The Yellow Fraction

by Rex Gordon

  The vibration was very bad. We will blow up, Len thought. He noticed he was thinking, in a kind of angry, despairing way. If we don’t blow up, he thought distinctly, then we will shake ourselves to pieces. He thought of Lucinda, down in her lonely cabin berth. Down there, she was supposed to keep her eye on crew’s morale at all times, but just then no one could keep an eye on anything.

  Acceleration became worse, in a sequence they had been trained for at the space school. Before black-out it was almost impossible not to give way to panic as a giant hand pressed downward. He fixed his gaze on the clock as long as he could. It was vibrating too, and he wondered if it would come out of its socket, just before he went into black-out.

  Coming out again, his sensation was a tumbling fall. The sensation of falling was another cause for panic.

  A bang. His mind, which was trying to work again, told him that that was the first stage departing. His feelings, which had been operating first, told him a different story. He guessed that when you came alive to a sensation of free-fall, and there was a bang, the nervous system transmitted the message that you had hit something.

  Noise again and harder, faster vibration. That would be the second stage firing, with a smaller load. Where were they now? One thing he was sure of, and that was that they were rapidly heading for black-out a second time.

  Somewhere in the upper atmosphere.

  Presumably.

  Was it not time the cover came off the dome? There was the sensation of free-fall again now. Over the phone, quite distinctly, came Penny’s voice. “My light’s gone out.”

  That was because they were existing in a creaking, pinging silence. To Len, it sounded as though the ship were breaking up. Then he realized that, with all the phone microphones that were connected to his ear, he was picking up every creak and ping throughout the ship. It was as well, for one of the two lights in their dome had gone out as well, and he personally felt a sudden lack of confidence in the Arcon engineers.

  “We are in space,” he announced.

  “How do you know?” Salford said in a low voice beside him. It was almost dark.

  “Because we are still alive,” Susan said, “by logic.”

  There was a phut or thud, and a tearing sound, and the cover came off the dome and proved it. Relief was blinding.

  All around them, through the facets of the glass, they saw the stars. Len stared at it, unbelieving.

  “In glorious color,” said Salford dryly. His voice was awed.

  It was true. Somehow, Len had thought that space would be black and white, white points of stars against a black background. Instead, as well as the colors of the stars, there were wisps and banks of ultraviolet A gas-cloud, faint and far away, threaded through the star bank, half concealing some stars and revealing others, which gave the scene perspective.

  Us, we, in space?

  Len had a moment of wonder. Where was Arcon? Away beneath them. And the suns were to the left, below, so that sun-rays cut the dome. Actuality.

  “Announce we made it.” Duncan’s voice was triumphant

  Triumph too soon? Why the awe and thought of warning? Len announced, just factually, “Your captain says we made it.”

  “Len.” It was Lucinda’s voice.

  Why was it there, in a tone of voice, the something that was expected?

  Because space, the starry scene that surrounded the dome, was perfect? What Arcon did was never perfect.

  “What is it, dear?”

  “Almost everyone’s lights are out. Things are not too good down here.” There were things unsaid in that tone.

  Trouble. The blast-off vibration had been too much. It reflected on the standards to which someone had built the rocket.

  “Duncan.” Len switched off his microphone and used a low tone. “The crew’s lights are out and there are other troubles. Lucinda is doubtful of things below decks.”

  Duncan, sitting up on his blast-off couch, was releasing his straps and looking out at the starry heavens. They were there, weren’t they? In space. He looked at Len, looking for what was unsaid in Len’s voice.

  They had begun to feel a light, very light, thrust of acceleration gravity, which should go on increasing.

  Sorensen, in Len’s ear, reported that the atomic motors had started. Doubtfully, he mentioned the machine-deck instruments. They should feel the major thrust of the ion-beam.

  Duncan looked at his instruments silently. They were now under ground control from the radio telescope, and their sensation of personal weight should rise soon, as acceleration increased, to something like three-fifths of normal gravity. It did not happen.

  Instead of telling Sorensen or Ropotsky to break out the electrical spares and repair the lights. Duncan said, “Tell the machine-deck crew to examine everything they can to see how it is functioning, then to come up here and report to me. Tell the girls, if they can find their way, to come up here for a little while.” It was an order. -

  Susan was asking Len to use his navigational instruments to take sights on Arcon, Arcon’s suns, and fixed stars, so that she could compute their velocity and course at takeoff. Len relayed Duncan’s message first. The pilots had retro-mirrors that came into action now that the casing was off the space vehicle, and by using them, as they would in theory when making a landing on a planet, they could obtain a full view of Arcon. Salford had suddenly gone silent and was staring with great concentration at the view behind them.

  While Len began to take the navigational sights for Susan, who fed them into her computer, the crew from below decks began to come up. No one in the control dome had had time to try any walking yet. Len only realized how difficult it was when he saw Lucinda, balancing like a high-wire artist, coming across to his couch. Accelerating away toward the speed of light, a process that would take weeks, it should have been almost normal.

  No one knew whether it was a good thing or a bad that almost all the crew was on the control deck when they discovered the truth about things. They would have had to be told anyway.

  Sorensen had come up and was standing by Duncan’s couch, reporting to him and holding onto it to keep his balance.

  “All the machine-deck instruments are reporting full power from the atomic motors. It looks as though this is all the thrust we are going to get.”

  Salford said, “Len, will any of your instruments look backward, and give you a close view of the detail of our own ship’s tail?”

  It was not warning in Salford’s voice. It was something not heard before from Salford.

  Len and Lucinda looked at one another. Fear?

  Take it easy, Len thought. Lucinda, who had come to stand by his couch, thought it better to hold on to it. They exchanged a glance again, and she looked at Salford. Her eyes asked, “Is he one of us?” It would be a bad time to find out that the twenty-four-legged monster, might or might not exist in Lucinda’s mind, was lame in two of its legs.

  Len moved the instruments that glittered above him in the stark light of the starlit dome. There was something unhomely in everything that was happening now. “The short-range rangefinder landing periscope should do it, Des.”

  He looked through the eyepiece. The first thing he saw was Arcon, with their ion-beam train trailing away toward it. It was a slender, almost invisible trail for their rocket there in space to stand on. As he adjusted the instrument the tail of their own ship came into view, and the long thin hull containing the atomic motors. He saw what Salford meant then, but, Salford did not give him time to remark on it.

  They wouldn’t do that to us, Len thought

  “We are in space all right,” Salford said. If there was anyone who had not been paying attention, they would be then.

  “But this ship isn't built right Maybe someone wanted to economize. Or maybe they couldn’t get enough lift from the blast-off rockets. We are missing some items, such as the landing rocket stages we would need to land on any planet—which means we are in space forever.”

  It was natural that
Salford should be sounding as though he did not like it.

  “It seems to be very final. There isn’t a spaceship even to rescue us, is there?” Lucinda said in a mild, disbelieving way that asked them to be calm about it.

  Len gulped a little.

  “We are lost in space,” Salford said with drama. "We are in a worse spot than anyone has been in, and it’s impossible to get us out of it. What use are your electric bits and pieces now, Len, when we have no means for landing?”

  Looking out into space, Len could see that it no longer mattered who controlled the rocket, which he had intended to do, when they could not land it. “Now, Des,” he said, “let’s think a little.”

  XLIV

  From The Short History of Arcon:

  Unfortunate and tragic as events were, It is necessary to be objective. It is surely agreed that the minds of men on Earth were barely human, and this fact should be noted when considering the further development that occurred on Arcon. We can hardly deny, when we consider the fated starship crew, a mental change of some kind.

  Compare them with Earth mentality, for example. It is the slowness, the lack of grasp of a situation, which seems impossible to us, in what we know of Earth. The men of Earth found it impossible to grasp even major facts. Aggression continued on Earth long after the biological need for it had been expended, and when sheer human survival alone demanded that mutual competition should cease, and that men should work together for mere existence. Yet men on Earth seem to have given no thought at all to the fact that they were no longer striving to become, but had long ago achieved the position of a dominant species. Men said it, but failed utterly to realize the implications.

  Contrast this with the behavior of the young people in the spacecraft known as Arcon One. The point is the speed with which they began to think of their own situation in planetary, stellar, and cosmic terms. It is not merely a matter of higher mental freedom, but of a wider frame of reference. They were still men and women. They were inexperienced men end women. It might even be true to say that they were innocent men and women. Yet, in their viewing of their own situation, there was a certain freedom that was not merely freedom, but a building-up of structure. Lacking a mental framework into which to place their problems, they rapidly built one. And there was nothing artificial about this. The behavior-pattern was not laborious or mechanistic. Apart from the deviation of the one of their number who was a substitute, it was completely natural.

  And ship-shape, as we would now say, in Vista fashion.

  XLV

  From the diary of J. Adolf Koln:

  September 6, 506 A. L. Noon.

  The waiting is over, finally. At the moment of blastoff, even now as I sit at this desk in my office in the Hexagon and look out on Davis City, the parachute troops who have ringed all the radio telescopes, and especially the one at the rocket project, will be closing in on them, arriving in their positions, and preparing for a coup that will be as effective as it will be almost bloodless.

  The steps of the operation are clear, and have been checked and double-checked. First they, the Information Office, must get the rocket in space, and have control of it. In this operation, Glasson must play his vital role. He must see that the Information Office technicians are present in the telecommunications building, and working, at the time our men cut the telephones and stop their communications. Nothing must be done until the rocket is in space, and he is to see that with his own eyes, then send the signal “Go" to us.

  2 P.M.

  The signal has come! I have fust received it by the

  telephone on my desk. The rocket has gone up, and the signal was "Successful,” which means Glasson has assured himself that not merely has it left the atmosphere and attained escape velocity, but the radio telescope has control of it. All I want now are the confirming signals from the Second Army and the Swamp Corps.

  Glasson must not move until tonight. As soon as the I. O. phones are cut, we can imagine that there will be protest and disturbance. They cannot possibly guess what we intend to do, but they will know that we intend something. That is why the takeover of the telecommunications and the radio telescopes must follow swiftly on the cutting of the land-lines and progress completely smoothly. The technicians who are trained to operate the equipment must be taken alive, to continue to work it, with a gun at their backs and one of our own experts standing over each of them. I have gone into this in detail with Pintopler, 38239 - Z, who is our double-agent.

  Nothing can stop me now except a defect, a miscalculation that would he purely technical. If I have fears, they are only that the planet’s fate could possibly be decided by some outside chance. Yet our calculations are exact. It is only a matter of deciding how far the rocket must go, between blast-off, which was three hours ago, and the time we turn it over and start to bring it back to land on Arcon. Surely no chance can enter when all of this is mathematical science and we know the answers.

  Pintopler is the one who, acting for us, has worked it out in detail. The rocket will have to lose the velocity it has acquired. First it must be made to slow down. Then it will start to fall back onto the planet, with an increasing acceleration that, if we did not check it with the retrorockets of the stage used for landing, would rapidly take it to too high a speed. It is not that I know about the retrorockets and landing stages, but Pintopler assures me that they are all there in the radio telescope controls, and marked with their dials and switches, which is as well. Without them, the rocket would continue to fall, and bum like a meteor, and explode on landing. A massive deceleration is required at that point, so that we can bring the capsule down slowly, and land it precisely in Davis City, as a spectacle.

  I do not see what can interfere with this, and it is fortunate that the space crew cannot, for if they did they would be dead on their arrival.

  XLVI

  From The Jottings of G. Berkeley:

  Lankowitz knew me. I could see that by the way he sat on the parapet and continued the process of my disillusion. Maybe he was taking a calculated risk. He could not know me with complete certainty, and another man, facing the loss of his faith, would certainly have lifted his gun and shot him.

  It was a question of what was my faith, and what part truth played in it. He could only guess, not know, that I had a compulsion to discover truth. Not many men have. The majority would rather kill any day than have their faith destroyed, and the fact that they know in their minds that it is the truth they are being told does not decrease the impulse.

  “Face it, Berkeley,” he said in his careful way. “You

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  know, really, what our predecessors did, when they led men from Earth to Arcon. They sold them a dream, man’s own dream, which he wished to believe in. They lied to them, and they were able to do it because men wished to believe the lies they told them.”

  For moments, when he was talking, I saw his dark figure as a spider, spinning its own web as they say an Earth spider does, out of its own substance, to enmesh and seal the fate of innocents. Those were the times I wished to kill him.

  “That is what all exponents of political and religious faiths have done,” he told me. “Cut the logical and factual comers, and emphasized the half-truths. The skill is to make the dream look real, and use emotion and the natural human longing for some half-glimpsed ideal to cover up the blind spots.”

  Yet I could not kill him until he had said it, until I had given him a chance to say it.

  “How true were the dreams men have sold in the past?” he asked me. “Life after death, and the reassembly of those particular molecules that compose our bodies? Would you have said Earth’s dream of communism would have worked, with every man contributing willingly to every other man’s needs, except by a change in the human spirit? And was it truly possible to change that spirit by the system of preaching love, the alternative, against the dogma background of a next world, resurrection, and rewards in heaven? These dreams were no more true, and just a shade more wild than
ours, yet they engaged the minds and hearts of men for centuries, for all that they moved them forward.” I could see him looking at me almost wistfully in the half-light, as though I were one of the few, and one whom he had selected, perhaps, to understand him. He spoke as though he had been intending for a long time to have this talk with me. He gestured as though to say, “Be practical.” “We led men from Earth, Berkeley,” he told me calmly, “as I am told someone called Moses once led a people into a desert. It may even have been a surprise to Moses that they acted on his dreams and followed blindly. And when that happens, the leaders are stuck with it, and must live with it, and face the people’s disillusion. Sustaining a religion then is not a matter of preaching. It becomes a desperate business, and a matter of compromising with the state, the power. Think what happened to us on Arcon, while we ourselves were facing the fact that to make our dream come true we might have to send a million expeditions to a million stars, so that one might be successful. This was the time we became a decaying, defeated, reviled and persecuted party.”

  Looking at him, and comparing him with what I believed I knew, I said, “But that was the time of your ancestor, your noble ancestor, the other Lankowitz,” and he heard my pride.

  He looked at me quietly for a moment. “So you know that piece of history.”

  He was looking at me as though I was the kind of man who would know.

  “I will tell you the truth. Do you think he was a saint, this Lankowitz who revived our party? He lived at a time when a man had only to express a Yellow opinion to be tarred and feathered, and he had trouble with his own beliefs. But he was a salesman, with business acumen. He invented a saying which we have in our family. ‘In time of doubt and despair,’ he used to say, ‘that is the time a good man will go out and cross his heart and tell an untruth boldly.’ ”