He knew he was going to hit hard. The way to keep from being hurt was to turn the vertical energy of his arrival into motion in another direction.
As he swept down to the metal surface he started running, his legs pumping wildly in s.p.a.ce. He hit with a bone-jarring thud, lost his footing and fell sideways, both hands cradling his helmet. He got to his feet instantly and looked for Santos.
"You all right, sir?" Santos called anxiously. "I think the others are over there." He pointed.
"We"ll find them," Rip said. His hip hurt like fury from smashing against the unyielding metal, and the worst part was that he couldn"t rub it. The blow had been strong enough to hurt through the heavy fabric and air pressure, but his hand wasn"t strong enough to compress the suit. Just the same, he tried.
And while he was trying, he found himself in direct sunlight!
He had forgotten to run. Standing still on the asteroid meant turning with it, from darkness into sunlight and back again. He yelled at Santos and legged it out of there, moving in long, gliding steps. He regained the shadow and kept going.
The first order of business was to stop the rock from turning. Otherwise they couldn"t live on it.
Rip knew that they had only one means of stopping the spin. That was to use the tubes of rocket fuel left over from correcting the course. They had three tubes left, but he didn"t know if that was enough to do the job.
Moving rapidly, he and Santos caught up to Koa and the Planeteers.
The Connie prisoners were pretty well bunched up, gliding along like a herd of fantastic sheep. Their shepherds were Pederson, Nunez, and Dowst.
The three Planeteers had a pistol in each hand. The spares were probably those taken from prisoners.
The Planeteers were loaded down with equipment. A few Connie prisoners carried equipment, too.
Trudeau had the rocket launcher and the remaining rockets. Kemp had his torch and two tanks of oxygen. Bradshaw had tied his safety line to the squat containers of chemical fuel for the torch and was towing them behind like strange balloons. The only trouble with that system, Rip thought, was that Bradshaw could stop, but the fuel would have a tendency to keep going. Unless the Englishman was skillful, his burden would drag him off his feet.
Dominico had a tube of rocket fuel under each arm. The Italian was small, and the tubes were bulky. Each was about ten feet long and two feet in diameter. With any gravity or air resistance at all, the Italian couldn"t have carried even one.
Santos took the radiation detection instruments and the case with the astrogation equipment from Koa. Rip greeted his men briefly, then took his computing board and began figuring. He knew the men were glad he and Santos had made it. But they kept their greetings short. A spinning asteroid was no place for long and sentimental speeches.
He remembered the dimensions of the asteroid and its ma.s.s. He computed its inertia, then figured out what it would take to overcome the inertia of the spin.
The mathematics would have been simpler under normal conditions, but doing them on the run, trying to watch his step at the same time, made things a little complicated. He had to hold the board under his arm, run alongside Santos while the new sergeant held the case open, select the book he wanted, open it and try to read the tables by his belt light, and then transfer the data to the board.
His ventilator had quieted down once he got into the darkness, but now it started whining slightly again because he was sweating profusely. Finally he figured out the thrust needed to stop the spin. Now all he had to do was compute how much fuel it would take.
He had figures on the amount of thrust given by the kind of rocket fuel in the tubes. He also knew how much fuel each tube contained. But the figures were not in his head. They were on reference sheets.
He collected the data on the fly, slowing down now and then to read something, until a yell from Santos or Koa warned that the sun line was creeping close. When he had all data noted on the board, he started his mathematics. He was right in the middle of a laborious equation when he stumbled over a thorium crystal. He went headlong, shooting like a rocket three feet above the ground. His board flew away at a tangent. His stylus sped out of his glove like a miniature projectile, and the slide rule clanged against his bubble.
It happened so fast that neither Koa nor Santos had time to grab him. The action had given him extra speed, and he saw with horror that he was going to crash into Trudeau. He yelled, "Frenchy! Watch out!" Then he put both hands before him to protect his helmet. His hands caught the French Planeteer between the shoulders.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Visitors!
Trudeau held tight to the launcher, but the rocket racks opened and spilled attack rockets into s.p.a.ce. They flew in a dozen different directions. Trudeau gave vent to his feelings in colorful French.
Koa and Santos laughed so hard they had trouble collecting the scattered equipment. Rip, slowed by his crash with Trudeau, got his feet under him again.
When the asteroid turned into the sun, they still had not collected Rip"s stylus and five of the attack rockets. The s.p.a.ce pencil was the only thing that could write on the computing board. It had to be found. "Next time around," Rip called to the others. He then led the way full speed ahead until they reached the safety of shadow again.
Rip suspected the stylus was somewhere above the rock and probably wouldn"t return to the surface for some minutes. While he was wondering what to do, there was a chorus of yells. A rocket sped between the Planeteers and shot off into s.p.a.ce.
"Our own rockets are after us," Trudeau gasped. There hadn"t been time to collect them all after Rip"s unwilling attack on the Frenchman had scattered them. Now the sun was setting them off. Another flashed past, fortunately over their heads. The sun"s heat was causing them to fire unevenly.
"Three more to go," Koa called. "Watch out!"
Only two went, and they were far enough away to offer no danger.
Santos had been fishing around in the instrument case. Suddenly he produced another stylus. "It was under the s.e.xtant," he explained triumphantly.
"If we get through this, I"ll propose you for ten more stripes," Rip vowed. "We"ll make you the highest ranking sergeant that ever made a private"s life miserable."
Working slowly but more safely, Rip figured that slightly more than two and a half tubes would do the trick.
Now to fire them. That meant finding a thorium crystal properly placed and big enough. There were plenty of crystals, so that was no problem.
The next step was for Kemp to cut holes with his torch, so that the thrust of the rocket fuel would be counter to the direction in which the asteroid was spinning.
Rip explained to all hands what had to be done. The burden would fall on Kemp, who would need a helper. Rip took that job himself. He took one oxygen tank from Kemp. Koa took the other, leaving the torchman with only his torch.
Then Rip took a container of chemical fuel from Bradshaw. Working while running, he lashed the two containers together with his safety line. Then he improvised a rope sling so they could hang on his back.
Kemp, meanwhile, a.s.sembled his torch and put the proper cutting nozzle in place. When he was ready, he moved over to Rip"s side and connected the torch hoses to the tanks the lieutenant carried. Kemp had the torch mechanism strapped to his own back. It was essentially a high-pressure pump that drew oxygen and fuel from the tanks and forced them through the nozzle, under terrific pressure.
When he had finished, he pressed the trigger that started the cutting torch going. The fuel ignited about a half inch in front of the nozzle.
The nozzle had two holes in it, one for oxygen and the other for fuel.
The holes were placed and angled to keep the flame always a half inch away, otherwise the nozzle itself would melt.
"How do we work this?" Kemp asked.
"We"ll get ahead of the others," Rip explained. "Keep up speed until we"re running at the forward sun line. Then, when the crystal we want comes around into the shadow, we stop running and work until it spins back into the sunshine again."
Rip estimated the axis on which the asteroid was spinning and selected a crystal in the right position. He had to be careful, otherwise their counterblast might do nothing more than start the gray planet wobbling.
He and Kemp ran ahead of the others. The Planeteers and their prisoners were running at a speed that kept them right in the middle of the dark area.
It was like running on a treadmill. The Planeteers were making good speed, but were actually staying in the same place relative to the sun"s position, keeping the turning asteroid between them and the sun.
Rip and Kemp ran forward until they were right at the sun line. Then they slowed down, holding position and waiting for the crystal they had chosen to reach them. As it came across the sun line into darkness, they stopped running and rode the crystal through the shadow until it reached the sun again. Then the two Planeteers ran back across the dark zone to meet the crystal as it came around again. There was only a few minutes" working time each revolution.
Kemp worked fast, and the first hole deepened. Rip helped as best he could by pushing away the chunks of thorium that Kemp cut free, but it was essentially a one-man job.
As Kemp neared the bottom of the first hole, Rip reviewed his plan and realized he had overlooked something. These weren"t nuclear bombs; they were simple tubes of chemical fuel. The tubes wouldn"t destroy the hole Kemp was cutting.
He reached a quick decision and called Koa to join them. Koa appeared as Kemp pulled his torch from the hole and started running again to avoid the sun. Rip and Koa ran right along with him, crossing the dark zone to meet the crystal as it came around again.
"There"s no reason to drill three holes," Rip explained as they ran.