Williamson, Jack - SS - Salvage in Space.pdf

(51 KB) Pobierz
Salvage in Space
Cover
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Salvage in Space, by John Stewart Williamson This eBook
is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Salvage in Space
Author: John Stewart Williamson
Release Date: July 1, 2009 [EBook #29283]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SALVAGE IN SPACE ***
Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Astounding Stories March 1933. Extensive research did not un-
cover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
Salvage in Space
By Jack Williamson
To Thad Allen, meteor miner, comes the dangerous bonanza of a derelict rocket-flier manned
by death invisible. His "planet" was the smallest in the solar system, and the loneliest, Thad
Allen was thinking, as he straightened wearily in the huge, bulging, inflated fabric of his Os-
prey space armor. Walking awkwardly in the magnetic boots that held him to the black
mass of meteoric iron, he mounted a projection and stood motionless, staring moodily
away through the vision panels of his bulky helmet into the dark mystery of the void.
His welding arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still glowing red. He had just finished
securing to this slowly-accumulated mass of iron his most recent find, a meteorite the size of
his head. Five perilous weeks he had labored, to collect this rugged lump of metal—a jagged
mass, some ten feet in diameter, composed of hundreds of fragments, that he had captured
and welded together. His luck had not been good. His findings had been heart-breakingly
small; the spectro-flash analysis had revealed that the content of the precious metals was
disappointingly minute. [1]
[1] The meteor or asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is "mined" by
such adventurers as Thad Allen for the platinum, iridium and osmium that all meteoric
irons contain in small quantities. The meteor swarms are supposed by some astronomers
to be fragments of a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode's Law, should occupy this
space.
On the other side of this tiny sphere of hard-won treasure, his Millen atomic rocket was sput-
tering, spurts of hot blue flame jetting from its exhaust. A simple mechanism, bolted to the
first sizable fragment he had captured, it drove the iron ball through space like a ship.
Through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots, Thad could feel the vibration of the iron
mass, beneath the rocket's regular thrust. The magazine of uranite fuel capsules was nearly
empty, now, he reflected. He would soon have to turn back toward Mars.
Turn back. But how could he, with so slender a reward for his efforts? Meteor mining
is expensive. There was his bill at Millen and Helion, Mars, for uranite and supplies. And the
unpaid last instalment on his Osprey suit. How could he outfit himself again, if he re-
turned with no more metal than this? There were men who averaged a thousand tons of
iron a month. Why couldn't fortune smile on him?
He knew men who had made fabulous strikes, who had captured whole planetoids of rich
metal, and he knew weary, white-haired men who had braved the perils of vacuum and ab-
solute cold and bullet-swift meteors for hard years, who still hoped.
But sometime fortune had to smile, and then....
The picture came to him. A tower of white metal, among the low red hills near Helion. A
slim, graceful tower of argent, rising in a fragrant garden of flowering Martian shrubs,
purple and saffron. And a girl waiting, at the silver door—a trim, slender girl in white, with
blue eyes and hair richly brown. Thad had seen the white tower many times, on his holiday
tramps through the hills about Helion. He had even dared to ask if it could be bought, to
find that its price was an amount that he might not amass in many years at his perilous
profession. But the girl in white was yet only a glorious dream.... Gigantic claws seemed to
reach out of empty air.
The strangeness of interplanetary space, and the somber mystery of it, pressed upon
him like an illimitable and deserted ocean. The sun was a tiny white disk on his right,
hanging between rosy coronal wings; his native Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in
the dark gulf below it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck above the shrunken
sun. Above him, below him, in all directions was vastness, blackness, emptiness. Ebon
infinity, sprinkled with far, cold stars.
Thad was alone. Utterly alone. No man was visible, in all the supernal vastness of space. And
no work of man—save the few tools of his daring trade, and the glittering little rocket bolted to
the black iron behind him. It was terrible to think that the nearest human being must be tens
of millions of miles away. On his first trips, the loneliness had been terrible, unendurable.
Now he was becoming accustomed to it. At least, he no longer feared that he was going
mad. But sometimes.... Thad shook himself and spoke aloud, his voice ringing hollow in his
huge metal helmet:
"Brace up, old top. In good company, when you're by yourself, as Dad used to say. Be back in
Helion in a week or so, anyhow. Look up Dan and 'Chuck' and the rest of the crowd
again, at Comet's place. What price a friendly boxing match with Mason, or an evening at
the teleview theater?
"Fresh air instead of this stale synthetic stuff! Real food, in place of these tasteless con-
centrates! A hot bath, instead of greasing yourself!
"Too dull out here. Life—" He broke off, set his jaw.
No use thinking about such things. Only made it worse. Besides, how did he know that a
whirring meteor wasn't going to flash him out before he got back?
He drew his right arm out of the bulging sleeve of the suit, into its ample interior, found a ci-
garette in an inside pocket, and lighted it. The smoke swirled about in the helmet, drawn
swiftly into the air filters.
"Darn clever, these suits," he murmured. "Food, smokes, water generator, all where you can
reach them. And darned expensive, too. I'd better be looking for pay metal!" He clambered
to a better position; stood peering out into space, searching for the tiny gleam of sunlight
on a meteoric fragment that might be worth capturing for its content of precious metals.
For an hour he scanned the black, star-strewn gulf, as the sputtering rocket continued to
drive him forward.
"There she glows!" he cried suddenly, and grinned.
Before him was a tiny, glowing fleck, that moved among the unchanging stars. He stared
at it intensely, breathing faster in the helmet.
Always he thrilled to see such a moving gleam. What treasure it promised! At first sight, it was
impossible to determine size or distance or rate of motion. It might be ten thousand tons of
rich metal. A fortune! It would more probably prove to be a tiny, stony mass, not worth
capturing. It might even be large and valuable, but moving so rapidly that he could
not overtake it with the power of the diminutive Millen rocket.
He studied the tiny speck intently, with practised eye, as the minutes passed—an un-
trained eye would never have seen it at all, among the flaming hosts of stars. Skilfully he
judged, from its apparent rate of motion and its slow increase in brilliance, its size and dis-
tance from him.
"Must be—must be fair size," he spoke aloud, at length. "A hundred tons, I'll bet my helmet!
But scooting along pretty fast. Stretch the little old rocket to run it down." He clambered back
to the rocket, changed the angle of the flaming exhaust, to drive him directly across the
path of the object ahead, filled the magazine again with the little pellets of uranite,
which were fed automatically into the combustion chamber, and increased the firing rate.
The trailing blue flame reached farther backward from the incandescent orifice of the
exhaust. The vibration of the metal sphere increased. Thad left the sputtering rocket and
went back where he could see the object before him.
It was nearer now, rushing obliquely across his path. Would he be in time to capture it as it
passed, or would it hurtle by ahead of him, and vanish in the limitless darkness of space
before his feeble rocket could check the momentum of his ball of metal?
He peered at it, as it drew closer.
Its surface seemed oddly bright, silvery. Not the dull black of meteoric iron. And it
was larger, more distant, than he had thought at first. In form, too, it seemed curiously reg-
ular, ellipsoid. It was no jagged mass of metal.
His hopes sank, rose again immediately. Even if it were not the mass of rich metal
for which he had prayed, it might be something as valuable—and more interesting.
He returned to the rocket, adjusted the angle of the nozzle again, and advanced the fir-
ing time slightly, even at the risk of a ruinous explosion.
When he returned to where he could see the hurtling object before him, he saw that
it was a ship. A tapering silver-green rocket-flier.
Once more his dreams were dashed. The officers of interplanetary liners lose no love
upon the meteor miners, claiming that their collected masses of metal, almost helpless, al-
ways underpowered, are menaces to navigation. Thad could expect nothing from the ship
save a heliographed warning to keep clear. But how came a rocket-flier here, in the peril-
ous swarms of the meteor belt? Many a vessel had been destroyed by collision with an
asteroid, in the days before charted lanes were cleared of drifting metal. The lanes more fre-
quently used, between Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury, were of course far inside the orbits

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin