“I hope it’s just a fracture,” he murmured.
Beads of sweat stood out on Forbes’s forehead beneath his close-cropped hair. There was a worried expression on his face. He licked his lips quickly.
“What else could it be, Doc?”
Dr. Phelps didn’t look up. His fingers kept moving rapidly around the wound. “Concussion,” he murmured.
Ted watched them from above, wanting to help, but knowing there was nothing he could really do.
“Is that bad?” Forbes asked.
Dr. Phelps’s black brows curled up onto his forehead in surprise. “Concussion?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Dr. Phelps nodded solemnly. “Yes, I’m afraid concussion would be very bad.”
Forbes let out a deep breath.
“The bleeding doesn’t seem to be too bad though,” Dr. Phelps went on. He barely turned his head. “Fred, let me have one of those sulfapaks.”
Dr. Gehardt lifted the lid of the kit too quickly, and a roll of gauze floated up into the air, unrolling as it went. Dr. Gehardt made a stab at recapturing it.
“Let it go,” Dr. Phelps said quickly. “The sulfapak, please.”
Dr. Gehardt’s fingers fumbled inside the kit. He was trembling when he finally handed Dr. Phelps the package. The physician ripped the package open, stared at the pad for a moment and then quickly placed it over the wound.
“There are some large squares of cotton in the kit,” he said. “The material, not the absorbent cotton. May I have several of them?”
Dr. Gehardt found the handkerchief-size pieces of cloth and handed them to Dr. Phelps. Quickly the doctor’s fingers formed the squares into a solid-looking ring pad, slightly larger than the wound and resembling a cloth quoit. “Get the gauze now,” he said.
Ted snatched the roll of gauze out of the air and brought it down to the doctor. Dr. Phelps took the end of the roll, placed the ring pad in place over the dressing, and then looped the gauze under Merola’s chin, up over his head and the wound, under the chin again. He kept unwinding the roll until the ring pad was completely covered with several layers of gauze. He snipped off a half-inch of adhesive then, and taped the bandage in place. He ran another bandage across Merola’s forehead and over the wound, taping this too.
“All right,” he said, “let’s move him to one of the couches.”
Forbes clumped across the deck in his heavy sandals and guided Merola’s feet, as Dr. Phelps steered his shoulders into the bottom couch on the starboard side of the ship. They laid him down gently, pulling the straps over his shoulders and waist.
Dr. Phelps squirted some more alcohol onto his hands, rinsing off the blood. He dried his hands, his eyes never leaving Merola’s inert figure on the couch.
He shook his head then. “There’s nothing more we can do. Except wait. And maybe pray.”
On the fourth day out from the Station, long after they had fixed the loose rivet, Forbes called a meeting of the crew. They clustered around the instrument panel, their faces serious. Ted stood off in the corner of the ship, an unwelcome eavesdropper.
Forbes got straight to the point. He ran his strong, square finger tips through his short blond hair, pulled his hand away from his head, and said, “We’re in a tight spot.” He paused, and his eyes were troubled. He looked as if he were about to cry, his features about to crumble. “George is still unconscious. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“I don’t believe it’s a concussion,” Dr. Phelps said. “A very bad fracture and subsequent shock — but not a concussion.” He shook his head. “If we had some way of taking an X ray...”
“Will he be coming around soon?” Forbes asked.
Dr. Phelps sighed deeply. “I wish I knew. He may gain consciousness at any moment, or it may take days.”
“We haven’t got days, Doc,” Forbes said grimly.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s simple. At about this time tomorrow, we’ll have to attempt a landing on the Moon.” Forbes’s shoulders sagged, as if he were too tired to go on. “George is our pilot and navigator.”
“Must we land tomorrow?” Dr. Gehardt asked. His eyes were cloudy with concern. Ted noticed that he seemed somehow older since the accident. “Isn’t there some way to postpone it until George is...”
“Our orbit was calculated to take us to the Moon,” Forbes said. “If we don’t land on it, we’ll crash on it.”
“Can’t we change our orbit?” Dr. Gehardt asked.
Forbes shook his head. “We’ve got just enough fuel to get us to the Moon. If we use that fuel to change our orbit, avoiding a crash, we wouldn’t have any left to take us anywhere else. As it is, we’ll be using that fuel when we start braking for a landing.”
“Braking?”
“Yes. In effect, we’ll be turning the rocket so that she’ll come down tail first, the thrust of our jets braking our descent. In other words, we’ll be literally sitting down on our jets.”
“But if you know all this, why can’t you bring her down?” Dr. Phelps asked.
Forbes slammed his fist into the open palm of his other hand. “That’s just the trouble. I know this ship as well as I know my own mother. I can take it apart and put it together again blindfolded. But navigation is something else again. And I wouldn’t want to fool with a navigation problem as tricky as this one will be.”
“But... I don’t understand. Why can’t we radio the Space Station? They should be able to give us directions.”
Forbes shook his head. “Doc, the only part of this trip that isn’t automatic is the landing process. Someday, maybe that’ll be automatic, too. But right now, all the figures are theoretical — and the margin of error is too great to gamble on.”
“We do have figures, then?”
“Sure. We have loads of approximate figures. All supplied by the Station months before the actual trip. Figures that say when turnover should take place, how long we should blast, all of it. But these figures have to be constantly checked against our course and speed and distance from the Moon as we move along. That can’t be done from the Station.”
“Why not? We can radio them, and they can do the computation there.”
“Up to a point, yes.”
“Why only up to a point?”
“Because turnover has to be a split-second maneuver. We could miss our turnover point in the time it took us to call a set of figures to the Station.”
“I see.”
“We could probably do the computation ourselves, and much faster. It takes quite a while for a voice to travel from here to the Station.”
“Yes,” Dr. Phelps agreed. “We’d be better off computing the figures ourselves.”
“I could probably handle that. Maybe. But tying that in with the actual navigation... that’s another thing. Translating figures into actual maneuvers...” Forbes shook his head. “And knowing just when to perform the maneuvers...”
“But suppose you had to?”
Forbes spread his hands helplessly. “I still couldn’t do it, Doc. It’s like... like asking me to perform brain surgery. Even if I had to, I couldn’t.”
Dr. Phelps nodded glumly. “I see.”
“Dan!”
The voice was barely a whisper. It shuddered across the cabin like a hoarse wind from a mountain-top.
“Dan!”
Forbes shoved himself away from the instrument panel. “George!” he shouted, his eyes brightening. “George, boy, George!”
In spite of the heavy sandals, he crossed the deck like a jack rabbit, pulling himself up short beside Merola’s couch. He kneeled down, his ear close to Merola’s face.