“Aye, I’m ready. But why didn’t I think of using the Walton? Damnation, I didn’t need to get you back here, I could have done it for myself.”
I began to reel in the line, slowly so that Mac could help by freeing himself from the stones and gravel. The Izaak Walton has been used for many years, ever since the first big space construction jobs pointed out the need for a way to move around in vacuum without wasting a suit’s reaction mass. If all you want is a little linear momentum, the argument went, why not take it from the massive structures around you? That’s all that the Waltons do. I’d used them hundreds of times in free fall, shooting the line out to a girder where I wanted to be, connecting, then reeling myself over there. So had Mac, and that’s why he was disgusted with himself. But it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever heard of a Walton being used on a planetary surface.
“I don’t think you could have done it, Mac,” I said. “This big rock’s the only solid one you could see from down there, and it doesn’t look as though it has a high metal content. You’d have nothing for the magnet to grab hold of up here.”
“Maybe.” He snorted. “But I should have had the sense to try. I’m a witless oaf.”
What that made me, I dreaded to think. I went on steadily hauling in the line until he had scrabbled his way up to stand by my side, then switched off the field. The line and magnet automatically ran into their storage reel in my suit, and we carefully turned and headed back to the other two.
They were just where I had left them. They stood, helmets touching, like a frozen and forlorn tableau in Vandell’s broken wilderness. It was more than fifteen minutes since I gone back to Mac, and I could imagine their uneasy thoughts. I leaned my helmet to touch both theirs.
“All present and safe. Let’s go.”
Jan gave my arm a great squeeze. We formed our chain again, and crabbed the rest of the way to the pod. It wasn’t quite as easy as it had looked, or as I suggested to Jan, but in less than fifteen minutes we were opening the outer hatch and bundling Sven and Jan into it.
The lock was only big enough for two at a time. They were out of their useless suits by the time that McAndrew and I could join them inside. Jan looked pale and shaky, ten years older than her seventeen years. Sven Wicklund was as blond and dreamy-looking as ever, still impossibly young in appearance. Like McAndrew, his own internal preoccupations partly shielded him from unpleasant realities — even now he was brandishing a piece of paper covered with squiggles at us. But Jan and Sven had both held together, keeping their composure well when death must have seemed certain. It occurred to me that if you wanted to find a rite of passage to adulthood, you wouldn’t find a tougher one than Jan had been through.
“Just look at this,” Sven said as soon as we were out of the hatch. “I’ve been plotting the cycles—”
“How long before it hits?” I interrupted.
“Four minutes. But—”
“Get into working suits, both of you.” I was already at the controls. “I’m taking us up as soon as I can, but if we’re too late I can’t guarantee that the pod hull will survive. You know what happened to yours.”
The ascent presented no problem of navigation — I had plenty of fuel, and I intended to go straight up with maximum lift. There would be time to worry about rendezvous with Merganser and Hoatzin when we were safely away from Vandell.
I believe in being careful, even on the simplest takeoff, so all my concentration was on the control sequences. I could hear Jan, McAndrew and Wicklund babbling to each other in the background, until I told them to get off my suit frequency and let me think. Vandell was still a complete mystery world to me, but if the others had answers, those, like the problem of ship rendezvous, could wait until we were off the surface.
Wicklund’s predictions for the timing of the next wave of violence proved to be unnecessary. I could see it coming directly, in the values provided by the pod’s field instruments. Every gauge reading in front of me was creeping up in unison as we lifted off; ionization levels, surface vibrations, dust density, electric and magnetic fields — readouts flickered rapidly higher, and needles turned steadily across their dials like the hands of an old-fashioned clock.
Something big was on its way. We lifted into a sky ripped by great lightning flashes, burning their way through the clouds of charged dust particles. The ascent we made was rapid. Within a few seconds we had reached three kilometers. And then, as I was beginning to relax a little and think that we had been just in time, the readings in front of me went mad. External field strengths flickered up so fast in value that the figures were unreadable, then warning lights came on. I heard the screech of a fatal overload in my suit’s radio, and saw the displays in front of me blank out one after another. The computer, after a brief mad flurry of a binary dump across the control screen, went totally dead. Suddenly I was flying blind and deaf. All the electronic tools that every pilot relied on were now totally disabled.
It was useless information, but suddenly I understood exactly what had killed the signal beacon from Jan and Sven’s pod without also killing them. Before the displays in front of me died, the electric and magnetic field strengths had risen to an impossible level. Even with partial shielding from the pod’s hull, their intensity was enough to wipe magnetic storage — that took care of computers, communications equipment, displays, and suit controls. If the suits hadn’t been designed with manual overrides for certain essentials so that Jan and Sven could control their air supply, that would have been the end.
Now our pod had the same problem as theirs. We hadn’t been pelted with boulders, as they had when they were sitting on the surface of Vandell, but we had no computer control of our flight and we were being whipped around the sky by the changing magnetic fields.
It wasn’t necessary for me to change to manual control. When the computer died, it dumped everything in my lap automatically. I gritted my teeth, tried to keep us heading straight up (not easy, the way we were being tilted and rocked) and refused to decrease thrust even though the pod shuddered as though it was getting ready to disintegrate.
I’m blessed with an iron stomach, one that doesn’t get sick no matter how much lurching and spinning it takes. McAndrew isn’t, and Jan takes after him. They couldn’t communicate with me, but I could take their misery for granted.
It was worth the discomfort. We were getting there, rising steadily, while the pink glow around the pod’s ports faded towards black. As our altitude increased I looked at the internal pressure gauge — thank God for a simple mechanical gadget. It was showing normal pressure, which meant that the hull hadn’t been breached on our ascent. I allowed myself the luxury of a quick look around me.
McAndrew was slumped forward in his straps, head down as low as he could get it. Sven and Jan were both leaning back, arms linked. All the faceplates were clear, so that I knew none of them had vomited in their suit — no joke, since the internal cleaning systems that would usually handle the mess were out of action.
The turbulence around the pod grew less. Stars were coming into view outside the ports as I turned us into an orbit that spiralled outward away from Vandell. I was looking for Hoatzin. Our orbit was clumsy and wasteful of fuel compared with what the navigation computer would have provided. But give me some credit, I was receiving no reference signals from the ship. All I had was instinct and experience.