Exile-and Glory (51 page)

The tank itself was fuzzy: They'd sprayed it with Styrofoam, building it up in layers until they had nearly a foot of insulation. There were straps on opposite sides of the tank to hold two passengers on.

The tank held nearly a hundred gallons of water. Kevin calculated that they had more than enough energy to boil it all in their two fuel cells, and they would only need sixty gallons to get to Ceres. The number was so small that he ran it four times, but it was correct.

The strangest part was the stability system: a pair of wheels taken from a mining cart and set up in front of the water tank. Electric motors rotated the wheels in opposite directions.

"Damndest gyros in the history of space research," Kevin said when they got the ship completed. "In fact, it's the damndest rocket ever."

"It ought to have a name," Glenda said. "Something heroic, fitting a knight rescuing us from durance vile—"

"How about Fudgesicle?" Kevin suggested.

"You'll hurt its feelings," Glenda said.

"The Gump?" Norsedal asked apologetically.

"Stop that!
Galahad.
That will do nicely, I think."

"You're crazy," Kevin said.

Norsedal laughed. Glenda's own laugh was strained. "I'm about to get aboard that thing, and you say I'm crazy? And you built it? Kevin, are we ready?"

"I guess so. I've been putting off the awful moment, but—"

"Right. Come on, Jacob—"

Norsedal sighed. "I have been over the calculations. That Gump
cannot
carry three people. You will be lucky to get down alive with two. Therefore I am not coming."

"You have to!" Glenda insisted. "If you don't get down, it does us no good—"

"Not true," Norsedal said. "I've given you the key words. And you do not know where you will land. Now it's true that I get around better in low gravity than I ever did on Earth, but it is also true that I am not athletic. I doubt that I can make my way over hundreds of kilometers of ravines—not in my present condition."

"You're feeling the lack of insulin?" Kevin demanded.

"Yes," Norsedal sighed.

"One of us should stay with you—" Glenda said. She sounded doubtful.

"Nonsense. You must go, because Kevin could do nothing alone once he gets there. Kevin should go because it is more likely I will be rescued if you two get down safely, and two are more likely to succeed than one. Now, are you ready?"

"I guess so," Kevin said.

"Then let's do it before we lose our nerve," Glenda said.

"Right." The total mass of
Galahad
with full water tank was just under 550 kilograms. In C-2's tiny gravity it was no problem at all to carry it outside.

They stood on the rocky surface of the moonlet to let their eyes adjust to starlight. Ceres filled a full sixty degrees below them, a third of space, so close they could not even see all of it. It loomed huge and darkly forbidding, its surface lit by sunlight to a brightness much less than Earth's moon, but it was enormously larger than any full moon.

"We won't have any trouble finding it," Kevin said.

"No," Norsedal said. "But finding it is not your main problem."

"Don't I know it."

Glenda said nothing. All three of them had tried to work the problem of a landing orbit, and they couldn't do it with a pocket calculator. The equations for low-thrust trajectories were too complex, and they had too little data about
Galahad's
probable performance. They would simply have to navigate by eye and hope to cancel out all their velocities.

They carried the hot-water tank to a low peak on the moonlet and pointed it so that the rocket nozzle was aimed as close to the direction they moved across Ceres's face as they could manage.

"Time," Kevin said.

"I'm scared—"

"I'm terrified," Kevin said. "But what choices have we? You know damned well Stoire and Donnelly will be back—"

"Yes. Let's do it."

It took only a gentle effort to push the steam rocket away from the moonlet, but the cartwheel-gyros resisted any effort to turn it. Finally they got it oriented properly in space. Then they climbed aboard.

"Full head of steam," Kevin said. "Almost fifty pounds. Ready?"

"Ready—"

He twisted the steam valve. At first both steam and water were expelled from the tank, but as they began to accelerate, the water settled and the exhaust valve let out only steam. C-2 dropped away. They missed it. It was a prison, but a safe one; now they had only their makeshift steam rocket.

Galahad
showed a tendency to tumble, but with the gyros resisting, they were able to control it with the steering vanes. A plume of steam shot from the tank, rapidly crystallizing into ice fog that engulfed them.

"Damn. That's going to make it hard to see," Kevin said. "Nothing we can do about it." He peered down toward Ceres. It didn't seem any closer. Jacob's farewell faded in their headsets.

Norsedal's calculations had shown that twenty minutes' thrust should be enough to cancel all their orbital velocity. It would use up just about half their fuel. Once
Galahad
was stopped dead in orbit above Ceres, they would fall toward the asteroid, and they would have half their steam left to counteract that.

The trouble was that Jacob couldn't calculate how high above Ceres they would be when the twenty minutes were finished. As they lost velocity, they would lose altitude, and their orbit would no longer be a smooth circle, but an ellipse intersecting Ceres—somewhere. At the end of twenty minutes Kevin cut the power off. He was pleased that they still had thirty pounds of steam pressure.

He waited for a half hour that seemed to take forever. They watched as Ceres grew larger. "Closer. But we're still a long way off. I think we should wait—"

"Time sure goes by fast when you're having fun," Glenda said.

Kevin grinned. "Yeah. OK, I can't stand it. Let's start up the steam again. There. Now we come right a bit—"

"Too far!"

He adjusted the vanes and overshot in the other direction.

"We don't have any steam to waste—"

"I knew that."

"A little more—Kevin, I think you've got it! We don't seem to be moving so fast—"

They were falling now, with much less horizontal motion. "Time to wait some more."

As they came closer, they could see details on the craggy surface below. Rugged canyons, high peaks, deep valleys, and rocks everywhere. Kevin had a protractor which he used to measure the angle Ceres filled in the space below them. Then he used that to calculate their altitude. It was crude and certainly not accurate to better than ten percent, but it was all they had.

"I read a hundred degrees," Kevin said. "That puts us just about a hundred kilometers above Ceres. If I've figured everything right, and if I'm reading the angles right—"

"You have to be right, don't you?" Glenda said. "There's nothing else we can do."

She was right. They couldn't get back to C-2 now, and they wouldn't be able to find the tiny moonlet even if they had the reaction mass.

"Time for another turn," Kevin said. "I think."

"We're still moving—"

"Yes, but that's what the numbers say."

"All right."

And a year ago I was working equations in school, Kevin thought. Numbers to crunch and write down for examinations. Now they're something to stake your life on. He twisted the tiller slightly. The tank rotated, and he pointed the tiller the other way to stop it. It took several more adjustments before he thought he had it right. Now the steam jet pointed almost directly toward Ceres, counteracting the asteroid's pull.

He was tempted to change the steam flow, but he didn't dare. That was the part he couldn't calculate at all. The mass of their tank changed constantly as steam spewed out, and as the mass fell, the thrust increased. If they turned the steam valve up too high, it would more than counteract Ceres's gravity, and they would move away from it; and when they ran out of steam, they would fall again, this time with no stopping, impacting at seven or eight hundred miles an hour.

"I feel like singing," Kevin shouted. "I am I, Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha, my destiny calls and I go—"

"Which makes me Dulcinea, the scullery maid?" Glenda demanded.

"You would rather be Sancho Panza?—No, that's Jacob. And
Galahad
is our charger. Now I need a broken lance and a bent sword—"

"I think we're getting closer."

"So do I." Kevin took out his protractor and eyeballed the size of Ceres below. They could no longer see much of the asteroid; they were low enough that there was a definite horizon less than 150 kilometers to each side. "When we get closer, we have to kill our velocity relative to the ground. Otherwise the landing impact will kill us."

"Where will we hit . . . I mean land?"

"I don't know. Fifty, seventy-five kilometers from the station, I hope. We brought plenty of spare air tanks."

For a long time they had seemed to be falling very slowly. Now, as they got closer, they seemed to be moving faster. Much too fast. Kevin couldn't estimate their speed, but it was many meters per second. He used the tillers to turn
Galahad
directly toward Ceres, opened the steam valve wider.

Not too wide, he told himself. Not too wide, or we'll use up steam too fast and—

The temptation to blast as hard as they could was almost irresistible. The craggy ground came up toward them at frightening speed. They were definitely coming down too fast, and they were too close. Desperately he opened the steam valve all the way, and switched full power to the heaters—

A minute went by. Another. Now they were very low—and they didn't seem to have much approach velocity, but they were moving across the surface much too quickly. Painfully they rotated the tank until the exhaust pointed in the direction they moved over the ground, then tilted it again toward Ceres. Kevin opened the steam valve again.

"We've still got pressure," he said. "But I have no idea how much water is left in the tank—"

"Don't talk about it," Glenda said grimly. "We're so close—"

"Sure." Now they were less than a kilometer high, still moving too fast. Again Kevin rotated toward Ceres, ignoring their lateral velocity to kill their falling speed. "Keep a lookout for large objects in our path—"

"I'd say we're moving fifty miles an hour," Glenda said. "Enough to kill you—" But slowly the rocket lost velocity toward the ground, and they were able to turn again. "Pick a landing site," Kevin said. "Something under our ground track."

"Over there. Ahead of us." He looked quickly toward the plateau she had selected. It was rocky but as good as anything else in sight. He rotated the rocket again; they were moving slantwise toward the ground, and Kevin kept the exhaust pointing straight in their direction of travel.

The steam pressure was falling. They were running out of water, or else they were using steam faster than the fuel cells could boil the water; it didn't matter. A few more seconds and they'd be down, one way or another—

The plateau came up toward them, but not so fast now. The steam valve was wide open. Nothing else they could do.

They were over the plateau and falling directly toward it, a hundred meters high and falling-plummeting straight down.

"Cut loose from the straps," Kevin shouted. "Be ready to jump clear just before we hit."

He worked frantically at the buckles, but he couldn't unfasten them and keep control of the tillers. The rocket showed a definite tendency to tumble now as Glenda moved in her perch, but there wasn't time for more talk, for more of anything—

Fifty meters. Twenty-five. Slowing all the time. Maybe they'd make it after all—

Then the ground came up and swatted them. They hit tail first. The rocket nozzle collapsed beneath, and steam spewed out, forming an ice fog that condensed on the rocks and on his face plate. He worked at the buckles and got them loose—

And realized he was lying on the surface. He couldn't see, but he heard Glenda's voice in his helmet. "Kevin! Are you all right?"

She didn't sound hurt. Gingerly he worked each limb. Nothing seemed broken. "We're down," he said.

Kevin estimated their landing velocity at about ten miles an hour. The crumpled rocket nozzle had absorbed much of the energy of the crash, and neither of them had been more than shaken up. "Any landing you walk away from is a good one. A pilot told me that once," Kevin muttered.

"What?"

"Nothing. Something Donnelly told me once. When we were still friends. Glenda, I haven't the faintest idea of where we are."

"Sure you do. Why do you think we have visibility even though we're on the night side?" She pointed up at the bright disc above them. "The station is just under the synchronous mirror."

"Yeah. I'm not thinking too well—"

"You're doing all right." She pointed to the remains of their steam rocket. "Splendidly, I'd say."

They loaded up all the full oxygen tanks and set out toward the satellite mirror. Kevin stopped to take an observation with his protractor, then punched numbers into his calculator. "I make it ninety to a hundred kilometers," he said.

"Not too bad. A few hours of following yonder star. We've got enough air."

"If we don't use it up talking." Kevin started bounding across the surface of the asteroid. Glenda followed.

They moved in long leaps. It was much easier than walking, almost like ice skating or skipping down hill; as long as they could keep going in a straight line, it took very little effort. Turning or stopping was much harder.

They could leap crevasses up to forty meters wide, and it was easy enough to go around bigger ones. If they had to climb, they could jump thirty meters upward, or jump down steep slopes.

It was like a combination of flying and skating, leaping across the surface of Ceres, and Kevin shouted with the sheer joy of being alive. They
were
alive, and for a while they were safe.

In seven hours they were within sight of Ceres Station. They paused on a hilltop looking down on the leveled plain which served as the spaceport.

"We could try to steal one of the scooters," Kevin said. "I think we can trust John Eliot and the Daedalus people."