Read Ebook: Thunder in space by Del Rey Lester Finlay Virgil Illustrator

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Ebook has 202 lines and 16678 words, and 5 pages

They obviously should, as soon as they were over one of their own stations. The rule was clear on that--when in doubt, shout! But meantime, they'd have to watch while still in view.

There was a faint spot of light, and Scarfield grunted. "They're blasting off! Maybe we can plot orbits and--"

The bright spot split into lances of fire, exploding savagely outwards! Every drop of monopropellant in the tanks must have let go at once to make such a flare. Then, before Blane could catch his breath, there was another flare and another. Suddenly the whole field was a great spread of flame as the other rockets were exploded by the savage blast of the first.

Later news filtered in slowly. Most of it had to be picked up from the regular FM news broadcasts that filtered through the ionosphere. A couple of the scientists who had learned Russian interpreted the news from Radio Moscow on their next trip over.

Surprisingly, there were no claims of American sabotage. Then Blane wondered whether it was so surprising. With the level of fear in Russia as high as elsewhere, it would probably have been a grave mistake for the leaders to suggest that any American sabotage of territory so far inside Russia was possible. The people had to count on the invulnerability of their station for what little hope they had; how that worked when the supply ships were already ruined was more than he could guess, but he had long since given up trying to understand the devious game of propaganda being played on Earth.

Blane had almost forgotten Manners and the worry over the strange increase in radioactivity. He had sent Manners' latest figures down with a query for instructions at the first chance to do so by tight-beam radio that would not leak security, and then had let the matter drop from his mind. It was several hours later when his secretary announced that Peal and Manners were in the outer office.

Manners looked both more worried and strangely satisfied, as if he were bursting to cry his I-told-you-so. But Peal's face was drained of any emotion except surprise.

The scientist nodded. "Captain Manners' figures were quite accurate. We've got to evacuate nearby sections of the station. In a way, we're lucky--radiation travels in straight lines, and the hull curves away from it here. There is about three hundred times normal radiation in there, and it's coming from inside the warheads. It isn't lethal yet--men can work there for a few hours at a time; but at the rate it's increasing, it soon will be. Any word from Earth?"

"No word," he said bitterly. Probably he wasn't even supposed to say that much, or to discuss it with the other two. But he chose to interpret the part about continuing as at present to permit the discussion to continue. He tried to focus his mind on what facts he knew. "I thought the radiation rate of the stuff in the warheads was constant, and that the casings were adequate shielding."

Peal nodded. "That's what's driving me out of my mind at the moment, Jerry. Except when it reaches critical mass, uranium-235 is supposed to have an absolutely fixed half-life; it shouldn't increase under any circumstances, and the mass of each section in those bombs can't increase to become nearer critical, either. It simply can't happen, according to any physics I ever learned. But it's doing so."

"What about the effects of cosmic rays?" Blane asked. Devlin might have learned more from Earth, and even if his story to Manners had been patently untrue, it might still offer some clue.

Peal shook his head, but somewhat doubtfully. "On Earth, they're mostly only mesons from strikes by cosmic radiation. Out here, we get only the extremely hard radiation--the shielding of the ship is too thin to affect them. Maybe they might speed up the half-life a little--but they shouldn't make it increase. I've been thinking about them, too. Meteorites show a much greater decay of uranium to lead than the ores on Earth, which might indicate some effect from cosmic radiation. But unless they somehow produce another isotope from uranium that's raising the activity, I can't figure it out. We need a top level nuclear physicist for this, and we don't have one here."

They discussed it at greater length, but without adding anything to their speculations. Blane felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickling, and was conscious of a vague picture in his mind of the warheads ticking away and getting set to blast spontaneously. But he put the idea aside. Earth might be a little careless of their welfare under the pressure of emergency, but right now Earth would never risk losing the station. It was only his overactive imagination.

He finally assigned Peal and Manners back to the task of studying the matter as best they could, and tried to dismiss it from his mind. There were more than enough other worries about the station. The cryogenics lab was in trouble--the group from Earth who had used the labs had badly depleted supplies and been careless about equipment that was common enough below but difficult to obtain here. The evacuation of the laboratories near the bomb bay threw severe strains on research, and Earth was demanding that some of it be speeded up. And the weather study was being crippled by the need to waste too much attention on detailed studies of every section of Russia. The whole station was on emergency orders to do twice as much as could possibly be done.

When Edwards came up again, Blane sent for him at once. The pilot had made a superb landing of his ship at Canaveral, and had then been jetted back to the Island. Normally he would have taken a long layover there before making another trip up, though he had senior pilot's right to select or refuse any flight he chose. Blane was curious about his reasons for choosing the first trip he could make.

Edwards lost no time in reporting. He hadn't stopped to remove his emergency space suit, though he'd left the helmet and the oxygen tank somewhere. He clumped in, accepted coffee, and began talking even as he shucked off the suit.

Some of the details came out slowly, with more color than clarity. But Blane gathered that they had reacted violently to the news that the government was trying to use the emergency as a means of forcing disarmament on the Russian station.

"You mean they actually did refuse help without such an agreement?" Blane asked. He hadn't wanted to believe the rumors.

"The government knew of that when it refused help?" he asked incredulously.

Edwards grunted. "Didn't start their extortion plans until they knew!" Then he grinned slowly. "Funny thing, Jerry, when I checked over the supplies I brought up for you, I found some of the boxes of equipment got mixed up in shipment. They're full of cans of mercury! I left them aboard the ship, figuring you wouldn't need them here."

Blane found his face muscles were trying to frown and smile at the same time, and he caught himself before he could laugh. He went to the door to make sure it was locked, and came back to his desk slowly.

"You don't have fuel enough," he decided.

"Nope. But you do--out in the blasted lunar ships that are still waiting appropriations."

Blane hadn't had time to think of the lunar ships during the hectic days of commanding the station. But Edwards' statement was true enough. The ships had been nearing completion for the long-desired American exploration of the Moon a year ago when Congress had eliminated appropriations for everything not connected with the current emergency. They still trailed the station a few miles in space. The workers had all returned to Earth, but the fuel still lay in the plastic balloons. The little ferry ship used between the ships and the station was still here, too. It could be used to bring the fuel back easily, since it had been equipped with tanks for moving fuel between supply rockets and the balloons.

"I'll take my chances--and so will you," Edwards protested.

"Not unless it's necessary. Sure, somebody's got to make the trip. But it doesn't have to be your ship. The ferry's a lot smaller, but it can handle that much cargo and fuel on such an orbit." He grinned at Edwards' stubborn expression. "Look, you know I ran it for a year while we built the station. I can still pilot it, and Austin Peal can handle the math in computing the orbit. I'll get it over to you and you can transship the mercury, then take off on schedule. Then let Earth guess what happens."

"And what will they do to you if they find out?"

Edwards nodded. "I'll take your last reason, Jerry. Only don't bother moving the ferry. I can work it over beside my ship, and it'll make your explanation sound better. Good luck. And if you do get in a jam--all the guys will be on your side."

He went out while Blane started off to find Peal. He had doubts about involving the scientist now. The man had never been part of a real space team. Yet someone had to do the preliminary computing. He had more doubts as he tried to explain things to Peal; the man listened quietly, making no comment, and with no visible approval or disapproval.

When Blane finished, Peal stood up, nodding. "Thanks for letting me in on it, Jerry. You get the fuel and I'll have the computations off the calculator by the time you get back here."

The ferry was a sausage-shaped structure of thin metal and plastic with an airlock at the front and a small reaction motor at the rear. It had been modified to hold either solid or liquid cargo and to operate off the monopropellant fuel instead of the lox and kerosene used when the station was built. There was even a plastic pipe between the cargo tank and its fuel tank to save separate filling, and no further modification was needed.

Blane took it out after checking the stowage of the mercury cans. He was slightly rusty, but he steadied down as he jockeyed into position beside one of the three lunar ships. He'd picked a balloon on the sunward side, and the warm fuel was soon flowing into his tank, forced through a long tube by a tiny, built-in pump. When he took off again, the ferry was overloaded and sluggish, but it showed no evidence of weakness. Of course, if they ran into a meteoroid of any size, they'd be ruined--but the chances of that were very slight.

Peal was already outside the hub, dressed in space suit and clinging to a convenient handhold. He came through the lock, carrying his computations, a small telescope, and an extra spacesuit for Blane. "May need this," he suggested. "Our front end probably won't fit the seal on their hub."

Blane nodded. He should have thought of it. But his chief interest was in the orbit. It had been figured so that they would accelerate away from the station and up from Earth at low thrust, well within the limits of his power. There was a table of times and star angles to locate his correct course. Peal had done an excellent job, far better than Blane had expected.

"I spent two years on the Island," the scientist explained. "I learned a little about astrogation, though I'm no navigator. But this is a simple problem."

Essentially, it was; to make it simpler, it was always possible to make minor corrections, since they had more than enough fuel.

"If the stations were run properly, there'd be a regular service between them," Peal suggested when they were coasting along in their orbit. "It would be cheaper to exchange supplies than to rush up a sudden emergency shipment from Earth. In fact, if a private company had built the first one, there would probably be a dozen stations by now, all connected. And we'd take over the television relay business, too."

Peal went on, warming to his theme. "History proves my point, Jerry. The stations have to be too complicated in function and too flexible in purpose to be run properly by men who have to think in terms of Earth politics. Every nation that ever tried controlling a major industrial set-up has found it won't work. They tried socializing railroads, airlines and factories--not to mention farming--and the experiment failed. Every Russian industry today is run independently by its own board who share in the profits, no matter how much theoretical ownership rests with the government. And China is now nothing but a system of state capitalism, whatever they call it there."

"Fine," Blane admitted. "Why didn't private industry build the stations, then?"

Peal grimaced, then grinned. "That's the weak point, of course. You can't sell shares to fund a venture until the public sees the need--and they couldn't see the need of space until military pressure put the stations up and proved they had other values. But now the stations have proved themselves. The government should turn them back to private hands under long-term loans, the same as they turned back factories after the war."

"They won't, though. And it's not just that no power is ever voluntarily given up," Blane pointed out. "They won't sell the stations because they're up here where no government on Earth could tax them. They might eventually, otherwise, but no government is going to lose its profit without getting taxes in return."

For a second, Peal started to argue. Then an expression of surprise crept onto his face. He sat silently through most of the trip. Like most scientists, he'd probably considered himself a fair amateur economist, but he'd overlooked one of the most basic aspects of economy--the fact that governments also had to operate on enough of a profit to pay their executives and bond-holders.

"Ah. So you can answer. Then if you can match our orbit, come beneath the hub. The smallest landing net will fit the nose of your taxi, if our records are correct. You did bring the mercury, didn't you?"

"We brought it," Peal assured her.

"Then in the name of science and humanity, I thank you. And--and I'm so glad to see you, I'll be there to kiss you welcome!"

"There are two of us," Peal started to answer, but she had clicked off. He watched as Blane began jockeying into position, cranking furiously at the little weighted wheel that controlled the angle of the ferry. "Pretty sure we'd come wasn't she?"

There were three girls and four men waiting for them inside the enormous hub. Six moved forward promptly to begin transferring the cans of mercury, but one girl, shorter, darker and prettier than the others, stepped forward. She kissed both of them--solemnly on both cheeks after the Russian formal fashion. Then she held out her hand.

"I'm Dr. Sonya Vartanian."

Peal introduced Blane and himself. After the handshaking, Blane gestured toward the main station, eager to see it and looking for an excuse. "I'm delighted to know you. But I think I'd better see your commanding officer."

"I'm in command." She said it quite simply. Then at their surprise she chuckled. "We don't have the male chauvinism of America. Besides, all the military officers were below when--when everything was destroyed. But perhaps you'd like to see our station?"

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