Invaders From Earth

9

The ship left at 1100 sharp on Thursday, July 5, 2044, and Ted Kennedy was aboard it.

The departure went smoothly and on schedule. The ship was nameless, bearing only the number GC-1073; the captain was a gruff man named Hills who did not seem pleased at the prospect of ferrying a groundlubber along with him to Ganymede. Blast-off was held at Spacefield Seven, a wide jet-blasted area in the flatlands of New Jersey that served as the sole spaceport for the eastern half of the United States.

A small group of friends and well-wishers rode out with Kennedy in the jetcab to see him off. Marge came, and Dave Spalding, and Mike Cameron, and Ernie Watsinski. Kennedy sat moodily in the corner of the cab, staring downward at the smoke-stained sky of industrialized New Jersey, saying nothing, thinking dark thoughts.

He was not looking forward to the trip at all.

Space travel, to him, was still something new and risky. There had been plenty of flights; space travel was forty years old and far from being in the pioneering stage. There had been flights to Mars and Venus, and there was a thriving colony of engineers living in a dome on Luna. Captain Hills had made the Ganymede run a dozen times in the past year. But still Kennedy was nervous.

He was being railroaded. They were all conspiring, he thought, all the smiling false friends who gathered around him. They wanted to send him off to the airless ball of ice halfway across the sky.

The ship was a thin needle standing on its tail, very much alone in the middle of the vast, grassless field. Little trucks had rolled up around it; one was feeding fuel into the reaction-mass hold, one was laden down with supplies for the men of the outpost, another carried mail— real mail, not the carnival-inspired fakery Kennedy had seen on World Holiday—for the men up there.

The ship would carry a crew of six, plus cargo. The invoices listed Kennedy as part of the cargo.

He stood nervously at the edge of the field, watching the ship being loaded and half-listening to the chatter of his farewell committee. A tall gaunt-looking man in a baggy gray uniform came up to them and without waiting for silence said, “Which one of you is Kennedy?”

“I am.” It was almost a croak.

“Glad to know you. I’m Charley Sizer, ship’s medic. Come on with me.”

Kennedy looked at his watch. “But it’s an hour till blastoff time.”

Sizer grinned. “Indeed it is. I want to get you loaded up with gravanol so acceleration doesn’t catch you by surprise. When that big fist comes down you won’t like it. Let’s go, now—you’re holding up the works.”

Kennedy glanced around at the suddenly solemn little group and said, “Well, I guess this is it. See you all three weeks from now. Ernie, make sure my paychecks get sent home on time.” He waited a couple of seconds more. “Marge?” he said finally. “Can I get a kiss good-bye?”

“I’m sorry, Ted.” She pecked at his lips and stepped back. He grinned lopsidedly and let Sizer lead him away.

He clambered up the catwalk into the ship. It was hardly an appealing interior. The ship was poorly lit and narrow; the companionways were strictly utilitarian. This was no shiny passenger ship. Racks of spacesuits hung to one side; far to the front he saw two men peering at a vastly complex control panel.

“Here’s where you’ll stay,” Sizer said, indicating a sort of hammock swung between two girders. “Suppose you climb in now and I’ll let you have the gravanol pill.”

Kennedy climbed in. There was a viewplate just to the left of his head, and he glanced out and saw Marge and Watsinski and the others standing far away, at the edge of the field, watching the ship. Sizer bustled efficiently around him, strapping a safety-webbing over him. The gaunt medic vanished and returned a few minutes later with a water flask and a small bluish pill.

“This stuff will take all the fret out of blast-off,” Sizer explained. “We could hit ten or fifteen g’s and you wouldn’t even know it. You’ll sleep like a babe.” He handed the pill to Kennedy, who swallowed it, finding it tasteless, and gulped water. Kennedy felt no internal changes that would make him resistant to gravity.

He rolled his eyes toward the right. “Say—what happens if there’s an accident? I mean, where’s my spacesuit? I ought to know where it is, in case—”

Sizer chuckled. “It takes about a month of training to learn how to live inside a spacesuit, brother. There just isn’t any sense in giving you one. But there aren’t going to be any accidents. Haven’t they told you space flight’s safer than driving a car?”

“Yes, but—”

“But nothing. The ship’s in perfect order. Nothing can go wrong. You’ve got Newton’s laws of physics working on your side all the way from here to Ganymede and back, and no crazy Holiday drivers coming toward you in your own lane. Just lie back and relax. You’ll doze off soon. Next thing you know, we’ll be past the Moon and Ganymede-bound.”

Kennedy started to protest that he wasn’t sleepy, that he was much too tense to be able to fall asleep. But even as he started to protest, he felt a wave of fatigue sweep over him. He yawned.

Grinning, Sizer said, “Don’t worry, now. See you later, friend.” He threaded his way forward.

Kennedy lay back. He was securely webbed down in the acceleration hammock; he could hardly move. Drowsiness was getting him now. He saw his watch dimly and made out the time as 1045. Fifteen minutes to blast-off. Through the port he saw the little trucks rolling away.

Sleep blurred his vision as the time crawled on toward 1100. He wanted to be awake at the moment of blast-off, to feel the impact, to see Earth leap away from them with sudden ferocity. But he was getting tired. I’ll just close my eyes a second, he thought. Just catch forty winks or so before we lift.

He let his eyelids drop.

A few minutes later he heard the sound of chuckling. Someone touched his arm. He blinked his eyes open and saw Medic Sizer and Captain Hills standing next to his hammock, looking intently at him.

“There something wrong?” he asked in alarm.

“We just wanted to find out how you were doing,” Hills said. “Everything okay?”

“Couldn’t be better. I’m loose and relaxed. But isn’t it almost time for blast-off?”

Hills laughed shortly. “Yeh. That’s a good one. Look out that port, Mr. Kennedy.”

Numbly Kennedy swiveled to the left and looked out. He saw darkness, broken by bright hard little dots of painful light. At the bottom of the viewplate, just barely visible, hung a small green ball with the outlines of Europe and Asia still visible. It looked like a geographical globe. At some distance away hung a smaller pockmarked ball.

Everything seemed frozen and terribly silent, like a Christmas-card scene.

In a hushed voice Kennedy said, “Are we in space?”

“We sure are. You slept through the whole thing, it seems. Blast-off and null-g and everything. We’re a half-day out from Earth. From here till Ganymede it’s all a pretty placid downhill coast, Mr. Kennedy.”

“Is it safe to get out of this cradle?” he asked.

Hills shrugged. “Why not?”

“I won’t float, or anything?”

“Three hours ago we imparted spin along the longitudinal axis, Mr. Kennedy. The gravity in here is precisely one g Earth-norm. If you’re hungry, food’s on in the galley up front.”

He ate. Ship food—packaged synthetics, nourishing and healthfully balanced and about as tasty as straw briquettes. He ate silently and alone, serving himself; the rest of the men had already had their midday meal.

Four of them were playing cards in the fore cubicle that looked out onto the stars. Kennedy was both shocked and amused when he stepped through the unlocked door and saw the four of them, grimy and bearded, dressed in filthy fatigue uniforms, squatting around an empty fuel drum playing poker with savage intensity, while five feet away from them all the splendor of the skies lay unveiled.

He had no desire to break into the game, and they ignored him so thoroughly that it was clear he was not invited. He turned away, smiling. No doubt after you made enough trips, he thought, the naked wonder of space turned dull on you, and poker remained eternally fascinating. The sight of an infinity of blazing suns was finite in its appeal, Kennedy decided. But he himself stared long and hard at the sharp blackness outside, broken by the stream of stars and by the distant redness of what he supposed was Mars.

Mars receded. Kennedy thought he caught sight of ringed Saturn later in the day. Hours passed. He ate again, slept, read.

Two days went by, or maybe three. To the six men of the crew, he was just a piece of cargo—ambulatory, perhaps, but still cargo. He read several books. He let his beard grow until the stubbly shoots began to itch fiercely, and then he shaved it off. Once he started to write a letter to Marge, but he never finished it. He wished bitterly he had brought Watsinski or Dinoli or Bullard along to live on this cramped ship and see Ganymede at first hand.

Even he grew tired of the splendor of the skies. He remembered a time in his boyhood when an uncle had given him a cheap microscope, and he had gone to a nearby park and scooped up a flask of stagnant water. For days he had stared in open-mouthed awe at paramecia and fledgling snails and a host of ciliated creatures, and then the universe in the drop of water had merely given him eye-strain and, bored with his host of creatures, he had impatiently flushed them down the drain.

It was much the same here. The stars were glorious, but even sheer glory palls at length. He could meditate only so long on the magnitude of space, on the multiplicity of suns, on the strange races that might circle red Antares or bright Capella. The vastness of space held a sheerly emotional kind of wonder for him, rather than intellectual, and so it easily became exhausting and finally commonplace. He turned away from the port and returned to his books.

Until finally great Jupiter blotted out the sky, and Sizer came by to tell him that the icy crescent sliver he saw faintly against the mighty planet’s bulk was their destination, Ganymede.

Again he was strapped into the cradle—the deceleration cradle, now; a mild semantic difference. A second time he took a pill, and a second time he slept. When he woke, some time later, there was whiteness outside the port—the endless eye-numbing whiteness of the snowfields of Ganymede.

It was day—“day” being a ghostly sort of half-dusk, at this distance from the sun. Kennedy knew enough about the mechanics of Ganymede from his pseudo-colony work of the past month to be aware that a Ganymedean day lasted slightly more than seven Earth days, the length of time it took Ganymede to revolve once about Jupiter—for Ganymede, like Earth’s Moon, kept the same face toward its primary at all times.

Jupiter now was a gibbous splinter from dayside, a vast chip of a planet that seemed to be falling toward Ganymede’s bleak surface like a celestial spear. Visible against the big planet’s bulk was the lesser splinter of one of the other Galilean moons—Io, most likely, Kennedy thought.

No doubt the dome was on the other side of the ship. From his port, nothing was visible but the ugly teeth of broken mountains, bare, tufted with layers of frozen ammonia, misted by swirling methane clouds.

The ship’s audio system barked. “All hands in suits! Mr. Kennedy, come forward, on the double. We’ve arrived on Ganymede.”

Kennedy wondered how they were going to transport him without a suit. His question was answered before it could be asked; Sizer and one of the crewmen came toward him, swinging the hollow bulk of a spacesuit between them like an eviscerated corpse.

They helped him into it, clamped down the helmet, and switched on his breathing unit and his audio.

Sizer said, “You won’t be in this thing long. Don’t touch any of the gadgets and try not to sneeze. If you feel your breathing supply going bad, yell and yell fast. Everything clear?”

“Yes,” Kennedy said. He felt warm and humid in the suit; they hadn’t bothered to switch on his air-conditioners, or perhaps there weren’t any. He saw men starting down the catwalk in their suits, and he advanced toward the yawning airlock, moving in a stiff, awkward robot-shuffle until he discovered the suit was flexible enough to allow him to walk normally.

He lowered himself through the lock and with great care descended the catwalk. He saw a sprawling low dome to his right, housing several slipshod prefabricated buildings. A truck had popped through an airlock in the side of the dome and was heading toward them. He saw a few figures inside the dome peering curiously outward at the newly arrived spaceship.

A sharp wind whistled about him; paradoxically, he was sweating inside his suit, but he also sensed the numbing cold that was just a fraction of an inch away from his skin. In the wan daylight he could see the cold outlines of stars bridging the blue-black sky. He realized that he had never actually visualized Ganymede despite all his press releases and publicity breaks.

It was a hard bitter place where the wind mumbled obscenities in his spacesuit’s audio pickup and the stars glimmered in the daylight. He looked into the distance, wondering if any of the natives were on hand to witness the new arrival, but as far as he could see the landscape was barren and empty.

The truck arrived. Within its sealed pressurized cab rode a red-bearded man who signaled for them to climb into the back. They did, Kennedy going up next to last and needing a boost from the man behind him to make it. He felt helpless and ashamed of himself.

The truck turned and headed toward the opening airlock of the Ganymede dome.