The forward cluster included the crew module, a sphere over five meters in diameter. A hemispherical cage of superconducting wires looped over the crew module, partially shielding the crew against cosmic rays and other charged particles in the interplanetary medium—which included the exhaust of other atomic ships. Snugged against the crew module’s base were the four cylindrical holds, each seven meters across and twenty meters long, grouped around the central strut. Like the sea-land cargo containers of the previous century, the holds were detachable and could be parked in orbit or picked up as needed; each was attached to Star Queen’s central shaft by its own airlock and was also accessible through outside pressure hatches.
Each hold was divided into compartments which could be pressurized or left in vacuum, depending on the nature of the cargo.
At the other end of the ship’s central strut were bulbous tanks of liquid hydrogen, surrounding the bulky cylinder of the atomic motor’s reactor core. Despite massive radiation shielding, the aft of the ship was not a place for casual visits by living creatures—robot systems did what work needed to be done there.
For all its ad hoc practicality, Star Queen had an air of elegance, the elegance of form following function. Apart from the occasional horn of a maneuvering rocket or the spike or dish of a communications antenna, the shapes from which she had been assembled shared a geometric purity, and all alike shone dazzling white under their fresh coats of electrobonded paint.
For three days, Board of Space Control inspectors went over the refurbished ship, at last pronouncing it fully spaceworthy. Star Queen was duly recertified. Her launch date was confirmed. Heavy-lift shuttles brought up cargo from Earth; other, smaller parcels were delivered by bonded courier.
Captain Lawrence Wycherly, however, did not pass the Board’s inspection. With one week to go before launch, flight surgeons discovered what Wycherly had disguised until now with illegal neural-enhancement preparations he had obtained from sources in Chile: he was dying from an incurable degeneration of the cerebellum. The viral infections and other minor illnesses that had plagued him were symptoms of a general failure of homeostasis. Never mind that the drugs might have accelerated his disease; Wycherly figured he was a dead man, and he was desperate for the money this last assignment was to have brought, for without it—the tale of his feckless investments and frantic spiral into debt was a cautionary tale of the age—his soon-to-be widow would lose their home, would lose everything.
The Board of Space Control notified the Pavlakis Lines home office in Athens that Star Queen was short a captain and that her launch permit had been withdrawn pending a qualified replacement. At the same time the Board routinely notified the ship’s insurors and every firm and individual who had placed cargo on the ship.
Delayed by “technical difficulties” on his way from Athens to Heathrow (stewards were staging a slow-down in protest against the government-owned airline), Nikos Pavlakis did not learn the devastating news until he stepped off the supersonic ramjet jitney at Heathrow. Miss Wisdom was glowering at him from behind the passport control screens, her paint-blackened eyes the very eyes of Nemesis beneath her helmet of wiry yellow hair. “This from your father,” she spat at him, when he came within reach, thrusting into his hands the flimsy from Athens.
Temporarily, but only temporarily, it appeared that Saint George had let Nikos Pavlakis down. Pavlakis spent the next twenty-four hours on the radio and phonelinks, sustained by a kilo or so of sugar dissolved in several liters of boiled Turkish coffee, and at the end of that time a miracle occurred.
Neither God nor Saint George had provided a new pilot.
No such luck, for Pavlakis could find no qualified pilots who would be free of their commitments or current assignments in time for Star Queen’s Venus window. And the miracle was not wholly unqualified, for no saint had prevented the prompt defection of a few of the shippers on the manifest—those for whom the arrival of their cargo at Port Hesperus was not time-critical, or whose cargo could easily be sold elsewhere. Bilbao Atmospherics was even now off-loading its tonne of liquid nitrogen from Hold B, and a valuable shipment of pine seedlings, the bulk of the cargo that was to have travelled in Hold A, had already been reclaimed by Silvawerke of Stuttgart.
Pavlakis’s miracle was the intervention of Sondra Sylvester.
He did not call her, she called him, from her rented villa on the Isle du Levant. She informed him that after their last conversation she had made it her business to check up on him and the members of Star Queen’s crew.
She praised Pavlakis for his measures to safeguard the in- tegrity of Star Queen during the refitting; he could hardly be blamed for Wycherly’s private difficulties. Her London solicitors had given her very full briefs on pilot Peter Grant and engineer Angus McNeil. In view of what she had learned, she had personally contacted the Board of Space Control and submitted an amicus brief on behalf of Pavlakis Lines’s application for a waiver of the crew-ofthree rule, citing her faith in the integrity of the firm and overriding economic considerations. She had also contacted Lloyd’s, urging that insurance not be withdrawn.
According to Sylvester’s best information, the waiver was sure to be granted. Star Queen would launch with two men aboard, carrying sufficient cargo for a profitable voyage.
When Pavlakis signed off the phonelink he was giddy with elation.
Sylvester’s best information proved correct, and Peter Grant was promoted to commander of a two-man crew.
Two days later heavy tugs moved Star Queen into launch orbit, beyond the Van Allen belts. The atomic motor erupted in a stream of white light. Under steady acceleration the ship began a five-week hyperbolic dive toward Venus.
PART THREE
BREAKING STRAIN
IX
Peter Grant rather enjoyed command. He was as relaxed as a working man can be—lying weightless, loosely strapped into the command pilot’s couch on Star Queen’s flight deck, dictating the ship’s log between puffs of a rich Turkish cigarette—when a skullcracker slammed into the hull.
For the second or two that it took Grant to crush his cigarette and reset the switches, red lights glared and sirens hooted hysterically. “Assess and report!” he barked.
He yanked an emergency air mask from the console and jammed it over his nose and mouth, and abruptly all was silent again. He waited an eternity as the console graphics rapidly shifted shape and color—thirty more seconds at least—while the computer assessed the damage.
“We have experienced severe overpressure in the southeast quadrant of the life support deck,” the computer announced in its matter-of-fact contralto. “Number two fuel cell has been ruptured. Automatic switchover to num- ber one and number three fuel cells has occurred. Gas lines from oxygen supply one and two have been sheared.
Emergency air supply valves have been opened”—Grant knew that; he was breathing the stuff now. But what the hell happened?—”Sensors have recorded supersonic air- flows at exterior hull panel L-43. Loss of pressure on the life support deck was total within twenty-three seconds.
The deck has been sealed and is now in vacuum. There has been no further systemic or structural damage. There has been no further loss of atmospheric pressure in the connecting passages or in any other part of the crew module”
—hearing which, Grant took the mask from his face and let it withdraw into the console panel. “This concludes damage assessment. Are there further queries?” the computer asked.
Yes, damn it all, what the hell happened? The computer didn’t answer questions like that unless it knew the answer, unambiguously. “No further queries,” Grant said, and keyed the comm: “McNeil, are you all right?”
No answer.
He tried the hi-band. “McNeil, Grant here. I want you on the flight deck.”
No answer.McNeil was out of touch, possibly hurt. After a moment’s thought Grant decided to steal just a couple of seconds more in an attempt to learn the cause of their predicament.
With a few flicks of his fingertips he sent one of the external monitor eyes scurrying over the command module hull toward panel L-43, on the lowest part of the sphere.
The image on the videoplate was a racing blur until the robot eye halted over the designated panel. Then there it was, fixed and plain on Grant’s screen: a black dot in the upper right quadrant of the white-painted steel panel as neat as a pellet hole in a paper target. “Meteoroid,”
Grant whispered. He flicked grids over the monitor image and read the hole at just under a millimeter in diameter.
“Big one.”
Where the devil was McNeil? He’d been down in the pressurized hold checking the humidifiers. Simple enough, so what was the problem?—the meteoroid hadn’t penetrated the holds. . . . Grant slipped out of his straps and dived into the central corridor.