Vance stood up, holding onto a brace when he had finished his dinner. “All right, men, this was a celebration. From now on, we begin regular routine—and you’ll find it’s just that; shipboard life isn’t going to be exciting, at best. I’ve left the ship on automatic controls this time, to prove to you that it can be done.
“You’ll need that confidence in the Eros. From now on, though, we keep regular watches. I’ll take the first from eight to four with Parsons; Nat, you and Wong get the four to midnight; and Dick, Chuck and Doc will hold midnight to eight.”
He grinned at Chuck. “Except tonight. I’ve noticed you limping around, so you’ll get Doc to bandage you, and go to bed. Orders.”
Chuck had smiled inwardly at the idea of anything being routine on the Eros, but the first week taught him the folly of such ideas. The Moon shrunk to a pinprick behind them, and Mars remained only a tiny red dot. The stars were the same ones he had always seen. And outside, the eternal blackness of space gave them no indication that they weren’t frozen motionlessly.
The only change came from the occasional drop of liquid that got free somehow and collected into a little round ball in mid-air. Chasing after it and trying to trap it gave some exercise, but is wasn’t a very pleasant kind—particularly when the liquid was hot.
Even that came to an end when Vance decided to set the ship spinning so that they might be able to lead a more normal life. The spinning would throw them out against the hull like a weight whirled on the end of a string. Centrifugal force wasn’t the same as gravity, but the feeling. would be the same. It would make navigation harder, but there was little need for that until they reached Mars.
Chuck heard the wheels of the gyroscope start to spin, turning up to three thousand revolutions per minute. Here in space, every motion in one direction by any part of the ship was automatically compensated for by an opposite motion on the rest of the ship—Newton had stated it in his second law of motion: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” It took 10,000 turns of the little six-pound wheel to turn the 60,000-pound ship once; and the whole ship began spinning, slowly at first, and then fester and faster.
When they seemed to weigh about ten pounds each, Vance let it stay, and set them to moving equipment to use the hull as their floor. The ship had been equipped for that. From then on, cooking went back to normal. In the hub, or central well of the ship, they were still weightless, but elsewhere they could walk if they were careful to take it easy.
Chuck found his niche. Half of his watch was spent in the hydroponic gardens, clipping the plants, tending them, and turning the clippings into a fresh batch of chemicals by means of the little chamber where bacteria reduced it all to liquid form. On board ship everything could be reused, over and over again; there was no loss, only change and that could be controlled. In theory they could have gone on forever, provided there was enough energy to maintain the processes.
The rest of his working time was spent in cleaning and in helping Ginger with the galley work. He was a combination cook, cleaning boy, and farmer.
Most of the communication was done on Vance’s shift, and he rarely saw the radar set. The few times when the alarm told of a signal coming through, it was of a purely technical nature, and not particularly interesting. Once he talked briefly to his father; he’d been sure that his family wouldn’t mind his running away, but it was nice to hear it confirmed. They were all” proud of him.
As they drew farther away from the moon, the radar took more and more energy to operate, and Vance discouraged using it. The atomic engine could operate for years to come, but the generators were subject to wear; all had been designed to weigh as little as possible, and there were only a minimum of replacements.
Most of the free time was spent in various games or in reading. Ginger had suggested a rough version of hockey down in the central shaft, where the absence of weight made it possible to leap from end to end if the initial push was Judged correctly. It provided exercise and amusement and soon became a regular part of their lives.
Finally, there was sleep. By the time Chuck went to bed, he was usually tired enough to drift off without trouble, and to sleep soundly through a full eight hours.
He was asleep, three weeks out from the Moon, when the first trouble came.
The gong suddenly cut through his dreams, wakening him so sharply that he fell from the hammock onto the “deck.” Without time to get back, he felt the rocket suddenly go on with the full thrust of the jets. His body slid down the length of the decks to crash into the steel plates. Only the shortness of the blast saved him from injury.
Then a call came from the control room. “All hands to control. Meteorites!”
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.