The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction MEGAPACK® by Robert Silverberg Page A
Authors: Robert Silverberg
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in a couple of hours.
Finally, I looked up at Erna and grinned. “This is known as making a virtue out of necessity,” I said. “Want to know what’s going on?”
“You bet I do.”
I leaned back. “We’re on our way to a chunk of rock known as (719)-Albert, which is chugging along not far from here on its way through the asteroid belt. (719)-Albert is a rock about three miles in diameter. Figure that it’s half the size of Deimos—and Deimos is about as small as a place can get.”
“But why are we going there?” she said, puzzled.
“(7I9)-Albert has an exceedingly eccentric orbit—and I mean eccentric in its astronomical sense: not a peculiar orbit, just one that’s very highly elongated. At perihelion (719)-Albert passes around 20 million miles from the orbit of Earth. At aphelion, which is where he’s heading now, he comes within 90 million miles of the orbit of Jupiter. Unless my figures are completely cockeyed, Jupiter is going to be about 150 million miles from Albert about a week from now.”
I saw I had lost her completely. She said dimly, “But you said a little while ago that we hardly had enough fuel to take us 50 million miles.”
“In the ship,” I said. “Yes. But I’ve got other ideas. We’ll land on Albert and abandon the ship. Then we ride pickaback on the asteroid until its closest approach to Jupiter—and blast off without the ship.”
“Blast off— how ?”
I smiled triumphantly. “We’ll make a raft out of your blessed logs,” I said. “Attach one of the ship’s rocket engines at the rear, and shove off. Escape velocity from Albert is so low it hardly matters. And since the mass of our raft will only be six or seven hundred pounds—Earthside weight, of course—instead of the thirty tons or so that this ship weighs, we’ll be able to coast to Ganymede with plenty of fuel left to burn.”
She was looking at me as if I’d just delivered a lecture in the General Theory of Relativity. Apparently the niceties of space travel just weren’t in her line at all. But she smiled and tried to look understanding. “It sounds very clever,” she said with an uncertain grin.
* * * *
I felt pretty clever about everything myself, three hours later, when we landed on the surface of an asteroid that could only be (719)-Albert. It had taken only one minor course correction to get us here. Which meant that my rule-of-thumb astrogation had been pretty good.
We donned breathing-suits and clambered out of the ship to inspect our landfall. (719)-Albert wasn’t very impressive. The landscape was mostly jagged upthrusts of a dark basalt-like rock. But the view was tremendous—a great backdrop of darkness, speckled with stars, and, much closer, the orbiting fragments of other lumps of rock. Albert’s horizon was on the foreshortened side, dipping away almost before it began. Gravitational attraction was so meager it hardly counted. A healthy jump was likely to continue indefinitely upward, as I made clear to Erna right at the start. I didn’t want her indulging in the usual hijinks that greenhorns are fond of when on a low-gravity planetoid such as this. I could visualize only too well the scene as she vanished into the void as the result of an overenthusiastic leap.
We surveyed our holdings and found that there was enough food for two people for sixteen days—so we would make it with some to spare. The air supply was less abundant, but there was enough so we didn’t need to begin worrying just yet.
We set about building the raft.
Erna dragged the logs out of the cargo hold—their weight didn’t amount to anything, here, though I had to caution her about throwing them around carelessly; mass and weight aren’t synonymous, and those logs were sturdy enough to knock me for a loop regardless of how little they seemed to weigh. She fetched, and I assembled. We used the thirteen longest logs for the body of the raft, and trussed a couple across the bottom, and a couple more
Finally, I looked up at Erna and grinned. “This is known as making a virtue out of necessity,” I said. “Want to know what’s going on?”
“You bet I do.”
I leaned back. “We’re on our way to a chunk of rock known as (719)-Albert, which is chugging along not far from here on its way through the asteroid belt. (719)-Albert is a rock about three miles in diameter. Figure that it’s half the size of Deimos—and Deimos is about as small as a place can get.”
“But why are we going there?” she said, puzzled.
“(7I9)-Albert has an exceedingly eccentric orbit—and I mean eccentric in its astronomical sense: not a peculiar orbit, just one that’s very highly elongated. At perihelion (719)-Albert passes around 20 million miles from the orbit of Earth. At aphelion, which is where he’s heading now, he comes within 90 million miles of the orbit of Jupiter. Unless my figures are completely cockeyed, Jupiter is going to be about 150 million miles from Albert about a week from now.”
I saw I had lost her completely. She said dimly, “But you said a little while ago that we hardly had enough fuel to take us 50 million miles.”
“In the ship,” I said. “Yes. But I’ve got other ideas. We’ll land on Albert and abandon the ship. Then we ride pickaback on the asteroid until its closest approach to Jupiter—and blast off without the ship.”
“Blast off— how ?”
I smiled triumphantly. “We’ll make a raft out of your blessed logs,” I said. “Attach one of the ship’s rocket engines at the rear, and shove off. Escape velocity from Albert is so low it hardly matters. And since the mass of our raft will only be six or seven hundred pounds—Earthside weight, of course—instead of the thirty tons or so that this ship weighs, we’ll be able to coast to Ganymede with plenty of fuel left to burn.”
She was looking at me as if I’d just delivered a lecture in the General Theory of Relativity. Apparently the niceties of space travel just weren’t in her line at all. But she smiled and tried to look understanding. “It sounds very clever,” she said with an uncertain grin.
* * * *
I felt pretty clever about everything myself, three hours later, when we landed on the surface of an asteroid that could only be (719)-Albert. It had taken only one minor course correction to get us here. Which meant that my rule-of-thumb astrogation had been pretty good.
We donned breathing-suits and clambered out of the ship to inspect our landfall. (719)-Albert wasn’t very impressive. The landscape was mostly jagged upthrusts of a dark basalt-like rock. But the view was tremendous—a great backdrop of darkness, speckled with stars, and, much closer, the orbiting fragments of other lumps of rock. Albert’s horizon was on the foreshortened side, dipping away almost before it began. Gravitational attraction was so meager it hardly counted. A healthy jump was likely to continue indefinitely upward, as I made clear to Erna right at the start. I didn’t want her indulging in the usual hijinks that greenhorns are fond of when on a low-gravity planetoid such as this. I could visualize only too well the scene as she vanished into the void as the result of an overenthusiastic leap.
We surveyed our holdings and found that there was enough food for two people for sixteen days—so we would make it with some to spare. The air supply was less abundant, but there was enough so we didn’t need to begin worrying just yet.
We set about building the raft.
Erna dragged the logs out of the cargo hold—their weight didn’t amount to anything, here, though I had to caution her about throwing them around carelessly; mass and weight aren’t synonymous, and those logs were sturdy enough to knock me for a loop regardless of how little they seemed to weigh. She fetched, and I assembled. We used the thirteen longest logs for the body of the raft, and trussed a couple across the bottom, and a couple more
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