“An astrogator then. Someone who can plot a course for us?”
“Someone whom you can have a little more faith in than a periscope you mean?” Ove asked, laughing, and opened the door to the engine compartment.
“Exactly. I’m thinking about all those course corrections, computations, and such that the Americans and Soviets have done before to get to the Moon. Can we really do it with this?”
“We have the same computations behind us, realize that. But we have a much simpler means of applying them because of the shorter duration of our flight. When time is allowed for our initial slower speed through the atmosphere, our flying time is almost exactly four hours. Knowing this, certain prominent stars were picked as targets and the computations were made. Those are our computation times. If we leave at the correct moment and keep the target star in the sight all of the time, we will be aiming at the spot in the Moon’s orbit where it will be at the end of the four hours. We both move to our appointed meeting place, and the descent can be made. After we locate the Soviet capsule, that is.”
“And that is going to be easy?” Nils asked, looking dubious.
“I don’t see why not,” Ove answered, poking his head out of the engine cubby, wiping his hands on a rag. “The generator is operating and the output is right on the button.” He pointed to the large photograph of the Moon pasted to the front bulkhead. “Goodness, we know what the Moon looks like, we’ve all looked through telescopes and can find the Sea of Tranquility. We go there, to the right spot, and if we don’t see the Soviets we use the direction finder to track them down.”
“And at what spot do we look in the Sea of Tranquility? Do we follow this?” Nils pointed to the blurry photograph of the Moon that had been cut from the newspaper Pravda.› There was a red star printed in the north of the mare where the cosmonauts had landed. “Pravda says this is where they are. Do we navigate from a newspaper photo?”
“We do unless you can think of something better,” Arnie said mildly. “And do not forget our direction finder is a standard small boat model bought from A.P. Moller Ship Supplies in Copenhagen. Does that bother you too?”
After one last scowl Nils burst out laughing. “The whole thing is so outrageous that it just has to succeed.” He fastened his lap belt. “Blaeksprutten to the rescue!”
“It is all much more secure than it might look,” Ove explained. “You must remember that we had this operational submarine to begin with. It is a sealed, tested, proven, self-sufficient spaceship built for a different kind of space. But it works just as well in a vacuum as under water. And the Daleth drive is operational and reliable—and will get us to the Moon in a few hours. The combination of radar and computer on Earth will track us and compute the correct course for us to follow. Everything possible has been done to make this trip a safe one. There will be later voyages and the instrumentation will be refined, but we have all we need now to get us safely to the Moon afld back. So don’t worry.”
“Who is worrying?” Nils said. “I always sweat and get pale at this time of day. Is it time to leave yet?”
“A few more minutes to go,” Arnie said, looking at the electronic chronometer before him. “I am going to take off and get a bit of altitude.”
His fingers moved across the controls and the deck pressed up against them. The waves dropped away. Tiny figures were visible aboard the Vitus Bering, waving enthusiastically, then they shrank and vanished from sight as Blaeksprutten hurled itself, faster and faster, into the sky.
The strangest thing about the voyage was its utter uneventfulness. Once clear of the atmosphere they accelerated at a constant one G. And one gravity of acceleration cannot be sensed as being different in any way from the gravity experienced on the surface of the Earth. Behind them, like a toy, or the projection on a large-size screen, the globe of the Earth shrank away. There was no thunder of rockets or roar of engines, no bouncing or air pockets. Since the ship was completely sealed, there was not even the small drop in atmospheric pressure that is felt in a commercial airliner. The equipment worked perfectly and, once clear of the Earth’s atmospheric envelope, their speed increased.
“On course—or at least we are aimed at the target star,” Nils said. “I think we can check with Copenhagen now and see if they are tracking us. It would be nice to know if we are going in the right direction.” He switched the transceiver to the preset frequency and called in the agreed code.
“Kylling calling Halvabe. Can you read me? Over.” He threw the switch. “I wonder what drunk thought up these code names,” he mumbled to himself. The sub was the “chick” and the other station the “lemur”—but these names were also slang terms for a quarter-litre and a hali-litre bottle of akvavit.
“We read you loud and clear, Kylling. You are on course, though your acceleration is slightly more than optimum. Suggest a five percent reduction.”
“Roger. Will conform. Are you tracking us?”
“Positive.”
“Will you send turnover signal?”
“Positive.”
“Over and out.” He killed the power. “Did you hear that? Things couldn’t be better.”
“I have cut the acceleration by the five percent,” Arnie said. “Yes, things could not be better.”
“Would anyone like a Carlsberg?” Ove asked. “Someone has stuffed a whole case back here.” He passed a can to Nils, but Arnie declined.
“Finish them quickly,” he said. “We are not far from turnover, and I cannot guarantee that things will not get shaken up a bit. I could reduce the thrust to zero before I turned the ship, but that would put us in free fall for awhile and I would like to avoid that if I could. Aside from our personal feelings, the equipment just isn’t designed for it. Instead, I shall attempt to rotate the ship one hundred eighty degrees while maintaining full thrust, at which point we will begin to decelerate.”
“Sounds fine to me,” Nils said, squinting through the periscope and making a precise adjustment. “But what about our course? Is that what we use this gas pipe in the deck for? The one that Henning was moaning about because it needed a hole in his pressure hull?”
“That is correct. There is a wide-angle lens system here, with an optical gunsight fitted into it.”
“The kind used on fighter planes to fire the guns?”
“Precisely. You will keep the star centered as before. I envisage no problems.”
“No, no problems at all.” Nils looked around at the jury-rigged and hurriedly converted sub and shook his head in wonder. “Will one of you take the con for me for a minute? I have to go to the head… The beer, you know.”
Turnover went smoothly, and they would not have known they were rotating if they hadn’t watched the sunlight move across the deck and up the bulkhead. A few loose objects rattled, and a pencil rolled across the desk and fell.
Time moved swiftly. The sun glared and there was some discussion of solar storms and Van Allen radiation. These were no serious menace since the pressure hull of the submarine was a solid metal barrier, incredibly thicker than that of any rocket ever launched.
“Have you thought about talking to the cosmonauts?” Ove asked. He stood in the doorway of the engine compartment where he could watch the fusion generator and talk with the others at the same time.
“They are all pilots,” Nils said. “So they should speak English.” Ove disagreed.
“Only if they have flown out of the country. Inside the Soviet Union Aeroflot uses Russian. Only on international flights is English required for radio control. I put in six months there, at Moscow University, so I can talk to them if I have to. I was hoping that one of you was more fluent.”