Exile-and Glory (50 page)

"Yeah, but it has to work the first time," Kevin said. "All they need to do is keep Norsedal away from the control console."

"They couldn't keep me away," Glenda said. "If I knew the key commands, I could make the computer obey me. I should have waited, but no, I had to do things my way. Damn, I'm an idiot."

"Don't be so hard on yourself. How could you order their computer around?"

"Implant. I have a transceiver implant, and an acceptor was put into the Ceres main computer when it was built on Earth. It was supposed to be my secret weapon, but I never got a chance to use it."

"Implant." Kevin fell silent for a moment. "I'm told those cost half a million francs."

She didn't say anything.

"I keep forgetting. You have half a million francs. A lot more. What—how does it feel to grow up rich?" he asked.

"Confined. Filled with obligations if your father is Aeneas MacKenzie."

"Yeah, I guess it would be like that."

"I ran away from it," Glenda said. "Oh, not really. But I grew up on the Moon, and I was the little princess, and it was stifling. When I was fifteen, I convinced myself I couldn't stand it any longer. I went to Earth for an education." She shuddered. "It was terrible at first. Getting used to high gravity, to rain, and dust and storms and cars and freeways—terrible and magnificent too. Sailing. I learned to sail a boat. You can fly on the Moon, but you can't sail.

"So I went to school on Earth and I had this phony identity, and I kidded myself I was independent, but of course I wasn't. I was still taking mother's money. And I was always afraid any boys I met would find out who I was and then they'd pretend to like me because I was the little princess—I was a mess, Kevin.

"I realized that finally, that I was worse off than ever because I was taking the benefits of being a Hansen-MacKenzie and I was shucking the responsibilities. So when I went back for a visit and heard about the Ceres operation and heard mother worrying about the small yields of Arthurium, I decided it was time to try to earn my keep."

"So it was all made up, about you and the foster homes, and the Futurians?"

"Most of it. Not the Futurians. They're real, and I am a junior member of their Fellowship. I thought Aeneas would be upset about it, but he wasn't. He supports them, and they've helped us. They're one reason you're here, Kevin."

"How's that?"

"Dr. Farrington is one of the Fellowship. One of the leaders. After—when we were on the ship, I was curious about you, so I sent for more information. One of the messages I got back was from him. He thinks highly of you."

"But—why did you want to know more about me?"

"Do I have to tell you?" She moved closer to him. "Kevin, I'm afraid I've made a thorough mess of everything. I don't feel much like Miss Supercompetent Independence just now."

"And I'm one poor excuse for a hero," Kevin said. "But I do love you—"

"And you said so before you knew who I was. That's important," she said. And then they didn't talk at all for a long time.

The scooter came back thirty hours later. It didn't land. Instead it closed to a few dozen meters from their moonlet and a suited figure leaped off. As the scooter drove away again, the newcomer landed with a suit reaction pistol and came to the airlock.

"Jacob!" They let him in eagerly. "What happened?" Kevin demanded.

"They caught me," Norsedal sighed. "And it's worse than that. They killed your friend Dykes—"

"Oh no." Tears formed in Glenda's eyes.

"And Wiley Ralston," Norsedal said.

"Wiley? How was he mixed up in this?" Kevin asked.

"He was an agent for the African bloc," Norsedal said. "Stoire had him arrested and held a trial. Accused him of murdering you two, and George Lange. He was probably guilty of killing Lange, and he confessed to trying to kill the two of you when you were leaving Earth—"

"He was the saboteur on
Wayfarer
?"
Kevin asked. "Wiley?"

"It looks that way," Jacob said. "He was executed for it."

"Damn," Kevin muttered. "There goes that chance. I was trying to see how Stoire intended to get away with it. I mean, the Hansen-MacKenzie heir can't just vanish! Aeneas MacKenzie would be out here with a shipload of Hansen security agents and blood in his eye—"

"And now he's got a scapegoat," Glenda said. "Dad will be suspicious, but—is there any evidence left?"

"There is now," Jacob said. "The computer still has a record of what happened. But Stoire will have done something about that before Mr. MacKenzie arrives. He is coming, by the way. There was a report that
Valkyrie
left Luna Station seven hundred hours ago. I wouldn't be surprised if he were bringing company police. But you've been reported dead and your murderer has been caught and executed."

"Looks pretty hopeless," Kevin said. "Unless you brought along a pocket scooter."

"Alas, no," Norsedal said. "They even took my computer."

"I don't understand why you're alive," Kevin said.

Jacob grinned slightly. "They're having some problems with the main computer just now. If they ever get them fixed, I'll be expendable, but they thought it might be best to have me around just in case they don't find the bugs."

"Will that stop them?" Glenda asked.

"Alas, no. Mr. Stoire is very clever. He'll figure out what I did, just as I finally figured out what he did."

"You know, then?" Kevin asked.

"Yes. Could I have some water?"

"Sure. There's plenty. Plenty of everything. We could be here for years," Kevin said.

"Not me." Norsedal's voice didn't change. "You see, they didn't leave me any insulin."

"How—how long?" Glenda asked after a while.

"If I'm careful about what I eat, three or four hundred hours," Jacob said. "Perhaps longer."

"We've got to get out of here," Glenda said.

"I agree, but I confess I don't know how," Norsedal said. "I was telling you what Stoire did. It was very clever, really. First he programmed the computer to report a much lower percentage of Arthurium in the ore. Understand, the computer knew better, and the refinery operated just the same as it always did, but the reported recovery was low. They told the computer to forget about one storage area, and routed ninety percent of the Arthurium there. Simple, clean, and really very pretty. And once Stoire erases the real log, there'll be no record of it at all."

They had explored every tunnel in the prison a dozen times, but found nothing. A hundred hours passed.

There was nothing they could do. No laser equipment to send signals with. No electronics. Nothing but some mining gear and the basic materials for staying alive. Even that took a lot of work. The algae in the tank farms had died, and their own power source was fuel cells. There were tanks of hydrogen and oxygen for those, but the carbon dioxide scrubbers needed constant recharging. They had less time than Kevin had thought.

"I would say two people have a thousand hours more oxygen," Norsedal said. "I could—" He hesitated. "I can add a couple of hundred hours to that, and it won't really matter."

"I'll be damned if you will," Kevin said. "Something will turn up."

"I doubt it," Jacob said. "C-4 is scheduled to go in about nine hundred hours. Daedalus is putting in the final equipment right now."

"And then Stoire and Donnelly are gone," Kevin said. "But how does he get away with it?"

Jacob shrugged. "It would be no great trick to put the Arthurium aboard C-4. As gold, for example. The bombs go off, C-4 heads for Earth. Somewhere between here and there a ship—it wouldn't have to be a very large one—meets them and when C-4 arrives in Earth orbit, the Arthurium is gone, with nothing left aboard that's not supposed to be there."

"And it was stupid to leave us alive," Kevin said. "Once he's ready to leave, he'll come back with Donnelly and finish us. No evidence, no embarrassing bodies—"

"More likely he will take Glenda on C-4," Jacob said. "Donnelly is part of his crew."

"I'm going to go have another look around," Kevin said. "There's got to be
something
we can do."

"I hope you think of it," Glenda said. "I can't."

"Alas, nor I," Jacob added.

Kevin prowled through the corridors of their prison. There has to be some way, he told himself. Ceres mocked him from below, less than three hundred kilometers down. It hung huge in the night sky.

Three hundred kilometers down, and we're moving about half a kilometer a second relative to Ceres, Kevin thought. That's not very much velocity. Under a thousand miles an hour. It doesn't take much energy to get to that speed. How much gasoline does it take to accelerate a car on Earth up to a hundred miles an hour—a gallon or so? We only need ten times that, not even that much.

There's plenty of hydrogen and oxygen. Marvelous rocket fuels if we only had a rocket. More than enough to get us down, except that the temperature of hydrogen burning in oxygen is a lot hotter than anything we have to contain in it—

No. That's not right. The fuel cells do it. But they do it by slowing down the reaction, and they can't be turned into rocket engines.

He remembered the early German Rocket Society experiments described by Willy Ley. The Berliners had blown up more rockets than they flew, and they were only using gasoline, not hydrogen. Liquid-fuel rockets need big hairy pumps, and Kevin didn't have any pumps.

What did he have? Fuel cells, plenty of them, and so what? An electric-powered rocket was theoretically possible, but Kevin didn't have the faintest idea of how to build one, even if there was enough equipment around to do it with. He wasn't sure anyone had ever built one—certainly he couldn't.

Back to first principles, he thought. The only way to change velocity in space is with a rocket. What is a rocket? A machine for throwing mass overboard. The faster the mass thrown away goes in one direction, the faster the rocket will go in the other, and the less you have to throw. All rockets are no more than a means of spewing out mass in a narrow direction. A rocket could consist of a man sitting in a bucket and throwing rocks backward.

That might get a few feet per second velocity change, but so what? There simply wasn't enough power in human muscles—even if he did have a lot of rocks. Was there any other way to throw them? Not fast; and unless the thrown-away mass had a high velocity, the rocket wouldn't be any use. He went on through the tunnels, looking at each piece of equipment he found, trying to think of how it might be used.

You can throw
anything
overboard to make a rocket. Hydrogen, for example. That's all
Wayfarer
's engines did, heat up hydrogen and let it go out through the rocket nozzle. We have hydrogen under pressure—

Not enough. Nowhere near enough hydrogen and nowhere near enough pressure, not to get velocity changes of hundreds of miles an hour. Ditto for oxygen. Gas under compression just can't furnish enough energy. What would? Chemical energy; burning hydrogen in oxygen would do it, but it gave off too much; there was nothing to contain that reaction except the fuel cells and they did it by slowing the reaction way down and—

And I'm back where I started, Kevin thought. Plenty of energy in the fuel cells if I could find a way to use it. Could I heat a gas with electricity? Certainly, only how—

His eye fell on the hot-water tank in the crew quarters. An electric hot-water tank. There was a pressure gauge: forty pounds per square inch. Forty p.s.i.—He looked at the tank as if seeing it for the first time, then went running back to the others.

"Glenda, Jacob, I've got it."

Jacob Norsedal bent over Kevin's pocket calculator. "I have worked it by three different methods and I get nearly the same answer each way," he said. "I believe it will work."

"Sure it works." Kevin grinned. "Steam at forty p.s.i. will come out
fast.
About a kilometer a second."

"I believe you," Glenda said. "But it sounds silly.
Steam
rockets?"

Kevin shrugged. "It is silly. There are a lot more efficient systems. But this will work—"

"In a low g field," Jacob said. "You will not have much thrust. Of course you won't need much."

"I'm sure it works," Kevin said. "Now all we have to do is build it." He made himself sound confident; he knew how much room for error there was in his figures. "Look, it takes nine hundred and eighty calories to turn a gram of water into steam. We heat that steam up another thirty or forty degrees and let it out. The energy is moving molecules. We know the molecular weight of water, so we can figure the number of molecules in a gram and—"

"I worked it too," Glenda reminded him. "And I get the same answer you do, but it doesn't mean I trust it."

"What else can we do?" Kevin asked.

"Nothing. You're right. Let's get to work."

They disconnected the hot-water tank and drilled holes in it. Several turns of heating wire went through the holes, then they sealed them in epoxy. At one end of the tank they drilled a large hole and threaded a pipe into it, threaded a large valve onto the pipe, and welded a makeshift rocket nozzle beyond that.

When it was done they tethered the tank and filled it with water, then connected a fuel cell to the heating leads. "Here goes," Kevin said. He threw the switch to start the heaters.

Slowly the water inside heated, then began to boil. The pressure shown on the gauge began to rise. In half an hour they had forty-five pounds of pressure. "All right, let's try it," Kevin said.

Glenda turned the valve to let out steam. A jet of steam and water shot out across the surface of the moonlet. Ice crystals formed in space and slowly settled to the rocket surface. The jet reached far away from them, well off the moonlet itself. The tank pulled against its tether lines, stretching the rope.

"It works!" Kevin shouted. "Damn it, we're going to make it!" He shut off the electricity. "Let's get her finished."

It didn't look like a spaceship. It didn't even resemble a scooter, crude as those were. It looked like a hot-water tank with fuel cells bolted onto it. For controls it had vanes set crosswise in the exhaust stream, spring-loaded to center, with two tillers, one for each vane; a valve to control steam flow; and switches to connect the fuel cells to the heaters. Nothing else.