Slingshot, Page 2

at thememory. And on the last mission they'd been lucky to get a draw. Thoseboys were good shots.

  * * * * *

  "We're crossing his track, Paul. Turn to nine point five o'clock andhold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds, starting on the count ...five--four--three--two--one--go!" He completed the operation in silence,remarking to himself how lucky he was to have Johnson. The boy loved achase. He navigated like a hungry hawk, though you had to admit histechniques were a bit irregular.

  Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way they operated, remembering thecourses, the tests, the procedures practiced until they could do thembackwards blindfolded. When they tangled with a Red, the Solterco-ordinates went out the hatch. They navigated by the enemy. There weretimes during a fight when he had no more idea of his position than whatthe old ladies told him, and what he could see of the Sun, the Earth,and the Moon.

  And using "right side up" as a basis for navigation. He chuckled again.Still, the service had had to concede on "right side up," in designingthe ships, so there was something to be said for it. They hadn't beenable to simulate gravity without fouling up the ships so they had tocall the pilot's head "up." There was something comforting about it.He'd driven a couple of the experimental jobs, one with the cockpit seton gimbals, and one where the whole ship rotated, and he hadn't caredfor them at all. Felt disoriented, with something nagging at his mindall the time, as though the ships had been sabotaged. A couple of pilotshad gone nuts in the "spindizzy," and remembering his own feelings as hewatched the sky go by, it was easy to understand.

  Anyway, "right side up" tied in perfectly with the old "clock" systemGarrity had dug out of those magazines he was always reading. Once theygot used to it, it had turned out really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, hisastrogation prof, would have turned purple if he'd ever dreamed they'duse such a conglomeration. But it worked. And when you were in a hurry,it worked in a hurry, and that was good enough for Coulter. He'dsubmitted a report on it to Colonel Silton.

  "You've got him, Paul. We're dead on his tail, five hundred miles back,and matching velocity. Turn forty-two degrees right, and you're lined upright on him." Johnson was pleased with the job he'd done.

  Coulter watched the pip move into his sightscreen. It settled less thana degree off dead center. He made the final corrections in course, setthe air pressure control to eight pounds, and locked his helmet.

  "Nice job, Johnny. Let's button up. You with us, Guns?"

  Garrity sounded lazy as a well-fed tiger. "Ah'm with yew, cap'n."

  Coulter advanced the throttle to 5 G's. And with the hiss of power, SF308 began the deadly, intricate, precarious maneuver called a combatpass--a maneuver inherited from the aerial dogfight--though it oftenturned into something more like the broadside duels of the old sailingships--as the best and least suicidal method of killing a spaceship. Tostart on the enemy's tail, just out of his radar range. To come up histrack at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six .30 caliber machine gunsfrom fifty miles out. In the last three or four seconds, to break outjust enough to clear him, praying that he won't break in the samedirection. _And to keep on going._

  _Four minutes and thirty-four seconds to the break._ Sixty seconds at 5G's; one hundred ninety-two seconds of free wheeling; and then, if theywere lucky, the twenty-two frantic seconds they were out herefor--throwing a few pounds of steel slugs out before them in oneunbroken burst, groping out fifty miles into the darkness with steel andradar fingers to kill a duplicate of themselves.

  _This is the worst. These three minutes are the worst._ One hundredninety-two eternal seconds of waiting, of deathly silence and deathlycalm, feeling and hearing nothing but the slow pounding of their ownheartbeats. Each time he got back, it faded away, and all he rememberedwas the excitement. But each time he went through it, it was worse. Juststanding and waiting in the silence, praying they weren'tspotted--staring at the unmoving firmament and knowing he was aprojectile hurtling two miles each second straight at a clump of metaland flesh that was the enemy. Knowing the odds were twenty to oneagainst their scoring a kill ... unless they ran into him.

  * * * * *

  At eighty-five seconds, he corrected slightly to center the pip. Themomentary hiss of the rockets was a relief. He heard the muffledyammering as Guns fired a short burst from the .30's standing out oftheir compartments around the sides of the ship. They were practicallyrecoilless, but the burst drifted him forward against the cradleharness.

  And suddenly the waiting was over. The ship filled with vibration asGuns opened up. _Twenty-five seconds to target._ His eyes flicked fromthe sightscreen to the sky ahead, looking for the telltale flare ofrockets--ready to follow like a ferret.

  _There he is!_ At eighteen miles from target, a tiny blue lightflickered ahead. He forgot everything but the sightscreen, concentratingon keeping the pip dead center. The guns hammered on. It seemed they'dbeen firing for centuries. At ten-mile range, the combat radar kickedthe automatics in, turning the ship ninety degrees to her course in oneand a half seconds. He heard the lee side firing cut out, as Garrityhung on with two, then three guns.

  He held it as long as he could. Closer than he ever had before. At fourmiles he poured 12 G's for two seconds.

  They missed ramming by something around a hundred yards. The enemy shipflashed across his tail in a fraction of a second, already turned aroundand heading up its own track, yet it seemed to Paul he could make outevery detail--the bright red star, even the tortured face of the pilot.Was there something lopsided in the shape of that rocket plume, or washe just imagining it in the blur of their passing? And did he hear a_ping_ just at that instant, feel the ship vibrate for a second?

  He continued the turn in the direction the automatics had started,bringing his nose around to watch the enemy's track. And as the shape ofthe plume told him the other ship was still heading back toward Earth,he brought the throttle back up to 12 G's, trying to overcome the leadhis pass had given away.

  Guns spoke quietly to Johnson. "Let me know when we kill his RV. Ah mayget another shot at him."

  And Johnny answered, hurt, "What do you think I'm doing downhere--reading one of your magazines?"

  Paul was struggling with hundred-pound arms, trying to focus thetelescope that swiveled over the panel. As the field cleared, he couldsee that the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering red and orange alongone side. Quietly and viciously, he was talking to himself. "Blow!Blow!"

  * * * * *

  And she blew. Like a dirty ragged bit of fireworks, throwing tinyhandfuls of sparks into the blackness. Something glowed red for a while,and slowly faded.

  _There, but for the grace of God...._ Paul shuddered in a confusedmixture of relief and revulsion.

  He cut back to 4 G's, noting that RVS registered about a mile per secondaway from station, and suddenly became aware that the red light was onfor loss of air. The cabin pressure gauge read zero, and his heartthrobbed into his throat as he remembered that _pinging_ sound, just asthey passed the enemy ship. He told Garrity to see if he could locatethe loss, and any other damage, and was shortly startled by a low amazedwhistle in his earphones.

  "If Ah wasn't lookin' at it, Ah wouldn't believe it. Musta been one ofhis shells went right around the fuel tank and out again, withouthittin' it. There's at least three inches of tank on a line between theholes! He musta been throwin' curves at us. Man, cap'n, this is ourlucky day!"

  Paul felt no surprise, only relief at having the trouble located. Thereaction to the close call might not come till hours later. "This kindof luck we can do without. Can you patch the holes?"

  "Ah can patch the one where it came in, but it musta been explodin' onthe way out. There's a hole Ah could stick mah head through."

  "That's a good idea." Johnson was not usually very witty, but this wasone he couldn't resist.

  "Never mind, Guns. A patch that big wouldn't be safe to hold air."

  * * * * *

 
; They were about eighty thousand miles out. He set course for Earth atabout five and a half mps, which Johnson calculated to bring them in onthe station on the "going away" side of its orbit, and settled back forthe tedious two hours of free wheeling. For ten or fifteen minutes, theinterphone crackled with the gregariousness born of recent peril, andgradually the ship fell silent as each man returned to his own privatethoughts.

  Paul was wondering about the men on the other ship--whether any of themwere still alive. Eighty thousand miles to fall. That was a littlebeyond the capacity of an emergency rocket--about 2 G's for sixtyseconds--even if they had them. What a way to go home! He wondered whathe'd do if it happened to him. Would he wait out his