The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars (40 page)

It was quite impossible to realize that the space station itself was rotating, and not the framework of sun and stars: to believe otherwise required an act of faith, a conscious effort of will. The stars were moving so quickly that only the brighter ones were clearly visible and the sun, when Gibson allowed himself to glance at it out of the corner of his eye, was a golden comet that crossed the sky every five seconds. With this fantastic speeding up of the natural order of events, it was easy to see how ancient man had refused to believe that his own solid earth was rotating, and had attributed all movement to the turning celestial sphere.

Partly occulted by the bulk of the station, the Earth was a great crescent spanning half the sky. It was slowly waxing as the station raced along on its globe-encircling orbit; in some forty minutes it would be full, and an hour after that would be totally invisible, a black shield eclipsing the sun while the station passed through its cone of shadow. The Earth would go through all its phases— from new to full and back again— in just two hours. The sense of time became distorted as one thought of these things; the familiar divisions of day and night, of months and seasons, had no meaning here.

About a kilometer from the station, moving with it in its orbit but not at the moment connected to it in any way, were the three spaceships that happened to be “in dock” at the moment. One was the tiny arrowhead of the rocket that had brought him, at such expense and such discomfort, up from Earth an hour ago. The second was a lunar-bound freighter of, he guessed, about a thousand tons gross. And the third, of course, was the
Ares,
almost dazzling in the splendor of her new aluminum paint.

Gibson had never become reconciled to the loss of the sleek, streamlined spaceships which had been the dream of the early twentieth century. The glittering dumb-bell hanging against the stars was not
his
idea of a space-liner; though the world had accepted it, he had not. Of course, he knew the familiar arguments— there was no need for streamlining in a ship that never entered an atmosphere, and therefore the design was dictated purely by structural and power-plant considerations. Since the violently radioactive drive-unit had to be as far away from the crew quarters as possible, the double-sphere and long connecting tube was the simplest solution.

It was also, Gibson thought, the ugliest; but that hardly mattered since the
Ares
would spend practically all her life in deep space where the only spectators were the stars. Presumably she was already fueled and merely waiting for the precisely calculated moment when her motors would burst into life, and she would pull away out of the orbit in which she was circling and had hitherto spent all her existence, to swing into the long hyperbola that led to Mars.

When that happened, he would be aboard, launched at last upon the adventure he had never really believed would come to him.

CHAPTER

2

T
he captain’s office aboard the
Ares
was not designed to hold more than three men when gravity was acting, but there was plenty of room for six while the ship was in a free orbit and one could stand on walls or ceiling according to taste. All except one of the group clustered at surrealist angles around Captain Norden had been in space before and knew what was expected of them, but this was no ordinary briefing. The maiden flight of a new spaceship is always an occasion, and the
Ares
was the first of her line— the first, indeed, of all spaceships ever to be built primarily for passengers and not for freight. When she was fully commissioned, she would carry a crew of thirty and a hundred and fifty passengers in somewhat spartan comfort. On her first voyage, however, the proportions were almost reversed and at the moment her crew of six was waiting for the single passenger to come aboard.

“I’m still not quite clear,” said Owen Bradley, the electronics officer, “what we are supposed to do with the fellow when we’ve got him. Whose bright idea was this, anyway?”

“I was coming to that,” said Captain Norden, running his hands over where his magnificent blond hair had been only a few days before. (Spaceships seldom carry professional barbers, and though there are always plenty of eager amateurs one prefers to put off the evil day as long as possible.) “You all know of Mr. Gibson, of course.”

This remark produced a chorus of replies, not all of them respectful.

“I think his stories stink,” said Dr. Scott. “The later ones, anyway. ‘Martian Dust’ wasn’t bad, but of course it’s completely dated now.”

“Nonsense!” snorted astrogator Mackay. “The last stories are much the best, now that Gibson’s got interested in fundamentals and has cut out the blood and thunder.”

This outburst from the mild little Scott was most uncharacteristic. Before anyone else could join in, Captain Norden interrupted.

“We’re not here to discuss literary criticism, if you don’t mind. There’ll be plenty of time for that later. But there are one or two points the Corporation wants me to make clear before we begin. Mr. Gibson is a very important man— a distinguished guest— and he’s been invited to come on this trip so that he can write a book about it later. It’s not just a publicity stunt.” (“Of course not!” interjected Bradley, with heavy sarcasm.) “But naturally the Corporation hopes that future clients won’t be— er— discouraged by what they read. Apart from that, we
are
making history; our maiden voyage ought to be recorded properly. So try and behave like gentlemen for a while; Gibson’s book will probably sell half a million copies, and your future reputations may depend on your behavior these next three months!”

“That sounds dangerously like blackmail to me,” said Bradley.

“Take it that way if you please,” continued Norden cheerfully. “Of course, I’ll explain to Gibson that he can’t expect the service that will be provided later when we’ve got stewards and cooks and Lord knows what. He’ll understand that, and won’t expect breakfast in bed every morning.”

“Will he help with the washing-up?” asked someone with a practical turn of mind.

Before Norden could deal with this problem in social etiquette a sudden buzzing came from the communications panel, and a voice began to call from the speaker grille.

“Station One calling
Ares
— your passenger’s coming over.”

Norden flipped a switch and replied, “O.K.— we’re ready.” Then he turned to the crew.

“With all these hair-cuts around, the poor chap will think it’s graduation day at Alcatraz. Go and meet him, Jimmy, and help him through the airlock when the tender couples up.”

Martin Gibson was still feeling somewhat exhilarated at having surmounted his first major obstacle— the M.O. at Space Station One. The loss of gravity on leaving the station and crossing to the
Ares
in the tiny, compressed-air driven tender had scarcely bothered him at all, but the sight that met his eyes when he entered Captain Norden’s cabin caused him a momentary relapse. Even when there was no gravity, one liked to pretend that
some
direction was “down,” and it seemed natural to assume that the surface on which chairs and table were bolted was the floor. Unfortunately the majority decision seemed otherwise, for two members of the crew were hanging like stalactites from the “ceiling,” while two more were relaxed at quite arbitrary angles in mid-air. Only the Captain was, according to Gibson’s ideas, the right way up. To make matters worse, their shaven heads gave these normally quite presentable men a faintly sinister appearance, so that the whole tableau looked like a family reunion at Castle Dracula.

There was a brief pause while the crew analyzed Gibson. They all recognized the novelist at once; his face had been familiar to the public ever since his first best-seller, “Thunder in the Dawn,” had appeared nearly twenty years ago. He was a chubby yet sharp-featured little man, still on the right side of forty-five, and when he spoke his voice was surprisingly deep and resonant.

“This,” said Captain Norden, working round the cabin from left to right, “is my engineer, Lieutenant Hilton. This is Dr. Mackay, our navigator— only a Ph.D., not a
real
doctor, like Dr. Scott here. Lieutenant Bradley is Electronics Officer, and Jimmy Spencer, who met you at the airlock, is our supernumerary and hopes to be Captain when he grows up.”

Gibson looked round the little group with some surprise. There were so few of them— five men and a boy! His face must have revealed his thoughts, for Captain Norden laughed and continued.

“Not many of us, are there? But you must remember that this ship is almost automatic— and besides, nothing ever happens in space. When we start the regular passenger run, there’ll be a crew of thirty. On this trip, we’re making up the weight in cargo, so we’re really traveling as a fast freighter.”

Gibson looked carefully at the men who would be his only companions for the next three months. His first reaction (he always distrusted first reactions, but was at pains to note them) was one of astonishment that they seemed so ordinary— when one made allowance for such superficial matters as their odd attitudes and temporary baldness. There was no way of guessing that they belonged to a profession more romantic than any that the world had known since the last cowboys traded in their broncos for helicopters.

At a signal which Gibson did not intercept, the others took their leave by launching themselves with fascinatingly effortless precision through the open doorway. Captain Norden settled down in his seat again and offered Gibson a cigarette. The author accepted it doubtfully.

“You don’t mind smoking?” he asked. “Doesn’t it waste oxygen?”

“There’d be a mutiny,” laughed Norden, “if I had to ban smoking for three months. In any case, the oxygen consumption’s negligible.”

Captain Norden, thought Gibson a little ruefully, was not fitting at all well into the expected pattern. The skipper of a space-liner, according to the best— or at least the most popular— literary tradition, should be a grizzled, keen-eyed veteran who had spent half his life in the ether and could navigate across the Solar System by the seat of his pants, thanks to his uncanny knowledge of the spaceways. He must also be a martinet; when he gave orders, his officers must jump to attention (not an easy thing under zero gravity), salute smartly, and depart at the double.

Instead, the captain of the
Ares
was certainly less than forty, and might have been taken for a successful business executive. As for being a martinet— so far Gibson had detected no signs of discipline whatsoever. This impression, he realized later, was not strictly accurate. The only discipline aboard the
Ares
was entirely self-imposed; that was the only form possible among the type of men who composed her crew.

“So you’ve never been in space before,” said Norden, looking thoughtfully at his passenger.

“I’m afraid not. I made several attempts to get on the lunar run, but it’s absolutely impossible unless you’re on official business. It’s a pity that space-travel’s still so infernally expensive.”

Norden smiled.

“We hope the
Ares
will do something to change that. I must say,” he added, “that you seem to have managed to write quite a lot about the subject with— ah— the minimum of practical experience.”

“Oh, that!” said Gibson airily, with what he hoped was a light laugh. “It’s a common delusion that authors must have experienced everything they describe in their books. I read all I could about space-travel when I was younger and did my best to get the local color right. Don’t forget that all my interplanetary novels were written in the early days— I’ve hardly touched the subject in the last few years. It’s rather surprising that people still associate my name with it.”

Norden wondered how much of this modesty was assumed. Gibson must know perfectly well that it was his space-travel novels that had made him famous— and had prompted the Corporation to invite him on this trip. The whole situation, Norden realized, had some highly entertaining possibilities. But they would have to wait; in the meantime he must explain to this landlubber the routine of life aboard the private world of the
Ares.

“We keep normal Earth-time— Greenwich Meridian— aboard the ship and everything shuts down at ‘night.’ There are no watches, as there used to be in the old days; the instruments can take over when we’re sleeping, so we aren’t on continuous duty. That’s one reason why we can manage with such a small crew. On this trip, as there’s plenty of space, we’ve all got separate cabins. Yours is a regular passenger stateroom; the only one that’s fitted up, as it happens. I think you’ll find it comfortable. Is all your cargo aboard? How much did they let you take?”

“A hundred kilos. It’s in the airlock.”

“A hundred kilos?” Norden managed to repress his amazement. The fellow must be emigrating— taking all his family heirlooms with him. Norden had the true astronaut’s horror of surplus mass, and did not doubt that Gibson was carrying a lot of unnecessary rubbish. However, if the Corporation had O.K.’d it, and the authorized load wasn’t exceeded, he had nothing to complain about.