ALONE, HE FACED MAN'S GREATEST
ADVENTURE . . .
"That was the first time I ever consciously thought of Robinson Crusoe in relation to myself. He and his island, me and Mars. Only I, born three hundred years later, could see it coming. Besides, I thought, strapping myself down and giving the rockets an experimental blast, those three centuries should have made a lot of difference. In Crusoe's day people did not know how skilled they were. They still imagined they would perish if left alone. Maybe I had got the same fixation. It was true that Mars had no breathable atmosphere, no drinkable water, and no sign of any source of food. So what?
"You might say that I had been bom with a wrench in one hand and a blueprint in the other.
"I was going in to land."
And what happened then is a classic of science-fiction imagination!
CAST OF CHARACTERS
GORDON HOLDER
A human being, male, full grown, unmarried, in his middle twenties. Born in England, an engineer by profession. Worked on experimental rockets at the Australian proving grounds in 1957. Sole survivor of a crew of seven manning an experimental space-ship a dozen years ahead of its time.
MARS
A planet about half the size of Earth. Its year about twice as long as on Earth, its day about the same. Atmospheric pressure about that of a very high mountain top. Oxygen constituent not one hundredth. Temperatures ranging between those of Siberia and those of a London spring. Life presumed to consist of primitive lichens and bacteria. Arid. Windless. Thin ice in the polar caps that melted in the summer.
FIRST ON MARS
by
REX GORDON
ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.
FIRST ON MAHS
Copyright ©, 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. AH Rights Reserved
Poor old Robinson Crusoe, How ever could they do so? They made him a coat From an old nanny goat, Poor old Robinson Crusoe.
—Anon.
rr, THE LAUNCHING SITE around which we all lived in tin huts at Woomera, in the heart of the Australian desert, was not at all like a battlefield of World War One. It was true that there were craters, caused by the occasional misfire or explosion, but they were craters in dry earth, not mud. At dawn or sunset, you got an impression of gaunt and twisted girders dominating a landscape of flat blackened earth.
If you looked out over the desert to the westwards it was interesting to think that there was not a human being for a thousand miles. Only radar towers, every hundred miles, to measure the flight of rockets.
I used to get letters from my mother if from no one else. She asked me what we found to talk about, in a place that was as empty and desolate as I described. I said we had plenty to talk about and listed exhaust velocities, fuels, the metallurgy of firing chambers, trajectories, and displacements caused by turn-overs at high altitudes. There were plenty more items, but they were more technical and I did not think she would understand them.
I wasn't a fool. I hadn't been there six weeks before I realised that you either made your life around those things, along with the bearded university professors, the mathematicians in grimy shorts, the chemists with sun hats on their bald heads, and the physicists whose hair seemed to grow mostly on their chests, or you went out with the screamers. You could tell the screamer cases even before they began to paint their funny pictures or write away for correspondence courses on how to play the oboe. They would walk around with a shattered expression on then-faces and, when you said something interesting about the new peroxide-nitric-acid comparison formula, they would
5
back away as though they had seen something creeping up behind you. They never lasted. There was only one thing that kept men sane at Woomera, and that was rockets.
You may not think that men can feel strongly about rockets, about the difference, say, between one rocket and another. But we—at any rate all of us who had been out there six months or more—were constantly in a state of near-revolt. We were still tied to the ground control and allowed to do no more than shy one rocket after another along the range. It is surprising how sane men are when they feel deeply about something and are seething with discontent.
The Government didn't know it but just about half the rockets that were shied along that range had men inside them. The deaths, of which there were bound to be a few, were always put down to 'lack of equipment due to inadequate finance". It was true, too. If we had had an R. A. F. Wing to assist us with the initial flying, and finance on the same scale the atom men were getting, we'd have been up to the moon before the Americans even sent up their artificial satellite.
In Woomera we seethed and fumed. We had two big rockets constructed, each capable of the seven-mile-per-second escape velocity from earth, and a little left for coming back, and we were held up for a year because no one could think of any reason to indent for the astronomical photographic equipment which would enable us to take the short-range pictures of the moon as we swung around it.
As for project M 76, which is what I am coming to, the only way anyone could think of protecting it from the prying eyes of visiting politicians, treasury officials, and our own more stupid Security guards was first to initiate a water project, sink an artesian well, build a water-tower, abandon the well because it produced no water, then hide the project in the tower. How would you have hidden a rocket standing two hundred feet high and with a diameter of fifty-six feet around the base?
It made us furious sometimes. All the best brains of sixteen universities going to waste because no one could think of a way of explaining why we needed three hundred-ton liquid oxygen tanks for rockets whose maximum all-up weight was supposed to be in the neighbourhood of thirty tons. I remember the bearded Professor Maxwell, his shorts held up by his tie and the sunburn peeling from his shoulders, as he held up his hands in supplication and cried to heaven: "Give me the bloody metal, and with these ten fingers 111 build the things!" He almost did, too. At least it was done by the heavy-gauge aluminium welding plant he first invented and then made. After that, we slit up thirty-gallon steel and aluminium tanks and rebuilt them as we wanted, lapped in layers like plywood.
As project M 76 grew inside its camouflage of the water-tower, I thought there would be murder done. It ended so that no mathematician was speaking to any other mathematician in the whole establishment. Every man had his own curve, all nicely calculated and involving the orbits of Mars or Venus, which he swore was the best within our limits of power and range. There were curves starting on one side of the sun, dipping in like a switchback then flying out in succession past Venus and the moon and so to Mars, returning to catch the Earth up after two hundred days. There were orbits that began as spirals, and orbits that were beautiful, so their opponents said, except that no space-ship, once it was in them, could ever break out again and come back.
There was only one M 76. By the nature of things that was all there could be. After M 76 had made a successful flight, and brought back the photographs of life, if not exactly towns on Mars, then, with world-wide interest aroused, would be the time to get official approval to build another.
The two seven-mile-per-second rockets had been held back. In those final days, when it was obvious that risks must be taken, the automatic photographic equipment had been indented for without any explanation of any sort. They would cover the moon at the same time as M 76 was sent to Mars—Mars because a motion-picture-camera picture could be obtained of its surface as 76 went into a tight orbit round it. Of Venus, such a picture would show only cloud.
"When I think," Maxwell said, standing inside the water-tower and looking up at the towering rocket that almost filled it. "When I think that if we could only have doctored the books to the tune of another three milli
on pounds we could have made a landing, it almost makes me weep."
He was the winner of the mathematical stakes. It was his plan and his trajectory which had been the one chosen by our aptly-named Escape Committee, and he was to command the ship and navigate her and bring her back. The emphasis was on the bring her back.
I was interested in this. For six months I had been playing astronautical chairs. This was the game played by everyone who had any hope or interest in becoming part of 76's crew. You first jockeyed yourself into a position you thought was favourable and then proceeded to demonstrate how important your own speciality was to the smooth running of any rocket. I had done rather well. As Fuel Consumption Engineer, which I had then become, I had made one of our standard rockets, which we shot off down the range at intervals to keep things looking pleasant, turn a double somersault just over the Administration Building and land not quite a hundred yards away.
When they had picked the broken glass out of their ears and papers, I explained. Irregular firing. A slight slip by the automatics or one of my subordinates. Such accidents should not occur again. Except perhaps with M 76. I was worried about M 76. That the ship should carry a Fuel Consumption Engineer was most important. I might, if I was persuaded, go myself.
Such modesty had its reward. After an all-night sitting the Escape Committee published its findings for the crew list.
My name was second on the list, right under Stephen Maxwell's. I went to the bar that night and really lived my shining hour.
A fortnight later seven of us climbed into the rocket and lay down on our couches and someone outside pulled the trigger.
2
SOME PEOPLE presumably do not know the sensation of being elevated in a rocket. They confuse it with being shot out of a cannon or taking off in a jet fighter or any of the other experiences that are apparently different only in degree. In fact a rocket flight is different in kind because it gets5 worse instead of better.
A rocket is a strange thing. It goes up nose first and comes down tail first. It moves in spasmodic fits and starts like an absent-minded grasshopper. For one thousandth of the time it betrays purpose and direction, but for the rest of the time it simply wanders, turning slowly end for end, or, unfortunately, spinning like a top. If you could imagine two ping-pong players, one in Europe and the other in the U.S.A., with the net erected in mid-Atlantic, then the rocket would be a leisurely-moving ball at some point between them.
After we climbed into the rocket we went to our rubber-lined couches and strapped ourselves down. I once saw a movie version of how people would travel in a space-ship. They climbed into something that looked singularly like the interior of an aircraft, sat down in comfortable seats, and went peacefully to sleep as the acceleration started. A real rocket is not like that at all. Considerations of space and equipment are identical with those in a submarine. Everyone knows how men live in a submarine, among a maze of pipes and machinery, tubes and levers. Their berths are tucked in or slung wherever an inch of space reveals itself amid instruments, wheel-valves, and highly explosive torpedo tubes. That was us, except that we had rather less space and rather more machinery. The only people who got any sort of daylight or any view at all were Maxwell and the maneuvering pilot, Petifer, who were up in a sealed compartment in the bow, and they made more use of periscopes, telescopes, calculating machines and chronometers than they did of the six-inch armoured windows.
The spin was the thing. That really upset us to begin with.
My berth was on the third level and tucked in between the air-purification plant and the softly-whining, oil-smelling gyros. A man called Bertram Hapton was with me there, lying slightly tensely looking up at our single yellow light-bulb. By 'slightly tensely', I mean he was supposed to be relaxed, but like me he found it difficult. There was such a racket going on before we started. We wondered if the team on the floor above were playing leapfrog or conducting a private war. In fact they were settling in, a little late, but no sooner had they quietened than hollow clangs began to take place in the packed spaces of the rocket down below. It sounded as though a giant machine were uncorking bottles, which it was.
Maxwell came over the loudspeaker. His voice echoed and reflected from the metal walls. "Prepare for take-off," he said. "Commander calling engine-room. Report on functioning of the automatics at second pre-take-off stage. Are they normal? Come in, Holder."
I looked at the row of dials in the panel above me. They had been carefully arranged where I could see them while bound hand and foot to my narrow couch. I spoke into the microphone that was rigidly suspended above my chin.
"What do you expect me to do about it if they're not?" I said.
"Five," he said.
"Four," he said. "Three, two, one."
I don't think any of us had expected the violence of the noise. I know my eyes widened. I could feel them. It wasn't the take-off that worried me. There was hardly, to begin with, any sensation of lift at all. It was just the vibration and screaming roar from every metal object in a world of metal objects.
The light went out. The filament had not stood the strain. It was a great beginning.
I noticed two things simultaneously. One was that we were evidently taking off in earnest. I could tell that because, as I lay there in the darkness, amid the screaming racket and the oil-smells, I could feel myself being forced down into my couch by a steadily increasing force. The other thing I noticed was a howl that permeated the screaming blackness. I could do something about that. I guessed' what had happened. The noise level had built up until it had set all the speakers and microphones into mutual oscillation. I felt round carefully with the fingers of my left hand until I found the appropriate button, and cut them off.
Suddenly, like lightning through the darkness, a sensation of fear shot through me. My hand, where it had been on the switch, was settling down. My body seemed to be flattening out.
That is what I mean about a rocket flight getting worse and worse. Any normal conveyance, a jet fighter for example, accelerates normally, going faster by regular amounts in each succeeding second. Acceleration is a product of thrust over weight, and both are nearly constant.
In the darkness, apart from the unbearable din, which seemed about to shatter my brain-pan as it had the light, my mind was suddenly full of vivid figures. As a rocket flies, so its weight decreases. In no time at all, it is halved, then halved again. Visually, it starts off slowly, heavy laden with its weight of fuel. But it climbs with an accelerating acceleration toward the zenith.
I was being flattened by a geometrically increasing weight into my couch. I saw it all, the whole beautiful equation, before my mind gave up in fear and then blacked out.
I saw that equation in my dreams for years to come, and any experience of darkness and noise and the smell of oil would do it.
It is a good way to teach relativity, when you think of it. When a rocket bums away half its mass, it loses half its weight by the standards of those people standing looking up at it on Earth.
But for anyone in that rocket, assuming that the force exerted by the rocket motors is the same, the force of gravity—what they feel as gravity—had simply doubled. Sitting inside, you don't see that you're accelerating twice as fast.
I came to slowly with a sensation of my chest muscles rasping. My ribs seemed to recede about three feet above my body, then close in until they compressed my heart, and then fly out again. There was a panting noise that I hardly thought was me and a singing as of angels in my head.
Little bubbles of sound were rising to the surface and breaking all around me. The darkness was hollow, like a vacuum inside a bell. But as consciousness returned with a jerk, I opened my mouth to scream. I was falling, falling. . . .
Then I had no need to scream. Someone was doing it for me. Rather far away, but steadily, on and on, a human voice was screaming.
It took a violent wrench of mind, in that oily blackness, to realise that the rocket was not falling back to earth—I hoped
it was not—but falling outwards (I hoped) at escape velocity, away from earth. It was with the same desperation as a parachutist pulls his rip-cord that I flicked on the switch for the communication system that connected me with the bridge.
Maxwell was there all right. As soon as he heard the speaker come alive above him, he yelled: "Stop that yelling!" Then five voices answered him at once, the speakers echoed against our metal shell, and the whole communications system went up in an oscillatory howl once more. It was a wonderful nightmare in the evil blackness.
That switch was the only thing I had to hang on to. I flicked it off and on again. It was heaven when I got a faindy hissing, ringing silence. The howler on the floor above had either been murdered or he had become even more frightened of pure noise itself.
Out of the loudspeaker above me came the strange sound of five men breathing as they seemed to fall through space.
"Captain Maxwell," I said. I regulated my voice and I kept my fingers right on the switch. "You may not be aware of it, but we can't see anything. We imagine we are falling and about to impact at any moment. Would you care to re--assure us?"
"Reassure hell," he said.
It was not very comforting in view of our sensations.
Someone else said quickly: "Captain, are we falling back?"
I kept my finger on that switch. I thought the sound communications were going to go up in a howl again, but they didn't. Everyone else was afraid too, of what happened when everyone spoke at once.
"Not that I am aware of," Maxwell said.
"Captain," I said. "If you'd just tell us what you see."
"Rings," he said. "The whole universe is revolving round us. Rather fast. Too fast to see which way it's going."
After a while, he said: "Did you hear that, Holder?"
Rex Gordon Page 1