The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (7 page)

"I'll get it right. Don't worry about it. Just you come
in right."

Rioz jumped upward and allowed himself to climb three
hundred yards to get an over-all look at the cavity. The gouge marks of the ship
were plain enough. They were concentrated at one point halfway down the pit. He
would get that.

It began to melt outward under the blaze of the projector.

Half an hour later the ship snuggled neatly into its cavity,
and Swenson, wearing his space suit, emerged to join Rioz.

Swenson said, "If you want to step in and climb out of
the suit, I'll take care of the icing."

"It's all right," said Rioz. "I'd just as
soon sit here and watch Saturn."

He sat down at the lip of the pit. There was a six-foot gap
between it and the ship. In some places about the circle, it was two feet; in a
few places, even merely a matter of inches. You couldn't expect a better fit
out of handwork. The final adjustment would be made by steaming ice gently and
letting it freeze into the cavity between the lip and the ship.

Saturn moved visibly across the sky, its vast bulk inching
below the horizon.

Rioz said, "How many ships are left to put in
place?"

Swenson said, "Last I heard, it was eleven. We're in
now, so that means only ten. Seven of the ones that are placed are iced in. Two
or three are dismantled."

"We're coming along fine."

"There's plenty to do yet. Don't forget the main jets
at the other end. And the cables and the power lines. Sometimes I wonder if
we'll make it. On the way out, it didn't bother me so much, but just now I was
sitting at the controls and I was saying, 'We won't make it. We'll sit out here
and starve and die with nothing but Saturn over us.' It makes me feel—"

He didn't explain how it made him feel. He just sat there.

Rioz said, "You think too damn much."

"It's different with you," said Swenson. "I
keep thinking of Pete— and Dora."

"What for? She said you could go, didn't she? The
Commissioner gave her that talk on patriotism and how you'd be a hero and set for
life once you got back, and she said you could go. You didn't sneak out the way
Adams did."

"Adams is different. That wife of his should have been
shot when she was born. Some women can make hell for a guy can't they? She
didn't want him to go—but she'd probably rather he didn't come back if she can
get his settlement pay."

"What's your kick, then? Dora wants you back, doesn't
she?"

Swenson sighed. "I never treated her right."

"You turned over your pay, it seems to me. I wouldn't
do that for any woman. Money for value received, not a cent more."

"Money isn't it. I get to thinking out here. A woman
likes company. A kid needs his father. What am I doing 'way out here?"

"Getting set to go home."

"Ah-h, you don't understand."

Ted Long wandered over the ridged surface of the ring
fragment with his spirits as icy as the ground he walked on. It had all seemed
perfectly logical back on Mars, but that was Mars. He had worked it out
carefully in his mind in perfectly reasonable steps. He could still remember exactly
how it went.

It didn't take a ton of water to move a ton of ship. It was
not mass equals mass, but mass times velocity equals mass times velocity. It
didn't matter, in other words, whether you shot out a ton of water at a mile a
second or a hundred pounds of water at twenty miles a second. You got the same
final velocity out of the ship.

That meant the jet nozzles had to be made narrower and the
steam hotter. But then drawbacks appeared. The narrower the nozzle, the more
energy was lost in friction and turbulence. The hotter the steam, the more
refractory the nozzle had to be and the shorter its life. The limit in that
direction was quickly reached.

Then, since a given weight of water could move considerably
more than its own weight under the narrow-nozzle conditions, it paid to be big.
The bigger the water-storage space, the larger the size of the actual
travel-head, even in proportion. So they started to make liners heavier and
bigger. But then the larger the shell, the heavier the bracings, the more
difficult the weldings, the more exacting the engineering requirements. At the
moment, the limit in that direction had been reached also.

And then he had put his finger on what had seemed to him to
be the basic flaw—the original unswervable conception that the fuel had to be
placed
inside
the ship; the metal had to be built to encircle a million
tons of water.

Why? Water did not have to be water. It could be ice, and
ice could be shaped. Holes could be melted into it. Travel-heads and jets could
be fitted into it. Cables could hold travel-heads and jets stiffly together
under the influence of magnetic field-force grips.

Long felt the trembling of the ground he walked on. He was
at the head of the fragment. A dozen ships were blasting in and out of sheaths
carved in its substance, and the fragment shuddered under the continuing impact.

The ice didn't have to be quarried. It existed in proper
chunks in the rings of Saturn. That's all the rings were—pieces of nearly pure
ice, circling Saturn. So spectroscopy stated and so it had turned out to be. He
was standing on one such piece now, over two miles long, nearly one mile thick.
It was almost half a billion tons of water, all in one piece, and he was
standing on it.

But now he was face to face with the realities of life. He
had never told the men just how quickly he had expected to set up the fragment
as a ship, but in his heart, he had imagined it would be two days. It was a
week now and he didn't dare to estimate the remaining time. He no longer even
had any confidence that the task was a possible one. Would they be able to
control jets with enough delicacy through leads slung across two miles of ice
to manipulate out of Saturn's dragging gravity?

Drinking water was low, though they could always distill
more out of the ice. Still, the food stores were not in a good way either.

He paused, looked up into the sky, eyes straining.
Was
the
object growing larger? He ought to measure its distance. Actually, he lacked
the spirit to add that trouble to the others. His mind slid back to greater
immediacies.

Morale, at least, was high. The men seemed to enjoy being
out Saturnway. They were the first humans to penetrate this far, the first to
pass the asteroids, the first to see Jupiter like a glowing pebble to the naked
eye, the first to see Saturn—like that.

He didn't think fifty practical, case-hardened,
shell-snatching Scavengers would take time to feel that sort of emotion. But
they did. And they were proud.

Two men and a half-buried ship slid up the moving horizon as
he walked.

He called crisply, "Hello, there!"

Rioz answered, "That you, Ted?"

"You bet. Is that Dick with you?"

"Sure. Come on, sit down. We were just getting ready to
ice in and we were looking for an excuse to delay."

"I'm not," said Swenson promptly. "When will
we be leaving, Ted?"

"As soon as we get through. That's no answer, is
it?"

Swenson said dispiritedly, "I suppose there isn't any
other answer."

Long looked up, staring at the irregular bright splotch in
the sky.

Rioz followed his glance. "What's the matter?"

For a moment, Long did not reply. The sky was black
otherwise and the ring fragments were an orange dust against it. Saturn was
more than three fourths below the horizon and the rings were going with it.
Half a mile away a ship bounded past the icy rim of the planetoid into the sky,
was orange-lit by Saturn-light, and sank down again.

The ground trembled gently.

Rioz said, "Something bothering you about the
Shadow?"

They called it that. It was the nearest fragment of the
rings, quite close considering that they were at the outer rim of the rings,
where the pieces spread themselves relatively thin. It was perhaps twenty miles
off, a jagged mountain, its shape clearly visible.

"How does it look to you?" asked Long.

Rioz shrugged. "Okay, I guess. I don't see anything
wrong."

"Doesn't it seem to be getting larger?"

"Why should it?"

"Well, doesn't it?" Long insisted.

Rioz and Swenson stared at it thoughtfully.

"It does look bigger," said Swenson.

"You're just putting the notion into our minds," Rioz
argued. "If it were getting bigger, it would be coming closer."

"What's impossible about that?"

"These things are on stable orbits."

"They were when we came here," said Long.
"There, did you feel that?"

The ground had trembled again.

Long said, "We've been blasting this thing for a week
now. First, twenty-five ships landed on it, which changed its momentum right
there. Not much, of course. Then we've been melting parts of it away and our
ships have been blasting in and out of it—all at one end, too. In a week, we
may have changed its orbit just a bit. The two fragments, this one and the
Shadow, might be converging."

"It's got plenty of room to miss us in." Rioz
watched it thoughtfully. "Besides, if we can't even tell for sure that
it's getting bigger, how quickly can it be moving? Relative to us, I
mean."

"It doesn't have to be moving quickly. Its momentum is
as large as ours, so that, however gently it hits, we'll be nudged completely
out of our orbit, maybe in toward Saturn, where we don't want to go. As a
matter of fact, ice has a very low tensile strength, so that both planetoids
might break up into gravel."

Swenson rose to his feet. "Damn it, if I can tell how a
shell is moving a thousand miles away, I can tell what a mountain is doing
twenty miles away." He turned toward the ship.

Long didn't stop him.

Rioz said, "There's a nervous guy."

The neighboring planetoid rose to zenith, passed overhead,
began sinking. Twenty minutes later, the horizon opposite that portion behind
which Saturn had disappeared burst into orange flame as its bulk began lifting
again.

Rioz called into his radio, "Hey Dick, are you dead in
there?"

"I'm checking," came the muffled response.

"Is it moving?" asked Long.

"Yes."

"Toward us?"

There was a pause. Swenson's voice was a sick one. "On
the nose, Ted. Intersection of orbits will take place in three days."

"You're crazy!" yelled Rioz.

"I checked four times," said Swenson.

Long thought blankly, What do we do now?

Some of the men were having trouble with the cables. They
had to be laid precisely; their geometry had to be very nearly perfect for the
magnetic field to attain maximum strength. In space, or even in air, it
wouldn't have mattered. The cables would have lined up automatically once the
juice went on.

Here it was different. A gouge had to be plowed along the
planetoid's surface and into it the cable had to be laid. If it were not lined
up within a few minutes of arc of the calculated direction, a torque would be
applied to the entire planetoid, with consequent loss of energy, none of which
could be spared. The gouges then had to be redriven, the cables shifted and
iced into the new positions.

The men plodded wearily through the routine.

And then the word reached them: "All hands to the
jets!"

Scavengers could not be said to be the type that took kindly
to discipline. It was a grumbling, growling, muttering group that set about
disassembling the jets of the ships that yet remained intact, carrying them to
the tail end of the planetoid, grubbing them into position, and stringing the
leads along the surface.

It was almost twenty-four hours before one of them looked
into the sky and said, "Holy jeepers!" followed by something less
printable.

His neighbor looked and said, "I'll be damned!"

Once they noticed, all did. It became the most astonishing
fact in the Universe.

"Look at the Shadow!"

It was spreading across the sky like an infected wound. Men
looked at it, found it had doubled its size, wondered why they hadn't noticed
that sooner.

Work came to a virtual halt. They besieged Ted Long.

He said, "We can't leave. We don't have the fuel to see
us back to Mars and we don't have the equipment to capture another planetoid.
So we've got to stay. Now the Shadow is creeping in on us because our blasting
has thrown us out of orbit. We've got to change that by continuing the
blasting. Since we can't blast the front end any more without endangering the
ship we're building, let's try another way."

They went back to work on the jets with a furious energy
that received impetus every half hour when the Shadow rose again over the
horizon, bigger and more menacing than before.

Long had no assurance that it would work. Even if the jets
would respond to the distant controls, even if the supply of water, which
depended upon a storage chamber opening directly into the icy body of the
planetoid, with built-in heat projectors steaming the propulsive fluid directly
into the driving cells, were adequate, there was still no certainty that the
body of the planetoid without a magnetic cable sheathing would hold together
under the enormously disruptive stresses.

"Ready!" came the signal in Long's receiver.

Long called, "Ready!" and depressed the contact.

The vibration grew about him. The star field in the
visiplate trembled.

In the rearview, there was a distant gleaming spume of
swiftly moving ice crystals.

"It's blowing!" was the cry.

It kept on blowing. Long dared not stop. For six hours, it
blew, hissing, bubbling, steaming into space; the body of the planetoid
converted to vapor and hurled away.

The Shadow came closer until men did nothing but stare at
the mountain in the sky, surpassing Saturn itself in spectacularity. Its every
groove and valley was a plain scar upon its face. But when it passed through
the planetoid's orbit, it crossed more than half a mile behind its then
position.