Astounding Science Fiction, August 1955 (British Edition) — page 73: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE TEST STAND 71 “No cut-off! No cut-off! It’s still hot!’’ Jerry yelled back, panicky. “‘Are the valves frozen?” I wanted to know. “Valve seat temperatures O.K.!’ an instrument man called out. A plume of vapor suddenly spurted from one of the tanks. “Relief vents are working,” Dan reported. I discovered I was shaking, but managed to pull myself back under control out of sheer necessity. This was no time for me, the test engineer, to lose my head. But it was one of those times when a second stretches out as long as an hour. It seemed to take me forever to move; I was simply rooted to the spot. Finally, I got out, ‘“‘Everybody stay put! Emergency condition! Jerry, stay at the board and watch things!” I backed away from the window until I bumped into the control-sequence recorders. Then I got a look at the ink lines on the paper. “Dan! Come here!’’ I called. Stepping away from Jerry’s side, my crew chief looked over my shoulder _ at the chart. “Something shorted,” he observed. “‘Looks like the igniter relay stuck.” | ‘‘There’s more than that,” I pointed out. “Instrumentation! What’s the pressure upstream of the gas-generator valve?” “No pressure yet,’ came the reply. “‘Then the pressure regulator jammed,’ Dan concluded. My mind ran over the schematic drawings of the electrical and pneumatic control systems of the unit. I came to two conclusions: The unit would blow sky-high if (a) the sticking igniter relay decided to work, or (b) the jammed pressure regulating valve suddenly functioned. There wasn’t a chance that they would decide to work at the same time, in which case the unit would run instead of blow. I recalled Jerry had said something earlier about the reliability of the electrical controls and the regs having a tendency to jam on surges. Maybe I should have listened to him; maybe he had more savvy than I thought. But why couldn’t we shut down the unit right now? That didn’t make sense to me until Jerry spoke up. *‘Mr. Edwards, I think I know where our trouble is.”’ ““Where?”’ ‘“‘Mac put in some jumper wires so we could make our functional checks. He was going to remove them before the test.”’ But Mac had gone home sick, and nobody had remembered the jumpers! If I hadn’t had years of test experience behind me, I would have blown my top over this stupid oversight. But even the most experienced crews pull blunders on occasion; every man has his assigned job, and the tension prior to a run is usually so high that you think of nothing except your specified job as outlined in the “‘cook book,” the operating procedure manual. You haven’t got time to worry about everyone else’s job. Sometimes the blunders are funny—like forgetting to turn the recorders on or neglecting to load the film in the cameras. But it’s not so funny when a man has to go outside to disarm a hot, misfired unit. Jerry went on, “Dan, if you’ll take the board here, I'll go and get us out 3° of trouble. comicbooks.conn