Cochrane was no mathematician, but he could see that there was no data for computation on hand. After one found out how fast an acceleration of one Earth-gravity in a Dabney field of such-and-such strength speeded up a ship, something like dead reckoning could be managed. But all that could be known right now was that they had come a long way.
He remembered a television show he’d produced, laid in space on an imaginary voyage. The script-writer had had one of the characters say that no constellation would be visible at a hundred light-years from the solar system. It would be rather like a canary trying to locate the window he’d escaped from, from a block away, with no memories of the flight from it.
Cochrane said suddenly, in a pleased tone:
“This is a pretty good break—if we can keep them from finding out about it back home! We’ll have an entirely new program, good for a thirteen-week sequence, on just this!”
Babs stared at him.
“Main set, this control-room,” said Cochrane enthusiastically. “We’ll get a long-beard scientist back home with a panel of experts. We’ll discuss our problems here! We’ll navigate from home, with the whole business on the air! We’ll have audience-identification up to a record! Everybody on Earth will feel like he’s here with us, sharing our problems!”
Jones said irritably:
“You don’t get it! We’re lost! We can’t check our speed without knowing where we are and how far we’ve come! We can’t find out what the ship will do when we can’t find out what it’s done! Don’t you see?”
Cochrane said patiently:
“I know! But we’re in touch with Luna through the Dabney field that got us here! It transmitted radiation before, faster than light. It’s transmitting voice and pictures now. Now we set up a television show which pays for our astrogation and lets the world sit in on the prettier aspects of our travels. Hm.… How long before you can sit down on a planet, after you have all the navigational aids of—say—the four best observatories on Earth to help you? I’ll arrange for a sponsor—.”
He went happily down the stairs again. This was a spiral stair, and he zestfully spun around it as he went to the next deck below. At the bottom he called up to Babs:
“Babs! Get Bell and Alicia Keith and come along to take dictation! I’m going to need some legal witnesses for the biggest deal in the history of advertising, made at several times the speed of light!”
And he went zestfully to the communicator to set it up.
And time passed. Data arrived, which at once solved Jones’ and the pilot’s problem of where they were and how far they had come—it was, actually, 178.3 light-years—and they spent an hour making further tests and getting further determinations, and then they got a destination.
They stopped in space to extrude from the airlock a small package which expanded into a forty-foot plastic balloon with a minute atomic battery attached to it. The plastic was an electric conductor. It was a field-plate of the Dabney field. It took over the field from Earth and maintained it. It provided a second field for the ship to maintain. The ship, then, could move at any angle from the balloon. The Dabney field stretched 178.3 light-years through emptiness to the balloon, and then at any desired direction to the ship.
The ship’s rockets thrust again—and the booster-circuit came into play. There were maneuverings. A second balloon was put out in space.
At 8:30 Central U. S. Time, on a period relinquished by other advertisers—bought out—a new program went on the air. It was a half-hour show, sponsored by the Intercity Credit Corporation—”Buy on Credit Guaranteed”—with ten straight minutes of commercials interjected in four sections. It was the highest-priced show ever put on the air. It showed the interior of the ship’s control-rooms, with occasional brief switches to authoritative persons on Earth for comment on what was relayed from the far-off skies.
The first broadcast ensured the success of the program beyond possible dispute. It started with curt conversation between Jones and the pilot, Al—Jones loathed this part of it, but Al turned out to be something of a ham—on the problems of approaching a new solar system. Cut to computers back on Earth. Back to the control-room of the starship. Pictures of the local sun, and comments on its differentness from the sun that had nourished the human race since time began.
Then the cameras—Bell worked them—panned down through the ship’s blister-ports. There was a planet below. The ship descended toward it. It swelled visibly as the space-ship approached. Cochrane stood out of camera-range and acted as director as well as producer of the opus. He used even Johnny Simms as an offstage voice repeating stern commands. It was corny. There was no doubt about it. It had a large content of ham.
But it happened to be authentic. The ship had reached another planet, with vast ice-caps and what appeared to be no more than a twenty-degree-wide equatorial belt where there was less than complete glaciation. The rockets roared and boomed as the ship let down into the cloud-layers.
Television audiences back on Earth viewed the new planet nearly as soon as did those in the ship. The time-lag was roughly three seconds for a distance of 203.7 light-years.
The surface of the planet was wild and dramatic beyond belief. There were valleys where vegetation grew luxuriantly. There were ranges of snow-clad mountains interpenetrating the equatorial strip, and there were masses of white which, as the ship descended, could be identified as glaciers moving down toward the vegetation.
But as the ship sank lower and lower—and the sound of its rockets became thunderous because of the atmosphere around it—a new feature took over the central position in one’s concept of what the planet was actually like.
The planet was volcanic. There were smoking cones everywhere—in the snow-fields, among the ice-caps, in between the glaciers, and even among the tumbled areas whose greenness proved that here was an environment which might be perilous, but where life should thrive abundantly.
The ship continued to descend toward a great forest near a terminal moraine.
CHAPTER SIX
Jamison declaimed, wearing a throat-mike as Bell zestfully panned his camera and the ship swung down. It was an impressive broadcast. The rockets roared. With the coming of air about the ship, they no longer made a mere rumbling. They created a tumult which was like the growl of thunder if one were in the midst of the thunder-cloud. It was a numbing noise. It was almost a paralyzing noise. But Jamison talked with professional smoothness.
“This planet,” he orated, while pictures from Bell’s camera went direct to the transmitter below, “this planet is the first world other than Earth on which a human ship has landed. It is paradoxic that before men have walked on Mars’ red iron-oxide plains and breathed its thin cold air, or fought for life in the formaldehyde gales of Venus, that they should look upon a world which welcomes them from illimitable remoteness. Here we descend, and all mankind can watch our descent upon a world whose vegetation is green; whose glaciers prove that there is air and water in plenty, whose very smoking volcanoes assure us of its close kinship to Earth!”
He lifted the mike away from his throat and framed words with his lips. “Am I still on?” Cochrane nodded. Cochrane wore headphones carrying what the communicator carried, as this broadcast went through an angled Dabney field relay system back to Lunar City and then to Earth. He spoke close to Jamison’s ear.
“Go ahead! If your voice fades, it will be the best possible sign-off. Suspense. Good television!”
Jamison let the throat-mike back against his skin. The roaring of the rockets would affect it only as his throat vibrated from the sound. It would register, even so.
“I see,” said Jamison above the rocket-thunder, “forests of giant trees like the sequoias of Mother Earth. I see rushing rivers, foaming along their rocky beds, taking their rise in glaciers. We are still too high to look for living creatures, but we descend swiftly. Now we are level with the highest of the mountains. Now we descend below their smoking tops. Under us there is a vast valley, miles wide
, leagues long. Here a city could be built. Over it looms a gigantic mountain-spur, capped with green. One would expect a castle to be built there.”
He raised his eyebrows at Cochrane. They were well in atmosphere, now, and it had been an obvious defect—condition—necessity of the Dabney field that both of its plates should be in a vacuum. One was certainly in air now. But Cochrane made that gesture which in television production-practice informs the actors that time to cutting is measured in tens of seconds, and he held up two fingers. Twenty seconds.
“We gaze, and you gaze with us,” said Jamison, “upon a world that future generations will come to know as home—the site of the first human colony among the stars!”
Cochrane began to beat time. Ten, nine, eight—.
“We are about to land,” Jamison declaimed. “We do not know what we shall find—What’s that?” He paused dramatically. “A living creature?—A living creature sighted down below! We sign off now—from the stars!”
The ending had been perfectly timed. Allowing for a three-second interval for the broadcast to reach the moon, and just about two more for it to be relayed to Earth, his final word, “Stars!” had been uttered at the precise instant to allow a four-minute commercial by Intercity Credit, in the United States, by Citroen in Europe, by Fabricanos Unidos in South and Central America, and Near East Oil along the Mediterranean. At the end of that four minutes it would be time for station identification and a time-signal, and the divers eight-second flashes before other programs came on the air.
The rockets roared and thundered. The ship went down and down. Jamison said:
“I thought we’d be cut off when we hit air!”
“That’s what Jones thought,” Cochrane assured him. He bellowed above the outside tumult, “Bell! See anything alive down below?”
Bell shook his head. He stayed at the camera aimed out a blister-port, storing up film-tape for later use. There was the feel of gravitation, now. Actually, it was the fact that the ship slowed swiftly in its descent.
Cochrane went to a port. The ship continued its descent.
“Living creature? Where?”
Jamison shrugged. He had used it as a sign-off line. An extrapolation from the fact that there was vegetation below. He looked somehow distastefully out the port at a swiftly rising green ground below. He was a city man. He had literally never before seen what looked like habitable territory of such vast extent, with no houses on it. In a valley easily ten miles long and two wide, there was not a square inch of concrete or of glass. There was not a man made object in view. The sky was blue and there were clouds, but to Jamison the sight of vegetation implied rooftops. There ought to be parapets where roofs ended to let light down to windows and streets below. He had never before seen grass save on elevated recreation-areas, nor bushes not arranged as landscaping, and certainly not trees other than the domesticated growths which can grow on the tops of buildings. To Jamison this was desolation. On the moon, absence of structures was understandable. There was no air. But here there should be a city!
The ship swayed a little as the rockets swung their blasts to balance the descending mass. The intended Mars-ship slowed, and slowed, and hovered—and there was terrifying smoke and flame suddenly all about—and then there was a distinct crunching impact. The rockets continued to burn, their ferocity diminished. They slackened again. And yet again. They were reduced to a mere faint murmur.
There was a remarkable immobility of everything. It was the result of gravity. Earth-value gravity, or very near it. There was a distinct pressure of one’s feet against the floor, and a feeling of heaviness to one’s body which was very different from Lunar City, and more different still from free flight in emptiness.
Nothing but swirling masses of smoke could be seen out the ports. They had landed in a forest, of sorts, and the rocket-blasts had burned away everything underneath, down to solid soil. In a circle forty yards about the ship the ground was a mass of smoking, steaming ash. Beyond that flames licked hungrily, creating more dense vapor. Beyond that still there was only coiling smoke.
Cochrane’s headphones yielded Babs’ voice, almost wailing:
“Mr. Cochrane! We must have landed! I want to see!”
Cochrane pressed the hand-mike button.
“Are we still hooked up to Lunar City?” he demanded. “We can’t be, but are we?”
“We are,” said Babs’ voice mutinously. “The broadcast went through all right. They want to talk to you. Everybody wants to talk to you!”
“Tell them to call back later,” commanded Cochrane. “Then leave the beam working—however it works!—and come up if you like. Tell the moon operator you’ll be away for ten minutes.”
He continued to stare out the window. Al, the pilot, stayed in his cushioned seat before the bank of rocket-controls. The rockets were barely alight. The ship stayed as it had landed, upright on its triple fins. He said to Jones:
“It feels like we’re solid. We won’t topple!”
Jones nodded. The rocket-sound cut off. Nothing happened.
“I think we could have saved fuel on that landing,” said Jones. Then he added, pleased, “Nice! The Dabney field’s still on! It has to be started in a vacuum, but it looks like it can hold air away from itself once it’s established. Nice!”
Babs rushed up the stairs. She gazed impassionedly out of a vision-port. Then she said disappointedly:
“It looks like—”
“It looks like hell,” said Cochrane. “Just smoke and steam and stuff. We can hope, though, that we haven’t started a forest fire, but have just burned off a landing-place.”
They stared out. Presently they went to another port and gazed out of that. The smoke was annoying, and yet it could have been foreseen. A moon-rocket, landing at its space-port on Earth, heated the tarmac to red-hotness in the process of landing. Tender-vehicles had to wait for it to cool before they could approach. Here the ship had landed in woodland. Naturally its flames had seared the spot where it came down. And there was inflammable stuff about, which caught fire. So the ship was in the situation of a phoenix, necessarily nesting in a conflagration. Anywhere it landed the same thing would apply, unless it tried landing on a glacier. But then it would settle down into a lake of boiling water, amid steam, and could expect to be frozen in as soon as its landing-place cooled.
Now there was nothing to do. They had to wait. Once the whole ship quivered very slightly, as if the ground trembled faintly under it. But there was nothing at which to be alarmed.
They could see that this particular forest was composed mainly of two kinds of trees which burned differently. One had a central trunk, and it burned with resinous flames and much black and gray-black smoke. The other was a curious growth—a solid, massive trunk which did not touch ground at all, but was held up by aerial roots which supported it aloft through very many slender shafts widely spread. Possibly the heavier part was formed on the ground and lifted as its air-roots grew.
It was irritating, though, to be unable to see from the ship so long as the fire burned outside. The pall of smoke lasted for a long time. In three hours there were no longer any fiercely blazing areas, but the ashes still smouldered and smoke still rose. In three hours and a half, the local sun began to set. There were colorings in the sky, beyond all comparison glorious. Which was logical enough. When Krakatoa, back on Earth, blew itself to bits in the eighteen hundreds, it sent such volumes of dust into the air that sunsets all around the globe were notably improved for three years afterward. On this planet, smoking cones were everywhere visible. Volcanic dust, then, made nightfall magnificent past description. There was not only gold and crimson in the west. The zenith itself glowed carmine and yellow, and those in the space-ship gazed up at a sky such as none of them could have imagined possible.
The colors changed and changed, from yellow to gold all over the sky, and still the glory continued. Presently there was a deep, deep red, deep past imagining, and presently faint bluish stars pierced it, and
they stared up at new strange constellations-some very bright indeed—and all about the ship there was a bed of white ash with glowing embers in it, and a thin sheet of white smoke still flowed away down the valley.
It was long after sunset when Cochrane got up from the communicator. Communication with Earth was broken at last. There was a balloon out in space somewhere with an atomic battery maintaining all its surface as a Dabney field plate. The ship maintained a field between itself and that plate. The balloon maintained another field between itself and another balloon a mere 178.3 light-years from the solar system. But the substance of this planet intervened between the nearer balloon and the ship. Jones made tests and observed that the field continued to exist, but was plugged by the matter of this newly-arrived-at world. Come tomorrow, when there was no solid-stone barrier to the passage of radiation, they could communicate with Earth again.
But Cochrane was weary and now discouraged. So long as talk with Earth was possible, he’d kept at it. There was a great deal of talking to be done. But a good deal of it was extremely unsatisfactory.
He found Bill Holden having supper with Babs, on the floor below the communicator. Very much of the recent talk had been over Cochrane’s head. He felt humiliated by the indignation of scientists who would not tell him what he wanted to know without previous information he could not give.
When he went over to the dining-table, he felt that he creaked from weariness and dejection. Babs looked at him solicitously, and then jumped up to get him something to eat. Everybody else was again watching out the ship’s ports at the new, strange world of which they could see next to nothing.
“Bill,” said Cochrane fretfully, “I’ve just been given the dressing-down of my life! You’re expecting to get out of the airlock in the morning and take a walk. But I’ve been talking to Earth. I’ve been given the devil for landing on a strange planet without bringing along a bacteriologist, an organic chemist, an ecologist, an epidemiologist, and a complete laboratory to test everything with, before daring to take a breath of outside air. I’m warned not to open a port!”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 93
