Songs From the Stars (21 page)
"We're just about there," Harker said. "Just over this rise."
The landscape below was subtly changing now. Dry scrub grew in big patches on a long uptilting plain like a scruffy day-old beard. To the northwest loomed the peaks of the biggest range of mountains Lou had seen yet. Bleak and hostile though this country was, Lou found a certain beauty in the vast empty spaces; a beauty not in the eye but of the spirit.
Then the eagle sailed out over the lip of a sudden precipice, and he was confronted by an unreal vista that took his breath away.
They were flying high over the southern end of a huge oval of brilliant silver glare, a deep gouge of a valley rimmed by enormous mountains like some great elongated crater. It was impossible to tell where the northern horizon met the sky, for the blinding sun reflecting off the silver-white valley floor melded sky to earth in a mirror-like shimmer that turned the landscape into a mirage of itself.
"Good gods," Sue muttered. "It's like—"
"—another planet?" Harker suggested. "A fitting site for a spaceport, don't you think?"
"So you've got a little poetry in your soul after all, Arnold," Sue said dryly.
"It makes an ideal launch and recovery site," the Spacer told her in a strangely defensive tone. "A nice flat dry lake bed, not much wind, and no worry about rain."
"I can believe that!" Lou muttered, still blown away by the preternatural beauty of the shimmering lake of light, even as the eagle began to drop toward it pluming vile petroleum smoke. He could see how dreams of visiting other planets could form in men's minds here. Alien and inhuman but with a beauty and grandeur in its own terms, this landscape both dwarfed and exalted the spirit.
Soon they were flying low over gleaming sand and cracked expanses of gray rock toward a pimple of incongruous green in the middle of the huge dry lake bed. Swiftly this became a greenhouse dome flanked by the largest human constructions Lou had ever seen.
To the left, a squat gray rectangle similar to the habitat of Starbase One, and beside it, a long low metal shed full four times its size. To the right, an immense tent of canvas over framework that dwarfed even the giant shed.
As the eagle rounded the far end of the behemoth tent, Lou saw that the buildings were laid out in a crescent enfolding a huge open-ended yard of shimmering gray sand. At the far tip of the crescent, two hemispheres of metal were sunk into the earth. At the other end, another, larger gray dome and a small windowed shed set high on metal stilts.
In the center was—
"The spaceship Enterprise," Harker announced grandly. "The reason for the Company's existence."
A huge silvery bird perched on the desert floor on three short legs ending in wheeled feet. Lou could not see how it was possible for such a thing to fly. It looked as if the cabin of an "airplane" had been built seamlessly into the middle of an eagle wing instead of slung below it. But the lift wing was little more than a pair of stubs extruded out from the cabin like the fins of a fat fish. And the thing was made of metal, it must weigh tons!
Indeed, it wasn't until the black eagle had landed close by the spaceship that Lou fully realized just how big the thing really was. Climbing out of the cabin for a closer took, he felt dwarfed by the man-made monster that towered above him; a bird of metal almost two hundred feet long, with a torso thick as the biggest redwood tree and windows for eyes set back over a bulbous beak. The wings, which had seemed like stubs from the air, were revealed from this perspective as far larger than those of any Spacer "airplane."
"You expect this to fly?" Lou asked incredulously.
Harker laughed. "Would you like a closer look?" he said proudly.
But Lou was already walking toward the spaceship, eyes drawn up to it in wonder. The Enterprise was formed of plates of silvery metal hammered into subtle curves and held together in a smooth skin by thousands of flathead rivets. Two huge coppery horns jutted out of the blunt stern like the bells of giants' trumpets. Workers crawled all over the spaceship, hammering rivets into sections where the missing metal skin revealed an equally metallic skeleton.
"A few more sections of hull to finish, install the rest of the electronics, and she's ready to fly," Harker said, coming up behind them.
"How can this thing possibly fly?" Sue asked, mirroring Lou's thought.
"I'll show you," Harker said, and he led them around to the great trumpets at the rear, each as wide as Lou was tall.
"These are the rocket engines," he said. "Each develops about a quarter of a million pounds of thrust. Together, they boost the spaceship to orbital velocity—two hundred miles above the Earth at eighteen thousand miles an hour!"
The numbers were meaningless magic as far as Lou was concerned. "And what does it burn to do all that?" he asked sharply. "A billion gallons of petroleum?"
"It burns water," Harker said slyly.
"Water? It burns water?"
"Actually it burns hydrogen and oxygen extracted from water," Harker said. "Or you could say the rockets really run on electricity. We pass a current through water, which separates the fluid into hydrogen and oxygen gas, which we compress to liquids and then recombine in the engines, where it releases the electrical energy stored in it as it burns back to water." He smiled fatuously at Lou. "Could you ask for anything whiter?"
"Why that's marvelous!" Sue exclaimed. "White science out of black!"
"And where does all this electricity come from?" Lou asked more dubiously.
"From a nuclear reactor," Harker admitted.
"I thought so."
"And you're sure this thing will work?" Sue asked, apparently hardly taken aback at all by this grim revelation. "I mean, you haven't flown it, it's not even finished yet..."
"The Company preserved many of the plans for the original Enterprise, a space shuttle that did fly before the Smash," Harker said. "This is as close a replica of the first Enterprise as we could build, and it will boost into orbit, I assure you. But let's have a look inside."
The sorcerer led them up a metal ladder leading to an open hatch below the windows.
Instead of the expected spacious cabin, Lou found himself inside a cramped cubicle no bigger than a second-rate room in a middle-grade inn. Three high-backed couches faced out the windows before a bewildering complexity of controls and switches and dials, surrounded by a maze of consoles and tubing and half-finished electronic apparatus. On the wall behind the couches hung three strange suits, bulky and silvery, with glass-faced helmets that covered the whole head. The rest of the space was crammed with canisters, piping, electronic gear, and metal cabinets. The cubicle was no more than ten feet long. There was a solid wall separating it from the rest of the spaceship and no door in it.
"How do you get to the rest of the cabin?" Sue asked Harker.
"There isn't any," Harker said. "This is the entire crew module."
"Then what's in the rest of this thing?"
"A ten-day supply of oxygen, food, and water. The recovery eagle. But mostly fuel tanks."
"Recovery eagle?"
"On the way back from space, the Enterprise re-enters the atmosphere as a hypersonic glider," Harker said. "Using the wings and drogue parachutes, it slows to a falling speed low enough to deploy a large helium eagle to fly it to the ground."
"That must be some eagle wing!" Lou exclaimed. He tried to picture a lift wing big enough to fly the weight of the spaceship, but his imagination failed him utterly.
"It's large enough, but not anywhere near as large as the launch eagle," Harker said. "Most of the launch weight is fuel, so the ship isn't nearly as heavy with the tanks empty."
He crawled out the hatch and began descending the ladder. "Now let me show you the launch eagle," he said. "The biggest thing that will ever fly through the air of this planet."
Harker led them toward the huge tent that dwarfed even the spaceship, a cliff of canvas a hundred feet high and ten times as long. He opened a small flap in the side and ushered them into an immense cavern of cloth, a cooler, darker space whose contrast with the bright sunlight outside momentarily blinded Lou's vision. When it cleared an instant later and he saw what he was seeing, he gasped and goggled, and it took him yet another moment to truly believe what he saw.
Lit by electric globes scattered like fireflies all through it, the interior of the tent was a vast angular forest of metal scaffolding. Taking form in the scaffolding was a half-finished wing that dazzled credibility with its sheer size. Fifty feet thick and a thousand feet from tip to tip, the wing was a spindly metal skeleton half-covered with a thin translucent skin like animal gut, which hordes of workers were even now stitching together over it. Like a gigantic half-skinned bird it sat there, dwarfing the craftsmen who swarmed over its surface like carrion beetles.
"That thing is going to fly?" Sue gasped.
"Of course it will fly," Harker said. "When we fill it with helium, it'll have enough lift to take the Enterprise to 20,000 feet. It drops the spaceship, the Enterprise boosts into orbit, and the launch eagle flies home. Every module in the system is recoverable and fully reusable."
It still all seemed improbable to Lou, experienced eagle freak that he was. Even if it would fly, how could you maneuver an eagle the size of a small mountain? "But the wind currents, keeping any kind of course with a wing that size..."
Harker gave him a superior smile. "No problem," he said. "The launch eagle will be powered by six jet engines—"
"Jet engines?"
"Like the rockets, except they burn petroleum and use the oxygen in the air for oxidizer. High thrust for low weight. Enough power to maneuver the launch eagle with ease in reasonably decent weather."
Lou shook his head. "You've got it all figured out, don't you?" he said. "In your heads. But where are you going to find someone crazy enough to actually fly the thing?"
Harker's spine seemed to stiffen and he fairly glowed with pride. "I am to be the command pilot of the spaceship Enterprise," he said. "You people are so concerned with spirit—but how dead would a soul have to be to pass up an opportunity like that out of cowardice? I'm not afraid, and we'll have no trouble getting the other two crew members either."
Lou regarded the Spacer with a certain grudging new respect, and he could see a similar expression dawning on Sue's face. He had to respect the courage of a man who, whatever his other flaws, dared something he was not sure he himself would care to risk. But—
"Wait a minute!" Lou exclaimed. "Two other crewmen? A spaceship the size of a house, a launch eagle the size of a mountain, fifty years to build them, three thousand people forced to live in boxes in the middle of a deadly desert, millions of gallons of petroleum burned in the atmosphere—all to take three people to a space station? For how long?"
"A three-man, ten-day mission," Harker said defensively, much of the air going out of his sails. "It's the best we could do..."
"You people are crazy!" Lou exclaimed. He was stunned by the insane disproportion of it all. Generations of madmen dedicating their lives to this monstrous project, pumping poison into the atmosphere for centuries, blackening their souls with the ultimate horror of atomic power—a whole little world, a whole history, a secret hidden nation, whose only reason for existence was the useless symbolic gesture of putting three people into space for ten days!
"Well I don't think it's crazy," Sue said, glaring at Lou. "It's good enough to get the broadcast satellite network turned on, isn't it?"
Lou looked at her in amazement. "Have you lost all sense of proportion too?" he said. "How many people have already died down through the generations because of the poison that's been pumped into the air in the service of this useless project? How many more will die? And what if one of those nuclear reactors does explode? And for what? To shoot three people into space for ten days and bring them back? I find Space Systems Incorporated guilty of monstrous shitheadedness above and beyond the call! Justice demands the total disbandment of your miserable tribe and the destruction of all your evil works!"
"Now who's being shitheaded?" Sue snapped. "Think of all the effort that's gone into this, Lou, think of what's waiting for us up there! Just because ten days is all—"
"It's all right, Sue," Harker said with infuriating icy calm. "This reaction was anticipated in the scenario." He turned to Lou, and now his cold eyes seemed to glow as if picking up vibes of power from the monstrous skeletal bird towering above them. "It's necessary that you appreciate the magnitude of the task and how far we're willing to go to complete it. For only now can you begin to understand the worth of the trade-off. Only now will your parochial mind be ready to encompass the most important event in the history of the planet."
The sorcerer seemed to become intoxicated by his own words; his eyes grew feverish with unwholesome fanaticism. "Imagine something that transcends all you know and believe," he said softly. "Something to which the entire evolutionary history of life on Earth is but a preamble. Something that utterly transcends the law of muscle, sun, wind and water, that transcends your Clear Blue Way, that transcends the Great Way itself. Something that in fact transcends all previous human experience."
Despite himself, Lou felt almost mesmerized by the sheer intensity of Harker's vibes, the utter insane certainty of his voice. Sue seemed to forget her anger at him to huddle closer against the sheer fervor of this psychic onslaught. At this moment, fired by his own madness, in the shadow of the huge construction which that madness had manifested into reality, Arnold Harker seemed a sorcerer indeed.
"The only thing that transcends ultimate sanity is ultimate insanity," Lou pontificated, his words sounding hollow to him even as he said them. For he couldn't escape the vertiginous feeling that he was about to be proven wrong.
"So you think that the human mind contains ultimate sanity, do you?" Harker said in a sardonic near whisper. "Well, come with me and learn something that will change your concept of what is ultimate forever."
He began leading them out of the great tent. "Now you will learn the deepest and most wonderful secret of what you call black science. Now you will join us of your own free will. Now the world will change for you forever."
"You really do believe that, don't you?" Lou said as they stepped out into the glaring hot sunlight.
"Believe it?" Harker answered. "I know it. Come with me and put your world behind you."