Read Online Prelude to Space by Arthur C. Clarke - Free Book Online Page B

almost featureless, like a giant
     bomb awaiting the moment of release. It was the first of the fuel containers for “Alpha,”
     holding tons of liquid methane which would be pumped into the spaceship’s tanks when
     it was ready to make its voyage
.
    “Beta” seemed to be hanging motionless against the ebon sky, while the Earth itself
     turned beneath her. The technicians aboard the ship, checking their instruments and
     relaying their findings to the control stations on the planet below, were in no particular
     hurry. It made little difference to them whether they circled the Earth once or a
     dozen times. They would stay in their orbit until they were satisfied with their tests—unless,
     as the chief engineer had remarked, they were forced down earlier by a shortage of
     cigarettes
.
    Presently, minute puffs of gas spurted along the line of contact between “Beta” and
     the fuel tank upon her back. The explosive bolts connecting them had been sheared:
     very slowly, at the rate of a few feet a minute, the great tank began to drift away
     from the ship
.
    In the hull of “Beta” an airlock door opened and two men floated out in their unwieldy
     spacesuits. With short bursts of gas from tiny cylinders, they directed themselves
     toward the drifting fuel tank and began to inspect it carefully. One of them opened
     a little hatch and started to take instrument readings, while the other began a survey
     of the hull with a portable leak detector
.
    Nothing else happened for nearly an hour, apart from occasional spurts of vapor from
     “Beta’s” auxiliary steering jets. The pilot was turning her so that she pointed against
     her orbital motion, and was obviously taking his time over the maneuver. A distance
     of nearly a hundred feet now lay between “Beta” and the fuel tank she had carried
     up from Earth. It was hard to realize that during their slow separation the two bodies
     had almost circled the Earth
.
    The space-suited engineers had finished their task. Slowly they jetted back to the
     waiting ship and the airlock door closed again behind them. There was another long
     pause as the pilot waited for the exact moment to begin braking
.
    Quite suddenly, a stream of unbearable incandescence jetted from “Beta’s” stern. The
     white-hot gases seemed to form a solid bar of light. To the men in the ship, normal
     weight would have returned again as the motors started to thrust. Every five seconds,
     “Beta” was losing a hundred miles an hour of her speed. She was breaking her orbit,
     and would soon be falling back to Earth
.
    The intolerable flame of the atomic rocket flickered and died. Once more the little
     controlling jets spurted vapor: the pilot was in a hurry now as he swung the ship
     round on her axis again. Out in space, one orientation was as good as another—but
     in a few minutes the ship would be entering atmosphere and must be pointing in the
     direction of her motion
.
    It would always be a tense moment, waiting for that first contact. To the men in the
     ship, it came in the form of a gentle but irresistible tugging of their seatstraps.
     Slowly it increased, minute by minute, until presently there came the faintest whisper
     of sound through the insulation of the walls. They were trading altitude for speed—speed
     which they could only lose against air-resistance. If the rate of exchange was too
     great, the stubby wings would snap, the hull would turn to molten metal, and the ship
     would crash in meteoric ruin down through a hundred miles of sky
.
    The wings were biting again into the thin air streaming past them at eighteen thousand
     miles an hour. Although the control surfaces were still useless, the ship would soon
     be responding sluggishly to their commands. Even without the use of his engines, the
     pilot could choose a landing spot almost anywhere on Earth. He was flying a hypersonic
     glider whose speed had given it world-wide range
.
    Very slowly, the ship was settling