Science fiction; Short stories; Space flight -- Fiction
The upper half, semiflexible with jointed arms ending in gloves from
which by contorting the shoulders the hands could be withdrawn into the
sleeves when not in use.
A metal and tinted plastic helmet with earphones, mike and chin switch.
An oxy air-conditioning and reprocessing unit with its spare pure oxygen
tank; on this he could possibly depend for twelve hours given no undue
exertion and with the most rigid economy all the time.
The power pack for suit operation and radio had a safety margin of one
hour over the maximum air supply, if the radio wasn't used. At this time
Johnny couldn't see much use for it.
Item: One Waste Disposal Cylinder, expendable, complete with motor and
full fuel tanks, packed, according to his loading manifest with sundry
supplies to avoid dead stowage space. Seldom used, since most station
waste was ferried down in the otherwise empty service ships, they
occasionally handled certain laboratory refuse it was considered best to
destroy in space. The cylinders were decelerated and allowed to fall
into atmosphere where the friction of the unchecked plunge burned up
what the magnesium charge inside had not already. The rest of the
shipwrecked material had by now drifted beyond easy reach and Johnny did
not feel like wasting fuel rounding it up.
Position? A matter of memory and some guesswork by now. Some ten minutes
out of powered flight at the time of collision, coasting up to station
orbit where a quick boost from the jets would have made up his lost
velocity to orbit standard. But there would be no boost now. So he'd
just fall off around the other side, falling around and into Mother
Earth, to skim atmosphere and climb on past and up to touch orbit
altitude--and down again. A nice elliptical orbit, apogee a thousand odd
miles, perigee, sixty-seventy--perhaps. How much speed had he left? How
long would it be before he brushed the fringe of atmosphere once too
often and too deep? Just another meteor.
And survival. A comparatively simple problem since the mechanics of it
were restricted by a simple formula in which his role would seem to be a
passive one. To survive he must be rescued by his own kind in twelve
hours or less. To be rescued he must be seen or heard. Since his radio
was a simple short-range intercom it followed that he must be seen first
and heard later. Being seen meant making a sufficiently distinguishable
_blip_ on somebody's radar screen to arouse comment over a _blip_ where,
according to schedule no orbiting _blip_ should be.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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