"And your —"
"My men are still there and will continue to be there for two hours and fifteen minutes more when Capitol's ship, Carolinia, whose owners have not been such fools as to adopt Kimberly suits, will let down and kindly assist my men back in."
"You could have —" Kimberly fumbled.
"No, we couldn't. Medford, the home office, our engineer's staff, and everybody else has been trying to figure it out for over thirty hours. A total blank. They couldn't get the men back in.
"There are just two more items, and then I'm through. Number one: Your suits are haunted."
"Haunted!"
"Screams like a built-in banshee nearly drove the men crazy for a while until they were laid out. It was so high-pitched they could scarcely hear it at first, but it was there. Is it one of your improvements? I didn't notice anything about it in this spread you have in 'Rocket Flight'."
"Look, Henry, our suits may spread eagle, but they don't scream."
"Seventeen men on the Moon say they do."
"Must have been defective radios oscillating."
"They cut them off. The suits are haunted. You know what happens to a ship or piece of equipment when something like that starts around. It doesn't have to make sense."
"Henry, we'll —"
But the screen was suddenly blank. Kimberly was saved the necessity of trying to think just what they'd do at the moment.
He put his head between his hands and groaned. He felt as if a large meteorite had rolled slowly over him. The two-page, four-color advertisement of Kimberly Suits was still spread out on the desk before him. A sudden taste like half ripe vinegar filled his mouth. He slapped the magazine shut and gave it a shove that sent it over the edge of the desk to the floor.
Haunted spacesuits! Awghhh —
And the Kimberly Joints? They had been tested under every conceivable circumstance. In the space room they had been flexed millions of times at a temperature of 0.001 degree K. The metallurgy department had come up with an alloy that looked like perfection. Hundreds of thousands of the springs had been tested without failure before a single one had been built into a suit.
And now they should fail.
And haunted to boot.
He tried to think what the screaming sound might have been. He could only suspect the communicator. And that had been cut off. Perhaps it was some psychological effect. Probably a minor matter, anyway. Of greatest importance was the failure of the Kimberly Joints. If they couldn't be perfected, the company would have to close up or start making flat irons and electric mixers.
He got up slowly and went out through the now empty outer offices. All the hired help had gone home. He supposed there'd still be a few of the boys puttering around in the labs, but he didn't want to see anybody.
He went down to the main floor where production lines were frozen in mid-motion. Scores of suits in all stages of production hung on the movable racks. He walked slowly down the line, from the point where the plastic came from the molds, past the subassembly sections where the intricate regulator valves and communication sets were put together, past the optical section where the circle of hundred and eighty degree lenses were set into the headpieces.
He walked by the test chambers where each plastic carcass was tested for pressure and cold after the Kimberly fastener, an air-tight pressure zipper had been installed. He glanced through a peephole at a score of pressure regulator valves on test. At the end of the line, he reached out to touch a completed suit, set up in its Iron Maiden, ready for shipment.
When he was a kid he'd read stories of space flight, and that was just before space flight had actually begun. Invariably, in the stories, the clean-cut young physicist or engineer would have occasion to hastily don his pleated, gabardine space suit and rush out into the vacuum of interstellar space on some urgent mission. Anyway, it looked like gabardine or something of the sort the way it was drawn by the illustrators. In total vacuum, the material hung in manly looking folds that made the hero look like a champion skier about to take off. Always, of course, the headpiece was a uniform, transparent globe. Kimberly wished he knew what material the artists had in mind for those globes, especially when the neck opening was too small to permit removal.
He glanced wryly at the thick headpieces of his own suits with their ugly semicircle of hundred and eighty degree lenses, and the stubby antenna sticking straight up. Maybe some day they'd get to the transparent globe stage — but it looked a long way ahead, especially in view of Johnson's complaint.
He trundled a carrier up to the nearest finished suit and mounted it, then wheeled slowly towards the space chamber down the line. An "icebox", the engineers called it. There was only one way to find out what was wrong with these suits —
He entered the lock of the chamber and closed the door. He chucked the Iron Maiden off the carrier and stripped off his clothes. From a closet he took a special liner and put it on. It resembled very closely a pair of ancient red flannel drawers.
It used to be that it took at least two other men to get one into an iron pants suit. For the first time now a man could get into a suit by himself — if the suit was a new Kimberly, and provided the Iron Maiden was there to hold it. Without her, six men and a boy couldn't put the suit on him.
Burton, the young engineer who was chiefly responsible for the new joints, was working on a system of dogs to make the Maiden unnecessary, but so far they weren't quite practical.
The Maiden was necessary because the tension of the counterbalances in each of the joints would otherwise have folded the suit into an intractable wad. It was surprising how many newcomers in the various branches of engineering associated with space flight did not appreciate the magnitude of the problem of joints and pressure regulation. So many of them thought all you had to do to build a spacesuit was make a man-shaped balloon, put a man and some air into it and turn him loose. They never realized that a man in such a rig would be spread-eagled by the air pressure that forced the suit to maximum volume and held it there. It wouldn't permit a man to bend an arm or move a leg. And if he could move, the changing volume would introduce such a violent change of air pressure in the suit that it would be uninhabitable.
The springs of the Kimberly Joint were ingeniously built into sheaths in the fabric in such a way as to counterbalance this spread-eagling force, thus leaving the spaceman free to move his body in a somewhat normal fashion.
But the springs, in turn, made the ungainly contraption nicknamed the Iron Maiden necessary to hold the uninflated suit.
So far, all means of dogging the counterbalances made it impossible to get into the suit, properly inflate, and then remove the dogs. In the Maiden, the suit was held rigid and the right arm dogged so that the openings could be closed and the suit inflated. Afterwards, the left hand was used to undog the right arm.
It was cumbersome, complicated, and ungainly, a lot different from the boyhood heroes Bryan Kimberly had read about, those dashing engineers who were forever shucking on a spacesuit at the drop of a ray gun and clearing the void of all that stood in their way.
But it was an improvement over the old ground joint, iron pants outfits, with their continual blowouts and violent deaths. So far, space flight had become useful only to the degree that suit engineering had freed men from the confines of the ships to explore the surface of the Moon.
And some day a Kimberly would make the first human footprint on the surface of Mars —
Kimberly slid his legs into the suit, then hunched down and drew himself into the rest of the carcass. He stood up straight sliding his arms into place and raising his head into the dark, tight cavern of the headpiece. More than ever, he wished those writers and illustrators of thirty years ago had left proper specifications for those beautiful suits and transparent helmets they designed. A suffocating, claustrophobic sense filled him momentarily. As good as they were, the lenses gave the impression of looking between fantastic bars as his sight shifted from one to another. It was difficult to get used to the distortion of field that they presented to his eyes — but some day there'd be transparent headpieces.