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could be quite serious. I think they'd better see Dr. Stewart as soon as
possible."
"Goddam. Rhoda's not going to like this," the foreman said. He maneuvered his
little open-frame scooter over to the airlock. Pam brought his friends out and
saw they were strapped in.
"Hurry up!" Hornbinder said. "Get moving!"
"Sure, Horny." There was a puzzled note in the foreman's voice. He started up
the bike. At maximum thrust it might make a twentieth of a gee. There was no
enclosed space, it was just a small chemical rocket with saddles, and you rode
it in your suit.
"Goddamit, get moving," Hornbinder was shouting. If there'd been air you might
have heard him a klick away. "You can make better time than this!"
I got inside and went up to the control cabin. Jan was grinning.
"Amazing what calomel can do," she said.
"Amazing." We took time off for a quick kiss before I strapped in. I didn't
feel much sympathy for
Horny, but the other two hadn't been so bad. The one to feel sorry for was
whoever had to clean up their suits.
Ship's engines are complicated things. First you take deuterium pellets and
zap them with a big laser. The dee fuses to helium. Now you've got far too
much hot gas at far too high a temperature, so it goes into an MHD system that
cools it and turns the energy into electricity.
Some of that powers the lasers to zap more dee. The rest powers the ion drive
system. Take a metal, preferably something with a low boiling point like
cesium, but since that's rare out here cadmium generally has to do. Boil it to
a vapor. Put the vapor through ionizing screens that you keep charged with
power from the fusion system.
Squirt the charged vapor through more charged plates to accelerate it, and
you've got a drive.
You've also got a charge on your ship, so you need an electron gun to get rid
of that.
There are only about nine hundred things to go wrong with the system.
Superconductors for the magnetic fields and charge plates: those take
cryogenic systems, and those have auxiliary systems to keep them going.
Nothing's simple, and nothing's small, so out of Slingshot's sixteen hundred
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ce.txt metric tons, well over a thousand tons is engine.
Now you know why there aren't any space yachts flitting around out here.
Slinger's one of the smallest ships in commission, and she's bloody big. If
Jan and I hadn't happened to hit lucky by being the only possible buyers for a
couple of wrecks, and hadn't had friends at Barclay's who thought we might
make a go of it, we'd never have owned our own ship.
When I tell people about the engines, they don't ask what we do aboard Slinger
when we're on long passages, but they're only partly right. You cant do
anything to an engine while it's on. It either works or it doesn't, and all
you have to do with it is see it gets fed.
It's when the damned things are shut down that the work starts, and that takes
so much time that you make sure you've done everything else in the ship when
you can't work on the engines. There's a lot of maintenance, as you might
guess when you think that we've got to make everything we need, from air to
zweiback. Living in a ship makes you appreciate planets.
Space operations go smooth, or generally they don't go at all. I looked at Jan
and we gave each other a quick wink. It's a good luck charm we've developed.
Then I hit the keys, and we were off.
It wasn't a long boost to catch up with Agamemnon. I spent most of it in the
contoured chair in front of the control screens. A fifth of a gee isn't much
for dirtsiders, but out here it's ten times what we're used to. Even the cats
hate it.
The high gees saved us on high calcium foods and the drugs we need to keep
going in low gravs, and of course we didn't have to put in so much time in the
exercise harnesses, but the only one happy about it was Dalquist. He came up
to the control cap about an hour out from Jefferson.
"I thought there would be other passengers," he said.
"Really? Barbara made it pretty clear that she wasn't interested in Pallas.
Might go to Mars, but -
"
"No, I meant Mr. Hornbinder."
"He, uh, seems to have become ill. So did his friends. Happened quite
suddenly."
Dalquist frowned. "I wish you hadn't done that."
"Really? Why?"
"It might not have been wise, Captain." I turned away from the screens to face
him. "Look, Mr.
Dalquist, I'm not sure what you're doing on this trip. I sure didn't need
Rhoda's goons along."
"Yes. Well, there's nothing to be done now in any event. "
"Just why are you aboard? I thought you were in a hurry to get back to
Marsport - "
"Butterworth interests may be affected, Captain. And I'm in no hurry."
That's all he had to say about it, too, no matter how hard I pressed him on
it.
I didn't have time to worry about it. As we boosted, I was talking with
Agamemnon. She passed about half a million kilometers from Jefferson, which is
awfully close out here. We'd started boosting before she was abreast of the
rock, and now we were chasing her. The idea was to catch up to her just as we
matched her velocity. Meanwhile, Agamemnon's crew had their work cut out.
When we were fifty kilometers behind, I cut the engines to minimum power. I
didn't dare shut them down entirely. The fusion power system has no difficulty
with restarts, but the ion screens are fouled if they're cooled. Unless
they're cleaned or replaced we can lose as much as half our thrust-and we were
going to need every dyne.
We could just make out Agamemnon with our telescope. She was too far away to
let us see any details. We could see a bright spot of light approaching us,
though: Captain Jason Ewert-James and two of his engineering officers. They
were using one of Agamemnon s scooters.
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