United States or Romania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"What?" asked Roger. "Impure reactant in Kit's ship, after fellows like Kit, Astro, and Sid checked it a hundred times. Gigi Duarte crashing after making record speed to the Moon. The minimum specifications being stolen from Commander Walters...." Tom stopped and looked at his friends. "That enough?" Roger, Astro, and Sid considered the young cadet's words.
He thought briefly of Astro and Roger, wishing his two unit mates were at their stations, and then switched on the power feed to the energizing pumps. There was a second's wait as the pressure began to build, and he watched the indicator over his head on the control panel carefully. When it had reached the proper level, he switched in the reactant feed, giving it full D-12 rate.
Instead, he'll order its skipper to dump part of his cargo out in space to be picked up later. He makes hundreds of decisions a day some of them really hair-raising. Once, when a rocket scout crew was threatened with exploding reactant mass, he calmly told them to blast off into a desolate spot in space and blow up.
Tom smiled. "It'll sure be nice to get up in the wide, high, and deep again," he said, glancing up at the cloudless sky. "Say it again, spaceman," breathed Astro. "One more lesson on the differential potential between chemical-burning rocket fuels and reactant energy and I'll blast off without a spaceship!" Roger and Tom laughed.
I called Bill over the intercom right away and he ordered me to get into a space suit and wait for him in the air lock. I heard him shut off the generators but that's all. The reactant blew and I must've been knocked cold, because the next thing I remember was this big ugly face bending over me ordering me to wake up." Tom grinned at Astro. "I see," mused the major aloud. "Now about the baffles.
Well, if you can get enough power, you can blast this satellite out of Tara's grip also, since the only thing holding it here is the gravity of Tara the same thing that holds the Moon in orbit around Earth!" Astro's eyes bulged. He looked at Connel blankly. "Why, sir," he stammered, "it'd take take a ton of reactant fuel to pull something that size away from Tara.
"Now I'm afraid we'll just have to wait until that bomb goes off." "Isn't there anything we can do?" asked Tom. "Not a blasted thing," replied Connel grimly. "Thank the universe we shut off all power. If that baby had blown while the reactant was feeding into the firing chambers, we'd have wound up a big splash of nothing."
He's running too close to the danger point in feeding reactant to the chambers, using D-18 rate of feed and D-9 is standard." "What about the other ships, sir?" asked Tom. "Do they all have safety factors?" Strong shrugged his shoulders. "They all specify standard reaction rates without actually using figures," he said. "But I'm certain that their feeders are being tuned up for maximum output.
"Thanks," replied Connel, also forgetting the hot exchange of a few minutes before. He stood up. "I'll take the Polaris, Commander. She's the fastest ship available with automatic controls for a solo hop." "She's been stripped of her reactant pile, Major," said Strong. "It'll take a good eighteen hours to soup her up again." "I'll take care of it," said Connel.
His eyes were glassy, his ears deaf to the roar of triumph from below as Loring and Mason, watching the flight of the jet boat on the control deck teleceiver screen, saw it explode. Roger couldn't move. He had fired a reactant bomb at Tom and Astro. "By the craters of Luna," roared Connel, "we've been attacked!"
Word Of The Day