Marooned on Mars

CHAPTER 6 Meteorites!

Chuck found Dick ahead of him and the others at his heels as he plunged into the little control room where Vance and Lew were busy. There was hardly room for all, but they had no time to worry about that sort of inconvenience.

“Chuck, take radar!” Vance began barking out orders to the others, but Chuck didn’t hear the words. He was sliding into the seat Lew had given up, and his eyes were tracing the lines that now seemed to dart across the screen. With more credits in radar interception than Lew, he was the logical man for the job now.

Nat Rothman stood over him, working a small computing machine, while Vance handled the controls.

Each of the streaks on the screen represented a tiny object ahead—the size was indicated by the brightness. Chuck snapped his eye to the indicator, and saw that it

was set to show pea-sized objects as medium brightness. Another screen indicated distance. “Link ‘em,” Rothman told him. He brought both images together, each in a separate color, on a third screen, and began setting up the first to show the probable speed of the meteorites in relation to the ship. This required compensating for the spin of the ship.

“There!” He pointed to one that was the size of a small marble and much too close. Rothman nodded at Vance, holding up one finger. The ship blasted forward for a tenth of a second. They waited perhaps another second, but no sound reached them from the walls.

“Missed,” Vance said tersely. “But we can’t keep it up. We…”

There was a sound like a rifle bullet hitting a steel shed, and a harsher sound immediately after it. One, smaller than a pea, had gotten through to them, drilling through the ship and out again. At speeds measured in miles per second, even the smallest particle was dangerous. Apparently all these were small—too small for the Lunar observatory to have seen them—-but there must have been thousands or more in the space ahead.

“Patch it,” Vance ordered. Steele, Lew, and Sokolsky nodded and were gone. They’d have to find the first tiny hole and the second larger one, slap plates over them, and weld them in place before the air could rush out into space.

The swarm had thinned out for a time. Chuck kept his eyes on the plate,, but there were only a few seconds of grace before they began to run into more.

“That first one must have been as big as a melon,” Rothman told Chuck. “The automatic alarm went on and Lew didn’t have time to set things up. We were simply lucky. Or we’re in bad luck. There isn’t supposed to be one chance in fifty of running into a meteorite between here and Mars. They’re mostly spread out pretty thin, and we’re a small target for all that space.”

Although the meteorites swung about the sun in orbits like the planets, they were comparatively rare. There had been only one case of trouble in all the trips to the Moon from Earth. But the Eros seemed jinxed.

Now they were approaching the other edge of the swarm where they .were thicker again. Someday there would be fully automatic machinery that figured their courses automatically and instantly, to drive ships safely out of their paths. But that was still in the future. Everything now depended on the accuracy of Chuck’s compensations, and the skill of Rothman in interpreting the little data he could get.

“Two!” Chuck called, and Rothman signaled Vance quickly.

This time the Eros seemed to go wild as the full power of her jets flashed on, and cut off. But it had not been successful, for however close Rothman’s guess had been, placing the ship exactly between both was too much to expect

Something hit the wall of the ship with a shriek of rock against metal. It flashed by Chuck’s nose, not a foot away, already white hot from the friction of its passage. It splatted against the control board, hissed, and disappeared, leaving a six-inch hole in the wall opposite the tiny half-inch hole it had made on entering.

Air began sighing out. Chuck snapped up the thin ship’s log and slapped it down over the larger hole, where air pressure forced it into tight contact. Vance had already covered the smaller hole with an eraser.

Steele came in with Lew and Sokolsky. All three showed signs of bruises from the slamming around they had taken when the rockets went on, but none seemed to realize it. They slid quickly cut sections of metal under the crude stoppers and began work with a small electric welder. In a few minutes, the holes were sealed.

The last of the streaks had vanished from the screens. Chuck turned the radar back to Lew, and reported the fact to Vance, who nodded slowly.

The captain was-staring at the wreck the meteorite had made of part of the control board. He moved to the panel and began testing, while Steele dropped down to study it directly.

“Some of the rocket-firing controls are damaged— you’ll have an unsteady blast. And that first meteorite wrecked the gyroscopes. We’re in a fine pickle.”

“Yeah. We’re probably safe enough now, until we reach Mars. But we’ll have to do some beautiful repair work if we’re going to make a safe landing there. Chuck, you did a good job—finer than could be expected. It’s not your fault—or yours either, Nat We came through better than we had any right to. Now the question is, how much and how soon can we repair things?”

He turned to Steele. The engineer shook his head. “I can get the gyroscopes remounted, but they won’t hold as high a speed, and I can’t promise how long the bearings will work. Chuck, you helped install this mess—take a look at it.”

Chuck bent down to the damaged wiring. It was a complete mess. Everything would have to be torn out and completely redone—enough following diagrams and re-soldering to last for months. He reported it, while Vance

searched through the papers in one of the wall safes for the diagrams.

“All right,” the captain told them finally. “Get busy. We’ve got a lot of time left, fortunately. But we can’t tell when we may need things again. Probably we won’t even get another meteorite signal on our screens. But I’m not betting on anything.”

All the men on the ship were trained at several things. Vance was a fair substitute for any of the men, as was Steele. Rothman was a fairly skilled geologist, capable of estimating the mineral resources of Mars, as well as being a pilot. Doctor Sokolsky was as much of a biologist as a medical doctor. From working with has father. Chuck had most of his father’s skill at engineering. “Lew had made a skilled hobby of archaeology. And even Ginger Parsons, who claimed only to be the world’s best photographer and-a fair cook, had a good grounding in science and mathematics.

But this was a job for two men only, since there was room for no more. The control panel work fell to Chuck and Lew automatically; Vance or Rothman would be with them, to operate the ship when needed, but they would ‘have to reconstruct the wiring by themselves.

Chuck went for his space suit, preferring from experience to do his soldering without air around; it didn’t make a great deal of difference, except for the more delicate work; but there, even the finest wire could be handled with a hot iron without fear of damage. Lew was awkward at first, but once the air was pumped out of the control room, he soon caught the knack.

It was tricky work. The original wiring had been done in sections, using complicated, specialized tools; the sub-assemblies had then been welded into place and hooked up. Now they had to begin work directly, trusting to extensions on their tools to get into the cramped space, and trying to organize it so that they would finish each section as they went along.

Twice the first day. Chuck had to pull out most of what had been done, in order to get in with parts that had seemed simple enough in the diagrams, but simply couldn’t be inserted as they had planned.

There was wire enough, and most of the parts were in stock in the big supply rooms along the central well. But many of the coils had been left out on the theory that they could be wound when needed; it was a good theory, if only one or two coils had to be made. But coil-winding was slow and tedious work.

There were tables that showed how the coils should be wound. But handwork is never exact. The prepared coils had to be tested on Q-meters and other instruments. Sometimes they were satisfactory. More often, time was spent in adding a few turns, removing turns, or squeezing and pulling the coils into the correct behavior. There Chuck’s work with his homemade set proved excellent experience; Lew had worked only with standard parts, and was less able to cut and manipulate parts into operating condition.

One section was finally finished, and Vance tried it out, It worked—but it would have taken long hours of practice to figure out how to compensate for small errors.

“It’s wired right—I know it is. And everything in it meets the limits set in the specifications,” Chuck told his captain. “It should be working exactly as it did before.”

Steele grinned at him. “Chuck, this is just like radar work. You can follow specs and get something that does well enough most of the time. But I saw the men who installed these panels. In the shop, they’d tested right on the button. Here, they drifted off. The installation took a long time—because they had to go over everything and rework it. Those panels interact; one of them throws another just a little off.”

Chuck groaned. But the engineer was right When he tested the whole assembly on his meters, he found that it would take days more to regulate its action to the correct degree of accuracy.

Next time, on later panels, he wouldn’t worry so much about exact behavior of the individual parts. He’d have to take care of that after the assembly was fixed, anyway.

More long days went by on the next of the three panels that had been injured; this was only partially hurt. The third one, which did the final job of taking the forces of all seven rocket tubes, calculating their differences, deciding how much that would tilt the ship, and making automatic corrections, would be the real headache.

They were still working on the second panel, making the final adjustments, when Dick Steele came up to announce that the gyroscopes were re-installed. Chuck took time off to join the others in looking over the repair.

It looked as good as the original. Dick had managed to melt down the broken sapphire bearing and re-shape it. Some of the supports were crudely welded, but that would not interfere with the operation. “How’ll it operate?” Vance asked. “Better than I hoped. I’ve had to handwind one of the motors, and rebalance it, but it should be good for longer than we’ll need it, coming and going. The only trouble is that you’ll have to run them a little more gently—they can’t start, stop, and reverse as smoothly. It won’t matter—unless you’re having trouble holding the ship steady when they should be compensating.”

Chuck frowned. He was tired, and the strain of the responsibility on his shoulders was beginning to tell on him. “Does that mean I’ve got to do perfect work on the control panels?”

“Just about,” Steele agreed. “If anything, you’ll have to do better than the men who installed the stuff in the first place.”

Chuck looked at Lew, who shrugged.

“I’ll do the best I can,” he promised. “But if I’ve got to make that good a job of it, you’ll have to turn off the master panel and cut off the control motors. I’ve got to find how much they interact and how they throw things off so that I’ll know how much to correct.”

Rothman started to protest, the lines of worry deepening on his face. But Steele cut him off. “The boy’s right,” he told Vance. “It’s the only way I can see. Good sound engineering practice.”

“But if we run into more meteorites…” Rothman pointed out. “We need some control.”

The pilot mulled it over while they moved back to the living quarters. Then he shrugged. “Okay, Chuck, I guess Vance and I will have to give in. If you have to do it, you have to do it. Go ahead.”

The captain agreed. Power was cut from the panel after Chuck and Lew had worked out a system that would take the smallest amount of time. The control room was already a mess of tools and wires, but Vance and Rothman filed in, somber about having the ship lifeless for even an hour. The pilot dropped into the radar seat and began working it unhappily, while Vance sat watching. He seemed unconcerned, and made no protest as the switches went down. He had inserted a small microphone under his helmet seals, and was relaying information on their progress down to the rest of the nervous crew. Chuck could imagine that his version of it was honest, but that it sounded much more reassuring than the captain really felt.

They were half-finished with their tests when the helmet radio snapped with Rothman’s voice. “Pips on the radar. Meteorites!”

“How much time?” Vance asked.

“A few minutes.”

It was too little; the panel could not be put. back into operation in less than half an hour. Chuck moved up to the radar controls, and readjusted them to give more precise information.

“I think we’ll miss them all,” he decided, but he couldn’t feel certain of it. Scanning such tiny particles at any distance beyond a few miles—a fraction of a second away—was difficult at best.

Vance looked, and went back to his seat, seeming unconcerned. “It must be the front of the swarm the observatory first spotted—they had to guess at its size from the few big ones they could photograph. I’ve been expecting them, but I thought they’d be farther on. Well, we’ll soon know.”

Chuck again tried to make a compensation for the spin of the ship that would give finer accuracy, but he could do little to improve his first setting. Lew watched for a second, and then turned back to testing the panels they were working on. Chuck offered to help, but Vance motioned him back. “I know enough for this. Chuck. Stick to the screens. At least, you can tell us in time to say a short prayer before we get it, maybe.”

The pips on the screen were brighter now. Rothman was busily figuring. The worry was back on his face, but his hands were steady in the gloves he wore—which was more than Chuck could say for his own. He was honestly afraid, and didn’t care who knew it. Rothman and Vance seemed incapable of feeling fear.

“Well miss them, I think,” the pilot announced. “It looks as if well just clear them. Another minute will tell”

Something sang against the hull of the ship as he finished. Chuck puzzled over that; no sound could carry without air. Then he realized the crew below must have tuned in their suit-radios; he was hearing the sounds they heard.

It was like the splintering of ice in a metal bucket. Vance grunted. ‘Turn it up. Ginger,” he ordered. An intake of surprised breath answered, and the sound increased in volume.

“Just dust—too small to pierce the hull, I guess,” Vance

decided.

It disappeared then. They listened tensely for it, but there was no return. It might have been the microscopic fragments of some meteorite which had collided with something and was still following the old orbit. But whatever it was, it was gone.

The pips on the screen brightened still more, but they were out of the center now. Then they moved away and left no trail. Rothman leaned back, sighing. “They passed behind us. If we don’t find more of them, we’re okay. What’s the range on this screen. Chuck? About twenty-five hundred miles?”

It was close enough, and Chuck nodded. “Unless you hit a big one with the beam.”

“A couple of minutes of our flight I’ll hold this, Chuck. Go on back to your work. If I see a pip, I’ll yell.”

Chuck and Lew worked on, measuring and comparing with the notes on the specifications. It was slow, tedious work. They were on the last few minutes of it when a surprised grunt came from Rothman.

“What’s up, Nat?” Vance asked quietly.

“I don’t know—I’m getting something like television snow on this thing. I don’t know whether I’m seeing meteorites or not.”

Chuck looked down at the soldering gun Lew was using, and grinned. He hit it with his foot and saw the switch snap back from where it had stuck. ‘That cure it?”

Rothman grinned back suddenly, and nodded. “Down with theory. Miles. Give me a kid whose father brought him up on engineering. No meteorites.”

“And no more reason to keep this off,” Lew reported. “We’re finished.”

With a relieved sigh, Vance threw the switches back to the fully on position. Now, if they had to, the ship could try dodging the impact of a meteorite again.

Rothman picked up the mass of readings they had, as Chuck stared at them. He reached for his calculator, and motioned the two boys to follow him down to the crew quarters, where they could work more comfortably. This was theoretical material, and here Lew and Rothman together could do more in a few minutes than Chuck would have been able to accomplish in hours.

Chuck realized that the meteorite collision had done some good. They were all beginning to work together as a team, each doing what he could do best without thinking about it; and each now knew what he should leave to someone else.

That was something no theoretical preparation could give them. He began to feel more optimistic than he had for weeks. Somehow, this was a crew that would get itself out of almost any trouble.

He listened to Rothman and Lew working over the books on theory and the results they had obtained. Then he went to his hammock to sleep. It would have seemed like shirking to him before he stowed away; now he knew that it was just good sense to get ready for the work that must come while others who could do this work better carried on.

As he was falling asleep, he suddenly realized that his father had spent years trying to teach him the lesson be had learned here so quickly. He smiled a little—and then scowled to himself in the darkness. It was a fine time to get homesick!