Giordano Bruno on Farside. Here, sensitive receivers, operating
fully shielded from the perpetual interference from Earth, and
gigantic telescopes, freed from any atmosphere and not having to
contend with distortions induced by their own weights, were pushing
the frontiers of the known Universe way out beyond the limits of
their Earth-bound predecessors. Hunt sat fascinated in front of the
monitor screens and resolved planets of some of the nearer stars;
he was shown one nine times the size of Jupiter, and another that
described a crazy figure-eight orbit about a double star. He gazed
deep into the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy, and out at distant
specks on the very threshold of detection. Scientists and
physicists described the strange new picture of the Cosmos that was
beginning to emerge from their work here and explained some of the
exciting advances in concepts of space-time mechanics, which
indicated that feasible methods could be devised for dcforming
astronomic geodesics in such a way that the limitations once
thought to apply to extreme effective velocities could be avoided.
If so, interstellar travel would become a practical proposition;
one of the scientists confidently predicted that man would cross
the Galaxy within fifty years.
Hunt's final stop brought him back to Nearside-to the base at
Copernicus near which Charlie had been found. Scientists at
Copernicus had been studying descriptions of the terrain over which
Charlie had traveled and the accompanying sketched maps; the
in-formation contained in the notebook had been transmitted up from
Houston. From the traveling times, distances, and estimates of
speed quoted, they suspected that Charlie's journey had begun
somewhere on Farside and had brought him, by way of the Jura
Mountains, Sinus Iridurn, and Mare Imbrium, to Copernicus. Not
everybody subscribed to this opinion, however; there was a problem.
For some unaccountable reason, the directions and compass points
mentioned in Charlie's notes bore no relationship to the
conventional lunar north-south that derived from its axis of
rotation. The only route for Charlie's journey that could be
interpreted to make any sense at all was the one from Farside
across Mare Imbrium, but even that only made sense if a completely
new direction was assumed for the north-south axis.
Attempts to locate Gorda had so far met with no positive success.
From the tone of the final entries in the diary, it could not have
been very far from the spot where Charlie was found. About fifteen
miles south of this point was an area covered by numerous
overlapping craters, all confirmed as being meteoritic and of
recent origin. Most researchers concluded that this must have been
the site of Gorda, totally obliterated by a freak concentration of
meteorites in the as yet unexplained storm.
Before leaving Copernicus, Hunt accepted an invitation to drive out
overland and visit the place of Charlie's discovery. He was
accompanied by a Professor Alberts from the base and the crew of
the UNSA survey vehicle.
* * *
The survey vehicle lumbered to a halt in a wide gorge, between
broken walls of slate-gray rock. All around it, the dust had been
churned into a bewildering pattern of groo$es and ridges by
Caterpillar tracks, wheels, landing gear, and human feet-evidence
of the intense activity that had occurred there over the last
eighteen months. From the observation dome of the upper cabin, Hunt
recognized the scene immediately; he had first seen it in
Caidwell's office. He identified the large mound of rubble against
the near wall of the gorge, and above it the notch leading into the
cleft.
A voice called from below. Hunt rose to his feet, his movements
slow and clumsy in his encumbering spacesuit, and clambered through
the floor hatch and down a short ladder to the control cabin. The
driver was stretching back in his seat, taking a long drink from a
flask of hot coffee. Behind him, the sergeant in command of the
vehicle was at a videoscreen, reporting back to base via comsat
that they had reached their destination without mishap. The third
crew member, a corporal who was to accompany Hunt and Alberts
outside and who was already fitted out, was helping the professor
secure his helmet. Hunt took his own helmet from the storage rack
by the door and fixed it in place. When the three were ready, the
sergeant supervised the final checkout of life-support and
communications systems and cleared them to pass, one by one,
through the airlock to the outside.
"Well, there you are, Vie. Really on the Moon now." Alberts's voice
came through the speaker inside Hunt's helmet. Hunt felt the spongy
dust yield beneath his boots and tried a few experimental steps up
and down.
"It's like Brighton Beach," he said.
"Okay, you guys?" asked the voice of the UNSA corporal.
"Okay."
"Sure."
"Let's go, then."
The three brightly colored figures-one orange, one red, and one
green-began moving slowly along the well-worn groove that ran up
the center of the mound of rubble. At the top they stopped to gaze
down at the survey vehicle, already looking toylike in the gorge
below.
They moved into the cleft, climbing between vertical walls of rocks
that closed in on both sides as they approached the bend. Above the
bend the cleft straightened, and in the distance Hunt
could see a huge wall of jagged buttresses towering over the
foothills above them-evidently the ridge described in Charlie's
note. He could picture vividly the scene in this very place so long
ago, when two other figures in spacesuits had toiled onward and
upward, their eyes fixed on that same feature. Above it, the red
and black portent of a tormented planet had glowered down on their
final agony like.
Hunt stopped, puzzled. He looked up at the ridge again, then turned
to stare at the bright disk of Earth, shining far behind his right
shoulder. He turned to look one way, then back again the other.
"Anything wrong?" Alberts, who had continued on a few paces, had
turned and was staring back at him.
"I'm not sure. Hang on there a second." Hunt moved up alongside the
professor and pointed up and ahead toward the ridge. "You're more
familiar with this place than I am. See that ridge up ahead there-
At any time in the year, could the Earth ever appear in a position
over the top of it?"
Alberts followed Hunt's pointing finger, glanced briefly back at
the Earth, and shook his head decisively behind his facepiece.
"Never. From the Lunar surface, the position of Earth is almost
constant. It does wobble about its mean position a bit as a result
of libration, but not by anything near that much." He looked again.
"Never anywhere near there. That's an odd question. Why do you
ask?"
"Just something that occurred to me. Doesn't really matter for
now."
Hunt lowered his eyes and saw an opening at the base of one of the
walls ahead. "That must be it. Let's carry on up to it."
The hole was exactly as he remembered from innumerable photographs.
Despite its age, the shape betrayed its artificial origin. Hunt
approached almost reverently and paused to finger the rock at one
side of the opening with his gauntlet. The score marks had
obviously been made by something like a drill.
"Well, that's it," came the voice of Alberts, who was standing a
few feet back. "Charlie's Cave, we call it-more or less exactly as
it must have been when he and his companion first saw it. Rather
like treading in the sacred chambers of one of the pyramids, isn't
it?"
"That's one way of putting it." Hunt ducked down to peer in-
side, pausing to fumble for the flashlight at his belt as the
sudden darkness blinded him temporarily.
The rockfall that originally had covered th~ body had been cleared,
and the interior was roomier than he expected. Strange emotions
welled inside him as he stared at the spot where, millennia before
the first page of history had been written, a huddled figure had
painfully scrawled the last page of a story that Hunt had read so
recently in an office in Houston, a quarter of a million miles
away. He thought of the time that had passed since those events had
taken place-of the empires that had grown and fallen, the cities
that had crumbled to dust, and the lives that had sparkled briefly
and been swallowed into the past-while all that time, unchanging,
the secret of these rocks had lain undisturbed. Many minutes passed
before Hunt reemerged and straightened up in the dazzling sunlight.
Again he frowned up toward the ridge. Something tantalizing was
dancing elusively just beyond the fringes of the thinking portions
of his mind, as if from the subconscious shadows that lay below,
something insistent was shrieking to be recognized. And then it was
gone.
He clipped the flashlight back into position on his belt and walked
across to rejoin Alberts, who was studying some rock f ormations on
the opposite wall.
chapter twenty
The giant ships that would fly on the fifth manned mission to
Jupiter had been under construction in Lunar orbit for over a year.
Besides the command ship, six freighters, each capable of carrying
thirty thousand tons of supplies and equipment, gradually took
shape high above the surface of the Moon. During the final two
months before scheduled departure, the floating jumbles of
machinery, materials, containers, vehicles, tanks, crates, drums,
and a thousand other items of assorted engineering that hung around
the ships like enormous Christmas-tree ornaments, were slowly
absorbed inside. The Vega surface shuttles, deep-space cruisers,
and other craft also destined for the mission began moving in over
a period of several weeks to join their respective mother ships. At
intervals throughout the last week, the freighters lifted out of
Lunar orbit and set course for Jupiter. By the time its passengers
and final complement of crew were being ferried up from the Lunar
surface, only the command ship was left, hanging alone in the void.
As H hour approached, the gaggle of service craft and attendant
satellites withdrew and a flock of escorts converged to stand a few
miles off, cameras transmitting live via Luna into the World News
Grid.
As the final minutes ticked by, a million viewscreens showed the
awesome mile-and-a-quarter-long shape drifting almost imperceptibly
against the background of stars; the serenity of the spectacle
seemed somehow to forewarn of the unimaginable power waiting to be
unleashed. Exactly on schedule, the ifight-control computers
completed their final-countdown-phase checkout, obtained "Go"
acknowledgment from the ground control master processor, and
activated the main thermonuclear drives in a flash that was visible
from Earth.
The Jupiter Five Mission was under way.
For the next fifteen minutes the ship gained speed and altitude
through successively higher orbits. Then, shrugging off the
restraining pull of Luna with effortless ease, Jupiter Five soared
out
and away to begin overtaking and marshaling together its flock of
freighters, by this time already strung out across a million miles
of space. After a while the escorts turned back to~ward Luna, while
on Earth the news screens showed a steadily diminishing point of
light, being tracked by the orbiting telescopes. Soon even that had
vanished, and oniy the long-range radars and laser links were left
to continue their electronic exchanges across the widening gulf.
Aboard the command ship, Hunt and the other UNSA scientists watched
on the wall screen in mess twenty-four as the minutes passed by and
Luna contracted into a full disk, partly eclipsing that of Earth
beyond. In the days that followed, the two globes waned and fused
into a single blob of brilliance, standing out in the heavens to
signpost the way they had come. As days turned into weeks, even
this shrank to become just another grain of dust among millions
until, after about a month, they could pick it out only with
difficulty.
Hunt found that it took time to adjust to the idea of living as
part of a tiny man-made world, with the cosmos stretching away to
infinity on every side and the distance between them and everything
that was familiar increasing at more than ten miles every second.
Now they depended utterly for survival on the skills of those who
had designed and built the ship. The green hills and blue skies of
Earth were no longer factors of survival and seemed to shed some of
their tangible attributes, almost like the aftermath of a dream
that had seemed real. Hunt came to think of reality as a relative
quantity-not something absolute that can be left for a while and
then returned to. The ship became the only reality; it was the
things left behind that ceased, temporarily, to exist.
He spent hours in the viewing domes along the outer hull, slowly
coming to terms with the new dimension being added to his
existence, gazing out at the only thing left that was familiar: the
Sun. He found reassurance in the eternal presence of the Sun, with
its limitless flood of life-giving warmth and light. Hunt thought
of the first sailors, who had never ventured out of sight of land;
they too had needed something familiar to cling to. But before
long, men would turn their prow toward the open gulf and plunge
into the voids between the galaxies. There would be no Sun to
reassure them then, and there would be no stars at all; the
galaxies themselves would be just faint spots, scattered all the
way to infinity.
What strange new continents were waiting on the other side of those
gulfs?
Danchekker was spending one of his relaxation periods in a
zero-gravity section of the ship, watching a game of 3-D football
being played between t
wo teams of off-duty crew members. The game
was based on American-style football and took place inside an
enormous sphere of transparent, rubbery plastic. Players hurtled
up, down, and in all directions, rebounding off the wall and off
each other in a glorious roughhouse directed-vaguely-at getting the
ball through two circular goals on opposite sides of the sphere. In
reality, the whole thing was just an excuse to let off steam and
flex muscles beginning to go soft during the long, monotonous
voyage.
A steward tapped the scientist on the shoulder and informed him
that a call was waiting in the videobooth outside the recreation
deck. Danchekker nodded, unclipped the safety loop of his belt from
the anchor pin attached to the seat, clipped it around the
handrail, and with a single effortless pull, sent himself floating
gracefully toward the door. Hunt's face greeted him, speaking from
a quarter of a mile away.
"Dr. Hunt," he acknowledged. "Good morning-or whatever it happens
to be at the present time in this infernal contraption."
"Hello, Professor," Hunt replied. "I've been having some thoughts
about the Ganymeans. There are one or two points I could use your
opinion on; could we meet somewhere for a bite to eat, say inside
the next half hour or so?"
"Very well. Where did you have in mind?"
"Well, I'm on my way to the restaurant in B section right now. I'll
be there for a while."
"I'll join you there in a few minutes." Danchekker cut off the
screen, emerged from the booth, and hauled himself back into the
corridor and along it to an entrance to one of the transverse
shafts leading "down" toward the axis of the ship. Using the
handrails, he sailed some distance toward the center before
checking himself opposite an exit from the shaft. He emerged
through a transfer lock into one of the rotating sections, with
simulated G, at a point near the axis where the speed differential
was low. He launched
himself back along another rail and felt himself accelerate gently,
to land thirty feet away, on his feet, on a part of the structure
that had suddenly become the floor. Walking normally, he followed
some signs to the nearest tube access point, pressed the call
button, and waited about twenty seconds for a capsule to arrive.
Once inside, he keyed in his destination and within seconds was
Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars Page 20