Rocket Jockey Read online

  But he knew it was hopeless to trust to memory. The belt became thicker at three hundred million miles from the sun, and went on until it finally petered out at a little over two hundred million miles. In all that space, it was impossible to guess accurately where there would be danger of a collision.

  Surprisingly, Tod was less worried than he was. The engineer had grown up in the belt and had rarely left it. To him, the hunks of rock and broken little worlds were familiar things; they were dangerous, of course-but only to men who didn't know what they were doing.

  He grumbled impatiently at Jerry. "If you're going to get scared now, then pull out. Go over the belt, like the freighters do. Tell the Commission you lost your chart! Dadgum it, you know the belt!"

  "Not at millions of miles an hour," Jerry answered.

  "But you're just getting scared because you've been listening to all that fancy school talk. I've read some of the books—make it seem like there's a rock every ten feet." He caught his breath, swallowing his Venus gum. For a second, it stopped him. Then he blinked and went on. "You know durned well you don't find a rock every hundred miles—or every thousand, for that matter!"

  Jerry let him fume. He knew that it would take only one, and that a lot of former racers had died there, even at much slower speeds, and with good charts.

  But he had grown determined that nothing would make him give up. After the last incident with Mars, he meant to finish, if it took a year. And he didn't intend to be the last one in. Mars might win, but she wasn't going to have a complete laugh at Earth.

  He'd slept a full ten hours before they began to get pips on the radar screen, and now he was refreshed enough. There was only the feeling of strain to cloud his reactions. He had the foot pedals out, controlling one bank of steering rockets and the main drive. His hands rested on the other steering controls. And his eyes were fixed on the radar screen.

  Tod gave up, finally. Probably he'd been thinking over the effect of a ship colliding with anything at their speed, and had begun to get worried. He went below, grumbling to himself. This time Jerry was glad to see him leave. He'd need every bit of his energy to concentrate on the belt.

  At a guess, there was one chance in forty that they could sail straight through without actually hitting anything big enough to do any damage. But that was too much to expect.

  All he could do was to hope that his memory hadn't played him false, and that the section into which he was heading was the thinnest. It brought him off his course a bit, but that couldn't be helped.

  He began to notice more pips now. The screen was adjusted so that the nearer bits would register more brightly than the others. Size was less important, since a good-sized pebble could wreck the ship now. They were covering almost two thousand miles every second.

  The radar had a calculator, designed to predict the course of the meteorites and register in red all those offering danger. But Jerry couldn't count on it's working at the speed they were making; there was no time for plotting courses properly.

  In this crisis, he'd had to drop back on the oldest of all instruments—his human mind, with its ability to put a hundred half-facts together to arrive at an almost instant answer. It could make mistakes, but at least it would give some answers.

  A bright red flashed on the screen, and he kicked down on the steering controls, then hit the main drive to nearly three gees for a split second as he saw a glare of white. It should have been safe, according to the screen, but it had felt wrong to him. He was counting on hunches now—hunches that had been trained in this same belt.

  He could never know whether his action saved them or whether they'd have missed anyhow. But he missed.

  His mind seemed to detach itself from the rest of him, leaving a machine at the keys, jerking the Last Hope about savagely at the whim of the lights on the screen. Sam Hoadley had run the belt once, he remembered, with his sick wife—straight through from Io to Mars, without a scratch; and the old-timer hadn't even known how to read a chart. It could be done. But he knew that was a freak trick.

  Then the first patch was over. There were spots in the belt where the pulls of Jupiter and Mars had swept space fairly clean. He found Tod standing beside him, holding a plastic can of coffee, and he gulped it down, letting the old man handle it while he kept his hands on the controls.

  A few minutes later, they were in the thick of it again. Lights flashed warning, and his fingers moved. Tod dropped into a seat, buckling in against the pitching of the ship, but kept silent.

  A sudden clear lane showed on the screen, and he hit the controls to make the tiny change that would bring them into it. The few yards difference the steering rockets made in his course wouldn't have been noticeable to anyone watching him from a few thousand miles away, but here they meant the difference between life and death.

  Something clipped against the ship, with the sound of a thousand mad Oriental demons, all in a hundredth of a second. Tod got up, but Jerry didn't dare to glance around. The old man was back a minute later.

  "Tiny one. Cut through the outer hull, but missed the inner one—must have gone out through the tail. No leaks."

  He heard it without letting his mind relax from the screen and the controls. At the speed they were making, the motion of the rocks out there really didn't count—everything would seem almost like a straight head-on collision with a motionless body.

  That brought the chances up, he tried to tell himself. There was one chance in twelve of getting by with only a single hit from a small meteorite. But he knew that it might be good statistics and still have no meaning; getting hit once was no assurance of not being hit again; in fact, it helped to prove that his mind and the screen were subject to failure.

  The fairly clear sections were all that saved him. They gave him a chance to catch his breath, relax for a few seconds, and rub the tension out of his muscles.

  He was amazed to find that they'd already covered half the distance, and that he'd been sitting there for over six hours.

  Then it began again, but it was a little thinner now, and his memory indicated that the path ahead was freer than most. The screen seemed to confirm it.

  He began to hope, until three red dots glared up, almost at once. He hit the controls, without knowing what he was doing, consciously.

  Something flicked across the port ahead, big and almost touching, but gone before his eyes could really see it. Tod gasped and ducked instinctively, though it could do no good here.

  "When you see them, forget them," Jerry said. It was one of Tod's own favorite comments on random meteorites in the belt. The old man chuckled, but it was a feeble sound.

  Jerry's mind wandered off again, while half of it stayed frozen to the controls. He should be turning over now, if he was to brake down toward Venus. But how could he turn over in this crazy mass of rocks?

  His stomach muscles were sore from the strapping that held him to the seat. Each jerk of the ship was beginning to feel like an evil hand that clutched at his nerves. But he couldn't let up to favor it.

  The tension was beginning to mount now. They were coming toward the end of the main part of the belt. They'd escaped so far. But the feeling that it would wait until the last minute and then strike grew stronger in him. It was simply fear and dread, he knew. It was totally illogical. But he couldn't put it down.

  They should have worn space suits. Then if one drilled a hole through the ship, they could at least have a faint chance. But it was too late to put them on now —he couldn't take time.

  Tod jumped up suddenly, half an hour later, and opened a chest. He took out some little things that looked like balloons and released them. They floated in the air, bobbing around, but they got in the way. The engineer began chasing them, catching them by short strings that dangled from them. Jerry shouted in annoyance.

  Then the old man was sitting down, holding them by the strings. Jerry forgot them. They passed through the last cleared section, and then into the final area of danger.

  Some
thing cracked sharply at the quartz port in front of him, and a tremendous scream went by his ear, with a blaze of heat and a shock wave of air that threw him out of the seat, straps and all. There was a horrible bursting sound down the central shaft, and more heat came welling up.

  Jerry had time for only the single thought that this was it, before blackness squeezed down on his mind.

  He came out of it to find Tod just pushing up from the floor. It was still hot, and the air stank of burned metal, but the air was apparently no thinner. He must have been unconscious for a few minutes at most.

  He sat up, testing for broken bones. The violence of the shock waves had made him a solid mass of aching flesh, but he could still move. He turned toward Tod, but the old man was getting to his feet.

  "We're tough." His voice trembled faintly in Jerry's ears, but it steadied almost at once. "I'm all right. How about you, kid?"

  Jerry nodded, unable to speak. He stared at the port, where a tiny hole the size of a pea showed. And finally he understood the purpose of the little balloons. The air must have begun to rush out just as they escaped from Tod's hand. They'd floated in the air currents, to jam up against the hole and break, releasing their small loads of quick-hardening goo. The hole was sealed.

  Jerry glanced at the screen and was amazed that no damage seemed to have been done his instruments. It looked clear. They'd gotten through the belt, still alive. If the ship wasn't permanently damaged, they were out of the danger.

  He hobbled after Tod, crawling down the rail. The tiny meteorite had cracked through the port and hit the air with a speed that had turned the atmosphere in the ship into a solid wall in front of it—unable to get out of its way. It had driven that seemingly solid air back by sheer force, changing its speed to heat as it went, until it had finally volatilized completely. There was no trace of it left.

  At that speed, it hadn't mattered whether it hit air or a wall of solid iron—the results would have been about the same.

  The shock wave in the central shaft had obviously been terrific. The tube was buckled in one place, and the rail was bent.

  "No bigger than a pea," Tod said slowly. "Just a speck!"

  "If it had been bigger, we'd be nothing but spots of grease, Tod. After that, I'm done calling this a jinx ship. We've had our share of good luck for the whole race, right here!"

  "If the engines aren't hurt," Tod amended it. He pulled himself down the rail. Jerry started to follow, but it wasn't worth the work. He crawled back into the control room. The phone weighed a ton in his hand as he waited for Tod's report.

  But apparently everything was all right. Jerry took the controls again in fingers that seemed to be without feeling, and began turning the ship end for end, to begin killing their wild speed—probably greater than any rocket ship had ever reached before. The steering tubes behaved perfectly. He swung the tail down to point toward the sun, steadied it, and set the ship back on an automatic course.

  There was still some danger of striking a meteorite; there was always that possibility in space, where a few bits of rock or metal danced around the sun in wild, elliptical orbits. But it was no more than normal, and that was one of the least of their dangers.

  Tod came clumping slowly up the rail, and nodded as he saw that they were decelerating at last. But his face was grim.

  "Broke a lead plate over the exciter for the tube," he reported. "Must have been brittle, anyhow, but that finished it."

  The ship was still operating, though. Jerry had never had time to learn all about his father's fuel, and he groped back in his memory. There had been something about using one of the tiny atom-cracking machines to trigger the fuel into exploding, he remembered now. It must be the hood-shaped gadget at the end of die big rocket tube.

  "Will it last till we land?" he asked.

  Tod nodded. "It'll last. But it means we stay out of the engine room as much as we can. There's radioactivity escaping now, and it won't be healthy. Maybe it's all right—takes a certain amount of that to do any damage. But we don't have any way of testing what's safe and what isn't."

  Jerry considered it. They'd already filtered the fuel in the other tanks, pumping from full tank to empty one as soon as the first one was used up.

  "Then we'll have to stay out of there. If nothing else goes wrong, we can get it fixed on Mercury, maybe."

  "Mercury? Lad, they've got better shops on Venus, where we're bound." Tod looked at the hastily drawn course, and back again to Jerry. "What's the idea of changing to Mercury?"

  Jerry handed over his quick figures, made from a hasty check of their position. The answer was plain enough.

  Again, they'd come too far before being able to turn over to decelerate. No thrust they could safely pile on would stop them at Venus' orbit. But Mercury lay thirty million miles nearer to the sun, and they could reach that planet safely, unless his figures were all wrong. At this stage, there wasn't much point in trying to follow Dick's original plan, since they were days behind, and all the planetary positions were slightly different.

  Tod handed the paper back.

  "No decent shops on Mercury. We'll be lucky to get any kind of repair work there. But you're the captain, lad—and I guess I can't argue with your figuring. Hit the sack!"

  "We both hit it, this time," Jerry told him.

  The old man didn't protest. Neither one of them could have sat upright for ten minutes more. And there wasn't much they could do now, anyhow.

  Tod made no comment as Jerry flopped onto the hammock in his clothes. The old man reached for his shoes, hesitated, and then climbed into his own hammock fully dressed.

  Chapter 12 The Burning Planet

  I

  od was partly wrong about the shops on Mercury. There were shops, Jerry discovered over the radio —but they were of limited capability. They could do routine repairs, but on such tricky equipment as many of the racers carried, they were of no help. They offered to beat the lead plate back into shape, until Tod explained. Then they gave up.

  The lead had crystallized and become brittle under the bombardment of nuclear particles inside the little atom-cracker, and it was also radioactive itself on its inner surfaces. They'd have to have an entirely new plate made.

  Jerry still found it hard to believe that the little world could support life at all. Smaller than Mars, it

  circled the sun at only thirty-six million miles out, making a complete circle every eighty-eight days. One side was always pointed toward the sun, and the temperature there rose to over seven hundred degrees-hot enough to make rivers of tin and lead flow easily! The other side was frozen and dark.

  The little colonies were all along the twilight belt, where a dangerous living was possible. Mercury wobbled a bit, so that every eighty-eight days the little colonies went through a single change from sunset to sunrise and back. They hovered there, between incredible heat and intense cold. There was no air, of course.

  Jerry set the ship down while there was still just a touch of dawn near the little dome. The colony couldn't have held more than five hundred people, and all of them were out to see him land on the tiny little field. They had brought with them a big platform on wheels, with a tiny dome over it.

  Jerry landed at eight p.m., Sunday the twenty-second, by the ship's clock. After the last long stretch-just two hours less than six days—any planet would have looked good to him.

  He went out in his space suit, to be met by a crowd that leaped around him, thumping him on the back, and touching helmets to yell questions. He'd never seen so many completely natural smiles in his life. They led him into the domed platform, and he found that it was a hastily contrived device to give him a small enclosed hall!

  The local representative of the Commission turned out to be the mayor of the colony, a young man of about thirty. The coveralls that seemed to be their universal garment were all of dull gray, but the mayor had ornamented his by sewing on a white badge of some strange material, with the symbol of the Commission sketched onto it.
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  He signed the papers, and threw them back. "From one fool to another—you race rockets, I live in this forsaken hole I You'd like it here, if you ever care to settle down."

  Jerry found himself grinning. He'd heard the legends of the happy-go-lucky, scatterbrained Mercu-tians, but seeing them was different. Probably the legends were true; they were all hopeless gamblers, who got no satisfaction out of anything except the daily gamble for their lives that this represented.

  But they were neat and clean, and the little dome looked as if it might be comfortable. He even saw flowers blooming inside it, the first ones he'd seen since leaving Earth.

  They knew nothing definite about the race. Mars was winning, of course; they took that for granted. It didn't matter to them. Their own entry hadn't arrived yet—probably gotten himself killed trying to touch Saturn, too! They said it with a grin, but Jerry wouldn't have put it past anyone who came from here.

  Then he found why he'd received such a cordial welcome. Io had finally spread the word of his dive into Jupiter, and he was automatically one of them.

  Some of them were helping Tod load the ship, while the others talked to Jerry. He saw them making a game of it, tossing the big cans of fuel about carelessly. It looked as if they were doing nothing but waste time, yet the loading seemed to be going on well enough.

  Finally the mayor got down to business. "I hear you've got a little radioactivity running loose?"

  "Some," Jerry admitted, trying to fit into their crazy way of looking at things. "Probably about enough to kill a man."

  The mayor picked up a small Geiger counter, zipped up his helmet, and motioned Jerry with him. Two of the children tried to follow him, but he chased them back. "And you'd better stay well behind me, too," he warned Jerry. "No use getting a burn, if you're still trying to beat Mars."