning nitric and hydrazine as an emergency measure. That was the pair, though, that was being used in the X-21. Their great advantage is that they do not need to be ignited. Their great disadvantage is that they become active when they are combined. McCauley had inspected the fuel delivery system and he was concerned about it. In the static runs of the ship's rocket engine everything had gone well. If all went well in space, everything would be fine. But if something didn't....
McCauley couldn't tell what would happen. His training in the mock-up hadn't included meeting that emergency, because there wasn't any way to meet it.
"If it happens," he muttered, "I'll know it because I'll hear St. Peter say, 'Hello, Ed! Come in!'"
He stirred restlessly. The light on the closed Venetian blinds was ruddy now. He found that he didn't feel hungry, but he ought to. He asked the way to the officer's mess and found that it was nearly empty. Most of the base was on leave until nine o'clock, which might be the base commandant's way of boasting that sending off the first actual spaceship on her test flight was duck soup for a well-run organization.
McCauley sat alone. There were a few other officers at dinner. Some of them nodded to him. None came over. He'd gotten a little too much publicity from that Aerobee job. Nobody would come near him lest he seem to want to shine in the reflected glory of a man who was already famous and was scheduled to become more so in the next twenty-four hours—unless he turned out to be fragments of nothing in particular out in space. He was left alone.
There was nothing to do but go back to his quarters. On the way he stopped at the newsstand and bought stuff to read.
He was very, very lonely. He was acutely conscious that he hadn't acted in the best possible way about Furness' action in speaking for him about the take-off. It was true that he should have been consulted. It was true that he hadn't intended to stand on his dignity. It was even true that he'd asked for reassurance rather than information, because the tests should have been complete. But Furness took it wrongly, and there was no way to mend the matter.
He couldn't read the stuff he'd brought. He smoked and brooded until he noticed the pile of cigarette butts he'd built up. He looked at his watch and dourly went to bed. He couldn't sleep. At long last he managed to doze off by reciting the names, capitals, and principal products of all the fifty states. He made himself so boring he went to sleep.
But when he slept he dreamed, and in the dream the ship was out of its hangar and being fueled. And McCauley dreamed that the fueling was being done all wrong. Horribly wrong. There were two tank trucks beside the ship. One was the hydrazine truck and the other the nitric. And they were pumping the two liquids into the ship at the same time. In his dream, McCauley's hair stood up straight on end. He tried to protest, but words wouldn't come. The hoses were being handled exactly as hoses at a filling station were in fueling a car. A man held each hose negligently, and from time to time squinted down past the nozzle to see how nearly full his tank was. McCauley knew that it was impossible and unthinkable, but in his dream it was both possible and plausible.
He saw bubbling, fuming nitric acid spout out of the filling tube and go splashing down on the ground. The nitric acid man looked at it stupidly as more splashed down after it. And then McCauley managed to cry out—and the dream disaster happened. The hydrazine overflowed too. It poured down....
And in his dream McCauley saw a sheet of purest fire leap up. Both trucks detonated in white-hot flame, and the ship crumpled and blew into atoms....
He found himself sitting up in his bunk, gasping, with the memory of the bubbling sounds he'd made which had waked him.
It was a good dream to wake up from. He sat up and heard small noises outside in what should have been the wholly silent night. He went to the window and tilted a slat of the Venetian blind.
The ship was out of the hangar. Men swarmed about it. Trucks towed it. It was being hauled well away from the buildings on the base. The preparations for take-off had begun. It would be a long time before fueling started, though. The ship would be towed for a couple of miles over the crunching pebbly ground, just in case something went wrong at the take-off. Then there'd have to be a checkover of everything from the tires to the wingtips to the instruments to the communication systems and the igniters for the ramjets, and so on indefinitely. Hours would be consumed in the simple final inspection. The ramjet fuel would go in. The jatos would be mounted and their circuits tested—the jatos would drop off after they'd done their stuff—Then on and on, endlessly. It would be long after sunrise before anybody began to think of the rocket fuel trucks.
He looked at his watch again. He knew he couldn't go back to sleep, but he wouldn't get dressed. He stood by the tilted slat of the Venetian blind, watching the disturbance in the moonlight go farther and farther away until it was lost in the vagueness of the partly lit plain.
He sat down, but didn't turn on the light in his room. He allowed himself one cigarette. He tried to relax, but his mind was tense. He managed a rueful grimace over his dream. That wasn't a good sign. He hadn't been worried before the Aerobee shoot, or so it seemed to him now. But in that shoot he'd had nothing to do but take a ride. Everything connected with the functioning of the rocket was somebody else's worry. Now everything was up to him.
He wondered uncomfortably how Furness felt. Probably like the devil....
With such discomfortable reflections, McCauley did not feel bright and chipper when there came footsteps outside his door and then a knock. He waited for the knock to be repeated, and then said, as if drowsily:
"What's the matter?"
"Time to get up, sir," said a noncom's voice, "if you want to watch the fuel-up of your ship, sir."
McCauley timed his pause and then said, less sleepily:
"Oh. All right. I'm awake. I'll get up right away."
He waited until the footsteps moved off. Then he swore. He'd put on an act himself. He was ashamed of being keyed up. He'd posed as a man with iron nerves, sleeping soundly before the take-off of the first ship ever to try a piloted orbital flight.
When he went out of his room he disliked himself very much.
It was an hour later, and the morning sunshine was bright, when he came out of the officers' quarters and got into the jeep that was waiting for him. Furness, he learned, was already out at the ship. The general was there too. Things were moving smoothly.
The jeep rolled over the flat ground, the picked-up pebbles making a thunderous rattling against the mud-guards and a vast plume of yellow dust trailing it.
And presently there was the ship. It was a singular spectacle—the huge, seemingly clumsy object with its dropped-down cabin shining in the slanting morning light. It seemed peculiarly isolated, out here on the featureless plain. There was nothing near it to account for its existence. Empty, board-flat ground stretched out for miles in every direction. The buildings at the base seemed tiny from here. The ship was alone like a steamer in the middle of the ocean, except that men clustered about its wheels, and there was a pickup truck that had brought ladders, and tiny dark figures swarmed over the still, glistening aluminum body.
The jeep drew near. It swung in a slightly exaggerated curve and came to a stop.
"The general's yonder," said the jeep driver, pointing.
McCauley walked over. The general faced him, and McCauley saluted.
"Ah, McCauley," the general said cordially. "You look fresh and rested."
"Yes, sir," said McCauley. He saw Furness nearby. He felt very much like a heel.
"It was a good idea to get a good night's sleep," said the general.
"Yes, sir," said McCauley.
"You've got your orders," said the general. "They give you a lot of leeway."
"Yes, sir," said McCauley.
"It's hoped you'll pass over the setup checkpoints, of course," said the general. "But the satellite watching stations will pick up your signal in any case. The main thing is to make a straight orbit. Anything short of a full twenty-four-thousand-mile course will cost you an impossible amount of fuel."
"Yes, sir," said McCauley. "I'm aware of it, sir."
It was one of the paradoxes of the flight that it would take much more fuel to make a shorter flight than a longer one. A course around the northern hemisphere, for example, not crossing the equator and the antipodes, would be extravagant in terms of the fuel required simply to stay aloft. But if McCauley established a proper orbit, he'd use fuel only to take off and to land. Landing would be as tricky a job as taking off, or even trickier. But McCauley had tried all the alternative landing processes in the training mock-up. His orders permitted him to choose the landing process himself, but it was not likely that he'd have any actual choice. The decision would be made by events.
Meanwhile there was nothing to do. McCauley stood around and watched as the general was doing. Figures moved here and there about the ship a hundred yards away. Men came up to a truck parked near it and handed in completed checklists and were given other lists to check. Once there was earnest discussion and a jeep went rushing away to the base and came rushing back, and a man took a small object over to the ship, where somebody had evidently decided that something had better be replaced. Furness avoided McCauley's eye. The whole process grew tedious. The officers, including the two who would presently fly the ship, simply stood at a distance to be out of the way and vigilantly watched men who knew what they were doing. The general had an air of vast satisfaction as matters progressed with no delays and no lack of decision at the proper level. When something is well-prepared, the commanding officer's job is finished when the action starts. The general in command of Quartermain Base had prepared things well.
The men around the ship moved away from it. They piled into personnel trucks and rolled off toward the base buildings. Other trucks came out with men in fueling suits. They took their places briskly. The hydrazine truck came up. It rolled into place as if on a railroad track, so great was its precision. The fueling crew briskly and deftly loaded the ship with its full portion of hydrazine. The tanks topped off. The truck coiled its hose and moved away.
"We'll move the ship a couple of hundred yards," said the general curtly, "before loading the nitric."
This was precaution carried to an extreme. Surely nothing could be spilled on the ground here! But to fuel the nitric from an entirely new site would make assurance doubly sure. The ship's position was shifted. The group of officers moved with it. The nitric truck came out, with a fresh crew of fuelers who loaded the nitric tank.
"Now," said the general, "you and Furness can get into your flight suits, McCauley. Then I give no more orders. You'll be on your own."
"Yes, sir," said McCauley.
A jeep came up and stopped. McCauley got in the front seat. Furness got silently into the back. The jeep raced toward the base. Crunching pebbles and raising dust, it created an extraordinary effect of self-importance and busyness.
The flight suits were in the building behind the flagpole. There were noncoms to help them don the clumsy, tight, intricately gadgeted outfits which provided protection against the effects of high acceleration, abrupt decompression, heat, cold—everything but sudden death. There were helmets. There were oxygen bottles and parachute-packs and mikes and headphones. When the two of them were completely outfitted, they looked like oversized robots.
Furness did not speak on the way back to the ship. McCauley made one half-hearted attempt to end the constraint between them.
"Isn't your wife coming out to watch the take-off?" he asked.
"She'll know when we go," said Furness without expression.
He said no more. McCauley carefully did not shrug his shoulders. But now the immediate problems of the take-off had to be thought over for the thousandth time, and he could spare no more thought for Furness' injured dignity.
They reached the standing group of officers. The ship's fuel was all aboard. The jatos were mounted. Now one man was working alone at the very tail of the ship. He was bleeding the air out of the fuel lines between the tanks and the rocket engine. He came away with a small bucket. Unlike a more normal rocket which would stand nose up and have its fuel tanks vertically above the motor, in the X-21 a certain amount of fuel had to come through the lines almost to the engine, to make certain that the pumps would deliver the two fuel elements at absolutely the same instant for self-ignition, the instant the rocket motor was turned on.
"Take that stuff," ordered the general, "and carry it well away from the ship."
A noncom ran to get the bucket. It might be nitric or it might be hydrazine. He carried it away a hundred yards or so. The lone man by the ship now stripped off his plastic coverall, including the gloves. He walked twenty yards from the ship, put on a fresh outfit, and went back to the ship. Presently he came away with another small bucket.
"Get that out of the way, too," commanded the general. He turned to McCauley. "Now, McCauley, it's all yours."
"I'd like," said McCauley, "to give the engine a one-second run. Just to make sure. I'd like everybody else away."
The general nodded. McCauley lumbered clumsily across the several hundred yards between the general and the ship. Furness started to follow, but the general said briskly:
"McCauley's right, Furness. Only one man's needed. Come along."
The general and the others moved to a position less directly in line with the body of the ship. It was a completely sensible thing to do. If he did not notice that the small buckets of bled-away fuel were closer to him and the other officers than they'd been before, he could be excused for it.
McCauley reached the ship and climbed up. He carefully inspected the instruments. Then he set the rocket timer for a one-second blast, threw off the safety, and pressed the firing button.
There was an instant, horrible bellow of a thousand dragons. The ship stirred, rolled forward—and the timer cut off the fuel supply to the rocket engine. The engine died. The ship rolled, crunching, to a stop. McCauley nodded tensely to himself. He waited.
His ears were a bit numbed by the sound, but after a time he turned to look back under the belly of the ship. There was confusion back there; the group of officers seemed agitated. There was a vast upsweep of yellow dust. And there was a hole, a crater, in the sun-baked plain. The dust was thicker and yellower above it.
Furness came trudging out to the ship. It was a good two minutes before he arrived. He climbed heavily upward and swung to close the pressure door and dog it. He settled in his seat with a thud, and then reached forward and flipped the communicator switch.
"Furness reporting, X-21 to control," he said into his microphone. "X-21 set to take off. Over."
McCauley saw that his face was ashen white.
"What's the matter, Furness?" he demanded sharply. "Anything wrong?"
"All those precautions were no good," said Furness harshly. "The stuff that bled out of the fuel lines turned over when the rocket blast hit it. It blew. It made a hole in the ground and pebbles flew every which way like bullets. One of them ripped the side of the general's cap clean off. For a moment I thought the ship had gone."
A tinny voice sounded from a speaker overhead.
"Control to X-21. Scheduled take-off time is now thirty-four seconds off. I will count down for time of take-off only." A long pause. "Twenty seconds." Another pause. "Fifteen." A silence which seemed ages long. McCauley settled himself. Furness held one hand oddly against his side. McCauley held his finger over the jato button. "Ten," said the tinny voice. "Nine ... eight ... seven ... six ... five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... take-off-ti-."
The last syllable was never completed. McCauley hit the jato button and the Mark Twenty jatos flamed, instantly and together. The jolt of the one-second blast before had been severe. This was punishment. McCauley was slammed back into his acceleration chair with intolerable violence. For two—five—seven seconds there was no world but weight and bellowings. There was nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard, nothing to be felt but the unbearable sound and intolerable pressure of the ship's acceleration.
On the outside, of course, more detailed impressions were possible. From absolute immobility, the ship suddenly rushed forward with mountainous masses of jato fumes swirling and mushrooming behind it. The noise was deafening even at half a mile. Then the ship lifted, flying steadily and gaining velocity at a preposterous rate. Then that rate increased.
McCauley knew when it happened. For six out of their life of fourteen seconds, the jatos pushed the ship ahead at an acceleration of eight gravities; in effect, McCauley was pushed back against his chair with a force of twelve hundred pounds. Then the ramjets caught. The ship was clear of the ground, with only inertia and air resistance to hold it back. The ramjets howled, and the whole ship jerked—a little to one side as well as ahead—and then the acceleration was ten gees. The difference was that between the unbearable and the unendurable. McCauley clamped his teeth fiercely and strained to survive this monstrous assault upon his consciousness and his life.
The jatos burned out and dropped off. The ship swept on smoothly, and there were only two gees acceleration. But McCauley had to work swiftly, in spite of feeling that flatirons were attached to his fingers. He shook his head and panted, and swept his eyes around the horizon. It was level. He grasped the stick, unlocked it, and pulled it back. The horizon dipped downward before him and the ship rose tumultuously toward the sky.
He heard Furness' voice as a faint murmur above the overwhelming noise from the ramjets.
"X-21 reporting. Take-off complete. Everything functioning normally. Rate of ascent...."
His voice went on. There was a strange note in it, though. Even in his desperate absorption in the task at hand, McCauley noted it. But he could not spare a look at Furness.
The ship was airborne and already two thousand feet high. McCauley put it into a gigantic climbing sweep around a circle fully twenty miles across. It flew with the grace and precision of a garbage scow. Now and again it tended to wallow in flight, and he balanced it tensely, and then delicately as he confirmed the calculated feel of its controls.
The earth spread out below, wider and wider as the ship rose, and the ramjets thundered a message of the flight to the empty plain and all the rolling ground beyond it.
Furness' voice was barely audible. He talked steadily, reading off instrument indications into a microphone. There were telemeterings of all these data in transmission that were being recorded down at the base, but when the ship reached the limit to which the ramjets could carry it and began its rocket-powered flight, continuous reception of microwaves would be dubious. A longer wave length for a voice broadcast was necessary if the full value of the flight was to be realized.
The X-21 was eighteen thousand feet up when it passed Quartermain Base on its first circle. Half the atmosphere was already beneath it. Furness read off the fuel consumption of the ramjet.... The air speed.... The altitude. His face was as gray as when he entered the cabin. He kept his left hand pressed stiffly against the left side of his abdomen. McCauley was aware of it, but could not spare the time to think about it.
The eastward-flowing jetstream rushed invisibly overhead. That river of racing air, pouring west to east at three hundred miles an hour and better, was lower than ordinary today. The ship should hit it at twenty-eight thousand feet. McCauley had to get into it without risking the sheering stresses the bottom part of it might exert. He had to get into it like a man stepping onto a moving sidewalk. He adjusted the rate of climb. At twenty thousand feet the ramjets were more effective. The ship climbed more steeply. There was a difference in the bellowing of the ramjets. The noise was still monstrous, but it was thinner. It did not have the substance of thunder at ground level. But the sound was still so tremendous that it seemed to fill all of McCauley's consciousness. It required an effort of will to see, when he was so battered and hammered at by sound. It was difficult to think. His hands were heavy, and movements of which he would ordinarily have been unconscious now required almost painful effort.
Twenty-five thousand feet. McCauley glanced at the gyrocompass, computed swiftly in his head, added together his known air speed and the reported wind direction at this height, and deduced an actual course. Then he had to guess at the angle at which to hit the jetstream so that when its direction and speed were added to the ship's, the result of the several forces would be a course around the globe as nearly as possible the right one. It should pass over the most closely placed tracking stations, and it should not be immoderately far from the wide-spaced Navy ships which had been alerted for the flight and a possible unscheduled descent.
He swung the ship from its circling. He aimed it up and up, south-east by a half east. The ship climbed.
There was a logy wallowing when it penetrated the bottom of the jetstream. But it kept on, and presently a clock assured McCauley that he'd been in the stream long enough to gain all the extra speed it could give him. He aimed the ship's nose still higher and gave the ramjets every particle of fuel they could consume.
The sky grew dark. Dark purple. Faint twinklings appeared here and there. They were the stars, visible in daylight. The ramjets' tumult was still thinner now. And little by little the rate of climb grew less.
Presently the ship did not climb at all. It was as high as the ramjets could take it. Now the sunshine on its aluminum body was painfully bright, but the sky was almost black. Had there been time, he could have traced the constellations—the same constellations that people down below would not see for months, until this part of the heavens shone down on Earth's dark side.
In the pressurized cabin, Furness' voice was more nearly audible. But this was the first of two moments of truth. Here and now McCauley had to perform, as the act of a man, what highly complicated machines would later compute he should have done. He had to get the X-21 into a three-dimensional relationship to the gravitational field of Earth. He had to point the ship not only laterally but vertically in the exact direction that the exact timing of rocket thrust would convert into an orbit. An error of half a degree would immediately be fatal. An even smaller error could make the ship's course so eccentric that when he got back into air it would be with a velocity that would burn ship and men together as a meteor some fifty miles high.
He sweated, in absolute absorption in his task. Not only did the ship have to point exactly when he fired the rocket engine, but it had to be stationary, so it would not move past that point. It had to be settled dead center on an imaginary optimum or the rocket thrust would change direction as the ship's nose turned.
He flung his hand against a switch. The ramjets died. There was a vast, furry stillness—the deafness produced by the past din. McCauley spoke and barely heard his own voice. He shouted to Furness:
"Settle back for rocket fire!"
Furness nodded. He looked cadaverous. His eyes seemed filled with a peculiar, tragic despair. But his lips moved. McCauley knew that he was saying:
"Ramjets off. Maneuvering for course prior to rocket firing. Over."
But he did not stir in his seat. His left hand stayed pressed against his side.
The ship would be coasting downward now. Its wings still gave some support, and its wingtips had some effect, but not enough. Now was the time to use the steam-jets on the fins. McCauley played them tensely as if they were a musical instrument. He struck balances of opposing thrusts as if they were chords. The nose of the ship steadied, steadied, steadied....
The timer button was set at one minute. He struck the rocket-firing button.
He was hurled back in his seat with a sort of vicious and unreasonable violence. He was caught in a vise of twelve gravities pressure which held him motionless against the seat back and tried to flatten out his legs and body and prevent his breathing. But his flight suit was designed to prevent exactly this. It squeezed also. His legs were tightened unbearably. His arms were constricted past endurance. His chest, his stomach—he was confined in the most horrible of strait jackets. He felt his tongue curling back down his throat to strangle him. With an utterly herculean effort he managed to turn his head to one side. Then he could breathe, and the grav-pressure air protected his chest from collapse, and he endured and endured and endured.
The minute of the rocket thrust lasted for centuries. Then the engine cut off, and his head was pure anguish from the blood spurted through it by his still-laboring heart. He was blinded by the pain. But it went away.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, his sound-deadened ears regained their sensitiveness. He heard Furness gasping:
"—minute rocket-blast ended. Checking course now. Over."
McCauley said absorbedly:
"There was a goof. A twelve-gee thrust with full fuel tanks is a whale of a lot more when they're nearly empty!"
It was true, of course. The ferocity of a rocket thrust that would accelerate a fully loaded ship at three hundred fifty-odd feet per second per second would accelerate much more a ship weighing half as much. Toward the end, McCauley and Furness had taken acceleration that no man could live through for more than a very short time. But a man can endure briefly a stress that would kill him if long-continued.
McCauley plunged into the desperately necessary task of this moment. He had to determine his present course and speed. He could not take the time to look out of the ports at the immensity of Earth below him. Men in capsules, orbiting, had been as high as this, but they did not have to compute their height or guide their vehicles. McCauley had to do both.
The height was relatively simple. A radar screen, reduced to a vertical slot for economy of space and weight, told him the distance to whatever was below. A Doppler-effect velocity indicator would read off the change in frequency of a crystal-controlled radio signal which his speed produced. This substantially resembled the way an automobile horn changes pitch when two cars pass each other; the pitch drops swiftly at the moment of passing. But there was an observation which was simpler and more direct.
He spotted a bright star near the horizon ahead. He read off its angular distance from the world's edge. Looking aft, under the belly of the ship, he read another angle from the world's edge to another star. Minutes later, he repeated the observations. The star ahead was higher, the one behind was lower. If one star rose faster than the other sank, he would be gaining height. If one sank faster than the other rose, he would be falling. If one rose exactly as fast as the other dropped, he would be in a perfect circular orbit, neither rising nor falling. That was too good to be expected. But from even two sets of observations he could tell the line the ship was following, and hence its speed.
The ship did not have quite the speed necessary for a complete orbit. It needed more. He could guess how much.
He said curtly to Furness:
"We've got to have a two-second push, anyhow. Maybe more later. Get set."
Furness did not reply, but McCauley heard him reporting.
There was singularly little exultation in the small cabin. Furness' face was drawn and colorless behind his helmet plate. McCauley was busy.
Presently, after a warning gesture, he set the rocket timer and pressed the firing button. All the ghastly impact of high acceleration repeated itself. But, lasting only two seconds, it was not much worse than—say—falling from a second-story window down on a hard mattress. It lasted longer, but there was not much other difference. It did not build up to the torture of continued rocket thrust.
Then the ship floated on. There was utter silence. The vertical-slot altimeter indicated a height which seemed absolutely steady. The Doppler-effect velocity meter gave a reasonably satisfactory if not too precise message. McCauley was working intensively on his course when Furness said, with an effort:
"Ground says satellite-watching stations picking up our signal report a good course. It could be a little more to the south."
McCauley flipped on his own microphone-to-ground switch.
"I figure I'm still a little short on velocity," he said crisply. "I'll have to blast again for about a second. Figure me an angle of heading for ten minutes from now, for a one-second blast. I'll report my figures for checking."
He did not bother with the ship controls now, of course. The ship was in orbit, like the numerous satellites circling Earth west to east and north and south. It did not matter which way it pointed. There was no air to impede its progress. As a matter of fact, a trace of rotating motion had been produced by a slight off-centering of the rocket thrust. The ship's center of mass had changed slightly because of fuel consumption.
There was silence. McCauley worked on busily. From time to time Furness spoke as if with great effort. He relayed the altitude from the slot radar. He relayed the velocity from the Doppler gauge. He relayed hull temperature, cosmic frequency, ultraviolet intensity. He did not report any physical sensations, but once he spoke as if in answer to a question:
"It must be out of order if it says that."
He might be referring to the telemetering apparatus which relayed the pulse and respiration and blood pressure readings of the two men in the ship.
In eight minutes McCauley reported the bearing he considered the ship should point to so that a one-second rocket thrust, adding its effect to all previous courses and speeds—plus a correction for the diminished weight of fuel in the tanks—would produce an exactly perfect orbit for the ship. Furness repeated it while McCauley took more horizon-to-star observations to check the present line of motion.
"Ground checks your figures," said Furness. "They say congratulations on perfect astrogation under service conditions. It's right."
"Okay," McCauley said absently.
He went on with his work. The ship was two hundred eighty miles—plus or minus half a mile—above the surface of the earth. An orbit required a speed and rate of downward curvature just fixed so the ship would go downward as the surface curved down, like a glider coasting down a curving hillside and always being the same distance from solidity. Since the earth was a globe, one could coast forever and be always falling, without ever touching the circled world. That is an orbit.
McCauley set the rocket timer and said:
"Here we go."
The rockets blasted. The ship flung itself forward. Again there was the sensation of falling an uncomfortable distance onto a hard mattress. But a one-second blast was a thousand times more endurable than a one-minute one.
The ship had now been aloft for something like thirty minutes, of which ten was airborne flight and twenty free fall in orbit, plus two corrections of course and speed. McCauley had had no time to gaze down at the vastness below him. He knew it only as a huge expanse of mottled tawny-green or blue with many white specks upon it. The specks, which were clouds, were closer together toward the horizon, and at any given moment the rim of the world was a ring of plain white.
Now he checked his work once more and then took time to look at Earth below him. At its speed, the ship should complete one revolution of the Earth in ninety minutes, more or less. Its speed was seventeen thousand two hundred and sixty miles per hour relative to the ground. In twenty minutes of free-fall flight it had covered something over five thousand and seven hundred miles, relative to the ground, and crossed eighty degrees of longitude. The local time down below was something more than five hours later than the local time at Quartermain Base. Sunset would be approaching here, as the earth's shadow moved from east to west like the dawn.
To the right of the floating ship there was only tawny-blue ocean that seemed much darker than ordinary because McCauley was looking down into its depths instead of at a sky reflection from its surface. Behind the ship there was a clumping of the white specks. These cloud masses would be above and around the Cape Verde Islands, now tens of scores of miles to the rear. Below and to the left there was an amorphousness, an indefiniteness peeping up from beneath the cloud cover. That would be Africa. McCauley could see for enormous distances over the cloud-hidden land. He knew that he floated over Senegal and British Guinea and French Guinea and Liberia and the Ivory Coast, all in a matter of tens of seconds. But he could see only at intervals between tufts of white-cottony vapor. Ahead, too, the dark-colored sea swept in, right to left, and in half minutes or less there was no land at all except behind him. Away ahead there was more of Africa, to be sure, because the X-21 sped along a line which would mark the limits of the Gulf of Guinea. The ship would cross the tip of Africa and head down past it to Antarctica.
But McCauley would not see Africa again. The whiteness which was the horizon turned dim where the ship's bow aimed, and the dimness spread to the left. The edge of the round world turned black. It was Earth's crawling shadow creating night. Darkness sped toward the ship, still high above the last slightest trace of atmosphere and glittering intolerably in the unshielded glare of the sun.
"It looks like we're all set, Furness," McCauley said with satisfaction. "We can relax, now, for all of twenty minutes."
Furness did not answer. There was no sensation of weight, of course. Nothing weighed anything. Nothing could be considered light or heavy. The difference between a copper penny and the ship itself was purely imaginary. They had different masses, but both would weigh the same—zero. McCauley suddenly turned off the silent air-circulator in the cabin. He struck a match. The flame flared, but not as a rising leaf shape. It was a perfect ball of incandescence. But it did not continue to burn. It went out, and there was a ball of white smokiness where the flame had been.
"I've heard that'd happen. I wanted to try it," McCauley said amusedly.
A match requires oxygen in which to burn. On the ground, the chemically fostered first flame of the match-head heats the air, which rises and is replaced, whereby fresh oxygen reaches the place of combustion and supports it. But in the X-21, in free fall, hot air was no lighter than cold. It did not rise. The match exhausted the oxygen around it and went out. McCauley turned the air-circulator on again lest he and Furness be similarly surrounded by vitiated air.
"Queer, eh?" said McCauley. Then he looked at Furness. Furness' eyes seemed filled with suffering. His pallor was deathlike.
"What's the matter?" McCauley asked.
Purely by instinct he raced his eyes across the instruments. They said nothing they should not.
"Furness!" snapped McCauley. "What's the matter? What's happened to you?"
With an air of terrible effort—though nothing weighed as much as a hair—Furness moved his left hand away from his side. It came away filled with blood. There was an ominous dark-red patch on the flight suit, and something seemed to be welling slowly out of a puncture in the cloth. The hole was the size of a bullet hole.
"Just before ... take-off," said Furness thinly, "the rocket fuel that was ... bled through the fuel pipes ... went off when you tested ... the engine. It exploded. It threw pebbles like bullets. One ... ripped the general's hat. One ... hit me."
McCauley swore. He felt a sort of bitter anger. Of all the places where instant medical attention for an injured man was impossible, the worst was the close, air-tight cabin of a ship out of atmosphere, traveling at some thousands of miles per hour and heading into night. Descending was out of the question. It was impossible to turn back.
"Let's look at that," said McCauley harshly. "Maybe we can check the bleeding somehow.—Why didn't you report you were hurt? Didn't you know you were risking your life?"
"I suppose," said Furness weakly, but with irony, "that you aren't risking yours!"
Then he winced a little as McCauley's finger explored the hole in the tough cloth. When the rocket fuel exploded on the surface of the ground, the impact of a pebble would have the effect of a bullet. It would numb more than it hurt. Furness knew he'd been hit, of course, but the ship was ready to take off, and the wound might only be trivial. To delay take-off for examination of what might be entirely insignificant would earn him McCauley's contempt—or so Furness had believed. And Furness was in no state of mind to risk that. Nothing short of absolute inability to hide his injury would have made him admit that he'd been hurt or even hit. So he'd climbed in the ship, and done his work steadily until this instant, all the time covering the wound with his hand lest McCauley discover it.
There was no room in the cabin for much movement. McCauley tried to enlarge the hole, but the cloth was reinforced with wire and could not be torn. Furthermore, he had nothing to work with if he could get at the wound—nothing for bandages, nothing to check the bleeding, nothing.... He swore deeply.
Then he felt for a familiar iron ring and pulled it. A tiny pilot chute leaped from his chute-pack. It was designed to pull out his main chute if he had to jump. He tore at it with his fingers.
"We'll pack it anyhow," he mumbled as he ripped strips from the small expanse of nylon. "At least check the bleeding."
He rolled up a strip of white cloth. He was irritated by the insistent feeling that he needed antiseptics he didn't have. He worked at the recalcitrant opening in the cloth of the flight suit and packed the wound with nylon. Then he worked more nylon about and over the packing to make a firm pad. He tore long strips to put around Furness' body to hold the packing fast and tied them tightly.
It was awkward to work where there was no weight. It seemed unreal to attempt the preposterous where there was no sound. He worked swiftly. Suddenly there was a redness in the light reflected all about the cabin from the sunshine that came in the ports.
He jerked up his head, thinking foolishly of fire. Then he saw the sun. It lay beyond a vast curved barrier that shut off all the light of all the stars. The sun was in the act of descending, to be eclipsed by the edge of Earth, and its light came through hundreds of miles of thick air which turned it from a burning golden glare to flame-red, and then crimson, and then ruby-red as he stared. Then its rim was blanked out and it slid swiftly down to extinction. The light went from gold to carmine to ruby and the sun was blotted out in less than ten seconds.
Then the ship traveled through purest night. The cosmos outside its ports was sharply divided. There was a hemisphere filled with the coruscations of a million million stars. The other half of the universe was the night side of Earth, but it looked like the abyss of nothingness from which all things came, and to which it may be that all things will return.
McCauley reached over and switched on lights. Furness looked at him through eyes that seemed deep-sunk in his head.
"You tore your pilot chute," he said thinly. "You've no chance to jump, now."
McCauley scowled. There were various methods by which the ship could be landed or at least its occupants might escape its crash. There was the skip process, in which the ship could be settled down into atmosphere just thick enough to slow it as it bounced out to space again for another settling, another slowing, another bounce. It was considered the most practical way for a ship to get back to Earth after an orbital flight. To choose the final landing place, of course, was out of the question. Also it was believed that even with the best of luck the ship's crew might have to take to their chutes and let the ship crash. But Furness could not make a chute-drop. Nor could McCauley, now.
"Time for a report," said McCauley.
He'd meant to make it, but Furness summoned all his strength. He ran his eyes along the instruments.
"X-21 reporting," he said as loudly as he could. "Just passed darkness line. Altitude...."
He went through the list of readings to be given by voice. They might be picked up by satellite-tracking stations which did not quite pick up the ship itself. They would almost certainly be picked up by South African radio amateurs listening for them.
"More comfortable?" McCauley asked gruffly.
Furness moved his head in a fashion that might be considered a nod. After a long time he said:
"Is there any ... water in the ... survival kit?"
McCauley fumbled. There was. The survival kits were the small parcels which might conceivably mean the difference between dying and not dying if a man had to ditch his disabled plane or jump from a burning one. Together with an inflatable boat, they were included in the X-21's equipment as a sort of pious wish. It was not to be believed that this ship would end its career like a mere atmosphere plane. If the steam-jets didn't work, the most perfect operation of the rocket engine would never get the ship down into the atmosphere, even for destruction. If it got down to the atmosphere there were still several thousand things that could go wrong. It was definitely not likely that its crew could jump to safety in case of need, or land so serenely on water that a rubber raft would do them any good. But the survival kits were there.
McCauley gave Furness water. He did not comment on the complications Furness' injury added to a landing problem that was already complicated enough. Instead, he looked at the clock.
"We're close to Antarctica now," he observed. "We ought to run into moonlight, too."
He peered out of a port. The tiny lighted cabin swam in emptiness, without sound, without sight of anything but remote and indifferent stars. It floated above the part of the world where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans flow together, and where there is unbroken sea all around the antarctic continent. A wind can blow completely around the world there, and rather frequently it does; and the gigantic waves that are engendered are spoken of with aversion by seamen. But McCauley could not see any waves. There was floating ice below, but as he thought of it it changed to the massive ice sheet of the bottom of the world. So the tiny lighted cabin raced over mountains and plains all buried in snow which had been there since the beginning.
He turned from the sight of a universe divided into stars and blackness. There was no practical measure to be taken—not now, anyhow. McCauley might contrive a way to get himself safely down to earth, letting Furness take his own chance with no strength to help himself. It seemed improbable in the extreme that Furness could survive a crash landing, even if no explosion followed. There was very little hope that the X-21 could be landed save in a crash. But it did not occur to McCauley that he was relieved of responsibility. A normal landing was not really hoped for. If McCauley piloted the X-21 into orbit and out again, he'd have done the unprecedented and the next try might go better. But he could not imagine himself leaving Furness in a ship headed for a landing that was bound to be a pile-up....
He couldn't expect to land intact himself, with his pilot chute ripped out and torn apart.
"I'm sorry you tore up your pilot chute," said Furness. "It about kills your chance of getting down to the ground in one piece. And it's my fault. You tore it up for me. But when I came on the ship I didn't think I was hurt badly."
"I'd have done just what you did," said McCauley. "It would have taken two broken legs to keep me from walking over as if nothing had happened to me." Then he remembered. "Report?"
Furness gathered his strength and spoke in an almost natural voice:
"X-21 reporting. We are over Antarctica at the farthest south part of our orbit. Altitude...."
He went through the list, and then his eyes went to the canteen from which McCauley had given him water. McCauley gave him another drink.
"That son of mine," said Furness abruptly. "He reveres you. When I was picked to ride observer with you, he almost went out of his head with pride. I was—I suspect I was a little bit jealous of you. A man likes his son to think he's the greatest man on earth. My boy almost believed it when I was picked for this job. But if I'd backed out...."
McCauley nodded.
"Under the circumstances," he agreed, "you'd walk to the ship and come aboard if you had to carry your head in your hand. A man wouldn't disappoint his son."
"He'd have been so proud," said Furness, "if we'd made it! And I've messed it all up!"
"I'm hanged if I'll compliment you," McCauley said, "but it would have been disgraceful if you'd done anything else. A man has to set an example for his son. And we may make out. In any case we're just thirty-two minutes from some very tricky stuff. I think we'd better think of cheerier things."
"Sorry," said Furness. He turned his eyes away. He brooded.
Seconds ticked by in the cabin. Frost began to form on the ports. There was no air outside, so there could not be said to be any temperature. But the ship radiated heat into empty space and received next to none in return. If allowed to cool until thermal equilibrium with its surroundings was reached, the X-21 would go down to some two hundred and fifty-four degrees below zero centigrade. But that would be in darkness. In sunlight it would be a different matter, and the ship'd be out of darkness in minutes.
They were very long minutes. The altitude radar said that the ship was maintaining the most nearly perfect circular orbit any man-made object had achieved to date. The X-21 was a lonely mote with yellow light glowing from its cabin openings. From time to time, invisibly, radio waves spread out from a stiff metal rod pointed sternward, and some of them might—with luck—be picked up by somebody. But the ship received nothing, here.
It passed south of Kerguelen Island in the blackness, and it was midnight local time, though the ship was only forty-five minutes of free-fall flight from Quartermain Base. Presently the X-21 headed northward and crossed the meridian where it was one A.M. something less than five minutes later. It reached a point south of Australia in under ten minutes more. It swept above the lowermost part of Australia and Tasmania together when the clocks on the ground said fiveA.M.
It was only when the remotest rim of the blackness which was Earth turned bright—when the dawn could be seen at the farthest horizon—that McCauley thought to look for the moon. It shone down coldly, but it was not bright enough to show him any pattern in the blackness nearly three hundred miles below the ship.
In eight minutes more, however, the sun had rolled up over the edge of the world and below the ship there was ocean. Away off to the left McCauley could see spiral arms of cloud, signifying a cyclonic disturbance moving north across the Coral Sea. Sturdy steamships fought for their lives in that typhoon, and many human beings would die in it. The ship sped on, and there came into the headphones of both McCauley and Furness a beamed message from the naval installation at Guam, which dimly and fugitively could be sighted under an aggregation of white clouds more dense than ordinary. The message said:
"Good work, guys! We're pulling for you!"
Then the Samoan Islands were far behind and dropping even farther. And time passed, and McCauley thought intensively and very grimly, and once again Furness asked for water. There was a clumping of cloud masses underneath and to the east which was Phoenix Island, and almost immediately afterward Washington Island and then Palmyra; after that it seemed barely seconds when a most respectable massing of clouds to the left was Hawaii.
McCauley could see solid ground there, and he talked curtly and very urgently into his own throat-mike, flipped into circuit with the voice transmitter for the occasion. It was not altogether likely that his message, relayed, would arrive ahead of the ship, but it was his only chance to do anything practical in the way of warnings to the ground.
He set to work. He did computations from instrument readings he barely remembered. He included a prayerful hope that the fuel-gauge instruments had been calibrated through their entire range. There was so much ramjet fuel, which might or might not do what it was supposed to do. There was so much rocket fuel, which must be expended to the last smallest drop before the ship could risk touching ground. And there was distance to be calculated, in terms of minutes and seconds instead of miles.
The clock flashed a red light and made a buzzing sound. It was a reminder that now, according to the figure evolved on the ground before take-off, McCauley might begin the attempt at skip landing, the improbable but still least implausible procedure for getting the ship on to the ground in not more than two or three pieces. It should begin with a rocket-driven dive into the atmosphere. He was expected to have enough fuel for that. With downward velocity established, he should bleed out all the remaining nitric acid to emptiness. After it had been completely expelled, and not before, he should wait the number of seconds which would be equivalent to five hundred miles, and then jettison the hydrazine. By that time the ship should hit the outermost fringes of air. He should dive into it until the ship's skin temperature began to rise—a matter of fractions of seconds—and then let the ship bounce out again. It would have lost some velocity and would no longer be capable of remaining in an orbit. So it would come down into the air again, after an interval in which it would cool off, and again it would bounce out like a stone skipping across the surface of a pond until it has lost enough speed to settle quietly to the bottom.
If McCauley attempted such a landing system, his place of entry into the air for a dead-stick landing would not be less than one thousand miles from the point of the first bounce, and it might be three thousand. It could not be calculated. Fractions of seconds and seconds of arc would apply, so McCauley might start his skip-stop descent out above the Pacific Ocean, and the X-21 might finally ditch in the Atlantic somewhere off Newfoundland.