Sam cut the connection. Forty-two minutes and counting.
“We have several electron beam guns aboard,” the skipper said. “In the lab module.”
“But they’re not powerful enough to charge the damned Nerf ball until it gets so close it’ll hit us anyway,” Sam muttered.
“We could go out on one of the OMVs,” I heard myself suggest.
“Yeah!” Sam brightened. “Go out and push it out of the way.”
I had to shake my head. “No, Sam. That won’t work. The Nerf ball is coming toward us; it’s in an opposite orbit. The OMV doesn’t have enough delta-v to go out there, turn around and match orbit with it, and then nudge it into a lower orbit.”
“You’d have to ram the OMV into it,” the commander said. “Like a kamikaze.”
“No thanks,” Sam said. “I’m brave but I’m not suicidal.” He started gnawing his fingernails.
I said, “But we could go out on an OMV and give it a good squirt with an electron gun as we passed it. Charge it up enough for the magnetic bumper to do the job.”
“You think so?”
“Forty minutes left,” Bonnie Jo said. Not a quaver in her voice. Not a half-tone higher than usual. Not a hint of fear.
The commander shook her head. “The OMVs aren’t pressurized. You don’t have enough time for pre-breathe.”
See, to run one of the OMVs you had to be suited up. Since the suits were pressurized only to a third of the normal air pressure that the station used, you had to pre-breathe oxygen for about an hour before sealing yourself inside the suit. Otherwise nitrogen bubbles would collect in your blood and you’d get the bends, just like a deep-sea diver.
“Fuck the pre-breathe,” Sam snapped. “We’re gonna save this goddamned station from Rockledge’s runaway Nerf ball.”
“I can’t let you do that, Sam,” the skipper said. Her hand went out to the comm keyboard again.
Sam leveled a stubby finger at her. “You let us give it a shot or I’ll tell everybody back at the Cape what really happened when we were supposed to be testing the lunar rover simulator.”
Her face flushed dark red.
“Listen,” Sam said jovially. “You get everybody into the shuttle and pull away from the station. Mutt and I will go out in the OMV. If we can deflect the Nerf ball and save the station you’ll be a hero. If not, the station gets shredded and you can give the bill to Rockledge International.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Who would be responsible for the destruction of this twenty-billion-dollar government installation? Who carried damage insurance on the space station?
“And the two of you will die of the bends,” she said. “No, I won’t allow it. I’m in charge here and …”
“Stick us in an airlock when we get back,” Sam cajoled. “Run up the pressure. That’s what they do for deep-sea divers, isn’t it? You’ve got a medic aboard, use the jerk for something more than ramming needles into people’s asses!”
“I can’t, Sam!”
He looked at her coyly. “I’ve got videodisks from the lunar simulator, you know.”
Thirty-five minutes.
The skipper gave in, of course. Sam’s way was the only hope she had of saving the station. Besides, whatever they had done in the lunar simulator was something she definitely did not want broadcast. So ten minutes later Sam and I are buttoning ourselves into space suits while the skipper and one of her crew are floating an electron gun down the connecting tunnel to the airlock where the OMVs were docked. Everybody else was already jamming themselves into the shuttle mid-deck and cockpit. It must have looked like a fraternity party in there, except that I’ll bet everybody was scared into constipation.
Everybody except Bonnie Jo. She seemed to have ice water in her veins. Cool and calm under fire.
I shook my head to get rid of my thoughts about her as I pulled on the space suit helmet. Sam was already buttoned up. My ears popped when I switched on the suit’s oxygen system, but otherwise there were no bad effects.
The orbital maneuvering vehicle had a closed cockpit, but it wasn’t pressurized. I lugged the electron gun and its power pack inside. “Lugged” isn’t the right word, exactly. The apparatus was weightless, just like everything else. But it was bulky and awkward to handle.
Sam did the piloting. I set up the electron gun and ran through its checks. Every indicator light was green, although the best voltage I could crank out of it was a bit below max. That worried me. We’d need all the juice we could get when we whizzed past the Nerf ball.
We launched off the station with a little lurch and headed toward our fleeting rendezvous with the runaway. Through my visor I saw the station dwindle behind us, two football fields long, looking sort of like a square double-ended paddle, the kind they use on kayaks, with a cluster of little cylinders huddled in its middle. Those were the habitat and lab modules. They looked small and fragile and terribly, terribly vulnerable.
For the first time in my life I paid no attention to the big beautiful curving mass of the Earth glowing huge and gorgeous below us. I had no time for sightseeing, even when the sights were the most spectacular that any human being had ever seen.
The shuttle was pulling away in the opposite direction, getting the hell out of the line of fire. Suddenly we were all alone out there, just Sam and me inside this contraption of struts and spherical tanks that we called an OMV.
“Just like a World War I airplane movie,” Sam said to me over the suit radio. “I’ll make a pass as close to the Nerf ball as I can get. You spray it with the gun.”
I nodded inside my helmet.
“Five minutes,” Sam said, tapping a gloved finger on the radar display. In the false-color image of the screen the Nerf ball looked like a tumbling mass of long thin filaments, barely hanging together. Something in my brain clicked; I remembered an old antimissile system called Homing Overlay that looked kind of like an umbrella that had lost its fabric. When it hit a missile nose cone it shattered the thing with the pure kinetic energy of the impact. That’s what the tatters of the aluminized plastic Nerf ball would do to the thin skin of the space station, if we let it hit. I could picture those great big solar panels exploding, throwing off jagged pieces that would slice up the lab and habitat modules like shards of glass going through paper walls.
“Three minutes.”
I swung the cockpit hatch open and pushed the business end of the electron gun outside with my boots.
“How long will the power pack run?” I asked. “The longer we fire this thing the more chance we’ll have of actually charging up the ball.”
Sam must have shrugged inside his suit. “Might as well start now, Mutt. Build up a cloud that the sucker has to fly through. Won’t do us a bit of good to have power still remaining once we’ve passed the goddamned spitball.”
That made sense. I clicked the right switches and turned the power dial up to max. In the vacuum I couldn’t hear whether it was humming or not, although I thought I felt a kind of vibration through my boots. All the dials said it was working, but that was scant comfort.
“One minute,” Sam said. I knew he was flying our OMV as close to the Nerf ball as humanly possible. Sam was as good as they came at piloting. Better than me; not by much, but better. He’d get us close enough to kiss that little sucker, I knew.
We were passing over an ocean, which one I don’t know to this day. Big wide deep blue below us, far as the eye could see, bright and glowing with long parades of teeny white clouds marching across it.
I saw something dark hurtling toward us, like a black octopus waving all its arms, like a silent banshee coming to grab us.
“There it… was,” Sam said.