Chapter I: Front Matter

COLLISION ORBIT

by CLYDE BECK

The tiny asteroid with the frightened girl and the wrecked spacer with the grim young man slowly spun closer and closer ... but the real danger came after the crash!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

There's one good thing about a blowout. You don't need a mechanic to tell you what the trouble is when it happens. This was the first blowout I ever had, but as soon as I heard that explosive pinging whistle and felt the floppy jolting and the terrifying sensation of a vehicle out of control, I knew what was wrong. I reached forward and cut the power.

When I leaned back in my seat I was sweating and my stomach was pushing my tonsils around, and not only on account of the sudden switch from one and a half G's to free fall. I was in a jam, and I didn't need a mechanic to tell me that, either. Spaceships don't carry spare drive tubes.

Not little wagons like the Aspera, anyway. If you could get a spare inside the hull you would have to leave out the air plant or the groceries or else stay home yourself, and even then there would be no room for the tools to make the change. Retubing is a dock job, and the nearest docks were a million miles away on Phobos and getting farther fast.

And besides, you never need a spare. Tubes don't blow in space. Diamondized graphite is tough--you caliper the throat every time you dock, and after a few thousand G-hours you find enough erosion to cut down efficiency to the point where it's a good idea to put in a new liner.

I knew all this, but at the same time I knew the main tube had blown. What I didn't know was what I was going to do about it. I lit a cigarette and took a deep drag, just in case the stimulating effect of the quabba smoke would give me an inspiration.

It made me sneeze.

I threw the butt on the deck and mashed it with my heel before it could bounce off and go adrift in the cabin. I never had liked the taste of the weedy stuff anyway. Smoking quabba is the prime attribute of a spaceman--it has the reputation of being a specific against spacesickness, toughening the cerebral meninges against high acceleration, cutting down reaction time when you have to act fast in a meteor field. Maybe it's all true. One thing it really does is make your clothes smell like a vacant lot on fire so people can say, "Ah, he's a spaceman," without having to ask.

No inspiration. Okay, Denby, think it out with your own brains. You've got a brain, haven't you?

Not being very eager to do any thinking about the situation I was in, I dragged the bulger out from under the seat and crawled into it. I had a vague idea that I might fake up some sort of patch for the tube and maybe limp back to Mars. I wasn't proud of it, but it was the best I had at the moment. I checked to make sure there was nothing on the screens, and then pulled myself over to the air lock, sealed the inner door, and started the pump.

While the chamber was exhausting, I tested the lubber line and snapped the end of it to a ring on the inner skin of the hull. When the lock clicked I pulled the hatch open and hooked it back. Then I took a short hold on the lubber line and stepped out into space.

For a minute I wished I had finished the quabba. This was not the first time I had been in open space, but the circumstances had not been so impressive before. Free fall had never bothered me particularly, but it bothered me now, with millions of miles of empty space under me in all directions and nothing in the sky but the tiny hard bright stars looking very far away. And the realization that I was alone, with a crippled ship, and a very good chance that the situation would be permanent, made me feel that an antidote against spacesickness would be a handy thing to have.

After a while the muscles of my forearm began to ache from gripping the lubber line so hard. I let go of it and took hold of a hand rail and crawled back to the stern.

* * * * *

It was a blowout, all right. The liner was completely gone and the jacket was a fused lump of slag. All I would need to patch it up was a week in the shops and a three-man crew. I crawled back along the hull and went through the hatch like a rabbit going down its hole.

I stowed away the suit and belted myself in the seat. So I would have to think anyway. I got out a pencil and reeled the tape out of the accelerometer and began figuring.

It took me an hour, which was not very good. Neither was the answer. I pushed the papers away and started all over again. The answer was still the same. The Aspera would miss the orbit of Jupiter by more than fifty million miles, and my nearest approach would occur about three and a half years after Jupiter had passed my intended point of tangency.

Of course these figures were only rough, and would be revised one way or the other after I had time to make a few triangulation shots. But I couldn't hope for much encouragement from any such revision. The Aspera, the ship my father had used to make the first landing on an asteroid ten years ago, was going to end up as an asteroid herself, and I would have the honor of being sole inhabitant--as long as I lasted.

I grabbed a sheet of paper and began figuring again. It took me only a minute or two this time. The period of the Aspera's orbit was seven and a half years, and seven and a half years Earth time make four Mars years within a few days. That was how much hope I had--in seven and a half years I would be back in the immediate vicinity of Mars, and I might have enough power in the steering jets to claw my way in to one of the moons. If I didn't bump into an asteroid. If Jupiter didn't pull me too far off course. If I didn't go star-happy in the meanwhile, or starve. Before seven and a half years were up I'd be eating the air plant.

I threw down the pencil, caught it on the first wild bounce, and stowed it away in my pocket. I felt like a fool.

With reason. It takes a very fancy kind of fool to rot four years in the Girdle swamps on Venus, getting drunk only every second month so he can save up enough of his pay to put himself through Space Tech, and then, when he has graduated second in his class, to throw away a plushy job with Translunar and go barging off into space in an ancient can and get himself wrecked just because he lets a girl talk him into making a magnificent gesture.

That's what I told myself. It didn't help any, but I had it coming. I was a worse fool than that, even. Betty Day hadn't talked me into this. I had thought the whole thing up with my own little brain. The germ of the idea was hers, though, or rather the inspiration for it.