by Fred Hoyle
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rocket disgorged capsules containing fuel for the machines
and food for the men, and oxygen too if that was needed, at regular intervals along its orbit. When it worked it was fine. But there was more than a chance that a capsule might burn up as it streaked like a meteorite into the atmosphere of the planet. And as the old explorers knew perfectly well, one failure along the chain of dumps was sufficient to cause disaster.
On an expedition such as this, far from home, away from any possible relief from Earth, the sensible thing was to choose a particular spot and not to attempt to explore more than a circular patch around that spot, say to a distance of five hundred miles. This meant they had to choose their landing place with care. If you were doing the same thing on the Earth you would obviously be unwise to put down in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Or on the tundras of Lap- land. So when they got down into the parking orbit they were in no hurry to make their next move. They wanted to make quite a number of circuits of Achilles. This way they could be sure they hadn’t missed all the interesting places. And they had plenty of time to debate which was the best spot.
By now the surface was only about three hundred miles below them. They had never seen anything remotely like it before. There just wasn’t any detail, anywhere. The green areas faded smoothly into the orange. They knew now what these orange regions were. They were sandy lakes, mainly of about fifty miles in area. Their shapes were highly variable, some being more or less circular, others long and thin, some curved, and some straight like canals. In places they formed a huge series of interconnected pools. It was rather like the system of pools that one might see on a sandy beach immediately after a spring tide, except that these systems sometimes stretched for a thousand miles, the pools being laid out below them in a fantastic mosaic. These were obviously the oceans of Achilles. Probably they were not very deep, perhaps only a few hundred fathoms. There were
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clouds dotted below them like a patchwork quilt. They looked rather like strange ships sailing a vast series of landlocked lagoons.
The green areas worried them. They still couldn’t tell what the darned stuff was. For one thing the green regions were unbroken, there were no outcrops of bare rock. In fact there didn’t seem to be any outcrop of rock to be found anywhere on the planet. This didn’t mean there were no hills; their measurements showed them that there were rises and falls of as much as ten thousand feet. But the green stuff went over the tops just as smoothly as it covered the lower slopes. At first they had thought they were rain-forests. But at this distance the telescopic viewer would just about show up tall trees, and it didn’t. And although they could see many places where rain was falling, there seemed to be nothing heavy enough to maintain a rain-forest. They decided it must be some sort of dense scrub. It looked as though it would be pretty well suited to the mobility machines.
By all the rules there should have been a sense erf exaltation inside the rocket. But hour followed hour with the men almost silent. The trouble was that their training hadn’t fitted them for anything like this. They had been trained to step out into a stark landscape, a landscape drenched perhaps by ultra-violet light and X-rays, an environment utterly hostile to human life. Here there was no reason why they shouldn’t breathe naturally as they did on Earth. There was plenty of atmosphere, plenty of ozone to shield them from all damaging rays, blue as the star Helios was. They weren’t used to this. It was too gentle. At each orbit they shifted their position somewhat, so that they would be able to take a look at the whole surface, to make sure that they hadn’t missed something.
On the seventeenth circuit Reinbaoh, who was at the viewer, exclaimed, ‘They’re down.’ Far below them they could see the gleaming needle of the Russian rocket.
‘Why are the bastards always first, even when it doesn’t
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really matter. It would have been better if they’d waited,’ Fawsett muttered.
‘Wow,’ grinned Larson mirthlessly, ‘it settles our problem for us. We’ll go in on the far side.’
That seemed the reasonable thing to do, then they’d each have half of the planet to play with, exactly as they had on Earth.
Their brief vision of the gleaming needle below them had told the Westerners nothing of what had happened. It was a remarkable indication of the technical equality of East and West that the initial gap of two days, of some ten million miles, had been maintained almost entirely throughout the flight. Because Pitoyan had been a little more careful with the orbit of his own ship than he had been with that of the Westerners, the last stages of their route had been slightly more economical. They had then widened their lead to about five days. But they had taken up the best part of three of them in orbiting Achilles. After their tenth revolution these tactics began to seem unnecessary to Ilyana and Pitoyan. Pitoyan felt that now they’d seen a fair sample of what was below them, and if it was a question of a decision it would be best to throw a coin for it. Both he and Ilyana, in spite of their diversions, were utterly weary of the journey. It was like being on a ship moored a mile from land after a long voyage. They were impatient to make a landing. But Kratov and Bakovsky knew better. For all any of them knew some creature down there might be waiting for them. Sooner or later such a creature might make a false move, giving itself away. So the two Army men maintained their unwinking vigil at the scanner. The slightest flicker on it could be important.
At wearisome last Bakovsky decided to go down. He insisted that Ilyana and Pitoyan, as amateurs, should strap themselves down safely in their bunks before he set the ship into its gentle downward glide. Pitoyan looked up from his bunk at the cabin lights. He hadn’t realized before how
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much he’d come to hate them. In a minute or less the retro drive would come into action. They’d have to take the best part of ten kilometres a second on the retros. There could be no question of braking down through the atmosphere by friction, they couldn’t make a fireball of the rocket, not with all the delicate equipment in it, necessary for the homeward trip. He didn’t like the big drive, the drive that seemed to flatten him into a thin sheet of jelly. He was just aware that it was coming on - then his thoughts were abruptly cut off. This was the black-out, blacker than a black-out in fact.
Pitoyan was next aware of someone peering down into his face. His head pounded furiously and his body felt as if the drive were still on. But it couldn’t be because nobody could be standing over him if the drive were still on. The mist cleared a little, and he could see, still rather vaguely, that it was the face of Bakovsky. He was aware that Bakovsky was undoing the straps that held him down to the bunk. He tried to move, but his right arm hurt him like hell; it pierced his nerve centres in spite of all the other aches that were being signalled to his brain. Now he could see that the whole cabin was a complete and utter shambles. Not a thing seemed to be where it should be. Incredible as it might seem there had been a crash. ‘Kratov is dead,’ muttered Bakovsky. The thought of Ilyana, that perhaps she was dead too, gripped him, and somehow he managed to struggle to his feet. His right arm hung limp at his side. He knew it must be broken. He knew why Kratov was dead. The body had been flung across the cabin and lay mutilated against the wall. He staggered towards Ilyana’s bunk and heard her moan before he blacked out again.
When he came to his senses again the body had disappeared. The cabin was still closed to the outside, so somewhere along the corridor leading from the cabin into the interior of the rocket there must be a place for the dead. Then Pitoyan remembered that there had to be such a space morgue in case of accidents. It was a place where the body would be frozen, so that it could be returned to Earth
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for the medical people to look at. You weren’t allowed to leave a body in space because the medical people might find o
ut something from it. It wasn’t like the old-time burial at sea. Almost irrationally Pitoyan wondered if the refrigerators were still working.
Then he remembered Ilyana. With a shock of relief he saw that the girl’s eyes were open. And they were focused on him, not staring vacantly. ‘Can you help me?’ she whispered. The straps were undone, Bakovsky must have done that already. With his good arm he managed to help her to sit up. He had a horrible fear that he would..see her limbs bent at some impossible angle. There was blood across her face and neck, but he realized that this was only from cuts which would heal. Her face was twisted in pain as she stood and made two or three tentative steps across the cabin. ‘I think I’m only badly cut about and bruised,’ she muttered.
So the score was two badly bruised, one broken arm, and one dead. Pitoyan judged that they must have struck the ground at no more than sixty miles an hour, otherwise none of them would have known anything about it. He grinned wryly at the thought that they’d been talking about drives of a hundred kilometres a second, gaily talking about it for the last year, when a collision of only one per cent of that speed could bring their little world down into ruin. Almost literally, they were nothing but bags of water, and the repositories of shrieking nervous systems.
Ilyana had of course graduated in a course of nursing. As soon as she was slightly recovered she began to tend Pitoyan’s arm. She gave him a strong shot of pain-killing drug, then cut away the sleeve of his jacket, made the best set she could and fixed him up with splints. She didn’t like to use a cast because the set might not be good enough. Then she collapsed back on her bunk.
Bakovsky meanwhile had managed to get the outer hatch open. In the shock of the moment it didn’t occur to him to put on a space-suit. The atmosphere ought to be right and he just risked it, something that every raw recruit at space-
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school would have told him was wrong. But there was no harm done, the spectroscopes had been right. He looked down at the ground four hundred feet below him. He tried to get the automatic ladders to work but they wouldn’t. Either they were jammed or the power- had gone. With a resigned shrug 'he got out an old-fashioned rope-ladder and paid it slowly out until he could see the end begin to curl up as it . rested on the ground. Then he stopped paying out the rope. It was an absurd thing to do, but even now in the face of disaster he couldn’t quite shake himself loose of a lifetime of obedience to instructions. After all hostile natives might attack the rocket, in which case it would be quicker to haul up the ladder if it wasn’t all paid out. 'It never crossed his mind that the presence of natives, even if hostile, might be preferable to their present situation.
It was a long way down to the ground and his arms hurt, and the big bruises hurt, before he reached it. It was going to be a hell of a climb back to the rocket but he thought he could make it. He realized that Pitoyan would never do it. Certainly it would be possible to lower Pitoyan to the ground, but not even he, Nuri Bakovsky, was strong enough to lift a full-grown man through a clear height of four hundred feet. So if Pitoyan came down he’d have to stay there.
He could see that the end of the rocket had driven into a hard sandy material. They had come down at a point quite close to the edge of one of the strange lagoon-like seas. He noticed for a moment that the sky was very, very blue. The rocket was projected against it, towering now high above his head. He saw that it leant drurikenly at an angle of about ten degrees to the vertical. With a sinking heart and a tightening in the pit of his stomach he realized that it would be almost impossible to trim it for their homeward flight. He saw the odds piled up against them. Buried deep inside this mass of metal, stuck there in the sand, was a smaller, but entirely new rocket. It had all its own motors and fuel. It had its own living quarters, smaller than the ones in which they had travelled two thousand million miles across space,
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but nevertheless sufficient for their purposes. It had its own motors and fuel supply. But how was he to strip down to it? How was he to get rid of the outer, now useless, exterior. There were only two men, himself and a weakling with a broken arm. And even if there were ten of them like himself, there was the obvious danger that the whole structure would topple over while they were working at it. They didn’t have any cranes to straighten it. The whole theory of stripping down was based on the assumption that you had made an absolutely perfect vertical landing. He looked up again at the yawning structure above him, grunted to himself, and began to climb the ladder.
It was a long bitter struggle and he was shaking violently by the time he reached the hatch. The ladder seemed almost impossibly heavy as he hauled it in. It didn’t occur to him that, but for the higher density of oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere, he would never have made it at all. Bakovsky was nearer to collapse than he realized. He returned to the cabin and began to do what he had to do. At the moment it seemed quite senseless but then you never knew what might happen. It was always possible that they would get back to Earth, and if that should happen the first thing that his superiors would demand would be a report on the accident. The report had to be written at the earliest possible moment, and that meant now. I t was one of those things that had to be done however ridiculous it might seem.
The effect of the drug was beginning to wear off. Pito- yan’s mind was slowly clearing. His reasoning was better now that his arm wasn’t hurting quite so much. He didn’t need to make the trip down to the ground to know how things stood. It was a miracle that they were standing up at all, even at an angle of ten degrees, and not lying flat out on the ground. He knew with a minimum of thought that unless they had help they were finished. It wouldn’t need hostile natives to see to that. The Westerners were the only hope of help. Messages to Earth would not get through, and even if they did it was doubtful whether a reserve rocket
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could reach them. It wasn’t at all like an appeal sent from the Moon or from Mars. Now they were attached to the Helios system, sweeping with it through the solar system.
With Ilyana’s help he managed to get the reserve electric generator working. The main radio transmitter didn’t seem to function properly. But there was also a reserve for that. He got it operating and began to send out endlessly the international distress signal.
Meanwhile Bakovsky worked away at his report. He checked and back-checked all the technical data. He didn’t work quickly and it took him quite a while to finish. He signed the sheets, looked up the automatic calendar, and dated them.
. ‘Will you read this through and sign it if you agree with it?’ he said abruptly to Pitoyan.
While Ilyana took his place at the radio transmitter Pitoyan read carefully through the dozen or so sheets of paper. Bakovsky had a clear, very direct style that it was not possible to misunderstand. By now Pitoyan was somewhat curious about the accident. Of course there had been cases of this sort of thing happening, but in modern times it was very rare. It was almost the last thing that he’d expected when he’d thought over all the possible disasters that might hit them. He could see nothing wrong with Bakovsky’s description of events before landing. They agreed with his own memory, although it was always possible that shock was producing some distortions. At the last he came to the pages of technical data. He almost decided to by-pass them and sign the document, but there was a dead man to answer for, so he thought that maybe he’d better finish the job properly.
It was all routine stuff - checking pre-set dial positions against the entries Bakovsky had made in the form of routine tables. There were the conditions of various switches, and these he came to last of all. They too checked against the report until he came to the switch that controlled the servo settings for the final landing. It was obviously impossible to
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predict with extreme precision how much retro drive would be necessary to make the final touch-down. So as the
rocket approached the ground there was a device that measured how fast it was coming in; if the speed was too great the drive would increase appropriately. Without this feed-back mechanism it was almost impossible to avoid striking the ground at a moderate speed of, say, fifty or sixty miles per hour, just as they had done. He stared down at the final page and then stared again. It was completely obvious what had happened. The fools had failed to activate the feed-back mechanism. In his fury Pitoyan forgot the pain in his arm. According to Bakovsky’s entry the servo switch was in the ‘On’ position. Pitoyan looked across at the control board again. The switch was manifestly in the ‘Off’ position.
He looked again over the other tables. Bakovsky couldn’t have made all those entries simply from memory, he must have consulted the control dials. So why had he marked the servo switch wrongly? If.he’d wanted to lie about it all he had to do was to turn it into the ‘ready’ position. In fact the whole of this cross-checking was a bit absurd if Bakovsky wanted to cheat. Probably he’d taken it as so obvious that the switch must be ‘On’ that he hadn’t even bothered to look.
His mouth tightly drawn, his face grey with the pain that seemed to fill him, he went out of the cabin, staggering as he did so, and made his way into the bowels of the ship looking for Bakovsky. He found him contemplating the magnetic clamps that held the inner rocket - the one they hadn’t used yet - in position. ‘Would you come back to the cabin. There’s something in the report that I don’t understand.’