Collected Short Fiction, page 594
DAWES clambered up the ladder that lined the companionway at the top of the circular room. He realized that, in flight, gyroscopic balancers would keep the ship forever upright—but it was difficult to visualize the way the compartments would be oriented.
At the top of the ladder another crewman waited. “Men’s dorm is straight ahead,” he was told.
Dawes found himself in a compartment large enough for twenty-five persons. There was nothing luxurious about the compartment: no money had been expended on plush carpeting, mosaic tile walls, or the other trimmings customary in commercial spacecraft. The walls were bare metal, unpainted, unornamented.
Dawes recognized Sid Nolan, the engineer from Tulsa, already sprawled out in one of the acceleration cradles. Dawes nodded hello and said, “What are we supposed to do, now that we’re here?”
“Just pick out a cradle and sit down. Once everybody’s aboard they’ll tell us what happens next.”
“Mind if I take this one?” Dawes asked, indicating the cradle that adjoined Nolan’s.
“Why should I mind? Suit yourself.”
Dawes lowered himself into the cradle. It was like an oversize lounge chair, suspended on shockproof cables. At right and left there dangled safety straps to be buckled before blastoff.
The chamber filled quickly. Dawes recognized Ky Noonan, the husky Volunteer, who entered, picked out a cradle, and immediately strapped himself in with an expert hand. Ed Sanderson, the accountant from Milwaukee, was three cradles to Dawes’ left.
Dawes’ watch said 1520 hours when the chamber was filled. A loudspeaker overhead crackled into life.
“Settlers of the planet Osiris, welcome aboard the starship Gegenschein,” a deep, pleasantly resonant voice said. “I’m Captain McKenzie, and for the next four weeks I’ll be in command of your ship. The compartments you now are in will be your residences for the entire journey—but you won’t be as cooped up as it may seem now. There are two lounges, one fore and one aft, and a galley where you’ll take your meals.
“The Gegenschein carries a crew of nine, and you’ll meet them all soon enough. But I’ll have to point out now that this isn’t exactly a luxury liner. My crewmen have their own jobs to do, such as navigating, controlling the fuel flow, servicing the ship in flight. You’ll be responsible for the tidiness of your own cabins, and each day ten of you will serve with the crew to help prepare meals and clean the ship.
“Blastoff will take place, as you know, at 1600 hours. We will travel on rocket drive for eighty-three minutes. At 1723 hours the rocket drive will cease to be operative, and we will make the Einsteinian conversion to nospace at 1730 hours. At 1800 hours dinner will be served in the galley.
“We’ll continue on Einstein drive for the next four weeks. In case any of you intend to get a last look at Earth as we blast off, please be informed now that there are no vision outlets or pickups anywhere in the ship but in the main control cabin. The reason for this is simple: any kind of porthole constitutes a structural weakness in the hull, and since better than 99% of the trip is going to be spent in nospace, where there’s nothing to see anyway, the designing engineers have eliminated the visual outlets.
“Let me ask you now simply to relax, lie back, and get to know your neighbor. Blastoff time is thirty-five minutes from now. Thank you.”
The speaker clicked off.
Minutes ticked away. Dawes tried to freeze in his mind the image of the moon full in the night sky, the Big Dipper, the belt of Orion. Less than ten minutes remained now.
He tried to picture the layout of the ship. At the very top, at the rounded nose, the control cabin and crew quarters were probably located. Then, he thought, below that were the two male dormitories, one on each side of the ship. Then the central lounge, and below that the two female dorms. In the rear, the other lounge, and the galley. And behind them, the rocket combustion chambers and the mysterious compartment housing the Einstein Drive.
He knew very little about the Einstein Drive. Only that its core was a thermonuclear generator that, by establishing a controlled field of greater than solar intensity, created a stress-pattern in the fabric of space. And that the ship would nose through the stress-pattern like a seal gliding through a cleft in the Arctic ice, and the ship would enter the realm termed nospace.
And then? Somehow, travelling faster than the normal universe’s limiting velocity, that of light, the Gegenschein would breast the gulf of light-years and emerge from nospace in the vicinity of Vega, to make a landing on Osiris by conventional chemical-rocket propulsion.
Far beneath him, Dawes sensed the rumbling of the giant rocket engines. There was a thunderous roar; a massive fist pushed down, against his chest, as the ship lifted. His heart pounded furiously under the strain of acceleration. He closed his eyes.
He felt the pang of separation. His last bond with Earth, the bond of gravity, had been severed.
IX
DAWES had never known four weeks could move so slowly.
The novelty of being spaceborne wore off almost at the beginning. In nospace, there was no sense of motion, no rocket vibration, no feeling of acceleration. The ship hung motionless. And the hundred passengers, crammed mercilessly into their tiny vessel, began to feel like prisoners in a large cell.
As “day” dragged into “day” and week into week, Dawes found himself going stale with the monotony and constant discomfort. He counted days, then hours, until landing. He slept as much as he could, sometimes fifteen and sixteen hours a day, until he could manage to sleep no more.
Little cliques were forming aboard the ship as the weeks passed. Groups of six or eight took shape: people from the same geographical area, or people of the same general age and intelligence groups, who saw something to share in their common misfortune. Dawes joined none of these groups. He was the youngest member of the colony, at twenty—by some fluke of the Computer, none of the other men was less than twenty-five, and most were in their early thirties—and he stood to one side, unable to mingle at ease with the older people. Many of them had lost wives, families, homes that had been built and furnished with care and expense, jobs that had cost them outlay of energy and vigorous exertion. He felt guilty, in a way, that he had lost nothing more serious than his education and his chosen profession. Conscious that the other Selectees were adults and he himself something less than that, though more than a boy, Dawes established and observed the gulf between them, and made few friends.
In the third week an election was held; Phil Haas was chosen Colony Director, running unopposed. He announced that he would serve for one year and then would hold new elections. The colonists assembled granted him the right to rule by decree until a constitution could be adopted, and some sort of colonial council established.
Dawes wondered about the unanimity of the election. Certainly there were other men among the fifty who yearned for power. Why had they kept politely silent while Haas was being acclaimed? Men like Dave Matthews, Lee Donaldson: strong men, capable men, outspoken men. Perhaps they were just biding their time, Devers thought. Waiting, letting Haas handle the difficult task of getting the colony in motion, then making their bids.
Dawes shrugged. He had no interest in playing politics. He kept to himself, intending to do his job as a colonist as best he could, without looking for trouble. Let others fight among themselves for responsibilities; he was content to drift passively along. After all, he thought, he hadn’t asked to be sent here. Nor was he going to ask for any great share in the responsibilities.
AT the end of the fourth week, finally—it seemed like the fourth century since blasting off from Earth—a shipwide announcement sent the Osiris colonists scuttling back to their protective cradles.
“The time is 1443 hours, ship time. In exactly twelve minutes, at 1455, we’re going to make a transition out of nospace and back to rocket drive. We’ll enter the atmosphere of Osiris at 1600 hours and take three hours to complete our landing orbit. We’ll touch down on the day-side of Osiris at 1900 hours, which will be exactly noonday down below. Everybody strap down now.”
Dawes’ fingers quivered nervously as he lashed himself into the acceleration cradle. This was it! Landing in less than five hours!
He wondered about Osiris. The Colonization Bureau had prepared a couple of mimeographed sheets about the planet for distribution to the colonists, but the information on them was scanty. He knew that the planet was roughly Earthsize—8100 miles in diameter—and that the soil was arable; that the air was like the air of Earth, only with a trifle less oxygen, a trifle more nitrogen, not enough of a difference to matter; that the planet had seven continents, of which two were polar and thus uninhabitable. Survey team reports were never tremendously reliable: the survey teams moved with desperate haste, often scouting an entire solar system in a day or two, and once they found a world to be reasonably suitable they rarely bothered to look for drawbacks.
According to the survey team report, there was no intelligent life on Osiris, at least not on the temperate northern continent that had been chosen for the colony. It was an easy statement to make; so far intelligent life had been discovered nowhere else in the universe. Many planets had species no more than a hundred thousand years away from intelligence, but nowhere but on Earth was there a culture, a civilization, as much as a language. Or so the findings had been so far.
At 1455 hours came the shock of transition. The Einstein generator lashed out, smashing a gap in the fabric of nospace, and the Gegenschein slipped through the aperture and back into the universe of real things. Instantly the rocket engines came into play, guiding the ship into orbit round the planet below. In a series of ever-narrowing spirals the Gegenschein would glide downward, matching velocities with Osiris, until its path grazed the skin of the planet and the ship came to rest at last.
Lying pinioned in his acceleration cradle, Mike Dawes clenched his teeth against the pounding of the rockets. The Gegenschein was not insulated very well against engine vibration; it was strictly functional, a tube designed to transport people from one world to another, without pretensions to comfort.
He regretted the lack of a vision screen. It might have been inspiring to see Osiris growing steadily ahead as the Gegenschein landed. Much more inspiring than lying on your back in a badly ventilated compartment, Dawes thought, lying in the half-darkness. Somewhere ahead in the night was Osiris, Vega IX, four billion miles from the fourth brightest star in Earth’s sky. Would Sol be visible in Osiris’ night sky? Probably—as an insignificant white dot of negligible magnitude.
NO ONE spoke as the Gegenschein plunged planetward. Each man in the compartment was alone with his dreams and memories now. The minutes passed; at 1600 hours Captain McKenzie announced that the ship had entered Osiris’ atmosphere at last. The actual landing was still three hours away, as the ship swung round the planet, coming closer and closer to the surface—
1900 hours. Within his cradle Mike Dawes struggled to keep his stomach under control. The last hour had been a bumpy, bouncing ride downward through thickening layers of atmosphere. Atmospheric eddies jounced the golden ship; a storm layer buffeted it. But the journey was ending. The Gegenschein hung low over Osiris’ northern temperate continent, dropping, dropping—Landing.
The impact shuddered through the ship. The Gegenschein wobbled only an instant before the landing-jacks took effect, digging into the ground.
Captain McKenzie said, “We’ve landed right on the nose. Welcome to Osiris, ladies and gentlemen.”
We’re here, Dawes thought.
He longed to burrow through the ship’s wall and see the new planet. But an hour more passed before the colonists could leave the ship. First, the routine atmospheric tests (“as if they’ll take us all back home if they discover that the air’s pure helium,” Sid Nolan grumbled). Then, the cooling-off period of fifteen minutes while nozzles beneath the ship’s belly sluiced decontaminating fluids onto the landing area to deal with the radiation products and chemical poisons of the rocket exhaust.
After that, the opening of the hatch, the lowering of the catwalk. No gantry lift waiting for them; descent from the ship would be by ladder only. Phil Haas and Mary Elliot were the first people out; after them came the others, filing in slow shuffle along the companionway until they reached the passenger exit hatch.
Dawes was the twentieth to leave the ship. He stepped out onto the lip of the hatch.
Osiris lay before him. The ship had landed in a clearing at the shore of a glittering blue lake. Beyond the expanse of pinkish-red sand, the soil became more fertile; not far away loomed a dark, ominous-looking forest, and high beyond rose arching black cliffs.
Gray clouds lay heavily in the dark-blue sky like greasy puffs of wool. High overhead burned giant Vega, with its disc the apparent size of the sun of Earth, even at a distance of four billion miles. The air smelled subtly different—thin, with a salt tang to it that was nothing like the tang of the open ocean. And it was cold. The temperature was about fifty, but an icy wind came sleeting down out of the forest, cutting into him as he stood staring sixty feet above the ground.
HE hadn’t expected it to be this cold. For no specific reason he had anticipated tropic heat. But Osiris, at least this continent at this time of year, seemed bleak, inhospitable, uninviting.
“Come on, kid,” someone said behind him. “Don’t stand there all day. Get down the ladder.”
Dawes reddened and scrambled hastily down the catwalk. The others were waiting below. The pinkish sand crunched underfoot. Feeling for the first time, Dawes thought with awe and wonder, the touch of a human foot.
Chill winds swept down on him as he stood huddling into himself for warmth, waiting for Haas to organize things, to take charge. As the colonists filed out of the ship, they wandered about aimlessly on the beach, moving without direction or purpose or words, all of them struggling to minimize the shock of concrete realization that they were alone on an alien planet, never to see Earth again.
At last all hundred had disembarked, as well as Captain McKenzie and his crew.
Haas had obtained a whistle from somewhere. He blew it now.
“Attention! Attention, everybody!”
The wanderers returned to the group. Silence fell. The wind hooted through the distant forest.
Haas said, “Captain McKenzie tells me that he intends to blast off for Earth as soon as possible. Our first job, then, is to unload the ship. We’ll do it in bucketbrigade fashion. Noonan, pick a team of five men and go with Captain McKenzie: you’ll be the ones to get the crates out of the ship. Sanderson, choose three and arrange yourselves near the ship to take the crates as they come out. We’ll pass them along until they’ve been placed over there, at the end of the beach, beyond the five hundred yard safety zone the Gegenschein is going to need.” Haas paused. “Matthews, take four colonists and go scouting around the area. Look around for any lurking wildlife, and yell if you see anything. The rest of you just stay in the area; no wandering off.”
Dawes was passed over by the heads of the teams; he shrugged, thrust his hands in his pockets, and stood to one side. The cargo hatch in the belly of the ship was lowered open, and Noonan and his team entered, while the Gegenschein crew clambered back up the catwalk to ready their ship for departure. In a few minutes, crates began appearing, heavy wire-bound wooden crates that contained all of Earth that there had been room to bring along.
OTHERS lugged the crates across the clearing, out of the way of the ship’s rocket-blast area. The job took nearly an hour. Haas inventoried each crate as it appeared, checking it off against a master list. When half had appeared, he whistled again and rotated the teams, letting the tired men rest and putting fresh ones to work. Dawes took his place in the second team, hauling the crates away from the ship and over to the supply dump.
The cargo hold was nearly empty when Dave Matthews came trotting out of the forest, shouting for Haas.
The Colony Director turned. “What is it, Dave?”
Matthews raced up, panting. Dawes and a few others stopped work to listen to him.
Matthews gasped, “Aliens! I saw aliens!”
Haas frowned. “What?”
“Skulking around in the edge of the forest. Dark shadowy things. They looked like men, or apes, or something.”
A twinge of fear went through Dawes. But Haas smiled. “Are you sure, Dave?”
“How can I be sure? They ran away as soon as I went toward them.”
“Did anyone else in your team see them?” Haas asked, looking at the other four members of the scouting patrol.
“Not me,” Sid Nolan said.
“Me neither,” Paul Wilson agreed. “We came running when Matthews shouted, but we didn’t see anything.”
“And the survey team said there was no intelligent life on Osiris,” Nolan pointed out.
Haas shrugged the matter off. “We’ll check later. You might have been mistaken, Dave.”
“I hope so. But I wasn’t.”
The affair was allowed to drop there. At the moment, it was more urgent to empty out the Gegenschein.
The work made Dawes perspire, and then he felt colder when a gust of wind came. But he enjoyed the mere activity of moving around, of using his muscles after four weeks of dreary confinement.
At last the ship was unloaded. An assortment of packing-crates and smaller cases sat in disorder five hundred yards from the ship. The crewmen bustled busily about, checking off items on a vastly accelerated count-down. It took two days to prepare a ship for blastoff when it was laden with colonists and cargo; empty, it could be readied in only a few hours.
While the crewmen worked, the hundred colonists boarded the ship for the last time, to prepare a meal in the galley. It would be their third meal of the day. But it was only, midday on Osiris, and Haas had ordered that work would continue until sundown, six or seven hours hence, so they would be adjusted to the new time-schedule from the very start. Dawes was on the cleanup crew after the meal. When he emerged from the ship, finally, he saw Haas and Captain McKenzie in conference. Haas was counting, to make certain everyone was off the ship. There was always the chance of a stowaway.
