by J F Bone
“That’s quite a mess of sound,” I said. “I’ve been on the spacelanes for twenty years, and I’ve yet to hear a Callistan whistler or a Kallik’s nesting call. Never was on any of the outer worlds except Ganymede, but you should have no trouble there. A hegemon’s easy to dicker with. For that matter, I’ve only heard a swampsucker just once—and, frankly, I don’t want to hear one again. Those subsonics play hell with the nervous system.”
“I tried to get the sounds from the Solar Union Academy,” Martinelli went on, “but they’re not recorded. You’d think they would be,” he added aggrievedly. “It just goes to show that when you want something out of a museum you can’t get it. They’ve got plenty of stuffed Kalliks, and whistlers, and even a stuffed swamp sucker, but not a single sound.” He shrugged. “And since the contract states that original sounds must be furnished, I’m stuck with an exploring job.”
“How much is the Academy offering for a copy of your soundtrack?” I asked.
Martinelli smiled wryly. “Not much, just the technicians, professional guides, and the recording apparatus.”
“That should be quite a saving.”
“It would be except for one thing. I have to pay them for every soundtrack over five, and I’m not sure they’ll record the proper key and pitch I’ll need to fit into the symphony.”
I shook my head. Martinelli had a job ahead. I wondered why he took it, and said so.
“You haven’t heard the “Nine Worlds,” Martinelli said, “otherwise you wouldn’t ask. You want to hear it?”
I nodded. Raposnikov is one of my favorite composers.
MARTINELLI opened his desk safe and took out a roll of recording tape. “I had this made in sections,” he said, “so no one would be able to copy the theme. Some of the sounds are in already—the first movement is complete; so you can get an idea what the finished piece will be like.” He pressed a button and a panel on top of his desk slid aside to reveal a modern stereo—one of those fancy jobs with acoustical depth. He threaded the tape and placed his finger on the starter button.
“The first movement,” Martinelli said quietly, “deals with man’s conquest of space. Unlike Dvorak’s “New World” the shape of the main subject is introduced directly. There is no hinting, no intimation of things to come. It is more like Beethoven’s Fifth—a direct, demanding introduction that draws the listener bodily into the vigorous Allegro molto with its hypnotic repetitive rhythm. The theme is advanced by a transition that is actually a subsidiary theme in F-minor played first by the flutes and oboes and picked up by the other woodwinds and strings. The second main theme is carried by the brasses in G-major, starting with a muted trumpet playing an unmistakeable derivation of Rosinski’s “Space and the Atom”. The harsh, almost militaristic note is augmented by the brasses, modified by the woodwinds and swept to a glittering crescendo by the strings and kettle drums, culminating in the hissing roar of a space-ship’s jet with their supersonic overtones that are almost painful—listen!” He pressed the button.
I was relaxed, soothed by Martinelli’s summation, and utterly unprepared for the violent opening as the full orchestration of over two hundred pieces hammered at my eardrums. It was a blockbuster opening, something that would have made Beethoven turn green with envy. It was Raposnikov all right, but a Raposnikov I had never heard nor dreamed of hearing. The music picked me up, hurled me into a world of sound and fury, of men and metal and dreams turned into steel and atomics. It was pure sensation—music that made me want to laugh and weep, to swell with pride, to suffer the heartbreak of failure and to feel the grim determination that next time—next time we would succeed. For a few minutes, I was a part of all mankind who ever dreamed of the stars. My chest hurt, my brain throbbed, and cold involuntary chills ran down my spine. My legs trembled, and tears actually came to my eyes at the termination when man finally achieved his ancient dream and left earth for those glittering witch lights in the heavens. The sounds, as Martinelli called them, were an integral part of the theme. Their presence was essential. From steam hammer to jetblast, the sounds were a part of the music, complementing it, augmenting it, making the whole movement the vital, living, striving thing it had to be.
Martinelli stopped the tape, and I relaxed, shivering with reaction.
“My God!” I said weakly. “I thought I had heard them all, but this is incredible!”
“See what I mean,” Martinelli said. “This is the greatest thing that man has done in music. Ownership of this score is literally worth millions. And I own it if I can reproduce it precisely as Raposnikov wrote it. Do you wonder why I am willing to spend over two million chartering your ship?”
“No,” I said. “And if the rest of that symphony is like the beginning, I’d almost be willing to donate the ‘Queen’ to help you pull it off.” I was drunk with sensation. Never in my life had I heard such music.
“Almost,” Martinelli chuckled, “but not quite—eh?”
I sighed, shrugged, and stood up. “A man must live,” I said, “and space is my life and the ‘Queen’ my home. There are things like fuel, repairs, wages and dockage charges. Those cost money and, unfortunately, I’m not a rich man.”
“But you love music,” Martinelli said, “so you will be eager to help me.”
“That’s about it,” I said. “And that is all I will need to make this debut a success,” Martinelli said. “I thank you, Captain Lundfors.” He held out his hand.
I gripped it. It was I who should be thanking him, I thought. He had given me a taste of glory.
A WEEK later the “Virgin Queen” was ready for blastoff. Port Maintenance had completed a man-killing crash program in record time, and the “Queen” was as tight and true as the day she left the ways. For the first time in years everything aboard the old girl worked as it should. I collected my crew from the fleshpots of New York and Westchester, herding the grumbling spacemen aboard like a father loading his children into the family car at the end of vacation. Three weeks liberty on full pay and the men still complained. They hadn’t had it so good in years but they wanted more. Of course they didn’t get it, since a contract is a contract, and a spaceship captain is God Almighty as far as his crew is concerned.
About the only man who looked happy about coming back was Egon Bernstein, my executive officer. Bernie was old enough to appreciate space. The rest—mostly four-year men—were hardly dry behind the ears. I wasn’t too happy with them, but with the major spacelines giving two year contracts and bonuses to experienced men with six or more years of service, an independent freighter has to take what’s left and be thankful it is no worse.
The Solar Union boys—five of them—arrived with a truckload of sound equipment which they supervised like mother hens guarding chicks. They stored their equipment with meticulous care, took their shockcouch assignments, and fitted into the ship’s routine with the ease of professional space travellers.
Martinelli and two heavyshouldered men showed up with another pile of gear which we stowed. We took on last minute supplies, extra fuel slugs for our reactor, and topped off the chemical tanks with nitric and hydrazine. I checked the stations from the control chair, got the all clear signal from the tower, and blasted off.
Outside the atmosphere shell of Earth I cut the chemicals and switched on the atomics. A pale blue glow spurted from the drive tubes as we began to pile on velocity for the long trip to Pluto. I had checked our possible courses at Port Astrogation and had finally decided that the relative positions of the planets were such that the outer worlds offered the best positional relationships—and when we had finished with them, the inner worlds would be in good juxtaposition if we could keep to the schedule I had planned.
The outward trip was fortunate. We picked up a thumbsized meteorite as we crossed the asteroid belt and the crash and hiss of escaping air were satisfactorily recorded by the Solar Union men. I gave them plenty of warning to get set up and although I could have used the screens to deflect the tiny chunk of metal, I figure
d that if we could get a meteor strike recording this early in the game we were all to the good.
Damage control quickly repaired the leak as the sound men checked their tapes with Martinelli.
“Did you know your hull rings in F-sharp?” Martinelli asked me as he came into the control room during the first watch after the collision. He had gotten over his space sickness quickly and was continuously active—nosing through the ship, asking questions of the crew, Bernie, and myself, and behaving like a rubber-necking tourist. In a way it was laughable, but somehow I couldn’t laugh at Martinelli. The man was too intense, too serious to be a comic figure.
“Is that good?” I asked. “It’s perfect. That passage was written in F-sharp. We won’t need to try again or make tonal adjustments. We have a recording that’ll turn the public’s hair when we use it. It’s great! And that young crewman yelling “Meteor strike!”—that was the convincing touch.”
“You mean Nalton?” I asked. “Yes, that’s his name.”
“He’s young,” I said, “young and pretty green. Making a planet out of an asteroid. He should have kept his mouth shut. But maybe its a good omen. When a goofur turns out all right that’s a good sign.”
“I never thought you were superstitious,” Martinelli said.
“All spacemen are superstitious,” I replied. “I guess it’s because space is so big and we’re so small.”
“When are we due to hit Pluto?” he asked.
“If we’ve laid the course right—in about two months.”
“Long time.”
“Long distance—Pluto isn’t just next door.”
“I realized that, but I didn’t realize what it’d be like cooped up in here with only a thin metal skin between us and space. Frankly, that meteorite scared me.”
I grinned. “I didn’t feel so good either—and we almost took it in the screen control which would really have made things sticky. Without screens we’d be in bad shape.”
“Would it be that serious?” he asked worriedly.
I smiled without humor. “We finished one run from Mars to Earth without screens,” I said, “and we ran out of patches. There were one hundred and thirty-seven holes in the ‘Queen’s” skin. We looked like a sieve, finished the trip in space suits, and had two casualties.” He shuddered. “I hope the screens hold this time.”
“They will,” I assured him. “The generators have been completely rebuilt.”
I WISH Nicolai Ilarionovitch had a better understanding of the technical details of sound transmission,” Martinelli said bitterly as we stood on Pluto’s icy surface and surveyed the frozen desolation about us. “Just how are we going to record an ice fall on a world without atmosphere?”
“There’s plenty of atmosphere,” I replied as I scuffed the blue-white dust underfoot with an insulated space boot. “The only trouble is that it’s all frozen,—liquid helium, solid oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. What would you expect on a world three and a half billion miles from the sun?” I was angry with myself. I should have realized that Pluto’s solid and semi-solid atmosphere was incapable of transmitting audible sound. We had our two and a half month trip for nothing.
All about us were the giant glaciers that covered Pluto’s surface, knife sharp jagged blocks of ice rising hundreds of feet into the air, cold and black under the faint light of the stars and the tiny disc of the sun low on the horizon. The radome of Pluto Station bulged darkly behind us and a little to one side were the clustered spikes of the station spaceships and the bulkier mass of the “Queen” standing on her landing pads.
Far below our feet in tunnels and corridors carved from the endless ice, the men and women of Pluto Station went about their daily tasks—adaptable as only humans can be—carving a life and living out of the frozen crust of the iceworld.
“Obviously Raposnikov was thinking of the icefall of ’98,” I said. “The one in the main lateral of the old station. There was air down there—and there was undoubtedly sound.”
“That could be it,” Martinelli agreed. “Let’s go below. It’s getting cold up here.”
I had to agree with him. Despite the insulation and heating elements of our spacesuits the frightful cold of Pluto was seeping through my boots and the joints of my armor. I turned toward the station’s airlock, the chilled joints of my armor somewhat stiffer than normal, and as I turned I cast one flickering glance around the horizon. It was purely habit—the trained eye reflex of a spaceman, but in that brief glance my vision caught an abnormality. One of the tall ice spires above us was distinctly wrong. No longer vertical the tall black tower was leaning outward, toppling with silent ponderous deliberation.
“Icefall!” I yelled. “Run!”
Martinelli’s reflexes were as fast as my own. He cast one lightning glance upward and then broke into a clumsy run for the steel and cryoplastic revetment that guarded the station entrance. I pounded along behind him. In Pluto’s light gravity we made surprisingly good time despite the armor that encased us. As we dove for the shelter of the revetment, the airless sky of Pluto was filled with hurtling shards of ice as the pinnacle struck and shattered. One small piece struck me in the ribs while another ricocheted off Martinelli’s helmet. Two years ago he’d have been a dead man breathing space through a shattered helmet, but the ice shard merely glanced off the tough cryoplastic without doing any harm.
Well—almost no harm. Martinelli was scared to death, but that was all. Apparently he had read some of the old stories about what happened when something hit a helmet.
“You’re O.K.” I assured him as I lifted him to his feet.
“My helmet?”
“New model,” I grunted. “They don’t shatter nowadays.”
“Thank God! For a minute I thought I’d had it,” Martinelli said. His voice was unsteady. “I don’t want to die—at least not until I’ve produced the ‘Nine Worlds’.”
“My personal opinion is that all conductors are born to be hung, so you’re safe until you get back to Earth.”
“Not funny,” Martinelli said, but he chuckled just the same. Occasionally it takes a bit of graveyard humor to draw the iron out of hiding. He was all right now. “You know, it’s too bad that Pluto has no free air. That could have been a wonderful sound.”
“The only sound I want to hear right now is the bubbling of a coffee pot,” I replied.
“You have a point there,” he said, as he helped me open the small airlock.
WE CHECKED with Herb Hallowell, the station superintendent, about the possibility of air remaining in the old station.
“The Old Station?—Hmm. I don’t know. We abandoned that place nearly fifty years ago. Why do you want to go there?”
“I don’t,” I said, “but Mr. Martinelli does.”
“I want to record an ice fall,” Martinelli said. “And since there’s no atmosphere outside—”
“There’s no sound,” Hallowed interrupted. “But why do you want to record an icefall?”
“I think I’d better explain,” Martinelli said. “In a year and a quarter, Earth time, the Solar Union centennial is going to occur and we’re going all out to make it one of the greatest shows Earth has ever seen. Part of the program is a sound recording of typical noises of the nine inhabited worlds, and an icefall is typical of Pluto.”
Hallowed grimaced. “It’s typical all right. Wed—you can visit the Old Station if you wish but I won’t be responsible for your safety.”
“Is there an atmosphere?” Martinelli asked.
“There was the last time anyone visited the place.”
“When was that?”
“Five years ago.”
“Hmm—that means there’s probably some left.”
“There should be. Ice is pretty good insulation.”
We left for the Old Station the next day. Five of us,—Martinelli, myself, Nalton, and the two heavy-shouldered apelike men Martinelli had brought along from Earth. Their names were Anderson and Bellini—which had become shortened n
aturally to Mr. A. and Mr. B., and finally to Able and Baker, during the long trip out to Pluto. Although most of the crew understood the inference, I’m sure that neither Able nor Baker did. It was one of those sly spacemen insults that often resulted in broken skulls when the victim realized what it meant, but in this case I doubted if it would. The simian resemblance of Able and Baker extended to their mental capacity if not to their sex. They were a pair of good-natured brutes, capable of shaking your hand or cutting your throat with the same friendly smile on their face. Martinelli called them guides, but goons would probably have been more accurate. Able had prospected on Titan and Baker was a Venerean swamprat, but neither of them had any experience on Pluto. Still, their muscles were handy for lugging heavy equipment, and we could use them.
We took along some of the high-priced recording equipment to get the sound of an icefall if an audible one could be made available, and a few explosive charges to make one available if nature wouldn’t cooperate.
The Solar Union men-refused to come unless Martinelli paid them, and Martinelli refused to pay for such a simple thing as this sort of recording. They were within their rights. Pluto wasn’t included on their agenda but I couldn’t blame Martinelli. After all, a technician’s pay on a hazardous mission isn’t peanuts and Martinelli had already laid out quite a bit of change for this trip. So we left them behind to enjoy the warm comfort of Pluto Station while we did the work.
The station rolligon carried us to the old airlock of Station One. The antique double lock was still functioning, and the dials on our spacesuits indicated a two-thirds Earth normal atmosphere inside. They didn’t indicate that the air was breathable, and we weren’t about to take any chances since we had twenty hours’ supply in our tanks. I had brought Nalton along to help us. The youngster was the only one of us who had morte than a speaking acquaintance with explosives. He had taken a course in field demolitions and derelict removal at the Space Academy and planned to start his own business as a spacelane contractor in the asteroid belt as soon as he finished his course in practical spacemanship on the “Queen”. Nalton was a nice kid—the cleancut Academy type that look as though they had been stamped out of a mold labelled “Made in Alamogordo”. But some of that Academy veneer was wearing off. He had a sense of humor, a quick wit, and a quick tongue. He learned fast and was well liked. Some day he’d be a first class spaceman. But it was his knowledge of explosives that made him a member of the party.
