The Space Trilogy (32 page)

The flight was now entering upon its closing weeks, and there was an inevitable sense of anticlimax and slackening interest, which would last until they entered the orbit of Mars. Nothing would happen until then; for the time being all of the excitements of the voyage were over.

The last high-light, for Gibson, had been the morning when he finally lost the Earth. Day by day it had come closer to the vast pearly wings of the corona, as though about to immolate all its millions in the funeral pyre of the Sun. One evening it had still been visible through the telescope—a tiny spark glittering bravely against the splendour that was soon to overwhelm it. Gibson had thought it might still be visible in the morning, but overnight some colossal explosion had thrown the corona half a million kilometres farther into space, and Earth was lost against that incandescent curtain. It would be a week before it reappeared, and by then Gibson’s world would have changed more than he would have believed possible in so short a time.

If anyone had asked Jimmy Spencer just what he thought of Gibson, that young man would have given rather different replies at various stages of the voyage. At first he had been quite overawed by his distinguished shipmate, but that stage had worn off very quickly. To do Gibson credit, he was completely free from snobbery, and he never made unreasonable use of his privileged position on board the
Ares.
Thus from Jimmy’s point of view he was more approachable than the rest of the liner’s inhabitants—all of whom were in some degree his superior officers.

When Gibson had started taking a serious interest in astronautics, Jimmy had seen him at close quarters once or twice a week and had made several efforts to weigh him up. This had not been at all easy, for Gibson never seemed to be the same person for very long. There were times when he was considerate and thoughtful and generally good company. Yet there were other occasions when he was so grumpy and morose that he easily qualified as the person on the
Ares
most to be avoided.

What Gibson thought of
him
Jimmy wasn’t at all sure. He sometimes had an uncomfortable feeling that the author regarded him purely as raw material that might or might not be of value some day. Most people who knew Gibson slightly had that impression, and most of them were right. Yet as he had tried to pump Jimmy directly there seemed no real grounds for these suspicions.

Another puzzling thing about Gibson was his technical background. When Jimmy had started his evening classes, as everyone called them, he had assumed that Gibson was merely anxious to avoid glaring errors in the material he radioed back to Earth, and had no very deep interest in astronautics for its own sake. It soon became clear that this was far from being the case. Gibson had an almost pathetic anxiety to master quite abstruse branches of the science, and to demand mathematical proofs, some of which Jimmy was hard put to provide. The older man must once have had a good deal of technical knowledge, fragments of which still remained with him. How he had acquired it he never explained; nor did he give any reason for his almost obsessive attempts, doomed though they were to repeated failures, to come to grips with scientific ideas far too advanced for him. Gibson’s disappointment after these failures was so obvious that Jimmy found himself very sorry for him—except on those occasions when his pupil became bad-tempered and showed a tendency to blame his instructor. Then there would be a brief exchange of discourtesies, Jimmy would pack up his books and the lesson would not be resumed until Gibson had apologized.

Sometimes, on the other hand, Gibson took these setbacks with humorous resignation and simply changed the subject. He would then talk about his experiences in the strange literary jungle in which he lived—a world of weird and often carnivorous beasts whose behaviour Jimmy found quite fascinating. Gibson was a good raconteur, with a fine flair for purveying scandal and undermining reputations. He seemed to do this without any malice, and some of the stories he told Jimmy about the distinguished figures of the day quite shocked that somewhat strait-laced youth. The curious fact was that the people whom Gibson so readily dissected often seemed to be his closest friends. This was something that Jimmy found very hard to understand.

Yet despite all these warnings Jimmy talked readily enough when the time came. One of their lessons had grounded on a reef of integro-differential equations and there was nothing to do but abandon ship. Gibson was in one of his amiable moods, and as he closed his books with a sigh he turned to Jimmy and remarked casually:

“You’ve never told me anything about yourself, Jimmy. What part of England do you come from, anyway?”

“Cambridge—at least, that’s where I was born.”

“I used to know it quite well, twenty years ago. But you don’t live there now?”

“No; when I was about six, my people moved to Leeds. I’ve been there ever since.”

“What made you take up astronautics?”

“It’s rather hard to say. I was always interested in science, and of course spaceflight was the coming thing when I was growing up. So I suppose it was just natural. If I’d been born fifty years before, I guess I’d have gone into aeronautics.”

“So you’re interested in spaceflight purely as a technical problem, and not as—shall we say—something that might revolutionize human thought, open up new planets, and all that sort of thing?”

Jimmy grinned.

“I suppose that’s true enough. Of course, I
am
interested in these ideas; but it’s the technical side that really fascinates me. Even if there was nothing on the planets, I’d still want to know how to reach them.”

Gibson shook his head in mock distress.

“You’re going to grow up into one of those cold-blooded scientists who know everything about nothing. Another good man wasted!”

“I’m glad you think it
will
be a waste,” said Jimmy with some spirit. “Anyway, why are you so interested in science?”

Gibson laughed, but there was a trace of annoyance in his voice as he replied:

“I’m only interested in science as a means, not as an end in itself.”

That, Jimmy was sure, was quite untrue. But something warned him not to pursue the matter any further, and before he could reply Gibson was questioning him again.

It was all done in such a friendly spirit of apparently genuine interest that Jimmy couldn’t avoid feeling flattered, couldn’t help talking freely and easily. Somehow it didn’t matter if Gibson was indeed studying him as disinterestedly and as clinically as a biologist watching the reactions of one of his laboratory animals. Jimmy felt like talking, and he preferred to give Gibson’s motives the benefit of the doubt.

He talked of his childhood and early life, and presently Gibson understood the occasional clouds that sometimes seemed to overlie the lad’s normally cheerful disposition. It was an old story—one of the oldest. Jimmy’s mother had died when he was a little more than a baby, and his father had left him in the charge of a married sister. Jimmy’s aunt had been kind to him, but he had never felt at home among his cousins, had always been an outsider. Nor had his father been a great deal of help, for he was seldom in England, and had died when Jimmy was about ten years old. He appeared to have left very little impression on his son, who, strangely enough, seemed to have clearer memories of the mother whom he could scarcely have known.

Once the barriers were down, Jimmy talked without reticence, as if glad to unburden his mind. Sometimes Gibson asked questions to prompt him, but the questions grew further and further apart and presently came no more.

“I don’t think my parents were really very much in love,” said Jimmy. “From what Aunt Ellen told me, it was all rather a mistake. There was another man first, but that fell through. My father was the next best thing. Oh, I know this sounds rather heartless, but please remember it all happened such a long time ago, and doesn’t mean much to me now.”

“I understand,” said Gibson quietly; and it seemed as if he really did. “Tell me more about your mother.”

“Her father—my granddad, that is—was one of the professors at the university. I think Mother spent all her life in Cambridge. When she was old enough she went to college for her degree—she was studying history. Oh, all this can’t possibly interest you!”

“It really does,” said Gibson earnestly. “Go on.”

So Jimmy talked. Everything he told must have been learned from hearsay, but the picture he gave Gibson was surprisingly clear and detailed. His listener guessed that Aunt Ellen must have been very talkative, and Jimmy a very attentive small boy.

It was one of those innumerable college romances that briefly flower and wither during that handful of years which seems a microcosm of life itself. But this one had been more serious than most. During her last term Jimmy’s mother—he still hadn’t told Gibson her name—had fallen in love with a young engineering student who was halfway through his college career. It had been a whirlwind romance, and the match was an ideal one despite the fact that the girl was several years older than the boy. Indeed, it had almost reached the stage of an engagement when—Jimmy wasn’t quite sure what had happened. The young man had been taken seriously ill, or had had a nervous breakdown, and had never come back to Cambridge.

“My mother never really got over it,” said Jimmy, with a grave assumption of wisdom which somehow did not seem completely incongruous. “But another student was very much in love with her, and so she married him. I sometimes feel rather sorry for my father, for he must have known all about the other affair. I never say much of him because—why, Mr. Gibson, don’t you feel well?”

Gibson forced a smile.

“It’s nothing—just a touch of space-sickness. I get it now and then—it will pass in a minute.”

He only wished that the words were true. All these weeks, in total ignorance and believing himself secure against all the shocks of time and chance, he had been steering a collision course with Fate. And now the moment of impact had come; the twenty years that lay behind had vanished like a dream, and he was face to face once more with the ghosts of his own forgotten past.

“There’s something wrong with Martin,” said Bradley, signing the signals log with a flourish. “It can’t be any news he’s had from Earth—I’ve read it all. Do you suppose he’s getting homesick?”

“He’s left it a little late in the day, if that’s the explanation,” replied Norden. “After all, we’ll be on Mars in a fortnight. But you do rather fancy yourself as an amateur psychologist, don’t you?”

“Well, who doesn’t?”

“
I
don’t for one,” began Norden pontifically. “Prying into other people’s affairs isn’t one of my—”

An anticipatory gleam in Bradley’s eyes warned him just in time, and to the other’s evident disappointment he checked himself in mid-sentence. Martin Gibson, complete with notebook and looking like a cub reporter attending his first press conference, had hurried into the office.

“Well, Owen, what was it you wanted to show me?” he asked eagerly.

Bradley moved to the main communication rack.

“It isn’t really very impressive,” he said, “but it means that we’ve passed another milestone and always gives me a bit of a kick. Listen to this.”

He pressed the speaker switch and slowly brought up the volume control. The room was flooded with the hiss and crackle of radio noise, like the sound of a thousand frying pans at the point of imminent ignition. It was a sound that Gibson had heard often enough in the signals cabin and, for all its unvarying monotony, it never failed to fill him with a sense of wonder. He was listening, he knew, to the voices of the stars and nebulae, to radiations that had set out upon their journey before the birth of Man. And buried far down in the depths of that crackling, whispering chaos there might be—there
must
be—the sounds of alien civilizations talking to one another in the deeps of space. But, alas, their voices were lost beyond recall in the welter of cosmic interference which Nature herself had made.

This, however, was certainly not what Bradley had called him to hear. Very delicately, the signals officer made some vernier adjustments, frowning a little as he did so.

“I had it on the nose a minute ago—hope it hasn’t drifted off—ah, here it is!”

At first Gibson could detect no alteration in the barrage of noise. Then he noticed that Bradley was silently marking time with his hand—rather quickly, at the rate of some two beats every second. With this to guide him, Gibson presently detected the infinitely faint undulating whistle that was breaking through the cosmic storm.

“What is it?” he asked, already half guessing the answer.

“It’s the radio beacon on Deimos. There’s one on Phobos as well, but it’s not so powerful and we can’t pick it up yet. When we get nearer Mars, we’ll be able to fix ourselves within a few hundred kilometres by using them. We’re at ten times the usable range now, but it’s nice to know.”

Yes, thought Gibson, it is nice to know. Of course, these radio aids weren’t essential when one could see one’s destination all the time, but they simplified some of the navigational problems. As he listened with half-closed eyes to that faint pulsing, sometimes almost drowned by the cosmic barrage, he knew how the mariners of old must have felt when they caught the first glimpse of the harbour lights from far out at sea.