'Have to cut into her?' the Captain asked.
'Yes, sir.'
'All right. I'll put the stuff out.'
Cutting into a ship is a tedious business. First you attach a large metal cup to the side and weld it on all round the edges and it looks as if the ship had developed a boil. Then a man gets into the cup by a small door in the top of it.
A cutter is handed in after him. He shuts the door from his side, for it's made to resist outward and not inward pressure, and gets to work with the cutter. The object of the cup is, of course, to prevent the escape of any air.
First, the man cuts away a circle of the outer hull, making a hole large enough for him to crawl through. If he is satisfied that the inner hull is intact, he re-opens the door of the cup and gets rid of the circle he has cut by pushing it outside. Then, after shutting the door again, he turns his attention to the inner hull. He trains his cutter steadily on a single point and watches carefully.
This is the part of the job which needs most judgment. The moment the area under the flame of his cutter begins to bulge, he switches off. His object is to let the air come as gently as possible into the evacuated space between the inner and outer hulls. If he lets it come with a rush he may have an extremely unpleasant time of it. More than that, if it so happens that the welding-on of the cup was imperfect, he and it may be shot off into space and the air from the wreck irretrievably lost.
Therefore, he makes the smallest hole he can and keeps a careful watch on his pressure gauge as the air comes through. Not until the needle has ceased to move can he go any further. When that has happened, however, and the pressure in his cup ceases to rise, he cuts a circle through the inner hull as he did through the outer, and at last he is able to get into the ship. Straightaway he reports and makes his way to the air-lock. There he gets ready to operate the lever which opens the outer door.
It would, of course, be much simpler if someone could devise a satisfactory method of opening the outer door from outside, but for several reasons—the main one being the superheating of outer shell in an atmosphere—no reliable mechanism has yet been made.
Chapter Three
SALVAGE IN SPACE
With the Excelsis, it took several hours' work before the cutter-in was able to report that we could come aboard. 'All right. Open up,' Captain Belford directed. The rest of us who had retired on board the Dido to wait looked at him expectantly. He chose the boarding party and we hurried into our suits. While we dressed he talked to the man on the other ship.
'How is it?'
'Pretty grim, sir.'
We were all wearing micro-wave sets in preparation for the job, and we could follow both sides of the conversation.
'Air pressure?' asked the Captain.
'Thirteen point seven pounds, sir. Seems to have held it perfectly. Releasing it into the double hull seems just about to account for the drop from normal.'
'Breathable?'
'Pretty bad, sir, by the look of things. I didn't risk trying.'
'Don't then. Got the lock open yet?'
'Yes, sir.'
'All right. We're coming now.'
From our own lock we pushed off and floated across to the open door of the other. We took little with us but welding arcs and some batteries to start up the air purifiers.
I'm not going to tell you what the Excelsis was like inside; it's not decent to try. All I'll say is that some of the passengers and crew had contrived to last a pretty long time. I felt pretty green and wondered if I was going to be sick. I had to take a hold on myself: being sick in a space-suit's a dangerous as well as an unpleasant business.
I was detailed, with the help of one of the hands, to weld up the recently made cut and to pump the air back from between the hulls. I think both of us were pretty glad to leave the clearing up operations to the rest.
Since space travel began it has been the practice to leave its victims out in space. And in my opinion it is a good thing, too. Certainly it could be no consolation to relatives to see the poor things which have to be thrust out of a wreck's air-lock to drift slowly astern. And that's another reason for keeping up some acceleration while salvage work is going on. If you don't, you can't lose those bodies. They just keep on drifting round, gravitating gradually to the mass of the ship. It's bad for the nerves to see dead men floating past the windows all the time.
When we'd finished our welding and pumping we found that the rest were nearly through with the nastiest part of the job.
The man in charge of the disposal squad was reporting tonelessly to the Captain who had been conducting a detailed examination of cargo and stores.
Thirty complete bodies, sir. Seventeen of those identified. Here's the list of them, sir.'
Captain Belford held out his hand and took it slowly. No one spoke for a minute or more. Only thirty complete bodies —and there had been eighty passengers and crew....
The Captain carefully put the list away in a pocket. Then he stepped over to a window and stood a moment looking at a thousand suns flaring in their bed of black. I felt he was trying to see them in all their pitilessness as the men on the Excelsis had seen them. His space-suit made a grotesque giant of him. Then with a scarcely audible sigh, he began to recite the prayer for those who have died in space.
The clearing up of the Excelsis was regular routine work. Only two of her fuel tanks had leaked, and the first thing we did was to fill our own from those which hadn't leaked—it's axiomatic to fill your tanks when you can in space. You never know when you are going to need just that extra bit of power.
There was a little food, just a few unopened tins of biscuits. The poor devils had made the food last longer than the water, for those tanks were dry to the last drop. The gold was intact in the strong room; we checked it over. The ganywood was still safely clamped down in the hold. One of the drums of patchatal oil had been broken open—we reckoned some poor thirst-crazy chap had tried to drink it. The rest were intact, and so were the bales of tillfer fibre.
The personal belongings we left in the cabins where we found them, just fastening any loose things down for safety. When we got the ship in, someone would go through them with the passenger list and return them to the next of kin.
All that is the lighter part of salvage work. A bit depressing, of course, but easy because once the air purifiers have got going you can dispense with space-suits.
Next came the outside work, and the first thing was to get a wide mesh net round the part of the ship we were going to work on. You can't cling on to the polished hull and you must have something to give you purchase when you're handling tools, so the answer is the net. You can climb about on it and hook yourself into it when necessary. When we'd got that fixed we began fixing ringbolts in the side.
It's a tedious job, but it has to be done and it has to be done well. There's only one way of easing the fall of a derelict or a ship out of control—that is by use of parachutes. And the attachment of parachutes is going to depend in the last stage upon the firm fixing of those ring-bolts. The strength of the parachutes' fabric, the braking effect of their area, the tensile strength of their steel hawsers; all that can be worked out mathematically on paper, but the fixing of the bolts is different; it must be trusted to the skill, care and conscientious workmanship of the men doing the job. There must be no botching or covering up of bad work. Luckily, it's a job that seldom has to be hurried.