"We're not in this for laughs! This is damned important. If it really is a weapon up there, a nuclear bomb . . ."
"I'll be the first to know, won't I?"
The countdown of the solid rocket booster went smooth- ly, swiftly, as Kinsman sat alone in the Manta spacecraft perched atop the rocket's nose. There was always the chance that a man or machine would fail at a crucial point and turn the intricate, delicately poised booster into a very large and powerful bomb.
Kinsman sat tautly in the contoured seat, listening to them tick off the seconds. He hated countdowns, hated being helpless, completely dependent on faceless voices that flick- ered through his earphones, waiting childlike in a mechanical womb, not truly alive, doubled up and crowded by the unfeeling impersonal machinery that automatically gave him warmth and breath and life.
Waiting.
He could feel the tiny vibrations along his spine that told him the ship was awakening. Green lights blossomed across the control panel, telling him that everything was functioning 111 and ready. Still the voices droned through his earphones in carefully measured cadence:
". . . three . . . two . . . one . . ."
And she bellowed to life. Acceleration flattened Kins- man into the seat. Vibration rattled his eyes in their sockets. Time became a meaningless roar. The surging, engulfing, overpowering bellow of the rocket engines made his head ring even after they had burned out into silence.
Within minutes he was in orbit, the long slender rocket stages falling away behind, together with all sensation of weight. Kinsman sat alone in the squat, delta-shaped space- craft: weightless, free of Earth.
Still he was the helpless unstirring one. Computers sent guidance corrections from the ground to the Mania's controls. Tiny vectoring thrusters squirted on and off, microscopic puffs that maneuvered the craft into the precise orbit needed for catching the Soviet satellite.
What if she zaps me as I approach her? Kinsman wondered.
Completely around the world he spun, southward over the Pacific and then up over the wrinkled cloud-shrouded mass of Eurasia. They must have picked me up on their radars, he thought. They must know that I'm chasing their bird. As he swung across Alaska the voices from the ground began talking to him again. He answered them as automati- cally as the machines did, reading numbers off the control panels, proving to them that he was alive and functioning properly.
Then Smitty's voice cut in. He was serving as communi- cator from Vandenberg. "There's been another launch, fif- teen minutes ago. From the cosmonaut base at Tyuratam. High-energy boost. Looks like you're going to have com- pany."
Kinsman acknowledged the information, but still sat unmoving.
Finally he saw it hurtling toward him. He came to life. To meet and board the satellite he had to match its orbit and velocity exactly. He was approaching too fast. Radar and computer data flashed in amber flickers across the screens on Kinsman's control panel. His eyes and fingers moved con- stantly, a well-trained pianist performing a new and tricky 112 sonata. He worked the thruster controls and finally eased his Manta into a rendezvous orbit a few dozen meters from the massive Russian satellite.
The big satellite seemed to hang motionless in space just ahead of him, a huge inert chunk of metal, dazzlingly brilliant where the sun lit its curving flank, totally invisible where it was in shadow. It looked ridiculously like a crescent moon made of flush-welded aluminum. A smaller crescent puzzled Kinsman until he realized it was a rocket nozzle hanging from the satellite's tailcan.
"I'm parked off her stern about fifty meters," he re- ported into his helmet microphone. "She looks like the complete upper stage of a Proton-class booster. I'm going outside."
"Better make it fast." Smitty's voice was taut, high- pitched with nervousness. "That second spacecraft is closing in fast."
"E.T.A.?"
A pause while voices mumbled in the background. Then, "About twenty minutes . . . maybe less."
