It was Garth who had engineered this hideous accident, he told himself. The faithful unsuspecting Garth had turned out to be a traitor. He was the one who had rigged the fuel lines so that at a certain predicted point along the course the flow along one set of conduits would be shunted to the other.
He should have killed Garth instead of merely stunning him, Dollard thought angrily.
For the twentieth time, he fed three-body calculations into the astro-computer. Somehow, somewhere, in the maze of the Newtonian science there had to be an answer. The complexities of force and heading analysis weren't so great but what machinery could eventually solve all the variables involved. That is, if only Sol's overwhelming gravitational attraction didn't provide a free-sliding path to hell with no choice of alternates in the meanwhile....
The click-click of the tape as it emerged from the electronic calculator seemed to present a different rhythm to Dollard's ears on the twenty-first try. Picking up the ribbon, he let his reddened eyes run over the printed symbols, translating them into finished equations. Elation suddenly sent his blood pressure soaring, as the meaning of what he read became apparent. There was a solution ... a course he could follow! One, which while it would not guide him to Venus, would prevent him from plunging into the sun.
Eagerly, he punched the figures for the heading onto a magnetized wire that would be fed into the gyropilot. After the heading was set, he crawled toward the ship's stern, dragging with him a hydrojet welding torch, a tool that could sear metal apart or join it by causing regulation of the molten rod protruding from its spring barrel. In the abdomen of the vessel, he found the wrecked fuel lines and removed the obstruction Garth had set up, repairing the channels.
eturning to the pilot chamber, he pressed the firing button and acceleration returned a form of gravity to the ship's interior, giving him weight for the first time since the freakish accident.
Sighing with relief as the heavens slowly rotated in his screen, Dollard slumped back in his chair. He punched new figures into the computer, thinking ... now once safely back into a no-pull zone, a man with a little luck should be able to make—
His chunky fingers froze to the keys. There was another flaw to be dealt with. The discrepancy was one the course-calculator had clearly pointed out, but he had overlooked it in his haste to get underway. The solution he had followed was the only possible one—that was still quite true. But, use of it only plunged him into a second predicament.