Of course, one is supposed to make other checks to prevent such mistakes. Somehow they hadn’t worked this time or the pilot hadn’t applied them. It wasn’t until a long time later that we found the full reason. The jammed oxygen valve, not the unhappy pilot, was the real culprit. I’d been the only one who had actually fainted, but the others had all been suffering from oxygen starvation. It’s a very dangerous complaint, because you don’t realize that there’s anything wrong with you. Indeed, you can be making all sorts of stupid mistakes, yet feel that you’re right on top of your job.
But it was not much use finding out why the accident had happened. The problem now was—what should be done next?
The extra speed we’d been given was just enough to put us into an escape orbit. In other words, we were traveling so fast that the earth could never pull us back. We were heading out into space, somewhere beyond the orbit of the moon, and wouldn’t know our exact path until we got HAVOC to work it out for us. Commander Doyle had radioed our position and velocity, and now we had to wait for further instructions.
The situation was serious, but not hopeless. We still had a considerable amount of fuel—the reserve intended for the approach to the Inner Station. If we used it now, we could at least prevent ourselves flying away from earth, but we should then be traveling in a new orbit that might not take us anywhere near one of the space stations. Whatever happened, we had to get fresh fuel from somewhere, and as quickly as possible. The short-range ship in which we were traveling wasn’t designed for long excursions into space and carried only a limited oxygen supply. We had enough for about a hundred hours. If help couldn’t reach us by that time, it would be just too bad.
It’s a funny thing, but though I was now in real danger for the first time, I didn’t feel half as frightened as I did when we were caught by Cuthbert or when the “meteor” holed the classroom. Somehow, this seemed different. We had several days’ breathing space before the crisis would be upon us. And we all had such confidence in Commander Doyle that we were sure he could get us out of this mess.
Though we couldn’t really appreciate it at the time, there was certainly something ironic about the fact that we’d have been quite safe if we’d stuck to the Morning Star and not ultra-cautiously decided to go home on another ship.
We had to wait for nearly fifteen minutes before the computing staff on the Inner Station worked out our new orbit and radioed it back to us. Commander Doyle plotted our path, and we all craned over his shoulder to see what course our ship was going to follow.
“We’re heading for the moon,” he said, tracing out the dotted line with his finger. “We’ll pass its orbit in about forty hours, near enough for its gravitational field to have quite an effect. If we want to use some rocket braking, we can let it capture us.”
“Wouldn’t that be a good idea? At least it would stop us heading out into space.”
The commander rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It depends on whether there are any ships on the moon that can come up to us.”
“Can’t we land on the moon ourselves, near one of the settlements?” asked Norman.
“No. We’ve not enough fuel for the descent. The motors aren’t powerful enough, anyway—you ought to know that.”
Norman subsided, and the cabin was filled with a long, thoughtful silence that began to get on my nerves. I wished I could help with some bright ideas, but it wasn’t likely they’d be any better than Norman’s.
“The trouble is,” said the commander at last, “that there are so many factors involved. There are several possible solutions to our problems. What we want to find is the most economical one. It’s going to cost a fortune if we have to call a ship up from the moon, just to match our speed and transfer a few tons of fuel. That’s the obvious, brute-force answer.”
It was a relief to know that there was an answer. That was really all that I wanted to hear. Someone else would have to worry about the bill.
Suddenly the pilot’s face lit up. He had been sunk in gloom until now and hadn’t contributed a word to the conversation.
“I’ve got it!” he said. “We should have thought of it before! What’s wrong with using the launcher down in Hipparchus? That should be able to shoot us up some fuel without any trouble, as far as one can tell from this chart.”
The conversation then grew very animated and technical, and I was rapidly left behind. Ten minutes later the general gloom in the cabin began to disperse, so I guessed that some satisfactory conclusion had been reached. When the discussion had died away, and all the radio calls had been made, I got Tim into a corner and threatened to keep bothering him until he explained what was going on.
“Surely, Roy,” he said, “you know about the Hipparchus launcher?”
“Isn’t it that magnetic thing that shoots fuel tanks up to rockets orbiting the moon?”
“Of course. It’s an electro-magnetic track about five miles long, running east and west across the crater Hipparchus. They chose that spot because it’s near the center of the moon’s disk and the fuel refineries aren’t far away. Ships waiting to be refueled get into an orbit round the moon, and at the right time they shoot up the containers into the same orbit. The ship’s got to do a bit of maneuvering by rocket power to ‘home’ on the tank, but it’s much cheaper than doing the whole job by rockets.”
“What happens to the empty tanks?”
“That depends on the launching speed. Sometimes they crash back on the moon; after all, there’s plenty of room for them to come down without doing any harm! But usually they’re given lunar escape velocity, so they just get lost in space. There’s even more out there!”
“I see. We’re going near enough to the moon for a fuel tank to be shot out to us.”
“Yes; they’re doing the calculations now. Our orbit will pass behind the moon, about five thousand miles above the surface. They’ll match our speed as accurately as they can with the launcher, and we’ll have to do the rest under our own power. It’ll mean using some of our fuel, of course, but the investment will be worth it!”
“And when will all this happen?”
“In about forty hours. We’re waiting for the exact figures now.”
I was probably the only one who felt really pleased with the prospect, now that I knew we were reasonably safe. To the others, this was a tedious waste of time, but it was going to give me an opportunity of seeing the moon at close quarters. This was certainly far more than I could have dared hope when I left earth. The Inner Station already seemed a long way behind me.
Hour by hour earth dwindled and the moon grew larger in the sky ahead. There was very little to do, apart from routine checks of the instruments and regular radio calls to the various space stations and the lunar base. Most of the time was spent sleeping and playing cards, but once I was given a chance to speak to Mom and Pop, way back on earth. They sounded a bit worried, and for the first time I realized that we were probably making headlines. However, I think I made it clear that I was enjoying myself and there was no real need for any alarm.
All the necessary arrangements had been agreed upon, and there was nothing to do but wait until we swept past the moon and made our appointment with the fuel container. Though I had often watched the moon through telescopes, both from earth and from the Inner Station, it was a very different matter to see the great plains and mountains with my own unaided eyes. We were now so close that all the larger craters were easily visible along the band dividing night from day. The line of sunrise had just passed the center of the disk, and it was early dawn down there in Hipparchus, where they were preparing for our rescue. I asked permission to borrow the ship’s telescope and peered down into the great crater.
It seemed that I was hanging in space only fifty miles above the moon. Hipparchus completely filled the field of vision; it was impossible to take it all in at once glance. The sunlight was slanting over the ruined walls of the crater, casting mile-long pools of inky sha
dow. Here and there upthrust peaks caught the first light of dawn and blazed like beacons in the darkness all around them.
There were other lights in the crater shadows, lights arranged in tiny, geometric patterns. I was looking down on one of the lunar settlements. Now hidden from me in the darkness were the great chemical plants, the pressurized domes, the spaceports and the power stations that drove the launching track. In a few hours they would be clearly visible as the sun rose above the mountains, but by then we should have passed behind the moon and the earthward side would be hidden from us.
And then I saw it, a thin bar of light stretching in a dead straight line across the darkened plain. I was looking at the floodlights of the launching track, ranged like the lamps along an arterial road. By their illumination, space-suited engineers would be checking the great electromagnets and seeing that the cradle ran freely in its guides. The fuel tank would be waiting at the head of the track, already loaded and ready to be placed on the cradle when the time arrived. If it had been daylight down there, perhaps I could have seen the actual launch. There would have been a tiny speck racing along the track, moving more and more swiftly as the generators poured their power into the magnets. It would leave the end of the launcher at a speed of over five thousand miles an hour, too fast for the moon ever to pull it back. As it traveled almost horizontally, the surface of the moon would curve away beneath it and it would sweep out into space to meet us, if all went well, three hours later.
I think the most impressive moment of all my adventures came when the ship passed behind the moon, and I saw with my own eyes the land that had remained hidden from human sight until the coming of the rocket. It was true that I had seen many films and photographs of the moon’s other side, and it was also true that it was very much the same as the visible face. Yet somehow the thrill remained. I thought of all the astronomers who had spent their lives charting the moon, but had never seen the land over which I was now passing. What would they have given for the opportunity that had now come to me, and come quite by chance, without any real effort on my part!
I had almost forgotten earth when Tim Benton drew my attention to it again. It was sinking swiftly toward the lunar horizon: the moon was rising up to eclipse it as we swept along in our great arc. A blinding blue-green crescent, the South Polar cap almost too brilliant to look upon, the reflection of the sun forming a pool of fire in the Pacific Ocean—that was my home, now a quarter of million miles away. I watched it drop behind the cruel lunar peaks until only the faint, misty rim was visible; then even this disappeared. The sun was still with us, but the earth had gone. Until this moment it had always been with us in the sky, part of the background of things. Now I had only sun, moon and stars.
The fuel container was already on its way up to meet us. It had been launched an hour before, and we had been told by radio that it was proceeding on the correct orbit. The moon’s gravitational field would curve its path and we would pass within a few hundred miles of it. Our job then was to match speeds by careful use of our remaining fuel and, when we had coupled our ship up to the tank, pump across its contents. Then we could turn for home and the empty container would coast on out into space to join the rest of the debris circulating in the solar system.
“But just suppose,” I said anxiously to Norman Powell, “that they score a direct hit on us! After all, the whole thing’s rather like shooting a gun at a target. And we’re the target.”
Norman laughed.
“It’ll be moving very slowly when it comes up to us, and we’ll spot it in our radar when it’s a long way off. So there’s no danger of a collision. By the time it is really close, we’ll have matched speeds and if we bump it’ll be about as violent as two snowflakes meeting head on.”
That was reassuring, though I still didn’t really like the idea of this projectile from the moon tearing up at us through space….
We picked up the signals from the fuel container when it was still a thousand miles away, not with our radar, but thanks to the tiny radio beacon that all these missiles carried to aid their detection. After this I kept out of the way while Commander Doyle and the pilot made our rendezvous in space. It was a delicate operation, this jockeying of a ship until it matched the course of the still-invisible projectile. Our fuel reserves were too slim to permit any more mistakes, and everyone breathed a great sigh of relief when the stubby, shining cylinder was hanging beside us.
The transfer took only about ten minutes, and when our pumps had finished their work the earth had emerged from behind the moon’s shield. It seemed a good omen. We were once more masters of the situation and in sight of home again.
I was watching the radar screen, because no one else wanted to use it, when we turned on the motors again. The empty fuel container, which had now been uncoupled, seemed to fall slowly astern. Actually, of course, it was we who were falling back, checking our speed to return earthward. The fuel capsule would go shooting on out into space, thrown away, now that its task was completed.
The extreme range of our radar was about five hundred miles, and I watched the bright spot representing the fuel container drift slowly toward the edge of the screen. It was the only object near enough to produce an echo. The volume of space which our beams were sweeping probably contained quite a number of meteors, but they were far too small to produce a visible signal. Yet there was something fascinating about watching even this almost empty screen—empty, that is, apart from an occasional sparkle of light caused by electrical interference. It made me visualize the thousand-mile-diameter globe at whose center we were traveling. Nothing of any size could enter that globe without our invisible radio fingers detecting it and giving the alarm.
We were now safely back on course, no longer racing out into space. Commander Doyle had decided not to return directly to the Inner Station, because our oxygen reserve was getting low. Instead, we would home on one of the three Relay Stations, twenty-two thousand miles above the earth. The ship could be reprovisioned there before we continued the last lap of our journey.
I was just about to switch off the radar screen when I saw a faint spark of light at extreme range. It vanished a second later as our beam moved into another sector of space, and I waited until it had swept through the complete cycle, wondering if I’d been mistaken. Were there any other spaceships around here? It was quite possible, of course.
There was no doubt about it. The spark appeared again, in the same position. I knew how to work the scanner controls and stopped the beam sweeping so that it locked on to the distant echo. It was just under five hundred miles away, moving very slowly with respect to us. I looked at it thoughtfully for a few seconds and then called Tim. It was probably not important enough to bother the commander. However, there was just the chance that it was a really large meteor, and they were always worth investigating. One that gave an echo this size would be much too big to bring home, but we might be able to chip bits off it for souvenirs—if we matched speed with it, of course.
Tim started the scanner going as soon as I handed over the controls. He thought I’d picked up our discarded fuel container again, which annoyed me since it showed little faith in my common sense. But he soon saw that it was in a different part of the sky and his skepticism vanished.
“It must be a spaceship,” he said, “though it doesn’t seem a large enough echo for that. We’ll soon find out. If it’s a ship, it’ll be carrying a radio beacon.”
He tuned our receiver to the beacon frequency, but without results. There were a few ships at great distances in other parts of the sky, but nothing as close as this.
Norman had now joined us and was looking over Tim’s shoulder.
“If it’s a meteor,” he said, “let’s hope it’s a nice lump of platinum or something equally valuable. Then we can retire for life.”
“Hey!” I exclaimed. “I found it!”
“I don’t think that counts. You’re not on the crew and shouldn’t be here anyway.”
“Don’t worr
y,” said Tim, “no one’s ever found anything except iron in meteors, at least not in any quantity. The most you can expect to run across out here is a chunk of nickel steel, probably so tough that you won’t even be able to saw off a piece as a souvenir.”
By now we had worked out the course of the object and discovered that it would pass within twenty miles of us. If we wished to make contact, we’d have to change our velocity by about two hundred miles an hour—not much, but it would waste some of our hard-won fuel and the commander certainly wouldn’t allow it, if it was merely a question of satisfying our curiosity.
“How big would it have to be to produce an echo this bright?” I asked.
“You can’t tell,” said Tim. “It depends on what it’s made of and which way it’s pointing. A spaceship could produce a signal as small as that, if we were only seeing it end on.”
“I think I’ve found it,” said Norman suddenly. “And it isn’t a meteor. You have a look.”
He had been searching with the ship’s telescope, and I took his place at the eyepiece, getting there just ahead of Tim. Against a background of faint stars a roughly cylindrical object, brilliantly lit by the sunlight, was very slowly revolving in space. Even at first glance I could see it was artificial. When I had watched it turn through a complete revolution, I could see that it was streamlined and had a pointed nose. It looked much more like an old-time artillery shell than a modern rocket. The fact that it was streamlined meant that it couldn’t be an empty fuel container from the launcher in Hipparchus; the tanks it shot up were plain, stubby cylinders, since streamlining was no use on the airless moon.
Commander Doyle stared through the telescope for a long time after we called him over. Finally, to my joy, he remarked: “Whatever it is, we’d better have a look at it and make a report. We can spare the fuel, and it will only take a few minutes.”