Traveling Companion Wanted
By Richard Wilson
Illustrated by DILLON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Magazine June 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
To share exps., relieve at wheel—must be
able drive under grt. pressure—in return
transp. doz. mi. or so under ocean bottom!
You remember Regan. He's the man who fell overboard in a spacesuit andfound that there really is a passage to India. It winds down from theChampion Deep in the Atlantic and comes out somewhere off Bombay. Ittook Regan a week to pop in one end of that underworld river and emergeat the other. He was delirious when he bobbed to the surface and waspicked up by the Chinese motorship. Starved, of course; had to spend along time in the hospital after he'd been transferred to shore.
The newspapers and radio and television made quite a thing of it.Reporters managed to interview Regan while he was still weak and maybetalking a little crazy. They got together afterward and agreed amongthemselves on what parts to leave out. Then Regan sold the first-personrights to a syndicate. He insisted on writing the installments himself,but a lot was edited out while the staff writer was re-doing it.
I didn't hear Regan's unpublished story till I met him in the bar atthe Palmer House in Chicago. He'd been attending a geophysical meetingthat I'd had to cover and we'd both got bored with it about the sametime. I thought I recognized him from his pictures and said so. Reganseemed glad to have a non-longhair to talk to, and he talked.
You know why Regan had been wearing a spacesuit in the first place;he'd become something of a hero on the return trip of one of theEarth-Mars hops after a meteor struck. Regan went out through theairlock to make repairs. It was his job as chief of maintenance.Patched up the hole and went back in. Routine, he said.
But the skipper messaged a report to Earth, and when the spaceshipreached the way station to take on landing fuel, the press was waitingfor it. The photographers were along and they wanted Regan to re-enactthe repair scene. He didn't want to, but the skipper insisted becauseit would be good public relations. So Regan climbed into the spacesuitagain and took along his mobile repair gear and tinkered away on thehull while the photogs snapped away from a patrol boat.
That was when the repair unit went out of whack.
Its mobility factor wasn't supposed to do anything more than move himaround on the hull to wherever he had to go. He'd worked with it ahundred times in test sessions and once in reality and it'd always beena lamb. But this time it went all screwy and shoved him off the hull.In some way one of the conduits wrapped itself around his arms like anoctopus, pinning them so he couldn't reach the controls. And in someother way the tiny rocket engine zipped over to full power and plungedhim down toward Earth.
If it had headed him out toward space, it would have been all right.The patrol boat could have overtaken him in a few hours at most andhauled him aboard. But Regan was heading Earthward and soon he was downwhere the traffic's pretty congested. The patrol boat made some valiantefforts, but after a couple of near misses with transcontinentalrockets, it gave up. Better to lose one person than a couple of hundred.
Radio messages were sent to low-flying craft and ships at sea. Thesedidn't do any good, except that a trawler