The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (6 page)

"That's just it—the volunteers will be the best men we
have. I hate to allow it."

"If we get back, it will be worth it."

"If! It's a big word, son."

"And a big thing we're trying to do."

"Well, I gave my word that if there was no help on
Earth, I'd see that the Phobos water hole lets you have all the water you'll
need. Good luck."

Half a million miles above Saturn, Mario Rioz was cradled on
nothing and sleep was delicious. He came out of it slowly and for a while,
alone in his suit, he counted the stars and traced lines from one to another.

At first, as the weeks flew past, it was scavenging all over
again, except for the gnawing feeling that every minute meant an additional
number of thousands of miles away from all humanity. That made it worse.

They had aimed high to pass out of the ecliptic while moving
through the Asteroid Belt. That had used up water and had probably been
unnecessary. Although tens of thousands of worldlets look as thick as vermin in
two-dimensional projection upon a photographic plate, they are nevertheless
scattered so thinly through the quadrillions of cubic miles that make up their
conglomerate orbit that only the most ridiculous of coincidences would have
brought about a collision.

Still, they passed over the Belt and someone calculated the
chances of collision with a fragment of matter large enough to do damage. The
value was so low, so impossibly low, that it was perhaps inevitable that the
notion of the "space-float" should occur to someone.

The days were long and many, space was empty, only one man
was needed at the controls at any one time. The thought was a natural.

First, it was a particularly daring one who ventured out for
fifteen minutes or so. Then another who tried half an hour. Eventually, before
the asteroids were entirely behind, each ship regularly had its off-watch
member suspended in space at the end of a cable.

It was easy enough. The cable, one of those intended for operations
at the conclusion of their journey, was magnetically attached at both ends, one
to the space suit to start with. Then you clambered out the lock onto the
ship's hull and attached the other end there. You paused awhile, clinging to
the metal skin by the electromagnets in your boots. Then you neutralized those
and made the slightest muscular effort.

Slowly, ever so slowly, you lifted from the ship and even
more slowly the ship's larger mass moved an equivalently shorter distance
downward. You floated incredibly, weightlessly, in solid, speckled black. When
the ship had moved far enough away from you, your gauntleted hand, which kept
touch upon the cable, tightened its grip slightly. Too tightly, and you would
begin moving back toward the ship and it toward you. Just tightly enough, and
friction would halt you. Because your motion was equivalent to that of the
ship, it seemed as motionless below you as though it had been painted against
an impossible background while the cable between you hung in coils that had no
reason to straighten out.

It was a half-ship to your eye. One half was lit by the
light of the feeble Sun, which was still too bright to look at directly without
the heavy protection of the polarized space-suit visor. The other half was
black on black, invisible.

Space closed in and it was like sleep. Your suit was warm,
it renewed its air automatically, it had food and drink in special containers
from which it could be sucked with a minimal motion of the head, it took care
of wastes appropriately. Most of all, more than anything else, there was the
delightful euphoria of weightlessness.

You never felt so well in your life. The days stopped being
too long, they weren't long enough, and there weren't enough of them.

They had passed Jupiter's orbit at a spot some 30 degrees
from its then position. For months, it was the brightest object in the sky,
always excepting the glowing white pea that was the Sun. At its brightest, some
of the Scavengers insisted they could make out Jupiter as a tiny sphere, one
side squashed out of true by the night shadow.

Then over a period of additional months it faded, while
another dot of light grew until it was brighter than Jupiter. It was Saturn,
first as a dot of brilliance, then as an oval, glowing splotch.

("Why oval?" someone asked, and after a while,
someone else said, "The rings, of course," and it was obvious.)

Everyone space-floated at all possible times toward the end,
watching Saturn incessantly.

("Hey, you jerk, come on back in, damn it. You're on
duty." "Who's on duty? I've got fifteen minutes more by my
watch." "You set your watch back. Besides, I gave you twenty minutes
yesterday." "You wouldn't give two minutes to your grandmother."
"Come on in, damn it, or I'm coming out anyway." "All right, I'm
coming. Holy howlers, what a racket over a lousy minute." But no quarrel
could possibly be serious, not in space. It felt too good.)

Saturn grew until at last it rivaled and then surpassed the
Sun. The rings, set at a broad angle to their trajectory of approach, swept
grandly about the planet, only a small portion being eclipsed. Then, as they
approached, the span of the rings grew still wider, yet narrower as the angle
of approach constantly decreased.

The larger moons showed up in the surrounding sky like
serene fireflies.

Mario Rioz was glad he was awake so that he could watch
again.

Saturn filled half the sky, streaked with orange, the night
shadow cutting it fuzzily nearly one quarter of the way in from the right. Two
round little dots in the brightness were shadows of two of the moons. To the
left and behind him (he could look over his left shoulder to see, and as he did
so, the rest of his body inched slightly to the right to conserve angular
momentum) was the white diamond of the Sun.

Most of all he liked to watch the rings. At the left, they
emerged from behind Saturn, a tight, bright triple band of orange light. At the
right, their beginnings were hidden in the night shadow, but showed up closer
and broader. They widened as they came, like the flare of a horn, growing
hazier as they approached, until, while the eye followed them, they seemed to
fill the sky and lose themselves.

From the position of the Scavenger fleet just inside the
outer rim of the outermost ring, the rings broke up and assumed their true
identity as a phenomenal cluster of solid fragments rather than the tight,
solid band of light they seemed.

Below him, or rather in the direction his feet pointed, some
twenty miles away, was one of the ring fragments. It looked like a large,
irregular splotch, marring the symmetry of space, three quarters in brightness
and the night shadow cutting it like a knife. Other fragments were farther off,
sparkling like Stardust, dimmer and thicker, until, as you followed them down,
they became rings once more.

The fragments were motionless, but that was only because the
ships had taken up an orbit about Saturn equivalent to that of the outer edge
of the rings.

The day before, Rioz reflected, he had been on that nearest
fragment, working along with more than a score of others to mold it into the
desired shape. Tomorrow he would be at it again.

Today—today he was space-floating.

"Mario?" The voice that broke upon his earphones
was questioning.

Momentarily Rioz was flooded with annoyance. Damn it, he wasn't
in the mood for company.

"Speaking," he said.

"I thought I had your ship spotted. How are you?"

"Fine. That you, Ted?"

"That's right," said Long.

"Anything wrong on the fragment?"

"Nothing. I'm out here floating."

"You?"

"It gets me, too, occasionally. Beautiful, isn't
it?"

"Nice," agreed Rioz.

"You know, I've read Earth books—"

"Grounder books, you mean." Rioz yawned and found
it difficult under the circumstances to use the expression with the proper
amount of resentment.

"—and sometimes I read descriptions of people lying on
grass," continued Long. "You know that green stuff like thin, long
pieces of paper they have all over the ground down there, and they look up at
the blue sky with clouds in it. Did you ever see any films of that?"

"Sure. It didn't attract me. It looked cold."

"I suppose it isn't, though. After all, Earth is quite
close to the Sun, and they say their atmosphere is thick enough to hold the
heat. I must admit that personally I would hate to be caught under open sky
with nothing on but clothes. Still, I imagine they like it."

"Grounders are nuts!"

"They talk about the trees, big brown stalks, and the
winds, air movements, you know."

"You mean drafts. They can keep that, too."

"It doesn't matter. The point is they describe it beautifully,
almost passionately. Many times I've wondered, 'What's it really like? Will I
ever feel it or is this something only Earthmen can possibly feel?' I've felt
so often that I was missing something vital. Now I know what it must be like.
It's this. Complete peace in the middle of a beauty-drenched universe."

Rioz said, "They wouldn't like it. The Grounders, I
mean. They're so used to their own lousy little world they wouldn't appreciate
what it's like to float and look down on Saturn." He flipped his body slightly
and began swaying back and forth about his center of mass, slowly, soothingly.

Long said, "Yes, I think so too. They're slaves to
their planet. Even if they come to Mars, it will only be their children that
are free. There'll be starships someday; great, huge things that can carry
thousands of people and maintain their self-contained equilibrium for decades,
maybe centuries. Mankind will spread through the whole Galaxy. But people will
have to live their lives out on shipboard until new methods of interstellar
travel are developed, so it will be Martians, not planet-bound Earthmen, who
will colonize the Universe. That's inevitable. It's got to be. It's the Martian
way."

But Rioz made no answer. He had dropped off to sleep again,
rocking and swaying gently, half a million miles above Saturn.

The work shift of the ring fragment was the tail of the
coin. The weightlessness, peace, and privacy of the space-float gave place to
something that had neither peace nor privacy. Even the weightlessness, which
continued, became more a purgatory than a paradise under the new conditions.

Try to manipulate an ordinarily non-portable heat projector.
It could be lifted despite the fact that it was six feet high and wide and
almost solid metal, since it weighed only a fraction of an ounce. But its
inertia was exactly what it had always been, which meant that if it wasn't
moved into position very slowly, it would just keep on going, taking you with
it. Then you would have to hike the pseudo-grav field of your suit and come
down with a jar.

Keralski had hiked the field a little too high and he came
down a little too roughly, with the projector coming down with him at a
dangerous angle. His crushed ankle had been the first casualty of the
expedition.

Rioz was swearing fluently and nearly continuously. He
continued to have the impulse to drag the back of his hand across his forehead
in order to wipe away the accumulating sweat. The few times that he had
succumbed to the impulse, metal had met silicone with a clash that rang loudly
inside his suit, but served no useful purpose. The desiccators within the suit
were sucking at maximum and, of course, recovering the water and restoring
ion-exchanged liquid, containing a careful proportion of salt, into the
appropriate receptacle.

Rioz yelled, "Damn it, Dick, wait till I give the word,
will you?"

And Swenson's voice rang in his ears, "Well, how long
am I supposed to sit here?"

"Till I say," replied Rioz.

He strengthened pseudo-grav and lifted the projector a bit.
He released pseudo-grav, insuring that the projector would stay in place for
minutes even if he withdrew support altogether. He kicked the cable out of the
way (it stretched beyond the close "horizon" to a power source that
was out of sight) and touched the release.

The material of which the fragment was composed bubbled and
vanished under its touch. A section of the lip of the tremendous cavity he had
already carved into its substance melted away and a roughness in its contour
had disappeared.

"Try it now," called Rioz.

Swenson was in the ship that was hovering nearly over Rioz's
head.

Swenson called, "All clear?"

"I told you to go ahead."

It was a feeble flicker of steam that issued from one of the
ship's forward vents. The ship drifted down toward the ring fragment. Another
flicker adjusted a tendency to drift sidewise. It came down straight.

A third flicker to the rear slowed it to a feather rate.

Rioz watched tensely. "Keep her coming. You'll make it.
You'll make it."

The rear of the ship entered the hole, nearly filling it.
The bellying walls came closer and closer to its rim. There was a grinding
vibration as the ship's motion halted.

It was Swenson's turn to curse. "It doesn't fit,"
he said.

Rioz threw the projector groundward in a passion and went
flailing up into space. The projector kicked up a white crystalline dust all
about it, and when Rioz came down under pseudo-grav, he did the same.

He said, "You went in on the bias, you dumb
Grounder."

"I hit it level, you dirt-eating farmer."

Backward-pointing side jets of the ship were blasting more
strongly than before, and Rioz hopped to get out of the way.

The ship scraped up from the pit, then shot into space half
a mile before forward jets could bring it to a halt.

Swenson said tensely, "We'll spring half a dozen plates
if we do this once again. Get it right, will you?"