CHAPTER VII

Still Alive!

WHAT could he do? Absolutely nothing. His problem as great as that of rescuing Rothberg. He thought of releasing part of the gases in the head of the rocket and taking the risk of them projecting him back to earth, but that would be too cowardly. How could he face Crystal after his failure?

Then he found a new puzzle. Why was the sun in the glass? Was he falling? Something certainly had happened to alter his course.

He looked for the satellite, but it was nowhere to be seen. That was queer! He had not changed the levers which moved the mirrors. He worked the mirror about and again caught a view of the ship. He drew his free hand across his forehead. Was he going daft? Was there some fluid in those upper regions to which steel was permeable and which had affected his brain so that he was seeing things? The magnets in the nose of the rocket were full on, and yet the heavy steel base was pointing toward the satellite. Not only that but the ship was between him and the earth! No—it was coming up, moving around him in a circle, and the butt of the rocket followed it like a compass needle!

The ship rose and eclipsed the sun. Then it occurred to him that the truth was the satellite was still and the rocket was circling it, for he remembered that there would be an attraction between two bodies moving freely in space, and that the smaller body would form a satellite of the larger. And yet, those strong magnets in the head of the rocket did not seem to take hold of the ship at the distance of a quarter of a mile, although they were the most powerful magnets that had ever been made. Around and around the ship he went like the little rubber ball he had swung around his head that night at the board meeting—like one of the carriage of an invisible ferris wheel with its hub at the ship. He felt as though he were floating in oceans of air. What little gravity he felt was directed toward the steel mass at the base of his tube and not toward the earth at all!

But he had little time to wonder at the new laws which had control of him. He was in the most desperate situation imaginable; one that was entirely foreign to human experience and he would have to do some bold, pioneer thinking if he were to extricate himself.

Gazing out the window of his little room he decided to take a long chance, really the only one possible. He pulled the switch which discharged the gases in the head of his rocket. The butt of the rocket pointed directly toward the ship, and Clifford knew a little gas might do no good at all, and too might send him ricocheting far beyond the pull of the ship and make his position even worse—if such a thing were possible. In truth though he did not expect anything to happen at all. He released a fraction of the gas in the nose of the rocket. To his surprise he went winging aross the quarter of a mile and he cut his gas immediately. Before he hardly knew what happened, his rocket swapped ends, the magnets caught the pull of the steel ship and with a resounding jar he made contact head on as neatly as he could have wished.

Even in his joy at having retrieved himself from a hopeless situation he thought with a great deal of interest of the mechanism of the rocket that permitted it to move through the vacuity of space. Surely there was no atmosphere where he was, for the friction of it would have started him in a spiral descent toward the earth. Then what law caused the change of velocity and enabled him to make contact?

He pondered over the thing as he moved his crawlers this way and that, working back and forth over the huge hull, in his search for the porthole.

DEEPLY engrossed with this problem, for the scientific trend of his nature was always alert, one of his mirrors discovered the porthole and he worked his rocket over near it. The glass was opaque with frost which had gathered inside the ship. He extended one of the mirrors so that it tapped on the glass. He waited and tapped again.

Was Rothberg dead? Was he all alone beyond the barriers which divided life to earth?

Sad and discouraged he waited and tapped again. Then he gasped with joy. Something was rubbing away at the frost on the glass! Rothberg must be alive!

He watched breathlessly as a place was cleaned and the drawn face of the old man pressed against the glass. There seemed to be a hopeless bravery in the haggard features as the gray old eyes searched about to seek the cause of that noise out in the cosmos. Rothberg's eyes opened with a start. Hope leaped into them. Every feature portrayed the fight for control he made as he took in the rocket and then Clifford himself.

Before Clifford could send any kind of a signal Rothberg left the porthole and soon he returned with an empty pitcher which he turned upside down and motioned to his throat indicating it was choked and dry. Clifford noticed that he was gasping. The ship was big and had contained a good many cubic feet of air, but it was plain that Rothberg now had little of it left to breathe. Briggs most certainly had lied about his invention to rinse carbon from respired air. Rothberg must have help soon or there would be no need of it at all.

Even as Rothberg stared at him hope seemed to fade from the kindly old face. He was no mean scientist and certainly knew what insurmountable difficulties to his rescue. Clifford motioned that he must return better equipped before he could hope to do anything.

The old eyes smiled encouragement but the chin sagged a little and then drew up tight and firm. Plainly Rothberg believed he would never come out alive. Yet, what could Clifford do to encourage him? The immutable laws which confined life to the earth were all against him. Try as he would he could think of no plan to enter the ship without exposing both of them to certain death. He glanced at his chronometer. The loss in not making direct contact had eaten heavily into his time and he was nearly back around the earth again. Time to kick off was at hand. He indicated with motions that he would soon be back, and Rothberg took his finger and wrote on a portion of the frosted glass:

"Tell Crystal BB—"

The sentence was but started. Whatever he wrote or intended to write, Clifford could not know, for contact came and the gases discharged. He was shot away. In a few seconds he found himself floating downward as the blades of his helicopter caught the rare upper air and began to race furiously above the tube.

He had been but a few seconds going up. It took him an hour to come down. Telescopes on the earth's surface must have picked up his descent, for there were ten thousand people gathered around the farmstead near the outskirts of town, when he landed. He opened the door and staggered out of the rocket. Then thousand voices and' auto horns drove him deaf with their raucous noise.

The Solution At Last!

HE paid no attention to the insistent reporters who trailed him. All he wanted was a phone to find out what had happened in the rocket yard after he had left. Among all that sea of faces about him was none he felt he could ask such a personal question. He hailed a car and the man inside seemed glad to be of service. Clifford asked to be driven at once to the munition works which was only a mile away. They went into seventy by the time they were on the highway.

At the works he got hold of Crystal and was much relieved when she answered the phone.

"Mrs. Briggs," he said and found it hard to get used to the fact that she was BB's wife, "I have good news for you."

"Tell me," she begged, "Is he alive?" "Yes, he is alive, but his condition is desperate. Your—I mean there were no provisions made for oxygen or water. I don't know about food."

"Could you speak with him at all?"

"No, but I saw him plainly at the port hole. He seemed brave but rather discouraged. I don't think he has much hope."

"Have you," she begged, "Did you find anything to give hope?"

"Not up there," he replied and wondered whether he should tell her the truth, "There is no way I can think of to transfer him to a rocket while the ship is aloft. We must bring her down."

"But you said it couldn't be brought down! That it was like death! You told BB that and it's true!"

"Listen a minute," he insisted, "I forgot one thing when I told Briggs that."

"What?" she cried eagerly.

"That the ship was of steel. We'll have to build magnets."

"Magnets?"

"Yes, powerful enough to hinder the ship at every revolution so that its speed may be checked enough to bring it under the influence of the earth's gravity."

"But that would crush him!"

"No, get hold of Blair and the rest of the Board. It will take close calculations, but the ship can be brought down in a spiral which will increase as it meets the friction of heavier and heavier layers of air. Blair can calculate where to place our magnets so as to let her drop in the sea outside the harbor. She is hollow and will rise and we can get him out."

"Oh God!" she said earnestly, "I hope you are right." He hung up and went back to the plant.

In an hour Gertz, Played, Rails, and Blair were there and a few minutes later Crystal and Briggs came into the dingy room used as an office.

Briggs regarded Clifford with the eyes of a wary cat. There was a hint of suppressed ferocity in his manner, and an excited curiosity in his gaze, but he did not ask how Clifford had fared aloft nor what he had learned. In fact he tried to act as though nothing had happened that morning in the rocket yard. Clifford after a look of appraisal gave him no more attention and went over to the group of scientists who had already gathered. Crystal followed him and Briggs remained near the door. He explained in a few words how he had started work on the largest electro-magnets ever constructed and how he hoped to hamper the speed of the satellite until it would respond to the earth's gravitational influence. He asked Blair to calculate where the magnets would have to be mounted to bring down the ship just off shore in the Atlantic, and asked Gertz to calculate the power necessary to influence the ship. Gertz listened until Clifford had finished and then he shook his warty little head. Rails echoed that shake by a baffled expression on his lean features.

"Your theory will not work out," Gertz whispered to him so that the girl could not hear.

"Why?" Clifford asked alarmed.

GERTZ lowered one eyelid as though trying to penetrate a deep distance, "I believe you had a fair example of how short a distance the magnetic field will affect in the way your magnets acted in the rocket as you circled the ship. Two hundred miles is entirely too far for the last hope that the use of electro-magnets will bring down the ship."

Clifford dared not look at Crystal. He knew the expression on his face would betray him. But he did not look at Briggs who had pushed into the group to catch what Gertz was saying. Briggs' face was an impersonal mask. If he felt any emotion he did not show it by the slightest change of expression.

"Has anything gone wrong?" Crystal asked as silence seemed to smother the little group. Clifford ran his fingers through his short cropped hair and made no reply. To cover their gloom the Scientists discussed electro-magnetism with an air of abstraction which revealed that their minds were on something else.

"What has gone wrong?" Crystal asked again.

"Nothing! Nothing at all!" Clifford shouted nervously above the low buzz of voices. Every man in the room turned upon him as though they thought his worry had suddenly turned him daft.

"I've got it!" he shouted again and waived a doubled fist. "Listen you men. Find some flaw in this if you can! Rockets are the solution after all! We have dozens of them ready at the laboratory. Fill them with bar magnets to increase their weight and hold on the ship. Fire enough of them to hamper her and bring her down in a spiral until she hits the sea!"

"You've got it!" Gertz beamed, pounding his fist on his knee. "Fire them with no more velocity than just to make contact? They will drag her down. The problem of how many is for Professor Blair!" Clifford's eyes were glowing as he looked at the girl and then for Briggs, but Briggs had disappeared. Not that anyone cared. BB had been useful in completing the rockets, but now nothing more complicated than bar magnets were needed to do the work.

Daybreak came again and Clifford stood beside the girl as the rockets shrieked upward to meet the ship. They watch through telescopes which had been mounted in the yard.

Clifford turned to the foremen and demanded:

"There are eleven of them. Blair said there should only be ten! Great God you will drown him sure!"

"We fired only ten," the foreman declared stubbornly. "Didn't I count them myself. Every man working counted them. There were only ten."

Clifford drew his lips thin and wondered if he had miscounted. The ship was then past the vision of his telescope and too far away to recount. But one thing was certain, she was coming down swiftly. The halt in her flight and the curvature of her orbit were apparent even though Blair had figured it would take three revolutions to bring it down and it would fall faster when it encountered denser air. Though six hours remained before they expected the ship to fall, there was an immediate surge for the shore line. Thousands of autos crammed each other and honked for room. They crowded each other and edged for positions as close as possible to the point Professor Blair had picked for the landing. That extra rocket troubled Clifford no little, though he said no more about it. He got Crystal and a number of close friends aboard a small cutter and pushed off to avoid the mob ashore. Briggs could not be found. Crystal seemed worried but the intense suspense as to the fate of her father must have kept her mind off him to some extent, for she did not mention him in all the six hours she waited—watching the passing of the steel satellite in its narrowing orbit.

Noon came. The summer sun blazed down upon the swelling waves as they came sweeping in from the limitless sea. Thousands upon thousands of people who jammed the shore had been waiting since early morning.