The Star (43 page)

Nothing to do but to sit and think in the minutes that were left to him before his pool of shadow contracted. He did not try to direct his thoughts, but let them wander where they willed. How strange that he should be dying now, because back in the nineteen-forties—years before he was born—a man at Palomar had spotted a streak of light on a photographic plate, and had named it so appropriately after the boy who flew too near the sun.

One day, he supposed, they would build a monument here for him on this blistered plain. What would they inscribe upon it? ‘Here died Colin Sherrard, astronics engineer, in the cause of Science.’ That would be funny, for he had never understood half the things that the scientists were trying to do.

Yet some of the excitement of their discoveries had communicated itself to him. He remembered how the geologists had scraped away the charred skin of the asteroid, and had polished the metallic surface that lay beneath. It had been covered with a curious pattern of lines and scratches, like one of the abstract paintings of the Post-Picasso Decadents. But these lines had some meaning; they wrote the history of Icarus, though only a geologist could read it. They revealed, so Sherrard had been told, that this lump of iron and rock had not always floated alone in space. At some remote time in the past, it had been under enormous pressure—and that could mean only one thing. Billions of years ago it had been part of a much larger body, perhaps a planet like Earth. For some reason that planet had blown up, and Icarus and all the thousands of other asteroids were the fragments of that cosmic explosion.

Even at this moment, as the incandescent line of sunlight came closer, this was a thought that stirred his mind. What Sherrard was lying upon was the core of a world—perhaps a world that had once known life. In a strange, irrational way it comforted him to know that his might not be the only ghost to haunt Icarus until the end of time.

The helmet was misting up; that could only mean that the cooling unit was about to fail. It had done its work well; even now, though the rocks only a few yards away must be glowing a sullen red, the heat inside the capsule was not unendurable. When failure came, it would be sudden and catastrophic.

He reached for the red lever that would rob the sun of its prey—but before he pulled it, he would look for the last time upon Earth. Cautiously, he lowered the dark filters, adjusting them so that they still cut out the glare from the rocks, but no longer blocked his view of space.

The stars were faint now, dimmed by the advancing glow of the corona. And just visible over the boulder whose shield would soon fail him was a stub of crimson flame, a crooked finger of fire jutting from the edge of the sun itself. He had only seconds left.

There was the Earth, there was the moon. Goodbye to them both, and to his friends and loved ones on each of them. While he was looking at the sky, the sunlight had begun to lick the base of the capsule, and he felt the first touch of fire. In a reflex as automatic as it was useless, he drew up his legs, trying to escape the advancing wave of heat.

What was that
? A brilliant flash of light, infinitely brighter than any of the stars, had suddenly exploded overhead. Miles above him, a huge mirror was sailing across the sky, reflecting the sunlight as it slowly turned through space. Such a thing was utterly impossible; he was beginning to suffer from hallucinations, and it was time he took his leave. Already the sweat was pouring from his body, and in a few seconds the capsule would be a furnace.

He waited no longer, but pulled on the Emergency Release with all his waning strength, bracing himself at the same moment to face the end.

Nothing happened; the lever would not move. He tugged it again and again before he realised that it was hopelessly jammed. There was no easy way out for him, no merciful death as the air gushed from his lungs. It was then, as the true terror of his situation struck home to him, that his nerve finally broke and he began to scream like a trapped animal.

When he heard Captain McClellan’s voice speaking to him, thin but clear, he knew that it must be another hallucination. Yet some last remnant of discipline and self-control checked his screaming; he clenched his teeth and listened to that familiar, commanding voice.

‘Sherrard! Hold on, man! We’ve got a fix on you—but keep shouting!’

‘Here I am!’ he cried. ‘But hurry, for God’s sake! I’m burning!’

Deep down in what was left of his rational mind he realised what had happened. Some feeble ghost of a signal was leaking through the broken stubs of his antennas, and the searchers had heard his screams—as he was hearing their voices. That meant they must be very close indeed, and the knowledge gave him sudden strength.

He stared through the steaming plastic of the dome, looking once more for that impossible mirror in the sky. There it was again—and now he realised that the baffling perspectives of space had tricked his senses. The mirror was not miles away, nor was it huge. It was almost on top of him, and it was moving fast.

He was still shouting when it slid across the face of the rising sun, and its blessed shadow fell upon him like a cool wind that had blown out of the heart of winter, over leagues of snow and ice. Now that it was so close, he recognised it at once; it was merely a large metal-foil radiation screen, no doubt hastily snatched from one of the instrument sites. In the safety of its shadow, his friends had been searching for him.

A heavy-duty, two-man capsule was hovering overhead, holding the glittering shield in one set of arms and reaching for him with the other. Even through the misty dome and the haze of heat that still sapped his senses, he recognised Captain McClellan’s anxious face, looking down at him from the other pod.

So this was what birth was like, for truly he had been reborn. He was too exhausted for gratitude—that would come later—but as he rose from the burning rocks his eyes sought and found the bright star of Earth. ‘Here I am,’ he said silently. ‘I’m coming back.’

Back to enjoy and cherish all the beauties of the world he had thought were lost forever. No—not all of them.

He would never enjoy summer again.

Saturn Rising

First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, March 1961

Collected in
Tales of Ten Worlds

Little did I imagine, when I wrote this story in 1960, that within less than two decades the fantastically successful Voyager Missions to the outer Solar System would reveal that the rings of Saturn were far more complex and beautiful than anyone had ever dreamed.

The story has, of course, been dated by the scientific discoveries of the last [four] decades—in particular, we now know that Titan does not have a predominantly methane atmosphere, but one which is mostly nitrogen.

There is another error which I might have corrected at the time. Even if you could observe Saturn from the surface of Titan (which atmospheric haze will probably prevent), you’d never see it ‘rising’. Almost certainly, Titan, like our own Moon, has had its rotation tidally braked, so that it always keeps the same face turned towards its primary. So Saturn remains fixed in Titan’s sky, just as the Earth does in the Moon’s.

Yes, that’s perfectly true. I met Morris Perlman when I was about twenty-eight. I met thousands of people in those days, from presidents downward.

When we got back from Saturn, everybody wanted to see us, and about half the crew took off on lecture tours. I’ve always enjoyed talking (don’t say you haven’t noticed it), but some of my colleagues said they’d rather go to Pluto than face another audience. Some of them did.

My beat was the Midwest, and the first time I ran into Mr Perlman—no one ever called him anything else, certainly never ‘Morris’—was in Chicago. The agency always booked me into good, but not too luxurious, hotels. That suited me; I liked to stay in places where I could come and go as I pleased without running a gauntlet of liveried flunkies, and where I could wear anything within reason without being made to feel a tramp. I see you’re grinning; well, I was only a kid then, and a lot of things have changed…

It’s all a long time ago now, but I must have been lecturing at the University. At any rate, I remember being disappointed because they couldn’t show me the place where Fermi started the first atomic pile—they said that the building had been pulled down forty years before, and there was only a plaque to mark the spot. I stood looking at it for a while, thinking of all that had happened since that far-off day in 1942. I’d been born, for one thing; and atomic power had taken me out to Saturn and back.
That
was probably something that Fermi and Co. never thought of, when they built their primitive latticework of uranium and graphite.

I was having breakfast in the coffee shop when a slightly built, middle-aged man dropped into the seat on the other side of the table. He nodded a polite ‘Good morning’, then gave a start of surprise as he recognised me. (Of course, he’d planned the encounter, but I didn’t know it at the time.)

‘This is a pleasure’ he said. ‘I was at your lecture last night. How I envied you!’

I gave a rather forced smile; I’m never very sociable at breakfast, and I’d learned to be on my guard against the cranks, bores, and enthusiasts who seemed to regard me as their legitimate prey. Mr Perlman, however, was not a bore—though he was certainly an enthusiast, and I suppose you could call him a crank.

He looked like any average, fairly prosperous businessman, and I assumed that he was a guest like myself. The fact that he had attended my lecture was not surprising; it had been a popular one, open to the public, and of course well advertised over press and radio.

‘Ever since I was a kid,’ said my uninvited companion, ‘Saturn has fascinated me. I know exactly when and how it all started. I must have been about ten years old when I came across those wonderful paintings of Chesley Bonestell’s, showing the planet as it would look from its nine moons. I suppose you’ve seen them?’

‘Of course,’ I answered. ‘Though they’re half a century old, no one’s beaten them yet. We had a couple aboard the
Endeavour
, pinned on the plotting table. I often used to look at the pictures and then compare them with the real thing.’

‘Then you know how I felt, back in the nineteen-fifties. I used to sit for hours trying to grasp the fact that this incredible object, with its silver rings spinning around it, wasn’t just some artist’s dream, but actually existed—that it was a world, in fact, ten times the size of Earth.

‘At that time I never imagined that I could see this wonderful thing for myself; I took it for granted that only the astronomers, with their giant telescopes, could ever look at such sights. But then, when I was about fifteen, I made another discovery—so exciting that I could hardly believe it.’

‘And what was that?’ I asked. By now I’d become reconciled to sharing breakfast; my companion seemed a harmless-enough character, and there was something quite endearing about his obvious enthusiasm.

‘I found that any fool could make a high-powered astronomical telescope in his own kitchen, for a few dollars and a couple of weeks’ work. It was a revelation; like thousands of other kids, I borrowed a copy of Ingalls’
Amateur Telescope Making
from the public library, and went ahead. Tell me—have
you
ever built a telescope of your own?’

‘No: I’m an engineer, not an astronomer. I wouldn’t know how to begin the job.’

‘It’s incredibly simple, if you follow the rules. You start with two discs of glass, about an inch thick. I got mine for fifty cents from a ship chandler’s; they were porthole glasses that were no use because they’d been chipped around the edges. Then you cement one disc to some flat, firm surface—I used an old barrel, standing on end.

‘Next you have to buy several grades of emery powder, starting from coarse, gritty stuff and working down to the finest that’s made. You lay a pinch of the coarsest powder between the two discs, and start rubbing the upper one back and forth with regular strokes. As you do so, you slowly circle around the job.

‘You see what happens? The upper disc gets hollowed out by the cutting action of the emery powder, and as you walk around, it shapes itself into a concave, spherical surface. From time to time you have to change to a finer grade of powder, and make some simple optical tests to check that your curve’s right.