by James Blish
And, finally, Paige's leave was to be over, day after tomorrow. After 'that, the Proserpine station and probably an order to follow, emerging out of the investigation, which would maroon him there for the rest of his life in the service.
And it wasn't worth it.
That realization had been staring him in the eyes all along. For Anne and Gunn, perhaps, the price was worth paying, the tricks were worth playing, the lying and the cheating and the risking of the lives of others were necessary and just to the end in view. But when the last card was down, Paige knew that he himself lacked the necessary dedication. Like every other road toward dedication that he had assayed, this one had turned out to have been paved with pure lead and had left him with no better emblem of conduct than the miserable one which had kept him going all the same: self-preservation.
He knew then, with cold disgust toward himself, that he was going to use what he knew to clear himself, as soon as the investigation hit the plant. Senator Wagoner, the grapevine said, would be conducting it oddly enough, for Wagoner and MacHinery were deadly political enemies; had MacHinery gotten the jump on him at last and would arrive tomorrow. If Paige timed himself very carefully, he could lay down the facts, leave the plant forever, and be out in space without having to face Hal Gunn or Anne Abbott at all. What would happen to the Pfitzner project thereafter would be old news by the time he landed at the Proserpine station more than three months old.
And by that time, he told himself, he would no longer care.
Nevertheless, when the quick morrow came, he marched into Gunn's office which Wagoner had taken over like a man going before a firing squad.
A moment later, he' felt as though he had been shot down while still crossing the doorsill. Even before he realized that Anne was already in the room, he heard Wagoner say:
"Colonel Russell, sit down. Fm glad to see you. I have a security clearance for you, and a new set of orders; you can forget Proserpine. You and Miss Abbott and I are leaving for Jupiter. Tonight,."
It was like a dream after that. In the Caddy oil the way to the spaceport, Wagoner said nothing. As for Anne, she seemed to be in a state of slight shock. From what little Paige thought he had learned about her and it was very little he deduced that she had expected this as little as he had. Her face as he had entered Gunn's office had been guarded, eager, and slightly smug all at once, as though she had thought she'd known what Wagoner would say. But when Wagoner had mentioned Jupiter, she'd turned to look at him as though he'd been turned from a senator into a boxing kangaroo, in the plain sight of the Pfitzner Pounders. Something was wrong. After the long catalog of things already visibly wrong, the statement didn't mean very much. But something had clearly gone wrong.
There were fireworks in the sky to the south, visible from the right side of the Caddy where Paige sat as the car turned east on to the parkway. They were nigh aim spectacular, and seemed to be going up from the heart of Manhattan. Paige was puzzled until he remembered, like a fact recalled from the heart of an absurd dream, that this was the last night of the Believer Revival, being held in the stadium on Randalls Island. The fireworks celebrated the Second Coming, which the Believers were confident could not now be long delayed.
Gewiss, gewiss, es naht noch heut und kann nicht lang mehr sliumen
Paige could remember having heard his father, an ardent Wagnerian, singing that; it was from Tristan. But he thought instead of those frightening medieval paintings of the Second Coming, in which Christ stands ignored in a corner of the canvas while the people flock reverently to the feet of the Anti-Christ, whose face, in the dim composite of Paige's memory, was a curious mixture of Francis X. MacHinery and Bliss Wagoner.
Words began to bloom along the black sky at the hearts of starshells:
Million now will die!
No doubt, Paige thought bleakly. The Believers also believed that the Earth was flat; but Paige was on his way to Jupiter not exactly a round planet, but rounder than the Believers' Earth. In quest, if you please, of immortality, in which he too had believed. Tasting bile, he thought, ft takes all kinds.
A final starshell, so brilliant even at this distance that the word inside it was almost dazzled out, burst soundlessly into blue white fire above the city. It said:
% , 'q.I_/ TOMORROW , 1
Paige swung his head abruptly and looked at Anne. Her face, a ghostly blur in the dying light of the shell, was turned raptly towar4 the window; she had been watching, too. He leaned forward and kissed her slightly parted lips, gently, forgetting all about Wagoner. After a frozen moment he could feel her mouth smiling against his, the smile which had astonished him so when he had seen it first, but softened, transformed, giving. The world went away for a while.
Then she touched his cheeks with her fingertips and sank back against the cushions; the Caddy swung sharply north off the parkway; and the spark of radiance which was the last retinal image of the shell vanished into drifting purple blotches, like aftervisions of the sun or of Jupiter seen close on. Anne had no way of knowing, of course, that he had been running away from her, toward the Proserpine station, when he had been cornered in this Caddy instead. Anne, Anne, I believe; help me in mine unbelief.
The Caddy was passed through the spaceport gates after a brief, whispered consultation between the chauffeur and the guards. Instead of driving directly for the Administration Building, however, it turned craftily to the left and ran along the inside of the wire fence, back toward the city and into the dark reaches of the emergency landing pits. It was not totally dark there, however; there was a pool of light on an apron some distance ahead, with a needle of glare pointing straight up from its center.
Paige leaned forward and peered through the double glass barrier one pane between himself and the driver, the other between the driver and the world. The needle o light was a ship, but it was not one he recognized. It was s single stage job: a ferry, designed to take them out no farther than to Satellite Vehicle One, where they would be transferred to a proper interplanetary vessel. But it was small, even for a ferry.
"How do you like her, Colonel?" Wagoner's voice said, unexpectedly, from the black corner where he sat.
"All right," Paige said. "She's a little small, isn't she?"
Wagoner chuckled. "Pretty damn small," he said, and fell silent again. Alarmed, Paige began to wonder if the senator was feeling entirely well. He turned to look at Anne, but he could not even see her face now. He groped for her hand; she responded with a feverish, rigid grip.
The Caddy shot abruptly from the fence. It bore down on the pool of light. Paige could see several marines standing on the apron at the tail of the ship. Absurdly, the vessel looked even smaller as it came closer.
"All right," Wagoner said. "Out of here, both of you. We'll be taking off in ten minutes. The crewmen will show you your quarters."
"Crewmen?" Paige said. 'Senator, that ship won't hold more than four people, and one of them has to be the tubeman. That leaves nobody to pilot her but me."
"Not this trip," Wagoner said, following him out of the car. "We're only passengers, you and I and Miss Abbott, and of course the marines. The Per Aspera has a separate crew of five. Let's not waste time, please."
It was impossible. On the cleats, Paige felt as though he were trying to climb into a .22 calibre longrifle cartridge. To get ten people into this tiny shell, you'd have to turn them into some sort of human concentrate and pour them, like powdered coffee.
Nevertheless, one of the marines met him in the airlock, and within another minute he was strapping himself down inside a windowless cabin as big as any he'd ever seen on board a standard interplanetary vessel far bigger than any ferry could accommodate. The intercom box at the head of his hammock was already calling the clearance routine.
"Dog down and make all fast. Airlock will cycle in one minute."
What had happened to Anne? She had come up the cleats after him, of that he was sure "All too fast. Takeoff in one minute. Passengers 'ware, but he'd been hustle
d down to this nonsensical cabin too fast to look back. There was something very wrong. Where was Wagoner? Thirty seconds. 'Ware G's."
Making some sort of a getaway? But from what? And why did he want to take Paige and Anne with him? As hostages they were "Twenty seconds."
Worthless, since they were of no value to the government, had no money, knew nothing damning about Wagoner "Fifteen seconds."
But wait a minute. Anne knew something about Wagoner, or thought she did. "Ten seconds. Stand by."
The call made him relax instinctively. There would be time to think about that later. At takeoff
"Five seconds."
It didn't pay
"Four."
to concentrate
"Three."
on anything
"Two."
else but
"One."
actual
"Zero."
Takeoff hit him with the abrupt, bone cracking, gut wrenching impact of all ferry takeoffs. There was nothing you could do to ameliorate it but let the strong muscles of the arms and legs and back bear it as best they could, with the automatic tetanus of the Seyle GA reaction, and concentrate on keeping your head and your abdomen in exact neutral with the acceleration thrust. The muscles you used for that were seldom called upon on the ground, even by weightlifters, but you learned to use them or were invalided out of the service; a trained spaceman's abdominal muscles will bounce a heavy rock, and no strong man can make him turn his head if his neck muscles say no.
Also, it helped a little to yell. Theoretically, the yell collapses the lungs acceleration pneumothorax, the books call it and keeps them collapsed until the surge of powered flight is over. By that time, the carbon dioxide level of the blood has risen so high that the breathing reflex will reassert itself with an enormous gasp, even if crucial chest muscles have been torn. The yell makes sure that when next you breathe, you breathe.
But more importantly for Paige and every other spaceman, the yell was the only protest he could form against that murderous nine seconds of pressure; it makes you feel better. Paige yelled with vigor.
He was still yelling when the ship went into free fall.
Instantly, while the yell was still dying incredulously in his throat, he was clawing at his harness. All his spaceman's reflexes had gone off at once. The powered flight period had been too short. Even the shortest possible takeoff acceleration outlasts the yell. Yet the ion rockets were obviously silenced. The little ship's power had failed she was falling back to the Earth "Attention, please," the intercom box said mildly. "We are now under way. Free fall will last only a few seconds. Stand by for restoration of normal gravity."
And then. . . And then the hammock against which Paige was struggling was down again, as though the ship were still resting quietly on Earth. Impossible; she couldn't even be out of the atmosphere yet. Even if she were, free fall should last all the rest of the trip. Gravity in an interplanetary vessel let alone a ferry could be reestablished only by rotating the ship around its long axis; few captains bothered with the fuel expensive maneuvre, since hardly anybody but old hands flew between the planets. Besides, this ship the Per Aspera hadn't gone through any such maneuvre, or Paige would have detected it.
Yet his body continued to press down against the hammock with an acceleration of one Earth gravity.
"Attention, please. We will be passing the Moon in one point two minutes. The observation blister is now open to passengers. Senator Wagoner requests the presence of Miss Abbott and Colonel Russell in the blister."
There was no further sound from the ionrockets, which had inexplicably been shut off when the Per Aspera could have been no more than 250 miles above the surface of the Earth. Yet she was passing the Moon now, without the slightest sensation of movement, though she must still be accelerating. What was driving her? Paige could hear nothing but the small hum of he ship's electrical generator, no louder than it would have been on the ground, unburdened of the job of if heating the electron-ion plasma which the rockets used. Grimly, he unsnapped the last gripper from his harness, conscious of what a baby he evidently was on board this ship, and got up.
The deck felt solid and abnormal under his feet, pressing against the soles of his shoes with a smug terrestrial pressure of one unvarying gravity. Only the habits of caution of a service lifetime prevented him from running forward up the companionway to the observation blister.
Anne and Senator Wagoner were there, the dimming moonlight bathing their backs as they looked ahead into deep space. They had been more than a little shaken up by the takeoff, that was obvious, but they were already almost recovered; compared to the effects of the normal ferry takeoff, this could only have ruffled them; and of course the sudden transformation to the impossible one gravity field would not have bollixed their untrained reflexes with anything like the thoroughness that it had scrambled Paige's long conditioned reactions. Looked at this way, spaceflight like this might well be easier for civilians than it would be for spacemen, at least for some years to come.
He padded cautiously toward them, feeling disastrously humbled. Shining between them was a brilliant, hard spot of yellow white light, glaring into the blister through the thick, cosmic proof glass. The spot was fixed and steady, as were all the stars looking into the blister; proof positive that the ship's gravity was not being produced by axial spin. The yellow spot itself, shining between Wagoner's elbow and Anne's upper arm, was Jupiter.
On either side of the planet were two smaller bright dots; the four Galilean satellites, as widely separated to Paige's naked eye as they would have looked on Earth through a telescope the size of Galileo's.
While Paige hesitated in the doorway to the blister, the little spots that were Jupiter's largest moons visibly drew apart from each other a little, Until one of them went into occulation behind Anne's right shoulder. The Per Aspera was still accelerating; it was driving toward Jupiter at a speed nothing in Paige's experience could have prepared him for. Stunned, he made a very rough estimate in his head of the increase in parallax and tried to calculate the ship's rate of approach from that.
The little lunar ferry, humming scarcely louder than a transformer for carrying five people let alone ten as far as SVl, was now hurtling toward Jupiter at about a quarter of the speed of light. At least forty thousand miles per second.
And the deepening color of Jupiter showed that the Per Aspera was still picking up speed.
"Come in, Colonel Russell," Wagoner's voice said, echoing slightly in the blister. "Come watch the show. We've been waiting for you."
CHAPTER TEN: Jupiter V
That is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into uncommon sense. One of the chief services which mathematics has rendered the human race in the past century is to put 'common sense' where it belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labeled 'discarded nonsense.'
Ejuc TEMPLE BELL
The fact that they landed as Helmuth was going on duty did nothing to lighten the load on his heart. In shape it was not distinguishable from any of the short-range ferries which covered the Jovian satellary circuit, carrying supplies from the regular SVl MarsBelt-Jupiter X cruiser to the inner moons and, sometimes, some years old mail; but it was considerably bigger than the usual Jovian ferry, and it grounded its outsize mass on Jupiter V with only the briefest cough of rockets.
That landing told Helmuth that his dream was well on its way to coming true. If the high brass had a real antigravity, there would have been no reason why the ion streams should have been necessary at all. Obviously, what had been discovered was some sort of partial gravity screen, which allowed a ship to operate with far less rocket thrust than was usual, but which still left it subject to a sizable fraction of the universal G, the inherent stress of space.
Nothing less than a complete, and completely controllable gravity screen would do, on Jupiter.
And theory said that a complete gravity screen was impossible. Once you set one up even supposing that yo
u could you would be unable to enter it or leave it. Crossing a boundary line between a one G field and a no G field would be precisely as difficult as surmounting a high jump with the bar Set at infinity, and for the same reasons. If you crossed it from the other direction, you would hit the ground on the other side of the line as hard as though you had fallen there from the Moon; a little harder, in fact.
Helmuth worked mechanically at the gang board, thinking. Charity was not in evidence, but there was no special reason why the foreman's board had to be manned on this trick. The work could be as easily supervised from here, and obviously Charity had expected Helmuth to do it that way, or he would have left notice. Probably Charity was already conferring with the senators, receiving what would be for him the glad news.
Helmuth realized suddenly that there was nothing left for him to do now, once this trick was over, but to cut and run.
There could be no real reason why he should be required to reenact the entire nightmare, helplessly, event for event, like an actor committed to a role. He was awake now, in full control of his own senses, and still at least partially sane. The man in the dream had volunteered but that man would not be Robert Helmuth. Not any longer.
While the senators were here on Jupiter V, he would turn in his resignation. Direct over Charity's head.
The wave of relief came washing over him just as he finished resetting the circuits which would enable him to supervise from the gang board, and left him so startlingly weak that he had to put the helmet down on the ledge before he had raised it halfway to his head. So that had been what he had been waiting for: to quit, nothing more.
He owed it to Charity to finish the Grand Tour of the Bridge. After that, he'd be free. He would never have to see the Bridge again, not even inside a viewing helmet. A farewell tour, and then back to Chicago, if there was still such a place.
