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                              PERIL ORBIT

                           By C. J. WEDLAKE

               Caught in the sun! The young pilot stared
               at the mass of angry flame--wondering why
                his training wouldn't let him give up.

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Planet Stories Summer 1949.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Across the blazing face of the sun moved a round dark speck, a tiny,
one-man space ship. It was very small, very close, and utterly
helpless. The side facing the sun glowed dull red.

Inside, Jim MacDonald stood glumly regarding the thermometer on the
pilot compartment bulkhead. Sweat made dark patches on the light blue
of his uniform and ran in beads down his forehead. He rubbed his arm
across his face. The thermometer read over two hundred. He shook his
head slowly. It couldn't be that hot, heat must be conducting along the
magnesium bulkhead to the instrument.

Jim ran his fingers through his hair to brush back the damp strands
that clung to his forehead. The hand came away with little droplets
clinging to his fingertips. He wiped it across his pants, and tapped
the thermometer again. The pointer stayed where it was, stuck against
the peg.

"About one forty-five," he guessed aloud, and turned to walk with a
slow, dragging step across to the pilot's seat. Weakly he slumped down
with his arms dangling loose over the chair arms, knuckles almost
touching the deck. He sat very still trying to ignore the temperature
in the compartment, but the hot stifle wrapped around him and his
chest heaved in a sigh.

Jim MacDonald was done for and he knew it. The thermo-couple to the
outside skin showed three thousand degrees. The inside cooling system
had not been built for this and had long since ceased to cope with the
heat. There seemed to be no use continuing his grim little existence,
or facing the worse smother of heat to come.

Yet, driven by the dull automatism of training and habit, he listlessly
swung the stand with the ship's log over before him and noted his
temperature readings. Then he critically reread what he had already
written.

A few days ago, he had been using the gravitational field of the sun
as a booster to help fling the little ship from Earth to Venus. In the
mighty field, a space warp had funneled out, caught him, and sucked the
ship toward the blazing maw.

The struggle to escape was a masterpiece of calculation. He had figured
with such a nicety that his fuel had run out just at the moment the
jet tubes at the rear became molten lumps on the ship's skin. He had
escaped the warp. But it was a futile thing now, for the ship swung
around the sun fuelless, inoperative, in a tight orbit that had a
little initial inward momentum.

He had tried to radio for help, but radioing from where he was, was
like trying to signal from the heart of an atomic bomb; if a signal got
through, it would be only a part of the meaningless jabber of static
that always came from here. And if the little black speck were seen,
it would only be taken for a stray meteorite moving across the sun's
incandescent face.

The ship was a little spherical world. It turned on its own axis once
in an hour and twenty minutes. That was its little day. The orbit
spiralled now a mere quarter million miles from the sun, one little
year to two earth days. It moved closer at a rate that accelerated a
few feet per second every second.

Eventually, said the impassive rows of equations in the log, the inward
movement would stop, as keeping the same speed in a smaller circle, the
ship's centrifugal force increased to set up an equilibrium. But that
point would be three thousand miles below the sun's surface. The ship
would never reach it. Jim MacDonald inhabited a doomed little world.

       *       *       *       *       *

He chuckled. He even had a moon. The natural physical function of a few
minutes before had left a jagged little chunk of ice swinging around
the ship, outside the waste lock on the side away from the sun. But
that wouldn't last long. It would pass into the hot light, and vanish
in a puff of steam.

Now the plastic fittings of the compartment began to send up a
nostril stinging stench. Jim leafed over a few pages in the log to
the page printed at the top: ... SUGGESTIONS FOR REDESIGN OF
SPACE-SHIPS.

Under his note, _Enlarge cooling systems_, he wrote, _Replace
urea formaldehyde plastics with metals, and insulate compartment
thermometers from bulkheads._

Feeling foolish at the useless act of writing that which no one would
ever read, Jim swung the log away. His tongue peeled from the roof
of his mouth like a strip of adhesive tape and he dragged across the
compartment for a drink. Glancing toward the sun, he held his aluminum
cup under the spout and pressed the hot button gingerly. Although the
windows on that side were blanked out almost purple, the sun's horizon
glared through in a heaving mass of leaping gassy prominences.

Jim turned away, his face wrinkling into a grimace. Across the
compartment a little cabinet held a pistol. It would be a simple sane
thing to walk across there, take out the pistol and bring this to a
sudden stop. He stepped toward it, then turned away ashamed. Spacemen
didn't think like that.

Ahead of the ship something flared into incandescent brilliance. Waves
of force pounded on the front, the deck heaved. Jim sprawled on his
face and skidded over under the instrument panel, his cup clattering
along beside him.

The deck scorched his hands and face. He wriggled out and dragged
himself up to the chair, clinging tightly. But it was all over. He
stood for a moment, waiting, then sat down.

Experimentally he caressed his burned face. Looking out the windows
he tried to see some cause for the shock. Then he realized his moon
was gone. It had passed out of the deep shadow into the penumbra of
the ship and had been instantly vaporized. The shock had been its
dissociated molecules pummeling the front of the ship.

He would have to be careful. If that could have passed directly into
the full light instead of through the half shadow of the penumbra,
the front of the ship might have caved in, softened as it was to near
plasticity. Jim reached for the log again, but his hand stopped in
mid air. With the spaceman's sensitivity to changes of state, he knew
something was wrong. Something had changed in the shock of the moon's
explosion.

He puzzled it over, but his heat befuddled brain refused to grasp
things. He scanned all the instruments on the panel, but saw nothing
unusual. At one side, he had a little tracer going, little drum turning
with a needle scribing a red line. On it he had set the increase in
the sun's pull against time to describe a curve. He examined this
curve. The red line had changed direction suddenly; the sun's pull was
increasing faster.

"Dammit!" he said. The force of the explosion in front had slowed him
and shorn off some protective centrifugal force. Now he picked up
points on the new curve, set down equations, and found he would die
some twenty hours sooner than he had expected.

       *       *       *       *       *

His mind began to revolt at the training that made him go on like this.
The turning of the ship now showed him only the face of the sun. He
looked at it a while, then shrugged his shoulders in disgust. Slowly he
got up and walked toward the gun cabinet. The little door swung open as
he pressed the button and he stared at the holstered weapon.

Leaving the door open, he walked away, looking back toward it. He
retrieved his cup and filled it with tepid water. Throwing his head
back he drained it at a gulp; then refilled it. He walked to the engine
compartment door. It swung open at his touch, and he stepped into
the tiny gangway. Here a tiny porthole looked out into the infinite
blue-black deeps of space. Jim leaned against a bulkhead and wiped
sweat from his eyes.

He tried to think. Not of escape, but of the frigid emptiness of
space, the cool earth he had left behind. Into his mind came a
fleeting glimpse of a lake back home on earth, a cold lake ringed with
blue-green pines, jade waters where he had dived deep with the iciness
stinging his skin. Against the metal bulkhead, his back began to burn.
The vision faded. He realized he was thirsty all over.

He gulped his cup of water and went back to the pilot's compartment.
At the open door of the gun cabinet, he stopped and sent his empty
cup clattering against the sunward windows. He took the gun from the
cabinet.

Back to the pilot's chair again. He toyed with the gun. The ship had
turned now so that the other vast heaving horizon cut across the view.
"Oh, hell!" Jim said, and brought the gun's muzzle to his mouth.

[Illustration: _"Oh, hell!" Jim said and brought the gun's muzzle to
his mouth._]

Then he lowered it, sweat poured down into his eyes as his forehead
wrinkled in dull puzzlement. He should be thinking about something,
he was forgetting something. Jim tried to cudgel his heat-beclouded
brain into some semblance of order.... Water, explosion, change of
velocity.... Where was the drain outlet for the water supply located?

He laid the gun aside and riffled through a drawer of blueprints, until
he found the piping layout. Now he explored the maze of piping along
the ship's sunward side. There it was, a little brass valve with a pipe
leading to the outside skin.

The valve was hot enough to sear his hand. Jim carefully wrapped his
handkerchief around the handle and twisted gently. Inside pressure
squirted a thin stream of water from the supply tank into the hot
vacuum of space. As it vaporized and dissociated into its atoms, Jim
felt a mighty surge of expansion against the ship. The blows of a soft
fist pummeled the side.

Jim groaned as the softened plates of the hull creaked and buckled,
but he held the valve as it was. An inside panel split and let a thin
sifting of insulation drift to the deck. His knee was against the deck
plates and he became conscious of the burning through the cloth of his
uniform. But he stayed there, until through the windows he saw nothing
but the speckled black of space turn slowly up. Then he shut the valve
off and, rubbing his burned knee, anxiously hobbled to the tracer.

The red line had not so much swoop to it now. "Ya!" he shouted
exultantly. The centrifugal force from his forward velocity needed just
a little help to begin pushing him away from the sun. Jim read the
water tank gauge; about twenty gallons left.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fidgeting, he waited another hour. The sun's horizon swung up into
view, the blazing plain filled the windows and at last he saw again the
other horizon. It would not do to twist the valve too soon; he had to
wait until the outlet was directly toward the sun so he wouldn't lose
any precious forward velocity.

The sun's horizon bisected the windows. Now! Encouraged by his other
success, Jim twisted the valve hard. He stepped back so his sore knee
would not rest against the plates.

The ship bounced like a beachball in the tremendous upshoot of the
gases outside. Jim clung to a stanchion to keep from being knocked off
his feet.

Like a rubber ball dimpled by a thumb, the ship's skin began to bulge
inward. Jim tried to let go his hold to get the valve.

The bounce of the ship knocked him to his knees. A little steel desk
came sliding across the compartment, banging him on the shoulder. He
let go with one hand and shoved the desk between the bulging wall and
a cross bulkhead. A white line appeared across the desk, and the paint
crackled as it began to fold in the middle.

Jim let go and dived for the valve. A panel split wide and insulation
poured out. A scream bubbled from his throat as radiation cut a line
across his face.

He rolled away, then struggled to get to the valve again. But the push
stopped. The tank was empty.

Groaning with the pain of his face, Jim went to his tracer. He forgot
the burn as he saw the curve now paralleled zero. No ... it went up a
little. Jim whooped for joy.

Now he scurried about the ship gathering together all the liquids he
could find. Soup, fruit juice, medicines. He piled them beside the
water tank and unscrewed the cap. Air whooshed in.

At the sound, Jim grinned. He left his pile of cans and bottles as they
were, and unscrewed the cap to a spare oxygen tank. The compartment
air pressure went up to about twenty five pounds. The excess of oxygen
exhilarated him.

He looked over his pile of cans and bottles. He didn't like consomme,
it went into the tank. Chicken broth followed. Everything he didn't
like went into the tank, everything else stayed out. Then he patched
the rip in the panel.

It was time. Jim crouched carefully beside the valve, opening it
slowly. The mess inside the tank squirted out. Again the surge beat
against the ship, but with the first groan of the hull, Jim throttled
the valve down a little. His eyes were on the compartment pressure
gauge. The consomme went and inside air began to hiss out. As it too
expanded, the push on the hull continued.

When the sun's horizon was out of sight, the inside pressure registered
only twelve pounds. Jim shut the valve off.

Now the tracer line was a nice curve upward.

Jim swung into the pilot's chair. He was a little oxygen drunk, but he
made calculations grow on the page until he had his result. Then he
leaned back and gave the universe a beatific smile.

His spiral now outward, would stop as soon as his orbit expanded and
centrifugal force became less. As the forces came into balance, he
would take up a permanent orbit around the sun. But that orbit lay well
outside the region of heavy static, and he could radio for help. In his
mind he already heard the sweet clang of magnetic grapples against the
hull.

Jim reached for the log and began to letter neatly at the top of a new
page:

SUGGESTIONS FOR SPACEMEN CAUGHT IN THE SUN.