Far from Home

Far from Home, by J.A. Taylor

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Title: Far from Home
Author: J.A. Taylor
Release Date: November 8, 2007 [EBook #23408]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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FAR FROM HOME
[Illustration]
BY J. A. TAYLOR

Illustrated by Emsh
"Far" is strictly a relative term. Half a world away from home is,
sometimes, no distance at all!
Someone must have talked over the fence because the newshounds
were clamoring on the trail within an hour after it happened.
The harassed Controller had lived in an aura of "Restricteds,"
"Classifieds" and "Top Secrets" for so long it had become a mental
conditioning and automatically hedged over information that had been
public property for years via the popular technical mags; but in time
they pried from him an admittance that the Station Service Lift rocket
A. J. "Able Jake" Four had indeed failed to rendezvous with Space
Station One, due at 9:16 Greenwich that morning.
The initial take-off and ascent had gone to flight plan and the pilot, in
the routine check-back after entering free flight had reported no motor
or control faults. At this point, unfortunately, a fault in the tracking
radar transmitter had resulted in it losing contact with the target. The
Controller did not, however, mention the defection of the hungover
operator in fouling up the signal to the standby unit, or the consequent
general confusion in the tracking network with no contact at all
thereafter, and fervently hoped that gentlemen of the press were not too
familiar with the organization of the tracking system.
At least one of the more shrewd looking reporters appeared as though
he were mentally baiting a large trap so the Controller, throwing
caution to the winds, plunged headlong into a violent refutal of various
erroneous reports already common in the streets.
Able Jake did not carry explosives or highly corrosive chemicals, only
some Waste Disposal cylinders, dry foodstuffs and sundry Station
Household supplies.
Furthermore there was no truth in the oft-revived rumors of weaknesses
in the so-called "spine-and-rib" construction of the Baur and Hammond
Type Three vessel under acceleration strain. The type had been

discontinued solely because the rather complicated structure raised
certain stowage difficulties in service with overlong turnabout times
resulting.
There may have been a collision with a meteor he conceded, but, it was
thought, highly unlikely. And now, the urgent business of the search
called, the Controller escaped, perspiring gently.
Able Jake was sighted a few minutes later but it was another three
hours before a service ship could be readied and got away without load
to allow it as much operating margin as possible. Getting a man aboard
was yet another matter. At this stage of space travel no maneuver of
this nature had ever been accomplished outside of theory.
Fuel-thrust-mass ratios were still a thing of pretty close reckoning, and
the service lift ships were simply not built for it.
The ship was in an elliptical orbit and a full degree off its normal
course. A large part of the control room was demolished and there was
a lengthy split in the hull. There was no sign of the pilot and some of
the cargo was missing also. The investigating crew assumed the
obvious and gave it as their opinion that the pilot had been literally
disintegrated by the intense heat of the collision.
The larger part of the world's population made it a point to listen in on
the first space burial service in history over the absent remains of
Johnny Melland.
* * * * *
Such a small thing to cause such a fury. A mere twenty Earth pounds of
an indifferent grade of rock and a little iron, an irregular, ungraceful
lump, spawned somewhere a billion years before as a star died. But it
still had most of the awesome velocity and inertia of its birth.
Able Jake, with the controlling influence of the jets cut, had yawed
slightly and was now traveling crabwise. The meteor on its own course,
a trifle oblique to that of the ship, struck almost directly the slender
spring steel spine, the frightful energy of the impact transmuted on the

instant into a heat that vaporized several feet of the nose and spine
before the dying shock caused an anguished flexing of the ship's
backbone; thrust violently outward along the radial