Sabotage -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space stations -- Fiction
There were clankings on the hull. Men moved, unfastening the lines which
held them to the hull to get freedom of movement, but not breaking the
links which bound them to each other. Joe saw Haney go grimly back to
the task of throwing away the stuff that they had brought out for the
purpose. Then Mike's voice, brittle and cagey: "Haney! Quit it!"
Sanford's voice again, horribly amused. "By all means! Don't throw away
our garbage! We may need it!"
A voice snapped, "This lock's fastened." Another voice: "And this...."
Other voices, with increasing desperation, verified that every airlock
was implacably sealed fast by the presence of air pressure inside the
lock itself.
Time was passing. Joe had never noticed, before, the minute noises of
the air pressure apparatus strapped to his back. His exhaled breath went
to a tiny pump that forced it through a hygroscopic filter which at once
extracted excess moisture and removed carbon dioxide. The same pump
carefully measured a volume of oxygen equal to the removed CO_2 and
added it to the air it released. The pump made very small sounds indeed,
and the valves were almost noiseless, but Joe could hear their
clickings.
Something burned him. He had been standing perfectly still while trying
to concentrate on a way out. Sunshine had shone uninterruptedly on one
side of his space suit for as long as five minutes. Despite the
insulation inside, that was too long. He turned quickly to expose
another part of himself to the sunlight. He knew abstractedly that the
metal underfoot would sear bare flesh that touched it. A few yards away,
in the shadow, the metal of the hull would be cold enough to freeze
hydrogen. But here it was fiercely hot. It would melt solder. It might--
Mike was fumbling tin cans out of the net bag from which Haney had been
throwing them away. He was a singular small figure, standing on shining
steel, looking at one tin can after another and impatiently putting them
aside.
He found one that seemed to suit him. It was a large can. He knelt with
it, pressing a part of it to the hot metal of the satellite's hull. A
moment later he was ripping it apart. The solder had softened. He
unrolled a sort of cylinder, then bent again, using the curved inner
surface to concentrate the intolerable sunshine.
Joe caught his breath at the implication. Concentrated sunshine can be
incredibly hot. Starting with unshielded, empty-space sunshine,
practically any imaginable temperature is possible with a large enough
mirror. Mike didn't have a concave mirror. He had only a cylindrical
one. He couldn't reflect light to a point, but only to a line. Mike
couldn't hope to do more than double or triple the temperature of a
given spot. But considering what he wore on his back--!
Joe made his way clumsily to the spot where Mike now gesticulated to
Haney, trying to convey his meaning by gestures since Sanford would
overhear any spoken word.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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