The Space Trilogy (30 page)

"Quite clever," said Gibson admiringly. "i'm sorry to disappoint you, though, but I can
still
differentiate I/
r
even at this advanced age."

There was a gentle cough at the back of the room.

“I hate to remind you, sir—” began Jimmy.

Norden laughed.

“O.K.—I’ll pay up. Here are the keys—locker 26. What are you going to do with that bottle of whiskey?”

“I was thinking of selling it back to Dr. Mackay.”

“Surely,” said Scott, looking severely at Jimmy, “this moment demands a general celebration, at which a toast—”

But Jimmy didn’t stop to hear the rest. He had fled to collect his loot.

Five

An hour ago we had only one passenger,” said Dr. Scott, nursing the long metal case delicately through the airlock. “Now we’ve got several billion.”

“How do you think they’ve stood the journey?” asked Gibson.

“The thermostats seemed to be working well, so they should be all right. I’ll transfer them to the cultures I’ve got ready, and then they should be quite happy until we get to Mars, gorging themselves to their little hearts’ content.”

Gibson moved over to the nearest observation post. He could see the stubby, white-painted shape of the missile lying alongside the airlock, with the slack mooring cables drifting away from it like the tentacles of some deep-sea creature. When the rocket had been brought almost to rest a few kilometres away by its automatic radio equipment, its final capture had been achieved by much less sophisticated techniques. Hilton and Bradley had gone out with cables and lassoed the missile as it slowly drifted by. Then the electric winches on the
Ares
had hauled it in.

“What’s going to happen to the carrier now?” Gibson asked Captain Norden, who was also watching the proceedings.

“We’ll salvage the drive and control assembly and leave the carcass in space. It wouldn’t be worth the fuel to carry it all back to Mars. So until we start accelerating again, we’ll have a little moon of our own.”

“Like the dog in Jules Verne’s story.”

“What,
From the Earth to the Moon
? I’ve never read it. At least, I tried once, but couldn’t be bothered. That’s the trouble with all those old stories. Nothing is deader than yesterday’s science-fiction—and Verne belongs to the day before yesterday.”

Gibson felt it necessary to defend his profession.

“So you don’t consider that science-fiction can ever have any permanent literary value?”

“I don’t think so. It may sometimes have a
social
value when it’s written, but to the next generation it must always seem quaint and archaic. Just look what happened, for example, to the space-travel story.”

“Go on. Don’t mind my feelings—as if you would.”

Norden was clearly warming to the subject, a fact which did not surprise Gibson in the least. If one of his companions had suddenly been revealed as an expert on reafforestation, Sanskrit, or bimetallism, Gibson would now have taken it in his stride. In any case, he knew that science-fiction was widely—sometimes hilariously—popular among professional astronauts.

“Very well,” said Norden. “Let’s see what happened there. Up to 1960—maybe 1970—people were still writing stories about the first journey to the Moon. They’re all quite unreadable now. When the Moon was reached, it was safe to write about Mars and Venus for another few years. Now
those
stories are dead too; no one would read them except to get a laugh. I suppose the outer planets will be a good investment for another generation; but the interplanetary romances our grandfathers knew really came to an end in the late 1970s.”

“But the theme of space-travel is still as popular as ever.”

“Yes, but it’s no longer science-fiction. It’s either purely factual—the sort of thing you are beaming back to Earth now—or else it’s pure fantasy. The stories have to go right outside the Solar System and so they might just as well be fairy tales. Which is all that most of them are.”

Norden had been speaking with great seriousness, but there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

“I contest your argument on two points,” said Gibson. “First of all people—lots of people—still read Wells’ yarns, though they’re a century old. And, to come from the sublime to the ridiculous, they still read
my
early books, like
Martian Dust
, although facts have caught up with them and left them a long way in the rear.”

“Wells wrote literature,” answered Norden, “but even so, I think I can prove my point. Which of his stories are most popular? Why, the straight novels like
Kipps
and
Mr. Polly
. When the fantasies are read at all, it’s in spite of their hopelessly dated prophecies, not because of them. Only
The Time Machine
is still at all popular, simply because it’s set so far in the future that it’s not outmoded—and because it contains Wells’ best writing.”

There was a slight pause. Gibson wondered if Norden was going to take up his second point. Finally he said:

“When did you write
Martian Dust
?”

Gibson did some rapid mental arithmetic.

“In ‘73 or ‘74.”

“I didn’t know it was as early as that. But that’s part of the explanation. Space-travel was just about to begin then, and everybody knew it. You had already begun to make a name with conventional fiction, and
Martian Dust
caught the rising tide very nicely.”

“That only explains why it sold
then.
It doesn’t answer my other point. It’s still quite popular, and I believe the Martian colony has taken several copies, despite the fact that it describes a Mars that never existed outside my imagination.”

“I attribute that to the unscrupulous advertising of your publisher, the careful way you’ve managed to keep in the public eye, and—just possibly—to the fact that it was the best thing you ever wrote. Moreover, as Mac would say, it managed to capture the
Zeitgeist
of the ‘70s, and that gives it a curiosity value now.”

“Hmm,” said Gibson, thinking matters over. He remained silent for a moment; then his face creased into a smile and he began to laugh.

“Well, share the joke. What’s so funny?”

“Our earlier conversation. I was just wondering what H. G. Wells would have thought if he’d known that one day a couple of men would be discussing his stories, halfway between Earth and Mars.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” grinned Norden. “We’re only a third of the way so far.”

It was long after midnight when Gibson suddenly awoke from a dreamless sleep. Something had disturbed him—some noise like a distance explosion, far away in the bowels of the ship. He sat up in the darkness, tensing against the broad elastic bands that held him to his bed. Only a glimmer of starlight came from the porthole-mirror, for his cabin was on the night side of the liner. He listened, mouth half opened, checking his breath to catch the faintest murmur of sound.

There were many voices in the
Ares
at night, and Gibson knew them all. The ship was alive, and silence would have meant the death of all aboard her. Infinitely reassuring was the unresting, unhurried suspiration of the air-pumps, driving the man-made trade winds of this tiny planet. Against that faint but continuous background were other intermittent noises: the occasional “whirr” of hidden motors carrying out some mysterious and automatic task, the “tick,” every thirty seconds precisely, of the electric clock, and sometimes the sound of water racing through the pressurized plumbing system. Certainly none of these could have roused him, for they were as familiar as the beating of his own heart.

Still only half awake, Gibson went to the cabin door and listened for a while in the corridor. Everything was perfectly normal; he knew that he must be the only man awake. For a moment he wondered if he should call Norden, then thought better of it. He might only have been dreaming, or the noise might have been produced by some equipment that had not gone into action before.

He was already back in bed when a thought suddenly occurred to him. Had the noise, after all, been so far away? That was merely his first impression; it might have been quite near. Anyway, he was tired, and it didn’t matter. Gibson had a complete and touching faith in the ship’s instrumentation. If anything had really gone wrong, the automatic alarms would have alerted everyone. They had been tested several times on the voyage, and were enough to awaken the dead. He could go to sleep, confident that they were watching over him with unresting vigilance.

He was perfectly correct, though he was never to know it; and by the morning he had forgotten the whole affair.

The camera swept out of the stricken council chamber, following the funeral cortège up the endlessly twining stairs, and on to the windy battlements above the sea. The music sobbed into silence; for a moment, the lonely figures with their tragic burden were silhouetted against the setting sun, motionless upon the ramparts of Elsinore. “Good night, sweet prince…” The play was ended.

The lights in the tiny theatre came on abruptly, and the State of Denmark was four centuries and fifty million kilometres away. Reluctantly, Gibson brought his mind back to the present, tearing himself free from the magic that had held him captive. What, he wondered, would Shakespeare have made of this interpretation, already a lifetime old, yet as untouched by time as the still older splendours of the immortal poetry? And what, above all, would he have made of this fantastic theatre, with its latticework of seats floating precariously in mid-air with the flimsiest of supports?

“It’s rather a pity,” said Dr. Scott, as the audience of six drifted out into the corridor, “that we’ll never have as fine a collection of films with us on our later runs. This batch is for the Central Martian Library, and we won’t be able to hang on to it.”

“What’s the next program going to be?” asked Gibson.

“We haven’t decided. It may be a current musical, or we may carry on with the classics and screen ‘Gone With the Wind.’ “

“My grandfather used to rave about that; I’d like to see it now we have the chance,” said Jimmy Spencer eagerly.

“Very well,” replied Scott. “I’ll put the matter to the Entertainments Committee and see if it can be arranged.” Since this Committee consisted of Scott and no one else, these negotiations would presumably be successful.

Norden, who had remained sunk in thought since the end of the film, came up behind Gibson and gave a nervous little cough.

“By the way, Martin,” he said. “You remember you were badgering me to let you go out in a spacesuit?”

“Yes. You said it was strictly against the rules.”

Norden seemed embarrassed, which was somewhat unlike him.

“Well, it
is
in a way, but this isn’t a normal trip and you aren’t technically a passenger. I think we can manage it after all.”

Gibson was delighted. He had always wondered what it was like to wear a spacesuit, and to stand in nothingness with the stars all around one. It never even occurred to him to ask Norden why he had changed his mind, and for this Norden was very thankful.

The plot had been brewing for about a week. Every morning a little ritual took place in Norden’s room when Hilton arrived with the daily maintenance schedules, summarizing the ship’s performance and the behaviour of all its multitudinous machines during the past twenty-four hours. Usually there was nothing of any importance, and Norden signed the reports and filed them away with the log book. Variety was the last thing he wanted here, but sometimes he got it.

“Listen, Johnnie,” said Hilton (he was the only one who called Norden by his first name; to the rest of the crew he was always “Skipper”). “It’s quite definite now about our air-pressure. The drop’s practically constant; in about ten days we’ll be outside tolerance limits.”

“Confound it! That means we’ll have to do something. I was hoping it wouldn’t matter till we dock.”

“I’m afraid we can’t wait until then; the records have to be turned over to the Space Safety Commission when we get home, and some nervous old woman is sure to start yelling if pressure drops below limits.”

“Where do you think the trouble is?”

“In the hull, almost certainly.”

“That pet leak of yours up round the North Pole?”

“I doubt it; this is too sudden. I think we’ve been holed again.”

Norden looked mildly annoyed. Punctures due to meteoric dust happened two or three times a year on a ship of this size. One usually let them accumulate until they were worth bothering about, but this one seemed a little too big to be ignored.

“How long will it take to find the leak?”

“That’s the trouble,” said Hilton in tones of some disgust. “We’ve only one leak detector, and fifty thousand square meters of hull. It may take a couple of days to go over it. Now if it had only been a nice big hole, the automatic bulkheads would have gone into operation and located it for us.”