“That’s one of the reasons we blasted off from Johnston Island,” Merola put in. “Both stages fell over water, you see.”
“I remember now,” Dr. Gehardt said, nodding. “You mentioned something about a wire-mesh parachute on each stage.”
“That’s right, Doc,” Merola said. “Those ring-shaped ribbon parachutes carry the stages safely to the water. They’re probably being picked up right now by Navy ships.”
“And they will be used again, of course,” Dr. Phelps said, his voice rising slightly to make his statement a question.
“Yes, of course,” Forbes said.
Merola suddenly clapped one palm against the other. “And that ends the lecture for today. Now if you gentlemen will silently float down this way, I’ll give you some size fourteens that will keep you glued to the deck.”
“Shoes?” Dr. Phelps asked.
Merola bent, lifting the lid on a foot locker. “Well, in a manner of speaking.” He lifted an object that looked very much like a metal sandal, fully two inches thick, with canvas straps dangling loose over the arch. “This is magnetized,” Merola explained. “One on each foot, and you can stop being eagles.”
Ted poked his forefinger against the overhead and began to drift toward the deck immediately. Merola handed him a pair of sandals, and he quickly strapped them to the heavy soles of his boots. He stood upright, his feet firmly rooted to the deck now.
“I think I liked floating up there better,” he said, grinning.
“The shoes have advantages,” Forbes told him. “You can climb up the side of the bulkheads with these. Makes you feel just like a fly.”
“Who wants to feel like a fly?” Jack asked.
His voice surprised Ted, who suddenly realized Jack had been unnaturally quiet ever since blastoff.
“Well, you might as well get used to them anyway,” Merola said, his brown eyes flashing. “It won’t matter on this short hop, but you might get tired of floating around when we’re on our way to the Moon.”
Dr. Phelps finished strapping on his sandals and stood up, the coveralls bagging loosely on his wiry frame. “That’s much better,” he said, staring down at his feet. “I’ve always been one to stand on my own two feet.”
Dr. Gehardt chuckled at this and stood up alongside Dr. Phelps, testing the sandals like a new pair of tennis shoes.
“I feel like a robot,” he announced.
“Wait until we put you in a space suit,” Merola said.
“Will we be wearing suits?” Dr. Gehardt asked. “That is, I know we’ll have to wear them on the Moon. But the Station...”
“The Station itself has its own oxygen supply and pressure control,” Merola said, “but we’ll need suits to get there from the ship.”
“I see.” Dr. Gehardt lifted his feet clumsily and clumped across the cabin. “Will we be there soon?” he asked.
“The entire trip takes fifty-six minutes.”
Dr. Gehardt moved over to the wide plexiglass viewport that swung in a semicircle across the waist of the cabin. Outside, like scattered diamonds on a jeweler’s velvet, the stars blinked at the rapidly moving ship. “This is an experience,” he said, his voice strangely solemn. “To be up among the stars.” He shook his head in silent wonder.
“We’re going a lot higher than this,” Jack put in.
The doctor turned away from the viewport and sighed deeply, almost as if Jack had broken his mood. “Yes, yes,” he agreed. “We will go much higher.” He glanced once more at the stars and added, “Man will always go much higher. This is our destiny.”
A strange silence seemed to shoulder its way into the cabin. Merola passed a hand over his upper lip and looked out through the viewport. Forbes shuffled his feet uncomfortably, and Ted leaned against the bulkhead, his eyes fastened to the glittering array in the sky outside.
It was Dr. Phelps who broke the silence.
“How fast would you say we’re going now?” he asked.
“Oh, close to 18,000 miles an hour,” Merola answered.
Dr. Phelps nodded knowingly. “That’s just what I figured. And there’s something I do not understand.”
“Here we go again,” Forbes said.
“If you prefer I didn’t ask questions,” the doctor started innocently. “I will...”
“Dan’s only kidding, Doc,” Merola said. “Fire away.”
Dr. Phelps nodded and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up into his scrawny neck. “If the Station is only 1,075 miles above the Earth, why will it take us all of fifty-six minutes to get there? You said we are traveling at a speed of 18,000 miles an hour. That’s approximately a thousand miles every three and a half minutes. If we can travel a thousand miles in such a short time, why do we need the extra fifty-three minutes? In fifty-six minutes, we should have traveled...”
“The Straight Line Fallacy,” Ted said quickly.
Dr. Phelps turned, his face curious. “What was that?”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Ted said. “Perhaps Captain Merola would...”
“No, go ahead,” Merola said. “I’m curious to hear what they teach you Academy Joes.”
“If you don’t mind,” Forbes interrupted, “I’m going down belowdecks to see if we’ve still got our engines with us.” He duck-waddled across the cabin on his metal sandals, stopping beside the hatch in the deck. He gave the wheel a sharp twist to the left, swung the cover open, and started down the ladder to the deck below.
“What about this... Straight Line Fallacy, did you call it?” Dr. Phelps asked.
“Yes,” Ted said. “That’s what we called it at the Academy.”
Jack sighed deeply, turned his back on the group and walked heavily to the viewport. He stood looking out at the stars, his arms folded across his chest.
“You see,” Ted continued, “most people assume that a rocket simply travels in a straight line from the Earth to its destination. That isn’t the case at all. Actually, only the first few minutes of flight are straight up. After that, the rocket is tilted into an egg-shaped orbit that gradually widens the distance from Earth.”
“Yes, go on,” Dr. Phelps said.
Ted grinned good-naturedly. “I thought that would explain it,” he confessed. He scratched his head. “Now, let’s see.”
“Will some actual figures help?” Merola asked.
“Well, yes. Yes, I think so.”
“We have to realize first that we are doing two things at the same time,” Merola said. “We are pushing forward at so many miles a minute, and we are also climbing upward. Forward and up at the same time. Have you got that?”
“Yes,” Dr. Phelps said.
“The rest is simple then,” Ted put in. “For each mile forward we go, we are also getting higher from the surface of the Earth. But because we are not going straight up, we will not necessarily have attained a height of ten miles when we have covered a distance of ten miles.”
“Here are the actual figures,” Merola continued. “When we’ve traveled an actual distance of 31.1 miles, we will have only reached a height of 24.9 miles. This difference between height reached and distance covered widens as the rocket continues in its orbit. For example, when we’ve covered 332 miles, our height is only 39.8 miles. When we’ve traveled 705 miles, we’d still be only 63.3 miles above the surface of the Earth.”
Ted nodded his head enthusiastically. “You can see, then, that in order to reach the comparatively low height of 1,075 miles, we’d have to travel a very great distance. In fact, we’ll have traveled more than halfway around the globe from the blastoff site before we reach the Space Station.” He paused for a moment and said, “It would be simple if we could just shoot straight up. We can’t, though.”
Dr. Gehardt nodded. “Halfway around the globe. And the circumference of the Earth is about 25,000 miles.”