“As you already know,” he said, “we’re going to rendezvous with a planetoid made of sea water. It’s the one on this side of the Solar System, which is why I’m interested in it, so we’ll be there in a few hours. When we get there I’m going to park the ship about two kilometres out, and we will complete the journey on suit power only.
“If the planetoid is rotating—and we have good reason to believe it is—we will penetrate the surface near one of the poles. We have these suits which were specially modified, and no doubt tested, by Miss Orchard,” Tarrant paused while the three youngsters gave their ready smiles, “so getting about inside the planetoid should be very easy, even for a non-swimmer. I’ve had a fair amount of experience with this type of suit, and I think I can promise you they won’t give any trouble.
“You four will remain near the surface, collecting samples, taking readings, and doing whatever you have to do. I have my own work to take care of, but I’ll be near you at all times and I foresee no difficulty at all in our wrapping the job up in two or three hours and getting back to the ship. After that, it’s an easy ride home.”
“Who’s got the picnic hamper?” Scotland said.
Tarrant was careful to join in the laughter which ensued. “The principal element of risk—and I must tell you this—comes from the ion drive unit of this ship.”
“It seems to be working very well,” Martine commented in a calm voice.
“It’s working perfectly, but I want everybody to be in possession of all the facts—just in case.” Tarrant twisted in his seat so that he could face his audience. “I might as well tell you that I quit the Air Force three years ago because they were making me fly these things, and I didn’t want to do it.”
“What was your objection?”
“Let me put it this way—the South Newzealand Air Force designation for this ship is Type 7, but its original Brazilian designation was Interceptor Type 83 Mark R2. In case you’re not familiar with the mark number system, the further through the alphabet you get the closer you are to flying a thing which is made of nothing but patches and plasticine. The term Interceptor means that the drive was originally rated for six hours at continuous maximum thrust—and that was a hundred years ago.”
Petersdorff looked thoughtful. “But the Air Force must have overhauled the propulsion unit in the meantime.”
“They tried that, but the units they tampered with always gave more trouble than the ones they left alone, so now they don’t bother. The pile, alternators and ion guns come in a sealed pack and they leave them that way.”
“Oh, Christ,” Petersdorff breathed. “Did you have to tell us that?”
“Yes, but don’t worry too much,” Tarrant said. “I wouldn’t have taken the ship up if I thought anything was going to go wrong with it, but I want everybody to stay strapped in their seats and only move around when absolutely necessary. Above all, if there’s a loss of thrust don’t allow yourselves to float—because it could come on again, without warning, at full boost and you might fall on something sharp. Even worse, you might fall on something delicate which we need.”
As Tarrant went on to outline the safety procedures he had learned from more experienced pilots, he found his thoughts straying to a small boat which was slicing through the Pacific night, provided it had not already been located and turned into incandescent gas. The only reason Will Somerville was caught in such a deadly trap was that he had taken a friendly interest in another man’s well-being. Tarrant had a yearning to set him free which went far beyond the obligations of his own code of ethics, but at the same time he found himself wondering about the girl called Myrah.
Her real personality was a mystery to him, and it would have been ridiculous to suppose they could have anything in common, yet she had a quality which in his mind distinguished her from the other two women. He could see the pallid nakedness of her everywhere he looked, and yet—perhaps for the first time in his life as an adult—he was overwhelmingly aware of an attractive female as a thinking individual, distinct and separate from all those physical attributes to which he was conditioned to respond.
It occurred to him that he might never have given Beth Kircher anything like a fair deal, and he was beginning to explore the novel idea when there was a slight fall-off in thrust from the ship’s drive. He glanced at the control panels, verified the change in impulsion and was composing words of reassurance when he saw that none of his companions had noticed the minute loss of weight. Deciding there would be little point in making his amateur crew more edgy than they already were, he suggested they should try to sleep while he refined the flight calculations. He ran the revised performance parameter through the ship’s minicomputer and established a new time for going into the deceleration phase which would span the second half of the journey.
During the next four hours there were three more marginal losses of thrust, and each time he computed a new flight profile on the assumption there would be no further deterioration. His instructors had told him that some drive units were inclined to be skittish in the early stages of operation, but the continued stepping down of output caused Tarrant some concern. He experimented with the various simplified controls, wishing he knew more about what lay beneath their housings, and then—playing a hunch—pulled the thrust control lever back a short distance and pushed it forward again to its original setting. There was an immediate boost in power, which caused someone behind him to give a low exclamation, and a glance at the instrumentation showed Tarrant the ship was back on the original acceleration of 1.1 gravities.
He stared at the thrust lever, appalled by what he might have discovered. The idea of controlling a ship on its progress through space was reduced to a preposterous fantasy unless the pilot could be certain of a number of basic engineering verities. High on the list, possibly at the top, was the requirement for a control linkage whose output had a perfect, fixed and unvarying relationship to the input. The guarantees a pilot demanded were routinely given by competent mechanical engineers, but—and this was every flier’s nightmare—they could be invalidated by an incident as trivial as a fitter dropping a lighted cigarette into his overalls and consequently forgetting to insert a locking pin in a push-rod joint.
Tarrant had no way of knowing if he was dealing with something as criminally simple as that, or if the fault lay in the exotic equipment at the heart of the drive unit, but suddenly he felt as though he was sitting on a time bomb. In particular, he disliked the possibility that the engine might cease delivering thrust altogether, especially at the peak velocities of turn-around time, in which case the ship was destined to carry five skeletons on a sight-seeing tour of the galaxy.
The sight of the Earth-Moon system shrinking to a brilliant double star failed to distract Tarrant’s mind from his fears. He maintained a broody silence until it was time to shut down the drive and reverse the direction of thrust, then he carried out the manoeuvre with painstaking deliberation, his senses alert for the slightest discrepancy between what the ship was doing and what he was commanding it to do.
There was no trouble at any point in the procedure, and with the engine configuration changed to bring the forward ion guns into play, he gradually advanced the thrust lever in its slot. His morbidly sensitive touch could detect no sloppiness or lack of response as the increasing thrust pushed him forward against his seat harness.