Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (12 page)

"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.