Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (19 page)

"I'm only trying to do a good job! I started off on this business as a
writer. I haven't had a real chance to show what I can do with this sort
of material!"

"Forget it!" Cochrane snapped again. "Stick to your cameras!"

Jamison said hopefully:

"You'll give me some data on plants and animals, Mr. Cochrane? Won't
you? I'm doing a book with Bell's pictures, and—"

"Let me alone!" raged Cochrane.

He reached the control-room. Al, the pilot, sat at the controls with an
air of special alertness.

"You're all right? For our lined up trip, we ought to leave in about
twenty minutes. We'll be pointing just about right then."

"I'm all right," said Cochrane. "And you can take off when you please."
To Jones he said: "How'd you find us? I didn't think it could be done."

"Doctor Holden figured it out," said Jones. "Simple enough, but I was
lost! When the ground-shocks came, everybody else ran to the ship. We
waited for you. You didn't come." It had been, of course, because
Cochrane would not risk taking Babs through a forest in which trees were
falling. "We finally had to choose between taking off and crashing. So
we took off."

"That was quite right. We'd all be messed up if you hadn't," Cochrane
told him.

Jones waved his hands.

"I didn't think we could ever find you again. We were sixty light-years
away when that booster effect died out. Then Doctor Holden got on the
communicator. He got Earth. The astronomers back there located us and
gave us the line to get back by. We found the planet. Even then I didn't
see how we'd pick out the valley. But Doc had had 'em checking the shots
we transmitted as we were making our landing. We had the whole first
approach on film-tape. They put a crowd of map-comparators to work. We
went in a Space Platform orbit around the planet, transmitting what we
saw from out there—they figured the orbit for us, too—and they checked
what we transmitted against what we'd photographed going down. So they
were able to spot the exact valley and tell us where to come down. We
actually spotted this valley last night, but we couldn't land in the
dark."

Cochrane felt abashed.

"I couldn't have done that job," he admitted, "so I didn't think anybody
could. Hm. Didn't all this cost a lot of fuel?"

Jones actually smiled.

"I worked out something. We don't use as much fuel as we did. We're
probably using too much now. Al—go ahead and lift. I want to check what
the new stuff does, anyhow. Take off!"

The pilot threw a switch, and Jones threw another, a newly installed
one, just added to his improvised control-column. A light glowed
brightly. Al pressed one button, very gently. A roaring set up outside.
The ship started up. There was practically no feeling of acceleration,
this time. The ship rose lightly. Even the rocket-roar was mild indeed,
compared to its take-off from Luna and the sound of its first landing on
the planet just below.

Cochrane saw the valley floors recede, and mountain-walls drop below.
From all directions, then, vegetation-filled valleys flowed toward the
ship, and underneath. Glaciers appeared, and volcanic cones, and then
enormous stretches of white, with smoking dots here and there upon it.
In seconds, it seemed, the horizon was visibly curved. In other seconds
the planet being left behind was a monstrous white ball, and there were
patches of intolerable white sunlight coming in the ports.

And Cochrane felt queer. Jones had given the order for take-off. Jones
had determined to leave at this moment, because Jones had tests he
wanted to make.... Cochrane felt like a passenger. From the man who
decided things because he was the one who knew what had to be done, he
had become something else. He had been absent two nights and part of a
day, and decisions had been made in which he had no part—

It felt queer. It felt even startling.

"We're in a modification of the modified Dabney field now," observed
Jones in a gratified tone. "You know the original theory."

"I don't," acknowledged Cochrane.

"The field's always a pipe, a tube, a column of stressed space between
the field-plates," Jones reminded him. "When we landed the first time,
back yonder, the tail of the ship wasn't in the field at all. The field
stretched from the bow of the ship only, out to that last balloon we
dropped. We were letting down at an angle to that line. It was like a
kite and a string and the kite's tail. The string was the Dabney field,
and the directions we were heading was the kite's tail."

Cochrane nodded. It occurred to him that Jones was very much unlike
Dabney. Jones had discovered the Dabney field, but having sold the
fame-rights to it, he now apparently thought "Dabney Field" was the
proper technical term for his own discovery, even in his own mind.

"Back on the moon," Jones went on zestfully, "I wasn't sure that a field
once established would hold in atmosphere. I hoped that with enough
power I could keep it, but I wasn't sure—"

"This doesn't mean much to me, Jones," said Cochrane. "What does it add
up to?"

"Why—the field held down into atmosphere. And we were out of the
primary field as far as the tail of the ship was concerned. But this
time we landed, I'd hooked in some ready-installed circuits. There was a
second Dabney field from the stern of the ship to the bow. There was the
main one, going out to those balloons and then back to Earth. But there
was—and is—a second one only enclosing the ship. It's a sort of
bubble. We can still trail a field behind us, and anybody can follow in
any sort of ship that's put into it. But now the ship has a completely
independent, second field. Its tail is never outside!"

Cochrane did not have the sort of mind to find such information either
lucid or suggestive.

"So what happens?"

"We have both plates of a Dabney field always with us," said Jones
triumphantly. "We're always in a field, even landing in atmosphere, and
the ship has practically no mass even when it's letting down to landing.
It has weight, but next to no mass. Didn't you notice the difference?"

"Stupid as it may seem, I didn't," admitted Cochrane. "I haven't the
least idea what you're talking about."

Jones looked at him patiently.

"Now we can shoot our exhaust out of the field! The ship-field, not the
main one!"

"I'm still numb," said Cochrane. "Multiple sclerosis of the brain-cells,
I suppose. Let me just take your word for it."

Jones tried once more.

"Try to see it! Listen! When we landed the first time we had to use a
lot of fuel because the tail of the ship wasn't in the Dabney field. It
had mass. So we had to use a lot of rocket-power to slow down that mass.
In the field, the ship hasn't much mass—the amount depends on the
strength of the field—but rockets depend for their thrust on the mass
that's thrown away astern. Looked at that way, rockets shouldn't push
hard in a Dabney field. There oughtn't to be any gain to be had by the
field at all. You see?"

Cochrane fumbled in his head.

"Oh, yes. I thought of that. But there is an advantage. The ship does
work."

"Because," said Jones, triumphant again, "the field-effect depends
partly on temperature! The gases in the rocket-blast are hot, away up in
the thousands of degrees. They don't have normal inertia, but they do
have what you might call heat-inertia. They acquire a sort of fictitious
mass when they get hot enough. So we carry along fuel that hasn't any
inertia to speak of when it's cold, but acquires a lunatic sort of
substitute for inertia when it's genuinely hot. So a ship can travel in
a Dabney field!"

"I'm relieved," acknowledged Cochrane. "I thought you were about to tell
me that we couldn't lift off the moon, and I was going to ask how we got
here."

Jones smiled patiently.

"What I'm telling you now is that we can shoot rocket-blasts out of the
Dabney field we make with the stern of the ship! Landing, we keep our
fuel and the ship with next to no mass, and we shoot it out to where it
does have mass, and the effect is practically the same as if we were
pushing against something solid! And so we started off with fuel for
maybe five or six landings and take-offs against Earth gravity. But with
this new trick, we've got fuel for a couple of hundred!"

"Ah!" said Cochrane mildly. "This is the first thing you've said that
meant anything to me. Congratulations! What comes next?"

"I thought you'd be pleased," said Jones. "What I'm really telling you
is that now we've got fuel enough to reach the Milky Way."

"Let's not," suggested Cochrane, "and say we did! You've got a new star
picked out to travel to?"

Jones shrugged his shoulders. In him, the gesture indicated practically
hysterical frustration. But he said:

"Yes. Twenty-one light-years. Back on Earth they're anxious for us to
check on sol-type suns and Earth-type planets."

"For once," said Cochrane, "I am one with the great scientific minds.
Let's go over."

He made his way to the circular stairway leading down to the main
saloon. On his clumsy way across the saloon floor to the communicator,
he felt the peculiar sensation of the booster-current, which should
have been a sound, but wasn't. It was the sensation which had preceded
the preposterous leap of the space-ship away from Luna, when in a
heart-beat of time all stars looked like streaks of light, and the ship
traveled nearly two light-centuries.

Sunshine blinked, and then shone again in the ports around the saloon
walls. The second shining came from a different direction—as if
somebody had switched off one exterior light and turned on another—and
at a different angle to the floor.

Cochrane reached the communicator. He felt no weight. He strapped
himself into the chair. He switched on the vision-phone which sent
radiation along the field to a balloon two hundred odd light-years from
Earth—that was the balloon near the glacier planet—and then switched
to the field traveling to a second balloon then the last hundred
seventy-odd light-years back to the moon, and then from Luna City down
to Earth.

He put in his call. He got an emergency message that had been waiting
for him. Seconds later he fought his way frantically through no-weight
to the control-room again.

"Jamison! Bell!" he cried desperately. "We've got a broadcast due in
twenty minutes! I lost track of time! We're sponsored on four continents
and we damwell have to put on a show! What the devil! Why didn't
somebody—"

Jamison said obviously from a blister-port where he swung a squat
star-telescope from one object to another:

"Noo-o-o. That's a gas-giant. We'd be squashed if we landed
there—though that big moon looks promising. I think we'd better try
yonder."

"Okay," said Jones in a flat voice. "Center on the next one in, Al, and
we'll toddle over."

Cochrane felt the ship swinging in emptiness. He knew because it seemed
to turn while he felt that he stayed still.

"We've got a show to put on!" he raged. "We've got to fake something—."

Jamison looked aside from his telescope.

"Tell him, Bell," he said expansively.

"I wrote a script of sorts," said Bell apologetically. "The story-line's
not so good—that's why I wanted a castaway narrative to put in it,
though I wouldn't have had time, really. We spliced film and Jamison
narrated it, and you can run it off. It's a kind of show. We ran it as a
space-platform survey of the glacier-planet, basing it on pictures we
took while we were in orbit around it. It's a sort of travelogue.
Jamison did himself proud. Alicia can find the tape-can for you."

He went back to his cameras. Cochrane saw a monstrous globe swing past a
control-room port. It was a featureless mass of clouds, save for
striations across what must be its equator. It looked like the Lunar
Observatory pictures of Jupiter, back in the Sun's family of planets.

It went past the port, and a moon swam into view. It was a very large
moon. It had at least one ice-cap—and therefore an atmosphere—and
there were mottlings of its surface which could hardly be anything but
continents and seas.

"We've got to put a show on!" raged Cochrane. "And now!"

"It's all set," Bell assured him. "You can transmit it. I hope you like
it!"

Cochrane sputtered. But there was nothing to do but transmit whatever
Bell and Jamison had gotten ready. He swam with nightmarelike difficulty
back to the communicator. He shouted frantically for Babs. She and
Alicia came. Alicia found the film-tape, and Cochrane threaded it into
the transmitter, and bitterly ran the first few feet. Babs smiled at
him, and Alicia looked at him oddly. Evidently, Babs had confided the
consequence of their casting-away. But Cochrane faced an emergency. He
began to check timings with far-distant Earth.

When the ship approached a second planet, Cochrane saw nothing of it. He
was furiously monitoring the broadcast of a show in which he'd had no
hand at all. From his own, professional standpoint it was terrible.
Jamison spouted interminably, so Cochrane considered. Al, the pilot, was
actually interviewed by an offscreen voice! But the pictures from space
were excellent. While the ship floated in orbit, waiting to descend to
pick up Babs and Cochrane, Bell had hooked his camera to an amplifying
telescope and he did have magnificent shots of dramatic terrain on the
planet now twenty light-years behind.

Cochrane watched the show in a mingling of jealousy and relief. It was
not as good as he would have done. But fortunately, Bell and Jamison had
stuck fairly close to straight travelogue-stuff, and close-up shots of
vegetation and animals had been interspersed with the remoter pictures
with moderate competence, if without undue imagination. An audience
which had not seen many shows of the kind would be thrilled. It even
amounted to a valid change of pace. Anybody who watched this would at
least want to see more and different pictures from the stars.