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IF
January and March 1964
Vol. 13, No. 6 and Vol. 14, No. 1
Custom eBook created by
Jerry eBooks
May 2020
I
The guide beam reached out in answer to his signal and locked onto him. Home again, he thought. His hands moved across the pilot board, adjusting vectors more delicately than a pianist controls notes, until the moonship rode a true curve.
Raising his eyes to the viewscreen, he saw Ganymede as half a globe ahead of him.
It was a cold sight, mountains like teeth, craters like fortress walls, their shadows long and lengthening across blue-gray plains. Though already nighted, just east of the John Glenn range, Berkeley Ice Field lay high enough to throw Jupiter light back at him, a sheening amber reach that lost itself around the curve of the world. Southwestward thence, slashing through the heights and a thousand miles over Mare Navium, the scar that was Dante Chasm ran toward the Red Mountains. Not far north of it, almost on the sunset line, Aurora’s visual beacon was now visible, a green star that flickered on and off, on and off. But past the horizon, blackness was aswarm with other and older stars, unblinking diamond sharpnesses.
Not for the first time, he thought, I’d like to know what’s out yonder.
But he wouldn’t live that long. And it didn’t matter. There was sufficient mystery in the Solar System for a lot of human lifetimes yet—yes, and trouble and danger and hope, all scrambled together in life’s careless fashion. Hope reborn on Earth just as hell was letting out for noon on Jupiter—
The radio buzzed “Aurora Space Traffic Control to Moonship 17. That’s one-seven. Acknowledge,” said a familiar voice.
Startled, Fraser jerked in his seat, and laughed a bit at himself for doing so. “Shucks, Bill, you needn’t get stuffy with me,” he said. “This is Mark in Good Ole Charlie. Remember?”
“Well—” Enderby sounded sheepish. “Ah, never mind. I was putting on company manners. But if any of ’em happen to be listening, let ’em think we’re slobs. They’ll probably be right.”
“Company? How’s that?”
“You haven’t heard? We told every outpost.”
“I wasn’t at Io Base. Went directly to the mine, and flitted directly back here when my job was finished. So what’s happened?”
“A battleship, that’s what happened.”
“Huh?”
“USS Vega. Made groundfall fifteen hours ago.”
Briefly, Fraser’s heart stumbled, and he had a sense of the hair rising on his skin. He shoved the tension down again as far as he could, and managed to ask, “What news?” in a level tone.
“Nothing much, from what I can gather. We’ve only seen a few of the personnel. According to what Ad-HQ announced to us, she was on patrol near Venus when the revolution broke, and was put to searching for an orbital base the Sam Halls were believed to have somewhere in that sector. Didn’t find it. I don’t
imagine she looked too hard, if her commander had any sneaking sympathy for them. He seems to have had, maybe to have been in cahoots with them all along, because the Vega wasn’t called straight home when the fighting ended. Instead, the new government ordered her here, to see if we needed anything and make sure of our allegiance.”
Fraser still was trying for calm—those had been hard months while an intermittent radio beam sent tatters of information about the civil war ripping across American soil, a war that could at any minute have gone nuclear; and then the beam was cut off when Earth slipped behind the solar wind curtain, eight days after a still uncertain victory.
He made himself picture the battleship’s track. She must have taken a cometary orbit to get here so fast: plunging as near the sun as coolers and radiation screens allowed, letting it swing her around, and then applying maximum blast. You gained considerable efficiency when you added gravitation potential energy to your jets. The saving in reaction mass would let you accelerate longer than usual, turn your eventual orbit into a still flatter and swifter hyperbola.
As always, he found engineer thoughts soothing. Forces and matrices were, so much easier to deal with than people.
“Our allegiance is okay and then some,” he said. “But I’d better write Santa Claus a long list of wants. My department’s run low on Mark Four Everything, what with the last supply ship not coming.” Well worth it, though, his mind added. A temporary breakdown in logistics, and any amount of belt-tightening is small price for being free again.
Why . . . I could go back home now . . . as my own man!
His eyes returned to the bleakness in the viewscreen, and for a moment it was blotted out by the memory of blue water and white foamcaps, a wind that tasted of salt, under Earth’s lordly sky. But then his glance wandered and fell on Jupiter, and suddenly he was unsure. He had lived a dozen years beneath that storm-blazoned shield, and if Ganymede’s rock and ice were hard to strike roots in, they gripped those roots all the more tightly.
“Well,” he said in haste, “what’s your call about, Bill?”
“Oh, that,” Enderby said. “With the battlewagon taking up so much room, we have to put moonships in a bunch at the north end. There are already several parked. You’ll have to descend on a very, very finicking line. And manually. Can do?”
“Look, I inspect and service this pilot board myself. I can put my boat down on the price of a Congressman.”
“R-r-roger.” Enderby issued instructions. Fraser listened with care, but had time to feel a little ashamed. The legislature and the courts ought to rate respect, now that the Army Liberation had booted out the dictatorship. Wasn’t that so?
Or was it? After this long a time at the far end of a four hundred million mile communications line, a trickle of censored radio, censored letters, censored publications, how much truth could he know?
Noble slogans were cheap. The finest causes could go awry. Even the dictatorship had started as a movement to restore to a beaten United States her sovereignty and her pride. Then somehow one emergency after another cropped up, and those who grumbled began to have problems with the cops . . .
His thoughts were swallowed up in the busyness of planetfall. Being meant to land at unpredictable points, the intersatellite carriers depended on their pilots as often as on autopilots. Not every person could acquire the necessary skills.
When the last jet was cut off and the cabin had shivered to silence, Fraser unharnessed. He was a tall man, rather on the gaunt side. Forty years had put lines in his long jut-nosed face, around the gray eyes and wide mouth; the darkness of his hair had begun to frost over.
Putting the system on standby, he went aft to the spacesuit locker. This far from the regular port facilities, a tube couldn’t snake out for his passage into Aurora. He got the garb on fast over his coverall and cycled through the airlock, as impatient to see Eve and the kids as he was to see the newcomers. And to call Theor, of course, to find out how matters stood on Jupiter. It had infuriated him, having to run over to Io for a week in the hour of his friend’s distress. But the automated mining establishments, here and on several other moons, were still a-building, and the colony’s chief cryogenicist was forever getting calls to come and troubleshoot.
He unfolded the accommodation ladder and went down it as if into a pit. The other craft stood close around, stubby big-bellied shapes that covered the ground with the inky shadows of airlessness. He almost collided with the spacesuited figure waiting by Charlie’s landing jacks, before he saw.
“Oh,
hello,” he said. “Can’t make out anything through your faceplate, but hello anyway.”
A hand grasped his helmet and pulled it into contact. “That is you, Mark, isn’t it?” came Lorraine Vlasek’s voice.
“What the devil! Why talk by conduction? Your radio out of whack?”
“Privacy.” The muffled sound had a frantic overtone. And his chief electronics technie wasn’t given to dramatics. His throat tightened anew.
“Thank God you’re back,” she said unsteadily. “You’re the only one I dare talk to.”
“Whatever’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But that battleship. Why did she come here?”
“Uh, well, Bill Enderby said—”
“Yes, yes, yes.” Her words fell over each other in their haste. “Does that really make sense to you? Maybe it does. You’ve been so long away from Earth. But I left only two years ago. Already then it was like a boiling kettle, subversive propaganda, security officers murdered, riots, raids, everywhere over the world. Is that supposed to stop just because there’s a new government in Washington? They could have sent us a cargo ship. We’re only five thousand men, women and children. Unarmed. Not even equipped to leave the Jovian System. What possible danger could we be? And meanwhile every bit of American power is needed at home, if things aren’t to explode!”
Fraser drew a long breath. His relief at finding her worries were empty ones turned him limp.
“See here, Lory,” he said, “you’re letting your prejudices—sorry, your opinions—run away with you. I can sympathize. I never blamed you for being so unhappy when we heard about the revolt, and I sincerely hope people will soon stop cold-shouldering you on that account. It’s not your fault that the schools drummed into your generation that the U.S.A. had to mount guard on the entire human race, or there’d be another thermonuclear war. But damnation, foreigners aren’t evil! They only resented our bossdom. Who wouldn’t? Didn’t our country resent the Soviet bossdom so much as to finally destroy it? If the Sam Halls really can establish the kind of cooperative peace authority they promise, why, that solves the whole problem—and Americans won’t have to enslave themselves any longer, either, just to sit on the lid. Stop shying at ghosts.”
“Oh, Mark! You’re a good engineer, but you simply don’t know—Never mind. I’m scared. That story the ship’s commander handed us is too thin. Seen from Jupiter, the solar wind interference doesn’t cover so wide an arc that Earth is out of radio touch with us for more than a couple of weeks . . . remember? Surely the government would wait that long and query us directly, before sending a ship that might not have been needed at all.
“And . . . there’s a guard posted around her. Every minute. And you’d expect the crew to get liberty, to come in and fraternize, but they haven’t! Except for a few officers, they’ve stayed inboard.”
“Hm.” Jarred, Fraser thought of his family, and of what a bombardment could do to Aurora. He wet his lips. “But they must know we’re on their side. Why the devil are more than half of us here in the first place? To do scientific research, sure, and the auxiliary work—but there’re plenty of similar opportunities elsewhere, not quite so far out at the end of beyond. No, we were damn well fed up with secret police and official uplift and labor drafts and censors and bureaucrats. We wanted to put as much space between us and Earth as possible. And the old government knew it, and was glad to cooperate in getting rid of us so easily and usefully. Everybody knew it.”
“Exactly. So why send a warship now?”
Fraser paused. In the silence of vacuum, his pulse arid breath sounded feverish. “I don’t know,” he said at last, harshly, “and I don’t know what to do about it, either. Any suggestions?”
“Yes. Make some quiet preparations for getting out of town.”
He caught at her arm, gauntlet against brassard, and blurted: “What do you expect will happen?”
“I’ve no idea. Maybe nothing.
Maybe I’m being hysterical. But . . . oh, I did so want to talk with you.”
She hasn’t anybody else, he realized. Which was odd. No other girl had remained single for two years, in a settlement still overloaded with bachelors. He patted her awkwardly on the back. “Well, here I am, kid, and what I have to say is, don’t be such a worrywart. Let’s go on in, huh?”
Perhaps she nodded. She heard the hum in his earplugs as she switched on her suit radio.
His own mind fretted while he led the way out between the moonships. But when he emerged, he stopped and whistled.
The Vega was huge. She could never have touched on Earth, and now that Lorraine had raised the question of motive, he did think it odd that she had not taken an orbit even around Ganymede. A five hundred foot spheroid, her gray paint scored and blistered by radiation and micrometeorites, rifle turrets and missile tubes and boat locks humping dinosaurian athwart the sky, she seemed almost to fill the concrete apron of the regular spacefield.
That was an illusion, he knew, and so was the impression of overwhelming mass. She was a shell, thinner than any civilian vessel, relying on speed and firepower for protection against weapons that made any armor futile. But nonetheless he felt as if a mountain had descended, and the land looked suddenly strange to him.
Unconsciously seeking familiarity, he gazed around. Westward the Sinus Americae stretched beyond sight, losing itself over the near horizon before it opened on Mare Navium. The sun hung low above Navajo Crater out there, winged with zodiacal light, the disc shrunken to a fifth of its homeside angular diameter but still too bright to look at. Eastward the lava plain lay equally bare and dark, save where the monorail to the ice mines slashed a metal streak; but the highest peaks of the John Glenns thrust into view. Northward the Gunnison made a jagged wall, ramparts touched with radiance. Over them, over everything arced the night of space. He couldn’t see many constellations. Though Ganymede gets only some four per cent of the illumination that Earth does, the human eye is so adaptable that the country does not seem especially dim, and the pupil narrows so much by day that none but the brightest stars shine through. But Jupiter was plain, of course: vast and cloudy brilliant in half phase, a little south of the zenith.
“Cha-arge!” he said and struck off with the long flat strides of low-gee. He took a secret pride in being able to move so lightly at his age. Not that he enjoyed regular calisthenics. He swallowed a euphoriac pill before each dismal session. But you had scant choice in the matter if you wanted to stay healthy in a mere eighteen per cent of Earth’s gravity field.
Passing near the ship, he noticed the ring of armed and armored sentries. Oh, hell, he thought, they only have an ultra-cautious skipper. Trying to shake off his unease, he glanced past them, down to the west end of the field. The Olympia was still there, her big clumsy-looking shape a comfort and a promise.
Unless—
His eyes strayed to the planet in the sky. “Any word from Jupiter while I was gone?” he asked.
“Yes,” Lorraine said. “Pat Mar honey told me that your friend, that prince or whatever he is, called about fifty hours ago and wanted urgently to talk to you. Somebody on the lingo team told Pat. But none of them could make out the reason why.”
She spoke absent-mindedly, her concern more with the guns that shadowed her. Fraser swore. “That must mean heap big trouble. I’d better contact him right away.” His fists drew together. “Though what can I do?”
Beyond the field, they zigzagged through a portal in the safety wall and confronted Aurora.
Apart from some outlying domes for special purposes, the town was four long slabsided sections, eight stories high, forming a quadrangle in whose courtyard the main radio mast lifted its beacon-eyed skeleton. The building material was native stone faced with white seal-plast. There was no reason to burrow underground here, as on Luna. Solar weather was too remote to be a hazard, and if you took your Antion on schedule you needn’t worry about biological damage from cosmic rays. Meteorites posed a theoretical danger, though no
big ones had struck this neighborhood in the thirty years since men started colonizing. If any did, interior compartmentation would minimize air loss. And it was worth the slight risk to save on power. Heat was lost to vacuum at a considerably lower rate than it would have been conducted away by Ganymedean rock, at two hundred or more degrees below the Fahrenheit zero.
Someday we’ll warm that rock with nuclear energy, and crush it into soil, and blanket it with atmosphere, and turn this whole world green.
An ironic part of Fraser reflected that it wouldn’t be done for particularly idealistic reasons. There was so much to learn in the Jovian System that a permanent research base was a scientific necessity; which meant there had to be an extensive life-support plant; which in turn meant a sizeable population of technics; who, like many of the scientists, wouldn’t settle here without their families; and so the colony mushroomed. You had to hydrocultivate most of your own food, rig and refine your own metal, for supply ships couldn’t come very often. And every further gain in economic independence meant a saving in haulage costs. The goal was to make Ganymede into New Earth.
Still, motives weren’t important. Nothing is as dead as the last generation’s practical politics. The thing itself was what mattered and would endure, blue sky, blinking lakes, forests that rustled and rippled in the wind, under Jupiter. Sometimes Fraser woke from a dream of his childhood’s ocean, and his pillow was wet.
He jerked out of his reverie. “Stop mooning, you.”
“What?” Lorraine said.
He realized he had spoken aloud, and flushed. “Nothing. Though, come to think of it, a bad pun . . . Damnation! If Theor’s people are overrun, it’ll set our work back twenty-years.”
She regarded him a while, until they stopped before an airlock. “Don’t kid me,” she said then, quietly. “I’ve watched you pace the floor as the bad news came in. Those Jovians mean more to you than a scientific project.”
Three Worlds to Conquer Page 1