Мюррей Лейнстер - Space Tug

He began to let himself back toward his acceleration chair. He could not possibly have climbed forward. It was a horrible task to let himself down, with triple his normal weight pulling at him and after the beating taken a little while ago.

Sweat stood out on his skin as he lowered himself sternward. Once his grip on a hand–line slipped and he had to sustain the drag of nearly six hundred pounds by a single hand and arm. It would not be a good idea to fall at three gravities.

The landing rockets roared and roared, and Joe tilted the bow down a little farther, so that the streaming flood of clouds drew nearer.

Haney got to his acceleration chair. He let himself into it and his eyes closed.

Mike's sharp voice barked: "What's the chance, Haney?"

Haney's mouth opened, and closed, and opened again. "Rocket flames," he gasped, "pushed back—wind—splash on hull—may melt—lighten weight—hundred to one against―"

The odds were worse than that. The ship couldn't land because its momentum was too great for the landing rockets to cancel out. If it had weighed five tons instead of twenty, landing might have been possible. Haney was saying that if the ship were to be lowered into air while rushing irresistibly sternward despite its rockets, that the rocket flames might be splashed out by the wind. Instead of streaking astern in a lance–like shape, they might be pushed out like a rocket blast when it hits the earth in a guided missile take–off. Such a blast spreads out flat in all directions. Here the rocket flames might be spread by wind until they played upon the hull of the ship. If they did, they might melt it as they melted their own steel cases in firing. And three–fourths or more of the hull might be torn loose from the cabin bow section. So much was unlikely, but it was possible.

The impossible odds were that the four could survive even if the cabin were detached. They were decelerating at three gravities now. If part of the ship burned or melted or was torn away, the rocket thrust might speed the cabin up to almost any figure. And there is a limit to the number of gravities a man can take, even in an acceleration chair.

Nevertheless, that was what Haney proposed. They were due to be killed anyhow. Joe tried it.

He dived into atmosphere. At 60 miles altitude a thin wailing seemed to develop without reason. At 40 miles, the ship had lost more than two miles per second of its speed since the landing–rockets were ignited, and there was a shuddering in all its fabric—though because of the loss of speed it was not as bad as the atmosphere–graze. At 30 it began to shake and tremble. At 25 miles high there was as horrible a vibration and as deadly a deceleration as at the air–graze. At 12 miles above the surface of the Earth the hull temperature indicators showed the hind part of the hull at red heat. The ship happened to be traveling backward at several times the speed of sound, and air could not move away from before it. It was compressed to white heat at the entering surface, and the metal plating went to bright red heat at that point. But the hull just aft of the rocket mouths was hotter still. There the splashing rocket flames bathed it in intolerable incandescence. Hull plates, braces and beams glared white―

The tip of the tail caved in. The ship's empty cargo space was instantly filled with air at intolerable pressure and heat.

The hull exploded outward where the rocket flames played. There was a monstrous, incredible jerking of the cabin that remained. That fraction of the ship received the full force of the rocket thrust. They could decelerate it at a rate of fifteen gravities or more.

They did.

Joe lost consciousness as instantly and as peacefully as if he had been hit on the jaw.

An unknown but brief time later, he found himself listening with a peculiar astonishment. The rockets had burned out. They had lasted only seconds after the separation of the ship into two fragments. Radars on the ground are authority for this. Those few seconds were extremely important. The cabin lost an additional half–mile per second of velocity, which was enough to make the difference between the cabin heating up too, and the cabin being not quite destroyed.

The cabin remnant was heavy, of course, but it was an irregular object, some twenty feet across. It was below orbital velocity, and wind–resistance slowed it. Even so, it traveled 47 miles to the east in falling the last 10 miles to Earth. It hit a hillside and dug itself a 70–foot crater in the ground.

But there was nobody in it, then. A little over a month before, it had seemed to Joe that ejection seats were the most useless of all possible pieces of equipment to have in a space ship. He'd been as much mistaken as anybody could be. With an ejection seat, a jet pilot can be shot out of a plane traveling over Mach one, and live to tell about it. This crumpling cabin fell fast, but Joe stuffed Mike in an ejection seat and shot him out. He and the Chief dragged Haney to a seat, and then the Chief shoved Joe off—and the four of them, one by one, were flung out into a screaming stream of air. But the ribbon–parachutes did not burst. They nearly broke the necks of their passengers, but they let them down almost gently.

And it was quite preposterous, but all four landed intact. Mike, being lightest and first to be ejected, came down by himself in a fury because he'd been treated with special favor. The Chief and Joe landed almost together. After a long time, Joe staggered out of his space suit and harness and tried to help the Chief, and they held each other up as they stumbled off together in search of Haney.

When they found him he was sleeping heavily, exhausted, in a canebrake. He hadn't even bothered to disengage his parachute harness or take off his suit.

A good deal of that landing remained confused in Joe's mind. While it was going on he was much too busy to be absorbing impressions. When he landed, he was as completely exhausted as anybody wants to be. It was only during the next day that he even tried to sort out his recollections.

Then he woke up suddenly, with a muffled roaring going on all about him. He blinked his eyes open and listened. Presently he realized what the noise was, and wondered that he hadn't realized before. It was the roaring of the motors of a multi–engined plane. He knew, without remembering the details at the moment, that he and the other three were on a plane bound across the Pacific for America. He was in a bunk—and he felt extraordinarily heavy. He tried to move, and it was an enormous effort to move his arm. He struggled to turn over, and found straps holding his body down.

He fumbled at them. They had readily releasable clasps, and he loosened them easily. After a bit he struggled to sit upright. He was horribly heavy or horribly weak. He couldn't tell which. And each separate muscle in his whole body ached. Twinges of pain accompanied every movement. He sat up, swaying a little with the slow movements of the plane, and gradually, things came back.

The landing in the ribbon–chute. They'd come down somewhere on the west coast of India, not too far from the sea. He remembered crashing into the edge of a thin jungle and finding the Chief, and the two of them searching out Haney and stumbling to open ground. After laying out a signal for air searchers, they went off into worn–out slumber while they waited.

He remembered that there'd been a patrol of American destroyers in the Arabian Sea, as everywhere under the orbit of the Platform. Their radar had reported the destruction of one space ship and the frantic diving of the other, its division into two parts, and then the tiny objects, which flew out from the smaller cabin section, which had descended as only ejection–seat parachutes could possibly have done. Two destroyers steamed onward underneath those drifting specks, to pick them up when they should come down. But the other nearby destroyers had other business in hand.