Whatever had happened was bound to be bad. There are certain scenarios in which no mistake is a trivial one, and the first test Jump had to be a dictionary definition of that. Corbin began checking the readings, noticing via the slightly distorted peripheral vision afforded by his wrap-helmet that his two companions were doing the same.
The die had been cast, now they had to see what number had come up.
Life-support systems were green. Power systems were green. The computer link to the displacement engines blinked alternately amber and red. He hit the reset switch, but the lights failed to go cool. Not good. The Jump engines weren’t taking calls.
All the other systems were green. How bad could it be?
He remembered, incongruously, how annoyed Dainbridge had always been at the use of the word “Jump” by the media and many of the team personnel. He had preferred “displacement.” Actually, there had been a lot of argument over a word that would work best to help popularize the process while remaining accurate to the science involved. No one had really been able to suggest one, and so Jump it had stayed.
Corbin stared at the readouts before him. How bad could it be? Real bad. They were a long, long way from home. No man had ever been farther. Don’t like ‘Jump’? I’ve got a word for it, he thought grimly. The perfect.
Suicide.
* * *
He had never set foot on a planet in his whole life, and he sure didn’t want to. His mother and father had been quite clear in their reasons for choosing to be among the first wave of immigrants to the tube-worlds that floated serenely at the LaGrange points between Luna and the Earth. The home-world that Dan had never walked was polluted, overcrowded, and generally bereft of any sort of opportunity. You couldn’t even go outside without risking UV burn, unless you slathered your skin with sun block. Dan had seen holoproj documentaries—the crime-ridden cities, the underdeveloped countries full of disease and war . . . no thank you. He might be only nine, but he already knew he never wanted to take the long slide down to the purgatory at the bottom of that gravity well. He would weigh twice as much on the planet, and that was a pretty bad feeling. Once in edcom they had made everybody strap on weights to see what it felt like to be a dirtwalker. Dan couldn’t believe how hard it had been to do anything—to sit up, walk, even eat: it took everything you had.
Nakawashi Station was a much better place to live. The name meant “inside the eagle,” and Dan knew that an eagle was a big bird native to Terra, bigger than any that flew free on the station. That was a neat thought, to be flying up above it all. A rotating cylinder approximately five klicks on its long axis, the station sustained its population of thirty-five hundred perfectly. It was a clean, compact, and small town. You could play in the open parks and streets of the main level with a comfort and security not known on Earth in over a hundred years. And one other thing about life on the station that pleased his parents particularly: it was nearly impossible to get lost here.
On a planet, how could you ever expect to find your way around?
* * *
“All right,” Baedecker said, holding the hard copy in one gloved hand. “Here’s the bottom line. The good news is, we made it. That big bright star seven degrees off starboard is Proxima Centauri. We’re less than one-point-five AUs from it. So the Dainbridge Displacement Drive works, and we’re the living proof.”
“For how long?” Tyne muttered.
Corbin stared at the other two crewmen. Baedecker was from Earth, a big, powerful man who probably outweighed Corbin by forty kilos. The Commander had thick shoulders and arms, and although he wore his black hair buzzed tight in a spacer’s cut like the rest of them, he had body hair all over him that was almost like fur. He was physically a throwback to some earlier time, but mentally he was strictly a rules man. Tyne liked to joke that Baedecker couldn’t go to the toilet without taking a copy of the Space Regs with him to tell him how to do it properly.
Tyne was more like Corbin in build, since he had also been born on a tube-world, but where Corbin was fair, with light brown hair and pale skin, Tyne was dark, with kinky hair and a complexion that was somewhere between cafe au lait and strong tea. Baedecker was a hot pilot in anything that could fly; Tyne was the copilot, but his real talent was that he could run and repair almost any machine he touched. Corbin’s primary responsibility was as navigator and com officer.
Baedecker ignored Tyne’s muttering. “We’ve covered over four light years in a little less than four minutes. The bad news is that the displacement generators are nonfunctional. I’ve no idea why, and neither, it seems, does the computer.”
There was a long silence in the wake of this. Corbin felt a fluttering in his stomach that had nothing to do with freefall. They had all known what the dangers of this test mission were when they volunteered; still, to face the reality of dying so far from home-it wasn’t easy. He looked at Tyne. “Can you fix it?”
Tyne shook his head. “I ran all the tests. It’s not a machine as much as it is some kind of metaphysical gobbledygook. I don’t know where to begin.”
“So,” Corbin said finally, “the operation was a success, but the patients die—is that it?”
“Not necessarily,” Baedecker replied. “Because there’s also some news that might be good or bad, but in any case it’s extremely interesting. We’ve known for decades—ever since the Belt telescopes became operational—that Proxima has a planetary system similar to our own, with at least one planet theoretically capable of supporting life.
“Well, the displacement drives may be down, but the ion subdrives and our Em-rockets are still operational. And we’re within four days of that planet.”
It took a moment for Corbin to understand what Baedecker was suggesting. When he did, it took him a moment longer to believe it. “You’re suggesting we make planetfall?”
Tyne began to shake his head. “Oh, man,” he said quietly, over and over. He moved to one of the viewplates. He touched a control, cleared the plate, and stared through it. Corbin followed his gaze; sure enough, there was the planet in question, a steady point of reflected light barely visible against the harsh glare of Proxima.
“Absolutely,” Baedecker was saying in response. “Mass interferometer and spectroscopy readings indicate a world very close in size and atmosphere mix to Earth. There’re no readings that indicate civilized energy output, so we must assume it’s a primitive world. If there’s life, it’s animal or pre-tech intelligence. Still, we might be able to survive there, and that’s our primary duty.”
Corbin stared at Baedecker in disbelief. He had always thought the man cold and emotionless, a real by-the-book rocket jockey. He hadn’t realized how right that estimate was. Here he was talking about landing on an alien planet as if it would be a holiday picnic in a theme park. And babbling about duty as well.
“Maybe we could,” Corbin said slowly, “assuming we don’t catch something fatal or get caught by something big and hungry. But even so, what’s the bloody point? Are you seriously suggesting we become castaways?”
Baedecker looked at him levelly for a long moment. “Is there an alternative? Our air will give out in a week, two if we do emergency coldpross. We will certainly die inside the ship in a maximum of another sixteen days. We have to send back our ship data as best we can, but we can also add to humanity’s knowledge of this planet.”
“Yeah,” Tyne said, “maybe they’ll even name it after us. Fools’ World.”
Corbin shook his head. “This is not an atmosphere ship. How are you going to get it down? It has the aerodynamics of a brick!”
“Better to attempt the unlikely than the impossible,” Baedecker replied. “Unless you know of a way to eat space dust and breathe vacuum, the only chance we have is on PC-Prime.”
Corbin stared at the viewplate. Choke to death slowly, or burn up during atmospheric entry, or crash-land the ship. Great choices.
*
* *
Most of the station was as familiar to Dan as his own cube; he had been all over with his friends. Almost all over. There were restricted areas, of course: the fusion plant, the smelters, and the waste recyke-and-dispose section. Children weren’t allowed to roam around in the restricted sections.
Except . . .
Except there was a way to sneak into the waste section. Two of his friends, Skinny Bill and Tooey Champion had done it. A circ vent went from Level One all the way down to Level Five, where waste was, and it was just big enough so somebody about nine could use it.
“Oh yeah,” Tooey said, as he and Dan sat near the main fountain on One, watching the water arc up and fall back. “It is too mean, you know? There’s these big, big titanium tanks full of goop, and huge shunt pipes that gurgle like boogs in the night. And there’s drones running back and forth like entcom police dragoons, watching for leaks and stuff. Mean, mean, mean!”
Dan grinned. “I gotta see it. When you wanna go?”
“Aw, I’m stuck doing base ed makeup until day after tomorrow. My father’ll scream if I don’t get it done. I can show you where the vent is, but you’d be afraid to go by yourself.”
“Earth I will! I’m not afraid!” “Bet you are.”
“Bet I’m not! Show me the vent.”
Tooey grinned. “I’ll show you, but you’d better wait for me. You can get lost down there.”
Dan laughed. “Lost? C’mon!”
“I heard that it happened to a guy once. First-term guy named Teek Chin. Right after the station was finished and everybody moved in. Teek went down and never came back. They never found him.”
Dan’s laugh was as loud as before, but a little forced.
“You’re making that up.”
“I swear on my spit. His ghost is supposed to still be down there.”
“Well, I’m not afraid. I’m going.”
“When?”
“As soon as you show me the vent.”
“You’ll need a light.”
Dan pulled a small induction lamp -from his tunic pocket and waved it at Tooey. As long as he was inside the station” the lamp would draw power from the ‘casters.
“Show me the vent,” he said.
* * *
The automatic broadcasts from the Argo I had been going on a tight-beam back toward the Solar System all along, telemetry and cabin recordings and other basic black-box info, but each of the three crewmen kept a personal log whose broadcasts were optional. Corbin hadn’t intended to send any of his back, but he had relatives who would want to know more than the official dry stats, should he die. And since it seemed that his death was approaching fairly rapidly, one way or another, he decided it was time to speak to it.
“Hi, Mom and Dad and Susita, this is Dan, calling from that pinpoint of light to your left to say hello and maybe goodbye. Seems that this seventy-billion-stad experimental toy is broke. It’s a long walk home, so we’re going to try to land on PC-Prime and do a little camping. Drop by next time you’re in the neighborhood . . . “
Corbin faltered, and the personally coded VA recorder shut off and waited for him to speak again. He was trying to make it easy on them, show them he was in good spirits despite the problem, but he didn’t feel like being light and funny. If he sent the message off now it would be four years before it would get home. Four years. By then, he could be nothing more than radioactive dust settling through the air of an alien world; or, if Baedecker somehow managed to miraculously put the ship down in one piece, probably dry bones bleaching under an alien sun.
He started again, speaking quietly so that the other two men wouldn’t hear him. “Look, things are bad and by the time you get this, I’ll probably have been dead for years. It’s okay. I wanted to come, wanted to be the navigator on the first ship to break light speed, wanted to be the one who would bring it home. I think you know why. I knew it was a risk. It’s been too many years since I had the nerve to try Level Five, and win or lose, I’m glad I came. I love you all. Remember that I did my best.”
“Dan?”
Corbin turned. Tyne was floating there. He had removed his suit and wore only his thin, pale-yellow synsilk coveralls.
“Hey, Leon. You’re out of uniform.”
“So what’s Baedecker going to do? Put me in space jail?” He smiled. “We get the Argo down in one piece and we are going to have to start breathing the local fluid sooner or later. If we don’t . . .” He shrugged.
Corbin untabbed his own wrap-helmet, pulled it off, and reached up to scratch his nose. “Ahh. Yeah, I guess you’re right. Anything more on starting the Jump engines?”
“I got it narrowed down some. The diagnostics say all the links are fine, but the slavecomp down there doesn’t want to talk to the mainframe. The slave is alive, it’s putting out tac and sensor data, I can get to the auxiliary storage disk, but that’s it. I can’t tell if the problem is in the slave or the engines. Doesn’t make much difference.”
“So much for triple backups. Could we maybe go down there and do an eyeball?”
“Sure, if you want your eyeballs fried.”
Corbin knew that the radiation danger was high inside the Jump engines. “Maybe we could draw straws? If we could fix it, might be two of us could get home.”
“Nice thought, but the slave is smack in the middle of the hi-rad cross-channel. Without a class-four radiation suit a man would last, oh, maybe forty-five seconds. It’d take that long to remove the inspection plate. We need a drone. I tried to tell them, but they didn’t want to spring for the extra mass.”
“Well, now you can say ‘I told you so.’ “
“That’s not exactly what I had in mind telling them.”
Corbin laughed. Tyne smiled back at him.
“Uh-oh,” Baedecker said.
Corbin and Tyne swiveled to look at where the Commander sat watching his comp screens.
“ ‘Uh-oh?’ “ Corbin said. “I don’t like the sound of that. “
“Check your screens,” Baedecker said. His voice was tight. “Doppler Two.”
Corbin swiveled his chair and punched up the appropriate channel. Tyne watched over his shoulder, holding onto the back of the chair with one hand to keep from floating away.
They were still a day away form making even a high planetary orbit, but the globe loomed large, filling the viewplates and the ship’s bioelectronic sensors. They could see cloud weather, pick up ionization bands and magnetic fields, tell within a hundred meters the depth of the three main oceans. They had already determined that the atmosphere at sea level was mostly nitrogen/oxygen, with about sixteen percent O2, so if they got that far they could breathe it, though it would be a bit thin. CO2 was at a level consistent with fairly extensive plant growth, and there were some forest like green patches. There was enough methane to postulate animal life.
But for Baedecker to say what he’d said meant something new had been added to the scenario.
When the doppler channel came on-line, Corbin saw what it was. Dop II was tied into the heat scan infrared viewer.
“Holy shit!” Tyne said.
Corbin punched in the computer augs and asked for an enhanced pix with peripherals. What he saw stunned him.
There were four continents on PC-Prime: Two of them were polar, both irregular pancakes, slightly larger at the north pole than the south; the third continent was a sprawling, almost diamond-shaped giant that straddled the equator and was fully half of all the land mass on the world, and possessed of a lot of mountains. The fourth continent was a mostly flat, squarish island probably close to the size of Australia. They’d taken to calling it “Square Land.” The planet’s rotation had brought this last continent around so that it now faced the approaching crippled ship.
Square Land was on fire.
The computer-generated pix ran a number crawl up the side
s, along with sliding graphs to show temp scales, and there were large fluctuations across the land, but the average temperature was over 300º C. The whole damned continent was burning! Already the smoke from it was blotting out the sight of the fire, and threatening to cloud over the entire eastern hemisphere.
It was hot enough down there to melt lead.
Tyne shoved himself through the cabin toward his own control panel and began operating his comp console.
“What the hell could do that?” Corbin whispered. “Split screen to Record I,” Tyne said.
Corbin dialed the screen to split and tapped in the command for the recording channel. The picture showed the same continent, but looking the way it had last time Corbin had seen it.
“That’s last revolution,” Tyne said, answering the question before anybody could ask it. “Check the clock. “
“Jesus,” Corbin said. Between the time the planet had taken the square continent around the other side and brought it back, something had set the whole thing aflame. No natural phenomenon Corbin had ever heard of was that violent. And anyway, the landmass didn’t show any signs of previous volcanic activity; that was all on Big Diamond. Hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land didn’t just spontaneously combust! And would a natural fire be able to burn that hot with the oxy that low?
On a hunch, Corbin flipped into his com board and scanned the radio bands. What he heard confirmed his suspicions.
“Listen up,” he said. “Opchan is catching wiggles from right on top of us.”
Tyne shook his head. Opchan—operations channel—was alive with old signals, of course; radio beams from the Solar System that had left the region for years past, but these were different. He looked at the readouts. “Jesus and Buddha, they’re bleeding all over five different bands.” He turned up the gain. “Listen to that!”
The Jupiter War Page 24