(ed note: in the year 2050, our heros are members of the Southwestern Rocket Society (SRS) fan club. The fans want to travel in space in the worst way, but civilians are not allowed to fly in their own ships.

On a field trip to Luna Louis' rocket junkyard they are stunned to find the space ship Absyrtis sitting in the lot. As it turns out that ship was Mr. Louis' last command when he was in the UN Space Force, and when the ship was decommissioned he managed to obtain it at scrap metal prices.

Club president Chubb Delany has an insane idea. He tells Mr. Louis that the club would love to refurbish the old ship, and fly it on a short hop to Luna. With Mr. Louis as captain.

Mr. Louis says if the club will promise that, he will give the ship to them free, along with any used rocket parts in the lot needed for the refurbishing.)

THE SPACE SHIP ABSYRTIS

UN Space Force interplanetary cruiser, missile launching, universal type, Argonaut Class

The space ship Absyrtis of the Argonaut Class saw twenty-two years of service as a ship of the UN Space Force line fleet, and an additional five years in support and reserve capacity. She was a member of the fleet which put down the Asgard Space Station Rebellion. After her modification to an express cargo vessel, she was instrumental in the sustenance of the outposts and colony on Venus. Subsequent modifications enabled her to serve the Jovian moons. She operated as a support ship in the Titan expedition to Saturn, but obsolescence forced her to confine her operations to the Earth-Luna area in which she served in many capacities until being mothballed and placed in circum-terrestrial orbit. She was finally returned to White Sands Spaceport, sealed, decommissioned, and left to stand for two years before being sold to a local salvage yard.

She was the first ship to bear the name and the last of her class to be decommissioned and removed from the Big Book. Her reliability earned for herself and her crews three ratings of excellence, two efficiency awards, a UN citation, numerous national commendations, and the International Astronautical Federation plaque in connection with her work in the Jovian moons area.

Manufacturer: Hueco Spacecraft Inc., White Sands Spaceport, America, Terra.

Commissioned: May 2018

(Chubb's genetic makeup predisposes him to be overweight, not allowed in space crews

“Have you, now?” Louis said quizzically. “And how do you like the farce space flight is now?”“Farce?” Chubb echoed.“Farce, son. They’re too sloppy these days. It’s too easy. Automatic controls. Nuclear drives. There was a time when space flight was an art! Yes, sir An art! Not button pushing! Used to load her up with thermo-propellants, hit the firing button when the clock said so, and fly her by the seat of your pants and the astrostat ! All the time wondering if she was going to blow! … That was space flight! Pilots, they call themselves! Bah! Bus drivers is what they arel” He settled back in his chair and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Now, in the good old days, it was different. Take the old Absyrtis back there on my lot …”The junk yard was old stuff to Chubb, but LeRoy was utterly amazed at the terrific amounts of junk of all types. As the old skipper led them out to where the Absyrtis towered seventy meters over the low sheds, the real estate man found himself making mental estimates of the combined worth of this desert land and the tremendous inventory on it. It was plain to see that Luna Louis was not a down-and-out old spacebum. “Captain, there seems to be a little bit of everything here. How’d you come by it all?”“Ships are scrapped all the time, mate,” Louis replied.“Why? Do they wear out?”“No, sir! They just get obsolete,,and it becomes cheaper to build a new ship than to modify the old one,” Luna Louis explained. “The Bureau of Space Commerce has some pretty strict rules about the condition of space craft; when a ship reaches a certain age, they usually down-check it on principle …”“How’s that?”“They figure it’s old enough that if something hasn’t happened to it yet, it will. But with a little decent maintenance and repair, a space ship’s good for over a hundred years … and a power plant’s good for a lot longer than that because its operating time is only a fraction of that of its ship.” Louis paused for a moment. “Of course, we get a good deal of equipment from wrecked or damaged ships. Got one lad who does nothing but sit up on the roof with a pair of binoculars watching for ships that don’t make the grade …” He let it drop at that because they had reached the boat-tail of the Absyrtis. Chubb stopped to catch his breath and looked up. In addition to the rust streaking her sides, there was no doubt that this ship was old. The tall, slim, almost regal lines were not those of a modern ship. Modern ships looked efficient; they were. The Absyrtis was merely beautiful, a work of art, the result of a designer with a sense of line and sweep and proportion who had labored over his drawing boards doing work which he must have loved. It was reflected starting from the parabola of revolution of her nose cone down her sleek, unbroken sides to the graceful curve of her boat-tail with its six gaping thrust chambers, and in the swallow-like profile of her drooping wings. It belonged to another day of space flight.“Shipped many a ton of lunar ore in this bucket,” Louis said in recollection. “But she was a bitch to handle under thrust. Shake? Man, she’d shake your teeth right out! And the center of pressure would tend to wander forward of the center of gravity if you didn’t watch the mass distribution. Let’s go aboard.” He grabbed a rope ladder hanging down the side of the ship and clambered spryly aloft with an agility which amazed Chubb and LeRoy.LeRoy followed and Chubb waited until the other had gained the lock high on the ship before he entrusted his full weight to the ropes. He didn’t look down; if he had, he would have frozen to the ladder with vertigo. He kept his eyes aloft and climbed steadily, hand-foot-hand-foot. He was out of breath when he stepped through the air lock and looked around.The tour of the old ship was fascinating. Chubb’s eyes were alight the entire time. It was like a childhood dream come true. It brought up memories entombed by the years and Chubb remembered the toy spaceships which looked like the Absyrtis and the drawings he had hopefully sent to the Space Force at White Sands, crude sketches of a “Sooper Space Combat Rocket”. And there were forgotten memories of a chubby little boy playing spaceman in that pile of boxes in the back yard, dreaming of a space ship the image of which was the Absyrtis.Just being in her gave him a feeling of satisfaction he had not experienced for years. Feeling the cold metal of her companionways and smelling the ancient, musty odors of far-off worlds which still lingered in her made him suddenly realize with a pang of sorrow and regret that this could have been his—could have, if he had had a different gene makeupThe Absyrtis was far from a complete space ship. Most of the power plant essentials were missing, the electronics had been stripped, and there were no astrogation instruments. The Absyrtis had seen hand tools, but not a cutting torch.“Give her just a few essentials and she’s ready to lift,” Louis remarked, sitting down on an acceleration couch in the barren, echoing control room far forward in the nose. “Many’s the time I’ve sweated it out on this couch, mates. But this old bucket never failed me. A taut, reliable old ship she was. After we converted her to thermo-juice, she saw Mars and Venus and Ganymede. Bailey took her out to Titan once after I got stuck on dirt for keeps. But she knows her way into Dianaport by heart; hardly have to lay a finger on the board for a landing. She just sniffs her way in.”“What are you going to do with her, skipper?” Chubb ventured to ask.“She’s the last of her kind, mate. The pure-nuclear ships have taken over now. And a new kind of spaceman is flying them. We’re both obsolete, so she stays here with me. Oh, maybe one of these days I’ll get me a red-hot crew together. We may not get high enough to crash, but we’ll still get oft the ground again. The regulation hounds will try to stop us, but to hell with them! It’s a sad thing, mates, when the laws won’t let a man do what he wants or even kill himself as long as he doesn’t hurt anybody else in the process.” The old man’s eyes were on the empty holes in the control panels where instruments, lights, and switches should have been.

(ed note: Mr. Louis takes them up on their offer. In exchange for refurbishing the Absyrtis and keeping Louis as captain, he will give them the ship for free)

Refitting the Absyrtis turned out to be quite a task. The old ship lacked more than was apparent on a cursory inspection. As a result, Chubb closed the doors to his consulting office in order to devote his full energies to the project.So he moved in with Luna Louis, sharing the old bachelor’s quarters with him. It was far from being luxurious, but Chubb was having the time of his life. He didn’t really care where he slept or when he ate; he had his hands on a space ship at last.Louis turned out to be less senile than any of them expected. He seemed to snap out of his dreamy moods. The transition was strange to behold. Once again, he stood straight and his voice carried the tone of authority and casual competence. His eyes became alert, and his mind sharpened like a rusty knife edge that has been put to the whetstone at long last.The youngsters of the SRS were by far the most persistent at the work site. They came in droves on Friday afternoon and stayed on the job until Monday morning when they dragged back across the desert to classes or to their jobs. Many of them came out during the week to perform the many tasks at hand.Their first job was a complete and minute inspection of the ship as she stood. No manuals on the Argonaut Class could be found, but Luna Louis turned out to be a man of remarkable memory.“Hey, skipper, this valve seat mikes a tenth of a millimeter less than the blade. What gives here?” LeRoy called from the power room on the temporary intercom Bert Eggstrom had rigged.Louis answered from the forward radar blister, “Where did it come from?”“The feed heater just abaft of the forward tank bay.”“That sounds about right, Mister Finch. What’s the condition of the seat and gland packing?”“Packing’s shot. But how can this valve seal?”“Don’t worry about it. It gets hot in that forward feed heater. Thermal expansion of the seat causes that valve to seal tighter than your old britches. Get the part number off that valve, and we’ll see if maybe I’ve got some packing for it. Pull the whole valve and take it down to the shop.”“Right-o, skipper!”“Hey, skipper?” Chubb’s voce echoed up the main ship well. “Got a minute?”Louis turned to the youngster who was working in the blister with him. “Yank that sweep selsyn , Jimmy. The rotor’s shot. I think maybe one of the units from that old Mark Fourteen radar out in the yard will fit. Don’t bother with those cap screws; knock it loose with a hammer, because you’ll have to drill and tap new holes anyway."“How about these waveguide junctions, skipper?”“Put the torque wrench to them. They’ll warp back,” the old skipper told him, handing him his tools and crawling out of the little hatch into the main portion of the ship. Wiping the sweat from his neck with a piece of waste, he yelled down the well, “Up here, mate!”Chubb came puffing up the ladder from below. “Here’s a survey of the equipment in the boat-tail, skipper.”Leafing slowly through the sheaf of papers handed to him, Louis mused, “Not as bad as I expected.”“What do you mean, skipper? Half the structural members back there are bent, broken, or missing! Engineering-wise, it’s flimsy as a paper bag!”“And just what do you know about space ship structures, Mister Delany?” Louis asked sarcastically. “The tail of this bucket was grossly over-designed. We ripped out those members years ago to make room for the thermo-juice drive.” He handed the papers back to Chubb and told him, “Take them down and give them to that gal who’s doing the consolidation. I’ve got most of these missing parts—or something that will do the job.”“Check, skipper. Tank bays and radars are the only lists we need now. Maybe we’d better start thinking about moving the ship out to a launching pad.”“Why move her?”“Huh?”“A fine “engineer you are! What would the costs be? I've got the parts, the shops, and the tools right here.”Chubb thought about this. “You mean refit and lift from here?”“Is there a better place?”“But it’ll wreck your yard when we lift, skipper.”“So it will. But once we raise ship, mate, I’ll not be needing this yard any longer.”Chubb stared at him for a moment, then quietly went out the hatch and clambered down the hastily-rigged servicing tower. A month ago, he would have paled at the thought of hanging on a slender ladder fifty meters up. He had in fact done so. But it didn’t bother him now, and he was in much better physical shape. It was a matter of pride to him that he had managed to lose five kilos.Wandering back through the yard toward the hut they were using for an office, he noticed the change in Luna Louis’ junk yard. Old tools had been ressurected from the heaps, cleaned up, and placed in sheds. Under a ragged tarpoline, three youths were hydrostating valves and pressure vessels; beside them was a jury-rigged flow bench. Farther down the line, he passed a leaning shack in which Bert and several other men were working over old radar gear. A sign over the door proudly announced, “Department of Witchcraft and Sorcery. Slightly Used Pentacles and Klystrons For Sale.”