The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 1 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  Before Rev could override the automatics, the motors had flamed for almost half a minute. The fuel he had de­pended upon to slow the ship so that it would drop, re-enter the atmosphere and be reclaimed by Earth was al­most gone. His efforts to counteract the excess speed re­sulted only in an approximation of the original orbit.

  The fact was this: Rev was up there. He would stay there until someone came and got him.

  And there was no way to get there.

  The Committee took that as an admission of guilt and incompetence; they tried to lever themselves free with it, but General Finch was not to be intimidated. A manned ship had been sent up because no mechanical or electronic computer could contain the vast possibilities for decision and action built into a human being.

  The original computer was still the best all-purpose computer.

  There had been only one ship built, true. But there was good reason for that, a completely practical reason-money.

  Leaders are, by definition, ahead of the people. But this wasn’t a field in which they could show the way and wait for the people to follow. This was no expedition in ancient ships, no light exploring party, no pilot-plant operation. Like a parachute jump, it had to be successful the first time.”

  This was an enterprise into new, expensive fields. It de­manded money (billions of dollars), brains (the best avail­able), and the hard, dedicated labor of men (thousands of them).

  General Finch became a national hero that afternoon. He said, in bold words, “With the limited funds you gave us, we have done what we set out to do. We have demon­strated that space flight is possible, that a space platform is feasible.

  “If there is any inefficiency, if there is any blame for what has happened, it lies at the door of those who lacked confidence in the courage and ability of their countrymen to fight free of Earth to the greatest glory. Senator, how did you vote on that?”

  But I am not writing a history. The shelves are full of them. I will touch on the international repercussions only enough to show that the event was no more a respecter of national boundaries than was Rev’s orbiting ship.

  The orbit was almost perpendicular to the equator. The ship traveled as far north as Nome, as far south as Little America on the Antarctic Continent. It completed one giant circle every two hours. Meanwhile, the Earth rotated beneath. If the ship had been equipped with adequate optical instruments, Rev could have observed every spot on Earth within twenty-four hours. He could have seen fleets and their dispositions, aircraft carriers and the planes taking off their decks, troop maneuvers.

  In the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Rus­sian ambassador protested this unwarranted and illegal violation of its national boundaries. He hinted darkly that it would not be allowed to continue. The U.S.S.R. had not been caught unprepared, he said. If the violation went on—”every few hours!”—drastic steps would be taken.

  World opinion reared up in indignation. The U.S.S.R. immediately retreated and pretended, as only it could, that its belligerence had been an unwarranted inference and that it had never said anything of the sort, anyway.

  This was not a military observer above our heads. It was a man who would soon be dead unless help reached him.

  A world offered what it had. Even the U.S.S.R. an­nounced that it was outfitting a rescue ship, since its space program was already on the verge of success. And the American public responded with more than a billion dollars within a week. Congress appropriated another billion. Thousands of men and women volunteered.

  The race began.

  Would the rescue party reach the ship in time? The world prayed.

  And it listened daily to the voice of a man it hoped to buy back from death.

  The problem shaped up like this:

  The trip had been planned to last for only a few days. By careful rationing, the food and water might be stretched out for more than a month, but the oxygen, by cutting down activity to conserve it, couldn’t possibly last more than thirty days. That was the absolute outside limit.

  I remember reading the carefully detailed calculations in the paper and studying them for some hopeful error. There was-none.

  Within a few hours, the discarded first stage of the ship had been located floating in the Atlantic Ocean. It was towed back to Cocoa, Florida. Almost a week was needed to find and return, to the Proving Grounds the second stage, which had landed 906 miles away.

  Both sections were practically undamaged; their fall had been cushioned by ribbon parachute. They could be cleaned, repaired and used again. The trouble was the vital third stage—the nose section. A new one had to be designed and built within a month.

  Space-madness became a new form of hysteria. We read statistics, we memorized insignificant details, we studied diagrams, we learned the risks and the dangers and how they would be met and conquered. It all became part of us. We watched the slow progress of the second ship and silently, tautly, urged it upward.

  The schedule overhead became part of everyone’s daily life. Work stopped while people rushed to windows or outside or to their television sets, hoping for a glimpse, a glint from the high, swift ship, so near, so untouchably far.

  And we listened to the voice from the cave of night:

  “I’ve been staring out the portholes. I never tire of that. Through the one on the right, I see what looks like a black velvet curtain with a strong light behind it. There are pinpoint holes in the curtain and the light shines through, not winking the way stars do, but steady. There’s no air up here. That’s the reason. The mind can under­stand and still misinterpret.

  “My air is holding out better than I expected. By my figures, it should last twenty-seven days more. I shouldn’t use so much of it talking all the time, but it’s hard to stop. Talking, I feel as if I’m still in touch with Earth, still one of you, even if I am way up here.

  “Through the left-hand window is San Francisco Bay, looking like a dark, wandering arm extended by the ocean octopus. The city itself looks like a heap of diamonds with trails scattered from it. It glitters up cheerfully, an old friend. It misses me, it says. Hurry home, it says. It’s gone now, out of sight. Good-bye, Frisco!

  “Do you hear me down there? Sometimes I wonder. You can’t see me now. I’m in the Earth’s shadow. You’ll have to wait hours for the dawn. I’ll have mine in a few minutes.

  “You’re all busy down there. I know that. If I know you, you’re all worrying about me, working to get me down, forgetting everything else. You don’t know what a feeling that is. I hope to Heaven you never have to, wonderful though it is.

  “Too bad the receiver was broken, but if it had to be one or the other, I’m glad it was the transmitter that came through. There’s only one of me. There are billions of you to talk to.

  “I wish there were some way I could be sure you were hearing me. Just that one thing might keep me from going crazy.”

  Rev, you were one in millions. We read all about your selection, your training. You were our representative, picked with our greatest skill.

  Out of a thousand who passed the initial rigid require­ments for education, physical and emotional condition and age, only five could qualify for space. They couldn’t be too tall, too stout, too young, too old. Medical and psychiatric tests weeded them out.

  One of the training machines—Lord, how we studied this—reproduces the acceleration strains of a blasting rocket. Another trains men for maneuvering in the weight­lessnes -of space. A third duplicates the cramped, sealed conditions of a spaceship cabin. Out of the final five, you were the only one who qualified.

  No, Rev, if any of us could stay sane, it was you.

  There were thousands of suggestions, almost all of them useless. Psychologists suggested self-hypnotism; cultists suggested yoga. One man sent in a detailed sketch of a giant electromagnet with which Rev’s ship could be drawn back to Earth.

  General Finch had the only practical idea. He outlined a plan for letting Rev know that we were listening. He picked out K
ansas City and set the time. “Midnight,” he said. “On the dot. Not a minute earlier or later. At that moment, he’ll be right overhead.”

  And at midnight, every light in the city went out and came back on and went out and came back on again.

  For a few awful moments, we wondered if the man up there in the cave of night had seen. Then came the voice we knew now so well that it seemed it had always been with us, a part of us, our dreams and our waking.

  The voice was husky with emotion:

  “Thanks… Thanks for listening. Thanks, Kansas City. I saw you winking at me. I’m not alone. I know that now. I’ll never forget. Thanks.”

  And silence then as the ship fell below the horizon. We pictured it to ourselves sometimes, continually circling the Earth, its trajectory exactly matching the curvature of the globe beneath it. We wondered if it would ever stop.

  Like the Moon, would it be a satellite of the Earth for­ever?

  We went through our daily chores like automatons while we watched the third stage of the rocket take shape. We raced against a dwindling air supply, and death raced to catch a ship moving at 15,800 miles per hour.

  We watched the ship grow. On our television screens, we saw the construction of the cellular fuel tanks, the; rocket motors, and the fantastic multitude of pumps, valves, gauges, switches, circuits, transistors, and tubes.

  The personnel space was built to carry five men instead of one man. We watched it develop, a Spartan simplicity in the middle of the great complex, and it was as if we our­selves would live there, would watch those dials and instru­ments, would grip those chair-arm controls for the infin­itesimal sign that the automatic pilot had faltered, would feel the soft flesh and the softer internal organs being wrenched away from the unyielding bone, and would hurtle upward into the cave of night.

  We watched the plating wrap itself protectively around the vitals of the nose section. The wings were attached; they would make the ship a huge, metal glider in its un-powered descent to Earth after the job was done.

  We met the men who would man the ship. We grew to know them as we watched them train, saw them fighting artificial gravities, testing spacesuits in simulated vacuums, practicing maneuvers in the weightless condition of free fall.

  That was what we lived for.

  And we listened to the voice that came to us out of the night:

  “Twenty-one days. Three weeks. Seems like more. Feel a little sluggish, but there’s no room for exercise in a coffin. The concentrated foods I’ve been eating are fine, but not for a steady diet. Oh, what I’d give for a piece of home-baked apple pie!

  “The weightlessness got me at first. Felt I was sitting on a ball that was spinning in all directions at once. Lost my breakfast a couple of times before I learned to stare at one thing. As long as you don’t let your eyes roam, you’re okay.

  “There’s Lake Michigan! My God, but it’s blue today! Dazzles the eyes! There’s Milwaukee, and how are the Braves doing? It must be a hot day in Chicago. It’s a little muggy up here, too. The water absorbers must be over-loaded.

  “The air smells funny, but I’m not surprised. I must smell funny, too, after twenty-one days without a bath. Wish I could have one. There are an awful lot of things I used to take for granted and suddenly want more than—

  “Forget that, will you? Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I know you’re working to get me down. If you don’t suc­ceed, that’s okay with me. My life wouldn’t just be wasted. I’ve done what I’ve always wanted to do. I’d do it again.

  “Too bad, though, that we only had the money for one ship.”

  And again: “An hour ago, I saw the Sun rise over Russia. It looks like any other land from here, green where it should be green, farther north a sort of mud color, and then white where the snow is still deep.

  “Up here, you wonder why we’re so different when the land is the same. You think: we’re all children of the same mother planet. Who says we’re different?

  “Think I’m crazy? Maybe you’re right. It doesn’t matter much what I say as long as I say something. This is one time I won’t be interrupted. Did any man ever have such an audience?”

  No, Rev. Never.

  The voice from above, historical now, preserved:

  “I guess the gadgets are all right. You slide-rule mechan­ics! You test-tube artists! You finding what you want? Get­ting the dope on cosmic rays, meteoric dust, those islands you could never map, the cloud formations, wind move­ments, all the weather data? Hope the telemetering gauges are working. They’re more important than my voice.”

  I don’t think so, Rev. But we got the data. We built some of it into the new ships. Ships, not ship, for we didn’t stop with one. Before we were finished, we had two complete three-stages and a dozen nose sections.

  The voice: “Air’s bad tonight. Can’t seem to get a full breath. Sticks in the lungs. Doesn’t matter, though. I wish you could all see what I have seen, the vast-spreading uni-verse around Earth, like a bride in a soft veil. You’d know, then, that we belong out here.”

  We know, Rev. You led us out. You showed us the way.

  We listened and we watched. It seems to me now that we held our breath for thirty days.

  At last we watched the fuel pumping into the ship-nitric acid and hydrazine. A month ago, we did not know their names; now we recognize them as the very substances of life itself. It flowed through the long special hoses, dan­gerous, cautiously grounded, over half a million dollars’ worth of rocket fuel.

  Statisticians estimate that more than a hundred million Americans were watching their television sets that day. Watching and praying.

  Suddenly the view switched to the ship fleeing south above us. The technicians were expert now. The telescopes picked it up instantly, the focus perfect the first time, and tracked it across the sky until it dropped beyond the hori­zon. It looked no different now than when we had seen it first.

  But the voice that came from our speakers was different. It was weak. It coughed frequently and paused for breath.

  “Air very bad. Better hurry. Can’t last much longer… Silly!… Of course you’ll hurry.

  “Don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me… I’ve been living fast… Thirty days? I’ve seen 360 sunrises, 360 sunsets… I’ve seen what no man has ever seen before… I was the first. That’s something… worth dying for…

  “I’ve seen the stars, clear and undiminished. They look cold, but there’s warmth to them and life. They have fam­ilies of planets like our own sun, some of them… They must. God wouldn’t put them there for no purpose… They can be homes to our future generations. Or, if they have inhabitants, we can trade with them: goods, ideas, the love of creation…

  “But—more than this—I have seen the Earth. I have seen it—as no man has ever seen it—turning below me like a fantastic ball, the seas like blue glass in the Sun… or lashed into gray storm-peaks… and the land green with life… the cities of the world in the night, sparkling… and the people…

  “I have seen the Earth—there where I have lived and loved… I have known it better than any man and loved it better and known its children better… It has been good…

  “Good-bye… I have a better tomb than the greatest conqueror Earth ever bore… Do not disturb…”

  We wept. How could we help it?

  Rescue was so close and we could not hurry it. We watched impotently. The crew were hoisted far up into the nose section of the three-stage rocket. It stood as tall as a 24-story building. Hurry! we urged. But they could not hurry. The interception of a swiftly moving target is precision business. The takeoff was all calculated and im­pressed on the metal and glass and free electrons of an electronic computer.

  The ship was tightened down methodically. The spec­tators scurried back from the base of the ship. We waited. The ship waited. Tall and slim as it was, it seemed to crouch. Someone counted off the seconds to a breathless world: ten—nine—eight… five, four, three… one—fire!

  The
re was no flame, and then we saw it spurting into the air from the exhaust tunnel several hundred feet away. The ship balanced, unmoving, on a squat column of in­candescence; the column stretched itself, grew tall; the huge ship picked up speed and dwindled into a point of brightness.

  The telescopic lenses found it, lost it, found it again. It arched over on its side and thrust itself seaward. At the end of 84 seconds, the rear jets faltered, and our hearts faltered with them. Then we saw that the first stage had been dropped. The rest of the ship moved off on a new fiery trail. A ring-shaped ribbon parachute blossomed out of the third stage and slowed it rapidly.

  The second stage dropped away 124 seconds later. The nose section, with its human cargo, its rescue equipment, went on alone. At 63 miles altitude, the flaring exhaust cut out. The third stage would coast up the gravitational hill more than a thousand miles.