2061: Odyssey Three (4 page)

Sir Lawrence Tsung was not a sentimental man, and was far too cosmopolitan to take patriotism seriously - though as an undergraduate he had briefly sported one of the artificial pigtails worn during the Third Cultural Revolution. Yet the planetarium re-enactment of the Tsien disaster moved him deeply, and caused him to focus much of his enormous influence and energy upon space.

Before long, he was taking weekend trips to the Moon, and had appointed his son Charles (the thirty-two-million-so! one) as Vice-President of Tsung Astrofreight. The new corporation had only two catapult-launched, hydrogen-fuelled ramrockets of less than a thousand tons empty mass; they would soon be obsolete, but they could provide Charles with the experience that, Sir Lawrence was quite certain, would be needed in the decades ahead. For at long last, the Space Age was truly about to begin.

Little more than half a century had separated the Wright Brothers and the coming of cheap, mass air transportation; it had taken twice as long to meet the far greater challenge of the Solar System.

Yet when Luis Alvarez and his team had discovered muon-catalysed fusion back in the 1950s, it had seemed no more than a tantalizing laboratory curiosity, of only theoretical interest. Just as the great Lord Rutherford had pooh-poohed the prospects of atomic power, so Alvarez himself doubted that ‘cold nuclear fusion’ would ever be of practical importance. Indeed, it was not until 2040 that the unexpected and accidental manufacture of stable muonium-hydrogen ‘compounds’ had opened up a new chapter of human history - exactly as the discovery of the neutron had initiated the Atomic Age.

Now small, portable nuclear power plants could be built, with a minimum of shielding. Such enormous investments had already been made in conventional fusion that the world’s electrical utilities were not - at first - affected, but the impact on space travel was immediate; it could be paralleled only by the jet revolution in air transport of a hundred years earlier.

No longer energy-limited, spacecraft could achieve far greater speeds; flight times in the Solar System could now be measured in weeks rather than months or even years. But the muon drive was still a reaction device - a sophisticated rocket, no different in principle from its chemically fuelled ancestors; it needed a working fluid to give it thrust. And the cheapest, cleanest, and most convenient of all working fluids was - plain water.

The Pacific Spaceport was not likely to run short of this useful substance. Matters were different at the next port of call - the Moon. Not a trace of water had been discovered by the Surveyor, Apollo, and Luna missions. If the Moon had ever possessed any native water, aeons of meteoric bombardment had boiled and blasted it into space.

Or so the selenologists believed; yet clues to the contrary had been visible, ever since Galileo had turned his first telescope upon the Moon. Some lunar mountains, for a few hours after dawn, glitter as brilliantly as if they are capped with snow. The most famous case is the rim of the magnificent crater Aristarchus, which William Herschel, the father of modem astronomy, once observed shining so brightly in the lunar night that he decided it must be an active volcano. He was wrong; what he saw was the Earthlight reflected from a thin and transient layer of frost, condensed during the three hundred hours of freezing darkness.

The discovery of the great ice deposits beneath Schroter’s Valley, the sinuous canyon winding away from Anstarchus, was the last factor in the equation that would transform the economics of space-flight. The Moon could provide a filling station just where it was needed, high up on the outermost slopes of the Earth’s gravitational field, at the beginning of the long haul to the planets.

Cosmos, first of the Tsung fleet, had been designed to carry freight and passengers on the Earth-Moon-Mars run, and as a test-vehicle, through complex deals with a dozen organizations and governments, of the still experimental muon drive. Built at the Imbriurn shipyards, she had just sufficient thrust to lift off from the Moon with zero payload; operating from orbit to orbit, she would never again touch the surface of any world. With his usual flair for publicity, Sir Lawrence arranged for her maiden flight to commence on the hundredth anniversary of Sputnik Day, 4 October 2057.

Two years later, Cosmos was joined by a sister ship. Galaxy was designed for the Earth-Jupiter run, and had enough thrust to operate directly to any of the Jovian moons, though at considerable sacrifice of payload. If necessary, she could even return to her lunar berth for refitting. She was by far the swiftest vehicle ever built by man: if she burned up her entire propellant mass in one orgasm of acceleration, she would attain a speed of a thousand kilometres a second - which would take her from Earth to Jupiter in a week, and to the nearest star in not much more than ten thousand years.

The third ship of the fleet - and Sir Lawrence’s pride and joy - embodied all that had been learned in the building of her two sisters. But Universe was not intended primarily for freight. She was designed from the beginning as the first passenger liner to cruise the space lanes - right out to Saturn, the jewel of the Solar System.

Sir Lawrence had planned something even more spectacular for her maiden voyage, but construction delays caused by a dispute with the Lunar Chapter of the Reformed Teamsters’ Union had upset his schedule. There would just be time for the initial flight tests and Lloyd’s certification in the closing months of 2060, before Universe left Earth orbit for her rendezvous. It would be a very close thing: Halley’s Comet would not wait, even for Sir Lawrence Tsung.

The survey satellite Europa VI had been in orbit for almost fifteen years, and had far exceeded its design life; whether it should be replaced was a subject of considerable debate in the small Ganymede scientific establishment.

It carried the usual collection of data-gathering instruments, as well as a now virtually useless imaging system. Though still in perfect working order, all that this normally showed of Europa was an unbroken cloudscape. The overworked science team on Ganymede scanned the recordings in ‘Quick Look’ mode once a week, then squirted the raw data back to Earth. On the whole, they would be rather relieved when Europa VI expired and its torrent of uninteresting gigabytes finally dried up.

Now, for the first time in years, it had produced something exciting.

‘Orbit 71934,’ said the Deputy Chief Astronomer, who had called van der Berg as soon as the latest data-dump had been evaluated. ‘Coming in from the nightside - heading straight for Mount Zeus. You won’t see anything for another ten seconds, though.’

The screen was completely black, yet van der Berg could imagine the frozen landscape rolling past beneath its blanket of clouds a thousand kilometres below. In a few hours the distant Sun would be shining there, for Europa revolved on its axis once in every seven Earth-days. ‘Nightside’ should really be called ‘Twilight-side’, for half the time it had ample light - but no heat. Yet the inaccurate name had stuck, because it had emotional validity: Europa knew Sunrise, but never Lucifer-rise.

And the Sunrise was coming now, speeded up a thousandfold by the racing probe. A faintly luminous band bisected the screen, as the horizon emerged from darkness.

The explosion of light was so sudden that van der Berg could almost imagine he was looking into the glare of an atomic bomb. In a fraction of a second, it ran through all the colours of the rainbow, then became pure white as the Sun leapt above the mountain - then vanished as the automatic filters cut into the circuit.

‘That’s all; pity there was no operator on duty at the time - he could have panned the camera down and had a good view of the mountain as we went over. But I knew you’d like to see it - even though it disproves your theory.’

‘How?’ said van der Berg, more puzzled than annoyed.

‘When you go through it in slow motion, you’ll see what I mean. Those beautiful rainbow effects - they’re not atmospheric - they’re caused by the mountain itself. Only ice could do that. Or glass - which doesn’t seem very likely.’

‘Not impossible - volcanoes can produce natural glass - but it’s usually black… of course!’

‘Yes?’

‘Er - I won’t commit myself until I’ve been through the data. But my guess would be rock crystal - transparent quartz. You can make beautiful prisms and lenses out of it. Any chance of some more observations?’

‘I’m afraid not - that was pure luck - Sun, mountain, camera all lined up at the right time. It won’t happen again in a thousand years.’

‘Thanks, anyway - can you send me over a copy? No hurry - I’m just leaving on a field trip to Perrine, and won’t be able to look at it until I get back.’

Van der Berg gave a short, rather apologetic laugh.

‘You know, if that really is rock crystal, it would be worth a fortune. Might even help solve our balance of payments problem…’

But that, of course, was utter fantasy. Whatever wonders - or treasures - Europa might conceal, the human race had been forbidden access to them, by that last message from Discovery. Fifty years later, there was no sign that the interdiction would ever be lifted.

For the first forty-eight hours of the voyage, Heywood Floyd could not really believe the comfort, the spaciousness - the sheer extravagance of Universe’s living arrangements. Yet most of his fellow passengers took them for granted; those who had never left Earth before assumed that all spaceships must be like this.

He had to look back at the history of aeronautics to put matters in the right perspective. In his own lifetime, he had witnessed - indeed, experienced - the revolution that had occurred in the skies of the planet now dwindling behind him. Between the clumsy old Leonov and the sophisticated Universe lay exactly fifty years. (Emotionally, he couldn’t really believe that - but it was useless arguing about arithmetic.)

And just fifty years had separated the Wright Brothers from the first jet airliners. At the beginning of that half-century, intrepid aviators had hopped from field to field, begoggled and windswept on open chairs; at its end, grandmothers had slumbered peacefully between continents at a thousand kilometres an hour.

So he should not, perhaps, have been astonished at the luxury and elegant decor of his stateroom, or even the fact that he had a steward to keep it tidy. The generously sized window was the most startling feature of his suite, and at first he felt quite uncomfortable thinking of the tons of air pressure it was holding in check against the implacable, and never for a moment relaxing, vacuum of space.

The biggest surprise, even though the advance literature should have prepared him for it, was the presence of gravity. Universe was the first spaceship ever built to cruise under continuous acceleration, except for the few hours of the mid-course ‘turnaround’. When her huge propellant tanks were fully loaded with their five thousand tons of water, she could manage a tenth of a gee - not much, but enough to keep loose objects from drifting around. This was particularly convenient at mealtimes - though it took a few days for the passengers to learn not to stir their soup too vigorously.

Forty-eight hours out from Earth, the population of Universe had already stratified itself into four distinct classes.

The aristocracy consisted of Captain Smith and his officers. Next came the passengers; then crew - non-commissioned and stewards. And then steerage…

That was the description that the five young space scientists had adopted for themselves, first as a joke but later with a certain amount of bitterness. When Hoyd compared their cramped and jury-rigged quarters with his own luxurious cabin, he could see their point of view, and soon became the conduit of their complaints to the Captain.

Yet all things considered, they had little to grumble about; in the rush to get the ship ready, it had been touch and go as to whether there would be any accommodation for them and their equipment. Now they could look forward to deploying instruments around - and on - the comet during the critical days before it rounded the Sun, and departed once more to the outer reaches of the Solar System. The members of the science team would establish their reputations on this voyage, and knew it. Only in moments of exhaustion, or fury with misbehaving instrumentation, did they start complaining about the noisy ventilating system, the claustrophobic cabins, and occasional strange smells of unknown origin.

But never the food, which everyone agreed was excellent. ‘Much better,’ Captain Smith assured them, ‘than Darwin had on the Beagle.’

To which Victor Willis had promptly retorted:

‘How does he know? And by the way, Beagle’s commander cut his throat when he got back to England.’

That was rather typical of Victor, perhaps the planet’s best-known science communicator - to his fans - or ‘pop-scientist’ - to his equally numerous detractors. It would be unfair to call them enemies; admiration for his talents was universal, if occasionally grudging. His soft, mid-Pacific accent and expansive gestures on camera were widely parodied, and he had been credited (or blamed) for the revival of full-length beards. ‘A man who grows that much hair,’ critics were fond of saying, ‘must have a lot to hide.’

He was certainly the most instantly recognizable of the six VIPs - though Floyd, who no longer regarded himself as a celebrity, always referred to them ironically as ‘The Famous Five’. Yva Merlin could often walk unrecognized on Park Avenue, on the rare occasions when she emerged from her apartment. Dimitri Mihailovich, to his considerable annoyance, was a good ten centimetres below average height; this might help to explain his fondness for thousand-piece orchestras - real or synthesized -but did not enhance his public image.

Clifford Greenburg and Margaret M’Bala also fell into the category of ‘famous unknowns’ - though this would certainly change when they got back to Earth. The first man to land on Mercury had one of those pleasant, unremarkable faces that are very hard to remember; moreover the days when he had dominated the news were now thirty years in the past. And like most authors who are not addicted to talk shows and autographing sessions, Ms M’Bala would be unrecognized by the vast majority of her millions of readers.

Her literary fame had been one of the sensations of the forties. A scholarly study of the Greek pantheon was not usually a candidate for the best-seller lists, but Ms M’Bala had placed its eternally inexhaustible myths in a contemporary space-age setting. Names which a century earlier had been familiar only to astronomers and classical scholars were now part of every educated person’s world picture; almost every day there would be news from Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Titan, Japetus - or even more obscure worlds like Carme, Pasiphaë, Hyperion, Phoebe…

Her book would have been no more than modestly successful, however, had she not focused on the complicated family life of Jupiter-Zeus, Father of all the Gods (as well as much else). And by a stroke of luck, an editor of genius had changed her original title, The View from Olympus, to The Passions of the Gods. Envious academics usually referred to it as Olympic Lusts, but invariably wished they had written it.

Not surprisingly, it was Maggie M - as she was quickly christened by her fellow passengers - who first used the phrase Ship of Fools. Victor Willis adopted it eagerly, and soon discovered an intriguing historical resonance. Almost a century ago, Katherine Anne Porter had herself sailed with a group of scientists and writers aboard an ocean liner to watch the launch of Apollo 17, and the end of the first phase of lunar exploration.

‘I’ll think about it,’ Ms M’Bala had remarked ominously, when this was reported to her. ‘Perhaps it’s time for a third version. But I won’t know, of course, until we get back to Earth…’