Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (82 page)

A new shuttle was built, reproducing the design of the original and the more complex internal design. Much of this replication was based on increased knowledge of how the vessel had once operated, though some of the copying was blind. The problem of stabilizing air pressure was minor compared to the challenge of supplying and purifying atmosphere for the projected twelve-man investigative team and two pilots. A considerable quantity of compressed oxygen would be needed. Based on low-altitude experiments, it was initially thought that the interim from launch to arrival at the mysterious orbiting body would be about three hours. This, however, in no way ensured immediate entrance into the vessel, if it was indeed a ship of some kind. From readings of early manuscripts and other documents relating to the
Kosmos
, the satellite gave indications of being a duplicate, at least in terms of its external form. The very-high-resolution observations made with the new telescope at McKie Observatory on Mount Zion in the equatorial region, with its 2-meter lens aperture, enabled astronomers to confirm that the object was at least a kilometer in length, and oval shaped.

If it
was
the
Kosmos
, or a duplicate, then shuttle bays would be waiting for us. They might or might not be closed. If all bays were closed, we still might be able to open one, since we had the command codes for this and other docking functions, left in the record logs of the original shuttle. Moreover, these were described as universal emergency portal codes in the archived, unpublished writings of Vladimir Kirilov, the pioneer who piloted the shuttle’s return to the planet at the foundation. Nevertheless, our radio transmission of the code still might not communicate with the code responder in the bay. We had no way of knowing whether or not our radio frequencies were dedicated—could “speak” with each other.

If
the shuttle were able to enter the ship, would the bay doors be closable? And would pressurization still operate in those bays? The ship’s designers surely would have seen the need for human oversight, providing a manual back-up in case of remote command failure. Yes, but in all likelihood, we would find no one left alive on board after two centuries of orbit; there would be no one there to open and shut the doors and change the pressure.

The questions multiplied: Was there breathable air in the ship? Was its internal gravity still maintained? Was there light and heat? We knew that the energy source had been “nuclear”. We understood very little about this form of power generation, and, of course, it was associated with the catastrophe—in other words, it was a dangerous entity. Clearly, mankind had once harnessed it for positive purposes, but how long did its fuel, or its apparatus, last? Had the ship’s silence been caused by the death of its energy source?

A year was set aside for test flights that brought pilots up through the stratosphere and well into the mesosphere. The sensation of weightlessness, though expected, was initially a cause of both disorientation and entertainment for the men, but they quickly grew accustomed to it. Oxygen regeneration worked adequately. Reentry was accomplished with only minimal damage (overheating due to too rapid a descent). The designers learned a good deal from these trial flights, and developed a clay-ceramic coating that went a long way toward protecting the hull from extremely high-friction temperatures. Even so, thereafter the shuttle’s test flights took much longer to complete, since ascent and descent times were deliberately increased in order to avoid unnecessary stress on the vessel’s outer skin.

Test flight
  In June of this year, the shuttle made its first full test flight to the ship, with two pilots at the helm. During the greater part of the six-hour ascent, their radio communications with Regnum-base were comprised of operational information. During the final hour, however, the pilots’ comments became more exclamatory, the tone increasingly excited by what they were seeing through the cabin window. “It
is
a ship!” they cried repeatedly. “It’s immense . . . beautiful . . . flawless!” As they made a pass from bow to stern, they discovered on one side, close to its underbelly, a single open bay.

“It looks like someone left the door open for us”, said one of the pilots.

“Waiting for us”, said the other.

With small bursts from its jets, the shuttle maneuvered close, so close in fact that there was a shudder as the two vessels touched, like the hulls of wooden boats bumping into each other without doing damage. The pilot in charge swiftly withdrew, and brought the shuttle level with the open bay. Carefully, he slid it toward the entrance. As he did so, the bay’s interior was suddenly illuminated by a bright light. When the craft was entirely inside, one more small burst brought it to the floor. The moment it touched the surface, the bay door began to lower from a recess in the wall above, and a red light began flashing.

Alarmed at first, the pilots did not know what to do. They simply sat there and watched it all, waiting to see what would happen. When the outer door was completely closed, the pilots realized that they now felt their bodies’ weight. The ship had internal gravity. Then they listened to a minute or so of roaring-hissing that steadily grew in volume until it abruptly ceased. The red light stopped flashing, and a loud voice that seemed to come from nowhere, or everywhere, announced in several languages: “Pressurization complete”.

The pilots remained where they were and waited. And waited. At this point, they should have obeyed their orders and taken the necessary steps to depart from the ship and return to Regnum-base. But they were unsure of how to reopen the door and were also overwhelmed by curiosity. They affixed their helmets to their pressure suits and locked them in place. Taking a few deep breaths, wondering if these would be their last, they agreed to make an experiment. The pilot in charge opened the shuttle’s portal, half-expecting to feel its atmosphere rush outward into a vacuum. Instead, the external atmosphere flowed into the shuttle. Now they had confirmation that the bay was indeed pressurized—though with what they did not know. The oxygen monitor for the shuttle’s internal air supply showed that some change in the atmosphere had occurred, and that it now contained slightly less oxygen, but the instrument could not indicate what other elements might be present, such as lethal gases or unknown factors detrimental to human health.

Rashly, the copilot opened his helmet, preparing to shut it at the first sensation of distress. He inhaled. Then he smiled.

“A bit stuffy”, he laughed. “But good enough for guys like us.”

Both men then exited their craft and walked about the bay. On the wall opposite the ship’s external wall, they located a large, closed doorway leading deeper into the interior. They had brought Vladimir Kirilov’s codes with them, and now they tried punching the numbers into a console beside the doorway. Finally, one of the numbers prompted the loud voice to say: “Access verified.” An overhead green light began flashing as the door slid slowly upward. When the entrance was fully open, the light stayed solid green.

The men now found themselves staring into a cavernous hallway or concourse, far longer than it was wide. They could not see either end of it, though here too the chamber was illuminated by overhead lights. The ceiling appeared to be sixty to eighty feet high.

“We shouldn’t be doing this”, murmured the pilot.

“Yes, you’re right”, said the copilot.

“If we die, the shuttle stays here—years of work gone in one stroke.”

“And no second chance.”

“Let’s go.”

Retracing their steps, they closed the doors to the interior. The copilot pointed out that there was a numerical console beside the huge door that accessed outer space, and he offered to try opening it using one of the codes. The pilot replied that this was a risk: if the door began opening too soon, whoever entered the code might be sucked out with the atmosphere, followed by a painful death, suit or no suit. Alternatively, the code command might have a delay response, giving him enough time to get back into the shuttle and pressurize it. But there was no way of knowing what the timing, if any, was.

Both men reentered the shuttle and sealed it. Then they sat there for a time, thinking.

“It may be automated”, said the pilot at last. He lightly touched the anti-gravity button and the vessel lifted from the floor. Immediately, the red light commenced its flashing, and the loud voice announced: “Prepare for depressurization.”

A minute later, the atmosphere hissed as it was pumped from the bay, and a bell rang continuously until there was no more air for soundwaves. The red light flashed on and on as the bay door began to rise, then turned green when it was completely open.

“Thank God”, both men exhaled simultaneously.

The pilot brought the shuttle out through the wide-open portal and headed for home.

The boarding
  And now, my personal account begins:

On the morning of 15 July 258, the new shuttle lifted off from the field base at the science center near Foundation City. We rose straight up into a clear blue sky, ascending very slowly. The first four hours of ascent would be through the troposphere and stratosphere, the next hour and a half through the mesosphere and ionosphere, and finally, when we had escaped the planet’s protective layers, came the short half-hour propulsion flight to the ship.

The party was comprised of fourteen people: seven scientists, including an electrical engineer, a chemist, a mathematician, an astronomer, a biologist, a physician, and a person who specializes in the new theoretical field of computer analysis. The non-scientists were our two pilots and a navigator, a representative of the Commonwealth Congress, who is also chief archivist of the continental library, and three historians, one of whom was myself in my combined capacity as historian, priest, and representative of the synod of bishops.

During the first hours of the journey, I felt an increasing sense of awe and love for this work of art that God had made and given to us: an entire world, a world so beautiful, so inexhaustibly rich in wonders. I had until then only imagined what it must look like as a whole. Though the newly rediscovered science of photography has given us marvels of image-making, it cannot convey the colors of reality and has never obtained images of the planet seen from above—seen as a whole. My first sight of it reduced me to tears, and I think my companions felt very much as I did, for we all grew motionless and silent as we gazed out the windows, and there was no speaking among us until later, when we boarded the great ship.

As we left the ionosphere behind, propulsion was ignited, and its thrust caused me to feel the return of a portion of my body’s weight. So many marvels all at once! Through the windows, we saw the massive form of the great ship swiftly approaching. Reducing thrust and maneuvering carefully, the pilots brought us in close and then, with small bursts from navigation vents, we entered the bay. The shuttle settled gently onto the floor, a red light began flashing, and the outer bay door descended, enclosing us within.

It is impossible to adequately convey our first impressions. These were various and conflicting, at times psychologically disorienting due to the sheer number of astonishing experiences and discoveries we would come upon within a very short period of time. In a word, we were overwhelmed, sometimes with awe, sometimes by fear, and occasionally by profound respect for those who had remained as passengers on the ship two hundred and fifty years before our time.

As the pilots led the team through the bay into the ship proper, we felt as if we were entering a city. During the following two weeks, the truth that it was a city floating in the heavens was never far from our thoughts. Our life’s experience had imprinted in us the subconscious conviction that heavy things up in the air must always fall down, and this was a very heavy thing indeed. At certain other moments, we felt as if we were wandering within the complexities of a colossal machine.

We had brought with us diagrams of the ship left to us by the pioneers. We had all read their memoirs, short and long, which had been published and republished over the centuries. We knew that we were now on the bottom level called PHM, which was divided into three main sections, titled Propulsion (at the rear of the vessel), Holds (the largest section, in the middle) and Maintenance (the smallest, in the forward area). The shuttle bays were on the port side of the ship, in a separate region that ran the length of Maintenance and Holds, with access mainly into the latter. The Holds was divided equally into two separate subsections: food storage and samples storage, where zoological, botanical, and mineral samples brought to the ship by shuttles had been stored for return to Earth.

The committee at Regnum-base had decided beforehand on a program of exploration that would bypass this bottom level and take the team straight up through the four intermediate residential concourses to the ship’s command center on KC. It would be the most likely place to find a hub of information.

The possibility that people were still alive on board was remote in the extreme. For two hundred years, the vessel had displayed not a flicker of life, at least none that we could detect. Regardless of the possibility that the first generation of voyageurs might have had children, grandchildren, and so forth, there was simply the problem of food. Pioneers had estimated that there would have been no more than a century’s supply at best, even as the number of the ship’s company declined. We did not yet know with certainty that this was the
Kosmos
, but it was generally believed to be the original ship. There were, after all, no other shuttles: there were three empty bays beside our own, which fit with what we knew about the condition of the ship at the time of the catastrophe.

Following the plan, we now moved as a body along the shuttle concourse until we reached a set of three doors in the left-hand, or inner, concourse wall. One stood open. Engraved in the wall above the doors was the word “elevator” in several languages. Apparently, the original inhabitants had used these very small room-like mechanisms to raise and lower themselves from level to level. This had played an important role in their lives. Regrettably, the numerical key consoles beside each door did not respond to touch. Within the single open elevator, we found another console with five command buttons, on which was inscribed their destination floors, reading from bottom to top: PHM, D, C, B, A, KC. None of them responded to touch, and throughout our remaining time on the ship we were unable to locate any elevator that still functioned. Why this should be so, we could not guess and did not try to discover, since we had far more important questions before us. A long walk from one end of the shuttle concourse to the other showed us that there were a dozen “emergency staircases” ranged along the route. Only the one closest to our arrival bay had an open door; the others were locked.