The Makeshift Rocket (11 page)

‘But Rory!’

‘Fifty seconds.’

‘But I mean to say, actually—’

‘Forty seconds.’

‘Oh, right-o, then. And I’m not angry with you, love, really I’m not. I mean, I want you to know a girl admires a man like you who actually is a man. Why, what would I do with one of those awful “Yes, dear” types, they’re positively Roman! Imperial Roman, I mean. The Republican Romans were at least virile, though of course they were barbarians and rather hairy. But what I meant to say, Rory, is that one reason I love you so much—’

After about five minutes of this, Major McConnell realized what was going on. With an inarticulate snarl he stabbed the computer, corrected his curve for time lost, punched it into the autopilot, and slapped down the main drive switch.

First the ship turned, seeking her direction, and then a Terrestrial gravity of acceleration pushed him back into the chair. No reason to apply more; he felt sure that leprechaun job he was chasing could scarcely pick up one meter per second squared, and matching velocities would be a tricky enough business for one man alone. He saw Grendel swing past the starboard viewport and drop behind. He applied a repulsor field forward to kill some of his present speed, simultaneously giving the ship an impulse toward ten-thirty o’clock, twenty-three degrees ‘high’. In a smooth arc, the
Mercury Girl
picked up the trail of Herr Syrup and began to close the gap.

‘Ah, now we’ll end this tale,’ murmured Rory McConnell, ‘an’ faith, ye’ve been a worthy foeman an ’tis not I that will stint ye when we meet ag’in in some friendly pub after the glorious redemption of Gaelic La – Oops!’

For a horrible moment, he thought that some practical joker had pulled the seat out from under him. He fell toward the floor, tensing his gluteal muscles for the crash … and fell, and fell, and after a few seconds realized he was in free fall.

‘What the jumpin’ blue hell?’ he roared and glared at the
control board meters, just as the lights went out

A thousand stars leered through the viewport. McConnell clawed blindly at his harness. He heard the ventilator fans sigh to a halt. The stillness became frightful. ‘Emily!’ he shouted, ‘Emily, where are ye?’ There was no reply. Somehow he found the intercom switch and jiggled it. Only a mechanical clicking answered; that circuit was also dead.

Groping and flailing his way aft, he needed black minutes to reach the engine room. It was like a cave. He entered, blind, drifting free, fanning the air with one invisible hand to keep from smothering in his own unventilated exhalations, his heartbeat thick and horrible in his ears. There should be a flashlight clipped somewhere near the door – but where? ‘Mother of God!’ he groaned. ‘Are we fallen into the devil’s fingers?’

A small sound came from somewhere in the gloom. ‘What’s that?’ he bawled. ‘Who’s there? Where are ye? Speak up before I beat the bejasus out of yez, ye—’ and he went on with a richness of description to be expected when Gaelic blood has had a checkered career.

‘Rory!’ said an offended feminine voice out of the abyss. ‘If you are going to use that kind of language before me, you can just wipe your mouth out and not come back until you are prepared to say it in Greek like a gentleman! I mean, really!’

‘Are ye here? Darlin’, are ye here? I thought—’

‘Well,’ said the girl, ‘I know I promised not to hit you any more, and I wouldn’t, not for all the world, but I still have to do what I can, don’t I, dear? I mean, if I gave up you’d just despise me. It wouldn’t be British.’

‘What have ye done
?’

After a long pause, Emily said in a small voice: ‘I don’t know.’

‘How’s that?’ snapped McConnell.

‘I just went over to that control panel or whatever it is and started pulling switches. I mean to say, you don’t expect me to know what all those things are for, do you? Because I don’t. However,’ said Emily brightly, ‘I can parse Greek verbs.’

‘Oh … no!’ groaned McConnell. He began fumbling his way toward the invisible board. Where was it, anyhow?

‘I can cook too,’ said Emily. ‘And sew. And I’m awfully fond of children.’

Herr Syrup noted on his crude meters that the first-stage beer barrel was now exhausted. He pulled the switch that dropped it and pushed himself up into the spacesuit to make sure that that had actually been done. Peering through the helmet globe, he saw that one relay had stuck and the keg still clung. He popped back inside and told Sarmishkidu to hand him some sections of iron pipe through the stovepipe valve; this emergency was not unanticipated. Clumsy in gauntlets, his fingers screwed the pieces together to make a prod which could reach far aft and crack the empty cask loose.

It occurred to him how much simpler it would have been to keep his tools in a box fastened to the outer hull. But of course such things only come to mind when a model is being tested.

He stared aft. The
Mercury Girl
was visible to the unaided eye, though dwindling perceptibly. She still floated inert, but he could not expect that condition to prevail for long. Well, a man can but try. Herr Syrup wriggled out of the armor torso and back into the cabin. Claus was practicing free-fall flight technique and nipping stray droplets of beer out of the air; sometimes he collided with a drifting
empty bottle, but he seemed to enjoy himself.

‘Resuming acceleration,’ said Herr Syrup. ‘Give me a pretzel.’

Suds gushed from the second barrel. The boat wobbled crazily. Of course the loss of the first one had changed its spin characteristics. Herr Syrup compensated and ploughed doggedly on. The second cask emptied and was discharged without trouble. He cut in the third one.

Presently Sarmishkidu crawled ‘up’ into the spacesuit. A whistle escaped him.

‘Vat?’ asked Herr Syrup.

‘There – behind us – your spaceship – und it is coming
verdammten fast
!’

Having strapped his fiancée carefully into the acceleration chair beside his own, Rory McConnell resumed pursuit. He had lost a couple of hours by now, between one thing and another. And while she drifted free, the
Girl
had of course orbited well off the correct track. He had to get back on it and then start casting about. For a half hour of strained silence, he maneuvered.

‘There!’ he said at last.

‘Where?’ asked Emily.

‘In the ‘scope,’ said McConnell. His ill humor let up and he squeezed her hand. ‘Hang on, here we go. I’ll have thim back aboard in ten minutes.’

The hazy cloud waxed so fast that he revised his estimate upward. He had too much velocity; it would be necessary to overshoot, brake, and come back—

Then
crash! clang-ng-ng!
His teeth jarred together. For a moment, his heart paused and he knew naked fear.

‘What was that?’ asked Emily.

He hated to frighten her, but he forced out of suddenly
stiff and sandy lips: ‘A meteor, I’m sure. An’ judging from the sound of it, ‘twas big an’ fast enough to stave in a whole compartment.’ You could not exactly roll your eyes heavenward in free space, but he tried manfully. ‘Holy St. Patrick, is this any way to treat your loyal son?’

He shot past the wallowing beer boat at kilometers per second, falling free while he ripped off his harness. ‘The instruments aren’t showin’ damage, but belike the crucial one is been knocked out,’ he muttered. ‘An’ us with no engine crew an’ no deckhands. I’ll have to go out there meself to check. At least this section is unharmed.’ He nodded at the handkerchief he had thrown into the air; when the ventilators were briefly turned off, it simply hung, borne on no current of leakage. ‘If we begin to lose air elsewhere, sweetheart, there’ll be automatic ports to seal yez off, so ye’re all right for the next few hours.’

‘But what about you?’ she cried, white-faced now that she understood. ‘What about you?’

‘I’ll be in a spacesuit.’ He leaned over and kissed her. ‘’Tis not the danger that’s so great as the delay. For somethin’ I’ll have to do, jist so acceleration strain don’t pull the damaged hull apart. I’ll be back when I can, darlin’.’

And yet, as he went aft, there was no sealing bulwark in his way, nowhere a wind whistling toward the dread emptiness outside. Puzzled and more than a little daunted, Rory McConnell completed his interior inspection in the engine room, broke out his own outsize space armor from his pack, and donned it: a slow, awkward task for one man alone. He floated to the nearest airlock and let himself out.

It was eerie on the hull, where only his clinging bootsoles held him fast among streaming cold constellations. The harshness of undiffused sunlight and the absolute blackness of shadow made it hard to recogize anything for what it was.
He saw a goblin and crossed himself violently before realizing it was only a lifeboat tank; and he was an experienced spaceman.

An hour’s search revealed no leak. There was a dent in the bow which might or might not be freshly made, nothing else. And yet that meteor had struck with such a doomsday clang that he had thought the hull might be torn in two. Well, evidently St. Patrick had been on the job. McConnell returned inside, disencumbered himself, went forward, reassured Emily, and began to kill his unwanted velocity.

Almost two hours had passed before he was back in the vicinity of the accident, and then he could not locate the fugitive boat. By now it would have ceased blasting; darkly painted, it would be close to invisible in this black sky. He would have to set up a search pattern and – He groaned.

Something drifted across his telescopic field of view. What the deuce? He nudged the spaceship closer, and gasped.

‘Son of a—’ Hastily, he switched to Gaelic.

‘What is it, light of both my eyes?’ asked Emily.

McConnell beat his head against the console. ‘A couple of hoops an’ some broken staves,’ he whimpered. ‘Oh, no, no, no!’

‘But what of it? I mean, after all, when you consider how Mr. Syrup put that boat together, well, actually.’

‘That’s just it!’ howled McConnell. ‘That’s what’s cost me near heart failure, plus two priceless hours or more an’—That was our meteor! An empty beer barrel! Oh, the ignominy of it!’

Herr Syrup stopped the exhaust of his fourth-stage keg and leaned back into weightlessness with a sigh. ‘Ve better not accelerate any more,’ he said. ‘Not yust now. Ve vill need a little reserve to maneuver later on.’

‘Vot later on?’ asked Herr von Himmelschmidt sourly. ‘I don’t know vy der ship shot on past us, but soon it comes back und den ve iss maneuvered into chail’

‘Veil, meanvile shall ve pass de time?’ Herr Syrup took a greasy pack of cards from his jacket and riffled them suggestively.

‘Stop riffling them suggestively!’ squealed Sarmishkidu. ‘This is no time for idle amusements.’

‘Well … hmmm … no, not that … Perhaps … no … Shilling ante?’

At the end of some four hours, when he was ahead by several pounds sterling in I.O.U.’s and Sarmishkidu was whistling like an indignant bagpipe, Herr Syrup noticed how dim the light was getting. The gauge showed him that the outside batteries were rather run down also. Everything would have to be charged up again. He explained the situation. ‘Do you vant first turn on de bicycle or shall I?’ he asked.

‘Who, me?’ Sarmishkidu wagged a languid ear. ‘Whatever gave you the idea that evolution has prepared my race for bicycle riding?’

‘Vell … I mean … dat is—’

‘You are letting your Danishness run away with you.’

‘
Satan i helvede
!’ muttered Herr Syrup. He floated himself into the saddle, put feet to pedals, and began working.

‘And de vorst of it is,’ he grumbled, ‘who is ever going to believe I crossed from Grendel to New Vinshester on a bicycle?’

Slowly, majestically, and off-center, the boat picked up an opposite rotation.

‘There they be!’ cried Rory McConnell.

‘Oh dear,’ said Emily Croft.

The beer boat swelled rapidly in the forward viewport. The weariness of hour upon hour, searching, dropped from the Erseman. ‘Here we go!’ he cried exultantly. ‘
Tantivy, tantivy, tantivy
!’

Then, lacking radar, he found that the human eye is a poor judge of free-space relationships. He buckled down to the awkward task of matching speeds.

‘Whoops!’ he said. ‘Overshot!’ Ten kilometers beyond, he came to a relative halt, twisted the cumbersome mass of the ship around, and approached slowly. He saw a head pop up into the spacesuit helmet, glare at him, and pop back again. Foam spouted; the boat slipped out of his view.

McConnell readjusted and came alongside, so that he looked directly from the turret at his prey. ‘He hasn’t the acceleration to escape us,’ he gloated. ‘I’ll folly each twist an’ turn he cares to make, from now until—’ He stopped.

‘Until we get to New Winchester?’ asked Emily in a demure tone.

‘But – I mean to say – but!’ Major McConnell bugged tired eyes at the keg-and-box bobbing across the stars.

‘But I’ve overhauled them!’ he shouted, pounding the console. ‘I’ve a regular ship with hundreds of times their mass
an’ … an’ … they’ve got to come aboard! It isn’t fair!’

‘Since we have no wireless, how can you inform them of that?’ purred the girl. She leaned over close and patted his cheek. Her gaze softened. ‘There, there. I’m sorry. I do love you, and I don’t want to tease you or anything, but honestly, don’t you think you’re becoming a bit of a bore on this subject? I mean, enough’s enough, don’t you know.’

‘Not if ye’re of Erse blood, it isn’t.’ McConnell set his jaw till it ached. ‘I’ll scoop ’em up, that’s what I will!’

There was a master control for the cargo machinery in the engine room, but none on the bridge. McConnell unstrapped himself, shoved grimly ‘down’ to the hold section, pumped out the main hatch chamber and opened the lock. Now he had it gaping wide enough to swallow the boat whole, and—

Weight came back. He crashed into the deck. ‘Emily!’ he bellowed, picking himself up with a bloody nose. ‘Emily, git away from them controls!’

Three Terrestrial gravities of acceleration were a monstrous load on any man. He took minutes to regain the bridge, drag himself to the main console, and slap down the main drive switch. Meanwhile Emily, sagging in her chair and gasping for breath, managed a tolerant smile.