Allen Meisner didn't look like a mad scientist. He not only didn't look mad, with his blonde hair neatly brushed to the side and his face set in a perpetual grin, but—at least in Judy Gallagher's opinion—he didn't look much like a scientist, either. He looked more like a beach bum.
But his business card read: "Allen T. Meisner, Mad Scientist," and he had the obligatory doctorate in physics to go with it. He also had a reputation as an outspoken member of INSANE, the politically active International Network of Scientists Against Nuclear Extermination, and he held patents on half a dozen futuristic gadgets, including the still-experimental positronic battery. He had all the qualifications, but he just didn't look the part.
That was all right with Judy. In her five years of flying the shuttle, most of the passengers she had taken up had looked like scientists, or worse: politicians. She enjoyed having a beach bum around for a change.
Right up to the time when he turned on his experiment and the Earth disappeared. She didn't enjoy that at all.
It started out as a routine satellite deployment and industrial retrieval mission, with two communications satellites going out to geostationary orbit and a month's supply of processed pharmaceuticals, optical fibers, and microcircuits coming back to Earth from the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. It was about as simple as a flight got, which was why NASA had sent a passenger along. Judy and the other two crewmembers would have time to look after him, and NASA could reduce by one more the backlog of civilians who had paid for trips into orbit.
Another reason they had sent him was the small size of his experiment. Since the shuttles had begun carrying payloads both ways there wasn't a whole lot of room for experiments, which meant that most scientists had to wait for a spacelab mission before they could go up. But Meisner had promised to fit everything he needed into a pair of getaway special cannisters if NASA would send him on the next available flight. After all the bad publicity they'd gotten for carrying the laser antisatellite weapons into orbit, they'd been glad to do it. It would give the press something else to talk about for a while.
They had even stretched the rules a little in their effort to launch a scientific mission. Most getaway specials were allowed only a simple on/off switch, or at most two switches, but they had allowed Meisner an alphanumeric keypad and a small liquid crystal display for his. It had seemed like a reasonable request at the time. After all, he would be there to run it himself; none of the crewmembers needed to fool with it.
Officially his was a "Spacetime Anomaly Transfer Application Experiment." One of the two cannisters was simply a high-powered radio transceiver, but the other was a mystery. It contained a bank of positronic batteries with enough combined power to run the entire shuttle for a month, plus enough circuitry to build a mainframe computer, all hooked to a single prototype integrated circuit chip the size of a deck of cards. That in turn was connected to a spherically-radiating antenna mounted on top of the cannister. Rumor had it that someone in the vast structure of NASA's bureaucracy knew what it was supposed to do. but no one admitted to being that person. Still, it apparently held nothing that could interfere with the shuttle's operating systems, so they let it on board. It was Meisner's problem if it didn't work.
So on the second day of the flight, as mission specialist Carl Reinhardt finished inspecting the last of the return packages in the cargo bay with the camera in the remote manipulator arm, he said to Meisner, "Why don't you go ahead and warm up your experiment? I'm about done here, and you're next on the agenda."
Discovery, like all of the shuttles, had ten windows: six wrapping all the way around the flight controls in front, two facing back into the cargo bay, and two more overhead when you were looking out the back. Meisner was blocking the view out the overheads; he'd been watching over Judy's shoulders while she used the aft reaction controls to edge the shuttle slowly away from the orbital laboratory and into its normal flight attitude. He nodded to Reinhardt and pushed himself over to the payload controls, a distance of only a few feet. In the cramped quarters of the shuttle's flight deck nearly everything was within easy reach. It was possible—if you floated with your feet in-between the pilot's and copilot's chairs and your head pointed toward the aft windows—to strand yourself without a handhold, but to manage it you had to be trying. Meisner had put himself in that position once earlier in the flight, and he'd gotten the worst case of five-second agoraphobia that Judy had ever seen before she could rescue him. After that he kept a handhold within easy reach all the time.
Judy finished maneuvering the shuttle into its parking orbit and watched the shadows in the cargo bay for a few more seconds to make sure that the shuttle was stable. She checked Reinhardt's progress as he latched down the manipulator arm, glanced upward through the overhead windows at the Earth, then turned to watch Meisner.
Here, in her opinion, was where the action was on this flight. For years NASA had promoted the image of the shuttle as a space truck, and that's what it had become, but for Judy the lure of space was in science, not industry. She wanted to explore, not drive a truck. But she was twenty years too late for Apollo, and by the looks of things at least twenty years too early for the planetary missions. Driving a space truck that occasionally did science projects was the best she could hope for.
She was looking over Meisner's shoulder now. His keypad took up a corner of one of the interchangeable panels that had been installed for controlling yesterday's satellite launches. Beside it was a simple toggle switch, which he flipped on. He looked at the display for a moment, then pushed a button labeled "Transmit/Time." The radio gave a loud beep, and the top line of the display began counting forward in seconds.
As he tapped instructions into the keyboard Judy saw a series of numbers flash on the display. They were in groups of three, but she could see no particular meaning to them.
"What are those numbers?" she asked.
"Coordinates," Meisner replied.
"Coordinates for what?"
Meisner smiled and pushed the enter button. "Us," he said.
Reinhardt, who was still looking out the aft windows into the payload bay, shouted something like "Whaaa!" and leaped for the attitude controls.
Judy's flinch launched her headfirst into the instrument panel in front of her. She swore and pushed herself over beside Reinhardt. "What happened?"
He pointed through the overhead windows, but it took Judy a second to realize what he was pointing at, or rather what wasn't where he was pointing. In normal flight the shuttle flew upside down over the Earth, making for an excellent view of the planet overhead, but now there were only stars where it should have been. She pushed off to the front windows and looked to either side, but it wasn't there either.
Meisner said, "Don't worry, it's—"
"Not now," Judy cut him off. First thing in an emergency: shut the passengers up so you can think. Now, what had happened? She had a suspicion. Meisner's experiment had blown up. It had to have. She pulled herself up to the aft windows to get a look down into the cargo bay where the getaway special cannisters were attached, next to the forward bulkhead. She couldn't see that close in, but there was no evidence of an explosion, nothing that could have jolted the shuttle enough to flip it over. Besides, she realized, nothing had. They would have felt the motion. The Earth had simply disappeared.
A long list of emergency procedures reeled through her mind. Fire control, blowout, toxic gases, medical emergencies—none of them applied here. There was nothing in the book about the Earth disappearing. But there was always one standing order that never changed. In any emergency, communicate with the ground.
"Don't use the jets," she said to Reinhardt, then, turning to the audio terminal she flipped it to transmit and said, "Control, this is Discovery, do you copy?"
Meisner cleared his throat and said, "I don't think you'll be able to raise them."
Judy shot him a look that shut him up and called again. "Control, this is Discovery. We've got a problem. Do you copy?"
After a couple of seconds she switched to another frequency and tried again, but still got no response. She was at the end of her checklist. What. now?
Meisner had been trying to say something all along. She turned around to face him and said, "All right. What did you do?"
"I—ah, I moved us a little bit. Don't worry! It worked beautifully."
"You moved us. How?"
"Hyperdrive."
There was a moment of silence before Judy burst out laughing. She couldn't help it. Hyperdrive? But her laughter faded as the truth of the situation started to hit her.
Hyperdrive?
Behind her, Reinhardt began to moan. As calmly as she could, Judy said, "Put us back."
Meisner looked hurt. He hadn't expected her to laugh. "I'm afraid I can't just yet," he said.
"Why not? You brought us here, wherever here is."
"We're somewhere between the orbits of Earth and Mars, and out of the plane of the ecliptic, but we could be off by as much as a few light-seconds from the distance I set. We shouldn't try to go near a planet until I take some distance measurements and calibrate—"
"Whoa! Slow down a minute. We're between Earth and Mars?" She felt a thrill rush through her as she asked the question. Could they really be? This was the sort of thing she had always dreamed of. Captain Gallagher of the Imperial Space Navy! Hopping from planet to planet at her merest whim, leading humanity outward from its cradle toward its ultimate destiny in space . . .
But right behind it came the thought, I'm not in command of my ship.
Meisner said, "If my initial calculations were correct we are. We'll know in a minute."
"How?"
"I sent a timing signal before we jumped. When it catches up with us I'll know exactly how far we moved. It should be coming in any time now."
Judy looked toward the radio speaker. It remained silent. Meisner began to look puzzled, then worried. He turned back to the keypad and began pushing buttons again.
"Stop!"
He looked up, surprised.
"Get away from there. Reinhardt, get between him and that panel."
Reinhardt nodded and pulled himself over beside Meisner.
"I'm just checking on the coordinates," Meisner said. "I must have miskeyed them."
After a moment's thought, Judy said, "Okay, go ahead, but explain what you're doing as you go along. And don't even think of moving the ship again without my permission." She nodded to Reinhardt, who backed away again, then she suddenly had a thought. "Christ, go wake up Gerry. He'd shoot us if we didn't get him in on this too."
A minute later Gerry Vaughn, the copilot, shot up through the hatch from the mid-deck and grabbed the back of the command chair to slow down. He looked out the forward windows, then floated closer and looked overhead, then down. He turned and kicked off toward the aft windows, looked around in every direction, and finally backed away. Then, very quietly, he said, "Son of a bitch."
Meisner beamed.
"Where are we?"
He lost some of his smile. "I'm not sure," he admitted. "We're supposed to be two and a half light-minutes from Earth in the direction of Vega, but we either missed the signal or went too far."
"Signal?"
"Before we jumped, I transmitted a coded pulse. When the pulse catches up we'll know our distance. Next time we jump I'll send another pulse, and as long as we jump beyond the first one then we can triangulate our position when they arrive. That way I can calculate the aiming error as well as the distance error."
"Oh," Vaughn said. He looked out the windows again as if to assure himself that the Earth was really gone. Finally he said, "Look at the sun."
"What'?"
"The sun."
Judy looked. It was shining in through the forward windows. She had to squint to keep it from burning her eyes, but not much, and now she could see what Vaughn was talking about. The solar disk was about a fourth the normal size.
Reinhardt had looked too. He made a strangling sound, looked over at Judy as if he was pleading for help, then his eyes rolled up and he went slack.
"Catch him!" Judy yelled, but it was hardly necessary. People don't fall when they faint in free-fall.
Neither do they faint. Blood doesn't rush away from the brain without gravity to pull it. So what had happened to him?
As she debated what to do, the answer came in a long, shuddering breath. "Oh," she said. "He forgot to breathe." She laughed, but it came out wrong and she cut it off. She wasn't far from Reinhardt's condition herself.
Get it under control, she thought.
"Vaughn, help him down to his bunk."
When they had gone below, she said, "Well, Meisner, this is a pretty situation you've got yourself in."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I mean hijacking and piracy."
"What? You've got to be—" He stopped. She wasn't kidding. "All right, I can believe hijacking, but piracy?"
"We're carrying a full load of privately-owned cargo, which you diverted without authority. That makes it piracy. You should have thought of that before you started pushing buttons."
Meisner looked at her without comprehension. "I don't get it," he said. "What's wrong with you people? I demonstrate a working hyperdrive engine and Reinhardt curls up into a ball, and now you start talking about piracy? Where's your sense of adventure? Don't you realize what this means? I've given us the key to the entire universe! We're not stuck on one planet anymore! I've ended the threat of nuclear extermination forever!"
Judy hadn't even thought of that angle. She'd been too busy trying to suppress the hysterical giggles that kept threatening to bubble to the surface. Hyperdrive! But now she did think about it, and she didn't like what she came up with. "Ended the threat of nuclear extermination? You idiot! You've probably caused it! Do you have any idea what's going on at Mission Control right now? Full scale panic, that's what. They've just lost an orbiter, gone, just like that, and it's not going to take long before somebody decides that the Soviets shot us down with an anti-satellite weapon. I think you're smart enough to figure out what happens then."
She watched him think it through. He opened his mouth to speak, but he couldn't.
Judy said it for him: "We've got to get back within radio range and let them know we're okay, or all sorts of hell is going to break loose. So how do we do that?"
"I—without calibrating it we shouldn't—"
"I just want you to reverse the direction. Send us back the same distance we came. Can you do that?"
"Uh . . . yes, I suppose so. The error in distance should be the same both ways. But I don't think it's a good idea. We could be off in direction as well as distance. We could wind up in the wrong orbit, or underground for that matter."
Judy tried to weigh the chances of that against the chances of nuclear war. Since the Soviet Union had put missiles in Cuba again in response to American missiles in Europe, both sides were on a launch-on-warning status. If somebody decided they had already used their A-sat weapon . . .?
She was starting to feel like a captain again. At least she felt the pressure of being the one in command. Four lives against five billion, hardly a choice except that she had to make it. She heard herself say, "It's a chance we'll have to take. Do it."
Seconds later she was convulsed in laughter. It was an involuntary reaction. The giggles had won.
Meisner stared at her for a moment before he ventured, "Are you all right?"
Judy fought for control, and eventually found it. She wiped fat globules of tears away from her eyes and sniffed. "Yeah," she said. "It just hit me." She pitched her voice in heroic tunes and said, " 'I'll take that chance, Scotty! Give me warp speed!' God, if only the Enterprise had flown."
Meisner looked puzzled for a second before comprehension lit up his face. "The first shuttle. Okay." He laughed quietly and turned to his keypad. As he punched in the coordinates he said. "You know, I did try to buy the Enterprise for this, but I couldn't come up with the cash."
"I'm surprised you didn't build your own ship out of an old septic tank or something. Isn't that the way most mad scientists do it?"
"Don't laugh; I could have done it that way. But I didn't think a flying septic tank was the image I wanted. I thought a shuttle would be better for getting the world's attention."
"Well you definitely did that. I just hope we can patch things back together before it's too late. Arc you ready there?"
"Ready."
"Let's go then."
Meisner grinned. "Warp speed. Captain," he said, and pushed the button.
Earth suddenly filled the view again. It was at the wrong angle, but just having it there again made Judy sigh in relief. She tried the radio again.
"Control, this is Discovery. Do you copy?"
Response came immediately. "Discovery, this is Control. We copy. What is your status, over?"
"Green bird. Everything is fine. We've had a minor, uh, navigational problem, but we've got that taken care of. No cause for alarm. What is your status, over?" She realized she was babbling. There would be hell to pay when she got back on the ground, but she didn't care. Warp speed!
The ground controller wasn't much better off. "Everything is under control here too," he said. "Barely. What is the nature of your navigational problem? Over."
She suddenly realized that she had another big choice to make. Half the world must be listening in on her transmission: should she tell them the truth? Or should she do the military thing and keep it a secret? There were code words for just such a contingency as this.
It was a simple decision, even simpler than the one to return. She said, "Dr. Meisner has just demonstrated what he calls a hyperdrive engine. I believe his description of it to be accurate. We went—"
There was a violent lurch, followed by the beep of Meisner's radio pulse, and the Earth disappeared again.
"Damn it, I told you not to touch that until I gave the word! Get away from there!"
Meisner looked hurt. "I think I just saved our lives," he said. "Somebody shot at us." He pointed out the aft windows into the cargo bay, where a cherry-red stump still glowed where the vertical stabilizer had been. Hydraulic fluid bubbled out into vacuum from the severed lines.
Jody took it all in in less than a second, then whirled and kicked herself forward between the commander's and the pilot's chairs to look at the fuel pressure gauges. They remained steady, but the hydraulics and the auxiliary power units that drove them were both losing pressure fast. It hardly mattered, though; both systems were used only during launch and descent, and there could be no descent without a vertical stabilizer.
She shut off the alarms and clung to the command chair for support. "That was stupid," she said. "Of course the A-sat weapons would fire on something that suddenly pops into orbit where it doesn't belong. Damn it! Now there really is going to be a war." She turned around to face Meisner. 'Take us back again, but this time put us short of the Earth. I don't want to go into orbit; I just want to be in radio range."
Meisner hesitated. "I—I don't think we should—"
"Do it! The end of the world is about fifteen minutes away. I don't care what it takes, just get us within radio range. And outside laser range."
Meisner nodded.
While he punched numbers on his keypad, Judy tried to compose what she was going to say. She wouldn't report the damage yet, not until she was sure everybody had their fingers off of the missile launch buttons. Ground control would know by their telemetry that something was wrong, but they wouldn't know how it happened, and the military would know that the Soviets had fired an A-sat weapon, but they wouldn't know at what. Or—she had a sudden thought. Who said it had to be a Soviet A-sat? It had to have been an automatic shot; that made it an even chance that it was an American beam.
It hardly mattered. Either way, it would mean war if she didn't explain what had happened.
Meisner looked over at her and said, "I've cut the radial distance by one percent. I don't know where that will put us, but it should at least be out of Earth orbit."
Judy nodded. "Okay. Do it." She turned to the radio.
The stars changed, but the Earth didn't fill the view. In fact it took Judy a moment to find it: a gibbous blob of white reminiscent of Venus seen through a cheap telescope. At least she supposed that was Earth. A bright point of light that might have shown a disk if she squinted had to be the Moon beside it. They were too close together, though, or so she thought until she remembered that the Moon could be between the ship and Earth, or on the other side of it, and the apparent distance would be shorter than it really was.
She shook her head. "Too far," she said. "We'd never make ourselves heard from this distance. You'll have to take us closer."
Meisner was starting to sweat. "Look," he said. "I can't keep moving us around without calibrating this thing. Every time we jump we're compounding our error, and we get farther and farther from knowing where we are."
"I know exactly where we are," Judy said. "We're too far for radio communications. Take us closer." She waited about two seconds while Meisner hesitated, then added, "Now."
"All right," he said. He tried to throw his hands up in a shrug, but he overbalanced and had to grab onto the overhead panel to steady himself. He pulled himself down again and began to work with the keyboard.
Judy heard the radio pulse and the view changed again. Earth was larger, about the size that it would be when seen from the Moon. She didn't see the Moon out the front windows, but when she looked back through the cargo bay windows she found it. It was bigger than the Earth. Much bigger. They couldn't have been more than a couple thousand miles from it. She watched the surface for a few seconds, trying to determine their relative motion. Was it getting closer? She couldn't tell.
All the same, as she plugged her headset into the radio she said, "Get ready to move us again." This time Meisner didn't argue.
"Control, this is Discovery, do you copy?"
She had forgotten about the time lag. She was about to call again when she heard, "Roger Discovery, we copy, but your signal is weak and you have disappeared from our radar. What's happening up there?"
"We're not in orbit any longer. Doctor Meisner's experiment has moved us to the general vicinity of the Moon. I repeat, Doctor Meisner's experiment is responsible for our change in position. There is no cause for alarm. Do you copy?"
A pause. "We copy, Discovery. No cause for alarm. You bet. We'll tell the guys at NORAD and SAC to get their fingers off the buttons, then. Hold on a second—uh . . . we've just gotten word from the Pentagon that we're not to mention the nature of Doctor Meisner's experiment, over."
"Don't tell the world that we've got hyperdrive? You know where you can tell them to put it, control. Kindly remind the idiots at the Pentagon that I am a civilian pilot, and that my loyalty goes to humanity first, nation second. What they request is tantamount to suppressing knowledge of the wheel, so you can tell the Pentagon to stuff it deep, over."
Judy saw motion out of the corner of her eye and turned to see Meisner applauding silently. He said, "I have a—"
Judy held up her hand to quiet him as mission control responded. She could hear the cheering in the background. "Roger, Discovery. We copy and agree. Your, ah, hyperspace jump seems to have messed with the telemetry. We're getting low pressure readings in the hydraulics and APU's. Do you confirm, over?"
"Your readings are correct. We have sustained damage to the vertical stabilizer. We won't be able to re-enter. Request you reserve space for us on the next flight down."
"Roger. Discovery. What kind of damage to the stabilizer?"
"It's been vaporized. Completely. melted away. We assume it was either a particle beam or laser anti-satellite weapon. automatically fired. We do not consider ourselves to have been attacked. Please be sure the Pentagon understands, over."
"Roger, Discovery. I'm sure they'll be glad to hear that."
Meisner butted in. "Uh, Commander?"
"I'll bet they will. Hold on a sec." She turned off the mike. "What, Allen?"
"I think we should get away from here. We're picking up velocity being this close to the Moon. It'll make it hard to put us back into orbit."
"Velocity? How?"
"Gravitation. We're falling toward the Moon. When we make our next hyperspace jump the velocity we gain will still be with us. We'll have to cancel it before we can go into Earth orbit."
"Oh. Right." Judy tried to visualize the situation in her mind. Too close to the Moon; well, "Can you put us on the other side of the Earth?"
"I don't want to fool around near the planets any more. I need to calibrate it. I think the danger of war is past, is it not?"
Judy nodded. "Okay. Give me a minute to explain what we're going to do, then you can take us wherever you want. Within reason," she amended quickly. She turned on the radio again and said, "Control, this is Discovery. Doctor Meisner says that the Moon's gravitation is causing us to build up unwanted velocity. We will have to make another hyperspace jump in order to leave the area, plus another series of jumps to calibrate the engine. We will be out of radio contact for a while. Promise you won't let them blow up the world while we're gone? Over."
"We'll do our best. Discovery: Things are a little hot down here."
"Just keep the lid on until we get back. Remind the President that this would be a really stupid time to go to war."
"We'll do that. Good luck, Discovery."
"Good luck to you. Discovery out." Judy switched off the radio, turned around, and screamed.
"Be calm," Vaughn said as he floated up through the hole between decks with the .45 from the emergency survival kit in his hand. "You may continue with your jump, Allen. Judy, you will please come away from the controls.
"What do you think you're doing?" she demanded.
"I am appropriating this vessel for the Soviet Union. You will not be harmed so long as you do as I say."
"Come off it, Gerry. You're not going to fire that thing in here. One stray shot and you'd lose all your air."
"There is that risk. I'd have preferred a less destructive weapon, but the survival kit doesn't carry a dart gun. I'll just have to be careful not to miss, won't I? Now come away. Slowly, that's it." He reached out and stopped her in mid-air, leaving her floating where he could see her move long before she reached anything to push off against.
Vaughn glanced out the aft windows at the surface of the Moon and said, "Allen, you may move us any time now." The gun didn't quite point at him.
Meisner swallowed. "Right," he said. He turned to the keyboard and began keying in coordinates.
"Why are you doing this, Vaughn?" Judy asked. "You're not a Russian."
"That depends on your definition. I have been a sleeper agent since before I entered the space program. In any case, my nationality is not the issue. What matters is my belief that the Soviet Union should have this device."
Meisner cleared his throat. "I, uh, I was planning on giving it to everybody. You see, part of the reason I did things the way I did was to get everybody to listen, so I could transmit the plans by radio to the whole world."
Vaughn shook his head. "A noble thought. Unfortunately, the world is not ready for it. The Soviet Union must keep this idea secret until the rest of humanity is sufficiently civilized to handle something this dangerous."
"Bullshit," Judy said. "You can't believe—"
Vaughn waved the pistol toward her. "Be quiet. Allen, you will make the jump now."
Meisner turned back to his keyboard and pushed the button that sent the timing pulse, then after a few seconds pushed the transmit button.
Nothing happened.
"What—?" He looked out the window, pushed it again, and looked again. Still nothing changed.
"I must have mis-keyed it," he said. He entered the coordinates again, canceled the timer and reset it, and hit "transmit'' again.
Still nothing.
"Something's wrong."
"Meisner." Vaughn did have the gun pointed at him now.
"I'm not lying! It's not working! It's hardly surprising, with all the jumps we've been doing in a row. Something's probably overheated. It's still an experimental model, you know."
"Then you will find the problem and fix it." Vaughn glanced out the window and added, "I suggest you do it quickly."
Judy followed his glance. The surface was definitely closer now.
Meisner said, "You'll have to go out and get the cannister."
"Not until you've exhausted the possibilities inside. The problem may be in the keyboard."
"It isn't. The signal is reaching the radio, and all the data uses one line. The problem is in the cannister."
Vaughn thought it through and nodded. "All right, but Judy will go out and get it. I prefer to remain here where I can watch you."
The Moon was larger still by the time Judy stepped out into the cargo bay. She had cut the suiting-up time to its bare minimum, but it still took time breathing pure oxygen to wash the nitrogen out of her bloodstream, and even Vaughn with his pistol couldn't force her to go outside before she was sure she was safe from the bends. Once she was out she took time for one quick look—she could see their motion now—then unfastened the "mystery" cannister and climbed back into the airlock with it under her arm. When she got back inside she handed it to Meisner and started to pull off her helmet.
"Leave it on," Vaughn said. Judy could hear the tension in his voice even through the intercom. She understood the reason for it, and for his order. She wouldn't have time to become uncomfortable in the suit. If Meisner found the problem she would have to take the cannister back outside, and if he didn't they would crash into the Moon; either way she wouldn't have to worry about the suit for very long.
Meisner floated over to the wall of lockers in the mid-deck and opened the tool locker. Then he opened the cannister and held it so the light shined down inside. It was a maze of wires and circuit boards. He looked for a minute, then reached in and pushed a few wires around. He let go of the cannister and left it floating in front of him, looked up and said. "I think I've found it. Judy, could you help hold this a minute?"
She nodded and pushed off toward him.
"Here, around on this side," he said, pulling her around so he was between her and Vaughn. Reinhardt was still unconscious in his bunk beside them; evidently Vaughn had given him a sleeping pill when he had the chance. Meisner let himself drift forward far enough to make sure he was blocking Reinhardt too, handed the cannister to Judy, then pulled a screwdriver out of the tool kit. He reached into the cannister's open end with it, then looked at Vaughn.
"I've just taken over the ship," he said. "Gerry, float that gun over here, very gently."
Vaughn didn't look amused. "What are you talking about? Get busy and fix that before I—"
"Before you what? I give you ten seconds to surrender or I take this screwdriver and stir. Shoot me before I make the repairs and you get the same result. Maybe they'll name the crater after you."
Vaughn shifted the gun to point at Judy, and Meisner shifted his head to be the target again. "Won't work. You can't risk hitting me and you know it. Float the gun over. Five seconds." Meisner slowly threaded the screwdriver in between the wires until his hand was inside the cannister, saying all the while, "Four seconds, three seconds, two seconds, one—very good. Gerry. Judy, catch that."
She let go of the cannister and fielded the gun, holding it in between her gloved hands. She felt a moment of panic. "I can't get my finger in the trigger guard!"
"Trade me." Wisner let go of the cannister and took the gun from her, then said, "Get in the bottom bunk, Gerry."
Wordlessly, Vaughn drifted over and slid into the bunk, and Meisner closed the panel after him. He hunted in the tool kit until he found a coil of what looked like bell wire and used that to tie the panel shut, then gave the gun back to Judy and took the cannister. He began looking inside it again, poking and prodding around.
"What are you doing?" Judy asked.
"Looking for the problem."
"I thought you said you'd found it."
"I lied. I didn't figure there was much point in looking until we had Gerry safely out of the way."
"But what if—never mind. Just hurry. We don't have much time."
"It won't take long. If it isn't something simple I won't be able to fix it anyway. I don't have any test equipment. All I brought along were spare parts."
Judy propped herself against the lockers, her back against the wall and her feet out at an angle against the floor. She'd discovered the position on her first flight. It almost felt like gravity, at least to the legs, and it had the added advantage of holding her in place. She said, "I can't believe you. Do you have the slightest idea what this means to the human race?"
"I think I do, yes."
"Then why are you risking it like this? You should have made it public the moment you realized what you had. Good god, if the secret dies with us now, we—"
"It won't. I arranged a mailing to every member of INSANE the day before we launched. The plans should be arriving in the mail today, all over the world." Meisner raised his voice, though the intercoms made it unnecessary. "There are thirty-seven Russians in INSANE, Gerry. They each got the packet too. So you see, none of this really would have made much difference in the long run anyway. This was just a public demonstration so they wouldn't waste time trying to decide if it would really work. And I still intend to make a radio broadcast of the plans from orbit when we get back. I don't think any elite group should have a monopoly on space travel, not even INSANE." He paused, squinted inside the cannister, and said, "I think I've found it. The heat blistered a ROM chip."
He opened his personal locker and got out a baggie full of electronics parts. He fished around until he found the one he needed, a black caterpillar of an I.C. chip about an inch long, and replaced the one in the cannister with it. He put the lid back on and held it out. "Okay, you can put it back now."
Judy took the cannister and pushed herself toward the airlock. Before she closed the door, she said, "Why don't I stay out there while you try it? It'll save time if we have to bring it in again."
"Good idea."
She closed the airlock door and began depressurizing it. It seemed to take forever to bleed the air out, but she knew that it only took three minutes. She could hear her own breathing inside her helmet, just the way she'd imagined she would when she was a little girl dreaming about space. The suit stiffened a little as the outside pressure dropped. When the gauge reached zero she opened the outer hatch and stepped out into the cargo bay.
The Moon was a flat gray wall of craters in front of her. She watched it for a moment, thinking, This is what it looked like to the Apollo crews. And I thought I'd never get to see it.
What sorts of other things would she be seeing that she had only dreamed of before? The other planets, almost certainly. Other stars? Why not? She knew she was going to be in trouble when she got back, but Meisner's invention practically assured her that the trouble wouldn't last. Space-trained pilots were going to be in very short supply before long. NASA couldn't afford to ground her now, but even if they did she knew she could get a job flying somebody else's ship. Or even her own, for that matter. She wasn't above flying a converted septic tank, if that's what it took to stay in space.
Judy heard a nervous voice over the intercom. "Having problems out there?"
She shook herself back to the present. The Moon was growing closer by the second. "No. Hang on." She fastened the getaway special cannister back to the cargo bay wall and plugged in the data link to the ship. "How's that?"
"I'm getting power. Let me run the diagnostic check." A few seconds later, Meisner said, "Looks good. I'm keying in the coordinates."
"You sure you don't want to stay and admire the view?"
"Uh . . . some other time, maybe."
"Right." Judy reached out to steady herself against the airlock door. She looked up for one last look at the Moon, so near she almost felt she could touch it. Some day she would. Some day soon. She cleared her throat. "Whenever you're—"
But it had already disappeared.