Part 2

An unintelligible buzz of voice murmured in the radios. Unconsciously Kevin tried to squeeze the earphones against his ears, but his heavily-gloved hands met only the rigid globe of his helmet.

"You get it, Bert?"

"No."

"This is Jones," a new voice loud and clear. "Earth says 15 seconds to blastoff."

"Rocket away!"

Like a tiny, clear bell the words emerged from static. Bert and Kevin gyrated their bodies so they could stare directly at the passing panorama of Earth below. They had seen it hundreds of times, but now 250 more miles of altitude gave the illusion they were studying a familiar landmark through the small end of a telescope.

"There it is!" Bert shouted.

A pinpoint of flame, that was it, with no apparent motion as it rose almost vertically toward them.

Then a black dot in an infinitesimal circle of flame--the rocket silhouetted against its own fire ... as big as a dime ... as big as a dollar....

... as big as a basketball, the circle of flame soared up toward them.

"It's still firing!" Kevin yelled. "It'll overshoot us."

As he spoke, the fire died, but the tiny bar of the rocket, black against the luminous surface of Earth, crawled rapidly up into their sector of starlit blackness. Then it was above Earth's horizon, nearly to the space station's orbit, crawling slowly along, almost to them--a beautiful long cylinder of metal, symbol of home and a civilization sending power to help them to safety.

Hope flashed through Kevin's mind that he was wrong, that the giant computer and the careful hands of technicians had matched the ship to their orbit after all.

But he was right. It passed them, angling slowly upward not 50 yards away.

Instantly the two men rode the rocket blast of their pistols to the nose of the huge projectile. But it carried velocity imparted by rockets that had fired a fraction of a minute too long.

Clinging to the metal with magnetic shoes, Morrow and Anderson pressed the triggers of the pistols, held them down, trying to push the cylinder down and back.

Bert's heavy breathing rasped in the radio as he unconsciously used the futile force of his muscles in the agonizing effort to move the ship.

Their pistols gave out almost simultaneously. Both reached for another. Thin streams of propulsive gas altered the course of the rocket, slightly, but the space station was smaller now, angling imperceptibly away and down as the rocket pressed outward into a new, higher orbit.

The rocket pistols were not enough.

"Get the hell back here!" Jones' voice blared in their ears. "You can't do it. You're 20 miles away now and angling up. Don't be dead heroes!" The last words were high and frantic.

"We've got to!" Morrow answered. "There's no other way."

"We can't do the impossible, chief," Bert gasped.

A group of tiny figures broke away from the rim of the space station. The tugmen were coming to help.

Then Kevin grasped the hideous truth. There were not enough rocket pistols to bring the men to the full ship and return _with any reserve to guide the projectile_.

"Get back!" he shouted. "Save the pistols. We're coming in."

Behind them their only chance for life continued serenely upward into a new orbit. There, 900 miles above the earth, it would revolve forever with more fuel in its tanks than it needed.

Fuel that would have saved the lives of 90 desperate men.

By leaving it, Morrow and Anderson had bought perhaps 30 more minutes of life before the space station became a huge meteor riding its fiery path to death in the the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

Both suffered the guilt of enormous betrayal. The fact that they could have done no more did not erase it.

Frantically, Kevin flipped over in his mind the possible tools that still could be brought to bear to lift the space station above its flaming destruction. But his tools were the stone axe of a primitive man trying to hack his way out of a forest fire.

* * * * *

Eager hands pulled them back into the station. For a moment there were the reassuring sounds as their helmets were unscrewed. Then the familiar smells and shape of the structure that had been home for so long. Now that haven was about to destroy itself.

Then Morrow remembered the Earth rocket that had brought Senator McKelvie to the great white sausage in space.

That rocket still contained a small quantity of fuel.

If fired at the precise moment, that fuel, anchored with the rocket in the hub socket, might be enough to lift the entire station.

He shouted instructions and men raced to obey. Kevin, himself, raced into the nearest tube. There was no sound, but ahead of him the hatch was open to the discharge chamber. He leaped into the zero gravity room.

McKelvie was crawling through the connecting port into the feeder rocket. Kevin sprawled headlong into Gordon. The recoil threw them apart, but Gordon recovered balance first.

He had a gun.

"Get back," he snarled. "We're going down." He laughed sharply, near hysteria. "We're going down to tell the world how you fried--through error and mismanagement."

"You messed up those lines," Kevin said. It didn't matter now. He only hoped to hold Gordon long enough for diversionary help to come out of the tube.

"Yes," Gordon leered. "We fixed the lines. The senator wasn't sure we should, but I helped him over his squeamishness, and now we'll crack the whip when we get back home."

"You won't make it," Kevin said. "We're still more than 600 miles high. The glide pattern in that rocket is built to take you down from 500 miles."

McKelvie's head appeared in the hatch. He was desperately afraid.

"You said you could fly this thing, Gordon. Can you?"

Max nodded his head rapidly, like a schoolboy asked to recite a lesson he has not studied.

Kevin was against the bulkhead. Now he pushed himself slowly forward.

"Stay back or I'll shoot?" Gordon screamed. Instead, he leaped backward through the hatch.

Hampered by his original slow motion, Kevin could not move faster until he reached another solid surface.

The hatch slammed shut before his grasping fingers touched it.

A wrenching tug jostled the space station structure. The rocket was gone, and with it the power that might have saved all of them.

Morrow ran again. He had not stopped running since the beginning of this nightmare.

He tumbled over Bert and Jones in the tube. They scrambled after him back to the control room. The three men watched through the port.

"If he doesn't hit the atmosphere too quick, too hard ..." Kevin whispered. His fists were clenched. He felt no malice at this moment. He did not wish them death. There was no sound in the radio. The plummeting projectile was a tiny black dot, vanishing below and behind them.

When the end came, it was a mote of orange red, then a dazzling smear of white fire as the rocket ripped into the atmosphere at nearly 20,000 miles an hour.

"They're dead!" Jones voice choked with disbelief. Kevin nodded, but it was a flashing thing that lost meaning for him in the same instant. He knew that unless a miracle happened, ninety men in his command would meet the same fate.

* * * * *

Like a perpetual motion machine, his brain kept reaching for something that could save his space station, his own people, the iron-nerved spacemen who knew they were near death but kept their vital posts, waiting for him to find a way.

Stories do not end unhappily--that thought kept cluttering his brain--a muddy optimism blanking out vital things that might be done.

"What's the altitude Jones?"

"520 now. Leveling a bit."

"Enough?" It was a stupid question and Kevin knew it. Jones shook his head.

"We might be lucky," he said. "We'll hit it about 97 miles up. The top isn't a smooth surface, it billows and dips. But," he added, almost a whisper, "we'll penetrate to about 80 miles before...."

"How much time?" Kevin asked sharply. A tiny chain of hope linked feebly.

"About 22 minutes."

"Bert, order all hands into space suits--emergency!"

While the order was being carried out, Kevin summoned the tugmen.

"How many loaded pistols do we have?"

"Six," the chief answered.

"All right. Get this quick. Anchor yourselves inside the hub. Aim those pistols at the Earth and fire until they're exhausted."

The chief stared incredulously.

"I know it's crazy," Kevin snapped. "It's not enough, but if it alters our orbit 50 feet, it'll help." The tugmen ran out. Bert, Kevin and Jones scrambled into space suits. Morrow called for reports.

"All hands," he intoned steadily, "open all ports. Repeat. Open all ports. Do not question. Follow directions closely."

Ten seconds later, a whoosh of escaping air signaled obedience.

"Now!" Kevin shouted, "grab every loose object within reach. Throw it at the Earth. Desks, books, tools, anything. Throw them down with every ounce of strength you've got!"

It was insane. Everything was insane. It couldn't possibly be enough.... But space around the hurtling station blossomed with every conceivable flying object that man has ever taken with him to a lonely outpost. A pair of shoes went tumbling into darkness, and behind it the plastic framed photograph of someone's wife and children.

Jones knew his superior had not gone berserk. He bent anxiously over the radar scope.

It was not a matter of jettisoning weight. Every action has an equal reaction, and the force each man gave to a thrown object was as effective in its diminuitive way as the exhaust from a rocket.

"Read it!" Morrow shouted. "Read it!"

"265 miles," Jones cried. "I need more readings to tell if it helped."

There was no sound in the radio circuit, save that of 90 men breathing, waiting to hear 90 death sentences. Jones' heavily-gloved hands moved the pencil clumsily over the graph paper. He drew a tangent to a new curve.

"It helped," he said tonelessly, "We'll go in at 100 miles, penetrate to 90...."

"Not enough," Kevin said. "Close all ports. Repeat. Close all ports!"

An unheard sigh breathed through the mammoth, complex doughnut as automatic machinery gave new breath to airless spaces.

It might never be needed again to sustain human life.

But the presence of air delivered one final hope to Morrow's frantic brain.

"Two three oh miles," Jones said.

"Air control," Kevin barked into the mike, "how much pressure can you get in 15 minutes?"

"Air control, aye," came the answer, and a pause while the chief calculated. "About 50 pounds with everything on the line."

"Get it on! And hang on to your hats," Kevin yelled.

The station dropped another 30 miles, slanting in sharply toward the planet's envelope of gas that could sustain life--or take it away. Morrow turned to Anderson.

"Bert. There are four tubes leading into the hub. Get men and open the outer airlocks. Then standby the four inner locks. When I give the signal, open those locks, fast. You may have to pull to help the machinery--you'll be fighting three times normal air pressure."

Bert ran out. Nothing now but to wait. Five minutes passed. Ten.

"We're at 135 miles," Jones said. Far below the Earth wheeled by, its apparent motion exaggerated as the space station swooped lower.

"120 miles."

Kevin's throat was parched, his lips dry. Increasing air pressure squeezed the space suits tighter around his flesh. A horror of claustrophobia gripped him and he knew every man was suffering the same torture.

"110 miles."

"Almost there," Bert breathed, unaware that his words were audible.

Then a new force gripped them, at first the touch of a caressing finger tip dragging back, ever so slightly. Kevin staggered as inertia tugged him forward.

"We're in the air!" he shouted. "Bert. Standby the airlocks!"

"Airlocks ready!"

The finger was a hand, now, a huge hand of tenuous gases, pressing, pressing, but the station still ripped through its death medium at a staggering 20,000 miles an hour.

Jones pointed. Morrow's eyes followed his indicating finger to the thermocouple dial.

The dial said 100째 F. While he watched it moved to 105, quickly to 110째.

* * * * *

Five seconds more. A blinding pain of tension stabbed Kevin behind the eyes. But through the flashing colors of agony, he counted, slowly, deliberately....

"Now!" he shouted. "Open airlocks, Bert. NOW!"

Air rushed out through the converging spokes of the great wheel, poured out under tremendous pressure, into the open cup of the space station hub, and there the force of three atmospheres spurted into space through the mammoth improvised rocket nozzle.

Kevin felt the motion. Every man of the crew felt the surge as the intricate mass of metal and nylon leaped upward.

That was all.

Morrow watched the temperature gauge. It climbed to 135째, to 140째 ... 145 ... 150....

"The temperature is at 150 degrees," he announced huskily over the radio circuit. "If it goes higher, there's nothing we can do."

The needle quivered at 151, moved to 152, and held....

Two minutes, three....

The needle stepped back, one degree.

"We're moving out," Kevin whispered. "We're moving out!"

The cheer, then, was a ringing, deafening roar in the earphones. Jones thumped Kevin madly on the back and leaped in a grotesque dance of joy.

* * * * *

Morrow leaned back in the control chair, pressed tired fingers to his temples. He could not remember when he had slept.

The first rocket from White Sands had brought power to adjust the orbit. This one was on the mark.

The next three brought the Senate investigating committee.

But that didn't matter, really. Kevin was happy, and he was waiting.

The control room door banged open. Mark Kramer's grin was like a flash of warm sunlight.

"Hi, commander," he said, "wait'll you see the marvelous pictures I got."

Outside the Moonbeam rode gently at anchor, tethered with new safety lines.