This flimsy giant kite Castor anchored to the ball of bicycles and other jetsam with an odd bit of string. No stronger link was necessary; out here no vagrant wind would blow it away, no one would cut it loose. ‘Pol,’ he said, ‘go bang on the port and tell ’em we’re ready.’
Pollux walked forward and did so, rapping on the quartz first to attract his grandmother’s attention, then tapping code to report. While he was gone Castor attached a piece of paper reading:
NOT FOR SALVAGE
This cargo is in free transit by intention. The undersigned owner intends to recover it and warns all parties not to claim it as abandoned. U.P. Rev. Stat. # 193401
Roger Stone, Master
P.Y. Rolling Stone, Luna
When Pollux came back he said, ‘Hazel says go ahead but take it easy.’
‘Of course.’ Castor untwisted the single wire that held the ungainly mass to the ship, then stood back and watched it. It did not move. He reached out and gave it the gentlest shove with his little finger, then continued watching. Slowly, slowly it separated from the ship. He wished to disturb its orbit as little as possible, to make it easy to find. The petty vector he had placed on it — an inch a minute was his guess — would act for all the days from there to Mars; he wanted the final sum to remain small.
Pollux twisted around and picked out the winking gleam of the War God. ‘Will the jet be clear of it when we swing ship?’ he asked anxiously.
‘Quit worrying. I already figured that.’
The maneuver to he performed was of the simplest — point to point in space in a region which could be treated as free of gravity strain since the two ships were practically the same distance from the Sun and Mars was too far away to matter. There were four simple steps: cancellation of the slight vector difference between the two ships (the relative speed with which the War God was puffing away), acceleration toward the War God, transit of the space between them, deceleration to match orbits and lie dead in space relative to each other on arrival.
Steps one and two would be combined by vector addition; step three was simply waiting time. The operation would be two maneuvers, two blasts on the jet.
But step three, the time it would take to reach the War God, could be enormously cut down by lavish use of reactive mass. Had time been no object they could have, as Hazel put it, closed the gap ‘by throwing rocks off the stern.’ There was an infinite number of choices, each requiring different amounts of reactive mass. One choice would have saved the bicycles and their personal possessions — but it would have stretched the transit time out to over two weeks.
This was a doctor’s emergency call — Roger Stone elected to jettison.
But he did not tell the twins this and he did not require them to work a ballistic. He did not care to let them know of the choice between sacrificing their capital or letting strangers wait for medical attention. After all, he reflected, the twins were pretty young.
Eleven hours from blast time the Stone hung in space close by the War God. The ships were still plunging toward Mars at some sixteen miles per second; relative to each other they were stationary — except that the liner continued her stately rotation, end over end. Dr Stone, her small figure encumbered not only with space suit, pressure bottles, radio, suit jet, and life lines, but also with a Santa Claus pack of surgical supplies, stood with her husband on the side of the Stone nearest the liner. Not knowing exactly what she might need she had taken all that she believed could be spared from the stock of their own craft —drugs, antibiotics, instruments, supplies.
The others had been kissed good-by inside and told to stay there. Lowell had cried and tried to keep his mother from entering the lock. He had not been told what was going on, but the emotions of the others were contagious.