«Tom! Tom, can you hear me?»
He turned away from the port and flicked a switch on the radio console.
«Hello, Ruth. I can hear you.»
A hubbub of excitement crackled through the radio receiver, then the woman’s voice: «Are you all right? Is everything—»
«Everything’s fine,» Tom said flatly. He could picture the scene back at the station—dozens of people clustered around the jury-rigged radio, Ruth working the controls, trying hard to stay calm when it was impossible to, brushing back that permanently displaced wisp of brown hair that stubbornly fell over her forehead.
«Jason will be here in a minute,» she said. «He’s in the tracking shack, helping to calculate your orbit.»
Of course Jason will be here, Tom thought. Aloud he said, «He needn’t bother. I can see the satellite packages; they’re only a couple of hundred yards from the ship.»
Even through the radio he could sense the stir that went through them.
Don’t get your hopes up, he warned silently. Remember, I’m no engineer. Engineers are too valuable to risk on this job. I’m just a tool, a mindless screwdriver sent here to assemble this glorified tinkertoy. I’m the muscle, Arnoldsson is the nerve link, and Jason is the brain.
Abruptly, Jason’s voice surged through the radio speaker, «We did it, Tom! We did it!»
No, Tom thought, you did it, Jason. This is all your show.
«You should be able to see the satellite components,» Jason said. His voice was excited yet controlled, and his comment had a ring of command in it.
«I’ve already looked,» Tom answered. «I can see them.»
«Are they damaged?»
«Not as far as I can see. Of course, from this distance—»
«Yes, of course,» Jason said. «You’d better get right outside and start working on them. You’ve only got forty-eight hours’ worth of oxygen.»
«Don’t worry about me,» Tom said into the radio. «Just remember your end of the bargain.»
«You’d better forget that until you get back here.»
«I’m not forgetting anything.»
«I mean you must concentrate on what you’re doing up there if you expect to get back alive.»
«When I get back we’re going to explore the bombed-out cities. You promised that. It’s the only reason I agreed to this.»
Jason’s voice stiffened. «My memory is quite as good as yours. We’ll discuss the expedition after you return. Now you’re using up valuable time. And oxygen.»
«Okay. I’m going outside.»
Ruth’s voice came back on: «Tom, remember to keep the ship’s radio open, or else your suit radio won’t be able to reach us. And we’re all here … Dr. Arnoldsson, Jason, the engineers … if anything comes up, we’ll be right here to help you.»
Tom grinned mirthlessly. Right here: 22,300 miles away.
«Tom?»
«Yes, Ruth.»
«Good luck,» she said. «From all of us.»
Even Jason? he wanted to ask, but instead said merely, «Thanks.»
He fitted the cumbersome helmet over his head and sealed it to the joints on his suit. A touch of a button on the control panel pumped the compartment’s air into storage cylinders. Then Tom stood up and unlocked the hatch directly over his seat.
Reaching for the handholds just outside the hatch, he pulled himself through, and after a weightless comic ballet managed to plant his magnetized boots on the outer skin of the ship. Then, standing, he looked out at the universe.
Oddly, he felt none of the overpowering emotion he had once expected of this moment. Grandeur, terror, awe—no, he was strangely calm. The stars were only points of light on a dead-black background; the Earth was a fat crescent patched with colors; the sun, through his heavily-tinted visor, was like the pictures he had seen at planetarium shows, years ago.
As he secured a lifeline to the grip beside the hatch, Tom thought that he felt as though someone had stuck a reverse hypodermic into him and drained away all his emotions.
Only then did he realize what had happened. Jason, the engineer, the leader, the man who thought of everything, had made Arnoldsson condition his mind for this. No gaping at the universe for the first man in space, too much of a chance to take! There’s a job to be done and no time for human frailty or sentiment.
Not even that, Tom said to himself. He wouldn’t even allow me one moment of human emotion.
But as he pushed away from the ship and floated ghostlike toward the largest of the satellite packages, Tom twisted around for another look at Earth.
I wonder if she looked that way before the war?
Slowly, painfully, men had attempted to rebuild their civilization after the war had exhausted itself. But of all the things destroyed by the bombs and plagues, the most agonizing loss was man’s sources of energy.
The coal mines, the oil refineries, the electricity-generating plants, the nuclear power piles … all shattered into radioactive rubble. There could be no return to any kind of organized society while men had to scavenge for wood to warm themselves and to run their primitive machines.
Then someone had remembered the satellite.
It had been designed, before the war, to collect solar energy and beam it to a receiving station on Earth. The satellite packages had been fired into a 24-hour orbit, circling the Earth over a fixed point on the Equator. The receiving station, built on the southeastern coast of the United States, saw the five units as a single second-magnitude star, low on the horizon all year, every year.
Of course the packages wavered slightly in their orbits, but not enough in eighteen years to spread very far apart. A man could still put them together into a power-beaming satellite.
If he could get there.
And if they were not damaged.
And if he knew how to put them together.
Through months that stretched into years, over miles of radioactive wilderness, on horseback, on carts, on foot, those who knew about the satellite spread the word, carefully, secretly, to what was left of North America’s scientists and engineers. Gradually they trickled into the once-abandoned settlement.
They elected a leader: Jason, the engineer, one of the few men who knew anything about rockets to survive the war and the lunatic bands that hunted down anyone suspected of being connected with prewar science.
Jason’s first act was to post guards around the settlement. Then he organized the work of rebuilding the power-receiving station and a man-carrying rocket.
They pieced together parts of a rocket and equipment that had been damaged by the war. What they did not know, they learned. What they did not have, they built or cannibalized from ruined equipment.
Jason sent armed foragers out for gasoline, charcoal and wood. They built a ramshackle electricity generator. They planted crops and hunted the small game in the local underbrush. A major celebration occurred whenever a forager came back towing a stray cow or horse or goat.
They erected fences around the settlement, because more than once they had to fight off the small armies of looters and anti-scientists that still roved the countryside.
But finally they completed the rocket … after exhausting almost every scrap of material and every ounce of willpower.
Then they picked a pilot: Thomas H. Morris, age 41, former historian and teacher. He had arrived a year before the completion of the rocket after walking 1,300 miles to find the settlement; his purpose was to organize some of the scientists and explore the bombed-out cities to see what could be salvaged out of man’s shattered heritage.
But Tom was ideal for the satellite job: the right size—five-six and one-hundred thirty pounds; no dependents—wife and two sons dead of radiation sickness. True, he had no technical background whatsoever; but with Arnoldsson’s hypnotic conditioning he could be taught all that was necessary for him to know … maybe.