Stuart Creque, You’re Toast
It’s funny how we think our technology is so reliable, we aren’t constantly at real risk of death. There’s an old saying on Earth: “Never turn your back on the sea.” Well, in space, no matter how you turn, some of it is behind your back, over your head, and under your feet, places where you can’t see the danger all around you.
I was working as a stevedore in the L5 spaceyard, moving cabin stores into the new passenger ship Rigel. It’s always easier to load the ship’s contents during construction when you don’t have to fight gravity or navigate through narrow passageways. I had an open dock tug to pull a few tons of stuff – galley equipment, appliances, tableware – in shrink-wrapped bundles gathered in a cargo net. Easy, right? I’d only done it hundreds of times before.
I’d pulled the load out of the cargo bay of the dock into open space and was set to adjust the trajectory to take it to the far side of the Rigel. I swiveled the thrusters for the new course, hit the button… and nothing.
I muttered under my breath as I unhitched the motor cover. When this kind of thing happens, it’s usually something like ice in one of the fuel or oxidizer lines. A little gentle heat gets everything flowing again.
I wasn’t prepared for what I found: the oxidizer line was leaking. Actually, “leak” is too mild a word: it spewed oxidizer like a geyser on Enceladus.
A fuel leak is pretty bad, but you can generally patch it and let the spilled fuel vaporize into space. An oxidizer leak, well, that’s something else entirely. The stuff eats away anything it touches, and if it touches the wrong thing, you get a huge explosion. It’s really impressive to the people who see it from a distance like I did once. It doesn’t impress the stevedore driving the tug, though: more like compresses him into a pink paste inside his suit and sends him flying off in a random direction – into the side of the ship he’s loading, or into the side of the spaceyard, or out to deep space.
I radioed for recovery, but I was pretty sure that lovely explosion would happen well before anyone could reach me.
My first instinct when I saw that oxidizer leak was to kick off back toward the spaceyard and let the tug and load drift away to a safe distance. Only, that’s a really low-percentage play: if your angle is off by the tiniest bit, you can miss your target – and if you can’t grab onto something solid when you drift by, it doesn’t matter if you miss by meters or microns.
I had no idea how I would get back to the dock. You can’t swim through space: you can only propel yourself through Newton’s Third Law of equal and opposite reaction. If you push your hands or feet out in one direction, you’re also pushing your body in the opposite direction, and the net result is nothing, no motion.
Then I saw it through the shrink-wrap: a toaster oven. A four-slot model for the ship’s self-service breakfast bar, to be exact.
In the tools aboard the tug, I found an electric cutter. I sliced through the shrink-wrap and pulled out the toaster oven. I rummaged deeper into the load until I found the breakfast bar’s bundle of small bread plates. Now I had a plan.
I unhitched the tug, put my back against the load, and shoved with my legs. The tug moved slowly but steadily away from both the load and the spaceyard. I hoped there would be enough separation between it and me before it blew.
Now I clutched my bundle of plates and my toaster oven in my arms, put my feet against the load, pulled myself into a low crouch, and pushed with all my might. Being much less massive than the tug, I achieved a fair bit of speed.
I headed toward the spaceyard, at least approximately. It was an effort to twist around every minute or so to see where my momentum was taking me.
When I realized I was off-angle by a couple of degrees, I pulled one of the plates out of its bundle. I opened the toaster oven, loaded in the plate, took careful aim, and snapped the toaster oven open. The toaster oven’s spring-loaded sliding shelf flung the plate into the void, transferring an equal and opposite amount of momentum to me.
I had gotten a fair distance from the tug and had used five of my “propulsion plates” by the time the explosion happened. It was even more impressive from close up, a glowing blue ball of combustion expanding from a central flashpoint. The tug was still close enough to the load to scorch part of it, but because the energy density of the cloud falls off by the cube of the distance, by the time it hit me, it was just enough to rustle my suit.
However, it did change my course slightly. I had to use a couple of my plates to get back on track to the spaceyard. And it was just a few minutes later that the recovery crew snagged me. As we turned around to go back in, I watched another stevedore chase down the load in her space tug.
They fired the equipment maintenance supervisor, I heard. And the union used this incident to get the company finally to agree to issue the stevedores compressed nitrogen canisters to carry on their suits. You can use them as a personal rocket motor – and as emergency equipment, they beat the hell out of small kitchen appliances.
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On The Edge 