The Cold Equations (25 page)

He passed by the shuttle and stopped to rest his hand on the bright, silvery focal ball. The solar system would be deep inside the ball; the atoms of the ball larger than Earth, perhaps, and far more impalpable than the thinnest air. The Slug cruisers would be in there, infinitesimally tiny, waiting for him to return . . . 

No—faulty reasoning. The solar system was as it had always been, not diminished in size and not really in the ball. It was only that two different points in two different dimensions coincided in the ball . . . 

He saw the answer.

He did not have to move the ship to Sirius—he had only to move the ball!

* * *

There would be little time, very little time. First, to see if the warp shuttle was portable—

It was. When he unfastened the clamp that held it to the stand it lifted up freely, trailing a heavy cable behind it. He saw it was only a power supply cable, with a plug that would fit one of the sockets in the bow of the ship. He left the shuttle floating in the air, leashed by the cable, and went to the computer. Next, he would have to know if Sirius would be fully in the ship—

He switched the computer on and typed:

DETERMINE THE DISTANCE FROM THE CENTER OF THE WARP SHUTTLE'S FOCAL BALL TO THE SPACE WARP POSITION OF SIRIUS AT 13:53, BASING YOUR COMPUTATIONS ON THE EXPANDING-SHIP THEORY.

It gave him the answer a moment later: 18.3496 METERS.

He visualized the distance, from his knowledge of the ship's interior, and saw the position would be within the forward spare-parts room.

Next, to learn exactly where in that room he should place the shuttle. He could not do so by measuring from the present position of the shuttle. The most precise steel tape would have to be at exactly the right temperature for such a measurement to be neither too short nor too long. He had no such tape, and the distance from the focal ball was only part of the necessary measuring: he would have to measure off a certain distance and a precisely certain angle from the purely imaginary central line of the ship's axis to intersect the original line. Such a measurement would be impossible in the time he had.

He considered what would be his last question to the computer. The hand was touching the zero and his question would have to be worded very clearly and subject to no misinterpretations. There would be no follow-up questions permitted.

He began typing:

IT IS DESIRED THAT THIS SHIP EMERGE INTO NORMAL SPACE ONE LIGHT-HOUR THIS SIDE OF SIRIUS AT 13:53. THIS WILL BE ACCOMPLISHED BY MOVING THE WARP SHUTTLE TO SUCH A POSITION THAT ITS FOCAL CENTER WILL BE IN A SPACE WARP POSITION COINCIDING WITH A NORMAL SPACE POSITION ONE LIGHT-HOUR THIS SIDE OF SIRIUS AT 13:53. CONSIDER ALL FACTORS THAT MIGHT HAVE AFFECTED THE DIMENSIONS OF THIS SHIP, SUCH AS TEMPERATURE CHANGES PRODUCED BY OUR NORMAL SPACE ACCELERATION AND DECELERATION, WHEN COMPUTING THE POSITION OF SIRIUS. THEN DEFINE THAT LOCATION IN RELATION TO THE STRUCTURAL FEATURES OF THE ROOM'S INTERIOR. DO THIS IN SUCH A MANNER THAT PLACING THE SHUTTLE IN THE PROPER POSITION WILL REQUIRE THE LEAST POSSIBLE AMOUNT OF MEASURING DISTANCES AND ANGLES.

It seemed to take it an unduly long time to answer the question and he waited restlessly, unpleasantly aware of the hand touching zero and wondering if the computer's mind was baffled by the question; the mind that thought best in terms of orderly mathematics and could not know or care that measurement by protractor and tape would result in a position fatally far from that described by the neat, rigid figures.

Then the answer appeared, beautifully concise:

POSITION WILL BE IN CORNER OF ROOM, 764.2 CENTIMETERS ABOVE FLOOR PLATE, 820 CENTIMETERS PERPENDICULAR TO PANEL AA, 652.05 CENTIMETERS PERPENDICULAR TO PANEL AB.

The computer died with an oddly human sigh. Its last act had been to give him the location of Sirius in such a manner that he could accurately position the shuttle's focal ball with the aid of the precision measuring devices in the ship's repair room.

He went to the shuttle and picked it up in his arms. It was entirely weightless, and each magnet-clicking step he took toward the bow of the ship brought Sirius almost half a light-year nearer.

* * *

He squinted against the white glare of Sirius in the viewscreen as he continued his terse report to the
Thunderbolt
's commander: "I have about a week's supply of food. How long will it be until you reach me?"

The commander's reply came after the pause caused by the distance involved:

"We'll be there within three days. Go ahead and eat hearty. But how did you travel from Earth to Sirius in only two hours? My God, man—what kind of a drive did that ship have?"

"Why, it didn't have any drive from the start," he said. "To get here I"—he frowned thoughtfully—"you might say I walked and carried the ship."

Editor's note: This story, as with the previous one, is a celebration of tenacity and perseverance in the face of disaster. The enemy here, however, is simply nature. But, whether facing death because of intelligent hostility or accidental misadventure, Godwin's heroes in this story are cut from the same cloth as all of his "survivors."  

The
Star Scout
's normal-space speed was far below that of light when she dropped out of hyperspace beyond the rim of the Thousand Suns. Two last stars lay beneath her; a binary composed of a small yellow sun and a larger blue-white sun. Observations were taken and instruments noted the tiny, shining mote that swung four hundred million miles out from the blue-white sun. Other instruments determined the new destination and the
Star Scout
vanished again into hyperspace.

When she dropped once more into normal space the shining mote had become a planet that blazed like a great, radiant gem against the black void beyond. The planet grew as the hours went by, filling the viewscreen as Blake braked for the descent into its atmosphere. Land masses and small oceans were faintly discernible through the fiery, opalescent haze that blanketed the planet. The image swelled and enlarged, the surplus running off the four sides of the screen, until the western side of a continent and a small portion of ocean filled the screen.

The four men in the deceleration chairs behind Blake, and held as helplessly as he by the force, watched the image on the viewscreen and the multiple hands of the air analyzer. The hands began to move as the first thin sample of air was scooped into the analyzer, then settled into position a few minutes later.

"Breathable." The gray-haired Taylor spoke with difficulty against the deceleration.

"Less carbon dioxide than New Earth," Wilfred commented. Young, short and stocky, he was far less affected by the deceleration than the elderly ex-dean. "I can't understand why the spectroscope showed such an incredibly high percentage of carbon. How could any planet's crust contain such an excess of carbon?"

"The carbon
must
be in the crust, rather than in the atmosphere," Taylor said. "Either that or the old spectroscope is erroneous. We know the air analyzer is a new and reliable instrument, but these old Warden spectroscopes, like men, develop eccentricities with age. If we had a new—"

"Hang on," Blake interrupted, his eyes on the instruments before him. "I'm going to have to brake a little harder."

The increased deceleration settled them all deeper in their chairs and no one spoke while the section of continent on the viewscreen became a hazy desert or plain through which ran dim wrinkles. The surplus slid away and the wrinkle in the center of the screen became a range of mountains. Blake watched the translucent white dot in the center of the screen that represented their point of landing and saw it would be along the eastern side of the mountain range. It would do as well as any other unknown section of the unknown world and he let the ship hold its course.

The green line of a tree-bordered creek appeared, hugging the mountain's foothills, with the white dot between the creek and the mountain. The area covered by the dot became a small delta of alluvium from one of the canyons with a few trees scattered across it. The delta swept up to meet them, slowing as it came, with the white dot in a flat clearing that seemed to be of some curiously glittering sand.

The
Star Scout
halted ten feet above the ground with a staccato of blasts from the drive tubes that sent the bright sand swirling in heavy clouds, then it dropped, cushioned by the drive, to touch the ground with a slight lurch. The wide tail fins settled in the sand and Blake cut off the drive.

"And here we are," he remarked.

* * *

The others were already hurrying to read the data recorded on the instruments; Taylor and Wilfred, Lenson and Cooke. Blake watched them, interested by their reactions. None of them had ever been off New Earth before, let alone on a world hitherto unknown to exist, and they were as excited as children with a new toy. Taylor, steeped in the academic environment all his life, was the most enthusiastic of them all. He had once told Blake: "With all due respect to ivied walls of stone, they can become a prison. I want to see a few things before I grow any older; deep space and distant suns and strange worlds—" Lenson, a tall, lean man with the easy grace of a cat, stood a full head taller than the pink young Wilfred; a pleasant sort of a man with a slow smile and a tolerant understanding of the foibles of others.

There was the indefinable mark of the intellectual upon all three of them and among them the paradox, Cooke, stood out like a black sheep among white. He was, Blake knew, fully as intelligent as any of the others; he, like the others, had been selected by Taylor because his intelligence and knowledge were considerably greater than the intelligence and knowledge of the average graduate. But he did not look the part. His dark, hard-jawed face was not that of an intellectual. Neither were his broken nose and glittering black eyes. Blake watched him, thinking: He doesn't belong with the others; he belongs on Old Earth three hundred years ago, on the deck of a pirate ship with a bloody cutlass in his hand.

But, for all his appearance of being a man of sanguine physical violence, Cooke seemed to be content to do no more than laugh at what his black eyes found in others and in life, itself.

"Earth-type in every important respect," Taylor was saying. "Gravity, temperature, air. No indications of any harmful bacteria—we've been incredibly fortunate."

"We had about one chance out of several thousand of this being an Earth-type planet, didn't we, Red?" Lenson asked, looking over at Blake.

Blake nodded his red head. "Quite a few thousand, since this isn't a class-G sun. As Taylor said, we were incredibly lucky to hit the jackpot the very first try."

"Then let's get out and look our find over," Cooke said, shifting restlessly. "Let's get out and romp across the sand and breathe some air we haven't breathed a million times already."

Taylor looked questioningly at Blake and Blake nodded. "I don't see any reason why we shouldn't," he said. He checked the readings on the control board instruments from long habit and saw the red line that indicated the drive room's temperature. It was climbing rapidly, and he turned a knob marked: DRIVE ROOM—OUTSIDE VENTILATION. This would open the ports in the drive room and start the blower to rushing its great volumes of cool outside air through the overheated room. "Drive room's mighty hot from the decelerating," he said as he followed the others to the elevator. "If we had had a little more money left over, we could have had full-size coolers installed."

"We were lucky to scrape up enough money to buy what we have," Wilfred said, dropping the elevator to the cabin level.

"Our worries are over, now," Cooke declared. "Anyone who owns an Earth-type world isn't just rich—he's lord of all he surveys."

* * *

They stopped at the cabin level only long enough to procure a sidearm each. "You can't tell what you may run into on an alien planet," Blake said as he stepped back into the elevator. "No signs of any intelligent, civilized life, but there might be animals. Sometimes animals don't wait for you to run into them—they take a deep breath and do their level best to run into
you
and tramp you into the ground."

They dropped to the lower air lock and went through it. The boarding ramp was dropped to the ground and they descended into the cloud of dust that still swirled about the ship.

"The blower is filling the drive room with this dusty air," Blake said, sneezing. "I didn't realize it was so thick. But the drive room door is shut and none of this dust can get into the rest of the ship."

They walked out away from the ship and the dust and stood in the glittering sand, looking about them curiously. The mouth of the canyon was visible above them, with the iridescent haze hiding the higher peaks. The trees were almost like those of the desert regions of New Earth, scattered very thinly across the mountain's foot, and viciously thorned bushes grew among them. Some of them, Blake noticed, were in bloom with exotically beautiful blossoms, ranging from delicate pink to vivid scarlet.

"Pretty," Cooke commented. "A little dangerous to try to pick one, I'd say; those thorns are Nature's ice picks."

"We ought to name it . . . this world," Taylor said. "What shall we call it?"

"Aurora," Lenson said instantly. "She was the goddess of the dawn in ancient mythology. She was beautiful and she wore a veil. This world is beautiful and it wears a veil—that shining haze."

"A good name," Taylor agreed. He looked toward the creek a few hundred feet away, the creek itself hidden by the green trees that grew thickly along its banks. "Let's get a sample of the water for analysis."

They walked toward the creek, each of them unconsciously glancing back at the towering bulk of the ship as they went their way. Men always did that, Blake had noticed, when they set down on an alien planet. They would go out from their ship with their eyes alertly watching for danger ahead, and they never failed to look back at the ship as though to reassure themselves that its ponderous mass was still there. It was a normal thing to do; when a man set down on an alien world he was on his own and his only link with other humans and other worlds was his ship. It had brought him there; it, alone, could take him back. A man walked out from his ship knowing that it would be waiting for him to return, like a great, patient dog; waiting and ready to hurl itself into space at his command. Sometimes an alien planet held death for the bipeds who ventured to explore it, such as the spider-monsters of Nelson 14, and the ship would be the sword of vengeance for those who lived to fight their way back to it. The ship would avenge the fallen with fury in the thunder of its voice and annihilation in its flaming breath, leaving only drifting ashes where once had been alien things that had made the mistake of killing a human.