2061: Odyssey Three (12 page)

‘Sloppiest job I’ve seen since I left college,’ grumbled the Chief Engineer. ‘But it’s the best we can do in the time.’

The makeshift pipeline stretched across fifty metres of dazzling, chemical-encrusted rock to the now quiescent vent of Old Faithful, where it ended in a rectangular, downward-pointing funnel. The sun had just risen over the hills, and already the ground had begun to tremble slightly as the geyser’s subterranean - or subhallean - reservoirs felt the first touch of warmth.

Watching from the observation lounge, Heywood Floyd could hardly believe that so much had happened in a mere twenty-four hours. First of all, the ship had split into two rival factions - one led by the Captain, the other perforce headed by himself. They had been coldly polite to each other, and there had been no actual exchange of blows; but he had discovered that in certain quarters he now rejoiced in the nickname of ‘Suicide’ Floyd. It was not an honour that he particularly appreciated.

Yet no-one could find anything fundamentally wrong with the Floyd-Jolson manoeuvre. (That name was also unfair: he had insisted that Jolson get all the credit, but no-one had listened. And Mihailovich had said: ‘Aren’t you prepared to share the blame?’)

The first test would be in twenty minutes, when Old Faithful, rather belatedly, greeted the dawn. But even if that worked, and the propellant tanks started to fill with sparkling pure water rather than the muddy slurry Captain Smith had predicted, the road to Europa was still not open.

A minor, but not unimportant, factor was the wishes of the distinguished passengers. They had expected to be home within two weeks; now, to their surprise and in some cases consternation, they were faced with the prospect of a dangerous mission halfway across the Solar System - and, even if it succeeded, no firm date for a return to Earth.

Willis was distraught; all his schedules would be totally wrecked. He drifted around muttering about lawsuits, but no-one expressed the slightest sympathy.

Greenburg, on the other hand, was ecstatic; now he would really be in the space business again! And Mihailovich - who spent a lot of time noisily composing in his far from soundproof cabin - was almost equally delighted. He was sure that the diversion would inspire him to new heights of creativity.

Maggie M was philosophical: ‘If it can save a lot of lives,’ she said, looking pointedly at Willis, ‘how can anyone possibly object?’

As for Yva Merlin, Floyd made a special effort to explain matters to her, and discovered that she understood the situation remarkably well. And it was Yva, to his utter astonishment, who asked the question to which no-one else seemed to have paid much attention: ‘Suppose the Europans don’t want us to land - even to rescue our friends?’

Floyd looked at her in frank amazement; even now, he still found it difficult to accept her as a real human being, and never knew when she would come out with some brilliant insight or utter stupidity.

‘That’s a very good question, Yva. Believe me, I’m working on it.’

He was telling the truth; he could never lie to Yva Merlin. That, somehow, would be an act of sacrilege.

The first wisps of vapour were appearing over the mouth of the geyser. They shot upwards and away in their unnatural vacuum trajectories, and evaporated swiftly in the fierce Sunlight.

Old Faithful coughed again, and cleared its throat. A snowy-white - and surprisingly compact - column of ice crystals and water droplets climbed swiftly towards the sky. All one’s terrestrial instincts expected it to topple and fall, but of course it did not. It continued onwards and upwards, spreading only slightly, until it merged into the vast, glowing envelope of the comet’s still expanding coma. Floyd noted, with satisfaction, that the pipeline was beginning to shake as fluid rushed into it.

Ten minutes later, there was a council of war on the bridge. Captain Smith, still in a huff, acknowledged Floyd’s presence with a slight nod; his Number Two, a little embarrassed, did all the talking.

‘Well, it works, surprisingly well. At this rate, we can fill our tanks in twenty hours - though we may have to go out and anchor the pipe more securely.’

‘What about the dirt?’ someone asked.

The First Officer held up a transparent squeeze-bulb holding a colourless liquid.

‘The filters got rid of everything down to a few microns, To be on the safe side, we’ll run through them twice, cycling from one tank to another. No swimming pool, I’m afraid, until we pass Mars.’

That got a much needed laugh, and even the Captain relaxed a little.

‘We’ll run up the engines, at minimum thrust, to check that there are no operational anomalies with Halley H20. If there are, we’ll forget the whole idea, and head home on good old Moon water, fob Aristarchus.’

There was one of those ‘party silences’ where everyone waits simultaneously for someone else to speak. Then Captain Smith broke the embarrassing hiatus.

‘As you all know,’ he said, ‘I’m very unhappy with the whole idea. In fact - ‘ he changed course abruptly; it was equally well-known that he had considered sending Sir Lawrence his resignation, though in the circumstances that would have been a somewhat pointless gesture.

‘But a couple of things have happened in the last few hours. The owner agrees with the project - if no fundamental objections emerge from our tests. And - this is the big surprise, and I don’t know any more about it than you do - the World Space Council has not only okayed but requested that we make the diversion, underwriting any expenses incurred. Your guess is as good as mine…

‘But I still have one worry -’ he looked doubtfully at the little bulb of water, which Heywood Floyd was now holding up to the light and shaking gently. ‘I’m an engineer, not a damn chemist. This stuff looks clean - but what will it do to the tank linings?’

Floyd never quite understood why he acted as he did; such rashness was completely uncharacteristic. Perhaps he was simply impatient with the whole debate, and wanted to get on with the job. Or perhaps he felt that the Captain needed a little stiffening of the moral fibre.

With one quick movement, he flicked open the stopcock and squirted approximately 20cc of Halley’s Comet down his throat.

‘There’s your answer, Captain,’ he said, when he had finished swallowing.

‘And that,’ said the ship’s doctor half an hour later, ‘was one of the silliest exhibitions I’ve ever seen. Don’t you know that there are cyanides and cyanogens and God knows what else in that stuff?’

‘Of course, I do,’ laughed Floyd. ‘I’ve seen the analyses - just a few parts in a million. Nothing to worry about, But I did have one surprise,’ he added ruefully.

‘And what was that?’

‘If you could ship this stuff back to Earth, you could make a fortune selling it as Halley’s Patent Purgative.’

Now that they were committed, the whole atmosphere aboard Universe had changed. There was no more argument; everyone was cooperating to the utmost, and very few people had much sleep for the next two rotations of the nucleus - a hundred hours of Earth time.

The first Halley ‘day’ was devoted to a still rather cautious tapping of Old Faithful, but when the geyser subsided towards nightfall the technique had been thoroughly mastered. More than a thousand tons of water had been taken aboard; the next period of daylight would be ample for the rest.

Heywood Floyd kept out of the Captain’s way, not wishing to press his luck; in any event, Smith had a thousand details to attend to. But the calculation of the new orbit was not among them; that had been checked and rechecked on Earth.

There was no doubt, now, that the concept was brilliant, and the savings even greater than Jolson had claimed. By refuelling on Halley, Universe had eliminated the two major orbit changes involved in the rendezvous with Earth; she could now go straight to her goal, under maximum acceleration, saving many weeks. Despite the possible risks, everyone now applauded the scheme.

Well, almost everyone.

On Earth, the swiftly organized ‘Hands off Halley!’ society was indignant. Its members (a mere 236, but they knew how to drum up publicity) did not consider the rifling of a celestial body justified, even to save lives. They refused to be placated even when it was pointed out that Universe was merely borrowing material that the comet was about to lose anyway. It was, they argued, the principle of the thing. Their angry communiqués gave much needed light relief aboard Universe.

Cautious as ever, Captain Smith ran the first low-powered tests with one of the attitude-control thrusters; if this became unserviceable, the ship could manage without it, There were no anomalies; the engine behaved exactly as if it was running on the best distilled water from the lunar mines.

Then he tested the central main engine, Number One; if that was damaged, there would be no loss of manoeuvrability - only of total thrust. The ship would still be fully controllable, but, with the four remaining outboards alone, peak acceleration would be down by twenty per cent.

Again, there were no problems; even the sceptics started being polite to Heywood Floyd, and Second Officer Jolson was no longer a social outcast.

The lift-off was scheduled late in the afternoon, just before Old Faithful was due to subside. (Would it still be there to greet the next visitors in seventy-six years’ time? Floyd wondered. Perhaps; there were hints of its existence even back on the 1910 photographs.)

There was no countdown, in the dramatic oldtime Cape Canaveral style. When he was quite satisfied that everything was shipshape, Captain Smith applied a mere five tons of thrust on Number One, and Universe drifted slowly upwards and away from the comet.

The acceleration was modest, but the pyrotechnics were awe-inspiring - and, to most of the watchers, wholly unexpected. Until now, the jets from the main engines had been virtually invisible, being formed entirely of highly ionized oxygen and hydrogen. Even when - hundreds of kilometres away - the gases had cooled off enough to combine chemically, there was still nothing to be seen, because the reaction gave no light in the visible spectrum.

But now, Universe was climbing away from Halley on a column of incandescence too brilliant for the eye to look upon; it seemed almost a solid pillar of flame. Where it hit the ground, rock exploded upwards and outwards; as it departed for ever, Universe was carving its signature, like cosmic graffiti, across the nucleus of Halley’s Comet.

Most of the passengers, accustomed to climbing spacewards with no visible means of support, reacted with considerable shock. Floyd waited for the inevitable explanation; one of his minor pleasures was catching Willis in some scientific error, but this very seldom happened. And even when it did, Willis always had some very plausible excuse.

‘Carbon,’ he said. ‘Incandescent carbon - exactly as in a candle flame - but slightly hotter.’

‘Slightly,’ murmured Floyd.

‘We’re no longer burning - if you’ll excuse the word -, (Floyd shrugged his shoulders) ‘pure water. Although it’s been carefully filtered, there’s a lot of colloidal carbon in it. As well as compounds that could only be removed by distillation.’

‘It’s very impressive, but I’m a little worried,’ said Greenburg. ‘All that radiation - won’t it affect the engines - and heat the ship badly?’

It was a very good question, and it had caused some anxiety. Floyd waited for Willis to handle it; but that shrewd operator bounced the ball right back to him.

‘I’d prefer Dr Floyd to deal with that - after all, it was his idea.’

‘Jolson’s, please. Good point, though. But it’s no real problem; when we’re under full thrust, all those fireworks will be a thousand kilometres behind us. We won’t have to worry about them.’

The ship was now hovering some two kilometres above the nucleus; had it not been for the glare of the exhaust, the whole sunlit face of the tiny world would have been spread out beneath. At this altitude - or distance - the column of Old Faithful had broadened slightly. It looked, Floyd suddenly recalled, like one of the giant fountains ornamenting Lake Geneva. He had not seen them for fifty years, and wondered if they still played there.

Captain Smith was testing the controls, slowly rotating the ship, then pitching and yawing it along the Y and Z axes. Everything seemed to be functioning perfectly.

‘Mission time zero is ten minutes from now,’ he announced. ‘0.1 gee for fifty hours; then 0.2 until turnaround - one hundred and fifty hours from now.’ He paused to let that sink in; no other ship had ever attempted to maintain so high a continuous acceleration, for so long. If Universe was not able to brake properly, she would also enter the history books as the first manned interstellar voyager.

The ship was now turning towards the horizontal - if that word could be used in this almost gravityless environment - and was pointing directly to the white column of mist and ice crystals still steadily spurting from the comet. Universe started to move towards it -

‘What’s he doing?’ said Mihailovich anxiously.

Obviously anticipating such questions, the Captain spoke again. He seemed to have completely recovered his good humour, and there was a hint of amusement in his voice.

‘Just one little chore before we leave, Don’t worry - I know exactly what I’m doing. And Number Two agrees with me - don’t you?’

‘Yessir - though I thought you were joking at first.’

‘What is going on up on the bridge?’ asked Willis, for once at a loss.

Now the ship was starting a slow roll, while still moving at no more than a good walking speed towards the geyser. From this distance - now less than a hundred metres - it reminded Floyd still more closely of those far-off Geneva fountains.

Surely he’s not taking us into it - But he was. Universe vibrated gently as it nuzzled its way into the rising column of foam. It was still rolling very slowly, as if it was drilling its way into the giant geyser. The video monitors and observation windows showed only a milky blankness.

The whole operation could not have lasted more than ten seconds; then they were out on the other side. There was a brief burst of spontaneous clapping from the officers on the bridge; but the passengers - even including Floyd - still felt somewhat put-upon.

‘Now we’re ready to go,’ said the Captain, in tones of great satisfaction. ‘We have a nice, clean ship again.’

During the next half-hour, more than ten thousand amateur observers on Earth and Moon reported that the comet had doubled its brightness. The Comet Watch Network broke down completely under the overload, and the professional astronomers were furious.

But the public loved it, and a few days later Universe put on an even better show, a few hours before dawn.

The ship, gaining speed by more than ten thousand kilometres an hour, every hour, was now far inside the orbit of Venus. It would get even closer to the sun before it made its perihelion passage - far more swiftly than any natural celestial body - and headed out towards Lucifer.

As it passed between Earth and Sun, the thousand kilometre tail of incandescent carbon was easily visible as a fourth magnitude star, showing appreciable movement against the constellations of the morning sky in the course of a single hour. At the very beginning of its rescue mission, Universe would be seen by more human beings, at the same moment, than any artefact in the history of the world.