The tiny asteroid with the frightened girl
and the wrecked spacer with the grim young
man slowly spun closer and closer ... but
the real danger came after the crash!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1950.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
There's one good thing about a blowout. You don't need a mechanicto tell you what the trouble is when it happens. This was the firstblowout I ever had, but as soon as I heard that explosive pingingwhistle and felt the floppy jolting and the terrifying sensation of avehicle out of control, I knew what was wrong. I reached forward andcut the power.
When I leaned back in my seat I was sweating and my stomach was pushingmy tonsils around, and not only on account of the sudden switch fromone and a half G's to free fall. I was in a jam, and I didn't need amechanic to tell me that, either. Spaceships don't carry spare drivetubes.
Not little wagons like the Aspera, anyway. If you could get a spareinside the hull you would have to leave out the air plant or thegroceries or else stay home yourself, and even then there would be noroom for the tools to make the change. Retubing is a dock job, and thenearest docks were a million miles away on Phobos and getting fartherfast.
And besides, you never need a spare. Tubes don't blow in space.Diamondized graphite is tough—you caliper the throat every time youdock, and after a few thousand G-hours you find enough erosion to cutdown efficiency to the point where it's a good idea to put in a newliner.
I knew all this, but at the same time I knew the main tube had blown.What I didn't know was what I was going to do about it. I lit acigarette and took a deep drag, just in case the stimulating effect ofthe quabba smoke would give me an inspiration.
It made me sneeze.
I threw the butt on the deck and mashed it with my heel before itcould bounce off and go adrift in the cabin. I never had likedthe taste of the weedy stuff anyway. Smoking quabba is the primeattribute of a spaceman—it has the reputation of being a specificagainst spacesickness, toughening the cerebral meninges against highacceleration, cutting down reaction time when you have to act fast ina meteor field. Maybe it's all true. One thing it really does is makeyour clothes smell like a vacant lot on fire so people can say, "Ah,he's a spaceman," without having to ask.
No inspiration. Okay, Denby, think it out with your own brains. You'vegot a brain, haven't you?
Not being very eager to do any thinking about the situation I was in,I dragged the bulger out from under the seat and crawled into it. Ihad a vague idea that I might fake up some sort of patch for the tubeand maybe limp back to Mars. I wasn't proud of it, but it was the bestI had at the moment. I checked to make sure there was nothing on thescreens, and then pulled myself over to the air lock, sealed the innerdoor, and started the pump.
While the chamber was exhausting, I tested the lubber line and snappedthe end of it to a ring on the inner skin of the hull. When the lockclicked I pulled the hatch open and hooked it back. Then I took a shorthold on the lubber line and stepped out into space.
For a minute I wished I had finished the quabba. This was not the firsttime I had been in open space, but the circumstances had not been soimpressive before. Free fall had never bothered me particularly, butit bothered me now, with millions of miles of empty space under me inall directions and nothing in the sky but the tiny hard bright starslooking very far away. And the realization tha