Operation: Outer Space

Chapter Five

The physical sensations of ascending to the ship's control–room were weird in the extreme. Cochrane had just been wakened from a worn–out sleep, and it was always startling on the moon to wake and find one's self weighing one–sixth of normal. It took seconds to remember how one got that way. But on the way up the stairs, Cochrane was further confused by the fact that the ship was surging this way and swaying that. It moved above the moon's surface to get over the tilted flat Dabney field plate on the ground a hundred yards from the ship's original position.

The Dabney field, obviously, was not in being. The ship hovered on its rockets. They had been designed to lift it off of Earth—and they had—against six times the effective gravity here, and with an acceleration of more gravities on top of that. So the ship rose lightly, almost skittishly. When gyros turned to make it drift sidewise—as a helicopter tilts in Earth's atmosphere—it fairly swooped to a new position. Somebody jockeyed it this way and that.

Cochrane got to the control–room by holding on with both hands to railings. He was angry and appalled.

The control–room was a hemisphere, with vertical vision–screens picturing the stars overhead. Jones stood in an odd sort of harness beside a set of control–switches that did not match the smoothly designed other controls of the ship. He looked out of a plastic blister, by which he could see around and below the ship. He made urgent signals to a man Cochrane had never seen before, who sat in a strap–chair before many other complex controls with his hands playing back and forth upon them. A loudspeaker blatted unmusically. It was Dabney's voice, highly agitated and uneasy.

" … my work for the advancement of science has been applied by other minds. I need to specify that if the experiment now about to begin does not succeed, it will not invalidate my discovery, which has been amply verified by other means. It may be, indeed, that my discovery is so far ahead of present engineering—."

"See here!" raged Cochrane. "You can't take off with Babs on board! This is dangerous!"

Nobody paid any attention. Jones made frantic gestures to indicate the most delicate of adjustments. The man in the strap–chair obeyed the instruction with an absorbed attention. Jones suddenly threw a switch. Something lighted, somewhere. There was a momentary throbbing sound which was not quite a sound.

"Take it away," said Jones in a flat voice.

The man in the strap–chair pressed hard on the controls. Cochrane glanced desperately out of one of the side ports. He saw the moonscape—the frozen lava sea with its layer of whitish–tan moondust. He saw many moon–jeeps gathered near, as if most of the population of Lunar City had been gathered to watch this event. He saw the extraordinary nearness of the moon's horizon.

But it was the most momentary of glimpses. As he opened his mouth to roar a protest, he felt the upward, curiously comforting thrust of acceleration to one full Earth–gravity.

The moonscape was snatched away from beneath the ship. It did not descend. The ship did not seem to rise. The moon itself diminished and vanished like a pricked bubble. The speed of its disappearance was not—it specifically was not—attributable to one earth–gravity of lift applied on a one–sixth–gravity moon.

The loudspeaker hiccoughed and was silent. Cochrane uttered the roar he had started before the added acceleration began. But it was useless. Out the side–port, he saw the stars. They were not still and changeless and winking, as they appeared from the moon. These stars seemed to stir uneasily, to shift ever so slightly among themselves, like flecks of bright color drifting on a breeze.

Jones said in an interested voice:

"Now we'll try the booster."

He threw another switch. And again there was a momentary throbbing sound which was not quite a sound. It was actually a sensation, which one seemed to feel all through one's body. It lasted only the fraction of a second, but while it lasted the stars out the side–ports ceased to be stars. They became little lines of light, all moving toward the ship's stern but at varying rates of speed. Some of them passed beyond view. Some of them moved only a little. But all shifted.

Then they were again tiny spots of light, of innumerable tints and colors, of every conceivably degree of brightness, stirring and moving ever–so–slightly with relation to each other.

"The devil!" said Cochrane, raging.

Jones turned to him. And Jones was not quite poker–faced, now. Not quite. He looked even pleased. Then his face went back to impassiveness again.

"It worked," he said mildly.

"I know it worked!" sputtered Cochrane. "But—where are we? How far did we come?"

"I haven't the least idea," said Jones mildly as before. "Does it matter?"

Cochrane glared at him. Then he realized how completely too late it was to protest anything.

The man he had seen absorbed in the handling of controls now lifted his hands from the board. The rockets died. There was a vast silence, and weightlessness. Cochrane weighed nothing. This was free flight again—like practically all of the ninety–odd hours from the space platform to the moon. The pilot left the controls and in an accustomed fashion soared to a port on the opposite side of the room. He gazed out, and then behind, and said in a tone of astonished satisfaction:

"This is good!—There's the sun!"

"How far?" asked Jones.

"It's fifth magnitude," said the pilot happily. "We really did pile on the horses!"

Jones looked momentarily pleased again. Cochrane said in a voice that even to himself sounded outraged:

"You mean the sun's a fifth–magnitude star from here? What the devil happened?"

"Booster," said Jones, nearly with enthusiasm. "When the field was just a radiation speed–up, I used forty milliamperes of current to the square centimetre of field–plate. That was the field–strength when we sent the signal–rocket across the crater. For the distress–torpedo test, I stepped the field–strength up. I used a tenth of an ampere per square centimetre. I told you! And don't you remember that I wondered what would happen if I used a capacity–storage system?"

Cochrane held fast to a hand–hold.

"The more power you put into your infernal field," he demanded, "the more speed you get?"

Jones said contentedly:

"There's a limit. It depends on the temperature of the things in the field. But I've fixed up the field, now, like a spot–welding outfit. Like a strobe–light. We took off with a light field. It's on now—we have to keep it on. But I got hold of some pretty storage condensers. I hooked them up in parallel to get a momentary surge of high–amperage current when I shorted them through my field–making coils. Couldn't make it a steady current! Everything would blow! But I had a surge of probably six amps per square centimetre for a while."

Cochrane swallowed.

"The field was sixty times as strong as the one the distress–torpedo used? We went—we're going—sixty times as fast?"

"We had lots more speed than that!" But then Jones' enthusiasm dwindled. "I haven't had time to check," he said unhappily. "It's one of the things I want to get at right away. But in theory the field should modify the effect of inertia as the fourth power of its strength. Sixty to the fourth is—."

"How far," demanded Cochrane, "is Proxima Centaurus? That's the nearest star to Earth. How near did we come to reaching it?"

The pilot on the other side of the control–room said with a trace less than his former zest:

"That looks like Sirius, over there … "

"We didn't head for Proxima Centaurus," said Jones mildly. "It's too close! And we have to keep the field–plate back on the moon lined up with us, more or less, so we headed out roughly along the moon's axis. Toward where its north pole points."

"Then where are we headed? Where are we going?"

"We're not going anywhere just yet," said Jones without interest. "We have to find out where we are, and from that—"

Cochrane ran his hand through his hair.

"Look!" he protested. "Who's running this show? You didn't tell me you were going to take off! You didn't pick out a destination! You didn't—"

Jones said very patiently:

"We have to try out the ship. We have to find out how fast it goes with how much field and how much rocket–thrust. We have to find out how far we went and if it was in a straight line. We even have to find out how to land! The ship's a new piece of apparatus. We can't do things with it until we find out what it can do."

Cochrane stared at him. Then he swallowed.

"I see," he said. "The financial and business department of Spaceways, Inc., has done its stuff for the time being."

Jones nodded.

"The technical staff now takes over?"

Jones nodded again.

"I still think," said Cochrane, "that we could have done with a little interdepartmental cooperation. How long before you know what you're about?"

Jones shook his head.

"I can't even guess. Ask Babs to come up here, will you?"

Cochrane threw up his hands. He went toward the spiral–ladder–with–handholds that led below. He went down into the main saloon. A tiny green light winked on and off, urgently, on the far side. Babs was seated at a tiny board, there. As Cochrane looked, she pushed buttons with professional skill. Bill Holden sat in a strap–chair with his face a greenish hue.

"We took off," said Holden in a strained voice.

"We did," said Cochrane. "And the sun's a fifth magnitude star from where we've got to—which is no place in particular. And I've just found out that we started off at random and Jones and the pilot he picked up are now happily about to do some pure–science research!"

Holden closed his eyes.

"When you want to cheer me up," he said feebly, "you can tell me we're about to crash somewhere and this misery will soon be over."

Cochrane said bitterly:

"Taking off without a destination! Letting Babs come along! They don't know how far we've come and they don't know where we're going! This is a hell of a way to run a business!"

"Who called it a business?" asked Holden, as feebly as before. "It started out as a psychiatric treatment!"

Babs' voice came from the side of the saloon where she sat at a vision–tube and microphone. She was saying professionally:

"I assure you it's true. We are linked to you by the Dabney field, in which radiation travels much faster than light. When you were a little boy didn't you ever put a string between two tin cans, and then talk along the string?"

Cochrane stopped beside her scowling. She looked up.

"The press association men on Luna, Mr. Cochrane. They saw us take off, and the radar verified that we traveled some hundred of thousands of miles, but then we simply vanished! They don't understand how they can talk to us without even the time–lag between Earth and Lunar City. I was explaining."

"I'll take it," said Cochrane. "Jones wants you in the control–room. Cameras? Who was handling the cameras?"

"Mr. Bell," said Babs briskly. "It's his hobby, along with poker–playing and children."

"Tell him to get some pictures of the star–fields around us," said Cochrane, "and then you can see what Jones wants. I will do a little business!"

He settled down in the seat Babs had vacated. He faced the two press–association reporters in the screen. They had seen the ship's take off. It was verified beyond any reasonable question. The microwave beam to Earth was working at capacity to transmit statements from the Moon Observatory, which annoyedly conceded that the Spaceways, Inc., salvaged ship had taken off with an acceleration beyond belief. But, the astronomers said firmly, the ship and all its contents must necessarily have been destroyed by the shock of their departure. The acceleration must have been as great as the shock of a meteor hitting Luna.

"You can consider," Cochrane told them, "that I am now an angel, if you like. But how about getting a statement from Dabney?"

A press–association man, back on Luna, uttered the first profanity ever to travel faster than light.

"All he can talk about," he said savagely, "is how wonderful he is! He agrees with the Observatory that you must all be dead. He said so. Can you give us any evidence that you're alive and out in space? Visual evidence, for broadcast?"

At this moment the entire fabric of the space–ship moved slightly. There was no sound of rockets. The ship seemed to turn a little, but that was all. No gravity. No acceleration. It was a singularly uncomfortable sensation, on top of the discomfort of weightlessness.

Cochrane said sardonically:

"If you can't take my word that I'm alive, I'll try to get you some proof! Hm. I'll send you some pictures of the star–fields around us. Shoot them to observatories back on Earth and let them figure out for themselves where we are! Displacement of the relative positions of the stars ought to let them figure things out!"

He left the communicator–board. Holden still looked greenish in his strap–chair. The main saloon was otherwise empty. Cochrane made his way gingerly to the stair going below. He stepped into thin air and descended by a pull on the hand–rail.

This was the dining–saloon. The ship having been built to impress investors in a stock–sales enterprise, it had been beautifully equipped with trimmings. And, having had to rise from Earth to Luna, and needing to take an acceleration of a good many gravities, it had necessarily to be reasonably well–built. It had had, in fact, to be an honest job of ship–building in order to put across a phoney promotion. But there were trimmings that could have been spared. The ports opening upon emptiness, for example, were not really practical arrangements. But everybody but Holden and the two men in the control–room now clustered at those ports, looking out at the stars. There was Jamison and Bell the writer, and Johnny Simms and his wife. Babs had been here and gone.

Bell was busy with a camera. As Cochrane moved to tell him of the need for star–shots to prove to a waiting planet that they were alive, Johnny Simms turned and saw Cochrane. His expression was amiable and unawed.

"Hello," said Johnny Simms cheerfully.

Cochrane nodded curtly.

"I bought West's stock in Spaceways," said Johnny Simms, amusedly, "because I want to come along. Right?"

"So I heard," said Cochrane, as curtly as before.

"West said," Johnny Simms told him gleefully, "that he was going back to Earth, punch Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe on their separate noses, and then go down to South Carolina and raise edible snails for the rest of his life."

"An understandable ambition," said Cochrane. He frowned, waiting to talk to Bell, who was taking an infernally long time to focus a camera out of a side–port.

"It's going to be good when he tries to cash my check," said Johnny Simms delightedly. "I stopped payment on it when he wouldn't pick up the tab for some drinks I invited him to have!"

Cochrane forced his face to impassiveness. Johnny Simms was that way, he understood. He was a psychopathic personality. He was completely insensitive to notions of ethics. Ideas of right and wrong were as completely meaningless to him as tones to a tone–deaf person, or pastel tints to a man who is color–blind. They simply didn't register. His mind was up to par, and he could be a charming companion. He could experience the most kindly of emotions and most generous of impulses, which he put into practice. But he also had a normal person's impulse to less admirable behavior, and he simply could not understand that there was any difference between impulses. He put the unpleasing ones into practice too. He'd been on the moon to avoid extradition because of past impulses which society called murderous. On this ship it was yet to be discovered what he would do—but because he was technically sane his lawyers could have prevented a take off unless he came along. Cochrane, at the moment, felt an impulse to heave him out an airlock as a probable danger. But Cochrane was not a psychopathic personality.

He stopped Bell in his picture–taking and looked at the first of the prints. They were excellent. He went back to the vision–set to transmit them back to Luna. He sent them off. They would be forwarded to observatories on Earth and inspected. They literally could not be faked. There were thousands of stars on each print—with the Milky Way for background on some—and each of those thousands of stars would be identified, and each would have changed its relative position from that seen on earth, with relation to every other star. Astronomers could detect the spot from which the picture had been taken. But to fake a single print would have required years of computation and almost certainly there would have been slip–ups somewhere. These pictures were unassailable evidence that a human expedition had reached a point in space that had been beyond all human dreaming.

Then Cochrane had nothing to do. He was a supernumerary member of the crew. The pilot and Jones were in charge of the ship. Jamison would take care of the catering, when meal–time came. Probably Alicia Keith—no, Alicia Simms—would help. Nothing else needed attention. The rockets either worked or they didn't. The air–apparatus needed no supervision. Cochrane found himself without a function.

He went restlessly back to the control–room. He found Babs looking helpless, and Jones staring blankly at a slip of paper in his hands, while the pilot was still at a blister–port, staring at the stars through one of those squat, thick telescopes used on Luna for the examination of the planets.

"How goes the research?" asked Cochrane.

"We're stumped," said Jones painfully. "I forgot something."

"What?"

"Whenever I wanted anything," said Jones, "I wrote it out and gave a memo to Babs. She attended to it."

"My system, exactly," admitted Cochrane.

"I wrote out a memo for her," said Jones unhappily, "asking for star–charts and for her to get somebody to set up a system of astrogation for outside the solar system. Nobody's ever bothered to do that before. Nobody's ever reached even Mars! But I figured we'd need it."

Cochrane waited. Jones showed him a creased bit of paper, closely written.

"I wrote out the memo and put it in my pocket," said Jones, "and I forgot to give it to Babs. So we can't astrogate. We don't know how. We didn't get either star–charts or instructions. We're lost."

Cochrane waited.

"Apparently Al was mistaken in the star he spotted as our sun," added Jones. He referred to the pilot, whom Cochrane had not met before. "Anyhow we can't find it again. We turned the ship to look at some more stars, and we can't pick it out any more."

Cochrane said:

"You'll keep looking, of course."

"For what?" asked Jones.

He waved his hand out the four equally–spaced plastic blister–ports. From where he stood, Cochrane could see thousands of thousands of stars out those four small openings. They were of every conceivable color and degree of brightness. The Milky Way was like a band of diamonds.

"We know the sun's a yellow star," said Jones, "but we don't know how bright it should be, or what the sky should look like beyond it."

"Constellations?" asked Cochrane.

"Find 'em!" said Jones vexedly.

Cochrane didn't try. If a moon–rocket pilot could not spot familiar star–groups, a television producer wasn't likely to see them. And it was obvious, once one thought, that the brighter stars seen from Earth would be mostly the nearer ones. If Jones was right in his guess that his booster had increased the speed of the ship by sixty to the fourth power, it would have gone some millions of times as fast as the distress–torpedo, for a brief period (the ratio was actually something over nineteen million times) and it happened that nobody had been able to measure the speed of that test–object.

Cochrane was no mathematician, but he could see that there was no data for computation on hand. After one found out how fast an acceleration of one Earth–gravity in a Dabney field of such–and–such strength speeded up a ship, something like dead reckoning could be managed. But all that could be known right now was that they had come a long way.

He remembered a television show he'd produced, laid in space on an imaginary voyage. The script–writer had had one of the characters say that no constellation would be visible at a hundred light–years from the solar system. It would be rather like a canary trying to locate the window he'd escaped from, from a block away, with no memories of the flight from it.

Cochrane said suddenly, in a pleased tone:

"This is a pretty good break—if we can keep them from finding out about it back home! We'll have an entirely new program, good for a thirteen–week sequence, on just this!"

Babs stared at him.

"Main set, this control–room," said Cochrane enthusiastically. "We'll get a long–beard scientist back home with a panel of experts. We'll discuss our problems here! We'll navigate from home, with the whole business on the air! We'll have audience–identification up to a record! Everybody on Earth will feel like he's here with us, sharing our problems!"

Jones said irritably:

"You don't get it! We're lost! We can't check our speed without knowing where we are and how far we've come! We can't find out what the ship will do when we can't find out what it's done! Don't you see?"

Cochrane said patiently:

"I know! But we're in touch with Luna through the Dabney field that got us here! It transmitted radiation before, faster than light. It's transmitting voice and pictures now. Now we set up a television show which pays for our astrogation and lets the world sit in on the prettier aspects of our travels. Hm…. How long before you can sit down on a planet, after you have all the navigational aids of—say—the four best observatories on Earth to help you? I'll arrange for a sponsor—."

He went happily down the stairs again. This was a spiral stair, and he zestfully spun around it as he went to the next deck below. At the bottom he called up to Babs:

"Babs! Get Bell and Alicia Keith and come along to take dictation! I'm going to need some legal witnesses for the biggest deal in the history of advertising, made at several times the speed of light!"

And he went zestfully to the communicator to set it up.

And time passed. Data arrived, which at once solved Jones' and the pilot's problem of where they were and how far they had come—it was, actually, 178.3 light–years—and they spent an hour making further tests and getting further determinations, and then they got a destination.

They stopped in space to extrude from the airlock a small package which expanded into a forty–foot plastic balloon with a minute atomic battery attached to it. The plastic was an electric conductor. It was a field–plate of the Dabney field. It took over the field from Earth and maintained it. It provided a second field for the ship to maintain. The ship, then, could move at any angle from the balloon. The Dabney field stretched 178.3 light–years through emptiness to the balloon, and then at any desired direction to the ship.

The ship's rockets thrust again—and the booster–circuit came into play. There were maneuverings. A second balloon was put out in space.

At 8:30 Central U. S. Time, on a period relinquished by other advertisers—bought out—a new program went on the air. It was a half–hour show, sponsored by the Intercity Credit Corporation—"Buy on Credit Guaranteed"—with ten straight minutes of commercials interjected in four sections. It was the highest–priced show ever put on the air. It showed the interior of the ship's control–rooms, with occasional brief switches to authoritative persons on Earth for comment on what was relayed from the far–off skies.

The first broadcast ensured the success of the program beyond possible dispute. It started with curt conversation between Jones and the pilot, Al—Jones loathed this part of it, but Al turned out to be something of a ham—on the problems of approaching a new solar system. Cut to computers back on Earth. Back to the control–room of the starship. Pictures of the local sun, and comments on its differentness from the sun that had nourished the human race since time began.

Then the cameras—Bell worked them—panned down through the ship's blister–ports. There was a planet below. The ship descended toward it. It swelled visibly as the space–ship approached. Cochrane stood out of camera–range and acted as director as well as producer of the opus. He used even Johnny Simms as an offstage voice repeating stern commands. It was corny. There was no doubt about it. It had a large content of ham.

But it happened to be authentic. The ship had reached another planet, with vast ice–caps and what appeared to be no more than a twenty–degree–wide equatorial belt where there was less than complete glaciation. The rockets roared and boomed as the ship let down into the cloud–layers.

Television audiences back on Earth viewed the new planet nearly as soon as did those in the ship. The time–lag was roughly three seconds for a distance of 203.7 light–years.

The surface of the planet was wild and dramatic beyond belief. There were valleys where vegetation grew luxuriantly. There were ranges of snow–clad mountains interpenetrating the equatorial strip, and there were masses of white which, as the ship descended, could be identified as glaciers moving down toward the vegetation.

But as the ship sank lower and lower—and the sound of its rockets became thunderous because of the atmosphere around it—a new feature took over the central position in one's concept of what the planet was actually like.

The planet was volcanic. There were smoking cones everywhere—in the snow–fields, among the ice–caps, in between the glaciers, and even among the tumbled areas whose greenness proved that here was an environment which might be perilous, but where life should thrive abundantly.

The ship continued to descend toward a great forest near a terminal moraine.