Futures Past (40 page)

  
It was a solution of sorts, a way out of this mess for himself and everyone else. But he couldn't tell them about it. He'd bite his tongue out first, he'd . . .

  
He was two people; Gregg, and somebody else. He was fighting with all the power he had to keep his mouth shut tight. But somebody else with a will just a little stronger than his was forcing it open, and forcing his lips into forming words that he did not want to say:

  
"I... I've got an idea."

  
Shut up! Gregg screamed silently at that hateful other inhabitant of his mind. Do you want to be stuck in a suit for days on end, with acceleration and your own stink tying your inside into knots? It would kill you. I know it, because I've been through it once....

  
But the stupid and suicidal other part of his mind would not shut up. Haltingly, he heard his voice begin to tell the men in the control room about his job on Deimos, and the abilities needed for it. And about the time a temporary structure had collapsed and he'd been able to escape from the slowly falling wreckage through his ability to judge distances and rates of fall of the loose pieces. This was different, of course, but not much.

  
Gregg tried desperately to choke off those words before it would be too late, but it was no good. He might as well give up the struggle, stop trying. But surprisingly, that decision when it came brought a feeling more of relief than of despair—as if it was what he'd been wanting to do all along. He listened to his own voice expanding on his idea, and even trying to sell the idea to the crewmen in the room!

  
"You," said the man beside him when he'd finished talking, "are mad." But a rising inflection on the last syllable made it more a question than a statement, and there was a growing brightness in the man's eyes.

  
Mercer said dazedly: "It might work at that. But are you sure you can do it?"

  
"No," Gregg said, "but is there an alternative?"

  
There wasn't.

  
Finally Allerton spoke: "We've no choice but to try it," he said, and he looked peculiarly at Gregg. "But do you know what this means, what you're letting yourself in for?"

  
"Yes." Gregg knew exactly what he was letting himself in for, stupid fool that he was.

  
The second pilot hesitated. For a moment it looked as if he might say something uncharacteristic—something warm and human that he would probably be ashamed of later. But the hesitation passed:

  
"In that case there's no time to waste. Peterson, Williamson, Mercer: Get suited up! And somebody dig me out a plan of the ship, quick! We've less than three hours. .."

  
There had been disagreement at first whether Gregg or one of the crew should do the job, but that had been settled when Allerton pointed out that any chance they had depended on the crew being at their stations. Then the matter of telling or not telling the passengers came up again. It was decided that they be kept in the dark; it would be kinder that way if the worst should happen. The decisions had been made while Peterson and another man removed a section of hull plating near the stern to make an observation niche, and Mercer ran a communications line from it direct to the control room. Not a second was wasted.

  
Finally, after the radio-medic had given him an emetic and cautioned him to drink as sparingly as possible, Gregg had been—installed. Three minutes later the ship began deceleration.

  
The second time wasn't nearly as bad as his memory of the first time had lead him to expect—nothing could be as horrible as that, Gregg realized now, because his fear-neurosis had blown that memory up out of all proportion. It was bad enough, though. He had to take two-and-a-half G's for nearly sixty hours, in an upright, standing position. He was sore and stiff and he could feel his blood being forced through each swollen, distended vein in his legs. He wondered if his two-and a-half times normal weight would cause them to rupture. The thought of bleeding to death from burst varicose veins wasn't pleasant; he tried to forget his legs. Occasionally he managed to sleep, or maybe it was that he simply blacked out. Time was stretched out to its ultimate elastic limit, but it did pass eventually.

  
When the ship was less than a planetary diameter out from Earth the A-Drive shut down. Gregg ordered several short bursts from the chemical motors to convert their direct approach course into a grazing ellipse, then the gyros nosed the ship over for entry into the atmosphere.

  
Allerton stammered something then about him being a hero; it made Gregg feel horribly embarrassed. He was, after all, trying to save his own life as well as everyone else's. Peterson, in a bellow that nearly overloaded Gregg's phones, yelled, "Ride 'em, cowboy!" and they slid into air.

  
Frictional heating began at once. The leading edges of their wings glowed red, then orange, then almost white hot—the vertical stabilizers, too. He could imagine what their anything-but-streamlined hull looked like all too well, though it was outside his angle of vision. The heating would be bad, he knew, because the ship was about as streamlined as a screw-nail. He hoped his suit would stand it.

  
He said: "Altitude about seventy miles. Speed Mach Five or Six. Heading West Nor'west. New Zealand way over on the right."

  
The ship dipped lower. The air screaming past became a solid thing that threatened to shake the ship apart. It tore at buckled and weakened plates, peeled them back, and ripped them off. It reached iron-clad fingers of supersonic turbulence into Gregg's observation niche and tried to pluck him out. It tried very hard. But Gregg was lashed —tightly—with chains and steel cable to one of the main longerons that ran the length of the ship. He stayed put.

  
His idea had been simply that he, Gregg, should become the ship's eyes, and he had managed to convince Allerton and the others that there was a good chance of landing the ship by "talking it" down. He now lay parallel with the long axis of the ship, just above the stern stabilizers. In the Wallaby's present position he had a good view straight down toward the planetary surface, and a reasonably good one sternwards for the coming tail-down landing. If the ship got anywhere near the surface in one piece, that was. In a landing of this type the Wallaby operated as a supersonic glider, everything depended on it retaining its aerodynamic stability. But if the collision had warped just one of the flying surfaces out of true, they would be flung into a spin that would pull them apart in seconds—with fatal results, naturally, to all concerned.

  
Abruptly a more immediate problem forced that thought out of his mind. The plates around his observation niche were glowing red. So were the chains binding him. His suit was getting hotter, and hotter__

  
"The heat will expand—and probably loosen—the chains slightly, but they should hold all right." Allerton's voice was harsh with strain, but he tried to sound reassuring. "It's mostly your imagination about the suit. It will heat up—but it's well insulated and will be livable . . ." the pilot's voice wavered, then went on: ". . . for as long as will be necessary to land the ship. You must have known that, Mr. Gregg."

  
Gregg grunted. The shoulder piece of his suit—the only part of it that he could see—was turning red. That wasn't imagination. Then it hit him. "You must have known that, Mr. Gregg!" Known what?

  
Suddenly, Gregg knew what.

  
They were crossing the sunrise line. The Indian Ocean below them was a deep blue-green shading almost into purple, and stippled with the bright orange spots of highflying alto-cumulus. Madagascar was a dun-colored shadow on the horizon, still lost in the haze of dawn. It was very, Very beautiful. Gregg barely noticed it.

  
So that was the reason for Allerton's peculiar look when Gregg had first told him about this idea, and the second pilot's asking him whether he knew exactly what he was doing. It explained why the crew started calling him "Mr." as if they really meant it, and their awkwardness toward the end. He'd only thought he had known what he was doing. He was a stupid, blind fool. And because of that utter stupidity, he was really going to be a hero.

  
The posthumous award sort.

  
If, or when the ship landed, Gregg now knew, his insulated suit would then be nearly as hot inside as it was outside now, and because that insulation was an extremely bad conductor of heat, it would retain that heat long after landing. He would be roasted in his own personal oven long before the crew—opening the airlock, lowering themselves on ropes, and cutting him free— could get him out. But on the other hand, if the shock of landing snapped his heat-weakened fastenings and threw him to the ground, the same thing would happen. If the impact with hard-baked earth didn't kill him outright, then the rocket's exhaust would fry him to a crisp. Gregg cursed himself silently. He should have kept his big mouth shut and his ideas to himself. He would at least have died comfortably that way; death from radiation poisoning was an easy way to go, he had heard.

  
Relatively, of course.

  
A voice crackled suddenly from his phones, startling him.

  
"We're banking right, I tell you! I feel it. Straighten up! Straighten up, quick!"

  
"Flying straight and level," Gregg contradicted. He added viciously: "I can see. You can't."

  
Allerton's voice sounded, sharply rebuking the offender; then, "Sorry about that, Mr. Gregg."

  
Gregg understood. The strain of flying a ship with nothing but a voice that said the ship was flying level, and going so fast, and with an altitude of such and such, must be killing to men used to the accurate readings on a panel full of instruments. Gregg felt sorry for them.

  
But he felt sorrier for himself.

  
Central Africa slid beneath them, then the outline of the West Coast. They were north of the equator now, almost paralleling it. The Atlantic, cloud-covered, was a sea of dirty gray cotton wool; there was no moon. South America passed below, then their glide took them south again into the Pacific.

  
After one of his periodic height and velocity reports, Gregg said: "We'll have to land next time round—my suit's getting too hot." There must have been something in his voice, Allerton didn't even try to argue.

  
"Right. Can we make Woomera or anywhere in Australia? The passengers—"

  
"No. Changing direction at this speed would pull our wings off. We want a big flat uninhabited spot. The Sahara looks the best bet, it's right in our line of flight and it should be light enough to—"

  
An involuntary cry of pain cut the sentence off as a scalding jet of steam erupted into his face. The unused water in his suit's canteen, vaporized by the increasing heat, had blown out the valve of his drinking tube. Eyelids pressed tightly shut and choking on a lung-searing mixture of steam and air, Gregg wondered if he was blind. Then he thought, what difference did blindness make to him now? He opened his eyes.

  
Allerton's voice was a panicky squeaking in his phones, wanting to know what had happened and calling for height and velocity reports. Gregg coughed a couple of times and was surprised when he found that he could talk.

  
"But can you see?" Allerton asked, his voice harsh with urgency. "Can you see at all?"

  
"Yes," Gregg lied. He could see all right, but only as far as the face-plate of his helmet. The visor was completely fogged, and the drying chemicals in his helmet— which were meant only to neutralize the water content of his breath—might not be able to handle it.

  
The Earth below was a gray, featureless shadow that showed neither shape nor distance.

  
Continuous transsonic buffeting threatened to shake the ship to pieces, and Gregg didn't know whether they were heading north, south, or straight down. He sensed changes in direction several times but didn't report them; he had to trust the inherent stability of the ship until he could see again. Gradually the sting went out of his scalded face and for a man who was going to die he didn't feel too badly.