“Oh, safe enough, if you place the pile on the far end of Pittsburgh and set it off there. I’ve worked out the precise location for you.” “We won’t get a fatal dose of radiation or anything?” “No, the mass of the asteroid will protect us from radiation. Since there’s no air outside the dome there will be no aerodynamic shock wave. No heat pulse or fallout, either, if the pile is properly sited in a crater.” “Then we’ll be okay.”
“We should be. The only thing to worry about is the seismic shock. The explosion will send quite a jolt through the body of the asteroid, of course.”
“I was wondering about that? How many gs?”
He frowned slightly. “That’s right, you astronauts think in terms of g-forces.” “Don’t you?”
“No. I was more concerned with Pittsburgh’s modulus of elasticity.” “It’s what?”
He gave me a faraway look. “The explosion will send a shock wave through the solid body of the asteroid.” “You already said that.”
“Yes. The question is: will that shock wave break up the asteroid?”
“Break it up? Break up Pittsburgh?”
“Yes.”
“Well, will it? Will it?”
“I don’t think so. But I simply don’t have enough data to be certain.” “Thanks,” I said.
So our choice is to sit on this rock until we starve to death or maybe blow it to smithereens with a jury-rigged atomic bomb. I’m going with the bomb. And keeping my fingers crossed.
Okay, we’re all in our pressure suits, inside the dome, lying flat inside our pitiful little inflated sleeping bags. When I press the button on the remote control unit in my hand the feebleminded robot out there on the other end of Pittsburgh will pull the control rods out of the power pile and it’ll go critical in a matter of seconds. Here we go.
Soon’s I work up the nerve.
Good news and bad news.
The pile exploded all right, and jolted Pittsburgh out of its orbit. The asteroid didn’t break up. None of us got killed. No significant radiation here in the dome, either.
That’s the good news.
There’s plenty of bad. First off, the explosion slammed us pretty damned hard. Like being kicked in the ribs by a big bruiser in army boots. We all slid and tumbled in our air bags and went sailing splat into the wall of the dome. Damned near tore it open before we untangled ourselves. Arms, legs, yelling, bitching. Good thing we were in the space suits; they cushioned some of the shock. The sleeping bags just added to the confusion.
Even so, Bo Williams snapped a shin bone when he slammed into a food crate. The rest of us are banged up, bruised, but Bo is crippled and in a lot of pain. Jean, of all people, pulled the leg straight and set the bone as well as anybody could without x-ray equipment.
“The last time I had to do anything like this was on a walking tour of Antarctica,” she calmly told us.
We tore the offending food crate apart to make a splint for Bo’s leg. A walking tour of Antarctica?
But the really bad news came from Lowell Hubble. He took a few observations of the stars, made a couple of calculations on his wrist computer, and told me—privately, very quietly—that the blast didn’t do enough.
“Whaddaya mean, not enough?” I wanted to yell, but I whispered, just like he did. The rest of the gang was clustered around Bo, who was manfully trying to bear his pain without flinching. The undivided attention of the four women helped.
“The explosion just didn’t have enough energy in it to push our orbit toward the Earth,” Hubble whispered. Drawing circles in the air with the stem of his pipe, he explained, “We’re moving inward, toward the Sun, all right. We’ll cross the orbit of Mars, eventually. But we won’t get much closer to Earth than that.”
“Eventually? How soon’s that?”
He stuck the pipe back in his mouth. “Three and a half years.”
I let out a weak little whistle. “That won’t do us a helluva lot of good, will it?”
“None at all,” he said, scratching at his scruffy chin.
I felt itchy, too. In another week or two my beard will be long enough to be silky. Right now it just irritates the hell out of me.
“We’ve got the other nuke,” I said.
“We’re going to need it.”
“I hate to have to go through the whole damned exercise again—pulling the pile out of its shielding, dismantling the control systems. We’re down to one usable robot.”
“I’ll volunteer, Sam.”
I turned and there was Rick Darling standing two meters away, a kind of little-boy look of mixed fear and anticipation on his fuzzless face.
“You’ll volunteer?” My voice squeaked with surprise.
“To work with you on the nuclear pile,” he said. “You tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
“You’re sure you want to?”
His lower lip was trembling. “Sam, I’ve been completely wrong about you. You are the bravest and strongest man I’ve ever met. I realize now that everything you’ve done has been for our own good. I’m willing to follow you wherever you choose to lead.”
I was too shocked to do much more than mumble, “Okay. Good.” Darling smiled happily at me and went back to his food crate.
Saints in heaven! I think Rick Darling is in love with me.
Well, we both took enough radiation out there to make our suit dosimeters screech. They went all the way into the red. Lethal dose, unless we get medical attention pretty damned quick. Fat chance.
We got the pile out of the generator, ripped out most of the safety rods, and put it where Hubble told us it has to be in order to push us closer to Earth. It took hours. The goddamned tin shit-can of a robot broke down on us halfway through the job and Darling and I had to manhandle the load by ourselves.
We didn’t do much talking out there, just a lot of grunting and swearing. Don’t let anybody tell you that working in microgravity is easy. Sure, things have no weight, but they still have mass and inertia. You try traipsing across the surface of an asteroid with the core of a nuclear reactor practically on your back, see how much fun you get out of it.
Anyway, we’re back in the dome. Hubble’s gone outside to check the position of the pile and to rig a line so we can yank out the last of the control rods manually. Marj and Grace are out there helping him. Sheena and Jean are here in the dome, hovering over Bo Williams. He’s got a fever and he doesn’t look too damned good.
While we were taking off our space suits Darling said to me, “You don’t have to be afraid of me, Sam. I know you don’t like me.”
“I never saw anything to like,” the words popped out of my mouth before I knew it, “until today.”
“I just want your respect,” he said.
“You’ve got it.”
“Would—would you stop calling me names, then? Please? They really hurt.”
There were tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry… Rick. I did it without thinking.”
He said, “I know you’re hetero. I’m not trying to seduce you, Sam. I just want to be your friend.”
I felt about an inch tall. “Yeah. That’s fine. You’ve earned it.”
He put out his fleshy hand. I took it in mine. We didn’t really shake; we just grasped each other’s hand for a long moment until I was too embarrassed to look at him any longer. I had to pull away.
It’s boom time again.
We’re all back in our suits, lying on the floor, wedged against the food cartons which are now up against the dome wall. Hubble’s calculated which way the blast will push us, and I’ve tried to arrange us so we won’t go sliding and slamming the way we did last time.
It took hours to get Bo Williams into his space suit, with his leg in Jean’s makeshift cast. He’s hot as a microwaved burger, face red, half unconscious and muttering deliriously. Doesn’t look good.
I’ve got the control box in my hand again. If this blast doesn’t do the job we’re finished. Probably finished anyway. I’ve picked up enough radiation to light a small city. No symptoms yet, but that’ll come, sure enough.