Lost: A Moon by Capon Paul

Author:Capon, Paul [Capon, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Google: ym9TAAAAYAAJ
Amazon: B0007E1MNS
Goodreads: 24096122
Publisher: Bobbs-Merrill
Published: 1955-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Bill’s attitude to his predicament was a curiously detached one. There he was, wallowing in space and doomed to eventual starvation and yet he remained calm and philosophical. All his life he had lived by the motto Never Say Die and although now his intelligence told him that he had not one single solitary hope of survival, in his heart he refused to believe it. On the other hand, he had to admit it was lonely out there. His body was gently spinning on a longitudinal axis and in turn he caught glimpses of Phobos, Mars and the sun. The space machine was visible only as a tiny speck against the Martian glare, and soon it disappeared altogether.

Strangely enough, this experience wasn’t altogether new to Bill. Something of the sort had happened once before. He had been sailing a small boat out in the Gulf, off Key West, when he had had the misfortune to fall overboard. By the time he came to the surface the boat was fifty yards away, sailing strongly and, although he struck out vigorously, he was without any real hope of overhauling it. However, he had refused to give in, and then, when the boat’s mainsail was no more than a white speck in the far distance, luck had come to his rescue. The wind had changed, causing the boat to yaw, and after swimming for another hour or so, he had managed to catch up with it and climb on board…

Yes, the two experiences were certainly similar, but there was one important difference—in space you can’t swim.

So far we know of only two forces that will move objects in space—gravitational pull and reaction propulsion—and Bill couldn’t see how either force was going to help him. Phobos hadn’t enough gravity to affect the issue, and as for Mars—well, he guessed he was already drifting toward Mars, but there was no comfort to be gained from the thought. The drift would merely get faster and faster until at last he crashed onto the planet and was killed…

“So gravity’s out,” he told himself, “and that brings me back to reaction propulsion. Heck, there must be some way out of the jam!”

Thoughts, goaded by the sheer desperation of his plight, streamed through his brain with speed of bullets; then suddenly there occurred to him a method by which he could turn himself into a one-man reaction-propulsion unit!

He let out a yell of triumph that almost burst his helmet, and then touched the button that released the spacesuit’s surface tension. Within a second it was hanging about him in loose folds, and next, touching another button, he closed the outlet valve in his helmet. Finally, he opened the valve between the suit and its oxygen supply to its fullest extent, and waited.

With the one valve wide open and the other closed, the result was a foregone conclusion-—the suit would swell like a balloon and the internal pressure would build up into something quite useful. Everyone knows how a

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