"Journey, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

MURRAY LEINSTER

The Journey

It was the year Joe graduated from college, and he signed on the Mavourneen for one trip out and back. He wanted to do it, he explained carefully to his father, just to get used to standing on his own feet and earning his living the hard way before beginning to practice the profession his father had paid to have him study for. His father admitted that it was normal for a young man to want to spend a certain amount of time making a fool of himself.
"It's a sort of honeymoon with life," he told Joe, "when you and the cosmos seem especially made for each other and you're sure you'll never quarrel. All right. Go ahead."
He did better than consent. He pulled some highly necessary wires so Joe could join the Mavourneen as a spaceman, second class, in spite of competition. And eventually he and Joe's mother went down to see the Mavourneen lift off. The ship was not new or impressive. She carried cargo only, so Joe was visible to them only as a figure in a white duck crew-suit, working a cargo-crane as the last bales Went on board. He saw them and waved, and presently the cargo port closed and sealed, and then the lift-warning horn blared. There was nothing overhead, so it didn't make a bit of difference, but it was custom. Then came that curious rumbling sound which is a drive warming up, and Joe's father and mother tried to get rid of the cotton-woolly feeling it made in their ears, and after a little the outside speaker said hollowly: "Seconds to lift:-ten,-nine-eight-seven-"
Joe's father and mother felt the way parents would feel at that moment, but Joe felt fine. He was sealed up in the Mavourneen for his first cruise-which would probably be his only one, things being as they were. It wasn't likely that he'd ever again be able to spare eight months out of his life to go traveling on a freighter, with a living to make which he had to try to nurse into a career.
Then the ungainly bulk of the Mavourneen lifted heavily and seemed to go grunting skyward.
Joe's mother waved her handkerchief until the ship was a bare speck. Then she wept, as mothers do when their sons take one step nearer to not needing their mothers any more. His father rumbled unhappily. He remembered, poignantly, how magnificently confident and competent a young man can feel. Then they drove homeward with their thoughts on the Mavourneen-out of atmosphere before they were a mile from the field-and they thought of the clumsy, bulbous-shaped ship as speeding splendidly toward the stars, with sunlight shining on her outer plates. They knew that was how Joe had been thinking of it.
But Joe was busy. He was rated as spaceman, second class, which is as low as a rating can go. The first hour up he worked in the cargo hold putting braces in place so the cargo wouldn't shift. That's always done, and at some time or another between take-off and landing the skipper puts his ship through her paces to see just how she handles with the trim for this particular voyage. The second hour up, Joe followed a'spaceman, first class, along a seemingly interminable corridor with white-painted walls and ceilings and a gray-painted floor. This was to learn where motors were- there were motors in most unexpected places-and exactly how they should be oiled.
He knew that outside the ship the sky had long since turned from blue to dark purple and then to black, and that it was no longer night or day but both at once. Which was because the son was always shining outside the ship, and the stars shone too-in uncountable multiples of the number to be seen when looking up from one's bedroom window at home.
But Joe didn't see the stars. When he'd followed the spaceman, first class, along the corridor, he went to the 'crew's quarters and found his bunk and his possessions exactly where he'd dumped them. His name was on a duty list, so he went and got a swab and wiped down a floor that didn't need wiping. Then he went to mess-the food was not at all bad-and he found out his watch, and learned that now he could turn in while other people walked around white-painted corridors and swabbed floors.
He lay in his bunk and thought gloriously that now he was in space. He saw, of course, nothing but the underside of the bunk above his and the strictly aseptic crew's quarters. He had exactly the physical sensations of anybody in an air-conditioned, metal-walled space anywhere at all. But he knew that outside there was illimitable emptiness, and the sun glared fiercely and silently in the middle of all of it, spurting out pseudopods orHame, and Earth would only be a ball that was momently growing smaller. By now it would be about the size of an orange-but a little greenish for an orange, with patches of fungus-looking white stuff at its poles. And all around would be the stars. Millions and billions and quintillions of them, tinier specks than anybody could imagine and more than anyone could think of counting. But he did not see them. Naturally!
He didn't sleep well that first night. -It wasn't really night, but only a certain number of hours of ship-time. His mother didn't sleep well either. Back on Earth, she and Joe's father went to bed and lay quite still, each pretending to the other to be asleep. But it was unbearable. Quite suddenly his mother gave up the pretense and said worriedly in the darkness of the bedroom: "Do you suppose they're nice boys in the ship?- They all looked so young!"
And Joe's father said with a dryness that Joe's mother didn't catch: "Oh, yes! They're nice boys. They're star-cra/y and ships can pick and choose their crews, you know."
This was perfectly true, because the most romantic thing in the world- No. The most romantic things in all the solar system were the ships that floated magnificently from one planet to another. There weren't but so many. There was a stodgy fleet that hauled metal from Mercury-ready-smelted metal. There were brisk liners that went to the domes on Venus-it was proof that one was a millionaire to spend a few weeks every year on Venus-and there were a couple of ships hauling back the things the scientists were finding in the ruined cities on Mars. Then there were the ships that went to the Jovian moons-two of them-and to the mines on Uranus and Pluto. That was all. There was work for perhaps a hundred space-ships. There wasn't work for more. So every year there were several thousand space-crazy young men trying frantically for each one of the very few vacancies in their crews. The ships could pick their crews ' on any basis their skippers pleased. Joe wss lucky to be signed on.
But he didn't see the stars. A week from Earth, he was trusted to remember all the motors and places that had to be oiled. Thereafter he made his round alone. Each watch, he made a trudging progress along what seemed miles of white-painted corridor, dutifully stopping at each place where a motor lurked behind a door or panel, and conscientiously made sure that each one was adequately lubricated. And he had divers other official duties, of which swabbing floors seemed to be most prominent.
When he was two weeks out he realized that he was pretty well ignored by the rest of the crew. He was acutely and gloriously aware that he was in space. They prided themselves upon being space-hardened. Which meant having no illusions about the romance of space travel. The older men may even have meant it, but the ones around Joe's age were self-consciously disillusioned. They were raucously amused at any suggestion that being a spaceman was anything but a tedious and not-too-well-paid job. They conceded only that their profession entitled them to-and secured them-their choice of female companionship in the dives they spent their pay in back on Earth. They talked as nearly as possible in four-letter words only. Which proved their sophistication but made their talk unduly monotonous. Lost in his rapt contemplation of the fact that he was in space, Joe bored them.
Once the man whose bunk was above Joe's took action. He sneaked a spare gravity coil out of the electrician's storeroom and set it up above Joe's bunk. When Joe was asleep he turned it on. It neatly neutralized the normal gravitation of the ship. Joe woke, weightless, gasping in terror. It was that nightmare sensation of unending fall-the sensation the very first rocketeers had when they essayed to "coast" to the moon on their own momentum. They could not sleep, because when they dozed ofl they woke instantly in the primeval horror of falling. Even on the moon they could not sleep. The gravity was not enough. Some of them died of sleeplessness and- But everybody knows all about that.
The gravity coil was intended as a joke. But it was used nightly, and many times a night, until Joe began to feel an hysterical terror of sleeping. Then an old hand exposed the trick and showed Joe the other trick of strapping himself down so that there was always pressure on his body. It was a substitute for the feel of something-or someone-holding him comfortingly fast. But it was a long time before Joe got back real confidence in sleep.
Back on Earth, Joe's mother and father very carefully made a boast of Joe's journeying. They said proudly to their friends that Joe was away out beyond Mars now, which was true. They said that he was an old hand in space now. Which was probably true, too. But he hadn't seen the stars. He only traveled among them.
On the trip out he actually saw the stars just once, and then it was a bare glimpse. It was a little beyond the orbit of Jupiter, when the MavB^meen was something over two months out from Earth and still accelerating-still going a little bit faster every instant than she'd been going the instant before. Joe was trudging the weary, endless, unchanging corridor in which he oiled motors. He saw the Mavourneeris first mate coming in the opposite direction.
The mate stopped by a round plate set in the outer wall of the corridor. He took a key from his pocket, unlocked something, and swung the plate inward on a hinge. He looked at what was uncovered.
Joe passed, going on his round. He glanced where the mate looked. Then he froze. The mate was making a routine check of the few, emergency, rarely-or-never-used viewports in the ship's hull. In the unthinkable event of disaster to the
control room-from which the stars were normally viewed- the ship could be navigated by hand with men at such ports as this, reporting to a jury-rigged control room. The mate was simply verifying that they were ready for use. But he uncovered the stars. And Joe looked.
He looked with his own eyes into infinity-past the mate's head and shoulders, of course. He saw the stars. Their number was like the number of grains of sand. Their color varied beyond belief. For the first time Joe realized that they differed only hi brightness and color, because they were all so far away that they were the same size. None was larger than a mathematical point. It was a sight which no man has ever seen save through some such window as the mate had uncovered.
Joe gazed with absolute rapture. The mate matter-of-factly made his verification of the condition of the port and the shutters that closed over it outside-the shutters which infinitesimal meteorites might pit with their tiny, violent explosions if they struck. The mate closed the inner plate, making sure that the outer shutters closed with it. He locked it and turned to go on. He saw Joe, dazed and agitated, staring at the metal plate which had just locked out the universe.
Joe said, swallowing:
"I-never saw the stars before, sir."
"Hie mate said, "Oh," and went on.
Joe continued about his duties, but his actions were purely automatic. For two watches he did not see anything much but the tiny, remembered segment of the cosmos, glimpsed beyond the head and shoulders of the Mavourneen's first mate. He did not notice what he ate. He had seen the stars!
He expanded the vision in his mind. He pictured the cosmos as that small scene multiplied until he could imagine looking in every direction and seeing nothing else, as if he were disembodied in emptiness. By the mere fact of thinking he discovered that odd quirk in man's constitution by which human beings stay sane in emptiness. The quirk is that the stars do not look far away. There is no feeling of distance. They are so remote that-like the toy-sized houses and roads and forests seen from a transport plane on earth-they lose all scale. They do not move. One knows that there is vastness about, but the sensation is comfortably that of
occupying a stable, solid building out of whose windows one sees a backdrop punctured with multitudes of holes. One simply does not feel empty distance all around, through which one might fall screaming for a thousand million years. And therefore men stay sane in space.
Nearing a planet, it is different. Refraction in an atmosphere makes a planet seem round. It is visibly a solid ball and nearer than its background of stars. One has a sensation of height and a conviction that it is far away, and a panicky, desperate need to reach it and feel its huge and reassuring
mass...
It is a fortunate thing that one has to use power to get down to a planet's surface from space.
Joe's meditations told him all this. Perhaps his companions had seen the stars with the same eagerness as himself, hi time past. After the first thrill they felt disappointment. And therefore they voiced their disillusionment hi raucous scorn. But still they stayed spacemen ...
Back on Earth, Joe's father and mother noticed that the later vision-casts were quite fascinating. They mentioned the matter to each other, pretending astonishment. They admitted ruefully that they were staying up too late and not getting tenough sleep. But they didn't refer to their separate discoveries that it was much wiser to be thoroughly tired out before thinking of going to bed-if one wanted to sleep. To their friends they said brightly that Joe's ship was out beyond Saturn.
It was. Joe oiled motors and swabbed decks. Presently his parents back on Earth were able to tell their friends confidently that Joe was out beyond Uranus!jorbit. He was. He still swabbed decks aad oiled motors ana trudged through a white-painted corridor and listened to his companions' talk -almost exclusively four-letter words-and sometimes he made use of the ship's crew's library. Sometimes he watched taped vision-casts.
After a while the ship was beyond Neptune.
Joe's mother and father knew the Mavoumeeri was decelerating, now. It made a non-stop voyage because that was the most practical way to make the run. The early rocket explorers hopped from one planet to another, carefully building up fuel stores for their ships before daring to go further. This was because fuel was their great problem.
Atomic-powered ships like the Mavourneen handled the matter otherwise. They wanted to use the smallest possible atom-piles, so they used the least power that would lift them. But fuel was no problem, so they kept the power on for half their journeys, building up speed second by second. On the second half of their voyages they used the same power to check the speed they had so painstakingly built up. Doubling the distance traveled in this way did not nearly double the time required to travel it. So, short journeys or broken ones were vastly wasteful of time. Therefore the Mavourneen made no stops on the way to Pluto.
But it was not an exciting journey. Each day Joe oiled and inspected more small motors than he had known could exist, before joining the Mavourneen's crew. Each day he swabbed decks, broke out stores, painted, polished, and performed other duties incident to the career of a spaceman, second class. On the way out to Pluto he spent a total of more than seven hundred hours at menial tasks, requiring neither skill nor the education his father had paid for. But he was very happy. He had seen a very small portion of the firmament for something like thirty seconds past the head and shoulders of a preoccupied first mate.
Back on Earth, his mother told her friends confidentially that she hadn't the least idea how she'd managed it, but she'd lost several pounds and wasn't it wonderful to lose weight without dieting? Joe's father apologetically admitted to his friends that he was getting a little bit absent-minded these days. Joe? His son Joe? Oh, Joe was fine! Out on a cargo ship to Pluto to get space-hunger and the wanderlust out of his system at the same time. Come to think of it, his ship ought to be landing on Pluto any day now ...
It was time for landing. Three days from landing the first mate inspected the cargo holds and had some extra braces put in place. Later, the ship performed elephantine maneuvers hi space. The sensation on board was precisely what would be produced by a slow and deliberate earthquake, when all of solidity changed its position, and changed back, and changed again, and again, and again. It was productive of pure, instinctive panic.
Naturally, Joe gave no sign of his sensations. He knew that a pale disk had appeared in the stars before the Mavourneen. It was not bright like the face of a planet near the sun. Here
the sun was only a bright star, yielding about as much light as the moon does to Earth. There were no days on Pluto. There was night; yes. Night without a moon, and with infinitesimal stars, much brighter than on Earth, shining in incredible multitudes from every crack and cranny of the heavens. And there was twilight. That was when the star-sized sun was overhead. But there was no day.
Joe knew, too, that the ghost disk to be seen from the Mavourneen's control room ports showed no markings at all. There were no seas. If there was water, it was frozen. There was no air. It was frozen, too. The planet was a featureless gray phantom of solidity as the Mavourneen approached its twilight side.
The ship's space radio was sending a beam of radio waves on ahead to notify its coming. Other signals were coming back from the tiny human settlement deep under the planet's frigid surface. Joe tried to imagine how explorers had found the heart to search such a planet for the mineral deposits which made a settlement worth while. The settlement itself, of course, was no problem. A ship like the Mavourneen would need only to settle to solidity anywhere, and it could run a shaft down to something which would neither evaporate or run away as a liquid at a temperature at which human beings could live. One ship could establish a village, which other ships could supply and increase down under the cold. For more than fifty years, now, there had been humans living on Pluto and working its mines. There were even families . . .