Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  As they stepped back to the airlock of the Little Falls, a crew under Hawley was just completing the job of filling the fuel tanks of the observatory with the chemically pure water that served as fuel for the atomic motors that powered the whole plant. Scarcely an hour after they had landed, the spaceship raised its nose to the heavens, jets blasting the frozen ground, and rocketed off into space, headed for a far-off sun.

  Riggs sat for some minutes beside the commander at the control board, watching him correct their course as Mercer read off the coordinates in Price’s place. At last the older man leaned back. “Ah,” he breathed, “that ought to get us there.”

  Riggs nodded silently, not trusting his clumsy tongue to keep off tender ground.

  “Say,” Hawley wanted to know, “did you adjust the clocks in there?”

  “No, sir,” Riggs replied. “They were only two-tenths of a second off, and I didn’t think that was enough to bother with. I’d as like as not have introduced a larger error in the other direction.”

  Hawley agreed in silence, then turned to the other two in the control room. “I suppose the boys down below would like a little help developing and printing that film,” he said. “What do you say, do we give them a hand?”

  The other three stood up and began getting out of their suits as they prepared to follow their commander to the photographic laboratory three decks below, leaving the Little Falls to find her prosaic way through the emptiness of interstellar space.

  ~ * ~

  Days ran into days as the Little Falls alternately accelerated and decelerated as she visited planet after planet. The time-consuming routine of gathering and replenishing film, of developing and inspecting it, left little time for personal contact between Hawley and Riggs. The copilot, ever conscious of his secret mission, made every effort to keep his relations with his superior as impersonal as possible, always fearing an open rupture between them. He was forced to admit, however, that Hawley was apparently all that a pilot should be. After the first landing, which he had wished off on Riggs, the commander alternated on landings with his copilot, making smooth, sound approaches under varying conditions of gravity and atmospheric pressure, never showing the slightest hesitation or confusion.

  Riggs secretly permitted himself to wonder, however, just how Hawley would fare should he have to land the ship from any position other than the vertical. The commander had made no “fancy” approaches, always carefully bringing the Little Falls directly over their objective before letting down. Riggs, as a matter of policy, had not attempted any angle approaches, afraid that Hawley would look upon them as a personal challenge, and even more afraid of his subtly scornful remarks so delicately concealed beneath routine conversation.

  Fifteen of the scheduled stops of the Little Falls had been completed before the event occurred for which Riggs had been waiting. The planetary system of Rigel II was one of extreme interest to terrestrial astronomers, since it was one of the few which did not conform to the usual arrangement of having all the planets in approximately the same plane. The sun’s nine planets revolved around it in nine different planes, and even the various moons did not conform to any general plan. This arrangement of planetary bodies, incompatible as it was with the general theory of origin of planetary systems, naturally excited interest, and observatories were located on several of the bodies in the system.

  Besides its astronomical interest, the system of Rigel II commanded close observation because its first planet, a huge, deeply atmosphered body of enormous surface temperatures and pressures, manifested evidences of high-temperature life. The physical conditions of its surface made it inaccessible to men, so that a compromise observatory had been erected on its only moon, a body that always faced its parent. This moon, like its planet, was often obscured by clouds, and in just such a time of precipitation Hawley approached it for a landing.

  The navigator and computer were unable to get adequate observations on the observatory, with the result that Hawley was forced at the last moment to change his course and attempt an angle approach. Riggs tensed himself as Mercer finally located the observatory, well off to one side—too far to permit a vertical descent.

  To the copilot’s surprise, Hawley did not ask the computer for an equation to express the optimum course of the Little Falls through the moon’s atmosphere to the ground. Instead he sat silently at the controls, listening to the coordinates Mercer snapped out from instant to instant. Riggs’s mind flew as he tried to work out the equation in his head, as Hawley was undoubtedly doing—the equation which would describe the parabolic curve that they were following through the murk. He marveled at the major’s confidence in his mental computations, descending, as he was, to an objective that was completely shrouded in mists. He felt the ship lay over on its side and waited tensely for the crash as it grounded. But Hawley dropped it to the muddy surface with scarcely a jar. In spite of himself, Riggs could not repress an ejaculation of relief and amazement at the landing.

  He regretted it in an instant as Hawley shot him a twinkling glance, a glance that made his “Not bad for an old man, eh, Riggs?” completely redundant.

  “No, sir,” Riggs replied obediently, glad to see the commander lead a small crew out to get the graphs and photographic magazines from the observatory.

  Riggs seethed inwardly at Hawley’s all too apparent condescension, wishing fitfully that he could talk to somebody about it. The old dope, proud of his mental calculation, was he? Thought he was pretty good, to hear a computer snap out three coordinates every five seconds and to transform them into a fourth-power parabolic equation. Well, there was more than one man in the world who could do it, Riggs reflected. He had kept abreast of Hawley’s mental mathematics. If he hadn’t known they were making the grade, he would have taken those controls away, major or no major. He stopped his annoyed reflections as Hawley stepped out of the airlock.

  “Let’s go, Riggs,” Hawley snapped, grinning a little.

  Riggs climbed silently into his seat behind the board, pressed the take-off warning, and as soon as the others were strapped in, blasted the Little Falls savagely off the surface.

  Hawley seemed more disposed than previously to talk as they sped toward the second planet of the same sun. Feeling his oats, Riggs reflected; proud of that landing.

  “Well, there’s one thing about that last place, Riggs,” Hawley observed. “It had enough of an atmosphere to look a little like Earth.” He swung a leg nonchalantly over the arm of his seat.

  “Yes, sir,” Riggs got out, “but I’ve never seen quite so vicious a cloudburst as the one we landed in.”

  Hawley laughed. “That’s one of the places where a live observer would go mad in three months, right?”

  “You bet,” Riggs replied, drawn into conversation in spite of himself. “Makes you feel kind of queer, do you know it,” he went on, “to go from planet to planet and never see a sign of intelligent life? Why, take a look at this system here. At least four of these nine planets could be inhabited, especially if the settlers were willing to do a little selective breeding. They all have oxygen atmospheres, their gravities are close to Earth’s, and temperatures and pressure aren’t impossible at all. You’d think they’d be inhabited.”

  Hawley shook his head. “There’s too much prejudice against it. They’ll have to develop a new race. Those planets won’t be colonized from Earth, but as soon as the few colonies that are in existence now get going, they’ll start colonizing all over the Galaxy. They’ll have a heritage of pioneering behind them, not so much attachment to the place they live in. That’s what’s the matter with Earth. Population groups stagnated for so many thousands of years that the attractions of staying home are too great. You really can’t blame them.”

  Although Riggs was pleased to find that his superior could act and talk like an ordinary human being if given chance enough, he retained his resolve to at least equal Hawley’s approach on the next landing he shot. Accordingly he approached the second planet of Rigel II a
t a sharp angle to the surface and, like Hawley, requesting no predetermined equations from the computer, quickly set up a parabolic equation of the fifth power of the potential series to describe the course of the spaceship, and began the necessary mental substitutions and subtractions as he tried to determine how far the Little Falls was departing from the course he had set up. Almost subconsciously he could hear Mercer working his calculator while Price called out the coordinates. That meant that Mercer didn’t trust him, that the navigator was substituting the coordinates that the Little Falls was cutting, in an effort to determine whether Riggs was conforming to any general equation.

  In spite of the apparent doubts of the navigator, Riggs successfully landed the Little Falls without aid from either the navigator or the computer other than the coordinates that Price called.

  Hawley made absolutely no comment on the landing. The rather pointed silence of the computer and navigator, who both were well aware that the two pilots had performed remarkable feats of mental calculation under extreme pressure, made it clear that all four in the control room realized that Riggs had accepted Hawley’s challenge. They realized Riggs was willing to match any feats of piloting the older man performed.

  ~ * ~

  The copilot was not to be disappointed. Shooting the next landing, on planet three of Rigel II, Hawley performed the almost impossible feat of using only one steering jet until he laid the ship over on her side for the grounding.

  The strain, while hard on the two pilots, was worse on the computer and navigator. After a particularly spectacular exhibition of a spiral approach at high velocity by Hawley on planet seven of Rigel II, Mercer approached Riggs while Hawley was leading the service crew to the observatory.

  “Pardon me, Captain,” he said, saluting. “Perhaps I’m speaking out of turn, but this contest between you and Hawley is getting pretty extreme.” He stopped and gulped, half expecting a severe reprimand. Riggs grimaced for a moment before he answered the navigator.

  “You’re right, Mercer,” he finally said. “Hawley undoubtedly can do anything any pilot in the Patrol can. I don’t think he’s run out of tricks yet. I suppose I could match that one of mentally calculating a three-dimensional curve to a blind spot, but I’d like to do it alone, instead of with nine other guys behind me. I think I’ll call the whole thing off at the next landing.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mercer murmured. “I hope you don’t think I’ve been impertinent, sir,” he half asked.

  “Oh, no, Mercer,” the copilot answered. “Hell, I don’t see how you guys have stood it this long. It’s damned lucky that the boys in the back end didn’t know what was going on. Some of them who don’t have space ratings would have gone nuts.”

  “That’s just it, Captain,” Mercer said, a little smile forming at the corners of his mouth. “Price let on that you two were having a sort of contest, and Clark has gone half insane every time one or the other of you tried something harder. It wouldn’t have been so bad if you were just filling in coordinates on some curve equation I’d figured out for you, but this stuff of forming your own equation as you landed had them all scared. I don’t think I would have spoken if the men below hadn’t asked me to.”

  Riggs began to chuckle. “I thought there was something a little screwy about this, Mercer,” he laughed. “You’ve been around too long to mind a little thing like this race we had. Well, you can pass on the word that it’s all over. I don’t want Hawley to know, though.”

  “Oh, sure, Captain,” Mercer grinned. “I get it, all right.”

  ~ * ~

  Approaching the ninth and last planet of Rigel II, Riggs brought the Little Falls in at a sharp angle, as each man had done on the several previous occasions. He could see Hawley watching him with intense interest, trying to determine what kind of a three-dimensional curve Riggs would try to ride down. But the copilot held the Little Falls off until he was over the objective, and then lowered straight down, keeping his eyes fixed dead ahead on the visiplate to keep from seeing Hawley’s superior smile. The damned show-off, Riggs thought—grand-stander. He thinks he’s done something. At least I’ve got enough sense to quit before one of us kills the whole crew.

  In spite of his determination not to show his feelings, Riggs all but exploded when the relieved Price offered comment on the landing, the first given since the contest had begun.

  “Sweet, Captain,” Price said.

  Hawley seemed suddenly to choke, and coughed heavily several times, while Riggs knew his neck was turning a gaudy shade of purple.

  “Thanks,” the copilot finally croaked to the embarrassed Price, who knew he had put his foot in it.

  Hawley, realizing that Riggs had quit, made no more fancy approaches on the next several landings. The routine of visiting various suns went on. But a series of events, culminating in the landing on the tiny fifth planet of Bruno, in Aquarius, disturbed Riggs greatly.

  The commander had not been his usual lofty, sarcastic self during his previous watch. All of the other three in the control room had been the objects of wrathful flare-ups over trivial occurrences. As the time for the landing on the little planet came closer, his nervousness and tenseness seemed to increase, and by the time the Little Falls was dropping toward the surface in its approach, his temper had grown so short that he had practically ceased to speak to the others.

  Shooting the landing in his regular turn, Hawley’s approach was entirely conventional, dropping straight down from over his objective. But as the Little Falls lowered on drumming rockets, the ship swung from line, and the long succession of zeros with which Price had prefixed his altitude figures rapidly became numbers indicating that Hawley had badly botched the approach. Instead of altering his approach into a sharp angle and repeating his performances on the planets of Rigel II, the commander blasted the Little Falls back to altitude and started his approach once more, only to become badly confused again. This time he attempted to save the landing by converting it into an angle approach, but the tense Riggs, following the coordinates that Price was barking out, quickly realized that Hawley was still messing the landing.

  The commander shook his head savagely and swore. He took his hands from the controls and snarled, “Take over!” to Riggs, who elected to blast back to altitude and try a straight approach rather than to straighten out Hawley’s extremely incorrect position.

  The silence that reigned in the control room after Riggs grounded the ship made those that had regularly occurred during the landings on the planets of Rigel II seem trifling. All four carefully kept their eyes averted, to prevent what each knew would be the exchange of a knowing glance. Hawley made matters no easier by remaining in a surly and disgruntled mood, obviously disturbed over his clumsy mistake.

  The next landing was, by the tacit arrangement to alternate approaches, Riggs’s. He found himself hoping that he would mess it slightly, and in spite of himself dropped the Little Falls somewhat heavily to the ground. Hawley did not seem cheered by this, but rather insulted. He said nothing, however, merely speared his unhappy copilot with a venomous eye.

  Contrary to what Riggs had expected, Hawley’s next approach was excellent, in spite of the fact that it was made under extremely unfavorable conditions of gravity and visibility. He had half expected Hawley to become confused again, remembering how easy it was to lose that keen edge of self-confidence and instantaneous, doubt-free response necessary to land a spaceship on her rockets. The commander, while rather sullen, grounded the ship perfectly, and repeated the performance three times thereafter in his turn.

  Long before they headed back for Earth, the copilot found himself worrying what he would report to the board of examiners. One bad landing was usually enough to cause at least a complete examination of the case, Riggs knew, even in the case of young pilots, and in Hawley’s instance, he felt sure, any report of loss of confidence might suffice to cost the aging pilot his space rating.

  The bad approach had quite completely broken down what camaraderie had grown up b
etween the two pilots, and Hawley rarely spoke to Riggs outside the line of duty. Shortly before they headed back for Earth, however, the two were together in the projection room, eyes riveted to the screen, as a roll of film exposed at the observatory last visited was run through the projector.

  The two sat in silence as the screen indicated the fixed positions of the stars in space and the irregular zigzagging of the three planets of the same sun as caught by the robot eye of the telescope. Suddenly a tiny point of light appeared where none had been before, instantly noted by both men, trained observers as they were.