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Trying to keep his mind off that falling-elevator sensation.
He wasn't about to get himself disqualified now…
They ate aboard in free-fall. Corbell copied the others, picking chunks of meat and potatoes out of a plastic bag of stew, pulling them through a membrane that sealed itself behind his pick.
"Of all the things I'm going to miss," he told the broad-faced guard, "I'm going to enjoy missing you most. You and your goddamn staring eyes." The guard smiled placidly and waited to see if Corbell would get sick.
They landed a day after takeoff on a broad plain where the Earth sat nestled among sharp lunar peaks. One day instead of three: The State had expended extra power to get him here. But an Earth-Moon flight must be a small thing these days.
The plain was black with blast pits. It must have been a landing field for decades. Transparent bubbles clustered near the runway end of the linear accelerator. There were buildings and groves of trees inside the bubbles. Spacecraft of various shapes and sizes were scattered about the plain.
The biggest was Corbel's ramship: a silver skyscraper lying on its side. The probes were in place, giving the ship a thick-waisted appearance. To Corbell's trained eye it looked ready for takeoff.
He was awed, he was humbled, he was proud. He tried to sort out his own reactions from RNA-inspired emotions, and probably failed.
Corbell do
An electric cart came for them. Apparently Corbell was not expected to know how to walk on an airless world. He thought to head for one of the domes, but the guard steered straight for the ship. It was a long way off.
It had become u
The guard said, "Now you inspect your ship."
"You can talk?"
"Yes. Yesterday, a quick course."
"Oh."
"Three things wrong with your ship. You find all three. You tell me. I tell him."
"Him? Oh, the pilot. Then what?"
"Then you fix one of the things, we fix the others. Then we launch you."
It was another test, of course. Maybe the last. Corbell was furious. He started immediately with the field generators and gradually he forgot the guard and the pilot and the sword still hanging over his head. He knew this ship. As it had been with the teaching chair, so it was with the ship itself. Corbell's impotence changed to omnipotence. The power of the beast, the intricacy, the potential, the-the hydrogen tank held far too much pressure. That wouldn't wait.
"I'll slurry this now," he told the guard. "Get a tanker over there to top it off." He bled hydrogen gas slowly through the valve, lowering the fuel's vapor pressure without letting fuel boil out the valve itself. When he finished the liquid hydrogen would be slushy with frozen crystals under near-vacuum pressure.
He finished the external inspection without finding anything more. It figured: The banks of dials would hold vastly more information than a man's eyes could read through opaque titan-alloy skin.
The airlock was a triple-door type, not so much to save air as to give him an airlock even if he lost a door somehow. Corbell shut the outer door, used the others when green lights indicated he could. He looked down at the telltales under his chin as he started to unclamp his helmet.
Vacuum?
He stopped. The ship's gauges said air. The suit's said vacuum. Which was right? Come to that, he hadn't heard any hissing. Just how soundproof was his helmet?
Just like Pierce to wait and see if he would take off his helmet in a vacuum. Well, how to test?
Hah! Corbell found the head, turned on a water faucet. The water splashed oddly in lunar gravity. It did not boil.
Did a flaw in his suit constitute a flaw in the ship?
Corbell doffed his helmet and continued his inspection.
There was no way to test the ram-field generators without causing all kinds of havoc in the linear accelerator. He checked out the tell-tales, then concentrated on the life-support mechanisms. The tailored plants in the air system were alive and well. But the urea absorption mechanism was plugged somehow. That would be a dirty job. He postponed it.
He decided to finish his inspection. The State might have missed something. It was his ship, his life.
The cold-sleep chamber was like a great coffin, a corpsicle coffin. Corbell shuddered, remembering two hundred years spent waiting in liquid nitrogen. He wondered again if Jerome Corbell were really dead-and then he shook off the thought and went to work.
No flaws in the cold-sleep system. He went on.
The computer was acting vaguely fu
He had a hell of a time tracing the problem. There was a minute break in one superconducting circuit, so small that some current was leaking through anyway, by inductance. Bastards. He do
The guard heard him out, consulted with the other man, then told Corbell, "You did good. Now finish with the topping-off procedure. We fix the other things."
"There's something wrong with my suit, too."
"New suit aboard now."
"I want some time with the computer. I want to be sure it's all right now."
"We fix it good. When you top off fuel you leave."
That suddenly, Corbell felt a vast sinking sensation. The whole Moon was dropping away under him.
They launched him hard. Corbell saw red before his eyes, felt his cheeks dragged far back toward his ears. The ship would be all right. It was built to stand electromagnetic eddy currents from any direction.
He survived. He fumbled out of his couch in time to watch the moonscape flying under him, receding, a magnificent view.
There were days of free-fall. He was not yet moving at ramscoop speeds. But the State had aimed him inside the orbit of Mercury, straight into the thickening solar wind. Protons. Thick fuel for the ram fields and a boost from the sun's gravity.
Meanwhile he had most of a day to play with the computer.
At one point it occurred to him that the State might monitor his computer work. He shrugged it off. Probably it was too late for the State to stop him now. In any case, he had said too much already.
He finished his work with the computer and got answers that satisfied him. At higher speeds the ram fields were self-reinforcing- they would support themselves and the ship. He could find no upper limit to the velocity of a seeder ramship.
With all the time in the world, then, he sat down at the control console and began to play with the fields.
They emerged like invisible wings. He felt the buffeting of badly controlled bursts of fusing hydrogen. He kept the fields close to the ship, fearful of losing the balance here, where the streaming of protons was so uneven. He could feel how he was doing. He could fly this ship by the seat of his pants, with RNA training to help him.
He felt like a giant. This enormous, phallic, germinal flying thing of metal and fire! Carrying the seeds of life for worlds that had never known life, he roared around the sun and out. The thrust dropped a bit then, because he and the solar wind were moving in the same direction. But he was catching it in his nets like wind in a sail, guiding it and burning it and throwing it behind him. The ship moved faster every second.
This feeling of power-enormous masculine power-had to be partly RNA training. At this point he didn't care. Part was him, Jerome Corbell.