Rip smiled as Dominico glided along. He looked as though the tubes were floating him over the asteroid, instead of the other way around.
Santos took the radiation detection instruments and the case with the astrogation equipment from Koa. Rip greeted his men briefly, then took his computing board and began figuring. He knew the men were glad he and Santos had made it. But they kept their greetings short. A spinning asteroid was no place for long and sentimental speeches.
He remembered the dimensions of the asteroid and its mass. He computed its inertia, then figured out what it would take to overcome the inertia of the spin.
The mathematics would have been simple under normal conditions, but doing them on the run, trying to watch his step at the same time, made things a little complicated. He had to hold the board under his arm, run alongside Santos while the new sergeant held the case open, select the book he wanted, open it and try to read the tables by his belt light and[pg 211] then transfer the data to the board.
His ventilator had quieted down once he got into the darkness, but now it started whining slightly again because he was sweating profusely. Finally he figured out the thrust needed to stop the spin. Now all he had to do was compute how much fuel it would take.
He had figures on the amount of thrust given by the kind of rocket fuel in the tubes. He also knew how much fuel each tube contained. But the figures were not in his head. They were on reference sheets.
He collected the data on the fly, slowing down now and then to read something, until a yell from Santos or Koa warned that the sun line was creeping close. When he had all data noted on the board, he started his mathematics. He was right in the middle of a laborious equation when he stumbled over a thorium crystal. He went headlong, shooting like a rocket three feet above the ground. His board flew away at a tangent. His stylus sped out of his glove like a miniature projectile, and the slide rule clanged against his bubble.
It happened so fast neither Koa nor Santos had time to grab him. The action had given him extra speed and he saw with horror that he was going to crash into Trudeau. He yelled, "Frenchy! Watch out!" Then put both hands before him to protect his helmet. His hands caught the French Planeteer between the shoulders with a bone-jarring thud.