The Scarlet Lake Mystery: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story

For a brief moment he succeeded, then the grayness moved in like an all-encompassing curtain.

Pegasus climbed into the blue sky, arrow-straight, still accelerating. The seconds ticked away. For an instant, the accelerometer hovered at twelve G, and slipped toward thirteen.

Rick was five feet, ten inches tall, and his weight was a constant hundred and sixty pounds. The rocket reached maximum acceleration, 12.6g, and for that instant Rick weighed 2,016 pounds – slightly over one ton!

Then.. all burnt, fuel exhausted, the first-stage motor stopped.

The explosive bolts went into action. There was an explosion that made itself felt in the skin of the rocket, and the grinding of metal as the first stage detached.

Rick's battered brains swam back to consciousness. For an instant he couldn't recall what had happened, then he realized he had survived the first-stage acceleration. He was in bad shape, he knew. The salt taste in his mouth was blood, and he was breathing bubbles of blood through internal damage in his nose or lungs. But there wasn't time for inventory. The aching silence was lost as the second stage fired. Acceleration built again. This time Rick slipped into the enveloping grayness almost at once. The acceleration was less, and the time of burning was less. Had he not been put through the torture of first-stage acceleration he could have taken the second stage without more than great discomfort. But now he had little resistance left.

He came back to consciousness again as the second stage cut off. In the welcome silence he found time to be thankful he was still alive, even though it might be a temporary thing. He looked up at Prince Machiavelli through bloodshot eyes and couldn't see the little monk. For a terrible instant he thought he was blind, then he saw a glimmer of light through the port. It was the sun. The rocket was in the wrong position to catch it directly, however, and the atmosphere was far too thin to scatter light.

He heard the second stage explode off and tried to brace himself for the final acceleration. He made himself think. He was in a spot, a very bad spot. The Earthman had sabotaged the flight. But how? The first two stages had worked. Even if the third-stage motor never fired, the rocket was high enough to prove out the project objective.

There was only one answer. Even to his fogged brain it was clear that the drone control had been sabotaged by the Earthman. Otherwise cutting the signal wire would have kept the board from showing green. Somehow, the signal wire had been bypassed, to keep the operators from knowing the drone control was inoperative.

The final stage fired and acceleration began once more. Rick fought it. He tried to ignore the pain of the crushing, distorting weight and tried to keep his mind on the problem. He failed.

Pegasus was no longer traveling straight out from earth now. The gimbaled rocket motor swung slightly to one side and the rocket's trajectory flattened. As it swung on the new course, sunlight glanced in through the open port and into Rick's open, sightless eyes.

It was raw sunlight, unfiltered by the atmosphere. It was sunlight no human had ever seen before. Even in his semiconscious state Rick realized the danger and managed to shut his eyes. The sunlight seemed to burn through the lids, to scorch the insides of his head. Then the rocket moved along its new trajectory slightly and the merciless beam shifted, blazed on the sketch of a knight in armor impaling Pegasus with his lance.

Rick realized dimly that the terrible light was gone. He opened his eyes and saw the spacemonk. It was as though someone had drawn layer after layer of gauze between the boy and the marmoset, but he understood that Prince Machiavelli was still alive, and in far better shape than he was.

The vibrating, paralyzing scream of the rocket suddenly cut off. Silence flooded in.

End of burning for stage three!

Pegasus had altered course slightly, in response to its pre-set mechanisms. Now it was on a course that would take it to the maximum point into space, but at the same time would keep it over Scarlet Lake. For a few minutes more it would coast on its momentum, slowing constantly until it reached maximum altitude. Then, briefly, it would hesitate.

Momentum used up, earth's gravity would again assume control. The rocket would slip back, tail first, slowly, slowly, then faster and faster, beginning the long, final plunge to the ground.

CHAPTER XVIII

Out of Control!

Rick came back to painful consciousness. He realized that the acceleration was at an end. The torture of G forces was over, and whatever happened from here on wouldn't compare with the past few minutes.

He tried to sit up, and strained muscles reacted. He groaned with pain and lay down again. Suddenly he realized he was no longer on the floor!

He hung in the air, as though by some weird magic, and tried to figure out what had happened to him. Of course he was weightless! The rocket was now in free flight, its inertia counteracting gravitational pull. He would continue weightless until gravity took over again.

It was comfortable, after the racking acceleration. He could have gone to sleep easily, and almost did. Then the spacemonk chirruped at him uneasily. The marmoset was feeling the odd weightlessness, too.

The chirrup brought Rick back to his senses. He wasn't in some marvelous bed, he was in space! But natural forces still bound him to earth, and mother earth would reclaim him with crushing, final impact within a very few minutes.

He tasted blood. The Earthman had done this! His death would be on the Earthman's head. He knew the drone control couldn't function, but he didn't know why. He was only sure of one thing. The Earthman was a member of the electronics department. Only someone who knew the drone system intimately could have bypassed the control by wiring it so the board showed green even when the control wasn't working.

Rising anger stirred him. With one trembling hand he reached out and managed to hook the channel on which the marmoset's chair was hung. He pulled himself erect. He had forgotten he was weightless. He kept right on going until his head banged painfully on the bottom of the nose-cone radar unit. The shock of pain, unlike the throbbing from the acceleration, cleared his head and made him angrier.

Carefully now, he hauled himself down again. He patted the spacemonk as he went by, an absent-minded, comradely gesture. He was intent on the drone control in the center of the floor. The Earthman hadn't had much time. Whatever he had done to sabotage the control must have been done in a very few minutes.

Rick got into position, kneeling on the deck, steadying himself with one hand. With the other he searched for his flashlight and found it hanging from his belt. His head sagged, and had it not been for the weightlessness he would have fallen forward onto the drone control. He was in worse shape than he realized. Then, some inner warning signal sounded, and he came back to consciousness with a start.

The startled reaction was enough to move him away from the drone control and break his loose grip. He slid through the air back against the bulkhead wall and felt the warmth that had not yet drained off into space. It was the heat of rapid passage through the atmosphere.

He thought grimly that the heat would be much worse when the rocket re-entered the atmosphere. Unless Jerry Lipton could somehow get control, the plunging rocket would flame like a meteor.

He moved back to the drone control, using his hands as paddles. His wrists were limp and his control was poor, but he made it. He had the flashlight now, and he shot its beam into the maze of wiring.

The cut wire dangled, its end gleaming redly in the light beam. Cutting the wire should have broken the circuit, but it hadn't. Why?

If the cut wire hadn't interrupted the circuit, that meant the circuit had been bypassed. Rick was sure a signal had gotten to the blockhouse somehow, showing that the drone control was operating.

He had it. Look for other cut wires. It didn't matter whether he found the bypass circuit or not. The signal to the blockhouse wasn't important for the moment, but getting the control back into operation was. He knew the board must still show green down where Earle and Gould were sitting, almost three hundred miles below.

Tracing the visible wires wasn't easy. There were dozens of them, and they all looked alike. His head wasn't working and his eyes kept seeing gray fog. Why, he knew this gadget by heart! He'd practically built most of it, and he'd checked it out half a dozen times.

Something was wrong inside the control box, but he couldn't put his finger on it.

He checked carefully, tracing the wiring with blurred eyes. Then, in a moment of clarity, he saw it! Someone had put an alligator clip in the box. It was clamping a wire to a terminal post. He shook his head. Pretty sloppy work. It made no sense at all to use a clip on a permanent wiring job. Who had done it? Didn't he know the clip was apt to vibrate off during the flight?

The grayness slipped away again and he recognized the circuit. Of course! He had found the bypass. The wire ran from the main, incoming signal circuit into the master control circuit. The Earthman had done this! What he had done was to feed the signal from the blockhouse right back to the blockhouse over the check-signal circuit, completely bypassing the drone control, which was still in operating condition but which now could not get the signals to activate it.

Rick studied the control carefully. He had to restore the circuit, but he couldn't for the life of him figure how to do it. Normally, before the crushing acceleration, he would have recognized the difficulty in a flash. Now his confused mind had to labor through steps that sometimes took him off on a wild tangent.

The rocket was slowing rapidly now. It reached maximum altitude and hesitated briefly.

One side of the rocket was brilliant with sunlight – raw, unfiltered light not meant for human eyes. The other side was black. On the sunny side, the rocket was heating from absorbed solar energy. On the dark side, the heat was radiating off. But the radiation was less than the absorption of energy, and the rocket was growing appreciably warmer.

For an instant the rocket paused, nearly three hundred miles above the earth. The space frontier was below – almost halfway back to earth. Out here was the vacuum of space.

Rick wasn't conscious of this. He wouldn't have cared. His whole attention was focused on the problem of the drone control. He didn't even realize the rocket had started the downward trip until he found himself floating upward. Then, frantically, he hauled himself back down to the control box, ignoring the stabbing pain in his stomach as he bent over again, one leg wrapped around the small pedestal that supported the control.

Strength was coming back to him slowly, his normal resilience overcoming to some extent the beating his body had taken. The grayness had thinned somewhat. He was less inclined to slip off into semiconsciousness.

Again he examined the circuit. The essential wire that fed the drone control the signals from the blockhouse was clipped to the terminal post. All he had to do was unclip it and reconnect it to the drone-control input.

He couldn't control his fingers accurately yet, and he made several attempts to pull the alligator clip off the terminal post. Finally he made it, and sank back exhausted from the physical effort.

Far below, in the blockhouse, the indicator light on the control panel changed from green to red. Circuit not operating! Those in the blockhouse had no way of knowing that it had been out of operation since before the take-off. To them, the sudden switch in signal meant something had gone wrong in flight.

Rick vaguely realized that the light must have changed, but he didn't think about it. Now he had to find the proper terminal for the input wire. He should know where it was. He had wired this circuit himself. But try as he would, he could not find the contact.

The rocket was accelerating rapidly now, and its flight pattern was changing slowly. Instead of dropping tail first, it was canting to one side. In less than a minute it would be entering the outer fringes of the atmosphere, in the region where friction against air molecules and atoms would start heating the rocket.

Rick's flashlight beam probed the innards of the drone control. The place from which the input wire had been ripped must be within easy reach. Otherwise, the Earthman couldn't have disconnected it in what must have been a short time. For another thing, it had to be within the length of loose wire, because the Earthman had simply disconnected it, then reconnected it in another place.

He was thinking more clearly now. He poked the loose wire around, careless of possible shorts, and his luck held. A dozen times the bare wire tip brushed within a tiny space of terminals that would have shorted out the whole control.

He found the terminal.

The wire had been soldered into place. The Earthman must have used a pair of needle-nose pliers to reach in and jerk it loose. There was a channel in the solder where the tip had rested.

Rick tried to replace the wire, but the area was too small for his hand. When he had wired the contact originally, the chassis had been sitting in the open on his workbench. Now it was encased in aluminum, except on the top where he had removed the cover plate.

He was conscious suddenly of a faint hiss. It was so faint that he didn't even notice it at first. Then, with sudden horror, he realized what it was. The rocket was striking the atmosphere! There wasn't yet enough air to act on the control surfaces. But soon the rocket would enter the denser layers of air and the airfoils would take hold. The rocket would turn over and plunge nose-down.

With the renewed energy of fear, Rick started to work again. He thrust his hand into the box, tearing the skin on the metal edge. He couldn't reach the terminal.

If he could only open the box in some way. But he couldn't do it with his bare hands. He needed a tool of some kind. He started to search his pockets and his hand brushed the kit at his belt. The pliers! He had completely forgotten them. He shook his head, and sweat ran down the sides of his face.

The rocket continued its rapidly accelerating fall, and heat built up, even from the thin air at a hundred and twenty miles. At the rocket's velocity of fall, Rick had less than two minutes to live. Pegasus was approaching dense air that would heat its skin to incandescence.

With the pliers he tore at the side of the box and managed to chew out a piece of the thin aluminum. Then he bent back the jagged edges and tried again. The wire touched the terminal.

Now to hold it in place!

He searched through the tool kit again, but found nothing that was useful for this purpose. The wire had to be locked in place fairly tightly, or it would tear loose just from vibration.

Again he flashed the light around, noting absently that he could see better. Light was diffusing into the cabin now that Pegasus had reached lower altitude.

The light fell on Prince Machiavelli. The spacemonk was taped tightly. Instruments were held to his shaven skin by surgical tape. Rick pulled himself to the monk's side and found an end of tape. It held the stethoscope. He pulled it free and the monk chattered at him excitedly.

"Sorry, boy," Rick muttered. The side-cutting pliers weren't the best tools, but he managed to chew off a piece of the tape. It was ragged, but it would have to do. Holding the piece of tape in the pliers, he pressed it down against the wire, forcing the wire tip into its tiny groove. Then he rubbed it with the blunt end of the pliers, trying to get a good bond between the tape and the solder of the junction.

He drew back and waited. The connection was made. He knew that the rush of air outside was louder, and he suddenly realized that the cabin was very hot. Jerry Lipton would have taken over control long ago! Why wasn't the control responding?

Rick fought down the fear that gripped at his throat and made breathing hard. He couldn't panic! There must be something still wrong. But what was it?

The flashlight beam moved over the maze of wiring, then stopped on the coppery gleam of a cut wire.

Of course! When he had pulled the alligator clip, the board had showed red. Jerry didn't know the controls were working!

Rick tried to reconnect the wire he had cut. The ends barely touched; the wire had been tight. He couldn't hold contact.

Jerry had to understand that the controls were working. If only he had a microphone, a key – anything with which to signal.

The heat was increasing rapidly. The temperature must surely be over a hundred. Pegasus had reached the air again, and was falling out of control!

CHAPTER XIX

The Unyielding Ground

Prince Machiavelli began to cry. He let Rick know he didn't like the heat in a series of sobbing yelps.

Rick glanced up, surprised at the sudden noise, and flashed his light on the monk. The little animal was suffering from the heat, the fur of his head matted and his eyes staring. Dangling from his little chest was the stethoscope Rick had ripped away to get the tape.

Rick stared at it. If only …

He fought his body's tendency to fly to the top of the rocket and got a firm grip with one leg around the channel under the spacemonk, then he took the stethoscope bell and began to tap in Morse code:

T-A-K-E C-O-N-T-R-O-L T-A-K-E C-O-N-T-R-O-L.

In the blockhouse, Charlie Kassick was watching the display with an anxious eye. Suddenly the straight line – a reading of zero – that had begun when the stethoscope quit functioning began to break up into a regular pattern.

Charlie couldn't read Morse code. He only knew there was something strange going on. He let out a yell that brought John Gordon jumping to his side.

Gordon studied the strange pattern, a square wave shape, a blank, then a peak followed by a square wave shape, a blank, then a square wave, peak, and square …

Rick was still tapping when he heard the sudden whine of servomotors. The rocket tilted but continued its fall, rushing toward earth while its nose swung slightly upward. Then the airfoils took hold and Pegasus began to climb once more.

Rick was flat on the floor, thrown there for a few seconds when gravity became normal. He climbed to his feet again, fighting pain and weakness. Jerry Lipton was flying Pegasus. It was a reprieve. The boy and the marmoset had a chance after all, if the heat didn't get them. Rick could feel his skin tighten, feel the moisture baking out of him.

He held on to the channel with one hand and found the stethoscope with the other. Concentrating, he tapped out a message.

E-R-T-H-M-A-N I-N E-L-E-C-T-R-O-N-C G-R-P H-E O-N-E O-F L-S-T T-O E-N-T-R R-O-C-K-T.

He signed his initials.

The rocket was dipping toward earth again, in accordance with the landing flight plan. It was traveling nearly ten thousand miles an hour. The speed had to be lost, and the only way to lose it was by friction against the air. But uncontrolled friction would turn it into a meteor, so Jerry was letting the heat build up by diving the rocket, then turning it upward again in a long glide, where it could cool in the outer fringes of atmosphere. Little by little it was losing its excess of kinetic energy.

Pegasus went into the atmosphere again in a long, shallow, turning glide. The heat built up until Rick's tense, weakened condition couldn't tolerate it any longer. He slid to the floor, unconscious.

Jerry Lipton had flown everything from small private planes to the latest jet. He had directed drone planes into atomic clouds and on trial bomb runs. But never in his career had he been faced with a piloting job like Pegasus.

It had been difficult enough, with just the rocket to worry about. But with Rick's life in his hands.

John Gordon and Gee-Gee Gould were standing by, relaying information to the pilot. Jerry watched the shape on the radar screen climb to higher altitude and asked, "What's his velocity?"

Dr. Bond was doing the calculations, based on the rocket's travel through the radar beam.

"Just above five thousand miles an hour."

Jerry shook his head. "I can't keep him up there all day. How's the temperature?"

Gee-Gee Gould consulted the temperature trace on the display.

"Cabin temperature is 105 Fahrenheit. The monk is in trouble, too. Skin temperature is just about the same as the cabin. That means Rick is running about the same."

"I'm going to cool 'em off." Jerry worked the controls and the angle of ascent steepened. He asked, without taking his eyes from the scope, "How much can he stand?"

The base physician was standing by. He had been summoned hurriedly. "It depends on the time of exposure. He could take quite high temperatures for a very short time."

"I'm worried," Gordon said bluntly. "He hasn't sent a signal since the last one. He must be badly hurt. According to Cliff's calculations, he pulled nearly thirteen G's on the ascent."

"He can't be in very good shape," the doctor agreed. "Can't you bring him down any faster?"

Jerry Lipton shook his head. "The faster the descent, the higher the heat. If the boy's already badly hurt, running his temperature up won't help his condition any. I'm no doctor, all I can do is try to bring him down in one piece, and that's tough enough for me. Decide, and I'll try to follow your plan."

The doctor went into a consultation with John Gordon, Dr. Bond, and Gee-Gee Gould.

"I see what Lipton means about bringing him down as slowly and smoothly as possible," the doctor said. "True, he's probably in bad shape, both physically and mentally, but we've no reason to assume any condition that might be more dangerous than the high temperature."

John Gordon nodded. The Spindrift scientist wanted to assure himself that the boy was all right. But that wasn't reason for taking a chance. "I agree," he said.

Bond and Gould nodded agreement, and John Gordon passed on their decision to Jerry Lipton.

"I think you're being wise," the pilot said. "Okay. Stand by, and I'll do the best I can."

Rick returned to consciousness slowly. He shook his head to clear it, but the grogginess persisted. It was light inside the cabin. He could see reasonably clearly, and he thought dimly that something was wrong. Then he realized what it was. He was plastered against the side of the cabin!

He realized that Pegasus was no longer a rocket, but a glider, traveling in a horizontal position. One part of the wall had become the deck when the rocket changed from vertical to normal flight. He saw the marmoset, still upright, riding smoothly. The channel supporting the spacemonk's little chair had moved as it was supposed to, changing position as the rocket's aspect changed.

The port window nearest Rick was within reach. He hauled himself up. It was like being in a plane. He looked down at the earth from an altitude of about thirty thousand feet. He was almost there, and the rocket was under control!

A wave of relief swept through him, and he sat down. He was going to make it! The cabin was hot, like a closed attic on a hot July day, but it was bearable. He got back to the port again and watched as Pegasus turned in lazy circles many miles in diameter. The earth was coming closer at a pretty good clip. He was almost comfortable now, knowing that Jerry Lipton had the rocket under control.

Rick closed his eyes, for just a moment. But the moment stretched ahead as his weakened body betrayed him. He didn't realize how much time had passed until he opened his eyes again just as Pegasus pulled up into a bank that sent the blood from his head and almost caused him to black out again. But in that instant he knew he was on the landing approach, and that his speed was far too great for comfort.

He had just enough sense left to take the proper precautions. He stretched out on his stomach, feet to the nose of the rocket, and cushioned his head in his hands.

Pegasus flashed low over the hills at the end of Scarlet Lake and touched earth at twelve hundred miles an hour. It bounced, then hit again on the tricycle landing gear. The brakes were applied, gently at first, then with all the strength of the servomotors. The deadly velocity dropped off, but not fast enough. The runway was miles long, but the rocket went over it and into the desert beyond. There was nothing anyone could do.