Part 5

There was silence. McCauley worked on busily. From time to time Furness spoke as if with great effort. He relayed the altitude from the slot radar. He relayed the velocity from the Doppler gauge. He relayed hull temperature, cosmic frequency, ultraviolet intensity. He did not report any physical sensations, but once he spoke as if in answer to a question:

"It must be out of order if it says that."

He might be referring to the telemetering apparatus which relayed the pulse and respiration and blood pressure readings of the two men in the ship.

In eight minutes McCauley reported the bearing he considered the ship should point to so that a one-second rocket thrust, adding its effect to all previous courses and speeds--plus a correction for the diminished weight of fuel in the tanks--would produce an exactly perfect orbit for the ship. Furness repeated it while McCauley took more horizon-to-star observations to check the present line of motion.

"Ground checks your figures," said Furness. "They say congratulations on perfect astrogation under service conditions. It's right."

"Okay," McCauley said absently.

He went on with his work. The ship was two hundred eighty miles--plus or minus half a mile--above the surface of the earth. An orbit required a speed and rate of downward curvature just fixed so the ship would go downward as the surface curved down, like a glider coasting down a curving hillside and always being the same distance from solidity. Since the earth was a globe, one could coast forever and be always falling, without ever touching the circled world. That is an orbit.

McCauley set the rocket timer and said:

"Here we go."

The rockets blasted. The ship flung itself forward. Again there was the sensation of falling an uncomfortable distance onto a hard mattress. But a one-second blast was a thousand times more endurable than a one-minute one.

The ship had now been aloft for something like thirty minutes, of which ten was airborne flight and twenty free fall in orbit, plus two corrections of course and speed. McCauley had had no time to gaze down at the vastness below him. He knew it only as a huge expanse of mottled tawny-green or blue with many white specks upon it. The specks, which were clouds, were closer together toward the horizon, and at any given moment the rim of the world was a ring of plain white.

Now he checked his work once more and then took time to look at Earth below him. At its speed, the ship should complete one revolution of the Earth in ninety minutes, more or less. Its speed was seventeen thousand two hundred and sixty miles per hour relative to the ground. In twenty minutes of free-fall flight it had covered something over five thousand and seven hundred miles, relative to the ground, and crossed eighty degrees of longitude. The local time down below was something more than five hours later than the local time at Quartermain Base. Sunset would be approaching here, as the earth's shadow moved from east to west like the dawn.

To the right of the floating ship there was only tawny-blue ocean that seemed much darker than ordinary because McCauley was looking down into its depths instead of at a sky reflection from its surface. Behind the ship there was a clumping of the white specks. These cloud masses would be above and around the Cape Verde Islands, now tens of scores of miles to the rear. Below and to the left there was an amorphousness, an indefiniteness peeping up from beneath the cloud cover. That would be Africa. McCauley could see for enormous distances over the cloud-hidden land. He knew that he floated over Senegal and British Guinea and French Guinea and Liberia and the Ivory Coast, all in a matter of tens of seconds. But he could see only at intervals between tufts of white-cottony vapor. Ahead, too, the dark-colored sea swept in, right to left, and in half minutes or less there was no land at all except behind him. Away ahead there was more of Africa, to be sure, because the X-21 sped along a line which would mark the limits of the Gulf of Guinea. The ship would cross the tip of Africa and head down past it to Antarctica.

But McCauley would not see Africa again. The whiteness which was the horizon turned dim where the ship's bow aimed, and the dimness spread to the left. The edge of the round world turned black. It was Earth's crawling shadow creating night. Darkness sped toward the ship, still high above the last slightest trace of atmosphere and glittering intolerably in the unshielded glare of the sun.

"It looks like we're all set, Furness," McCauley said with satisfaction. "We can relax, now, for all of twenty minutes."

Furness did not answer. There was no sensation of weight, of course. Nothing weighed anything. Nothing could be considered light or heavy. The difference between a copper penny and the ship itself was purely imaginary. They had different masses, but both would weigh the same--zero. McCauley suddenly turned off the silent air-circulator in the cabin. He struck a match. The flame flared, but not as a rising leaf shape. It was a perfect ball of incandescence. But it did not continue to burn. It went out, and there was a ball of white smokiness where the flame had been.

"I've heard that'd happen. I wanted to try it," McCauley said amusedly.

A match requires oxygen in which to burn. On the ground, the chemically fostered first flame of the match-head heats the air, which rises and is replaced, whereby fresh oxygen reaches the place of combustion and supports it. But in the X-21, in free fall, hot air was no lighter than cold. It did not rise. The match exhausted the oxygen around it and went out. McCauley turned the air-circulator on again lest he and Furness be similarly surrounded by vitiated air.

"Queer, eh?" said McCauley. Then he looked at Furness. Furness' eyes seemed filled with suffering. His pallor was deathlike.

"What's the matter?" McCauley asked.

Purely by instinct he raced his eyes across the instruments. They said nothing they should not.

"Furness!" snapped McCauley. "What's the matter? What's happened to you?"

With an air of terrible effort--though nothing weighed as much as a hair--Furness moved his left hand away from his side. It came away filled with blood. There was an ominous dark-red patch on the flight suit, and something seemed to be welling slowly out of a puncture in the cloth. The hole was the size of a bullet hole.

"Just before ... take-off," said Furness thinly, "the rocket fuel that was ... bled through the fuel pipes ... went off when you tested ... the engine. It exploded. It threw pebbles like bullets. One ... ripped the general's hat. One ... hit me."

McCauley swore. He felt a sort of bitter anger. Of all the places where instant medical attention for an injured man was impossible, the worst was the close, air-tight cabin of a ship out of atmosphere, traveling at some thousands of miles per hour and heading into night. Descending was out of the question. It was impossible to turn back.

"Let's look at that," said McCauley harshly. "Maybe we can check the bleeding somehow.--Why didn't you report you were hurt? Didn't you know you were risking your life?"

"I suppose," said Furness weakly, but with irony, "that you aren't risking yours!"

Then he winced a little as McCauley's finger explored the hole in the tough cloth. When the rocket fuel exploded on the surface of the ground, the impact of a pebble would have the effect of a bullet. It would numb more than it hurt. Furness knew he'd been hit, of course, but the ship was ready to take off, and the wound might only be trivial. To delay take-off for examination of what might be entirely insignificant would earn him McCauley's contempt--or so Furness had believed. And Furness was in no state of mind to risk that. Nothing short of absolute inability to hide his injury would have made him admit that he'd been hurt or even hit. So he'd climbed in the ship, and done his work steadily until this instant, all the time covering the wound with his hand lest McCauley discover it.

There was no room in the cabin for much movement. McCauley tried to enlarge the hole, but the cloth was reinforced with wire and could not be torn. Furthermore, he had nothing to work with if he could get at the wound--nothing for bandages, nothing to check the bleeding, nothing.... He swore deeply.

Then he felt for a familiar iron ring and pulled it. A tiny pilot chute leaped from his chute-pack. It was designed to pull out his main chute if he had to jump. He tore at it with his fingers.

"We'll pack it anyhow," he mumbled as he ripped strips from the small expanse of nylon. "At least check the bleeding."

He rolled up a strip of white cloth. He was irritated by the insistent feeling that he needed antiseptics he didn't have. He worked at the recalcitrant opening in the cloth of the flight suit and packed the wound with nylon. Then he worked more nylon about and over the packing to make a firm pad. He tore long strips to put around Furness' body to hold the packing fast and tied them tightly.

It was awkward to work where there was no weight. It seemed unreal to attempt the preposterous where there was no sound. He worked swiftly. Suddenly there was a redness in the light reflected all about the cabin from the sunshine that came in the ports.

He jerked up his head, thinking foolishly of fire. Then he saw the sun. It lay beyond a vast curved barrier that shut off all the light of all the stars. The sun was in the act of descending, to be eclipsed by the edge of Earth, and its light came through hundreds of miles of thick air which turned it from a burning golden glare to flame-red, and then crimson, and then ruby-red as he stared. Then its rim was blanked out and it slid swiftly down to extinction. The light went from gold to carmine to ruby and the sun was blotted out in less than ten seconds.

Then the ship traveled through purest night. The cosmos outside its ports was sharply divided. There was a hemisphere filled with the coruscations of a million million stars. The other half of the universe was the night side of Earth, but it looked like the abyss of nothingness from which all things came, and to which it may be that all things will return.

McCauley reached over and switched on lights. Furness looked at him through eyes that seemed deep-sunk in his head.

"You tore your pilot chute," he said thinly. "You've no chance to jump, now."

McCauley scowled. There were various methods by which the ship could be landed or at least its occupants might escape its crash. There was the skip process, in which the ship could be settled down into atmosphere just thick enough to slow it as it bounced out to space again for another settling, another slowing, another bounce. It was considered the most practical way for a ship to get back to Earth after an orbital flight. To choose the final landing place, of course, was out of the question. Also it was believed that even with the best of luck the ship's crew might have to take to their chutes and let the ship crash. But Furness could not make a chute-drop. Nor could McCauley, now.

"Time for a report," said McCauley.

He'd meant to make it, but Furness summoned all his strength. He ran his eyes along the instruments.

"X-21 reporting," he said as loudly as he could. "Just passed darkness line. Altitude...."

He went through the list of readings to be given by voice. They might be picked up by satellite-tracking stations which did not quite pick up the ship itself. They would almost certainly be picked up by South African radio amateurs listening for them.

"More comfortable?" McCauley asked gruffly.

Furness moved his head in a fashion that might be considered a nod. After a long time he said:

"Is there any ... water in the ... survival kit?"

McCauley fumbled. There was. The survival kits were the small parcels which might conceivably mean the difference between dying and not dying if a man had to ditch his disabled plane or jump from a burning one. Together with an inflatable boat, they were included in the X-21's equipment as a sort of pious wish. It was not to be believed that this ship would end its career like a mere atmosphere plane. If the steam-jets didn't work, the most perfect operation of the rocket engine would never get the ship down into the atmosphere, even for destruction. If it got down to the atmosphere there were still several thousand things that could go wrong. It was definitely not likely that its crew could jump to safety in case of need, or land so serenely on water that a rubber raft would do them any good. But the survival kits were there.

McCauley gave Furness water. He did not comment on the complications Furness' injury added to a landing problem that was already complicated enough. Instead, he looked at the clock.

"We're close to Antarctica now," he observed. "We ought to run into moonlight, too."

He peered out of a port. The tiny lighted cabin swam in emptiness, without sound, without sight of anything but remote and indifferent stars. It floated above the part of the world where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans flow together, and where there is unbroken sea all around the antarctic continent. A wind can blow completely around the world there, and rather frequently it does; and the gigantic waves that are engendered are spoken of with aversion by seamen. But McCauley could not see any waves. There was floating ice below, but as he thought of it it changed to the massive ice sheet of the bottom of the world. So the tiny lighted cabin raced over mountains and plains all buried in snow which had been there since the beginning.

He turned from the sight of a universe divided into stars and blackness. There was no practical measure to be taken--not now, anyhow. McCauley might contrive a way to get himself safely down to earth, letting Furness take his own chance with no strength to help himself. It seemed improbable in the extreme that Furness could survive a crash landing, even if no explosion followed. There was very little hope that the X-21 could be landed save in a crash. But it did not occur to McCauley that he was relieved of responsibility. A normal landing was not really hoped for. If McCauley piloted the X-21 into orbit and out again, he'd have done the unprecedented and the next try might go better. But he could not imagine himself leaving Furness in a ship headed for a landing that was bound to be a pile-up....

He couldn't expect to land intact himself, with his pilot chute ripped out and torn apart.

"I'm sorry you tore up your pilot chute," said Furness. "It about kills your chance of getting down to the ground in one piece. And it's my fault. You tore it up for me. But when I came on the ship I didn't think I was hurt badly."

"I'd have done just what you did," said McCauley. "It would have taken two broken legs to keep me from walking over as if nothing had happened to me." Then he remembered. "Report?"

Furness gathered his strength and spoke in an almost natural voice:

"X-21 reporting. We are over Antarctica at the farthest south part of our orbit. Altitude...."

He went through the list, and then his eyes went to the canteen from which McCauley had given him water. McCauley gave him another drink.

"That son of mine," said Furness abruptly. "He reveres you. When I was picked to ride observer with you, he almost went out of his head with pride. I was--I suspect I was a little bit jealous of you. A man likes his son to think he's the greatest man on earth. My boy almost believed it when I was picked for this job. But if I'd backed out...."

McCauley nodded.

"Under the circumstances," he agreed, "you'd walk to the ship and come aboard if you had to carry your head in your hand. A man wouldn't disappoint his son."

"He'd have been so proud," said Furness, "if we'd made it! And I've messed it all up!"

"I'm hanged if I'll compliment you," McCauley said, "but it would have been disgraceful if you'd done anything else. A man has to set an example for his son. And we may make out. In any case we're just thirty-two minutes from some very tricky stuff. I think we'd better think of cheerier things."

"Sorry," said Furness. He turned his eyes away. He brooded.

Seconds ticked by in the cabin. Frost began to form on the ports. There was no air outside, so there could not be said to be any temperature. But the ship radiated heat into empty space and received next to none in return. If allowed to cool until thermal equilibrium with its surroundings was reached, the X-21 would go down to some two hundred and fifty-four degrees below zero centigrade. But that would be in darkness. In sunlight it would be a different matter, and the ship'd be out of darkness in minutes.

They were very long minutes. The altitude radar said that the ship was maintaining the most nearly perfect circular orbit any man-made object had achieved to date. The X-21 was a lonely mote with yellow light glowing from its cabin openings. From time to time, invisibly, radio waves spread out from a stiff metal rod pointed sternward, and some of them might--with luck--be picked up by somebody. But the ship received nothing, here.

It passed south of Kerguelen Island in the blackness, and it was midnight local time, though the ship was only forty-five minutes of free-fall flight from Quartermain Base. Presently the X-21 headed northward and crossed the meridian where it was one A.M. something less than five minutes later. It reached a point south of Australia in under ten minutes more. It swept above the lowermost part of Australia and Tasmania together when the clocks on the ground said five A.M.

It was only when the remotest rim of the blackness which was Earth turned bright--when the dawn could be seen at the farthest horizon--that McCauley thought to look for the moon. It shone down coldly, but it was not bright enough to show him any pattern in the blackness nearly three hundred miles below the ship.

In eight minutes more, however, the sun had rolled up over the edge of the world and below the ship there was ocean. Away off to the left McCauley could see spiral arms of cloud, signifying a cyclonic disturbance moving north across the Coral Sea. Sturdy steamships fought for their lives in that typhoon, and many human beings would die in it. The ship sped on, and there came into the headphones of both McCauley and Furness a beamed message from the naval installation at Guam, which dimly and fugitively could be sighted under an aggregation of white clouds more dense than ordinary. The message said:

"_Good work, guys! We're pulling for you!_"

Then the Samoan Islands were far behind and dropping even farther. And time passed, and McCauley thought intensively and very grimly, and once again Furness asked for water. There was a clumping of cloud masses underneath and to the east which was Phoenix Island, and almost immediately afterward Washington Island and then Palmyra; after that it seemed barely seconds when a most respectable massing of clouds to the left was Hawaii.

McCauley could see solid ground there, and he talked curtly and very urgently into his own throat-mike, flipped into circuit with the voice transmitter for the occasion. It was not altogether likely that his message, relayed, would arrive ahead of the ship, but it was his only chance to do anything practical in the way of warnings to the ground.

He set to work. He did computations from instrument readings he barely remembered. He included a prayerful hope that the fuel-gauge instruments had been calibrated through their entire range. There was so much ramjet fuel, which might or might not do what it was supposed to do. There was so much rocket fuel, which must be expended to the last smallest drop before the ship could risk touching ground. And there was distance to be calculated, in terms of minutes and seconds instead of miles.

The clock flashed a red light and made a buzzing sound. It was a reminder that now, according to the figure evolved on the ground before take-off, McCauley might begin the attempt at skip landing, the improbable but still least implausible procedure for getting the ship on to the ground in not more than two or three pieces. It should begin with a rocket-driven dive into the atmosphere. He was expected to have enough fuel for that. With downward velocity established, he should bleed out all the remaining nitric acid to emptiness. After it had been completely expelled, and not before, he should wait the number of seconds which would be equivalent to five hundred miles, and then jettison the hydrazine. By that time the ship should hit the outermost fringes of air. He should dive into it until the ship's skin temperature began to rise--a matter of fractions of seconds--and then let the ship bounce out again. It would have lost some velocity and would no longer be capable of remaining in an orbit. So it would come down into the air again, after an interval in which it would cool off, and again it would bounce out like a stone skipping across the surface of a pond until it has lost enough speed to settle quietly to the bottom.

If McCauley attempted such a landing system, his place of entry into the air for a dead-stick landing would not be less than one thousand miles from the point of the first bounce, and it might be three thousand. It could not be calculated. Fractions of seconds and seconds of arc would apply, so McCauley might start his skip-stop descent out above the Pacific Ocean, and the X-21 might finally ditch in the Atlantic somewhere off Newfoundland.

Furness tried to speak.

"Report," he said faintly. "I should report."

McCauley threw the switch for him. Furness summoned what seemed to be his last reserve of strength.

"X-21 reporting," he said almost naturally. "We are well past Hawaii and approaching the continent. Altitude...."

He was halfway through when green solid ground with very few clouds lay directly below, and the Rocky Mountains were a little way ahead. He could not quite detect their height, but the pattern of the soil was distinctive. McCauley flipped on his own throat-mike and said:

"I interrupt. Here is the situation. My fuel tanks read...." He snapped off the readings. "I'm going to swing the ship end for end and burn my remaining rocket fuel to kill velocity. Then I'll adopt such skip-stop practices as the situation requires. I doubt it will require them. We were lucky enough to get a nearly circular orbit. In consequence our velocity is lower than if we'd had to make an eccentric one. We saved fuel unexpectedly in getting into space, and I'm going to use it getting out. Over."

He cut off and made his preparations. His figuring was extremely close. But there had necessarily been a slight margin of fuel. A circular orbit does not require nearly the fuel expenditure that an elliptical one does. But McCauley had made the most efficient possible use of fuel at the beginning. He'd used one long blast, a two-second blast, and a one-second rocket thrust to get into nearly a perfect space trail. He meant to collect for that partly accidental expertness. But he meant to collect much more for an observation.

The observation was that a one-second blast was not a thousandth the ordeal that a sixty-second blast was. No man could survive a long-continued twenty-gravity acceleration. But most men could take a one-second push--and not only once, but many times. With time for recovery in between, and a rocket engine that fired infallibly when it was turned on....

He set the rocket timer.

"This," he said over his shoulder, "may be our last chance to exchange compliments, Furness. But I think you're the same kind of idiot as I am. I'd have come on this trip with my insides hanging out rather than stay behind. So would you. Very nearly, you did. It's nice to have known you. I hope we survive."