CHAPTER FIVE
The physical sensations of ascending to the ship's control-room wereweird in the extreme. Cochrane had just been wakened from a worn-outsleep, and it was always startling on the moon to wake and find one'sself weighing one-sixth of normal. It took seconds to remember how onegot that way. But on the way up the stairs, Cochrane was furtherconfused by the fact that the ship was surging this way and swayingthat. It moved above the moon's surface to get over the tilted flatDabney field plate on the ground a hundred yards from the ship'soriginal position.
The Dabney field, obviously, was not in being. The ship hovered on itsrockets. They had been designed to lift it off of Earth--and theyhad--against six times the effective gravity here, and with anacceleration of more gravities on top of that. So the ship rose lightly,almost skittishly. When gyros turned to make it drift sidewise--as ahelicopter tilts in Earth's atmosphere--it fairly swooped to a newposition. Somebody jockeyed it this way and that.
Cochrane got to the control-room by holding on with both hands torailings. He was angry and appalled.
The control-room was a hemisphere, with vertical vision-screenspicturing the stars overhead. Jones stood in an odd sort of harnessbeside a set of control-switches that did not match the smoothlydesigned other controls of the ship. He looked out of a plastic blister,by which he could see around and below the ship. He made urgent signalsto a man Cochrane had never seen before, who sat in a strap-chair beforemany other complex controls with his hands playing back and forth uponthem. A loudspeaker blatted unmusically. It was Dabney's voice, highlyagitated and uneasy.
"_ ... my work for the advancement of science has been applied by otherminds. I need to specify that if the experiment now about to begin doesnot succeed, it will not invalidate my discovery, which has been amplyverified by other means. It may be, indeed, that my discovery is so farahead of present engineering--._"
"See here!" raged Cochrane. "You can't take off with Babs on board! Thisis dangerous!"
Nobody paid any attention. Jones made frantic gestures to indicate themost delicate of adjustments. The man in the strap-chair obeyed theinstruction with an absorbed attention. Jones suddenly threw a switch.Something lighted, somewhere. There was a momentary throbbing soundwhich was not quite a sound.
"Take it away," said Jones in a flat voice.
The man in the strap-chair pressed hard on the controls. Cochraneglanced desperately out of one of the side ports. He saw themoonscape--the frozen lava sea with its layer of whitish-tan moondust.He saw many moon-jeeps gathered near, as if most of the population ofLunar City had been gathered to watch this event. He saw theextraordinary nearness of the moon's horizon.
But it was the most momentary of glimpses. As he opened his mouth toroar a protest, he felt the upward, curiously comforting thrust ofacceleration to one full Earth-gravity.
The moonscape was snatched away from beneath the ship. It did notdescend. The ship did not seem to rise. The moon itself diminished andvanished like a pricked bubble. The speed of its disappearance wasnot--it specifically was not--attributable to one earth-gravity of liftapplied on a one-sixth-gravity moon.
The loudspeaker hiccoughed and was silent. Cochrane uttered the roar hehad started before the added acceleration began. But it was useless. Outthe side-port, he saw the stars. They were not still and changeless andwinking, as they appeared from the moon. These stars seemed to stiruneasily, to shift ever so slightly among themselves, like flecks ofbright color drifting on a breeze.
Jones said in an interested voice:
"Now we'll try the booster."
He threw another switch. And again there was a momentary throbbing soundwhich was not quite a sound. It was actually a sensation, which oneseemed to feel all through one's body. It lasted only the fraction of asecond, but while it lasted the stars out the side-ports ceased to bestars. They became little lines of light, all moving toward the ship'sstern but at varying rates of speed. Some of them passed beyond view.Some of them moved only a little. But all shifted.
Then they were again tiny spots of light, of innumerable tints andcolors, of every conceivably degree of brightness, stirring and movingever-so-slightly with relation to each other.
"The devil!" said Cochrane, raging.
Jones turned to him. And Jones was not quite poker-faced, now. Notquite. He looked even pleased. Then his face went back to impassivenessagain.
"It worked," he said mildly.
"I know it worked!" sputtered Cochrane. "But--where are we? How far didwe come?"
"I haven't the least idea," said Jones mildly as before. "Does itmatter?"
Cochrane glared at him. Then he realized how completely too late it wasto protest anything.
The man he had seen absorbed in the handling of controls now lifted hishands from the board. The rockets died. There was a vast silence, andweightlessness. Cochrane weighed nothing. This was free flightagain--like practically all of the ninety-odd hours from the spaceplatform to the moon. The pilot left the controls and in an accustomedfashion soared to a port on the opposite side of the room. He gazed out,and then behind, and said in a tone of astonished satisfaction:
"This is good!--There's the sun!"
"How far?" asked Jones.
"It's fifth magnitude," said the pilot happily. "We really did pile onthe horses!"
Jones looked momentarily pleased again. Cochrane said in a voice thateven to himself sounded outraged:
"You mean the sun's a fifth-magnitude star from here? What the devilhappened?"
"Booster," said Jones, nearly with enthusiasm. "When the field was justa radiation speed-up, I used forty milliamperes of current to the squarecentimetre of field-plate. That was the field-strength when we sent thesignal-rocket across the crater. For the distress-torpedo test, Istepped the field-strength up. I used a tenth of an ampere per squarecentimetre. I told you! And don't you remember that I wondered whatwould happen if I used a capacity-storage system?"
Cochrane held fast to a hand-hold.
"The more power you put into your infernal field," he demanded, "themore speed you get?"
Jones said contentedly:
"There's a limit. It depends on the temperature of the things in thefield. But I've fixed up the field, now, like a spot-welding outfit.Like a strobe-light. We took off with a light field. It's on now--wehave to keep it on. But I got hold of some pretty storage condensers. Ihooked them up in parallel to get a momentary surge of high-amperagecurrent when I shorted them through my field-making coils. Couldn't makeit a steady current! Everything would blow! But I had a surge ofprobably six amps per square centimetre for a while."
Cochrane swallowed.
"The field was sixty times as strong as the one the distress-torpedoused? We went--we're going--sixty times as fast?"
"We had lots more speed than that!" But then Jones' enthusiasm dwindled."I haven't had time to check," he said unhappily. "It's one of thethings I want to get at right away. But in theory the field shouldmodify the effect of inertia as the fourth power of its strength. Sixtyto the fourth is--."
"How far," demanded Cochrane, "is Proxima Centaurus? That's the neareststar to Earth. How near did we come to reaching it?"
The pilot on the other side of the control-room said with a trace lessthan his former zest:
"That looks like Sirius, over there ..."
"We didn't head for Proxima Centaurus," said Jones mildly. "It's tooclose! And we have to keep the field-plate back on the moon lined upwith us, more or less, so we headed out roughly along the moon's axis.Toward where its north pole points."
"Then where are we headed? Where are we going?"
"We're not going anywhere just yet," said Jones without interest. "Wehave to find out where we are, and from that--"
Cochrane ran his hand through his hair.
"Look!" he protested. "Who's running this show? You didn't tell me youwere going to take off! You didn't pick out a destination! You didn't--"
Jones said very patiently:
"We have to try out the ship. We have to find out how fast it goes withhow much field and how much rocket-thrust. We have to find out how farwe went and if it was in a straight line. We even have to find out howto land! The ship's a new piece of apparatus. We can't do things with ituntil we find out what it can do."
Cochrane stared at him. Then he swallowed.
"I see," he said. "The financial and business department of Spaceways,Inc., has done its stuff for the time being."
Jones nodded.
"The technical staff now takes over?"
Jones nodded again.
"I still think," said Cochrane, "that we could have done with a littleinterdepartmental cooperation. How long before you know what you'reabout?"
Jones shook his head.
"I can't even guess. Ask Babs to come up here, will you?"
Cochrane threw up his hands. He went toward thespiral-ladder-with-handholds that led below. He went down into the mainsaloon. A tiny green light winked on and off, urgently, on the far side.Babs was seated at a tiny board, there. As Cochrane looked, she pushedbuttons with professional skill. Bill Holden sat in a strap-chair withhis face a greenish hue.
"We took off," said Holden in a strained voice.
"We did," said Cochrane. "And the sun's a fifth magnitude star fromwhere we've got to--which is no place in particular. And I've just foundout that we started off at random and Jones and the pilot he picked upare now happily about to do some pure-science research!"
Holden closed his eyes.
"When you want to cheer me up," he said feebly, "you can tell me we'reabout to crash somewhere and this misery will soon be over."
Cochrane said bitterly:
"Taking off without a destination! Letting Babs come along! They don'tknow how far we've come and they don't know where we're going! This is ahell of a way to run a business!"
"Who called it a business?" asked Holden, as feebly as before. "Itstarted out as a psychiatric treatment!"
Babs' voice came from the side of the saloon where she sat at avision-tube and microphone. She was saying professionally:
"I assure you it's true. We are linked to you by the Dabney field, inwhich radiation travels much faster than light. When you were a littleboy didn't you ever put a string between two tin cans, and then talkalong the string?"
Cochrane stopped beside her scowling. She looked up.
"The press association men on Luna, Mr. Cochrane. They saw us take off,and the radar verified that we traveled some hundred of thousands ofmiles, but then we simply vanished! They don't understand how they cantalk to us without even the time-lag between Earth and Lunar City. I wasexplaining."
"I'll take it," said Cochrane. "Jones wants you in the control-room.Cameras? Who was handling the cameras?"
"Mr. Bell," said Babs briskly. "It's his hobby, along with poker-playingand children."
"Tell him to get some pictures of the star-fields around us," saidCochrane, "and then you can see what Jones wants. I will do a littlebusiness!"
He settled down in the seat Babs had vacated. He faced the twopress-association reporters in the screen. They had seen the ship's takeoff. It was verified beyond any reasonable question. The microwave beamto Earth was working at capacity to transmit statements from the MoonObservatory, which annoyedly conceded that the Spaceways, Inc., salvagedship had taken off with an acceleration beyond belief. But, theastronomers said firmly, the ship and all its contents must necessarilyhave been destroyed by the shock of their departure. The accelerationmust have been as great as the shock of a meteor hitting Luna.
"You can consider," Cochrane told them, "that I am now an angel, if youlike. But how about getting a statement from Dabney?"
A press-association man, back on Luna, uttered the first profanity everto travel faster than light.
"All he can talk about," he said savagely, "is how wonderful he is! Heagrees with the Observatory that you must all be dead. He said so. Canyou give us any evidence that you're alive and out in space? Visualevidence, for broadcast?"
At this moment the entire fabric of the space-ship moved slightly. Therewas no sound of rockets. The ship seemed to turn a little, but that wasall. No gravity. No acceleration. It was a singularly uncomfortablesensation, on top of the discomfort of weightlessness.
Cochrane said sardonically:
"If you can't take my word that I'm alive, I'll try to get you someproof! Hm. I'll send you some pictures of the star-fields around us.Shoot them to observatories back on Earth and let them figure out forthemselves where we are! Displacement of the relative positions of thestars ought to let them figure things out!"
He left the communicator-board. Holden still looked greenish in hisstrap-chair. The main saloon was otherwise empty. Cochrane made his waygingerly to the stair going below. He stepped into thin air anddescended by a pull on the hand-rail.
This was the dining-saloon. The ship having been built to impressinvestors in a stock-sales enterprise, it had been beautifully equippedwith trimmings. And, having had to rise from Earth to Luna, and needingto take an acceleration of a good many gravities, it had necessarily tobe reasonably well-built. It had had, in fact, to be an honest job ofship-building in order to put across a phoney promotion. But there weretrimmings that could have been spared. The ports opening upon emptiness,for example, were not really practical arrangements. But everybody butHolden and the two men in the control-room now clustered at those ports,looking out at the stars. There was Jamison and Bell the writer, andJohnny Simms and his wife. Babs had been here and gone.
Bell was busy with a camera. As Cochrane moved to tell him of the needfor star-shots to prove to a waiting planet that they were alive, JohnnySimms turned and saw Cochrane. His expression was amiable and unawed.
"Hello," said Johnny Simms cheerfully.
Cochrane nodded curtly.
"I bought West's stock in Spaceways," said Johnny Simms, amusedly,"because I want to come along. Right?"
"So I heard," said Cochrane, as curtly as before.
"West said," Johnny Simms told him gleefully, "that he was going back toEarth, punch Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe on their separatenoses, and then go down to South Carolina and raise edible snails forthe rest of his life."
"An understandable ambition," said Cochrane. He frowned, waiting to talkto Bell, who was taking an infernally long time to focus a camera out ofa side-port.
"It's going to be good when he tries to cash my check," said JohnnySimms delightedly. "I stopped payment on it when he wouldn't pick upthe tab for some drinks I invited him to have!"
Cochrane forced his face to impassiveness. Johnny Simms was that way, heunderstood. He was a psychopathic personality. He was completelyinsensitive to notions of ethics. Ideas of right and wrong were ascompletely meaningless to him as tones to a tone-deaf person, or pasteltints to a man who is color-blind. They simply didn't register. His mindwas up to par, and he could be a charming companion. He could experiencethe most kindly of emotions and most generous of impulses, which he putinto practice. But he also had a normal person's impulse to lessadmirable behavior, and he simply could not understand that there wasany difference between impulses. He put the unpleasing ones intopractice too. He'd been on the moon to avoid extradition because of pastimpulses which society called murderous. On this ship it was yet to bediscovered what he would do--but because he was technically sane hislawyers could have prevented a take off unless he came along. Cochrane,at the moment, felt an impulse to heave him out an airlock as a probabledanger. But Cochrane was not a psychopathic personality.
He stopped Bell in his picture-taking and looked at the first of theprints. They were excellent. He went back to the vision-set to transmitthem back to Luna. He sent them off. They would be forwarded toobservatories on Earth and inspected. They literally could not be faked.There were thousands of stars on each print--with the Milky Way forbackground on some--and each of those thousands of stars would beidentified, and each would have changed its relative position from thatseen on earth
, with relation to every other star. Astronomers coulddetect the spot from which the picture had been taken. But to fake asingle print would have required years of computation and almostcertainly there would have been slip-ups somewhere. These pictures wereunassailable evidence that a human expedition had reached a point inspace that had been beyond all human dreaming.
Then Cochrane had nothing to do. He was a supernumerary member of thecrew. The pilot and Jones were in charge of the ship. Jamison would takecare of the catering, when meal-time came. Probably Alicia Keith--no,Alicia Simms--would help. Nothing else needed attention. The rocketseither worked or they didn't. The air-apparatus needed no supervision.Cochrane found himself without a function.
He went restlessly back to the control-room. He found Babs lookinghelpless, and Jones staring blankly at a slip of paper in his hands,while the pilot was still at a blister-port, staring at the starsthrough one of those squat, thick telescopes used on Luna for theexamination of the planets.
"How goes the research?" asked Cochrane.
"We're stumped," said Jones painfully. "I forgot something."
"What?"
"Whenever I wanted anything," said Jones, "I wrote it out and gave amemo to Babs. She attended to it."
"My system, exactly," admitted Cochrane.
"I wrote out a memo for her," said Jones unhappily, "asking forstar-charts and for her to get somebody to set up a system ofastrogation for outside the solar system. Nobody's ever bothered to dothat before. Nobody's ever reached even Mars! But I figured we'd needit."
Cochrane waited. Jones showed him a creased bit of paper, closelywritten.
"I wrote out the memo and put it in my pocket," said Jones, "and Iforgot to give it to Babs. So we can't astrogate. We don't know how. Wedidn't get either star-charts or instructions. We're lost."
Cochrane waited.
"Apparently Al was mistaken in the star he spotted as our sun," addedJones. He referred to the pilot, whom Cochrane had not met before."Anyhow we can't find it again. We turned the ship to look at some morestars, and we can't pick it out any more."
Cochrane said:
"You'll keep looking, of course."
"For what?" asked Jones.
He waved his hand out the four equally-spaced plastic blister-ports.From where he stood, Cochrane could see thousands of thousands of starsout those four small openings. They were of every conceivable color anddegree of brightness. The Milky Way was like a band of diamonds.
"We know the sun's a yellow star," said Jones, "but we don't know howbright it should be, or what the sky should look like beyond it."
"Constellations?" asked Cochrane.
"Find 'em!" said Jones vexedly.
Cochrane didn't try. If a moon-rocket pilot could not spot familiarstar-groups, a television producer wasn't likely to see them. And it wasobvious, once one thought, that the brighter stars seen from Earth wouldbe mostly the nearer ones. If Jones was right in his guess that hisbooster had increased the speed of the ship by sixty to the fourthpower, it would have gone some millions of times as fast as thedistress-torpedo, for a brief period (the ratio was actually somethingover nineteen million times) and it happened that nobody had been ableto measure the speed of that test-object.
Cochrane was no mathematician, but he could see that there was no datafor computation on hand. After one found out how fast an acceleration ofone Earth-gravity in a Dabney field of such-and-such strength speeded upa ship, something like dead reckoning could be managed. But all thatcould be known right now was that they had come a long way.
He remembered a television show he'd produced, laid in space on animaginary voyage. The script-writer had had one of the characters saythat no constellation would be visible at a hundred light-years from thesolar system. It would be rather like a canary trying to locate thewindow he'd escaped from, from a block away, with no memories of theflight from it.
Cochrane said suddenly, in a pleased tone:
"This is a pretty good break--if we can keep them from finding out aboutit back home! We'll have an entirely new program, good for athirteen-week sequence, on just this!"
Babs stared at him.
"Main set, this control-room," said Cochrane enthusiastically. "We'llget a long-beard scientist back home with a panel of experts. We'lldiscuss our problems here! We'll navigate from home, with the wholebusiness on the air! We'll have audience-identification up to a record!Everybody on Earth will feel like he's here with us, sharing ourproblems!"
Jones said irritably:
"You don't get it! We're lost! We can't check our speed without knowingwhere we are and how far we've come! We can't find out what the shipwill do when we can't find out what it's done! Don't you see?"
Cochrane said patiently:
"I know! But we're in touch with Luna through the Dabney field that gotus here! It transmitted radiation before, faster than light. It'stransmitting voice and pictures now. Now we set up a television showwhich pays for our astrogation and lets the world sit in on the prettieraspects of our travels. Hm.... How long before you can sit down on aplanet, after you have all the navigational aids of--say--the four bestobservatories on Earth to help you? I'll arrange for a sponsor--."
He went happily down the stairs again. This was a spiral stair, and hezestfully spun around it as he went to the next deck below. At thebottom he called up to Babs:
"Babs! Get Bell and Alicia Keith and come along to take dictation! I'mgoing to need some legal witnesses for the biggest deal in the historyof advertising, made at several times the speed of light!"
And he went zestfully to the communicator to set it up.
And time passed. Data arrived, which at once solved Jones' and thepilot's problem of where they were and how far they had come--it was,actually, 178.3 light-years--and they spent an hour making further testsand getting further determinations, and then they got a destination.
They stopped in space to extrude from the airlock a small package whichexpanded into a forty-foot plastic balloon with a minute atomic batteryattached to it. The plastic was an electric conductor. It was afield-plate of the Dabney field. It took over the field from Earth andmaintained it. It provided a second field for the ship to maintain. Theship, then, could move at any angle from the balloon. The Dabney fieldstretched 178.3 light-years through emptiness to the balloon, and thenat any desired direction to the ship.
The ship's rockets thrust again--and the booster-circuit came into play.There were maneuverings. A second balloon was put out in space.
At 8:30 Central U. S. Time, on a period relinquished by otheradvertisers--bought out--a new program went on the air. It was ahalf-hour show, sponsored by the Intercity Credit Corporation--"Buy onCredit Guaranteed"--with ten straight minutes of commercials interjectedin four sections. It was the highest-priced show ever put on the air. Itshowed the interior of the ship's control-rooms, with occasional briefswitches to authoritative persons on Earth for comment on what wasrelayed from the far-off skies.
The first broadcast ensured the success of the program beyond possibledispute. It started with curt conversation between Jones and the pilot,Al--Jones loathed this part of it, but Al turned out to be something ofa ham--on the problems of approaching a new solar system. Cut tocomputers back on Earth. Back to the control-room of the starship.Pictures of the local sun, and comments on its differentness from thesun that had nourished the human race since time began.
Then the cameras--Bell worked them--panned down through the ship'sblister-ports. There was a planet below. The ship descended toward it.It swelled visibly as the space-ship approached. Cochrane stood out ofcamera-range and acted as director as well as producer of the opus. Heused even Johnny Simms as an offstage voice repeating stern commands. Itwas corny. There was no doubt about it. It had a large content of ham.
But it happened to be authentic. The ship had reached another planet,with vast ice-caps and what appeared to be no more than atwenty-degree-wide equatorial belt where there was less than completeglaciation. The rockets roare
d and boomed as the ship let down into thecloud-layers.
Television audiences back on Earth viewed the new planet nearly as soonas did those in the ship. The time-lag was roughly three seconds for adistance of 203.7 light-years.
The surface of the planet was wild and dramatic beyond belief. Therewere valleys where vegetation grew luxuriantly. There were ranges ofsnow-clad mountains interpenetrating the equatorial strip, and therewere masses of white which, as the ship descended, could be identifiedas glaciers moving down toward the vegetation.
But as the ship sank lower and lower--and the sound of its rocketsbecame thunderous because of the atmosphere around it--a new featuretook over the central position in one's concept of what the planet wasactually like.
The planet was volcanic. There were smoking cones everywhere--in thesnow-fields, among the ice-caps, in between the glaciers, and even amongthe tumbled areas whose greenness proved that here was an environmentwhich might be perilous, but where life should thrive abundantly.
The ship continued to descend toward a great forest near a terminalmoraine.