Fiasco (20 page)

Mark Tempe—who knew that he had another name, but said nothing, out of consideration for the doctors—studied the roster of the crew of the
Hermes
before bed. Of the ten, he knew only Gerbert well and, from the get-togethers at Lauger's, the short, dark-eyed Nakamura. About the captain under whom he would be serving, he knew next to nothing. The man's name was Steergard; he was Ter Horab's second in command, and his additional specialty was sociodynamic game theory. (Every participant of the reconnaissance mission had to have a field that duplicated someone else's, so that in case of accident or illness the functioning of the team would not be impaired. ) The gravistician Polassar was in charge of the drive on the
Hermes.
Mark knew him only as an excellent swimmer and diver in the pool on the
Eurydice,
where he had admired the man's muscular body performing triple twists off the high board. That was not the place to acquaint oneself with sidereal engineering, so Mark tried tackling the subject on his own—in vain: the introduction to it required a familiarity with a sophisticated offshoot of the theory of relativity. The first pilot was Harrach. Large, heavy, irascible, he also knew information theory and shared with the astromatician Albright the care of the
Hermes'
computer. Or—as that computer once put it—the two humans were entrusted to
its
care.

This was a computer of the "last" generation—last, because no other could have greater calculating power. Limits were imposed by such properties of matter as Planck's constant and the speed of light. Greater calculating ability could be achieved only by the so-called imaginary computers, designed by theorists engaged in pure mathematics and not dependent on the real world. The constructors' dilemma arose from the necessity of satisfying mutually exclusive conditions to pack the most neurons into the smallest volume. The travel time of the signals could not be longer than the reaction time of the components; otherwise, the time taken by the signals would limit the speed of calculation. The newest relays responded in one-hundred-billionth of a second. They were the size of atoms, so that an actual computer had a diameter of barely three centimeters. A computer any larger would be slower. The
Hermes'
computer did indeed take up half the control room, but that was for its peripherals: decoders, hierarchic assemblers, and so-called hypothesis generators, which, with the linguistic modules, did not operate in real time. But decisions in critical situations,
in extremis,
were made by the lightning-swift core, which was no bigger than a pigeon's egg. It was named DEUS: Digital Engrammic Universal System. Not everyone believed that the acronym was accidental. The
Hermes
was equipped with two DEUSes; the
Eurydice
had eighteen.

In addition to Steergard, Nakamura, Gerbert, Polassar, and Harrach, all of whom had been chosen for the reconnaissance mission prior to takeoff, Arago was to participate in it as a reserve physician—an unexpected result of the secret balloting. And there was Tempe in the post of second pilot, the logician Rotmont, and two men selected out of a dozen exobiologists and other experts from the presidium of SETI on Earth: Kirsting and El Salam. In the last weeks of the voyage the ten took quarters in the fifth section of the
Eurydice,
which contained an exact mock-up of the interior of the
Hermes,
so that they could become familiar both with each other and with the task ahead of them. Every day they played out, on the simulators, different variants of the approach to Quinta as well as the tactics of establishing contact with its inhabitants. Another of the men from SETI, Chu, running these simulations, saw to it that the future crew of the
Hermes
got to know one another well, throwing them into the most fiendish emergencies, where accidents coincided with other accidents or with a flood of incomprehensible signals imitating the voice of the alien planet. No one knew how or why it happened, but during this time the apostolic delegate began to be called not Father but Dr. Arago. Mark had the impression that the priest himself preferred this. Then the simulations were cut short; Ter Horab summoned the reconnaissance group to brief them on the latest observations of the Zeta System.

Of the eight planets of that tranquil class-K star, the four inner ones—small, with masses on the order of Mercury or Mars—showed a good deal of volcanic activity and hardly any atmosphere. In the distance, Zeta was orbited by three gas giants like Jupiter, ringed, with powerful, stormy atmospheres of superdense hydrogen. Septima, twice as heavy as Jupiter, threw off into space more energy than it received from its sun: little would have been required to kindle it into a star. Only Quinta, having a one-and-a-half-year period of revolution around Zeta, shone blue like Earth. Breaks in the white clouds revealed the outlines of oceans and continents. Observation at a distance of nearly five light-years presented considerable difficulties. The resolution of the optical instruments on the
Eurydice
was not adequate to the task, nor were the images beamed from the orbiters that were sent out sharp enough.

Quinta was in its second quarter from the
Eurydice
's vantage; half the disk was illuminated. Over it, the spectral lines of water and hydroxyl in large concentrations had just been discovered—as if, right at the equator, Quinta was encircled by a belt of remarkably compressed water vapor. Yet the belt lay above, outside the atmosphere. The possibility of an ice ring was suggested, whose inner edge touched the top layer of the atmosphere. Which meant that before long it would break up. The astrophysicists estimated its mass to be between three and four trillion tons. If the water came from the ocean, the ocean would have lost about 20,000 cubic kilometers: not more than 1 percent of its volume. As it was impossible to find any natural cause for this phenomenon, engineering became highly probable—undertaken for the purpose of lowering the level of the seas, thereby uncovering the continental shelves and creating additional dry land for settlement. On the other hand, the whole operation seemed poorly executed: the frozen fraction of the ocean, not put into an orbit high enough, would have to fall back down after a mere several hundred years. Given the scale of the project, this seemed strange, incomprehensible.

Things even more mysterious, events, could be observed on Quinta. The electromagnetic noise, emitted unequally from many places on the planet, intensified considerably, as if hundreds of maxwellian transmitters had been turned on at once. At the same time, the radiation in the infrared increased, with small flashes at the centers. These could be mirrors focusing sunlight for power plants. But then it turned out that the thermal component of that emission was not great. The spectra of the flashes were not copies of the spectrum of Zeta (as they would have been in the case of reflection), nor did they resemble the spectra of nuclear explosions. Meanwhile the radio noise continued to grow—shortwave and medium-wave, in many bands. The meter-length emission had the look of being modulated. This produced great excitement, particularly when someone garbled the news to the effect that the radiation was directed like radar—or, in other words, that the planet had already noticed the
Eurydice.
The astrophysicists ignored this rumor: no kind of radar could have detected the ship near the collapsar.

The mood at zero hour was jubilant. Beyond all doubt Quinta was inhabited by a civilization so advanced technologically that it had entered the Cosmos not merely in small craft but with a power able to lift oceans into space.

Preparations for takeoff of the scout ship took place in an altered orbit, in the relatively calm aphelion of Hades. The piping of the piezoelectric indicators, showing the constant change in stresses in the ribs and girders of the hull, died away. At the same time, on the screens of the takeoff control center—blank until now—there appeared at an angle a glowing, spiral arm of the galaxy, and with good will and a little imagination one could pick out, among the whitish, motionless swirls of stars and the dark dust clouds, Zeta Harpyiae. Its planets were not optically visible. The technicians readied the
Hermes
for unmooring.

In the storage bays at the stern, cranes swiveled; the flanges of the pipes with which the
Eurydice
filled the hypergolic fuel tanks of the scout ship shuddered under the pressure of the pumps. The head staff checked the systems—drive, navigation, air control, the dynatrons—once through DEUS and once without, employing parallel lines. One by one, the numbered units announced that their programs were ready; radio range-finders and antennas protruded and moved like the horns of a giant snail; the deep bass of the turbines that pumped oxygen to the tunnels in the hold of the
Hermes
sent subtle vibrations through its dock-shaped bed. During all this antlike bustle, the billion-ton
Eurydice
slowly turned her stern in the direction of Zeta Harpyiae like a cannon about to fire.

The crew of the
Hermes
parted with the Commander and their best friends. There were too many people on board the mother ship for everyone to shake hands. Then Ter Horab, with those who were able to leave their stations, escorted the crew of the
Hermes
and stood in the cylindrical passage between the sections while, after the closing of the large dock gate, the small personnel hatches were shut and, as on a launching chute, the
Hermes
began to move gradually, white as snow, pushed inch by inch by hydraulic jacks, since the hundred-and-eighty-thousand-ton mass, though weightless, preserved every bit of its inertia.

The technicians of the
Eurydice,
with the biologists Davis and Vahradian, were already putting the crew of the
Hermes
to sleep—a sleep that would last many years, but without ice or hibernation. Instead they were subjected to embryonization, a process in which people returned to a life before birth—a fetal existence, or at least strikingly similar: no breath, underwater.

Man's first small steps into space had shown how very terrestrial a creature he was, how poorly adapted to the powerful forces required by the crossing of great distances as rapidly as possible. Violent acceleration crushed the body, especially the lungs, which were filled with air; the force flattened the rib cage and stopped the circulation of the blood. If the laws of nature could not be bent, then one had to change the astronauts to conform to them. Embryonization accomplished this.

First the blood was replaced with an oxygen-carrying fluid that also possessed other properties of blood, from coagulability to the immunological functions. This fluid, white as milk, was onax. After the body's temperature was lowered to that of hibernating animals, closed vessels were surgically reopened: vessels through which the fetus at one time had exchanged blood with the placenta in the mother's womb. Though the heart continued to work, respiration ceased in the lungs, which collapsed and filled with onax. When there was no air remaining in either the rib cage or the intestines, the unconscious man was immersed in a liquid as incompressible as water. The astronaut then was locked inside an embryonator, a container in the shape of a two-meter torpedo that kept the body above freezing and supplied it with nutritive substances and oxygen. Onax was pumped into the organism by artificial vessels through the navel.

A man thus prepared could withstand tremendous pressures without harm, like bathypelagic fish which were not crushed at depths of miles beneath the ocean because the outside pressure equaled the pressure within their tissues. The liquid in the embryonator was kept, therefore, at hundreds of atmospheres per square centimeter of body surface. Each such container on the ship was held in swinging suspension by pincers. The astronauts lay in their armored cocoons like giant pupas, in such a way that acceleration and deceleration hit them always chest-first. The bodies, now more than 85 percent water and onax, already airless, were as compression-resistant as water. Thanks to this, there was no problem in maintaining a constant acceleration of 20 g's, at which a body weighed two tons, and moving the ribs to breathe would have been a task beyond even an athlete. But the embryonized did not breathe, and the limit of their durability for stellar flight was fixed only by the delicate molecular structure of the cells.

When ten hearts in full embryonizative compression were beating only a few times a minute, DEUS assumed charge of the unconscious, and the people of the
Eurydice
returned on board. The operators then disconnected the computers of the mother ship from the
Hermes.
Except for the dead cables, nothing now joined the two craft.

The
Eurydice
ejected the scout ship from her wide-open stern, which was ringed with the giant plates of an expanding photon mirror. Her steel claws, extending, tore away the useless cables like threads and thrust the hull of the
Hermes
into the void. Then the
Hermes'
side engines glowed with pale ionic flame. But the impulse was too weak to move it from its place; such an enormous mass could not acquire speed suddenly. The
Eurydice
drew in her catapults and closed the stern, and everyone observing the takeoff from her control room breathed a sigh of relief: DEUS, correct to the fraction of a second, took over. The hypergolic boosters of the
Hermes,
silent until now, fired. To build impetus, the batteries fired in sequence. At the same time, the ionic engines blazed full-force. Their blue, transparent flame mixed with the blinding glare of the boosters; the hull, wrapped in shimmering heat, moved smoothly, evenly, into the eternal night. In the darkened control room, the reflection from the screens made the faces of those who stood by the Commander deathly pale.

The
Hermes,
sending toward them a lengthening tail of steady flame, grew more distant as its speed increased. When the telemeters indicated the necessary distance, and when at the edge of the field of vision an empty cylinder tumbled end over end in free-fall (up to the last minute it had connected the
Hermes
and the
Eurydice,
and now, shot by the starting salvos, it flew off into the darkness), the mirror of the billion-ton ship locked in place. Through the central opening the blunt cone of an emitter slowly emerged; it flashed once, twice, three times, until a column of light stabbed space and hit the
Hermes.
In both control rooms of the
Eurydice
there was a triumphant cheer and—it must be confessed—an exclamation of surprise, too, that the thing had gone off so well. The
Hermes
soon vanished from the visual monitors. The screens showed only dwindling, glowing circles, as if an invisible giant had lit a cigarette among the stars and blown rings of white smoke. Finally these rings fused into a trembling point that was the mirror of the scout ship reflecting the
Eurydice s
driving laser.