Part 4

McCauley timed his pause and then said, less sleepily:

"Oh. All right. I'm awake. I'll get up right away."

He waited until the footsteps moved off. Then he swore. He'd put on an act himself. He was ashamed of being keyed up. He'd posed as a man with iron nerves, sleeping soundly before the take-off of the first ship ever to try a piloted orbital flight.

When he went out of his room he disliked himself very much.

It was an hour later, and the morning sunshine was bright, when he came out of the officers' quarters and got into the jeep that was waiting for him. Furness, he learned, was already out at the ship. The general was there too. Things were moving smoothly.

The jeep rolled over the flat ground, the picked-up pebbles making a thunderous rattling against the mud-guards and a vast plume of yellow dust trailing it.

And presently there was the ship. It was a singular spectacle--the huge, seemingly clumsy object with its dropped-down cabin shining in the slanting morning light. It seemed peculiarly isolated, out here on the featureless plain. There was nothing near it to account for its existence. Empty, board-flat ground stretched out for miles in every direction. The buildings at the base seemed tiny from here. The ship was alone like a steamer in the middle of the ocean, except that men clustered about its wheels, and there was a pickup truck that had brought ladders, and tiny dark figures swarmed over the still, glistening aluminum body.

The jeep drew near. It swung in a slightly exaggerated curve and came to a stop.

"The general's yonder," said the jeep driver, pointing.

McCauley walked over. The general faced him, and McCauley saluted.

"Ah, McCauley," the general said cordially. "You look fresh and rested."

"Yes, sir," said McCauley. He saw Furness nearby. He felt very much like a heel.

"It was a good idea to get a good night's sleep," said the general.

"Yes, sir," said McCauley.

"You've got your orders," said the general. "They give you a lot of leeway."

"Yes, sir," said McCauley.

"It's hoped you'll pass over the setup checkpoints, of course," said the general. "But the satellite watching stations will pick up your signal in any case. The main thing is to make a straight orbit. Anything short of a full twenty-four-thousand-mile course will cost you an impossible amount of fuel."

"Yes, sir," said McCauley. "I'm aware of it, sir."

It was one of the paradoxes of the flight that it would take much more fuel to make a shorter flight than a longer one. A course around the northern hemisphere, for example, not crossing the equator and the antipodes, would be extravagant in terms of the fuel required simply to stay aloft. But if McCauley established a proper orbit, he'd use fuel only to take off and to land. Landing would be as tricky a job as taking off, or even trickier. But McCauley had tried all the alternative landing processes in the training mock-up. His orders permitted him to choose the landing process himself, but it was not likely that he'd have any actual choice. The decision would be made by events.

Meanwhile there was nothing to do. McCauley stood around and watched as the general was doing. Figures moved here and there about the ship a hundred yards away. Men came up to a truck parked near it and handed in completed checklists and were given other lists to check. Once there was earnest discussion and a jeep went rushing away to the base and came rushing back, and a man took a small object over to the ship, where somebody had evidently decided that something had better be replaced. Furness avoided McCauley's eye. The whole process grew tedious. The officers, including the two who would presently fly the ship, simply stood at a distance to be out of the way and vigilantly watched men who knew what they were doing. The general had an air of vast satisfaction as matters progressed with no delays and no lack of decision at the proper level. When something is well-prepared, the commanding officer's job is finished when the action starts. The general in command of Quartermain Base had prepared things well.

The men around the ship moved away from it. They piled into personnel trucks and rolled off toward the base buildings. Other trucks came out with men in fueling suits. They took their places briskly. The hydrazine truck came up. It rolled into place as if on a railroad track, so great was its precision. The fueling crew briskly and deftly loaded the ship with its full portion of hydrazine. The tanks topped off. The truck coiled its hose and moved away.

"We'll move the ship a couple of hundred yards," said the general curtly, "before loading the nitric."

This was precaution carried to an extreme. Surely nothing could be spilled on the ground here! But to fuel the nitric from an entirely new site would make assurance doubly sure. The ship's position was shifted. The group of officers moved with it. The nitric truck came out, with a fresh crew of fuelers who loaded the nitric tank.

"Now," said the general, "you and Furness can get into your flight suits, McCauley. Then I give no more orders. You'll be on your own."

"Yes, sir," said McCauley.

A jeep came up and stopped. McCauley got in the front seat. Furness got silently into the back. The jeep raced toward the base. Crunching pebbles and raising dust, it created an extraordinary effect of self-importance and busyness.

The flight suits were in the building behind the flagpole. There were noncoms to help them don the clumsy, tight, intricately gadgeted outfits which provided protection against the effects of high acceleration, abrupt decompression, heat, cold--everything but sudden death. There were helmets. There were oxygen bottles and parachute-packs and mikes and headphones. When the two of them were completely outfitted, they looked like oversized robots.

Furness did not speak on the way back to the ship. McCauley made one half-hearted attempt to end the constraint between them.

"Isn't your wife coming out to watch the take-off?" he asked.

"She'll know when we go," said Furness without expression.

He said no more. McCauley carefully did not shrug his shoulders. But now the immediate problems of the take-off had to be thought over for the thousandth time, and he could spare no more thought for Furness' injured dignity.

They reached the standing group of officers. The ship's fuel was all aboard. The jatos were mounted. Now one man was working alone at the very tail of the ship. He was bleeding the air out of the fuel lines between the tanks and the rocket engine. He came away with a small bucket. Unlike a more normal rocket which would stand nose up and have its fuel tanks vertically above the motor, in the X-21 a certain amount of fuel had to come through the lines almost to the engine, to make certain that the pumps would deliver the two fuel elements at absolutely the same instant for self-ignition, the instant the rocket motor was turned on.

"Take that stuff," ordered the general, "and carry it well away from the ship."

A noncom ran to get the bucket. It might be nitric or it might be hydrazine. He carried it away a hundred yards or so. The lone man by the ship now stripped off his plastic coverall, including the gloves. He walked twenty yards from the ship, put on a fresh outfit, and went back to the ship. Presently he came away with another small bucket.

"Get that out of the way, too," commanded the general. He turned to McCauley. "Now, McCauley, it's all yours."

"I'd like," said McCauley, "to give the engine a one-second run. Just to make sure. I'd like everybody else away."

The general nodded. McCauley lumbered clumsily across the several hundred yards between the general and the ship. Furness started to follow, but the general said briskly:

"McCauley's right, Furness. Only one man's needed. Come along."

The general and the others moved to a position less directly in line with the body of the ship. It was a completely sensible thing to do. If he did not notice that the small buckets of bled-away fuel were closer to him and the other officers than they'd been before, he could be excused for it.

McCauley reached the ship and climbed up. He carefully inspected the instruments. Then he set the rocket timer for a one-second blast, threw off the safety, and pressed the firing button.

There was an instant, horrible bellow of a thousand dragons. The ship stirred, rolled forward--and the timer cut off the fuel supply to the rocket engine. The engine died. The ship rolled, crunching, to a stop. McCauley nodded tensely to himself. He waited.

His ears were a bit numbed by the sound, but after a time he turned to look back under the belly of the ship. There was confusion back there; the group of officers seemed agitated. There was a vast upsweep of yellow dust. And there was a hole, a crater, in the sun-baked plain. The dust was thicker and yellower above it.

Furness came trudging out to the ship. It was a good two minutes before he arrived. He climbed heavily upward and swung to close the pressure door and dog it. He settled in his seat with a thud, and then reached forward and flipped the communicator switch.

"Furness reporting, X-21 to control," he said into his microphone. "X-21 set to take off. Over."

McCauley saw that his face was ashen white.

"What's the matter, Furness?" he demanded sharply. "Anything wrong?"

"All those precautions were no good," said Furness harshly. "The stuff that bled out of the fuel lines turned over when the rocket blast hit it. It blew. It made a hole in the ground and pebbles flew every which way like bullets. One of them ripped the side of the general's cap clean off. For a moment I thought the ship had gone."

A tinny voice sounded from a speaker overhead.

"_Control to X-21. Scheduled take-off time is now thirty-four seconds off. I will count down for time of take-off only._" A long pause. "_Twenty seconds._" Another pause. "_Fifteen._" A silence which seemed ages long. McCauley settled himself. Furness held one hand oddly against his side. McCauley held his finger over the jato button. "_Ten_," said the tinny voice. "_Nine ... eight ... seven ... six ... five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... take-off-ti-._"

The last syllable was never completed. McCauley hit the jato button and the Mark Twenty jatos flamed, instantly and together. The jolt of the one-second blast before had been severe. This was punishment. McCauley was slammed back into his acceleration chair with intolerable violence. For two--five--seven seconds there was no world but weight and bellowings. There was nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard, nothing to be felt but the unbearable sound and intolerable pressure of the ship's acceleration.

On the outside, of course, more detailed impressions were possible. From absolute immobility, the ship suddenly rushed forward with mountainous masses of jato fumes swirling and mushrooming behind it. The noise was deafening even at half a mile. Then the ship lifted, flying steadily and gaining velocity at a preposterous rate. Then that rate increased.

McCauley knew when it happened. For six out of their life of fourteen seconds, the jatos pushed the ship ahead at an acceleration of eight gravities; in effect, McCauley was pushed back against his chair with a force of twelve hundred pounds. Then the ramjets caught. The ship was clear of the ground, with only inertia and air resistance to hold it back. The ramjets howled, and the whole ship jerked--a little to one side as well as ahead--and then the acceleration was ten gees. The difference was that between the unbearable and the unendurable. McCauley clamped his teeth fiercely and strained to survive this monstrous assault upon his consciousness and his life.

The jatos burned out and dropped off. The ship swept on smoothly, and there were only two gees acceleration. But McCauley had to work swiftly, in spite of feeling that flatirons were attached to his fingers. He shook his head and panted, and swept his eyes around the horizon. It was level. He grasped the stick, unlocked it, and pulled it back. The horizon dipped downward before him and the ship rose tumultuously toward the sky.

He heard Furness' voice as a faint murmur above the overwhelming noise from the ramjets.

"X-21 reporting. Take-off complete. Everything functioning normally. Rate of ascent...."

His voice went on. There was a strange note in it, though. Even in his desperate absorption in the task at hand, McCauley noted it. But he could not spare a look at Furness.

The ship was airborne and already two thousand feet high. McCauley put it into a gigantic climbing sweep around a circle fully twenty miles across. It flew with the grace and precision of a garbage scow. Now and again it tended to wallow in flight, and he balanced it tensely, and then delicately as he confirmed the calculated feel of its controls.

The earth spread out below, wider and wider as the ship rose, and the ramjets thundered a message of the flight to the empty plain and all the rolling ground beyond it.

Furness' voice was barely audible. He talked steadily, reading off instrument indications into a microphone. There were telemeterings of all these data in transmission that were being recorded down at the base, but when the ship reached the limit to which the ramjets could carry it and began its rocket-powered flight, continuous reception of microwaves would be dubious. A longer wave length for a voice broadcast was necessary if the full value of the flight was to be realized.

The X-21 was eighteen thousand feet up when it passed Quartermain Base on its first circle. Half the atmosphere was already beneath it. Furness read off the fuel consumption of the ramjet.... The air speed.... The altitude. His face was as gray as when he entered the cabin. He kept his left hand pressed stiffly against the left side of his abdomen. McCauley was aware of it, but could not spare the time to think about it.

The eastward-flowing jetstream rushed invisibly overhead. That river of racing air, pouring west to east at three hundred miles an hour and better, was lower than ordinary today. The ship should hit it at twenty-eight thousand feet. McCauley had to get into it without risking the sheering stresses the bottom part of it might exert. He had to get into it like a man stepping onto a moving sidewalk. He adjusted the rate of climb. At twenty thousand feet the ramjets were more effective. The ship climbed more steeply. There was a difference in the bellowing of the ramjets. The noise was still monstrous, but it was thinner. It did not have the substance of thunder at ground level. But the sound was still so tremendous that it seemed to fill all of McCauley's consciousness. It required an effort of will to see, when he was so battered and hammered at by sound. It was difficult to think. His hands were heavy, and movements of which he would ordinarily have been unconscious now required almost painful effort.

Twenty-five thousand feet. McCauley glanced at the gyrocompass, computed swiftly in his head, added together his known air speed and the reported wind direction at this height, and deduced an actual course. Then he had to guess at the angle at which to hit the jetstream so that when its direction and speed were added to the ship's, the result of the several forces would be a course around the globe as nearly as possible the right one. It should pass over the most closely placed tracking stations, and it should not be immoderately far from the wide-spaced Navy ships which had been alerted for the flight and a possible unscheduled descent.

He swung the ship from its circling. He aimed it up and up, south-east by a half east. The ship climbed.

There was a logy wallowing when it penetrated the bottom of the jetstream. But it kept on, and presently a clock assured McCauley that he'd been in the stream long enough to gain all the extra speed it could give him. He aimed the ship's nose still higher and gave the ramjets every particle of fuel they could consume.

The sky grew dark. Dark purple. Faint twinklings appeared here and there. They were the stars, visible in daylight. The ramjets' tumult was still thinner now. And little by little the rate of climb grew less.

Presently the ship did not climb at all. It was as high as the ramjets could take it. Now the sunshine on its aluminum body was painfully bright, but the sky was almost black. Had there been time, he could have traced the constellations--the same constellations that people down below would not see for months, until this part of the heavens shone down on Earth's dark side.

In the pressurized cabin, Furness' voice was more nearly audible. But this was the first of two moments of truth. Here and now McCauley had to perform, as the act of a man, what highly complicated machines would later compute he should have done. He had to get the X-21 into a three-dimensional relationship to the gravitational field of Earth. He had to point the ship not only laterally but vertically in the exact direction that the exact timing of rocket thrust would convert into an orbit. An error of half a degree would immediately be fatal. An even smaller error could make the ship's course so eccentric that when he got back into air it would be with a velocity that would burn ship and men together as a meteor some fifty miles high.

He sweated, in absolute absorption in his task. Not only did the ship have to point exactly when he fired the rocket engine, but it had to be stationary, so it would not move past that point. It had to be settled dead center on an imaginary optimum or the rocket thrust would change direction as the ship's nose turned.

He flung his hand against a switch. The ramjets died. There was a vast, furry stillness--the deafness produced by the past din. McCauley spoke and barely heard his own voice. He shouted to Furness:

"Settle back for rocket fire!"

Furness nodded. He looked cadaverous. His eyes seemed filled with a peculiar, tragic despair. But his lips moved. McCauley knew that he was saying:

"Ramjets off. Maneuvering for course prior to rocket firing. Over."

But he did not stir in his seat. His left hand stayed pressed against his side.

The ship would be coasting downward now. Its wings still gave some support, and its wingtips had some effect, but not enough. Now was the time to use the steam-jets on the fins. McCauley played them tensely as if they were a musical instrument. He struck balances of opposing thrusts as if they were chords. The nose of the ship steadied, steadied, steadied....

The timer button was set at one minute. He struck the rocket-firing button.

He was hurled back in his seat with a sort of vicious and unreasonable violence. He was caught in a vise of twelve gravities pressure which held him motionless against the seat back and tried to flatten out his legs and body and prevent his breathing. But his flight suit was designed to prevent exactly this. It squeezed also. His legs were tightened unbearably. His arms were constricted past endurance. His chest, his stomach--he was confined in the most horrible of strait jackets. He felt his tongue curling back down his throat to strangle him. With an utterly herculean effort he managed to turn his head to one side. Then he could breathe, and the grav-pressure air protected his chest from collapse, and he endured and endured and endured.

The minute of the rocket thrust lasted for centuries. Then the engine cut off, and his head was pure anguish from the blood spurted through it by his still-laboring heart. He was blinded by the pain. But it went away.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, his sound-deadened ears regained their sensitiveness. He heard Furness gasping:

"--minute rocket-blast ended. Checking course now. Over."

McCauley said absorbedly:

"There was a goof. A twelve-gee thrust with full fuel tanks is a whale of a lot more when they're nearly empty!"

It was true, of course. The ferocity of a rocket thrust that would accelerate a fully loaded ship at three hundred fifty-odd feet per second per second would accelerate much more a ship weighing half as much. Toward the end, McCauley and Furness had taken acceleration that no man could live through for more than a very short time. But a man can endure briefly a stress that would kill him if long-continued.

McCauley plunged into the desperately necessary task of this moment. He had to determine his present course and speed. He could not take the time to look out of the ports at the immensity of Earth below him. Men in capsules, orbiting, had been as high as this, but they did not have to compute their height or guide their vehicles. McCauley had to do both.

The height was relatively simple. A radar screen, reduced to a vertical slot for economy of space and weight, told him the distance to whatever was below. A Doppler-effect velocity indicator would read off the change in frequency of a crystal-controlled radio signal which his speed produced. This substantially resembled the way an automobile horn changes pitch when two cars pass each other; the pitch drops swiftly at the moment of passing. But there was an observation which was simpler and more direct.

He spotted a bright star near the horizon ahead. He read off its angular distance from the world's edge. Looking aft, under the belly of the ship, he read another angle from the world's edge to another star. Minutes later, he repeated the observations. The star ahead was higher, the one behind was lower. If one star rose faster than the other sank, he would be gaining height. If one sank faster than the other rose, he would be falling. If one rose exactly as fast as the other dropped, he would be in a perfect circular orbit, neither rising nor falling. That was too good to be expected. But from even two sets of observations he could tell the line the ship was following, and hence its speed.

The ship did not have quite the speed necessary for a complete orbit. It needed more. He could guess how much.

He said curtly to Furness:

"We've got to have a two-second push, anyhow. Maybe more later. Get set."

Furness did not reply, but McCauley heard him reporting.

There was singularly little exultation in the small cabin. Furness' face was drawn and colorless behind his helmet plate. McCauley was busy.

Presently, after a warning gesture, he set the rocket timer and pressed the firing button. All the ghastly impact of high acceleration repeated itself. But, lasting only two seconds, it was not much worse than--say--falling from a second-story window down on a hard mattress. It lasted longer, but there was not much other difference. It did not build up to the torture of continued rocket thrust.

Then the ship floated on. There was utter silence. The vertical-slot altimeter indicated a height which seemed absolutely steady. The Doppler-effect velocity meter gave a reasonably satisfactory if not too precise message. McCauley was working intensively on his course when Furness said, with an effort:

"Ground says satellite-watching stations picking up our signal report a good course. It could be a little more to the south."

McCauley flipped on his own microphone-to-ground switch.

"I figure I'm still a little short on velocity," he said crisply. "I'll have to blast again for about a second. Figure me an angle of heading for ten minutes from now, for a one-second blast. I'll report my figures for checking."

He did not bother with the ship controls now, of course. The ship was in orbit, like the numerous satellites circling Earth west to east and north and south. It did not matter which way it pointed. There was no air to impede its progress. As a matter of fact, a trace of rotating motion had been produced by a slight off-centering of the rocket thrust. The ship's center of mass had changed slightly because of fuel consumption.