Robert Silverberg - Delivery Guaranteed

“How the hell did you get aboard?” I demanded.

“Slipped through the security checkers…but the ship took off ahead of schedule. I did not expect to be on board when blastoff came.”

“Sorry to have fouled up your plans,” I told him.

“But I regained consciousness in time. Your ship is ruined! You refused to heed my warning, and now you will never reach Ganymede alive. So perish all enemies of the Venusian Republic! So perish those who have desecrated our noble shrines!”

He was practically foaming at the mouth. I started toward him. He swung the crowbar and might have bashed my head in if he had known how to handle himself under nograv conditions, but he didn’t, and the only result of his exertion was to send himself drifting toward the roof of the cabin. I yanked on his leg as it went past me and dragged him down. The crowbar dropped from his numb hand. I caught it and poked him across the head with it.

There isn’t any hesitation in a spaceman’s mind when he finds a stowaway. Fuel is a precious thing, and so is air and food; stowaways simply aren’t allowed to live. I didn’t feel any qualms about what I did next, but all the same I was glad that Erna Vanderweghe wasn’t awake and watching me while I went about it.

I slipped into my breathing-helmet and sealed off the cabin. Opening the airlock, I carried the unconscious Venusian out the hatch and gave him a good push, imparting enough momentum to send him out on an orbit of his own. The compensating reaction pushed me back into the airlock. I closed the hatch. The Venusian must have died instantly, without ever knowing what was happening to him.

Then I had a look-see to determine just how much damage the stowaway had been able to do before I woke up and caught him.

It was plenty.

All our communication equipment was gone, but permanently. The radio was a gutted ruin. The computer was smashed. Two auxiliary fuel tanks had been jettisoned. We were hopelessly off course in asteroid country, and the odds on reaching Ganymede looked mighty slim. By the time I finished making course corrections, we’d be down to our reserve fuel supply. Ganymede was about 350 million miles ahead of us. I didn’t see how we were going to travel more than a tenth that distance before air and food troubles set in, and we weren’t carrying enough fuel now for a safe landing even if we lived to reach Ganymede.

It was time to wake Miss Vanderweghe and tell her the news, I figured.

She was lying curled up tight in her acceleration cradle, asleep, with a childlike, trusting expression on her face. I watched her for perhaps five minutes before I woke her. She sat up immediately.

“What—oh. Is everything all right? Did we make a good blastoff?”

“Fine blastoff,” I said quietly. “But everything isn’t all right.” I told her about the stowaway and how thoroughly he had wrecked us.

“Oh—that horrible little man from Venus! I knew he had followed me to Mars—that’s why I wanted to leave for Ganymede so soon. He made all sorts of absurd threats, as if the things I had bought were holy relics—”

“They are, in a way. If you worship Macintyre and his fellow rebels, then the stuff you carried away is equivalent to the True Cross, I suppose.”

“I’m so sorry I got you into this, Sam.”

I shrugged. “It’s my own fault all the way. Your Venusian friend approached me at the hotel this afternoon and warned me off, but I didn’t listen to him. I had my chance to pull out.”

“Where’s the stowaway now? Unconscious?”

I shook my head, jerking my thumb toward the single port in her cabin. “He’s out there. Without a suit. Stowaways aren’t entitled to charity under the space laws.”

“Oh,” she said quietly, turning pale. “I—see. You—ejected him.”

I nodded. Then, to get off what promised to be an unpleasant topic, I said, “We’re in real trouble. We’re off course and we don’t have enough fuel for making corrections—not without jettisoning everything on board, ourselves included.”

“I don’t mind if the cargo goes. I mean, I’d hate to lose it, but if you have to dump it—”

“Uh-uh. The ship itself is the bulk of our mass. The problem isn’t the cargo. If there were only some way of jettisoning the ship—”

My mouth sagged open. No, I thought. It wouldn’t ever work. It’s too fantastic to consider.

“I have an idea,” I said. “We will jettison the ship. And we’ll get to Ganymede.”

Luckily our saboteur friend hadn’t bothered to rip up my charts. I spent half an hour feverishly thumbing through the volume devoted to asteroid orbits, while Erna hovered over my shoulder, not daring to ask questions but probably wondering just what in blazes I was figuring out.

Pretty soon I had a list of a dozen likely asteroids. I narrowed it down to five, then to three, then to one. I missed the convenience of my computer, but regulations require a pilot to be able to get along without one in a pinch, and I got along.

I computed a course toward the asteroid known as (719)-Albert. Luck was riding with us. (719)-Albert was on the outward swing of his orbit. On the basis of some extremely rough computations I worked out an orbit for our crippled ship that would match Albert’s in a couple of hours.

Finally, I looked up at Erna and grinned. “This is known as making a virtue out of necessity,” I said. “Want to know what’s going on?”

“You bet I do.”

I leaned back. “We’re on our way to a chunk of rock known as (719)-Albert, which is chugging along not far from here on its way through the asteroid belt. (719)-Albert is a rock about three miles in diameter. Figure that it’s half the size of Deimos—and Deimos is about as small as a place can get.”

“But why are we going there?” she said, puzzled.

“(7I9)-Albert has an exceedingly eccentric orbit—and I mean eccentric in its astronomical sense: not a peculiar orbit, just one that’s very highly elongated. At perihelion (719)-Albert passes around 20 million miles from the orbit of Earth. At aphelion, which is where he’s heading now, he comes within 90 million miles of the orbit of Jupiter. Unless my figures are completely cockeyed, Jupiter is going to be about 150 million miles from Albert about a week from now.”

I saw I had lost her completely. She said dimly, “But you said a little while ago that we hardly had enough fuel to take us 50 million miles.”

“In the ship,” I said. “Yes. But I’ve got other ideas. We’ll land on Albert and abandon the ship. Then we ride pickaback on the asteroid until its closest approach to Jupiter—and blast off without the ship.”

“Blast off— how?”

I smiled triumphantly. “We’ll make a raft out of your blessed logs,” I said. “Attach one of the ship’s rocket engines at the rear, and shove off. Escape velocity from Albert is so low it hardly matters. And since the mass of our raft will only be six or seven hundred pounds—Earthside weight, of course—instead of the thirty tons or so that this ship weighs, we’ll be able to coast to Ganymede with plenty of fuel left to burn.”

She was looking at me as if I’d just delivered a lecture in the General Theory of Relativity. Apparently the niceties of space travel just weren’t in her line at all. But she smiled and tried to look understanding. “It sounds very clever,” she said with an uncertain grin.

I felt pretty clever about everything myself, three hours later, when we landed on the surface of an asteroid that could only be (719)-Albert. It had taken only one minor course correction to get us here. Which meant that my rule-of-thumb astrogation had been pretty good.

We donned breathing-suits and clambered out of the ship to inspect our landfall. (719)-Albert wasn’t very impressive. The landscape was mostly jagged upthrusts of a dark basalt-like rock. But the view was tremendous—a great backdrop of darkness, speckled with stars, and, much closer, the orbiting fragments of other lumps of rock. Albert’s horizon was on the foreshortened side, dipping away almost before it began. Gravitational attraction was so meager it hardly counted. A healthy jump was likely to continue indefinitely upward, as I made clear to Erna right at the start. I didn’t want her indulging in the usual hijinks that greenhorns are fond of when on a low-gravity planetoid such as this. I could visualize only too well the scene as she vanished into the void as the result of an overenthusiastic leap.