The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (45 page)

three .
. .
two .
. .
one.

And she bellowed into life. Acceleration pressure flattened Kinsman into the couch. Vibration rattled his eyes in their sockets. Time became meaningless. The surging, engulfing, overpowering noise of the mighty rocket engines made his head ring, even after they burned out into silence.

Within minutes he was in orbit, the long slender rocket stages falling away behind, together with all sensations of weight. Kinsman was alone now in the squat, delta-shaped capsule: weightless, free of Earth.

Still he was the helpless, unstirring one. Computers sent guidance instructions from the ground to the capsule’s controls. Tiny vectoring rockets placed around the capsule’s black hull squirted on and off, microscopic puffs of thrust that maneuvered the capsule into the precise orbit needed for catching the unidentified satellite.

Completely around the world Kinsman spun, southward over the Pacific, past the gleaming whiteness of Antarctica, and then north again over the wrinkled, cloud-spattered land mass of Asia. As he crossed the night-shrouded Arctic, nearly two hours after being launched, the voices from his base began crackling in his earphones again. He answered them as automatically as the machines did, reading off the numbers on the control panel, proving to them that he was alive and functioning properly.

Then Murdock’s voice cut in: “There’s been another launch, fifteen minutes ago. From somewhere near Mongolia as near as we can determine it. It’s a high-energy boost; looks as though you’re going to have company.”

Kinsman acknowledged the information, but still sat unmoving. Then he saw it looming ahead of him, seemingly hurtling toward him.

He came to life. To meet and board the satellite he had to match its orbit and speed, exactly. He was approaching it too fast. No computer on Earth could handle this part of the job. Radar and stabilizing gyros helped, but it was his own eyes and the fingers that manipulated the retrorocket controls that finally eased the capsule into a rendezvous orbit.

Finally, the big satellite seemed to be stopped in space, dead ahead of his capsule, a huge inert hulk of metal, dazzlingly brilliant where the sun lit its curving side, totally invisible where it was in shadow. It looked ridiculously like a crescent moon made of flush-welded aluminum. A smaller crescent puzzled Kinsman until he realized it was a dead rocket-nozzle hanging from the satellite’s tailcan.

“I’m parked alongside her, about fifty feet off,” he reported into his helmet microphone. “She looks like the complete upper stage of a Saturn-class booster. Can’t see any markings from this angle. I’ll have to go outside.”

“You’d better make it fast,” Murdock’s voice answered. “That second ship is closing in fast.”

“What’s the E.T.A?”

A pause while voices mumbled in the background. “About fifteen minutes . . . maybe less.”

“Great.”

“You can abort if you want to.”

Same to you, Pal,
Kinsman said to himself. Aloud, he replied, “I’m going to take a close look at her. Maybe get inside, if I can. Call you back in fifteen minutes.”

Murdock didn’t argue. Kinsman smiled grimly at the realization that the colonel had not reminded him that the satellite might be booby-trapped. Old Mother Murdock hardly forgot such items. He simply had decided not to make the choice of aborting the mission too attractive.

Gimmicked or not, the satellite was too near and too enticing to turn back now. Kinsman quickly checked out his pressure suit, pumped the air out of his cabin and into storage tanks, and then opened the airlock hatch over his head.

Out of the womb and into the world.

He climbed out and teetered on the lip of the airlock, balancing weightlessly.
The real world.
No matter how many times he saw it, it always caught his breath. The vast sweep of the multi-hued Earth, hanging at an impossible angle, decked with dazzling clouds, immense and beautiful beyond imagining. The unending black of space, sprinkled with countless, gleaming jewels of stars that shone steadily, solemnly, the unblinking eyes of infinity.

I’ll bet this is all there is to heaven,
he said to himself.
You don’t need anything more than this.

Then he turned, with the careful deliberate motions of a deep-sea diver, and looked at the fat crescent of the nearby satellite. Only ten minutes now. Even less.

He pushed off from his capsule and sailed effortlessly, arms outstretched. Behind him trailed the umbilical cord that carried his air and electrical power for heating/cooling. As he approached the satellite, the sun rose over the humped curve of its hull and nearly blinded him, despite the automatic darkening of the photochromic plastic in his faceplate visor. He kicked downward and ducked behind the satellite’s protective shadow again.

Still half-blind from the sudden glare, he bumped into the satellite’s massive body and rebounded gently. With an effort, he twisted about, pushed back to the satellite, and planted his magnetized boots on the metal hull.

I claim this island for Isabella of Spain,
he muttered foolishly.
Now where the hell’s the hatch?

The hatch was over on the sunlit side, he found, at last. It wasn’t too hard to figure out how to operate it, even though there were absolutely no printed words in any language anywhere on the hull. Kinsman knelt down and turned the locking mechanism. He felt it click open.

For a moment he hesitated.
It might be booby-trapped,
he heard the colonel warn.

The hell with it.

Kinsman yanked the hatch open. No explosion, no sound at all. A dim light came from within the satellite. Carefully he slid down inside. A trio of faint emergency lights were on; there were other lights in place, he saw, but not operating.

“Saving the juice,” he muttered to himself.

It took a moment for his eyes to accustom themselves to the dimness. Then he began to appreciate what he saw. The satellite was packed with equipment. He couldn’t understand what most of it was, but it was clearly not a bomb. Surveillance equipment, he guessed. Cameras, recording instruments, small telescopes. Three contoured couches lay side by side beneath the hatch. He was standing on one of them. Up forward of the couches was a gallery of compact cabinets.

“All very cozy.”

He stepped off the couch and onto the main deck, crouching to avoid bumping his head on the instrument rack, above. He opened a few of the cabinets.
Murdock’ll probably want a few samples to play with.
He found a set of small hand wrenches, unfastened them from their setting.

With the wrenches in one hand, Kinsman tried the center couch. By lying all the way back on it, he could see through the satellite’s only observation port. He scanned the instrument panel:

Cyrillic letters and Arabic numerals on all the gauges.

Made in the USSR
. Kinsman put the wrenches down on the armrest of the couch. They stuck, magnetically. Then he reached for the miniature camera at his belt. He took four snaps of the instrument panel.

Something flashed in the corner of his eye.

He tucked the camera back in its belt holster and looked at the observation port. Nothing but the stars: beautiful, impersonal. Then another flash, and this time his eye caught and held the slim crescent of another ship gliding toward him. Most of the ship was in impenetrable shadow; he would have never found it without the telltale burst of the retrorockets.

She’s damned close!
Kinsman grabbed his tiny horde of stolen wrenches and got up from the couch. In his haste, he stumbled over his trailing umbilical cord and nearly went sprawling. A weightless fall might not hurt you, but it could keep you bouncing around for precious minutes before you regained your equilibrium.

Kinsman hoisted himself out of the satellite’s hatch just as the second ship make its final rendezvous maneuver. A final flare of its retrorockets, and the ship seemed to come to a stop alongside the satellite.

Kinsman ducked across the satellite’s hull and crouched in the shadows of the dark side. Squatting in utter blackness, safely invisible, he watched the second ship.

She was considerably smaller than the satellite, but built along the same general lines. Abruptly, a hatch popped open. A strange-looking figure emerged and hovered, dreamlike, for a long moment.

The figure looked like a tapered canister, with flexible arms and legs and a plastic bubble over the head. Kinsman could see no umbilical cord. There were bulging packs of equipment attached all around the canister.

Self-contained capsule,
Kinsman said to himself. Very
neat.

A wispy plume of gas jetted from the canister, and the cosmonaut sailed purposefully over to the satellite’s hatch.

Got his own reaction
motor,
too.
Kinsman was impressed.

Unconsciously, he hunched down deeper in the shadows as the figure approached. Only one of them; no one else appeared from the second ship. The newcomer touched down easily beside the still-open hatch of the satellite. For several minutes he did not move. Then he edged away from the satellite slightly and, hovering, turned toward Kinsman’s capsule, still hanging only a few hundred feet away.

Kinsman felt himself start to sweat, even in the cold darkness. The cosmonaut jetted away from the satellite, straight toward the American capsule.

Damn!
Kinsman snapped at himself.
First rule of warfare, you stupid slob: keep your line of retreat open!

He leaped off the satellite and started floating back toward his own capsule. It was nightmarish, drifting through space with agonizing slowness while the weird-looking cosmonaut sped on ahead. The cosmonaut spotted Kinsman as soon as he cleared the shadow of the satellite and emerged into the sunlight.

For a moment they simply stared at each other, separated by a hundred feet of nothingness.

“Get away from that capsule!” Kinsman shouted, even though he knew that the intruder could not possibly hear him.

As if to prove the point, the cosmonaut put a hand on the lip of the capsule’s hatch and peered inside. Kinsman flailed his arms and legs, trying to raise some speed, but still he moved with hellish slowness. Then he remembered the wrenches he was carrying.

Almost without thinking, he tossed the whole handful at the cosmonaut. The effort spun him wildly off-balance. The Earth slid across his field of vision, then the stars swam by dizzingly. He caught a glimpse of the cosmonaut as the wrenches reached the capsule—most of them missed and bounced noiselessly off the capsule. But one banged into the intruder’s helmet hard enough to jar him, then rebounded crazily out of sight.

Kinsman lost sight of the entire capsule as he spun around. Grimly, he fought to straighten himself, using his arms and legs as counterweights. Finally, the stars stopped whirling. He turned and found the capsule again, but it was upside-down. Very carefully, Kinsman turned himself to the same orientation as the cosmonaut.

The intruder still had his hand on the capsule hatch, and his free hand was rubbing along the spot where the wrench had hit. He looked ludicrously like a little boy rubbing a bump on his head.

“That means get off, stranger,” Kinsman muttered. “No trespassing. U.S. property. Beware of the eagle. Next time I’ll crack your helmet in half.”

The newcomer turned slightly and reached for one of the equipment packs on the canister-suit. A weird-looking tool appeared in his hand. Kinsman drifted helplessly and watched the cosmonaut take up a section of the umbilical line. Then he applied the hand tool to it. Sparks flared.

Electrical torch! He’s trying to cut the line! He’ll kill me!

Frantically, Kinsman began clambering along the umbilical line, hand-over-hand. All he could see, all he could think of, was that flashing torch eating into his lifeline.

Almost without thinking, he grabbed the line in both hands and snapped it, viciously. Again he tumbled wildly, but he saw the wave created by his snap race down the line. The intruder found the section of line he was holding suddenly bounce violently out of his hand. The torch spun away from him and winked off.

Both men moved at once.

The cosmonaut jetted away from the capsule, looking for the torch. Kinsman hurled himself directly toward the hatch. He planted his magnetized boots on the capsule’s hull and grasped the open hatch in both hands.

Duck inside, slam shut, and get the hell out of here.

But he did not move. Instead, he watched the cosmonaut, a weird sun-etched outline figure now, mostly in shadow, drifting quietly some fifty feet away, sizing up the situation.

That glorified tin can tried to kill me.

Kinsman coiled like a cat on the edge of the hatch and then sprang at his enemy. The cosmonaut reached for the jet controls at his belt but Kinsman slammed into him and they both went hurtling through space, tumbling and clawing at each other. It was an unearthly struggle, human fury in the infinite calm of star-studded blackness. No sound, except your own harsh breath and the bone-carried shock of colliding arms and legs.

They wheeled out of the capsule’s shadow and into the painful glare of the sun. In a cold rage, Kinsman grabbed the air hose that connected the cosmonaut’s oxygen tank and helmet. He hesitated a moment and glanced into the bulbous plastic helmet. All he could see was the back of the cosmonaut’s head, covered with a dark, skin-tight flying hood. With a vicious yank, he ripped out the air hose. The cosmonaut jerked twice, spasmodically, inside the canister, then went inert.

With a conscious effort, Kinsman unclenched his teeth. His jaws ached. He was trembling, and covered with a cold sweat. He released his death-grip on the enemy. The two human forms drifted slightly apart. The dead cosmonaut turned, gently, as Kinsman floated beside him. The sun glinted brightly on the metal canister and shone full onto the enemy’s lifeless, terror-stricken face.

Kinsman looked into that face for an eternally long moment, and felt the life drain out of him. He dragged himself back to the capsule, sealed the hatch and cracked open the air tanks with automatic, unthinking motions. He flicked on the radio and ignored the flood of interrogating voices that streamed in from the ground.