34. Car Wash
Now that they were committed, the whole atmosphere aboard Universe had changed. There was no more argument; everyone was cooperating to the utmost, and very few people had much sleep for the next two rotations of the nucleus - a hundred hours of Earth time.
The first Halley 'day' was devoted to a still rather cautious tapping of Old Faithful, but when the geyser subsided towards nightfall the technique had been thoroughly mastered. More than a thousand tons of water had been taken aboard; the next period of daylight would be ample for the rest.
Heywood Floyd kept out of the Captain's way, not wishing to press his luck; in any event, Smith had a thousand details to attend to. But the calculation of the new orbit was not among them; that had been checked and rechecked on Earth.
There was no doubt, now, that the concept was brilliant, and the savings even greater than Jolson had claimed. By refuelling on Halley, Universe had eliminated the two major orbit changes involved in the rendezvous with Earth; she could now go straight to her goal, under maximum acceleration, saving many weeks. Despite the possible risks, everyone now applauded the scheme.
Well, almost everyone.
On Earth, the swiftly organized 'Hands off Halley!' society was indignant. Its members (a mere 236, but they knew how to drum up publicity) did not consider the rifling of a celestial body justified, even to save lives. They refused to be placated even when it was pointed out that Universe was merely borrowing material that the comet was about to lose anyway. It was, they argued, the principle of the thing. Their angry communiqués gave much needed light relief aboard Universe.
Cautious as ever, Captain Smith ran the first low-powered tests with one of the attitude-control thrusters; if this became unserviceable, the ship could manage without it, There were no anomalies; the engine behaved exactly as if it was running on the best distilled water from the lunar mines.
Then he tested the central main engine, Number One; if that was damaged, there would be no loss of manoeuvrability - only of total thrust. The ship would still be fully controllable, but, with the four remaining outboards alone, peak acceleration would be down by twenty per cent.
Again, there were no problems; even the sceptics started being polite to Heywood Floyd, and Second Officer Jolson was no longer a social outcast.
The lift-off was scheduled late in the afternoon, just before Old Faithful was due to subside. (Would it still be there to greet the next visitors in seventy-six years' time? Floyd wondered. Perhaps; there were hints of its existence even back on the 1910 photographs.)
There was no countdown, in the dramatic oldtime Cape Canaveral style. When he was quite satisfied that everything was shipshape, Captain Smith applied a mere five tons of thrust on Number One, and Universe drifted slowly upwards and away from the comet.
The acceleration was modest, but the pyrotechnics were awe-inspiring - and, to most of the watchers, wholly unexpected. Until now, the jets from the main engines had been virtually invisible, being formed entirely of highly ionized oxygen and hydrogen. Even when - hundreds of kilometres away - the gases had cooled off enough to combine chemically, there was still nothing to be seen, because the reaction gave no light in the visible spectrum.
But now, Universe was climbing away from Halley on a column of incandescence too brilliant for the eye to look upon; it seemed almost a solid pillar of flame. Where it hit the ground, rock exploded upwards and outwards; as it departed for ever, Universe was carving its signature, like cosmic graffiti, across the nucleus of Halley's Comet.
Most of the passengers, accustomed to climbing spacewards with no visible means of support, reacted with considerable shock. Floyd waited for the inevitable explanation; one of his minor pleasures was catching Willis in some scientific error, but this very seldom …
