And then the radio quit.
This was bad! No more tapes were being made of signals received—Earth to one of the artificial satellites to Phobos to a cone of space which a rather smug-looking computer insisted held the Hellik Olav—for later study by electronics engineers. As for the men, they were suddenly bereft of their favorite programs. Adam Langnes, captain, no longer got the beeps whose distortions gave him an idea of exterior conditions and whose Doppler frequency gave him a check on his velocity. Torvald Winge, astronomer, had no answers to his requests for data omitted from his handbook and computations too elaborate for the ship’s digital. Per Helledahl, physicist, heard no more sentimental folk songs nor the recorded babblings of his youngest child. And Erik Bull, engineer, couldn’t get the cowboy music sent from the American radio satellite. He couldn’t even get the Russians’ Progressive jazz.
Furthermore, and still more ominous, the ship’s transmitter also stopped working.
Helledahl turned from its disassembled guts. Despite all he could do with racks, bags, magnetic boards, he was surrounded by a zero gravity halo of wires, resistances, transistors, and other small objects. His moon face peered through it with an unwonted grimness. «I can find nothing wrong,» he said. «The trouble must be outside, in the boom.»
Captain Langnes, tall and gaunt and stiff of manner, adjusted his monocle. «I dare say we can repair the trouble,» he said. «Can’t be too serious, can it?»
«It can like the devil, if the radar goes out too,» snapped Helledahl.
«Oh, heavens!» exclaimed Winge. His mild, middle-aged features registered dismay. «If I can’t maintain my meteorite count, what am I out here for?»
«If we can’t detect the big meteorites in time for the autopilot to jerk us off a collision course, you won’t be out here very long,» said Bull. «None of us will, except as scrap metal and frozen hamburger.»
Helledahl winced. «Must you, Erik?»
«Your attitude is undesirable, Herr Bull,» Captain Langnes chided. «Never forget, gentlemen, the four of us, crowded into one small vessel for possibly two years, under extremely hazardous conditions, can only survive by maintaining order, self-respect, morale.»
«How can I forget?» muttered Bull. «You repeat it every thirty-seven hours and fourteen minutes by the clock.» But he didn’t mutter very loudly.
«You had best have a look outside, Herr Bull,» went on the captain.
«I was afraid it’d come to that,» said the engineer dismally. «Hang on, boys, here we go again.»
Putting on space armor is a tedious job at best, requiring much assistance. In a cramped air-lock chamber—for lack of another place—and under free fall, it gets so exasperating that one forgets any element of emergency. By the time he was through the outer valve, Bull had invented three new verbal obscenities, the best of which took four minutes to enunciate.
He was a big, blocky, redhaired and freckle-faced young man, who hadn’t wanted to come on this expedition. It was just a miserable series of accidents, he thought. As a boy, standing at a grisly hour on a cliff above the Sognefjord to watch the first Sputnik rise, he had decided to be a spaceship engineer. As a youth, he got a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and afterward worked for two years on American interplanetary projects. Returning home, he found himself one of the few Norwegians with that kind of experience. But he also found himself thoroughly tired of it. The cramped quarters, tight discipline, reconstituted food and reconstituted air and reconstituted conversation, were bad enough. The innumerable petty nuisances of weightlessness, especially the hours a day spent doing ridiculous exercises lest his very bones atrophy, were worse. The exclusively male companionship was still worse: especially when that all-female Russian satellite station generally called the Nunnery passed within view.
«In short,» Erik Bull told his friends, «if I want to take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, I’d do better to sign up as a Benedictine monk. I’d at least have something drinkable on hand.»
Not that he regretted the time spent, once it was safely behind him. With judicious embroidering, he had a lifetime supply of dinner-table reminiscences. More important, he could take his pick of Earthside jobs. Such as the marine reclamation station his countrymen were building off Svalbard, with regular airbus service to Trondheim and Oslo. There was a post!
Instead of which, he was now spinning off beyond Mars, hell for leather into a volume of space that had already swallowed a score of craft without trace.
He emerged on the hull, made sure his life line was fast, and floated a few minutes to let his eyes adjust. A tiny heatless sun, too brilliant to look close to, spotted puddles of undiffused glare among coalsack shadows. The stars, unwinking, needle bright, were so many that they swamped the old familiar constellations in their sheer number. He identified several points as asteroids, some twinkling as rotation exposed their irregular surfaces, some so close that their relative motion was visible. His senses did not react to the radiation, which the ship’s magnetic field was supposed to ward off from the interior but which sharply limited his stay outside. Bull imagined all those particles zipping through him, each drilling a neat submicroscopic hole, and wished he hadn’t.
The much-touted majestic silence of space wasn’t evident either. His air pump made too much noise. Also, the suit stank.
Presently he could make sense out of the view. The ship was a long cylinder, lumpy where meteor bumpers protected the most vital spots. A Norwegian flag, painted near the bows, was faded by solar ultraviolet, eroded by micrometeoric impacts. The vessel was old, though basically sound. The Russians had given it to Norway for a museum piece, as a propaganda gesture. But then the Americans had hastily given Norway the parts needed to renovate. Bull himself had spent six dreary months helping do that job. He hadn’t been too unhappy about it, though. He liked the idea of his country joining in the exploitation of space. Also, he was Americanized enough to feel a certain malicious pleasure when the Ivan Pavlov was rechristened in honor of St. Olav.
However, he had not expected to serve aboard the thing!
«O.K., O.K.,» he sneered in English, «hold still, Holy Ole, and we’ll have a look at your latest disease.»
He drew himself back along the line and waddled forward over the hull in stickum boots. Something on the radio transceiver boom… what the devil? He bent over. The motion pulled his boots loose. He upended and went drifting off toward Andromeda. Cursing in a lackluster voice, he came back hand over hand. But as he examined the roughened surface he forgot even to be annoyed.
He tried unsuccessfully to pinch himself.
An hour convinced him. He made his laborious way below again. Captain Langnes, who was Navy insisted that you went «below» when you entered the ship, even in free fall. When his spacesuit was off, with only one frost burn suffered from touching the metal, he faced the others across a cluttered main cabin.
«Well?» barked Helledahl. «What is it?»
«As the lady said when she saw an elephant eating cabbages with what she thought was his tail,» Bull answered slowly, «if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.»
«Of course I would!» said Langnes. «Out with it!»
«Well, skipper… we have barnacles.»
A certain amount of chemical and biological apparatus had been brought along to study possible effects of the whatever-it-was that seemed to forbid spacecraft crossing the Asteroid Belt. The equipment was most inadequate, and between them the four men had only an elementary knowledge of its use. But then, all equipment was inadequate in zero gravity, and all knowledge was elementary out here.