SEVERAL seconds of silence followed, echoed on the screen from Grayling, where Kelsoe and his staff had heard too. Everyone exchanged looks, waiting for someone else to voice the objection that had to be there but was too obvious to just at that instant. Yet nobody did. Finally, the senior CR officer nodded curtly "Do It," he said Ullerman looked around uncertainly as the realization hit him that the onus was suddenly on him to take it from here.
"Let Linc try," Willie prompted, with uncharacteristic forwardness from among those to the side. "He's the best telecontrol man we've got."
Ullerman pulled himself together. "Get an identification from the assignment list of which waldo that is, "he said to Quine and indicated one of the telecontrol consoles. "Then get a link from it to Unit 9 there."
Not waiting to be told, Linc hauled himself over to the TC console that Ullerman had specified, clipped into the operator harness, and began pulling on the gloves. One of the others, spurred into action by his move, plugged in the helmet for him and lowered it over his head. "Do we know if that waldo out there is still working?" Linc heard somebody asking as darkness blotted out the scene in the room.
"We'll soon find out," Quine's voice replied.
The start-up page appeared in Linc's visual field. He stepped rapidly through the familiar activation routine—"It's checking positive," Quine's voice said from somewhere, sounding crisper now that there was something to do—and suddenly Linc was out in space.
But hurled into an experience unlike any he had known before. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick. The stars around him careened in a wild, irregular motion which, although it was purely visual, caused his stomach to churn and threw his balance reflexes into chaos. It was like being on a runaway roller coaster bucking and falling in three dimensions. Although the waldo was still anchored, Linc found himself clutching instinctively to hold on with the manipulators, via the gloves.
Ullerman's voice came through the helmet. "We have a slave off your visual, Linc. It looks good. You copy?"
"I'm reading you."
"How does it feel?"
"Rough."
"You need to get to the other end of the line. The engineers don't want to risk the recoil of cutting it where you are. Can you do that, Linc?"
That was all he needed, Linc thought, fighting the heaves still assailing his stomach. "I'll try, sir."
"There probably isn't a lot of time . . . ."
"Sys on," Linc ordered. "Manipulator both, power gain to max." A virtual gauge superposed upon his vision confirmed the setting. He gripped the structure immediately in front of him. "Anchor, disengage. Sys off." Now he was attached only by the metal-fingered hands, clamping at full power. The forces feeding back through the gloves made him feel as if he were hanging onto a treetop swishing in a gale. The waldo swung away from the girder like a flag from a mast, then crashed back against it as the structure changed direction. Linc marveled that its joints were able to take the stress.
Cautiously releasing one hand, he extended it to a new position. Miraculously, the single remaining hand held. Making certain the first was firmly secured before releasing the other, he pulled in and turned the waldo slowly until he was looking out along the cable that connected to the capsule. The line in between snaked up and down and from side to side in curves flowing first toward him and then back again, while the stars continued their deranged dance in the background. That was the gap he was going to have to cross. For a moment he caught a glimpse of the rescue flier whirling past in the distance; then it was gone again. From nowhere the preposterous thought formed in his mind that if he ever did go climbing with Patch in the mountains again, at least it wouldn't be like this. Alternating his grasps with slow deliberation, he began hauling himself hand-over-hand out onto the line writhing across empty space.
"I just want you to know we're with you every inch of the way, son," a high-ranking voice in his helmet informed him.
Yeah, right . . . . Linc was having to concentrate too much to reply.
The ride on the piece of debris had been nothing compared with the line. Linc was hurled back and forth, feeling like a fly on a whip that was being cracked. And yet, as his confidence in the waldo increased, and he began getting the hang of coordinating his moves, he managed to move faster. He was past the halfway point when Ullerman's voice came through once more.
"Linc, do you read?"
"I read."
"You're doing just great. Nancy has got a hand camera operating in there. The doc says that Arvin's shoulder looks as if it's out. Arvin's head has cleared a bit, and he wants to talk to you. Can we patch him through?"
"Right now? I am kinda busy."
"He's being insistent."
"Make it quick, then."
One side of Linc's visual field became an internal shot from the capsule, showing Arvin clinging with his good arm to the pilot's support frame. The other side of him was crookedly misshapen. His face was strained and whiter than Linc had ever seen it. A cut in his arm was oozing globs of blood that drifted lazily in the air like slow-motion details from a violent action movie. "Am I through?" he asked in a wheezy voice.
"You're patched into the waldo channel," someone answered.
"I can see you, Arv," Linc confirmed. "I'm right outside, almost there now."
"I guess I flunked pilot's school, eh?" Arvin said.
"I wouldn't say you had a lot to do with it. We'll get you out of there, don't worry."
"Look, Linc . . . just in case this doesn't work out . . ." Arvin winced and had to pause to regather his voice. He gasped several breaths. "There's something that you have to know . . . It's important."
"We don't really have time for this," Quine's voice cut in.
Linc decided Arvin was partly delirious. "Arv, save it. You can tell me about it back in Grayling. I got work to do, buddy. Sys on. Com out," he instructed. The scene from inside the capsule vanished.
Now there were just ten yards or so to go. The capsule's mass was less than that of the wreckage at the end Linc had started out from, and its oscillations correspondingly more violent. Its outside was buckled where the cable had crushed it. Fortunately, the capsule was designed with a double hull. Getting the knack now, Linc was able to use the surges in the cable to help him along. He was almost there when a new voice came through.
"Cadet Marani?"
"Yes?"
"This is the chief engineering officer from the Bridge at Grayling."
"Sir?"
"You're just approaching the capsule, is that right? We've been following you on the shots coming back from the rescue fliers."
"Almost there now, sir."
"We have a Doppler-radar fix on you from here. Look, I don't know if you follow this, but the center of mass there is moving away from us at a considerable velocity. However, due to the rotation, the end of the cable that you're at periodically traces a reverse trajectory that almost cancels it. That means that if you cut the line at the right moment—which we'll tell you from here—the capsule should come out of it practically dead in the water, on little more than a slow drift relative to us. Do you understand?"
"Anchor on the capsule side . . . Don't make the cut until you say so."
"You've got it."
The way a wheel rolls, the axle carries the whole assembly forward, while the point on the rim immediately below is actually rotating backward at the same speed. The two velocities cancel, and so the rim of the wheel doesn't slip. The CEO was saying they were going to try to lose the capsule's velocity by detaching it a an instant when a comparable state of affairs existed.
Linc finished the final yards swinging almost evenly, like an orangutan coasting the trees. He hauled himself around the mess of cable and anchored the waldo on one of the capsule's thruster mounts. Relief swept through him as he felt himself become a part of something solid again. "Sys on. Control, right appendage. Disenable manipulator. Enable cutter. Sys off." His right arm had become a cutter. He positioned it around the base of the cable. "In position and ready," he reported into his helmet mike.
Voices came across the gap from Grayling.
"Delta—vee two-twenty, reducing."
"Here's that harmonic again. This could be it . . ."
"One-eighty, one-fifty . . . The derivative's not leveling. It looks like we're going all the way down."
"Standing by, Marani?"
"I read. Standing by."
"Under a hundred. Good enough?"
"We can go more. It's not bottoming yet."
"Forty . . . thirty . . . twenty-five . . . twenty . . . fifteen . . . . Look at that. It's flat. You won't do any better. It's gonna pick up again now."
"Okay, cut it!"
Linc snipped two of his fingers together; fifty miles way across space, metal shears cut through braided steel almost an inch thick . . . .
And almost instantly, his world returned to sanity.
Like a flurry of snow being called to order, the stars suddenly stabilized, and the cable became part of a spinning anomaly shrinking and vanishing rapidly into the distance. Linc found himself on the outside of the capsule, drifting gently against a backdrop of space that was normal again. Then it all vanished abruptly, and he was back, dripping with sweat, inside the Construction Shack.
The three rescue craft moved in and enveloped the stricken capsule in a plastic bag, which was quickly sealed and filled with air. Medics and rescue techs were already in the lock, waiting to enter. They found the three occupants unconscious. The slackening of the cable had allowed a tear in the inner hull to open, losing the last reserves of air. In the engineer's estimation, the remaining supply had by that time run down to less than five minutes' worth in any case. They were rushed back to Grayling, Arvin with a dislocated shoulder and strained back, Cliff with a concussion, Nancy still in acute shock, and all of them with multiple cuts and bruises. But none of the damage was serious or permanent, and all three were expected to come out of it just fine.
Linc earned himself a new nickname: Bronco.