Spectrum 5 - [Anthology]

by Kingsley Amis

  Yet, though such stubborn faith might prove to be in vain, it had its advantages. Stubborn men die hard—sometimes it takes more than merely impossible difficulties to persuade a stubborn man to die at all.

  “I think you have the right idea,” Blake said.

  There was a silence as Blake returned his attention to the dawn, then Cooke remarked, “We won’t have but a few more like that—before we leave here, one sun or the other will be in view all the time. And, by then, the yellow one will be too bright to permit any sunrise effects from the other one.”

  “Aurora doesn’t have many days left.”

  “What a show that will be!” Cooke mused. “First a nova as Aurora goes into the yellow sun, then the big blue-white sun will go into the nova.” Then he sighed and said, “But I sort of hate to see it. I don’t care about the suns, but I hate to see Aurora go up in a blaze, no matter how glorious that blaze may be. She’s a hard world on humans, but she forced us to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. She’s a beautiful little devil and I hate to see her destroyed.”

  The good die young, Blake thought, watching the dawn flame into vivid, fiery life. Not that Aurora was good. She was cruel and beautiful; she was a splendid, glittering prison taking them with her on her swift, silent flight to extinction.

  It was not the way a world should die. The death of a world should come only when the fires of her sun went out. A world should grow old and cold for millennia upon millennia; death should come slowly and quietly like that of an old, old woman. But it would not be so for Aurora; for her death would be quick and violent and she would explode a yellow sun into a nova as she died.

  * * *

  Two days later they were ready to put X145 to the test. It was similar to the long-past X117 in that the same blue-white diamond swung from the same long thread, but the assembly was of a different form and the steam engine was cold. They had made a battery, a simply storage battery, and X145 would either succeed or fail with the battery’s small current.

  The tension was far greater than it had ever been at any previous test, and even Cooke had no cheerful smile or remarks. X145 would be the test; if it failed all their labors leading up to it had been to a dead-end. And they would have no time to try another approach.

  “I guess we’re ready,” Cooke said. Blake went to the rheostat that controlled the amount of current and the others grouped about the X145 assembly.

  “I’ll give it the juice gradually,” Blake said. “Although if it as much as quivers at full current, we really will have our drive.”

  Blake watched the diamond as he turned the rheostat’s knob. He felt the faint click of it as it made first contact, then flinched involuntarily as something cracked like a pistol shot and the diamond, thread and scale vanished. Something clattered to the floor across the room and Lenson’s surprised question was cut off by a shout from Cooke: “Look—the scale!”

  He ran to where it had fallen and picked it up, holding it for all to see. There was a hole torn through it.

  “How much . . . how much power did you give it?” he demanded of Blake.

  “Minimum current,” Blake replied.

  “Minimum current,” Wilfred murmured. “Minimum current—and it shot the diamond through the scale!”

  The torn scale was passed from hand to hand and the talk it engendered was both voluble and optimistic.

  Cooke hurried out after another scale and Blake and Lenson connected another rheostat in series with the first, then added still another when Wilfred gave the results of his calculations on the slide rule.

  Cooke returned with the scale, a much larger one, and a block of copper. “Three?” He lifted his eyebrows toward the three rheostats. “If we can budge a pound of copper with full current through three rheostats, then we can lift a thousand ships with our generator.”

  The copper block was suspended from the scale, to swing down in the field of the X145, and Blake said, “I’ll try minimum current again, even though it may not be enough to affect it at all. We can’t expect it to do anything spectacular at minimum current, I’m sure.”

  He turned the rheostat knob a fraction of an inch and felt the faint click, his eyes on the copper block. There was a roar, sharp and deafening in the room, and the copper block vanished as the diamond had. A hard pull of hot air struck him and something ricocheted back down from the roof to strike him painfully on the shoulder, a fragment of metal from the scale. Wilfred was pointing upward, yelling something. “ . . . Through the roof!”

  Blake looked up and saw what he meant; there was a small hole torn through the hull of the ship over their heads, a hole such as would be made by a one-pound block of copper.

  “Three rheostats,” Cooke exclaimed. “We not only have the power to lift our ship; we could lift ten thousand of them!”

  Cooke began to make rapid calculations and Wilfred followed suit. Blake, curious though he was, saw no reason for three of them to work simultaneously on the same problem so he waited, as did Taylor and Lenson. Taylor was smiling; the first time in many days he had seen the old man smile.

  * * *

  “The problem of power for the hyperspace drive no longer exists,” Lenson said. “We can apply the same principles to its alteration that we just now made use of and we can actually ‘slip’ through the barrier rather than bulldozing our way through it.”

  “We have a means of driving our ship and we have a means of slipping her into hyperspace,” Blake said. “We’ve come mighty near to succeeding in our plans—will we have the time to succeed all the way?”

  “Time?” Lenson looked surprised. “How much time do you want? We have seven days. Isn’t that enough?”

  Blake shook his head. “We can’t have the ship ready in that short space of time. To leave here within seven days we’ll have to—”

  “Did I say ten thousand ships?” Cooke’s black eyes glittered with exultation. “We could move a world with the power in that generator!”

  “We’ve really reversed the gravitic flow,” Wilfred said, as enthused as Cooke. “The only power required to move an object is that for the reversing field—or whatever we should call it. This power requirement is negligible with a capital N.”

  “Homeward bound!” Cooke said. “Safe and snug beyond the nova’s reach in hyperspace!”

  “If we want to give up the habit of breathing,” Blake pointed out.

  The four of them stared at him, and one by one their faces fell as they realized what he referred to; the thing they had forgotten in the intensity of their efforts to devise a drive.

  “The ship—” Cooke was the first to express the thought in the minds of all of them. “It leaks like a sieve!”

  “How, in seven days, can we finish cutting the two halves of the ship apart, wall in the cut-off end and repair all the broken-apart seams?” Blake asked.

  “We can’t,” Taylor said. He sat down, suddenly old and tired, his former cheerfulness gone. “I don’t see how we could make the ship leak-proof in less than four months with the tools and materials we have.” He smiled again, but without mirth. “But we came close to succeeding, didn’t we?”

  “We’ll succeed,” Blake said. “It’s a tough problem, apparently, but I have an idea.”

  “How about enclosing the ship in a gravitic field large enough to hold its air by plain gravity?” Wilfred asked.

  “And how big a field would that have to be?” Lenson asked.

  “Big,” Blake said. “Even in hyperspace, it will take us six months to get home—or near that. Air has a tendency to leak away and dissipate into space rather easily. I doubt that we could enclose the ship in a field large enough to hold enough air to last us for six months—as I say, it leaks away into space very easily.”

  “The gradual loss of our air would be an unpleasant way to die,” Cooke said. “The ship leaks, we don’t have the time to repair it, so what do we do? How do we solve that last little problem?”

  “Seven days to do a four months’
repair job—” Lenson sat down beside Taylor and sighed. “It looks like we can’t make our ship leak-proof in the time we have. But surely there is some way—”

  “There is,” Blake said. “We have a perfect method of both getting home and keeping air in our ship. It should be obvious to all of you.”

  Questioning looks gave way to dawning comprehension. There was a long silence as they considered the plan, then Cooke said, “After all, a fortune was what we set out for.”

  “We’ll have to call them in advance,” Wilfred said. “We can’t just barge in.”

  Blake nodded. “Homeward bound, safe and snug in hyperspace—but, as you say, we’ll have to radio them in advance. If we just barreled in without giving them a chance to tell us where to park, it could raise merry hell with everything.”

  * * *

  Redmond, control-tower radio operator of Spaceport 1, New Earth, was puzzled. He scratched his thinning hair and leaned closer to the speaker. The voice from it came in distinctly, but faintly.

  “Can’t you step up your volume?” he asked.

  “No,” the tiny voice answered. “I told you we had to couple in the driver stage—our power stage is gone.”

  “How far out are you?” Redmond asked.

  “About a billion miles. Did you get what I told you? This is the Star Scout and we’re just back from beyond the Thousand Suns. We were going to get caught by a nova—”

  “I got everything,” Redmond interrupted. “Your planet was going into the yellow sun and its high carbon content would create a nova. You learned how to control field-type forces so that you would have a drive for your ship. So you came back to New Earth—or a billion miles out from it. But why do you keep insisting that I have my superiors engage an astrophysicist to tell you where to park your ship? And another thing—you said it would take four months to make your ship leak-proof and you only had seven days. How did you do a four months’ job in seven days?”

  “We didn’t,” the thin voice from the speaker answered. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you and that’s why we’ll have to have an astrophysicist define our parking place. We didn’t have time to repair our ship, and we couldn’t enclose it in a gravitic field large enough to hold air for six months.”

  Redmond clutched his thinning hair again, feeling suddenly dizzy. “You don’t mean—”

  “Yeah. We brought the planet with us.”

  <>

  * * * *

  THE FAR LOOK

  by Theodore L. Thomas

  The ship appeared first as a dot low on the horizon. The television cameras immediately picked it up. At first the ship did not give the impression of motion; it seemed to hover motionless and swell in size. Then in a few seconds it passed the first television station, the screaming roar of its passage rocking the camera slightly.

  Thirty miles beyond, its belly skids touched the packed New Mexican sand. An immense dust cloud stirred into life at the rear of the ship and spread slowly across the desert.

  As soon as the ship touched, the three helicopters took off to meet it. The helicopters were ten miles away when the ship halted and lay motionless. The dust began to dissipate rearward. The late afternoon sun distorted the flowing lines of the ship and made it look like some outlandish beast of prey crouched on the desert.

  As the lead helicopter drew within a mile of the ship, its television camera caught the ship clearly for the first time. Telephoto lenses brought it in close, and viewers once again watched closely. They looked admiringly at the stubby swept-back wings and at the gaping opening at the rear from which poured the fires of hell itself. But most of all they looked to the area amidship where the door was.

  And as they watched, the door swung open. The sun slanted in and showed two figures standing there. The figures moved to a point just inside the door and stopped. They stood there looking out, motionless, for what seemed an interminable period. Then the two figures looked at each other, nodded, and jumped out the door.

  Though the sand was only four feet below the sill of the door, both men fell to their knees. They quickly arose, knocked the dust from their clothes, and started walking to where the helicopters were waiting. And all over the country people watched that now-familiar moon walk—the rocking of the body from side to side to get too-heavy feet off the ground, the relaxed muscles on the down step where the foot just seemed to plop against the ground.

  But the cameras did not focus on the general appearance or action of the men. The zoom lenses went to work and a close-up of the faces of the two men side by side flashed across the country.

  The faces even at first glance seemed different. And as the cameras lingered, it became apparent that the difference was in the eyes: a level-eyed expression, undeviating, penetrating, probing, yet laden with compassion. There was a look of things seen from deep inside, and of things seen beyond the range of normal vision. It was a far look, a compelling look, a powerful look set in the eyes of normal men. And even when those eyes were closed, there was something different. A network of tiny creases laced out from both corners of each eye. The crinkled appearance of the eyes made each man appear older than he was, older and strangely wizened.

  The cameras stayed on the men’s faces as they awkwardly walked toward the helicopters. Even though several dignitaries hurried forward to greet the men, the camera remained on the faces, transmitting that strange look for all to see. A nation crammed forward to watch.

  In Macon, Georgia, Mary Sinderman touched a wetted finger to the bottom of the iron. She heard it pop as she stared across her ironing board at the television screen with the faces of two men on it.

  “Charlie. Oh, Charlie,” she called. “Here they are.”

  A dark, squat man in an undershirt came into the room and looked at the picture. “Yeah,” he grunted. “They got it all right. Both of ‘em.”

  “Aren’t they handsome?” she said.

  He threw a black look at her and said, “No, they ain’t.” And he went out the door he had come in.

  In Stamford, Connecticut, Walter Dwyer lowered his newspaper and peered over the top of it at the faces of two men on the television screen. “Look at that, honey,” he said.

  His wife looked up from her section of the paper and nodded silently. He said, “Two more, dear. If this keeps up, we’ll all be able to retire and let them run things.” She chuckled, and nodded and continued to watch the screen.

  In Boise, Idaho, the Tankard Saloon was doing a moderate business. The television set was on up over one end of the bar. The faces of two men flashed on the screen. Slowly a silence fell over the saloon as one person after another stopped what he was doing to watch. One man sitting in close under the screen raised his drink high in tribute to the two faces.

  * * * *

  In a long, low building on the New Mexican flats, the wall TV set was on. A thin young man wearing heavy glasses sat stiffly erect on a folding chair, watching the two faces. “Dr. Scott,” he said, “they both have the look.”

  The older man nodded wordlessly.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to find out anything this time, Dr. Scott?” young Webb asked.

  A slight urge to tell this young man to keep his big fat mouth shut rose up in Dr. Scott. He noted the urge and filed it away with other urges toward bright young men who believe everything they learned at college, and no more.

  “I don’t know, Dr. Webb,” he said. “We’ve examined sixteen of these fellows without finding out anything so far.”

  The two men boarded a helicopter. The screen faded to a blare of martial music, and then came to life on a toothy announcer praising the virtues of a hair shampoo. Webb snapped the set off, turned to Scott, and said, “Of course, you’ve isolated all the factors resulting from your system of selection?”

  Scott clamped his teeth down on the bit of his cold pipe. He took time to strike a match and puff it back to life, and then he was able to answer calmly, “Yes, of course. The first ten men we chose were not
selected by the same standards we use now. Two of them died on the Moon, but the same ratio of those who returned developed the far look. The change in the selection system seems to effect survival— but not the ‘far look.’ “

  “Then it must be something that happens to them. Don’t all these men go through some experience in common?”

  “All the men go through a great many experiences in common,” Scott answered. “They go through two years of intensive training. They make a flight through space and land on the Moon. They spend twenty-eight days of hell reading instruments, making surveys, and collecting samples. They suffer loneliness such as no human being has ever known before. Their lives are in constant peril. Each pair has had at least one disaster during their stay. Then they get their replacements and come back to Earth. Yes, they have something in common all right. But a few come back without the far look. They’ve improved; they’re better than most men here on Earth. But they are not on a par with the rest.”