The band played on

by Lester Del Rey

He put one hand on the switch that would unlock the guy cables simultaneously. With the other, he started the peroxide pump for the fuel and threw the switch to ignite the rockets. He could hear the whine of the pump and feel the beginnings of power rumble through the ship, but he kept it at minimum. His eyes were glued to the weather picture on the screen that indicated his best chance coming up. Control was going crazy. With their count-off already finished, they wanted him off! Let them stew! A few seconds' difference in take-off was something he could correct for later.

Then his hand depressed the main blast lever all the way, a split second before he released the cable grapples. The Mollyann jumped free and began to walk upstairs on stilts, teetering and yawing in the wind. But his choice of take-off time had been correct. For the first hundred feet, she behaved herself, though the wind was driving him away from the blast deflection pit.

Then hell began. Acceleration mauled him backwards until only muscles toughened by a thousand previous flights could stand the power he was using. His fingers and arms could barely move against it. Yet they had to dance across the controls. The ship twisted and tilted, with every plate of her screaming in agony from the torsion and distortion of the pressures. Somehow, automatically, his fingers found a combination that righted her. His ears were clogged with the heavy pounding of his blood, his sense of balance was frozen, and his eyes could barely manage to focus on the dials in front of him.

He had stopped normal thinking and become a machine. The ship spun crazily in the twisting chaos of pressure differences. Unaccountably, she stayed upright as his hands moved with an unwilling life of their own, while fuel poured out at a rate that should have blacked him out from the acceleration. It was wasteful, but his only chance was to get through the storm in the shortest possible time and hang the consequences. If he could make the station at all, there would be fuel there for his return kick-off.

He was making no effort to tilt into a normal curve. A red light on the controls sprang into hazy existence before his eyes. The ship was going too fast for the height, heating the hull. He had to risk that, though.

Then surprisingly, the ship began to steady. He'd climbed over the storm.

He cut power back to normal, feeling a return of thought and hearing, and began tilting slowly to swing around the Earth toward his destination on the other side and a thousand miles up. It would make a rotten imitation of a synergy curve, but he'd survived! He felt the big first stage let go, followed by a brief moment with no pressure, until the second stage roared out. Only a little over a minute had passed in the storm, in spite of the hours of torture he had felt.

A voice started shouting in his phones, but he paid no attention to it. Now was his chance to say something heroic, to make the jest that was the ultimate in braggadocio!

"Shut up, damn it! I'm all right!" he screamed into the microphone. How could he figure out a proper saying for the papers when they wouldn't let him alone? Then slowly he realized he'd already answered, and it was too late for pretty phrases.

The second stage kicked off finally, and the third stage went on alone. He set up the rough corrections for his atypical take-off, hoping he hadn't missed too much, while the second hand swept around until he could cut off all power and just drift. Then he lay back, welcoming weightlessness. He was trembling now, and his whole body seemed to be a mass of bruises he couldn't remember getting. Sweat poured from his forehead and goose pimples rose on his arms. He barely made it to the little cabinet in time to be sick without splattering the whole cabin.