The Angry Planet (5 page)

“I say,” said Mike, in an awed whisper. “What a
monster!”

“It’s beautiful,” sighed Jacky, “it’s simply
beautiful!”

It certainly was. It was huge, like a great shining
silver fish, all sparkling in the sun. As Mike had said, it was pear-shaped.
All down the back of it there was a long slender fin. Judging from what we knew
to be the length of the enclosure, it was a good 150 feet long.

We stared and stared. Then Mike said, in a puzzled
voice:

“I say—it’s facing a different way from what it was
last Sunday—and it’s much more tilted up into the air. That ramp it’s on must
be adjustable—probably there’s a little donkey engine or something to work it.
That means the door is on the other side now—come on, I’m going round.”

We went round by the bulging end, which soared high
into the air above us—almost perpendicularly, it seemed. As we got to the front
we saw two enormous windows (like the ones all along the sides I have already
mentioned, only much bigger). They seemed like huge shining eyes. Painted in a
semi-circle between them, in silver, were the words:
THE ALBATROSS.

“Lovely,” said Jacky softly. “What a perfect name for
it! It’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t know whether it’s meant to
go to the moon or not, but it certainly deserves to go to the moon!”

When we got round to the other side we saw that in
that part of the enclosure there were a great many sheds and lean-to shelters
against the wall. Inside them we could see some machinery—lathes and so on—so
we took these to be the workshops. Also on this side of the enclosure there was
an immense gate in the wall, but this, of course, was closed.

High up in the rocket on this side, near the huge
blunt nose, there was a big metal door, wide open. Suspended from it was a
slender ladder of flexible steel. Before we could say a word, Mike was half-way
up it.

“Mike!” called Jacky. “There’ll be trouble! You can’t
do it!”

“Oh, can’t I!” he yelled back, and gave one of his
guffaws of triumph. “Come on, the two of you, while you have the chance. Don’t
be a couple of sissies!”

By this time he had reached the top and had
disappeared inside the rocket. I looked at Jacky and she looked at me.

“Oh well!” she said. “We might as well be hanged for
sheep as lambs.”

And she started to climb, too. And when she was almost
at the top, I followed her.

We found ourselves, when we got through the outer
door, confronted, over a gap of about two feet, by another door, which was also
open, though this one opened inwards. I saw, immediately, looking along to my
left and right from the little bridge or gangway, why this was: the outside of
the rocket was a huge casing-shell—a sort of skin, or envelope: the whole thing
was like a gigantic thermos flask, with an inner chamber—the two parts
separated, as I saw, with massive springs.

Inside the inner door we were in a huge cabin. It must
have been pivoted in some way to the inner shell, for in spite of the angle at
which the rocket lay, the floor of it was level, and parallel to the ground.

I can’t begin to describe what this cabin was like at
a first glance. There was, at one end of it, a huge panel of controls—wheels,
levers, dials covered with figures, switches, resistance coils, valves, and so
on. Two small windows were let into this panel, and through them we could see
across the space between the inner and outer shells and so through the two huge
eyes in the front of the
Albatross.
There were small windows in the side
walls of the cabin, too, that gave on the portholes down the side of the
rocket. In the back wall of the cabin were several steel doors—we opened one of
them and found a small cupboard full of cardboard boxes. These boxes, when we
had a look inside them, proved to our surprise to contain thousands and
thousands of tubes of toothpaste! Mike and I were puzzling what on earth anyone
could want so much tooth-paste on a rocket for, when suddenly there came an
excited yelp from Jacky, who was over by the cabin door.

“Mike—Paul,” she said, “we’re trapped! They’re
coming—Uncle Steve and the Doctor are coming in!”

We rushed over beside her. Far below, the big gate in
the palisade had been swung open, and Uncle Steve and Doctor Mac were walking
from it across to the ladder of the rocket!

“Good Lord!” I gasped. “Now there’s going to be
trouble! What on earth can we say?”

“We needn’t say anything,” said Mike in a whisper. “Ten
to one they’re only coming for a look over. They can’t stay all night—Uncle
Steve is expecting us at the cottage at 6, don’t forget. I vote we get into
that toothpaste cupboard and hide—it’s big enough for the three of us—and with
luck we’ll get away with it. Come on!”

We rushed across the cabin and crowded into the
cupboard. We got the door shut in the nick of time—as I pulled it to behind us,
I heard Uncle Steve and the Doctor at the top of the ladder.

We huddled together, hardly daring to breathe. It was
pitch dark. Through the steel door we could hear, in a muffled way, the
movements of Uncle Steve and the Doctor. First there were two loud clanging
noises, then a sound of hissing, quite strong at first, but getting fainter. I
pressed my ear to the door and could just hear the Doctor and Uncle Steve
speaking.

There were only two short speeches. After a long
pause, Doctor Mac said (and even through the steel door I could hear an awful
sort of excitement in his voice):

“Well, Steve, this is it—this is it at last!”

And Uncle Steve said:

“Yes, this is it, Mac.” Then he added, in a queer, half-choking
voice: “Good-bye, old earth—Good-bye!
 . . .
”

Then there was another pause. Then a slight whirring
noise. And then—

An immense, explosive, rushing sound! And I felt,
suddenly, as if my ears would burst. And there was a terrible, terrible
pressure on my chest—it was as if, suddenly, I weighed hundreds and thousands
of pounds!

And then everything went black. I—all three of us, as
I learned later—lost consciousness.
 . . .

Some parenthetical
remarks by Andrew McGillivray, PH.D., F.R.S.,

on rockets and
space-ships in general, and the
Albatross
in particular

MY FRIEND, Mr. Stephen MacFarlane, has asked me to
contribute an occasional paper to this volume, an obligation which I hasten to
fulfill with the greatest of pleasure. He has also asked me to keep my remarks
short, and to couch them in a language that will be quite comprehensible to the
most completely lay mind. This part of the commitment I view with some dismay.
I am, after all, a scientist, and a scientist who has specialized in a
particularly complex subject. It is almost impossible, I feel compelled to say,
for me to write comfortably about this subject in what I might call an
elementary
way. In one sense, anything of value I might say would
necessarily
be completely unintelligible to the lay mind that Mr.
MacFarlane talks of! However, on the understanding that these remarks are to be
regarded as doing no more than skim the surface of a vast subject, I hasten to
perform what my friend has asked of me. Any who wish to pursue the topic
further—to delve into the finer technicalities—are referred to the numerous
contributions I have made to the better-known scientific journals since the
return of the
Albatross
to earth.

With this preamble, then, let me begin by saying that
I was first attracted to serious experimentation with rockets some fourteen or
fifteen years ago. Before that, I knew what the normally well-educated man
might be expected to know on the subject—that rockets were more than mere Guy
Fawkes toys: that the principle behind them was possible of application to the
aeroplane—the flying machine: that there were even in the world some wild and
daring souls who dreamed of traveling, by means of rockets, not only into and
through the stratosphere, but to the moon—and even beyond the moon. One day,
however, I met, on a train journey, a young man who told me that he had just
come back from a tour of Germany, where he had seen some truly remarkable
experiments with small mail-carrying rockets, and even one that had
transported, it was alleged, an intrepid human traveler some six miles into the
stratosphere. I was so impressed by what he told me that I read all the
available literature on the subject, and in a very short space of time I became
so enthralled by it that I could barely think of anything else. The more I
studied, the more convinced I became that rocket flights of greater and greater
distances would be possible in the future. I grew to believe that journeys
through space to the moon and the planets were not such illusory dreams after
all—in short, I joined the band of “wild and daring souls” I have just referred
to.

Mr. MacFarlane has told, elsewhere in this book, how
he helped me in my experiments with his savings—how, eventually, my coming into
a considerable legacy made it possible for me to devote myself completely to
the whole immense subject.

I will not weary you with an account in detail of my
innumerable attempts and failures at building a ship to go through space—such a
catalogue would be of interest only to the specialist. It will suffice to say
that as I went on I grew more and more enthusiastic. One by one I solved the
various problems—each experiment taught me something new. I learned, gradually,
what shape my rocket would have to be, how I could overcome such problems as
insulation (from the tremendous friction of the atmosphere in the initial part
of the flight), how I could slow down my space-ship at the end of a journey and
effect an easy and comfortable landing, and so on and so on. Through it all,
behind and beyond every experiment, lay the real problem, the immense, the
overwhelming difficulty: fuel.

Let me embark here on a short explanation of what is
entailed in a space flight.

In order to cover the immense distances involved—Mars,
for instance, is 35,000,000 miles away at its nearest to earth, and the moon,
the closest of all the heavenly bodies, is some 239,000 miles distant—in order,
as I say, to cover these vast spaces, a truly colossal initial speed is
required of the rocket. Yet, by a paradox, the propelling
power is not
required to function throughout the entire journey.
If sufficient speed can
be engendered on leaving the earth, the motors can be switched off once the
machine is free of the earth’s atmosphere, and thereafter the rocket will
continue traveling—through infinity, in fact, if nothing is done to control it.

The trouble is, however, that the human body cannot
stand too great a sudden speed. If the rocket left the earth at the final speed
necessary, the travelers in it would be struck dead immediately. What, then,
can be done?

Fortunately, the pull of the earth’s gravity lessens
as one gets more and more distant from the center of it. Suppose that the pull
of gravity on the earth’s surface (which is about 4,000 miles from the center)
is represented by the unit 1. Then, at 4,000 miles from the surface—i.e., twice
this distance from the center—the pull would be 1/4th. At 8,000 miles—three
times the distance—it would be 1/9th—in short (if I may be permitted by Mr.
MacFarlane to say so!) the force of gravity varies as the square of the
distance.

All this, in brief, means that it is possible to
visualize starting off from the actual surface of the earth at a speed that
can, without too much discomfort, be borne by the human body. Then at some
distance from the surface, when everything—including the human body—is very
much lighter, and consequently not subject to the fatal increase of pressure,
the speed can be stepped up. By the time the earth’s atmosphere is left
behind—about 200 miles at least from the surface—the total desired speed may be
begun to be reached without discomfort—a speed well above the pull of gravity
(seven miles per second). It is now that the motors can be shut off, and the
machine will go on traveling.

This delayed acceleration has the additional advantage
that the rocket is not traveling at so great a speed through the 200 miles
atmosphere belt as to be burned up by friction.