Rogue Ship

22

Averill Hewitt hung up the phone, and repeated aloud the message he had just been given: 'Your spaceship, Hope of Man, is entering the atmosphere of Earth.'

The words echoed and re-echoed in his mind, a discordant repetition. He staggered to a couch and lay down.

Other words began to join the whirlpool of meaning and implication that was the original message: After six years... the Hope of Man... after six years, when by even his minimum estimates he had pictured it a good fifth of the way to the Centaurus suns... re-entering the atmosphere of Earth...

Lying there Hewitt thought: 'And for ten years I've accepted Astronomer John Lesbee's theory that our sun is due to show some of the characteristics of a Cepheid Variable – within months now!'

Worse, he had spent the greater part of his huge, inherited fortune to build the giant vessel. The world had ridiculed the West's richest sucker; Joan had left him, taking the children; and only the vast, interstellar colonizing plan had finally won him government support for the journey itself -

All that was now totally nullified by the return of the Hope of Man, on the eve of the very disaster it had been built to avoid.

Hewitt thought hopelessly, 'What could have made John Lesbee turn back-?'

His bitter reverie ended, as the phone began to ring. He climbed off the couch, and as he went to answer, he thought, 'I'll have to go aboard and try to persuade them. As soon as they land, I'll-'

This time, his caller was an official of the Space Patrol. Hewitt listened, trying to grasp the picture the other was presenting. It had proved impossible to communicate with those aboard.

'We've had men in space suits at all the observation ports, Mr. Hewitt, and on the bridge. Naturally, they couldn't see in, since it's one-way-vision material. But they pounded on the metal for well over an hour, and received no response.'

Hewitt hesitated. He had no real comment to make, but said finally, 'How fast is the ship going?'

'It's overtaking the earth at about a thousand miles an hour.'

Hewitt scarcely heard the reply. His mind was working faster now. He said, 'I authorize all expense necessary to get inside. I'll be there myself in an hour.'

As he headed for his private ship, he was thinking, 'If I can get inside, I'll talk to them. I'll convince them. I'll force them to go back.'

He felt remorseless. It seemed to him that for the first time in the history of the human race, any means of compulsion was justified.

Two hours later, he said, 'You mean, the airlock won't open?'

He said it incredulously, while standing inside the rescue ship, Molly D, watching a huge magnet try to unscrew one of the hatches of the Hope of Man. Reluctantly, Hewitt drew his restless mind from his own private purposes.

He felt impatient, unwilling to accept the need to adjust to the possibility that there had been trouble aboard. He said urgently, 'Keep trying! It's obviously stuck. That lock was made to open easily and quickly.'

He was aware that the others had let him take control of rescue operations. In a way, it was natural enough. The Molly D was a commercial salvage vessel, which had been commandeered by the Space Patrol. Now that Hewitt was aboard, the representative of the patrol, Lieutenant Commander Mardonell, had assumed the role of observer. And the permanent captain of the vessel took instructions, as a matter of course, from the man paying the bills.

More than an hour later, the giant magnet had turned the round lock-door just a little over one foot. Pale, tense, and astounded, Hewitt held counsel with the two officers.

The altimeter of the Molly D showed ninety-one miles. Lieutenant Commander Mardonell made the decisive comment about that: 'We've come down about nine miles in sixty-eighty minutes. Since we're going forward as well as down, we'll strike the surface on a slant in ten hours.'

It was evident that it would take much longer than that to unscrew the thirty-five feet of thread on the lock-door, at one foot per hour.

Hewitt considered the situation angrily. He still thought of this whole boarding problem as a minor affair, as an irritation. 'We'll have to burn in or use a big drill,' he said. 'Cut through the wall.'

He radioed for one to be sent ahead. But even with the full authority of the Space Patrol behind him, two and a half hours went by before it was in position, Hewitt gave the order to start the powerful drill motor. He left instructions: 'Call me when we're about to penetrate.'

He had been progressively aware of exhaustion, as much mental as physical. He retreated to one of the ship's bunks and lay down.

He slept tensely, expecting to be called any moment. He turned and twisted, and, during his wakeful periods, his mind was wholly on the problem of what he would do when he got inside the ship.

He awoke suddenly and saw by his watch that more than five hours had gone by. He dressed with a sense of disaster. He was met by Mardonell. The Space Patrol officer said, 'I didn't call you, Mr. Hewitt, because when it became apparent that we weren't going to get in, I contacted my headquarters. As a result we've been getting advice from some of the world's greatest scientists.' The man was quite pale, as he finished. 'I'm afraid it's no use. All the advice in the world hasn't helped that drill, and cutting torches did no good.'

'What do you mean?'

'Better go take a look.'

The drill was still turning as Hewitt approached. He ordered it shut off, and examined the metal wall of the Hope of Man. It had been penetrated – he measured it – to a depth of three quarters of a millimeter.

'But that's ridiculous,' Hewitt protested. 'That metal drilled easily enough six years ago when the ship was built.'

Mardonell said, 'We've had two extra drills brought up. Diamonds don't mean a thing to that metal.' He added, 'It's been calculated that she'll crash somewhere in the higher foothills of the Rockies. We've been able to pin it down pretty accurately, and people have been warned.'

Hewitt said, 'What about those aboard? What about-' He stopped. He had been intending to ask, 'What about the human race?' He didn't say it. That was a special madness of his own, which would only irritate other people.

Trembling, he walked over to a porthole of the rescue ship. He guessed they were about fifteen miles above the surface of Earth. Less than two hours before crashing.

When that time limit had dwindled to twenty minutes, Hewitt gave the order to cast off. The rescue ship withdrew slowly from the bigger host, climbing as she went. A little later, Hewitt stood watching with an awful, empty feeling, as the huge round ship made its first contact with Earth below, the side of a hill.

At just under a thousand miles an hour, horizontal velocity, it plowed through the soil, creating a cloud of dust. From where Hewitt and his men watched, no sound was audible, but the impact must have been terrific.

'That did it,' said Hewitt, swallowing. 'If anybody was alive aboard, they died at that moment.'

It needed no imagination to picture the colossal concussion. All human beings inside would now be bloody splotches against a floor, ceiling, or wall.

A moment later, the sound of the impact reached him. It arrived with all the power and sharpness of a sonic boom, and the salvage vessel itself shuddered with its blow. The noise was louder by far than he had anticipated.

Somebody shouted, 'She's through the hill!'

Hewitt said, 'My God!'

The small mountain, made of rock and packed soil, thicker than a score of ships like the Hope of Man, was sheared in two. Through a cloud of dust, Hewitt made out the round ship skimming the high valley beyond. She struck the valley floor, and once again, there was dust. The machine did not slow; showed no reaction to the impact.

It continued at undiminished speed on into the earth.

The dust cleared slowly. There was a hole, over twelve hundred feet in diameter, slanting into the far hillside. The hole began to collapse. Tons of rock crashed down from the upper lip of the cave.

The rescue ship had sunk to a point nearer the ground, and Hewitt heard plainly the thunder of the falling debris.

Rock and soil were still falling when a radio report arrived. A mountain had collapsed fifty miles away. There was a new valley, and somebody had been killed. Three small earthquakes had shaken the neighborhood.

For twenty minutes, the reports piled up. The land was uneasy. Fourteen more earthquakes were recorded. Two of them were the most violent ever recorded in the affected areas. Great fissures had appeared. The ground jumped and trembled. The last temblor had occurred four hundred miles from the first; and they all lined up with the course of the Hope of Man.

Abruptly, there came an electrifying message. The round ship had emerged in the desert, and was beginning to climb upward on a long, swift shallow slant.

Less than three hours later, the salvage ship was again clinging to the side of the larger machine. Its huge magnets twisted stubbornly at the great lock-door. To the half-dozen government scientists who had come aboard, Hewitt said, 'It took an hour to turn it one foot. It shouldn't take more than thirty-five hours to turn it thirty-five feet. Then, of course, we have the inner door, but that's a different problem.' He broke off. 'Gentlemen, shall we discuss the fantastic thing that has happened?'

The discussion that followed arrived at no conclusion.

Hewitt said, 'That does it!' The outer door had been open for some while, and now, through the thick asbesglas, they watched the huge magnet make its final turn on the inner door. As they waited behind the transparent barrier, a thick metal arm was poked into the airlock, and shoved at the door. After straining with it for several seconds, its operator turned and glanced at Hewitt. The latter turned on his walkie-talkie.

'Come on back inside the ship. We'll put some air pressure in there. That'll open the door.'

He had to fight to keep his anger out of his voice. The outer door had opened without trouble, once all the turns had been made. There seemed no reason why the inner door should not respond in the same way. The Hope of Man was persisting in being recalcitrant.

The captain of the salvage vessel looked doubtful when Hewitt transmitted the order to him. 'If she's stuck,' he objected, 'you never can tell just how much pressure it'll take to open her. Don't forget we're holding the two ships together with magnets. It wouldn't take much to push them apart.'

Hewitt frowned over that. He said finally, 'Maybe it won't take a great deal. And if we do get pushed apart, well, we'll just have to add more magnets.' He added swiftly, 'Or maybe we can build a bulkhead into the lock itself, join the two ships with a steel framework.'

It was decided to try a gradual increase in air pressure. Presently, Hewitt watched the pressure gauge as it slowly crept up. It registered in pounds and atmospheres. At a fraction over ninety-one atmospheres, the pressure started rapidly down. It went down to eighty-six in a few seconds, then steadied, and began to creep up again. The captain barked an order to the engine room, and the gauge stopped rising. The man turned to Hewitt.

'Well, that's it. At ninety-one atmospheres, the rubber lining began to lose air, and didn't seal up again till the pressure went down.'

Hewitt shook his head in bewilderment. 'I don't understand it,' he said. 'That's over twelve hundred pounds to the square inch.'

Reluctantly, he radioed for the equipment that would be needed to brace the two ships together. While they waited, they tried several methods of using machinery to push open the door. None of the methods worked. It was evident that far higher pressures would be needed to force an entrance.

It required a pressure of nine hundred and seventy-four atmospheres.

The door swung open grudgingly. Hewitt watched the air gauge, and waited for the needle to race downward. The air should be rushing through the open door, on into the ship, dissipating its terrific pressure in the enormous cubic area of the bigger machine. It could sweep through like a tornado, destroying everything in its path.

The pressure went down to nine hundred and seventy-three. There it stopped. There it stayed. Beside Hewitt, a government scientist said in a strangled tone, 'But what's happened? It seems to be equalized at an impossible level. How can that be? That's over thirteen thousand pounds to the square inch.'

Hewitt drew away from the asbesglas barrier. 'I'll have to get a specially designed suit,' he said. 'Nothing we have would hold that pressure for an instant.'

It meant going down to Earth. Not that it would take a great deal of time. There were firms capable of building such a suit in a few days. But he would have to be present in person to supervise its construction. As he headed for a landing craft, Hewitt thought: 'All I've got to do is to get aboard, and start the ship back to Centaurus. I'll probably have to go along. But that's immaterial now.' It was too late to build more colonizing ships.

He was suddenly confident that the entire unusual affair would be resolved swiftly. He had no premonition.

It was morning at the steel city when he landed. The news of his coming had preceded him; and when he emerged from the space-suit factory shortly after noon, a group of reporters were waiting for him. Hewitt told them what he knew, but left them dissatisfied.

Back at his office, he made a mistake. He called Joan. It was years since they had talked and evidently she was no longer so tense, for she actually came to the phone. Her manner was light. 'And what's on your mind?' she asked.

'Reconciliation.'

'For Pete's sake!' she said, and laughed.

Her voice sounded more strident than when he had last seen her. It struck Hewitt with a pang that the vague reports he had heard, that she was associating not only with one man – which would be normal and to be expected – but with many, were true.

The realization stopped him a little but only a little. He said soberly, 'I don't know why that amuses you. What's happened to the profound and undying love which you used to swear would last for all eternity?'

There was a pause, then: 'You know,' she said, 'I really do believe you are simpleton enough, and that you are calling for a reconciliation. But I'm smart these days, and so I'll just put two and two together and guess that the return of your silly ship is probably connected with this call. Do you want me to get the family together and we all go back with you to Centaurus?'

Hewitt had the feeling that, after such an unfruitful beginning, it would be a mistake to continue the conversation. But he persisted anyway. 'Why not let me have the children?' he urged. 'The trip won't hurt them and at least they'll be out of the way when -'

Joan cut him off at that point. 'You see,' she laughed, 'I figured the whole crazy thing correctly.'

With that, she banged the receiver in his ear.

The evening papers phoned him about it, and then carried a garbled account of her version of his proposal to her. In print, the reference to himself as the 'baby Nova man' made him cringe. Hewitt hid from reporters who thereafter maintained a twenty-four-hour vigil in the lobby of the hotel where he lived.

Two days later, he needed a police escort to take him to the factory to pick up the specially built tank suit, and then on to the field, where he took off once more for the Molly D.

Once there, more than an hour was spent in testing. But at last a magnet drew shut the inner door of the Hope of Man. Then the air pressure in the connecting bulkhead was reduced to one atmosphere. Hewitt, arrayed in his new, motor-driven capsule on wheels, was then lifted out of the salvage ship into the bulkhead by a crane. The door locked tight behind him. Air was again pumped into the space. Hewitt watched the suit's air-pressure gauges carefully as the outside pressure was gradually increased to nine hundred and seventy-three atmospheres. When, after many minutes, the tank suit still showed no signs of buckling, he edged it forward in low gear and gently pushed open the door of the big ship.

A few moments later he was inside the Hope of Man.