Such a weight could not be slowed down by the 'chute in the time available, and the ship would tend to remain at relatively high altitudes for but a limited period as a result of her small angle of elevation. Soon she would tilt downwards and enter denser air with too high a velocity; thus the 'chute would inevitably tear away from her.
The first step was obviously to lighten the top stage by dumping the propellants!
Burck closed the servo operated hydrazine valve and whipped his turbopump to its full delivery. This forced nitric acid alone into the rocket motor from which it emerged through the areas uncovered by the jettisoning of the side plates, to be sucked out and dissipated in the rushing air. After less than a minute the tank emptied. Burck closed the nitric acid valve and opened the hydrazine. This drained the other tank, thus reducing the weight of the top stage to 47 tons by expelling 83 tons of propellants. The 'chute was then laden with 117 tons rather than the 70 for which it had been designed.
The situation was much improved over that of the former load of 200 tons, but there was still great danger of descending too rapidly into lower and denser air. To make matters worse, the vessel was beginning to roll slowly around her longitudinal axis to the right.
Burck undertook the risk of rigging out the telescoping wing panels of the top stage, whereupon he applied full left aileron. This stopped the roll and he pulled back on the flippers.
Then began a weird and wonderful flight, for the 'chute of the baby booster was still slowing them down gradually. The 'chute was extended behind an almost conventional aircraft whose wings were producing lift and could extend the time during which the odd and unforeseen configuration could remain at altitude, compared to what this time would have been had the wingless rocket followed a natural descent path dragging the 'chute. At the controls of the queer craft sat a pilot bemused by the apparent ease with which things had gone up to that point.
Burck was grubbing in his memory to remember the correlation of altitude and velocity which corresponded to the flight path of the baby booster and it's 'chute alone.
He wanted to try to fly the weird combination of rocket and aircraft according to that data, and he cursed silently the paucity of information in his flight data folder. At the moment, he was entirely out of sympathy with the Space Force pen-pushers who hadn't foreseen that a captain might some day have to make a landing with his baby booster still attached!
Had they really envisaged every emergency as they claimed, he would not now find himself without that vital curve sheet.
So he simply hauled back on his slipper controls as far as he could without tearing off the wings, coaxing every possible bit of lift out of the straining panels. For his own life and the lives of his crew, he must enter the lower air strata as slowly as possible. That would reduce the deceleration which endangered the parachute.
Two and one half minutes had elapsed before Hercules' velocity was down to 5,300 m/sec. At just under 70 km altitude, the great vessel soared east-northeast across the deserted Pacific. The deceleration of the 'chute had been reduced from 1.8g at the time of 'chute release to about 0.7g by reason of the gain in altitude and the decrease in velocity.
Burck became conscious of a new worry; he might be able to use his wings to prevent too rapid a descent, but the mass of his vessel was greater than that of the baby booster alone, and he could not prevent her from descending to a point far beyond where the baby booster would normally have taken to the ocean. Salvage ships would be awaiting the solitary booster, and away beyond that point there would be none. Furthermore, the baby booster's deceleration rockets were not calculated to check the fall of such a great mass as now composed of their odd aircraft. The cabin might well be crushed by the impact on the sea and bar their exit, and the empty propellant tanks of the booster might admit water and sink them below the pitiless waves of the Pacific. He hated the thought of making a half-way decent landing with the prospect of drowning with his crew like rats in a trap.
Burck grasped the intercom. "Radio! S.O.S. to Christmas Island from Hercules. Top stage not separated form baby booster. Now gliding, wings extended, on projection of great circle of ascent track. Send cross-bearings and locations any sea vessels in this region. Anticipate landing 1,970 km distant from launching site. Prefer to land near any vessel in that area."
Another thought came to him with a shiver. "P.S.," he said over the intercom, "Hope nitric acid dumped doesn't corrode my 'chute too fast!"
After a couple of minutes their cross-bearings began to come in. 500 km ahead and slightly to port, the tanker Patrick was steaming towards San Diego. Burck would attempt to land alongside her.
Hercules' velocity was now down to 3,000 m/sec and her altitude to about 48 km, but the deceleration had become almost unbearable with the descent into denser air. Five g's pressed Burck against his shoulder belt where he gasped for breath, barely able to read the instruments and to keep his craft in the flight attitude. Slowly the nose began to point downwards, and when it reached 30 degrees, the agony relented. With this angle and 31 km high, they slipped below the 500 m/sec mark and the copilot with his binoculars reported a steamer diagonally beneath them. It could only be the Patrick and Burck, still able somewhat to control the winged parachute bomb which the Hercules now was, headed in the direction of the tanker.
At 10 km altitude, Hercules pointed vertically downwards like a parabomb before impact. Her crew hung forward in their belts, gazing terrorized at the up-rushing ocean.
Already they could make out the white caps and the bone in the teeth of the Patrick steaming under forced draft towards the point of their prospective dunking.
Fifty meters above the water, the circumferential checking rockets in the baby booster above them roared out and the deceleration again threw them into their belts with violence. The jets from the rockets screamed past their portholes in a mantle of flame.
Then the greenish darkness of the sea veiled the ports, breaking some of them and compressing the air into the crew's Eustachian tubes. Their ears cracked. This must be the end… But there was a rolling and twisting of their cabin, and sunlight burst through the broken ports, reviving their flagging spirits. Hercules stood like a can buoy upon her fractious baby booster and they were safe.
An hour later, Burck and his crew watched from the tanker the great mass riding safely on the ground swell of the Pacific, the great wings torn and twisted by the impact.
The Patrick stood by until the arrival of the salvage ship Sea Lion. The latter, after considerable difficulty, got the badly damaged rocket aboard and, with its crew, steamed off for Christmas Island.
Braden reacted typically to the report of the accident. His radio to Burck read tersely:
"Congrats. More luck than brains. Braden."
Holt, who had been about to leave Christmas Island, delayed his departure and interviewed Burck in detail. When he had heard the whole tale, he was convinced that Braden had been unjust to Burck, to whose presence of mind, Holt felt, was not only responsible for the survival of the crew, but had also provided valuable information on how to avoid future troubles of the same nature.
Holt's wire to Braden read, "Burck's brains beat bad luck."
A few weeks later, Burck's dearest wish came true when he read his orders to command one of the Mars vessels.