Goddard figured out the best orbits early in the twentieth century, when the only rockets in existence were mere toys. He discovered that the most economical orbit could be found by drawing the orbit of Earth, 93,000,000 miles from the. Sun, and the orbit of Mars, which was 128,000,00 miles from the Sun at its closest point; then, if another cycle is drawn which Just touches both orbits, it will be the ideal orbit for a rocket flight between the two planets.
Chuck stood in the control room of the Eros, resting his hands and studying the chart of their flight with all its markings for days and speeds. Lew was doubled into the ruined control panel, pulling out the mass of bent and fused parts, but the chart was the only thing of any interest to Chuck in the place.
“Stop muttering,” Lew told him. “Either read the stuff aloud, or keep quiet. You’re reminding me of how much I’ve forgotten of the schooling I had whenever you mumble a figure and I can’t remember it”
Chuck grinned, and began trying to make sense of it over the radio.
It wasn’t a simple path. It left Earth on one side of the Sun and went all the way around to the other side before it met the orbit of Mars. Even at the speeds they were traveling, it would take 237 days, from start to finish.
Even then, it was possible only when Earth and Mars were in exactly the right place—which happened over periods that were years apart.
Earth traveled around the Sun at more than eighteen miles a second, and the ship’s acceleration had boosted its-speed to better than twenty-five miles a second. Now they were fighting against the pull of the Sun, which reached out, trying to drag them inward, forcing them to lose speed until they would arrive at Mars’ orbit with only fifteen miles a second left; but that was as it should be, since Mars only traveled in its orbit at that speed. “Simple enough, Lew?”
“If you discount the pull of Mars,” Vance commented, as he entered the control room through the lock they had installed. “You make it sound as if we simply drift down and touch without any more work. Don’t forget that we’ll start falling for Mars as soon as we come near, and we’ll have to land with the rockets, unless we want to ‘be smashed flat or burned up in her atmosphere. That’s why you’d better get those controls fixed.”
Chuck nodded, and took his turn with the wires as Lew came out for a rest. Being a pilot on interplanetary ships began to sound like a worse dose of mathematics than being an engineer.
They were already more than half the way. Now they would begin heading closer and closer to Mars. Already the Sun, as seen through the filters, had shrunk enough to be noticeably smaller.
He pulled a fused box out of the ruins and studied it carefully, comparing it to the diagrams. In the drawings, it was shown as a dotted box around two bars that didn’t quite touch—the symbol for a shielded condenser. But this was obviously a lot more complicated than that.
Chuck picked up the small welding torch and began stripping off the twisted, half-melted shielding. Inside was the wreck of a maze of wires, resistors, condensers, and something that might have been crystal rectifiers once. He motioned to Lew. “Make anything of this?”
“Not much. I’ve been studying that ‘condenser,’ and wondering how it worked. Doesn’t seem to make sense. Give me. those specs.”
They went over them together, trying to figure it out. Beside the box was a number, as there was beside each part. Lew went back for a book of parts, trying to find it. It wasn’t mentioned!
“Nice,” he said bitterly. “They must have put a new circuit in just before the specs were printed—so some engineer drew that in, expecting to key it later. And it got passed over. What is it—some pulsing circuit do you think?”
“Must be. Looks as if it takes the pulses from the motors and chop the tops off them—but it must do more than that.”
“Put it aside,” Chuck suggested. “We can go over it later. You’re strong on theory—you’ll have to figure what went into it, unless we have a part among the spares that isn’t listed in the book.”
Vance picked the box up and turned it over. “How important is this?”
Lew shrugged. “I don’t know, but I suspect it’s the main trick in getting smooth controls. We’re playing this by feel, more or less; control is mostly electronic, but it has some twists I don’t know about.”
Vance put in a call for Steele, but the engineer shook his head as he looked at the box. He picked up the diagrams and began studying them.
There was a cloud on his usually handsome face as he returned the box and drawings. “It’s important—I can tell that much. But it’s some new development I don’t know a thing about. Shall I put the others to work taking inventory?”
Vance nodded tersely, and Steele went out, still scowling. Inventory of stocks went on while Lew and Chuck dug farther into the control panel, and began putting it back together, leaving space for the box. Eventually the last piece had been inspected. There was no spare on board.
The time was getting short. They were beginning to draw near to Mars. The planet now ahead of them was just visible on the radar screen, when it was set for the longest range—where it took a planetary mass to affect it.
Chuck worked on testing the panel, while Lew, Rothman, and Steele pored over the diagrams, trying to figure out exactly what the theory behind it was. They had already put in calls to Earth, but the specifications there were obviously different since they failed to show the box at all; the mix-up on the diagrams had obviously been a complete one. Apparently some engineer had come up with a new development, wired it into the circuit, and marked it hastily into the drawings. He’d failed to report his changes, and when the panel passed its tests, it had been installed without any record that it was nonstandard.
Earth was trying to track down the singularly modest inventor. They reported finally that they had found who it was—but the man had been killed in an auto accident the day he finished the panel!
It accounted for the trouble with the drawings, but it didn’t help any. Chuck could only suggest that they try to find his working notes and see if they contained any information.
Another week passed before the answer came. The notes had been found and decoded. They were incomplete, and the engineers there had no model to work from, but the general theories had been discovered. They read them off to the Eros, spelling each word in triplicate to make sure nothing was lost.
More days went by while Lew, Chuck and Steele pored over the information and the ruined box, redeveloping the dead engineer’s theories, and trying to see how to apply them.
Finally they began work on the actual construction, and none of them looked happy. Chuck knew that half of their work was founded on guesses, but he was too exhausted to worry about it. He took the parts that he needed and began assembling them.
“It all depends—” he answered Vance’s questions. ‘There’s a tricky coil here, and we can only hope we’ve figured out how it was wired from what we found of the original. And we don’t know the size of the two condensers. We’re just making the best guesses we can. If it works at all, we may be able to tune it up properly, and we may not. With enough time, I suppose we could get it working as well as the original—maybe better.”
Vance nodded and left them alone. When he came back, the box was installed, and they were frantically adjusting things in it, trying to get a response from it. The needles on their test equipment stood unmoving at zero.
Chuck lay awake a long time that night. He was sure that the box should work. Of course, he was a little weaker on theory than Lew—but he’d been boning up from the technical books in the microfilm library. He was beginning to feel like a machine, with no human emotions left.