The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein
“Check. But I was thinking of something else. With Van and the first officer sick, maybe about to check in, if the second officer comes down with it, too, the War God might not even get as far as a parking orbit.”
Roger Stone did not have to have the thought elaborated; a ship approaching a planet, unless maneuvered at the last by a skilled pilot, can do one of only two things—crash, or swing on past and out endlessly into empty space to take up a comet-like orbit which arrives nowhere ever.
He covered his face with his hands. “What do I do, Mother?”
“You are captain, son.”
He sighed. “I suppose I knew it all along.”
“Yes, but you had to struggle with it first.” She kissed him. “Orders, son?”
“Let’s get to it. It’s a good thing we didn’t waste any margin in departure.”
“That it is.”
When Hazel told the others the news Castor asked, “Does Dad want us to compute a ballistic?”
“No.”
“A good thing—for we’ve got to get those bikes inboard, fast! Come on, Pol. Meade, how about suiting up and giving us a hand? Unless Mother needs you?”
“She does,” answered Hazel, “to take care of Lowell and keep him out of the way. But you won’t be bringing the bikes inboard.”
“What? You can’t balance the ship for maneuvers with them where they are. Besides, the first blast would probably snap the wires and change your mass factor.”
“Cas, where are your brains? Can’t you see the situation? We jettison.”
“Huh? We throw away our bikes? After dragging almost to Mars?”
“Your bikes, all our books, and everything else we can do without. The rough run-through on the computer made that clear as quartz; it’s the only way we can do this maneuver and still be sure of having a safe margin for homing in. Your father is checking over the weight schedule right now.”
“But—” Castor’s face suddenly relaxed and became impassive. “Aye aye, ma’am.”
The twins were suiting up but had not yet gone outside when Pollux was struck by a notion. “Cas? We cut the bikes loose; then what happens?”
“We charge it off to experience—and try to recover from Four-Planets Transit. They won’t pay up, of course.”
“Use your skull. Where do the bikes end up?”
“Huh? Why, at Mars!”
“Right. Or pretty near. In the orbit we’re in now, they swing in mighty close and then head down Sunside again. Suppose, on closest approach, we are standing there waiting to snag ’em?”
“Not a chance. It will take us just as long to get to Mars—and in a different orbit, same as the War God’s.”
“Yes, but just supposing. You know, I wish I had a spare radar beacon to hang on them. Then if we could reach them, we’d know where they were.”
“Well, we haven’t got one. Say! Where did you put that used reflecting foil?”
“Huh? Oh, I see. Grandpa, sometimes your senile decay is not quite so noticeable.” The Stone had started out, of course, covered on one side of her living quarters by mirror-bright aluminum foil. As she drifted farther and farther from the Sun, reflecting the Sun’s heat had grown less necessary, absorbing it more desirable. To reduce the load on the ship’s heating and cooling system, square yards of it were peeled up and taken inside to store from week to week.
“Let’s ask Dad.”
Hazel stopped them at the hatch to the control room. “He’s at the computer. What’s the complaint?”
“Hazel, the reflecting foil we’ve been salvaging—is it on the jettison list?”
“Certainly. We’ll pick up some more on Mars for the trip back. Why?”
“A radar corner—that’s why!” They explained the plan.
She nodded. “A long chance, but it makes sense. See here, wire everything we jettison to the bikes. We might get it all back.”
“Sure thing!” The twins got busy. While Pollux gathered together the bunches of bicycles, all but a few in good repair and brave with new paint, Castor constructed a curious geometrical toy. With 8-gauge wire, aluminum foil, and sticky tape he made a giant square of foil, edged and held flat with wire. This he bisected at right angles with a second square. The two squares he again bisected at the remaining possible right angle with a third square. The result was eight shiny right-angled corners facing among them in all possible directions—a radar reflector. Each corner would bounce radar waves directly back to source, a principle easily illustrated with a rubber ball and any room or box corner. The final result was to step up the effectiveness of radar from an inverse fourth-power law to an inverse square law—in theory, at least. In practice it would be somewhat less than perfectly efficient but the radar response of the assembly would be increased enormously. A mass so tagged would stand out on a radar screen like a candle in a cave.
This flimsy giant kite Castor anchored to the ball of bicycles and other jetsam with an odd bit of string. No stronger link was necessary; out here no vagrant wind would blow it away, no one would cut it loose. “Pol,” he said, “go bang on the port and tell ’em we’re ready.”
Pollux walked forward and did so, rapping on the quartz first to attract his grandmother’s attention, then tapping code to report. While he was gone Castor attached a piece of paper reading:
NOT FOR SALVAGE
This cargo is in free transit by intention. The undersigned owner intends to recover it and warns all parties not to claim it as abandoned. U.P. Rev. Stat. #193401
Roger Stone, Master
P.Y. Rolling Stone, Luna
When Pollux came back he said, “Hazel says go ahead but take it easy.”
“Of course.” Castor untwisted the single wire that held the ungainly mass to the ship, then stood back and watched it. It did not move. He reached out and gave it the gentlest shove with his little finger, then continued watching. Slowly, slowly it separated from the ship. He wished to disturb its orbit as little as possible, to make it easy to find. The petty vector he had placed on it—an inch a minute was his guess—would act for all the days from there to Mars; he wanted the final sum to remain small.
Pollux twisted around and picked out the winking gleam of the War God. “Will the jet be clear of it when we swing ship?” he asked anxiously.
“Quit worrying. I already figured that.”
The maneuver to be performed was of the simplest—point to point in space in a region which could be treated as free of gravity strain since the two ships were practically the same distance from the Sun and Mars was too far away to matter. There were four simple steps: cancellation of the slight vector difference between the two ships (the relative speed with which the War God was pulling away), acceleration toward the War God, transit of the space between them, deceleration to match orbits and lie dead in space relative to each other on arrival.
Steps one and two would be combined by vector addition; step three was simply waiting time. The operation would be two maneuvers, two blasts on the jet.
But step three, the time it would take to reach the War God, could be enormously cut down by lavish use of reactive mass. Had time been no object they could have, as Hazel put it, closed the gap “by throwing rocks off the stern.” There was an infinite number of choices, each requiring different amounts of reactive mass. One choice would have saved the bicycles and their personal possessions—but it would have stretched the transit time out to over two weeks.
This was a doctor’s emergency call—Roger Stone elected to jettison.
But he did not tell the twins this and he did not require them to work a ballistic. He did not care to let them know of the choice between sacrificing their capital or letting strangers wait for medical attention. After all, he reflected, the twins were pretty young.
Eleven hours from blast time the Stone hung in space close by the War God. The ships were still plunging toward Mars at some sixteen miles per second; relative to each other they were stationary—except that the liner continued h
The others had been kissed good-by inside and told to stay there. Lowell had cried and tried to keep his mother from entering the lock. He had not been told what was going on, but the emotions of the others were contagious.
Roger Stone was saying anxiously, “Now see here, the minute you have this under control, back you come—you hear?”
She shook her head. “I’ll see you on Mars, dearest.”
“No indeed! You—”
“No, Roger. I might act as a carrier. We can’t risk it.”
“You might act as a carrier coming back to us on Mars, too. Don’t you ever expect to come back?”
She ignored the rhetorical question. “On Mars there will be hospitals. But I can’t risk a family epidemic in space.”
“Edith! I’ve a good mind to refuse to—”
“They’re ready for me, dear. See?”
Over their heads, two hundred yards away, a passenger lock on the rotation axis of the mighty ship had opened; two small figures spilled silently out, flipped neatly to boot contact, stood on the ship’s side, their heads pointing “down” at Mr. and Mrs. Stone. Roger Stone called into his microphone, “War God!”
“War God aye aye!”
“Are you ready?”
“Whenever you are.”
“Stand by for transfer.”
Acting Captain Rowley had proposed sending a man over to conduct Dr. Stone across the gap. She had refused, not wishing to have anyone from the infected ship in contact with the Rolling Stone. Now she said, “Are my lines free for running, Roger?”
“Yes, dearest.” He had bent several lines together, one end to her waist, the other to a padeye.
“Will you do my boots, dear?”
He kneeled and unzipped her magnetic boots without speaking, his voice having become uncertain. He straightened and she put her arms around him. They embraced awkwardly, hampered by the suits, hampered by the extra back pack she carried. “Adios, my darling,” she said softly. “Take care of the children.”
“Edith! Take care of yourself!”
“Yes, dear. Steady me now.”
He slipped his hands to her hips; she stepped out of the boots, was now held against the ship only by his hands.
“Ready! One! Two!” They crouched down together. “Three!” She jumped straight away from the ship, her lines snaking after her. For long, long seconds she sailed straight out over his head, closing the gap between her and the liner. Presently it became evident that she had not leapt quite straight; her husband got ready to haul her back in.
But the reception committee was ready for that exigency. One of them was swinging a weighted line around his head; he let the end of it swing farther and farther out. As she started to move past the side of the War God he swung it against her safety line; the weighted end wrapped itself around her line. Back at the Rolling Stone, Roger Stone snubbed her line and stopped her; the man on the liner gently pulled her in.
The second man caught her and snapped a hook to her belt, then unfastened the long line from the Stone. Before she entered the lock she waved, and the door closed.
Roger Stone looked at the closed door for a moment, then pulled in the line. He let his eyes drop to the pair of little boots left standing empty beside him. He pulled them loose, held them to him, and plodded back to his own airlock.
CHAPTER NINE
ASSETS RECOVERABLE
THE TWINS KEPT OUT OF THEIR FATHER’S WAY
for the next several days. He was unusually tender and affectionate with all of them but he never smiled and his mood was likely to flare suddenly and unexpectedly into anger. They stayed in their bunkroom and pretended to study—they actually did study some of the time. Meade and Hazel split the care of Lowell between them; the child’s feeling of security was damaged by the absence of his mother. He expressed it by temper tantrums and demands for attention.
Hazel took over the cooking of lunch and dinner; she was no better at it than Meade. She could be heard twice a day, burning herself and swearing and complaining that she was not the domestic type and never had had any ambitions that way. Never!
Dr. Stone phoned once a day, spoke briefly with her husband, and begged off from speaking to anyone else for the reason that she was much too busy. Roger Stone’s explosions of temper were most likely to occur shortly after these daily calls.
Hazel alone had the courage to quiz him about the calls. On the sixth day at lunch she said, “Well, Roger? What was the news today? Give.”
“Nothing much. Hazel, these chops are atrocious.”
“They ought to be good; I flavored ’em with my own blood.” She held out a bandaged thumb. “Why don’t you try cooking? But back to the subject. Don’t evade me, boy.”
“She thinks she’s on the track of something. So far as she can tell from their medical records, nobody has caught it so far who is known to have had measles.”
Meade said, “Measles? People don’t die of that, do they?”
“Hardly ever,” agreed her grandmother, “though it can be fairly serious in an adult.”
“I didn’t say it was measles,” her father answered testily, “nor did your mother. She thinks it’s related to measles, a mutant strain maybe—more virulent.”
“Call it ‘neomeasles’,” suggested Hazel. “That’s a good question-begging tag and it has an impressive scientific sound to it. Any more deaths, Roger?”
“Well, yes.”
“How many?”
“She wouldn’t say. Van is still alive, though, and she says that he is recovering. She told me,” he added, as if trying to convince himself, “that she thought she was learning how to treat it.”
“Measles,” Hazel said thoughtfully. “You’ve never had it, Roger.”
“No.”
“Nor any of the kids.”
“Of course not,” put in Pollux. Luna City was by long odds the healthiest place in the known universe; the routine childhood diseases of Earth had never been given a chance to establish.
“How did she sound, Son?”
“Dog tired.” He frowned. “She even snapped at me.”
“Not Mummy!”
“Quiet, Meade.” Hazel went on, “I’ve had measles, seventy or eighty years ago. Roger, I had better go over and help her.”
He smiled without humor. “She anticipated that. She said to tell you thanks but she had all the unskilled help she could use.”
“‘Unskilled help!’ I like that! Why, during the epidemic of ’93 there were times when I was the only woman in the colony able to change a bed. Hummph!”
Hazel deliberately waited around for the phone call the next day, determined to get a few words at least with her daughter-in-law. The call came in about the usual time; Roger took it. It was not his wife.
“Captain Stone? Turner, sir—Charlie Turner. I’m the third engineer. Your wife asked me to phone you.”
“What’s the matter? She busy?”
“Quite busy.”
“Tell her to call me as soon as she’s free. I’ll wait by the board.”
“I’m afraid that’s no good, sir. She was quite specific that she would not be calling you today. She won’t have time.”
“Fiddlesticks! It will only take her thirty seconds. In a big ship like yours you can hook her in wherever she is.”
The man sounded embarrassed. “I’m sorry, sir. Dr. Stone gave strict orders not to be disturbed.”
“But confound it, I—”
“I’m very sorry, sir. Good-by.” He left him sputtering into a dead circuit.
Roger Stone remained quiet for several m
Hazel answered quietly, “Don’t jump to conclusions, Son.” But in her own heart she had already reached the same conclusion. Edith Stone had contracted the disease she had gone to treat.
The same barren stall was given Roger Stone on the following day; by the third day they gave up the pretense. Dr. Stone was ill, but her husband was not to worry. She had already, before she gave into it herself, progressed far enough in standardizing a treatment that all the new cases—hers among them—were doing nicely. So they said.
No, they would not arrange a circuit to her bed. No, he could not talk to Captain Vandenbergh; the Captain was still too ill.
“I’m coming over!” Roger Stone shouted.
Turner hesitated. “That’s up to you, Captain. But if you do, we’ll have to quarantine you here. Dr. Stone’s written orders.”
Roger Stone switched off. He knew that that settled it; in matters medical Edith was a Roman judge—and he could not abandon his own ship, his family, to get to Mars by themselves. One frail old woman, two cocksure half-trained student pilots—no, he had to take his ship in.
They sweated it out. The cooking got worse, when anyone bothered to cook. It was seven endless, Earth-standard days later when the daily call was answered by, “Roger—hello, darling!”
“Edith! Are you all right?”
“Getting that way.”
“What’s your temperature?”
“Now, darling, I won’t have you quack-doctoring me. My temperature is satisfactory, as is the rest of my physical being. I’ve lost a little weight, but I could stand to—don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t. Listen—you come home! You hear me?”
“Roger dearest! I can’t and that’s settled. This entire ship is under quarantine. But how is the rest of my family?”
“Oh, shucks, fine, fine! We’re all in the pink.”
“Stay that way. I’ll call you tomorrow. Bye, dear.”
Dinner that night was a celebration. Hazel cut her thumb again, but not even she cared.