Watson, Ian - Novel 11 (10 page)

 
          
“Bravo!”
applauded Sidorov.

 
          
“We
need to keep our minds open, gentlemen.
And ladies.
If
the evidence discredits my hypothesis of a spaceship, I’ll be the first one to
discard it. With regret, true . .
.Yet
without
defending it blindly to the death, as is so often the case.”

           
“If we
do
find broken bits of a spaceship from another world,” began
Lydia
.

 
          
“No,
no!” Tsiolkovsky interrupted her. “There won’t be any broken bits.”

 
          
“I
thought you said—”

 
          
“I
said broken atoms—that’s different. This isn’t like an artillery shell
exploding, showering pieces of metal around. The ship would be totally
evaporated.”

 
          
This
touched
Lydia
’s heart. “Alas, what sort of brave creatures can have been in it?”

 
          
Perhaps
because her voice was higher in pitch, Tsiolkovsky heard her perfectly.
“Creatures possessed of noble intentions, I promise you! Only the nobly-minded
will heed the call of the cosmos.” As the conversation proceeded, and as duck
was succeeded by stewed gooseberries with cream, Anton decided with relief that
he hadn’t made such an error of judgement after all. Vagabond though he looked,
and blunt though his manners were at times, this Tsiolkovsky was a man of
vision and endurance and honest rationality. Perhaps it was unfair to expect
him to have insight into the human heart as well . . .

 
          
They
repaired to the drawing room after dinner. With
Lydia
’s nodded consent, Mirek commandeered a
bottle of vodka
en route.
Olga
Franzovna seated herself promptly at the piano and proceeded to butcher a
transcription of the first movement of Peter Tchaikovsky’s
Fifth Symphony.
In despair at her heavy- handedness—compared with
her legerdemain at cards—Anton fled upstairs to fetch Tsiolkovsky’s manuscript.

 
          
Returning,
he passed this over to its author before the governess could commence murdering
the second movement; fortunately Olga took the hint, and retired from the
piano.

 
          
“Konstantin
Eduardovich would like to entertain us with a short shory he’s written—with
your permission, Countess?” “With your stamp of approval on it, Anton
Pavlovich, how could anyone possibly refuse . . . ?”

           
Tsiolkovsky adopted a pedagogic
stance in front of the fireplace. In the stilted style of a teacher dictating
out of a Chemistry textbook, he at once began to read his tale of science
fantasy. Fortunately, once the narrative moved on to the heady delights of
flying through the air under one’s own steam, freed from the oppressive pull of
Earth, his delivery improved markedly. His voice thrilled; he seemed
intoxicated, like a religious ecstatic. Sidorov watched him devotedly all the
while, wearing the expression of a loyal hound whose master has just returned home
after a six months absence . . .

 
          
Afterwards,
and it was quite a long while afterwards, everyone applauded the unusual story.
Olga Franzovna jumped up and pirouetted around. Casting discretion to the
winds,
Lydia
joined her, and together the two women whirled around the room like a
swiftly rotating planet and its attendant moon.

 
          
“TIME for ONE last tour of
inspection, Sorina!’’

           
If a common house fly could have
sneaked into the observation pod, what else might be lying around which
oughtn’t to be? “But we’re almost ready, Commander.’*

 
          
“Damn
it, I want to look round the ship! You’ll accompany me, Sorina—that’s an
order.’’

 
          
Together
they floated upside-down into the control room, where Second Officer Yuri
Valentin was fiddling with the Fluxtime gauges. He seemed to be having a spot
of bother with the chronodyne resonometer.

 
          
“Well,
he
ain’t ready.’’

 
          
Valentin
grinned. “Slight imbalance, that’s all. Fix it in a jiffy.’’ Chief Engineer
Anna Aksakova was busy checking the fusion- drive master switches. Screens
glowed with schematics; tell-tales winked on and off. And all around Sasha
Sorina’s vacated bay video screens were showing sections of starfield, and the
Earth, Moon and Sun (with glare compensation). Her Deep Space Radar was up and
running, tracking satellites and debris . . .

 
          
“You’ve
no imagination, that’s the trouble,’’ Anton said to Sasha. “What was it that
Mayakovsky said about the bureaucrats holding back time?”

 
          
“I’m
sure I don’t know.”

 
          
He
drifted to the open hatch giving access to the upper transverse corridor.
Time Forward
!’
That’s what his Five Year Plan proclaimed. And soon a great big time machine
was invented. But all the bureaucrats got shaken out of it, and left behind . .
.” “Really!” she protested, indignant.

           
“Or how about
Zamyatin? ‘
In the name of Tomorrow, we judge
Today
!’
How about that for a rallying cry?”
Bracing himself in
the hatch, he launched off in the direction of the Phys and Chem labs. The fat
steel tube of the corridor was painted a restful sky blue, and lit with
fluorescent strips. Spaced evenly a metre apart on each side, hand grips were
set like rungs* so that personnel wouldn’t collide with one another.

 
          
“But,”
came
her rational tones from behind, ‘‘we’ll be going
back through time—not forwards.”

 
          
“Aha!
Do you fear we’ll be forced to recapitulate history? Do you imagine we’ll need
to live through another feudal age and another capitalist era before we reach
utopia?”

 
          
“I
didn’t say anything of the sort! Imagining such things is the job of our Social
Planning Officer.”

 
          
“Imagination
is a job? How neatly you prove Mayakovsky’s point.”

 
          
Anton
caught hold of the final rung, at the intersection corridor before the Chem
Lab.

 
          
“I
mean, he’ll see to it that we don’t become feudal or bourgeois.”

 
          
“Oh,
old
Saratov
’ll give it a try. He’ll have the Hammer and
Sickle up in orbit to point at, won’t he?”

 
          
A
vertical shaft descended through the decks nearby: one of the free fall
‘elevators’. Out of it popped a shuttle pilot, in her yellow serge zipper-suit.
Gripping a rung, she saluted.

 
          
“Never
mind the formalities. Hurry up!” Anton turned to Sasha, now clinging close
behind him. “You see? I didn’t find a mouse gumming up the works—but I found a
shuttle pilot out of station.” The pilot was already floating swiftly towards
Phys. “Oh, and talking of the old Hammer and Sickle up in the sky, wouldn’t it
be a laugh if we kind of
regressed
—and
ended up worshipping it, as a sign of power in the heavens?
Praying
to it for rain!”

 
          
“How
you ever passed screening for this command, I’ll never know,” said Sasha in
amazement.

           
“Maybe it takes a merry nutter to
command a ship like this?” Anton patted the little box in his pocket.
“My apologies, Sorina!
I’m a bit nervous—like the proverbial
virgin on her wedding night, eh?”

 
          
She
sniffed. “That happy event will occur some while
after
we establish our colony.”

 
          
“You’d
better watch out for
Saratov
, old girl. He might want all the women locked up in a breeding harem
for the first ten generations.”

 
          
“As though he would!
You know perfectly well our colony can
only function properly with
active
participations by all female personnel. As soon as I stop being Astrogator, I
become a Land Surveyor.”

 
          
“I
didn’t think you’d become a Comedienne.” Anton pushed through into Chem,
catching hold of the mass spectrometer to look round the lab for any flasks of
acid poised to crash into the walls whenever acceleration surged. None were.
Three chemists in cream and blue tunics were buckled in their seats.

 
          
“Good,
good,” he said vaguely. Feeling vindicated, he thrust back through the hatch,
and deliberately bumped into Sonya. Gripping her momentarily, he whispered, “We
must preserve the gene for humour.
Other worlds, other
jokes!”

 
          
When
they arrived back in the control room, Yuri Valentin seemed to have satisfied
himself that the resonometer was working properly in full harmony with all his
other gauges: the temporal symptomometer, retardograph, horologe, horometer,
isocalendar and datalscope.

 
          
“Drive
and attitude jets primed for instant firing,” reported Anna, while Anton and
Sasha buckled themselves into their padded seats. Ideally, these jets shouldn’t
need to be fired instantly, but there was always a microscopic chance that the
ship might emerge from the Flux on collision course with something: an
asteroid, the photosphere of a sun, whatever.

 
          
“Okay,
Yuri, blow the horn.”

 
          
A
klaxon hooted through the ship half a dozen times.

 
          
“P.A.
system patched in to the Motherland?”

 
          
“Aye, aye.
Now.”

 
          
Anton
flicked on his chin-mike. “This is Commander Astrov of the Flux-ship
K. E. Tsiolkovsky
calling Earth.
Comrades, at your word we’re ready to proceed—out into the unknown cosmos.”
Crackle-crackle
. . .

 
          
Ground
Control in
Siberia
delivered a short, uplifting speech to
which Anton presently replied in kind, wishing that he could lift up a glass of
vodka to toast the mission. Who was the distillery specialist amongst the
colonists?
he
wondered.

 
          
“.
. . You may proceed at your discretion!”

 
          
Actually,
Ground Control had controlled nothing since the last supply ship left. Anton
flipped off his mike for a moment.

 
          
“You
know, folks, we’ve just become an independent state.” “An autonomous socialist
republic,” Sasha said sternly.

 
          
He
reactivated his mike. “This is your Commander speaking. Secure yourselves! We go
into the Flux in exactly five minutes from now. Our first time-jump will carry
us one hundred and fifty- seven light years. This should bring us to within
three light months of a target star which has already been verified from Earth
by telescope as ‘promising’. According to the scientists this jump should seem
quasi-instantaneous, which I gather is their way of saying that it might seem
to occupy several minutes. Once we emerge, remember that it’ll take us several
hours of work to confirm the presence of an Earth-type planet. And if there
isn’t one, off we’ll jump again. Let’s hope it’s ‘first time lucky’. Good luck
to us all!” And off with the mike.

 
          
“Right,
that’s that bit over.
Departure in four minutes, twenty
seconds.
Hit the button on my word, Anna.”

 
          
Anton
spent the remaining time softly whistling melodies from the
1812 Overture.
As it happened, when
departure time arrived he was in the middle of the Czarist national anthem.