“Never mind. All went well. George always has hopes of a stranger, you see: sometimes one has been known to laugh. One doesn’t like that.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I told him. “His state strikes me as very far from funny.”
“It is indeed,” he agreed. “But he’s improving. I doubt whether he knows it himself, but he is. A year ago he would often weep quietly through the whole dejeuner.—Rather depressing until one got used to it.”
“He lives here in Lahua, then?” I asked.
“He exists. He spends most of his time in the church. For the rest he wanders round. He sleeps at that big white house up on the hill. His grand-daughter’s place. She sees that he’s decently turned out, and pays the bills for whatever he fancies down here.”
I thought I must have misheard.
“His grand-daughter!” I exclaimed. “But he’s a young man. He can’t be much over thirty years old...”
He looked at me.
“You’ll very likely come across him again. Just as well to know how things stand. Of course it isn’t the sort of thing the family likes to publicize, but there’s no secret about it.”
The café-cognacs arrived. He added cream to his, and began:
About five years ago (he said), yes, it would be in 2194, young Gerald Troon was taking a ship out to one of the larger asteroids—the one that de Gasparis called Psyche when he spotted it in 1852. The ship was a space-built freighter called the Celestis, working from the moon-base. Her crew was five, with not bad accommodation forward. Apart from that and the motor-section these ships are not much more than one big hold which is very often empty on the outward journeys unless it is carrying gear to set up new workings. This time it was empty because the assignment was simply to pick up a load of uranium ore—Psyche is half made of high-yield ore, and all that was necessary was to set going the digging machinery already on the site, and load the stuff in. It seemed simple enough.
But the Asteroid Belt is still a very tricky area, you know. The main bodies and groups are charted, of course —but that only helps you to find them. The place is full of outfliers of all sizes that you couldn’t hope to chart, but have to avoid. About the best you can do is to tackle the Belt as near to your objective as possible, reduce speed until you are little more than local orbit velocity, and then edge your way in, going very canny. The trouble is the time it can take to keep on fiddling along that way for thousands—hundreds of thousands, maybe—of miles. Fellows get bored and inattentive, or sick to death of it and start to take chances. I don’t know what the answer is. You can bounce radar off the big chunks and hitch that up to a course deflector to keep you away from them. But the small stuff is just as deadly to a ship, and there’s so much of it about that if you were to make the course-deflector sensitive enough to react to it you’d have your ship shying off everything the whole time, and getting nowhere. What we want is someone to come up with a kind of repulse mechanism with only a limited range of operation— say, a hundred miles—but no one does. So, as I say, it’s tricky. Since they first started to tackle it back in 2150 they’ve lost half-a-dozen ships in there, and had a dozen more damaged one way or another. Not a nice place at all... On the other hand, uranium is uranium....
Gerald’s a good lad though. He has the authentic Troon yen for space without being much of a chancer; besides, Psyche isn’t too far from the inner rim of the orbit—not nearly the approach problem Ceres is, for instance—what’s more, he’d done it several times before.
Well, he got into the Belt, and jockeyed and fiddled and niggled his way until he was about three hundred miles out from Psyche and getting ready to come in. Perhaps he’d got a bit careless by then; in any case he’d not be expecting to find anything in orbit around the asteroid. But that’s just what he did find—the hard way...
There was a crash which made the whole ship ring round him and his crew as if they were in an enormous bell. It’s about the nastiest—and very likely to be the last —sound a spaceman can ever hear. This time, however, their luck was in. They discovered that as they crowded to watch the indicator dials. Nothing vital had been hit.
Gerald turned over the controls to his First, and he and the engineer, Steve, pulled spacesuits out of the locker. When the airlock opened they hitched their safety-lines on the spring hooks, and slid their way aft along the hull on magnetic soles. It was soon clear that the damage was not on the airlock side, and they worked round the curve of the hull.
One thing was evident right away—that it had hit with no great force. If it had, it would have gone right through and out the other side, for the hold of a freighter is little more than a single-walled cylinder: there is no need for it to be more, it doesn’t have to conserve warmth, nor contain air, nor to resist the friction of an atmosphere, nor does it have to contend with any more gravitational pull than that of the moon; it is only in the living-quarters that there have to be the complexities necessary to sustain life.
Another, which was immediately clear, was that this was not the only misadventure that had befallen the small ship. Something had, at some time, sliced off most of its after part, carrying away not only the driving tubes but the mixing-chambers as well, and leaving it hopelessly disabled.
Shuffling round the wreckage to inspect it, Gerald found no entrance. It was thoroughly jammed into the hole it had made, and its airlock must lie forward, somewhere inside the freighter. He sent Steve back for a cutter and for a key that would get them into the hold. While he waited he spoke, through his helmet radio to the operator in the Celestis’s living-quarters, and explained the situation. He added:
“Can you raise the moon-station just now, Jake? I’d better make a report.”
“Strong and clear, Cap’n.”
“Good. Tell them to put me on to the Duty Officer, will you.”
He heard Jake open up and call. There was a pause while the waves crossed and recrossed the millions of miles between them, then a voice:
“Hullo Celestis! Hullo Celestis! Moon-station responding. Go ahead, Jake. Over I”
Gerald waited out the exchange patiently. In due course another voice spoke.
“Hullo Celestis! Moon-station Duty Officer speaking. Give your location and go ahead.”
“Hullo, Charles. This is Gerald Troon calling from Celestis now in orbit about Psyche. Approximately three-twenty miles altitude. I am notifying damage by collision. No harm to personnel. Not repeat not in danger. Damage appears to be confined to empty hold-section. Cause of damage ...” He went on to give particulars, and concluded: “I am about to investigate. Will report further. Please keep the link open. Over!”
The engineer returned, floating a self-powered cutter with him on a short safety-cord, and holding the key which would screw back the bolts of the hold’s entrance-port. Gerald took the key, inserted it in the hole beside the door, and inserted his legs into the two staples that would give him the purchase to wind it.
The moon man’s voice came again.
“Hullo, Ticker. Understand no immediate danger. But don’t go taking any chances, boy. Can you identify the derelict?”
“Repeat no danger,” Troon told him. “Plumb lucky. If she’d hit six feet further forward we’d have had real trouble. I have now opened small door of the hold, and am going in to examine the forepart of the derelict. Will try to identify it.”