By
W. E. Lopez
©2001
Tommy looked over the irregular surface
of the landing field. He couldn’t see
very far. Standing only four foot,
three inches tall, the distance to his horizon was less than a mile. His dad had worked the problem for him. The approximate diameter of the asteroid
Ceres was 913 kilometers. Using the
radius, when converted to feet, and taken as one side of a right triangle, with
his height of eye added to the opposite side, and the rule for right triangles,
the base measured only 3,564 feet. Give
or take a cat’s whisker.
Tommy wasn’t interested in cat whiskers;
he wanted to get a look inside the control room of the freighter that would
soon be departing for Mars. In eighteen
more years, the first manned mission to Proxima Centauri was scheduled for
launch. Tommy wanted to be aboard that
vessel. He had a deep interest in
astronomy, astrophysics, astrogation, and electronics. As young as he was, he was one of only four
radio amateurs in the asteroid belt privileged to use the XT276 suffix with his
call sign. XT for extra-terrestrial,
and 276 representing Ceres’ mean distance from the sun, or 2.76 astronomical
units. If he studied hard, he would be
able to finish high school, graduate college, and have more than six years of
practical experience behind him before mission departure. Tommy was dedicated to studying hard, and
his natural curiosity sought him to seek answers in all his classes.
With his skill at electronics, Tommy had disabled the automatic
transponder of his space suit so surface control would not know that he was
headed into a restricted area. There
were no fences or guards on the asteroid; the cost would have been prohibitive. Instead, surface control monitored the
location of all space suits by transponder.
The transponder also served as a lifeline enabling rescue teams to
search for and locate personnel lost or injured.
Tommy had no more wish to be located than his teen-age sister
when she was on a date with one of the young space cadets. He picked his way across the landing field
toward the freighter, his curiosity building.
The surface of Ceres was pitted in places by collisions with smaller
particles of space debris and layered with a thin coating of dust and rock
fragments. His footsteps raised tiny
plumes of debris that slowly settled back to the surface under the feeble
effects of gravity.
The freighter consisted of six cargo cylinders attached to a
larger inner cylinder containing living quarters for the crew and the nuclear
propulsion system. It was empty now,
but Tommy knew that in less than 72 hours it would blast off for Mars with a
cargo of heavy metals mined from the asteroid belt. In spite of the immense distance and cost of mining and
transporting raw material from the asteroids to Mars, it was still much more
economical than shipping from Earth.
Tommy just wanted a peek inside the control room of the freighter before
it blasted.
When he reached the awkward looking ship, Tommy easily leaped
twenty feet up to the crew-boarding ladder then pulled him self up, hand over
hand, until he could enter the airlock.
He pulled the outer door closed then located the barometric pressure
sensor and stuffed it with a small wad of silicon putty he had brought with
him. The sensor was another safeguard
that would signal surface control if the lock were pressurized, which Tommy had
to do before he could open the inner door.
The inner lock opened automatically when the pressure was
equal and Tommy stepped into the galley of the freighter. There would be only a crew of eight making
the trip, but they needed room for personal needs during the four months they
would be in space. There was a small
table for eating meals, writing letters, playing card games or simply reading a
book. Tommy knew that a few of the
crewmembers could be senior space cadets making a short voyage during their
final year at the academy. They would
probably use this area for studying as well as eating.
On one bulkhead there was a picture calendar, which Tommy
knew was not academy issue. It was four
years out of date and advertised a bar in the Syrtis Minor complex on
mars. The photograph featured a well
proportioned, bikini clad, redhead smiling at the viewer. Her bikini was on an LCD overlay, which would
vanish at the touch of a finger. Tommy
was about to reach for the LCD when he felt a vibration through the boots of
his space suit. Some one was coming up
the crew ladder!
How had anyone discovered he was here? It couldn’t be the freighter crew, they
would not cone aboard until shortly before take off. Could it be an unscheduled maintenance check? Instead of heading for the control room
above him, Tommy headed down, past the tiny crew cabins. He found a utility storage area between the
cabins and engineering sections where he felt he could hide until the
maintenance personnel left the ship.
There were several hanging lockers where the crew would store their
space suits. Because the storage area
was dimly lit, Tommy thought he might be able to get away with pretending to be
a space suit hanging in the locker behind the wire mesh door and quickly hid
himself in plain sight.
A moment later the bulky figure of a helmetless
man hurried past and into the engineering section. His voice called to someone who must be above in the control
room.
“Okay, Mike! Give me
ten minutes to run through the pre-flight and then you can lift off!”
Lift off, Tommy thought.
Why, these were not maintenance workers, they were thieves who were
going to steal this ship! He knew that
piracy existed among the asteroids, but he never anticipated getting involved
in it!
“Hurry it up, Red! I
want to get out of here while that academy cruiser is still blasting
outbound. Not much chance she’ll cancel
that mission and reverse course, even if the radar on this rock could track us,
but there’s no reason for us to take that risk.”
“She’ll blast when she’s ready, Mike. You can’t hurry a torch, you know. It ain’t like frying eggs and all you have
to do is turn up the heat. The reaction
mass has to be heated to melting, then the liquid has to be super heated to
produce a high velocity jet. If I try
and hurry it too much, all we’ll get is another crater in the ground that’ll
glow in the dark for a thousand years.”
Tommy began to creep from his hiding place. If he hurried, maybe he could get out the
air lock and away from the ship before it blasted. Or, the super hot jet could vaporize him as he leaped to the
ground. Could he dare take the
risk? He would have to chance it if he
did not want to be kidnapped by these two thieves. He quietly opened the mesh door of the locker and slowly
stretched one foot toward the deck.
“Well, look what we have here,” a female voice said. “You’re kind of small, even for a space
cadet, aren’t you?”
A third thief had spotted him as he tried to escape!
She popped the clamps to his helmet and removed it. “Why, you’re just a kid!” she
exclaimed. She stowed his helmet in the
locker then grabbed him by the belt and began towing him as she climbed the
ladder to the control room. Tommy felt
like a trussed chicken in a market and weighed hardly more than that in the
asteroid’s gravity field.
“Mike,” she said as she
placed Tommy on his feet in the control room.
“We’ve got a small problem.”
“How small?” the man asked,
never looking up from the computer where he was entering flight data.
“About four-foot and
thirty-five kilos.”
“What?” he asked as he
turned toward her. He glimpsed Tommy
for the first time. “Well, I’ll be… at
least he’s dressed for the occasion.
Toss him out the lock, Nell. No
witnesses means no proof for the patrol.”
“I’ll not be a part to
murder, Mike. A little thievery is one
thing, but I’m not gonna kill this kid.”
“Then get Red to do it. We’ve got to get off this ball before a troop
of Girl Scouts arrives next. What the
heck are you doing here, kid?”
“I was just looking
around. I wasn’t gonna steal anything.”
“You sure weren’t,” Mike said, “cause this baby belongs to Iron
Mike. As soon as we get this tub hidden
at our base, we’ll load the ore into our own ship and bring it back here to
sell. Then we’ll part out this crate
and sell the parts. A couple more hauls
and we’ll head back to Earth with fat bank accounts. And, you ain’t gonna foul up my plans.”
Tommy swallowed hard. He knew that piracy was one of the few
remaining crimes still rating the death penalty. Although hanging would not be effective here, where a man weighed
only a few kilos, the authorities would certainly have other ways.
“Soups on!” the man called
Red yelled from below. “Light her fire,
Mike!”
“You’re in luck, kid. I ain’t got time to deal with you at the
moment. Put him in a couch, Nell, and
fasten the straps where he can’t get at them.
I don’t want no distractions while I’m piloting this bucket of bolts.”
The woman forced Tommy to
recline on an acceleration couch and placed belts across his chest, waist, and
legs. She moved the buckles around
beneath him where he could not reach them and fastened them securely. When Nell had buckled herself in, Mike
blasted, neglecting the formality of requesting clearance or filing a
navigation plan. Tommy figured a pirate
couldn’t be troubled with the lesser regulations of space flight.
For the next seventy-two
hours the pilot gunned the freighter, abruptly decelerating, changing course,
then accelerating again. Tommy had no
idea where they were located or where they were going. He wondered if the pilot knew.
At regular intervals he was
fed and Nell led him to the head and waited outside the door while he relieved
himself. Afterwards, he was led back to
his couch and strapped in again. Tommy
didn’t have much opportunity to plan an escape. Even literary heroes like Le
Compte de Monte Cristo and Papillion
had needed years to plan their escape. They were not encumbered by the fact that a
human being could not live just outside their confinement. Tommy used the time to get lots of rest.
Nell turned out not to be
such a bad companion. Her only problem
was that her brain was not one of her finer attributes. She was hopelessly
in love with Mike and he would lead her to a bad end, or worse.
Mike and Red, on the other
hand, were thorough scoundrels. Tommy
would not be surprised to find himself pushed through the airlock any time soon
by one of the two, without benefit of a space suit. He did his best to keep quiet and remain unobtrusive. Perhaps Mike or Red had been the author of
the phrase, “Children should be seen and
not heard,” that his dad was often fond of quoting.
At the end of three days, the stolen freighter nudged its way close to
a small asteroid, scarcely more than thirty kilometers across. That it had once been the scene of mining
operations was evident when Mike carefully nudged it into a cavernous excavation
and well-lighted interior. At least a dozen
vessels were moored here, with lines holding them suspended from the barren
rock.
After they were tied fast,
Mike donned his space suit and readied himself to leave the craft. “I’ll check in with the Major,” he
said. “No sense dragging the brat along
with us and letting him get his eyes full.
You and Red stay here and keep him out of trouble until I return.” Then he was gone.
Nell fixed another meal for
Tommy then she and Red drifted at opposite ends of the mess table and played a
game of cards to pass the time. A
magnetic cribbage board set on the table and plastic cards were shuffled and
dealt. A small electro-static charge
kept the cards in place on the table when they were played. Red had easily beaten the woman in two games
before Mike returned.
“Put the kid in his space
suit, Red. Take him to one of the ships
concealed on the surface and leave him.”
Red went below to don his
own space suit and soon returned with Tommy’s.
“You won’t kill him, will
you Mike? I really don’t want any part
of a killing,” Nell said.
“Not actually kill him Nell. But those ships hidden topside are stripped down jobs. The electronics and power plants are
gone. He can live there for several
days until the Major decides if the kid’s dad can pay a ransom. If we happen to forget about him…? Well, they tell me that running out of air
is not unpleasant. You just sort of
drift off to sleep.”
Tommy shuddered. Perhaps it was not unpleasant, but it didn’t
sound very inviting to him.
Red and Tommy donned and
checked their gear then, Red took him outside where a mule was tethered. The mules
the asteroid miners used bore little resemblance to their Earth side namesakes,
but they served the same utilitarian purpose.
Looking like a hot-dog eight meters long, the mules had tiny thrusters
mounted on gimbals at each end. A
pressurized tank containing a hypergolic propellant fed the thrusters,
providing forward or reverse thrust or providing pitch and yaw control. Supplies, ore, even passengers, could be
stowed beneath a cargo net in a centrally located cargo area.
Red buckled Tommy into a
saddle and cautioned him not to unfasten his belt. “Even though we won’t be doing more than fifty to a hunnert miles
an hour, you can get seriously injured if you fall off the mule and slam into
the rock some where with no way to stop.”
Tommy thought he might prefer the possibility of being “seriously
injured” to certain asphyxiation in an abandoned hulk.
Red gunned them out of the
cavern and into the blackness of space.
It wasn’t nearly as dark as Tommy had imagined it would be. They were barely 250 million miles from the
sun and the illumination falling on the tiny asteroid was quite bright. Red watched a small radar with a liquid
crystal display and began braking the mule when they were free of the
cavern. After killing their forward
velocity, he turned the mule to approach the asteroid from another
direction. Tommy could not see the
surface because it was in shadow from this point of view, but Red seemed to
know where he was going.
As they closed with the
asteroid and Tommy’s eyes compensated for the gloom, he could see where they
were headed. There was an irregular
shaped hump on the surface, quite as dark as the surrounding terrain, but strangely
out of place. Suddenly it came into
focus for Tommy and he could identify at least four other freighters, concealed
with camouflage netting like the military had used on Earth in the last
century.
Red braked the mule to a
stop and drove a piton into the rock to act as a temporary anchor, preventing
the mule from drifting away.
“Come on, junior. You’ve got deluxe reservations at the
Waldorf here.” Red unbuckled Tommy’s
seat belt and grasped him by the belt at his waist as Nell had done in the
freighter. He lifted the edge of the
camouflage netting and carried Tommy to the air lock and shoved him
inside. When the lock had filled, Red
opened the inner door and shoved Tommy inside.
“You just stay here and keep out of trouble until the Major decides if
you’re of any use to us. You ain’t going
anywhere because I’m going to latch the outer door open. The atmospheric pressure on the inner door
may only be eight pounds per square inch, but even a small door will have
several tons of pressure holding it shut against the vacuum outside.” Having said his piece, Red closed the door
and left.
Tommy spent the next half
hour checking out the abandoned ship.
He found it wasn’t much more than a hulk. There was at least some power in the ships batteries, for the
interior lights were working. The life
support system had been scavenged, meaning he would have only the air that
remained in the ship’s tanks before the CO2 built up to a point
where Tommy would die of asphyxiation.
Naturally, all the expensive electronics had been salvaged so there was
no way he could radio for help.
Tommy ran the problem
through the computer between his ears, again and again. He had a short-range radio in the helmet of
his space suit, but he doubted if the signal would carry more than a few
kilometers. What he really needed was
several hundred watts of out put power, and an antenna to beam the signal to
Ceres, wherever the asteroid might be located.
Without instruments, he had no idea how to find Ceres.
Wait a minute! He didn’t have to find Ceres; they would be
looking for him! And, they’d be
monitoring the transponder frequencies trying to locate his space suit.
Tommy removed his helmet so
he could get at the electronics located in the auxiliary pack on the back. “Yuck!”
The air in the abandoned ship smelled of sweat and cooking, tobacco and
stagnation! Without the life support
system to cleanse and replenish the atmosphere, it smelled worse than six weeks
accumulation of dirty clothes in his mom’s laundry basket, not that mom would
ever let laundry go more than a day or so before processing and sterilizing.
When he had removed the
transponder unit, Tommy replaced his helmet, thankful that his space suit could
provide him with clean air for at least another six hours. He took the tiny unit below to the
engineering shack, but found that most of the vessel’s tools had been
removed. At least he had the Swiss Army
knife his dad had given him for his birthday in his belt pack.
Tommy placed the transponder on the workbench and positioned a work
lamp over head. In 10 minutes the
transponder was working again. But the
output was still only a few milli-watts, powerful enough for anyone to locate
him on the surface of Ceres, but not capable of transmitting several hundreds
or thousands of kilometers. Tommy
needed a linear amplifier.
“Sure, no problem!” he said
out loud. “Just head to the supply room
with a requisition, or go to the electronics store with a few hundred credits
and buy one!” Another of his dad’s
favorite saying came back to him, “Where
there’s a will, there’s a way.” Or
had that been his mom’s?
Never mind. Although nearly all
electronics were solid-state these days, Tommy remembered the principles of
vacuum tubes. Of course, there was no
way he could construct and test a complicated device like that, but he had
several billion cubic miles of total vacuum just outside this vessel. All he needed to construct would be a
cathode, anode, grid, and cathode heater, then jury rig the wiring from the
ships batteries.
Tommy found some scrap paper
to make a sketch and do his calculations on.
He also found a few odds and ends, such as capacitors and resistors, in
minor electronic components too useless to salvage from the hulk. Smashing a light bulb in the engineering
section, he salvaged the tungsten filament to use as his cathode heater.
After placing his treasures,
and they were indeed treasures, on
the workbench, he un-gasketed one glove and stuffed the sleeve with a dirty
rag. He wanted to be able to use the
digital calculator on his wristwatch, but he didn’t want to have to breathe the
foul air of the space ship until he absolutely had to.
He sketched, and
figured. He planned, then,
re-planned. He used a piece of plastic
as insulation to breadboard his creation.
Now he had to test it; but without a signal meter, how could he do that?
Tommy removed his helmet
once more. The air inside the ship
didn’t seem to smell as bad now; perhaps he was getting accustomed to it? His helmet included two 100-watt floodlights
for use when working in the dark.
Removing one, he connected one lead to the metal hull of the ship for a
ground, and the other to a short length of bare wire to serve as an
antenna. The transponder worked in the
giga-hertz range, and the wire would probably serve as a multiple wavelength
antenna.
Tommy connected the power
leads and turned on the transponder.
The tungsten cathode heater began glowing with a white-hot incandescence
and Tommy quickly turned off the power.
He had forgotten that in the atmosphere of the ship, the tungsten
filament could actually begin to burn!
Setting aside his creation
for a moment, Tommy went to the air tanks and checked their status, only four
percent. Well, it would have to be
enough. Since there was no way he could
open the air lock door, he used the auger from his Swiss Army knife to dig out
the silicone gasket around the door until he could hear the air begin
escaping. The loud hissing reminded him
that he better put his helmet and glove back on. Back to the workbench, he resealed his space suit and waited for
the air in the ship to bleed off. All
the while he kept testing the inner door of the air lock. After 20 minutes it finally opened.
Now that he was working in a
vacuum, Tommy fed the power to his make shift amplifier again. This time the cathode heater glowed red, but
not incandescent. The floodlight
remained dark. Tommy removed the
resistor that limited the power to the control grid and replaced it with one of
lesser value. Still, nothing.
He tried again and was
rewarded by a feeble glow, so dim as to be hardly noticeable. After six more tries, the floodlight was
shining brightly. His amplifier was
working!
Tommy took his apparatus
forward to the control room where the connections to the ship’s antennas were
located. After attaching the leads and
applying the power, there was nothing more he needed to do. His space suit transponder automatically
sent out it’s digital identification, so he didn’t need to continually switch
the power on and off as a crude method of sending Morse code.
Tommy sat back and
waited. He wondered how much air was
left in the tanks of his space suit?
Would it last until he could be rescued? Would there even be a rescue?
Was his signal getting through to surface control on Ceres?
He had no way of
knowing. He had no receiver. How long would they need to arrive here if
they heard his signal? What if the
pirates heard his signal first and came to shut it off? Tommy could only hope the pirates were not
tuned to the search and rescue frequencies.
The boy had done his best;
there was nothing more to do except wait.
Tommy sat on the floor of the control room and leaned back against a
bulkhead. He was very tired, and wanted
to sleep. Should he go to the air lock
and reseal it? If he did, he could
remove his space suit and sleep more comfortably. He could re-pressurize the hull with the remaining air in the
ship’s tanks and would probably live longer than in his space suit. But, if he re-pressurized the hull, the
crude amplifier would certainly catch fire and then there would be no more
distress signal.
Tommy rested his eyes. All he could do was wait. He lost consciousness with that thought on
his mind…
* * *
“His breathing is stronger,”
a voice said. “I think he’s coming
around!”
“Tommy! Tommy!
Speak to me,” he heard his dad saying.
“It may be too early to
tell, sir. We have no way of knowing
how long he was out of air. I don’t
want to worry you, but there could be serious, permanent brain damage.”
“When will you be able to
tell, Doctor?”
“If… I mean, when he regains consciousness, we can
run some tests. That’s about all we can
do for the moment, sir. We’ll just have
to wait…”
Tommy fluttered his
eyes. “…waiting,” he murmured. “I’ve been waiting so long… I did my best,
honest I did. What took you so long?”
“You certainly did, son,” he
heard his father saying. “The waiting
is over and you did real fine. But, if
you hadn’t disobeyed safety procedures, you would never have been in such a
fix. I hope you’ve learned a lesson
from this.” Tommy’s dad hugged his son
close… he felt he had to scold the boy, but he didn’t ever want to be parted
from him again.
“Your boy really used his
head, mister. That home made amplifier
was a real inspiration, believe me.”
The man speaking had just walked into Tommy’s hospital room. “I think he may have a real future before
him. Please, take my card. If your boy is interested, ask him to get in
touch with me in a few years. I may be
able to help with his education… scholarship grants, you know?”
The stranger handed Tommy’s
dad a plastic com-net card with a digital code imprinted on it. Tommy’s dad glanced at it before shoving it
in his pocket. Franklin Russell, the card read.
Project Administrator, Proxima
Expedition.
“Maybe later,” Tommy’s dad
answered. “Much, much later.”