o space. I
have to use magnetic screws on reassembly, so there is no point saving
what I take out. Doug Folley has doped out something like a motorman's
change-dispenser that will dispense one screw at a time into my
tweezers, and I'll carry a supply of all thirty-four kinds at my
waist."

"That's one," he counted on a hairy forefinger.

"We can use something like a double-faced pressure-sensitive tape to
hold other parts," I said. "We'll draw a diagram on it, stick it to
some unopened part of the satellite near where I'm working, and as I
pull pieces out, I'll just press them against the other sticky face,
in the correct place in the diagram, and they'll be there to pull
loose when I want them."

"At absolute zero?" he scoffed. "That sticky face will be hard as
glass."

"We'll face the bird around to the sun," I said. "And warm it up. If
we have to, we'll put wiring in the tape, connect it to Telstar's
battery supply, and keep it warm."

"Might work," he grumped. "That's two. How about the spacesuit part?"

That had been tougher. Some forty or fifty men had made the ride into
space and back from Cape Canaveral by this time, and there had been
rendezvous in space in preparation for flights to the moon. But so far
no one had done any free maneuvering in space in a suit.

[Illustration]

They had put me in a swimming pool in a concentrated salt solution
that gave me just zero buoyancy, and I had practiced a kind of
skin-diving in a spacesuit. The problem was one of mobility, and the
one thing we could not reproduce, of course, was frictionless motion.
No matter how I moved, the viscosity of the solution quickly slowed me
down. Out in space I'd have to learn on the first try how to get
around where every force imparted a motion that would continue
indefinitely until an equal and opposite force had been applied.

The force part had been worked out in theory long before. To my
spacesuit they had fixed two tiny rockets. One aimed out from the
small of my back, the other straight out from my belly. Two
pressurized containers contained hydrazine and nitric acid, which
could be released in tiny streams into peanut rocket chambers by a
single valve-release. They were self-igniting, and spurted out a
needle-fine jet of fire that imparted a few dynes of force as long as
the valve was held open. It only had two positions--full open, or
closed, so that navigation would consist of triggering the valve
briefly open until a