The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars (45 page)

“You know something about these carrier missiles. How long must it receive our signal to give it time to home accurately on to us?”

“That depends, of course, on its relative speed and several other factors. In this case, since it’s a low-acceleration job, a good ten minutes, I should say.”

“And then it doesn’t matter even if our beacon fails?”

“No. As soon as the carrier’s vectored itself towards you, you can go off the air again. Of course, you’ll have to send it another signal when it passes right by you, but that should be easy.”

“How long will it take to get here if I
do
catch it?”

“A couple of days, maybe less. What are you trying out now?”

“The power amplifiers of this transmitter run at seven hundred and fifty volts. I’m taking a thousand-volt line from another supply, that’s all. It will be a short life and a merry one, but we’ll double or treble the output while the tubes last.”

He switched on the intercom and called Mackay, who, not knowing the transmitter had been switched off for some time, was still carefully holding the array lined up on Arcturus, like an armor-plated William Tell aiming a crossbow.

“Hello, Mac, you all set?”

“I am practically ossified,” said Mackay with dignity. “How much longer——”

“We’re just starting now. Here goes.”

Bradley threw the switch. Gibson, who had been expecting sparks to start flying, was disappointed. Everything seemed exactly as before; but Bradley, who knew better, looked at his meters and bit his lips savagely.

It would take radio waves only half a second to bridge the gap to that tiny, far-off rocket with its wonderful automatic mechanisms that must remain forever lifeless unless this signal could reach them. The half-second passed, and the next. There had been time for the reply, but still that maddening heterodyne whistle came unbroken from the speaker. Then, suddenly, it stopped. For an age there was absolute silence. A hundred and fifty thousand kilometers away, the robot was investigating this new phenomenon. It took perhaps five seconds to make up its mind— and the carrier wave broke through again, but now modulated into an endless string of “beep-beep-beeps.”

Bradley checked the enthusiasm in the cabin.

“We’re not out of the wood yet,” he said. “Remember it’s got to hold our signal for ten minutes before it can complete its course alterations.” He looked anxiously at his meters and wondered how long it would be before the output tubes gave up the unequal battle.

They lasted seven minutes, but Bradley had spares ready and was on the air again in twenty seconds. The replacements were still operating when the missile carrier wave changed its modulation once more, and with a sigh of relief Bradley shut down the maltreated beacon.

“You can come indoors now, Mac,” he called into the microphone. “We made it.”

“Thank heavens for that. I’ve nearly got sunstroke, as well as calcification of the joints, doing this Cupid’s bow act out here.”

“When you’re finished celebrating,” complained Gibson, who had been an interested but baffled spectator, “perhaps you’ll tell me in a few short, well-chosen phrases just how you managed to pull this particular rabbit out of the hat.”

“By beaming our beacon signal and then overloading the transmitter, of course.”

“Yes, I know that. What I don’t understand is why you’ve switched it off again.”

“The controlling gear in the missile has done its job,” explained Bradley, with the air of a professor of philosophy talking to a mentally retarded child. “That first signal indicated that it had detected our wave; we knew then that it was automatically vectoring on to us. That took it several minutes, and when it had finished it shut off its motors and sent us the second signal. It’s still at almost the same distance, of course, but it’s heading towards us now and should be passing in a couple of days. I’ll have the beacon running again then. That will bring it to within a kilometer or less.”

There was a gentle cough at the back of the room.

“I hate to remind you, sir…” began Jimmy.

Norden laughed.

“O.K.— I’ll pay up. Here are the keys— locker 26. What are you going to do with that bottle of whiskey?”

“I was thinking of selling it back to Dr. Mackay.”

“Surely,” said Scott, looking severely at Jimmy, “this moment demands a general celebration, at which a toast…”

But Jimmy didn’t stop to hear the rest. He had fled to collect his loot.

CHAPTER

5

A
n hour ago we had only one passenger,” said Dr. Scott, nursing the long metal case delicately through the airlock. “Now we’ve got several billion.”

“How do you think they’ve stood the journey?” asked Gibson.

“The thermostats seemed to be working well, so they should be all right. I’ll transfer them to the cultures I’ve got ready, and then they should be quite happy until we get to Mars, gorging themselves to their little hearts’ content.”

Gibson moved over to the nearest observation post. He could see the stubby, white-painted shape of the missile lying alongside the airlock, with the slack mooring cables drifting away from it like the tentacles of some deep-sea creature. When the rocket had been brought almost to rest a few kilometers away by its automatic radio equipment, its final capture had been achieved by much less sophisticated techniques. Hilton and Bradley had gone out with cables and lassoed the missile as it slowly drifted by. Then the electric winches on the
Ares
had hauled it in.

“What’s going to happen to the carrier now?” Gibson asked Captain Norden, who was also watching the proceedings.

“We’ll salvage the drive and control assembly and leave the carcass in space. It wouldn’t be worth the fuel to carry it all back to Mars. So until we start accelerating again, we’ll have a little moon of our own.”

“Like the dog in Jules Verne’s story.”

“What, ‘From the Earth to the Moon’? I’ve never read it. At least, I tried once, but couldn’t be bothered. That’s the trouble with all those old stories. Nothing is deader than yesterday’s science-fiction— and Verne belongs to the day before yesterday.”

Gibson felt it necessary to defend his profession.

“So you don’t consider that science-fiction can ever have any permanent literary value?”

“I don’t think so. It may sometimes have a
social
value when it’s written, but to the next generation it must always seem quaint and archaic. Just look what happened, for example, to the space-travel story.”

“Go on. Don’t mind my feelings— as if you would.”

Norden was clearly warming to the subject, a fact which did not surprise Gibson in the least. If one of his companions had suddenly been revealed as an expert on reafforestation, Sanskrit, or bimetallism, Gibson would now have taken it in his stride. In any case, he knew that science-fiction was widely— sometimes hilariously— popular among professional astronauts.

“Very well,” said Norden. “Let’s see what happened there. Up to 1960— maybe 1970— people were still writing stories about the first journey to the Moon. They’re all quite unreadable now. When the Moon was reached, it was safe to write about Mars and Venus for another few years. Now
those
stories are dead too; no one would read them except to get a laugh. I suppose the outer planets will be a good investment for another generation; but the interplanetary romances our grandfathers knew really came to an end in the late 1970’s.”

“But the theme of space-travel is still as popular as ever.”

“Yes, but it’s no longer science-fiction. It’s either purely factual— the sort of thing you are beaming back to Earth now— or else it’s pure fantasy. The stories have to go right outside the Solar System and so they might just as well be fairy tales. Which is all that most of them are.”

Norden had been speaking with great seriousness, but there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

“I contest your argument on two points,” said Gibson. “First of all people— lots of people— still read Wells’ yarns, though they’re a century old. And, to come from the sublime to the ridiculous, they still read
my
early books, like ‘Martian Dust,’ although facts have caught up with them and left them a long way in the rear.”

“Wells wrote literature,” answered Norden, “but even so, I think I can prove my point. Which of his stories are most popular? Why, the straight novels like ‘Kipps’ and ‘Mr. Polly.’ When the fantasies are read at all, it’s in spite of their hopelessly dated prophecies, not because of them. Only ‘The Time Machine’ is still at all popular, simply because it’s set so far in the future that it’s not outmoded— and because it contains Wells’ best writing.”

There was a slight pause. Gibson wondered if Norden was going to take up his second point. Finally he said:

“When did you write ‘Martian Dust’?”

Gibson did some rapid mental arithmetic.

“In ‘73 or ‘74.”

“I didn’t know it was as early as that. But that’s part of the explanation. Space-travel was just about to begin then, and everybody knew it. You had already begun to make a name with conventional fiction, and ‘Martian Dust’ caught the rising tide very nicely.”

“That only explains why it sold
then.
It doesn’t answer my other point. It’s still quite popular, and I believe the Martian colony has taken several copies, despite the fact that it describes a Mars that never existed outside my imagination.”

“I attribute that to the unscrupulous advertising of your publisher, the careful way you’ve managed to keep in the public eye, and— just possibly— to the fact that it was the best thing you ever wrote. Moreover, as Mac would say, it managed to capture the
Zeitgeist
of the ‘70’s, and that gives it a curiosity value now.”

“Hmm,” said Gibson, thinking matters over.

He remained silent for a moment; then his face creased into a smile and he began to laugh.

“Well, share the joke. What’s so funny?”

“Our earlier conversation. I was just wondering what H. G. Wells would have thought if he’d known that one day a couple of men would be discussing his stories, halfway between Earth and Mars.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” grinned Norden. “We’re only a third of the way so far.”

It was long after midnight when Gibson suddenly awoke from a dreamless sleep. Something had disturbed him— some noise like a distance explosion, far away in the bowels of the ship. He sat up in the darkness, tensing against the broad elastic bands that held him to his bed. Only a glimmer of starlight came from the porthole-mirror, for his cabin was on the night side of the liner. He listened, mouth half opened, checking his breath to catch the faintest murmur of sound.

There were many voices in the
Ares
at night, and Gibson knew them all. The ship was alive, and silence would have meant the death of all aboard her. Infinitely reassuring was the unresting, unhurried suspiration of the air-pumps, driving the man-made trade winds of this tiny planet. Against that faint but continuous background were other intermittent noises: the occasional “whirr” of hidden motors carrying out some mysterious and automatic task, the “tick,” every thirty seconds precisely, of the electric clock, and sometimes the sound of water racing through the pressurized plumbing system. Certainly none of these could have roused him, for they were as familiar as the beating of his own heart.

Still only half awake, Gibson went to the cabin door and listened for a while in the corridor. Everything was perfectly normal; he knew that he must be the only man awake. For a moment he wondered if he should call Norden, then thought better of it. He might only have been dreaming, or the noise might have been produced by some equipment that had not gone into action before.

He was already back in bed when a thought suddenly occurred to him. Had the noise, after all, been so far away? That was merely his first impression; it might have been quite near. Anyway, he was tired, and it didn’t matter. Gibson had a complete and touching faith in the ship’s instrumentation. If anything had really gone wrong, the automatic alarms would have alerted everyone. They had been tested several times on the voyage, and were enough to awaken the dead. He could go to sleep, confident that they were watching over him with unresting vigilance.