“You don’t have to convince us, sir,” said Roger with a smile. “We’ll never forget it as long as we live.”
Later, when Tom, Roger and Astro had taken a shower and dressed in fresh uniforms, Strong came in with an audioscriber and the three cadets gave the full version of their adventure for the official report back to the Academy. When they had finished, Strong told them of his efforts to find them.
“We knew you were in trouble right away,” said Strong, “and we tracked you on radar. But that blasted storm fouled us all up. We figured that the sand would have covered up the ship, and that the chances of finding you in a scout were very small, so I got permission from Commander Walters to organize this ground search for you.” He paused. “Frankly we had just about given up hope. Took us three weeks finally to locate the section of desert you landed in.”
“We knew you would come, sir,” said Tom, “but we didn’t have enough water to wait for you—and we had to leave.”
“Boys,” said Strong slowly, “I’ve had a lot of wonderful things happen to me in the Solar Guard. But I have to confess that seeing you three space-brained idiots clinging to that raft, ready to eat a raw fish—well, that was just about the happiest moment of my life.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Roger, “and I think I can speak for Tom and Astro when I say that seeing you here with over a hundred men, and all this equipment, ready to start searching for us in that desert—well, it makes us feel pretty proud to be members of an outfit where the skipper feels that way about his crew!”
“What happens now, sir?” asked Tom.
“Aside from getting a well-deserved liberty, it’s back to the old grind at the Academy. The Polaris is at the spaceport at Marsopolis, waiting for us.” He paused and eyed the three cadets with a smile. “I guess the routine at Space Academy will seem a little dull now, after what you’ve been through.”
“Captain Strong,” said Astro formally, “I know I speak for Tom and Roger when I say that routine is all we want for a long time to come!”
“Amen!” added Tom and Roger in unison.
“Very well,” said Strong. “Polaris unit—Staaaaand TO!”
The three boys snapped to attention.
“You are hereby ordered to report aboard the Polaris at fifteen hundred hours and stand by to raise ship!”
He returned their salutes, turned sharply and walked from the room.
Outside, Steve Strong leaned against the wall and stared through the crystal shell of the atmosphere station into the endless desert.
“Thank you, Mars,” he said softly, “for making spacemen out of the Polaris crew!” He saluted sharply and walked away.
Tom suddenly burst from the room with Roger and Astro yelling after him.
“Hey, Tom, where you going?” yelled Roger.
“I’ve got to get a bottle of that water out of the canal for my kid brother Billy!” shouted Tom and disappeared down a slidestairs.
Roger turned to Astro and said, “That’s what I call a real spaceman.”
“What do you mean?” asked Astro.
“After what we’ve been through, he still remembers that his kid brother wants a bottle of water from a canal as a souvenir!”
“Yeah,” breathed Astro, “Tom Corbett is—is—a real spaceman!”
DANGER IN DEEP SPACE
(originally published in 1953)
CHAPTER 1
“Stand by to reduce thrust on main drive rockets!” The tall, broad-shouldered officer in the uniform of the Solar Guard snapped out the order as he watched the telescanner screen and saw the Western Hemisphere of Earth looming larger and larger.
“Aye, aye, Captain Strong,” replied a handsome curly-haired Space Cadet. He turned to the ship’s intercom and spoke quickly into the microphone.
“Control deck to power deck. Check in!”
“Power deck, aye,” a bull-throated voice bellowed over the loud-speaker.
“Stand by rockets, Astro! We’re coming in for a landing.”
“Standing by!”
The Solar Guard officer turned away from the telescanner and glanced quickly over the illuminated banks of indicators on the control panel. “Is our orbit to Space Academy clear?” he asked the cadet. “Have we been assigned a landing ramp?”
“I’ll check topside, sir,” answered the cadet, turning back to the intercom. “Control deck to radar deck. Check in!”
“Radar bridge, aye,” drawled a lazy voice over the speaker.
“Are we cleared for landing, Roger?”
“Everything clear as glass ahead, Tom,” was the calm reply.
“We’re steady on orbit and we touch down on ramp seven. Then”—the voice began to quicken with excitement—“three weeks’ liberty coming up!”
The rumbling voice of the power-deck cadet suddenly broke in over the intercom. “Lay off that space gas, Manning. Just see that this space wagon gets on the ground in one piece. Then you can dream about your leave!”
“Plug your jets, you big Venusian ape man,” was the reply, “or I’ll turn you inside out!”
“Yeah? You and what fleet of spaceships?”
“Just me, buster, with my bare hands!”
The Solar Guard officer on the control deck smiled at the young cadet beside him as the good-natured argument crackled over the intercom speaker overhead. “Looks like those two will never stop battling, Corbett,” he commented dryly.
“Guess they’ll never learn, sir,” sighed the cadet.
“That’s all right. It’s when they stop battling that I’ll start getting worried,” answered the officer. He turned back to the controls. “One hundred thousand feet from Earth’s surface! Begin landing procedure!”
As Cadet Tom Corbett snapped orders into the intercom and his unit-mates responded by smooth co-ordinated action, the giant rocket cruiser Polaris slowly arched through Earth’s atmosphere, first nosing up to lose speed and then settling tailfirst toward its destination—the spaceport at Space Academy, U.S.A.
Far below, on the grounds of the Academy, cadets wearing the green uniforms of first-year Earthworms and the blue of the upper-classmen stopped all activity as they heard the blasting of the braking rockets high in the heavens. They stared enviously into the sky, watching the smooth steel-hulled spaceship drop toward the concrete ramp area of the spaceport, three miles away.
In his office at the top of the gleaming Tower of Galileo, Commander Walters, commandant of Space Academy, paused for a moment from his duties and turned from his desk to watch the touchdown of the great spaceship. And on the grassy quadrangle, Warrant Officer Mike McKenny, short and stubby in his scarlet uniform of the enlisted Solar Guard, stopped his frustrating task of drilling newly arrived cadets to watch the mighty ship come to Earth.
Young and old, the feeling of belonging to the great fleet that patrolled the space lanes across the millions of miles of the solar system was something that never died in a true spaceman. The green-clad cadets dreamed of the future when they would feel the bucking rockets in their backs. And the older men smiled faintly as memories of their own first space flight came to mind.
Aboard the Polaris, the young cadet crew worked swiftly and smoothly to bring their ship to a safe landing. There was Tom Corbett, an average young man in this age of science, who had been selected as the control-deck and command