Joe passed, going on his round. He glanced where the mate looked. Then he froze. The mate was making a routine check of the few, emergency, rarely-or-never-used viewports in the ship’s hull. In the unthinkable event of disaster to the control room—from which the stars were normally viewed— the ship could be navigated by hand with men at such ports as this, reporting to a jury-rigged control room. The mate was simply verifying that they were ready for use. But he uncovered the stars. And Joe looked.
He looked with his own eyes into infinity—past the mate’s head and shoulders, of course. He saw the stars. Their number was like the number of grains of sand. Their color varied beyond belief. For the first time Joe realized that they differed only in brightness and color, because they were all so far away that they were the same size. None was larger than a mathematical point. It was a sight which no man has ever seen save through some such window as the mate had uncovered.
Joe gazed with absolute rapture. The mate matter-of-factly made his verification of the condition of the port and the shutters that closed over it outside—the shutters which infinitesimal meteorites might pit with their tiny, violent explosions if they struck. The mate closed the inner plate, making sure that the outer shutters closed with it. He locked it and turned to go on. He saw Joe, dazed and agitated, staring at the metal plate which had just locked out the universe.
Joe said, swallowing:
“I—never saw the stars before, sir.”
The mate said, “Oh,” and went on.
Joe continued about his duties, but his actions were purely automatic. For two watches he did not see anything much but the tiny, remembered segment of the cosmos, glimpsed beyond the head and shoulders of the Mavourneen’s first mate. He did not notice what he ate. He had seen the stars!
He expanded the vision in his mind. He pictured the cosmos as that small scene multiplied until he could imagine looking in every direction and seeing nothing else, as if he were disembodied in emptiness. By the mere fact of thinking he discovered that odd quirk in man’s constitution by which human beings stay sane in emptiness. The quirk is that the stars do not look far away. There is no feeling of distance. They are so remote that—like the toy-sized houses and roads and forests seen from a transport plane on earth—they lose all scale. They do not move. One knows that there is vastness about, but the sensation is comfortably that of occupying a stable, solid building out of whose windows one sees a backdrop punctured with multitudes of holes. One simply does not feel empty distance all around, through which one might fall screaming for a thousand million years. And therefore men stay sane in space.
Nearing a planet, it is different. Refraction in an atmosphere makes a planet seem round. It is visibly a solid ball and nearer than its background of stars. One has a sensation of height and a conviction that it is far away, and a panicky, desperate need to reach it and feel its huge and reassuring mass...
It is a fortunate thing that one has to use power to get down to a planet’s surface from space.
Joe’s meditations told him all this. Perhaps his companions had seen the stars with the same eagerness as himself, in time past. After the first thrill they felt disappointment. And therefore they voiced their disillusionment in raucous scorn. But still they stayed spacemen . ..
Back on Earth, Joe’s father and mother noticed that the later vision-casts were quite fascinating. They mentioned the matter to each other, pretending astonishment. They admitted ruefully that they were staying up too late and not getting enough sleep. But they didn’t refer to their separate discoveries that it was much wiser to be thoroughly tired out before thinking of going to bed—if one wanted to sleep. To their friends they said brightly that Joe’s ship was out beyond Saturn.
It was. Joe oiled motors and swabbed decks. Presently his parents back on Earth were able to tell their friends confidently that Joe was out beyond Uranus’ orbit. He was. He still swabbed decks and oiled motors and trudged through a white-painted corridor and listened to his companions’ talk —almost exclusively four-letter words—and sometimes he made use of the ship’s crew’s library. Sometimes he watched taped vision-casts.
After a while the ship was beyond Neptune.
Joe’s mother and father knew theMavourneen was decelerating, now. It made a non-stop voyage because that was the most practical way to make the run. The early rocket explorers hopped from one planet to another, carefully building up fuel stores for their ships before daring to go further. This was because fuel was their great problem. Atomic-powered ships like the Mavourneen handled the matter otherwise. They wanted to use the smallest possible atom-piles, so they used the least power that would lift them. But fuel was no problem, so they kept the power on for half their journeys, building up speed second by second. On the second half of their voyages they used the same power to check the speed they had so painstakingly built up. Doubling the distance traveled in this way did not nearly double the time required to travel it. So, short journeys or broken ones were vastly wasteful of time. Therefore the Mavourneen made no stops on the way to Pluto.
But it was not an exciting journey. Each day Joe oiled and inspected more small motors than he had known could exist, before joining the Mavourneen’s crew. Each day he swabbed decks, broke out stores, painted, polished, and performed other duties incident to the career of a spaceman, second class. On the way out to Pluto he spent a total of more than seven hundred hours at menial tasks, requiring neither skill nor the education his father had paid for. But he was very happy. He had seen a very small portion of the firmament for something like thirty seconds past the head and shoulders of a preoccupied first mate.
Back on Earth, his mother told her friends confidentially that she hadn’t the least idea how she’d managed it, but she’d lost several pounds and wasn’t it wonderful to lose weight without dieting? Joe’s father apologetically admitted to his friends that he was getting a little bit absent-minded these days. Joe? His son Joe? Oh, Joe was fine! Out on a cargo ship to Pluto to get space-hunger and the wanderlust out of his system at the same time. Come to think of it, his ship ought to be landing on Pluto any day now ...
It was time for landing. Three days from landing the first mate inspected the cargo holds and had some extra braces put in place. Later, the ship performed elephantine maneuvers in space. The sensation on board was precisely what would be produced by a slow and deliberate earthquake, when all of solidity changed its position, and changed back, and changed again, and again, and again. It was productive of pure, instinctive panic.
Naturally, Joe gave no sign of his sensations. He knew that a pale disk had appeared in the stars before theMavourneen. It was not bright like the face of a planet near the sun. Here the sun was only a bright star, yielding about as much light as the moon does to Earth. There were no days on Pluto. There was night; yes. Night without a moon, and with infinitesimal stars, much brighter than on Earth, shining in incredible multitudes from every crack and cranny of the heavens. And there was twilight. That was when the star-sized sun was overhead. But there was no day.
Joe knew, too, that the ghost disk to be seen from the Mavourneen’s control room ports showed no markings at all. There were no seas. If there was water, it was frozen. There was no air. It was frozen, too. The planet was a featureless gray phantom of solidity as the Mavourneen approached its twilight side.
The ship’s space radio was sending a beam of radio waves on ahead to notify its coming. Other signals were coming back from the tiny human settlement deep under the planet’s frigid surface. Joe tried to imagine how explorers had found the heart to search such a planet for the mineral deposits which made a settlement worth while. The settlement itself, of course, was no problem. A ship like the Mavourneen would need only to settle to solidity anywhere, and it could run a shaft down to something which would neither evaporate or run away as a liquid at a temperature at which human beings could live. One ship could establish a village, which other ships could supply and increase down under the cold.
For more than fifty years, now, there had been humans living on Pluto and working its mines. There were even families . . .
But Joe could not quite imagine family life on Pluto.
He knew that the landing was due, but he did not know when the ship went down to the planet-wide plain which a radio beam assured the Mavourneen’s skipper was his destination. Joe did not see the tiny, flickering, pinpoint of brightness which was the landing-beacon and the first actual contact with human beings outside the ship for some thousands of millions of miles. He was swabbing a floor when his ears abruptly felt strange. There was something very odd about all his surroundings. It was seconds before he realized what had happened.
The drive was off. It had been in his ears every second of the time since leaving Earth. Now it had stopped.
The Mavourneen had landed on Pluto.
Joe continued to swab. But his feelings were remarkable.
During his next watch, the unloading of cargo on Pluto began. The ship was sealed to the ground by a wall attached to the rounded hull at the top, and to the landing-platform at the bottom. It was made of stuff squirted out of hoses, which hardened where it landed and almost as it splashed. It was water, mined at the end of one of the galleries leading in all directions from the underground settlement. It made an airtight connection of the ship to the ground. In thick work jackets, the crew of the Mavourneen unloaded cargo in this temporary ice-walled cavern. Their breaths were frosty in the glare of the unloading-lights. The cargo vanished into shafts going down into the village.
In his watch off, Joe was given shore-leave. He was permitted to go down to the village on Pluto. There were nearly two thousand people here, and ships came fairly often. There was no loneliness. The folk who lived here felt no such hunger for talk as Joe felt. They had a reasonably spacious community, with metal walls and ceilings—mostly painted white—and they had shops and homes, and life went on very comfortably. The air had a peculiar, invigorating smell to it, because of the hydroponic gardens which grew fresh vegetables. It was warmer, too, than on the ship. The community had an atom pile for power, and mined uranium as part of its way of life. Part of the cargo for Earth was pigs of uranium.
The only thing Joe could really note down as distinctive was that the settlement was warmer than he was at all used to. Otherwise the feel of things was like that in a medium-sized village, assuming only that it lived in a single apartment house and that all the time was night. —That was because all the light was artificial. But this did not seem strange to Joe. He had seen no other sort of light all the way out on the ship.
He bought souvenirs for his parents—minerals, and some of those inexplicable fossil-bearing lumps of transparent rock that are familiar enough in museums. There was no other distinctive local product to buy. The settlement on Pluto was small, but it was prosperous and up-to-date. The only thing in the least backward about it was the visi-screen shows. They were brought out recorded on tape, and Joe had seen all of them.
Just before the last of the ship’s cargo was unloaded, Joe broke his arm. It was one of those unforeseeable accidents. A cargo sling let go the fraction of a second before it should have. A bale came tumbling, and Joe tried to stop it with a cargo hook, and the bale was heavier than it should have been. His arm was flicked aside with a deceptive gentleness, and he felt the bones snap.
It was nothing very serious. There was a hospital, of course, where highly professional X-rays determined the exact damage, and a perfectly competent surgeon pinned the bones, put the arm in a light plastic cast, and told Joe he was quite fit for light duty. Even the first mate took it casually.
“I’ll give you second steward rating on the way back,” he said matter-of-factly. “That’ll mean a little better pay, even. You wait on table and help the cook for the officers’ mess.”
“But the work I was doing—”
“A second steward’s signing off,” said the mate. “Hell stay out here between ships. Good pay in the mines. And there’s a man wants to get back to Earth. He’s made a stake. His papers say he’s an engineer, third, but he’ll go back as spaceman, second class.”
And that was that. There was no passenger traffic to Pluto. There was nothing to see. While the ship was aground Joe never saw the surface, and aside from the souvenir minerals the only oddity he remembered was the warm, man-made climate.
He was helping the cook with the officers’ mess when the Mavourneen took off again. He felt the cotton-wooly sensation in his ears when the drive warmed up, and he knew the moment of take-off because the sound changed. And of course he knew it would no longer be possible to go down into the underground settlement on his watch off. But that was all. He regretted that he hadn’t been able to see the ice seal melted down by space-suited figures using torches to melt the ship free. The water would have frozen again instantly, of course. Then the walls would be broken up and taken down into the village to be used again later.
But when the Mavourneen was only two hours out from Pluto, bound back to Earth, Joe had the first inkling of the event that was to make his whole journey remarkable. The first mate brought a girl into the kitchen and said briefly:
“This is Miss Alice Cawdor. She rates as supernumerary steward. The skipper had orders to bring her to Earth if she wanted to make the trip. See that she has meals. She isn’t required to do any work, but if she wants to, she may.”
He went away. The girl said politely:
“How do you do?”
She looked at Joe with a friendly reserve which was exactly the way a small-town girl looks at people she has not met before. Not suspicious, and not stand-offish, but like somebody who’s known the same people all her life, and knows that some new people will become her friends and some won’t. Joe had been pretty lonely on Pluto, and he’d expected to be lonely on the way back. He found himself hoping that this girl would decide he was worth making friends with.
Back on Earth his father and mother were beginning to talk about taking a vacation somewhere. They needed it. Joe’s father was drawn pretty fine, now, and his mother had had to take in all her clothes. There could be no communication by radio beyond a distance to be measured in thousands of miles. The distance to where Joe was was thousands of millions of miles. So there would be no word from or about Joe until his ship got back. The next three and a half months were going to be hard to last through.
Joe’s new duties as a second steward were easier than those of a spaceman, second class. He set the table for the officers and put the food on it. He took out the dishes and put them in the washer. Later he stacked them. He did some polishing of cutlery and pans. Not much. The girl stayed in an empty cabin most of the time. She came and got her meals from the kitchen and took them to her cabin to eat, alone. She was pleasant, but reserved.
During the first week, though, she did ask Joe if there were any books or vision-tapes to read or look at. He found some for her and set up a small tape-viewer for her to watch the vision-tapes in. He mentioned one record he thought she’d like.
The sun, at that time, was a flaring bright star four light-hours away. It would take the Mavourneen a little over three and a half months to reach a spot eight light-minutes away from it, where there should be a certain small planet called Earth.
Joe worked in the kitchen and served the officers’ meals. He thought often and deeply about the stars. He set a table and cleared it and put dishes in a washer and later stacked them. Once he thought about the profession he had studied to practice. He also thought about the vision-reels in the ship’s library, and the books, and picked out some others for the girl to see when she wanted them.
Two weeks out of Pluto they were talking about other subjects than books and vision-reels. With a little embarrassment she told him she’d been born on Pluto and had lived all her life in the underground settlement there.
“My mother got tired of it, finally,” she said. “She used to get homesick for Earth. I don’t remember, but she made my father promise that he�
��d send me back to Earth to see it, anyway, before I married somebody out there.”
“Have you picked him out?” asked Joe.
She shook her head.
By the time they passed the orbit of Neptune they were friends. And Joe knew that she’d estimated him carefully before she gave him her friendship. He felt that the honor was great. His selection of vision-reels and books became even more painstaking. But they talked quite a lot. Sometimes about the stars outside the ship. She had never seen the stars, either.
“You’ll see them on Earth,” Joe promised. “You’ll see them every night.”
She said uncomfortably:
“Night ... It must be strange. That’s when there isn’t any light. And the stars are in the sky . . .” She said uncertainly. “I can’t imagine what a sky is like. My father says there isn’t any ceiling over your head ...”
Joe looked at her in astonishment. Then he realized. He, himself, had not seen a sky for nearly five months. She had never seen one. She had never been out-of-doors. Not that she had suffered physically from the fact. Lamps supplied needed ultraviolet in the ship, and certainly in the settlement on Pluto.
“And sunshine,” she added uneasily. “It’s yellow, isn’t it? I wonder what I’ll look like in—daylight?”
Star Science Fiction 1 - [Anthology] Page 22