Futures Past (39 page)

  
"About an hour ago this ship hit—and ran through—a cargo net belonging to another ship. A cargo net is made of fine steel cable, highly flexible, and is anything up to three hundred square yards in area. It's used for transporting cargo on the outside of a ship's hull when the ship in question doesn't intend landing on a planet where air resistance would make streamlining necessary. A ship doesn't often lose its cargo net, but overloading, a sudden change of acceleration, or faulty fastening has been known to cause one to tear free of its ship. When this happens, the springy net opens out to its full area, forming a rare but very dangerous menace to navigation. So rare that we are the first to find out how deadly a menace it is."

  
Everyone knew all this, of course; but they listened closely. The simple statement of the problem facing them might suggest some line of attack which would never occur to them through dividing it up into highly technical and specialized pigeonholes. Gregg hoped so anyway.

  
"Traveling at a velocity relatively small with respect to ours—any greater and we'd not be talking about it now— this man-made meteor hit us and went past.

  
"It practically sandpapered us flat."

  
Mercer took a deep breath and let it out by his nose. As radioman, this was the part which affected him most strongly. He continued: "Our retractable radio gear had been run out at the time, ready for use when the Drive shut down during turnover, and for general testing. It was ripped away. All of it.

  
"The approach and landing radar, the fore and aft vision pickups, and the radio-altimeter and air-speed indicator—all of which were set more or less flush with the outer skin—are now heavily abraded junk. We can't call for help. We can't see to land. And if we were stupid enough to try landing blind, we can't have a "talk-down" because we've no receiver. We're deaf, dumb, and blind —completely blind, because the direct vision ports are so badly scratched we can't see through them.

  
"And don't ask about safety devices and alternative circuits," Mercer anticipated as Gregg opened his mouth to put exactly that question. "The ship has them, all right, but they were under the outer skin, too. You know, this ship could have taken any ordinary collision—it could have as many punctures as a sieve—and still remain fully operable. But this was no ordinary collision. Instead of knocking a hole in us the way a meteor is supposed to, this one peeled us like an orange.

  
"The circuits which haven't been completely ruined are in such a mess that it would take weeks to salvage anything usable from them, and then building a transmitter while wearing a spacesuit is practically impossible. But we haven't got weeks, we've only a few hours—"

  
"But why a few hours?" Gregg interrupted. He was beginning to realize the full extent of the disaster, but surely somebody would be able to think of something, given time. The ship was only halfway between Mars and Earth. What was the big rush?

  
"Our course has been pre-set and timed," Mercer explained patiently. "Two-and-a-half G's acceleration from Mars to turnover point, then half-an-hour for swapping ends and general checking up, followed by two-and-a-half G's deceleration to Earth. Once every five hours, acceleration is cut to one* G to allow for natural functions, but that has been precalculated, too. That means we have to stick closely to our flight plan if we want to reach Earth in our present blinded state."

  
Mercer glanced quickly at his watch, then went on: "But the premature shutting down of the Drive when we hit the net upset the calculations—acceleration ceased approximately two hours earlier than expected. Therefore, in order to compensate for this, deceleration must be delayed by exactly the same time. In effect this means that the usual half hour turnover period is extended to a little under six hours, and two of those are gone already.

  
"A method of landing the ship must be found within the four hours of weightless flight remaining before deceleration begins, because we can't do a thing during it but lie down, and when we arrive there won't be time to think or do anything." Mercer's mouth went through the motions of smiling, but his heart wasn't in it. "Add to that the fact of gradually mounting radioactivity in Storage Four —caused by the collision scattering the lead shielding bricks around the shipment of Mars-produced synthetic isotopes—which will not rise to fatal intensity if we can land and get away from this ship on time.

  
"That, Mr. Gregg, is the reason for all the rush."

  
Gregg wasn't really on a crippled ship, listening to a crew who intended flying her blindfolded into a planet. It was silly, he told himself desperately; things like that didn't happen. But there was an ache in his stomach that wasn't from hunger, and the room temperature had nothing to do with the cold sweat that prickled suddenly on his forehead and back. This was true all right, and he'd just thought of something else ...

  
The Wallaby might follow its precalculated course, but would the Earth be waiting at the end of it? In six hours Earth would have moved a considerable distance along her orbit, and—Gregg felt his throat go dry at the thought —supposing the planet's orbital motion was toward them. They'd smash right into it.

  
Faces became even more white and strained as he relayed that thought to the others in the room. They hadn't thought of that.

  
Allerton reached for a scratch pad and began doing some hasty calculations. Finished, he looked up and said: "It's all right. We'll be overtaking the Earth in its orbit, so the six-hour delay will mean that we come to rest a couple of thousand miles short. We can use the extra elbow room.

  
"But," he ended, his voice cutting sharply through the general sigh of relief, "We've still got to land, remember."

  
"Let's stop trying to fool ourselves," said a voice suddenly. It sounded, Gregg thought, like the engineer, Peterson. "We can't possibly land, and you, as pilot, know that better than any of us. We're dead ducks, the lot of us, and the sooner we admit it to ourselves the better."

  
Allerton didn't reply, but sat staring down at his hands.. Several others in the room nodded their heads.

  
They all agreed with him.

  
"What's the matter with you all?" Gregg burst out, fear as well as anger sending his voice up in pitch. "You can't just give in like this. There must be something ..." An idea hit him suddenly. "What about the suit radios? And —and couldn't we circle Earth under power? The flare from the A-Drive would certainly be seen, and somebody would want to investigate—"

  
"But we can't see the Earth to circle it," Mercer interrupted harshly. "And there's the radioactivity, remember. We can't hang around until someone gets curious, we'd be dead by that time. I tell you it's hopeless."

  
Gregg shut up.

  
It really was hopeless. Gregg admitted that now. Any hopes he had had stemmed solely from his own ignorance of the workings of the ship. The crew were just as anxious to live as he was, but unlike him, they knew when they were beaten.

  
This was such a stupid sort of disaster. Ships had crashed, blown up, and sometimes torn themselves apart through uncontrolled acceleration—with the gory demise of all hands. But here nobody—with the exception of Captain Ferguson—had been hurt. No bodies smashed flat by acceleration, or burst open by explosive decompression. All were sound in wind and limb. And all were as good as dead already.

  
Gregg felt anger growing in him again, rebellious anger. Some crazy fate must have ordained that he perish in a space-wreck, and it was going to the most fantastic lengths to make sure he did just that. When he had barely escaped with his life from the old Allendyne, he'd sworn that he was through with space travel. That insane fate must have gnashed its teeth and frothed at the mouth then —-but not for long. If Gregg—either through injury or sheer yellow cowardice, or both—would have nothing further to do with spaceships, then fate would have to maneuver things so that he would have to take another trip, so that it could take another crack at him.

  
And the second time it wouldn't miss.

  
With great cunning it arranged an understanding medical officer on Mars station, a company representative on the planet itself who was a real nice guy, and a construction job on the new Mars station which was to be hollowed out of the rock of Deimos. That last bit hadn't been hard, because a lot of people were needed for construction. But it had gone to a lot of trouble to see that Gregg made a good showing in his job, and gained rapid promotion. After several occasions when Gregg's—or Fate's— quick thinking saved the company a fair-sized fortune in material when someone miscalculated heights and velocities while moving structural members, he suddenly found himself second-in-charge of the project, and then heading it. He liked the work, he did well at it, and the company liked a man who never seemed to want Earth-leave.

  
When the new Mars station was completed, Gregg was an important man. So important that other jobs were mentioned. Would Mr. Gregg like to take charge of the proposed new station on Titan? Certainly he would, it was a wonderful opportunity. Would Mr. Gregg then present himself on Earth for a top-level conference on the matter?

  
Mr. Gregg wouldn't.

  
But the understanding M.O. and the nice guy who had once been Gregg's boss ganged up on him and told him not to be a fool. He was throwing away the chance of a lifetime over a silly neurosis. Besides, the Wallaby was the safest thing in space. Fate rubbed its hands and beamed with glee. It began twisting and stretching the laws of probability to utterly fantastic lengths. This time it wouldn't miss.

  
And when Gregg ventured out into space again— smack!

  
The eyes of all the crew watching him made Gregg abruptly aware that he was talking to himself, and in a not particularly low undertone. Embarrassed, he wondered how long that had been going on, but Allerton relieved the situation by drawing the attention away from him.

  
"I suppose," the second pilot said, "we should tell the passengers." He sounded doubtful about it.

  
An argument started about whether or not to tell the passengers, but it was a dispirited thing. Time dragged by, the way it does when there's nothing whatever to do. Like jail, Gregg thought, or being buried alive, which was a closer simile—buried in a great big complicated coffin that had cost more than a pyramid, with company. It was a great pity about the company, some of them were real nice people.

  
He thought about the girl with the blue eyes and mussed hair who was still probably mad at him. She didn't deserve this. Or that nice old lady who had spouted higher mathematics at him when he'd expected hysterics . , . Gregg laughed softly in spite of himself.

  
He had to tell the crewman beside him what he'd found to laugh about.

  
"Oh, that's Dr. Townsley," the man explained, "the Dr. Townsley. She was chief astronomer at Luna Observatory for a while. A mathematical genius, a quiz kid who kept on getting better as she grew up. She's a very nice sort, personally, though."

  
"You know," Gregg mused, "if we knew our time of collision, our velocity, mass and so on with complete accuracy, we should be able to land by dead reckoning alone—"

  
"We do not know those things with fair accuracy," the other interrupted. "But it wouldn't work. You're forgetting stratospheric winds—which are completely unpredictable —and the surface of the Earth itself. We'd smash into a mountain top, or come to rest a couple of thousand feet above an ocean." He shook his head. "It's hopeless. What you need to land a ship is constant and accurate information on mass, thrust, air resistance, velocity, and distance from the surface, and for that," he ended grimly, "you need a full set of landing instruments. We haven't any."

  
Velocity, mass, distance. Gregg felt himself sweating again. The other's words were repeating themselves over and over inside his head, louder and louder with each repetition. His skull felt as if it would come apart any second with the sheer, thundering volume of those three words. Desperately he willed himself to stop, to go back to the sharing of the crew's despair and quiet resignation. If he didn't do that, Gregg knew, then the idea lying behind those three words would come fully formed to his mind. He didn't want that to happen. He couldn't go through that again!