They had made an amateur radar operator out of me, because it was easy to do, and gave Sid more time for actual rocket valving. My belt cut me hard as he braked for several seconds.
"There," Sid's voice said in my ear. "We should still be catching up about fifty miles an hour. Let's not ram that thing. See any blip?"
"Not yet. How close are we supposed to be?"
He lit the cabin light and tapped at the calculator that he swung out from its rack. "Still got a hundred miles to go, I'd judge." He moved awkwardly in his suit to finger a switch on his neck and I heard him speaking to the ground again, and heard in my earphones the answer that came up from Woomera. We had eighty miles to go, and were now a little below the orbit of the bird we were chasing.
"Can't have both ends of the stick, Mike," Sid explained, calling me by name for the first time. "As soon as we slowed down we had to drop lower." He fooled around with the steering jets, which were hydrazine-nitric acid rockets much like the tiny motors on my suit, and re-oriented Nelly Bly. A little burst from the nose, and I got my first blip.
"There!" I said, putting a finger on the PPI. "Turn out the light, Sid, so I can see the 'scope'."
He switched off the cabin light and followed my directions with tiny shoves, sometimes from the rockets, sometimes from the steering jets, while I conned us closer.
Our radar would only read within about half a mile. When we got that close I got the searchlight going and took my first real look through the forward port out into space.
It's black. Nothing—nothing you have ever seen will persuade you how dark it is out there. That was my first big shock. Oh, I had practiced in the dark, with only my helmet light to guide my tests and assemblies, but this was a different kind of dark. Our light had no visible beam—you couldn't even tell it was working. At first I had the idea we'd see the satellite occulting some stars, but a little mental arithmetic told me that an object six or eight feet in section would not subtend much of an angle of vision at half a mile.
We had chosen, I decided, much too narrow a beam of light for the searchlight, but just at that moment I got a flash from out in space, and worked the light back on to our objective.