by Fred Hoyle
There was a slight air of belligerence in Bakovsky’s face as they climbed back to the cabin.
‘Well, what is it?’
‘The switch for the servo of the retro.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘You’ve marked it as being in the “On” position, whereas 104
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it’s “Off”. That’s the cause of all the trouble, you blasted idiot.’
Bakovsky’s face reddened. This was the sort of thing you hit a man for. He glanced at the control board and then turned to Pitoyan and said angrily, ‘But the switch is in the “On” position. Can’t you see for yourself? Haven’t you got eyes, little man?’
The Westerners had made their decision. Like the Russians they chose a spot within a green area but not far from one of the orange seas. They wanted to be able to explore both kinds of region. And they didn’t want to go too near the seas, for they suspected that the ground would be sandy and perhaps awkwardly soft for a landing. Their chosen place was almost at the opposite side of the planet from that of the Russians. Being professionals they did not start their ship immediately downwards once they had taken their decision. After all they had spent eight months getting there, so a few more hours wasn’t going to make much difference. So they continued to circuit the planet for a while. And all the time as they moved they sent out radio waves which were bounced back by the surface below them and picked up in their receivers. This not only gave them their height from the ground, it also gave them rough information about what the ground was like.
‘Funny, we’re getting interference.’ Fawsett was at the receiver.
‘What sort of interference?’
They were all round the receiver now.
‘Looks more or less like C.W.’
The image in the display tube was blurred, but then for a moment it became clear as if the interference had ceased. Then it blurred again, and so it went on for perhaps fifteen minutes.
‘Looks as though we’re out of it, whatever it was.’
‘We’ll still see if it’s there when we come round again.’
‘Gould it be the Russos?’ asked Reinbach.
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‘What the devil would they do that for ?’
‘I don’t know. But we’re fairly close to the place where they landed, aren’t we ?’
An hour and a half later they were back again. The signals were still there, and they were only there on the particular frequency they were using. Now they were on the right track it didn’t take them very long to figure it out.
‘It’s the distress signal. For some reason their modulation can’t be working. The Russos are in trouble.’
‘What trouble?’ asked Fiske, not addressing anybody in particular. ‘They can’t have blown up the landing. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen any more.’
They chose a spot for landing, decently clear of the Russian ship, about a hundred miles away. They checked and cross-checked all the necessary details for making the landing, made three more orbits of the planet, and only then started up the motors again, still very gently. The rocket began to bite into the atmosphere. As the temperature of the outer skin rose, so the motors came more and more into action. The crew were on their bunks now. This was what they had come for.
Larson was the first man up. His first move was to check the stabilizers. It looked O.K., well within tolerance. He checked the condition of the motors. They weren’t bad, although it didn’t matter much because they’d be having new motors for the trip back. Pity in a way that they couldn’t use the old motors to get them back into the parking orbit. Then they could have used the new ones only under Tow thrust, except of course for the final landing back on Earth. But that hardly figured. It wouldn’t be possible to strip the ship down in orbit. They weren’t equipped for that.
‘Everything O.K.?’asked Fawsett.
'I’m told so,’ answered Larson, still looking at the dials.
They prepared to test the atmosphere. It was all right, it just had to be all right, that’s what the spectroscope said. But you didn’t take any chances with things like that. First
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they evacuated a capsule, then opened it to the outside so that the atmospheric gases would rush in. They sealed it again, carried it back to their working quarters and worked through a series of standard tests. The tests gave the same results as the spectroscopic analysis had done. They had to, of course, but somehow you trusted the results more when you actually had a bit of the stuff inside your own rocket.
They filled a transparent airlock with more of the stuff. Reinbach got into it, wearing a space helmet and still breathing their own oxygen supply. Slowly and carefully he took off the helmet. From outside the others saw a smile spread across his face and he gave them the thumbs-up sign. A few minutes later they opened the main hatch and allowed the air to enter the rocket. Nothing happened. It was all right. Fiske threw the switch that sent the ladders down to the ground.
‘Mike, you’re in charge.’ Larson set his foot on the ladder and began to climb down. Reinbach and Fiske followed, leaving Fawsett behind, just in case. All three of them laughed when they reached the ground. Now they knew what the green stuff was. Nothing but grass. Grass that stretched away from them in all directions, over hill over dale. It came about up to their calves and it had a nice soft pile. They weren’t botanists so they couldn’t tell whether it was any different from the grass back home. After all one grass looks pretty well like another. Embedded in the grass were flowers which they couldn’t recognize. Even so it all looked pretty much like a clover field. There was a light wind that produced a slight stirring of its surface. They walked a few hundred yards away from the rocket. The sky, they noticed, was very blue, a little richer than on Earth. The wind and the grass were producing a very gentle whispering sound.
Uli Reinbach climbed back into the rocket. Fawsett and he soon had the first of their vehicles ready. With a small crane which they projected from inside the rocket the vehicle was lowered to the ground on a sling. It was a rather
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primitive arrangement but somehow it seemed always to work perfectly well. With it they lowered a consignment of stores. Now Larson had to make a decision. He wanted more than anything to make the trip across the rolling hills ahead of them. But as leader it was his job to stay by the rocket, at any rate until they had really cased the joint. Reluctantly he gave orders for Fawsett to come down. Mike swung his way quickly hand-over-hand down the vertical rigid ladder. He knew that this meant that he was going to make the trip, not Larson.
‘You’re going to take her, Mike. Got the bearing?’
‘Yes, I’ve got it. How far do you reckon they are away?’ ‘Between ninety and a hundred miles.’
‘Pity in a way we didn’t come down a bit nearer.*
‘You can make it, there’s twelve hours of light. We don’t want to be breathing down their necks. It might cause trouble later on.’
Larson waved and there was a faint 'halloo from Reinbadh high in the rocket as they made off. Mike let Fiske take the driver’s seat. They hadn’t gone half a mile before they’d complimented each other on how sweetly the motor was working. The excess oxygen concentration of the atmosphere saw to that.
They’d never seen ground quite as smooth as this, their great centipede-like machine was simply chewing up the distance. After climbing steadily for fifteen hundred feet or so, they began on a long gentle switchback about five hundred feet up and five hundred feet down, and always the grass, about nine inches to a foot in height, stretched ahead of them. They had no fears of being benighted. The length of the ‘day’ on Achilles was nearly thirty-six hours, and it was still well before noon at the place where they had landed. Large white fleecy clouds were dotted over the hills, and Mike realized that it would only have needed a flock or two of sheep
for him to have persuaded himself that the whole thing had been a dream and that he was really back home. But there were no sheep; in fact, as far as they could
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see, there was no animal life at all on the planet. That was one of the odd things about all this grass. There were no small insects weaving-their ways amongst it. The faint drone of a terrestrial landscape was missing. There was just the wind whispering in the grass.
They ran into a few showers of light rain. Mike put his hand out into it. He looked at the little transparent drops in the palm of his hand. It was water all right. Even the rain here was gentle.
The only discordant element in the scene was the rasping noise of their exhaust and the thud of the eight metal feet as they pounded into the earth. It was a mere three and a half hours before they sighted the gleaming column of the Russian ship. They saw it from the top of one of the rises, still an hour and a half’s journey away from them. They could also see the gleam of water far away on their left. It revived memories of many places on Earth, but it wasn’t really like any of them.
The rocket was standing at the bottom of a long decline. They clawed their way down over three miles of flat, softer ground without difficulty. At first they couldn’t tell what had gone wrong because the rocket was inclined directly towards them, but as they veered to the right to avoid a shallow pool they saw it leaning there, like a fantastic tower of Pisa.
‘Jesus, bow did they manage that?’ grinned Fiske. ‘You’d think they’d been using a guidance system from out of the Ark.’
They reached the open space in front of the rocket. There was no sign of any movement.
‘Looks as if nobody’s home,’ said Fiske.
They set up a hideous din on their hooter, and after a couple of minutes a door high in the wall of the rocket opened up. They could see a white face, which disappeared, to be replaced by two faces. They shouted up asking what was the matter, and didn’t understand what was shouted back in reply from above. The faces withdrew, but after a
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moment a wriggling coil of rope began to descend towards them.
‘Jeez, they must be pooped if they’re using a thing like that.’
Nobody started to come down and there were more shouts from above.
‘Looks as though they want us to go up.’
‘Am I under orders ?’
Fiske was grinning. Mike had a feeling that he wanted to try out the rope ladder.
‘You are. I reckon you can’t make it in five minutes.’
Fiske went up the first fifty feet very quickly, then up the next fifty more slowly. By the time he was two hundred feet up, half-way from the ground to the door above, his legs were beginning to tremble. He stopped a moment and then did what he should have done from the beginning, climbed slowly and deliberately without thinking about it. At least he did have one thought, that he could always manage to go down again if he had to. Fifty feet below the door he saw that the twisting of the ladder had caused him to get on the wrong side. Moving his hands gingerly round one by one to the other side, grasping a rung firmly he hooked -one foot around and then quickly threw his weight to the other side. He caught sight of the ground and sweated even more than he had been doing. He found the last few feet very hard going, but a strong arm at last hauled him through the opening.
‘What the hell’s the trouble ?’ _
The short stocky man who had pulled him in said something he didn’t understand. Then he caught sight of a slim dark fellow, his arm between splints.
‘My name is Pitoyan. It was I who sent you the orbit. We need your help now.’
Pretty direct, thought Fiske. “You’ll have to come along and see the Captain.’
It was obvious that this particular machine would never lift itself again off the ground - not with the sort of treat-
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ment they’d be able to give to it. The stocky man was sorting over a coil of rope. It made him mad to think they hadn’t given him a guide-line.
Then he saw a fair girl standing in the shadow.
‘My name is Tara Ilyana,’ she said. ‘I hope that you can help us. We are in great difficulty.’
Like hell they were, he thought.
They put a guide-line on Ilyana and with its support she didn’t find the descent to the ground too bad. Mike received her with open arms. He wished he’d had a shave and a clean-up before starting out, but Larson would have given him no peace. He could now see a figure being lowered like a sack of potatoes. Pitoyan could not manage the ladder and it was simpler that way. Next came a bundle wrapped in a strong white plastic sheet. At last both Fiske and Bakovsky were also down. Incredibly Bakovsky had managed to shut the door by sheer brute strength.
Mike signalled Bakovsky and Pitoyan to climb into the cabin along with him. He started up the machine and set out towards the nearest of the hills. It took them twenty minutes to get there. There was an unspoken question as they dismounted. The two Russians looked slowly over the place, then turned to Fawsett and nodded. Returning the way they had come, Bakovsky and Fawsett lifted the bundle into the machine. Ilyana and Pitoyan were put into the cabin, the others climbed on to the outside of the vehicle as best they could, and they moved away. Back at the hilltop everybody again dismounted. Mike made an adjustment that reversed two of the large metal feet to form a digging instrument. It took only a couple of minutes with this improvised bulldozer to scoop an adequate grave for Kratov among the gently waving grass. They all saluted. Before climbing aboard the machine Bakovsky walked away alone. He turned towards their rocket and saluted again.
Pitoyan found the pounding as they thudded up and down, over and above, down and under, more than painful. There was a constant hammering in his ears and in his head.
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He was in poor shape by the time they got back to the Western camp. They took him up into the rocket and Ilyana came with him. They took off the splints and put his arm in some sort of machine.
‘Instant bone-setter,’ grinned Reinbach.
Even through the mists of pain he could not help wondering at the ingenuity of the Americans. He was given sedatives and put to bed. Before sleep overtook him he called Larson to his side and said, ‘You must watch that man Bakovsky. He is quite mad. He did not set the landing servos.’
‘You mean he deliberately crashed the ship?’ asked Larson.
‘I do not know. You see 'he thinks that the switches were set correctly. Even when I showed him that it was not right he still could not see it. When the switch was off, he said it was on. In front of my eyes he deliberately changed the switches round and said “Now that is off”. I am not a fool. When he said he had put the switch off 'he had really put it on. There is something changed round inside him, he sees that switch the wrong way round. It is the beginning of madness. You can see that I am right because the ship did crash.’
The others hadn’t caught these ramblings of Pitoyan’s. When they asked Larson about it he said, ‘He says this Bakovsky fellow has got bugs. We’d better watch him.’
After the months spent in the rocket they would all have liked to sleep outside. But although it was ludricrous to imagine an attack, security demanded that two of them at least should stay with Pitoyan, now in a deep sleep inside the rocket. Because he and Fawsett had already had many hours in the open, free of worries, Reinbach agreed with Larson that they should be the unlucky ones. They also decided that it would be a good thing to keep Bakovsky outside the rocket as much as possible. There was no telling what he might do if he was bugs.
As Helios sank below the horizon they drank a last mug of coffee and climbed into their sleeping-bags.
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Ilyana liked this sleeping out under the stars. As she lay on her bed she could see the whole arch of the Milky Way stretching from
one side "of the horizon to the other. It was funny that the constellations looked exactly the same as they did from Earth, except that the Pole Star wasn’t the Pole Star. The whole heavens seemed to revolve around a point somewhere near Arcturus. Now the starlight had gone the wind seemed louder. And the rustling in the grass seemed louder. Before she fell asleep she realized that a patch of light in what she had come to think of as the East was growing lighter. It couldn’t be dawn already, that must he twelve hours away. Then she realized that it was the Sun. It was now an almost ridiculously tiny dim ball.
Chapter Ten
Exploration
By now they were approaching the most difficult problem of all. It was always the way on a big expedition. To begin with there were the plans back home, the building of the equipment, the expenditure of tens of thousands of millions of dollars. Then came the space run itself, with all the uncertainties and possible dangers. The landing place held to be found, the actual landing itself made, and the tricky business of leaving the rocket - of changing one environment for another. After that you came to grips with the biggest problem. What were you to do ?
Take their present situation for instance. They could report that the atmosphere of Achilles did in fact have the same composition as the spectroscope said it had. They could take back pictures of the rolling green slopes around them, and the films they’d taken while the rocket was still in orbit. The pictures would show fleecy clouds and perhaps a rainbow if they were lucky. They would show the orange- tinted sandy lakes. But there were cynical bastards back home who would say that one didn’t need to come five thousand million miles, and spend gillions of dollars, to get pictures of orange-tinted lakes. So there they were, back with the problem: what exactly were they to do?
To begin with, at any rate, there wasn’t much difficulty in answering this question. The first thing to do was to strip down the rocket. This they set about the day after the landing. The job was made easier by the presence of the Russians. Bakovsky, bugs as he might be, was a willing and experienced worker. Ilyana was a willing and welcome worker. And although Pitoyan with his damaged arm was