Part 5

“Not taking credit away from Biff, any good spaceman would have done what he did,” said Mr. Shannon. “But few would have attempted your trick of jumping into space after your sister with no way of getting back. Right, Biff?”

Biff nodded his plastic helmet. “It wasn’t the smartest thing you could have done, Steve, but it showed your bravery. Courage counts just as much as ability in a spaceman. Don’t ever forget that, son.”

Steve, who wanted to be a spaceman some day, would not forget it.

_THE FLYING MOUNTAIN_

Steve and Sue were playing a game as the freighter headed through space toward Earth. It was fun trying to see who could build the higher tower of sticks. The young Shannons were in extra good spirits. Before long they would be seeing Mom and their home in Arkansas, after being in space for so many months.

Steve carefully placed the last stick on his tower which was almost as high as he could reach.

“_I_ won, Sis!” he exclaimed. But as he drew his hand away, it brushed against the tower, causing the sticks to drift off in all directions.

“_I_ won!” Sue cried gleefully, “Yours broke up!”

Steve made a face and began picking the sticks out of the air before they floated too far. It was lack of weight in space that made it possible to play such a game. The twins would have hung in the air like the sticks if their shoe soles were not held to the floor by magnetism.

“I’ll beat you next time,” Steve boasted.

Before they could start again, their father came into the room. “It looks as though we may not be getting home as quickly as we had expected, kids. Captain Furman has received an S. O. S. from a passenger rocket that’s down on the asteroid, Sierra.” The twins knew an asteroid to be one of the thousands of tiny planets in the Solar System.

“Are we going to her aid?” Steve asked.

“It depends on whether we have enough fuel or not,” his father replied. “Even atomic fuel runs out sometime, you know. Captain Furman is talking with his officers now. It’ll be a shame if we can’t help the _Pole Star_—as much as I want to see Mom.”

It was just like his unselfish dad to say that, Steve thought. He felt the same way about it. And he didn’t doubt that tender-hearted Sue was of the same mind.

Mr. Shannon started out of the room again. “I’m going to see what they are going to do.”

Steve and Sue went back to their game. But somehow it wasn’t as much fun now. People were in trouble and trouble in space was often a frightening thing.

It seemed like a long time before their father came back. He walked in so fast that his magnetic shoes sounded like tiny hammers. “Kids,” he said, “the captain wants to see you.”

“_Us?_” Steve asked.

“That’s right. Come quickly.”

They went out, leaving some sticks in mid-air and others drifting off. The young Shannons walked shyly into the captain’s room where all the officers stood. Steve felt out of place among the neatly uniformed spacemen.

Mr. Shannon was in charge of cargo which the freighter dropped off at different ports in space, for he was an official of the American Space Supply Company. But he had nothing to do with the running of the ship.

“Young folks,” said the tall captain, who had a blond mustache, “we want you to help us solve a problem.”

“Sir?” Steve asked, puzzled.

“Here it is,” went on the chief, in his booming voice. “If we go on past Earth to Sierra to help the _Pole Star_, it’ll leave us with only a fifty-fifty chance of having enough fuel to reach Earth. But the _Pole Star_ is running short of supplies and their radio just went dead a while ago. It’s too late to get help from Earth. The crew is divided on what we should do, so I decided to call you two in to see what you think.”

A husky crewman spoke out boldly, “What do these kids know about space, Captain? They’re not even old enough to be out here! I say stick to our course and get this crew and ship back safely to Earth!”

The remark angered Steve, but the spaceman looked too big to talk back to. Sue wasn’t so timid.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” she exclaimed. “Thinking of yourself when other people are in trouble!”

Steve and his father were surprised at Sue’s outburst. Captain Furman and the other crewmen smiled.

“I think that solves our problem,” the captain spoke firmly. “If the young lady has courage enough to overlook the risk, the rest of us should have it, too. Thank you, Sue. We move at full rocket thrust to aid the _Pole Star_.”

As the Shannons went out into the corridor, Steve asked his sister, “Wow, Sue, what made you talk back to that big fellow like that?”

“He was so selfish!” Sue answered. “Besides, it made me mad to hear him say we didn’t know anything about space! Why, we’ve been over almost all of the Solar System, haven’t we, Dad?”

Her father pressed her shoulder. “Of course, honey. I’m proud of you, because I felt the same way.”

It took a few days for the freighter to reach the asteroid. The space ship, in going past the Earth, had come close enough for the Earth to be seen as a misty, green light. It made the twins long for home as they saw it.

“Sierra is like a big meteor, isn’t it, Dad?” Steve asked, as the three of them looked downward on the flat, egg-shaped rock.

His father nodded. “It’s often called, ‘The Flying Mountain,’ because of the low peaks on it. Sierra is only a mile long and less than that wide.”

“I remember from school that it wasn’t discovered until 1965,” Sue said.

“That’s because it’s so small and isn’t very bright in the sky,” her father spoke. “Most of the asteroids are much farther out, between Mars and Jupiter, but a few come in close to Earth like Sierra, Hermes, Eros and some others.”

The freighter landed safely in a flat area about two hundred feet from the _Pole Star_. The Shannons could see the damaged space ship jammed against a cliff. Brilliant sunshine reflected upward from bare dark rock, dazzling their eyes. It was over a hundred degrees on Sierra, for there was no atmosphere to check the sun’s heat.

“Boy, what a place for a sunburn!” Steve said.

“It’s certainly summertime on Sierra!” Sue added.

They watched crewmen in space suits come out of the freighter and begin uncoiling a spool of rope that would stretch between the two ships. Safety lines led from all the men back to the cargo ship.

“There’s almost no gravity at all here,” Mr. Shannon told his son and daughter, “because the asteroid is so small. If the people from the _Pole Star_—providing there are any alive—didn’t have the rope to hang on to, they might float right off Sierra.”

The children asked to go outside. The three suited up and went out, using safety lines, just in case.

The glare was so strong that they had to lower their darkening glasses over the face part of their helmets. The heat was such that they had to switch on the cooling outfits in their suits. It was strange to see the edge of the asteroid so close, just beyond a fringe of dagger-like peaks. It was like being on a big space raft.

The twins tried walking. They were less than feather-light and it was quite a job for them even to keep upright. Sue decided this wouldn’t be a very good place to spend a summer vacation.

Sue’s cooling outfit made her sneeze. She was lifted right off the ground and her father had to pull her down quickly. She and Steve laughed but they had been scared.

“See, it doesn’t take much to send you sky high!” Mr. Shannon joked, speaking over the radio set which all three of them carried in their space suits.

At last the crewmen, who had been moving so carefully over the ground toward the _Pole Star_, reached the ship and fastened the rope to it. The outer door of the _Pole Star_ was then opened by someone inside.

“Thank goodness somebody’s alive in there!” Mr. Shannon said thankfully. “I guess the ship just coasted into the rock wall without too much force.”

The freighter crew began helping people out of the passenger rocket. If things weren’t so serious, it would have been funny for Sue and Steve to see them in their balloon-like space suits, bouncing one careful step at a time and holding on for dear life to the rope.

As the party neared the freighter, the twins suddenly saw their father dash toward the ship. In his haste, Mr. Shannon seemed to have forgotten where he was and went scooting upward like a high-jumper.

“Dad!” Sue and Steve cried out together.

Mr. Shannon had to put out his hands and feet at the last minute to keep from crashing into the wall of the freighter. Then he pulled himself down to the ground with his safety line. When they saw that their father was unhurt, Sue and Steve began walking toward the ship with careful steps.

They heard their dad exclaim, “Mr. Ballinger!” as he walked over to one of the men from the _Pole Star_.

“John Shannon!” the man said.

It turned out that Mr. Ballinger was the president of the American Space Supply Company and was Mr. Shannon’s boss. Mr. Ballinger explained that the _Pole Star_ was heading for Mars when there was an explosion in the rocket tubes. By landing on Sierra the captain thought there was a better chance of their being found than if they had just kept drifting in space, because all ships knew the path of “The Flying Mountain.” No one had been hurt in the landing and the _Pole Star_ had enough fuel to get the freighter back to Earth.

“I don’t know whether I should fire you people or not for risking my good freighter just to save an old codger like me!” the friendly Mr. Ballinger joked.

“We almost didn’t,” Steve’s dad reminded him and explained how Sue’s outburst had decided the problem.

“You’ve certainly got some smart ones there, John,” Mr. Ballinger said, smiling at Sue and Steve. “Your son has already proved himself a hero before and now it’s Sue. Yes, sir, I sure wish I had a pair like them!”

But the twins scarcely heard him. They were thinking that, in spite of the great fun they had had on all their space adventures, how wonderful it was going to be to see Mom again and set foot on the grandest planet in all the Solar System—Earth!

_CASTAWAYS IN SPACE_

The two of them had just shoved the supply case against the chute door when the space ship gave an unexpected burst of rocket power, knocking Skip Miller against the release lever. The escape door shot up and a big square of black space opened before the boys’ eyes.

Glen Hartzell was stunned to see his friend go spinning down the incline and follow the supply case toward the open door. Automatically, Glen stretched his lean body full length trying to grasp Skip’s space suit before he escaped. But his momentum sent him skidding down the slope and the next thing he knew he was out in space, too.

A week ago Glen wouldn’t have cared whether he faced death or not. He and Skip had just made the scorned fraternity of “Wockies,” washed-out cadets. His failure had cut like a knife. He had wanted to pilot ships through the depths of space more than anything else in the world. Instead, he and Skip had been assigned to ground crews on Mars. That, at least, had been their destination until Skip’s elbow unexpectedly made them castaways in space.

Glen’s first thought was directed to Skip, who looked like a toy balloon as he drifted through the vacuum. “Skip!” he called over his space suit radio. “Do you hear me, Skip?”

“Yeah, Glen,” Skip’s reply was scarcely more than a squeak.

Glen looked down and ahead where a massive rock some ten miles in diameter hung in the starry emptiness. “If we can make Phobos, we may be all right.”

“We’re done for,” Skip groaned.

“We’re not!” Glen’s wits were sharpened by the danger. “We’re lined up pretty well with Phobos. She doesn’t have any gravity to speak of and we may be able to land on her.”

“We won’t make Phobos,” Skip argued. “We’ll either run into Mars’ gravity field and crash on its surface or float through space until our air runs out.”

“Shut up, Skip!” Glen’s tone was sharp. “Listen to me. See if you can pick up a little speed by kicking out behind with your feet and hands. If you can catch up with the supply case, hang on.”

Skip didn’t reply but Glen saw his arms and legs begin to move. Glen worked his own. It was a grueling effort, but Glen found that he was able to increase his speed much in the manner of a space ship’s thrust. By the time Glen touched Skip’s suit, both of them were sucking freely of their precious oxygen.

“What’s the idea?” Skip asked as his gloved hand clutched the strap of the supply case and Glen held onto him.

“We’ll use the case as a buffer to break our fall,” Glen explained. “Remember, it’s covered with foam rubber so that it won’t shatter when it hits.”

The two had been preparing to drop the emergency supply case on Mars at the time of the accident. Glen was glad now that they’d donned space suits.

Glen saw that the space ship was now only a tiny needle against the red disk of Mars. He and Skip had probably not even been missed by the crew. When they did find out, they wouldn’t know where to look for the boys.

Phobos was a jagged, frightening giant below, but Glen held nothing but love for it. Their speed had increased slightly, but it did not look as if they would hit the ground dangerously fast.

Glen felt Skip’s muscles tense for the landing.

“Steady, fellow!” Glen breathed.

He felt a rough jar in the pit of his stomach. Glen bounced off Skip’s back as though he were rubber. He spread out his arms to ease his fall, then was surprised to find his body settling down to rest as lightly as a leaf.

Glen felt a prickly chill in his cheeks. “We’ve got practically no weight at all!” he breathed. Skip had almost drifted off into space again, but Glen grabbed his leg and pulled him back.

“It’s a crazy world, isn’t it?” Skip searched the rocky landscape that sloped down from them on both sides. It was weird to be on a globe so tiny you were conscious of its roundness.

Glenn nodded. “We’ve _really_ got to keep both feet on the ground!”

“What if they don’t find us, Glen?” Skip asked. “What then?”

“I don’t know, Skip,” Glen sighed. “Let’s see what’s in the supply case.”

Glen was able to crawl better than he could walk over to the supply case. Skip followed. Glen pressed a button on the case and the top sprang up.

“Whew! There’s not much that isn’t included!” Skip said. “Spare oxygen tanks, a bubble tent outfit, food capsules, water maker, first-aid, flares, books, electronic stove-heater.”

“Let’s put up the bubble tent,” Glen said. “It’ll help save our heat.”

As he had learned in cadet training, he removed a cylinder from the outfit and pulled a lever. It popped open and a plastic bubble began growing out of it. The bubble, which was slightly oblong and transparent, enlarged to about seven feet, then detached itself from the cartridge airtight. After it had hardened for several minutes, Glen took an electric saw from the kit and cut a small door in the side. They made hinges from self-sealing plastic strips.

They used the foam rubber from around the case for flooring, then put the supplies inside the bubble. They turned on the heater and then turned off the heat units in their suits.

“How long do you figure our supplies can last, Glen?” Skip asked.

“They’re supposed to last two people ten days,” Glen replied. “Don’t you remember that question on our exam?”

“Don’t remind me!” Skip said. “I’m tired of hearing about the cadet corps.”

“I know,” Glen said bitterly.

“How could they flunk us on one question?” Skip asked. “It wasn’t fair.”

“I agree with you,” Glen answered, “but the fact remains that we’ve got to take it.”

Skip chuckled grimly. “You talk as if we have a lifetime ahead of us. We don’t know whether we’ve got _tomorrow_.”

“Which reminds me, we’d better send off some flares to let somebody know where we are.” Glen picked up some of the rocket flares and “drifted” out of the bubble tent. He set up a flare on its tripod legs, pointed it at Mars’ ruddy face and pulled on the release catch. But it wouldn’t move.

“It’s jammed!” Glen tried another rocket and got the same result. Then another, and another. They were all useless, all the catches warped, possibly from having been kept too near a heat source in the ship.

“How are we going to signal Mars now?” Skip asked.

“Anything we toss out will be drawn to the planet by its gravitation,” Glen was thinking out loud.

“How about throwing out some of the extra supplies we have?” Skip proposed. “We can attach a note.”

“It’s a million-to-one shot they’d be found. Don’t you realize that only a fraction of Mars has colonists? No, I’m afraid we’d wait here until doomsday if we had to count on that.”

“But what else is there to do?” Skip’s eyes were round with dread.

Glen fought down his own sudden despair. “It looks as though we’ll have to get to Mars on our own, Skip.”

“Now you’re crazy! We’d be smashed to pieces!”

“Not the way I’m thinking.” A plan was forming in Glen’s mind, as he scrambled into the bubble tent and came out with one of their engineering books. Skip watched in amazement as Glen began working math problems in the dirt with a piece of stone.

After a while, Glen said, “I think it’ll work, Skip. Want to take a chance?”

“I’d like to know what it is first.”

“We can use the chute from the supply case and attach it to the bubble,” Glen explained. “Then we can ride in the bubble to Mars.”

“It sounds fantastic!”

“I’ve figured it every way I know,” Glen said. “At least, it’s better than sitting here and hoping we’ll accidentally be found. Shall we try it?”

Skip shrugged. “If it’s our only chance. But I hope you’ve figured all the angles!”

“We’d better get started right away,” Glen advised. “We may need all our air tanks if we have to do some walking when we land.”

They set to work fastening the lines of the chute around and under the plastic bubble. They used more of the plastic strips to secure the lines tightly. The chute was still folded, since the vacuum on Phobos had failed to trip the automatic release. The boys decided to carry only a minimum of supplies to make their weight as light as possible. When they were ready to go, they climbed into the bubble and Glen shoved them off with one foot outside the door. Then he closed the door.

“How long will it take us to get there?” Skip asked.

“I’ve figured on about a hundred hours,” Glen answered. “That should put us close to Mars City, figuring on Mars’ rotation. But if it doesn’t, we should be able to reach some research settlement.”

They moved slowly at first. Glen hoped for only enough speed to carry them into Mars’ gravity pull. As they approached the red planet, their speed would increase and that worried Glen. If they whacked into Mars’ air blanket too fast, the chute might be ripped from the bubble.

To while away the many hours, the boys dozed and took turns reading the one novel they had brought along. Their legs soon became cramped and sore, and they would have given a good deal to have been able to stretch or walk about.

On the third day, the boys could see the canals criss-crossing in a tangled network on the ruddy globe of Mars. On the fourth day, just as Glen had figured, the glassite domes of Mars City began to show through the violet haze of atmosphere. Glen wondered how fast they were going. There was no way to tell because their insulation kept them from feeling the rush of air.

“Cross your fingers, Skip,” Glen warned. “Our chute should open in the next few minutes.”

The seconds appeared to last hours as they waited, and Glen suffered a torture of suspense. What if the chute did not open? In that case, they would end up in fragments on Mars’ red earth. Or what if the force of the air should jerk the chute off the bubble?

Even as Glen worried, he felt a sharp drag and was tumbled over on Skip.

“Look! The chute’s open!” Skip pointed overhead.

Some minutes later, the red ground rushed up at them like an enfolding blanket. Their final problem faced them now. If they landed safely, they would have conquered space in a way no spaceman had ever done before.

Glen’s muscles drew tight and his heart thumped rapidly as the last few hundred feet melted away. He wanted to close his eyes during these final seconds but he forced himself to watch the rising ground so that he could brace himself at the moment of contact. He was glad they had the foam rubber cushion beneath them.

Glen counted off the last few feet. “A hundred—fifty—twenty—!”

As they struck, Glen was thrown against the ceiling of the bubble. Plastic clattered against plastic as the bubble rolled over on the ground many times before stopping. Glen straightened himself out. He was shaken up but he was unhurt. He looked across at Skip.

“We made it,” Glen said, but his voice shook, as if he wasn’t yet able to believe it. He tore off the door seals, shoved out the door. Then they got out and stretched their legs. Looking at the domes of Mars City in the distance, Glen asked, “Ready to start walking?”

“After being cooped up like a chicken, I’m willing to walk all over Mars. Let’s go.” Skip’s natural good humor had returned.

Less than an hour later, an astonished captain at the Mars City spaceport heard the boys’ strange story.

“Your courage and ingenuity have been incredible!” the captain said when they had finished. “I can’t believe that you two are Wockies. If you weren’t flunked for reasons of scholarship, I’m sure you’ll be reinstated.”

“We weren’t flunked for that reason, sir,” Skip said.

“For what reason then?” the captain asked.

Glen smiled wryly as he replied, “We were flunked, sir, because we failed the test to determine whether we could bear up in an emergency or not!”

_THE BIG SPACE BALL GAME_

It was an unusual setting for baseball. Instead of a blue sky, there was the darkness of space and the brilliance of stars overhead. The light of Earth flooded the scene, and surrounding the oversized diamond were the walls of Copernicus crater, over fifty miles across.

On the mound, Bill Cherry was pitching practice balls to his catcher, Ollie Taylor. Only underhand throwing was allowed in baseball on the Moon, for the ball was exceedingly fast in the light gravity and airlessness. Bill, in snug-fitting space gear, was standing farther than the regulation ninety feet from the plate. This was because of the pitcher’s advantage over the batter in Lunar ball.

Bill wound up and threw. The ball shot like a bullet into Ollie’s double-padded mitt.

“Thatta boy, Bill!” Ollie’s voice came over Bill’s space suit radio. “If you’re this sharp when we meet the Comets this afternoon, we’re bound to win our first championship!”

“That’s enough practice, fellows!” Coach Lippert called, coming out of the dugout. “No use giving our best before the game!”

It was the _big_ game for the team from Plato, which was tied with the league leaders in this last game of the season. Plato was the farthest colony on the Moon and was named for the big crater in which it was located. Copernicus colony, the baseball leader, had won the championship every year since the school league had been formed. As a prize, the champions were always given a free rocket trip to Earth.

The Plato Rocketeers were homesick for their mother planet. One of them, little Pete Irby, had never set foot there. He had been born on the Moon.

“It must be wonderful to go around without even a space suit on like they do on Earth!” Pete said wistfully to Bill.

“Don’t worry, Pete,” Bill said confidently. “I have a feeling that this is our year and that we’re all going to Earth.”

“I sure hope you’re right,” Pete replied, with great feeling. “I can’t wait to see the great national parks and rivers and all the other wonderful things there!”

At game time the grandstand was filled and some people were standing. It was the largest crowd ever to see a ball game on the Moon. Much of the crowd was made up of hopeful parents from the Plato colony who had come seven hundred miles by rocket plane to see their boys play.