The Space Trilogy (27 page)

Gibson was quite exhausted, mentally and physically, when he got back to his room. Norden had been an altogether too conscientious guide, and Gibson suspected that he had been getting some of his own back, and thoroughly enjoying it. He wondered exactly what his companions thought of his literary activities; probably he would not be left in ignorance for long.

He was lying in his bunk, sorting out his impressions, when there came a modest knock on the door.

“Damn,” said Gibson, quietly. “Who’s that?” he continued, a little louder.

“It’s Jim—Spencer, Mr. Gibson. I’ve got a radiogram for you.”

Young Jimmy floated into the room, bearing an envelope with the Signals Officer’s stamp. It was sealed, but Gibson surmised that he was the only person on the ship who didn’t know its contents. He had a shrewd idea of what they would be, and groaned inwardly. There was really no way of escape from Earth; it could catch you wherever you went.

The message was brief and contained only one redundant word:

NEW YORKER, REVUE DES QUATRE MONDES, LIFE INTERPLANETARY WANT FIVE THOUSAND WORDS EACH. PLEASE RADIO BY NEXT SUNDAY. LOVE. RUTH.

Gibson sighed. He had left Earth in such a rush that there had been no time for a final consultation with his agent, Ruth Goldstein, apart from a hurried phone-call half-way around the world. But he’d told her quite clearly that he wanted to be left alone for a fortnight. It never made any difference, of course. Ruth always went happily ahead, confident that he would deliver the goods on time. Well, for once he wouldn’t be bullied and she could darned well wait; he’d earned this holiday.

He grabbed his scribbling pad and, while Jimmy gazed ostentatiously elsewhere, wrote quickly:

SORRY. EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS ALREADY PROMISED TO SOUTH ALABAMA PIG KEEPER AND POULTRY FANCIER. WILL SEND DETAILS ANY MONTH NOW. WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO POISON HARRY? LOVE, MART.

Harry was the literary, as opposed to the business, half of Goldstein and Co. He had been happily married to Ruth for over twenty years, during the last fifteen of which Gibson had never ceased to remind them both that they were getting in a rut and needed a change and that the whole thing couldn’t possibly last much longer.

Goggling slightly, Jimmy Spencer disappeared with this unusual message, leaving Gibson alone with his thoughts. Of course, he would have to start work some time, but meanwhile his typewriter was buried down in the hold where he couldn’t see it. He had even felt like attaching one of those “NOT WANTED IN SPACE—MAY BE STOWED IN VACUUM” labels, but had manfully resisted the temptation. Like most writers who had never had to rely solely on their literary earnings, Gibson hated
starting
to write. Once he had begun, it was different… sometimes.

His holiday lasted a full week. At the end of that time, Earth was merely the most brilliant of the stars and would soon be lost in the glare of the Sun. It was hard to believe that he had ever known any life but that of the little, self-contained universe that was the
Ares.
And its crew no longer consisted of Norden, Hilton, Mackay, Bradley, and Scott—but of John, Fred, Angus, Owen, and Bob.

He had grown to know them all, though Hilton and Bradley had a curious reserve that he had been unable to penetrate. Each man was a definite and sharply contrasted character; almost the only thing they had in common was intelligence. Gibson doubted if any of them had an IQ of less than 120, and he sometimes wriggled with embarrassment as he remembered the crews he had imagined for some of his fictional spaceships. He recalled Master Pilot Graham, from
Five Moons Too Many
—still one of his favourite characters. Graham had been tough (had he not once survived half a minute in vacuum before being able to get to his spacesuit?) and he regularly disposed of a bottle of whiskey a day. He was a distinct contrast to Dr. Angus Mackay, Ph.D. (Astron.), FRAS, who was now sitting quietly in a corner reading a much annotated copy of
The Canterbury Tales
and taking an occasional squirt from a bulbful of milk.

The mistake that Gibson had made, along with so many other writers back in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, was the assumption that there would be no fundamental difference between ships of space and ships of the sea—or between the men who manned them. There were parallels, it was true, but they were far outnumbered by the contrasts. The reason was purely technical, and should have been foreseen, but the popular writers of the mid-century had taken the lazy course and had tried to use the traditions of Herman Melville and Frank Dana in a medium for which they were grotesquely unfitted.

A ship of space was much more like a stratosphere liner than anything that had ever moved on the face of the ocean, and the technical training of its crew was at a much higher level even than that required in aviation. A man like Norden had spent five years at college, three years in space, and another two back at college on advanced astronautical theory before qualifying for his present position.

It had been a very quiet week. Gibson had lazed around taking life easily for the first time in years, looking at the unbelievable star fields for hours on end, and joining in the arguments that made almost every meal an affair of indefinite duration. There was no strict routine aboard the ship: no one could have ordered Norden's crew around, and Norden was much too intelligent to try. He knew that the work would be properly done by men who took a pride in it: apart from the daily maintenance reports which everyone initialled and brought to the Captain each evening, there was the minimum of control or supervision. The
Ares
was a good example of democracy in action.

Gibson was having a quiet game of darts with Dr. Scott when the first excitement of the voyage burst unexpectedly upon them. There are not many games of skill that can be played in space; for a long time cards and chess had been the classical stand-bys, until some ingenious Englishman had decided that a flight of darts would perform very well in the absence of gravity. The distance between thrower and board had been increased to ten meters, but otherwise the game still obeyed the rules that had been formulated over the centuries amid an atmosphere of beer and tobacco smoke in English pubs.

Gibson had been delighted to find that he was quite good at the game. He almost always managed to beat Scott, despite—or because of—the other’s elaborate technique. This consisted of placing the “arrow” carefully in mid-air, and then going back a couple of meters to squint along it before smacking it smartly on its way.

Scott was optimistically aiming for a treble twenty when Bradley drifted into the room bearing a signals form in his hand.

“Don’t look now,” he said in his soft, carefully modulated voice, “but we’re being followed.”

Everyone gaped at him as he relaxed in the doorway. Mackay was the first to recover.

“Please elucidate,” he said primly.

“There’s a Mark III carrier missile coming after us hell for leather. It’s just been launched from the Outer Station and should pass us in four days. They want me to catch it with our radio control as it goes by, but with the dispersion it will have at this range that’s asking a lot. I doubt if it will go within a hundred thousand kilometres of us.”

“What’s it in aid of? Someone left their toothbrush behind?”

“It seems to be carrying urgent medical supplies. Here, Doc, you have a look.”

Dr. Scott examined the message carefully.

“This
is
interesting. They think they’ve got an antidote for Martian fever. It’s a serum of some kind; the Pasteur Institute’s made it. They must be pretty sure of the stuff if they’ve gone to all this trouble to catch us.”

“What, for heaven’s sake, is a Mark III missile—not to mention Martian fever?” exploded Gibson at last.

Dr. Scott answered before anyone else could get a word in.

“Martian fever isn’t really a Martian disease. It seems to be caused by a terrestrial organism that we carried there and which liked the new climate more than the old one. It has the same sort of effect as malaria: people aren’t often killed by it, but its economic effects are very serious. In any one year the percentage of man-hours lost—”

“Thank you very much. I remember all about it now. And the missile?”

Hilton slid smoothly into the conversation.

“That’s simply a little automatic rocket with radio control and a very high terminal speed. It’s used to carry cargoes between the space-stations, or to chase after spaceships when they’ve left anything behind. When it gets into radio range it will pick up our transmitter and home on to us. Hey, Bob,” he said suddenly, turning to Scott, “why haven’t they sent it direct to Mars? It could get there long before we do.”

“Because its little passengers wouldn’t like it. I’ll have to fix up some cultures for them to live in, and look after them like a nursemaid. Not my usual line of business, but I think I can remember some of the stuff I did at St. Thomas’s.”

“Wouldn’t it be appropriate,” said Mackay with one of his rare attempts at humour, “if someone went and painted the Red Cross outside?”

Gibson was thinking deeply.

“I was under the impression,” he said after a pause, “that life on Mars was very healthy, both physically and psychologically.”

“You mustn’t believe all you read in books,” drawled Bradley. “Why anyone should ever want to go to Mars I can’t imagine. It’s flat, it’s cold, and it’s full of miserable half-starved plants looking like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. We’ve sunk millions into the place and haven’t got a penny back. Anyone who goes there of his own free will should have his head examined. Meaning no offense, of course.”

Gibson only smiled amicably. He had learned to discount Bradley’s cynicism by about ninety per cent; but he was never quite sure how far the other was only
pretending
to be insulting. For once, however, Captain Norden asserted his authority; not merely to stop Bradley from getting away with it, but to prevent such alarm and despondency from spreading into print. He gave his electronics officer an angry glare.

“I ought to tell you, Martin,” he said, “that although Mr. Bradley doesn’t like Mars, he takes an equally poor view of Earth and Venus. So don’t let his opinions depress you.”

“I won’t,” laughed Gibson. “But there’s one thing I’d like to ask.”

“What’s that?” said Norden anxiously.

“Does Mr. Bradley take as ‘poor a view,’ as you put it, of Mr. Bradley as he does of everything else?”

“Oddly enough, he does,” admitted Norden. “That shows that one at least of his judgments is accurate.”

“Touché,”
murmured Bradley, for once at a loss. “I will retire in high dudgeon and compose a suitable reply. Meanwhile, Mac, will you get the missile’s co-ordinates and let me know when it should come into range?”

“All right,” said Mackay absently. He was deep in Chaucer again.

Four

During the next few days Gibson was too busy with his own affairs to take much part in the somewhat limited social life of the
Ares.
His conscience had smitten him, as it always did when he rested for more than a week, and he was hard at work again.

His crew-mates (for Gibson no longer regarded himself as a privileged passenger) respected his solitude. At first they had wandered into his room whenever they were passing, to talk about nothing in particular or to exchange solemn complaints about the weather. This had been veru pleasant, but Gibson had been forced to stop it with a 'DANGER—MAN AT WORK' notice pinned on his door. Needless to say this had rapidly become adorned with ribald comments in various hands, but it had served its purpose.

The typewriter had been disentangled from his belongings and now occupied the place of honour in the little cabin. Sheets of manuscript lay everywhere—Gibson was an untidy worker—and had to be prevented from escaping by elastic bands. There had been a lot of trouble with the flimsy carbon paper, which had a habit of getting into the airflow and gluing itself against the ventilator, but Gibson had now mastered the minor techniques of life under zero gravity. It was amazing how quickly one learned them, and how soon they became a part of everyday life.

Gibson had found it very hard to get his impressions of space down on paper; one could not very well say “space is awfully big” and leave it at that. The take-off from Earth had taxed his skill to the utmost. He had not actually lied, but anyone who read his dramatic description of the Earth falling away beneath the blast of the rocket would certainly never get the impression that the writer had then been in a state of blissful unconsciousness, swiftly followed by a state of far from blissful consciousness.

As soon as he had produced a couple of articles which would keep Ruth happy for a while (she had meanwhile sent three further radiograms of increasing asperity) he went Northwards to the Signals Office. Bradley received the sheets of MSS. with marked lack of enthusiasm.

“I suppose this is going to happen every day from now on,” he said glumly.

“I hope so—but I’m afraid not. It depends on my inspiration.”

“There’s a split infinitive right here on the top of page 2.”