by Rex Gordon
It was decided on the first day that security should be maintained and that since the power of the party was based on the Information Office monopoly of information, no steps should be taken which would compromise that position, or which would bring matters they had control of into the area of random chance of public politics.
XXV
They rode in the back of the armored car, with soldiers with guns in their hands sitting stolidly beside them as they crossed fold after fold of the rolling desert. When something began to emerge out of the haze ahead, they said nothing at first. They could see the others in the line of cars also looking ahead, making out a hillside where there seemed to be some land of habitation, at least a line of army hutments. As they went down into a deeper dip and lost the view, Len turned to Lucinda and watched the frown and the movement of her tongue across her lips. Since their recapture, the close guard under which they were kept in the vehicles had not encouraged conversation.
Since they had been able to make out the buildings of what looked like a township on the hillside, and above it the hazy but indisputable shape of the tilted dish of a radio telescope, Len turned to a soldier.
“What is this place where you’re taking us?”
The soldier looked at him, then looked ahead again. His expression was almost, but not quite, indifferent. Maybe he had been told not to talk to them, or maybe, from the way he looked, they knew too little yet. He was not keen to talk against the noise and jolting of the car. Not the amount of talk that they would need, to tell them.
They would see soon enough, the soldier’s silence said, and as they traveled through a defile, rising and watching the air became clearer, Len found Lucinda’s dark eyes upon him and suddenly meeting his in one long glance.
They came out of the defile, with a track leading them forward to the hills along the level ground of an escarpment, and it was all before them. They had known that there was something there, and that someone, somehow, where the mountains met the desert, must have found a source of water that would allow them to build what was virtually a township. But they had not begun to understand that there was so much of it. It was too much for one view.
There was an incredibly tall, thin, spire-like object away to their right, with its base still out of view in a place where there were also construction buildings, in a valley bottom.
Feeling Lucinda’s touch on his hand, with a sense of the intimacy of the physical contact, Len looked ahead where she looked. She was looking at where their track went, between the valley and the hillside.
“It looks as though they have found a container that will contain us,” she said, just loudly enough for him to hear and understand her.
The building toward which they were indubitably heading if they kept to the track, since it stood alone, had high walls and looked at first like a desert fortress, until Len looked more closely and saw there were considerable grounds inside the walls, surrounding a central glass-and-concrete building, the nature of which it was hard to see at first.
Since there was no one that the walls could be meant to keep out, it seemed they might be meant to keep someone in. Or maybe it was just part of the security. And security and secrecy were what the whole location of the place was meant for, if Len could believe what he was seeing.
“Look at the tall object in the valley.”
The helicopters which had come to them in the desert were overhead. The flight went past them at an angle, heading for the valley, where evidently there was an airfield. Out of the valley, booming up out of the murk and heading away through the foothills in the direction of Davis City, went a heavy army transport plane. It was like a freight line from a desert factory.
“Is it... ? A space rocket, here on Arcon?”
She might well ask that, Len thought, looking at it while he had the chance, while they were still crossing the escarpment toward the isolated fortress-building with the grounds.
There were no space rockets on Arcon. In a way, that was the point of Arcon politics. The public of Arcon had had enough of space, after one great space adventure. The planet might have its problems, as had any world, but under the Blues and Greens, for five centuries, it was Arcon that the people had kept their minds on.
But there was something unmistakable about the tall cylinder, wide at the base and narrowing upward in successive stages, lonely, somehow forceful and erect and emphatic in those surroundings, still under construction, as they could see by movement on the skeleton gantry that stood beside it. It was a matter of trying to guess the scale of it against the foothills.
“A rocket,” Len said. He looked at the soldiers, who held their weapons and looked ahead at the fortress-building.
“A deep-space interstellar rocket. And being built here in an army desert outpost.”
“What are we doing here?” Lucinda said, and Len looked quickly at her.
She was still a dark slim girl in a tom dress, but her eyes were taking in the whole scene, from the radio telescope on the hill, through the white houses on the hillside, the building toward which they were heading, and the valley and the rocket. She had gripped his hand after she had touched it Her mind was moving quickly, seeking the essential points of the situation with which she was confronted. She glanced quickly at the soldiers, guessing how far they could talk in front of them.
Len thought: In the lottery of our twelve, 1 seem to have drawn more than a pretty figure.
Her eyes had narrowed on what they could see of the valley. “You think it is an interstellar rocket?”
“I’m no expert, Lucinda,” Len said dryly. Who was, on Arcon? “It just looks as though there are two chemical blast-off stages. The third stage is tall and long. That would be the atomics for the deep-space ion-beam propulsion. Above that, though we’re too far away to see, should be landing rockets, and the living quarters in the space capsule itself, just below the nose cone.”
Lucinda gave him a look which said he had told her more than she knew, or had expected. They .were sitting close together in the vehicle.
“But this isn’t a starship, big as a city, such as our people came here from Earth in?”
They watched the soldiers, trying to get some confirmation from them. They could not communicate with those in the other vehicles. Len looked again at the rocket as they approached the building that lay ahead, where a gate was open.
“If you look at the nose cone, you can see it can only be a small crew.”
“How many?”
Len was silent, riding in the car.
He found Lucinda’s eyes watching, saying she had not dropped her question. “How do I know?” he said. “Ten. Maybe twenty.”
He would not fool Lucinda by avoiding twelve. It was just a wild idea. They had no need to think it, he told himself insistently. Or was it true that the men in the car with them were grinning, as much as to say, “You don’t know”?
“We might wonder why we have been brought here,”
Lucinda said. She looked again at the almost-completed rocket. “At this stage of the proceedings.”
They had to look back to look at the rocket now. They were approaching the open gate in the walls of the construction that lay ahead.
They almost lost sight of the glass-and-concrete building that lay within the walls. The whole thing was set on a desert shelf, away from the township and the valley. Over the wall, they could still see a tall thin metal tower. Through the gate, they began to see what looked like a training area within the grounds. Just before they reached the gate, Ropotsky stood up in the leading car and pointed back at the rocket, only to disappear again, evidently pulled down by the soldiers who were riding with him. Then their whole column of vehicles drove through the gate, moving more slowly through the entrace where there were sentries standing. It was impossible not to feel that they were not intended to come out of that gate again for a little time.
To Lucinda, Len said, “So this is the place we’ve come to.”
It did not look u
npleasant inside the walls. The glass-and-concrete building might have been a college wing, and beside it, welcoming in the desert, was a glint of water from a pool. The grounds had a drive through them, which their convoy was following toward the building. On each side were skeleton pieces of apparatus that looked like machines. One of them was cylindrical in shape and looked like a section of a mock-up of a rocket. The tower they had seen had wires descending from it, with a platform at the top as though it were intended for jumping in a harness for a duration of three seconds free-fall. Len stared at one piece of apparatus. It was a seat on a long arm, which was intended to rotate about a center.
The leading cars drove up and stopped at the building to discharge their passengers, and then drove off and out of the gate again. Soon they were all standing in a group, looking at the building itself, which had windows that showed them academic classrooms, and from which a man in a colonel’s uniform was emerging to meet them, with a staff behind him. Duncan and Penny stood near Len and Lucinda. Duncan said, “This is a place for space-flight training.”
They stood looking at men in white coats who were walking among the machines, and at the gate which the sentries were closing after the last of the vehicles had gone out again. No one had told them which way to go. If the place was intended for space-flight training, they could see no students in it, except themselves.
“So you are our volunteers,” the colonel said. He had stopped to survey them ten yards from them. “I am told you had already wrecked the plane before you got here. It’s not a good beginning.”
It was a little later, when they were in the building, after they had eaten and washed and he had had them assembled in a classroom, that he gave them what he called his introductory lecture.
“Don’t ask me why you in particular are here. I didn’t choose you. That was in the hands of the Information Office, and it is not for me to say if they made a good job of it. It is sufficient that you are here, and we have to work together.”
From the low dais on which he stood, with a man in a white coat beside him, he looked them over.
“The situation is this. Some time ago, the Information Office told us that they had discovered that the Yellows had begun to take an interest in radio astronomy, and in particular in a star called Vista. It is neither your business nor mine to know the how and why. It is sufficient that radio signals were coming from the vicinity of Vista, which is twenty light-years from Arcon, and the Yellows, our own anti-government party, have tried to communicate with the signals’ senders.
“As you know, we on Arcon are very ignorant of the stellar space around us. Since the Landing, all our energies have been used on Arcon and we have had neither the means nor the incentive to look beyond our own solar system. It was natural that we should assume that, as far as intelligent life went, the space around us was wholly empty.”
The colonel, whose name they had learned was Glasson, surveyed them thoughtfully, in a singularly grim way.
“The situation is different now. For the security of our world, it is essential that we should know something of this Vista planet. We cannot send radio probes, for the signals needed to control them would alert Vista of our intentions, and of our presence if the Yellows have not already done that damage for us. There must therefore be a manned flight, and that is where you come in. What you have been selected for is to be the space crew.”
He watched their reactions to his statement as though wondering if they already knew it. He did not dislike the telling.
But he did not sound as though that was the end, or the worst, of what he had to tell them.
“There are difficulties about that too. Arcon is not a wealthy planet. I presume I had better tell you this. We cannot provide you with a rocket that will reach a very high proportion of the speed of light. You will not get very much shrinkage of the universe or time-dilation such as occurs at C-speeds. Your journey of forty light-years, to and from Vista, where you will orbit the planet when you find it, and photograph its surface, will take forty years of your time. That is why you are evenly divided as to sexes, so that should you not survive the voyage, your children will bring the spaceship back, and the photographs you will have taken of this world.”
It was a moment before it hit them.
Whatever else they had expected on coming into the space school in the desert, it was not what the colonel had just said, that they would spend their lives in the rocket, traveling just near enough to the speed of light for the time difference to compensate for the amount by which they did not achieve that speed.
Len tried to envisage them, old as they would be by then, and near the death-age by Arcon time, arriving at a strange solar system, seeing the planets come up, hearing radio signals, and trying to photograph an alien world. Then, after that, and even supposing they were successful, turning back to Arcon to fly homeward to a world they would never live to reach.
Their questions burst out on the colonel. There was Eliza Teen’s voice rising above the rest. “Do you mean the girls are expected to have children in this rocket?”
For some reason, the colonel on the platform in the classroom looked as though he enjoyed telling them. “I think it will happen,” he said. He looked at the six girls and the six men. “It would be surprising if it didn’t.”
He held up a hand when the girls called out to him, and Salford in particular began to have his say. To find out what was before them, they had to listen to the colonel.
“Understand this,” he said. “You were selected by the Information Office for this work, no doubt for their own good reasons. And you can’t do anything about it. Your rocket will be kept under radio control for as long as they consider it safe to do so. At the space school here you will be working not only for the project but for your own survival. You know the facts now and, from the Information Office, I understand you volunteered for it.”
With that, he stepped down from the platform and left
the classroom, and they were taken to their separate rooms inside the space school, with armed guards to see they went there.
XXVI
From I. O. records:
C. Q. Lankowitz was the first at the table with the view of the cove through the hanging vines when the conference was resumed the following morning. He indicated the mid-morning view of the sunlight over the placid southeastern sea, and complimented the others on the way in which they merged with the background of wealthy vacation people at the hotel, and asked them if they had changed their positions overnight
T. Chinn ordered fruit juice when the waiter came, and said he would not have as much to drink that day as he had had the previous night. P. Vulmany said, “If I remember correctly, we got ourselves into a deadlock. We could not make the space project public, lest the information on which it is based be questioned, or in case we might lose control of it. Yet we have to keep it to save the party.”
C. Q. Lankowitz said that the morale and the strength and enthusiasm of the party must be their overriding consideration. That was what they were there for. It was because the party needed it that he had accepted General Koln’s gambit, when the General had come, as he thought, to force him into it. That had been despite the fact that he knew he was embarking on a dangerous course. He instanced once again G. Berkeley, typical of the good men in the party, whom he had had reason to believe might have become dissatisfied with the present leadership, and might even have led a move to challenge it, but whose whole attitude had been changed since then.
P. Vulmany said that he agreed that anything presenting a challenge to the present leadership was indeed the most serious matter of all that they had to deal with.
T. Chinn remarked that in that case they had to sustain a space-shot when it was impossible to sustain a space-shot, and it seemed to him that it would take considerable experience to do this.
C. Q. Lankowitz said that it was not a space-shot, but a space project that they had to sustain, both to satisfy the party, avoid any possible thr
eat to the leadership, and maintain their relationship with the army. He had naturally given the matter a little thought before he came to them.
The advantage of security had always seemed to him important. When dealing with classified material this was particularly so. Various design teams were working on the rocket. He had thought it better that they should be kept out of touch with one another. It was also better if the pm-chasing of prefabricated items and systems from industrial firms was handled by the Information Office. It would be better if the construction teams were insulated from one another, and also from the design teams.
P. Vulmany asked what that meant.
C. Q. Lankowitz said that a certain scaling down of items of the project might take place at certain stages, and this would be facilitated if the overall plans for the rocket were handled exclusively by his office. For instance, the requirements for an atomic drive motor for a deep-space project were exceptionally severe. If these were scaled down, the item would be far less bulky, which in turn could mean a considerable reduction in the lift-off stages. A project would then become feasible both without too much disruption of Arcon industry and within the limitations of secrecy.
T. Chinn said he was not too sure what that meant, but he felt he would have to reserve his position on it, and think a little.
P. Vulmany said it would be unfortunate if things were like that. He had always cherished certain ideals throughout his life. He did not think he was a very sentimental person.
C. Q. Lankowitz said no one felt that more than he did, but they had to be realistic. The army could be told, for example, that the rocket would take two generations to get there and back. And it was more convenient that way. For if it took a longer period for the journey than the number of light-years involved, then, if as a consequence of the alterations the rocket did not come back at all, there was a chance it would be forgotten. Or it could be said to have fallen to the enemy, which would give them the excuse for another space project someday, which would be good for the Yellow Party, which was their main objective.