Rocket Ship Galileo

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Joe the Robot was called again and told to consult a second cam concealed in his dark insides, a cam which provided for the necessary braking drive and the final ticklish contact on maneuvering jets and radar. Cargraves carefully leveled the ship at the exact altitude and speed Joe would need for the approach and flipped over to automatic when Morrie signaled that they were at the exact, precalculated distance necessary for the landing.

  Joe took over. He flipped the ship over, using the maneuvering rockets, then started backing in to a landing, using the jet in the tail to kill their still tremendous speed. The moon was below them now and Cargraves could see nothing but the stars, the stars and the crescent of the earth—a quarter of a million miles away and no help to him now.

  He wondered if he would ever set foot on it again.

  Morrie was studying the approach in the radar scope. “Checking out to nine zeros, Captain,” he announced proudly and with considerable exaggeration. “It’s in the bag.”

  The ground came up rapidly in the scope. When they were close and no longer, for the moment, dropping at all, Joe cut the main jet and flipped them over.

  When he had collected, himself from the wild gyration of the somersault, Cargraves saw the nose jets reach out and splash in front of them and realized that the belly jets were in play, too, as the surge of power pushed the seat of the chair up against him. He felt almost as if he could land it himself, it seemed so much like his first wild landing on the New Mexico desert.

  Then for one frantic second he saw the smooth, flat ground ahead of the splash of the plowing nose jets give way to a desolation of rocky ridges, sharp crevasses, loose and dangerous cosmic rubble…soil from which, if they landed without crashing, they could not hope to take off.

  The sunlight had fooled them. With the sun behind them the badlands had cast no shadows they could see; the flat plain had appeared to stretch to the mountains ahead. These were no mountains, but they were quite sufficient to wreck the Galileo.

  The horrible second it took him to size up the situation was followed by frantic action. With one hand he cut the automatic pilot; with the other he twisted violently on the knob controlling the tail jet. He slapped the belly jets on full.

  Her nose lifted.

  She hung there, ready to fall, kept steady on her jets only by her gyros. Then slowly, slowly, slowly the mighty tail jet reached out—so slowly that he knew at that moment that the logy response of the atomic pile would never serve him for what he had to do next, which was to land her himself.

  The Galileo pulled away from the surface of the moon.

  “That was close,” Morrie said mildly.

  Cargraves swiped the sweat from his eyes and shivered.

  He knew what was called for now, in all reason. He knew that he should turn the ship away from the moon, head her in the general direction of the earth and work out a return path, a path to a planet with an atmosphere to help a pilot put down his savage ship. He knew right then that he was not the stuff of heroes, that he was getting old and knew it.

  But he hated to tell Morrie.

  “Going to put her down on manual?” the boy inquired.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s the only way we’ll get her down on a strange field. I can see that now you’ve got to be able to see your spot at the last half minute—nose jets and no radar.”

  “I can’t do it, Morrie.”

  The younger man said nothing. He simply sat and stared ahead without expression.

  “I’m going to head her back to earth, Morrie.”

  The boy gave absolutely no sign of having heard him. There was neither approval nor disapproval on his face, nor any faint suggestion.

  Cargraves thought of the scene when Ross, blind and bandaged, had told him off. Of Art, quelling his space sickness to get his pictures. He thought, too, of the hot and tiring days when he and Morrie had qualified for piloting together.

  The boy said nothing, neither did he look at him.

  These kids, these damn kids! How had he gotten up here, with a rocket under his hand and a cargo of minors to be responsible for? He was a laboratory scientist, not a superman. If it had been Ross, if Ross were a pilot—even where he now was, he shivered at the recollection of Ross’s hair-raising driving. Art was about as bad. Morrie was worse.

  He knew he would never be a hot pilot—not by twenty years. These kids, with their casual ignorance, with their hot rod rigs, it was for them; piloting was their kind of a job. They were too young and too ignorant to care and their reflexes were not hobbled by second thoughts. He remembered Ross’s words: “I’ll go to the moon if I have to walk!”

  “Land her, Morrie.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  The boy never looked, at him. He flipped her up on her tail, then let her drop slowly by easing off on the tail jet. Purely by the seat of his pants, by some inner calculation—for Cargraves could see nothing through the port but stars, and neither could the boy—he flipped her over again, cutting the tail jet as he did so.

  The ground was close to them and coming up fast.

  He kicked her once with the belly jets, placing them thereby over a smooth stretch of land, and started taking her down with quick blasts of the nose jets, while sneaking a look between blasts.

  When he had her down so close that Cargraves was sure that he was going to land her on her nose, crushing in the port and killing them, he gave her one more blast which made her rise a trifle, kicked her level and brought her down on the belly jets, almost horizontal, and so close to the ground that Cargraves could see it ahead of them, out the port.

  Glancing casually out the port, Morrie gave one last squirt with the belly jets and let her settle. They grated heavily and were stopped. The Galileo sat on the face of the moon.

  “Landed, sir. Time: Oh-eight-three-four.”

  Cargraves drew in a breath. “A beautiful, beautiful landing, Morrie.”

  “Thanks, Captain.”

  “THE BARE BONES—”

  • 12 •

  ROSS AND ART WERE ALREADY out of their straps and talking loudly about getting out the space suits when Cargraves climbed shakily out of his chair—and then nearly fell. The lowered gravitation, one-sixth earth-normal, fooled him. He was used to weightlessness by now, and to the chest-binding pressure of high acceleration; the pseudo-normal weight of a one-g drive was no trouble, and maneuvering while strapped down was no worse than stunting in an airplane.

  This was different and required a little getting used to, he decided. It reminded him a little of walking on rubber, or the curiously light-footed feeling one got after removing snow shoes or heavy boots.

  Morrie remained at his post for a few moments longer to complete and sign his log. He hesitated over the space in the log sheet marked ‘position’. They had taught him in school to enter here the latitude and longitude of the port of arrival—but what were the latitude and longitude of this spot?

  The moon had its north and south poles just as definitely as the earth, which gave any spot a definite latitude, nor was longitude uncertain once a zero meridian was selected. That had been done; Tycho was to be the Greenwich of the moon.

  But his navigation tables were tables for the earth.

  The problem could be solved; he knew that. By spherical trigonometry the solutions of celestial triangles on which all navigation was based could be converted to the special conditions of Luna, but it would require tedious calculation, not at all like the precalculated short cuts used by all pilots in the age of aircraft and rocket. He would have to go back to the Marc St. Hilaire method, obsolete for twenty years, after converting laboriously each piece of data from earth reference terms to moon reference terms.

  Well, he could do it later, he decided, and get Cargraves to check him. The face of the moon called him.

  He joined the little group huddled around the port. In front of them stretched a dun and lifeless floor, breaking into jagged hills a few miles beyond them. It was hot, glaring hot, under th
e oblique rays of the sun, and utterly still. The earth was not in sight; they had dropped over the rim into the unknown side in the last minutes of the impromptu landing.

  Instead of the brassy sky one might expect over such a scene of blistering desert desolation, a black dome of night, studded brilliantly with stars, hung over it. At least, thought Morrie, his mind returning to his problem in navigation, it would be hard to get lost here. A man could set a course by the stars with no trouble.

  “When are we going out?” demanded Art.

  “Keep your shirt on,” Ross told him and turned to Cargraves. “Say, Doc, that was sure a slick landing. Tell me—was that first approach just a look around on manual, or did you feed that into the automatic pilot, too?”

  “Neither one, exactly.” He hesitated. It had been evident from their first remarks that neither Ross nor Art had been aware of the danger, nor of his own agonizing indecision. Was it necessary to worry them with it now? He was aware that, if he did not speak, Morrie would never mention it.

  That decided him. The man—man was the word, he now knew, not “boy”—was entitled to public credit. “Morrie made that landing,” he informed them. “We had to cut out the robot and Morrie put her down.”

  Ross whistled.

  Art said, “Huh? What did you say? Don’t tell me that radar cut out—I checked it six ways.”

  “Your gadgets all stood up,” Cargraves assured him, “but there are some things a man can do that a gadget can’t. This was one of them.” He elaborated what had happened.

  Ross looked Morrie up and down until Morrie blushed. “Hot Pilot I said, and Hot Pilot it is,” Ross told him. “But I’m glad I didn’t know.” He walked aft, whistling Danse Macabre, off key again, and began to fiddle with his space suit.

  “When do we go outside?,” Art persisted.

  “Practically at once, I suppose.”

  “Whoopee!”

  “Don’t get in a hurry. You might be the man with the short straw and have to stay with the ship.”

  “But… Look, Uncle, why does anybody have to stay with the ship? Nobody’s going to steal it.”

  Cargraves hesitated. With automatic caution, he had intended always to keep at least one man in the ship, as a safety measure. On second thought there seemed no reason for it. A man inside the ship could do nothing for a man outside the ship without first donning a pressure suit and coming outside. “We’ll compromise,” he said. “Morrie and I—no, you and I.” He realized that he could not risk both pilots at once. “You and I will go first. If it’s okay, the others can follow us. All right, troops,” he said, turning. “Into your space suits!”

  They helped each other into them, after first applying white sunburn ointment liberally over the skin outside their goggles. It gave them an appropriate out-of-this-world appearance. Then Cargraves had them check their suits at twice normal pressure while he personally inspected their oxygen-bottle back packs.

  All the while they were checking their walky-talkies; ordinary conversation could be heard, but only faintly, through the helmets as long as they were in the air of the ship; the radios were louder.

  “Okay, sports,” he said at last. “Art and I will go into the lock together, then proceed around to the front, where you can see us. When I give you the high sign, come on out. One last word: stay together. Don’t get more than ten yards or so away from me. And remember this. When you get out there, every last one of you is going to want to see how high you can jump; I’ve heard you talking about it. Well, you can probably jump twenty-five or thirty feet high if you try. But don’t do it!”

  “Why not?” Ross’s voice was strange, through the radio.

  “Because if you land on your head and crack your helmet open, we’ll bury you right where you fall! Come on, Morrie. No, sorry—I mean ‘Art’.”

  They crowded into the tiny lock, almost filling it. The motor which drove the impeller to scavenge the air from the lock whirred briefly, so little was the space left unoccupied by their bodies, then sighed and stopped. The scavenger valve clicked into place and Cargraves unclamped the outer door.

  He found that he floated, rather than jumped, to the ground. Art came after him, landing on his hands and knees and springing lightly up.

  “Okay, kid?”

  “Swell!”

  They moved around to the front, boots scuffing silently in the loose soil. He looked at it and picked up a handful to see if it looked like stuff that had been hit by radioactive blast. He was thinking of Morrie’s theory. They were on the floor of a crater; that was evident, for the wall of hills extended all around them. Was it an atomic bomb crater?

  He could not tell. The moon soil did have the boiled and bubbly look of atom-scorched earth, but that might have been volcanic action, or, even, the tremendous heat of the impact of a giant meteor. Well, the problem could wait.

  Art stopped suddenly. “Say! Uncle, I’ve got to go back.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I forgot my camera!”

  Cargraves chuckled. “Make it next time. Your subject won’t move.” Art’s excitement had set a new high, he decided; there was a small school of thought which believed he bathed with his camera.

  Speaking of baths, Cargraves mused, I could stand one. Space travel had its drawbacks. He was beginning to dislike his own smell, particularly when it was confined in a space suit!

  Ross and Morrie were waiting for them, not patiently, at the port. Their radio voices, blanked until now by the ship’s sides, came clearly through the quartz. “How about it, Doc?” Ross sang out, pressing his nose to the port.

  “Seems all right,” they heard him say.

  “Then here we come!”

  “Wait a few minutes yet. I want to be sure.”

  “Well—okay.” Ross showed his impatience, but discipline was no longer a problem. Art made faces at them, then essayed a little dance, staying close to the ground but letting each step carry him a few feet into the air—or, rather, vacuum. He floated slowly and with some grace. It was like a dance in slow motion, or a ballet under water.

  When he started rising a little higher and clicking his boot heels together as he sailed, Cargraves motioned for him to stop. “Put down your flaps, chum,” he cautioned, “and land. You aren’t Nijinsky.”

  “Who’s Nijinsky?”

  “Never mind. Just stay planted. Keep at least one foot on the ground. Okay, Morrie,” he called out, “come on out. You and Ross.”

  The port was suddenly deserted.

  When Morrie set foot on the moon and looked around him at the flat and unchanging plain and at the broken crags beyond he felt a sudden overwhelming emotion of tragedy and of foreboding welling up inside him. “It’s the bare bones,” he muttered, half to himself, “the bare bones of a dead world.”

  “Huh?” said Ross. “Are you coming, Morrie?”

  “Right behind you.”

  Cargraves and Art had joined them. “Where to?” asked Ross, as the captain came up.

  “Well, I don’t want to get too far from the ship this first time,” Cargraves declared. “This place might have some dirty tricks up its sleeve that we hadn’t figured on. How much pressure you guys carrying?”

  “Ship pressure.”

  “You can cut it down to about half that without the lower pressure bothering you. It’s oxygen, you know.”

  “Let’s walk over to those hills,” Morrie suggested. He pointed astern where the rim of the crater was less than half a mile from the ship. It was the sunward side and the shadows stretched from the rim to within a hundred yards or so of the ship.

  “Well, part way, anyhow. That shade might feel good. I’m beginning to sweat.”

  “I think,” said Morrie, “if I remember correctly, we ought to be able to see earth from the top of the rim. I caught a flash of it, just as we inverted. We aren’t very far over on the back side.”

  “Just where are we?”

  “I’ll have to take some sights before I can repor
t,” Morrie admitted. “Some place west of Oceanus Procellarum and near the equator.”

  “I know that.”

  “Well, if you’re in a hurry, Skipper, you had better call up the Automobile Club.”

  “I’m in no hurry. Injun not lost—wigwam lost. But I hope the earth is visible from there. It would be a good spot, in that case, to set up Art’s antenna, not too far from the ship. Frankly, I’m opposed to moving the ship until we head back, even if we miss a chance to try to contact earth.”

  They were in the shadows now, to Cargraves’ relief. Contrary to popular fancy, the shadows were not black, despite the lack of air-dispersed sunlight. The dazzle of the floor behind them and the glare of the hills beyond all contrived to throw quite a lot of reflected light into the shadows.

  When they had proceeded some distance farther toward the hills, Cargraves realized that he was not keeping his party together too well. He had paused to examine a place, discovered by Ross, where the base rock pushed up through the waste of the desert floor, and was trying in the dim light to make out its nature, when he noticed that Morrie was not with them.

  He restrained his vexation; it was entirely possible that Morrie, who was in the lead, had not seen them stop. But he looked around anxiously.

  Morrie was about a hundred yards ahead, where the first folds of the hills broke through. “Morrie!”

  The figure stood up, but no answer came over the radio. He noticed then that Morrie was veering, weaving around. “Morrie! Come back here! Are you all right?”

  “All right? Sure, I’m all right.” He giggled.

  “Well, come back here.”

  “Can’t come back. ’M busy—I’ve found it!” Morrie took a careless step, bounded high in the air, came down, and staggered.

  “Morrie! Stand still.” Cargraves was hurrying toward him.

  But he did not stand still. He began bounding around, leaping higher and higher. “I’ve found it!” he shrieked. “I’ve found it!” He gave one last bound and while he floated lazily down, he shouted, “I’ve found…the bare bones—” His voice trailed off. He lit feet first, bounced through a complete forward flip and collapsed.