“I don’t believe Alstair!” said the girl evenly. “And, anyhow, it was Jack who caught the signals. And he’s the one who’s working with them, officer or Mut! And he’s human, anyhow. It’s time for the signals to come again and you depend on him to handle them.”
The old man frowned. He walked with a careful steadiness to a seat. He sat down with an old man’s habitual and rather pathetic caution. The Adastra, of course, required no such constant vigilance at the controls as the interplanetary space ships require. Out here in emptiness there was no need to watch for meteors, for traffic, or for those queer and yet inexplicable force fields which at first made interplanetary flights so hazardous.
The ship was so monstrous a structure, in any case, that the tinier meteorites could not have harmed her. And at the speed she was now making greater ones would be noticed by the induction fields in time for observation and if necessary the changing of her course.
A door at the side of the control room opened briskly and a man stepped in. He glanced with conscious professionalism at the banks of indicators. A relay clicked, and his eyes darted to the spot. He turned and saluted the old man with meticulous precision. He smiled at the girl.
“Ah, Alstair,” said the old man. “You are curious about the signals, too?”
“Yes, sir. Of course! And as second in command I rather like to keep an eye on signals. Gary is a Mut, and I would not like him to gather information that might be kept from the officers.”
“That’s nonsense!” said the girl hotly.
“Probably,” agreed Alstair. “I hope so. I even think so. But I prefer to leave out no precaution.”
A buzzer sounded. Alstair pressed a button and a vision plate lighted. A dark, rather grim young face stared out of it.
“Very well, Gary,” said Alstair curtly. He pressed another button. The vision plate darkened and lighted again to show a long corridor down which a solitary figure came. It came close and the same face looked impassively out. Alstair said even more curtly, “The other doors are open, Gary. You can come straight through.”
“I think that’s monstrous!” said the girl angrily as the plate clicked off. “You know you trust him! You have to! Yet every time he comes into officers’ quarters you act as if you thought he had bombs in each hand and all the rest of the men behind him!”
Alstair shrugged and glanced at the old man, who said tiredly, “Alstair is second in command, my dear, and he will be commander on the way back to Earth. I could wish you would be less offensive.”
But the girl deliberately withdrew her eyes from the brisk figure of Alstair with its smart uniform, and rested her chin in her hands to gaze broodingly at the farther wall. Alstair went to the banks of indicators, surveying them in detail. The ventilator hummed softly. A relay clicked with a curiously smug, self-satisfied note. Otherwise there was no sound.
The Adastra, mightiest work of the human race, hurtled on through space with the light of a strange sun shining faintly upon her enormous hull. Twelve lambent purple flames glowed from holes in her forward part. She was decelerating, lessening her speed by thirty-two point two feet per second per second, maintaining the effect of Earth’s gravity within her bulk.
Earth was seven years behind and uncounted millions of millions of miles. Interplanetary travel was a commonplace in the solar system now, and a thriving colony on Venus and a precariously maintained outpost on the largest of Jupiter’s moons promised to make space commerce thrive even after the dead cities of Mars had ceased to give up their incredibly rich loot. But only the Adastra had ever essayed space beyond Pluto.
She was the greatest of ships, the most colossal structure ever attempted by man. In the beginning, indeed, her design was derided as impossible of achievement by the very men who later made her building a fact. Her framework beams were so huge that, once cast, they could not be moved by any lifting contrivance at her builders’ disposal. Therefore the molds for them were built and the metal poured in their final position as a part of the ship. Her rocket tubes were so colossal that the necessary supersonic vibrations—to neutralize the disintegration effect of the Caldwell field—had to be generated at thirty separate points on each tube, else the disintegration of her fuel would have spread to the tubes themselves and the big ship afterward, with even the mother planet following in a burst of lambent purple flame. At full acceleration a set of twelve tubes disintegrated five cubic centimeters of water per second.
Her diameter was a shade over five thousand feet. Her air tanks carried a reserve supply which could run her crew of three hundred for ten months without purification. Her stores, her shops, her supplies of raw and finished materials, were in such vast quantities that to enumerate them would be merely to recite meaningless figures.
There were even four hundred acres of food-growing space within her, where crops were grown under sun lamps. Those crops used waste organic matter as fertilizer and restored exhaled carbon dioxide to use, in part as oxygen and in part as carbohydrate foodstuffs.
The Adastra was a world in herself. Given power, she could subsist her crew forever, growing her food supplies, purifying her own internal atmosphere without loss and without fail, and containing space within which every human need could be provided, even solitude.
And starting out upon the most stupendous journey in human history, she had formally been given the status of a world, with her commander empowered to make and enforce all needed laws. Bound for a destination four light-years distant, the minimum time for her return was considered to be fourteen years. No crew could possibly survive so long a voyage undecimated. Therefore the enlistments for the voyage had not been by men, but by families.
There were fifty children on board when the Adastra lifted from Earth’s surface. In the first year of her voyage ten more were born. It had seemed to the people of Earth that not only could the mighty ship subsist her crew forever, but that the crew itself, well-nourished and with more than adequate facilities both for amusement and education, could so far perpetuate itself as to make a voyage of a thousand years as practicable as the mere journey to Proxima Centauri.
And so it could, but for a fact at once so needless and so human that nobody anticipated it. The fact was tedium. In less than six months the journey had ceased to become a great adventure. To the women in particular, the voyage of the big ship became deadly routine.
The Adastra itself took on the semblance of a gigantic apartment house without newspapers, department stores, new film plays, new faces, or even the relieving annoyances of changeable weather. The sheer completeness of all preparations for the voyage made the voyage itself uneventful. That meant tedium.
Tedium meant restlessness. And restlessness, with women on board who had envisioned high adventure, meant the devil to pay. Their husbands no longer appeared as glamorous heroes. They were merely human beings. The men encountered similar disillusionments. Pleas for divorce flooded the commander’s desk, he being legally the fount of all legal action. During the eighth month there was one murder, and in the three months following, two more.
A year and a half out from Earth, and the crew was in a state of semi-mutiny originating in sheer boredom. By two years out, the officers’ quarters were sealed off from the greater part of the Adastra’s interior, the crew was disarmed, and what work was demanded of the mutineers was enforced by force guns in the hands of the officers. By three years out, the crew was demanding a return to Earth. But by the time the Adastra could be slowed and stopped from her then incredible velocity, she would be so near her destination as to make no appreciable difference in the length of her total voyage. For the rest of the time the members of the crew strove to relieve utter monotony by such vices and such pastimes as could be improvised in the absence of any actual need to work.
The officers referred to their underlings by a contraction of the word “mutineers”—Muts. The crew came to have a queer distaste for all dealing with the officers. But, despite Alstair, there was no longer much danger o
f an uprising. A certain mental equilibrium had—very late—developed.
From the nerve-racked psychology of dwellers in an isolated apartment house, the greater number of the Adastra’s complement came to have the psychology of dwellers in an isolated village. The difference was profound. In particular the children who had come to maturity during the long journey through space were well adjusted to the conditions of isolation and of routine.
Jack Gary was one of them. He had been sixteen when the trip began, son of a rocket-tube engineer whose death took place the second year out. Helen Bradley was another. She had been fourteen when her father, as designer and commanding officer of the mighty globe, pressed the control key that set the huge rockets into action.
Her father had been past maturity at the beginning. Aged by responsibility for seven uninterrupted years, he was an old man now. And he knew, and even Helen knew without admitting it, that he would never survive the long trip back. Alstair would take his place and the despotic authority inherent in it, and he wanted to marry Helen.
She thought of these things, with her chin cupped in her hand, brooding in the control room. There was no sound save the humming of the ventilator and the infrequent smug click of a relay operating the automatic machinery to keep the Adastra a world in which nothing ever happened.
A knock on the door. The commander opened his eyes a trifle vaguely. He was very old now, the commander. He had dozed.
Alstair said shortly, “Come in!” and Jack Gary entered.
He saluted, pointedly to the commander. Which was according to regulations, but Alstair’s eyes snapped.
“Ah, yes,” said the commander. “Gary. It’s about time for more signals, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack Gary was very quiet, very businesslike. Only once, when he glanced at Helen, was there any hint of anything but the formal manner of a man intent on his job. Then his eyes told her something, in an infinitely small fraction of a second, which changed her expression to one of flushed content.
Short as the glance was, Alstair saw it. He said harshly:
“Have you made any progress in deciphering the signals, Gary?”
Jack was setting the dials of a pan-wave receptor, glancing at penciled notes on a calculator pad. He continued to set up the reception pattern.
“No, sir. There is still a sequence of sounds at the beginning which must be a form of call, because a part of the same sequence is used as a signature at the close. With the commander’s permission I have used the first part of that call sequence as a signature in our signals in reply. But in looking over the records of the signals I’ve found something that looks important.”
The commander said mildly, “What is it, Gary?”
“We’ve been sending signals ahead of us on a tight beam, sir, for some months. Your idea was to signal ahead, so that if there were any civilized inhabitants on planets about the sun, they’d get an impression of a peaceful mission.”
“Of course!” said the commander. “It would be tragic for the first of interstellar communications to be unfriendly!”
“We’ve been getting answers to our signals for nearly three months. Always at intervals of a trifle over thirty hours. We assumed, of course, that a fixed transmitter was sending them, and that it was signaling once a day when the station was in the most favorable position for transmitting to us.”
“Of course,” said the commander gently. “It gave us the period of rotation of the planet from which the signals come.”
Jack Gary set the last dial and turned on the switch. A low-pitched hum arose, which died away. He glanced at the dials again, checking them.
“I’ve been comparing the records, sir, making due allowance for our approach. Because we cut down the distance between us and the star so rapidly, our signals today take several seconds less to reach Proxima Centauri than they did yesterday. Their signals should show the same shortening of interval, if they are actually sent out at the same instant of planetary time every day.”
The commander nodded benevolently.
“They did, at first,” said Jack. “But about three weeks ago the time interval changed in a brand-new fashion. The signal strength changed, and the wave form altered a little, too, as if a new transmitter was sending. And the first day of that change the signals came through one second earlier than our velocity of approach would account for. The second day they were three seconds earlier, the third day six, the fourth day ten, and so on. They kept coming earlier by a period indicating a linear function until one week ago. Then the rate of change began to decrease again.”
“That’s nonsense!” said Alstair harshly.
“That’s the record,” returned Jack curtly.
“But how do you explain it, Gary?” asked the commander mildly.
“They’re sending now from a space ship, sir,” replied Jack briefly, “which is moving toward us at four times our maximum acceleration. And they’re flashing us a signal at the same interval, according to their clocks, as before.”
A pause. Helen Bradley smiled warmly. The commander thought carefully. Then he admitted:
“Very good, Gary! It sounds plausible. What next?”
“Why, sir,” said Jack, “since the rate of change shifted, a week ago, it looks as if that other space ship started to decelerate again. Here are my calculations, sir. If the signals are sent at the same interval they kept up for over a month, there is another space ship headed toward us, and she is decelerating to stop and reverse and will be matching our course and speed in four days and eighteen hours. They’ll meet and surprise us, they think.”
The commander’s face lighted up. “Marvelous, Gary! They must be far advanced indeed in civilization! Intercourse between two such peoples, separated by four light-years of distance! What marvels we shall learn! And to think of their sending a ship far beyond their own system to greet and welcome us!”
Jack’s expression remained grim.
“I hope so, sir,” he said dryly.
“What now, Gary?” demanded Alstair angrily.
“Why,” said Jack deliberately, “they’re still pretending that the signals come from their planet, by signaling at what they think are the same times. They could exchange signals for twenty-four hours a day, if they chose, and be working out a code for communication. Instead, they’re trying to deceive us. My guess is that they’re coming at least prepared to fight. And if I’m right, their signals will begin in three seconds, exactly.”
He stopped, looking at the dials of the receptor. The tape which photographed the waves as they came in, and the other which recorded the modulations, came out of the receptor blank. But suddenly, in just three seconds, a needle kicked over and tiny white lines appeared on the rushing tapes. The speaker uttered sounds.
It was a voice which spoke. So much was clear. It was harsh yet sibilant, more like the stridulation of an insect than anything else. But the sounds it uttered were modulated as no insect can modulate its outcry. They formed what were plainly words, without vowels or consonants, yet possessing expression and varying in pitch and tone quality.
The three men in the control room had heard them many times before, and so had the girl. But for the first time they carried to her an impression of menace, of threat, of a concealed lust for destruction that made her blood run cold.
II.
The space ship hurtled on through space, her rocket tubes sending forth small and apparently insufficient purple flames which emitted no smoke, gave off no gas, and were seemingly nothing but small marsh fires inexplicably burning in emptiness.
There was no change in her outer appearance. There had been none to speak of in years. At long, infrequent intervals men had emerged from air locks and moved about her sides, bathing the steel they walked on and themselves alike with fierce glares from heat lamps lest the cold of her plating transmit itself through the material of the suits and kill the men like ants on red-hot metal. But for a long time no such expedition had been needed.
Only now, in the distant faint light of Proxima Centauri, a man in a space suit emerged from such a tiny lock. Instantly he shot out to the end of a threadlike life line. The constant deceleration of the ship not only simulated gravity within. Anything partaking of its motion showed the same effect. The man upon its decelerating forward side was flung away from the ship by his own momentum, the same force which, within it, had pressed his feet against the floors.
He hauled himself back laboriously, moving with an exaggerated clumsiness in his bloated space suit. He clung to handholds and hooked himself in place, while he worked an electric drill. He moved still more clumsily to another place and drilled again. A third, and fourth, and fifth. For half an hour or more, then, he labored to set up on the vast steel surface, which seemed always above him, an intricate array of wires and framework. In the end he seemed content. He hauled himself back to the air lock and climbed within. The Adastra hurtled onward, utterly unchanged save for a very tiny fretwork of wire, perhaps thirty feet across, which looked more like a microscopic barbed-wire entanglement than anything else.
Within the Adastra, Helen Bradley greeted Jack warmly as he got out of his space suit.
“It was horrible!” she told him, “to see you dangling like that! With millions of miles of empty space below you!”
“Let’s go turn on the inductor and see how the new reception grid works,” said Jack quietly.
He hung up the space suit. As they turned to go through the doorway their hands touched accidentally. They looked at each other and faltered. They stopped, Helen’s eyes shining. They all unconsciously swayed toward each other. Jack’s hands lifted hungrily.
Footsteps sounded close by. Alstair, second in command of the space ship, rounded a corner and stopped short.
First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster Page 31
