Chef Vlad emerged from the kitchen and pressed little cups of brandy into our hands. I took a sip through the straw and felt a numbing, reassuring heat against my throat.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Medicinal purpose only,” he said, patting my back. “We need food. No, no, do not argue with me. I know about food and how and when people need it. I will make food for us now!”
In the lounge Dr. Turgenev had a pencil and a slide rule, and was frantically doing calculations on a notepad. Sir Hugh sat strapped into an armchair, his eyes tightly shut, as though hoping he’d open them to a new and better day.
“Well,” said Miss Karr with a sardonic smile. “We’ve come through one scrape. With all the big brains around here, I’m sure we’ll get through this one too.”
We all nodded and said yes, yes.
But we didn’t talk much after that. I think we were all too scared to voice our fears, in case they swelled and billowed and filled the room to bursting. The captain had turned the heat down, and already it was getting chilly, so we went up to our cabins briefly for extra clothing.
Aside from the cold, the ship felt not one bit different, but this wasn’t reassuring at all. It made it worse, because we could almost force ourselves to believe we were still making our normal descent earthward—but only for a second, and then it was like learning the crushing truth all over again.
The captain and Tobias came downstairs to join us. There was little need for anyone on the bridge right now. There was no way of piloting the Starclimber. Tobias looked very pale. He accepted a cup of brandy and took a big swallow.
I noticed a small leather-bound book in Captain Walken’s hand.
“There’s no prayer yet for loss of life in outer space,” he said. “The closest I could find was for the sea.”
He opened the book and we all bowed our heads.
“Lord God, as we commit the body of our brother Charles Shepherd to the deep, grant him peace and tranquility….”
The prayer was brief and beautiful, but I can’t say I found it comforting. I didn’t like thinking of his body all alone out there.
After a moment’s silence Captain Walken looked up at us. “Now then, we need to find a way back to earth.”
I was amazed at how easily he said it. It wasn’t a question but a confident statement of fact. Going home was within our grasp; he was telling us all we needed to do was bend our wills to the task.
Just then Chef Vlad appeared from the kitchen and summoned us all to the table to eat. For a moment, Captain Walken looked like he was about to object, but then he just smiled and nodded. Like obedient children, we drifted to the dining area, buckled ourselves to our seats, and let Chef Vlad put food before us. It smelled delicious.
I picked up my cup of water. “To Mr. Shepherd.”
“To Mr. Shepherd,” the others said solemnly.
It felt good to eat, and was surprisingly comforting: to chew, to swallow, to feel something satisfied inside you.
“Dr. Turgenev,” said the captain, “I see you’ve been making notes. Do you have any ideas?”
The Russian scientist blew air out his cheeks. “Ship was designed only to climb cable. So we did not make engines. Why make engines, since cable was unbreakable?”
“Well, it bloody well wasn’t, was it?” puffed Sir Hugh. “A little barnacle just ate it!”
“Unbreakable on earth,” said Dr. Turgenev. “We test and test it….” He trailed off, like he couldn’t quite believe this terrible thing had happened.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Turgenev,” said Sir Hugh. “That was uncalled for.”
Hovering over the table, eating tidbits from Miss Karr, Haiku let loose with an explosive fart that jetted him halfway across the lounge.
“Miss Karr,” said Sir Hugh, “it’s a shame we can’t harness your monkey’s flatulence to get home.”
I stared at the drifting monkey and had a brainstorm.
“That’s it!” I said. “Jet propulsion, like the etherians!”
Tobias was looking at me like I’d cracked, but then I saw the light come on in his eyes.
“We’ve got no rocket engines,” I said, “but we do have compressed gas. There’s an emergency tank of oxygen in the air lock.”
Captain Walken was nodding, a smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “Carry on, Mr. Cruse.”
“Open the valve, out it shoots—and off we go!” I said.
Kate’s eyes were wide. “Surely that can’t be enough to get us back to earth.”
“We’re weightless,” I told her. “There’s a lot of force in that canister. Dr. Turgenev, what do you think?”
“It is crude form of propulsion,” he said.
“It’s the only one we have,” I replied.
The Russian scientist looked glum. “We cannot control thrust or duration. Once valve is opened, gas will vent until gone. It will be single big push.”
“But could it get us home?” Captain Walken asked.
Dr. Turgenev rocked his head from side to side. “I don’t know.” I could tell he was getting interested in the problem, and I watched him with a mixture of dread and hope. “Let me see tank. Go get for me.”
At once I glided down to the air lock, unstrapped the emergency tank, and floated it back up to Dr. Turgenev. He peered at it over the top of his spectacles, making a few notations on his notepad, murmuring the names of symbols and numbers to himself. He looked very unhappy, and my heart sank.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “I think, given current speed, this would give us enough thrust to make reentry.”
“Thank heavens for farting monkeys,” said Miss Karr.
“How would we rig it?” I asked. “We can’t just point the tank out the hatch and turn it on.”
“We’d need to affix it to the outside hull,” said Captain Walken. “Very securely.”
“I can weld it,” Tobias said. “We’ve got the equipment aboard.”
“We forget something,” said Dr. Turgenev dolefully. “Please remember that earth’s atmosphere is thick, yes? Very dense. Remember shooting stars? That is rock, burning up as it hits atmosphere.”
“I don’t understand,” said Kate. “We always meant to reenter the atmosphere. No one talked about burning up before!”
“But on the cable we’d be going pretty slowly,” I said. “Only a hundred twenty-five miles an hour.”
“And that is not problem,” Dr. Turgenev said. “Now we make reentry at maybe, ah, seventeen thousand miles an hour.”
“That much?” said Sir Hugh, aghast.
Dr. Turgenev angled his hand steeply down to the table. “If we enter too steep, heat is too much, and we burn up. Pfffft! If too shallow”—he leveled off his hand, grazed the table, and deflected off it—“we skip off atmosphere like stone hitting water. We must make sure angle of ship is just right. But is impossible, because there is no way of steering Starclimber.”
This silenced everyone. I hadn’t thought about steering. It wasn’t as if a rudder would help us in outer space.
“The etherians have vents all over their bodies,” said Kate. “Isn’t there any way we could do the same kind of thing?”
“This is very complex system of thrusters,” said Dr. Turgenev. “I do not think we have time or resources up here.”
“The toilets!” Kate exclaimed.
“The girl’s come unhinged,” said Sir Hugh. “It’s no wonder, the pressure we’re all under.”
“I am not unhinged,” Kate said impatiently.
“No, no, she’s right,” I said, understanding. “The toilets flush out waste. It’s like a little controlled explosion. They could give us a push.”
“We have two toilets,” said Kate, beaming. “A-Deck and B-Deck, and they’re more or less on opposite sides of the ship, aren’t they?”
Captain Walken nodded. “Would those be enough to adjust our angle, Dr. Turgenev?”
“This is very crude,” said Dr. Turgenev doubtfully, pursing his lips.
> I wouldn’t let my hopes cool so swiftly this time; by now I knew the tortuous way Dr. Turgenev thought things through.
“Maybe yes, it works,” said the scientist morosely. “We would have to flush toilets great deal. What we must do is this: We must angle ship where she can best take heat during reentry.”
“The stern,” said Captain Walken. “She’s thickest there, apart from the porthole. Tobias, can you weld something over that?”
Tobias nodded. “A couple layers of spare hull plate maybe.”
“Good,” said Dr. Turgenev. “We make reentry stern first, at angle of…um…I need to make more calculations for this.”
“So that means we’ll want the oxygen tank at the ship’s bow,” I said.
“Dead center,” said the captain. “The dome’s summit. There’s alumiron plate around the cable shaft.”
“It must point straight as arrow,” Dr. Turgenev told Tobias. “We need true course. You can do this, Mr. Blanchard?”
“Yeah. I’ll need help, though.”
“I’ll lend a hand,” I said, starting to feel truly hopeful.
“Um, forgive me,” said Sir Hugh with a bitter chuckle. “Even assuming we can reenter earth’s atmosphere, what then? We’ll just plummet to our deaths in a giant tin can!”
“Don’t worry, Sir Hugh,” said the captain. “We had two emergency hydrium balloons built into the bow, just in case the rollers gave out on descent.”
“The big boys think of everything after all,” said Miss Karr.
“Actually I was against plan,” said Dr. Turgenev. “I thought it needless. Mr. Lunardi overruled me.”
“And we’re very glad of it,” said Miss Karr.
“Once we’re back in the sky, we can inflate the balloons,” the captain said, “and they should slow our fall.”
“Enough to give us a soft landing?” Sir Hugh asked.
“Soft enough,” said the Russian scientist. “Now I must do mathematics, please.”
“Dr. Turgenev, we don’t have a great deal of time,” the captain said gently.
“I know, I know. I work swiftly.”
The Starclimber seemed almost unbearably small and lonely, as Tobias and I made our way through space to the bow. No cable ran through the ship’s center, guiding her home. Below us turned the earth, but it moved slowly compared to us. Cut loose from Ground Station, we hurtled around the planet in our fatal orbit.
Earlier on the voyage, I’d grown tired of seeing the same view of the Pacificus from our fixed spot. I’d wished we could swoop around earth like some cosmic bird. I was getting my wish now, at a terrible price. Asia was below us, Japan just coming into view over the eastern horizon. The music of the spheres played faintly in my head, but I couldn’t help feeling it had a mocking tone now.
Without Shepherd, it fell to Captain Walken to spot us from the air lock. Dr. Turgenev manned the bridge, watching us through the glass dome. Drifting behind us on tethers was all the equipment we’d need for the job ahead: the oxygen canister, Tobias’s bulky arc-welding gear, and an additional pouch of tools.
“You’re not to get all giddy and fly off to the moon,” I said to Tobias over the radio.
I heard his chuckle. “Promise.”
We’d already made a separate trip to the ship’s stern, to weld a cover onto the crow’s nest porthole. I hoped it was enough. I thought of the immense heat the ship would have to endure when we reentered.
We reached the dome’s summit. We positioned ourselves securely and then started to maneuver the equipment into place. Tobias was surprisingly deft despite his bulky gloves. Inside the Starclimber he’d fixed a thick metal collar around the oxygen tank—our rocket—so he could weld it more securely to the outside hull.
I did my best to hold the tank steady for him. From the corner of my eye I saw the spark of intense blue light from Tobias’s torch as he set to work. It took all my attention and strength to keep the tank straight. It was to be our one and only engine, and if it wasn’t properly fixed, it wouldn’t send us on a true path home.
“Let’s trade places,” Tobias said. “I need to weld the other side.”
When he finished, I inspected his handiwork. The tank looked as if it had been designed to fit atop the Starclimber’s dome.
“That’s a fine job,” I said.
“Should hold it.”
I looked at the tank’s valve. When it was time, a good turn would release a jet of compressed oxygen that would rocket our ship earthward. Back home. Back to the sky.
“We’re coming back in,” I told the captain over my headset. “The Starclimber now has rocket power.”
Fluttering all around us on the bridge were Dr. Turgenev’s sheets of paper, each of them covered with a bewildering swirl of equations and diagrams. He’d suddenly flail about, snatch one, check something, and then go back to scribbling on his notepad and looking along his astrolabe.
I’d learned enough celestial navigation at the Academy to know what he was doing. He was finding reference points in the heavens, so he could calculate our current trajectory around the planet. And from that he’d figure out the angle, speed, and distance of our reentry. I shuddered at the task. We were asking a great deal of him. There was no room for even one wrong calculation. A decimal point could mean the difference between life and death.
“Very complicated,” he muttered to himself. “Very complex, everything moving. We move. Earth moves. Earth rotates. Earth revolves…”
My face felt feverish, even though the heaters were turned to their lowest setting. Captain Walken, Tobias, and I were all on the bridge, furiously performing the calculations that Dr. Turgenev set us. There was much talking as facts and figures flew among us.
Earth, turning at one thousand forty-seven miles per hour…
The Starclimber, moving at fifteen thousand miles an hour in an eastward equatorial orbit that was deteriorating as we accelerated…
Earth’s gravity pulling us in, changing our trajectory, pulling us lower…
The shape of our orbit changing from circle to ellipse, slinging us around earth faster and faster with every minute…
Nothing was still, just as Dr. Turgenev said. Take too long to solve one equation, and all the numbers had already changed.
“Mr. Cruse,” the scientist said, snapping his fingers, “do you have figures I gave you?”
I handed him my piece of paper. “Please check them, Dr. Turgenev. I wouldn’t trust myself…”
His bloodshot eyes glanced over my workings. “Good, Mr. Cruse, this is very good. Thank you.”
I’d struggled with math and physics at the Academy, and never thought those wretched theorems would be of any use. I was glad now I’d forced myself to master them.
I glanced once again at the ship’s clock, ticking seconds, and felt like I was watching sand hurtle through an hourglass.
Captain Walken had unfurled a map of the world and fastened it to the chart table, making notations. We’d picked the prairies as our ideal landing site, just to the east of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. It was as flat as you could hope, and the winds would be light.
“If we deploy the hydrium balloons at forty thousand feet, here,” the captain told us, pointing with his dividers, “then we can free-balloon to earth, venting hydrium as necessary.”
It would be a tricky business, but we’d have plenty of space, and our landing was bound to be in a field of wheat or corn.
“What is all this scribbling here?” Dr. Turgenev said irritably.
We all turned to the Russian scientist, who was squinting at a sheet of paper like he’d never seen it before in his life. I leaned closer to have a peek.
“Weren’t those your final calculations, Dr. Turgenev?” I said, trying not to sound worried. I think we were all concerned that, under the stress, Dr. Turgenev might suffer a bout of astral psychosis. His was the only mind capable of getting us back home safely.
“This is complete gibberish,” he murmured, then: “Oh…yes??
?I see now. This is done. This is it. Good. We are finished. Look here.”
He floated closer to the map and pointed to the steppes of Mongolia. “We reenter atmosphere here, at angle of no greater than seven and a half degrees. Then we travel east over Pacificus and Rocky Mountains. And then if we have not melted—little joke, ha-ha—we come out over prairies. This is what will happen.”
Captain Walken patted him on the shoulder. “Thank you, Dr. Turgenev.”
Step by step we went through the entire reentry procedure. There were parts where I had to concentrate very hard, to stop my mind straying to the disasters that could crush us at each turn. I needed to focus only on what we must do if we had any hope of survival. It was a sequence of daring and risky events, held together by fraying cobweb.
“Are we all clear?” Captain Walken said.
There were a few little tricky bits that we went over a second time.
“We’re out of time,” I said, looking at the ship’s clock.
Tobias looked at the voltmeter. “Our batteries are near worn out,” he said.
“As long as the ventilation system keeps ticking over, that’s all we need,” I said.
“Not quite,” Tobias reminded me. “We’ll need enough power to launch the emergency balloons with the explosive bolts.”
“We must align Starclimber now,” Dr. Turgenev said. He made his way over to the astrolabe. “I stay here to check ship’s position against stars and earth. I will need several minutes to prepare. Captain, you stay here and relay my instructions via ship’s phone. Mr. Cruse and Mr. Blanchard, go below and get ready to flush toilets!”
When Tobias and I emerged from the bridge, Kate was waiting on A-Deck at the base of the stairs, looking furious.
“I was just about to come up and find out what’s going on!” she said.
“We’ve been hammering out the reentry plan,” I told her.
“I’m sure you have, but you’ve been up there two hours and you need to tell the rest of us what’s happening! You can’t just forget about us down here! It’s very inconsiderate!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and truly I was. It must have been terrible for them, waiting and waiting while we made our calculations. I thought for a moment she was going to burst into tears, but then her eyes grew fierce again.