Stillness hummed, except for the noise of the crowding, flashing stars. Earth rolled tremendous against an ultimate dark. The sail began to bend at the edges as centrifugal force waned. Had it not faced the sun head on, it could have buckled into a hopeless tangle. As matters stood, when rotation ended it would approximate a section of a sphere.
Bailey’s gulp gurgled in earplugs. “You win. I’ll get several crews to you within a couple of hours, and meanwhile tell Captain Villegas to put his men under your direction. What equipment will be needed?”
“Torches, mainly,” West said. “Quickest way of slicing up that stuff. We have metal rods aboard, so I can construct a frame to hold the whole mess in position myself, rather fast. Your gang will also want …”
Golescu signaled Storrs to switch bands. “Whew!” he said. “That was a nasty minute. I didn’t think old Ed had it in him.”
“Ed’s a good fellow,” Storrs said. “Uh, we’ll still only require one man aboard Merlin, but—”
“Hell with that bleat. We’re in this together. I’m sticking with him when the time comes.”
“Right. Me too.”
It was necessary for the herdship to grapple and apply power, lest spin expose the bag to the radiation storm. Golescu should have been at the pilot board then, but he and Storrs were too exhausted. The work had been brutal. They sat in the saloon with untasted mugs of coffee, staring emptily at the bulkheads, while West rode the controls.
Outside, Lucifer ran free. Coughed from the sun, ions with energies in the millions of electron volts flooded all space. Down on Earth, tourists in the Antarctic lodges crowded into the observation domes to watch the winter sky come alive with vast flapping curtains of aurora. Elsewhere, men who had heard the news huddled near their 3V screens, waiting for word. Reception was poor. The nuclear generators of ships beyond the atmosphere poured power into screen fields, deflecting that murderous torrent from their hulls. The engineers’ eyes never left the gauges.
Merlin throbbed. Now and then, as she moved to keep the load at the end of her grapnel on an even keel, her members groaned with stress. That was the only token granted the men in the saloon. They dared not interrupt the pilot with questions.
“It’s got to work,” Storrs said stupidly, for the dozenth time. He rubbed his chin. The bristles of beard made an audible scratching.
“Sure it will,” Golescu said. “My idea, wasn’t it?” The cockiness had left his voice.
“Well,” Storrs said, “if it doesn’t … if that cargo explodes … we’ll never know.” He laid his fist on the table and regarded the knobby knuckles. “I’d like to know, though. How I’d laugh at those fat Earthlings.”
Golescu reached for his coffee. It had gone cold. “They aren’t that bad. And if you’ve got to be such a hot-bottomed patriot, don’t forget that trouble on Earth would affect the Republic. We need them, same as they need us.”
“Bull. I can show you economic statistics—damn and double damn! It isn’t right! How many men’s lives is it proper to risk, to save ten billion or so lousy dollars?”
“That dinero represents a lot more man-years than we three will rack up, even if I achieve my ambition to become a dirty old man.”
“Work years. Not deaths.”
“Scared?”
Storrs spat in the ashcatcher. “No. Tired and angry. This means one thing to Ed. Economic breakdown on Earth would hurt him directly. But you and me——”
“You didn’t have to be aboard.”
“I sure did.”
“Oh, fork all those fancy moral issues,” Golescu said. “This is what we get paid for.”
“Hm-m-m … yeah ….Another half hour to go, by the clock, if the prediction is right. I hope Ed can stand the strain.”
“He’d better. That’s the real chance we take. We knew right along the shield would be more than ample. Well, I saw him swallow a whole medicine chest full of antifatigue pills and psychodrugs.” Golescu stirred in his seat. “Feel like a game of rummy?”
“No.”
The sun’s arrows rushed on through vacuum. Where they encountered Merlin’s screen, they swerved, with a spiteful gout of X-radiation that her internal shielding drank up. Where they struck at the cargo section—
They hit a barrier of plastic and aluminum: the sail, cut into fifteen-meter squares that were layered within a welded framework. The shielding factor came to about fifty grams per square centimeter. Light metals and hydrogen-rich carbon compounds are highly effective stoppers of stripped small atoms like the hydrogen and helium ions which make up nearly the whole of flare emission. For example, 32.7 grams per square centimeter of aluminum will halt protons of 200 million electron volts. The recoil characteristics are such that secondary radiation is not a serious problem—at least, not to isonitrate, which is only touched off by a nucleus plowing into its giant molecule.
But the whole clumsy ensemble of shield, cargo section, and herdship must be kept facing directly into the blast. And gravitation kept trying to swing it into orbit, which brought gyroscopic forces into play. Control was exercised at the end of a long arm; the mass had considerable turning moment, nor was it perfectly balanced. Compensation could become overcompensation with gruesome ease.
“If we ride this one out,” Golescu said, “we really will get that bonus Ed was faunching for.”
“Uh-huh.” Storrs raised dark-rimmed eyes. “Andy, you’re a good oscar and I hope we can ship out together again, but right now I’ve got some thinking to do. Keep quiet, huh?”
“Okay,” Golescu said. “Though thinking’s the last thing I want to do.”
He prowled aft to have a look at the engine-room meters. Not that he could improve matters much if anything was going awry, in his present condition. Why had not one single man, out of the scores who divided the sail, volunteered to ride along and help? Earthlings, of course, had no great cause to love asterites. Golescu caught himself wondering if the revolution had really been justified—if anything ever was that raised such bitterness between men. Now stow that! Break out the guitar and—no, it’d bother Ed. Sam too, I guess.
I should’a taken a sleeping pill—uh-uh, none o’ that, either.
His bleared vision focused on the bank of indicators. Everything operating smoothly—good ship—wait a second! The external radiation count—
“Yi-yi-yip!” he screamed. “She’s going down! The flare’s dying!” And he did a war dance around the workshop and up the length of the corridor beyond.
Slowly, slowly, the storm faded. Until at last West said from the intercom, “It’s over with. We’re alive, boys.”
Storrs began to dance, too.
After a while West reported, “Earth called in. Congratulations and so forth. They’ll send a tug at once for this cargo, and hold it in the moon’s shadow while they unload. We’re invited groundside for a celebration.” Wistfulness tinged his voice. “D’you think the company would mind if we accepted?”
“They better not,” Storrs said.
“We need a checkout anyway, after putting the ship to so much stress,” Golescu added. “And they’ll have to compute a new orbit for the rest of our mission. We’re bound to have a few days’ layover.” Exhaustion dropped from him. “Fleshpots, here I come!”
He snatched up his guitar and bellowed forth:
Ol’ Einstein was a transporteer, he was, he was.
Ol’ Einstein was a transporteer, he was, he was.
His racing car used too much gas;
It shrank the time but it raised the mass.
Bravo, bravo, hurrah for the transporteers!
Now he had a story to embroider for the girls in Pallas Town.
Interlude 6
Amspaugh, whose official position at the time provided him with many details that didn’t get into the news, finishes the story.
“And the moral of it is?” Lindgren sounds a trifle sardonic.
“That there isn’t any moral,” McVeagh says.
“Or else
that there’re as many different morals as persons who want to draw one,” I complain.
Dworczyk claps his hands down onto his knees. “This isn’t helping us launch,” he says. “I repeat, our business is not to make some pompous ‘interpretation’ and stuff it down the throats of the young. They’d regurgitate it anyway. We’re simply choosing what facts, what actual events, every educated individual aboard this ship ought to know. Along with what aspects of political background, technology, economics, manners, morals, and so forth, at any given time, are worth remembering.”
“Of course,” Missy nods. “Our problem, though, is to find a basis on which to select what information should be included.”
“But it’s so simple!” Dworczyk exclaims.
We regard him. He drops his eyes momentarily sheepish; then he stiffens in defiance. “Okay,” he says. “You want my specs. I’ll give ’em to you. How’s this for a broad outline of postwar history?”
He takes a few more seconds to arrange his words, then:
“In spite of everything, old grudges did tend to die, especially as prosperity grew and spread. The nations of Earth came to like the Republic, and many sold what asteroids they still had to its government. Their traffic with it was making them steadily more comfortable, as material resources flowed in from space. They didn’t mind that per capita wealth was increasing faster—much faster—among the asterites. After all, the typical asterite worked a lot harder, often a lot more dangerously, than the typical citizen of a welfare state. Technological progress made it easier and easier to do things. The average Earthling took advantage of this opportunity to relax, to enjoy more leisure and security. The average asterite used the new capabilities to accomplish more. That made him richer yet; but from the Earthling’s point of view, we weren’t allowing ourselves a decent amount of time for enjoying that money.”
“Besides,” McVeagh comments, “Earthlings got—still get—vast satisfaction out of decrying the crudity and materialism of the space dwellers.”
“It’s too bad so many of the younger generation in the Republic are taking the Earthside criticism seriously,” Amspaugh says.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lindgren replies. “The end result may be just to polish some of the rough edges off our people. That, for certain would be no bad thing. Anyway, it’s not our problem aboard this ship.”
“Let me finish my outline, please,” Dworczyk says. “I realize I’ve been using stereotypes. A book would have to show it was more complicated and interesting than that. Um-m-m … Plenty of Earthmen were explorers, pioneers, innovators, entrepreneurs. And plenty of asterites were scientists, artists, poets, philanthropists. Especially after a large economic surplus became available, private foundations and consortiums undertook nonprofit enterprises—like building a ship to reach the stars.”
He stands up. “That’s a rough sketch of what I have in mind,” he says. “I really don’t understand what the fuss is about. Let’s lay down a truthful outline of what happened. The writers can fill it in with significant and entertaining details. And there you are. Now, either we cut this meeting pretty soon so I can return to my lab, or I’m going to pour me a drink and forget about working today.”
“Bring me a rum and grapefruit juice, then, while you’re at it,” Amspaugh smiles. “You’ve hit the nucleus of our real problem.”
“Which is?”
“Look, we want the youngsters to get a balanced account of the events that led to their being aboard—that made us determine the course of their lives. We want them to become neither nihilistic cynics, such as Colin pretends to be, nor unrealistic ideologues, such as Conchita pretends to be.” Amspaugh wags his pipestem in the direction of those two. “You grapple my meaning, I hope. You’re sincere in your basic views, and we want you to express them so we can get as wide a variety of opinions as possible. But in a discussion like this, everybody tends to overstate his own case.” To Dworczyk: “You included. Tom.”
“Okay, I’m off to the bar.” Dworczyk continues talking as he moves. “Tell me how I exaggerate.”
“As regards the possibility of a simple, straightforward account of happenings that were anything else except that. Oh, yes, it can be done for the earlier days. No great harm in ignoring certain complexities and failings among our glorious ancestors. However—” His humor departs Amspaugh. He becomes occupied with his pipe, knocking out dottle, refilling, relighting, “However,” he says slowly, “we can’t hide what is in this ship. She’s not that big; and the children will have eyes to see what’s around them. How shall we teach them to understand, and forgive, the raw truth?”
“Why … that wasn’t supposed to pose any grave difficulties, was it?” Dworczyk reaches his destination and gets busy. “Had it been, this expedition would scarcely have started off.”
“True, true,” Amspaugh says. “Nevertheless, it’s one thing to decide in theory that such-and-such a human situation ought to work out as planned. It’s quite another to try it in practice. That’s why the Board—very rightly—ruled that we should decide our own educational policies, after we’d had some direct experience. And my impression, on the basis of that experience, is that the decision’s no easy one to make.”
“Correct,” Missy says. “The kids won’t have known any world except this ship. They’ll take for granted that the order of things here is right and normal … until their school history teaches them that it’s exceptional, that other orders exist which are entirely different. The shock of learning this, if it isn’t taught with care, could be badly unsettling.”
“I can bear witness to that from the opposite side,” I remark.
“How so?” Echevaray asks.
With hundreds aboard, Astra hasn’t been under weigh so long that each of us in this room has had a chance to become familiar with the past life of everyone else. This is the more true when the experience I am thinking of was never made public.
“I didn’t know what the setup was when I first came here,” I say. “Believe me, it rocked my back teeth to find out.”
“How could you not have heard?” Echevaray wonders. “With the years she was a-building, the thousands of books, ’casts, news stories, debates——”
“But I wasn’t in the Belt,” I explain, “or on Earth, Luna, Mars, the Jovian moons, anywhere in easy contact. I’d spent the previous five years on Triton, helping construct the city there for Nasty.”
“For what?”
“Neptune And Satellites TYcoons. Not the official name of the outfit, nor the acronym we used when a big jet came visiting from headquarters.” Nor was this the acronym we used when ladies weren’t present. “Anyhow, my contract expired before we got the maser receiver built, so word from the inner System while I was there depended on an occasional supply ship. No doubt the reading matter that came in held some scatty accounts of Astra’s personnel difficulties. But I didn’t happen to see them. After a tour of work”—in rock wastes, the night upon them hardly touched by a sun that was hardly more than the brightest of the stars, their sky dominated and saddened by Neptune’s dim gray hulk—“a chap wants a nice piece of … of escape fiction, that is, not serious news analysis from worlds that almost don’t seem real any longer. Or he’ll go for games, sports, chasing the few unmarried females, and other hobbies. All in all, I came back with no idea of the truth about this project.”
“You must have picked it up quite soon,” Dworczyk says.
“Sure, I would’ve,” I reply. “But don’t forget, by then the policy decision had been made. The subject had stopped being news; everybody took for granted that everybody else knew the facts.
“That certainly was the case in company HQ on Ceres. I checked in with the idea of drawing my back pay and bonuses and really doing the planets on the year’s leave I had coming. But they requested me rather urgently to handle one more job first. As you probably know, they were the prime contractor for this ship’s internal power grid. It’d tested out well, but had suddenly been reported as
giving bad trouble. Nobody aboard seemed able to find out what was wrong, and every qualified engineer on the company’s rolls was busy elsewhere. And the system was similar to the one I’d been concerned with on Triton.
“Well, what the deuce, why not? I was interested in seeing the vessel anyway. They sent me in one of their speedsters. That didn’t give me much time to study the technical setup; Astra happened to be orbiting fairly close to Ceres just then. So I had no conversation with my pilot. I arrived totally unprepared for the kind of men I’d meet. Talk about getting rammed in the rear by a comet!”
Recruiting Nation
At first she was only another spark and would have been lost in the star swarms did she not show the flicker and twinkle of an irregular body rotating in spatial sunlight. But the boat closed swiftly in. Astra swelled to a globe, to a city of clustered domes and turrets and housings and machines, to a world filling nearly half the sky. I leaned back in my safety harness and watched the play of radiance and shadow across that medley, as we spiraled toward rendezvous. The low power-hum vibrated in me like the beat of my own blood. The words that came to me from the forward section, where my pilot spoke with a traffic control officer, were laconic; but bugles have sent less of a shiver along my skin.
Here was the ship that would seek new suns.
Not at once, I reminded myself. At least two years’ worth of work—basic work, not the improvements that the crew can make during her long voyage—remains to be done. Including this debugging job of mine. And didn’t Garrett drop some remark about recruiting troubles, about there not yet being a minimal complement committed to go? I can’t understand that. When did a splendid vision ever lack for followers?
An entry port gaped before us. I felt the slight, elastic impact when the mesh field took hold on our hull and eased it into a cradle. The lock closed and air brawled in to repressurize the chamber. My pilot checked his gauges, uttered a final sentence to the control office, opened a master switch, and started unharnessing. “Here we are, Mr. Sanders,” he said.
Tales of the Flying Mountains Page 21
