They had put me in a swimming pool in a concentrated salt solution that gave me just zero buoyancy, and I had practiced a kind of skin-diving in a spacesuit. The problem was one of mobility, and the one thing we could not reproduce, of course, was frictionless motion. No matter how I moved, the viscosity of the solution quickly slowed me down. Out in space I'd have to learn on the first try how to get around where every force imparted a motion that would continue indefinitely until an equal and opposite force had been applied.

The force part had been worked out in theory long before. To my spacesuit they had fixed two tiny rockets. One aimed out from the small of my back, the other straight out from my belly. Two pressurized containers contained hydrazine and nitric acid, which could be released in tiny streams into peanut rocket chambers by a single valve-release. They were self-igniting, and spurted out a needle-fine jet of fire that imparted a few dynes of force as long as the valve was held open. It only had two positions—full open, or closed, so that navigation would consist of triggering the valve briefly open until a little push had been imparted, and drifting until you triggered the opposite rocket for braking.

The airtanks on my back were right off a scuba outfit.

Really, they spent more time on the gloves than anything else. At first we thought of the problem as a heat problem, but it was tougher than that. Heat loss was not much, out there in a vacuum, and they made arrangements to warm the handles of my tools so that I wouldn't bleed heat through my gloves to them and thus freeze my fingers. No, the problem was to get a glove that stood up to a pressure difference of three or four pounds per square inch and could still be flexed with any accuracy by my fingers. We could make a glove that was pretty thin, but it stiffened out under pressure and made delicate work really tough. It was a lot like trying to do brain surgery in mittens.

They eventually gave me a porous glove that leaked air when you flexed your fingers. Air, they said, could always be gotten from the Dyna-Soar rocket that would be hanging close at hand in space. Well, we hoped it would work. I could do pretty fair work with the leaky gloves, and all we could hope was that the vapor would be dry enough as it seeped out through the gloves to prevent formation of a foggy cloud all around me, or the formation of frost on the gloves. That we could not test under any conditions easy to simulate.

Each team spent ninety days. They tell me that's right quick work for pointing up a launch. But at the end of three months I had assembled enough stuff to do the job, and still well within the weight limit they had to set. I wasn't a walking machine shop, but there was a lot I could do if I had to.

Ninety days had been enough for several dates with Sylvia. Out of the office she wasn't quite the protective harpy about Paul Cleary that she had been in the office, although the thought was never far from her mind.

We spent my final night in New York before leaving for the Cape at Sweets, a real old fashioned seafood house down on Fulton street. After the obligatory oysters, we had broiled bluefish, and otherwise lived it up. They serve a good piece of apple pie, and we had that with our coffee.

"Are you scared?" Sylvia asked me.

"Of what?" I lied innocently.

"Of being out in space—just floating around?"

"Yes," I told her honestly. "I'm scared to death. What if I have a queasy stomach? They say a good half of the men who have been in orbit have chucked up or gotten dizzy or something. What if they go to all this trouble and I get spacesick?"

"What if you drift away and can't get back?" she said. "It isn't like swimming back to shore."

"There's always a way," I said, my stomach tightening as I thought of what she said.

That was the night she kissed me good night. It wasn't much of a kiss, because we were standing in the lobby of her apartment house, and she wasn't going to invite me up, because she never did. But she said: "Hurry back."

"Just you know it, Shouff," I said, bitter inside.

I'd have been a lot more bitter if I had known what was in store for me at the Cape. COMCORP flew me down in one of our private prop-jets, with only Paul Cleary for company. He introduced me to the brass, and we sat through a couple conferences while the idea was spelled out to a group of sure-enough spacemen. Then they turned that mob loose on me.

I was emotionally unprepared. First off, Cleary and Fred had been building me up all through the three months, and I had actually gotten to the point where I thought I knew what I was doing. These space-jockeys spent most of their time deflating my ego.

My tormentor-in-chief was a wise punk from Brooklyn named Sid Stein. "How have you made out in your centrifuge tests?" he asked me at breakfast the first morning after I had reached the Cape.

"I have never done any of that stuff, Mr. Stein," I said.

"Well, how many gees can you pull?"

I shrugged. "Same as you, I suppose. How many is that?"

"Brother!"

The space medic wasn't any better. The mission chief insisted that it wasn't safe to put anybody in a satellite who couldn't pass the physical. I guess you know that about one man in a thousand can qualify. This was supposed to wash me out.

"Remarkable shape." The space medic kept saying. "You must take considerable exercise, doctor."

"Oh, no," I said. "Just jog a mile or so before breakfast. Nothing spectacular."

"No other formal activity?"

"Well," I snarled, "just swimming, fencing and weight lifting. I've given up the boxing and handball."

"Kept in excellent shape, nevertheless," he said. "You'll be a disappointment to them."

"Look," Stein said to me after a week of tests and countertests. "Don't be deceived by these tests. All they show is that your heart is still beating. The big thing is emotional. Doc, I think you should reconsider this idea of flopping around out there in the void. We've got experienced men here, and none of them is ready to try it."

"Fools rush in, eh, Mr. Stein."

"Precisely."

In the meantime I got a daily phone call from Paul Cleary. That I could have snarled off, but Sylvia always came on the line first, and there was a minute or so of chit-chat before she cut her boss in on the line. I'm sure she listened to all the calls. But her first words were deadly. For example:

"Mike! Hi, Mike. Mr. Cleary wants to see how you're doing."

"Good. Put him on."

"In a minute. I think it's so wonderful you passed the final physical, Mike. You're really so deceptive. I never had imagined you had such a steely physique."

"Clean living," I said. "No girls."

"There'd better not be!"

"Don't worry. How could I get to see any girls down here? Every time I look away from my work all I can see is Bikini swim suits."

"Cut that out!" she snickered, and put Cleary on the line.

There came a final day when the mission chief called me in to his office.

"Come in, Mike. Come in," he said shortly. "Sit down." He leaned back against his desk and started talking to me, like they say, straight from the shoulder:

"I'll give it to you straight, Mike. We've tried every legal way to wash you out of this mission. There isn't a one of us here at the Cape that wants any part of taking an armchair theorist and slapping him into space—into the kind of a mission you've cooked up. Somebody's going to get hurt out there, because you aren't fit for the job. Now, physically, yes, you have the capacity. But emotionally and environmentally, you simply don't add up. You're looking at this thing as an extension of your laboratory, and instead it is an enormous physical and mental hazard that you are undertaking. This country has never lost a man in space—and you'll be the cause of our first casualty, as well as being one yourself. I'm asking you man to man to disqualify yourself."

"And put an end to this mission?"

"We'll train one of our men," he said.

"In two or three years your best man might be barely capable," I said. "I don't think COMCORP is prepared to waste that much time. After all," I said ingratiatingly, "all you have to do is refuse the mission. Say I'm a built-in hazard and let it go at that." I grinned at him. I was learning from Paul Cleary. I figured how space-jockeys would react to that.

He told me: "Do you think any of these men would admit they are not up to a mission a mere technician is ready to try? No! I can't get them to beg off, either!"

"When do we go?" I asked.

Sid Stein was assigned as my pilot. He had made the trip into orbit and back four times with the Dyna-Soar rocket, and was considered the best risk to get me there and get me back. He was also the least convinced I had any right to sit beside him in the cabin.

His final briefing was a beaut: "This is a spaceship, doctor," he said frigidly. "And I want you to remember the 'ship' part of it. I'm in command, and my every word, my every belch, has got to be law. Do you understand that? This is my mission, and I'll tell you where to put your feet."

"Sure," I said. "Who wants it?"

"Can't figure out why you do!"

"I'm just paying somebody back," I said. "Is it tomorrow?"

The start was a drag. Eighteen hours before blast-off Sid and I went into a tank so that we would get rid of our nitrogen. We breathed the standard helium-oxygen mix at normal pressure until about four hours before H-hour. They wouldn't even let me smoke. Then we suited up and were lifted by a crane and stuck in the control room of Nelly Bly, as I had named our Dyna-Soar rocket-glider. The hatch stayed open, but we were buttoned up tight in our suits. They had a couple of mods that were supposed to fit them better for the mission. Instead of the usual metal helmet with face plate, we had full-vision bubble helmets of clear plastic. The necks were large enough so that we could, in theory, drag our arms out of our suits and clean the inside of the bubbles. That was in case I sicked up out in space, which all experience said was a real enough hazard. They figured that filling me full of motion sickness pills was partial prevention.

These space-jockeys have their own vocabulary, and their own oh, so cool way of playing it during the countdown. I'm pretty familiar with complex components, but they were checking off equipment I never heard of. We had gyros—hell, our gyros had gyros. And we had tanks, and pressures and temperatures and voltages and who-stuck-John. It was all very impressive.

There were suited men up on the gantry unplugging our air feed and closing our hatch. Sid was straining up from where he lay on his back to dog it down tight.

"Roger," Sid was saying to somebody, as he had been all morning.

The white vapor from our umbilical stopped, which let me know our tanks had been topped off and sealed, and that we were about to blast off.

"This is it, Seaman," Sid Stein said. "Now for Pete's sake don't move, don't speak, just lie there. I've got the con."

That was a bunch of baloney. He really had nothing to do until we were in orbit. The delicate accelerometers and inertial guidance components did all the piloting until the second stage kicked us loose. But I kept my mouth shut. He'd have some work to do before the ride was over, and I might need him.

When the lift-off came, it was gentle as a dove's wing. But as we burned off fuel, the twenty-million pound thrust of our Apollo booster began to tell, and my vision started to go black. The gee-meter said we were pulling about ten gees when I could no longer read it, and I learned later we peaked out at eleven gees in the final seconds before first-stage burn-out. I didn't like it a little bit.

The liquid hydrogen second stage kicked in like a hopped up mule, and we pulled ten gees, right at the limit of my vision, for its whole four minutes of burning. My earphones were talking now as Sid gave it the A-OK and Roger bit all the way. This was the stuff, kid!

Our Dyna-Soar had been modified to some degree for this mission. It's essentially a big delta-winged glider with a squarish fuselage in the center. The mods had consisted of tying a third rocket stage out behind, so that Sid could move us around the orbit from one Telstar to the next if my work on the first one proved out. The retro-rockets had several times their normal complement of fuel, so that he could stop after he got started. The same was true of our steering jets.

The ship was not pressurized on the lift off. Cabin pressure fell rather quickly, as we could feel from the inflation of our suits, to their three and a half-pound pressure. No bends for either of us, because of the helium substitution for nitrogen. Because there were two of us, we could chuck and unchuck airtanks for each other as we needed fresh supplies. We had enough air and water for forty-eight hours. Together with our low-residue diet for the final week, they figured we could sweat it out in our suits for two days. We had suit radios, of course, and could talk with each other for a distance of a mile or so.

Burnout of the second stage came suddenly, and we heaved slightly against our belts as the springs in our seats pushed back out. And then I got my first taste of free fall. Each veteran astronaut I had talked to at the Cape had a different way of trying to scare me with the idea of falling endlessly, and each had different ideas about how to lick it. In spite of all the talk, I grabbed the arms of my seat to keep from falling. I turned my head and in the glow from our instruments could see Sid sneering across at me through his transparent bubble helmet.

"How you like them apples?" his voice came from my earphone.

"That first step is a killer, Sid," I said, trying to sound chipper. I felt horrible.

"Let me know when you've had enough," he suggested. "I've got things to do."

I knew he did. We had dry-run it a hundred times. If we had been inserted correctly in orbit, the Nelly Bly was right in the path that three of the Telstars were now following, and catching up with Number One at several hundred miles an hour. On the ground, radars all around the world were taking fixes on us, and Sid was talking shop over his long-range radio with the radar crews.

By the time my stomach had made up its mind that it would stick with me, he had a report.

"It could be worse," he said. "We've got a lot more velocity than I'd like, but we're on course. Our orbit would differ quite some, Seaman. Because of this speed we'd be somewhat more eccentric—maybe swing out a hundred miles beyond the birds we're chasing. Are you making it?"

"Easy, Sid. Do we slow down yet?"

"I'll fire the retros and retard us to the speed of what we're chasing," he said. "That will equalize our orbits very nearly. Get busy on that scope if you're up to it. I'll compute my retro."

They had made an amateur radar operator out of me, because it was easy to do, and gave Sid more time for actual rocket valving. My belt cut me hard as he braked for several seconds.

"There," Sid's voice said in my ear. "We should still be catching up about fifty miles an hour. Let's not ram that thing. See any blip?"

"Not yet. How close are we supposed to be?"

He lit the cabin light and tapped at the calculator that he swung out from its rack. "Still got a hundred miles to go, I'd judge." He moved awkwardly in his suit to finger a switch on his neck and I heard him speaking to the ground again, and heard in my earphones the answer that came up from Woomera. We had eighty miles to go, and were now a little below the orbit of the bird we were chasing.

"Can't have both ends of the stick, Mike," Sid explained, calling me by name for the first time. "As soon as we slowed down we had to drop lower." He fooled around with the steering jets, which were hydrazine-nitric acid rockets much like the tiny motors on my suit, and re-oriented Nelly Bly. A little burst from the nose, and I got my first blip.

"There!" I said, putting a finger on the PPI. "Turn out the light, Sid, so I can see the 'scope'."

He switched off the cabin light and followed my directions with tiny shoves, sometimes from the rockets, sometimes from the steering jets, while I conned us closer.

Our radar would only read within about half a mile. When we got that close I got the searchlight going and took my first real look through the forward port out into space.

It's black. Nothing—nothing you have ever seen will persuade you how dark it is out there. That was my first big shock. Oh, I had practiced in the dark, with only my helmet light to guide my tests and assemblies, but this was a different kind of dark. Our light had no visible beam—you couldn't even tell it was working. At first I had the idea we'd see the satellite occulting some stars, but a little mental arithmetic told me that an object six or eight feet in section would not subtend much of an angle of vision at half a mile.

We had chosen, I decided, much too narrow a beam of light for the searchlight, but just at that moment I got a flash from out in space, and worked the light back on to our objective.

"Got it," I said.

"Yoicks!" Sid said, and went back to the fine controls. After a long time, and lots of patience, we were hanging about fifty feet out from our bird. We were farther out in space so that the dark bulk of the satellite was silhouetted against the crescent light of Earth. I turned off the spot and switched on the floodlight.

"Here goes nothing, Sid," I said, and undid the dogs that held the canopy above our heads.

My earphone spoke to me: "This is Cleary. Do you read me, Mike?"

I fumbled around to find the right jack and plugged myself into the radio. "Yes, Paul. Loud and clear."

"Watch yourself. Think first. You've got all the time in the world."

"Sure."

"Sylvia would miss you," he added.

I hoped he was right.

Clinging carefully to the handholds that had been specially provided on the outside of Nelly Bly, I clambered through the hatch and hung in the darkness, looking down at South America. The world was turning visibly under me, although I knew that in fact we were skimming rapidly about three thousand miles over its surface. I got myself lined up nice and straight with the bird and did my first bit of non-thinking. I pushed off good and proper with my feet, the way you'd dive into a swimming pool. It was a fool stunt for my first act. I was doing a good five or six feet a second. You may not think that is very fast, but before I could gulp twice I had zipped past that bird and was headed for Buenos Aires.

I know I screamed. That was the first time I realized I really was falling. Earth looked awfully close, and seemed to be rushing up to meet me.

My orientation was all wrong for stopping. By diving head first I had neither my back nor my belly rocket lined up to stop me.

My training failed completely. I tried to squirm straight, and by proper swinging of my arms out to full length, and kicking the same way with my feet, I got turned around to where my belly was facing the floodlight on Nelly Bly. That's not how I was supposed to do it.

The glider had disappeared—all I could see was the floodlight. It was still by far the brightest thing in the sky, but if I drifted much longer, I would have to use radio direction-finding to get back. I triggered the motor on my back and felt its gentle push against my spine.

"Sid!" I called.

"Roger, Mike!"

"Light the tip lights. I've got to get a fix on my velocity. I went way past and I'm trying to get back."

Two new stars winked into being, on either side of the floodlight. This had been some bright guy's idea, and it was paying off. I kept watching the apparent distance between them shrink as I continued my trip toward Earth. Memory and a little calculating told me that my acceleration of three inches per second per second would take twenty seconds of blast to slow me to a stop. I counted them off, aloud: "Mississippi one, Mississippi two, Mississippi three," as I had been taught to measure seconds. When I got to Mississippi twenty my visual measurement said I was about stationary with regard to Nelly Bly.

I used a little more blast and let a couple minutes go by while I drifted closer to the Telstar. I started squirming again, until I remembered to use the deflection plate they had given me to hold in my belly blast, and that got me lined up. But finally I was within touching distance of the bird, which was rotating with a certain slow majesty on its long axis.

The leisurely spin was there to make sure one side didn't face the sun too long and heat up. My plan called for stopping the bird's spin so that I could get reasonable solar heating of the part I was working on. The trouble was there was nothing to grab as the satellite turned. But we had worked on that part, too, and I went into my act of backing off the right distance, accelerating with my back rocket until I drifted close by the bird at its translational speed. I got one end of my sticky webbing stuck to it by pressure and decelerated so that the bird turned under me while I paid off the web. In a moment I had it girdled, and snapped the nifty sort of buckle they had made for me. Then drawing the webbing tight was no trouble, and I was spinning with the bird. My added weight slowed its spin down some.

Next came the trick of getting some special equipment loose from my right leg. This was a little rocket canister which had just enough poof, the slide-rule boys had said, to stop the rotation of the bird. I fastened the canister to the webbing, pushed softly with one finger to get me a few feet away, and drifted while waiting for the delayed fuse to fire the antispin rocket. It lanced out a flame for a few seconds, and sputtered dead. The bird hung virtually motionless beneath me—or above me—or beside me—or whatever you want to call it when there is no up or down.

Our light was dimming as we passed the terminator and pulled over Earth's dark side. The sun was still visible, however, although soon to be eclipsed by Earth. I jetted softly back to the bird and lit my helmet light. I had to find the right face of the twelve-sided thing so that I could open the right gate. The markings were there. They were just hard to read from inside a helmet. Then the sun was eclipsed, and my headlamp gave me the kind of light I was used to working with. The sector I wanted was on the satellite's dark side. I had to clamp on to the girdle and jet quite a while to turn it halfway round, and then decelerate just as long to bring it to a stop. I fooled around several minutes getting the sector to face where the sun would soon rise.

My earphone spoke.

"Mike!"

"Roger, Sid. What's up."

"Take it easy on your steering fuel. You're getting low."

"Roger."

I had to wait for the sun before I could start work. When it came up, heating seemed quick. First a test with a thermocouple showed that Telstar's surface was warming nicely and would soon support the pressure-sensitive mat I was going to stick to some of her solar generators. When the 'couple said Telstar had reached zero centigrade, I pulled the mat loose from where it was stuck to my left leg and plastered it above the gate I was going to open. I say above, because it was closer to one pole—the "North" pole of the satellite—than the gate.

It was time to go to work on my first screw. And there I got my next lesson. It was a real big screw, as they go, a 4-40 flat head machine screw with a length of about three-quarters of an inch. I would have to give it thirty turns to back it out. I never gave it the first turn. The head snapped off as soon as I applied a few inch-pounds of torque.

Yes, the surface had heated up nicely, but the shank of the screw was about two hundred below zero centigrade, and far brittler than glass.

I cussed some and reported to Sid what had happened.

"Have to drill it out," I said.

My drill was a cutie. It was a modified dentists' drill, the kind that's run by a little air turbine at about two hundred thousand r.p.m.'s. I really mean that. They turn like mad.

I'd been taught to use it with care. When a dentist drills your teeth, he blows olive oil and water through the turbine, and the mixture cools the tooth—and the drill—while the cutting is going on. We couldn't afford any cloud of vapor—or the shorting out that ice would cause—so I had only the pressurized mixture of oxygen and helium in the tanks on my back to run the drill. And that meant light and intermittent pressures on the number 43 wire gauge drill—the one that's the right size to drill out a 4-40. It took me about fifteen minutes and I was down to my last number 43 drill bit when she broke free.

From then on I had to heat each screw before I went to work on it. I had something like a soldering iron that I could press against the screw-head. Heat would flow through the highly conductive alloy and make it less brittle. I flicked each screw I removed out into space and at last carefully hinged the gate wide open.

The gate was the length of the sector—about two feet. It was four inches wide and about an inch thick and had parts strung along it like kernels on an ear of corn.

At this stage I readjusted the position of my webbing girdle until I could clamp my head in position and begin the testing. It was slow work. The first sad thing was to learn that the solenoid M1537 was as good as new. When I put enough voltage across its terminals, the actuator clicked down through the core.

I swore a blue streak.

"What is it Mike?" Sid's voice came in my ear.

"Trouble," I said. "What did we expect?"

"Roger," he said in that toneless unexcited astronauts' voice. "Return to ship, Mike."

"Not now," I said. "I've just got the oyster opened."

His voice cut like my drill-bit. "I ordered you to return to ship. Your air supply is about shot."

"I haven't been out that long," I protested, not feeling too sure about the lapse of time.

"Your drill chewed it up pretty fast. Quit talking and start moving."

I was thankful for the experience of moving in close to the bird. The same tricks worked much more smoothly as I used my deflection plate in front of my belly blast to turn me to face the floodlight, and then followed up with a light shove or two in the spine to start me drifting toward Nelly Bly. There didn't seem any rush, and I drifted slowly over, using only a couple triggered bursts of deceleration to slow me down as I approached the open hatch.

Inside we went through the drill. My ears popped a little as Sid unchucked my spent tanks, and popped again as the new ones came on with a hiss.

"Take it easy on that steering fuel, Mike," he said again. "You're getting awfully low."

"Sure," I said and let myself drift out the hatch. I had enough sense to twist so that my back jet wouldn't hit the ship. Then I took a zig-zag course through the darkness to my bird, got oriented at the open gate and went back to work. Before I could get started, my earphones spoke.

"Mike, Cleary here."

"Roger, Paul. What is it?"

"Have you gotten to that solenoid yet?"

"Yes."

"What can you tell me?"

"That you're a fathead. Now shut up. I'm busy."

"Roger, Mike," Paul Cleary acknowledged quite meekly.

So I started again, reaching with my leads from point to point. After a certain number of tests, I had the area isolated, but not the part. From here on it would have to be disassembly. Every tiny screw had to be heated, then teased out with a jeweler's screwdriver. Some took my patented ratchet extension. The big miracle was that I didn't break anything.

When I got to it, it was ridiculous. A small length of wire connected one component to another. Space was lacking, and the wire was tight against the metal of the gate. Its insulation was one of these space-age wonders, a form of clear plastic that would remain ductile under zero temperature and pressure. Only it didn't. It had shrunk and cracked, and there was a simple short against the metal of the gate. There were so many forms of circuit-breakers and self-protectors in the machine that the whole gate had been switched off as long as the short was in existence. No wonder telemetry hadn't told us anything.

As I prepared to fix the trouble, I switched on my radio and had Sid connect me with the ground. "Canaveral Control," one of those emotionless voices said. He could afford to be. He was on the ground.

"Get me Cleary," I ordered.

"Cleary here, Mike. What have you found, boy?" He sure was anxious about that solenoid.

"Not much, Paul. Just that Fred Stone is a fathead, too. Over and out, like they say." I switched off and went back to my work.

The one thing I had nothing of was any kind of insulating material. With my screwdriver I hacked a piece loose from the double-faced sticky-tape I had used to keep loose parts from flying around, and teased it under the wire with my tweezers. Perhaps I could have done as well by heating the wire and bending it straight, but there was little room, and I was afraid of melting a solder joint. So I took my time teasing the tape through and finally got it to act as an insulator without breaking the wire. How long it would stay there was anybody's guess. It was held mechanically as well as by its sticky action, but when the bird cooled off enough, the sticky effect would lessen. I hoped the pressure between the wire and the gate could be enough to keep it in place. Certainly no forces would be acting to move it.

Just as I had figured, the reassembly was the tedious part. I had to move around into about sixteen screwy positions to do all the fixing. Finally it was back in one piece and I swung the gate closed.

When the final 4-40's were run up as tight as they were supposed to be run, I reported to Paul Cleary. "Try her," I suggested. "I think I found the trouble. No point my coming back down if it doesn't work."

They made me sweat it out for about ten minutes before Paul said, "Runs like a watch, Mike. Put the spin back on her, boy." At least he was quiet about his solenoid.

This called for the second rocket canister, which I hooked on to the girdle and, after thinking it out carefully, got headed in the right direction. I eased away with finger pressure, and let the delayed fuse do the firing. Telstar started her slow spin again.

Getting the girdle off was a lot harder than getting it on, something we hadn't figured on, and in the final stages of the job I found that my steering motors no longer fired.

"Sid!"

"Roger, Mike."

"How much fuel do you read in my steering jets?"

"You've been out of fuel for about five minutes, by my gauge. But don't worry about it," Sid said. "I'll nurse Nelly over there with my steering jets and pick you up."

"O.K.," I said doubtfully. "But watch it. Bump this bird and we'll have it all to do over again."

Sid had more trouble than he had figured. He had steering jets to run him in every direction except fore and aft. For that motion the retro-rockets were considered enough. But one belch out of them was enough to get me screaming into the mike: "Cut those retros!" I yelled, the volume making my earphones crack, as it undoubtedly did his.

"Roger. What's wrong?"

"You'll burn the solar generators right off the bird, you fool! Steering jets, do you hear, steering jets!"

"Roger."

But it was not that easy. Finally Sid got Nelly within about twenty feet, and pretty near at zero relative velocity.

"All right, Sid," I said. "Hold it there. I'll push over."

A gentle shove against the side of Telstar was all it took. I got it straight, which was all that counted. My drift was slow, and I was a good five minutes making the twenty-foot crossing. But a handhold came within reach, and I worked my way back into the cabin and climbed in without shutting the hatch.

"Don't try that again," I cautioned him. "This thing weighs ten thousand pounds, and that bird half as much. Even at a couple feet a second, you can crush me to jelly between them, even if you don't burn one or the other of us to a crisp."

"Roger," Sid said, not quite so emotionlessly. "Are we ready to move?"

"What for?" I asked him. "Until we get me some steering fuel, I'm useless."

"I thought we'd abort this mission before we were through," he sneered.

"Not so fast. You've got the same rig on your suit. All we have to do is put your fuel tanks on my suit."

"Are you nuts?" he demanded.

"What's the matter with it? Those tanks aren't welded to you, and I've got tools."

I could see him shake his head in the dim light from the instrument panel. "You know those fuels ignite on contact with each other," he pointed out. "If we spill a couple drops of each in here, and they vaporize, we'll blow this kite to pieces!"

"Then we'll get outside to make the switch," I insisted. "It won't hurt anything if a few grams burn up out there, will it, with nothing to confine the expansion."

"But then I won't be able to come after you if anything goes wrong," he pointed out. "No dice."

"You're grasping, Stein," I growled. "At this stage I'm in charge around here. I'll take my chances on getting back."

With the cabin light on I went as far as possible in dismounting both our tanks. After a couple rehearsals to make sure that at least one of us would always have a glove on a handhold, we both climbed out the hatch and I made the switch. Just as Sid suspected, we spilled a few drops. They vaporized, and again as we had feared, combined in what would have been an explosion in a confined space. The soundless flash, dim but real, said we had released quite a little energy uniformly all around us. I never felt a thing except a faint warmth from infrared through my helmet.

Best of all, my jets worked. We both climbed back aboard Nelly, dogged the hatch, and started after Telstar Two.

The second bird was about fifteen thousand miles ahead of us. I slept most of the time, for after Sid gave us a jolt of added velocity, we had to settle down to about six hours of drifting. I woke up as the belt cut me when he fired the retros. We went through the radar and searchlight bit, and had the devil's own time finding our bird. But at last I got the flash of reflection and went to work.

I won't say the second job was any easier, except for the fact that I removed only one part to make room to do my bit with the insulation, and thus had very few screws to replace. My navigating in space was a lot better, and I didn't use steering fuel as wastefully as the first time. Still, when we dogged down to chase after the final bird, the cabin gauge said that I had less than half my load of steering fuel left. Equally glum, Nelly herself was even lower on steering fuel. Neither Sid nor I had been as expert as we were supposed to be.

Nevertheless, we took off after the third bird, and found it glistening in bright sunlight without the help of the searchlight. I thought that was a good omen. But from there on nothing seemed to work right.

We had been aloft about thirty-six hours, and fatigue was setting in. I was clumsy on the steering and had quite a time making contact.

The repair went according to Hoyle, but after I had put the spin back on the bird I found that I had no more steering fuel. I hung about ten or fifteen feet from Telstar Three and maybe eighty feet from Nelly, drifting slowly from both.

"Sid!"

"Roger, Mike."

"This one will have to make it with the girdle on."

"Can't you get it off?"

"I can't get back to it. Steering fuel gone."

"Oh, no!"

"No sweat, Sid. It occludes a small share of the solar generators, but not enough to hurt anything."

"That's not what I meant," he said quietly into my ear. "Nelly's out of steering fuel, too. I can't pick you up!"

I gulped on that one.

"Canaveral Control!" I heard him call.

"Cut that out," I said. "They can't help. Shut up and let me think."

But he didn't, and I couldn't. I had no fuel with which to move. Sid had only the retros and stern rockets, no good for swinging or turning. I was out of touching range of the bird, and couldn't shove against it to build up a little drift. Just as Sylvia said, it's not like swimming back to shore.

There was a lot of excited chatter in my earphones, in which I did not participate. Nobody made any sense, and Sid shut the thing down.

"Mike!"

"Yeah." Disgusted.

"Whatever you dope out, make it quick. You don't have all the air in the world." Sid warned me.

"How much?"

"Ten minutes or so."

"All right," I said. "It ought to be enough. Keep your eye on me. You may have to reach out an arm or leg for me to grab as I go by."

"How are you going to move?"

"I've got a lifesaver," I said.

I writhed and squirmed and made every use of the law of conservation of angular momentum until I had my back to Nelly. Then I wound up and threw my fancy screwdriver as hard as I could heave it away from me. I didn't get the zip on it I would have liked, but because it was sort of like a throwing stick, I got a little more on it than you might expect, maybe fifty or sixty feet a second. And the thing weighed about four pounds, with its fancy ratchet and torque clutch. Since in my suit I weighed just about a hundred times as much, I started toward Nelly at just one-one-hundredth of the velocity I had imparted to the screwdriver. In a couple minutes I was drifting pretty close, but tumbling. I had forgotten that part.

Throwing the screwdriver had given my body the correct vector and some velocity, but I had set up quite a tumbling moment, since I had thrown from the shoulder and not from my center of gravity.

I chucked a couple lighter tools away to correct my drift, and Sid snagged me as I drifted by the hatch.

"Come to Papa," he said, and drew me inside. We didn't horse around congratulating ourselves. My air tanks were no longer hissing, and we made a quick swap.

Sid let me dog down the hatch while he figured position. He used the iron compass method, just taking a close look at Earth, which was more or less dead ahead of us. That was a good place for it, because we had no steering fuel.

The re-entry was a mess, from Sid's point of view. We came in at a weird angle and heated up to beat hell before there was enough atmosphere for our rudder to swing us around straight. He bounced us off twice after that as we slowed down, but the creak of heating metal was all about us each time we dropped in. He cussed me plenty all the way.

The trick, of course, was to slow down to the point where he could spiral us down to Muroc Dry Lake. Nelly was a sort of glider. Her performance at about Mach 10 and two hundred thousand feet was quite respectable, but the lower and slower we went, the more she flew like the proverbial kitchen sink. Sid only had one bright spot: Our big fuel supply gave him plenty of rocket and retro when he wanted it, and allowed him to get us back over Muroc.

I can't say he made the landing look easy, because he didn't. It looked like plain hell to me, for we scorched in at something over four hundred miles an hour.

When Nelly screeched to a stop, we just sat there. There was none of this romantic business about snapping open face plates and exchanging witty remarks. Bubble helmets don't have face plates, and besides, I didn't have anything I wanted to say to Sid. I was as tired of him as he was of me. I was just plain tired, if you want to know the truth.

They didn't let us alone, of course. While the crash trucks were still kicking up a dust trail tearing out to get us, there were guys on the radio with those cool voices, and Sid was tiredly saying "Roger," to all their questions. And we didn't do any moving about. You'd be surprised how weighing four hundred pounds makes you willing to wait for the crane to lift you from your seat. All at once I almost wanted to be back in space again, where I didn't weigh anything at all. Almost.

They flew us back to Canaveral for the de-briefing, both asleep. The whole mob was there to greet us, Paul Cleary, Fred Stone, and even Sylvia. They met us at the plane and Sylvia was the first to grab me as I came down the steps.

"Mike!" she squealed. "Are you all right?"

"Better now," I said, kind of untangling from her. "How did you manage this?" I looked up. "Hi, Paul," I said to his sleepy old grin, and knew how.

"Dinner tonight?" she insisted.

"I don't know," I said, looking over at Paul. "I think there's a de-briefing or something before they turn me loose."

"Don't be silly," Sylvia said. "It's not as if you were an astronaut or something."

I was back on the ground, all right.

Well, there was sort of a de-briefing. Cleary and Stone got me alone for a moment in somebody's office.

"Well, Mike," Paul said, "that was a great performance. What was the trouble up there?"

I laughed at both of them. "Go jump in the lake," I said. "I'm out of the middle."

"What do you mean, Mike?" Doc Stone asked, holding his young-man's pipe at arm's length.

"It wasn't design—because the solenoid worked. And it wasn't installation. It was materials." I told them about the no-good insulation.

"Lucky it's only used in a couple points," Paul said, scowling. "I guess any other point where it broke up wasn't as critical in dimension and no short resulted."

"Not yet," I grinned. "It may. And I couldn't care less."

"You're a big winner, then, Mike," Paul grinned. "Fred and I have kind of made up anyway, and you're in solid with Sylvia."

"Not with that noise," I said. "No dame was worth that ride. Let Sid have her."