by Fred Hoyle
But about three hours before dawn Reinbach broke down. It was obvious that his temperature was soaring up again. There was nothing that Fiske could do except to let him lie there in the grass. It looked as though there was nothing that either of them could do. For Fiske knew that they would never find their way back to the machine. He tried to put his own jacket around Reinbach, but in his delirium the sick man kept throwing it off again. A bright star rose above the
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horizon. Tom realized that it couldn’t be a star, there wasn’t a bright star in that place. He realized it was Jupiter, one of their own planets.
When dawn came he looked around him. To his intense relief there was no sign of the can, or of the machine for that matter. At least so far they hadn’t gone round in a circle. His eyes scanned the horizon and at one point he caught a distant flash of light. His mouth was dry with a growing excitement as he realized that it must be the rocket. The terror seemed to fall away from him in the morning light. He knew he would make it now.
The only trouble was Reinbach. He was obviously in a bad way and couldn’t be expected to do more than stumble a few yards at a time, at best. Tom thought about leaving him and going to fetch help, but then he realized that it would be next to impossible to find him again in this featureless countryside. So he did the only thing possible, he slung Reinbach across his shoulders and set out slowly but steadily towards the welcoming point of light. -It would take a long time, but he would make it.
Ilyana had told her story to Pitoyan. Although he said he believed her he’d asked for the camera and had gone to process the film. Sitting waiting in the grass she saw him coming down the ladder from the rocket holding a bunch of prints in his bad hand. With a sinking heart she knew that they’d be blanks. There wouldn’t be anything on them at all. And that was the way it was. They were all just useless blanks.
The way he looked at her it was obvious that he thought that she was mad, the same way that the American, Fawsett, seemed to be mad.
Then Pitoyan told her that he knew the two men had been killed in a very different way. They had been killed in fighting over her, and that 9he might as well admit it instead of producing a ridiculous story. Ilyana, seeing that she would never convince him, admitted it. She told him that
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the American had attacked her, which in a sense was true. Bakovsky had come back unexpectedly, and in the ensuing fight the American had killed him, but not before Bakovsky had exploded a grenade. It sounded silly to her but Pitoyan seemed to believe it. It came within the range he could believe whereas the truth did not. And Ilyana saw that this would be the way of it when they got back to Earth, if they ever got back. By now she didn’t seem to care very much. She thought of the endless, anonymous grey buildings in Moscow, and decided it was unimportant what they believed.
Pitoyan began to climb back into the rocket. It was funny the way he seemed to spend almost all his time inside the thing, thought Ilyana. He even slept there, as if he were afraid of this new world around them. Ilyana shivered as the memories of yesterday came back to her. Even about those memories there was something strange. They weren’t as clear or as sharp as they should have been. They should have been etched indelibly on her mind, but it was more as if they had happened three years ago. In a way she was glad of this, for it prevented her from being frightened out of her wits, of having the same trembling fits as the American, Fawsett, had.
She began to think about the Americans in the other vehicle. She hadn’t thought much about them before, but now, suddenly, she was quite sure they must be in trouble. She started up the ladder after Pitoyan, intending to ask him to try to raise them on the radio. At the top she paused for a moment to gaze out over the green countryside. It was then she saw two men moving very slowly on foot about five miles away. In a few seconds she was on the ground again, starting up her machine. She drove it, threshing and thudding, up the incline towards the distant hills.
Tom Fiske was now staggering very badly. The weight on his shoulders seemed to press him into the ground, his ears were thudding with the sound of his own heartbeats. For a while he couldn’t believe that the noise really came
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from a machine that seemed to be coming towards him. For a moment he had the wild idea that somehow his own machine had managed to get started by itself, but this one pulled in alongside of him and the pretty Russian girl climbed down from the cabin.
She helped him up with Reinbach’s inert body, and they moved off. He sat in a stupor. He didn’t have to carry anything any more, and within an incredibly short time they were back in front of the rocket. Again he had to make a big effort. He had to carry Reinbach up the long vertical ladder, he couldn’t expect the girl to help with this. Somehow he got him into one of the bunks, and he and the little Russian fellow shot him full of drugs. Uli ought to be all right now.
Pitoyan told him what had happened. He told him about Fawsett, and it was obvious to Tom that both Mike and Uli had gone down with the same sort of fever. It was equally obvious that the expedition was over. The sooner they lifted the rocket up into the sky and were started back for home the better. But first he had to check up on Larson’s death. This was absolutely necessary because of the inquiry there would be back on Earth. He went down and re-tanked the machine. Then he went to Ilyana and said, ‘I’ve got to make a checkup. I’m sorry but you’ll have to show me the way back.’ Ilyana nodded dumbly. She climbed into the cabin alongside Fiske. It all seemed so similar to the way that she, Bakovsky and the big American had started out four days ago.
By the time they had gone about ten miles, and were traversing what looked like an undulating grassy road, she realized that it was quite useless. She doubted if she could really find her way back, and even if she did find the proper place she doubted if they would see anything at all. It would be just as blank as the pictures had been. She motioned Fiske to stop for a moment and got down from the cabin. Tom quite misinterpreted her reason for this, and he allowed her to lead him about two hundred yards along the track to a spot where they could just see the machine. She sat down in
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the grass and motioned him to follow. Then she began to tell him what had really happened. She spoke in slow, precise English, and he saw the picture gradually unfold itself - the sandy seas, and the gleaming transparent sheets.
‘Well,’ he said when she’d finished, ‘it figures.’
‘What does that mean ?’
‘It means that if that’s the way it happened, that’s the way it happened. I believe you.’
He told her his own experience of the strangeness of this new world, of the useless and unending circling they’d been condemned to, how they’d just gone round and round like flies walking around a window-pane. When he’d finished she took his hand in her own and began to stroke it. ‘You must say that you ran out of fuel. It is better to be thought a fool than to be thought mad. But I know that what you say is right.’
It seemed the most natural thing he’d ever known to take this fair-haired girl into 'his arms. For the first time in his life he found himself to be making love without congratulating himself that he was doing so.
Chapter Eleven
The Return
The ship lifted itself swiftly an d smoothly out of the atmosphere of Achilles. They made ten orbits around the planet. Without telling the others, Tom Fiske and Ilyana looked for the gleaming translucent sheets, but none could be seen. Pitoyan obtained the data for the first crude setting of their orbit and Tom set the controls and opened up the motors. The ship seemed lighter and easier to handle than on the outward journey but this was probably just an illusion.
A day later they were almost a million miles out from Achilles. It was still a remarkable sight, the green areas looked just the same as they had on the way in. Two days ago Fiske h
ad cursed the endless grass slopes, but now as he looked at them for almost the last time there was a strange tightening in his throat. He remembered what Reinbach had said about the fish off ’Frisco Bay and he had a feeling that that’s what they’d been - a lot of fish that didn’t know what was going on around them.
The cabin had been laid out for a crew of four, which meant that either they’d got to improvise or that two of them had to share the same bunk. Tom Fiske and Ilyana shared the same bunk and made no bones about doing so over the whole of the long trip back home. Pitoyan, furious at first, realized that even without a damaged arm 'he wouldn’t be a match for Tom. He thought about taking his revenge by refusing to calculate the orbits. That would have been fine if he’d been in another ship, but any disaster to this ship was a disaster to himself. So he calculated the orbits and with equal correctness reckoned that he would have no difficulty in finding girls back home. He had achieved some
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thing worth talking about and had every intention of taking complete advantage of it.
The sick men caused them a lot of trouble. It wasn’t just the careful nursing they needed at times, it was the way they seemed to become queer when they recovered for a while. A lunatic was the last thing you wanted to have on your hands in a space-ship. And they seemed to have two lunatics. Luckily they never seemed to be at their best at the same moment.
When the fever went out of them they behaved as if they were somehow vacant. Both of them would climb about the rocket asking questions as if they’d never seen a ship before. It was as if they were back in childhood, although when you looked them straight in the eye they didn’t look at all like kids. Their eyes looked more like deep pools, and it was a bit uncanny the way each of them seemed to know what was wrong with the other. When one of them was more or less all right and the other was in a high fever the one who was all right would sit around endlessly just looking down at the other fellow. It was a sort of medical game of tag, and it gave them the creeps.They got into the way of leaving Reinbach and Fawsett to look after each other more and more. But for this the final tragedy would probably not have happened."
It occurred at a time when Reinbach was in comparatively good shape. Fawsett was in a high fever and was shouting incoherently - shouting the usual name of Cathy. When he was in this state it almost looked as if he thought he was talking to somebody. He would reach out his hands as if to take hold of something or somebody. The three of them got into the way of keeping as far off as possible when these attacks were on him, especially if Reinbach was there to watch. One day, about four months out from Achilles, they found Fawsett sprawled on top of Reinbach. His hands were clamped around Reinbach’s neck and they had to open his rigid fingers to pull him off. Reinbach’s face was black and the sight made Tom Fiske sick. Fawsett was still shrieking
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for Cathy, so Fiske hit him hard on the jaw, and this put a stop to the nonsense for a while.
By rights they should have put Reinbach’s body in the freezing compartment. But Fiske felt that Uli’s death might be easier to explain if they got rid of the body. It didn’t seem as if it would be much harder to account for four deaths on the planet instead of just three. Why stop at three? So they placed Reinbach in a long metal cylinder, sealed it, and ejected it from the ship. It occurred to Fiske that if anybody ever recovered a body from space, with the lack of oxygen it would probably be perfectly preserved.
After this they kept a close watch on Fawsett. Secretly they all felt that they wouldn’t be sorry if this shrieking maniac were to put an end to himself. In their closely confined circumstances it was'a continuous waiting nightmare. The trouble was that you couldn’t get on terms with Fawsett, even when he seemed to have recovered for a time. The strange thing was that he seemed to be mad with them about Reinbach’s death - as if they’d caused it. The sooner they got him into a bug-house back on Earth the better they’d feel.
Back on Earth they had news of the returning ship. The bursts of radio noise from Helios were weakening somewhat, and the angle between the direction of the ship and of the star was widening. So at last, after almost a year, they had news.
The problem to those in the ship was what to do by way of explanation. They decided, without formulating any plan or purpose, essentially each for himself, to be as vague as possible. Fiske sent out transmissions on the Euro-American wave-length, while Pitoyan sent out communications on the Russian wave-length. So both sides thought that their ship was returning.
Of the endless stream of questions to which they were subjected they answered some and ignored others. For the moment at least they could claim that transmission was
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faulty. Pitoyan had the inspiration of doctoring their transmitter, so that it deliberately garbled their messages. He spent a lot of effort doing this in a way that he hoped the experts would find difficult to understand when finally the rocket landed on Earth. It would have been easy to have put the transmitter out of action altogether, but it was necessary to keep Earth accurately informed on one point, namely when and where they would be coming in to land. Later on, as Pitoyan said, they would have to play it by ear.
Both Washington and Moscow were unbearably frustrated by these tactics. The two Governments wanted full and accurate information themselves, although they still hadn’t informed their respective publics.
They had a sound psychological reason for this. It would still be three or four months before any ship could return, there was still the long coasting section through the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. And they knew that the populace at large simply cannot maintain its interest in any topic for three months. There would be an intense newspaper, radio and television publicity for perhaps ten days, and after that the public’s appetite would fall off quite steeply. But if they held their horses until about three weeks before the landing, then interest instead of falling could be whipped up to fever point. After all, this was a sort of gladiatorial show - except that, instead of putting up a million or two for a building like the Colosseum in Rome, this had cost them more than a hundred thousand million. Both Governments intended to see they got good value for their money.
Of course the news could not be kept from the public if the publicity services hadn’t been willing to cooperate. There were certain to be scores of official leaks. This was particularly true in the West. But the plan of the Governments was really in the interests of the publicity services themselves. Responsible people soon saw that. To prevent a break occurring it was made very clear that whatever syndicate attempted to jump the gun would have all its official privileges withdrawn. So although it would have
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been possible for any one group to have scooped the others, the gain - while undoubtedly large for the moment - would in the long run have been more than compensated through the long-term loss of facilities. No group was willing to run such a risk and all leaks were plugged before they could spout their delicious liquid into the mouths of the waiting public.
So those who were in the know were aware of the return some three months before Fiske finally put the rocket down neatly and squarely in the south of Florida. Conway was one of those who knew, and it was hardly possible for him to keep the news from Cathy. During the past year their marriage had worked a little better than it normally did. Cathy had made no reference at all to Mike Fawsett. But with the news of the impending return she instantly shed another mental skin, in just the way she had done on the day of Fawsett’s departure. Now Conway did not exist at all for her. She seemed to 'live in a dream world of her own. Conway realized that the moment of the landing would be the culmination of her affair with Fawsett. It was in fact more a vision than a human relationship. The great rocket would stream downwards from the heavens, its exhaust belching the familiar orange ring, and it would fall more and more slowly until with infinite grace it came to re
st on the huge ten-mile-square asphalt area. There would be a surge of vehicles towards it, the ladder would come down, the public would be martialled by hundreds of police, those with priority passes to the fore.
Then at last the astronauts would begin their majestic descent from above. They would swing athletically down the vertical ladder. The first to touch the ground would be Mike Fawsett. And no sooner was he there - the cheers deafening his ears - than Cathy would run forward and throw herself into his arms. So they would stand for all the world to see, Cathy and her hero from space. That was the dream.
The Earth could now be seen as a vast ball in the tele
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scopic viewer. Fiske knew they would be there within the week. The moment had now arrived, the moment they had been putting off for months. It would be best now to send out a terse description of the basic facts, that only one rocket was returning, that only a half of the original complement of both ships would be returning. Fiske decided that there was no point in explaining at this stage. Pitoyan agreed with him. So they sent out a bare, cold statement of the true position.
The consternation that this message produced in all major capitals may well be imagined. For three weeks past now the news had been out, both in the West and in the East. Every child throughout the vast region from Smolensk to Peking knew that their beloved heroes were returning. Arrangements had been made for the parades. In Moscow itself there was to be the biggest super-S parade of all times. The factories had turned out many millions of yards of the best banner material. The cream of the fighting services would swing their way along the vast flower-decked avenues, they would be followed by schoolgirls in phalanxes, phalanxes of cunning design, schoolgirls with pigtails who had listened avidly to the reports from Ilyana. Finally, in the rear, the parade would end with an impressive platoon of wise men.