“All right. Tell me again just what you’re going to do while
I’m gone, so I won’t find myself blowing the whistle when
you’re nowhere around.” The sound of a suit locker being
opened came tinnily over the intercom. Sweeney’s chute har-
ness was already strapped on, and getting the respirator and
throat-mikes into place would only take a moment. Sweeney
needed no other protection.
“I’m to stay up here with all power off except maintenance
for 300 days,” Meikiejon’s voice, sounding more distant now,
was repeating. “Supposedly by that time you’ll have worked
yourself in good with our friends down there and will know
the setup. I stand ready to get a message from you on a fixed
frequency. You’re to send me only a set of code letters; I
feed them into the computer, the comp tells me what to do
and I act accordingly. If I don’t hear from you after 300 days,
I utter a brief but heartfelt prayer and go home. Beyond that,
God help me, I don’t know a thing.”
“That’s plenty,” Sweeney told him. “Let’s go.”
Sweeney went out his personal airlock. Like all true inter-
planetary craft, Meikiejon’s ship had no overall hull. She con-
sisted of her essential components, including the personnel
globe, held together by a visible framework of girders and
I-beams. It was one of the longest of the latter, one which
was already pointed toward Howe’s H, which would serve as
the “catapult.”
Sweeney looked up at the globe of the satellite. The old fa-
miliar feeling of falling came over him for a moment; he
-looked down, reorienting himself to the ship, until it went