A strut had given way, and a section of the solar panel was off center. It had to be straightened, and we couldn’t turn off the thrust while we did it. True, our total thrust was tiny, a quarter of a percent of a gravity, hardly enough to notice, but we needed it all.
Because otherwise we’d go out toward the Belt but we wouldn’t get there, and by the time the Shack—Skylark, now—returned inevitably to Earth orbit there’d be no one alive aboard her.
I noticed all the work, but I didn’t help. Someone cursed me, but I went on, looking for Halfey.
I saw him. I dove for him, neglecting safety lines, forgetting everything. I had to get to him before that connector went.
His suit blew open across the middle. As if the fabric had been weakened with, say, acid. Jack screamed and tried to hold himself together.
He had no safety line either. When he let go he came loose from the spiderweb. Skylark pulled away from him, slowly, two and a half centimeters per second; slow but inexorable.
I lit where he’d been, turned, and dove for him. I got him and used my reaction pistol to drive us toward the airlock.
I left it on too long. We were headed fast for the airlock entrance, too fast, we’d hit too hard. I tumbled about to get Jack across my back so that I’d be between him and the impact. I’d probably break a leg, but without Halfey I might as well have a broken neck and get it over with.
Leon Briscoe, our chemist, had the same idea. He got under us and braced, reaction pistol flaring behind us. We hit in a menage à trois, with me as Lucky Pierre.
Leon cracked an ankle. I ignored him as I threw Halfey into the airlock and slammed it shut, hit the recycle switch. Air hissed in.
Jack had a nosebleed, and his cough sounded bad; but he was breathing. He’d been in vacuum about forty seconds. Fortunately the decompression hadn’t been totally explosive. The intake line to his suit had fractured a half second before the fabric blew…
The Moon grew in the scopes. Grew and kept growing, until it wasn’t a sphere but a circle, and still it grew. There were mountains dead ahead.
“How close?” I demanded.
Dot had her eyes glued to a radar scope. “Not too close. About a kilometer.”
“A kilometer!” One thousand meters. “You said two, before.”
“So I forgot the shuttle pilot.” She continued to stare at the scope, then her fingers bashed at the console keyboard. “Make that 800 meters,” she said absently.
I was past saying anything. I watched the Moon grow and grow. Terror banished the last of my hangover; amazing what adrenalin in massive doses can do.
Jill looked worse than I did. And I didn’t know. Were we lovers?
“Thirty seconds to periastron,” Dot said.
“How close?” McLeve asked.
“Five hundred meters. Make that four-fifty.”
“Good,” McLeve muttered. “Closer the better.”
He was right; the nearer we came to the Moon, the more slingshot velocity we’d pick up, and the faster we’d get to the Belt.
“Periastron,” Dot announced. “Closest approach, four twenty-three and a fraction.” She looked up in satisfaction. Potato eyes smiled. “We’re on our way.”
On Earth we were heroes. We’d captured the downers’ imaginations. Intrepid explorers. Before we were out of range we got a number of offers for book rights, should we happen to survive.
There were even noises about hydrogen shipments to the Moon. Of course there was nothing they could do for us. There weren’t any ships designed for a three-year trek.
Certainly Skylark wasn’t. But we were trying it.
There were solar flares. We all huddled around McLeve’s house, with as much of our livestock as we could catch stuffed into his bedroom. It took weeks to clean it out properly afterward. We had to re-seed blighted areas and weed out mutated plants after each flare. More of our recycled air was coming from the algae tanks now.
In a time of the quiet sun we swarmed outside and moved all of the mirrors. The sun was too far away now, and the grass was turning brown, until we doubled the sunlight flooding through the windows.
But it seemed we’d reach Ceres. Already our telescopes showed five boulders in orbit around that largest of the asteroids. We’d look at them all, but we wanted the smallest one we could find: the least daunting challenge. If it didn’t have ice somewhere in its makeup, the next one would, or the next.
And then we’d all be working like sled dogs, for our lives.
I was circling round the outside of Skylark, not working, just observing: looking for points with some structural strength, places where I could put stress when the real work began. Win or lose, with or without a cargo, we would have to get home a lot faster than we came. The life support system wouldn’t hold up forever. Something would give out. Vitamins, water, something in the soil or the algae tanks. Something.
Our idea was to build a mass driver, a miniature of the machine that had been throwing rocks at us from the Moon. If we found copper in that rock ahead—a pinpoint to the naked eye now, near the tiny battered disk of Ceres—we could make the kilometers of copper wire we’d need. If not, iron would do. We had power from the sun, and dust from the rocks around Ceres, and we’d send that dust down the mass driver at rocket-exhaust speeds. Home in ten months if we found copper.
I went back inside.
The air had an odd smell when I took off my helmet. We were used to it; we never noticed now unless we’d been breathing tanked air. I made a mental note: mention it to Jill. It was getting stronger.
I had only the helmet off when Jean and Kathy Gaynor came to drag me out. I was clumsy in my pressure suit, and they thought that was hilarious. They danced me around and around, pulled me
