2061: Odyssey Three (10 page)

Captain Laplace woke instantly at the first gentle tapping, like a distant woodpecker, of the attitude control jets. For a moment he wondered if he was dreaming: no, the ship was definitely turning in space.

Perhaps it was getting too hot on one side and the thermal control system was making some minor adjustments. That did happen occasionally, and was a black mark for the officer on duty, who should have noticed that the temperature envelope was being approached.

He reached for the intercom button to call - who was it? - Mr Chang on the bridge. His hand never completed the movement.

After days of weightlessness, even a tenth of a gravity is a shock. To the Captain it seemed like minutes, though it must have been only a few seconds, before he could unbuckle his restraining harness and struggle out of his bunk. This time, he found the button and jabbed it viciously. There was no reply.

He tried to ignore the thuds and bumps of inadequately secured objects that had been taken unawares by the onset of gravity. Things seemed to go on falling for a long time, but presently the only abnormal sound was the muffled, far-off scream of the drive at full blast.

He tore open the curtain of the cabin’s little window, and looked out at the stars. He knew roughly where the ship’s axis should have been pointing; even if he could only judge it to within thirty or forty degrees, that would allow him to distinguish between the two possible alternatives.

Galaxy could be vectored either to gain, or to lose, orbital velocity. It was losing it - and therefore preparing to fall towards Europa.

There was an insistent banging on the door, and the Captain realized that little more than a minute could really have passed. Second Officer Floyd and two other crew members were crowded in the narrow passageway.

‘The bridge is locked, Sir,’ Floyd reported breathlessly. ‘We can’t get in - and Chang doesn’t answer. We don’t know what’s happened.’

‘I’m afraid I do,’ Captain Laplace answered, climbing into his shorts. ‘Some madman was bound to try it sooner or later. We’ve been hijacked, and I know where. But I’m damned if I know why.’

He glanced at his watch, and did a quick mental calculation.

‘At this thrust level, we’ll have deorbited within fifteen minutes - make it ten for safety. Any way we can cut the drive without endangering the ship?’

Second Officer Yu, Engineering, looked very unhappy, but volunteered a reluctant reply.

‘We could pull the circuit breakers in the pump motor lines, and cut off the propellant supply.’

‘Can we get at them?’

‘Yes - they’re on Deck Three.’

‘Then let’s go.’

‘Er - then the independent backup system would take over. For safety, that’s behind a sealed bulkhead on Deck Five - we’d have to get a cutter - no, it couldn’t be done in time.’

Captain Laplace had been afraid of that. The men of genius who had designed Galaxy had tried to protect the ship from all plausible accidents. There was no way they could have safeguarded it against human malevolence.

‘Any alternatives?’

‘Not in the time available, I’m afraid.’

‘Then let’s get to the bridge and see if we can talk to Chang - and whoever is with him.’

And who could that be? he wondered. He refused to believe that it could be one of his regular crew. That left - of course, there was the answer! He could see it all. Monomaniac researcher tries to prove theory - experiments frustrated - decides that the quest for knowledge takes precedence over everything else.

It was uncomfortably like one of those cheap ‘mad scientist’ melodramas, but it fitted the facts perfectly. He wondered if Dr Anderson had decided that this was the only road to a Nobel Prize.

That theory was swiftly demolished when the breathless and dishevelled geologist arrived gasping:

‘For God’s sake, Captain - what’s happening? We’re under full thrust! Are we going up - or down?’

‘Down,’ answered Captain Laplace. ‘In about ten minutes, we’ll be in an orbit that will hit Europa. I can only hope that whoever’s at the controls knows what he’s doing.’

Now they were at the bridge, facing the closed door. Not a sound came from the far side.

Laplate rapped as loudly as he possibly could without bruising his knuckles.

‘This is the Captain! Let us in!’

He felt rather foolish at giving an order which would certainly be ignored, but he hoped for at least some reaction. To his surprise, he got one.

The external speaker hissed into life, and a voice said: ‘Don’t attempt anything foolish, Captain. I have a gun, and Mr Chang is obeying my orders.’

‘Who was that?’ whispered one of the officers. ‘It sounds like a woman!’

‘You’re right,’ said the Captain grimly. That certainly cut down the alternatives, but didn’t help matters in any way.

‘What do you hope to do? You know you can’t possibly get away with it!’ he shouted, trying to sound masterful rather than plaintive.

‘We’re landing on Europa. And if you want to take off again, don’t try to stop me.’

‘Her room’s completely clean,’ Second Officer Chris Floyd reported thirty minutes later, when the thrust had been cut to zero and Galaxy was falling along the ellipse which would soon graze the atmosphere of Europa. They were now committed; although it would now be possible to immobilize the engines, it would be suicide to do so. They would be needed again to make a landing - although that could be merely a more protracted form of suicide.

‘Rosie McCullen! Who would have believed it! Do you suppose she’s on drugs?’

‘No,’ said Floyd. ‘This has been very carefully planned. She must have a radio hidden somewhere in the ship. We should search for it.’

‘You sound like a damned cop.’

‘That will do, gentlemen,’ said the Captain. Tempers were getting frayed, largely through sheer frustration and the total failure to establish any further contact with the barricaded bridge. He glanced at his watch.

‘Less than two hours before we enter atmosphere - what there is of it. I’ll be in my cabin - it’s just possible they may try to call me there. Mr Yu, please stand by the bridge and report any developments at once.’

He had never felt so helpless in his life, but there were times when doing nothing was the only thing to do. As he left the officers’ wardroom, he heard someone say wistfully: ‘I could do with a bulb of coffee. Rosie made the best I’ve ever tasted.’

Yes, thought the Captain grimly, she’s certainly efficient. Whatever job she tackles, she’ll do it thoroughly.

There was only one man aboard Galaxy who could regard the situation as anything but a total disaster. I may be about to die, Rolf van der Berg told himself; but at least I have a chance of scientific immortality. Though that might be poor consolation, it was more than anyone else on the ship could hope for.

That Galaxy was heading for Mount Zeus he did not doubt for a moment; there was nothing else on Europa of any significance. Indeed, there was nothing remotely comparable on any planet.

So his theory - and he had to admit that it was still a theory - was no longer a secret. How could it have leaked out?

He trusted Uncle Paul implicitly, but he might have been indiscreet. More likely, someone had monitored his computers, perhaps as a matter of routine. If so, the old scientist could well be in danger; Rolf wondered if he could - or should - get a warning to him. He knew that the communications officer was trying to contact Ganymede via one of the emergency transmitters; an automatic beacon alert had already gone out, and the news would be hitting Earth any minute now. It had been on its way now for almost an hour…

‘Come in,’ he said, at the quiet knock on his cabin door. ‘Oh - hello, Chris. What can I do for you?’

He was surprised to see Second Officer Chris Floyd, whom he knew no better than any of his other colleagues. If they landed safely on Europa, he thought gloomily, they might get to know each other far better than they wished.

‘Hello, Doctor. You’re the only person who lives around here. I wondered if you could help me.’

‘I’m not sure how anyone can help anyone at the moment. What’s the latest from the bridge?’

‘Nothing new: I’ve just left Yu and Gillings up there, trying to fix a mike on the door. But no-one inside seems to be talking; not surprising - Chang must have his hands full.’

‘Can he get us down safely?’

‘He’s the best; if anyone can do it, he can. I’m more worried about getting off again.’

‘God - I’d not been looking that far ahead. I assumed that was no problem.’

‘It could be marginal. Remember, this ship is designed for orbital operations. We hadn’t planned to put down on any major moon - though we had hoped to rendezvous with Ananke and Carme. So we could be stuck on Europa - especially if Chang has to waste propellant looking for a good landing site.’

‘Do we know where he is trying to land?’ Rolf asked, trying not to sound more interested than might be reasonably expected. He must have failed, because Chris looked at him sharply.

‘There’s no way we can tell at this stage, though we may get a better idea when he starts braking. But you know these moons; where do you think?’

‘There’s only one interesting place. Mount Zeus.’

‘Why should anyone want to land there?’

RoIf shrugged.

‘That was one of the things we’d hoped to find out. Cost us two expensive penetrometers.’

‘And it looks like costing a great deal more. Haven’t you any ideas?’

‘You sound like a cop,’ said van der Berg with a grin, not intending it in the least seriously.

‘Funny - that’s the second time I’ve been told that in the last hour.’

Instantly, there was a subtle change in the atmosphere of the cabin - almost as if the life-support system had readjusted itself.

‘Oh - I was just joking - are you?’

‘If I was, I wouldn’t admit it, would I?’

That was no answer, thought van der Berg; but on second thoughts, perhaps it was.

He looked intently at the young officer, noticing - not for the first time - his striking resemblance to his famous grandfather. Someone had mentioned that Chris Floyd had only joined Galaxy on this mission, from another ship in the Tsung fleet - adding sarcastically that it was useful to have good connections in any business. But there had been no criticism of Floyd’s ability; he was an excellent space officer. Those skills might qualify him for other part-time jobs as well; look at RosieMcCulIen - who had also, now he came to think of it, joined Galaxy just before this mission.

Rolf van der Berg felt that he had become enmeshed in some vast and tenuous web of interplanetary intrigue; as a scientist, accustomed to getting - usually - straightforward answers to the questions he put to nature, he did not enjoy the situation.

But he could hardly claim to be an innocent victim. He had tried to conceal the truth - or at least what he believed to be the truth. And now the consequences of that deceit had multiplied like the neutrons in a chain reaction; with results that might be equally disastrous.

Which side was Chris Floyd on? How many sides were there? The Bund would certainly be involved, once the secret had leaked out. But there were splinter groups within the Bund itself, and groups opposing them; it was like a hall of mirrors.

There was one point, however, on which he did feel reasonably certain. Chris Floyd, if only because of his connections, could be trusted. I’d put my money, thought van der Berg, on him being assigned to ASTROPOL for the duration of the mission - however long, or short, that might now be.

‘I’d like to help you, Chris,’ he said slowly. ‘As you probably suspect, I do have some theories. But they may still be utter nonsense.

‘In less than half an hour, we may know the truth. Until then, I prefer to say nothing.’

And this is not, he told himself, merely ingrained Boer stubbornness. If he had been mistaken, he would prefer not to die among men who knew that he was the fool who had brought them to their doom.

Second Officer Chang had been wrestling with the problem ever since Galaxy had been successfully - to his surprise as much as his relief - injected into transfer orbit. For the next couple of hours she was in the hands of God, or at least Sir Isaac Newton; there was nothing to do but wait until the final braking and descent manoeuvre.

He had briefly considered trying to fool Rosie by giving the ship a reverse vector at closest approach, and so taking it out into space again. It would then be back in a stable orbit, and a rescue could eventually be mounted from Ganymede. But there was a fundamental objection to this scheme: he would certainly not be alive to be rescued. Though Chang was no coward, he would prefer not to become a posthumous hero of the spaceways.

In any event, his chances of surviving the next hour seemed remote. He had been ordered to take down, single-handed, a three-thousand tonner on totally unknown territory. This was not a feat he would care to attempt even on the familiar Moon.

‘How many minutes before you start braking?’ asked Rosie. Perhaps it was more of an order than a question; she clearly understood the fundamentals of astronautics, and Chang abandoned his last wild fantasies of outwitting her.

‘Five,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Can I warn the rest of the ship to stand by?’

‘I’ll do it. Give me the mike… THIS IS THE BRIDGE. WE START BRAKING IN FIVE MINUTES. REPEAT, FIVE MINUTES. OUT.’

To the scientists and officers assembled in the wardroom, the message was fully expected. They had had one piece of luck; the external video monitors had not been switched off. Perhaps Rose had forgotten about them; it was more likely that she had not bothered. So now, as helpless spectators - quite literally, a captive audience - they could watch their unfolding doom.

The cloudy crescent of Europa now filled the field of the rear-view camera. There was no break anywhere in the solid overcast of water vapour recondensing on its way back to nightside. That was not important, since the landing would be radar-controlled until the last moment. It would, however, prolong the agony of observers who had to rely on visible light,

No-one stared more intently at the approaching world than the man who had studied it with such frustration for almost a decade. Rolf van der Berg, seated in one of the flimsy low-gravity chairs with the restraining belt lightly fastened, barely noticed the first onset of weight as braking commenced.

In five seconds, they were up to full thrust. All the officers were doing rapid calculations on their comsets; without access to Navigation, there would be a lot of guesswork, and Captain Laplace waited for a consensus to emerge.

‘Eleven minutes,’ he announced presently, ‘assuming he doesn’t reduce thrust level - he’s at max now. And assuming he’s going to hover at ten kilometres - just above the overcast - and then go straight down. That could take another five minutes.’

It was unnecessary for him to add that the last second of those five minutes would be the most critical.

Europa seemed determined to keep its secrets to the very end. When Galaxy was hovering motionless, just above the cloudscape, there was still no sign of the land - or sea - beneath. Then, for a few agonizing seconds, the screens became completely blank - except for a glimpse of the now extended, and very seldom used, landing gear. The noise of its emergence a few minutes earlier had caused a brief flurry of alarm among the passengers; now they could only hope that it would perform its duty.

How thick is this damn cloud? van der Berg asked himself. Does it go all the way down -No, it was breaking, thinning out into shreds and wisps - and there was the new Europa, spread out, it seemed, only a few thousand metres below.

It was indeed new; one did not have to be a geologist to see that. Four billion years ago, perhaps, the infant Earth had looked like this, as land and sea prepared to begin their endless conflict.

Here, until fifty years ago, there had been neither land nor sea - only ice. But now the ice had melted on the Lucifer-facing hemisphere, the resulting water had boiled upwards - and been deposited in the permanent deep-freeze of nightside. The removal of billions of tons of liquid from one hemisphere to the other had thus exposed ancient seabeds that had never before known even the pale light of the far-distant Sun.

Some day, perhaps, these contorted landscapes would be softened and tamed by a spreading blanket of vegetation; now they were barren lava flows and gently steaming mud flats, interrupted occasionally by masses of up-thrust rock with strangely slanting strata. This had clearly been an area of great tectonic disturbance, which was hardly surprising if it had seen the recent birth of a mountain the size of Everest.

And there it was - looming up over the unnaturally close horizon. Rolf van der Berg felt a tightness in his chest, and a tingling of the flesh at the back of his neck. No longer through the remote impersonal senses of instruments, but with his own eyes, he was seeing the mountain of his dreams.

As he well knew, it was in the approximate shape of a tetrahedron, tilted so that one face was almost vertical. (That would be a nice challenge to climbers, even in this gravity - especially as they couldn’t drive pitons into it…) The summit was hidden in the clouds, and much of the gently-sloping face turned towards them was covered with snow.

‘Is that what all the fuss is about?’ muttered someone in disgust. ‘Looks like a perfectly ordinary mountain to me. I guess that once you’ve seen one -’ He was ’shushed’ angrily into silence.

Galaxy was now drifting slowly towards Mount Zeus, as Chang searched for a good landing place. The ship had very little lateral control, as ninety per cent of the main thrust had to be used merely to support it. There was enough propellant to hover for perhaps five minutes; after that, he might still be able to land safely - but he could never take off again.

Neil Armstrong had faced the same dilemma, almost a hundred years ago. But he had not been piloting with a gun aimed at his head.

Yet for the last few minutes, Chang had totally forgotten both gun and Rosie. Every sense was focused on the job ahead; he was virtually part of the great machine he was controlling. The only human emotion left to him was not fear - but exhilaration. This was the job he had been trained to perform; this was the highlight of his professional career - even as it might be the finale.

And that was what it looked like becoming. The foot of the mountain was now less than a kilometre away - and he had still found no landing site. The terrain was incredibly rugged, torn with canyons, littered with gigantic boulders. He had not seen a single horizontal area larger than a tennis court -and the red line on the propellant gauge was only thirty seconds away.

But there, at last, was a smooth surface - much the flattest he’d seen - it was his only chance within the time frame.

Delicately, he juggled the giant, unstable cylinder he was controlling towards the patch of horizontal ground - it seemed to be snow-covered - yes, it was - the blast was blowing the snow away - but what’s underneath? - looks like ice - must be a frozen lake - how thick? - HOW THICK? -The five-hundred-ton hammer-blow of Galaxy’s main jets hit the treacherously inviting surface. A pattern of radiating lines sped swiftly across it; the ice cracked, and great sheets started to overturn. Concentric waves of boiling water hurtled outwards as the fury of the drive blasted into the suddenly uncovered lake.

Like the well-trained officer he was, Chang reacted automatically, without the fatal hesitations of thought. His left hand ripped open the SAFETY LOCK bar; his right grabbed the red lever it protected - and pulled it to the open position.

The ABORT program, peacefully sleeping ever since Galaxy was launched, took over and hurled the ship back up into the sky.