The Other Side of the Sky Page 9

  ‘Hold on a minute!’ protested Bill. ‘I am a mathematician, and a darn good one, even when I’m sober. And I’ve read all about this kind of thing in the science fiction magazines. I presume you’re talking about some kind of short cut through a higher dimension of space. That’s old stuff – pre-Einstein.’

  A sensation of distinct surprise seeped into Bill’s mind.

  ‘We had no idea you were so advanced scientifically,’ said the Thaarns. ‘But we haven’t time to talk about the theory. All that matters is this – if you were to step into that opening in front of you, you’d find yourself instantly on another planet. It’s a short cut, as you said – in this case through the thirty-seventh dimension.’

  ‘And it leads to your world?’

  ‘Oh no – you couldn’t live here. But there are plenty of planets like Earth in the universe, and we’ve found one that will suit you. We’ll establish bridgeheads like this all over Earth, so your people will only have to walk through them to be saved. Of course, they’ll have to start building up civilisation again when they reach their new homes, but it’s their only hope. You have to pass on this message, and tell them what to do.’

  ‘I can just see them listening to me,’ said Bill. ‘Why don’t you go and talk to the president?’

  ‘Because yours was the only mind we were able to contact. Others seemed closed to us: we don’t understand why.’

  ‘I could tell you,’ said Bill, looking at the nearly empty bottle in front of him. He was certainly getting his money’s worth. What a remarkable thing the human mind was! Of course, there was nothing at all original in this dialogue: it was easy to see where the ideas came from. Only last week he’d been reading a story about the end of the world, and all this wishful thinking about bridges and tunnels through space was pretty obvious compensation for anyone who’d spent five years wrestling with recalcitrant rockets.

  ‘If the sun does blow up,’ Bill asked abruptly – trying to catch his hallucination unawares – ‘what would happen?’

  ‘Why, your planet would be melted instantly. All the planets, in fact, right out to Jupiter.’

  Bill had to admit that this was quite a grandiose conception. He let his mind play with the thought, and the more he considered it, the more he liked it.

  ‘My dear hallucination,’ he remarked pityingly, ‘if I believed you, d’you know what I’d say?’

  ‘But you must believe us!’ came the despairing cry across the light-years.

  Bill ignored it. He was warming to his theme.

  ‘I’d tell you this. It would be the best thing that could possibly happen. Yes, it would save a whole lot of misery. No one would have to worry about the Russians and the atom bomb and the high cost of living. Oh, it would be wonderful! It’s just what everybody really wants. Nice of you to come along and tell us, but just you go back home and pull your old bridges after you.’

  There was consternation on Thaar. The Supreme Scientist’s brain, floating like a great mass of coral in its tank of nutrient solution, turned slightly yellow about the edges – something it had not done since the Xantil invasion, five thousand years ago. At least fifteen psychologists had nervous breakdowns and were never the same again. The main computer in the College of Cosmophysics started dividing every number in its memory circuits by zero, and promptly blew all its fuses.

  And on Earth, Bill Cross was really hitting his stride.

  ‘Look at me,’ he said, pointing a wavering finger at his chest. ‘I’ve spent years trying to make rockets do something useful, and they tell me I’m only allowed to build guided missiles, so that we can all blow each other up. The sun will make a neater job of it, and if you did give us another planet we’d only start the whole damn thing all over again.’

  He paused sadly, marshalling his morbid thoughts.

  ‘And now Brenda heads out of town without even leaving a note. So you’ll pardon my lack of enthusiasm for your Boy Scout act.’

  He couldn’t have said ‘enthusiasm’ aloud, Bill realised. But he could still think it, which was an interesting scientific discovery. As he got drunker and drunker, would his cogitation – whoops, that nearly threw him! – finally drop down to words of one syllable?

  In a final despairing exertion, the Thaarns sent their thoughts along the tunnel between the stars.

  ‘You can’t really mean it, Bill! Are all human beings like you?’

  Now that was an interesting philosophical question! Bill considered it carefully – or as carefully as he could in view of the warm, rosy glow that was now beginning to envelop him. After all, things might be worse. He could get another job, if only for the pleasure of telling General Porter what he could do with his three stars. And as for Brenda – well, women were like streetcars; there’d always be another along in a minute.

  Best of all, there was a second bottle of whisky in the Top Secret file. Oh, frabjous day! He rose unsteadily to his feet and wavered across the room.

  For the last time, Thaar spoke to Earth.

  ‘Bill!’ it repeated desperately. ‘Surely all human beings can’t be like you!’

  Bill turned and looked into the swirling tunnel. Strange – it seemed to be lighted with flecks of starlight, and was really rather pretty. He felt proud of himself: not many people could imagine that.

  ‘Like me?’ he said. ‘No, they’re not.’ He smiled smugly across the light-years, as the rising tide of euphoria lifted him out of his despondency. ‘Come to think of it,’ he added, ‘there are a lot of people much worse off than me. Yes, I guess I must be one of the lucky ones, after all.’

  He blinked in mild surprise, for the tunnel had suddenly collapsed upon itself and the whitewashed wall was there again, exactly as it had always been. Thaar knew when it was beaten.

  ‘So much for that hallucination,’ thought Bill. ‘I was getting tired of it, anyway. Let’s see what the next one’s like.’

  As it happened, there wasn’t a next one, for five seconds later he passed out cold, just as he was getting the combination of the file cabinet.

  The next two days were rather vague and bloodshot, and he forgot all about the interview.

  On the third day something was nagging at the back of his mind: he might have remembered if Brenda hadn’t turned up again and kept him busy being forgiving.

  And there wasn’t a fourth day, of course.

  Venture to the Moon

  First published in the London Evening Standard, 1956

  Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

  ‘Venture to the Moon’ was originally written as a series of six independent but linked stories for the London Evening Standard, in 1956. When the commission was first proposed I turned it down. It appeared impossible to write stories in only 1,500 words which would be understandable to a mass readership despite being set in a totally alien environment, but on second thought this seemed such an interesting challenge that I decided to tackle it. The resulting series was successful enough to demand a second …

  The Starting Line

  The story of the first lunar expedition has been written so many times that some people will doubt if there is anything fresh to be said about it. Yet all the official reports and eyewitness accounts, the on-the-spot recordings and broadcasts never, in my opinion, gave the full picture. They said a great deal about the discoveries that were made – but very little about the men who made them.

  As captain of the Endeavour and thus commander of the British party, I was able to observe a good many things you will not find in the history books, and some – though not all – of them can now be told. One day, I hope, my opposite numbers on the Goddard and the Ziolkovski will give their points of view. But as Commander Vandenburg is still on Mars and Commander Krasnin is somewhere inside the orbit of Venus, it looks as if we will have to wait a few more years for their memoirs.

  Confession, it is said, is good for the soul. I shall certainly feel much happier when I have told the true story behind the timing of the first lunar flight
, about which there has always been a good deal of mystery.

  As everyone knows, the American, Russian and British ships were assembled in the orbit of Space Station Three, five hundred miles above the Earth, from components flown up by relays of freight rockets. Though all the parts had been prefabricated, the assembly and testing of the ships took over two years, by which time a great many people – who did not realise the complexity of the task – were beginning to get slightly impatient. They had seen dozens of photos and telecasts of the three ships floating there in space beside Station Three, apparently quite complete and ready to pull away from Earth at a moment’s notice. What the picture didn’t show was the careful and tedious work still in progress as thousands of pipes, wires, motors, and instruments were fitted and subjected to every conceivable test.

  There was no definite target date for departure; since the moon is always at approximately the same distance, you can leave for it at almost any time you like – once you are ready. It makes practically no difference, from the point of view of fuel consumption, if you blast off at full moon or new moon or at any time in between. We were very careful to make no predictions about blast-off, though everyone was always trying to get us to fix the time. So many things can go wrong in a spaceship, and we were not going to say goodbye to Earth until we were ready down to the last detail.

  I shall always remember the last commanders’ conference, aboard the space station, when we all announced that we were ready. Since it was a co-operative venture, each party specialising in some particular task, it had been agreed that we should all make our landings within the same twenty-four-hour period, on the preselected site in the Mare Imbrium. The details of the journey, however, had been left to the individual commanders, presumably in the hope that we would not copy each other’s mistakes.

  ‘I’ll be ready,’ said Commander Vandenburg, ‘to make my first dummy take-off at 0900 tomorrow. What about you, gentlemen? Shall we ask Earth Control to stand by for all three of us?’

  ‘That’s OK by me,’ said Krasnin, who could never be convinced that his American slang was twenty years out of date.

  I nodded my agreement. It was true that one bank of fuel gauges was still misbehaving, but that didn’t really matter; they would be fixed by the time the tanks were filled.

  The dummy run consisted of an exact replica of a real blast-off, with everyone carrying out the job he would do when the time came for the genuine thing. We had practised, of course, in mock-ups down on Earth, but this was a perfect imitation of what would happen to us when we finally took off for the moon. All that was missing was the roar of the motors that would tell us that the voyage had begun.

  We did six complete imitations of blast-off, took the ships to pieces to eliminate anything that hadn’t behaved perfectly, then did six more. The Endeavour, the Goddard, and the Ziolkovski were all in the same state of serviceability. There now only remained the job of fuelling up, and we would be ready to leave.

  The suspense of those last few hours is not something I would care to go through again. The eyes of the world were upon us; departure time had now been set, with an uncertainty of only a few hours. All the final tests had been made, and we were convinced that our ships were as ready as humanly possible.

  It was then that I had an urgent and secret personal radio call from a very high official indeed, and a suggestion was made which had so much authority behind it that there was little point in pretending that it wasn’t an order. The first flight to the moon, I was reminded, was a co-operative venture – but think of the prestige if we got there first. It need only be by a couple of hours….

  I was shocked at the suggestion, and said so. By this time Vandenburg and Krasnin were good friends of mine, and we were all in this together. I made every excuse I could and said that since our flight paths had already been computed there wasn’t anything that could be done about it. Each ship was making the journey by the most economical route, to conserve fuel. If we started together, we should arrive together – within seconds.

  Unfortunately, someone had thought of the answer to that. Our three ships, fuelled up and with their crews standing by, would be circling earth in a state of complete readiness for several hours before they actually pulled away from their satellite orbits and headed out to the moon. At our five-hundred-mile altitude, we took ninety-five minutes to make one circuit of the Earth, and only once every revolution would the moment be ripe to begin the voyage. If we could jump the gun by one revolution, the others would have to wait that ninety-five minutes before they could follow. And so they would land on the moon ninety-five minutes behind us.

  I won’t go into the arguments, and I’m still a little ashamed that I yielded and agreed to deceive my two colleagues. We were in the shadow of Earth, in momentary eclipse, when the carefully calculated moment came. Vandenburg and Krasnin, honest fellows, thought I was going to make one more round trip with them before we all set off together. I have seldom felt a bigger heel in my life than when I pressed the firing key and felt the sudden thrust of the motors as they swept me away from my mother world.

  For the next ten minutes we had no time for anything but our instruments, as we checked to see that the Endeavour was forging ahead along her precomputed orbit. Almost at the moment that we finally escaped from Earth and could cut the motors, we burst out of shadow into the full blaze of the sun. There would be no more night until we reached the moon, after five days of effortless and silent coasting through space.

  Already Space Station Three and the two other ships must be a thousand miles behind. In eighty-five more minutes Vandenburg and Krasnin would be back at the correct starting point and could take off after me, as we had all planned. But they could never overcome my lead, and I hoped they wouldn’t be too mad at me when we met again on the moon.

  I switched on the rear camera and looked back at the distant gleam of the space station, just emerging from the shadow of Earth. It was some moments before I realised that the Goddard and the Ziolkovski weren’t still floating beside it where I’d left them….

  No; they were just half a mile away, neatly matching my velocity. I stared at them in utter disbelief for a second, before I realised that every one of us had had the same idea. ‘Why, you pair of double-crossers!’ I gasped. Then I began to laugh so much that it was several minutes before I dared call up a very worried Earth Control and tell them that everything had gone according to plan – though in no case was it the plan that had been originally announced….

  We were all very sheepish when we radioed each other to exchange mutual congratulations. Yet at the same time, I think everyone was secretly pleased that it had turned out this way. For the rest of the trip, we were never more than a few miles apart, and the actual landing manoeuvres were so well synchronised that our three braking jets hit the moon simultaneously.

  Well, almost simultaneously. I might make something of the fact that the recorder tape shows I touched down two-fifths of a second ahead of Krasnin. But I’d better not, for Vandenburg was precisely the same moment ahead of me.

  On a quarter-of-a-million-mile trip, I think you could call that a photo finish….

  Robin Hood, F.R.S.

  We had landed early in the dawn of the long lunar day, and the slanting shadows lay all around us, extending for miles across the plain. They would slowly shorten as the sun rose higher in the sky, until at noon they would almost vanish – but noon was still five days away, as we measured time on Earth, and nightfall was seven days later still. We had almost two weeks of daylight ahead of us before the sun set and the bluely gleaming Earth became the mistress of the sky.

  There was little time for exploration during those first hectic days. We had to unload the ships, grow accustomed to the alien conditions surrounding us, learn to handle our electrically powered tractors and scooters, and erect the igloos that would serve as homes, offices, and labs until the time came to leave. At a pinch, we could live in the spaceships, but it would be excessively uncomfor
table and cramped. The igloos were not exactly commodious, but they were luxury after five days in space. Made of tough, flexible plastic, they were blown up like balloons, and their interiors were then partitioned into separate rooms. Air locks allowed access to the outer world, and a good deal of plumbing linked to the ships’ air-purification plants kept the atmosphere breathable. Needless to say, the American igloo was the biggest one, and had come complete with everything, including the kitchen sink – not to mention a washing machine, which we and the Russians were always borrowing.

  It was late in the ‘afternoon’ – about ten days after we had landed – before we were properly organised and could think about serious scientific work. The first parties made nervous little forays out into the wilderness around the base, familiarising themselves with the territory. Of course, we already possessed minutely detailed maps and photographs of the region in which we had landed, but it was surprising how misleading they could sometimes be. What had been marked as a small hill on a chart often looked like a mountain to a man toiling along in a space suit, and apparently smooth plains were often covered knee-deep with dust, which made progress extremely slow and tedious.

  These were minor difficulties, however, and the low gravity – which gave all objects only a sixth of their terrestrial weight – compensated for much. As the scientists began to accumulate their results and specimens, the radio and TV circuits with Earth became busier and busier, until they were in continuous operation. We were taking no chances; even if we didn’t get home, the knowledge we were gathering would do so.

  The first of the automatic supply rockets landed two days before sunset, precisely according to plan. We saw its braking jets flame briefly against the stars, then blast again a few seconds before touchdown. The actual landing was hidden from us, since for safety reasons the dropping ground was three miles from the base. And on the moon, three miles is well over the curve of the horizon.