Astounding Science Fiction (British edition) — page 33: what you’re looking at

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

PIONEER 31 with Don. There was over an hour to wait, since radar indicated the Nomad was in a two-hour orbit slightly more than a thousand miles above the surface. . A mere thousand miles! Why, Karl- ter’s transocean rockets covered that distance in a matter of minutes. But this thousand miles was the roughest thousand in existence: straight up. He got aft to the gyros. They were tumbling, all right, and therefore use- less. He disconnected them from the autopilot. The Nomad was still out to kill him, he thought. In twenty-four hours, the oxygen would be gone, and the ship would drag the last bit of gasping life from him. He had to get out of this mess before that. “Think, man, think!” he cried to himself. It was an engineering prob- lem of stopping a tumble in a free system. He knew he could solve it if he tried. Or could he? He didn’t have much to work with. The Earth wheeled by the port, and he stopped for a look. Through the vacuum of space, he saw it as no other man had. It looked close enough to reach out and touch, every feature on the surface standing out boldly. The Nomad was swinging north over the East Indies at dawn, and myriad islands dotted the dark ocean. The continent of Australia was just visible to the south. He wanted very much to have his son see this. Dick had spent the weekend with the lad, and they’d talked rockets in- cessantly. Tommy was enjoying Baird Point Academy with its naval tradi- tions, and was looking forward to Annapolis, Caltech, and the years in the Navy Rocket Arm which would follow. Tommy wanted Space and rockets, and wanted them with a seriousness of purpose- unusual for a fourteen-year-old. It was a rugged life with chances of its being short, but the boy wanted it. Well, if he wanted to pioneer, he’d learn like his dad that pioneers don’t go wholly because they want to. They get pushed. Now that Dick thought about it, he saw that he had to get back down. The courts would give Tommy to Elien automatically if he didn’t, and she would then control the purse strings for Baird Point. Even the letter he’d left for Don Karlter making the industrialist his executor, would have little effect; Don could not get guard- janship. Tommy would get yanked out of Baird Point at once. He recalled how hard the two of them had fought to get Ellen to give in to the idea of Baird Point and what followed. Ellen did not want Tommy away from home. More important, she did not want him to follow in his father’s foot- steps. Ellen had ideas of her own: Harvard, perhaps, and then law school. Tommy was to become someone she could be proud of. He would own a fine home, have fine friends, make lots of money, belong to the best clubs, and be in charge of a fine business. But Tommy had rockets on the brain, planets in his eyes, and a slide rule in his pocket already. Well, maybe he would see more than just the Earth; maybe he’d walk the barren craters of Luna and drink the canal waters of Mars. Yes, he certainly would, if his father had anything to say about it. So he had to return. There was more than money involved after all. He was going to have to fight the thing through personally. “O.K.,” he told himself, “problem. Solve it.” Gyros gone. No way to kill the tum- ble by precessing them. Action and re- action were the only things left. The tumble could be stopped by setting up a force to oppose it. conniclbooks.conn