Buck Rogers 1 - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (2 page)

The world teetered between poverty and wealth, between famine and plenty, between tyranny and freedom; it teetered between peace and war.

High over the Atlantic an enemy hunter-killer satellite zeroed in on an American telemetry relay satellite. The hunter-killer automatically adjusted its sights and focussed its laser-projector preparatory to disabling the relay satellite. At the same time an American counter-hunter-killer satellite detected the enemy device and switched on its thrusters to bring itself into better range.

At the same moment that the enemy hunter-killer switched on its laser, the American satellite thrust itself against the enemy device and knocked it tumbling from its course.

And at the same time that these actions were taking place, a swarm of small meteorites spun silently and invisibly on their course above the Earth’s atmosphere.

No one knows how many meteors are scattered through the solar system, no one has even made a reasonable estimate. We know there are a lot of them, but whether that means thousands, millions, billions, or even more, is anybody’s guess. Meteors are not large objects like comets. They don’t move in regular orbits, or if they do, those orbits are seldom known to astronomers.

There are too many meteors, and most of them are too small, and too dim, to be seen from Earth. The largest of them is likely as large as a small planetoid; the smallest, the size of a grain of monosodium glutamate.

And at the same time that the enemy and American satellites were engaging in their deadly game of orbital musical chairs high above the Atlantic Ocean, a swarm of meteors swept past—their orbit a mystery but their present position not much more than a thousand miles above the Atlantic, not far downrange from the launching pads of Cape Canaveral.

The automatic program-sequencer at Mission Control was methodically ticking off the final seconds of the countdown for the day’s dramatic launch. The chief capsule communicator was whispering the words so they ghosted into the ears of the astronaut who half-sat, half-lay, all alone in the capsule of the most advanced spaceship ever built by human hands.

“Ten.”

The astronaut took a final look at his checklist, saw the proper mark in every square on the pasteboard page.

“Nine.”

The chief flight controller duplicated the astronaut’s actions, nodding to himself in satisfaction.

“Eight.”

Aboard the spaceship the astronaut clicked down the cover on his checklist and turned his eyes back to his real-time booster-condition readout dials.

“Seven.”

The direct-coupled communications system carried the same readout information to Mission Control.

“Six.”

A thousand miles overhead, the communications satellite, unaware of its near brush with death from the enemy hunter-killer machine, picked up the information from the spaceship and sent it speeding at the speed of radio waves—which is to say, at the speed of light—back to Cape Canaveral and simultaneously to NASA-Houston. Thus the system showed its multiple-redundancy, an almost foolproof method of making sure that nothing went wrong.

“Five.”

In Cape Canaveral and in Houston, hundreds of pairs of engineers’ eyes were glued to green oscilloscope screens, working as if by sheer will power, to make sure that wiggling and wavering lines kept within established limits of tolerance.

“Four.”

Within the VIP viewing stand, dozens of generals and admirals and congressmen and senators strained their eyes to catch the first flaring burst of flame as the rocket’s engines picked up their ignition.

“Three.”

The chief administrator of NASA, a confirmed atheist from the age of nine, breathed a silent prayer for the safety of the pilot and the success of the mission. The administrator didn’t know what the outcome would be; if the administrator had known, that prayer might have been worded somewhat differently.

“Two.”

Aboard the spaceship, the astronaut turned his head ninety degrees and peered out the window for the last time before lift-off. His lips were moving, forming the sounds of the lyrics of a funny little song that had been written when his grandfather was a little boy.

“Chicago.”

“One!”

“Chicago.”

“Zero!”

“That toddlin’ town!”

An enemy spy-satellite picked up the last phrase and dutifully transmitted it to a ground station on another continent, where a scientific intelligence monitoring officer raised her dark eyebrows and an expression of puzzlement replaced the usual one of intelligent concentration on her regular features.

The great orange and golden and red flower bloomed suddenly, for the moment silently, on the great launching pad at Cape Canaveral. For an instant the spaceship disappeared, not merely to the dazzled eyes of the VIP delegation watching with naked orbs, but even to the eyes of more sensible and responsible workers watching the launch on closed-circuit television monitors.

Inside the cabin, the astronaut pressed into his acceleration couch under the giant hand of monstrous G-forces that endless months of training had only half-prepared him to encounter. His steely blue eyes closed with the strain. His flesh sagged. His hands pressed against the rests designed for them.

His pressure suit prevented his body from being squeezed out and crushed flat beneath the pressure, but the torso of the suit itself spread and stretched.

Even the astronaut’s own name, stitched carefully onto a patch of duracloth and attached to his spacesuit, distorted. It would have taken a keen eye to read the name at this strange moment.

The name was Rogers. The pilot’s personnel dossier listed him as William Rogers, Captain, United States Air Force, on loan to NASA in connection with a classified special project under direct White House sponsorship and authority.

Captain Rogers’ friends had a shorter name for him, a name that he’d carried from childhood. Nobody knew whether it referred to a bronco or a dollar, but everybody called him Buck.

On closed-circuit video monitors in Florida and Texas, the spaceship reappeared, riding on top of the growing ball of orange-gold flame for a few seconds, balancing there on its tail, then lofting away into the sunny Florida morning.

There was a brief exchange between Captain Rogers and Mission Control. The spaceship was cleared for staging.

The automatic sequencer clicked in; the ship’s computers raced through their stored programs, electrons flowing silently and invisibly along silicon-etched microcircuits, through gates and switches, taking instrument readouts, tripping relays, setting indicators. Triplicated computers in Florida and Texas performed the same operations, compared results, found agreement, turned all lights green.

The first stage of the ship dropped away and the second stage engine ignited. For a second time, Captain Rogers felt the giant hand of the space deity crush him against his acceleration couching. For the second time his weight multiplied, his body flattened, then the engine cut off and Buck resumed his task of checking instruments and adjusting controls.

The satellites continued their deadly game: jets puffed, verniers squirted, satellites turned and slid silently through their orbits. Laser beams flashed invisibly, sometimes finding a target, sometimes not.

Higher above the planet, a swarm of meteors, millions or billions of years old, swept silently ahead.

Buck Rogers’ ship, its earlier stages exhausted and jettisoned, its command capsule and auxiliary module resembling a sleek silvery dart, left the Earth’s atmosphere and continued on its course.

Buck’s mission was no quick expedition to the moon and return. Lunar exploration had been conducted almost two decades before. Scientist-astronauts had brought back their samples, conducted their experiments, drawn their conclusions, buttressed those conclusions with masses of data, and abandoned the dead, silent moon to the solitude which had ruled her for billions of years.

Buck was to be gone from earth for months, exploring the planets and the deep vacuum between them. He would return to Earth carrying the records both of longest duration for a space flight beyond earth, and greatest distance covered by any traveler off the face of the Earth. His exploits would cover not millions but billions of miles. His was the dream of Verne and Wells, of Tsiolkovsky and Goddard and Von Braun and Ley, of Hamilton and Williamson and Gernsback and Campbell and Brackett.

The outside of Buck Rogers’ spaceship was suddenly struck by a swarming hail of tiny meteors. Inside the ship they first set up a racket like a fistful of gravel dropping onto a tin-roofed shack. In seconds the sound had increased in intensity until it resembled that of a machine gun firing at top speed, then to that of a battlefield where rifles and machine guns fired constantly, their ceaseless chatter punctuated by the occasional thud of a howitzer, crash of a recoilless rifle, whumpf of a heavy mortar lobbing its deadly freight over fortifications to drop it remorselessly on the enemy from above.

Inside the command capsule, Buck Rogers had little time to contemplate the syncopation of meteors rattling and thudding against the hull of his ship. The steady orbit of the craft was jolted and shaken by the countless tiny and great impacts. The ship threatened to lose headway and tumble end-for-end.

The meteors must have carried some weird electrical charge, for suddenly the inside of the ship began to dance with scintillating lights. The very atmosphere within the ship was transformed into a seething kaleidoscope of brilliantly glowing gasses. Every hue in the spectrum was there, from strange greenish chartreuses to bizarre purplish reds and blues, from dancing, pulsating yellows and golds to heavy, torpid grays, ochres, and blacks.

Trapped in his acceleration couch, Buck could only watch in consternation as the life-support controls of the ship went mad. Ion-counters and radiation fluctuated wildly. Pressure rose and dipped, rose and dipped until he felt he was trapped in the center of a giant vacuum chamber. The temperature rose briefly to a dangerous high, then dropped almost instantaneously to absolute zero.

Buck Rogers, still lying in his acceleration couch, his space suit surprisingly intact, lay suddenly motionless as a statue of polished marble.

If any hand had touched him he would have felt as cold and as stiff as the unliving.

But he was not a statue, nor a corpse.

He was a man in a state of stasis. Not merely frozen, but trapped in a state of timeless preservation, he lay with unseeing eyes, unbeating heart, unmoving hands, unthinking brain.

His ship tumbled on through space. It might collide by accident with some other object in its course, but space is vast and even the largest objects in it fill only the smallest percentage of its volume.

Buck’s ship
might
collide with some other object, but all of the laws of statistics said that it wasn’t very likely. No, far more likely it would just tumble on, and on, and on.

Its planned journey of five months would stretch to years, then to decades, even to centuries. To Buck, lying within the metal-and-plastic sarcophagus that was his spaceship, the time meant no more than it does to an ordinary corpse lying buried safely in an earthly grave.

But Buck Rogers was not dead.

Buck Rogers’ ship tumbled on and on through the limitless reaches of the solar system. What strange sights Buck might have seen had he been observing as the ship passed the asteroid belt and the great-gas-liquid giants with their titanic atmospheres and families of rings and moons, he could not know. For all practical purposes, Buck Rogers was a dead man—but dead men do not rise from their tombs!

Five hundred years!

Five hundred years passed while Buck’s ship tumbled aimlessly through space. On Earth his mishap was headline news for a few days. The newspapers bannered the tragedy of the lost hero and his unfortunate ship. The television newscasters ran and reran and re-reran tapes of his lift-off, of the guidance and mission control centers in Cape Canaveral and Houston, interviews with his flight controller, his air force buddies, his family, his old school chums, the milkman who delivered milk to his house and the teacher who had scolded him for flying paper airplanes instead of concentrating on social studies when he was in the sixth grade.

There were even proposals to mount a rescue mission for Buck. But saner heads prevailed. It would take too long to outfit and launch the rescue ship. It would never reach Buck’s ship anyway. And if it did it would only find a corpse.

Better to let the space-martyr have a hero’s burial in deep space. Better let his tumbling spaceship carry him to that strange outworldly valhalla where the dead astronauts and cosmonauts of all nations joined in their own fraternity of eternal space travel.

In a week the story was off page one and inside the papers; off the prime-time news and onto the features and backgrounders and the talk shows.

A few months later it was no longer Buck Rogers, but Buck Who? And then he was forgotten.

Dynasties rose and fell.

Wars were fought.

The earth teetered—and tipped.

O N E

An incredibly antiquated spaceship tumbled aimlessly, out of control, through the blackness between the planets. Why it had never found its way out of the solar system, to drift on forever in the space between the stars, was a matter of cosmic laws. In its disastrous tumble, Buck Rogers’ ship had failed to reach solar escape velocity. Falling freely, with no propulsion system functioning, it had reached the farthest point of its orbit and then arched back toward its point of origin.