Chapter Eighteen
"You want me to go to Jupiter?" Hunt repeated slowly, making sure he had heard correctly.
Caldwell stared back over his desk impassively. "The Jupiter Five Mission will depart from Luna in six weeks time," he stated. "Danchekker has gone about as far as he can go with Charlie. What details are left to be found out can be taken care of by his staff at Westwood. He's got better things he'd like to be doing on Ganymede. There's a whole collection of alien skeletons there, plus a shipload of zoology from way back that nobody's ever seen the like of before. It's got him excited. He wants to get his hands on them. Jupiter Five is going right there, so he's getting together a biological team to go with it."
Hunt already knew all this. Nevertheless, he went through the motions of digesting the information and checking through it for any point he might have missed. After an appropriate pause he replied:
"That's fine—I can see his angle. But what does it have to do with me?"
Caldwell frowned and drummed his fingers, as if he had been expecting this question to come, while hoping it wouldn't.
"Consider this an extension of your assignment," he said at last. "From all the arguing that's going on around this place, nobody seems to be able to agree just how the Ganymeans fit into the Charlie business. Maybe they're a big part of the answer, maybe they're not. Nobody knows for sure."
"True." Hunt nodded.
Caldwell took this as all the confirmation he needed. "Okay," he said with a gesture of finality. "You've done a good job so far on the Charlie side of the picture; maybe it's time to balance things up a bit and give you a crack at the other side, too. Well"—he shrugged—"the information's not here—it's on Ganymede. In six weeks time, J Five shoves off for Ganymede. It makes sense to me that you go with it."
Hunt's brow remained creased in an expression that indicated he still didn't quite see everything. He posed the obvious question. "What about the job here?"
"What about it? Basically you correlate information that comes from different places. The information will still keep coming from the places whether you're in Houston or on board Jupiter Five. Your assistant is capable of stepping in and keeping the routine background research and cross-checking running smoothly in Group L. There's no reason why you can't continue to be kept updated on what's going on if you're out there. Anyhow, a change of scene never did anybody any harm. You've been on this job a year and a half now."
"But we're talking about a break of years, maybe."
"Not necessarily. Jupiter Five is a later design than J Four, it will make Ganymede in under six months. Also, a number of ships are being ferried out with the Jupiter Five Mission to start building up a fleet that will be based out there. Once a reserve's been established, there will be regular two-way traffic with Earth. In other words, once you've had enough of the place we'll have no problem getting you back."
Hunt reflected that nothing ever seemed to stay normal for very long when Caldwell was around. He felt no inclination to argue with this new directive. On the contrary, the prospect excited him. But there was something that didn't quite add up in the reasons Caldwell was giving. Hunt had the same feeling he had experienced on previous occasions that there was an ulterior motive lurking beneath the surface somewhere. Still, that didn't really matter. Caldwell seemed to have made up his mind, and Hunt knew from experience that when Caldwell made up his mind that something would be so, then by some uncanny power of preordination, so it would inevitably turn out to be.
Caldwell waited for possible objections. Seeing that none was forthcoming, he concluded: "When you joined us, I told you your place in UNSA was out front. That statement implied a promise. I always keep promises."
* * *
For the next two weeks Hunt worked frantically, reorganizing the operation of Group L and making his own personal preparations for a prolonged absence from Earth. After that, he was sent to Galveston for two weeks.
By the third decade of the twenty-first century, commercial flight reservations to Luna could be made through any reputable travel agent, for seats either on regular UNSA ships or on chartered ships crewed by UNSA officers. The standards of comfort provided on passenger flights were high, and accommodation at the larger Lunar bases was secure, enabling Lunar travel to become a routine chore in the lives of many businessmen and a memorable event for more than a few casual visitors, none of whom needed any specialized knowledge or training. Indeed, one enterprising consortium, comprising a hotel chain, an international airline, a travel-tour operator, and an engineering corporation, had commenced the construction of a Lunar holiday resort, which was already fully booked for the opening season.
Places like Jupiter, however, were not yet open to the public. Persons detailed for assignments with the UNSA deep-space missions needed to know what they were doing and how to act in emergency situations. The ice sheets of Ganymede and the cauldron of Venus were no places for tourists.
At Galveston, Hunt learned about UNSA space suits and the standard items of ancillary equipment; he was taught the use of communication equipment, survival kits, emergency life support systems, and repair kits; he practiced test routines, radio-location procedures, and equipment-fault diagnostic techniques. "Your life could depend on this little box," one instructor told the group. "You could wind up in a situation where it fails and the only person inside a hundred miles to fix it is you." Doctors lectured on the rudiments of space medicine and recommended methods of dealing with oxygen starvation, decompression, heat stroke, and hypothermia. Physiologists described the effects on bone calcium of long periods of reduced body weight, and showed how a correct balance could be maintained by a specially selected diet and drugs. UNSA officers gave useful hints that covered the whole gamut of staying alive and sane in alien environments, from navigating afoot on a hostile surface using satellite beacons as reference points, to the art of washing one's face in zero gravity.
And so, just over four weeks after his directive from Caldwell, Hunt found himself fifty feet below ground level at pad twelve of number-two terminal complex twenty miles outside Houston, walking along one of the access ramps that connected the wall of the silo to the gleaming hull of the Vega. An hour later, the hydraulic rams beneath the platform supporting the tail thrust the ship slowly upward and out, to stand clear on the roof of the structure. Within minutes the Vega was streaking into the darkening void above. It docked thirty minutes later, two and a half seconds behind schedule, with the half-mile-diameter transfer satellite Kepler.
On Kepler the passengers traveling on to Luna—including Hunt, three propulsion-systems experts keen to examine the suspected Ganymean gravity drives, four communications specialists, two structural engineers, and Danchekker's team, all destined to join Jupiter Five—transferred to the ugly and ungainly Capella class moonship that would carry them for the remainder of the journey from Earth orbit to the Lunar surface. The voyage lasted thirty hours and was uneventful. After they had been in Lunar orbit for twenty minutes, the announcement came over the loudspeaker that the craft had been cleared for descent.
Shortly afterward, the unending procession of plains, mountains, crags, and hills that had been marching across the cabin display screen slowed to a halt and the view started growing perceptively larger. Hunt recognized the twin ring-walled plains of Ptolemy and Albategnius, with its central conical mountain and Crater Klein interrupting its encircling wall, before the ship swung northward and these details were lost off the top of the steadily enlarging image. The picture stabilized, now centered upon the broken and crumbling mountain wall that separated Ptolemy from the southern edge of the Plain of Hipparchus. What had previously looked like smooth terrain resolved itself into a jumble of rugged cliffs and valleys, and in the center, glints of sunlight began to appear, reflected from the metal structures of the vast base below.
As the outlines of the surface installations materialized out of the gray background and expanded to fill the screen, a yellow glow in the cent
er grew, gradually transforming into the gaping entrance to one of the underground moonship berths. There was a brief impression of tiers of access levels stretching down out of sight as huge service gantries swung back to admit the ship. Rows of brilliant arc lights flooded the scene before the exhaust from the braking motors blotted out the view. A mild jolt signaled that the landing legs had made contact with Lunar rock, and silence fell abruptly inside the ship as the engines were cut. Above the squat nose of the moonship, massive steel shutters rolled together to seal out the stars. As the berth filled with air, a new world of sound impinged on the ears of the ship's occupants. Shortly afterward, the access ramps slid smoothly from the walls to connect the ship to the reception bays.
Thirty minutes after clearing arrival formalities, Hunt emerged from an elevator high atop one of the viewing domes that dominated the surface of Ptolemy Main Base. For a long time he gazed soberly at the harsh desolation in which man had carved this oasis of life. The streaky blue and white disk of Earth, hanging motionless above the horizon, suddenly brought home to him the remoteness of places like Houston, Reading, Cambridge, and the meaning of everything familiar, which until so recently he had taken for granted. In his wanderings he had never come to regard any particular place as home; unconsciously he had always accepted any part of the world to be as much home as any other. Now, all at once, he realized that he was away from home for the first time in his life.
As Hunt turned to take in more of the scene below, he saw that he was not alone. On the far side of the dome a lean, balding figure stood staring silently out over the wilderness, absorbed in thoughts of its own. Hunt hesitated for a long time. At last he moved slowly across to stand beside the figure. All around them the mile-wide clutter of silver-gray metallic geometry that made up the base sprawled amid a confusion of pipes, girders, pylons, and antennae. On towers above, the radars swept the skyline in endless circles, while the tall, praying-mantislike laser transceivers stared unblinkingly at the heavens, carrying the ceaseless dialogues between the base computers and unseen communications satellites fifty miles up. In the distance beyond the base, the rugged bastions of Ptolemy's mountain wall towered above the plain. From the blackness above them, a surface transporter was sliding toward the base on its landing approach.
Eventually Hunt said: "To think—a generation ago, all this was just desert." It was more a thought voiced than a statement.
Danchekker did not answer for a long time. When he did, he kept his eyes fixed outside.
"But man dared to dream . . ." he murmured slowly. After a pause he added, "And what man dares to dream today, tomorrow he makes come true."
Another long silence followed. Hunt took a cigarette from his case and lit it. "You know," he said at last, blowing a stream of smoke slowly toward the glass wall of the dome, "it's going to be a long voyage to Jupiter. We could get a drink down below—one for the road, as it were."
Danchekker seemed to turn the suggestion over in his mind for a while. At length he shifted his gaze back within the confines of the dome and turned to face Hunt directly.
"I think not, Dr. Hunt," he said quietly.
Hunt sighed and made as if to turn.
"However . . ." The tone of Danchekker's voice checked him before he moved. He looked up. "If your metabolism is capable of withstanding the unaccustomed shock of nonalcoholic beverages, a strong coffee might, ah, perhaps be extremely welcome."
It was a joke. Danchekker had actually cracked a joke!
"I'll try anything once," Hunt said as they began walking toward the door of the elevator.
Chapter Nineteen
Embarkation on the orbiting Jupiter Five command ship was not scheduled to take place until a few days later. Danchekker would be busy making final arrangements for his team and their equipment to be ferried up from the Lunar surface. Hunt, not being involved in these undertakings, prepared an itinerary of places to visit during the free time he had available.
The first thing he did was fly to Tycho by surface transporter to observe the excavations still going on around the areas of some of the Lunarian finds, and to meet at last many of the people who up until then had existed only as faces on display screens. He also went to see the deep mining and boring operations in progress not far from Tycho, where engineers were attempting to penetrate to the core regions of the Moon. They believed that concentrations of rich metal-bearing ores might be found there. If this turned out to be so, within decades the Moon could become an enormous spaceship factory, where parts prefabricated in processing and forming plants on the surface would be ferried up for final assembly in Lunar orbit. The economic advantages of constructing deep-space craft here and from Lunar materials, without having to lift everything up out of Earth's gravity pit to start with, promised to be enormous.
Next, Hunt visited the huge radio and optical observatories of Giordano Bruno on Farside. Here, sensitive receivers, operating fully shielded from the perpetual interference from Earth, and gigantic telescopes, freed from any atmosphere and not having to contend with distortions induced by their own weights, were pushing the frontiers of the known Universe way out beyond the limits of their Earth-bound predecessors. Hunt sat fascinated in front of the monitor screens and resolved planets of some of the nearer stars; he was shown one nine times the size of Jupiter, and another that described a crazy figure-eight orbit about a double star. He gazed deep into the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy, and out at distant specks on the very threshold of detection. Scientists and physicists described the strange new picture of the Cosmos that was beginning to emerge from their work here and explained some of the exciting advances in concepts of space-time mechanics, which indicated that feasible methods could be devised for deforming astronomic geodesics in such a way that the limitations once thought to apply to extreme effective velocities could be avoided. If so, interstellar travel would become a practical proposition; one of the scientists confidently predicted that man would cross the Galaxy within fifty years.
Hunt's final stop brought him back to Nearside—to the base at Copernicus near which Charlie had been found. Scientists at Copernicus had been studying descriptions of the terrain over which Charlie had traveled and the accompanying sketched maps; the information contained in the notebook had been transmitted up from Houston. From the traveling times, distances, and estimates of speed quoted, they suspected that Charlie's journey had begun somewhere on Farside and had brought him, by way of the Jura Mountains, Sinus Iridum, and Mare Imbrium, to Copernicus. Not everybody subscribed to this opinion, however, there was a problem. For some unaccountable reason, the directions and compass points mentioned in Charlie's notes bore no relationship to the conventional lunar north-south that derived from its axis of rotation. The only route for Charlie's journey that could be interpreted to make any sense at all was the one from Farside across Mare Imbrium, but even that only made sense if a completely new direction was assumed for the north-south axis.
Attempts to locate Gorda had so far met with no positive success. From the tone of the final entries in the diary, it could not have been very far from the spot where Charlie was found. About fifteen miles south of this point was an area covered by numerous overlapping craters, all confirmed as being meteoritic and of recent origin. Most researchers concluded that this must have been the site of Gorda, totally obliterated by a freak concentration of meteorites in the as yet unexplained storm.
Before leaving Copernicus, Hunt accepted an invitation to drive out overland and visit the place of Charlie's discovery. He was accompanied by a Professor Alberts from the base and the crew of the UNSA survey vehicle.
* * *
The survey vehicle lumbered to a halt in a wide gorge, between broken walls of slate-gray rock. All around it, the dust had been churned into a bewildering pattern of grooves and ridges by Caterpillar tracks, wheels, landing gear, and human feet—evidence of the intense activity that had occurred there over the last eighteen months. From the observation dome of the upper cabin,
Hunt recognized the scene immediately; he had first seen it in Caldwell's office. He identified the large mound of rubble against the near wall of the gorge, and above it the notch leading into the cleft.
A voice called from below. Hunt rose to his feet, his movements slow and clumsy in his encumbering space suit, and clambered through the floor hatch and down a short ladder to the control cabin. The driver was stretching back in his seat, taking a long drink from a flask of hot coffee. Behind him, the sergeant in command of the vehicle was at a videoscreen, reporting back to base via comsat that they had reached their destination without mishap. The third crew member, a corporal who was to accompany Hunt and Alberts outside and who was already fitted out, was helping the professor secure his helmet. Hunt took his own helmet from the storage rack by the door and fixed it in place. When the three were ready, the sergeant supervised the final checkout of life-support and communications systems and cleared them to pass, one by one, through the airlock to the outside.
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