“Yes, sir.”
“Very well, Lieutenant Mathers. Carry on.” The commodore twisted his mouth in a grim smile. “From this patrol I do not expect you to return before your full three weeks, Mathers. Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir.”
With a sinking relief in his stomach, Don turned and marched from the office. Out in the corridors, he let air from his lungs. That had been a close one.
He took his hovercart over to the officers’ quarters and changed into the coveralls which were universally worn in space. He left his papers and wrist chronometer in the locker. He went on back to the hovercart and took it out to the hangers to find that his V-102, his One Man Scout, had already been wheeled out. Several of the mechanics of his crew were giving it a last minute inspection.
He came up to the sergeant who was head of the crew and said, “How does she look, Wilkins?”
Sergeant Jerry Wilkins was an old hand. Theoretically, he could have retired but he was wedded to the job and as good a mechanic as any on the base. Wilkins could have taken apart and reassembled a One Man Scout in the dark.
Don was aware of the fact that the mechanic knew that nothing had been wrong with the V-102 on the last patrol and probably nothing on the preceding three aborted patrols. But the sergeant must have had a certain tolerance. He was too long in the Space Service not to be aware of the reality of space cafard and the fact that at one time or another there wasn’t a pilot who hadn’t been hit by it.
Wilkins was rubbing grease from his hands with a piece of waste. He said, with satisfaction, “Lieutenant, you won’t have no trouble with her this patrol. We’ve been working her over for the last three weeks. We’ve got her tuned like a chronometer.”
“Good,” Don said. “I’ve been beginning to think I was hexed.” He knew that the other knew he was lying, but you had to make the effort.
He was a bit behind time, due to his interview with the commodore but Don didn’t allow that to hurry him. He circled the V-102, the sergeant walking behind. Care was the essence, making the difference between getting back to where he started or blowing the ultra-hot little One Man Scout. He checked, checked, checked. Then he got in and settled down into the pilot seat. Once you were space borne in a One Man Scout there was no way of getting out until you returned to base. The larger craft, yes, the Monitors and even the smaller cruisers had lifeboats, but not a One Man Scout. If something happened to you in deep space, you were dead, period.
Now, automatically, he went over the procedure that was second nature to him. He began checking in one corner of the cockpit and went around it, missing nothing. Every switch, every meter, every screen, the cooling rheostats and the cabin pressurization, every gauge.
He said finally to Wilkins, through the hatch, “All right, Sergeant, let’s get this beetle into space.” He closed the hatch, dogged it down, knowing the sergeant was doing the same outside.
He could envision the ground crew driving up the lift and shortly the V-102 was being hoisted up onto it. He could feel the slow-moving vehicle trudging him over to the shuttlecraft and then the V-102 being lifted up into the cradle.
He switched on his communication screen. Lieutenant Risseeuw was piloting the shuttle. “Cheers, Jan,” Don said, “what spins?”
Jan Risseeuw said, “Hi, Don. Heard you’ve had trouble the last few patrols.”
“Yeah,” Don said, keeping his voice glum. “A regular jinx. If I don’t snap out of this, they’ll fire me and I’ll have to take a job being a Tri-Di star, or something.”
“Ha,” die other said. “All set down there?”
“Take her away,” Don said.
He knew damn good and well that Jan, as much so as his sergeant mechanic, knew as did every pilot on the base that Don Mathers was running scared, aborting patrol after patrol. And nobody could possibly like it. Fellow pilots tried to take care of their own, but the Space Service just wasn’t large enough to run sufficient patrols. More spacecraft were being poured into the skies, but there still weren’t enough. When Don Mathers was taking his three weeks leave of absence, after each patrol, his sector was empty. Command tried to cover by having his adjoining sectors manned during that period, in the same way as when he was on patrol while the adjoining pilots were on leave; but it still left a hole. And particularly did it leave a hole when a One Man Scout returned from a supposed three week patrol in just several days.
But that wasn’t his worry now.
Jan lifted and Don Mathers sunk back into his acceleration chair. This was the part he, and every other pilot, particularly hated, the initial lift into space. Among other things, this was where most of the danger was. If you were going to blow, four times out of five it was when you were lifting off, getting into initial orbit.
As always, they went up fast, out into the zone where it was safe for him to activate his nuclear engines. Out where Earth was no longer in danger, even if he blew.
Don said into the screen, “How’s Greta?”
“She’s all right,” Jan told him. “Going to drop her kid in about two weeks.”
“How many does that make?”
“Four.”
“Fifty years ago they could have jailed you.”
“That was before the Kradens. Now we need every human being we can get. When this planetary engineering really gets under way, we can populate Luna, Mars, and the Jupiter satellites, maybe even some of the others.”
“That’s the dream,” Don said. “Read the other day that they’ve located several asteroids that are solid ice. What they want to do is chivy them over and drop them onto Mars to melt”
“Sounds pretty far out. I’d hate to be under it when one of them dropped. But if they could swing it, it’d be something. I suppose you’d have as much water as a good-sized lake.”
Don said, “I was pretty well holed up this last three weeks. Anything new happened during that tune?”
“Not much. Marty Cantone reported he saw a Kraden over in his sector. Just a quick spotting and then it was gone.”
“Did he?”
Don could hear the other’s yawn. “Naw. When he got in, he was shaking with cafard. That boy ought to take the psych treatment.”
Don said carefully, “I ran into a guy the other day, a technician on the Luna radio telescopes, who claims there aren’t any Kradens. His theory is that they came that one time, half a century ago, found we were hostile, and took off and haven’t returned.”
Jan grunted. “He might be right.
“How could you, in a shuttle?”
Jan said, “I was in the Two Man Scouts for a couple of years. They pulled me out. Too susceptible to space cafard. They decided that not even a psych job would help for any length of time. Well, here we are, Don. Ready for the drop?”
“All set. See you, Jan. Give my regards to Greta.”
“Luck,” the shuttle pilot said.
Don could feel his craft falling away. For the moment, he was in free fall. His practiced hands darted about the cockpit, firing up his nuclear engines.
Under way, he turned to his navigation, flicking this, touching that, checking dials and gauges, getting the coordinates of his sector A22-K223 into the computer. He flicked his acceleration over to 2 Gs and felt himself pressed back into the acceleration chair.
Don Mathers was an old hand. He reached into his kit and brought forth a vacuum bottle. It supposedly contained fruit juice, and didn’t. He took a deep swig from it and then turned to his mini-tapes and selected one, a revival of an old-old two dimensional movie,
It was a far cry from the early days of the space age when with rocket engines you lifted off from Earth and headed for, say, Luna. You reached your escape velocity and from then on, until it was time to start braking, you coasted. No more, with the coming of nuclear powered engines. Now you could continue to accelerate until you reached almost to your destination. Aside from the speed, you also avoided the misery of free fall. Once arrived in
