He gasped just as the sign erased itself.
“What happened?” Li said.
“They’ve stopped talking. We haven’t much time.”
He handed the telescope back to Maybury and took up his screwdriver again. There was a clipboard of checklists for powering and firing the landing vehicle in an assortment of circumstances, but they were of limited value. None of them included the problem of using the craft’s engines while it was still clamped to the mother ship. Before Jameson dared cut in the engines, he and Li had to disconnect the safety circuits and improvise an entirely new firing sequence.
“What do you think?” he asked Li.
“Another half-hour.”
Jameson punched through to the bridge. Kay Thorwald’s plain, pleasant face showed up on the little screen.
“Ready to blast in a half-hour, Kay,” he said. “What’s the condition of the ship?”
“We’ve finished a preliminary damage survey, Tod. There’s nothing we can’t fix—in time. We’re not going to try to make the whole ring airtight. We’ll all just have to live in close quarters in a few of the compartments. Kiernan says he can get the air plant going—enough frozen seed stock survived.”
“How about the attitude controls? Can we get this ship pointed in the right direction?” He glanced down at the slip of paper Maybury was shoving under his nose. “Maybury says that if we fire in thirty minutes, you’ve got to line the ship up with Vega and keep correcting for the angle of my push.”
“Just a minute.”
She turned away from the screen toward a work table where Yeh was going over some diagrams with Fiaccone. She and Yeh talked a moment.
“Comrade Yeh says that we can do it. Some of our attitude jets are gone, but we can lock the ring and use the thrusters that normally set it spinning. There’s a good distribution of workable ones around the circumference. We’re feeding the problem to the computer now.”
“Thanks, Kay.”
He switched off and got the engine room. A harried-looking Chinese fusion tech said, “
Mike appeared on the screen, his hair and beard disheveled.
“How long?” Jameson said.
Mike scratched his head. “The Cygnans didn’t touch much,” he said. “But they bollixed things up just looking. Quentin will have the boron part of the cycle fixed in a couple of hours. But we can’t get a fusion reaction going for at least a day.”
“It’s up to Li and me, then,” Jameson said.
“You and the Giff,” Mike said and signed off.
Jameson looked out a port at the long shaft of the ship. Gifford’s white spacesuit was visible among the blue-clad Chinese strapping down a scoop-nosed drone that Jameson recognized as one of the Jupiter cloudtop orbiters. Just over the curve of the hull was the stubby shape of the vehicle that contained the radiation-shielded crawler that had been destined for a soft landing on Io. They had represented a bold ambition of the human race. Now, he thought sadly, neither of them would ever be used. Their increment of thrust—that’s all they were good for now.
He tried to attract Gifford’s attention through the port, but failed. He called Communications and got Sue Jarowski. “Sue,” he said, “can you patch me through to Gifford’s suit radio?”
“Right away.” He watched her face as she pushed buttons. The long Cygnan captivity had melted flesh from her wide Slavic cheekbones, making them even more prominent. Her full, bold mouth and strong chin were set in concentration. Absent-mindedly she pushed back a curtain of thick dark hair. Jameson was thinking how striking she looked when Gifford’s voice crackled from the speaker.
“Yeah?”
Outside, Gifford was looking in his direction. He raised a gloved hand and waved toward the window of the Callisto lander.
“How’s it coming?” Jameson said.
Gifford’s voice came over the sound of frying eggs. “Give us another couple hours and we can get one more drone out of its cocoon, pointed in the right direction, and bolted down. Then we gotta come inside. These boys can’t work under acceleration. It ought to be enough to start the push. When we run out of juice, we’ll come out again and strap on a cluster of rocket engines from the missiles.”
“A couple of hours?” Jameson said. “Can you cut that in half?”
“Commander,” Gifford called, sounding aggrieved, “I’ve got only five of these boys to work with, plus Smitty. And she’s still under your boat, bolting on the braces.”
“Can we break out of orbit with just the vehicles you’ve got ready now?”
“Maggie says no. If you want me to, I’ll ask her to run the figures through the computer again.”
Jameson’s face turned to stone. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’ll take her word for it. Just work as fast as you can.”
Maybury made a small choking sound behind him. “They’re coming,” she announced.
Jameson looked out the other port. Space was filled with a sudden hail of fire. Over a front that must have been a hundred miles across, streaks of light lengthened and shrank to points again, like golden straws tumbling among the stars.
“That was their turnover point,” Jameson said. “They’re halfway across. Decelerating at one g, they’ll be here in minutes.”
Li looked up from the console, his blunt peasant face smeared with grime where he’d wiped away sweat with stained fingers. “All through now,” he said. “Safety override is off. Now we should put it through test sequence.”
“No time,” Jameson responded. “We’ll have to take our chances.” He spoke into the mike pickup. “Gifford, hear this. Tell the men they have thirty seconds to find something to grab on to. We’re moving.”
He switched off before Gifford could object. Some of the men must have been listening through their own circuits. There was a scramble as stuffed blue dolls wrapped themselves around stanchions, hooked themselves onto safety rails. Immediately under the port, Jameson saw Smitty wriggle out from beneath the lander and glide belly-down along the hull until she found a grip.
He settled down in the pilot’s seat beside Li, and the two of them began to run through the newly edited checklist for powering the vehicle. Maybury crouched behind them, lightpad in hand, helping them keep track of all the changes.
It felt strange to be doing it this way, after all the months of training. He and Li had honed themselves for one purpose: to land the spidery craft on the surface of Jupiter’s second-largest moon. The lockers behind them were crammed with geological equipment. The little boxy hovercraft for exploring Callisto’s surface was still folded in its bay. Now the lander would never touch down. It had been turned into a tugboat.
The main engine fired, and the cabin shook with unplanned stresses. A few seconds later, Jameson saw through the port that Gifford had ignited the strapped probes by radio signal. Little jets flared along the shaft of the main ship and along the circumference of the ring, as Kay and Yeh compensated for the irregularities in direction of the thrust.
There was no sensation of movement yet. The buildup was going to be slow, slow.
Maybury’s voice came hesitantly. “Maggie’s calculations were correct, you know. This won’t break us out of orbit.”
Without turning his head, Jameson said, “You checked her figures, then?”
“Yes,” Maybury answered in a small voice.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jameson. “We’ll get ourselves into a return trajectory later. All I want to do now is get us moving!”
Slowly, like a freight train being pushed along the tracks by an elephant, the great wheel-and-axle of the Jupiter ship responded. Jameson could feel the first faint suggestion of weight on the seat of his pants. There was visible movement against the grid of stars, some of it lateral as the ungainly mass shuddered to align itself.
It wasn’t good enough.
