Production Test

And the Kimberly Joints? They had been tested under every conceivable circumstance. In the space room they had been flexed millions of times at a temperature of 0.001 degree K. The metallurgy department had come up with an alloy that looked like perfection. Hundreds of thousands of the springs had been tested without failure before a single one had been built into a suit.

And now they should fail.

And haunted to boot.

He tried to think what the screaming sound might have been. He could only suspect the communicator. And that had been cut off. Perhaps it was some psychological effect. Probably a minor matter, anyway. Of greatest importance was the failure of the Kimberly Joints. If they couldn't be perfected, the company would have to close up or start making flat irons and electric mixers.

He got up slowly and went out through the now empty outer offices. All the hired help had gone home. He supposed there'd still be a few of the boys puttering around in the labs, but he didn't want to see anybody.

He went down to the main floor where production lines were frozen in mid-motion. Scores of suits in all stages of production hung on the movable racks. He walked slowly down the line, from the point where the plastic came from the molds, past the subassembly sections where the intricate regulator valves and communication sets were put together, past the optical section where the circle of hundred and eighty degree lenses were set into the headpieces.

He walked by the test chambers where each plastic carcass was tested for pressure and cold after the Kimberly fastener, an air-tight pressure zipper had been installed. He glanced through a peephole at a score of pressure regulator valves on test. At the end of the line, he reached out to touch a completed suit, set up in its Iron Maiden, ready for shipment.

When he was a kid he'd read stories of space flight, and that was just before space flight had actually begun. Invariably, in the stories, the clean-cut young physicist or engineer would have occasion to hastily don his pleated, gabardine space suit and rush out into the vacuum of interstellar space on some urgent mission. Anyway, it looked like gabardine or something of the sort the way it was drawn by the illustrators. In total vacuum, the material hung in manly looking folds that made the hero look like a champion skier about to take off. Always, of course, the headpiece was a uniform, transparent globe. Kimberly wished he knew what material the artists had in mind for those globes, especially when the neck opening was too small to permit removal.

He glanced wryly at the thick headpieces of his own suits with their ugly semicircle of hundred and eighty degree lenses, and the stubby antenna sticking straight up. Maybe some day they'd get to the transparent globe stage — but it looked a long way ahead, especially in view of Johnson's complaint.

He trundled a carrier up to the nearest finished suit and mounted it, then wheeled slowly towards the space chamber down the line. An "icebox", the engineers called it. There was only one way to find out what was wrong with these suits —

He entered the lock of the chamber and closed the door. He chucked the Iron Maiden off the carrier and stripped off his clothes. From a closet he took a special liner and put it on. It resembled very closely a pair of ancient red flannel drawers.

It used to be that it took at least two other men to get one into an iron pants suit. For the first time now a man could get into a suit by himself — if the suit was a new Kimberly, and provided the Iron Maiden was there to hold it. Without her, six men and a boy couldn't put the suit on him.

Burton, the young engineer who was chiefly responsible for the new joints, was working on a system of dogs to make the Maiden unnecessary, but so far they weren't quite practical.

The Maiden was necessary because the tension of the counterbalances in each of the joints would otherwise have folded the suit into an intractable wad. It was surprising how many newcomers in the various branches of engineering associated with space flight did not appreciate the magnitude of the problem of joints and pressure regulation. So many of them thought all you had to do to build a spacesuit was make a man-shaped balloon, put a man and some air into it and turn him loose. They never realized that a man in such a rig would be spread-eagled by the air pressure that forced the suit to maximum volume and held it there. It wouldn't permit a man to bend an arm or move a leg. And if he could move, the changing volume would introduce such a violent change of air pressure in the suit that it would be uninhabitable.

The springs of the Kimberly Joint were ingeniously built into sheaths in the fabric in such a way as to counterbalance this spread-eagling force, thus leaving the spaceman free to move his body in a somewhat normal fashion.