by Jerry
Anyway, after Lynds completed six orbital revolutions, they began the deceleration and descent. The whole affair, as I said, was very solidly based on technical determinations of stresses, heat limits, patterns of glide, and Bannister’s absolute conviction that nothing would let go. The bitter part was that it let go just short of where Lynds might have made it. He was through the bad part of it, the primary and secondary decelerations, the stretches where you think if you don’t fry from the heat, the ship will melt apart under you, and the buffeting in the upper levels when ionospheric resistance really starts to take hold. And believe me, the buffeting that you know about, when you approach Mach 1 in an after-burnered machine, is a piece of cake to the buffeting at Mach 5 in a rocket when you hit the atmosphere, any level of atmosphere. The meteorites that strike our atmosphere don’t just burn up, we know that now. They also get knocked to bits. And they’re solid iron.
Lynds was about seventy miles up, his velocity down to a point or two over Mach 2, in level flight heading east over the south Atlantic. From about that altitude, manual controls are essential, not just to make one feel better, but because you really need them. The automated controls did not have any tolerance. You don’t understand, do you? Look, when one flies and wants to alter direction, one applies pressure to the control surfaces, altering their positions, redirecting the flow of air over the wings, the rudder and so forth. Now, in applying pressure, you occasionally have to ease up or perhaps press a bit more, as the case may be, to counteract turbulence, shift in air current, or any of a million other circumstances that can occur. That all depends on touch. It’s what makes some flyers live longer than others. It’s like the drag on a fishing reel. You set it tight or loose according to the weight of the fish you’re playing. When you reel in, the line can’t become too tight or it will snap, so you have the drag. It’s really quite ingenious. It lets the fish pull out line as you reel in. It’s the degree of tolerance that makes it work well as an instrument. In flying, the degree of tolerance, the compensating factor is in man’s hands. In the atmosphere, it’s too unpredictable for any other way.
Well, they calculated to set the dive brakes at twelve degrees at the point where Lynds was. Lynds saw it all.
“This is more like my cup of tea,” he said at that point. “Harry, the sky is a strange kind of purple black up here.”
“They’re going to activate the brakes, Den,” I said. “What’s it like?”
“Not yet, Harry. Not yet.”
I looked at Bannister. He noted the chart, his finger under a line of calculations.
“The precise rate of speed and the exact instant of calculation, Captain Jackson,” Bannister said. “Would you care to question anything further.”
“He said not yet,” I told him.
“Therefore you would say not yet?”
“I would say this. He’s about in the stratosphere. He knows where he is now. He’s one of the finest pilots in the world. He’ll feel the right moment better than your instruments.”
“Ridiculous. Fourteen seconds. Stand by.”
“Wait,” I said.
“And if we wait, where does he come down, I ask you? You cannot calculate haphazardly, by feel. There are only four points at which the landing can be made. It must be now.”
I flipped the communications switch, still looking at Bannister.
“This is it, Den. They’re coming out now.”
“Yes, I see them. What are they set for?”
“Twelve degrees.”
“I’m dropping like a stone, Harry. Tell them to ease up on the brake. Bannister, do you hear me? Bring them in or they’ll tear off. This is not flying, anymore.” His voice sounded as if he was having difficulty breathing.
“Harry,” he called.
They held the brakes at twelve degrees, of course. The calculations dictated that. They tore away in fifteen seconds.
“Bannister! They’re gone,” Dennis shouted. “They’re gone, Bannister, you butcher. Now what do you say?”
Bannister’s face didn’t flinch. He watched the controls steadily.
“Try half-degree rudder in either direction,” I said.
Bannister looked at me for a second. “His direction is vertical, Captain. Would you attempt a rudder manipulation in a vertical dive?”
“Not a terminal velocity drive, Bannister. He said it’s not flying anymore. Lord knows which way he’s falling.”
“So?”
“So I’d try anything. You’ve got to slow him.”
“Or return him to level flight.”
“At this speed?”
We both looked at the controls now. The ship was accelerating again, and dropping so rapidly I couldn’t follow the revolutions counter.
“Engage the ailerons,” Bannister ordered. “Point seven degrees, negative.”
Dennis came back on. “Harry, what are you doing? The ship is falling apart. The ailerons. It won’t help. Listen, Harry, you’ve got to be careful. The flight configuration is so tenuous, anything can turn this thing into a falling stone. It had to happen, I knew, but I don’t want to believe it now. This sitting here with that noise getting louder. It’s spiraling out at me, getting bigger. Now it’s smaller again. I’m afraid, Harry. The ailerons, Harry, they’re gone. Very tenuous. They’re gone. I can’t see anything. The screens are black. No more shaking. No more noise. It’s quiet and I hear myself breathing, Harry. Harry, the wrist straps on the suits are too tight. And the helmet, when you want to scratch your face, you can go mad. And Harry—”
That was the end of the communications. Something in the transmitter must have gone. They never found out. He didn’t hit until almost a minute later, and nobody ever saw it. The tracking screen followed him down very precisely and very silently. There was no retrieving anything, of course. You don’t conduct salvage operations in the middle of the south Atlantic.
I turned in my report after that. No one had asked for it, so it went through unorthodox channels. It took an awfully long time and my suspension did not become effective until after the second shot. I was the pilot on that one, you know. I got them to install the duplicate controls, over the insistence by Bannister that resorting to them, even in the event that it became necessary, would prove nothing. He even went as far as to talk about load redistribution electric control design. As a matter of fact, I thought he had me for a while, but I think in the end they decided to try to avoid the waste of another vehicle. At least, that might be the kind of argument that would carry weight. The vehicles were enormously expensive, you realize.
I made it all right, as I said. It took me nine hours and then some, once they dropped me from orbit. I switched off the automatic controls at the point where the dive brakes were to have been engaged. This time, the brakes had not responded to the auto controls and they did not open at all. I found out readily enough why Lynds was against opening them at that point. Metal fatigue had brought the ship to a point where even a shift in my position could cause it to stop flying.
I came down in Australia and the braking ‘chute tore right out when I released it. I skidded nine miles. A Royal Australian Air Force helicopter picked me up two hours later.
I learned of the suspension while in the hospital. I didn’t get out until just in time to get to London for the hearing. My evidence and Forrest’s, and Lynds’ recorded voice all served to no purpose. You don’t become a hero by proving an expert wrong. It doesn’t work that way. It would not do to have Bannister looked upon as a bad gambit, not after all they went through to stay in power after putting him in. The reason, after all, was all in the way you looked at it. And a human element could always be overlooked in the cause of human endeavor. Especially when the constituents never find out about it.
After that, they started experimentation with powered returns. The atmosphere has been conquered, and now there remained the last stage. They never did it successfully. They couldn’t. But it did not really matter. What it all proved was that they did no
t really need pilots for what Bannister was after. He had started with a premise of testing man’s reactions to space probes under actual conditions, but what he was actually doing was testing space probes alone, with man as a necessary evil to contend with to give the project a reason.
It was all like putting a man in a racing car traveling flat out on the Salts in Bonneville, Utah. He’ll survive, of course. But put the man in the car with no controls for him to operate and then run the thing completely through remote transmission, and you’ve eliminated the purpose for the man. Survival as an afterthought might be a thing to test, if you didn’t care a hoot about man. Survival for its own sake doesn’t mean anything unless I’ve missed the whole point of living, somewhere along the line.
Bannister once described to me the firing of a prototype V-2. The firing took place after sunset. When the rocket had achieved a certain altitude, it suddenly took on a brilliant yellow glow. It had passed beyond the shadow of the earth and risen into the sunlight. Here was Bannister’s passion. He was out to establish the feasibility of putting a rocket vehicle on the moon. It could have a man in it, or a monkey. Both were just as useless. Neither could fly the thing back, even if it did get down in one piece. It could tell us nothing about the moon we didn’t already know. Getting it down in one piece, of course, was the reason why they gave Bannister the project to begin with.
So Bannister is now a triumphant hero, despite the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. But nobody understood it. Bannister put a vehicle on the moon. We were the first to do it. We proved something by doing nothing. Perhaps the situation of true classified information is not too healthy a one, at that. You see, we’ve had rockets with that kind of power for an awfully long time now. Maybe some of them know what he’s up to. When I think about that, I really become frightened.
The monkey, I suppose, is dead. The most we can hope for is that he died fast. It’s very like another kind of miserable hope I felt once, a long time ago, for a lot of people who could be offered little more than hope for a fast death, because of something somebody was trying to prove. There’s some consolation this time. It’s really only a monkey.
This I know, they’ll never publish a picture of the vehicle. Someone might start to wonder why the cabin seems equipped to carry a man.
When you’re out in a clear night in summer, the sky looks very friendly, the moon a big pleasant place where nothing at all can happen to you. The vehicle used in Project Argus had a porthole. I can’t imagine why. The monkey must have been able to see out the porthole. Did he notice, I wonder, whether the earth looks friendly from out there. THE END
THE SEEDER
Max Williams
Being just plain Pop was not enough—he was bucking for All-Fatherhood.
IT TOOK me less than three thousand years to catch up with Pop; which, all things considered, was pretty good going. I came out of overdrive at 018970 hours in orbit around an ugly-looking A3-type planet, and there was his ship below me.
I slammed my cruiser down right alongside—hard enough to pulverize a couple of feet of basalt and make Pop and his ship bounce a little. He’d put me to quite a bit of trouble and I was annoyed.
Pop got to his feet and stood there looking kind of sheepish as I climbed out of the cruiser. The old fool had his helmet off and was breathing in the foul atmosphere as if it were health gas. His gills had begun to turn a little blue from the methane and C02. He was a character all right.
His name wasn’t really Pop, of course. I guess the nickname had been tacked on because he was such an eccentric. old codger, and because he looked like a couple of billion years old. Actually, of course, he wasn’t nearly that old.
“Welcome aboard planet,” he said. “I kind of figured you’d be along sooner or later. Or someone like you.”
“Well, I’m here,” I said. He looked harmless, but I kept a 201R projector on him just in case. Pop had given Security Division a lot of trouble, and I had strict orders.
I crawled over to his ship and slid inside. The cabin looked neat enough, but the old fool had so much junk crammed into the ship you could hardly turn around. I found what I was looking for toward the bow—row after row of cylindrical canisters. I broke one open and the biodetector on my back began to stutter like crazy. I dropped it and sprayed them all until they glowed dull green. By then the contents were cooked.
POP was still standing in the same place when I crawled out, looking as casual as you please. He only had a few eyes on me. Most of them he had turned toward the planet’s oversize satellite and a raw, angry-looking sea that was breaking a few ship’s-lengths away.
“How’d you catch up with me?” he asked.
“Space warp. You left a trail a child could follow.” I moved around his ship and found the reason he was looking so innocent. He’d already set up one of his canisters and the seal was about to break. I sprayed it. So much for several billion one-celled forms of life bottled under pressure.
“All right,” I said. “That’s the last of them. Let’s get going.”
“Okay,” said Pop. “Never argue with Security Division. Still, you’ve got to admit I gave you a good run for your money. And I seeded quite a mess of planets.”
I shouldn’t have done it, but I was angry. I snapped a claw across his nerve center before he could draw it back into his shell. It must have hurt plenty, because ten or twelve of his eyes began to water.
“Seeded, hell!” I said. “You touched down on exactly 9080 planets, and I sterilized every one of them after you left. That’s what took me so long.”
He seemed to shrink a little inside, and for the first time I realized just how old the nut really was.
“All that time,” he said. “All that effort wasted. Damn. Double damn.”
“You should have figured that in the first place,” I said. “Central Maxim 0438 clearly states that no life is to be introduced into the outer galaxies. And don’t ask me why. I’m no biologist. I just follow orders.”
“Listen,” said Pop. “Please listen. Back at Central Galaxy they think we—our race—is pretty much immortal. But they don’t know. They don’t know for sure if any life will be left in our galaxy after two or three hundred wars like the last one and—”
“Hold it,” I said. “You’re wasting your time. I’m not a philosopher and you know it.”
“That’s right,” said Pop. “And you’re not a biologist, either. You told me.” He waved a claw in gesture of resignation number seven. “Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe I have been an old fool. Let’s go home. No use hanging around an ugly planet like this one.” He made gesture of contempt number fifteen.
Well, I thought, that’s a relief. Maybe the old geezer wasn’t as crazy as I’d figured. Maybe he just needed some sense slapped into him. At any rate, he didn’t make any trouble when I disintegrated his ship—the old crate wasn’t spaceworthy to begin with—and he climbed into my cruiser meek as could be.
I PUT the drive in low and pulled out of the system. The next planet—Pop had landed on the third—was going through G14 disintegration into asteroids, but I eased through without any trouble and began to pick up speed.
Just then Pop swung around in his seat and made good-luck gesture eight and long-life gesture twelve toward the planet we’d left.
I stared at him. “I don’t get it,” I said. “Just a while ago you agreed that was an ugly hunk of rock. You even made contempt gesture fifteen—you spat on it.”
“That’s right,” said Pop. “I did, didn’t I? Right into a pool of brackish water.” Then he began to chuckle. He kept on chuckling for five years, until I got annoyed and slapped his nerve center again.
Aside from that, the return voyage was uneventful.
END
SOMETHING STRANGE
Kingsley Amis
SOMETHING STRANGE HAPpened every day. It might happen during the morning, while the two men were taking their readings and observations and the two women busy with the domesti
c routine: the big faces had come during the morning. Or, as with the little faces and the coloured fires, the strange thing would happen in the afternoon, in the middle of Bruno’s maintenance programme and Clovis’s transmission to Base, Iia’s rounds of the garden and Myri’s work on her story. The evening was often undisturbed, the night less often.
They all understood that ordinary temporal expressions had no meaning for people confined indefinitely, as they were, to a motionless steel sphere hanging in a region of space so empty that the light of the nearest star took some hundreds of years to reach them. The Standing Orders devised by Base, however, recommended that they adopt a twenty-four-hour unit of time, as was the rule on the Earth they had not seen for many months. The arrangement suited them well: their work, recreation and rest seemed to fall naturally into the periods provided. It was only the prospect of year after year of the same routine, stretching further into the future than they could see, that was a source of strain.
Bruno commented on this to Clovis after a morning spent repairing a fault in the’ spectrum analyser they used for investigating and classifying the nearer stars. They were sitting at the main observation port in the lounge, drinking the midday cocktail and waiting for the women to join them.
“I’d say we stood up to it extremely well,” Clovis said in answer to Bruno. “Perhaps too well.”
Bruno hunched his fat figure upright. “How do you mean?”
“We may be hindering our chances of being relieved.”
“Base has never said a word about our relief.”
“Exactly. With half a million stations to staff, it’ll be a long time before they get round to one like this, where everything runs smoothly. You and I are a perfect team, and you have Lia and I have Myri, and they’re all right together—no real conflict at all. Hence no reason for a relief.”
