“I’m serious, Chris. There have been far too many silly damned women who’ve given their quixotic boyfriends their all, and waved them goodbye, and then sat and moped in widowhood for the rest of their lives.” She chuckled grimly. “We used to have a rather good motto in the Underground — although we were careful never to say it aloud if any of the Leaders were around: ‘Do what you’re told, and volunteer for nothing.’ ”
It was Wilkinson’s turn to laugh. “That motto,” he told her, “came into existence with the world’s first army. It was passed on to the first navy and then, after the lapse of millennia, to the first air force. Then, oddly enough, the Space Navy got hold of it …”
“That makes no difference to the truth of it.”
“Oh, it’s true, up to a point. But I’ve said that I’ll do the job. I can’t back out now.”
“Can’t you? You may be the only astronaut on the premises, but that doesn’t make you God’s gift to aeronautics. It may interest you to know that Natalie belonged to a gliding club, back at some place called Austral on Earth, and told me that after a couple of lessons she’d be able to handle a folplane.”
“But who’s going to issue her license? Don’t you know the regulations? So many hours with an instructor, so many hours solo, so many takeoffs, so many landings …”
“And who the hell is going to ask to see her license on that cockeyed Coil of Time next door? John Carter, or Dejah Thoris, or Carthoris, or Thuvia, or Tars Tarkas, or … or …”
“A thoat-herder’s license might be more to the point,” admitted Wilkinson.
“So what does it matter? Natalie wants to share the risks with Boris — and I want you to share a certain freedom from risk with me. Of course, if you insist on going …” She abruptly turned away from him.
He took hold of her shoulders, tried to turn her back. At first she resisted, then came willingly enough. But still she kept her arms, her tightly clenched fists, between them. She whispered, “Only if you promise. Only if you promise to teach Natalie, to give her her chance.”
He surrendered at last, but he muttered, “I’ll feel like a louse.”
“Better a live louse than a dead lion,” she said.
XI
“VANESSA, I suppose?” Titov said when Wilkinson told him of his decision not to make the Time Jump.
Wilkinson admitted this.
“Can’t say that I blame her. Come to that,” he added, “I had my troubles last night. Natalie’s determined to come with me, and she’s quite convinced that a day’s instruction is all she needs to be able to fly the folplane.” He snorted. “Women!”
“Women!” agreed Wilkinson.
“So, Chris, I’ll be vastly obliged if you do your best to get that wench of mine airborne as soon as the contraption’s to hand.”
“I still think,” said Wilkinson stubbornly, “that it’s no job for a woman.”
“Isn’t it? Oh, perhaps we in Science City are a little less square than you astronautical types. Of course, you have centuries of tradition to contend with, tradition that’s been building up ever since the very first ship was launched. Women and children first, and all the rest of it.” He laughed. “Oh, I’m not sneering, Chris. Tradition’s a fine thing. But there are times when it has to be jettisoned. Look at it this way. Suppose something goes wrong with Henshaw’s Time Twister … won’t it be better if Natalie and I are marooned together on some other Coil of Time than for me to be stuck there, and for her to be stuck here?”
The rocket from Marsala came in then, skidding to a spectacular landing in a great cloud of glittering ice crystals. Wilkinson and the biologist walked out to it, reached it just as the outer airlock door opened. The first of the technicians to emerge called, his voice muffled by his respirator, “Hi, Cap! Got some parcels for you here!” Two of his mates dumped the bundles out onto the snow, then passed down from the aircraft a half dozen gas cylinders.
By this time Vanessa and Natalie had joined them.
“When do we start?” asked the red-haired girl.
“Now, if you like,” Wilkinson told her. “Give me a hand to lug all this junk clear of the rocket.”
Even in a gravitational field as heavy as Earth’s there would have been no real work involved. The pack containing the folplane itself was fantastically light, and the motor, the power packs and the skis of the undercarriage came in cases and a strapped bundle that could be carried with ease. The gas bottles were weightier than the other components, but they were small and not hard to handle.
Wilkinson led the way to a smooth stretch of snow where there were no protruding boulders. He unsnapped the catches on the pack, carefully unfolded the fabric of the collapsed aircraft, and spread it out on the ground. It looked like a silhouette of an old-fashioned airplane cut by a child out of a sheet of crumpled paper. He then removed the motor and one of the power packs from their cases, carefully set them down on the patches of reinforced fabric marked for their reception, and snapped the retaining straps into place. Then, as the others watched in mystification, he placed the cylinders that he would not be using on other reinforced patches — patches that, when the thing was inflated, would become shallow sockets.
“What’s the idea, Chris?” asked Titov.
“Ballast,” replied Wilkinson. “We’ll be filling this thing with helium, and we don’t want it taking off before there’s anybody aboard it.”
“But why helium? Why not carbon dioxide, or ordinary compressed air?”
Wilkinson paused in his work. “The folplane, inflated and with a full payload, has negative buoyancy. But it’s still so light that the motor doesn’t have to work very hard to keep it airborne — and, of course, this means that it has a much greater cruising range. Then, too, in the event of motor failure you drift down like a falling leaf; you don’t drop like a stone.”
“Just as well,” said Titov, “seeing that I’ll have an inexperienced pilot.”
“I may be inexperienced now,” Natalie told him sharply.
By this time Wilkinson had the cylinders connected up, and was opening the valves. Slowly the wings and fuselage of the folplane swelled; slowly the wrinkles were smoothed from the thing’s yellow hide. It stood there on its stubby landing gear — the skis, and the struts that were no more than tightly inflated tubes of plastic — looking more like a toy than a real flying machine. Of the party, only Natalie showed any enthusiasm.
“I think I can fly her,” she said. “I know I can fly her.”
And, as Wilkinson was bound to admit, she was right. She mastered the simple controls the first time in the air, made child’s play of the power-conserving technique of drifting in to a landing with a dead motor. And it was she who suggested an improvement to the takeoff procedure, this being to steer for a gently swelling hummock, run for it at full speed and then, from its summit, literally jump into the air.
After she had made three solo flights — the second and third with Titov as passenger — Wilkinson was satisfied.
He also felt far less guilty.
• • •
So Titov and Natalie were ready, but Henshaw was not. By this time Wilkinson was beginning to appreciate the importance of the role played by the Director of Science City, the man who was more a politician and administrator than a real scientist. There had been bright ideas aplenty on this expedition, but nobody seemed to have been possessed of the necessary patience to work out irksome details in advance. There had been far too much playing by ear.
It took Henshaw three days to make the required modifications to his apparatus — three days in which Wilkinson acted as flying instructor to Titov as well as to Natalie, three days in which the technicians from Marsala made some progress with the engineroom repairs. It was on the evening of the third day, just after the departure of the Jones and Wilson rocket for the spaceport, that Henshaw at last announced that he was ready.
Very promptly, Titov and Natalie said that they, too, were ready. And so, in their spacesuits, hung ar
ound with weapons and equipment like Christmas trees, helium bottles stacked around their feet, holding the packaged folplane over their heads, they stood together in the circle of white paint.
Henshaw fussed over his control panel. The flickering blue light started to play through the convolutions of glass tubing, the gleaming rotors to spin and to precess. Slowly, slowly, the Moebius strip began to turn on its mounting. But there was something wrong. Henshaw was muttering to himself, was experiencing increasing difficulty in adjusting his controls.
And then Wilkinson realized what was wrong. There was the odd sensation of abnormal lightness, and there was the vibration, out of phase with that induced by the Time Twister. But it couldn’t be that. He had issued strict orders that no test runs were to be made of the Drive without his permission. And the main fuse was securely locked away in his safe.
But the sense of lightness persisted, and the off-beat vibration.
“Dr. Henshaw!” he shouted. “Stop the machine! At once!”
“I have to get it started first, young man. Don’t interrupt!”
“Stop it, I say!”
Wilkinson jumped to his feet, took hasty strides to where the physicist was fluttering around the control panel. But he was too late. Suddenly one of the attenuated Klein flasks exploded, and from it crackled a streamer of blue flame, playing like lightning, like a lightning flash of impossibly long duration, over the complexity of spinning rotors. The deranged machine whined querulously and then screamed, a dreadful, high-pitched scream that rose above the limits of audibility, that even when it could no longer be heard was excruciatingly painful.
Wilkinson knew that he was not competent to deal with this emergency — but the cause of it lay within his competence. He ran out of the main saloon, through alleyways and down ladders, hurrying to the engineroom. And there, as he had expected, he found Clavering, a misshapen gnome in filthy overalls, crouched before the Main Drive. It was running — slowly, slowly, barely ticking over. But it was running.
Wilkinson ignored the engineer, reached out for the switchboard, knocked up the main switch. Clavering slowly straightened, a puzzled expression on his seamed, dirty face, muttering, “What the hell’s wrong wi’ the bastard no’?” And then he saw Wilkinson, and what he had done. He snarled, “Ah’ll thank ye tae keep yer scabby honds off my switchboard, Skipper!”
“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” demanded Wilkinson. Then, keeping his voice low and controlled with a great effort, he said, “Mr. Clavering, I gave strict orders that the Drive was not, repeat not, to be run without my permission.”
“Dinna be sae daft, mon. A wee bitty test …”
“And where did you get the fuse?” Wilkinson glared at the socket that should have been empty, saw the ruddy gleam of metal. He reached out and viciously wrenched free the short length of heavy gauge copper wire. “I see.” He counted to ten, then to another ten. After the second countdown he was able to say coldly, “Mr. Clavering, you’d better start packing your bags. You are instantly dismissed. As and from now.”
“Ye canna dae that tae me, Skipper.”
“I’ve done it. Unless you’d prefer to appear before a civil court on a charge of willful disobedience to lawful commands.”
The telephone buzzed. Clavering reached out for it, but Wilkinson slapped his hand away and picked up the handset himself. At first he did not recognize the voice that came from the instrument. He knew Titov well by this time, but had never, until now, heard the biologist when he was in a state of excitement. “Is that you, Chris? You’d better come topside, to the Control Room. Fast!”
“I’ll deal with you later,” Wilkinson growled to the engineer. “Meanwhile, touch nothing! That’s an order!”
He could not guess what this fresh emergency might be — but he knew, from Titov’s obvious excitement, that it must be a serious one.
XII
WILKINSON PASSED through the main saloon when he hurried up to the Control Room. Henshaw was still there; he and his aides were clucking over the ruined machine like a flock of old hens. The physicist tried to detain him, but Wilkinson brushed him aside.
As soon as he emerged from the hatch in the Control Room deck he could see that there was something wrong, very wrong. It had been only a few minutes after sunset when the experiment had been commenced; now bright sunlight was streaming through the big viewports. He looked up, to the transparent overhead dome. He could see blue sky — far too light a blue. He could see gleaming wisps of high, feathery cirrus. This could never be the Martian firmament — or could never be the firmament of the Mars that he knew.
He joined Vanessa, Natalie and Titov at one of the viewports. He stood there, saying nothing, and stared. There was snow outside the ship — but it was real snow, not a sparse coating of ice crystals. There was snow, thick snow, piled in drifts around protruding, weatherworn boulders, great, smooth rocks encrusted with what appeared to be a pinkish lichen. And there were wind-heaped dunes of snow stretching in glittering undulations to the horizon.
In the middle distance there was a building — low, black, untidily sprawling, its proportions oddly alien. From a squat stack on its convex roof drifted a plume of white vapor. This was the only visible movement in the wintry scene.
Titov broke the silence. He said, “I think I know what has happened. I still don’t know how it happened.”
“That damned fool Clavering started the Main Drive,” Wilkinson told him.
“Against stupidity, the gods themselves fight in vain,” murmured the biologist. “But I thought you had the main fuse in your safe.”
“It’s still there. But it’s removal from its socket was more for psychological than mechanical effect. Any fool can rig a makeshift fuse.”
“Which he did.”
“The damage has been done now,” muttered Wilkinson.
“But tell me. Where are we? Or when?”
“Mars, of course.”
“But … All this snow. And there must be a reasonably dense atmosphere.”
“As you say. And, for your information, I’ve already checked the outside temperature. It’s quite mild — minus 5° Centigrade. So in low latitudes it must be definitely warm.”
“Not Mars,” said Wilkinson definitely. “There must have been a displacement in space as well as in time.”
“Must there? You, of all people, shouldn’t advance that theory. You know that climatic conditions on our Venus are slightly different from those on the world from which you rescued Vanessa.”
“Yes. But Henshaw himself said that he didn’t know what would happen if the Drive were operated at the same time as his Time Twister.”
“He knows now.” Titov took hold of Wilkinson’s arm. “Look, Christopher. I’m no navigator, but even I know that the horizon wouldn’t be as close as it is if we were on a planet the size of Earth. Then there’s the gravitational field: if we’d been suddenly transported to Earth we’d feel the difference. Wouldn’t we?”
“We should,” admitted Wilkinson grudgingly.
“So I’m convinced that this is the Mars we were trying to reach. And now, what shall we do about it?”
“Sit tight,” said Wilkinson without hesitation. “Sit tight until Henshaw has figured out a way to get us back to where we belong.”
“But to get here was the purpose of the expedition. If the entire damned ship, with all her equipment, has made the Jump instead of only two people, so much the better. Well, Captain, what do we do now?”
“I’m just the bus driver.”
“You are the Master. Not only is the ship your responsibility — so are all the people aboard her.”
“Then, as I’ve already said, we’ll sit tight.”
“Do you want a mutiny on your hands?” Titov laughed. “What I propose is that we call for a couple of volunteers — and I’ll be one of them — to investigate the pumping station.”
“The what?”
“You heard me. The building where the pumps a
re — the pumps that maintain the flow of water from the snowcap through the canals. The canals that we didn’t cut, that were here when Man hadn’t yet come down out of the trees. Oh, everything may be fully automated.” He laughed again. “I know that automation is something of a dirty word in this ship, but no matter. The pumping station may be fully automated, but if it’s not there’ll be attendants. Human attendants, if the memories from which Burroughs and Bracket worked were reliable ones. We have to make contact with them.”
“How is it,” asked Wilkinson, staring out at the alien building, “that they haven’t made contact with us? The ship’s big enough to see, and obviously not a permanent feature of their landscape.”
“Why should they come out into the cold? And I can’t see any windows in that shack, although there must be doors … Anyhow, Chris, I suggest that you call a general muster. Up here will be the best place. Everybody will be able to see for himself, then, what’s happened.”
Wilkinson agreed.
• • •
And now, with Vanessa and Natalie beside him, he was watching Titov and one of the other scientists, a young man called Farrell, plodding off across the snow toward the black building. The two men were wearing snow shoes — which were, as a matter of fact, Venusian dust shoes, some of Discovery’s people having been wearing them when boarding the ship. They were wearing spacesuits, although more for warmth than for any other reason; the tests had shown that the atmosphere of this Mars was perfectly breathable. Too, there was the convenience of being able to use the suits’ built-in radios. They were armed, each carrying a rifle and a heavy automatic slung at his belt.
At first they had maintained a stream of chatter, a running commentary on almost every step. But now they were silent; it had been hard going over the deep snow. The sound of their heavy breathing was audible from the speaker of the Control Room transceiver.
The Alternate Martians Page 5
