The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “I’ll go now,” he said finally. “I need to tell the others.”

  The captain shut the cabin door tightly. He carefully put the test tube into a rack. He listened. The reactor’s cooling system was buzzing quietly. The engines that increased the Pole’s speed were working perfectly.

  …Ten minutes later the captain went down to the crew’s quarters. Five people were standing waiting for him. They were all wearing their astronaut uniforms, which they put on only on rare occasions, and the captain understood: he did not need to explain the situation to anyone.

  “So…,” he started. “Apparently I’m the only one who forgot to get dolled up….”

  Nobody smiled.

  “Sit down,” the captain said. “A council of war…So…Well. Let the youngest speak first, as is the custom. You, Lenochka. What should we do, what do you think?” He turned to the woman.

  She spoke very seriously:

  “I am a doctor, Aleksey Pavlovich. This is a more technical question. Please let me give my opinion later.”

  The captain nodded:

  “Of course. You are the wisest of us all, Lenochka. And the quickest thinker. I’d be willing to bet that you have an opinion. You do have one already.”

  The woman didn’t answer.

  “Well,” the captain said, “Lenochka will talk later. So now it’s your turn, Sergey.”

  The astrophysicist flung his arms wide.

  “This has nothing to do with my specialism either, I don’t have any firm opinions. But I know that the fuel will last for our trip to Barnard’s Star. Why turn back halfway?”

  “Yes, why?” the captain repeated. “Because we can’t come back. We can turn back halfway. But we can’t return once we reach our destination.”

  “Agreed,” the astrophysicist said thoughtfully. “But is it really true that we can’t come back? We ourselves, of course, will not return. But people will fly after us. They will see that we haven’t come back and will set out to find us. Astronautics is a developing science.”

  “Developing,” the captain laughed. “As time goes by…So, we should fly onward? Am I understanding you correctly? Very good. Now you, Georgey. Does this relate to your specialism?”

  The navigator leapt up, pushing his chair back from the table.

  “Sit down,” the captain said. “Sit down and speak calmly. Don’t jump around.”

  “There is no way to get back!” The navigator was almost shouting. “We can only move onward. Onward, through the impossible! Anyway, think about it, how can we return? Didn’t we know that the expedition would be a difficult one? Of course we knew. And here we are, up against the first difficulty, ready to throw it all in….No, no, onward, ever onward!”

  “Ri-ight,” the captain drawled. “Onward through the impossible. Sounds good…Well, what do the engineers think? You, Nina Vladimirovna? You, Nikolay?”

  The engineer looked at his wife. She nodded and he started to speak. He spoke calmly, as if thinking aloud.

  “Our flight to Barnard’s Star is a research expedition. If we six learn anything new, make any discoveries, then that in itself won’t have any value. Our discoveries will only develop a value when they are known to other people, to mankind as a whole. If we fly to Barnard’s Star and have no means of return, what’s the point of any discoveries we make? Sergey said that people would end up flying after us. That’s true. But the ones who follow will have to make these discoveries without us. What will our contribution have been? What benefit will our expedition have been to humanity? In fact, we will only have caused harm. Yes, harm. They will wait on Earth for our expedition to return. They will wait in vain. If we come back now, then the amount of time lost will be minimized. A new expedition will set out. We will set out ourselves. We may lose a few years, but the material we have gathered so far will be stored on Earth. At the moment there’s no chance that will happen….Fly on? Why? No, we—Nina and I—are against it. We have to go back. At once.”

  There was a long silence. Then Lena asked:

  “And what do you think, Captain?”

  The captain smiled sadly.

  “I think that our engineers are right. Beautiful words are nothing but words. But common sense, logic, calculation: these are all on the side of the engineers. We are flying in order to make discoveries. And if these discoveries are not transmitted to Earth, then they are worthless. Nikolay is right, a thousand times right….”

  Zarubin stood up and walked heavily round the cabin. It was difficult to walk: movement was impeded by the triple-strength gravity caused by the acceleration of the rocket.

  “Waiting for a relief rocket is out of the question,” the captain continued. “There are two other possibilities. The first is to return to Earth. The second is to fly to Barnard’s Star…and then fly back to Earth. To return in spite of the loss of fuel.”

  “How?” the engineer asked.

  Zarubin went back to his chair and sat down without answering immediately.

  “I don’t know how. But we have time. There are still eleven months to go before we reach Barnard’s Star. If you decide to return now, then we will return. But if you believe that we can think up something over the next eleven months, that we can invent some sort of solution, then…then onward, through the impossible! That’s all I’ve got to say, my friends. What about you. It’s your turn, Lenochka.”

  The woman winked at him.

  “You’re the quickest thinker. I’d be willing to bet that you have something worked out already.”

  The captain laughed.

  “You lose! I haven’t got anything in mind. But there are still eleven months left. We’ll be able to think up something during that time.”

  “We have faith,” the engineer said. “We have faith.” He was silent for a moment. “Although, to tell the truth, I’m not sure how we’re going to make it. Fuel levels on the Pole will be at eighteen percent when we get there. Eighteen percent instead of fifty…But you’ve said you’re certain, and that’s that. We’ll go to Barnard’s Star. Like Georgey said, onward through the impossible.”

  The door squeaks quietly. The wind ruffles the pages, hurries about the room, filling it with the damp smell of the sea. Smell’s a funny thing. There are no smells on board a rocket. The conditioners clean the air, keep the temperature and humidity levels constant. But conditioned air is tasteless, like distilled water. They tried artificial scent generators a couple of times, but nothing came of them. The smell of normal Earth air is too complicated; it’s difficult to reproduce. Like now…I smell the sea, the damp autumn leaves, and a distant smell of perfume, and from time to time, when the wind gets up, the smell of earth. And a very faint smell of paint.

  The wind leafs through the pages….What was the captain banking on? He really had to “think something up.” And he was the only experienced astronaut on board the ship.

  Of course, Zarubin could rely on the help of the members of his crew—the navigator, the engineers, the astrophysicist, the doctor. But that would be later. First of all, he had to “think something up.” That is the particular specialism of a ship’s captain.

  I am a doctor, but I have been on space flights and I know that there is no such thing as a miracle. When the Pole reached Barnard’s Star, it would only have 18 percent of its fuel remaining. Eighteen instead of fifty…

  There is no such thing as a miracle. But if the captain had asked me if I believed he would find a way out, I would have said, “Yes.” I would have answered straightaway, without needing to think: “Yes, yes, yes!” I don’t believe in miracles, but I believe implicitly in people.

  In the morning I asked the chief archivist to show me Zarubin’s paintings.

  “You’ll need to go upstairs,” he said. “But…Tell me, have you read all the documents?”

  He listened to my reply, and nodded.

  “I understand. I thought as much. Yes, the captain took on a great responsibility….Would you have trusted him?”

  “Yes.�
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  “So would I.”

  He was silent for a long time, biting his lips. Then he stood up and pushed his glasses up his nose.

  “All right then, let’s go.”

  The chief archivist walked with a limp. We walked slowly along the corridors of the archive.

  “You’ll read some more about this,” the archivist said. “If I’m not wrong, it’s in the second volume, round about page one hundred. Zarubin wanted to discover the secrets of the Italian Renaissance masters. From the eighteenth century onward there had been a falling off in oil painting, at least on the level of craft. Many people considered that this was an irreversible decline. Artists were unable to get hold of colors that were at the same time bright and long lasting. The brighter they were, the quicker the paintings faded. Especially blues. Well, Zarubin…but you’ll see.”

  Zarubin’s paintings hung in a narrow sunlit gallery. The first thing that leapt out at me was that each painting was only one color—red, blue, green….

  “These are studies,” the archivist said. “Technical exercises, nothing more. Here’s his Study in Blue.”

  Two fragile human figures—a man and a woman—with strap-on wings were flying side by side through a blue sky. Everything was painted in different shades of blue, but I had never seen so many. It was a night sky, blue-black, on the lower left edge and a transparent warm midday blue in the opposite corner. The people’s wings were painted in shades of light and dark blue, shading into violet. At points the colors were harsh, clear, sparkling, and in other parts they were softer, muted, transparent. Next to this painting, Degas’s Blue Dancers would have seemed very limited and poorly colored.

  There were other pictures hanging there as well. Study in Red: two crimson suns above an unknown planet, a chaos of shadows and half shadows, from blood-red to pale pink. Study in Brown: an imaginary fairy forest…

  “Zarubin had a great imagination,” the archivist said. “He was just trying out his colors. But then…”

  He fell silent. I waited, looking at the blue impermeable glasses over his eyes.

  “Just read more,” he said quietly. “Then I’ll show you some other paintings. Then you’ll understand….”

  I read as fast as I can, trying to grasp the most important points.

  The Pole flew to Barnard’s Star. The spaceship reached its maximum speed and then the motors started to go into reverse. Judging from the brief entries in the log, everything proceeded normally. There were no accidents, no illnesses. And the captain was, as always, calm, confident, cheerful. He spent a lot of his time studying the technology of paint manufacture, and painting his studies….

  What was he thinking of, in his cabin? The log and the navigator’s personal journal do nothing to answer this question. But here’s an interesting document. It’s the engineer’s report. It discusses faults in the cooling system. Dry, precise language, technical terms. But between the lines what I read was the following: “My friend, if you have second thoughts, you can still turn round. Retreat with honor….” And there’s a note in the captain’s hand: “The cooling systems will be repaired once we reach Barnard’s Star.” And what that meant was “No, my friend, I haven’t changed my mind.”

  Zarubin didn’t change his mind. He drove the Pole onward, through the impossible. Nineteen months after takeoff they reached Barnard’s Star. The dim red star had only one planet, almost as large as Earth, but covered in ice. The Pole tried to land. The ion stream from the engines melted the ice and the first attempt at landing was unsuccessful. The captain chose a different spot—and the ice melted again. Six times the Pole tried to land, until it finally came across a granite cliff under the ice.

  At this point, the entries in the log start to be made in red ink. This was the traditional method of recording discoveries.

  The planet was dead. Its atmosphere was almost pure oxygen, but there was not a single living creature, not a single plant on its dead surface. The thermometer read minus fifty degrees.

  “An undistinguished planet,” the navigator wrote in his diary, “but what a wonderful star! A whole avalanche of discoveries…”

  Yes, a whole avalanche of discoveries. Even now, when research into the formation and evolution of stars has taken a great leap forward, even now the discoveries made by the crew of the Pole are still to a large extent useful. The research made into the gaseous envelope of “red dwarves” of the Barnard’s Star type is still cited as one of the fullest and most accurate studies.

  The log…The scientific report…The astrophysicist’s handwriting, setting out his paradoxical hypotheses on the evolution of stars…And, finally, what I was looking for: the commander’s order to return. It was unexpected, implausible. Not willing to believe it, I quickly flick through the pages. The entry in the navigator’s journal. Now I believe, I know for a fact—this is how it was.

  One day the captain said:

  “Enough. Time to go home.”

  Five people looked silently at Zarubin. The clock ticked calmly….

  Five people looked at the captain. They were waiting.

  “Time to go home,” the captain repeated. “You know that we have eighteen percent of our fuel remaining. But there is a way out. First of all, we need to make the rocket lighter. We need to get rid of all the electronic equipment apart from the navigation controls….” He saw that the navigator wanted to say something, and stopped him with a gesture. “That’s how it needs to be. Apparatus, internal partitions in the empty tanks, bits of the greenhouse. And the most important is the heavy electronic apparatus. But that’s not all. The main usage of fuel takes place during the first few months of a flight—because of the slow acceleration. We’ll have to get used to being uncomfortable: the Pole will take off not at three g’s, but at twelve.”

  “Accelerating like that we won’t be able to control the rocket,” the engineer interrupted. “The pilot won’t be able to—”

  “I know that,” the captain interrupted firmly. “I know that. Control of the ship over the first few months will have to be carried out here, from the planet. One crew member will stay here….Silence! Silence, I said! Remember, there’s no other way out. This is how it will be. So, I’ll carry on. You, Nina Vladimirovna, and you, Nikolay, will not be able to stay: you’re going to have a child. Yes, I know. You, Lenochka, are the ship’s doctor and so you have to fly. Sergey is the astrophysicist. He needs to fly as well. And Georgey can’t control himself. And so the only one left is me. Once more—silence! This is how it will be.”

  …I have in front of me the calculations that Zarubin made. I am a doctor, but I understand all of them. One thing I notice straightaway: The calculations are made, one might say, to the limit. The ship will be stripped down to the limit, the gravitational force at takeoff will be pushed to the limit. Most of the greenhouse will be left on the planet, and so the daily ration for the astronauts will be small—much lower than the established norms. The backup power supply with its two mini-reactors will be removed. Almost all the electronic equipment will be removed. If something unforeseen happens on the flight back, the rocket will be unable even to make it back to Barnard’s Star. “The risk is raised to the power of three,” is written down in the navigator’s diary. And below that: “But for the person who stays behind, it is raised to the tenth power, the hundredth….”

  Zarubin will have to wait for fourteen years. It is only then that another rocket can come to find him. Fourteen years alone, on an alien frozen world…More calculations. The most important thing is the energy supply. It will have to be enough to control the rocket remotely, and then last for fourteen long, endless, eternal years. And once again, everything is worked out to the limit, right on the edge.

  A photofilm of the captain’s quarters. It is made out of sections of the greenhouse. Through the transparent panes you can see the electronic apparatus and the mini-reactors. The tele-control antennae are on the roof. And all around is a frozen desert. Barnard’s Star shines coldly in the gray,
dim, fog-covered sky. It is about four times as large as the Earth’s sun but shines no brighter than the moon.

  I quickly go through the log. Here’s everything: the captain’s parting words, the agreement reached about radio contact over the first few days of the journey, and a list of objects which need to be left for the captain….And suddenly four words: “The Pole takes off.” And then there are some strange notes. They look as if they were made by a child: the lines cross over one another, the letters are angular, broken. That is the twelve-g acceleration.

  I make out the words with difficulty. The first entry: “All is good. Damn gravity overload! Purple patches in front of my eyes…” Two days later: “We’re accelerating as planned. Impossible to walk, we can only crawl….” A week later: “Difficult, very [crossed out]…we’re coping. The reactor is working as calculated.”

  Two pages of the log are not filled in. On the third, heavily blotted, is the following entry, written at an angle: “Contact lost with ground control. Something is blocking the beam. It is [crossed out]…It is the end….” But then, right on the edge of the page, is another entry in a much firmer hand: “Contact with ground control reestablished. The power indicator shows strength at level four. The captain is giving us all the energy from his mini-reactors, and we can’t stop him. He’s sacrificing himself….”

  I close the log. Now all I can think about is Zarubin. The breakdown in communications must have been unexpected for him. A sudden light on a control panel…

  The warning buzzer went off. The needle trembled and pointed to zero. The radio signals came through, but the control signals did not.

  The captain stood by the transparent walls of the greenhouse. The dull crimson sun sank over the horizon. Brown shadows fled along the frozen riverbed. The wind howled, threw up dusty snow, hurled it up into the faded red-gray sky.

  The warning buzzer rang continuously. The radio signals were growing diffuse; they were no longer strong enough to control the rocket. Zarubin looked at the setting Barnard’s Star. Behind him the lamps flashed feverishly on the electronic control panel.