“Kanti, here’s what you have to do,” Greg said as calmly as possible. “This couch has straps; whatever happens, I can’t be sent flying around the cabin. Strap me in. Then open the window cover, and get up here. Then push this lever all the way forward fast, then get over to the other side and push the other one the same way as fast as it will let you and brace yourself. If I’m right, the engines will fire as soon as the propellants mix.”
She nodded very seriously. “Got it.” She went over to the covered viewport and looked at the cover helplessly. The ship shook again, and Uther song penetrated its hull.
Then an amplified hoot from outside demanded attention. “INSIDE HUMANS, IF TALK NOW—THEN—YOU NOT BE INSTANTLY KILLED.”
He didn’t need Bach’s hoots to tell him that there was no possibility that the promise would be kept, nor, if it were, would they be allowed to warn others of the fleet.
Greg allowed himself a little smile. “Don’t panic. I think they’re trying to scare us out. The last thing they want is for this thing to explode in the middle of a thousand other fueled spacecraft. Tell that to Bach.”
Kanti sang triplets, then repeated them.
Bach, stopped its panicky warbling, and sang a few chords.
Kanti sang again, then Bach.
“Bach says it will open the window when we’re ready. It knows how to work the latch.”
“OK. We’ll do it this way. Fuel, Window, Peroxide. Get up here and grab the left lever! Push it forward, tell Bach to open the window, then go over and push the other one forward.”
Kanti sprang up onto the control deck as if on wings and pushed the indicated lever.
“It won’t move!”
Bach warbled insistently—again there was no need for translation. The cacophony outside was increasing. Why wouldn’t the lever move? Come on, he told himself, the idiots that made this thing were bright. They had redundancy, they were concerned about hull integrity—safety.
“Check for some kind of safety latch—something mechanical to insure no one opens the valves accidentally. Probably down by the base.”
After a too-long five or ten seconds, she said, “Found it, just a little hook. I unlatched it. Push the lever now?”
“Yes!—No! Wait! There’ll be a safety hook on the other lever too. Unlatch that first, then open this one.”
Kanti bounded over his Uther couch, where he held onto the directional controls with white knuckles. Bach had stopped its panicky warbles—what Kanti was doing was simple enough for it to see and understand, and it was bright enough not to interrupt in the crisis.
Then Kanti was back across the couch again and at the first lever, and looked at him.
He was probably about to be blown to bits, and his life should be passing in front of his eyes, but the thought barely passed through his mind. He was concentrated on direction. Try to go straight up, roll to find the sun, lock in and keep it there. He nodded sharply to Kanti. She shoved the lever all the way forward. A sound like a toilet flushing ran through the ship.
“Window!” he yelled. She warbled to Bach as she jumped over to the peroxide lever.
Bach flung open the window shade, and let loose a blast of sound at the Uther face that appeared in it.
Surprising himself, Greg thought he recognized the tone mote for “far, far, far.” The Uther in the window vanished, as if pulled by a string. The loudest roar Greg had ever heard let loose as Kanti pushed the peroxide lever forward and fell back with the sudden acceleration.
Up they went. In less time than it took him to think about it, the horizon vanished from Greg’s sight. In an instant he realized his control idea was wrong. First, keep the horizon level in the window; that was straight up. Then worry about the sun and roll. He couldn’t be too far off; the pitch control was still near center and the window still showed distant land. He edged the control slightly in the direction away from the window and got the horizon again, but tilted.
Inertia helped—the massive ship didn’t change direction quickly and his reflexes were easily fast enough. He had to remember that he had time to think and not overcontrol.
Pushing the “roll” control forward rotated the ship counterclockwise. He rolled the window toward the ground, and gingerly pitched until the horizon was level in the port again.
Whoever was watching this was seeing some crazy corkscrews, he thought. But the controls felt very smooth and responsive; the designers had built some inherent stability into this rocket—after that initial tilt, it didn’t change directions easily. When he got good at keeping the horizon level, he rolled to find the sun.
The gap between the sun and the horizon had grown significantly already. Soon, the sun would be out of view high, if he kept the horizon. But he would lose his “down” reference if he lost the horizon.
The glare was nearly blinding him; he’d keep the horizon. But what about direction? He looked down. The flight deck was a brilliant green in the bright sunlight.
He didn’t have to see the sun—he could track the spot of sunlight the sun cast into the cabin! Keep the spot on the floor, in the same place near and left of the window, and they’d be on an eastward vector!
He rolled the spot onto the bulkhead left of the window, then gradually tilted the horizon. The spot of sunlight wobbled along the floor to a point beneath the port as the horizon tilted to just short of vertical.
It wobbled around as he made continual corrections—the steering was getting more sensitive. Also, Greg’s arms were getting very heavy.
The ship was getting lighter, of course, as they burned fuel, and acceleration was up.
He tried to think: a mass ratio of, say, thirty with an initial acceleration of something like fifteen meters per second squared, two Eponan gravities? With a little over half the fuel gone, acceleration would double.
“Kanti!”
Groan.
“You have to ease the peroxide lever back. Push yourself up and do it! Now!”
Groan.
How stable were these controls? Could he get up and do it himself? They must be up to three gravities—but he had to.
No, Kanti was crawling over to the lever. She pulled it back, and acceleration eased.
“Pull it back slowly until you’re comfortable.”
This, he realized, wasn’t very efficient. They should be reducing the hydrocarbon too, or soon they would be too fuel rich and waste delta-V.
“Can you go over to the other lever now? Reduce thrust by pulling that one back until it’s about the same position as the other one. Then keep going back and forth, OK?
“Got it,” she answered. Thrust went way down, then started to build back up again. In a minute, Kanti established a routine, going from one lever to another. Acceleration stabilized.
They must have wasted one hell of a lot of fuel, Greg thought. But at more or less constant acceleration, the lever positions at least gave him some idea of how much fuel he had left.
In a tribute to the engineers, the levers stayed where they were unless moved. Greg quickly discovered that he could keep his hands off the directional levers too, except when he needed to make a slight change, and the ride got much smoother.
The sky outside was black now. They had been rising for what, five minutes? It seemed to Greg like an eternity. Keep going, he said to himself—keep it going. Crazily, he noted that, in the confines of the cabin, he and Kanti still stank from the insides of the snail.
When the propellant valve levers had gone about 90 percent of the distance back to where they had started, Greg had Kanti pull them all the way back, peroxide first. Acceleration vanished. Hopefully, they were in orbit, or at least on a trajectory high enough to it to be rescued.