Fifth Planet

by Fred Hoyle

  85

  Fifth Planet ...

  course due to a profusion of star-spots on Helios. It was all a question of sidelobes. The word became bandied about the corridors of power - after all, an election depended on the darned things, whatever they were - these sidelobes.

  The big question was what were they going to do about it. The problem of the sidelobes had simply got to be licked. The cost was irrelevant. The committees became irritated and appalled by the dunderheads of scientists who claimed that the problem just couldn’t be solved. It didn’t matter what you were willing to pay - it still couldn’t be solved. That seemed incredible.

  Then at last it all boiled down to there being one slight loophole. A dish of thirty thousand feet would be about ten times better than the present ten-thousand-footer in the Vale of Aosta. This might help, although the engineers pointed out that unless a bigger dish could be made with the same precision as the present ones as much would be lost as would be gained. This also seemed incredible but there it was. Orders were given for the instant construction of a super-S dish. Cost was immaterial. Conway nattered and raved about it. ‘Can’t the fools see they can’t win this way,’ he stormed. ‘A gain of ten will be useless. The blasted star is bound to win out. They’d need a million-footer to beat it.’

  Nothing was said to Larson and his crew. There was no point in upsetting them - sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. So the flight went inexorably on. For every second that the committee men talked, for every second that the constructional engineers worked at the monstrous new project, the ships moved another thirty miles towards their destination.

  The situation was tense indeed in the Russian rocket. It was being temporarily stabilized by Pitoyan, who had to switch from his former tactics and play the part of the disinterested party man. He let the other fellows see that he disapproved of their glances at the girl’s legs. He studiously

  86

  The Voyage

  looked the other way whenever she undressed. His unspoken chiding served to return Kratov and Bakovsky to within the perimeter of their training. Such feedback effects among the psychological currents had been correctly foreseen by Pop- kin.

  George Larson and Uli Reinbach were on a sleeping jag. It sometimes happened on a long trip that the sheer void in your own mind caught up on you. Then you would sleep maybe for a week at a time. In fact you’d quite likely just go on sleeping and sleeping unless there was someone there to waken you. They’d all have gone to sleep endlessly if it hadn’t been for the small sounds that were artificially generated in their cabin. The utter silence of space did that for you. Before the effect of the silence, and of the long wait, became well known, there had been cases of whole crews drifting into a hypnotic sleep. There had been bad tragedies, failures to correct orbits at the right moment and of ships, passing for ever out of the solar system, ships that would continue to hurde through the void for as long as die Galaxy itself should last. That was why Mike Fawsett and Tom Fiske remained awake while the two others slept. There always had to be two of you awake, just in case one should go to sleep. It was a danger that they knew all about and, being professionals, they knew how to deal with it.

  Mike Fawsett was filling the latest details on micrometeorites into the log-book. There were instruments on the outside of the rocket that detected an occasional impact of these very tiny solid particles. They were still to be found around them, even though they were well up from the plane of the solar system. One good feature of being up here was that it cut out the risk of being hit by a great chunk of rook. This was always a worry when you were down in the plane, on a run past Jupiter, especially when in the asteroidal belt, which consisted of chunks of rock resulting from the original break-up of asteroids. The particles that they were getting now came, very likely, from comets which moved as much out of the plane as they did in it. Mike wasn’t thinking very

  87

  Fifth Planet

  much about it all, however. He was thinking what an idiot

  he’d been not to make absolutely the most of his week-end with Cathy. He remembered something in Shakespeare but he couldn’t quite recall the exact words — it was something about being cloyed with a surfeit of sweetness. Well, he could do with a bit of sweetness now. Tom Fiske was thinking much the same thoughts as he read through the latest message from Earth. But then the message caught his attention.

  ‘Scan this,’ he said to Fawsett.

  The message read: ‘Return if difficulties encountered. Stop, repeat stop. Correct orbit uncertain. Return, repeat return at your discretion.’

  Mike read it through twice and he still couldn’t understand it. For the past two or three weeks they’d been getting messages that were all a bit off-centre. It was as though nobody down there was taking any notice of what they said, as if they weren’t receiving transmissions from the ship.

  Mike made a series of cheoks on their bearings. It wasn’t very difficult out here on any of a thousand of the distant stars that stared unwinkingly from the black depths. It seemed as if they were trying to read into the innermost comers of the mind. After being brought up on the Earth, after looking at stars that twinkled in a friendly way, this steady glare was disconcerting. It was rather like eyes without lids. One never got used to it.

  The stellar bearings checked with those of the gyros. There was nothing the matter with their course. Mike had had the idea that perhaps they’d somehow got themselves exactly on to the line joining Helios to the Earth. Then it wouldn’t have been surprising if the terrestrial receivers had been unable to pick them up against the background of the star. But everything was perfectly O.K. They were a good two and a half degrees outside that line.

  He decided to do something they should have done weeks ago, to turn the aerials round towards Helios instead of towards the Earth. Of course they had kept a close watch

  88

  The Voyage

  out for all forms of flare activity and of the emission of streams of particles, but it had never occurred to any of them to worry about radio emission, not while they were receiving Earth. They hadn’t bothered to do this before because they expected only meaningless noise.

  The receiver saturated instantly. There was no gain setting low enough to stop it overloading. So Mike quickly turned the aerials off the star. This was the source of the trouble, although like the committees he couldn’t see why. They woke Larson and Reinbach. Once he’d washed down a couple of pills with a glass of water and once he’d understood what it was all about, Larson began to swear steadily.

  ‘It means we blueblooded well can’t make it,’ he ended.

  ‘We could try,’ said Fiske.

  They all sat silently for quite a while. Each man knew what a ‘try’ would mean. It would mean they’d lose momentum, and in correcting their mistakes they’d waste fuel. The margin of safety was small enough as it was. If they wasted twenty per cent of their momentum drive they couldn’t get back to Earth.

  ‘There’s two things to be done/ began Larson at last. ‘We try for it, and maybe we lose twenty kilometres a second. All right, then we can just park around the job instead of going down on to it. That’ll save us what we lose. Or we can go right ahead and down and make land. Then we don’t get back. But we can get back far enough for our fellows to find us, once this scintillator has gotten itself out of the way.’

  They thought about it for a while. That was the way it would be on a normal trip. But one of the things that had been hammered into them during the months of training was the danger of judging by past experience. The difficulty was that the gravitational fields changed faster than you moved. What looked like the right orbit now would turn out to be the wrong one by the time you got there. None of them was very clear as to why this was so, but they’d been put through tests of exactly this sort, tests in which they were asked to guess orbits in advance and in which they’d

  89

  Fifth Planet

&nbs
p; been completely fooled. In their hearts they knew that it would be easy to lose, not just twenty kilometres of momentum, but the whole of their fuel supply. It would be dead easy to find themselves attached to Helios instead of to the Sun at the end of it all and for them to be swept out of the solar system altogether.

  An odd idea was forming in Mike’s head.

  ‘We could always contact the Russes,’ he began. ‘They’ve got a boff and a computer in their job. Why couldn’t they compute our orbit for us?’

  ‘Jesus, we’d never hear the last of it,’ said Reinbach wiping his face. ‘They’d radio straight through to Earth and we’d be for the plank when we got back. It would be better to turn back right now.’

  ‘They can’t radio back to Earth,’ answered Fawsett.

  ‘They’ll have the same trouble as we have.’

  ‘That’s true too,’ acknowledged Larson. ‘They couldn’t say anything until afterwards, and I reckon afterwards will be too late.’

  They pondered this for a while. There was a lot in it. Face-saving and face-losing is a game in which correct timing is absolutely essential. The master stroke of today looks old hat by tomorrow.

  ‘They could always give us the wrong orbit,’ grunted Larson.

  ‘That’s a problem we can come to when we reach it. We haven’t got the orbit yet.’

  ‘And I’d say there wasn’t much chance of diem giving us it.’

  ‘Well, we can’t do any harm by trying. What do you say?’

  They decided after talking it out to try to raise Earth once more. If that failed then they’d make their appeal to the Russians.

  Pitoyan had some difficulty in deciphering the message from the Americans.

  The appeal for help didn’t surprise him at all because they had already had information from Earth that communica

  90

  The Voyage

  tions were not being received. The very frankness of the Russians on this point can be regarded in the light of self- congratulation, emphasizing that no matter how far the unexpected might arise they would still be masters of the situation.

  Pitoyan’s prestige had of course risen enormously. Without him the rocket could not reach its destination. Previously he had merely represented a measure of safety, of insurance, but now everything turned on his knowledge and skill in calculating the orbit ahead of them. And now the Euro-American capitalists had been obliged to turn to him for help. This impressed and overwhelmed Kratov and Bakovsky more than anything else could do. To them, as to all ordinary Russians, the West was a fairyland, steeped in delicious vice. To keep up their self-respect Kratov and Bakovsky still continued to send back their diurnal messages towards Earth. To Pitoyan this was futile and ridiculous, and he felt himself now to be the effective leader of the expedition.

  Pitoyan felt like ten men when he awoke. He awoke because Ilyana’s hair was tickling his nose. He dressed quickly in order not to excite the suspicions of Kratov and Bakovsky. Then he turned to his work with a zest. It was just because of this that two days later an orbit was sent out from the Russian ship and was received some two minutes later by Tom Fiske.

  There was really nothing that the Euro-Americans could do but accept the orbit as it was given to them. They set their ship on the prescribed course and determined to keep the strictest possible check on future developments. It had surprised them a little to be given the complete orbit. They’d expected the Russians to give them only the starting speed and direction. This way they’d have a better chance of checking that the Russos weren’t up to any tricks. It didn’t occur to them that as far as tricks were concerned they were thinking along quite the wrong lines.

  9i

  Fifth Planet

  By now they were about equidistant between Helios and the Sun. When Conway had gazed at the star across the gasoline-tainted pavements of Florida it had seemed a small, distant, blue-grey disc. But now it was clear which star was really the monarch of the skies. The Sun was a dull faint orange disc. One of the most frightening things about these long distance trips was the way in which the Sun faded into comparative insignificance. In comparison, Helios was a brilliant object projected against a black sky. It is a matter of some difficulty to know what colour one should call it. One might say that the Sun is white and Helios a white steely-blue, but the human eye is a most primitive colourmeasuring device. In fact Helios shone out a magnificent turquoise blue.

  The weeks continued to pass, and the distant glittering disc imperceptibly grew larger and larger. Comparing one day with the next there seemed to be no change but gradually a new splendour emerged, of brilliance and light, of sparkle and of awe. As they moved into the Helios system the blazing ball in front of them was growing rapidly bigger, dramatically bigger. It was approaching the Sun’s normal size but was apparently incomparably brighter. It is true that scientific instruments revealed the cold fact that it was only ten times brighter, but it didn’t seem so to the now almost silent crews of the approaching ships. Its surface detail was almost indescribably complex. There were the crimson-red tongues of flame, prominences similar to those of the Sun but on a larger scale. These could be seen only at the limb where they lifted themselves hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of miles above the surface of the star. The darker areas of the surface glowed orange almost like the surface of the Sun.These areas were quite small patches lying embedded in brilliant blue seas. For once they felt lucky to be cut off from communication with home, for they knew their words would be totally inadequate to describe what they saw. It was better to take films which would show things as they really were.

  92

  The Voyage

  The accelerations of their ships were surprisingly gentle. There was none of the sound and fury of a take-off from Earth. They had to change speed by fifty kilometres per second, but since they had at least a couple of weeks to do this in they did not feel the gentle push that was bringing their motion into consonance with that of the Helios system. Below their feet the suspended reactors pulsed at a low level. The inert fuel was injected steadily along the cylinder walls, where it was heated into a sheet of rapidly streaming gas.

  So far they had paid little attention to Achilles itself for it was still only a point of light. For a long time the outstanding planets were Hera and Semele. But now there came an inversion. Achilles was growing brighter than its rivals. This could mean only one thing. They were closing the distance. It was only at this stage that Larson and his crew became sure that they had not been sold down the river. It had always been possible that the orbit they were following was a false one. It had been hell waiting to know whether they were in the right orbit or in an orbit that would throw them back where they had just come from, in one that would leave them permanently attached to Helios, or in an orbit that would take them entirely out into space away from both stars. But now they knew that the Russians had played it square.

  These days they were to be found more and more at the telescopic viewer. Achilles filled a good-sized television screen, and the image was reasonably clean. There were two overridingly dominant colours, orange and green. The strange thing was that although the picture was good they could still see no details. It wasn’t that the atmosphere of Achilles was blocking their vision, as is the case for instance for the planet Venus, it was just as if there didn’t seem to be any details. There were large green areas, and there were large orange areas. Occasionally they picked up a flash, however, and this they knew to be the reflection of sunlight in a liquid, almost certainly in water. Simple measurements now confirmed what was suspected about the mass and size

  93

  Fifth Planet

  of the planet. In conformity with the general pattern of the Helios system everything was just that bit bigger than in the solar system. The mass was one and a quarter tim$s that of the Earth, and the radius was also a trifle larger. Gravity would be a bit greater than on Earth, but only slightly so, certainly not enough to be of t
he slightest worry to them.

  The composition of the atmosphere they already knew pretty well. Almost twice the oxygen density of the Earth, a little less nitrogen, water vapour and carbon dioxide. And they said to themselves, they’d seen it all before. To men who had stood on the surface of the Moon and on Mars, it looked pretty good. As Reinbach said, ‘If the Earth was like that it would just about be perfect.’

  Larson moved over to the controls. Any fool could manage it now. He set the dials, checked them, pressed the re-set and, with gentle pressure from the main control lever, started the ship down towards its parking orbit.

  Chapter Nine

  The Landing

  A difficulty about making a landing on any planet, which was not realized in early days of space flight, when everybody was only too keen to make a landing at all, was that you only get one bite at the cherry. If you put down at what turned out later to be the wrong place - well, then you’d had it. You couldn’t simply blast off again and make a second try. It cost too much fuel. And an ordinary simple aeroplane, if you were to take the trouble to carry one with you, Suffered in the same way - it needed too much fuel. But they did have very fine mobility machines. Machines that walked on eight great padded legs. They had been found enormously more serviceable on broken ground than caterpillar tractors. The first time down on a planet, or at a particular spot on a planet, was always a tricky matter. You never knew whether you were going to find yourself on steep mountain slopes or on hundreds of miles of soft quicksand. A combination of the two was the worst - quicksands lying on top of large boulders, and covering small rock precipices.

  The range of their land vehicles again depended on fuel - not on the fuel they could carry in the rocket this time, but on how much each vehicle itself could carry. With a full load each vehicle had a range of about five hundred miles. This you could extend, perhaps to two thousand miles, by carefully laying a chain of dumps. It was rather like the methods used by the old polar explorers. You used big machines to carry supplies for smaller ones, and it was enormously wasteful and tedious. A more brilliant method was to lay the dumps already from the parking orbit. The