The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars (42 page)

The discussion group was breaking up as the various officers drifted— literally— away to their posts, but Gibson’s thoughts were still circling Saturn as Captain Norden came across to him and broke into his reverie.

“I don’t know what sort of schedule you’ve planned,” he said, “but I suppose you’d like to look over our ship. After all, that’s what usually happens around this stage in one of your stories.”

Gibson smiled, somewhat mechanically. He feared it was going to be some time before he lived down his past.

“I’m afraid you’re quite right there. It’s the easiest way, of course, of letting the reader know how things work, and sketching in the
locale
of the plot. Luckily it’s not so important now that everyone knows exactly what a spaceship is like inside. One can take the technical details for granted, and get on with the story. But when I started writing about astronautics, back in the ‘60s, one had to hold up the plot for thousands of words to explain how the spacesuits worked, how the atomic drive operated, and clear up anything else that might come into the story.”

“Then I can take it,” said Norden, with the most disarming of smiles, “that there’s not a great deal we can teach you about the
Ares.
”

Gibson managed to summon up a blush.

“I’d appreciate it very much if you’d show me round— whether you do it according to the standard literary pattern or not.”

“Very well,” grinned Norden. “We’ll start at the control room. Come along.”

For the next two hours they floated along the labyrinth of corridors that crossed and criss-crossed like arteries in the spherical body of the
Ares.
Soon, Gibson knew, the interior of the ship would be so familiar to him that he could find his way blindfolded from one end to the other; but he had already lost his way once and would do so again before he had learned his way around.

As the ship was spherical, it had been divided into zones of latitude like the Earth. The resulting nomenclature was very useful, since it at once gave a mental picture of the liner’s geography. To go “North” meant that one was heading for the control cabin and the crew’s quarters. A trip to the Equator suggested that one was visiting either the great dining-hall occupying most of the central plane of the ship, or the observation gallery which completely encircled the liner. The Southern hemisphere was almost entirely fuel tank, with a few storage holds and miscellaneous machinery. Now that the
Ares
was no longer using her motors, she had been swung round in space so that the Northern Hemisphere was in perpetual sunlight and the “uninhabited” Southern one in darkness. At the South Pole itself was a small metal door bearing a set of impressive official seals and the notice: “To be Opened only under the Express Orders of the Captain or his Deputy.” Behind it lay the long, narrow tube connecting the main body of the ship with the smaller sphere, a hundred meters away, which held the power plant and drive units. Gibson wondered what was the point of having a door at all if no one could ever go through it; then he remembered that there must be some provision to enable the servicing robots of the Atomic Energy Commission to reach their work.

Strangely enough, Gibson received one of his strongest impressions not from the scientific and technical wonders of the ship, which he had expected to see in any case, but from the empty passenger quarters— a honeycomb of closely packed cells that occupied most of the North Temperate Zone. The impression was rather a disagreeable one. A house so new that no one has ever lived in it can be more lonely than an old, deserted ruin that has once known life and may still be peopled by ghosts. The sense of desolate emptiness was very strong here in the echoing, brightly lit corridors which would one day be crowded with life, but which now lay bleak and lonely in the sunlight piped through the walls— a sunlight much bluer than on earth and therefore hard and cold.

Gibson was quite exhausted, mentally and physically, when he got back to his room. Norden had been an altogether too conscientious guide, and Gibson suspected that he had been getting some of his own back, and thoroughly enjoying it. He wondered exactly what his companions thought of his literary activities; probably he would not be left in ignorance for long.

He was lying in his bunk, sorting out his impressions, when there came a modest knock on the door.

“Damn,” said Gibson, quietly. “Who’s that?” he continued, a little louder.

“It’s Jim— Spencer, Mr. Gibson. I’ve got a radiogram for you.”

Young Jimmy floated into the room, bearing an envelope with the Signals Officer’s stamp. It was sealed, but Gibson surmised that he was the only person on the ship who didn’t know its contents. He had a shrewd idea of what they would be, and groaned inwardly. There was really no way of escape from Earth; it could catch you wherever you went.

The message was brief and contained only one redundant word:

NEW YORKER, REVUE DES QUATRE MONDES, LIFE INTERPLANETARY WANT FIVE THOUSAND WORDS EACH. PLEASE RADIO BY NEXT SUNDAY. LOVE. RUTH.

Gibson sighed. He had left Earth in such a rush that there had been no time for a final consultation with his agent, Ruth Goldstein, apart from a hurried phone-call halfway around the world. But he’d told her quite clearly that he wanted to be left alone for a fortnight. It never made any difference, of course. Ruth always went happily ahead, confident that he would deliver the goods on time. Well, for once he wouldn’t be bullied and she could darned well wait; he’d earned this holiday.

He grabbed his scribbling pad and, while Jimmy gazed ostentatiously elsewhere, wrote quickly:

SORRY. EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS ALREADY PROMISED TO SOUTH ALABAMA PIG KEEPER AND POULTRY FANCIER. WILL SEND DETAILS ANY MONTH NOW. WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO POISON HARRY? LOVE, MART.

Harry was the literary, as opposed to the business, half of Goldstein and Co. He had been happily married to Ruth for over twenty years, during the last fifteen of which Gibson had never ceased to remind them both that they were getting in a rut and needed a change and that the whole thing couldn’t possibly last much longer.

Goggling slightly, Jimmy Spencer disappeared with this unusual message, leaving Gibson alone with his thoughts. Of course, he would have to start work some time, but meanwhile his typewriter was buried down in the hold where he couldn’t see it. He had even felt like attaching one of those “NOT WANTED IN SPACE—MAY BE STOWED IN VACUUM” labels, but had manfully resisted the temptation. Like most writers who had never had to rely solely on their literary earnings, Gibson hated
starting
to write. Once he had begun, it was different… sometimes.

His holiday lasted a full week. At the end of that time, Earth was merely the most brilliant of the stars and would soon be lost in the glare of the Sun. It was hard to believe that he had ever known any life but that of the little, self-contained universe that was the
Ares.
And its crew no longer consisted of Norden, Hilton, Mackay, Bradley, and Scott— but of John, Fred, Angus, Owen, and Bob.

He had grown to know them all, though Hilton and Bradley had a curious reserve that he had been unable to penetrate. Each man was a definite and sharply contrasted character; almost the only thing they had in common was intelligence. Gibson doubted if any of them had an I.Q. of less than 120, and he sometimes wriggled with embarrassment as he remembered the crews he had imagined for some of his fictional spaceships. He recalled Master Pilot Graham, from “Five Moons Too Many”— still one of his favorite characters. Graham had been tough (had he not once survived half a minute in vacuum before being able to get to his spacesuit?) and he regularly disposed of a bottle of whiskey a day. He was a distinct contrast to Dr. Angus Mackay, Ph.D. (Astron.), F.R.A.S., who was now sitting quietly in a corner reading a much annotated copy of “The Canterbury Tales” and taking an occasional squirt from a bulbful of milk.

The mistake that Gibson had made, along with so many other writers back in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, was the assumption that there would be no fundamental difference between ships of space and ships of the sea— or between the men who manned them. There were parallels, it was true, but they were far outnumbered by the contrasts. The reason was purely technical, and should have been foreseen, but the popular writers of the mid-century had taken the lazy course and had tried to use the traditions of Herman Melville and Frank Dana in a medium for which they were grotesquely unfitted.

A ship of space was much more like a stratosphere liner than anything that had ever moved on the face of the ocean, and the technical training of its crew was at a much higher level even than that required in aviation. A man like Norden had spent five years at college, three years in space, and another two back at college on advanced astronautical theory before qualifying for his present position.

Gibson was having a quiet game of darts with Dr. Scott when the first excitement of the voyage burst unexpectedly upon them. There are not many games of skill that can be played in space; for a long time cards and chess had been the classical stand-bys, until some ingenious Englishman had decided that a flight of darts would perform very well in the absence of gravity. The distance between thrower and board had been increased to ten meters, but otherwise the game still obeyed the rules that had been formulated over the centuries amid an atmosphere of beer and tobacco smoke in English pubs.

Gibson had been delighted to find that he was quite good at the game. He almost always managed to beat Scott, despite— or because of— the other’s elaborate technique. This consisted of placing the “arrow” carefully in mid-air, and then going back a couple of meters to squint along it before smacking it smartly on its way.

Scott was optimistically aiming for a treble twenty when Bradley drifted into the room bearing a signals form in his hand.

“Don’t look now,” he said in his soft, carefully modulated voice, “but we’re being followed.”

Everyone gaped at him as he relaxed in the doorway. Mackay was the first to recover.

“Please elucidate,” he said primly.

“There’s a Mark III carrier missile coming after us hell for leather. It’s just been launched from the Outer Station and should pass us in four days. They want me to catch it with our radio control as it goes by, but with the dispersion it will have at this range that’s asking a lot. I doubt if it will go within a hundred thousand kilometers of us.”

“What’s it in aid of? Someone left their toothbrush behind?”

“It seems to be carrying urgent medical supplies. Here, Doc, you have a look.”

Dr. Scott examined the message carefully.

“This
is
interesting. They think they’ve got an antidote for Martian fever. It’s a serum of some kind; the Pasteur Institute’s made it. They must be pretty sure of the stuff if they’ve gone to all this trouble to catch us.”

“What, for heaven’s sake, is a Mark III missile— not to mention Martian fever?” exploded Gibson at last.

Dr. Scott answered before anyone else could get a word in.

“Martian fever isn’t really a Martian disease. It seems to be caused by a terrestrial organism that we carried there and which liked the new climate more than the old one. It has the same sort of effect as malaria: people aren’t often killed by it, but its economic effects are very serious. In any one year the percentage of man-hours lost——”

“Thank you very much. I remember all about it now. And the missile?”

Hilton slid smoothly into the conversation.

“That’s simply a little automatic rocket with radio control and a very high terminal speed. It’s used to carry cargoes between the space-stations, or to chase after spaceships when they’ve left anything behind. When it gets into radio range it will pick up our transmitter and home on to us. Hey, Bob,” he said suddenly, turning to Scott, “why haven’t they sent it direct to Mars? It could get there long before we do.”

“Because its little passengers wouldn’t like it. I’ll have to fix up some cultures for them to live in, and look after them like a nursemaid. Not my usual line of business, but I think I can remember some of the stuff I did at St. Thomas’s.”

“Wouldn’t it be appropriate,” said Mackay with one of his rare attempts at humor, “if someone went and painted the Red Cross outside?”

Gibson was thinking deeply.

“I was under the impression,” he said after a pause, “that life on Mars was very healthy, both physically and psychologically.”

“You mustn’t believe all you read in books,” drawled Bradley. “Why anyone should ever want to go to Mars I can’t imagine. It’s flat, it’s cold, and it’s full of miserable half-starved plants looking like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. We’ve sunk millions into the place and haven’t got a penny back. Anyone who goes there of his own free will should have his head examined. Meaning no offense, of course.”

Gibson only smiled amicably. He had learned to discount Bradley’s cynicism by about ninety per cent; but he was never quite sure how far the other was only
pretending
to be insulting. For once, however, Captain Norden asserted his authority; not merely to stop Bradley from getting away with it, but to prevent such alarm and despondency from spreading into print. He gave his electronics officer an angry glare.