Robert Heinlein: Between Planets

Costello touched a switch, stopping the voice, and demanded, "Cameras ready?"

"Hot and rolling)"

"Shift!"

They watched the picture build up-a wiring diagram, Don decided it must be-or else a plate of spaghetti. When the picture was complete the voice resumed.

After more than two hours of this, broken only by desultory conversation, Don turned to Isobel. "I'm not doing any good here and I'm certainly not learning anything. What do you say we leave?"

"Suits."

They went down the ramp and headed for a tunnel that led toward living quarters. On the way they ran into Phipps, his face glowing with happiness. Don nodded and started to push on past; Phipps stopped him. "I was just going to hunt you up."

"Me?"

"Yes. I thought you might want this-for a souvenir." He held out the ring.

Don took it and examined it curiously. There was a very tiny break in one branch of the "H" where the enamel had been eaten away. The framing circle was an empty, slightly shadowed groove, a groove so narrow and shallow that Don could hardly catch his fingernail in it.

"You've no more use for it?"

"It's squeezed dry. Keep it. You'll be able to sell it to a museum some day, for a high price."

"No," said Don. "I reckon I'll deliver it to my father-eventually."

DON moved out of the Gargantuan chambers he had been given and in with the other humans. Sir Isaac would have let him stay until the Sun grew cold, monopolizing an acre or so of living space, but to Don it seemed not only silly for one person to clutter up chambers built big enough for dragons but not entirely comfortable-so much open space made a man tuned to bush fighting uneasy.

The human guests occupied one dragon apartment with the great rooms partitioned off into cubicles. They shared its wallowing trough as a plunge bath and had a communal mess. Don roomed with Dr. Roger Conrad, a tall and shaggy young man with a perpetual grin. Don was a bit surprised to find that Conrad was held in high esteem by the other scientists.

He saw very little of his roommate, nor of any of the others-even Isobel was busy with clerical work. The team worked night and day with driving intensity. The ring had been opened and they had engineering data to work from, true-but that task force was already swinging toward Mars. Nobody knew-nobody could know-whether or not they could finish in time to save their colleagues.

Conrad had tried to explain it to Don one night late as he was turning in. "We don't have adequate facilities here. The instructions were conceived in terms of Earth- and Mars-type techniques. The dragons do things differently. We've got mighty little of our own stuff and it's hard to jury-rig what we need from their stuff. The original notion was to install the gear in-you know those little jumpbug ships that people use to get around in on Mars?"

"Seen pictures of them."

"Never actually seen 'em myself. Useless as rocketships, of course, but they are pressurized and big enough. Now we've got to adapt for a shuttle." A superstratospheric shuttle "with its ears trimmed"-the spreading glider wings unshipped and carried awaywaited in a covered bayou outside Sir Isaac's family seat. It would make the trip to Mars if it could be prepared. "It's a headache," he added.

"Well, can we do it?"

"We'll have to do it. We can't possibly do the design calculations over again; we don't have the machines, even if we had time to re-engineer the job-which we haven't."

"That's what I meant. Will you finish in time?"

Conrad sighed. "I wish I knew."

The pressure of time sat heavily on all of them. In their mess hall they had set up a large chart showing Earth, Sun, Venus, and Mars, each in its proper position. At lunch each day the markers were moved along the scribed orbits, the Earth by one degree, Venus a bit more, Mars by only half a degree and a trifle.

A long dotted line curved from a point on Earth's orbit to a rendezvous with Mars-their best estimate of the path and arrival date of the Federation task force. The departure date was all they knew with certainty; the trajectory itself and the arrival date were based on the relative positions of the two planets and what was believed to be the maximum performance of any Federation ship, assuming refueling in parking orbit around Earth.

For a rocket ship some orbits are possible, some are impossible. A military ship in a hurry would not, of course, use the economical doubly-tangent ellipse; such a trip from Earth to Mars would require 258 Earth days. But, even using hyperboloids and wasting fuel, there are severe limits to how quickly a reaction-driven ship can make an interplanetary voyage.

An Earth calendar hung beside the chart; near it was a clock showing Earth Greenwich time. Posted near these was a figure, changed each time the clock read twenty-four hundred, the number of days till M-day-by their best estimate, now only thirty-nine.

Don was enjoying a combat soldier's paradise-hot food sharp on the hour, well cooked and plenty of it, all the sack time he cared to soak up, clean clothes, clean skin, no duties and no hazards. The only trouble was that he soon grew to hate it.

The intense activity around him shamed him into wanting to help-and try to help he did-until he found out that he was being given make-work to shut him up. Actually there was nothing he could do to help; the sweating specialists, trying their level best to haywire improbable circuits into working, had no time to waste on an untrained assistant. He gave up and went back to loafing, found that he could sleep all right in the afternoons but that the practice kept him awake at night.

He wondered why he could not enjoy so pleasant a leave. It was not that-he was worried about his parents.

Yes, he was! Though they had grown dim in his memory his conscience was biting him that he was doing nothing helpful for them. That was why he wanted to get out, away from here where he could do no good, back to his outfit, back to his trade-back to where there was nothing to worry about between scrambles-and plenty to worry about then. With the blackness around you and the sound of your mate's breathing on your right and the same for the man on your left-the slow move forward, trying to feel out what dirty tricks the Greenie techs had thought of this time to guard their sleep... the quick strike-and the pounding drive back to the boat with nothing to guide you through the dark but the supersonics in your head bones

He wanted to go back.

He went to see Phipps about it, sought him out in his office. "You, eh? Have a cigarette."

"No, thanks."

"Real tobacco-none of your `crazy weed.'"

"No, thanks, I don't use 'em."

"Well, maybe you've got something. The way my mouth tastes these mornings-" Phipps lit up himself, sat back and waited.

Don said, "Look-you're the boss around here."

Phipps exhaled, then said carefully, "Let's say I'm the coordinator. I certainly don't try to boss the technical work."

Don brushed it aside. "You're the boss for my purposes. See here, Mr. Phipps, I feel useless around here. Can you arrange to get me back to my outfit?"

Phipps carefully made a smoke ring. "I'm sorry you feel that way. I could give you work to do. You could be an executive assistant to me."

Don shook his head. "I've had enough of `pick up sticks and lay them straight. I want real work-my own work. I'm a soldier and there's a war going on-that's where I belong. Now when can I get transportation?"

"You can't."

"Huh?"

"Mr. Harvey, I can't let you go; you know too much. If you had turned over the ring without asking questions, you could have gone back to your outfit the next hour-but you had to know, you had to know everything. Now we don't dare risk your capture. You know the Greenies put every prisoner through full interrogation; we can't dare risk that-not yet."