Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (25 page)

I was interested in Ben’s suggestion. Mike Marshall, our leader, had dropped the morale problem on me in one of his fits of delegation, and since I was bored myself I was in favor of any project that might give us something to do on Sundays.

I said, “This is a good idea, Ben. There’s one problem, though. We don’t have the equipment for an assault like that. You know how tight the budget is, too. I could ask Mike.”

“Don’t ask Mike!”

“Well, I’d have to ask Mike. And he could ask. But I don’t think we’d get what we have to have.”

“But it’s much simpler than that,” Ben said. “The Uranus bathyscaphe is still on Titania. It’s old, of course, but there is no reason it couldn’t be used here. The two planets are practically twins. Opposition is coming up. The bathyscaphe could be brought here for almost nothing. I thought you could requisition it through your department.”

That was Ben for you.
A very strange man.
I think he supposed that I would very quietly requisition the bathyscaphe that had been used to probe the atmosphere-ocean of Uranus, and just not say anything to Mike. Then he and I would slip quietly over to Neptune on our weekends. If he could have obtained and operated the machine by himself, I’m sure he would have preferred that.

“If the equipment is still on Titania, we may be able to get it,” I said. “I’ll ask Mike when I take up d
e
partment operations with him tomorrow.”

“Don’t ask Mike.”

“Look, Ben. If you want this at all, it has to go through Mike. There’s no other way. You know that.”

“No,” he said. “Just forget the whole thing. I’m sorry I brought the subject up.”

Ben was jealous of his ideas. If they passed through too many hands, they lost their savor for him. This was a good idea, or so it seemed to me, but he would prefer to let it lapse than to have the rest of our little colony involved.

I talked to Mike the next day. Mike was another odd one. At some previous time he may have had drive, but he no longer cared very deeply. He delegated as much responsibility as he possibly could. He worked erratically. And he greeted my proposal with no great interest.

“Who cares if we find life on Neptune? We already know that ammonia-methane worlds can support life, and none of it has been very interesting after the novelty wears off.”

“That’s true,” I said, “but do you suppose I care one way or the other if we find another strange kind of minnow? The important thing is that it would give as many of us as turned out to be interested something constructive to do. It’s a project I could enjoy.”

“Do you think anybody else would?” Mike asked. “How many first landings have there been? If you count everything, there must have been fifty or sixty. Who remembers them all? Who cares?”

“The point isn’t whether anybody else would be interested,” I said. “This isn’t for outsiders. Mike, this morning I got out of my chair and I found that my rear end had gone to sleep. I want something to do.”

It took argument, but Mike finally agreed to find out if the bathyscaphe was available. It turned out to be, and it arrived at Triton Base aboard ship some seven months later. That wasn’t so very long. We didn’t have anything else to do. We didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Ben, of course, was hopping mad, mostly with me. I’d stolen his idea. I’d ruined his idea. I’d betrayed his trust. I’d spoiled things.

“It’s the last time I ever tell you anything,” he said.
As he had said more than once before.

The project turned out to be far more of a success than I had ever anticipated. Our job was to keep contact with the starship, which we did adequately, and to keep a large, empty house in order, which we did i
n
adequately. Not that anybody cared.

After the bathyscaphe arrived, however, schedules started being observed. People cared whether or not they were relieved on time. There was less dust in corners, less dirt on people. Minor illness fell off dr
a
matically. And my rear end stopped going to sleep on me. Even Mike, of all people, became interested.

It was all very much like the boat you built in your basement when you were fourteen. It was what we did in our spare time. It was the Project.

Ben was in and Ben was out. Ben worked sometimes and sometimes he didn’t. He didn’t feel the venture was quite his anymore, but he couldn’t bring himself to stay away. So even he wound up involved.

Everybody else cared a lot. There was work to do. The bathyscaphe had to be overhauled completely. That took a lot of spare time. And when we were done, there was every prospect of even more spare time being whiled away in months and months of exploration.

Like all the outer planets except Pluto, which is a misplaced moon, Neptune is a gassy giant. At one time it was expected to have a layer of ice and rocky core beneath its atmosphere. In fact, however, it has no solid surface. It’s all
atmosphere
, a murky green sea of hydrogen and helium and methane and ammonia. There are clouds and snowstorms, but no place to put your feet.

More than anything else, it is like the oceans of Earth, and the vehicle we intended to use to explore its unknown depths was a fantastic cross between a dirigible and the bathyscaphes of Piccard and his su
c
cessors. Neptune was no well-tended garden, safe and comfortable, but in fact it was more easily accessible than are Earth’s hostile ocean deeps with their incredible pressures.

The planet was only a step away from us on Triton, closer than the Moon is to Earth. It was possible for the bathyscaphe to reach Neptune under its own power, but not for it to return up the gravity well. Co
n
sequently we decided to use a mother ship, like a tender for a helmet
diver, that
would drop the bathyscaphe and then recover it. In a way I was sorry, because I found the idea of a hydrogen-fired balloon chugging its way through space amusing.

In time we were ready to make our first probe. The question then became one of who would be the two of us to go first. It was a painful question. Should it be settled by rank? Should it be settled by amount of work contributed? Should it be settled by lot? As the day of readiness came closer, the issue became more acute. Each method of choice had its champions. By and large we were polite about the subject, but there was one fistfight between Arlo Harlow, who had worked particularly hard, and Sperry Donner, who was se
c
ond-in-command, which was terminated when both participants discovered they actually had no particular enthusiasm for fistfighting.

Mike finally settled the issue. The first trip would be Ben and me because we were responsible. After that it would be alphabetically by pairs. He told me later that he had been intending to be strictly alphabetical,
but that would have thrown Ben into the last pair, which was one problem, and would have made Ben the partner of Roy Wilimczyk, which was another.

“This seemed the best solution,” he said. “If anybody can cope with him, it’s you.”

“Thank you,” I said, and he understood that I didn’t mean it.

Ben was frankly mellow that week—mellow for Ben. This means that about forty percent of the time he was his obnoxious ingratiating self instead of his normal obnoxious uningratiating self. He even forgave me.

Finally, on a Sunday that was as brisk and bright and sunny as a day ever gets on Triton, four of us set off toward the great green cotton-candy boulder that filled a full ten degrees of sky. Ben and I didn’t wait to see it grow. Long before the ship was in a parking orbit, Ben and I were in the cabin of the bathyscaphe and the whole was enclosed in a drop capsule.

I was piloting our machine. Ben was to supervise the monitoring equipment that would record our e
n
counters with the planet. We weren’t lowered over the side in the tradition of Earth’s oceans. We were popped out like a watermelon seed. We were strapped in and blind. I had my fingers on the manual switch and had no need to trigger it. The rockets did what rockets do. The drop capsule peeled away automatically.

Then when our lights came on, we were deep in a green murk. It wasn’t of a consistency. There were winds or eddies, call them whichever you choose. Our lights probed ahead. Sometimes we could see for considerable distances—yards. Often we could only see a few feet. We had the additional eyes of radar, which looked in circles about us and saw nothing except once what I took to be an ammonia snowstorm and avoided. Other sensors listened to the sound of the planet, took its temperature and pulse. Its temperature was very, very cold. Its pulse was slow and steady.

I feathered my elevators and found that the bathyscaphe worked as I had been assured that it did. The turboprops drove us steadily through the green. I was extremely glad to have my instruments. They told me I was right-side up, a fact I would not otherwise have known. And they kept me connected to our mother ship.

“I hope you are keeping in mind why we are here,” Ben said.

“I am,” I said. “However, until we know the planet better, I think one place will be about as likely as the next. I haven’t seen any whale herds yet.”

“No,” said Ben, “but it doesn’t mean they’re not out there. They may simply be shy. After all, the e
x
istence of the Great Sea Serpent wasn’t definitely established until the last ten years. I’d settle for som
e
thing smaller, though.”

We had collecting plates out. They might well demonstrate the presence of the same sort of soupy life that was found on Uranus. Ben kept busy with his monitoring. I kept busy with my piloting.

I had helped on this venture because I was bored, thoroughly tired of doing nothing in particular. I had come to Neptune with only the mildest interest in proving Ben’s case. Now, however, I began to feel pleased to be where I was. The view, as we drove ourselves through the currents of this gassy sea, was monotonous, monochromatic, but weirdly beautiful. This was another sort of world than any I had been used to. I liked it. It may sound funny, but I respected it for being itself in the same way that you respect a totally ugly girl who has come to terms with herself.

I was pleased that men should be here in this last dark corner of the Solar System, and glad that I was one of the men. There is a place in reference books for this, too, if only in a footnote with the hundreds of people
who have made first contacts.

It was a full five hours before we were back aboard our mother ship. Arlo Harlow helped us out of the bathyscaphe.

“How did it go?” he said.

“We won’t know until we check through the data,” Ben said. “We didn’t see anything identifiable. Not where he drove.”

I said, “You’ll have to see it for yourself. I don’t think I can describe it for you. You’ll see. It’s a real experience.”

Arlo said, “Mike wants to talk to you. He’s got news.”

Ben and I went forward to talk to Mike back at Triton Base. The satellite was invisible ahead of us—with Neptune full, Triton was necessarily a new moon, and dark.

“Hello, Mike,” I said. “Arlo says you have news. Did the starship check in?”

“No,” he said. “The news is you. You two are a human-interest story.
The last planet landing in the Solar System.
Hold on. The first fac sheet has already come through. The headline is,
‘neptune reached.’
It begins, ‘In these days of groups and organizations and institutions, in these days when man’s first ship to the stars casts off with a crew of ten thousand, stories of individual human courage seem a thing of the distant past.’ And it ends, ‘If men like these bear our colors forward, the race of man shall yet prevail.’”

“I like that,” Ben said. “That’s very good.”

Mike said, “There’s also a story that wants to know why money was ever spent on such pointless flamboyance as this landing.”

“Tell them in the first place that there wasn’t any landing,” I said. “We were in Neptune, not on it. Then make the point that the bathyscaphe was left over from the Uranus probe and that we put it in shape ou
r
selves.”

“I did that,” Mike said. “They got it in the story.
The first one.
The writer applauds your courage in chancing your life in such a primitive and antiquated exploratory vehicle.”

“Oh, hell,” I said.

“Listen. They have some questions they want answered. They want to know why you went. Why did you go, Bob?”

“Tell them that it seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said.

“I can’t give them that.”

“We wanted to find out whether there was life on Neptune,” Ben said.

“Did you find any?”

“As far as we know, we didn’t,” I said.

“Then I can’t give them that. Try again.”

I thought. After a moment I said, “Tell them that we didn’t think it was right for men to go to the stars without having touched all the bases here.”

As “touch all the bases,” that line has passed into the familiar quotation books.

Ben and I are in the history books, too—in the footnotes along with the hundreds of other people who made first landings. If you count the starships, that list would run into the thousands.