Fifth Planet
Page 8
‘Boy, what a beaut,’ muttered Fiske. And a beaut she was, sleek and powerful, ready at a touch to hurl them on their journey towards the unknown planet.
The Russians waited until it was known that the four astronauts were safely transferred to the big ship before announcing that their own ship had already been in flight towards Helios for two days. The West groaned, and earnest commentators on the television networks assured viewers that the East had scored yet another propaganda victory; they were always ahead.
Actually the Russians had had their difficulties. The inclusion ctf Ilyana in the party was all very well at the stage when everything was on paper. It was a useful goad for pricking the capitalist warmongers of the West. But as the project took shape and neared completion it was gradually borne in on the Russian planners that they really were committed to sending a woman into space - and on the most difficult and hazardous journey that had yet been attempted. The mathematicians demonstrated very plainly
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that any withdrawal would lose more ground than had been gained by the original trick. So Ilyana had to go. When the matter was referred to the engineers they made light of it. After all, it would be possible to take the girl out to orbit under quite low acceleration. This could easily be done in a specially designed transit vehicle. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to take Pitoyan that way too for he wasn’t a professional either. The accelerations of the main ship as it moved away from its parking orbit around the Earth would in any case be quite gentle. The only dicey part would be the actual landing on Achilles, and Ilyana would simply have to take her chance. Nobody in Moscow would have dreamt that Ilyana was to come out of that particular episode rather better than the others.
A small, but not negligible, advantage was to be had from leaving the parking orbit quite quickly, at a moment when the direction in the orbit was parallel to the Earth’s motion around the Sun. This meant that a fairly powerful acceleration had to be used, in fact as powerful as the reactor motors could reasonably stand without risks being taken. Both Pitoyan and Ilyana had had a rather bad passage during this phase. When it was over, but while they were still feeling groggy, Pitoyan was rather annoyed by the excessive attention that Kratov and Bakovsky were giving to their female colleague. He consoled himself with the thought that, once recovered, he should have little difficulty in cutting out such a pair of corn-growers.
Bakovsky set the ship on a slowly ascending climb out of the plane of the planetary orbits. Helios was not moving in that plane, so it was essential to move upwards at about 450 in order to make the interception at the right point, at the right point if they were ever to be able to return safely, that is to say. Pitoyan quickly recovered his self-respect by checking that the course had been correctly set. This was his line of business, and the others acknowledged it.
Ilyana had been thrilled by the sight of the Earth as they had moved up to their parking orbit. She had made a tape
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recording, in pleasant flowing terms, describing it all. The tape was returned to Moscow where tens of thousands of copies were made. These were sent out, throughout the length and breadth of the Russo-Chinese Union. They were played in schools to earnest-faced children, children who spent the summer herding goats in Uzbekistan, to slanteyed children on the river Lena, and to girls with pigtails in Odessa. Ilyana was very proud.
The Earth had looked very beautiful as it receded away from them, now it was a rather small distant disc. Ilyana spent many hours at the viewer, entranced by the beauties of the colours and by the ever-changing patterns. She watched a storm developing in the Atlantic and wondered whether the effects would reach as far as Moscow. On the dark side of the Earth she could see the lights of cities, and this sent shivers down her back. It was improper to think it, but she couldn’t help thinking it - of all the things that were going on in those cities, of how important the Earth seemed to the people down there, and of how little it looked in the telescope - no bigger than a firefly. She thought it was rather like being a god to look down on it, and then despised herself for such bourgeois thoughts.
She liked it when the region of her birth around Kiev came into view, and was exasperated that the picture was not a great deal clearer. Pitoyan told her that it was the refracting effect of the Earth’s own atmosphere, and this of course was correct. She knew she would have a bit of trouble with Pitoyan. Not that that would have mattered very much in itself, but it would upset the other two, whom she thought of as being very nice and sweet and rather harmless.
It was also fascinating to look at Mars and Venus, and Jupiter and Saturn. It was true that she had seen them just as well in books, but somehow it seemed infinitely more exciting actually to see the planets. Everywhere it was black except that the stars shone as beautiful points of light. Along the Milky Way there was an endless carpet of star-dust. It reminded her of childhood stories, of the diamonds in the
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Tsar’s palace. But the Sun seemed alive, she could see things wriggling on its surface like snakes. She saw the lances of the corona as they streamed out many millions of miles into space and felt an overwhelming fear of the relentless tongues erf flame.
Pitoyan found that things were not as easy as he had expected. He had thought that there would be lots of times when Kratov and Bakovsky would both be thoroughly and soundly asleep. But the way it turned out the lights were always on, and there always seemed to be someone thoroughly awake. The situation was impossible, the opportunities nil. What Pitoyan had not reckoned on was Popkin’s Theorem. All this had been taken account of in the calculations. And Popkin was perfectly right, the amount of talk on sex in the Russian rocket was absolutely nil in contrast to that in the American rocket, now two and a half days behind.
They were travelling at this time at about thirty kilometres per second. This meant a distance of about two million miles a day, so that the Russians were some five million miles ahead. But there was still a very long way to go. It was like winning the first couple of matches in the baseball season. It meant little or nothing.
To both rockets there was a constant flow erf information and of questions from Earth. The time for a message to get through was still only about a couple of minutes. Later on, when the time would widen to about eight hours, they would have far more privacy. Only genuinely important information would then be sent.
Chapter Eight
The Voyage
For the most part the messages were concerned with technical data, but there were also more personal messages - what was the crew eating, how were they sleeping, how did they manage to occupy the time. It had all been gone into a score of times before, but the public wanted to know about it again, especially since for the first time a woman was in space. The bulletins concerning Ilyana swept the headlines. When it turned out that her pulse counts, her electrocardiogram, and so on were entirely normal, there was an outcry from women’s organizations all over the globe, particularly from the United States. They asked why a woman had not been sent into space before. Governments disdained to answer this question, for there really was no answer to it.
The public maintained its interest for as long as the public is capable of maintaining interest in anything at all, that is to say, about ten days. Interest waned and withered and was replaced by the remarkable story of a gorilla living with a harem of human women in the Massif Central of France. Investigation failed to reveal any gorilla, but it did reveal the existence of three good restaurants, the proprietor of which was a very smart businessman from Paris.
The four professionals in the Western rocket spent no time gazing at the star-dust along the Milky Way. They went about their business with a slow unhurried precision. They too set their ship on an inclined path up from the plane of the solar system. Just as the basic design of both was the same, so they moved along nearly parallel paths. It was true that the slight divergence
might carry them a
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few tens of millions of miles apart, but this was only a small fraction of the total length of their journey, which was to be measured in thousands of millions of miles.
Life in the ships was almost indescribably inactive. There was of course the routine checking of instruments, the preparation of the messages to be sent back to Earth and the reception and interpretation of incoming messages, the careful checking of themselves — heartbeats and the like - but this took only a small fraction of the twenty-four hours of each day. By the standards of the first space-craft they were luxuriously housed, but by any terrestrial standard they were packed like peas in a pod. It was here that one of the two essential qualities of the long-trip man showed itself. The first necessity was the obvious one, of being able to take big accelerations, of being able to take a physical beating, and still react quickly at the end of it. The second was in some ways more difficult, simply to lie there for weeks on end, in this case for months on end, doing nothing. It was even worse than being a prisoner of war in the old days, for there was no compound to trot round for a bit of exercise. For the most part a man didn’t talk to his companions but just lay there reading, thinking, sleeping, or resting with a vacant mind. The ability to keep quiet was an absolute must for any long-distance astronaut. One chatterer in a ship and you’d had it, either you throttled him and chuoked him out into space, or in a couple of months you were all prime for the nut-house. You spoke either in monosyllables ' or else tersely in highly-developed space slang. Exceptionally, Larson and his crew did in fact do a certain amount of talking from time to time, their subject being the inevitable one, the presence of Ilyana in the Russian rocket. Their visions of what must be happening there were lurid in the extreme. They cursed their own authorities at some length for not having the same idea. It was the best idea since the old chemical fuels went out.
Actually the situation in the Russian rocket was becoming more tense. Gradually the tiny container became the whole
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world, became the whole universe. The combine-harvesters sweeping across the landscape of his native steppes now seemed much less real to Kratov; the great crowds in Red Square began to evaporate in the mind of Nuri Bakovsky. The effect of the pounding and kneading that their personalities had received almost from birth was perceptibly weakening. They began to cast covert glances at Ilyana. At first they felt guilty about it. Nothing such as the Americans were imagining was taking place, hut the tension was building up. Popkin, if he could have been there as an unseen observer, would have had less confidence in his Theorem.
The rockets had been on their outward journey for about a month when the first slightly disturbing incident took place. A burst of radio waves was detected from the Helios system. There was a major scare on Earth.
It was generated in the following way. The radio waves were first detected at the European Radio Astronomy Centre in the Aosta Valley north of Milan. The science correspondent of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro happened to be there at the time and heard about it over lunch. Within an hour he was in Milan phoning through to his friends in all the major capitals. Radiating from the capitals, telephone lines were set tingling to a score of internation- ally-famous scientists, some of whom made the mistake of answering the phone. They were told that a burst of radio waves had been picked up from Achilles. What did they think of that?
The news was so shattering that most of them answered the question instead of slamming the receiver down. Conway said it was bad and that he didn’t like it at all; others expressed much the same opinion. Within a couple of hours it was on the news-stands everywhere throughout the world. Conway had just time to see his name in large type before he received a call from officialdom. An angry voice told him that the radio burst wasn’t from Achilles at all, it was from the star Helios. But it was a good scare whilst it lasted.
Conway kicked himself for being so foolish as to fall into
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such a silly trap. Over the hundred years during which Helios had been intensively observed there had been three comparatively short periods, of a year or two each, during which the star had become a strong emitter of radio waves. It started with the emission of a few isolated bursts, but then the bursts became more frequent until they overlapped each other. At this stage there was a continuous roar of radio noise from Helios that had proved a most serious nuisance to radio astronomy. Then after a while the bursts became less frequent, they no longer overlapped each other, and gradually the whole thing died away. It was obvious that Helios was running into another of these episodes.
Over the last hundred years more information had been accumulated about Helios than was available for any star, except of course the Sun. The mass was fifty-two per cent greater than that of the Sun and the brightness was almost ten times greater - Helios being not only more massive but more evolved, as the astronomers said. This meant that, whereas the Sun had a future of about eight billion years in front of it, the future of Helios was limited to about one billion years. But long before that time was over, perhaps after only another five hundred million years, any animal life that existed on Achilles would be fried to a crisp. It had occurred to Conway, as well as to the military planners, that any such animal life - if it was in a position to do so =- might consider that a switch of planets would be advantageous. But does one bother about what is going to happen a few hundred million years hence?
Because it was more evolved Helios was not quite as blue in colour as it would otherwise have been. The effective temperature at its surface was about 6,500°, which meant that the maximum of its spectrum fell in the green region, not in the yellow as with the Sun. Helios was a blue-green star and Achilles was a green planet. The distance of Achilles from its star had of course to be considerably greater than the distance of the Earth from the Sun, otherwise everything on Achilles would already have been fried to a
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crisp anyway. The much greater brightness of Helios would have seen to that. In fact the whole system was just a little bigger than the solar system in every respect. Its planets were just that bit more spread out. It was as if the scale of our own system was rather more than doubled, as if the orbit of the Earth were moved somewhere out beyond Mars. It wasn’t at all a big change, our own system could easily have been like it. But then the Earth would have been much too cold. The oceans would have been permanently frozen and, instead of plant growth covering the rocks, the land masses would have been grey, black, and brown. That is at the present stage of course. Eventually the Sun would evolve; it would get hotter; and a time would come when even a more distant Earth would warm up until the waters melted and life might begin in the resulting slime.
But if the burst of radio waves from Helios had not signalled the presence of little men with antennae, it did create a difficult problem indeed. The West had gambled, apparently unjustifiably, on a more or less constant interval of thirty years between these seizures of the star. The last one had been nineteen years earlier. So it had looked as though the next wouldn’t happen until Helios had swept on its way past the solar system. Yet here it was, beginning again after only nineteen years, and this was extremely awkward. The noise emissions would jam the messages from the spaceships back to Earth. There was no problem to begin with, there was still a large angle between the directions of the ships and the direction of Helios, but later on the angles would become much less - not much more than 30. The difficulty arose in the transmission from the ships to the Earth, not the other way round. This could be serious because, Unless the ships could signal through their precise positions, speeds, and directions of motion, the appropriate orbits could not be worked out by the terrestrial computers. Then it was more than doubtful whether they would be able to navigate themselves through the tricky gravitational fields.
The Voyage
Nobody of course could be blamed for the behaviour of Helios. But the Western administration could be blamed for not showing the same foresight as the Russians in sending a scientist on the voyage. There was more than a chance that, whereas the Western rocket would go astray or be forced to return empty-handed, Pitoyan would be able to work himself through die difficulties. People fumed to think that the Russians had done it again. It was clear that Lee and Marty Kipling would not win the next election. •
At first sight one might wonder why any jamming at all should occur. After all, the big dishes, the ten-thousand-foot dish in the Aosta valley, for instance, would be pointed towards the ship, not towards the star. There should be 30 or more between the directions of the ship and the star, so why any jamming? This was the question that the committees wanted a clear answer to.
They got an answer, but to them at least it wasn’t clear - sidelobes. Nobody could quite understand this. It was pointed out that if a telescope was pointed at an object, one simply did not see things that were three degrees away. The scientists said this was perfectly right, but that radio waves weren’t the same as seeing things. The answer came back that committee members had always thought light and radio waves to be really aspects of the same thing. Were the technicians trying now to say that this was not so? The technicians said that it was so, but that the frequency of radio waves was not the same as for light and this made all the difference. Indeed the same phenomenon did exist for ordinary light but normally it was too small to be noticed. There was a big difference due to the frequency and of