“I don’t. You know I don’t.” But Deedee was following Rick’s lead, reading each word on the screen aloud, stumbling over the hard ones.
They struggled on, reading in unison, cursing unknown words, correcting each other. Until finally Deedee cried out and pointed at the display, “Attitude. That’s what that word is. Attitude control. This is the part we want. Come on, Rick. Read it!”
Rick was certainly trying; but he had already discovered that simple need and urgency didn’t let you read any faster. They ground on together, word by word, through the next three paragraphs. And at a certain point, groaned in unison.
“It’s obvious!” Rick slapped his knee with his gloved hand.
“And we’re idiots.” Deedee repeated the important sentences, gabbling them on the second time through. “ ‘In the event of thrust module imbalance, the carrier must be returned to the main maintenance facility.’—Yeah. Thanks a lot.—’However, should a thrust module fail and a temporary course adjustment be necessary in space, this can easily be performed by the use of minor lateral control jets. These can be used to spin the ship about its long-it-ud-in-al’—hell of a word—’axis, so that the mean thrust is maintained in the desired direction. The same elementary technique can be used to make general direction adjustments, by halting longitudinal rotation after any suitable angle.’ Do it, Rick!”
“I am doing it.” Rick was already using the lateral thrusters, turning the ship about its main axis to bring the failed thruster module onto the opposite side. “I’m going to have to juggle this. If I thrust too long in the other direction we’ll swing too far and miss the base on the other side.”
“Do it in—little bits.” The main thrusters fired, this time in a pattern as jerky as Deedee’s speech. “We still have plenty of time. Go easy. You can afford to go easy.”
“I will go easy. Trust me.”
Rick was eyeing CM-2 as it swung back into view in the forward port. Under his control the drive was stuttering uneasily on and off while the ship rotated unevenly about its main axis. He knew exactly where he wanted to go—into the hard-edged aperture that sat like a bullet hole in the planetoid’s rugged side. But getting there, exactly there, was another matter. It was another half hour before Rick could turn off all power, shiver in released tension, lift his hands from the controls, and wait for the magnetic arrest system to guide the carrier to a berth within CM-2.
Before the grapple was complete Deedee was out of her seat and heading for the lock. “Come on. We have to go.”
“What’s the hurry?” Rick was moving more slowly, stretching cramped hands as he eased himself from the pilot’s chair. “You said we had plenty of time.”
“I lied.” Deedee was already in the lock, waiting impatiently. “I didn’t want you worrying about time when you were flying the carrier. But it’s going to be touch and go.”
Rick took a glance at his helmet chronometer and leaped for the lock. “We only have twenty-three minutes left!”
“I know.” The lock was cycling. “We can do it, though—so long as we don’t meet any more snags.”
They flew side-by-side from the docking berth to the mine entry point to CM-2. “Say, two minutes each end.” Rick hit the entry combination. “Twelve minutes to get through the tunnels—that’s about as fast as we can go. But we still have a seven minute cushion.” He keyed in the entry combination again. “What’s wrong with this thing? It shouldn’t take this long.”
“The power has been turned off.” Deedee pointed to the telltale set in the great door. “And it’s too heavy for manual operation.”
“Turkey. The bastard. He’s screwed us. We can’t get in.”
“Then we’ll have to go around. Or use one of the side tunnels?”
“No good. They all lead outside, not to the training facility.”
“That’s our answer.” Deedee had turned. “We can go right around the outside. Don’t waste time with that door, Rick. Come on! We’re down to twenty-one minutes.”
She led the way, zooming at maximum suit speed for the open entrance of the mine loading chamber. Rick, close behind, did the calculation. They had to make their way right around CM-2 to almost the opposite side of the planetoid. Say, three kilometers. If they could average ten per hour, they would do it. If not. . .
All Rick could think of was that early this morning he had made Deedee sit down and eat breakfast when she was hyped up and raring to go. If they were too late now, it was his fault.
They came to the edge of the loading chamber and burst out from the darkness. As Deedee, still ahead of Rick, emerged into full sunlight she reversed suit jets and came to an abrupt dead halt.
“Keep going, Dee. I’m right behind you.”
But she was not moving. “Listen to your dosimeter, Rick.”
He became aware of a tinny rattle in the background. It was his suit’s radiation monitor, operating well above the danger level.
“Back inside.” And when he hesitated, “We have to, Rick. Right now.” She had him by the arm of his suit, towing him. “It must be a solar burst, a sudden one and a big one. We’re safe enough as soon as we get some rock shielding around us.”
They were already out of sight of the Sun. Safe enough. And failed. Rick glanced at his chronometer. Eighteen and a half minutes.
“Deedee, we wouldn’t be outside for very long. I’ll bet the integrated dose would be small enough, it wouldn’t harm us.”
“Maybe. But are you sure?”
He wasn’t. Worse than that, he didn’t know how to make sure. The calculation couldn’t be very difficult, no more than a formula and a few simple summations. Jigger would probably have done it in his head. But Rick didn’t know how to do it at all. He groaned.
“We’re safe enough here.” Deedee had misunderstood the reason for his misery. “Rock is a perfect shield.”
“I know. I don’t want a shield. I want to beat that goddamn deadline.”
“We can’t possibly. A solar storm could last for days, and we have only seventeen minutes left.”
Rock is a perfect shield.
“Dee, we still have a chance. The sun is shining almost directly into the loading chamber. The training facility is on the opposite side. We can go through a side tunnel to a point where we’re out of direct sunlight, then jet the rest of the way outside shielded by CM-2 itself.”
“Sixteen minutes. We’ll never do it in time.” But she was following Rick as he plunged back into the dark interior. He picked one side tunnel and went into it without hesitating. Fortunately Deedee didn’t ask why Rick knew so well the network of passages and chambers that criss-crossed the interior of CM-2. He certainly wasn’t going to mention it or the disastrous episode it had led to with Gina.
The passageways had been designed for mining rather than rapid travel through them. The trip through the interior seemed to take forever. At last Rick and Deedee were at the surface again, about a quarter of the way around the planetoid, but they were running out of time. Five minutes left. A kilometer and a half to go on the outside, hugging close to CM-2 to avoid the solar flare. It didn’t sound far. But it meant averaging eighteen kilometers an hour. You couldn’t do that. Not in a suit, zooming around the irregular exterior of a planetoid.
Rick knew it. Deedee probably knew it, too. Neither said a word as the final minute flashed past and the deadline was missed. They kept going, bitterly, all the way to the lock that would lead them into the training facility.
As the lock opened, Rick halted. “No good. Six minutes late. Sorry.”