Trapped!
That was Cosmic Agent Mac Malsenn's thought as he surveyed the desolate surface of the airless planet. Behind him, his ship the Star Vole lay canted at an angle on the rocks, seemingly undamaged--but the drive and communicators were useless.
The ambush had been cunningly planned; the intention was to trap him in the gravitational collapse of an entire galaxy. In escaping, he had burnt out two essential drive components: a left-handed sprocket and a rubber band. The latter he had replaced, using his own springy hair to braid a substitute--but no sprocket could be found.
'Damit!' he cried, lapsing into German.
Above him there leered the camera eye of a synchronous-orbit satellite, a hundred metres up. It seemed that the galactic arch-fiend Nivek, setter of the trap, intended to watch his death. He had less than an hour to wait, for Malsenn felt the unmistakable twinges of his old H-bomb wound which meant the sun would shortly go nova. Meteorites thudded into the ground--he dodged them automatically while pondering the problem.
Perhaps, in the satellite--?
As soon as the thought came to him, he fired his blaster, which would bring down anything not fitted with a fourth-order interference screen.
The satellite was fitted with a fourth-order interference screen.
The sun was growing brighter.
Malsenn dashed into his ship and tore loose two hundred metres of connecting cables. Swiftly he fashioned a lasso, and, again outside, flung the noose up at the satellite. It caught, and held. Now he had only to drag it down, remove the sprocket of its drive, and freedom would be in sight.
He dragged. The satellite responded automatically, firing auxiliary jets to support his weight and maintain its synchronous orbit.
'Rampant reactors!' he swore. Grimly he climbed the cable. Soon he reached the tiny satellite, and rapidly removed a side panel. There, before his very eyes, was a drive sprocket! He wrenched it out eagerly. The satellite began to fall, its jets useless. In haste, Malsenn replaced the sprocket. Once more the jets fired, and the original orbit was restored. This was something of a problem. The sunlight was close to intolerable. There was no way to deactivate the interference screens or bring the satellite down without falling to his death. He climbed down the cable again, and thought hard.
Wait! How did the satellite 'know' what height to maintain? It must use a radar altimeter, since the world was airless. And, in that case, it could be deceived.
He drew his potent blaster and vaporized the rocky ground until a huge pit lay below the point where the satellite orbited. Taking the bottom of the pit as ground-level, it drifted down; as the pit grew deeper, so the automatic controls brought the flying sphere closer, until it hovered in powered synchronous orbit, a metre from the ground. Malsenn stood on the edge of the pit, reached out, and grabbed the sprocket. The satellite fell. Fitting the vital part into his own drive unit, he dashed for the controls and prepared to blast off. Nothing happened. The controls connected to the drive via cables--which were now a hundred metres down in the pit.
Time was running out. The sun was about to blow. Striking sparks from his emergency flint, Malsenn ignited the drive-jets manually.
The Star Vole was in space three seconds later; the sun went nova at the same time.
'I suppose I'm just lucky,' Malsenn thought, removing his helmet and gasping in exhaustion. He continued to gasp. As a sudden afterthought, he closed the airlock.
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