Orion Shall Rise

by Poul Anderson

  The Maurai nodded. ‘Your hypothesis sounds plausible,’ he said in a level voice.

  Mikli gave him a look that warned: Don’t think you’ll get any chance to act as his backup.

  The captain tugged his chin. ‘Well,’ he murmured, ‘it does appear to fit what facts we have. Yes, a brave man might have tried it. We’ll never be sure, of course.’

  He glanced around. ‘Any further comments? If not, no point in keeping station here. The corpse won’t rise for days, and we’ve no idea where it’ll be carried first. You may as well turn in. I’ll start us on our way again.’

  – The bunks were narrow, but Iern and Ronica spent the rest of the night in hers, holding each other, only holding each other close. They both wept a little.

  3

  Surf raged among skerries below ramparts of cliff. A boat or a man could not live through it. Terai was nearly blind in the windy, sleety, foamy dark, but he heard the waters roar and felt them recoil. He turned left at random and swam parallel to the unseen coast. Maybe he’d find an accessible shore before he drowned.

  The pain of exhaustion, the gnawing of cold had faded into numbness – how long ago? He remembered vaguely that he had estimated three hours for the passage. They might as well have been three centuries. He was a thing that swam.

  But then, and then – He came into a quietness aflow beneath the wind. His cracked lips tasted less salt. Scarcely more aware than a homing salmon, he started landward, and where a stream emptied into the sea he felt stones under his feet.

  He reeled ashore and lay for a while upon blessed hardness.

  The wind savaged him. He forced into himself the will to move, sat up, crawled out of his garment. Once in a half-forgotten dream, Ronica had warned that the chill factor in wet clothes could be deadly.

  Yet the stuff had saved him. Had freed him. In the minute when a friendly sailor offered a – what did they call it? – a ‘union suit,’ he had thought what to do, how he might escape and be taken for dead yet remain alive.

  ‘Wool’s the best survival fabric there is,’ Ronica had said by the campfire. ‘Nothing holds heat better, whether or not it’s wet. Raw wool, the natural grease in it, is preferable, but the ordinary cloth is good too. A shame we haven’t got any here.’

  Terai had it on shipboard. He and Wairoa latched their cabin door and spent an hour rubbing the underwear with butter. When he sundered that door he was fully clad, but merely to hide the fabric beneath, lest someone guess his intention. Overboard, he shed the outer garments – he had loaded his pockets to sink them – and swam off in what amounted to a diver’s wet suit.

  At that, he’d barely survived. He would still die if he didn’t seek cover.

  He climbed centimeter by centimeter to his feet and staggered toward the glooms that soughed before him. Probably his best bet was to heap a lot of pine duff, leaves, humus, and so on over himself and wait for dawn. Later in the trip he could do better.

  Later … better. … He was doubtless on an island. His single possession was a piece of smeared underwear. He was almost certainly the sole human being around. It was an unknown but huge distance, over mountains and through primeval forests, to civilization and the Maurai Inspectorate.

  He went in among the trees. They broke the wind and he began to shiver slightly less. He began to think.

  First thing in the morning, he should find some suitable rocks and chip out an edged tool, a knife or handax. Then he should construct a shelter, and traps for small animals, and a weir for fish – and, oh, yes, meanwhile live off grubs, roots, tubers, pine nuts, remnant berries, whatever he could get. Presently he should have accumulated bones for awls and daggers, sharp stones for scrapers, gut and sinew for making such things as a fire drill. He’d have to see about clothing; the wool wouldn’t last unless it had protection from brush and ground. Maybe he could kill and skin a large beast. Likelier, for the time being, he must settle for plaiting grass, or something of the kind. Improve the tool kit, smoke meat, collect trail rations in general, develop a way – paddling on a log? – to get his stuff across the narrows to the mainland.…

  He dared not dawdle. Winter was fast closing in. He might well perish. But (for a moment of pride, he raised his weary head) he thought his chances were fair. He was strong, and had skillful hands, and had learned a great deal from Ronica Birken.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Beneath the mountains in Laska there was coming to birth a terrible beauty.

  Eygar Dreng, director, did not look like a sorcerer. He was a short, stocky man, half Eskimo, his features heavy and rather flat under a shock of grizzled black hair. A wound suffered in the Power War made him limp and use a cane. He dressed carelessly. His manner was affable unless incompetence had angered him, then he could outswear a longshoreman. He was cozily married, with four children whose ages ranged from twenty-five to thirteen; the oldest was wedded too and had overjoyed him with a grandchild. When time allowed, he would attend a party or a hard-fought poker game, and he was active in the Kenai chapter of the Wolf Lodge.

  His background was scarcely more spectacular. A native of the area, he had moved south to study mechanical engineering and, later, work on aircraft development. During the war he served in the volunteer army, attaining the rank of major before he was invalided out. While the last battles were fought, he was among the first to dream of Orion and scheme for it. The site was picked at his suggestion, and he was a leader throughout the initial, most cruelly difficult years of preparation. Nevertheless he found moments in which to ‘generate notions’ – his phrase – that engineers drawing up the basic designs found useful. When work on the actual hardware could commence, fifteen years ago, he was a natural choice for boss. Here he had been ever since, coordinating efforts that began with experimental parts, crude, small, scarcely worthy of being called toys, and that failed heartbreakingly at every level of advance, as men and women strove to create a thing which had never existed before.

  And yet – ‘The man is a wizard,’ Plik said to Iern after they had met him. ‘A Faust. But with what devil has he made his pact?’

  The dedication, the sheer will that drove Orion was in its way more awesome than the achievement. Eygar Dreng never went far from here; likewise his family, and the several hundred workers under him and their families, including spouses and children who had no direct role in Orion and very little knowledge of it. An occasional specialist visited from outside, consultant on a knotty problem, but only when the security officers had convinced themselves absolutely of his trust-worthiness. Secrecy was, however, not the ultimate reason why this community sealed itself off year by year by year. That would have been impossible, especially for Northwesterners, were these not selected for desire as well as abilities. The vision was what held them. Whether or not they knew it, they were preparing the way for their god who had been prophesied unto them.

  ‘Freedom first, yes,’ Eygar Dreng told the Uropans. ‘We’ve got to have that before we can go on, and when we do, a lot of us will happily retire. But not all; and new ones will pour in. Freedom first, not foremost!’

  ‘What afterward?’ Iern asked, though Ronica had spoken of it to him earlier.

  Thereby she had kindled in him some of the flame that blazed in Eygar: ‘Space! The planets and the stars!

  ‘Sure, we can’t launch many of these nuke ships from Earth. Too much fallout. Besides, we’d soon run out of explosive. But we won’t have to, either. Given the payload capacity they’ve got, in a few trips we can put the apparatus in Earth orbit and on the moon for a bridgehead, a permanent human presence yonder. From then on, it’ll grow of itself. Can’t help doing so, among all those opportunities. The resources are unlimited. The ancients proved that. We’re got perfectly feasible plans of theirs in the files, waiting. The lunar regolith alone contains nearly every raw material we need. The asteroids contain more, and in more concentrated form. A single asteroid, nudged or solar-sailed into Earth orbit, or maybe mined on the spot by robots that
catapult the stuff back – a single nickel-iron asteroid a klick or two in diameter would supply world industry for at least a century. Not just ferrous metals, either, but everything critical for alloys and electronics. And not just the Union, but world industry, including what the retrograded peoples need to lift them back to a decent life.

  ‘And energy.’ He paced his office like a polar bear in a cage. Its narrowness and bleakness strengthened the image. Folk in these caverns had not taken time for making them luxurious. ‘As much energy as we can ever use, clean, free, inexhaustible. Only build enough solar collectors, big enough, in space. No limit. No night or weather or dust or birdshit to interfere, ever. Though I’d rather revive another ancient idea, myself. Instead of hanging them in the sky, build Criswell stations on the moon, out of lunar materials. Either way, beam the power down here as microwaves and turn it into electricity. Shucks, in due course we Norries could make the Maurai happy and dismantle the nuclear powerplants we’ll have built on Earth. We won’t need them any longer.

  ‘Given that kind of energy, we can make all the fuel anybody wants, and not from coal or biomass, but hydrogen straight out of seawater. That includes fuel for chemical spacecraft boosters –unless we decide on laser launches and strictly aerodynamic reentries. No more nuclear blasts in the atmosphere.

  ‘Actually, with that prospect before us, unlimited power, we can afford to burn up a certain amount of present-day fuel in launches at the beginning. Ten Orion shots to liberate us; ten or twenty more to orbit the really heavy stuff needed for an early start on space development; and that’s all. From then on, the Orion system will only operate out yonder, where it belongs. Where man belongs. Of course, it’ll soon be obsolete. Fusion-powered craft are already on some drawing boards.’

  ‘You’ll transfigure the world,’ Plik murmured.

  ‘Maybe less than you think, son.’ Eygar’s words, which had tumbled and crackled, took on a calmer tone. The fanaticism faded out of his narrow black eyes. ‘Aside from civilizing it. Manufacturing should follow mining out into space. We won’t need to take our raw materials from the hide of mother Earth, nor rub pollution into the wounds. Come back in a hundred years or so, and you may find us living in a pastoral paradise.’

  Plik shook his head. ‘Only angels are fit for paradise.’

  Eygar scowled. ‘What’re men fit for, then?’ He dismissed his irritation. ‘Work, at least. Okay, come have a look at ours.’

  More than a hundred meters deep, below their camouflaged covers, ten shafts in a mountain were the wombs of Orion. Between them, and elsewhere under the range, ran a web of corridors, rooms, vaults, rails, pipes, cables, machines at their business like trolls.

  Simply building the physical plant had been a superherculean task. Some natural caves and extinct fumaroles were a nucleus, but mostly the means had been dynamite, a limited amount of power equipment, and human muscle – through day and night, sunshine, rain, fog, snow, frost, thaw for worse than four years. The cost had been gigantic too, and continued so: the cost of concrete, metal, apparatus, labor, fuel for the generators whose electricity powered everything from fluorescents and ventilators to furnaces and groundwater pumps.

  (Construction workers were hired in the South, none for longer than a year except those few who knew the truth. They heard that they were building an industrial site to exploit Northern natural resources, for a consortium of entrepreneurs. Local inhabitants heard the same. They didn’t complain too loudly about being excluded. They had work aplenty of their own, and reckoned it bad manners to pry when people didn’t care to talk. … At last Eygar took a small part of the uranium-235 that had been collected and faked a volcanic eruption. The consortium announced that the shock had ruined everything. It could not afford to rebuild. Luckily, the disaster smote in a pause between excavation and furbishing; few personnel were there and casualties were nil. Then the Wolf Lodge, members of which had been leaders of the project, kindly offered to purchase the site for a wildlife refuge and scientific base it had been contemplating.… The Maurai were only marginally aware of all this, and not interested. Their Inspectorate was still new and overextended in the South, Laska was remote and inclement, they had no reason to suspect trickery.)

  Not much showed aboveground: cabins, sheds, primitive roads, a laboratory, what an ecological research station would reasonably maintain. None of it was on the mountain of the spacecraft. Nor was much else visible except peaks and the forests below them; Tyonek, on Cook Inlet, lay eighty wild kilometers to the east.

  Staff, their families, and their community facilities were housed underground. It was not as claustrophobic a situation as Iern had imagined. Living quarters were small but adequate, more comfortable and healthful than those wherein most of humanity huddled; interior decoration had become a folk art; places existed for meetings, games, sports, hobbies, celebrations; the school and the public library were excellent; if dining was perforce in mess halls, the food and the kitchen help were superior; individuals found themselves in countless permutations of mutual-interest groups. They could and did go topside almost anytime off duty that they wished, into a land where they could hike, climb, ski, hunt, fish, boat, picnic, frolic, or simply enjoy its magnificence. Sometimes parties of them took cruises by bus or yacht, which might include a fling among the fleshpots of Sitka.

  Indeed, the isolation was not and could not be total. A fair number of persons, such as Ronica, had frequent occasion to go elsewhere. Then there were those, integral to the organization, who never had reason to come here – her mother and stepfather, for example. Living in Kenai, they were agents for one of the Wolf Lodge’s commercial enterprises. It was a genuine job, but it was also cover for their service as a liaison, arranging the unobtrusive shipment of needed goods to the establishment across the firth.

  On the whole, for nearly all concerned, and counting in the sense of vital achievement, rewards outweighed sacrifices.

  Not that they dwelt in perfection. Everybody hated censorship of mail to the outside, and most longed for a glimpse of the South, a change of scene and neighbors, knowing they would not leave this cranny of the world until Orion rose or they died. They quarreled, connived, divorced, fell sick, knew loss and grief and frustration. A few committed crimes, punished by a tribunal of the directorate that governed here. Three who had developed psychoses were humanely but permanently confined.

  Adolescent rebellion was less than might have been expected. The majority of those growing up in this place had only dim memories of anything else, or none. It was taken for granted that as they came of working age they would serve the undertaking, in whatever capacities they were able, until it was finished. A minority cherished no such wish, and resented the fact that they must remain after they reached adulthood. Their parents had contracted to live under what amounted to a dictatorship; they themselves had not, and weren’t Norrmen supposed to be freemen? Could they not be trusted to keep their mouths shut?

  The answer was no, they could not; yes, this was a gross violation of their liberty; once the nation was free, they would receive generous compensation, or they could file damage suits for larger sums if they saw fit. Thus far, none had attempted escape, though it would be possible if carefully planned. After all, they were the children of intelligent couples, who had raised them in an atmosphere of patience, hard work, and exalted hope. How would they feel if, somehow, they betrayed Orion, or simply if they let Orion rise without them?

  The entire arrangement was metastable at best. Sooner or later, some random event must tear secrecy asunder, unless the great purpose was attained first. But then, the enterprise itself was marginal, a desperate, wildly daring venture. By that very fact, it caught at the spirit. Orion was a huge thing for which to live. These people had it, and it had them.

  The spacecraft were at different stages of construction. In one case, it was demolition. Engineers were taking apart the unmanned test vehicle that had flown this summer, to study piece by piece. They planned to rebuil
d her, but along modified lines. She had been designed for flotation, to be recovered at sea where no outsiders were watching and returned here in sections. The rest were intended for ground landings.

  Just two more preliminary flights were scheduled. Iern had the technical background to know how dismaying that paucity was, but the staff had scant choice. Every shot was a clue to the nature and location of what was under way, and the Maurai hounds were chasing down every other possible trace, too. On that account, the search for fissionables was now suspended, a decision whose rightness the narrow escape of Mikli’s group underscored. Nevertheless, given time, it was sheerly inevitable that the enemy would find this stronghold. Eygar did not propose to grant the time.

  The second excursion would be manned, to check out controls and landing gear. Eygar hoped to launch it in a few months, as soon as certain alterations were completed which the first experiment had indicated were desirable. The third flight, also manned, would carry lasers, solar collectors, and solid projectiles for testing; it should be ready in a year or so. Assuming no out-and-out fiasco or disaster, its results would be the basis for equipping the whole fleet. Orion ought to rise in full strength less than two years hence.

  ‘That’s cutting it almighty thin, I know,’ Eygar said. ‘We’ll launch sequentially, over a period of a week, unless the Maurai are right on our necks by then. That should give a chance to correct some mistakes, as experience shows us what they are. My guess is we’ll lose a couple of vehicles, and a couple more will prove useless because of malfunctions. Give me five that work, though –’ he held a palm upward, fingers crooked like talons –’give me a hand of ships, and we’ll set ourselves free.’

  Electric chills went along Iern’s spine as he beheld Orion Two.