Maxwell could have told me the minutes, the seconds, the degrees of aim-off to apply, like the mathematical duck-shooter that he was. But Maxwell was dead.
Petifer was dead, the pilot who was skilled enough to make a landing on a planet when Maxwell found it.
They were all dead, even Hapton who had added to his duties those of cook and steward. Alone, I could not even get in touch with our base to tell them what had happened.
I pressed my button again, turning the rocket back to the bow-on position to her course, as shown to me by the gyro compass. That was the only certain thing I had to go on.
In time, this course, this orbit I was making, and that of Mars, would intersect. I wondered if Maxwell had left any instructions for making an orbit back to Earth from that position. I got up from his couch. I began a methodical search among his papers that was to last me several days.
I found papers with figures on them—papers and figures that were meaningless to me. And Maxwell had not brought any simple text-books on astronautics with him. There were none, for one thing. If there had been, he would have written them, would know them, and therefore would not need to bring them.
There was, of all things, a nautical almanac, which gave me the positions of the planets for every day and every hour as seen by a sailor or an airman back on Earth.
I wandered away through the ship in a daze. I found things to do. I scrubbed out the compartment that had been soiled with blood and torn-out lungs. I emptied the slops through the blow-out ejector mechanism from the ship. After one day, I began to drink. After two, I began to eat. Within a week I was taking my meals regularly and dividing my time into intervals of sleep.
But I could not work out for myself the whole theory of astronomy and the positions of the planets in relation to the sun and one another from such simple information as that the hour-angle was this and the declination of a star was that at a certain place on Earth on a certain day. Maxwell could and I could not. There was that difference between us from the start.
Perhaps, if I had been inside the ship, and working those airtight doors, instead of Maxwell, the accident would not have happened.
Each man to his trade. My present trade was to live, eat, and sleep, and wait for death and wonder in what form it would come. What disheartened me was the unbearable silence of the rocket, the stillness inside and the unchanging nature of the sky. I used to go down to the engine-room, to my old couch, and lie there, with the door closed, simply to listen to the untaxed gyros' softly melodious hum.
The dead men in the storage compartment had to be sealed in there. I could not bear the sight of that iron door and hung a sheet across it. The sight of the sheet was worse. I tore it down, and, on my constant passing between the engine-room and the bow of the ship, went through the central level with my head averted.
It was Shakespeare's idle fancy to speak of the music of the spheres. I could speak volumes about their silence.
When a ruddy disc detached itself from the otherwise unchanging constellations that lay in my path, I looked at it hopelessly and balefully from Maxwell's couch.
Mars. A planet about half the size of Earth. A year that was about twice as long as on Earth, a day that was about the same. Atmospheric pressure one hundred millibars. 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.
I could see the polar caps. Now I knew where the planet was, I could turn a telescope upon it. I had to do something, after all, and it was this that I had come so far to see.
I lost interest after a time. Everyone does. It's an experience when you first turn a pair of good binoculars on the moon, but you don't keep on doing it, even though its features are clearer and more startling than those of Mars.
It isn't as though you could see smoking towns and factories and seas and ships. Nor could I on Mars. It looked exactly, disappointingly, like what people like Maxwell had said it would be.
I watched it grow from a tiny, identifiable speck to a world the size of sixpence. When it grew to the size of a penny, and I could see two pinheads that were its moons, I began to feel nervous as I looked at it. I could do simple trigonometry all right. Enough to tell me of converging courses. I tried a few sailors' tricks I'd read about, like doubling the angle on the bow
That gives you your distance off as you pass the point or headland you can see approaching The answer I got was not quite zero, but it was very near it.
Maxwell had calculated too well. And he had talked of "Maneuvering when we get near the planet Mars."
I grew disgusted with that great thing there, that bright red penny that was growing on the rocket's bow. I suddenly hated the hours and weeks I would have to wait to die if, as seemed likely, I went into an orbit round it.
And then, grimly, I thought how it would be if I swung close past it and went off into space again, the sun growing smaller and the rocket getting colder as I swept out through the asteroids, past Jupiter and Uranus.
That was the first time I ever consciously thought of Robinson Crusoe in relation to myself. I thought of that incident after he was wrecked on the island. He is in despair about his prospects but he makes a raft of some sort to get out to the wreck. A current gets him and threatens to carry him out to sea. Instandy the island, which he had hated, becomes the object of all his thoughts and strivings. If he can get back there, he thinks, what an escape it will be from immediate death.
Me and Mars, just the same. Only I, bom three hundred years later, could see it coming. The human race had had enough experience since then to give me foresight.
Besides, I thought, strapping myself down to the maneuvering couch and giving the rockets an experimental blast: besides, those three hundred years should have made a lot of difference. In Crusoe's day people did not know how skilled they were. They still imagined that they would perish if left alone and separated from their tribe. Maybe I had got the same fixation. It was true that Mars had no breathable atmosphere, no potable water, and no sign of any source of food. So what?
You might say that I had been bom with a spanner in one hand and a blueprint in the other.
I was going in to land.
5
THERE WAS terror in my soul as I lay on my couch, in my straps, looking down on that red planet which seemed to swell until it ate up the heavens. What I was doing was suicide, but it was suicide on the grand scale. During all the previous history of our world men had risen from it, climbed and flown, but never failed to return. Never had they landed anywhere else. Who knew what effect it might have, this transfer of substance from one planet to another? Even if my dead body lay there, crushed in the wreck of the rocket on some plain of Mars, it would be Earth decay that would ensue, Earth bacteria that would be released.
Yet, grand as my project was, there was the grim human reality behind it all. To an Earth creature, bom and trained to Earth reactions, it was terrifying to see that world expand.
Though still weightless and in free-fall, I had learned, in my time in the rocket, a sense of stability in weightlessness. It was now that I could see my fall visibly, appreciate the planet not as a speck, a disc which hung far from me in the sky, but as a sphere with a horizon which was growing hourly nearer, that I felt again in me that anguish of insidious fear. My nerves became taut as though there was in me some deep but atavistic urge to turn away, to climb into the tail of the rocket and hide my head. Repressed within me was an animal that did not understand and knew pure terror. Yet, below me, the world expanded and took form. No longer a brilliant disc, a blur of coloured light, it had substance, form.
I could see two snowy polar caps, one large, one small. I could see an edge of flatness to the disc where night lay across all the other side. I could see great bands and areas of vivid colour. This was a world, an actual world. I had seen photographs of Mars—who on Earth h
as not?—but those hazy miniatures, hardly impressing one with their detail nor even conveying the reality of their subject, were nothing to what I saw now. I could not, it is true, pick out, to any great extent, more detail. Certainly I could see neither cities nor evidences of life, nor even mountain ranges, evident for what they were, such as are visible in any photograph of the moon. This was a flat planet, without seas or great outstanding features, but it was its reality that was impressive, its oveiwhelming existence as a solid world.
I altered the angle of the bow of the rocket. It seemed to me that Mars was going to sweep past across my bow. It was in that way, momentarily left behind, that I would miss the surface and go into an orbit round it. I adjusted the rocket until it pointed away ahead along the line of Mars's apparent motion. Then I fired the rocket motors. I knew that it was probably my own death-warrant that I was sealing by my action. But, at the same time, my brain said insistently that I had a hope, a small hope but a true one. With the gyros, by the aid of which I could swing the rocket's bow which way I willed, I turned the ship until I could see again. Mars was perceptibly nearer, and it seemed to me that her relative motion was smaller now.
Hanging by my straps—I had the sensation of hanging now when my gaze was downwards, though I was dreadfully unaware of any weight and only of an increasing perception of a headlong fall—I wondered where on the planet, if I had the choice, I would aim to land. I could see the polar caps now clearly. The Southern pole was large, and the planet's surface near it was a dull dun brown. The Northern polar cap was small and, though from my height I could not see what caused it, I could see the vivid colour, red near the pole and green towards the tropics, that had been remarked so many times from Earth as being the characteristic of the Martian summers. Should I land there, where the season was evidently well advanced, or in the South where the spring had yet to come? Or in the tropics where the temperature, at least in daytime, would equal a temperate day on Earth, but where the water, or water-vapour as it had been supposed to be, would be more scarce?
In the event, I had no choice. When I was landing, I was too busy to know where I was. I was only accurate enough to keep away from the poles themselves.
With the gyros, I turned the rocket over. I shifted my gaze from the open port, which gave me a view ahead to the maneuvering periscope, which gave me a view below the rocket's tail. That was where Mars was now, and I was falling on to her. When with the magnification of the periscope, I saw the surface, dull and indeterminable as it was, rushing up to me, it was all I could do not to fire away my fuel at once. I knew I was falling now, and, sweating, I had to allow the fall to persist until I knew I was fairly in the planet's grip and would not slam past.
I do not know how many hours it took, from the moment I became fully engaged, until the landing. I know I lengthened the period of my agony and terror by firing the first blast off too soon.
Yet I dare not enter the atmosphere too fast. I knew that Mars had a very thin and tenuous atmosphere reaching up to great heights above the surface, unlike the Earth's which was thicker and more compressed. If I entered that atmosphere too fast, I would blaze and incandesce like any comet. I fired my braking charges, paused, and fired and fired again, desperately, glad of the giant weight which came upon me as I began to check my fall.
Then down and down again, more slowly now, but still too fast. I watched my periscope, then fired a charge again.
I came in through the upper atmosphere of the planet, at once terrified and exulting. Through the object glass of the periscope, I had a sudden vision of a plain.
Then rocks.
Not stable rocks but squares and boulders, fangs, that seemed to hurl themselves from a cataract of tumbling earth.
I knew fear then, wild and" uncontrollable. Why had I thought to land on Mars? Below me was a wildly shifting, racing surface. Yet it was not the surface that moved, but I who was skimming past it. Though I came down lightly as a feather, the very spinning of the planet itself ensured that I would strike that surface at thousands of miles an hour.
It was then that I understood the madness of what I had attempted. I should have had Maxwell beside me, tracking an object on the surface with a swinging telescope. I should have had engineers, myself as it had been, watching the dials in the engine-room, informing me from moment to moment of the fuel used. From these observations the electronic predictor would have given me an angle at which to set the ship and the charge to fire.
My only hope was a rumbling sound, which began as a whisper all around me, then grew into a roar. The atmosphere! It was at once my greatest danger and the only thing that could check my headlong tangential course around the planet. Was it burning the rocket's shell already? Was there a bright spark now, engendered by some roughness on the outer surface, which would spread like a chain reaction until I perished in a flaming track of light? I did not know. I thought of flame and death and tilted my ship and fired blast and blast again against the angle of spin of the world below me.
Yet I was falling now: an unskilled pilot, I could not counteract motion in two planes at once. I had a dreadful vision—so near, too near—of a rocky chain of hills, and then a line of red, and then an empty, endless plain. Hammering myself down into my couch, I fired my rocket motors with squandering wastefulness. My mind clung fantastically to a single hope: that Mars, so much smaller than the Earth, had only a third the gravity. Even though I was wasteful, clumsy, there must, there must be enough fuel and time to check my fall.
The first crash came then, a gigantic hammer blow. I had been ready for it a moment earlier, and yet, when it came, it seemed too soon. It was a shock like a gigantic kick along my spine. I felt myself black out, then live again. I seemed to turn over in space—rebounding?
The second crash came. I had thought to be flattened and smashed to pulp. I had a vision of the great rocket turning over like a falling wheel. Bow first or tail first this time? Nothing was more certain than that I could do nothing. My whole existence was buried and encompassed in a roar of sound as though my universe were breaking apart into its component atoms. And then the second crash, a blow that sent me in agony against my straps, blacked me out again, and resulted in a new, intolerable tearing roar. I had a vision then—whether through the port or the periscope glass I do not know—of a plain that was furrowed, amid clouds of dust, and wreckage spreading, rolling, twisted. The roar—it might have been my blood-rose to a climax.
As blackness intervened, I thought: "This is the end!" It seemed inevitable to me that my compartment in the bow, strengthened though it was, should be torn apart. Then, as the pressure rushed out of it, I too would be torn, my lungs exploded.
What a way to die, I thought. The Space way to die, the end of so many rocket ventures before they were successful.
6
SILENCE, oil-smells, darkness.
I was a submariner, a last survivor trapped amid the machinery of a ship on an unknown ocean bed.
I was an airman lying in terror after a crash. In another instant the explosion would ensue. Too late already. . . .
I seemed to be on my side and hanging from my straps. I could not see a thing. It was a hot, close darkness. Somewhere, striking terror to my very bones, an object fell with a tinny, tinkling sound.
I was on Mars. I remembered then. I was in a crashed ship. Around me was an unknown world. I was facing dangers innumerable. My consciousness seemed to come and go, and my spirits whirled. I had been successful! I had crashed, and was still alive!
But the ship could not still be airtight after the battering she had been through. Even now, not quickly, but inevitably, the air must be leaking from her. Soon I would choke and die. This was just an aftermath, a pause before the final terror.
I moved suddenly, struggling in my bonds. I had seen the faintest gleam of light from below me: the port-hole, apparently partly buried in the earth. That brought home to me the anguish of my position.
I tore at my straps, began to unfast
en them, then clung to them. The moment I released myself I would surely fall. On to what? Was it possible that my eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness as my world, my tiny world, took form around me?
Round? It seemed to me that the rocket was flattened and lying on its side. What was below me? Could I see if I turned my head? Wreckage. The litter from the entire compartment.
I struggled again, impelled again by fear of some catastrophe that must be imminent. Not till then did I remember that there could be no fire on Mars.
Slowly, standing, I came to myself. I had landed on Mars. Not well, Not badly. I was still alive in the remnants of my ship. The room was in a frightful state of wreckage. What was left of the rocket was evidently lying on its side. I was standing on the side of one of the couches at that moment.
Suddenly I moved as though impelled by all the fiends of hell. I scrambled, sliding and stumbling, to the port-hole. I put my face to it, and stared out greedily. But it looked downwards into torn earth. I went to the glass, the periscope that had served me in my landing. It gave out only a dark, dim light, and its glass was cracked. But I saw in it, as I adjusted the focus, a barren plain and a low horizon.
I sat down again on the bunk-side. So this was Mars. Outside was an unknown landscape with less air upon it than on the summit of Everest back on Earth. I did not know if I had arrived at dawn or sunset. It had been too much to expect to sight any sign of life. Perhaps there was no life. The changing colours of this planet, it had been suggested, were due to changing crystallisation of the rocks.
I was confined to the wreck. It was too much to think of it now as a vehicle, a rocket.
Why had I landed here? What had I hoped to gain, even if I had been completely successful instead of only partly so?
Sitting in the dim, wrecked control compartment of the ship, I realised what it was. It was the sensation that even then gave me a feeling of irrational hope and power.
Rex Gordon Page 3