The Planet Strappers Part 10

Frank felt the intense anguish of trying to decide somebody else's quandary that might be a life or death matter which would surely involve them all. d.a.m.n, weak-kneed kid! How had he ever gotten so far?

"We should have set up his bubb first, put him inside, and spun it to kill that sense of fall!" Gimp said. "We'll do it, now! He should be all right. He _did_ pa.s.s his s.p.a.ce-fitness tests, and the experts ought to know."

With the three of them at it, and with the Kuzaks joining them in a moment, the job was quickly finished.

Meanwhile, the sharp, commanding voice of Ground Control sounded in their phones, again: "GOs-11 and -12 returning to port. Is all in order among delivered pa.s.sengers? Sound out if true. Baines, George?..."

David Lester's name was called just before Frank Nelsen's, and he managed to say, "In order!" almost firmly, creating a d.a.m.nable illusion, Frank thought. But for a moment, mixed with his anger, Frank felt a strange, almost paternal gentleness, too.

At the end of the roll call, the doors of the GO rockets closed. Stubby wings, useful for the ticklish operation of skip-glide deceleration and re-entry into the atmosphere, slid out of their sheaths. Little, lateral jets turned the vehicles around. Their main engines flamed lightly; losing speed, they dipped in their paths, beginning to fall.

Watching the rockets leave created a tingling sense of being left all alone, at an empty, breathless height from which you could never get down--a height full of dazzling, unnatural suns.h.i.+ne, that in moments would become the dreadful darkness of Earth's shadow.

"Hey--our spare drum--it'll drift off!" Ramos shouted.

The Kuzaks dived to retrieve the cylinder. Others followed. But there was a peculiar circ.u.mstance. The friction cover at one of its ends hung open. There was a trailing wisp of stellene--part of the bubb packed inside--and a thin, angry face with rather hysterical eyes, within the helmet of an Archer Five.

"Shhh--it ain't safe for me to come out yet," Glen Tiflin hissed threateningly. "d.a.m.n you all--if you dare queer me...!"

"Cripes--another Jonah!" Charlie Reynolds growled.

Frank Nelsen looked at the Kuzaks, floating near.

"Well--what could we do?" Joe Kuzak, the gentler twin, whispered. "He came back to Jarviston, to our rooming house, one night. We promised to help him a little. What are you going to do with a character nuts enough about s.p.a.ce to armor up and stuff himself inside a blastoff drum? Of course he didn't come that way from home. There's that electronic check of drum contents at the gate of the port. But he was there on a visitor's pa.s.s, waiting--having hitchhiked all the way to here. After the electronic check, he figured on stowing away, while the drums were waiting to be loaded. The only thing we did to help was to take a little of the stuff out of the spare drum and stow it in our two drums, to leave him some room. We thought sure he'd be caught, quick. But you can see how he got away with it. Those U.S.S.F. boys at the port don't really give a d.a.m.n who gets Out Here."

"Okay--I'll buy it," Reynolds sighed heavily. "Good luck with the stunt, Tif."

Tiflin only gave him a poisonous glare, as the nine fragile, gleaming rings, the drifting men and the spare drum, orbited on into the Earth's shadow, not nearly as dark as it might have been because the Moon was brilliant.

"We'd better rig the parabolic mirrors of the ionics to catch the first suns.h.i.+ne in about forty minutes, so we can start moving out of orbit,"

Ramos said. "We'll have to think of food, sometime, too."

"Food, yet--ugh!" Art Kuzak grunted.

Frank felt the fingers of spasm taking hold of his stomach. Most everybody was getting fall-sick, now, their insides not finding any up or down direction. But the guys wavered back to their bubbs. The shoulder ionics of their Archers, though normally sun-energized, could draw power from the small nuclear batteries of the armor during the rare moments when there could be darkness anywhere in solar s.p.a.ce.

The Planet Strappers stood in the rigging of their fragile vehicles, setting the full-sized ionics to produce increased acceleration which would gradually push the craft beyond orbit. Joe Kuzak ran a steel wire from a pivot bolt at the hub of his ring, to tow Tiflin and his drum.

Then everybody crawled into their respective bubbs, most of them needing the centrifugal gravity to help straighten out their fall-sickness.

"My neck is swelling, too," Frank Nelsen heard Charlie Reynolds say.

"Lymphatic glands sometimes bog down in the absence of weight. Don't worry if it happens to some of you. We know that it straightens out."

For a few minutes it seemed that they had a small respite in their struggle for adjustment to a fantastic environment.

"Well--I got cleaned up, some--that's better," Two-and-Two said. "But look at the fuzzy lights down on Earth. h.e.l.l, is it right for a fella to be looking down on the lights of Paris, Moscow, Cairo, and Rangoon--when he hasn't ever been any farther than Minneapolis?" Two-and-Two sounded fabulously befuddled.

David Lester started screaming again. They had left him alone and apparently unconscious, inside his ring, because all ionics, including his, had had to be set. Then, in the pressure of events, they had almost forgotten him.

"I'll go look," Frank Nelsen said.

Mitch Storey was there ahead of him. Mitch's helmet was off; his dark face was all planes and hollows in the moonlight coming through the thin, transparent walls of the vehicle. "Should we call the U.S.S.F.

patrol, Frank?" he asked anxiously. "Have them take him off? 'Cause he sure can't stand another devil-killer."

"We'd better," Frank answered quickly.

But now Tiflin, having deserted his blastoff drum, was coming through the airlock flaps, too. He stepped forward gingerly, along the spinning, ring-shaped tunnel.

"Poor bookworm," he growled in a tone curiously soft for Glen Tiflin.

"Think I don't understand how it is? And how do you know if he _wants_ to get sent back?"

Mitch had removed Lester's helmet, too. Tiflin knelt. His arm moved with savage quickness. There was the crack of knuckles, in a rubberized steel-fabric s.p.a.ce glove, against Lester's jaw. His hysterical eyes glazed and closed; his face relaxed.

For a second of intolerable fury, Frank wanted to tear Tiflin apart.

But Mitch half-grinned. "That might be an answer," he said.

They plopped where they were, and tried to rest until the orbiting cl.u.s.ter of rings emerged from Earth's shadow into blazing suns.h.i.+ne, again. Then Mitch and Frank returned to their own bubbs to check on the acceleration.

It was soon plain that Joe Kuzak's bubb, towing Tiflin's drum, would lag.

"h.e.l.l!" Art Kuzak snapped. "Get that character out here to help us inflate and rig his own equipment! We did enough for him! So if the Force notices that there are ten bubbs instead of nine, the extra is still just our spare... Hey--Tiflin!"

"Nuts--I'm looking after Pantywaist," Tiflin growled back.

"Awright," Art returned. "So we just cast your junk adrift! Come on, boy!" There was no kidding in the dry tone.

Tiflin snarled but obeyed.

Ions jetting from the Earthward hub-ends of the rotating rings, yielded their steady few pounds of thrust. The gradual outward spiral began.

"Cripes--I'm not sure I can even astrogate to the Moon," Two-and-Two was heard to complain.

"I'll check your ionic setting for you, Two-and-Two," Gimp answered him.

"After that the acceleration should continue properly without much attention. So how about you and me taking first watch, while the others ease off a little...?"

Frank Nelsen crept carefully back into his own rotating ring, still half afraid that an armored knee or elbow might go right through the thin, yielding stellene. p.r.o.ne, and with his helmet still sealed, he slipped into the fog which the tranquilizer now induced in his brain, while the universe of stars, Moon, sun and Earth tumbled regularly around him.

He dreamed of yelling in endless fall, and of climbing over metal-veined chunks of a broken world, where once there had been air, sea, desert and forest, and minds not unlike those of men, but in bodies that were far different. Gurgling thickly, he awoke, and snapped on his helmet phone to kill the utter silence.

Someone muttered a prayer in a foreign tongue:

"... _Nuestra Dama de Guadalupe--te pido, por favor... Tengo miedo_--I'm scared... _Pero pienso mas en ella_--I think more of her. _Mi chula, mi linda_... My beautiful Eileen... Keep her--"

The prayer broke off, as if a switch was turned. It had been brash Ramos... Now there were only some fragments of harmonica music...

Frank slipped into the blur, again, awakening at last with Two-and-Two shaking his shoulder. "Hey, Frankie--we're five hours out, by the chronometers--look how small the Earth has got...! We're all gonna have brunch in Ramos' vehicle... Know what that goof ball Mex was doing, before? Stripped down to his shorts, and with the spin stopped for zero-G, he was bouncing back and forth from wall to wall inside his bubb! The sun makes it nice and warm in there. Think I might try it, myself, sometime. Shucks, I feel pretty good, now... Frankie, ain't you hungry?"