'Those weren't really wings that we'd watch unfold, though ages ago, when Mercury had an atmosphere, they had been. The creature I'd discovered was one of the most marvellous examples of adaptation known in the Solar System. Its normal home is the Twilight Zone, but because the minerals it feeds on have been exhausted there it has to go foraging far into the Night Land. Its whole body has evolved to resist that incredible cold: that's the reason why it's silvery white, because this colour radiates the least amount of heat. Even so, it can't stay in the Night Land indefinitely: it has to return to the Twilight Zone at intervals, just as on our own world, a whale has to come up for air. When it sees the Sun again, it spreads those black wings, which are really heat absorbers. I suppose my flare must have triggered off this reaction—or maybe even the small amount of heat given off by it was worth grabbing.
'The search for food must be desperate for Nature to have taken such drastic steps. The Mercurians aren't really vicious beasts, but they have to fight among themselves for survival. Since the hard casing of the body is almost invulnerable, they go for the legs. A crippled Night-Lander is doomed, because he can't reach the Twilight Zone again before his stores of heat are exhausted. So they've learned to throw stones at each other's legs with great accuracy. My space-suit must have puzzled the specimen I met—but it did its best to cripple me. As I soon discovered, it succeeded rather too well.
'We still don't know much about these creatures, despite the efforts that have been made to study them. And I've got a theory I'd like to see investigated. It seems to me that, just as some of the Mercurians have evolved so that they can forage into the cold of the Night Land, there may be another variety that's gone into the burning Day Side. I wonder what they'll be like?'
The Commander stopped talking: I got the impression that he didn't really want to continue. But our waiting silence was too much for him, and he carried on.
'We were walking back slowly to the ship, still arguing about the creature we'd met, when suddenly I realized that something had gone wrong. My feet were getting cold—very cold. The heat was ebbing out of my spacesuit, sucked away by the frozen rocks beneath me.
'I knew at once what had happened. The blow my suit had received had broken the leg heater circuits—and there was nothing that could be done about it until I got back to the ship. And I had four miles still ahead of me…
'I told the others what had happened and we put on all the speed we could. Every time my feet touched the ground I could feel the appalling chill striking deeper. After a while all sensation was lost: that at least was something to be thankful for. My legs were just wooden stumps with no feeling at all, and I was still two miles from the ship when I couldn't move them any more. The joints of the suit were freezing solid…
'After that my companions had to carry me, and I must have lost consciousness for a while. I revived once while we were still some way from the end of that journey, and for a moment I thought I must be delirious. For the land all around me was ablaze with light: brilliant-coloured streamers were flickering across the sky: overhead, waves of crimson fire were marching beneath the stars. In my dazed state, it was some time before I realized what had happened. The Aurora, which is far more brilliant on Mercury than on Earth, had suddenly decided to switch on one of its displays. It was ironic, though at the time I could scarcely appreciate it. For although the land all around me seemed to be burning, I was swiftly freezing to death.
'Well, we made it somehow, though I don't remember ever entering the ship. When I came back to consciousness, we were on the way back to Earth. But my legs were still on Mercury.'
No one said anything for a long time. Then the pilot glanced at his chronometer and exclaimed: 'Wow! I should have made my course check ten minutes ago!' That broke the suspense, and our imaginations came rushing back from Mercury.
For the next few minutes the pilot was busy with the ship's position-finding gear. The first space-navigators only had the stars to guide them, but now there were all sorts of radio and radar aids. One only bothered about the rather tedious astronomical methods when one was a long way from home, out of range of the Earth stations.
I was watching the pilot's fingers flying across the calculator keyboard, envying his effortless skill, when suddenly he froze over his desk. Then, very carefully, he pecked at the keys and set up his calculations again. An answer came up on the register—and I knew that something was horribly wrong. For a moment the pilot stared at his figures as if unable to believe them. Then he loosened himself from the straps holding him to his seat, and moved swiftly over to the nearest observation port.
I was the only one who noticed: the others were now quietly reading in their bunks or trying to snatch some sleep. There was a port only a few feet away from me and I headed for it. Out there in space was the Earth, nearly full—the planet towards which we were slowly falling.
Then an icy hand seemed to grip my chest: for a moment I completely stopped breathing. By this time, I knew, Earth should already be appreciably larger as we dropped in from the orbit of the Hospital. Yet unless my eyes deceived me, it was smaller than when I had last seen it. I looked again at the pilot, and his face confirmed my fears.
We were heading out into space.
Nine
THE SHOT FROM THE MOON
'Commander Doyle,' said the pilot, in a very thin voice. 'Will you come here a minute?'
The Commander stirred in his bunk.
'Confound it—I was nearly asleep!'
'I'm sorry, but—well, there's been an accident. We're—we're in an escape orbit.'
'What!'
The roar woke up everyone else. With a mighty heave the Commander left his bunk and headed for the control desk. There was a rapid conference with the unhappy pilot; then the Commander said: 'Get me the nearest Relay Station. I'm taking over.'
'What's happened?' I whispered to Tim Benton.
'I think I know,' said Tim, 'but wait a minute before we jump to conclusions.'
It was almost a quarter of an hour before anyone bothered to explain things to me—a quarter of an hour of furious activity, radio calls, and lightning calculations. Then Norman Powell, who like me had nothing to do but watch, took pity on my ignorance.
'This ship's got a curse on it,' he said in disgust. 'The pilot's made the one navigation error you'd think was impossible. He should have cut our speed by point nine miles a second. Instead, he applied power in exactly the wrong direction—we've gained speed by that amount. So instead of falling Earthwards, we're heading out into space.'
Even to me, it seemed hard to imagine that anyone could make such an extraordinary mistake. Later, I discovered that it was one of those things—like landing an aircraft with wheels up—that isn't as difficult to do as it sounds. Aboard a spaceship in free orbit, there's no way of telling in what direction and at what speed you're moving. Everything has to be done by instruments and calculations—and if at a certain stage a minus sign is taken for a plus, then it's easy to point the ship in exactly the wrong direction before applying power.
Of course, one is supposed to make other checks to prevent such mistakes. Somehow they hadn't worked this time, or the pilot hadn't applied them. It wasn't until a long time later that we found the full reason. The jammed oxygen valve, not the unhappy pilot, was the real culprit. I'd been the only one who had actually fainted, but the others had all been suffering from oxygen starvation. It's a very dangerous complaint, because you don't realize that there's anything wrong with you. In fact, it's rather like being drunk: you can be making all sorts of stupid mistakes, yet feel that you're right on top of your job.
But it was not much use finding why the accident had happened. The problem now was—what should we do next?
The extra speed we'd been given was just enough to put us into an escape orbit. In other words, we were travelling so fast that the Earth could never pull us back. We were heading out into space, somewhere beyond the orbit of the Moon—we wouldn't know our exact path unti
l we got HAVOC to work it out for us. Commander Doyle had radioed our position and velocity, and now we had to wait for further instructions.
The situation was serious, but not hopeless. We still had a considerable amount of fuel—the reserve intended for the approach to the Inner Station. If we used it now, we could at least prevent ourselves flying away from Earth, but we should then be travelling in a new orbit that might take us nowhere near any of the space-stations. Whatever happened, we had to get fresh fuel from somewhere—and as quickly as possible. The short-range ship in which we were travelling wasn't designed for long excursions into space, and carried only a limited oxygen supply. We had enough for about a hundred hours: if help couldn't reach us by that time, it would be just too bad…
It's a funny thing, but though I was now in real danger for the first time, I didn't feel half as frightened as I did when we were caught by Cuthbert, or when the 'meteor' holed the classroom. Somehow, this seemed different. We had several days' breathing-space—literally!—before the crisis would be upon us. And we all had such confidence in Commander Doyle that we were sure he could get us out of this mess.
Though we couldn't really appreciate it at the time, there was certainly something ironic about the fact that we'd have been quite safe if we'd stuck to the Morning Star and not ultra-cautiously decided to go home on another ship…
We had to wait for nearly fifteen minutes before the computing staff on the Inner Station worked out our new orbit and radioed it back to us. Commander Doyle plotted our path and we all craned over his shoulder to see what course the ship was going to follow.
'We're heading for the Moon,' he said, tracing out the dotted line with his finger. 'We'll pass its orbit in about forty hours, near enough for its gravitational field to have quite an effect. If we like to use some rocket braking, we can let it capture us.'
'Wouldn't that be a good idea? At least it would stop us heading out into space.'
The Commander rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
'I don't know,' he said. 'It depends if there are any ships on the Moon that can come up to us.'
'Can't we land on the Moon ourselves, near one of the settlements?' asked Norman.
'No—we've not enough fuel for the descent. The motors aren't powerful enough, anyway—you ought to know that.'
Norman subsided, and the cabin was filled with a long, thoughtful silence that began to get on my nerves. I wished I could help with some bright ideas, but it wasn't likely they'd be any better than Norman's.
'The trouble is,' said the Commander at last, 'that there are so many factors involved. There are several possible solutions to our problem. What we want to find is the most economical one. It's going to cost a fortune if we have to call up a ship from the moon, just to match our speed and transfer a few tons of fuel. That's the obvious, brute-force answer.'
It was a relief to know that there was an answer. That was really all that I wanted to hear. Someone else would have to worry about the bill.
Suddenly the pilot's face lit up. He had been sunk in gloom until now and hadn't contributed a word to the conversation.
'I've got it!' he said. 'We should have thought of it before! What's wrong with using the launcher down in Hipparchus? That should be able to shoot us up some fuel without any trouble—as far as one can tell from this chart.'
The conversation then grew very animated and very technical, and I was rapidly left behind. Ten minutes later the general gloom in the cabin began to disperse, so I guessed that some satisfactory conclusion had been reached. When the discussion had died away, and all the radio calls had been made, I got Tim into a corner and threatened to keep bothering until he explained exactly what was going on.
'Surely, Roy,' he said, 'you know about the Hipparchus launcher?'
'Isn't it that magnetic thing that shoots fuel tanks up to rockets orbiting the Moon?'
'Of course: it's an electro-magnetic track about five miles long, running east and west across the crater Hipparchus. They chose that spot because it's near the centre of the Moon's disc, and the fuel refineries aren't far away. Ships waiting to be refuelled get into an orbit round the Moon, and at the right time they shoot up the containers into the same orbit. The ship's got to do a bit of manoeuvring by rocket power to "home" on the tank, but it's much cheaper than doing the whole job by rockets.'
'What happens to the empty tanks?'
'That depends on the launching speed. Sometimes they crash back on the Moon—after all, there's plenty of room for them to come down without doing any harm! But usually they're given lunar escape velocity, so they just get lost in space. There's even more room out there…'
'I see—we're going near enough to the Moon for a fuel tank to be shot out to us.'
'Yes: they're doing the calculations now. Our orbit will pass behind the Moon, about five thousand miles above the surface. They'll match our speed as accurately as they can with the launcher, and we'll have to do the rest under our own power: it'll mean using some of our fuel, of course—but the investment will be worth it!'
'And when will all this happen?'
'In about forty hours: we're waiting for the exact figures now.'
I was probably the only one who felt really pleased with the prospect, now that I knew we were reasonably safe. To the others, this was a tedious waste of time—but it was going to give me an opportunity of seeing the Moon at close Quarters. This was certainly far more than I could have dared hope when I left Earth: the Inner Station already seemed a long way behind me…
Hour by hour Earth dwindled and the Moon grew larger in the sky ahead. There was very little to do, apart from routine checks of the instruments and regular radio calls to the various space-stations and the lunar base. Most of the time was spent sleeping and playing cards, but once I was given a chance of speaking to Mom and Pop, way back on Earth. They sounded a bit worried, and for the first time I realized that we were probably making headlines. However, I think I made it clear that I was enjoying myself and there was no real need for any alarm.
All the necessary arrangements had been made, and there was nothing to do but wait until we swept past the Moon and made our appointment with the fuel container. Though I had often watched the Moon through telescopes, both from Earth and from the Inner Station, it was a very different matter to see the great plains and mountains with my own unaided eyes. We were now so close that all the larger craters were easily visible, along the band dividing night from day. The line of sunrise had just passed the centre of the disc, and it was early dawn down there in Hipparchus, where they were preparing for our rescue. I asked permission to borrow the ship's telescope, and peered down into the great crater.
It seemed that I was hanging in space only fifty miles above the Moon. Hipparchus completely filled the field of vision—it was impossible to take it all in at one glance. The sunlight was slanting over the ruined walls of the crater, casting mile-long pools of inky shadow. Here and there upthrust peaks caught the first light of the dawn, and blazed like beacons in the darkness all around them.
And there were other lights in the crater shadows—lights arranged in tiny, geometric patterns. I was looking down on one of the lunar settlements: hidden from me in the darkness were the great chemical plants, the pressurized domes, the space-ports and the power stations that drove the launching track. In a few hours they would be clearly visible as the Sun rose above the mountains—but by then we should have passed behind the Moon and the Earthward side would be hidden from us.
And then I saw it—a thin bar of light stretching in a dead straight line across the darkened plain. I was looking at the floodlights of the launching track, ranged like the lamps along an arterial road. By their illumination, space-suited engineers would be checking the great electromagnets and seeing that the cradle ran freely in its guides. The fuel tank would be waiting at the head of the track, already loaded and ready to be placed on the cradle when the time arrived. If it had been daylight down there, perhaps I could have seen th
e actual launch. There would have been a tiny speck racing along the track, moving more and more swiftly as the generators poured their power into the magnets. It would leave the end of the launcher at a speed of over five thousand miles an hour—too fast for the Moon ever to pull it back. As it travelled almost horizontally, the surface of the Moon would curve away beneath it and it would swoop out into space—to meet us, if all went well, three hours later.
I think the most impressive moment of all my adventures came when the ship passed behind the Moon, and I saw with my own eyes the land that had remained hidden from human sight until the coming of the rocket. It was true that I had seen many films and photographs of the Moon's other side—and it was also true that it was very much the same as the visible face. Yet somehow the thrill remained. I thought of all the astronomers who had spent their lives charting the Moon, and had never seen the land over which I was now passing. What would they have given for the opportunity that had now come to me—and come quite by chance, without any real effort on my part!
I had almost forgotten Earth when Tim Benton drew my attention to it again. It was sinking swiftly towards the lunar horizon: the Moon was rising up to eclipse it as we swept along in our great arc. A blinding blue-green crescent—the South Polar cap—almost too brilliant to look upon, the reflection of the sun forming a pool of fire in the Pacific Ocean—that was my home, now a quarter of a million miles away. I watched it drop behind the cruel lower peaks until only the faint, misty rim was visible: then even this disappeared. The Sun was still with us—but Earth had gone. Until this moment it had always been with us in the sky, part of the background of things. Now I had only Sun, Moon and stars.
The fuel container was already on its way up to meet us. It had been launched an hour ago, and we had been told by radio that it was proceeding on the correct orbit. The Moon's gravitational field would curve its path and we would pass within a few hundred miles of it. Our job then was to match speeds by careful use of our remaining fuel and, when we had coupled our ship up to the tank, pump across its contents. Then we could turn for home and the empty container would coast on out into space, to join the rest of the debris circulating in the Solar System.
The Space Trilogy Page 12