Sometimes we appreciate a complicated passage in a work by Poul Anderson by summarizing it in a blog post but this passage is extra complicated so please bear with us.
The fleet of spaceships enters planetary orbit at a safe distance from the planet, Rustum. Winged, thermally propelled ferries take some of the crew and all of the colonists to High America, the habitable plateau on Rustum. Some of the crew on the planet refine reaction mass for the return journey while the others help the colonists to get settled.
To unload cargo, each ship in turn is brought to a lower orbit and therefore spirals down through a radiation belt in the planetary magnetic field. To save time, colonist Jan Svoboda, ferried back up, begins preparing cargo for discharge in the flag ship, the Ranger, while it is still descending. The autopilot gives a few seconds of 5G blast to avoid an approaching meteorite just as Svoboda has unslung an object massing more than a ton. Crashing through a deck and smashing a hole in the engine room wall, the object activates the fail safe system of the nuclear plant, thus stopping fusion reaction. The radiation screen goes off and it becomes immediately necessary to:
"'Abandon ship!'" (p. 71)
Maybe that was easier than I had expected.
Tomorrow, once more: a visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop. That means hours away from the computer but probably something worth reporting later.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I remember that part of Part 3, and I think the basic mistake was the new First Captain,* Nils Kivi, not more carefully pre-planning exactly what and when was going to be done by whom beforehand. The fleet commander should have ordered that no cargo was to be unstrapped or unbound before the "Ranger" had reached the desired orbit. Jan Svoboda would not have liked more delay? Tough, sometimes the best way to make haste is to move slowly.
Ad astra! Sean
*Joshua Coffin had resigned as Fleet Commander and chosen to join the new colony on Rustum.
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