Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars

by Inherit the Stars [lit]

  Giordano Bruno on Farside. Here, sensitive receivers, operating

  fully shielded from the perpetual interference from Earth, and

  gigantic telescopes, freed from any atmosphere and not having to

  contend with distortions induced by their own weights, were pushing

  the frontiers of the known Universe way out beyond the limits of

  their Earth-bound predecessors. Hunt sat fascinated in front of the

  monitor screens and resolved planets of some of the nearer stars;

  he was shown one nine times the size of Jupiter, and another that

  described a crazy figure-eight orbit about a double star. He gazed

  deep into the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy, and out at distant

  specks on the very threshold of detection. Scientists and

  physicists described the strange new picture of the Cosmos that was

  beginning to emerge from their work here and explained some of the

  exciting advances in concepts of space-time mechanics, which

  indicated that feasible methods could be devised for dcforming

  astronomic geodesics in such a way that the limitations once

  thought to apply to extreme effective velocities could be avoided.

  If so, interstellar travel would become a practical proposition;

  one of the scientists confidently predicted that man would cross

  the Galaxy within fifty years.

  Hunt's final stop brought him back to Nearside-to the base at

  Copernicus near which Charlie had been found. Scientists at

  Copernicus had been studying descriptions of the terrain over which

  Charlie had traveled and the accompanying sketched maps; the

  in-formation contained in the notebook had been transmitted up from

  Houston. From the traveling times, distances, and estimates of

  speed quoted, they suspected that Charlie's journey had begun

  somewhere on Farside and had brought him, by way of the Jura

  Mountains, Sinus Iridurn, and Mare Imbrium, to Copernicus. Not

  everybody subscribed to this opinion, however; there was a problem.

  For some unaccountable reason, the directions and compass points

  mentioned in Charlie's notes bore no relationship to the

  conventional lunar north-south that derived from its axis of

  rotation. The only route for Charlie's journey that could be

  interpreted to make any sense at all was the one from Farside

  across Mare Imbrium, but even that only made sense if a completely

  new direction was assumed for the north-south axis.

  Attempts to locate Gorda had so far met with no positive success.

  From the tone of the final entries in the diary, it could not have

  been very far from the spot where Charlie was found. About fifteen

  miles south of this point was an area covered by numerous

  overlapping craters, all confirmed as being meteoritic and of

  recent origin. Most researchers concluded that this must have been

  the site of Gorda, totally obliterated by a freak concentration of

  meteorites in the as yet unexplained storm.

  Before leaving Copernicus, Hunt accepted an invitation to drive out

  overland and visit the place of Charlie's discovery. He was

  accompanied by a Professor Alberts from the base and the crew of

  the UNSA survey vehicle.

  * * *

  The survey vehicle lumbered to a halt in a wide gorge, between

  broken walls of slate-gray rock. All around it, the dust had been

  churned into a bewildering pattern of groo$es and ridges by

  Caterpillar tracks, wheels, landing gear, and human feet-evidence

  of the intense activity that had occurred there over the last

  eighteen months. From the observation dome of the upper cabin, Hunt

  recognized the scene immediately; he had first seen it in

  Caidwell's office. He identified the large mound of rubble against

  the near wall of the gorge, and above it the notch leading into the

  cleft.

  A voice called from below. Hunt rose to his feet, his movements

  slow and clumsy in his encumbering spacesuit, and clambered through

  the floor hatch and down a short ladder to the control cabin. The

  driver was stretching back in his seat, taking a long drink from a

  flask of hot coffee. Behind him, the sergeant in command of the

  vehicle was at a videoscreen, reporting back to base via comsat

  that they had reached their destination without mishap. The third

  crew member, a corporal who was to accompany Hunt and Alberts

  outside and who was already fitted out, was helping the professor

  secure his helmet. Hunt took his own helmet from the storage rack

  by the door and fixed it in place. When the three were ready, the

  sergeant supervised the final checkout of life-support and

  communications systems and cleared them to pass, one by one,

  through the airlock to the outside.

  "Well, there you are, Vie. Really on the Moon now." Alberts's voice

  came through the speaker inside Hunt's helmet. Hunt felt the spongy

  dust yield beneath his boots and tried a few experimental steps up

  and down.

  "It's like Brighton Beach," he said.

  "Okay, you guys?" asked the voice of the UNSA corporal.

  "Okay."

  "Sure."

  "Let's go, then."

  The three brightly colored figures-one orange, one red, and one

  green-began moving slowly along the well-worn groove that ran up

  the center of the mound of rubble. At the top they stopped to gaze

  down at the survey vehicle, already looking toylike in the gorge

  below.

  They moved into the cleft, climbing between vertical walls of rocks

  that closed in on both sides as they approached the bend. Above the

  bend the cleft straightened, and in the distance Hunt

  could see a huge wall of jagged buttresses towering over the

  foothills above them-evidently the ridge described in Charlie's

  note. He could picture vividly the scene in this very place so long

  ago, when two other figures in spacesuits had toiled onward and

  upward, their eyes fixed on that same feature. Above it, the red

  and black portent of a tormented planet had glowered down on their

  final agony like.

  Hunt stopped, puzzled. He looked up at the ridge again, then turned

  to stare at the bright disk of Earth, shining far behind his right

  shoulder. He turned to look one way, then back again the other.

  "Anything wrong?" Alberts, who had continued on a few paces, had

  turned and was staring back at him.

  "I'm not sure. Hang on there a second." Hunt moved up alongside the

  professor and pointed up and ahead toward the ridge. "You're more

  familiar with this place than I am. See that ridge up ahead there-

  At any time in the year, could the Earth ever appear in a position

  over the top of it?"

  Alberts followed Hunt's pointing finger, glanced briefly back at

  the Earth, and shook his head decisively behind his facepiece.

  "Never. From the Lunar surface, the position of Earth is almost

  constant. It does wobble about its mean position a bit as a result

  of libration, but not by anything near that much." He looked again.

  "Never anywhere near there. That's an odd question. Why do you

  ask?"

  "Just something that occurred to me. Doesn't really matter for

  now."


  Hunt lowered his eyes and saw an opening at the base of one of the

  walls ahead. "That must be it. Let's carry on up to it."

  The hole was exactly as he remembered from innumerable photographs.

  Despite its age, the shape betrayed its artificial origin. Hunt

  approached almost reverently and paused to finger the rock at one

  side of the opening with his gauntlet. The score marks had

  obviously been made by something like a drill.

  "Well, that's it," came the voice of Alberts, who was standing a

  few feet back. "Charlie's Cave, we call it-more or less exactly as

  it must have been when he and his companion first saw it. Rather

  like treading in the sacred chambers of one of the pyramids, isn't

  it?"

  "That's one way of putting it." Hunt ducked down to peer in-

  side, pausing to fumble for the flashlight at his belt as the

  sudden darkness blinded him temporarily.

  The rockfall that originally had covered th~ body had been cleared,

  and the interior was roomier than he expected. Strange emotions

  welled inside him as he stared at the spot where, millennia before

  the first page of history had been written, a huddled figure had

  painfully scrawled the last page of a story that Hunt had read so

  recently in an office in Houston, a quarter of a million miles

  away. He thought of the time that had passed since those events had

  taken place-of the empires that had grown and fallen, the cities

  that had crumbled to dust, and the lives that had sparkled briefly

  and been swallowed into the past-while all that time, unchanging,

  the secret of these rocks had lain undisturbed. Many minutes passed

  before Hunt reemerged and straightened up in the dazzling sunlight.

  Again he frowned up toward the ridge. Something tantalizing was

  dancing elusively just beyond the fringes of the thinking portions

  of his mind, as if from the subconscious shadows that lay below,

  something insistent was shrieking to be recognized. And then it was

  gone.

  He clipped the flashlight back into position on his belt and walked

  across to rejoin Alberts, who was studying some rock f ormations on

  the opposite wall.

  chapter twenty

  The giant ships that would fly on the fifth manned mission to

  Jupiter had been under construction in Lunar orbit for over a year.

  Besides the command ship, six freighters, each capable of carrying

  thirty thousand tons of supplies and equipment, gradually took

  shape high above the surface of the Moon. During the final two

  months before scheduled departure, the floating jumbles of

  machinery, materials, containers, vehicles, tanks, crates, drums,

  and a thousand other items of assorted engineering that hung around

  the ships like enormous Christmas-tree ornaments, were slowly

  absorbed inside. The Vega surface shuttles, deep-space cruisers,

  and other craft also destined for the mission began moving in over

  a period of several weeks to join their respective mother ships. At

  intervals throughout the last week, the freighters lifted out of

  Lunar orbit and set course for Jupiter. By the time its passengers

  and final complement of crew were being ferried up from the Lunar

  surface, only the command ship was left, hanging alone in the void.

  As H hour approached, the gaggle of service craft and attendant

  satellites withdrew and a flock of escorts converged to stand a few

  miles off, cameras transmitting live via Luna into the World News

  Grid.

  As the final minutes ticked by, a million viewscreens showed the

  awesome mile-and-a-quarter-long shape drifting almost imperceptibly

  against the background of stars; the serenity of the spectacle

  seemed somehow to forewarn of the unimaginable power waiting to be

  unleashed. Exactly on schedule, the ifight-control computers

  completed their final-countdown-phase checkout, obtained "Go"

  acknowledgment from the ground control master processor, and

  activated the main thermonuclear drives in a flash that was visible

  from Earth.

  The Jupiter Five Mission was under way.

  For the next fifteen minutes the ship gained speed and altitude

  through successively higher orbits. Then, shrugging off the

  restraining pull of Luna with effortless ease, Jupiter Five soared

  out

  and away to begin overtaking and marshaling together its flock of

  freighters, by this time already strung out across a million miles

  of space. After a while the escorts turned back to~ward Luna, while

  on Earth the news screens showed a steadily diminishing point of

  light, being tracked by the orbiting telescopes. Soon even that had

  vanished, and oniy the long-range radars and laser links were left

  to continue their electronic exchanges across the widening gulf.

  Aboard the command ship, Hunt and the other UNSA scientists watched

  on the wall screen in mess twenty-four as the minutes passed by and

  Luna contracted into a full disk, partly eclipsing that of Earth

  beyond. In the days that followed, the two globes waned and fused

  into a single blob of brilliance, standing out in the heavens to

  signpost the way they had come. As days turned into weeks, even

  this shrank to become just another grain of dust among millions

  until, after about a month, they could pick it out only with

  difficulty.

  Hunt found that it took time to adjust to the idea of living as

  part of a tiny man-made world, with the cosmos stretching away to

  infinity on every side and the distance between them and everything

  that was familiar increasing at more than ten miles every second.

  Now they depended utterly for survival on the skills of those who

  had designed and built the ship. The green hills and blue skies of

  Earth were no longer factors of survival and seemed to shed some of

  their tangible attributes, almost like the aftermath of a dream

  that had seemed real. Hunt came to think of reality as a relative

  quantity-not something absolute that can be left for a while and

  then returned to. The ship became the only reality; it was the

  things left behind that ceased, temporarily, to exist.

  He spent hours in the viewing domes along the outer hull, slowly

  coming to terms with the new dimension being added to his

  existence, gazing out at the only thing left that was familiar: the

  Sun. He found reassurance in the eternal presence of the Sun, with

  its limitless flood of life-giving warmth and light. Hunt thought

  of the first sailors, who had never ventured out of sight of land;

  they too had needed something familiar to cling to. But before

  long, men would turn their prow toward the open gulf and plunge

  into the voids between the galaxies. There would be no Sun to

  reassure them then, and there would be no stars at all; the

  galaxies themselves would be just faint spots, scattered all the

  way to infinity.

  What strange new continents were waiting on the other side of those

  gulfs?

  Danchekker was spending one of his relaxation periods in a

  zero-gravity section of the ship, watching a game of 3-D football

  being played between t
wo teams of off-duty crew members. The game

  was based on American-style football and took place inside an

  enormous sphere of transparent, rubbery plastic. Players hurtled

  up, down, and in all directions, rebounding off the wall and off

  each other in a glorious roughhouse directed-vaguely-at getting the

  ball through two circular goals on opposite sides of the sphere. In

  reality, the whole thing was just an excuse to let off steam and

  flex muscles beginning to go soft during the long, monotonous

  voyage.

  A steward tapped the scientist on the shoulder and informed him

  that a call was waiting in the videobooth outside the recreation

  deck. Danchekker nodded, unclipped the safety loop of his belt from

  the anchor pin attached to the seat, clipped it around the

  handrail, and with a single effortless pull, sent himself floating

  gracefully toward the door. Hunt's face greeted him, speaking from

  a quarter of a mile away.

  "Dr. Hunt," he acknowledged. "Good morning-or whatever it happens

  to be at the present time in this infernal contraption."

  "Hello, Professor," Hunt replied. "I've been having some thoughts

  about the Ganymeans. There are one or two points I could use your

  opinion on; could we meet somewhere for a bite to eat, say inside

  the next half hour or so?"

  "Very well. Where did you have in mind?"

  "Well, I'm on my way to the restaurant in B section right now. I'll

  be there for a while."

  "I'll join you there in a few minutes." Danchekker cut off the

  screen, emerged from the booth, and hauled himself back into the

  corridor and along it to an entrance to one of the transverse

  shafts leading "down" toward the axis of the ship. Using the

  handrails, he sailed some distance toward the center before

  checking himself opposite an exit from the shaft. He emerged

  through a transfer lock into one of the rotating sections, with

  simulated G, at a point near the axis where the speed differential

  was low. He launched

  himself back along another rail and felt himself accelerate gently,

  to land thirty feet away, on his feet, on a part of the structure

  that had suddenly become the floor. Walking normally, he followed

  some signs to the nearest tube access point, pressed the call

  button, and waited about twenty seconds for a capsule to arrive.

  Once inside, he keyed in his destination and within seconds was