News From Elsewhere (5 page)

On the twenty-fifth day the possibility became a certainty. The
Santa Maria
was falling toward the green planet. There remained the problem of choice between two courses of action. Captain Mauris could either allow the ship to continue her free fall until she vaporized on hitting the atmosphere—if any—or exploded on ground impact, or else he could apply the auxiliary brake rockets and the landing retard, thus making a bid for survival.

The period of tranquillity was over: he was in a state of chronic indecision.

He was afraid in the very core of his being. He was afraid to make up his mind. He went uncertainly to the mess deck, seeking consolation and enlightenment in the 
liqueur brandy. He did not find it.

Eventually he was drawn back to the navigation deck as by a magnet. He climbed into the astrodome and regarded the green planet. It was expanding rapidly, almost visibly. With trembling fingers, Captain Mauris adjusted the manual telescope. He gazed through it at a startlingly close panorama of oceans, continents, and islands. He stared hypnotically for a while and felt the beads of cold moisture grow on his forehead.

At last he came down and went to drink more brandy. It solved nothing, because he was still sober enough to face the choice.

Suddenly he could stand it no more. He lurched unsteadily to the navigation deck, reached the control panel, and threw in three switches almost simultaneously. Reflex radar, altimeter, and positioning gyro were immediately synchronized with the auto-pilot. Whether the reversed instruments functioned correctly or not, Mauris neither knew nor cared. He had rid himself of an intolerable weight. He had made a decision.

Immediately, he who had accepted so much responsibility in his career felt an overwhelming need to escape the responsibility of attempting to survive. He fled to the library and, forcing himself to try and forget the decision, placed a random microfilm in the book projector. It was 
The Goldert Ass
of Apuleius.

He looked at the words, and they had no meaning for him. He was too busy awaiting the shock of the first automatic blast of the auxiliary brake rockets.

After an eternity of hours that seemed years, he felt a sharp surge as the motors produced a field of double gravity, piling on the ship’s own synthetic 1/3 G force.

Mauris fell sideways from his chair and lay on the bulkhead, groaning heavily. The rocket burst lasted five seconds, and he felt crushed by its relentless force. Abruptly, it ended. He slithered painfully to the deck.

Then the old habits reasserted themselves. The Master’s place in a powerful maneuver was on the navigation deck. Captain Mauris picked
hims
elf up and made his way forward.

The second automatic power maneuver hit him before he could reach a contour berth. A field of 5 G slammed him against the bulkhead of the navigation deck. He had 
fallen sideways about ten feet. He lay there spreadeagled, unconscious.

The auto-pilot had positioned the ship accurately. The ship’s attitude, controlled by the gyromanipulator, had brought the green planet dead astern, and with rockets blazing, the
Santa Maria
dropped backward to that rapidly expanding surface. On the screens of the external visulators, the silvery shapes of mountains and hills, of rivers and forests leaped into a growing reality. The fleecy shapes of clouds passed like fantastic birds.

But Captain Mauris lay inert against the bulkhead, the accelerating G force crushing his unconscious body to the hard metal.

He awoke with every muscle aching from the tremendous stress of ordinary physical deceleration, but he awoke with a sensation of profound peace.

He picked himself up and climbed into the astrodome. The stars were no longer sharp, unwinking points against a backcloth of jet. They twinkled, dancing to the whim of atmosphere.

Looking down, Captain Mauris felt his heart thump violently. The
Santa Maria
had made a perfect automatic landing on what appeared, in the semidarkness, to be smooth grassland. A few yards away, he thought he saw dimly the ripple of running water.

The United Space Corporation had laid down a cautious and definitive procedure for the exploration of strange planets. But, as Mauris told himself lightly, the United Space Corporation would not begin to exist even in its own galaxy for another sixteen hundred thousand years.

Casting discretion aside, Captain Mauris made his way aft toward the airlock. He seized a combination pressure suit and climbed into it impatiently. Then he entered the pressure chamber. He closed the door behind him and threw the switch. The needle remained steady, indicating that the external pressure—the planetary atmosphere —was at par.

Captain Mauris was surprised. He began to feel that it was part of some obliging dream. He pressed a luminous button on the bulkhead, and a heavy door of the entry-port swung open. The Captain took a nylon ladder from 
its locker and secured one end to the stanchions of the entry-port. He tossed out the bundle of ladder and watched it drop through the misty atmosphere. Then slowly he climbed down.

Captain Mauris stood still and gazed at the terrain through a deceptive half-light. What he could see of it was so reassuringly normal as to be quite improbable. It might have been country in the temperate zones of Earth.

He tried to think of the fantastic chances against landing on such a planet after the
Santa Maria
had crippled both her stellar and planetary drives in the extragalactic jump. Logically there was no chance. What had happened was merely impossible.

“Luck,” thought Captain Mauris. “Or is it something else?”

With sudden inexplicable determination, he tried to tempt Fate for the last time. He released the safety valve on his pressure suit. Nothing happened. With an audible laugh of triumph and amazement, he began to take off the headpiece. Presently he stepped out of the pressure suit, his oxygen cylinder unneeded.

Captain Mauris stood on an unknown planet and took in the unmistakable scents of summer. He felt drunk— drunk on the sheer fantasy of reality. As he gazed about him he saw, over a patch of woodland, gray streaks of light pushing back the darkness, dulling the stars. And fifty yards from the spaceship, he discerned the edge of a stream whose quiet murmur seemed suddenly to communicate with his awakened sense of hearing.

Giving a wild cry of pleasure, Mauris forgot all about space-frame physicists and the extragalactic jump. He ran swiftly to the banks of the stream, knelt down, and splashed the warm, living water over his face. Then, impatiently, he tore off his stale clothes and waded into the dark, refreshing water.

And as he bathed, the intensity of light grew over the distant trees.

At last he came out of the stream, refreshed and exhilarated. He felt a warm breeze against his body, felt the blood coursing more rapidly through his veins.

He did not bother to dress, but walked wonderingly toward the increasing light.

The vault of darkness was being pushed slowly back, 
while the stars seemed to slip behind an invisible curtain.

Captain Mauris watched the landscape come quietly to life. Then he looked up at the sky.

“And darkness,” said Captain Mauris as he gazed at the fading stars, “darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

He stood there, feeling the years roll back, feeling the vitality of youth drive back some secret winter. At length he turned around to look at the spaceship, to assure himself of the reality of the journey. There was nothing to be seen. The thin vein of water flowed quietly through vacant land.

Surprised at his own calmness, his lack of distress, he turned again toward the patch of trees. And from the direction that he would learn to call east, there rose the crimson edge of a new sun.

He remembered then and suddenly understood the message of a woman’s voice in a dream of absolute stillness.

Lukas threw a rapid glance at the bank of instruments on the navigation panel. Velocity had stabilized at thirty thousand kilometers, with a constant altitude of three hundred and fifty. Down below—and it was certainly a relief to use the concept “below” once again after several thousand hours of star flight—the red-gold continental masses of Fomalhaut Three swung slowly along their apparent rotation.

Soon the starship
Henri Poincari
would make its first free-fall transit over the night side of the planet. For all 
practical purposes, this was the end of the outward journey. Allowing his gaze to return to the procession of continents and emerald-green oceans on the surface of Fomalhaut Three, Captain Lukas felt a faint surge of anticipatory pleasure.

“Orbit maneuver concluded,” he said softly over his shoulder. “O.D. shut down.”

Duluth, the engineer, who was standing expectantly by the control pedestal, stooped down and threw back his master switch. He watched the red power needle slowly fall to zero. Then he stood up and yawned.

“Orbit drive shut down,” he remarked drowsily. “And now Fm going to get me some sleep. . . . Do you know how long we’ve been awake, Skipper?”

Lukas turned from the observation screen and grinned. “What’s the matter, Joe? Feeling old?”

Duluth stretched and yawned even more profoundly. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been on duty more than two days. A man gets just a little fatigued after staying awake maybe sixty hours.”

Lukas watched him with red-rimmed eyes. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I noticed.”

At that moment they heard steps on the companion ladder. A couple of seconds later, Alsdorf, the geophysicist, poked his head through the hatch. He looked fresh, almost bursting with energy, but then he hadn’t needed to stay awake for the maneuvers.

“You two look like death,” said Alsdorf pleasantly. “Come on down to the mess deck. Tony is fixing cocoa and sandwiches.”

“The hell with sandwiches,” said Duluth. “I want to sleep.”

Alsdorf beamed. “Cocoa first, then a sedative. You will need it with all those action tablets you have taken.”

Lukas said, “Well, we got here, Kurt. Now you can earn your living. From here on, I’m a spectator.”

The intercom crackled. “What’s the matter?” complained an indignant voice. “There’s a gallon of hot cocoa waiting for you. Want me to recycle it?”

“Recycle yourself,” growled Duluth. “O.K. We’re on our way, Tony.”

With Alsdorf leading, they went down to the mess deck. Tony Chirico, a dapper Italian biochemist who looked as if he ought to have been a barber, greeted Lukas with a toothy smile.

“So you got us here, Mike. Somebody ought to make a speech about it. Have a sandwich.”

“What’s in ’em?” asked Duluth suspiciously, as he grabbed a pink flask of cocoa and anchored himself to a bench.

“Bombay duck,” said Chirico, “same as usual.”

Duluth gave a mirthless laugh. “Hydroponics garbage a la carte.”

Captain Lukas sat down and sipped his cocoa. He gazed at the observation panel and saw the dark side of Fomalhaut Three tinning slowly into view.

“We’re a fine bunch of heroes,” he remarked. “With the imaginative capacity of bedbugs. Here we knock a hole through space and find a system that nobody has ever seen before, and what do we do? We sit on our backsides, drink cocoa, and grumble about the food. For all we know, this planet we’re riding might have a civilization that’d make all Earth cultures look like a cretin nightmare.”

“A virgin planet,” said Alsdorf with an avaricious gleam in his eye. “Trans-Solar Chemicals will set up an independent station here. . . . With one Kurt Alsdorf as director.”

“A virgin planet,” echoed Chirico with a sardonic grin. “I think we shall awaken her—gently.”

“Can it,” mumbled Duluth, slumping over the table. “You got virgins on the brain.”

“You don’t think we’re going to find any intelligent owners down there?” asked Lukas.

Alsdorf lit a cigarette. “Face the facts, Mike. In the last two decades, seventeen new planets have been listed. The highest animal life discovered so far was the three-legged pseudo-wolf on Procyon Five. You could train it to fetch sticks, and that was all.”

Lukas took a good swig of his cocoa. “Well, it’s got to happen someday.”

Chirico laughed. “Sure, everything has to happen someday. Give a monkey with a typewriter enough time and he’ll rewrite Shakespeare with genuine improvements.”

Lukas shrugged. “A few hundred years ago men thought that Earth was unique. Now they only think the human race is unique. ... I hope I’m still around when 
bright boys like you get the big surprise.”

Alsdorf prodded Duluth and was rewarded with a volley of snores and grunts, “Joe is no longer with us,” he remarked. “We ought to put him to bed. You, too, Mike. ... We need you wide awake when we go down to the surface to hunt out the supermen.” He gave a hearty laugh.

“Enjoy yourself,” grinned Lukas. “Now it’s your turn to lose some sleep. . . . How long will it take to select a touch-down point?”

The geophysicist stared absently through the observation panel. “Nine-tenths water,” he murmured almost to himself. “A good continental survey should take about a hundred hours, but we can probably select a useful area in a quarter of that time.”