The Planet Strappers Part 2

Jig Hollins wrote in swooping, arrogant circles, that came, perhaps, from his extra jobs as an advertising sky writer with an airplane.

Frank Nelsen was next, and Charlie Reynolds was last. Theirs were the most indistinctive signatures in the lot. Just ordinary writing.

"So here we all are, on a piece of paper--pledged to victory or death,"

Reynolds laughed. "Anyhow, we're out of a rut."

Nelsen figured that that was the thing about Charlie Reynolds. Some might not like him, entirely. But he could get the Bunch unsnarled and in motion.

Old Paul Hendricks had come back from waiting on some casual customers in the store.

"Want to sign, too, Paul?" Reynolds chuckled.

"Nope--that would make thirteen," Paul answered, his eyes twinkling.

"I'll watch and listen--and maybe tell you if I think you're off beam."

"Here comes Otto with the beer and sandwiches," Ramos burst out.

They all crowded around heavy Otto Kramer and his basket--all except Frank Nelsen and Paul Hendricks, and Eileen Sands who made the ancient typewriter click in the little office-enclosure, as she typed up the order list that Nelsen would mail out with a bank draft in the morning.

Nelsen had a powerful urge to talk to the old man who was his long-time friend, and who had said little all during the session, though he knew more about s.p.a.ce travel than any of them--as much as anybody can know without ever having been off the Earth.

"Hey, Paul," Frank called in a low tone, leaning his elbows across a workbench.

"Yeah?"

"Nothing," Frank Nelsen answered with a lopsided smile.

But he felt that that was the right word, when your thoughts and feelings became too huge and complicated for you to express with any ease.

Grandeur, poetry, music--for instance, the haunting popular song, _Fire Streak_, about the burial of a s.p.a.ceman--at orbital speed--in the atmosphere of his native planet. And fragments of history, such as covered wagons. All sorts of subjects, ideas and pictures were swirling inside his head. Wanting to sample everything in the solar system...

Home versus the distance, and the fierce urge to build a wild history of his own... Gentleness and l.u.s.t to be fulfilled, sometime. There would be a girl... And there were second thoughts to twist your guts and make you wonder if all your savage drives were foolish. But there was a duty to be equal to your era--helping to give dangerously crowded humanity on Earth more room, dispersal, a chance for race survival, if some unimaginable violence were turned loose...

He thought of the names of places Out There. Serenitatis Base--Serene--on the Moon. l.u.s.ty, fantastic Pallastown, on the Golden Asteroid, Pallas... He remembered his parents, killed in a car wreck just outside of Jarviston, four Christmases ago. Some present!... But there was one small benefit--he was left free to go where he wanted, without any family complications, like other guys might have. Poor Dave Lester. How was it that his mother allowed him to be with the Bunch at all? How did he work it? Or was she the one that was right?...

Paul Hendricks had leaned his elbows on the workbench, too.

"Sure--_nothing_--Frank," he said, and his watery eyes were bland.

The old codger understood. Neither of them said anything for a minute, while the rest of the Bunch, except Eileen who was still typing, guzzled Pepsi and beer, and wolfed hotdogs. There was lots of courage-lifting noise and laughter.

Ramos said something, and Jig Hollins answered him back. "Think there'll be any girls in gra.s.s skirts out in the Asteroid Belt, Mex?"

"Oh, they'll arrive," Ramos a.s.sured him.

Nelsen didn't listen anymore. His and Paul's attention had wandered to the largest color photo thumbtacked to the wall, above the TV set, and the shelf of dog-eared technical books. It showed a fragile, pearly ring, almost diaphanous, hanging tilted against spatial blackness and pinpoint stars. Its hub was a cylindrical spindle, with radial guys of fine, stainless steel wire. It was like the earliest ideas about a s.p.a.ce station, yet it was also different. To many--Frank Nelsen and Paul Hendricks certainly included--such devices had as much beauty as a yacht under full sail had ever had for anybody.

Old Paul smirked with pleasure. "It's a shame, ain't it, Frank--calling a pretty thing like that a 'bubb'--it's an ugly word. Or even a 's.p.a.ce bubble.' Technical talk gets kind of cheap."

"I don't mind," Frank Nelsen answered. "Our first one, here, could look just as nice--inflated, and riding free against the stars."

He touched the crinkly material, draped across its wooden support.

"It _will_," the old man promised. "Funny--not so long ago people thought that s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+ps would have to be really rigid--all metal. So how did they turn out? Made of stellene, mostly--an improved form of polyethylene--almost the same stuff as a weather balloon."

"A few millimeters thick, light, perfectly flexible when deflated,"

Nelsen added. "Cut out and cement your bubb together in any shape you choose. Fold it up firmly, like a parachute--it makes a small package that can be carried up into orbit in a blastoff rocket with the best efficiency. There, attached flasks of breathable atmosphere fill it out in a minute. Eight pounds pressure makes it fairly solid in a vacuum.

So, behold--you've got breathing and living room, inside. There's nylon cording for increased strength--as in an automobile tire--though not nearly as much. There's a silicone gum between the thin double layers, to seal possible meteor punctures. A darkening lead-salt impregnation in the otherwise transparent stellene cuts radiation entry below the danger level, and filters the glare and the hard ultra-violet out of the suns.h.i.+ne. So there you are, all set up."

"Rig your hub and guy wires," old Paul carried on, cheerfully. "Attach your sun-powered ionic drive, set up your air-restorer, spin your vehicle for centrifuge-gravity, and you're ready to move--out of orbit."

They laughed, because getting into s.p.a.ce wasn't as easy as they made it sound. The bubbs, one of the basic inventions that made interplanetary travel possible, were, for all their almost vagabondish simplicity, still a concession in lightness and compactness for atmospheric transit, to that first and greatest problem--breaking the terrific initial grip of Earth's gravity from the ground upward, and gaining stable orbital speed. Only a tremendously costly rocket, with a thrust greater than its own weight when fully loaded, could do that. Buying a blastoff pa.s.sage _had_ to be expensive.

"Figuring, scrounging, counting our pennies, risking our necks," Nelsen chuckled. "And maybe, even if we make it, we'll be just a third-rate group, lost in the crowd that's following the explorers... Just the same, I wish you could plan to go, too, Paul."

"Don't rub it in, kid. But I figure on kicking in a couple of thousand bucks, soon, to help you characters along."

Nelsen felt an embarra.s.sed lift of hope.

"You shouldn't, Paul," he advised. "We've overrun and taken possession of your shop--almost your store, too. You've waived any profit, whenever we've bought anything. That's enough favors."

"My dough, my pleasure... Let's each get one of Reynolds' beers and hotdogs, if any are left..."

Later, when all the others had gone, except Gimp Hines, they uncovered the Archer, which everyone else had tried. Paul got into it, first. Then Nelsen took his turn, sitting as if within an inclosed vault, hearing the gurgle of bubbles pa.s.sing through the green, almost living fluid of the air-restorer capsule. Chlorophane, like the chlorophyl of green plants, could break up exhaled carbon dioxide, freeing the oxygen for re-breathing. But it was synthetic, far more efficient, and it could use much stronger sunlight as an energy source. Like chlorophyl, too, it produced edible starches and sugars that could be imbibed, mixed with water, through a tube inside the Archer's helmet.

Even with the Archer enclosing him, Nelsen's mind didn't quite reach. He had learned a lot about s.p.a.ce, but it remained curiously inconceivable to him. He felt the frost-fringed thrill.

"Now we know--a little," he chortled, after he stood again, just in his usual garb.

It was almost eight o'clock. Gimp Hines hadn't gone to supper, or to celebrate decision on one of the last evenings of any kind of freedom from work. He couldn't wait for that... Under fluorescent lights, he was threading wire through miniature grommets, hurrying to complete the full-size ionic drive. He said, "Hi, Frank," and let his eyes drop, again, into absorption in his labors. Mad little guy. Tragic, sort of. A cripple...

"I'll shove off, Paul," Nelsen was saying in a moment.

Out under the significant stars of the crisp October night, Nelsen was approached at once by a shadow. "I was waiting for you, Frank. I got a problem." The voice was hoa.r.s.e sorrow--almost lugubrious comedy.

"Math again, Two-and-Two? Sure--shoot."

"Well--that kind is always around--with me," Two-and-Two Baines chuckled shakily. "This is something else--personal. We're liable--honest to gosh--to _go_, aren't we?"

"Some of us, maybe," Nelsen replied warily. "Sixty thousand bucks for the whole Bunch looks like a royal heap of cabbage to me."

"Split among a dozen guys, it looks smaller," Two-and-Two persisted.

"And you can earn royal dough on the Moon--just for example. Plenty to pay back a loan."

"Still, you don't pick loans off trees," Nelsen gruffed. "Not for a shoestring crowd like us. We look too unsubstantial."

"Okay, Frank--have that part your way. I believe there still is a good chance we _will_ go. I _want_ to go. But I get to thinking. Out There is like being buried in millions of miles of nothing that you can breathe.

Can a guy stand it? You hear stories about going loopy from claustrophobia and stuff. And I got to think about my mother and dad."

"Uh-huh--other people could be having minor second thoughts--including me," Frank Nelsen growled.