He remembered his parents, he knew his family; he recalled his girl friend, lovely by Komarian standards—she had a particularly attractive mane of hair running from the back of her neck to the base of her spine—a female attribute of special beauty. . . .
The voice on the radio beam spoke again. It was inquiring after him personally; did he feel well? Was he dizzy, and so forth. Warren reassured his listener on these subjects, and quietly began to describe the Ice Moon as seen from his position.
He was coming in on this satellite for a landing, the first such landing ever to be made. The satellite was the largest of those of Komar. That planet was a world of Earthly size, judging strictly by local analogies. There were giant gaseous planets in the system of the same type as Jupiter and Saturn. By comparison with these, Komar was a solid world, smaller and warmer—an Earth-type "inner" planet. It had two moons; one stony and fairly small and distant; the other larger—a thousand miles in diameter if you considered Komar as seven thousand—and apparently a huge mass of ice, a ball.of frozen water which possibly might have a rocky core.
Landing on it was important. Whatever nation could establish control of it might well prove the victor of the planet Komar. Warren searched Dau's brain and he was able to add to the missing centuries in Komarian history as known on Thunderhook. There had indeed been an industrial revolution as scheduled, and that world now found itself with two leading nations, both with radimentary atomic power. One was a democracy, the other an oligarchy. Each distrusted the other, each feared war, but found peace untenable. And each thought that possession of the Ice Moon meant an end to the threat of conflict.
Warren rode the rocket for two days. During this time he began to live the role of Dau so well that for periods he virtually forgot who he had been. Yet, searching space out-, side the rocket, he was impressed again with the reality of this other universe, as compared with that in which Earth existed. He saw on all sides a depth of black space sprinkled with stars. He saw that the stars were thick and heavy near the center of the galaxy, and that they thinned out on the opposite side. He saw the several planets of Sun 20 glowing in their orbits, he saw a comet, and his instruments recorded meteors—the last remnants of the cosmic dust of creation. He saw Komar shining warm and homelike across a wide field on one segment.
With his knowledge of the universe of Earth and Sol, Warren strained his eyes to the darkest section of the space around him, but no evidence was there of this other universe surrounding. And he began to wonder just what was the true relationship between the two universes.
Steiner had insisted that the microcosm was truly as large as the entire Milky Way galaxy, that its enclosure within the space of the dome on Thunderhook was only relative— that it was a sort of illusion or optical concentration on a small break in space-time. Steiner had argued that a mile inside the microcosm was fully the equal of a mile outside it . . . and this never had made sense.
But how could Warren doubt it now? Concentrate as he would, he could not dispute that his present body, the rocket he rode, the planet hed left and the satellite for which he headed, were—so far as he could tell—made of molecules and atoms of exactly the same chemical and electronic values of those of the universe he had left. Science said that a molecule of carbon is a molecule of carbon, regardless of where and when. The carbon molecules of the microcosm had to be exactly the same size and quality and have the same properties as those of the outer universe. If that didn't make sense, it was merely due to the limitations of the human mind.
As he lived and breathed the life of Dau Wool-house, Warren Alton was forced to acknowledge that indeed this man was every bit as alive and normal and valid as the reporter for People. What, then, was reality?
Reality, Warren considered, lies in the sizes of these universes. Ours is infinite, this is finite. We have thousands of mighty galaxies; this, but one.
On this thought he searched the outer skies through the rocket's telescope for those glimmering spirals of light that marked such galaxies as those of Andromeda—but he found none. Searching Dau's memory of school, he recalled the philosophical arguments that waxed hot in the colleges of Komar: Was the universe infinite and endless, or was it finite and curved on itself in space?
The rocket was swinging around the Ice Moon now, braking itself by assuming an orbit, gradually narrowing the distance to the glistening surface of ice. Looming high were great mountains, upthrust peaks of ice reaching thousands of feet into the satellite's airless sky. There were huge crevasses and chasms, where the ice shield that had coated the moon in some distant past had buckled and split. There were star-spray cracks where meteors had smashed into the ice surface.
The closer one came the more striking the view; it was a landscape of desolation and wonder, the rays of the sun constantly breaking into rainbow auras that mingled in a hundred different spectra as the light struck the crags and tossed surfaces of the moon.
As he closed in for the final landing, Warren saw something else in the field. There was a glimpse of light and a flash of fire far off in the view, and he strained his eyes against the glow of the ice world. There was another rocket coming in for a landing—another rocket where there could not be one!
He called back to Komar for instructions, but he was so close to the Ice Moon that he could not hear the answer. He decided to ignore that other rocket until he made his landing.
His rocket closed in, swooped lower and lower, and now slid just over the peaks of a viciously sharp upthrust of mountainous ice and down onto a wide hundred-mile field of shining ice. Down lower and lower he arced and knew as he did so that his rocket was intended to land that way—not tail-down, as Earth rockets were supposed to land on Luna. No, for this moon, the giant runners that ran about the body of his rocket would do the trick.
Now the rocket slid gently down on the ice, its runners touched, bounced, touched again, and then the rocket was whizzing across the ice like a bullet. Desperately Warren held the controls, riding the tobogganing spacecraft across the endless horizon of white glassy ice. He saw a crevice appear before him, a spurt of the rocket power lifted the craft over it and set it down again. He twisted the controls, spun the rocket around until he was facing the rear and the rocket racing backwards, and now he fired his rockets in quick short spurts. The sliding craft began to brake rapidly, was brought to a proper halt, and Warren was congratulating himself on a good landing when suddenly there was a jarring crash. Warren was thrown from his seat, as the bulkhead behind him seemed to cave in on him. He heard a grinding noise, a tearing of metal, and he hit the front windshield with a bang.
He picked himself up dizzily in a moment. Plainly he must have struck against something unforeseen, some up-thrust in the ice, an invisible obstacle in this supposedly flat ice field. Quickly he looked himself over; he was all right, save for a bruise on his forehead, and a skinned hand. He sniffed, but the little cabin was still airtight. There was no telltale hiss of air escaping. He glanced at the board but it had stopped functioning as far as the engines were concerned. He depressed switches but could get no reaction.
He opened the little cabinet and took out his pressure suit. Rapidly he dressed himself in it, in the tight compression of the bands and the form-fitting suit which would keep him warm and keep his body under normal pressure. The helmet went on tightly, the airtank fit. All set, he pushed open the door that led into the middle section, where a now-empty fuel tank would become his airlock section. As he pushed the door open, there was a whoosh of air. The rest of his ship was no longer airtight, that was clear. He saw that the outer metal skin of the middle compartment had buckled. Through it he could see twisted tubes and great splinters of jagged ice thrust inside.
The lock door was bent in the middle but he forced it open and stepped out on the surface of the Ice Moon. He was the first man to set foot on another world—but likely it would be some other that would bear the honor, for honors do not go to those who do not return.
Around him
the sky was still obscured by the cloud of ice dust that had been sprayed by the collision. It was hanging in the airless space, slowly drifting to the ground in the light gravity of the small world.
He felt giddy himself, realized his weight was slight. He turned around and surveyed the rocket.
The entire rear, the engines and tubes were smashed like an eggshell. The tobogganing rocket had slid into a mass of broken ice directly in its path. It had crumpled. There could be no repairing its engines.
Warren tramped around the rocket examining it, confirming the damage. He saw that there was a chance he might be able to hitch up one or two of the dislodged batteries and get his cabin elements functioning—maybe even get off a communication to Souva.
Food he had—the collision might break it up, but that wouldn't render it inedible—if he could manage to defrost it.
Warren stood and looked up at Komar and his Dau memories were shocked and sad. To have made it, yet to have lost at the same time. But—he smiled—in any case, Souva would get the honor of claiming the Ice Moon. He searched inside the wrecked stores of the rocket and found what he was seeking: a light titanium pole bearing at its top the standard of Souva. He dragged this out, bent it straight where it had been twisted in the crash, and, walking out a little way from the rocket, stood it up and forced it into the ice.
He stood back and saluted. The standard of the nation of Souva stood there proudly, the five-rayed sun of gold with the clasped hands of blue and orange superimposed.
He went back to the rocket and looked again. And this time, somehow, the standard looked lost and small against the black sky and the cold hard brilliance of the icy landscape. The stars shone down in burning splendor and the world of Komar appeared soft and glowingly warm. A-gainst these the standard now suddenly seemed only a childish toy.
As Warren stood there in the cracked door of his rocket, before beginning the task of trying to rig up his electric system, the other rocket came into view. He saw the yellow flame of its exhaust just over the edge of the mountain top; he saw it flaring down for a sliding landing on the same field of flat ice that had deceived Warren.
He stood and gaped in astonishment. He could not take his eyes off the other rocket. It came on down, angled towards the ice, hit in a nice sliding run, skated on long runners across the ice leaving a cloud of ice particles like a trailer behind it.
He saw the rocket begin to swing about, to reverse itself on its runners, just as Warren had done, and suddenly Warren himself could not suppress a cry, "Look out!"
But the driver of the other rocket could not hear him. For at the instant of the shout, the nose of the other rocket brushed against the ice, the rocket dipped sharply and skidded along on its nose for another thousand feet before spinning to a stop.
Warren began to run across the ice in great bounds, aided by the light gravity, toward the other rocket, possibly two miles away.
He ran on, leaping small cracks, sliding madly on the icy surface, and as he ran he strained his eyes. Now a figure climbed from the bent and broken nose of the other rocket; he saw a bulkily space-suited figure stumble as if in pain across the ice. The figure was carrying something.
Warren skidded to a halt, perplexed. Was this rocketeer carrying a weapon? He realized that of course he was being foolish running to the aid of an enemy. This man must be from Tannok, from the odious oligarchy. Perhaps he would be fired on.
The other figure stumbled to a halt, swung the object he was carrying and stuck it upright in the ice. Warren gasped. It was the Tannok standard, of course. He should have realized: the infamous Duk-Duk bird with its talons grasping a three-pronged star!
Suddenly the whole thing struck Warren as"°ûnbearably funny. Two hopelessly wrecked rocket pilots, without a chance of returning to Komar," planting their silly symbols on a frozen world that haa no use for either of them. Two emblems of the quarrels of planet-bound worms, trying to pretend that their petty differences mattered here.
He burst out in uncontrollable laughter and staggered forward. And finally the other figure came to him, and when they met, Warren saw that the stranger was equally hysterical. They fell into each others' arms, roaring with laughter and crying at the same time.
CHAPTER NINE
'WE WERE on the Ice Moon for three full months before we finally managed to get back. The engines and tanks of the Tannok ship were in good condition, the nose and living quarters of mine were likewise. We moved the broken nose of his and welded on the front of mine. It took three months to complete the job."
Warren's voice, relating his experiences, was holding everyone spellbound. It was late in the evening, supper had been finished and the great living room in the lodge was mainly dark, save for the flickering of logs in the old fireplace. Around the big table were most of the staff of Thunderhook, all fascinated.
These were men who had heard many stories of strange worlds, but this time they knew they had passed over a line into something different. Warren's adventure was the first to go into a scientific achievement beyond those of Earth itself. He was the first human who had experienced—even though, in a sense, at second-hand—actual space flight and actual conditions on uninhabitable worlds.
Marge was there in the big room, but she had taken herself over to a corner by the fireplace and was exchanging whispers with the off-duty guard, Jack. Steiner and Hyatt were on duty. But the others had spent the hour after the table had been cleared listening to Warren.
'Why the laughter? Why the amity between the two antagonists?" asked Weidekind. "I don't understand what you two had in common. Didn't you both owe everything to your own nations?"
Alton pursed his lips. "It's hard for me to explain it now," he said, "but at the time it was quite clear. Somehow being so far away from the home world made its politics petty. It was the outer view. It wasn't a loss of patriotism or anything like that—rather, it was a new and greater sort of pride, a sort of planetary pride. We were both proud simply of being men and being from Komar. We had, you see, so much more in common with each other than with any conceivable thing or object on the Ice Moon where we had landed.
"Our act of planting our standards was sort of a conditioned reflex, you see. It was an act we had each thought of before ever starting our trip; but when we actually did it, it seemed so silly! You see, there was our home world right up there in plain sight in the sky, so much more awesome, so much vaster somehow than our silly little standards, representative of conflicting superstitions and the fossilized angers of long-dead ancients. On top of that, it was so obvious to us both that we were as good as dead. We had both cracked up, neither of us could return. Why fight?
"It wasn't until afterwards that we thought we could make the return trip up by patching one good ship out of two wrecks. If the gravity hadn't been so light there, we probably couldn't have achieved it. But we had nothing else to do and only a few months' limited supply of air and food— so we tried, and succeeded.
"By the time we returned to Komar in our hybrid rocket the whole planet had had plenty of time to follow our adventures. Our names were on everyone's mind and mouth.
We outshone all the petty political troubles, all the border disputes, all the selfish mutual distrusts of our nations.
"And we ourselves saw what a chance had been given us. When we returned, we landed in a neutral nation, famous on Komar for its skill in effecting international arbitration and peace. We asked the leaders of our own countries to come to us—and they did. They had to, public pressure was so strong on them to do so after our return. Then we gave them our new philosophy. Out in space, Komar was our world and against the other regions of space, we were and could only be Komarian—not Souvans or Tannoki.
"I don't know what will come of it in the history of Komar, because I blanked out in the middle of a triumphal tour the next month. That's when I came to here—after just about seventy of our minutes had passed since the transferal started."
There was quiet at the table. Then
several started discussing it at the same time. Some seemed to understand the viewpoint, others insisted that it must have been an idiosyncracy of the Komarian mind. Enderby finally rapped on the table. "Time to retire, men; we still have work ahead of us."
As the staff began to leave, Enderby turned to Warren. "Did you finish writing up the details of your experience? Have you gotten the data on that rocket ship down—its engine, its fuel and mechanism? This is actually the very first new invention to come out of our microcosm. It's extremely important!"
Warren nodded. "I have most of it down on paper, Chief. I'll complete it in my room before I go to sleep. I don't want any of the details to fade from my memory."
Enderby nodded agreement. They began to drift out to their separate quarters. Warren went up to his bedroom on the second floor of the lodge, sat at his writing desk there and worked for another three hours on his manuscript, detailing exactly what he could remember. He was able to describe the rocket ship minutely—having had three months of actual work in taking one apart and putting another together. He was able to sketch out the wiring, the fitting and sizes of the rockets and their chambers, the fuel consumption and the nature of the fuel itself. As he worked, he was aware that some of the details would prove eye-openers to modern Terrestrial engineers. There were clever short cuts, there were hookups that would solve some difficult problems of rocketry; and the fuel itself was revolutionary.
By midnight he was through. He could expand on the notes next day, but now it was basically all there. He yawned, undressed, and putting out the light went to bed.
Sometime later he opened his eyes. The room was dark, it was still deep night. Something had disturbed him. He lay silent and then heard a faint squeaking, a tension of changing floor boards. He strained his ears and fancied he could hear breathing, then the squeak came again as if someone were stealthily trying to cross his floor on bare feet.
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