Jimmy had been down to the Southern Hemisphere and was making his way along the equatorial observation deck when he saw Gibson sitting at one of the windows, staring out into space. For a moment he thought the other had not seen him and had decided not to intrude upon his thoughts when Gibson called out: “Hello, Jimmy. Have you got a moment to spare?”
As it happened, Jimmy was rather busy. But he knew that there had been something wrong with Gibson, and realized that the older man needed his presence. So he came and sat on the bench recessed into the observation port, and presently he knew as much of the truth as Gibson thought good for either of them.
“I’m going to tell you something, Jimmy,” Gibson began, “which is known to only a handful of people. Don’t interrupt me and don’t ask any questions—not until I’ve finished, at any rate.
“When I was rather younger than you, I wanted to be an engineer. I was quite a bright kid in those days and had no difficulty in getting into college through the usual examinations. As I wasn’t sure what I intended to do, I took the five-year course in general engineering physics, which was quite a new thing in those days. In my first year I did fairly well—well enough to encourage me to work harder next time. In my second year I did—not brilliantly, but a lot better than average. And in the third year I fell in love. It wasn’t exactly for the first time, but I knew it was the real thing at last.
“Now falling in love while you’re at college may or may not be a good thing for you; it all depends on circumstances. If it’s only a mild flirtation, it probably doesn’t matter one way or the other. But if it’s really serious, there are two possibilities.
“It may act as a stimulus—it may make you determined to do your best, to show that you’re better than the other fellows. On the other hand, you may get so emotionally involved in the affair that nothing else seems to matter, and your studies go to pieces. That is what happened in my case.”
Gibson fell into a brooding silence, and Jimmy stole a glance at him as he sat in the darkness a few feet away. They were on the night side of the ship, and the corridor lights had been dimmed so that the stars could be seen in their unchallenged glory. The constellation of Leo was directly ahead, and there in its heart was the brilliant ruby gem that was their goal. Next to the Sun itself, Mars was by far the brightest of all celestial bodies, and already its disc was just visible to the naked eye. The brilliant crimson light playing full on his face gave Gibson a healthy, even a cheerful appearance quite out of keeping with his feelings.
Was it true, Gibson wondered, that one never really forgot anything? It seemed now as it if might be. He could still see, as clearly as he had twenty years ago, that message pinned on the faculty notice-board: “The Dean of Engineering wishes to see M. Gibson in his office at 3.00.” He had had to wait, of course, until 3.15, and that hadn’t helped. Nor would it have been so bad if the Dean had been sarcastic, or icily aloof, or even if he had lost his temper. Gibson could still picture that inhumanly tidy room, with its neat files and careful rows of books, could remember the Dean’s secretary padding away on her typewriter in the corner, pretending not to listen.
(Perhaps, now he came to think of it, she wasn’t pretending after all. The experience wouldn’t have been so novel to her as it was to him.)
Gibson had liked and respected the Dean, for all the old man’s finicky ways and meticulous pedantry, and now he had let him down, which made his failure doubly hard to bear. The Dean had rubbed it in with his “more in sorrow than in anger” technique, which had been more effective than he knew or intended. He had given Gibson another chance, but he was never to take it.
What made matters worse, though he was ashamed to admit the fact, was that Kathleen had done fairly well in her own exams. When his results had been published, Gibson had avoided her for several days, and when they met again he had already identified her with the cause of his failure. He could see this so clearly now that it no longer hurt. Had he really been in love if he was prepared to sacrifice Kathleen for the sake of his own self-respect? For that is what it came to; he had tried to shift the blame on to her.
The rest was inevitable. That quarrel on their last long cycle ride together into the country, and their returns by separate routes. The letters that hadn’t been opened—above all, the letters that hadn’t been written. Their unsuccessful attempt to meet, if only to say good-bye, on his last day in Cambridge. But even this had fallen through; the message hadn’t reached Kathleen in time, and though he had waited until the last minute she had never come. The crowded train, packed with cheering students, had drawn noisily out of the station, leaving Cambridge and Kathleen behind. He had never seen either again.
There was no need to tell Jimmy about the dark months that had followed. He need never know what was meant by the simple words: “I had a breakdown and was advised not to return to college.” Dr. Evans had made a pretty good job of patching him up, and he’d always be grateful for that. It was Evans who’d persuaded him to take up writing during his convalescence, with results that had surprised them both. (How many people knew that his first novel had been dedicated to his psychoanalyst? Well, if Rachmaninoff could do the same thing with the C Minor Concerto, why shouldn’t he?)
Evans had given him a new personality and a vocation through which he could win back his self-confidence. But he couldn’t restore the future that had been lost. All his life Gibson would envy the men who had finished what he had only begun—the men who could put after their names the degrees and qualifications he would never possess, and who would find their life’s work in fields of which he could be only a spectator.
If the trouble had lain no deeper than this, it might not have mattered greatly. But in salvaging his pride by throwing the blame on to Kathleen he had warped his whole life. She, and through her all women, had become identified with failure and disgrace. Apart from few attachments which had not been taken very seriously by either partner, Gibson had never fallen in love again, and now he realized that he never would. Knowing the cause of his complaint had helped him not in the least to find a cure.
None of these things, of course, need be mentioned to Jimmy. It was sufficient to give the bare facts, and to leave Jimmy to guess what he could. One day, perhaps, he might tell him more, but that depended on many things.
When Gibson had finished, he was surprised to find how nervously he was waiting for Jimmy’s reactions. He felt himself wondering if the boy had read between the lines and apportioned blame where it was due, whether he would be sympathetic, angry—or merely embarrassed. It had suddenly become of the utmost importance to win Jimmy’s respect and friendship, more important than anything that had happened to Gibson for a very long time. Only thus could he satisfy his conscience and quieten those accusing voices from the past.
He could not see Jimmy’s face, for the other was in shadow, and it seemed an age before he broke the silence.
“Why have you told me this?” he asked quietly. His voice was completely neutral—free both from sympathy or reproach.
Gibson hesitated before answering. The pause was natural enough, for, even to himself, he could hardly have explained all his motives.
“I just had to tell you,” he said earnestly. “I couldn’t have been happy until I’d done so. And besides—I felt I might be able to help, somehow.”
Again that nerve-racking silence. Then Jimmy rose slowly to his feet.
“I’ll have to think about what you’ve told me,” he said, his voice still almost emotionless. “I don’t know what to say now.”
Then he was gone. He left Gibson in a state of extreme uncertainty and confusion, wondering whether he had made a fool of himself or not. Jimmy’s self-control, his failure to react, had thrown him off balance and left him completely at a loss. Only of one thing was he certain: in telling the facts, he had already done a great deal to relieve his mind.
But there was still much that he had not told Jimmy; indeed there was still much that he did not know himself.
Seven
This is completely crazy!” stormed Norden, looking like a berserk Viking chief. “There must be some explanation! Good heavens, there aren’t any proper docking facilities on Deimos—how do they expect us to unload? I’m going to call the Chief Executive and raise hell!”
“I shouldn’t if I were you,” drawled Bradley. “Did you notice the signature? This isn’t an instruction from Earth, routed through Mars. It originated in the CE’s office. The old man may be a Tartar, but he doesn’t do things unless he’s got a good reason.”
“Name just one!”
Bradley shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t have to run Mars, so how would I know? We’ll find out soon enough.” He gave a malicious little chuckle. “I wonder how Mac is going to take it? He’ll have to recompute our approach orbit.”
Norden leaned across the control panel and threw a switch.
“Hello, Mac—Skipper here. You receiving me?”
There was a short pause; then Hilton’s voice came from the speaker.
“Mac’s not here at the moment. Any message?”
“All right—you can break it to him. We’ve had orders from Mars to re-route the ship. They’ve diverted us from Phobos—no reason given at all. Tell Mac to calculate an orbit to Deimos, and to let me have it as soon as he can.”
“I don’t understand it. Why, Deimos is just a lot of mountains with no—”
“Yes—we’ve been through all that! Maybe we’ll know the answer when we get there. Tell Mac to contact me as soon as he can, will you?”
Dr. Scott broke the news to Gibson while the author was putting the final touches to one of his weekly articles.
“Heard the latest?” he exclaimed breathlessly. “We’ve been diverted to Deimos. Skipper’s mad as hell—it may make us a day late.”
“Does anyone know why?”
“No; it’s a complete mystery. We’ve asked, but Mars won’t tell.”
Gibson scratched his head, examining and rejecting half a dozen ideas. He knew that Phobos, the inner moon, had been used as a base ever since the first expedition had reached Mars. Only 6,000 kilometres from the surface of the planet, and with a gravity less than a thousandth of Earth’s, it was ideal for this purpose. The lightly built spaceships could land safely on a world where their total weight was under a ton and it took minutes to fall a few metres. A small observatory, a radio station, and a few pressurized buildings completed the attractions of the tiny satellite, which was only about thirty kilometres in diameter. The smaller and more distant moon, Deimos, had nothing on it at all except an automatic radio beacon.
The Ares was due to dock in less than a week, and already Mars was a small disc showing numerous surface markings even to the naked eye. Gibson had borrowed a large Mercator projection of the planet and had begun to learn the names of its chief features—names that had been given, most of them, more than a century ago by astronomers who had certainly never dreamed that men would one day use them as part of their normal lives. How poetical those old mapmakers had been when they had ransacked mythology! Even to look at those words on the map was to set the blood pounding in the veins—Deucalion, Elysium, Eumenides, Arcadia, Atlantis, Utopia, Eos… Gibson could sit for hours, fondling those wonderful names with his tongue, feeling as if in truth Keats’ charm’d magic casements were opening before him. But there were no seas, perilous or otherwise, on Mars—though many of its lands were sufficiently forlorn.
The path of the Ares was now cutting steeply across the planet’s orbit, and in a few days the motors would be checking the ship’s outward speed. The change of velocity needed to deflect the voyage orbit from Phobos to Deimos was trivial, though it had involved Mackay in several hours of computing.
Every meal was devoted to discussing one thing—the crew’s plans when Mars was reached. Gibson, the gentleman of leisure, could land on Mars right away, but the workers, as it was pointedly explained to him, would have to stay on Deimos for several days, checking the ship and seeing the cargo safely off.
Gibson’s plans could be summed up in one phrase—to see as much as possible. It was, perhaps, a little optimistic to imagine that one could get to know a whole planet in two months, despite Bradley’s repeated assurances that two days was quite long enough for Mars.
The excitement of the voyage’s approaching end had, to some extent, taken Gibson’s mind away from his personal problems. He met Jimmy perhaps half a dozen times a day at meals and during accidental encounters, but they had not reopened their earlier conversation. For a while Gibson suspected that Jimmy was deliberately avoiding him, but he soon realized that this was not altogether the case. Like the rest of the crew, Jimmy was very busy preparing for the end of the voyage. Norden was determined to have the ship in perfect condition when she docked, and a vast amount of checking and servicing was in progress.
Yet despite this activity, Jimmy had given a good deal of thought to what Gibson had told him. At first he had felt bitter and angry towards the man who had been responsible, however unintentionally, for his mother’s unhappiness. But after a while, he began to see Gibson’s point of view and understood a little of the other’s feelings. Jimmy was shrewd enough to guess that Gibson had not only left a good deal untold, but had put his own case as favourably as possible. Even allowing for this, however, it was obvious that Gibson genuinely regretted the past, and was anxious to undo whatever damage he could, even though he was a generation late.
It was strange to feel the sensation of returning weight and to hear the distant roar of the motors once again as the Ares reduced her speed to match the far smaller velocity of Mars. The manoeuvring and the final delicate course-corrections took more than twenty-four hours. When it was over, Mars was a dozen times as large as the full moon from Earth, with Phobos and Deimos visible as tiny stars whose movements could be clearly seen after a few minutes of observation.
Gibson had never really realized how red the great deserts were. But the simple word “red” conveyed no idea of the variety of colour on that slowly expanding disc. Some regions were almost scarlet, others yellow-brown, while perhaps the commonest hue was what could best be described as powdered brick.
It was late spring in the southern hemisphere, and the polar cap had dwindled to a few glittering specks of whiteness where the snow still lingered stubbornly on higher ground. The broad belt of vegetation between pole and desert was for the greater part a pale bluish-green, but every imaginable shade of colour could be found somewhere on that mottled disc.
The Ares was swimming into the orbit of Deimos at a relative speed of less than a thousand kilometres an hour. Ahead of the ship, the tiny moon was already showing a visible disc, and as the hours passed it grew until, from a few hundred kilometres away, it looked as large as Mars. But what a contrast it presented! Here were no rich reds and greens, only a dark chaos of jumbled rocks, of mountains which jutted up towards the stars at all angels in this world of practically zero gravity.
Slowly the cruel rocks slid closer and swept past them, as the Ares cautiously felt her way down towards the radio beacon which Gibson had heard calling days before. Presently he saw, on an almost level area a few kilometres below, the first signs that man had ever visited this barren world. Two rows of vertical pillars jutted up from the ground, and between them was slung a network of cables. Almost imperceptibly the Ares sank toward Deimos; the main rockets had long since been silenced, for the small auxiliary jets had no difficulty in handling the ship’s effective weight of a few hundred kilogrammes.
It was impossible to tell the moment of contact; only the sudden silence when the jets were cut off told Gibson that the journey was over, and the Ares was now resting in the cradle that had been prepared for her. He was still, of course, twenty thousand kilometres from Mars and would not actually reach the planet itself for another day, in one of the little rockets that was already climbing up to meet them. But as far as the Ares was concerned, the voyage was ended. The tiny cabin t
hat had been his home for so many weeks would soon know him no more.
He left the observation deck and hurried up to the control room, which he had deliberately avoided during the last busy hours. It was no longer so easy to move around inside the Ares, for the minute gravitational field of Deimos was just sufficient to upset his instinctive movements and he had to make a conscious allowance for it. He wondered just what it would be like to experience a real gravitational field again. It was hard to believe that only three months ago the idea of having no gravity at all had seemed very strange and unsettling, yet now he had come to regard it as normal. How adaptable the human body was!
The entire crew was sitting round the chart table, looking very smug and self-satisfied.
“You’re just in time, Martin,” said Norden cheerfully. “We’re going to have a little celebration. Go and get your camera and take our pictures while we toast the old crate’s health.”
“Don’t drink it all before I come back!” warned Gibson, and departed in search of his Leica. When he re-entered, Dr. Scott was attempting an interesting experiment.
“I’m fed up with squirting my beer out of a bulb,” he explained. “I want to pour it properly into a glass now we’ve got the chance again. Let’s see how long it takes.”
“It’ll be flat before it gets there,” warned Mackay. “Let’s see—g’s about half a centimetre a second squared, you’re pouring from a height of…” He retired into a brown study.
But the experiment was already in progress. Scott was holding the punctured beer-tin about a foot above his glass—and, for the first time in three months, the word “above” had some meaning, even if very little. For, with incredible slowness, the amber liquid oozed out of the tin—so slowly that one might have taken it for syrup. A thin column extended downwards, moving almost imperceptibly at first, but then slowly accelerating. It seemed an age before the glass was reached; then a great cheer went up as contact was made and the level of the liquid began to creep upwards.
The Space Trilogy Page 24
