Six

The acceleration, though it gave us a "down" we could refer to, wasn't enough to give us a sense of movement (if it ever is when it's constant); and we adjusted our masses so that we felt fairly normal (about half our usual mass).

And there we were, hanging in space for a week. At first, the earth receded quickly, though we weren't going any where near as fast as later, and we could see it go away from us, looking like a beautiful moon; and then as the moon came from behind it, like a moon with another tiny moon chasing it backwards.

We weren't, of course, going directly away from the earth, in one sense, since the shortest distance between two orbiting planets looks, on a chart, like anything but a straight line. We were subject to the momentum of the earth from both its rotation and its revolution in orbit, and we also had to hit, not where Jupiter was, but where it would be by the time we got there.

In any case, the earth seemed rather beside us for a great while, gradually, however, growing smaller and smaller (though less and less rapidly), until it began to recede into what looked like a planet when you see it through a telescope, and then all too soon a planet like the ones we could see with our naked eyes from earth.

At this point, all notion of movement was gone. We just hung there, surrounded by a myriad of fixed, brilliant stars, none twinkling, and the one large sun (but not so large as "ours" on earth), all in the absolutely black void. You got the impression that the "sky" was sucking in light; it was a kind of positive force that ate up what was not itself, not just a neutral background for everything. There is something malevolent about space; if it is nothing, it certainly doesn't feel like nothing when you're out in it.

There began to be no question but that the cabin was cramped. We could move around, but not much; and we envied the astronauts in the old movies, who had huge ships with race tracks for exercise. We had to do sit-ups and pushups and other exercises that took up no room to speak of.

"Next time," Mike said at one point, "we'll be smart enough to get a big plastic bag that we can inflate and stick onto the hatch door. Then at least we'll have some room to move around in."

"Sure, and if a meteorite comes along and punctures it," said Michele, "we'll find out what it's like to be sucked into the lovely outdoors."

"Typical," said Mike with a grin. "Leave it to you to zero in on what can go wrong." A look of pain passed for a second over Michele's face. "Forget it," he said.

I couldn't understand it. Keith had been so transparent, it seemed to me, and from the hints he dropped, I gathered that Mike's choice had been between coming with us or being framed on something that would send him to prison for a good long time. I'd expected him to be morose and sour, and was ready to put up with it because in fact we needed him and his expertise badly. But now that he was aboard, he seemed to be enjoying himself, and didn't give the least sign that he minded Michele's being there--if anything, the contrary. It was the most outstanding example of making the best of a bad thing that I'd ever seen, and I began to wonder whether Chinese inscrutability might be transmitted genetically after all.

Four days into the journey, and ten light-minutes away from earth (the delay-time of communication), Jupiter was already looking like a small moon out the forward port, with the Red Spot near the equator periodically appearing and disappearing around the planet, a vast sea of hydrogen you couldn't get a glimpse of because of the bands of bright and dark clouds that covered its surface. Speculation was that the Red Spot was red because it was a vortex or something that didn't have clouds and you could see the glowing interior of the planet (Jupiter was almost big enough to be a star; and its center certainly was an inferno).

"Look at that," I said. "If you stare at it long enough, you can almost see it moving." Jupiter has a day of only ten hours or so, in spite of its vast size.

"It's going to be fun chasing that thing around the planet if our calculations aren't right," said Mike.

"It seems impossible that we'll be able to fit the ship into it," said Michele; "and to think that the whole United States could fall in and just rattle around."

"That's one of the problems for our ostensible mission," said Mike. "I hope we hear some of those radio signals, so we can aim for them. If there actually is anything but liquid hydrogen in the Red Spot, we could still miss it even if we cruised around for weeks. Whatever's in there will have plenty of wide open space to get lost in."

"You never know," Michele answered. "Look at the oceans; you can't budge without finding life. Maybe Jupiter's like that."

"In an ocean of hydrogen? What would they breathe?"

"Hydrogen, of course."

"And then there'll be all those Jupiterian--or I guess Jovian--porpoises that are really intelligent beings we can communicate with; and they'll conveniently know English or talk by thought-transference, so there won't be any language problem. That's the thing that I never could swallow in science fiction."

"Well, who knows?" she said.

"I, for one."

"Oh, well sure. You--"

"What was that?" I said. A slight bump, that was all. But a bump out in space?

"Oh, oh," said Mike. "Start checking things."

"I'll get reporting to earth."

"A lot of good that'll do. It'll take twenty minutes to get an answer."

"You start looking; you know the procedure." I typed, "Just experienced a jolt. If you can find out what's wrong, advise us and keep talking without waiting for an answer."

"Your next project ought to be to change the speed of light," said Mike, while he and Michele looked over the instruments.

"It'd help."

"Here's what it is," said Michele, "and it's not good. The hydrogen tank of the first stage has lost pressure, and it's dropping fast."

"And we're changing direction," said Mike. I was typing everything into the communicator.

"Just the first stage, Mich?" I asked. "What about the tanks in the second stage?"

"They look full."

"That's a help. We can use them. Mike, what about the direction? Where are we headed?"

"About fifteen degrees on the plus side of azimuth, and ten altitude; but it's increasing. Evidently there's a hole in the side of the tank; we probably hit something. But we're not spinning to amount to anything; probably we got hit amidships."

"There's a vapor trail out the port," I said. "There goes our hydrogen."

"Mike, start punching coordinates." All the time, I was typing data into the communicator, and turning on the storage; the thought occurred to me that we might be moving out of the laser beam, or be tipped enough so our signal wouldn't reach earth. "We're probably going to have to do this pretty much ourselves. By the time they hear, we might be far enough off so that an answer won't be able to reach us. Thank God we're far enough out so the beam from earth is good and wide."

"We're drifting fast, Paul. In five minutes it says we'll be out of it."

"Lovely. Well, maybe they can follow the drift of our radio signal and compensate; but I wouldn't count on it. I tell you what. Take the yaw and pitch thrusters over, and see if you can turn this thing so that the hydrogen blowing out of that hole will push us back on course."

"What--Oh, I get it. Okay."

"And Michi, you see if you can figure out the orientation our antennas should have."

"I think we can do it," said Mike, as the universe turned outside the windows.

"I'm having trouble with the antenna," said Michele.

"Here, switch places," I said. "If we're lucky, we'll be back on course in a couple of minutes, and then we won't need too much adjustment. I'll have to watch Mike, though, so keep ducked."

"It's working," Mike said. "Apparently the hole's very big, because I can get more thrust out of the thrusters than it's making--and we've lost most of the hydrogen out of it already," he added, looking at the fuel gauge. "It must be a hole as big as the cabin! Man! I'd like to have seen what hit us!"

"When we get back in place, Mike, give us a quick spin."

"How'll we pull out of it? We'll just go spinning on forever."

"You forget we have practically no mass. When we get back into the proper orientation, I'll just add a lot of mass here, and it'll absorb the angular momentum."

"We better program this, or we'll overcorrect," he said, looking at the graphics on the screen. "I'll take care of it; you see to what the antenna has to do to keep headed toward earth."

That was fairly tricky, since the computer was too small to take in all the data of the new movements we had been having. I finally hitched one of the backups of the main computer to it to locate earth, and began to get Jonathan's voice in my ears.

"--were hit by a fairly large object, probably an asteroid. We're getting your instrument readings now along with the voice. I know you know you've been hit, but I'm just letting you know what we're aware of. At any rate, something tore a hole in the first stage and ruptured the hydrogen tank. It doesn't seem to have gone through, or to be in there, though; maybe it just glanced by and ripped off the skin as it went. It's begun to send you off cour--yes, I see you've noticed.

"I'd recommend that you just let it blow you off course; it won't last at this rate for more than an hour or less, and we can figure out what's happening and keep you in our sights, if you can keep your antenna pointed at us--"

Nothing.

"I'll bet he's tracking where he thinks we'll be," I said. "Beautiful."

"But our antenna's pointed at him, isn't it?" said Michele. "He can still hear us."

"I hope so. Radio spreads out a lot more than a laser does anyway, so he probably does. Of course, we won't know that for twenty minutes."

"It won't be that long," said Mike. "He'll be getting a steady flow of data from us, except for that minute or two when the antenna was off direction, and so he'll know we corrected things. I hope. Are you sending all of this stuff, Michele?"

"As much as I can. I'm not as good at this as Paul."

"Here, I think we can switch back," I said, and we changed couches again.

A few minutes later Jonathan's voice came back, with no information that was really helpful. By this time, the hydrogen was gone, and we were for practical purposes where we should have been, "Except," said Mike, "we're going sideways now, but it's in the right direction, so who cares up here? I mean, it's not worth the effort to try to rotate back and then foul up the antenna again."

It did put "down" in a rather strange place; but the acceleration was so slight that we all agreed that it didn't really make any difference; and after a couple of days, we forgot all about it. We had other things to occupy us by then anyway.

I then warned Jonathan that I was going to send a high-speed readout of everything from the time when the bump occurred, in case he missed anything. He, of course, was filling us in on what was happening (ten minutes ago) down there, and about five minutes later, he saw that he had got back into communication with us, and suggested that we send a high-speed readout. It's interesting to have followed instructions five or ten minutes before they're given.

Once we had checked out the instruments and verified them with the computers on the ground, we found that we still had a first-stage tank that was almost full of oxygen, and totally intact second and third stages.

"So we've got no worries about something to breathe," said Mike.

"Provided we can get at it if we need it," Michele remarked.

"Oh, we could," he answered. "If we really needed it."

"And as far as fuel is concerned," I said, looking at the computer screen, "It looks as though we could spend a month more here in space and still have enough to cruise around the Red Spot for a couple of weeks in case there's anything to see there."

"And to think the astronauts who used this thing barely got to the moon and back with all three stages!" said Michele.

"I really didn't have any worries about fuel as soon as I saw that the second stage hadn't been damaged," I said.

"All right," said Mike. "And now let me say what we've all been thinking: Now that everything's under control, we might as well go outside and take a look at what happened."

He was right. It hadn't got to the stage of a conscious thought with me, since I'd been so busy, but it was there in the back of my mind. There followed a considerable amount of discussion as to who was to go; and it turned out that at this particular stage of the proceedings, I was the one who'd do least damage if lost in space--which wasn't the way it was put, exactly, but which is what it amounted to, as I realized with some misgivings when I was putting forward my credentials--and so we all struggled into those body-shaped suitcases they called space suits, depressurized the cabin, and I climbed out. We had taken the precaution of installing electromagnets on our shoes and gloves, so that I stuck to the skin of the ship as if it were a floor.

Still, it didn't feel like a floor. Jupiter was by this time about three or four times as big as a harvest moon, with all its satellites arrayed around it, over my left shoulder as I clambered onto the ship. And as soon as I stood up, "over my shoulder" became "way down there," and I had for a while the feeling that I was going to fall all the way down to the planet. I crouched back down in a hurry and stuck my gloves onto the ship, while Michele's voice came in my earphones,"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I said, shakily. "Nothing really. I'm just disoriented for the moment," and I explained what I felt.

"Oh, yes, I read about that," she answered. "I forgot to warn you. They say you get over it. Don't look down--or maybe think of it as up or something."

Mike's rather scornful laughter made it pass perhaps a bit quicker than it might have, and I began--trailing the rope that tied me to the interior of the cabin--to inch my way back and around out of their sight and the sight of that striped pieplate pasted onto the blackness. Fortunately, this was where I needed to go anyway, and I could use that as an excuse to get somewhere where I would dare to stand up. Once there was nothing but starry blackness surrounding me, the ship became "down" again, and I had no problem walking on its surface.

And there it was: an enormous hole, halfway up the first stage, about the size of the space craft itself, blown into the skin. I walked over to the edge, where the metal was all bent inward.

"Whatever hit us seems to have bounced, or we bounced away from it," I said. "There's only one hole, and it's humongous; but I don't see anything on the other side, or even any debris except metal inside," I was leaning over and shining my light around.

"Probably a glancing blow," said Mike's voice. "If it hit us square on, it would have gone through and knocked us so far off course we'd never have got back."

"Looks like it," I said.

When I returned and we'd got comfortable again, we began discussing what to do.

"There's no sense carrying the first stage the rest of the way," I said. "We might as well jettison it right here."

"It seems a shame to lose all that oxygen," said Michele. "Who knows if we might need it? And with everything having so little mass, what difference would it make if we kept it on?"

"Just what were you planning to use it for?" said Mike.

"I don't know. But there's none around here, you know," she said a bit witheringly, "and what happens if we get hit again? I just like the security."

"She has got a point," I said. "It's not going to cost any--say!" "Oh, oh!" said Mike. "He's got that look in his eyes again!"

Michele looked closely at me, staring off into the starry black out the window, and said, "What is it this time?"

"It's probably crazy," I said, and I heard Mike mutter, "What idea of his isn't?" and I added, "but that hole looks big enough so that the hydrogen tank would fit over the nose of the ship down over the hatch. Suppose we stuck it on top of us. We've got welding equipment here, and they say that welds are simple in the vacuum out there."

"But why on earth . . . ?" said Michele.

"I get it!" said Mike. "We could climb out the hatch and have the whole tank to run around in! And we could fill it with oxygen from the oxygen tank! I wonder if we could do it!"

"I've got to hand it to you, Paul," said Michele, "you do think up things that would never occur to any sane mind. How do you think you'd ever stick it on?"

"Oh that," I said nonchalantly. "You forget that it has practically no mass. If we increase our mass to normal, we should be able to toss it around like a tennis ball." Theoretically. But I wasn't going to let her know that I had my doubts.

The three hours of debate on the subject need not be reported here, nor the annoying exchange with Jonathan on the ground, whose first incredulous reaction came, of course, twenty minutes after we told him our intentions, and a good ten minutes after we had filled him in on most of the details. It became a comedy of errors that I'd rather not recall. Communication in space at enormous distances has a great deal to recommend it, because you don't feel as isolated as Columbus and the early explorers must have felt; but it's no situation to hold a discussion in. Finally, I told him that we were going ahead anyway, so just to stand by and listen for results. This didn't stop his advice coming, of course.

In any case, we separated the stages, increasing their mass temporarily so that neither would go flying off crazily because of the force of the uncoupling, and then reduced the masses back down to where they could be handled. Mike and I then went out, with our mass up to normal to give us leverage. The problem that the early astronauts had in working in space was that they were weightless (as we were too, of course, since for safety now we had shut the engines down and were coasting), and the greater mass of what they were working on meant that when they turned a screw, they had to fight to keep from turning themselves instead of the screw. But we had the advantage of mass on our side, and so--theoretically, as I said--everything should be all right.

There was the first stage, floating behind us, within easy reach. By this time, I was fairly acclimated to being outside, and while Mike got his space legs, I--I won't say ran, but close to it--to the back of the second stage, leaned out and grabbed the first stage, which was as big as a downtown office building, swung it round with one hand, and as it came crashing down at us, held out my other hand, and stopped it dead.

Michele had her head poked out of the hatch, and was taking pictures and video disks of all of this. I still look at them sometimes and marvel. Mike cowered when he saw the stage about to hit him, but since I had it in my hand, I could feel that it felt almost nonexistent--it was more or less like holding onto a hologram that had decided it wanted to materialize a bit--and I knew that even if it hit us, it wouldn't do any more harm than being hit with a block of Styrofoam. But it sure looked impressive, especially when you knew it was the real thing, not just fancy photography.

Mike and I then just grabbed onto it and shifted it around so that we were on either side of the hole, and carried it to the nose of the ship. It didn't quite fit, which was a blessing in disguise, since we were able to open the hole to the right shape so that we could get it over the nose cone just enough so that the hatch would open inside it, and the windows of the space craft would still be on the outside. Cutting the metal with the welding equipment was no problem; and once we got it fitted on, taking the scraps we had cut off and making a seal wasn't much more difficult. It took us a whole day; but we really had nothing else to do, and it was fun, if exhausting.

"There," said Mike finally, as he had finished cutting a door with a crazy kind of air lock in it in the side of the hydrogen tank. "It looks horrible, but it should be tight. I'll stay out here, and you go inside and start filling it with oxygen. I'll see any leaks, and there shouldn't be any trouble plugging them; the oxygen escaping will help the weld."

This took us another day, and finally we had an enormous room to run around in. The explosion had even flattened most of the side of the hydrogen tank. so that we had a more or less flat floor. Mike had us running and jumping, even increasing our mass to normal, while he stayed outside to check leaks.

"Okay," he said when everything checked out. "A good solid jolt will break it apart, but the roads up here don't have too many chuckholes."

"Not too many," said Michele, thinking of what gave us the room in the first place.

"Anyway, we're past the asteroid belt now," I said. We've got at least two days to enjoy this; and who knows? If we're careful when we land on Jupiter, we might be able to hold onto it altogether.

Michele had managed to get some light into the stage, which wasn't adequate for seeing all through the vast area, but made it not quite so forbidding as it was originally, with the light from the cabin just streaming up in the middle; and we'd been able to use some padding to make ourselves little beds we could actually lie down on, and used scrap (there were some huge pieces of skin left over) to partition the area near the cabin into rooms where we could be somewhat private.

"Talk about the Swiss Family Robinson!" said Mike.

"More like the little house in outer space," she said.