Chapter II

Four minutes came and went, while MacIlheny and the others smoked cigarettes and tried to maintain a certain amount of calm as they waited.

At the end of the four minutes, the phone rang. Blake, who was nearest, answered.

"Yes. Good! Okay, thanks, Dr. Vanner!" He cradled the receiver and turned to MacIlheny. "The Observatory. They've spotted Number Four. She's slowed way down and dropped. They're feeding the orbit figures to Orbits Division now, by teletype. She evidently hit a fast meteor, head on."

MacIlheny nodded. "It figures. Tell Orbits to feed us a computation we can sight by--feed it directly into the Brain first, so we can get things going. We've got to get that satellite back up where she belongs!"

As the figures came in, it became obvious that the orbit of Number Four had been radically altered. Evidently, a high-speed, fairly massive meteor had struck her from above and forward, slowing her down. Immediately, the satellite had begun to drop, since angular acceleration no longer gave her enough centrifugal force to offset the gravitational pull of the Earth. As she dropped, however, she picked up more speed, and was able to establish a new, different orbit.

With this information fed into it, the electronic brain in the top twenty floors of the CGC Building went smoothly to work. Now that it knew where the satellite was, it could again focus the beams on her. Since the direction and velocity of the artificial moon in her new orbit were also known, the trackers could hold the beam on her.

MacIlheny rubbed his chin with a nervous forefinger as he watched the instruments on the control board come to life again as contact was re-established.

Meanwhile, Orbits Division was still at work. In order to re-establish the old orbit, the atomic rocket engines in the satellite would have to be used. Short bursts, fired at precisely the right time, in precisely the right direction, would lift her back up to where she belonged. It was up to Orbits Division to compute exactly how long and in what direction the remote-controlled rockets should apply their thrust.

As the beams again locked on the wayward satellite, MacIlheny kept his eyes on the control board. Lights flickered and rippled across the panel; needles on various meters wavered and jumped. MacIlheny watched for several seconds before he said:

"Blake! What the hell's wrong there?"

Blake watched a set of oscilloscopes, four green-glowing screens which traced and re-traced bright yellow-green lines across their surfaces. His dark brows lowered over his eyes.

"We can't get anything to her, Mac. She's dead. Either that meteor hit her power supply or else it did more damage than we thought."

"No control, then?"

Blake shook his head. "No control."

MacIlheny frowned. If the remote controls wouldn't work, then it wouldn't be possible to realign the orbit of the satellite. "Keep trying," he said. Then he turned from the control board, went to the phone, and punched the number of the Orbits Division.

"Orbits Division, Masterson here," said a gruff voice from the other end.

"This is MacIlheny. How does that orbit on Number Four look now?"

"We've got it, Mac. I'll send the corrective thrust data to the brain as soon as--"

"Never mind the corrective thrust," MacIlheny interrupted impatiently. "We can't use it yet. We don't have any positive contact with her; she's dead--no response to the radio controls."

"You mean you can't get her out of that orbit?" Masterson's voice was harsh.

"That's exactly what I mean. She's stuck in her new orbit until we find some other way to change it. It can't be done from here."

There was a pause at the other end, then Masterson said: "Mac, I hate to say this, but you've got a hot potato on your hands. That thing's in a cometary orbit!"

"_Cometary?_"

"That's right. Instead of a normal, near-circular path, she's going in an elongated ellipse. At perigee, she'll be less than a hundred and fifty miles above the surface."

"_Uh!_" MacIlheny felt as though someone had slugged him. If the satellite went that low, the air resistance would slow her even more before she broke free again. Each successive passage through the atmosphere would slow her more and more until she finally fell to Earth. If she fell into the ocean, that would be bad enough; but if she hit a populated area....

* * * * *

Fortunately, by that time her velocity would be considerably cut down; if she were to hit the atmosphere with her present velocity, the shock wave alone would be disastrous.

"Okay," said MacIlheny at last. "Notify every observatory within sight range of her orbit! Keep a check on her every foot of the way! We'll have to send up a drone."

"Right!" There was a subdued click as Masterson hung up.

MacIlheny turned. Blake was standing beside him. "I've got White Sands on the line, Mac."

MacIlheny flashed an appreciative grin. "Thanks, Blake." He went to Blake's office and closed the door. In the screen of the visiphone, he saw the face of Paul Loch, of Commercial Rockets, Inc., White Sands.

"How's it going, Mac?" Loch asked. "I understand you're having trouble with Number Four."

"It's worse than just trouble, Paul," MacIlheny told him. He carefully explained what had happened.

Loch nodded. "Looks rough. What do you figure on doing?"

"How much will it cost me to rent one of your RJ-37 jobs with a drone robot in it?"

"Fully fueled?" Loch thought a moment, then named a figure.

"That's pretty steep," MacIlheny objected.

Loch spread his hands. "Actually, it's just a guess; but I'm pretty sure we won't be able to get insurance on her for something like this. What do you plan to do?"

"I want to take an RJ-37 up there to Number Four and use it to put the satellite back in a safe orbit. It'll have to be done quickly or we'll lose the satellite and a few thousand square miles of Earth."

Loch paused again, turning the idea over in his mind. MacIlheny said nothing; he knew how the mind of Paul Loch worked. Finally, Loch said: "Tell you what; get the Government to underwrite the insurance, and we'll give you the RJ-37 at cost. Fair enough?"

MacIlheny nodded. "Get her ready. If the President won't okay the insurance, we'll have to pay the extra tariff. We absolutely can't afford to lose that satellite."

"It'll be ready in half an hour," Loch promised as he cut off.

MacIlheny began punching the code numbers for Washington, but the phone rang before he was through.

_Pure luck_, MacIlheny thought to himself as the President's face came onto the screen.

"Evening, Fitz," said the President of the United States.

"Good evening, Mr. President."

"Fitz, I understand you're having a little trouble with one of your satellites. The Naval Observatory tells me it's in a collision orbit of some kind. Where will it come down?"

MacIlheny shrugged. "I don't know, sir. It'll depend on how much resistance it offers to the atmosphere at that altitude, and that will depend on how badly it was torn up by the meteor."

"I see. What do you propose to do?"

"I'm going to try to get one of Commercial's RJ-37's up there to put her back on course. I don't want to lose a twelve-million-dollar space station."

"I can understand that, but--" The President looked off his screen suddenly as though someone had attracted his attention. "Hold the line a minute, Fitz," he said. And the screen went blank. MacIlheny waited. When the President came back, he wore a frown on his face. "The French government has been informed of what has happened. They want to know what we intend to do."

"Did you tell them, sir?"

"Not yet, but I will. But there are going to be other governments interested pretty quickly. Nobody wants something like that falling down on their heads. We may have to send up a hydrogen bomb and blow it out of existence if you can't get it back into a safe orbit."

"I know." He paused. "Mr. President, I have an idea. Suppose we load the RJ-37 with a thermonuclear warhead. If we can't change the orbit of the satellite, we'll blast her."

A slow grin spread across the face of the Chief Executive. "Very neat, Fitz; it'll also mean the government will have to underwrite the full insurance cost of the RJ-37 if you have to detonate the bomb."

MacIlheny grinned back. "It will, at that. But don't worry, Mr. President; I won't set off the warhead unless I absolutely have to. I want to save that satellite--not destroy it."

"All right, Fitz. I'll call White Sands and authorize the whole project. And I'll try to keep the foreign governments happy."

"Fine, sir. We'll know more after her first passage through perigee. If her orbit changes too much--"

"I'll leave it up to you, Fitz. Good luck."

* * * * *

The special controls for remote operation of the RJ-37 were in a room just off the main monitors. It was set up just like the control cockpit of the ship itself, with all the instruments in their proper places. If a pilot moved a control knob here, the same knob would move the same amount in the ship. Instead of the heavy paraglass window in the nose of the ship, the control room in the CGC Building had a wide, three-dimensional color TV screen. It gave the illusion of actually being in the ship.

The remote control cockpit was occupied by a Space Service officer--a Major Hamacher, who had been ordered up from a tour of inspection at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He was a square-faced, clear-eyed, prematurely graying man in his early thirties.

MacIlheny was relieved when he saw the major; the officer looked as though he could do the job. MacIlheny had wanted to use one of the Company pilots, but the President had vetoed that idea. If the ship was going to be insured by the government, then piloting it would be the government's job, too.

It had been nearly an hour, now, since the accident which had disabled Satellite Number Four. She had been carefully tracked by several observatories across the face of the Earth, and the figures had been carefully checked and rechecked.

Lower and lower the satellite dropped, as it spun around Earth in its elongated orbit. At a hundred and fifty miles altitude, the air is thin--thinner than the air in any but the very best vacuum tubes. But it is still dense enough to slow down anything traveling as fast as the satellite. The slight friction would be enough to alter the course of the flying moon.

Major Hamacher sat in the control chair, his hat off and his sleeves rolled up. As soon as the satellite started up again and her new orbit stabilized, the major would take off the RJ-37 and guide it to Number Four.

The men waited tensely. MacIlheny gnawed impatiently at the stem of his pipe, which had gone dead minutes before without his noticing it.

They waited. Very soon, now, Number Four would hit perigee.

It never did.

The observatories saw what happened. As the satellite came lower and lower, it looked as though it were following a perfectly normal path. Then, quite suddenly, there was a flare of light from beneath her! She leaped up again, under the driving thrust of her underjets.

Number Four had--somehow--changed her own orbit before the tenuous atmosphere could even begin to drag her down.