Islands in the Sky Page 15

  We could not play around in that peculiar pool as long as I would have liked, for presently the loud-speakers began to call softly and I knew that my time was running out. All the passengers were asked to check the packing of their luggage and to assemble in the main hall of the station. The colonists, I knew, were planning some kind of farewell, and though it didn’t really concern me, I felt sufficiently interested to go along. After talking to the Moores I’d begun to like them and to understand their point of view a good deal better.

  It was a subdued little gathering that we joined a few minutes later. These weren’t tough, confident pioneers any more. They knew that soon they’d be separated and in a strange world, among millions of other human beings with totally different modes of life. All their talk about “going home” seemed to have evaporated; it was Mars, not earth, they were homesick for now.

  As I listened to their farewells and little speeches, I suddenly felt very sorry for them. And I felt sorry for myself, because in a few hours I too would be saying good-by to space.

  12 THE LONG FALL HOME

  I had come up from earth by myself, but I was going home in plenty of company. There were nearly fifty passengers crowded into the “One Third Gravity” floor waiting to disembark. That was the complement for the first rocket: the rest of the colonists would be going down on later flights.

  Before we left the station, we were all handed a bundle of leaflets full of instructions, warnings and advice about conditions on earth. I felt that it was hardly necessary for me to read through all this, but was quite glad to have another souvenir of my visit. It was certainly a good idea giving these leaflets out at this stage in the homeward journey, because it kept most of the passengers so busy reading that they didn’t have time to worry about anything else until we’d landed.

  The air lock was only large enough to hold about a dozen people at a time, so it took quite a while to shepherd us all through. As each batch left the station, the lock had to be set revolving to counteract its normal spin, then it had to be coupled to the waiting spaceship, uncoupled again when the occupants had gone through, and the whole sequence restarted. I wondered what would happen if something jammed while the spinning station was connected to the stationary ship. Probably the ship would come off worse—that is, next to the unfortunate people in the air lock! However, I discovered later there was an additional movable coupling to take care of just such an emergency.

  The earth ferry was the biggest spaceship I had ever been inside. There was one large cabin for the passengers, with rows of seats in which we were supposed to remain strapped during the trip. Since I was lucky enough to be one of the first to go aboard, I was able to get a seat near a window. Most of the passengers had nothing to look at but each other and the handful of leaflets they’d been given to read.

  We waited for nearly an hour before everyone was aboard and the luggage had been stowed away. Then the loud-speakers told us to stand by for take-off in five minutes. The ship had now been completely uncoupled from the station and had drifted several hundred feet away from it.

  I had always thought that the return to earth would be rather an anticlimax after the excitement of a take-off. There was a different sort of feeling, it was true, but it was still quite an experience. Until now we had been, if not beyond the power of gravity, at least traveling so swiftly in our orbit that earth could never pull us down. But now we were going to throw away the speed that gave us safety. We would descend until we had re-entered the atmosphere and were forced to spiral back to the surface. If we came in too steeply, our ship might blaze across the sky like a meteor and come to the same fiery end.

  I looked at the tense faces around me. Perhaps the Martian colonists were thinking the same thoughts. Perhaps they were wondering what they were going to meet and do down on the planet which so few of them had ever before seen. I hoped that none of them would be disappointed.

  Three sharp notes from the loud-speaker gave us the last warning. Five seconds later the motors opened up gently, quickly increasing power to full thrust. I saw the Residential Station fall swiftly astern, its great, spinning drum dwindling against the stars. Then, with a lump in my throat, I watched the untidy maze of girders and pressure chambers that housed so many of my friends go swimming by. Useless though the gesture was, I couldn’t help giving them a wave. After all, they knew I was aboard this ship and might catch a glimpse of me through the window.

  Now the two components of the Inner Station were receding rapidly behind us and soon had passed out of sight under the great wing of the ferry. It was hard to realize that in reality we were losing speed while the station continued on its unvarying way. And as we lost speed, so we would start falling down to earth on a long curve that would take us to the other side of the planet before we entered the atmosphere.

  After a surprisingly short period, the motors cut out again. We had shed all the speed that was necessary, and gravity would do the rest. Most of the passengers had settled down to read, but I decided to have my last look at the stars, undimmed by atmosphere. This was also my last chance of experiencing weightlessness, but it was wasted because I couldn’t leave my seat. I did try—and got shooed back by the steward.

  The ship was now pointing against the direction of its orbital motion and had to be swung round so that it entered the atmosphere nose first. There was plenty of time to carry out this maneuver, and the pilot did it in a leisurely fashion with the low-powered steering jets at the wing-tips. From where I was sitting I could see the short columns of mist stabbing from the nozzles, and very slowly the stars swung around us. It was a full ten minutes before we came to rest again, with the nose of the ship now pointing due east.

  We were still almost five hundred miles above the Equator, moving at nearly eighteen thousand miles an hour. But we were now slowly dropping earthward. In thirty minutes we would make our first contact with the atmosphere.

  John was sitting next to me, and so I had a chance of airing my knowledge of geography.

  “That’s the Pacific Ocean down there,” I said. And something prompted me to add, not very tactfully, “You could drop Mars in it without going near either of the coast lines.”

  However, John was too fascinated by the great expanse of water to take any offense. It must have been an overwhelming sight for anyone who had lived on sealess Mars. There are not even any permanent lakes on that planet, only a few shallow pools that form around the melting icecaps in the summer. And now John was looking down upon water that stretched as far as he could see in every direction, with a few specks of land dotted upon it here and there.

  “Look,” I said, “there, straight ahead! You can see the coast line of South America. We can’t be more than two hundred miles up now.”

  Still in utter silence, the ship dropped earthward and the ocean rolled back beneath us. No one was reading now if he had a chance of seeing from one of the windows. I felt very sorry for the passengers in the middle of the cabin who weren’t able to watch the approaching landscape beneath.

  The coast of South America flashed by in seconds, and ahead lay the great jungles of the Amazon. Here was life on a scale that Mars could not match, not even, perhaps, in the days of its youth. Thousands of square miles of crowded forests, countless streams and rivers were unfolding beneath us, so swiftly that as soon as one feature had been grasped, it was already out of sight.

  Now the great river was widening as we shot above its course. We were approaching the Atlantic, which should have been visible by this time, but which seemed to be hidden by mists. As we passed above the mouth of the Amazon, I saw that a great storm was raging below. From time to time brilliant flashes of lightning played across the clouds. It was uncanny to see all this happening in utter silence as we raced high overhead.

  “A tropical storm,” I said to John. “Do you ever have anything like that on Mars?”

  “Not with rain, of course,” he said. “But sometimes we get pretty bad sandstorms over the deserts. And I�
�ve seen lightning once or perhaps twice.”

  “What, without rain clouds?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, the sand gets electrified. Not very often, but it does happen.”

  The storm was now far behind us, and the Atlantic lay smooth in the evening sun. We would not see it much longer, however, for darkness lay ahead. We were nearing the night side of the planet, and on the horizon I could see a band of shadow swiftly approaching as we hurtled into twilight. There was something terrifying about plunging headlong into that curtain of darkness. In mid-Atlantic we lost the sun, and at almost the same moment we heard the first whisper of air along the hull.

  It was an eerie sound, and it made the hair rise at the back of my neck. After the silence of space any noise seemed wrong. But it grew steadily as the minutes passed, from a faint, distant wail to a high-pitched scream. We were still more than fifty miles up, but at the speed we were traveling even the incredibly thin atmosphere of these heights was protesting as we tore through it.

  More than that, it was tearing at the ship, slowing it down. There was a faint but steadily increasing tug from our straps; the deceleration was trying to force us out of our seats. It was like sitting in a car when the brakes are being slowly applied. But in this case, the braking was going to last for two hours, and we would go once more round the world before we slowed to a halt.

  We were no longer in a spaceship but an airplane. In almost complete darkness—there was no moon—we passed above Africa and the Indian Ocean. The fact that we were speeding through the night, traveling above the invisible earth at many thousands of miles an hour, made it all the more impressive. The thin shriek of the upper atmosphere had become a steady background to our flight; it grew neither louder nor fainter as the minutes passed.

  I was looking out into the darkness when I saw a faint red glow beneath me. At first, because there was no sense of perspective or distance, it seemed at an immense depth below the ship, and I could not imagine what it might be. A great forest fire, perhaps—but we were now, surely, over the ocean again. Then I realized, with a shock that nearly jolted me out of my seat, that this ominous red glow came from our wing. The heat of our passage through the atmosphere was turning it cherry-red.

  I stared at that disturbing sight for several seconds before I decided that everything was really quite in order. All our tremendous energy of motion was being converted into heat, though I had never realized just how much heat would be produced. For the glow was increasing even as I watched. When I flattened my face against the window, I could see part of the leading edge, and it was a bright yellow in places. I wondered if the other passengers had noticed it, or perhaps the little leaflets, which I hadn’t bothered to read, had already told them not to worry.

  I was glad when we emerged into daylight once more, greeting the dawn above the Pacific. The glow from the wings was no longer visible, and so ceased to worry me. Besides, the sheer splendor of the sunrise, which we were approaching at nearly ten thousand miles an hour, took away all other sensations. From the Inner Station, I had watched many dawns and sunsets pass across the earth. But up there I had been detached, not part of the scene itself. Now I was once more inside the atmosphere and these wonderful colors were all around me.

  We had now made one complete circuit of the earth and had shed more than half our speed. It was much longer, this time, before the Brazilian jungles came into view, and they passed more slowly now. Above the mouth of the Amazon the storm was still raging, only a little way beneath us, as we started out on our last crossing of the South Atlantic.

  Then night came once more, and there again was the wing glowing redly in the darkness around the ship. It seemed even hotter now, but perhaps I had grown used to it, for the sight no longer worried me. We were nearly home, on the last lap of the journey. By now we must have lost so much speed that we were probably traveling no faster than many normal aircraft.

  A cluster of lights along the coast of East Africa told us that we were heading out over the Indian Ocean again. I wished I could be up in the control cabin, watching the preparations for the final approach to the spaceport. By now the pilot would have picked up the guiding radio beacons and would be coming down the beam, still at a great speed but according to a carefully prearranged program. When we reached New Guinea, our velocity would be almost completely spent. Our ship would be nothing more than a great glider, flying through the night sky on the last dregs of its momentum.

  The loud-speaker broke into my thoughts.

  “Pilot to passengers. We shall be landing in twenty minutes.”

  Even without this warning, I could tell that the flight was nearing its end. The scream of the wind outside our hull had dropped in pitch, and there had been a perceptible change of direction as the ship slanted downward. And, most striking sign of all, the red glow outside the window was rapidly fading. Presently there were only a few dull patches left, near the leading edge of the wing. A few minutes later, even these had gone.

  It was still night as we passed over Sumatra and Borneo. From time to time the lights of ships and cities winked into view and went astern—very slowly now, it seemed, after the headlong rush of our first circuit. At frequent intervals the loud-speaker called out our speed and position. We were traveling at less than a thousand miles an hour when we passed over the deeper darkness that was the New Guinea coast line.

  “There it is!” I whispered to John. The ship had banked slightly, and beneath the wing was a great constellation of lights. A signal flare rose up in a slow, graceful arc and exploded into crimson fire. In the momentary glare, I caught a glimpse of the white mountain peaks surrounding the spaceport, and I wondered just how much margin of height we had. It would be very ironic to meet with disaster in the last few miles after traveling all this distance.

  I never knew the actual moment when we touched down, the landing was so perfect. At one instant we were still airborne, at the next the lights of the runway were rolling past as the ship slowly came to rest. I sat quite still in my seat, trying to realize that I was back on earth again. Then I looked at John. Judging from his expression, he could hardly believe it either.

  The steward came around to help people release their seat straps and give last-minute advice. As I looked at the slightly harassed visitors, I could not help a mild feeling of superiority. I knew my way about on earth, but all this must be very strange to them. They must be realizing, also, that they were now in the full grip of earth’s gravity, and there was nothing they could do about it until they were out in space again.

  As we had been the first to enter the ship, we were the last to leave it. I helped John with some of his personal luggage, as he was obviously not very happy and wanted at least one hand free to grab any convenient support.

  “Cheer up!” I said. “You’ll soon be jumping around just as much as you did on Mars!”

  “I hope you’re right,” he answered gloomily. “At the moment I feel like a cripple who’s lost his crutch.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Moore, I noticed, had expressions of grim determination on their faces as they walked cautiously to the air lock. But if they wished they were back on Mars, they kept their feelings to themselves. So did the girls, who for some reason seemed less worried by gravity than any of us.

  We emerged under the shadow of the great wing, the thin mountain air blowing against our faces. It was quite warm, surprisingly so, in fact, for night at such a high altitude. Then I realized that the wing above us was still hot—probably too hot to touch, even though it was no longer visibly glowing.

  We moved slowly away from the ship toward the waiting transport vehicles. Before I stepped into the bus that would take us across to the Port buildings. I looked up once more at the starlit sky that had been my home for a little while, and which, I was resolved, would be my home again. Up there in the shadow of the earth, speeding the traffic that moved from world to world, were Commander Doyle, Tim Benton, Ronnie Jordan, Norman Powell, and all the other friends I’d made on my
visit to the Inner Station. I remembered Commander Doyle’s promise, and wondered how soon I would remind him of it….

  John Moore was waiting patiently behind me, clutching the door handle of the bus. He saw me looking up into the sky and followed my gaze.

  “You won’t be able to see the station,” I said. “It’s in eclipse.”

  John didn’t answer, and then I saw that he was staring into the east, where the first hint of dawn glowed along the horizon. High against these unfamiliar southern stars was something that I did recognize, a brilliant, ruby beacon, the brightest object in the sky.

  “My home,” said John, in a faint, sad voice.

  I stared into that beckoning light and remembered the pictures John had shown me and the stories he had told. Up there were the great colored deserts, the old sea-beds that man was bringing once more to life, the little Martians who might, or might not, belong to a race that was more ancient than ours.

  And I knew that, after all, I was going to disappoint Commander Doyle. The space stations were too near home to satisfy me now. My imagination had been captured by that little red world glowing bravely against the stars. When I went into space again, the Inner Station would only be the first milestone on my outward road from earth.