Just now he wasn't worrying about the East World rocket. Not at this point. With Drone Able riding to starboard, the Aztec was moving at an ever slower rate of speed. It would continue to decelerate, slowed by the earth's pull as it moved outward, traveling on inertial force since the silencing of its engines. By the time it reached the neutral zone where the moon and earth gravispheres canceled each other, the Aztec would have just enough speed left to coast into the moon's field of influence. Then it would accelerate again, picking up speed until slowed by its braking rockets. That was the hour that occupied his thoughts—a time when he would be called upon for split-second decisions coming in waves.
He tried to anticipate every contingency. The mass ratio necessary to inject the Aztec into its moon trajectory had precluded fuel beyond the absolute minimum needed. The rocket would approach the moon in an elliptical path, correct its heading to a north-south line relative to the planet and decelerate in a tight spiral. At a precise point in space he would have to start using the braking rockets, slow the ship until they occupied an exact point in the infinite space-time continuum, then let down into cliff-brimmed Arzachel, a bleak, airless, utterly alien wasteland with but one virtue: Uranium. That and the fact that it represented the gateway to the Solar System.
He mentally reviewed the scene a hundred times. He would do this and this and that. He rehearsed each step, each operation, each fleeting second in which all the long years of planning would summate in victory or disaster. He was the X in the equation in which the Y-scale was represented by the radar altimeter. He would juggle speed, deceleration, altitude, mass and a dozen other variables, keeping them in delicate balance. Nor could he forget for one second the hostile architecture of their destination.
For all practical purposes Arzachel was a huge hole sunk in the moon—a vast depression undoubtedly broken by rocks, rills, rough lava outcrops. The task struck him as similar to trying to land a high-speed jet in a well shaft. Well, almost as bad.
He tried to anticipate possible contingencies, formulating his responses to each. He was, he thought, like an actor preparing for his first night. Only this time there would be no repeat performance. The critics were the gods of chance in a strictly one-night stand.
Gotch was the man who had placed him here. But the responsibility was all his. Gotch! All he gave a damn about was the moon—a chunk of real estate scorned by its Maker. Crag bit his lip ruefully. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, boy, he thought. You asked for it—practically begged for it. Now you've got it.
By the end of the second day the novelty of space had worn off. Crag and Prochaska routinely checked the myriad of instruments jammed into the faces of the consoles: Meteorite impact counters, erosion counters, radiation counters—counters of all kinds. Little numbers on dials and gauges that told man how he was faring in the wastelands of the universe. Nagel kept a special watch on the oxygen pressure gauge. Meteorite damage had been one of Gotch's fears. A hole the size of a pinhead could mean eventual death through oxygen loss, hence Nagel seldom let a half-hour pass without checking the readings.
Crag and Prochaska spelled each other in brief catnaps. Larkwell, with no duties to perform, was restless. At first he had passed long hours at the viewports, uttering exclamations of surprise and delight from time to time. But sight of the ebony sky with its fields of strewn jewels had, in the end, tended to make him moody. He spent most of the second day dozing.
Nagel kept busy prowling through the oxygen gear, testing connections and making minor adjustments. His seeming concern with the equipment bothered Crag. The narrow escape with the time bomb had robbed him of his confidence in the crew. He told himself the bomb could have been planted during the last security shakedown. But a "sleeper" in security seemed highly unlikely. So did a "sleeper" in the Aztec. Everyone of them, he knew, had been scanned under the finest security microscope almost from birth to the moment each had climbed the tall ladder leading to the space cabin.