Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 12: what you’re looking at

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

10 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION He kicked a switch. A low whine came from one of the pumps and rose ‘up the scale. The power room throbbed and shook as the other three pumps joined it. As the pump pressure backed up against the injector valves, Garver checked meter readings then turned four knobs. The scream of the pumps changed key as the valves opened and allowed the test fuel, water, to pour down through the cold pile and out through the jet into the splash pit. The noise hurt Vanderhoff’s ears; he had never heard the noise of the pumps before, having’ been in the control room whenever the jets were fired. Garver was used to it. Finally, satisfied with the test, Garver cut the pumps off. As the sound dropped to something a man could shout over, he yelled, ‘‘A little rough! I’ll tinker a bit longer!” The silence that finally settled in the control room seemed strange. The skipper offered Garver a cigarette. “Do you live down here?’’ Vander- hoff asked, looking at his wrist watch. “It’s near midnight.” “So it is. I hadn’t noticed.” * “Did you eat recently?” “Supper. I came back to check out a few things.” “Going to work all night?” “If I have to. The ship’s got to be ready for the Terra jump when the time comes, and that won’t be soon enough for me.” The skipper sat thinking for a moment, listening to the hum of the ship’s generator on the other side of the room. “I don’t understand why you want to go back to Terra and live on the ground,” he finally remarked. ‘You seem to be a man who loves this sort of work.” **Sure, I love it,’ Garver told him. He held out his left hand. “This is why I’m going home. I was just lucky to get signed on here. Nobody else. will have me, so I’ve got to go home and start all over again. Besides, I think my luck in space has almost run out.” In the middle of the third week, Garver had the power room in shape to fly again and turned his efforts to the rest of the ship. In spite of what he said, his heart was in his work and he did not notice the passage of time at all. He ran over every inch of the Fafnir’s two hundred forty feet, check- ing this and fixing that. He did not frankly see why Angus had called her a flying coffin. For her fourteen years, she was in good shape. She had been well built by the successors of the hands who had developed the V-2. Garver grew to think of himself as a member of the tight we-group that was the Fafnir’s crew. Cosmo even grew to tolerate him in the ship, and in the electronic compartment in particular. Vanderhoff and Winch no longer looked upon him as a space bum with only one hand. He knew it and could almost feel it; he was their jetman, a man who’d_ just had bad luck, a man who knew and loved his work as they did, and a man they knew they could depend on. He never admitted that anything on the ship was working perfectly; there was always something he had to “tinker with just a little more.”’ The skipper finally asked him, “Garv, have you tinkered enough now that we can raise ship?”’ “Well . . . yes; she'll lift all right,” Garver admitted. “You’re a perfectionist,” WVander- hoff sighed. “I’m taking on cargo tomorrow morning. We lift at 1600, Mars local time, Friday. See that the ship is fueled and ready.” On lift day, Garver was up at dawn. He was not sure about the response time of the rod control in the “‘fire- box,” the atomic pile. He checked it Comichbooks*com Ay alee Wo) A (UA ‘