m

SCIENCE
HCTIONM

--------------EDITED BY---------------
ISAAC ASIMOV,
MARTIN HARRY GREENBERG
AND CHARLES G.WAUGH
 tKB
S20K3311/JSJIKmL
mm mmn
------------- EDITED BY--------------
ISAAC ASIMOV,
MARTIN HARRY GREENBERG
AND CHARLES G. WAUGH

Who could be a more knowledgeable or

delightful guide for a tour of the solar
system than the renowned Isaac Asimov?
Absolutely no one, of course, and for
this altogether winning new anthology,
Asimov and his colleagues Martin Harry
Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh have
collected a baker's dozen of marvelous
stories about the sun, comets, asteroids,
and all the planets. Here are Arthur C.
Clarke’s Saturn Rising, James Blish's
Bridge, Theodore L. Thom as's The
Weather on the Sun, A sim ov’s own
Waterclap, and much, much more. Each
tale is studded with the fine writing and
brilliant imagination which make for
science fiction at its best.
To complete the volume, Isaac Asimov
introduces each section with fascinating
information that tells what we know today
about the solar system—and what we
knew when the stories were written.
All in all, The Science Fictional Solar
System is top-notch entertainment for
lovers of science and fine fiction.

1079
The Science Fictional
Solar System
T h e S c ie n c e Fictional
S o la r S y ste m

E d ite d by Isaac A s im o v ,
M a r tin H a r r y G ree nb erg ,

and Charles G . W a u g h
 Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint:

“The Weather on the Sun” by Theodore L. Thomas from Orbit 8. edited by Da­
mon Knight. Copyright © 1970 by Damon Knight. Reprinted by permission of the
author.
“Brightside Crossing” by Alan E. Nourse, reprinted by permission of the author
and David McKay Company, Inc., N.Y., from Tiger by the Tail and Other Science
Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse. Copyright © 1951, 1952, 1953, 1956, 1957, 1961
by Alan E. Nourse.
“Prospector’s Special” by Robert Sheckley. First appeared in the December 1959
issue of Galaxy. Copyright © 1959 by Robert Sheckley. Reprinted by permission of
The Sterling Lord Agency, Inc.
“Waterclap” by Isaac Asimov. First appeared in the April 1970 issue of If. Copy­
right © 1970 by UPD Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the au­
thor.
“Hop-Friend” by Terry Carr. First appeared in the November 1962 issue of The
Magazine o f Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright © 1962 by Mercury Press, Inc.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
C o n t in u e d

the SCIENCE FICTIONAL s o l a r SYSTEM. Copyright ©1979 by Isaac Asimov, Martin

Harry Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh. All rights reserved. Printed in the United
States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations em­
bodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Pub­
lishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street. New York. N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously
in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

FIRST EDITION
Designer: Janice Stern

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main entry under title:

The Science fictional solar system.

CONTENTS: Thomas, T. The weather on the sun.—Nourse, A, E. Brightside

crossing—Sheckley. R, Prospector's special, (etc.)
L Science fiction, American. 2. Solar system— Fiction. I. Asimov, Isaac, 1920—
II. Greenberg, Martin, 1918 - III. Waugh, Charles.
PZ1.S416 (PS648.S3) 813 .0876 78-20198
ISBN 0-06-011527-0

79 80 81 82 83 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 1

“ Barnacle Bull” by Poul Anderson. First appeared in the September 1960 issue of
Astounding Science-Fiction. Copyright © 1960 by Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Lit­
erary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022.
“ Bridge” by James Blish. First appeared in the February 6, 1952, issue of As­
tounding Science-Fiction. Copyright 1952 by Conde Nast Publications, Inc. Re­
printed by permission of Judith Blish.
“Saturn Rising” by Arthur C. Clarke. First appeared in the March 1961 issue of
The Magazine o f Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright © 1961 by Mercury Press,
Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith
Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022.
“The Snowbank Orbit” by Fritz Leiber. First appeared in the September 1962 is­
sue of If. Copyright © 1962 by UPD Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permis­
sion of Robert P. Mills, Ltd.
“One Sunday in Neptune” by Alexei Panshin. Copyright © 1969 by Alexei Pan­
shin, from Tomorrow's Worlds, edited by Robert Silverberg. Reprinted by permis­
sion of Alexei Panshin.
“Wait It Out” by Larry Niven appeared in somewhat different form in The Fu­
ture Unbounded Program Book. Copyright © 1968 by Larry Niven. Reprinted by
permission of Robert P. Mills, Ltd.
“Nikita Eisenhower Jones” by Robert F. Young. First appeared in the August
1960 issue of The Magazine o f Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright © 1960 by
Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Comet, the Cairn and the Capsule” by Duncan Lunan. First appeared in the
August 1972 issue of If. Copyright © 1972 by UPD Publishing Corporation. Re­
printed by permission of the author.
 CONTENTS

Introduction by Isaac Asimov

SUN
The Weather on the Sun
by Theodore L. Thomas 5

MERCURY
Brightside Crossing
by Alan E. Nourse 34

VENUS
Prospector’s Special
by Robert Sheckley 62

EARTH
Waterclap
by Isaac Asimov 93

MARS
Hop-Friend
by Terry Carr 134

ASTEROIDS
Barnacle Bull
Poul Anderson (as Winston P. Sanders)

JUPITER
Bridge
by James Blish 177
 SATURN
Saturn Rising
by A rthur C. Clarke 214

URANUS
The Snowbank Orbit
by Fritz Leiber 229

NEPTUNE
One Sunday in Neptune
by Alexei Panshin 249

PLUTO
W ait It Out
by Larry Niven 261
Nikita Eisenhower Jones
by Robert F. Young 270

COMETS
The Comet, the Cairn and the Capsule
by Duncan Lunan 294

Notes About the Authors

314

viii
 INTRODUCTION
BY ISAAC ASIMOV

The classic science fiction tale has more often dealt with
space exploration than with any other theme. In addition, the
more valued science fiction stories have always been those in
which scientific fact is respected and scientific extrapolation
is informed and rational.
It seemed to us, then, that it would be interesting to gather
together thirteen stories, at least one for each of the nine
planets, and for the Sun, the asteroids, and the comets in ad­
dition, and to choose those that were reasonably accurate for
the time in which they were written.
How better and more interestingly to indicate the speed
with which knowledge of our Solar system has advanced in
this last generation of radio astronomy and space probes than
by seeing where these stories—all less than thirty years old—
are still accurate and where they have been outdated by ad­
vancing knowledge.
For that purpose I have added to each of the twelve sec­
tions a discussion of where we were and where we are. My
own hope is that although the essays, like the stories, are in­
teresting in themselves, the combination will prove more in­
teresting than either separately.

IX
The Science Fictional
Solar System
 ■»

Any suggestion that the Sun might be changing is frightening. It

is the constant on which all life depends. Make it slightly vari­
able and life is destroyed. Extend the variation a little more and
Earth is destroyed.
Yet it is only within the last half-century that human beings
learned how the Sun worked and what kept it going. In 1938,
Hans Albrecht Bethe and Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker inde­
pendently suggested the mechanism that might do the trick.
They based their deduction on nuclear research in laboratories
on Earth.
To begin with, the Sun is mostly hydrogen. That had been
known for quite a while from spectroscopic studies. Therefore,
any nuclear reaction designed to produce as much energy as
the Sun has produced for billions of years must involve hydro­
gen. There wasn’t enough of anything else for the job.
If hydrogen were to fuse to the slightly more complex atom of
helium, enough energy would be produced. Given the nuclear re­
actions that were known to involve hydrogen; given the pres­
sure and temperature of the Solar core; then the step-by-step
succession of reacting nuclei could be worked out. With time
the Bethe/von Weizsacker mechanism was honed and made
more precise, but the basic changes were not altered.
Eventually, the hydrogen-fuel of the Sun would run low and
the helium-rich core would contract and heat up. New nuclear
reactions would then begin to take place, and as a result of that

1
2 SUN

the Sun would grow into a red giant. This, however, would not
be for some billions of years yet, so there is no immediate need
to worry.
The Sun, in other words, has been stable and will continue to
be stable (so says the theory), and we are living in the healthy
middle years of its lifetime. To be sure, there is a Sunspot cycle
moving up and down in a slightly irregular period of about 21.4
years (counting alternations in the direction of the magnetic
field), but that would seem a minor ripple on the vast sea of con­
stant Solar energy we receive.
This was the view in 1970 when "The Weather on the Sun”
was first published.
Scientists would naturally like to collect direct evidence con­
cerning what is happening in the Sun’s core, but how? Actually
plunging into the Sun is not within the bounds of possibility right
now— but perhaps something might come out of it. Neutrinos,
for instance.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that virtually do not interact
with matter. They can go right through the Earth— or the Sun—
or trillions of kilometers of solid lead and scarcely be affected.
An occasional neutrino will be absorbed by an atomic nucleus
en route, but countless trillions move on untouched and undis­
turbed.
The nuclear reactions at the Sun’s core (if they are those
predicted by theory) produce both photons and neutrinos. The
photons, which make up light and lightlike radiations, are easy
to detect, but they take a million years to get to the Sun’s sur­
face and have so complicated a history of absorption and re­
emission that by the time we detect them, they tell us nothing
about the core. The neutrinos, on the other hand, streak
straight from core to us in eight minutes (like the photons, neu­
trinos move at the speed of light) and come to us fresh with
news about the core.
The problem is to detect them. This task was undertaken by
Raymond Davis, Jr., who took advantage of the fact that some­
times a neutrino will interact with a variety of chlorine atoms to
 ■»

SUN 3

produce a radioactive atom of the gas argon. The argon can be

collected and detected even if only a few atoms are formed.
Davis used a huge tank containing 378,000 liters (100,000
gallons) of tetrachloroethylene, a common cleaning fluid that
happens to be rich in chlorine atoms. He placed it deep in the
Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota, where there were
1.5 kilometers (almost one mile) of rock between itself and the
surface. All that rock would absorb any particles coming from
space except neutrinos.
It was then only a matter of waiting for argon atoms to form.
If accepted theories of events in the Sun’s core were correct,
then a certain number of neutrinos should be formed each sec­
ond; of these, a certain percentage should reach the Earth; of
these, a certain percentage should pass through the tank of
cleaning fluid; of these, a certain percentage should interact
with chlorine atoms, and a certain number of argon atoms
should be formed.
All these percentages were known and Davis was confident
that he would be able to detect a certain number of neutrino ab­
sorptions per day. From fluctuations in the rate of absorption,
he hoped that conclusions might be drawn concerning events at
the Sun’s core.
Almost at once, however, Davis had cause for astonishment.
Very few neutrinos were detected, far fewer than had been ex­
pected. Only one-sixth as many neutrinos were detected as had
been expected.
The Davis scheme of observation has been checked out and
has been found to have no significant discoverable flaw. All the
calculations that don’t involve the Sun's core seem to be cor­
rect.
Conclusion: What is actually going on at the Sun's core
doesn’t seem to be what for forty years we have been thinking
has been going on at the Sun’s core.
It may be that there is some small point that scientists have
overlooked— some side reaction they failed to take into ac­
count— some change of temperature and pressure that they
4 SUN

haven’t quite calculated correctly. A small correction might ex­

plain the missing neutrinos without raising any disturbing ques­
tions about the Sun’s fate.
On the other hand, it is just possible that the reactions at the
Sun’s core have recently become slower. Can it be that the Sun
may be dying?
If we don’t find some explanation, it may be that we really
don’t understand how the Sun works or, by extension, any of
the stars at all. If that is so, then we don’t really know why the
Sun is stable, or if it really is all that stable, and whether at
some time in the future it might not suddenly begin to show un­
expected changes.
Right now “ The Weather on the Sun’’ seems just a tiny bit
less fantastic than when it first appeared.
 •J

The Weather on the Sun

THEODORE L. THOMAS

,.. the name "Weather Bureau” continued to be used, although

the organization itself was somewhat changed in form. Thus the
Weather Congress consisted o f three arms. First was the political
arm, the Weather Council. Second was the scientific arm, the
Weather Advisers. Third was the operating arm, the Weather Bu­
reau.
—The Columbia Encyclopedia, 32nd Edition,
Columbia University Press

The mass of colors on the great globe shimmered and twisted

in silence. The dials on the instruments along the curved
walls dimmed and brightened each time the needles moved.
The Weather Room presented an indecipherable complex of
color to the untrained eye, but to the eyes of the Advisers
who lounged there it presented an instantaneous picture of
the world’s weather, when they bothered to look at it. The
day shift was near its end, and the mathemeteorologists were
waiting to go home. Now and then one of them would look at
some spot on the great globe to see how the weather pattern
reacted—to check on a bit of his own work carried out earlier
in the day. But he was not really interested; his mind was on
the evening’s date, or dinner, or a hockey game. Even Green­
berg, head of the Weather Advisers, felt the general lassi­
tude.
Anna Brackney was too bored to sit still. She got up and
wandered into the computer room, plopped down again and

5
6 THE WEATHER ON THE SUN

punched a 2414 computer to check the day’s match. It was

90.4 percent. She muttered, “ Lousy,” and then looked
around guiltily. She punched the call-up to see what the
match had been last week. Ninety point six. She started to
say aloud, “ Not bad,” but stopped herself in time. James
Eden would not approve of her talking to herself. Idly she
punched call-up and looked at the results for last month and
the month before that. Then she sat bolt upright and punched
for data for the last six months. Very loudly she said, “ Well,
well, well, well, what do you know about that?” Ignoring the
stares of two computer operators, she marched back into the
Weather Room, right up to Greenberg.
“ Do you realize,” she said, “that our fit has been slipping a
little each week? We are now operating on a fit of a little
better than ninety percent, when as recently as six months
ago our fit was better than ninety-three percent? Did you re­
alize that?”
Greenberg sat up and looked alert. “ No. Are you sure?”
Anna did not bother to answer. Greenberg leaned aside
and spoke into a communicator. “Charlie, get me a summary
of the weekly fit for the last six months." He touched a but­
ton and said, “Upton, come on out to the Weather Room,
will you? We may have a problem.”
Greenberg touched several more buttons. In two minutes
there was a circle of people around him, and he held a slip of
paper in one hand. He said, “Somehow, in the last six
months, we’ve slipped three percentage points in our match.
How could that happen?”
The people looked at one another. Upton said, “ Everybody
thought somebody else was checking the long-term fit. I only
compared it with the week before.”
There was a chorus of “So did I,” and Greenberg slapped
his forehead. “ How in hell could a thing like that happen?”
He was a man who normally did not swear. “ We've been
drifting away from acceptable performance for six months
and nobody even noticed it? What about the complaints?
 THEODORE L. THOMAS 7

What kind of complaints we been getting?”

The people shrugged, and Upton spoke for them again.
“ Nothing special. Just the usual gripes. Two weeks ago the
Manitoba Council complained the breeze we made to blow
away the mosquitoes was too strong, but—”
“ Never you mind,” said Anna Brackney. “That was my
mathematical model on that problem, and the twenty-knot
wind they got was just right to eliminate the mosquitoes be­
cause the foresters—”
“Knock it off,” said Greenberg. “I take it there have been
no serious complaints? I’d better check further.” He talked
into the phone with one of the secretaries, then said to the
group, “ Well, it seems we’ve been lucky. Anyhow, we’ve got
to find out what’s wrong. And we’ve got to find it before
somebody else notices it, or we’ll have the Weather Council
on our necks. I wonder if I ought to call President Wilburn.”
The people shook their heads, and Upton said, “ I don’t like
to be sneaky or anything like that. But if we’ve somehow
slipped in our procedures and got away with it, let’s correct
them without stirring up trouble. You know politicians.”
Greenberg said, “We’ll all have to stay on this until we
find it. All of you willing?”
The people gave up their visions of dinner and dates and
hockey games and nodded.
“ Okay, then. Each of you set up a program designed to
make independent repeat of your models for the last six
months. Most of it was routine stuff, so it won’t be bad. Call
in the computer technicians and utilize all of the university’s
staff and equipment you need. If you need more, I’ll set up a
net and we can pull in everything we need from beyond
Stockholm. Monitor your steps and when you find an error
feed it into the 9680 as a collecting computer. Any other sug­
gestions?”
The people shook their heads.
“All right. Let’s get to work and solve this before anybody
else even knows there’s a problem. Good luck.” A red light
8 THE WEATHER ON THE SUN

flashed on the phone at Greenberg’s elbow, and the opera­

tor’s voice said, “ Dr. Greenberg, President Wilburn is on the
phone. Some kind of emergency.”
Greenberg looked startled. He picked up the phone and lis­
tened. In a moment he turned up the audio so that the people
could hear what Wilburn was saying.

The ox was almost done, and it smelled mighty good to Big

John Sommerville. He stood at the edge of the great patio
and looked across it through the morning groups of people to
where the ox slowly turned on the spit. A cloud of steam rose
above it and quickly disappeared in the still, dry air. Beyond
the barbecue pit with its automatic basters, auxiliary heaters,
powder sprinklers, temperature sensors and color detectors
stood one of the cattle barns, and beyond that the roll of the
prairie began. It was picture-pretty: a stand of oak and maple
on the forward slope, a road winding up, a stream meander­
ing down the dip at the foot of the first hill fed from some
hidden subterranean channel that groped its way to the low
mountains. Big John Sommerville turned to look at the
house.
It rambled and twisted behind him, cloaked in brown-
stained shingles and roofed with cedar. It sprawled and
sprouted unexpected wings and went on for three hundred
feet. There was a story that two years ago there had been
eight guests in that house for a week before Big John found
out about it. It was a good house, built for comfort, and it
had a sense of belonging.
Big John Sommerville hooked his thumbs in his belt and
started to stroll over toward the roasting ox. His face was
craggy with little sags in the right places, and his body was
big with a thin layer of fat over hard muscles, a good Texas
face on a good Texas body.
“Hey, John, when do we eat?”
“ Half an hour, I reckon.” He walked on.
A hand slapped him on the shoulder, jolted him a little off
 THEODORE L. THOMAS 9

balance. As he turned he said, “You hungry, too, Brian?”

“Sure am.” It was Brian Travers, mayor of Austin, the
third most potent political figure in the area, and he held a
large glass of straight bourbon. “I can wait through another
pint or so of bourbon, but then I’m going to put me away a
hindquarter of that ox. Hope it’s as good as the last.”
“Ought to be. Why, hello, Henry. Just get here?”
Henry Carpenter shook hands and looked around cautious­
ly. “ Everything under control? They all here?”
Travers said, “They’re here. Quit worrying, Henry. We’ll
get it.” The three of them had arranged the ox roast for a
hundred of the major and minor citizens of the region to win
over their support for a proposed monorail shipping line. It
never hurt to line up the solid citizenry on your side before
you tackled the local, state, and national officials. “We’ll get
them feeling comfortable on John’s bourbon and ox, and then
we’ll tell them what we want to do. They’ll go along, all
right.”
“ Got a surprise,” said Big John Sommerville. “I got to a
few ears and I made out a case for a little water table replen­
ishment around here. In exactly an hour and a half we will
have a gentle rainfall on the mountains right behind the
house, just over that near ridge. The time and position will be
just right for the damnedest rainbow you ever saw in your
life—the pot of gold will be right on top of that rise there. I’ll
announce the rainfall a half hour before it’s due, and we’ll let
these fellows think I got extra-special connections at the
Weather Council. When these fellows see what I can do with
the Council, they’ll split their britches to get behind us on the
monoline. Right?”
Travers and Carpenter raised their glasses and took a long
pull in honor of Big John Sommerville.
The bourbon was smooth, the ox was tender and tasty, and
the announcement came at just the right time. The clouds
formed on schedule. And then the rains came. The black
heavens opened up and poured out their watery hell all over
10 THE WEATHER ON THE SUN

the spread of Big John Sommerville. Something like twelve

inches of rain fell in the first twenty minutes, and the mean­
dering stream turned into a devastating giant that swept
away the barn and the stand of trees and the winding road.
The water roared down the gentle slope behind the house and
burst through the glass doors that opened out on the con­
cealed porches and little hideaway nooks at the back of the
house. The basement quickly filled with water, and the water
lifted the floor joists from the plates. The little subterranean
waterways built up pressure and quickly saturated the soil to
a depth of fifteen feet. A mud slide started that transformed
the entire house into a kind of roller coaster. Big John Som­
merville felt it start and succeeded in getting everybody out
of the house, so there were no casualties. In a final cloud­
burst, the rainstorm passed away.
One hundred and three men stood on a rocky ledge and
looked in awe at all that was left of the house, garages, barns,
corral, fences, and trees: a sea of soupy mud with occasional
pieces of lumber protruding at crazy angles. The bare bones
of the hill showed, and the barbecue pit lay somewhere
downslope under fifty feet of mud.
“ Big John,” said Travers, “when you order yourself a rain,
you really order yourself a rain.”

It took Big John Sommerville three hours to reach a phone,

and by that time his plans were made. First he called the
Governor, explained what had happened and what he intend­
ed to do. It turned out that the Governor also had some infor­
mation about a weather order or two that had gone wrong.
So the Governor made a few calls himself, ending with a call
to Wilburn’s office to say that an important constituent
named Big John Sommerville would soon be calling to talk to
Wilburn about an important problem, and please arrange to
have President Wilburn take the call. Big John Sommerville
placed a few additional calls to other district councilmen, to
three other governors, to several mayors and to half a dozen
 THEODORE L. THOMAS 11

wealthy industrialists. As it happened, many of these people

had some small pieces of information of their own about
weather mishaps. When these folk called President Wilburn’s
office to suggest the President listen to what Big John Som-
merville had to say, they also tossed into the conversation a
few pointed remarks about weather control and sloppy man­
agement.
In two hours’ time, the communications network surround­
ing President Wilburn’s office in Sicily was in a snarled mess,
out of which, nevertheless, two pertinent facts stood out: One,
many good citizens were acutely unhappy about the weather
control, and, two, Big John Sommerville was acoming.
When Big John Sommerville himself got on the line, Presi­
dent Wilburn was sitting there waiting. The five hours of
pent-up anger burst into his office while he sat and marveled.
The dirty red face that glared at him, the mud-caked hair,
the ripped shirt, the glorious near-incoherence of the teeth-
clenched stream of words were all fascinating. Never in his
political life had President Wilburn received such a dressing
down. Partway through it, Wilburn had to remind himself
that the situation was not funny. He was, in fact, in the midst
of a totally unexpected crisis.
The screen went blank. Big John Sommerville had had his
say.
Wilburn sat quietly and reflected. The world government
was not so mighty that one influential and irate citizen could
not shake it a little. There should be no false moves now.
First he had to find out what had gone wrong. He called
Greenberg at the Advisers.

Greenberg had just turned up the audio.

“ Let me make certain there is no misunderstanding,” said
Wilburn. “ Every staff member of the Advisers and all associ­
ated personnel are hereby placed on an emergency basis, and
you have authority to do whatever is necessary— I repeat,
whatever is necessary—to get to the bottom of this and cor-
12 THE WEATHER ON THE SUN

rect it. Money, time, people, equipment, anything y a k need

you get. In twelve hours I want a preliminary rep d ^ fro m
you, and hopefully you will have the complete answers by
that time. If not, your entire organization will stay on the
problem until it is solved. Routine work will be suspended ex­
cept for weather control requests you receive personally from
me. Do you have any questions?”
“No, Mr. President,” and they hung up.
Anna Brackney said, “Why didn’t you tell him we had just
discovered the problem ourselves?”
Greenberg gave her a look, then said to the group, “All
right, let’s go the way we planned. I guess we were dreaming
a little to think we were going to solve this before anybody
else caught on.”
As they turned and walked away, Greenberg heard Anna
Brackney say to Hiromaka, “ But I don’t understand why he
didn’t tell him we had already found out there was a prob­
lem.”
Hiromaka said, “Aw, shut up.”

At breakfast the next morning Harriet Wilburn said to

Jonathan, “I guess this will be a bad one. We'd better make
it a good breakfast; lunch may be a little tense." She poked
the Diner for his coffee and then began making his onion-fla­
vored eggs basted with pork sauce.
“Why is it,” he said, “every time something pops I wind up
having the breakfast I used to have when 1 was a boy? You
suppose there’s an element of regression there?”
“ I certainly hope so. I'd hate to think it was some deep, un­
defined craving. Do you really think you ought to look at that
now?” Wilburn had picked up a morning English-language
newspaper.
“Oh, don't worry,” he said. “ I know I’m going to get the
most severe castigation of my career. I’m sort of looking for­
ward to how imaginative the press will be.” He began to
read.
 THEODORE L. THOMAS 13

Wlmn his eggs were ready he put down the paper and said,
“Yes,^*ey’re in full cry. The editors, the seers, and colum­
nists say they have been fully aware that things haven’t been
going right with the Weather Congress for several months,
but they were just waiting to see if I would get going and do
my job.”
Harriet said, “ Well, you know and I know and your friends
know the truth. Eat your eggs, dear.”
He ate his eggs. He sipped coffeS when he was done, read
through another paper, then went out into the soft Sicilian
air, stepped on a walk, and rode a while. He got off and
walked for a mile as was his custom, but a slight numbness
crept into his legs, so he finished the trip on the slidewalk. He
entered the Great Hall and went straight to his office
through the private door.
Before he closed the door, Tongareva was there. Wilburn
said, “Just the man I wanted to see. Come in, Gardner.”
On his way to a seat, Tongareva started talking. “ I have
been reflecting on the events. I think we are caught up in
some kind of world hysteria. I think the people have resented
the Congress and the Council the way a small boy resents his
authoritative father, and now they have found an excuse to
let off steam. On top of that, elections are coming. I think we
must be very careful.”
Wilburn sank into his chair, ignoring the flashing lights on
his phones and visuals. “Did you hear about that rained-out
picnic in Texas?”
Tongareva nodded, a shade of a smile on his face. “That
must have been the granddaddy of all rained-out picnics. The
Texan knew just what to do to make an international issue
out of it.”
“The way he told it to me, it was an international issue. He
led me to believe that everyone of any international impor­
tance was at that picnic, except you and me. Well, let me cali
Greenberg to see if he’s found out what’s gone haywire here.
Please stay with me, Gardner.”
14 THE WEATHER ON THE SUN

Greenberg took the call in his office, with Upton and Hiro-
maka. “The information I have for you is incomplete, Mr.
President. In fact, I hope it is so incomplete as to be incor­
rect. But you see, twelve hours is not really enough—”
“What are you trying to say, Dr. Greenberg?”
Greenberg glanced at Upton, took a deep breath and said,
“A detailed check of all the procedures, all the mathematical
models, all the parameters used here, shows that no error has
been made and that our mathematical fit matches the predic­
tion. This would indicate that the error was elsewhere. So we
got in touch with Base Lieutenant Commander Markov;
Hechmer and Eden are on vacation. We told Markov what
we were doing and asked him to check out his results, too.
We have his results now, and at least preliminarily, neither
he nor we can find any fault with his operations. In short, the
Weather Bureau on the Sun accomplished each of its mis­
sions within tolerance. There’s no error there either.” Green­
berg stopped and rubbed his face.
Wilburn asked gently, “What is your conclusion?”
Greenberg said, “ Well, since the data were used and ap­
plied as correctly as we know how, and since the theory
checks out as well as ever—”
He fell silent. After a moment Wilburn said, “ Well?"
Greenberg looked straight at him and said, “The trouble
might be in the Sun itself. The Sun is changing, and our the­
ories are no longer as valid as they used to be.”
Wilburn’s breath caught, and he felt his body grow cold.
He understood what Greenberg had said, but he did not im­
mediately allow the full thought to enter his mind. He held it
in front of him where it could not really frighten him, where
it hung like a rotted piece of meat that would have to be eat­
en eventually, but not now. No one spoke or moved in either
office. Greenberg and Tongareva did not want to force the
swallowing, and so they waited. Finally, Wilburn took it in.
He sat back and groaned, and then stood up and paced out
of range of the viewer. Greenberg sat and waited. Then he
 THEODORE L. THOMAS 15

heard Wilburn’s voice asking, “If what you say is true, our
whole system of weather control is faulty. Is that right?”
“Yes, if it proves out,” said Greenberg.
“Our entire culture, our entire civilization, the world over,
is built on weather control. It is the primary fact of life for
every living being. If our ability to control weather is de­
stroyed, our world will be destroyed. We go back to sectional­
ism, predatory individualism. The one factor that ties all men
everywhere together would disappear. The only thing left—
chaos.”
No one answered him, and for another full minute they
were all silent.
Wilburn came back and sat down at his desk. He said to
Greenberg, “ I have to think. How much time will you need to
verify your findings so far?”
“Another twelve hours. The European computer net is on
it now, and we are in the process of bringing in the United
States net and the Asian net simultaneously. Both of them
will be on line in an hour. I might say this is the most inten­
sive effort the Advisers have ever made, and it is causing talk
already. There will be no secrets about our findings when we
finally get them.”
“ I understand. I have twelve hours to think of something,
and I am going to assume you will confirm what you’ve al­
ready found; that’s the worst result I can think of, so I’ll get
ready to face it.” The snap was coming back to Wilburn’s
voice. “If anything comes up along the way that makes you
change your mind, let me know immediately. And thanks for
the effort, Dr. Greenberg.”

Wilburn looked around his office. The men gathered there

did not look happy, and several of them, his political enemies,
were frowning. Yet Wilburn needed them all. This was the
group that served as a kind of unofficial executive for the en­
tire Council. But it was a difficult group to work with, pri­
marily because they represented such diverse interests.
16 THE WEATHER ON THE SUN

Councilman Maitland said, “ I am afraid, President Wil­

burn, that you have brought the Council to its lowest point of
public esteem that I can remember.”
Barstow reared up. “Now just a minute here. How do
you—”
Wilburn waved a hand. “ It’s all right, Arthur. We all
agree we have an enormous problem. I called this meeting to
ask this group to think about what we do now.”
Barstow sat back and nodded. The others were quiet, and
then Tongareva said, “You give the impression that you have
a plan to solve our present crisis, Jonathan. Are you ready to
discuss it?”
“Yes. Although it isn’t much of a plan, really.” He leaned
forward. “We have been this route before. We are confronted
with a scientific crisis. The Sun is changing. Our weather
control is no longer as accurate, and we may have other dan­
gers we don’t even know about yet. The Advisers tell me that
these unexpected changes in the Sun might be serious, far
more so than our failure to control weather accurately. We
don’t know what’s happening. So here we go again, but this
time I’m afraid we will have to mount the largest and most
expensive research program the world has ever seen. It is al­
ready possible to tell that the answers won't be easy to get.
The Weather Bureau has not seen any changes at all. so the
Advisers think things must be happening deep inside the Sun.
We’ve never been able to go deep, so the first scientific order
of business will be to solve that one.”
“Costs, Jonathan?" It was Du Bois, always a worrier about
other people’s money.
“ Enormous, Georges. This is why we will have to be so
careful. The tax burden will be the largest we’ve ever asked
our people to bear. But unless someone can think of another
program, I think we’ll have to sell it.”
Barstow said, “ Do you mind if 1 talk to Greenberg? I want
to be able to assure my constituents that I’ve looked into this
personally ”
 THEODORE L. THOMAS 17

“ I hope everyone here will do that, and more. Please talk

to any person you want, scientific or not, on any possible so­
lutions he may have. Let’s adjourn now and meet here in
twenty-four hours to thrash it out.”
Tongareva stayed, as Wilburn knew he would. He said,
“Who’s going to head up the program?”
Wilburn looked at him and smiled. “Need you ask? Aren’t
Dr. Jefferson Potter and Senior Boatmaster James Eden the
ones to do the job?”

Greenberg seemed upset. “Look, with all due respect to

you two, I don’t think you see the ramifications of the prob­
lem. First”—he counted on his fingers—“the trouble appears
to lie deep within the Sun. Second, we don’t have a vehicle
that can penetrate deeper than about two miles; in fact,
Jim”—he looked at Eden—“no one has ever equaled that
depth you reached some years ago on that Anderson problem.
Third, we can’t even take measurements at those depths.
Fourth, our theories of occurrences at those depths have nev­
er been proved out.” He dropped his hands. “ We are prob­
ably in a worse position than we were when we first ap­
proached the problem of Sun control as a means of weather
control.”
Potter and Eden stared reflectively at Greenberg. Then
Potter said, “You know, he’s just given us an overall break­
down.” Greenberg wondered what he was talking about, then
realized that Potter was talking to Eden.
Eden said, still looking at Greenberg, “Yes, and he’s the
man in the best position to make the judgment so far. Four
main groups along those lines, with good cross liaison. He’s
come up with a great way to start out, at least.”
Potter said, “ Four scientific administrators, each with a
cabinet of a dozen or so people with assigned responsibilities.
Each of the four groups places its own R and D and hires its
own people.”
Eden said, “Each cabinet has a member responsible for
18 THE WEATHER ON THE SUN

cross liaison with the other groups. In fact, each cabinet

member has sole responsibility for an assigned area. He’ll
have his own staff to help administer his group.”
It was Potter’s turn again. “Any overlapping can be mini­
mized by frequent meetings of the big four. Ought to work.
Now let’s see. All the problems come together on the Sun, so
I guess that’s where you ought to be. I’ll stay here to keep
things on the track. We can get together every month or so if
necessary. How’s that sound to you, Bob?”
Greenberg had caught the drift of the discussion and had
been following it, fascinated. He nodded. “Sounds fine to me.
Where do the Advisers come into this?”
“Seems to me you should be standing by for any extraordi­
nary computing problems, of which there will be plenty.
Don’t forget you will also have the day-to-day work going on
as usual. You had better increase your staff here, don’t you
think?”
Greenberg nodded. “Yes, but I can see some problems in
getting enough scientific personnel to do all the work on the
overall project. We’ll wind up with one of our groups bidding
against another.”
“ Bound to happen. We’ll try to keep it to a minimum.”
Potter said, “ All right. I'll get on the horn and we'll start
the ball rolling. Wilburn ought to be explaining things to ev­
erybody right about now.”

Only two of the two hundred councilmen were absent, and

Wilburn knew those two were in the hospital. Furthermore,
the councilmen sat on the edge of their seats, listening intent­
ly to the voices booming over their desk speakers. Wilburn
looked down impassively from his desk, but he was deeply
shaken. The debate had gone on for three hours with no in­
terruptions for any reason, and the opposition to the proposed
research program was surprisingly strong. What was worse,
the mood of the Council was emotional to a degree Wilburn
had never seen before. Even Councilman Reardon of 35-50 E
 THEODORE L. THOMAS 19

30-45 N, normally a cool speaker, ended his five minutes

with his voice broken and quavering. Wilburn frantically
tried to think of a way to break the spell, to interject some­
how a rational appeal. But he could not prevent the council-
men from obtaining their five minutes to speak. Many of
them were so carried away with what they were saying that
they did not see the thirty-second warning light on their
desks, and they were cut off in mid-sentence by the sergeant
at arms when their five minutes were up, left sobbing at a
dead microphone.
Wilburn quietly turned to his desk, checked his directory,
and dialed the desk of the next speaker, Francisco Espaiyat,
60-75 W 15-30 N. “Frank,” he said, “you getting ready to
speak?”
“ I certainly am, Wilburn. Fve come up with some reasons
that haven’t been mentioned yet, so I hope to do some good
here. You got any particular suggestions?”
Wilburn hesitated. “Yes, I have, Frank, but I don’t know
whether to ask you to do it or not. See what you think. When
you come on, simply state that you are in favor of the pro­
gram, and then leave the rest of your time empty. Give us
four minutes and fifty-five seconds of golden silence for a lit­
tle somber reflection along with a quick trip to the bathroom.
I don’t like to ask you to give up your speaking time, but no­
body yet has got through to these hotheads. What do you
think?”
Espaiyat thought about it and then said slowly, “I don’t
know if it will work, Jonathan, but I’m willing to give it a
try.”
Three minutes later, when the sergeant at arms announced
the speech of Councilman Espaiyat, the Council was startled
to hear, “I speak in favor of the program, but I hereby devote
the balance of my time to rest and relief from this intermina­
ble speechmaking.” Espaiyat got up and started down the
aisle. Immediately Wilburn got up and went out the door
nearest him. After a moment’s looking around the chamber
20 THE WEATHER ON THE SUN

in puzzlement, every other councilman suddenly got up and

headed for a door, and as they pressed out to the corridors,
some of them began to laugh. A low chant of “Yay,
Espaiyat” started up from a few members and quickly spread
over the entire chamber and up to the galleries, which were
also emptying.
When they poured back to their desks a few minutes later,
the spell was broken. Men and women chatted and called to
one another. The next speaker, Madame Iwanowski, 45-60 E
45-60 N, spoke against the program, but she tried to marshal
some facts. She yielded after two minutes twenty-eight sec­
onds. The crisis had passed. Other speakers disgorged their
thoughts, but the tenor of the speeches was only mildly argu­
mentative, for the sake of the constituency back home. In
half an hour the question was called and the vote taken. The
tabulation flashed on the great board. A small cheer broke
out from the floor and gallery. The vote was 133 for, 65
against. Wilburn sat impassively, staring out over the floor,
ignoring the numbness that had come back in his legs. They
had the required two-thirds vote, but it was much, much too
close. On a project of this size he needed all the support in
the Council he could get, but about one-third of the group
was against him. He sighed. This would not do. There were
hard times ahead. If this program didn't work out, he saw
clearly who the scapegoat would be. For the first time a
President of the Weather Congress would not so much step
down as be thrown out. Well, that was politics. Harriet would
be waiting for him when it was over, and they could always
take up a pleasurable retirement, Key West, now, there was a
place he had always loved, and perhaps the time had come
to— He caught himself and straightened his shoulders. No
time for retirement thoughts yet. There was work to be done.
He headed for his office to call Greenberg.

“The trouble is,” Senior Boatmaster James Eden said mat-

ter-of-factly, “the film of carbon vapor begins to collapse at
 THEODORE L. THOMAS 21

these pressures. The rate of carbon consumption goes up, the

sessile effect dissipates, and the boat itself is consumed.”
“Very interesting,” said Dr. John Plant. “Now don’t you
think we ought to get the hell out of here before you demon­
strate the point?”
Eden nodded and said into the intercom, “Up. Forty de­
grees. Now.” He fingered the keys and took the boat up to
within five hundred yards of the surface before he leveled off.
He said to Plant, “ Don’t wash it out, though. Those limita­
tions I just mentioned will allow these boats to be consumed,
but there may be a way around them.”
“I don’t know what they could be. Those limitations seem
pretty fundamental to me. I think we need a whole new ap­
proach to get down to the center. We’ll never do it with this
kind of equipment.”
Eden shook his head and said, “I never thought I’d be sit­
ting in a sessile boat on the Sun and hear someone say it was
obsolete. Look here. The carbon toruses that surround the
boat act as a mirror. They absorb all the radiation from in­
frared down to the hard stuff to a depth of a fraction of a
millimeter and then reflect it with an efficiency of ninety-
nine point nine nine nine nine eight. That’s the turnaround
effect we’ve been telling you about. Carbon vaporization pro­
tects against the balance of the radiation, and the power dif­
ference is supplied by our internal reactors. So look. If we
can increase the efficiency of the turnaround effect by a fac­
tor of a few thousand, we could cope with the increased tem­
peratures and radiative effects at great depths. What’s wrong
with that?”
“ Well, just how do you—”
“ We can still balance out the gravitational force by chan­
neling additional power to the bottom toruses, to take advan­
tage of the radiative pressure on the bottom of the boat.
Right?”
“ Well, just how do you-—?”
“That’s your problem. I’ve told you how to do it. You’re
22 THE WEATHER ON THE SUN

the scientist. I’m just a boat captain. Now, stand by while we

get this thing back to base. I’m going Earthside today.”
Plant sighed and settled back in his harness while Eden
picked up the beacon and followed it back to base, through
the lock and into the bay. While they were stripping off their
lead suits, Plant said, “ Maybe a carbon alloy.”
“W hat?” said Eden.
“ Maybe a carbon alloy would improve the efficiency of the
turnaround effect.”
“Sounds promising to me. Give it a whirl. Nice going."
Plant looked at him wryly. “Thanks. Glad you like my
ideas.” Eden was too busy to pay any attention to the slight
emphasis on the word “my,” so Plant smiled at Eden’s back,
shrugged, and hung up his suit.
They found Base Commander Hechmer in the day room
with some of the staff watching a teevee transmit Earthside.
Wilburn was addressing the Weather Council, bringing the
members up to date on the Sun program. He told them re­
sults were coming in. The Sun’s core was behaving anoma­
lously. Neutrino formation at the core had accelerated and
apparently was going to accelerate even more. The Sun ap­
peared to be moving out of the main sequence a billion years
ahead of schedule. Hechmer said, to no one in particular,
“Gives you a nice comfortable feeling, doesn't it?"
On the screen Wilburn said, “To finish my report to you,
we should know in a few weeks exactly what is wrong with
the Sun, and we should then be in a position to know what to
do about it. In short, ladies and gentlemen of the Weather
Council, this most massive of research efforts has borne fruit.
It is isolating the problem, and it will arrive at a solution.
Thank you.” The applause was long and genuine, and Wil­
burn made a slight bow and quickly put his hand on the podi­
um.

The Advisers had the jitters, so Greenberg called together

his mathemeteorologists and said, “ Now look. Just because
 THEODORE L. THOMAS 23

we have the heavy artillery in the scientific world showing up

here in a few minutes is no reason to get all upset. It’s just a
high-level meeting, and they’re holding it here. After all,
we’ve made an important contribution to the total research
effort on this program.”
“ Yes, but why here? They going to change the Advisers?”
“ I hear they’re going to fire us.”
“Yeah, clean shop and start again with a new group.”
Greenberg said, “Oh, cut it out. They probably want our
advice on the next steps in the program. You’ll have to admit,
we have a problem there. We may have accomplished every­
thing we can in the program.”
People began to drift in, and soon the room was full. Potter
took over as chairman. “ What we’ve got to do is see where
we go from here. We’ve accomplished almost all the major
objectives of the program. W hat’s left?”
Kowalski said, “ We’ve fallen down on boat design. We
haven’t been able to come up with a boat that will get us
down to the center of the Sun and back up again. We don’t
know where to turn next. We’ve explored every alley we can
think of, and we have some thirty thousand people working
on the project, including some real bright ones, problem solv­
ers. All we’ve done is improve the efficiency of the boats by a
factor of a thousand. We don’t know where to turn next.”
Potter said, “You can get a boat down, but you can’t get it
back. That right?”
“Yes, and don’t anybody here tell us about remote control
or automation. Center-of-Sun conditions are such that we
can’t communicate twenty feet away. As to automation, we
can’t get into the boat a computer of the size we need to
make a few critical decisions. The presence of the boat is go­
ing to change center-of-Sun conditions, so someone is going
to have to make a quick evaluation. Well, let Frank Valko
tell you what’s there.”
Dr. Frank Valko, senior scientist in charge of evaluation of
the Sun’s deep interior, smiled and rubbed his chin in embar-
24 THE WEATHER ON THE SUN

rassment. “I wish I could tell you precisely what’s there.

Then perhaps we could automate. But here’s what we have.
Our Bomnak group came up with a neutrino detector of rea­
sonable size, one we could get in a spaceship. This is a device
we’ve been trying for a hundred years. If the program pro­
duced nothing else, the neutrino detector alone has been
worth it. Well, we put it in a ship and orbited it around the
Sun and did some scanning. This detector is adjustable—
most remarkable. We ran the scale from the fastest neutrinos
with the weakest interaction to the slowest with some slight
interaction, and we were able to peel the core of the Sun like
an onion. Each interior layer is a bit hotter than the one out­
side it. And when we got to the core— I mean the real core
now—we found the trouble. We found the very center at a
temperature of over half a billion degrees Kelvin. The neu­
trino energy was greater than the light energy. The electron-
positron pairs do not annihilate back to high-energy photons
completely. We get significant neutrino-antineutrino forma­
tion. There are also some neutrino-photon reactions. But the
point is that with such neutrino formation, energy can escape
from the core, right through the walls of the Sun. And there
you are.” He looked around at the others brightly.
The rest of them looked at him blankly, and Eden said it.
“Where?”
“Why, the Sun is in the earliest stages of decay, unpredict-
ably early. All we have to do is dampen the core, and we get
our old Sun back ”
Potter said sarcastically, “ How do we do that? Throw
some water on it?”
“ Well, water might not be the best substance. We’re work­
ing out the theory to improve on water. 1 think we’ll come up
with something.”
Eden said, “ From a practical point of view, wouldn’t it
take quite a bit of water?”
“Of course not. Oh, I forgot to tell you. The hot core—the
 THEODORE L. THOMAS 25

troublemaking part—is only about one hundred feet in diam­

eter right now. But it’s spreading. We ought to do something
within the next six months.”
Potter sat back and rubbed his face. “All right. We know
what the trouble is. We know where the trouble is. And we
will soon know what to do about it. Fair enough?” He looked
around the room. Most of those present nodded. Anna Brack-
ney and two other mathemeteorologists shrugged. Potter
glared at them for a moment and continued. “We can even
get down there to quench it. But we can’t get back. Is that
what’s left of our problem?” No one said anything, and there
were no shrugs this time. Potter waited a moment, then con­
tinued. “ Well, if that’s really all that’s left, then we may be
all done. I’m certain we can find a volunteer to take the ses­
sile boat down to the core. The question is, should we allow
the volunteer to do it? Do we continue to try to find a way to
get him back up?”
Eden started to speak, but before he could form the words
Anna Brackney cut in. “Now, just you don’t say anything
here at all. There’s going to be a lot more thought put in on
this problem before we go setting up a hero situation.” She
turned to Kowalski and said, “You have six months. Isn’t
there a chance you can come up with a suitable boat design
in that time?”
Kowalski said, “A chance, yes. But it isn’t very likely.
We’ve reached the point where we know we need a major
breakthrough. It could happen tomorrow—we’re trying. Or it
might not happen in the next ten years of intensive work.
We’ve defined the problem sufficiently so that we know
what’s needed to solve it. I am not optimistic.”
Potter said, “Any ideas from any others? McCormick,
Metzger?”
Metzger said, “ I think you’ve summarized it, Jeff. Let’s try
for another, say, four months to get a boat design and to
check out what we think we know. If we finish up right where
26 THE WEATHER ON THE SUN

we are now, we won’t have hurt anything. We can then find

someone to take a boat down, and we’ll give him a great big
farewell party. Isn’t that about it?”
More shrugs from the mathemeteorologists, and Anna
Brackney glared at Eden. Potter said, “ I think I’ll go call
President Wilburn and tell him our conclusion. Can I use
your office, Bob?” Greenberg nodded, and Potter said, “ Be
back in a minute. Work out the details while I make the
call.”
He left, and a desultory conversation went on in his ab­
sence as the group set up priorities and discussed the begin­
nings of the phase-out of the giant program. Ten minutes
passed. Potter reappeared and stood in the doorway. Eden
looked up, leaped to his feet and ran around the table toward
him. Potter was pale and his face was drawn. He leaned
against the door jamb and said, “President Wilburn is dy­
ing.”

“ I’m going with you, Jonathan,” said Harriet Wilburn.

She sat across from Wilburn, dry-eyed, in their breakfast
corner.
He smiled at her, and the cosmetics on his face wrinkled,
giving his face an odd, ragged appearance. He reached across
and patted her hand. “You have to stay behind to protect my
good name. There’s a bitterness in some people. As long as
my wife is alive, they won’t go too far."
“ I don’t care about them.” The tears were in her eyes now,
and she looked down at the table to hide them. She wiped her
cheeks in annoyance and said in a steady voice, “When do
you leave'’”
“In three days. The doctors want to make one more at­
tempt to find out what’s causing the central myelitis; there’s
got to be some reason for spinal cord deterioration. They
hope they can come up with a cure someday, but first they
have to find out what causes it.”
Harriet Wilburn burst out, “ I don’t care about all this
 THEODORE L. THOMAS 27

knowledge, all this good, all this benefit-of-man nonsense. I

want you.” She put her head down on the table and frankly
sobbed. Wilburn reached over and patted the back of her
head.

“ I don’t really believe all this, Boatmaster,” said Techni­

cian O’Rourke. “ When the first manlike creature put out the
first fire something like a half million years ago, he almost
certainly used water. Now here we are, quenching the core of
a sun heading toward a nova, and what do we use? Water. I
don’t believe it.”
Eden did not smile. His mind was on a sessile boat, now
about thirty thousand miles deep within the Sun and heading
deeper. He sat with Technician O’Rourke in front of the
main viewer panel of the neutrino detector, monitoring the
flux density at the various energy levels. Eden said, “The re­
action we are trying to get back to is simply the high-energy
reaction of two photons to produce an electron-positron pair.
As it is now, in the core the temperature is so high that the
electron-positron pair doesn’t go back to two high-energy
photons. Instead they are producing a neutrino-antineutrino
pair, and these pour right out through the Sun and are lost to
space. If we don’t stop that energy loss, the core will collapse.
Since all we have to do is reduce the temperature by absorb­
ing photons, we have a choice of materials to use. Many sub­
stances will do it, but water is the safest to carry down there
without decomposing or volatilizing and killing Wilburn.
That’s why the water.”
“ Well, thanks. I still say it’s a mighty funny situation.
Somebody’s going to do a lot of philosophizing on it, I’ll bet
you. How deep is he now?”
“About forty thousand miles.”

Wilburn thought, You never know. You never know until

you’re there. I thought I’d be reflecting on my life, the few
things I did right, the many things I did wrong, wondering
28 THE WEATHER ON THE SUN

what it all meant. He glanced at a depth gauge that read

46,000, and he continued thinking: About ten percent of the
way, ninety percent to go, many hours yet. He felt hungry,
but his ability to swallow had deteriorated to the extent that
it was no longer possible for him to eat normally. He sighed,
and went about the business of hooking up a bottle of a solu­
tion of sugar and protein to the needle in his arm. There were
other ingredients in the solution, too, so after the solution was
all in, he took a long, painless nap. When he awoke, there
were only forty thousand miles to go, and Wilburn realized
with a shock that he had had his last meal.
He checked out the few gauges he was familiar with; his
briefing period had been limited. He remembered once as a
boy his father had taken him through a power plant, and the
array of dials and gauges had been fantastic. There had been
a large room, divided by a series of panels, and every square
inch of the panels and walls of the room had been covered
with dials and gauges. When the time came to kick in addi­
tional units, one of the operators had called him over and
said, “Okay, son. Push that button.” Wilburn did, and his fa­
ther said to him, “ Don’t forget this. All the sensing instru­
ments and dials in the world don't mean a thing without one
human finger.”
Wilburn looked at the one gauge he didn't like—the one
that recorded outside temperature. It read 678,000°K, and
Wilburn looked away quickly. He was not a scientific man.
and he was incapable of really believing that any living crea­
ture could exist in an environment of six hundred and seven­
ty-eight thousand degrees. He thought of Harriet.
He had found it necessary to take steps to prevent her from
using her rather significant influence to stow away on this
boat. He chuckled and felt the wave of warmth he always felt
when he thought of her. For her sake it would have been bet­
ter to allow her to come, but there were times when one could
not take the easy and most desirable path. A soft chime
sounded through the boat.
 THEODORE L. THOMAS 29

He was approaching the core. He focused his attention on

the two instruments directly in front of him. He could feel
the deceleration of the boat as the toruses, top and bottom,
became more nearly balanced. The temperature inside the
cabin was one hundred and forty-six degrees Fahrenheit, but
Wilburn was not uncomfortable. He had the feeling that ev­
erything was going very well, and he wished he could tell
Harriet. The deceleration continued; several of the gauges on
the periphery of his vision went off scale. He was very close
to the core. Conditions seemed to be as predicted.
He continued to watch, and a chime softly began a beat
that slowly increased in tempo. He did not know it, because
there was no instrument to record it, but the temperature
outside approached the one billion mark. He watched the
neutrino flux direction indicator, knowing that the great
quantity of water aboard was no longer in the form of a liq­
uid, vapor, or solid, and it crossed his mind to wonder how
that could be. And when the neutrino flux direction indicator
wavered, and changed direction to show he had just passed
through the very center of the core, he placed his finger on
the black button. The last thing he remembered were the
words, still clear in his ears, “don’t mean a thing without one
human finger.” Then the walls of the boat collapsed and re­
leased the water. And the electron-positron pairs appeared in­
stead of the neutrino-antineutrino pairs. On the neutrino de­
tector in the orbiting ship, Eden saw the tiny hot core fade
and disappear. The technician made an adjustment to bring
in the neutrinos with slightly greater interaction, and the nor­
mal core showed up again, with its normal neutrino flux. But
Eden, though he stared at the screen with eyes wide open,
could see nothing but a blur.
 MERCURY

Mercury was known to the ancients, but it was only after the
coming of the Copernican view of the Solar system in 1543 that
it was clearly understood that Mercury was the planet nearest
the Sun.
It was found to be a small planet only 4860 kilometers (3020
miles) in diameter— not quite two-fifths the diameter of Earth—
and its orbit about the Sun was substantially elliptical.
Mercury’s average distance from the Sun is 57,800,000 kilo­
meters (35,900,000 miles), but when it is at its farthest point
from the Sun it is 69,800,000 kilometers (43,400,000 miles)
away from it. That is only 45 percent of Earth’s distance from
the Sun, but that is the farthest that Mercury can get. When it is
closest to the Sun, at the opposite end of its orbit, Mercury is
only 46,000,000 kilometers (28,600,000 miles) from the Sun,
only 30 percent of Earth's distance.
It seemed clear under those circumstances that Mercury was
bound to be the hottest of the planets, especially when closest
to the Sun. When farthest from the Sun, Mercury sees it twice
as wide as when seen from Earth, and the Sun then delivers 4.3
times as much heat to Mercury as it delivers to Earth. When the
Sun is at its closest, it seems 3.3 times as wide to Mercury as
when seen from Earth and delivers 10.6 times as much energy.
What effect this has on Mercury’s surface temperature de­
pends also on how fast Mercury rotates. How long does its
swollen Sun shine down on a particular spot?

30
 MERCURY 31

It’s hard to tell. Mercury is so near the Sun in the sky and so
small that it is very difficult to observe. Then, too, when it is far­
thest from the Sun and most easily seen, less than half the side
we see is bathed in Sunlight. The rest is dark and invisible.
A logical guess, though, was that its rotational period was 88
days, equal to its time of revolution about the Sun. After all,
when a small body is subjected to the gravitational pull of a
nearby large body, tidal effects are produced which tend to
slow the rotation of the small body till it matches the period of
revolution. This has happened to the Moon, for instance, under
the tidal effects of Earth’s gravitation.
When the period of rotation equals the period of revolution,
then the small body turns one side to the large body at all times.
That is true of the Moon with respect to the Earth, and we see
only one side of the Moon.
The Sun’s tidal effects on Mercury are not quite as strong as
Earth’s on the Moon, but they might be strong enough. If so,
Mercury would face only one side to the Sun as it turned. There
would be a Brightside and a Darkside.
Since Mercury’s orbit is quite lopsided, its speed of revolution
would vary with position in orbit, being faster when closer to the
Sun and slower when farther. Mercury’s rotation, which would
be constant, would alternately pull ahead of the revolution and
fall behind. The Sun would therefore seem to oscillate in Mer­
cury’s sky, and there would be two broad sectors between the
Brightside and the Darkside where the Sun would rise and set
twice a revolution. These sectors would be relatively mild in
temperature— for Mercury.
The Darkside, which never saw the Sun, would be at tem­
peratures near absolute zero. The Brightside, especially when
the Sun was at its closest, would blaze at temperatures hot
enough to melt tin and lead. The fact that Mercury has no atmo­
sphere would make the temperatures all the more extreme.
In the 1880s, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli set up the basis
for the above analysis. He made out dim streaks on Mercury
and decided that they always maintained the same position rela-
32 MERCURY

tive to the Sun. By 1890, he announced that Mercury definitely

did keep one side to the Sun, and that was accepted for three-
quarters of a century. It was still taken as truth in 1956, when
"Brightside Crossing” appeared.
But then microwave astronomy developed in the decades
after World War II. The Darkside of Mercury gave off no light, of
course, but it could give off lightlike radiation of longer wave­
length (such as microwaves) that was not visible to the eye but
was detectable to other instruments. Such radiation is given off
at any temperature, and the wavelength and intensity of such
radiation is characteristic of the temperature. Study the radi­
ation, in other words, and you know the temperature.
In the early 1960s, microwaves were detected to be radiated
from the Darkside in surprising quantities. The Darkside had to
be quite warm to produce that many microwaves, and it couldn’t
possibly be that warm if it never saw the Sun, especially as
there was no atmosphere to circulate and bring warmth from
the Brightside to the Darkside.
Microwaves can also be used to measure a planet’s rate of
rotation. If microwaves are sent out to a planet, and if they are
reflected by the planetary surface, and if the reflected waves
are detected, then that is all that is needed. The reflection is not
quite the same from a moving surface as from a stationary one,
and the changes increase with the speed of motion. By studying
the reflected microwaves, in other words, Mercury’s speed of
rotation could be determined.
In 1965, it was discovered that Mercury rotated on its axis
within a period of 58.7 days— just two-thirds its period of revo­
lution. This could be brought about if the tidal effect were not
quite strong enough to slow down the speed of rotation to an
exact equality with the period of revolution.
It was something that might have been foreseen as a possibil­
ity, but hadn’t been.
This means that every part of Mercury experiences both day
and night. Each day is 88 Earth-days long and each night is 88
Earth-days long, but there is neither constant day nor constant
night anywhere.
 MERCURY 33

Still, one side of Mercury always experiences its Sunlight

when the Sun is at or near its closest, and the other side when
the Sun is at or near its farthest. This means that one hemi­
sphere is hotter than the other, and so a "Brightside” cross­
ing— that is, during daytime on the side of the planet that is
then near the Sun— can still be spoken of.
It would not be quite as hot as had been thought, however,
and if one traveled in the right direction, the night shadow would
come to meet one and shave off some of the duration— but it
would still be bad enough.
In 1974, by the way, the Mariner 10 probe passed close by
Mercury and took photographs that finally revealed its surface
in detail. It looks very much like a larger Moon, though it lacks
"maria,” the wide, relatively flat, and unscarred "seas” of the
Moon.
 Brightside Crossing
ALAN E. NOURSE

James Baron was not pleased to hear that he had had a visi­
tor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no
stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were press­
ing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had
flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand par­
dons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name.
He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.”
Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring
about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the
Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in
number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew
vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were.
Over near the door he recognized old Balmer. who had
mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Ve­
nus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled
back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded
his time without justifying it.
Presently a small grizzled man crossed the room and sat
down at Baron's table. He was short and wiry. His face held
no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—
but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and
forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still
healing.
The stranger said, “I'm glad you waited. I've heard you’re
planning to attempt the Brightside.”

34
 ALAN E. NOURSE 35

Baron stared at the man for a moment. “ I see you can read
telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are go­
ing to make a Brightside Crossing.”
“At perihelion?”
“Of course. When else?”
The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment
without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid
you’re not going to make the Crossing.”
“Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded.
“The name is Claney,” said the stranger.
There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?”
“That’s right.”
Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger
gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hid­
ing? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!”
“ I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the
whole idea.”
“Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “ My
friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking.
Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fin­
gers were trembling.
Peter Claney shook his head. “ I can’t tell you anything you
want to hear.”
“ But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s
attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And
the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need
details. Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you
miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a
finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma?
Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve
got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it
across where your attempt failed—”
“ You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney.
“Of course we want to know. We have to know.”
“ It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We
couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will
36 BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING

ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.”
“Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.”
Claney shrugged. “ I was there. I know what I’m saying.
You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws
in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were
fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun.
They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.”
“Never,” said Baron.
“Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said.

I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I

can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when
Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in
2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial
and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared.
I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off
without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of
surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn't have
made a hundred miles—but I didn't know that then, and it
was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson's
work in the twilight lab up there and began to get Brightside
into my blood, sure as death.
But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you
ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not
Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Inter­
planetary Service for some years and hung on to the title
after he gave up his commission.
He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days,
did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the
Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years
together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since
the Matto Grosso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan
Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later.
I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool,
the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further
ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a
 ALAN E. NOURSE 37

tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and
luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had
the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men
and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thou­
sand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him.
He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at
first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking
about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and
how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the twilight lab on
Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any
day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been
doing since Venus and what my plans were.
“ No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?”
He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?”
I told him one thirty-five.
“That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on
you, at any rate. How do you take heat?”
“ You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.”
“No, I mean real heat.”
Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.”
“That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be
dangerous, too.”
“ What trip?”
“ Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said.
I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?”
He threw his head back. “ Why try a Crossing at aphelion?
What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcher-
ous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data
and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-
four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without
any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “ I want
to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the
surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then,
nobody's got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help
getting it.”
I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider
38 BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING

it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared.

Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels
around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always
facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihe­
lion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single ex­
ception: the surface of the Sun itself.
It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned
just how hellish, and they never came back to tell about it. It
was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody
would cross it.
I wanted to be along.

The twilight lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was

the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn't very
extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for San­
derson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that
housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten
years before.
Twilight lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Bright­
side, of course—the Sun was Sanderson's baby and he'd
picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that
could hold his observatory. He'd chosen a good location, too.
On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at peri­
helion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No
permanent installation with a human crew could survive at
either extreme. But with Mercury's wobble, the twilight zone
between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to
survival temperatures.
Sanderson built the lab up near the pole, where the zone is
about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60
degrees with the libration. The Solar 'scope could take that
much change and they’d get good clear observation of the
Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the
planet to wheel around.
The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something
 ALAN E. NOURSE 39

about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the lab

to make final preparations.
Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said
so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week
briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had
arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier.
Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, San­
derson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Bright-
side was like.
Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but
he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join
this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care
for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, fol­
lowed him around like a puppy.
It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was get­
ting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they
do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them
can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway,
Stone had borrowed three men from the lab, and had the
supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready
to check and test.
We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and
some government cash the Major had talked his way
around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done
the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from San­
derson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire
models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat
set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the
sledges.
The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he
said, “ Have you heard anything from Mclvers?”
“ Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know.
“ He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name
for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You've
probably heard of him.”
40 BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING

I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted Mclvers and I wasn’t

too happy to hear that he was joining us. “ Kind of a daredev­
il, isn’t he?”
“ Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the
line? We’ll need plenty of both.”
“Have you ever worked with him?” I asked.
“No. Are you worried?”
“ Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.”
The Major laughed. “ I don’t think we need to worry about
Mclvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip
to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do
any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list.
“ Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need
to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says
we should leave in three days.”
Two days later, Mclvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t
say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We
spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such
as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from
so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up.
They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and
faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a
broad outline of our course.
“This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around
the board, “ is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But
these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph
tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse
down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface
shifting.”
Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably con­
stant surface activity."
The Major shrugged. “ Well, it’s treacherous, there's no
doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the
pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of
less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we
 ALAN E. NOURSE 41

could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—”
It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the
further we got from a solution. We knew there were active
volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though
surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and lo­
calized.
But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as
well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric
flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter
gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from
Brightside millennia ago— but there was C 0 2, and nitrogen,
and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abun­
dance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur
dioxide.
The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it
condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sander­
son to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals
on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a pas­
sage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in
the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The
only way we would find out what was happening where was
to be there.
Finally, on the third day, Mclvers blew in on a freight
rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and
I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus
in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too up­
set about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things
and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited.
He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely
gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-
closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alert­
ness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always
doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about.
Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his
arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were
42 BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING

running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening,

Stone and Mclvers were thick as thieves, and everything was
set for an early departure after we got some rest.

“And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling

the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.”
Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “ Mclvers?”
“Of course.”
Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around
them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place
like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most
reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t
our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and
route next.”
Baron nodded in agreement. “ What kind of suits did you
have?”
“The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “ Each
one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid
the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit
and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges ev­
ery eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome
reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees.
And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pres­
sure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of
course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us
to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.”
“How about the Bugs?"
“They were insulated, too, but we weren't counting on
them too much for protection.”
“You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “ Why not?”
“We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mo­
bility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of for­
ward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “ Which meant
that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air
between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like
water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of
 ALAN E. NOURSE 43

sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a camp­

fire.”
Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool wet glass
as he set it down on the tablecloth.
“Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?”
“Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right.
We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m
getting to that.”
He settled back in his chair and continued.

We jumped off- from Twilight on a course due southeast

with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we
could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit
Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest
approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of
the planet at the hottest it ever gets.
The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon
when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every
day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day
the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center,
the job was only half done—we would still have to travel an­
other two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. San­
derson was to meet us on the other side in the laboratory’s
scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we
jumped off.
That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those
seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter
what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous
and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all
knew that.
The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left.
“Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped
down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giv­
ing you a hundred-yard lead. Mclvers, you’ll have the job of
dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pret­
ty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given
44 BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING

point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore

ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?”
Mclvers and Stone exchanged glances. Mclvers said,
“Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he
could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mo­
bility.”
The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that,
Jack?”
Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—”
Mclvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “ It
doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does
it make any difference?”
“I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you'll flank Pe­
ter along with me. Right?”
“Sure, sure.” Mclvers pulled at his lower lip. “ Who’s going
to do the advance scouting?”
“ It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “ We want to keep the lead
Bug light as possible.”
Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down
to the frame and wheels.”
Mclvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work.
You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—
to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don't
you?” He stared at the Major. “ I mean, how can we tell what
sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout
up ahead?”
“That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said
sharply.
“Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to
worry about the major topography. It's the little faults you
can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the
charts down excitedly. “ Look, let me take a Bug out ahead
and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of
the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but
scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid
the flaws. Then—”
“No dice,” the Major broke in.
 ALAN E. NOURSE 45

“ But why not? We could save ourselves days!”

“ I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When
we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That
means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times.
Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than
one man alone— any time, any place.”
Mclvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he
gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.”
“ Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff.
We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing
together. Got that?”
Mclvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and
we nodded, too.
“All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight,
let’s go.”
It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll
never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a
break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the
first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and
fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast
of the twilight lab.
I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the
Major and Mclvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires
taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them,
Stone dragged the sledges.
Even at only 30 percent Earth gravity they were a strain on
the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic
ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for
the first twenty miles.
I kept my eyes pasted to the big Polaroid binocs, picking
out the track the early research teams had made out into the
edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past
Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped.
We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was begin­
ning to bite.
We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We
saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable
46 BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING

seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes

watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going
past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We
poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace.
We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period
came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw
up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and
rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or sev­
enty degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate
from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein,
carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins.
The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because
we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise.
We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiolo­
gists and psychiatrists why—they can give you half a dozen
interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was
that it happened to be so.
We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our
eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring head­
aches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking
at each other. Then Mclvers would say how good a beer
would taste, and off we’d go. We'd have murdered our grand­
mothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer.
After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at
the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made
Earth's old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden.
Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge,
with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled
with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous
gases.
It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but
the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No
one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who
had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still
there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be
crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything
 ALAN E. NOURSE 47

the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time pos­
sible.
Yet we knew that even the land might have been con­
quered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute
cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and
won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the sur­
face of the Sun itself.
Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it
would get us. That was the bargain.
I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving peri­
ods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we
moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran
south and east. This range had shown no activity since the
first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it
there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters
constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash.
We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot,
sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across
the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The
craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of
rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smok­
ing and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over every­
thing was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and lime­
stone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offer­
ing a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires.
I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the
sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it
from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to
a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with
light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more
until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It
was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly,
at first.
Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to
think so, too.
Mclver’s restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves.
48 BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING

He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were

driving—wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin
with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route
now and then, never far, but a little farther each time.
Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with
each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it,
but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was appre­
hensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better.
And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher
in the sky and hotter. Without our ultraviolet screens and
glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes
ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled
at the end of an eight-hour trek.
But it took one of those side trips of Mclvers’ to deliver the
penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driv­
en down a side branch of a long canyon running off west of
our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when
we heard a sharp cry through our earphones.
I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and
spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the
top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering
down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a
thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.
We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the
gorge, and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was
the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the
sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in
a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up
the middle, half buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away
were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through
the fiberglass helmets.
This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on
their Brightside Crossing.

On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to

 ALAN E. NOURSE 49

change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt
different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl
of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug
gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened.
I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs,
thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as
the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the
wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the
tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all
the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead,
steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash.
I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting
into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really
treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had
okayed Mclvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more danger­
ous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now
and I didn’t like it.
One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t think­
ing much about the others. I was worried about me, plenty
worried. I kept thinking, Better Mclvers should go than me.
It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get
the thought out of my mind.
It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in
the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a
broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface
cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the ma­
chines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the
yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of
it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped
six feet beyond a deep crack.
I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug
forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved
fifty yards to the left, then back to the right.
There was only one place that looked like a possible cross­
ing—a long narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a
50 BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING

section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could

feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the
ledge shift over a few feet.
The Major’s voice sounded in my ears. “ How about it, Pe­
ter?”
“I don’t know. This crust is on roller skates,” I called back.
“How about that ledge?”
I hesitated. “I’m scared of it, Major. Let’s backtrack and
try to find a way around.”
There was a roar of disgust in my earphones and Mclvers’
Bug suddenly lurched forward. It rolled down past me,
picked up speed, with Mclvers hunched behind the wheel like
a race driver. He was heading past me straight for the gray
ledge.
My shout caught in my throat; I heard the Major take a
huge breath and roar, “ Mac! Stop that thing, you fool!” and
then Mclvers’ Bug was out on the ledge, lumbering across
like a juggernaut.
The ledge jolted as the tires struck it; for a horrible mo­
ment it seemed to be sliding out from under the machine.
And then the Bug was across in a cloud of dust, and 1 heard
Mclvers’ voice in my ears, shouting in glee. “Come on, you
slowpokes. It’ll hold you!”
Something unprintable came through the earphones as the
Major drew up alongside me and moved his Bug out on the
ledge slowly and over to the other side. Then he said, “Take
it slow, Peter. Then give Jack a hand with the sledges." His
voice sounded tight as a wire.
Ten minutes later, we were on the other side of the cleft.
The Major checked the whole column; then he turned on
Mclvers angrily. “One more trick like that,” he said, “and
I’ll strap you to a rock and leave you. Do you understand
me? One more time—”
Mclvers’ voice was heavy with protest. “Good Lord, if we
leave it up to Claney, he’ll have us out here forever! Any
blind fool could see that that ledge would hold.”
 ALAN E. NOURSE 51

“/ saw it moving,” I shot back at him.

“All right, all right, so you’ve got good eyes. Why all the
fuss? We got across, didn’t we? But I say we’ve got to have a
little nerve and use it once in a while if we’re ever going to
get across this lousy hotbox.”
“We need to use a little judgment, too,” the Major
snapped. “All right, let’s roll. But if you think I was joking,
you just try me out once.” He let it soak in for a minute.
Then he geared his Bug on around to my flank again.
At the stopover, the incident wasn’t mentioned again, but
the Major drew me aside just as I was settling down for
sleep. “Peter, I’m worried,” he said slowly.
“Mclvers? Don’t worry. He’s not as reckless as he seems—
just impatient. We are over a hundred miles behind schedule
and we’re moving awfully slow. We only made forty miles
this last drive.”
The Major shook his head. “I don’t mean Mclvers. I mean
the kid.”
“Jack? What about him?”
“Take a look.”
Stone was shaking. He was over near the tractor—away
from the rest of us—and he was lying on his back, but he
wasn’t asleep. His whole body was shaking, convulsively. I
saw him grip an outcropping of rock hard.
I walked over and sat down beside him. “Get your water
all right?” I said.
He didn’t answer. He just kept on shaking.
“ Hey, boy,” I said. “W hat’s the trouble?”
“ It’s hot,” he said, choking out the words.
“Sure it’s hot, but don’t let it throw you. We’re in really
good shape.”
“ We're not,” he snapped. “We’re in rotten shape, if you
ask me. We’re not going to make it, do you know that? That
crazy fool’s going to kill us for sure—” All of a sudden, he
was bawling like a baby. “ I’m scared— I shouldn’t be here—
I’m scared. What am I trying to prove by coming out here,
52 BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING

for God’s sake? I’m some kind of hero or something? I tell

you I’m scared—”
“Look,” I said. “ Mikuta’s scared, I ’m scared. So what?
We’ll make it, don’t worry. And nobody’s trying to be a
hero.”
“Nobody but Hero Stone,” he said bitterly. He shook him­
self and gave a tight little laugh. “Some hero, eh?”
“We’ll make it,” I said.
“Sure,” he said finally. “Sorry. I’ll be okay.”
I rolled over, but waited until he was good and quiet. Then
I tried to sleep, but I didn’t sleep too well. I kept thinking
about that ledge. I’d known from the look of it what it was; a
zinc slough of the sort Sanderson had warned us about, a
wide sheet of almost pure zinc that had been thrown up
white-hot from below, quite recently, just waiting for oxygen
or sulfur to rot it through.
I knew enough about zinc to know that at these tempera­
tures it gets brittle as glass. Take a chance like Mclvers had
taken and the whole sheet could snap like a dry pine board.
And it wasn’t Mclvers’ fault that it hadn’t.
Five hours later, we were back at the wheel. We were
hardly moving at all. The ragged surface was almost impass­
able—great jutting rocks peppered the plateau; ledges crum­
bled the moment my tires touched them; long, open canyons
turned into lead mires or sulfur pits.
A dozen times I climbed out of the Bug to prod out an un­
certain area with my boots and pikestaff. Whenever I did,
Mclvers piled out behind me, running ahead like a schoolboy
at the fair, then climbing back again red-faced and panting,
while we moved the machines ahead another mile or two.
Time was pressing us now and Mclvers wouldn't let me
forget it. We had made only about three hundred twenty
miles in six driving periods, so we were about a hundred miles
or even more behind schedule.
“We're not going to make it,” Mclvers would complain an-
 ALAN E. NOURSE 53

grily. “That Sun’s going to be out to aphelion by the time we

hit the Center—”
“Sorry, but I can’t take it any faster,” I told him. I was
getting good and mad. I knew what he wanted, but didn’t
dare let him have it. I was scared enough pushing the Bug
out on those ledges, even knowing that at least I was making
the decisions. Put him in the lead and we wouldn’t last for
eight hours. Our nerves wouldn’t take it, at any rate, even if
the machines would.
Jack Stone looked up from the aluminum chart sheets.
“Another hundred miles and we should hit a good stretch,”
he said. “ Maybe we can make up distance there for a couple
of days.”
The Major agreed, but Mclvers couldn’t hold his impa­
tience. He kept staring up at the Sun as if he had a personal
grudge against it and stamped back and forth under the sun-
shield.
“That’ll be just fine,” he said. “I f we ever get that far, that
is.”
We dropped it there, but the Major stopped me as we
climbed aboard for the next run. “That guy’s going to blow
wide open if we don’t move faster, Peter. I don’t want him in
the lead, no matter what happens. He’s right though, about
the need to make better time. Keep your head, but crowd
your luck a little, okay?”
“ I’ll try,” I said. It was asking the impossible and Mikuta
knew it. We were on a long downward slope that shifted and
buckled all around us, as though there were a molten under­
lay beneath the crust; the slope was broken by huge cre­
vasses, partly covered with dust and zinc sheeting, like a vast
glacier of stone and metal. The outside temperature regis­
tered 547° F. and getting hotter. It was no place to start
rushing ahead.
I tried it anyway. I took half a dozen shaky passages, edg­
ing slowly out on flat zinc ledges, then toppling over and
54 BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING

across. It seemed easy for a while and we made progress. We

hit an even stretch and raced ahead. And then I quickly
jumped on my brakes and jerked the Bug to a halt in a cloud
of dust.
I’d gone too far. We were out on a wide flat sheet of gray
stuff, apparently solid—until I’d suddenly caught sight of the
crevasse beneath in the corner of my eye. It was an overhang­
ing shell that trembled under me as I stopped.
Mclvers’ voice was in my ear. “ W hat’s the trouble now,
Claney?”
“Move back!” I shouted. “It can’t hold us!”
“Looks solid enough from here.”
“You want to argue about it? It’s too thin, it’ll snap. Move
back!”
I started edging back down the ledge. I heard Mclvers
swear; then I saw his Bug start to creep outward on the shelf.
Not fast or reckless, this time, but slowly, churning up dust
in a gentle cloud behind him.
I just stared and felt the blood rush to my head. It seemed
so hot I could hardly breathe as he edged out beyond me, fur­
ther and further—
I think I felt it snap before I saw it. My own machine gave
a sickening lurch and a long black crack appeared across the
shelf—and widened. Then the ledge began to upend. I heard
a scream as Mclvers’ Bug rose up and up and then crashed
down into the crevasse in a thundering slide of rock and shat­
tered metal.
I just stared for a full minute, I think. I couldn’t move un­
til I heard Jack Stone groan and the Major shouting,
“Claney! I couldn’t see - what happened?"
“ It snapped on him, that’s what happened,” I roared. I
gunned my motor, edged forward toward the fresh broken
edge of the shelf. The crevasse gaped; I couldn’t see any sign
of the machine. Dust was still billowing up blindingly from
below.
 ALAN E. NOURSE 55

We stood staring down, the three of us. I caught a glimpse

of Jack Stone’s face through his helmet. It wasn’t pretty.
“ Well,” said the Major heavily, “that’s that.”
“ I guess so.” I felt the way Stone looked.
“ W ait,” said Stone. “I heard something.”
He had. It was a cry in the earphones—faint, but unmis­
takable.
“ Mac!” the Major called. “ Mac, can you hear me?”
“Yeah, yeah. I can hear you.” The voice was very weak.
“Are you all right?”
“I don’t know. Broken leg, I think. It’s—hot.” There was a
long pause. Then: “ I think my cooler’s gone out.”
The Major shot me a glance, then turned to Stone. “Get a
cable from the second sledge fast. He’ll fry alive if we don’t
get him out of there. Peter, I need you to lower me. Use the
tractor winch.”
I lowered him; he stayed down only a few moments. When
I hauled him up, his face was drawn. “Still alive,” he panted.
“ He won’t be very long, though.” He hesitated for just an in­
stant. “ We’ve got to make a try.”
“ I don’t like this ledge,” I said. “It’s moved twice since I
got out. Why not back off and lower him a cable?”
“No good. The Bug is smashed and he’s inside it. We’ll
need torches and I’ll need one of you to help.” He looked at
me and then gave Stone a long look. “Peter, you’d better
come.”
“ W ait,” said Stone. His face was very white. “ Let me go
down with you.”
“Peter is lighter.”
“I’m not so heavy. Let me go down.”
“Okay, if that’s the way you want it.” The Major tossed
him a torch. “Peter, check these hitches and lower us slowly.
If you see any kind of trouble, anything, cast yourself free
and back off this thing, do you understand? This whole ledge
may go.”
56 BRIGHTSIDE CROSSING

I nodded. “Good luck.”

They went over the ledge. I let the cable down bit by bit
until it hit two hundred feet and slacked off.
“How does it look?” I shouted.
“Bad,” said the Major. “ We’ll have to work fast. This
whole side of the crevasse is ready to crumble. Down a little
more.”
Minutes passed without a sound. I tried to relax, but I
couldn’t. Then I felt the ground shift, and the tractor lurched
to the side.
The Major shouted, “It’s going, Peter—pull back!" and I
threw the tractor into reverse, jerked the controls as the trac­
tor rumbled off the shelf. The cable snapped, coiled up in
front like a broken clockspring. The whole surface under me
was shaking wildly now; ash rose in huge gray clouds. Then,
with a roar, the whole shelf lurched and slid sideways. It tee­
tered on the edge for seconds before it crashed into the cre­
vasse, tearing the side wall down with it in a mammoth slide.
I jerked the tractor to a halt as the dust and flame billowed
up.
They were gone—all three of them, Mclvers and the Ma­
jor and Jack Stone—buried under a thousand tons of rock
and zinc and molten lead. There wasn't any danger of any­
body ever finding their bones.

Peter Claney leaned back, finishing his drink, rubbing his

scarred face as he looked across at Baron.
Slowly, Baron's grip relaxed on the chair arm. ”You got
back,” he said.
Claney nodded. “ I got back. sure. I had the tractor and the
sledges. I had seven days to drive back under that yellow
Sun. I had plenty of time to think.”
“You took the wrong man along,” Baron said. “That was
your mistake. Without him you would have made it.”
“ Never.” Claney shook his head. “That's what I was think­
ing the first day or so—that it was Mclvers’ fault, that he
 ALAN E. NOURSE 57

was to blame. But that isn’t true. He was wild, reckless, and
had lots of nerve.”
“ But his judgment was bad!”
“ It couldn’t have been sounder. We had to keep to our
schedule even if it killed us, because it would positively kill us
if we didn’t.”
“ But a man like that—”
“A man like Mclvers was necessary. Can’t you see that? It
was the Sun that beat us, that surface. Perhaps we were
licked the very day we started.” Claney leaned across the ta­
ble, his eyes pleading. “ We didn’t realize that, but it was
true. There are places that men can’t go, conditions men
can’t tolerate. The others had to die to learn that. I was
lucky, I came back. But I’m trying to tell you what I found
out—that nobody will ever make a Brightside Crossing.”
“ We will,” said Baron. “It won’t be a picnic, but we’ll
make it.”
“ But suppose you do,” said Claney, suddenly. “Suppose
I’m all wrong, suppose you do make it. Then what? What
comes next?"
“The Sun,” said Baron.
Claney nodded slowly. “Yes. That would be it, wouldn’t
it?” He laughed. “Good-by, Baron. Jolly talk and all that.
Thanks for listening.”
Baron caught his wrist as he started to rise. “Just one ques­
tion more, Claney. Why did you come here?”
“To try to talk you out of killing yourself,” said Claney.
“You’re a liar,” said Baron.
Claney stared down at him for a long moment. Then he
crumpled in the chair. There was defeat in his pale blue eyes
and something else.
“Well?”
Peter Claney spread his hands, a helpless gesture. “ When
do you leave, Baron? I want you to take me along.”
 VENUS

Venus is a frustrating planet, for it has long been a mystery

even though it is the closest planet to ourselves. When it and
the Earth are in appropriate positions in their orbits, they may
be separated by only 38,900,000 kilometers (24,100,000
miles) or only 101 times the distance between the Earth and the
Moon.
It is the brightest of the planets, far brighter than any star,
brighter than any permanent object in our skies except the Sun
and Moon, and with a larger apparent disc. You would suppose
astronomers would have a field day studying it.
They don’t. The closer it comes to us and the larger it gets,
the more of the side that is facing us is dark. Venus is closer to
the Sun than we are (its average distance from the Sun is only
0.72 that of Earth’s distance) and it gets in between us and the
Sun when it is close. We then see the wrong side.
Even if we could look at Venus completely Sun-lit, it would do
us no good, for one of the earliest discoveries of the early tele-
scopists was that Venus is covered with a solid layer of clouds
that never breaks. Its visible “ surface" is absolutely feature­
less.
Right down to the 1950s, we knew Venus’s size and the na­
ture of its orbit but nothing about its solid surface. We didn’t
even know what the planet’s speed of rotation was.
One could guess, of course, and people did, fancying that
they could measure the rotation from fugitive markings. Some

58
 VENUS 59

reported that Venus rotated in 24 hours as Earth did; some re­

ported that it faced one side to the Sun at all times (as Mercury
was thought to do), so that it rotated once in 224.7 days, which
is the planet’s period of revolution.
Most people suspected a relatively fast rotation. Between
that and the cloudy layer (which reflected three-fourths of the
incoming Solar radiation) it was felt that Venus’s surface, while
warm, would not be too warm for life. The planet, it was felt,
would be a tropical one everywhere, dark by night, rather gray
by day.
Clouds are naturally associated with rain, so it seemed natu­
ral to suppose that Venus was a rainy planet. Some even felt
that Venus might have a planetary ocean, with little or no land
surface.
By the mid-1950s, however, astronomers began to come up
with some puzzling news. Microwaves from Venus seemed to
be coming in unexpectedly large quantities. To give off so much
in the way of microwaves, Venus would have to be very hot—
hotter than the boiling point of water. If that were so, Venus
would have to be a hot desert, a super-Sahara.
It didn’t seem likely and, for a while, many astronomers felt
that there might be some mistake, that the data were being mis­
interpreted. Still, science fiction writers seized on the reports to
write stories based on new versions of the Venus environment,
such as ‘'Prospector’s Special,” which was published in 1959.
If anything, though, the initial suggestions of Venerian heat
were conservative. On December 14, 1962, a probe, Mariner 2,
flew by Venus at a nearest approach of 35,000 kilometers
(22,000 miles) and was able to measure the microwave emis­
sion with great precision. It seemed clear that Venus's surface
temperature approached an unbelievable 500°C. on both the
sunny side and the dark side.
There couldn’t be a drop of liquid water anywhere on the sur­
face of Venus, and even the world of "Prospector's Special” is
now out of date.
Why should Venus be so hot? The answer probably lies in the
60 VENUS

atmosphere. It was expected to be thicker than Earth’s and to

be rich in carbon dioxide, but the full extent of the thickness and
richness wasn’t known until 1967, when a Soviet probe, Venera
IV, finally actually entered the atmosphere and passed through
it to the solid surface of the planet.
It was supposed that the atmosphere might be 20 times as
dense as Earth’s; it was actually over 90 times as dense. And
95 percent of that souplike atmosphere was carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is transparent to visible light and quite opaque
to infrared. Sunlight passes through to hit the surface, be ab­
sorbed, and converted to heat. The hot surface reradiates ener­
gy as infrared, which cannot get through the atmosphere. The
heat is trapped and Venus’s temperature goes up till the in­
frared is forced through. The result is called a “ runaway green­
house effect” (so called because the glass in a greenhouse per­
forms a similar function).
According to the data we are now receiving from Venus by
way of our probes, not only is there not a drop of liquid water
on the planet, but even the clouds are not simply water drop­
lets. There is very likely sulfuric acid present; and if it could
ever rain on Venus, which it can’t, it would rain a wildly corro­
sive liquid.
And what about Venus's period of rotation? Scientists have
sent microwave beams to Venus and these can pierce the
clouds and bounce off the solid surface. Using microwave re­
flection, they can even make crude maps of that surface and
have located what seem to be mountain ranges and volcanoes.
What’s more, the microwave reflections measure the period
of rotation, which turns out to be slow— even slower than its pe­
riod of revolution. Venus turns on its axis only once in 243.1
Earth-days, and does so in a retrograde fashion— east to west,
rather than west to east.
This means that the length of time between sunrise and sun­
set on Venus is 117 Earth-days.
Venus may be farther from the Sun than Mercury is, but Ve­
nus is the more hostile world of the two. It is hotter all over its
 VENUS 61

surface than Mercury is even under the blaze of its Sun at its
largest.
On Mercury, the temperature drops when the Sun is not at
zenith, and during the night its surface gets cold, even very
cold. Venus's thick atmosphere, whipping about in gales, equal­
izes the temperature everywhere and makes it hell everywhere.
Considering the surface temperature, the atmospheric pres­
sure, and the sulfuric acid clouds, it doesn’t seem as though
manned exploration of Venus is going to take place in a hurry.
 Prospector’s Special
ROBERT SHECKLEY

The sandcar moved smoothly over the rolling dunes, its six
fat wheels rising and falling like the ponderous rumps of tan­
dem elephants. The hidden sun beat down from a dead-white
sky, pouring heat into the canvas top, reflecting heat back
from the parched sand.
“Stay awake,” Morrison told himself, pulling the sandcar
back to its compass course.
It was his twenty-first day on Venus's Scorpion Desert, his
twenty-first day of fighting sleep while the sandcar rocked
across the dunes, forging over humpbacked little waves.
Night travel would have been easier, but there were too many
steep ravines to avoid, too many house-sized boulders to
dodge. Now he knew why men went into the desert in teams;
one man drove while the other kept shaking him awake.
“ But it’s better alone," Morrison reminded himself. “ Half
the supplies and no accidental murders."
His head was beginning to droop; he snapped himself erect.
In front of him, the landscape shimmered and danced
through the Polaroid windshield. The sandcar lurched and
rocked with treacherous gentleness. Morrison rubbed his eyes
and turned on the radio.
He was a big sunburned, rangy young man with close-
cropped black hair and gray eyes. He had come to Venus
with a grubstake of twenty thousand dollars, to find his for­
tune in the Scorpion Desert as others had done before him.

62
 ROBERT SHECKLEY 63

He had outfitted in Presto, the last town on the edge of the

wilderness, and spent all but ten dollars on the sandcar and
equipment.
In Presto, ten dollars just covered the cost of a drink in the
town’s only saloon. So Morrison ordered rye and water,
drank with the miners and prospectors, and laughed at the
oldtimers’ yarns about the sandwolf packs and the squadrons
of voracious birds that inhabited the interior desert. He knew
all about sunblindness, heatstroke, and telephone breakdown.
He was sure none of it would happen to him.
But now, after twenty-one days and eighteen hundred
miles, he had learned respect for this waterless waste of sand
and stone three times the area of the Sahara. You really
could die here!
But you could also get rich, and that was what Morrison
planned to do.
His radio hummed. At full volume, he could hear the faint­
est murmur of dance music from Venusborg. Then it faded
and only the hum was left.
He turned off the radio and gripped the steering wheel
tightly in both hands. He unclenched one hand and looked at
his watch. Nine-fifteen in the morning. At ten-thirty he
would stop and take a nap. A man had to have rest in this
heat. But only a half-hour nap. Treasure lay somewhere
ahead of him, and he wanted to find it before his supplies got
much lower.
The precious outcroppings of goldenstone had to be up
ahead! He’d been following traces for two days now. Maybe
he would hit a real bonanza, as Kirk did in ’89, or Edmonson
and Arsler in ’93. If so, he would do just what they did. He’d
order up a Prospector’s Special, and to hell with the cost.
The sandcar rolled along at an even thirty miles an hour,
and Morrison tried to concentrate on the heat-blasted yellow-
brown landscape. That sandstone patch over there was just
the tawny color of Janie’s hair.
After he struck it rich, he and Janie would get married,
64 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c ia l

and he’d go back to Earth and buy an ocean farm. No more

prospecting. Just one rich strike so he could buy his spread on
the deep blue Atlantic. Maybe some people thought fish-
herding was tame; it was good enough for him.
He could see it now, the mackerel herds drifting along and
browsing at the plankton pens, himself and his trusty dolphin
keeping an eye out for the silvery flash of a predatory barra­
cuda or a steel-gray shark coming along behind the branch­
ing coral.. . .
Morrison felt the sandcar lurch. He woke up, grabbed the
steering wheel and turned it hard. During his moments of
sleep, the vehicle had crept over the dune’s crumbling edge.
Sand and pebbles spun under the fat tires as the sandcar
fought for traction. The car tilted perilously. The tires
shrieked against the sand, gripped, and started to pull the ve­
hicle back up the slope.
Then the whole face of the dune collapsed.
Morrison held on to the steering wheel as the sandcar
flipped over on its side and rolled down the slope. Sand filled
his mouth and eyes. He spat and held on while the car rolled
over again and dropped into emptiness.
For seconds, he was in the air. The sandcar hit bottom
squarely on its wheels. Morrison heard a double boom as the
two rear tires blew out. Then his head hit the windshield.
When he recovered consciousness, the first thing he did
was look at his watch. It read 10:35.
“Time for that nap,” Morrison said to himself. “ But I
guess I'll survey the situation first."
He found that he was at the bottom of a shallow fault
strewn with knife-edged pebbles. Two tires had blown on im­
pact, his windshield was gone, and one of the doors was
sprung. His equipment was strewn around, but appeared to
be intact.
“Could have been worse," Morrison said.
He bent down to examine the tires more carefully.
“ It is worse,’’ he said.
 ROBERT SHECKLEY 65

The two blown tires were shredded beyond repair. There

wasn’t enough rubber left in them to make a child’s balloon.
He had used up his spares ten days back crossing Devil’s
Grill. Used them and discarded them. He couldn’t go on
without tires.
Morrison unpacked his telephone. He wiped dust from its
black plastic face, then dialed Al’s Garage in Presto. After a
moment, the small video screen lighted up. He could see a
man’s long, mournful grease-stained face.
“Al’s Garage. Eddie speaking.”
“ Hi, Eddie. This is Tom Morrison. I bought that GM
sandcar from you about a month ago. Remember?”
“Sure I remember you,” Eddie said. “You’re the guy doing
a single into the Southwest Track. How’s the bus holding
out?”
“Fine. Great little car. Reason I called—”
“ Hey,” Eddie said, “what happened to your face?”
Morrison put his hand to his forehead and felt blood.
“ Nothing much,” he said. “ I went over a dune and blew out
two tires.”
He turned the telephone so that Eddie could see the tires.
“Unrepairable,” said Eddie.
“I thought so. And I used up all my spares crossing Devil’s
Grill. Look, Eddie, I’d like you to ’port me a couple of tires.
Retreads are fine. I can’t move the sandcar without them.”
“ Sure,” Eddie said, “except I haven’t any retreads. I’ll
have to ’port you new ones at five hundred apiece. Plus four
hundred dollars ’porting charges. Fourteen hundred dollars,
Mr. Morrison.”
“All right.”
“Yes, sir. Now if you’ll show me the cash, or a money or­
der which you can send back with the receipt, I’ll get moving
on it.”
“At the moment,” Morrison said, “ I haven’t got a cent on
me.”
“ Bank account?”
6 6 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c ia l

“Stripped clean.”
“ Bonds? Property? Anything you can convert into cash?”
“Nothing except this sandcar, which you sold me for eight
thousand dollars. When I come back. I’ll settle my bill with
the sandcar.”
“I f you get back. Sorry, Mr. Morrison. No can do.”
“What do you mean?” Morrison asked. “ You know I’ll
pay for the tires.”
“And you know the rules on Venus,” Eddie said, his
mournful face set in obstinate lines. “No credit! Cash and
carry!”
“I can’t run the sandcar without tires," Morrison said.
“Are you going to strand me out here?”
“Who in hell is stranding you?” Eddie asked. “This sort of
thing happens to prospectors every day. You know what you
have to do now, Mr. Morrison. Call Public Utility and de­
clare yourself a bankrupt. Sign over what's left of the sand­
car, equipment, and anything you’ve found on the way.
They’ll get you out.”
“I’m not turning back,” Morrison said. “ Look!” He held
the telephone close to the ground. “You see the traces, Ed­
die? See those red and purple flecks? There's precious stuff
near here!”
“ Every prospector sees traces,” Eddie said. “ Damned de­
sert if full of traces.”
“These are rich,” Morrison said. “These are leading
straight to big stuff, a bonanza lode. Eddie, I know it's a lot
to ask, but if you could stake me to a couple of tires—”
“ I can’t do it,” Eddie said. “ I just work here. I can’t 'port
you any tires, not unless you show me money first. Otherwise
I get fired and probably jailed. You know the law.”
“Cash and carry,” Morrison said bleakly.
“Right. Be smart and turn back now. Maybe you can try
again some other time.”
“I spent twelve years getting this stake together,” Morri­
son said. “I’m not going back.”
He turned off the telephone and tried to think. Was there
 ROBERT SHECKLEY 67

anyone else on Venus he could call? Only Max Krandall, his

jewel broker. But Max couldn’t raise fourteen hundred dol­
lars in that crummy two-by-four office near Venusborg’s jew­
el market. Max could barely scrape up his own rent, much
less take care of stranded prospectors.
“ I can’t ask Max for help,” Morrison decided. “Not until
I’ve found goldenstone. The real stuff, not just traces. So that
leaves it up to me.”
He opened the back of the sandcar and began to unload,
piling his equipment on the sand. He would have to choose
carefully; anything he took would have to be carried on his
back.
The telephone had to go with him, and his lightweight test­
ing kit. Food concentrates, revolver, compass. And nothing
else but water, all the water he could carry. The rest of the
stuff would have to stay behind.
By nightfall, Morrison was ready. He looked regretfully at
the twenty cans of water he was leaving. In the desert, water
was a man’s most precious possession, second only to his tele­
phone. But it couldn’t be helped. After drinking his fill, he
hoisted his pack and set a southwest course into the desert.
For three days he trekked to the southwest; then on the
fourth day he veered to due south, following an increasingly
rich trace. The sun, eternally hidden, beat down on him, and
the dead-white sky was like a roof of heated iron over his
head. Morrison followed the traces, and something followed
him.
On the sixth day, he sensed movement just out of the range
of his vision. On the seventh day, he saw what was trailing
him.
Venus’s own brand of wolf, small, lean, with a yellow coat
and long, grinning jaws, it was one of the few mammals that
made its home in the Scorpion Desert. As Morrison watched,
two more sandwolves appeared beside it.
He loosened the revolver in its holster. The wolves made no
attempt to come closer. They had plenty of time.
Morrison kept on going, wishing he had brought a rifle
6 8 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c i a l

with him. But that would have meant eight pounds more,
which meant eight pounds less water.
As he was pitching camp at dusk the eighth day, he heard
a crackling sound. He whirled around and located its source,
about ten feet to his left and above his head. A little vortex
had appeared, a tiny mouth in the air like a whirlpool in the
sea. It spun, making the characteristic crackling sounds of
’porting.
“Now who could be ’porting anything to me?” Morrison
asked, waiting while the whirlpool slowly widened.
Solidoporting from a base projector to a field target was a
standard means of moving goods across the vast distances of
Venus. Any inanimate object could be ’ported; animate be­
ings couldn’t because the process involved certain minor but
distressing molecular changes in protoplasm. A few people
had found this out the hard way when "porting was first in­
troduced.
Morrison waited. The aerial whirlpool became a mouth
three feet in diameter. From the mouth stepped a chrome-
plated robot carrying a large sack.
“Oh, it’s you,” Morrison said.
“Yes, sir,” the robot said, now completely clear of the
field. “Williams Four at your service with the Venus Mail."
It was a robot of medium height, thin-shanked and flat-
footed, humanoid in appearance, amiable in disposition. For
twenty-three years it had been Venus's entire postal service—
sorter, deliverer, and dead storage. It had been built to last,
and for twenty-three years the mails had always come
through.
“ Here we are, Mr. Morrison,” Williams 4 said. “Only
twice-a-month mail call in the desert, I'm sorry to say, but it
comes promptly and that’s a blessing. This is for you. And
this. I think there’s one more. Sandcar broke down, eh?”
“It sure did," Morrison said, taking his letters.
Williams 4 went on rummaging through its bag. Although
it was a superbly efficient postman, the old robot was known
as the worst gossip on three planets.
 R O B E R T SHECKLEY 69

“There’s one more in here somewhere,” Williams 4 said.

“Too bad about the sandcar. They just don’t build ’em like
they did in my youth. Take my advice, young man. Turn
back if you still have the chance.”
Morrison shook his head.
“ Foolish, downright foolish,” the old robot said. “Pity you
don’t have my perspective. Too many’s the time I’ve come
across you boys lying in the sand in the dried-out sack of
your skin, or with your bones gnawed to splinters by the
sandwolves and the filthy black kites. Twenty-three years I’ve
been delivering mail to fine-looking young men like you, and
each one thinking he’s unique and different.”
The robot’s eyecells became distant with memory. “But
they aren’t different,” Williams 4 said. “They’re as alike as
robots off the assembly line—especially after the wolves get
through with them. And then I have to send their letters and
personal effects back to their loved ones on Earth.”
“ I know,” Morrison said. “But some get through, don’t
they?”
“Sure they do,” the robot said. “I’ve seen men make one,
two, three fortunes. And then die on the sands trying to make
a fourth.”
“ Not me,” Morrison said. “I just want one. Then I’m go­
ing to buy me an undersea farm on Earth.”
The robot shuddered. “ I have a dread of salt water. But to
each his own. Good luck, young man.”
The robot looked Morrison over carefully—probably to see
what he had in the way of personal effects—then climbed
back into the aerial whirlpool. In a moment, it was gone. In
another moment, the whirlpool had vanished.
Morrison sat down to read his mail. The first letter was
from his jewel broker, Max Krandall. It told about the de­
pression that had hit Venusborg, and hinted that Krandall
might have to go into bankruptcy if some of his prospectors
didn’t strike something good.
The second letter was a statement from the Venus Tele­
phone Company. Morrison owed two hundred and ten dollars
70 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c i a l

and eight cents for two months’ telephone service. Unless he

remitted this sum at once, his telephone was liable to be
turned off.
The last letter, all the way from Earth, was from Janie. It
was filled with news about his cousins, aunts and uncles. She
told him about the Atlantic farm sites she had looked over,
and the wonderful little place she had found near Martinique
in the Caribbean. She begged him to give up prospecting if it
looked dangerous; they could find another way of financing
the farm. She sent all her love and wished him a happy birth­
day in advance.
“Birthday?” Morrison asked himself. “Let’s see, today is
July twenty-third. No, it’s the twenty-fourth, and my birth­
day’s August first. Thanks for remembering Janie.”
That night he dreamed of Earth and the blue expanse of
the Atlantic Ocean. But toward dawn, when the heat of Ve­
nus became insistent, he found he was dreaming of mile upon
mile of goldenstone, of grinning sandwolves, and of the Pros­
pector’s Special.
Rock gave way to sand as Morrison plowed his way across
the bottom of a long-vanished lake. Then it was rock again,
twisted and tortured into a thousand gaunt shapes. Reds, yel­
lows, and browns swam in front of his eyes. In all that desert,
there wasn’t one patch of green.
He continued his trek into the tumbled stone mazes of the
interior desert, and the wolves trekked with him, keeping
pace far out on either flank.
Morrison ignored them. He had enough on his mind just to
negotiate the sheer cliffs and the fields of broken stone that
blocked his way to the south.
By the eleventh day after leaving the sandcar, the traces
were almost rich enough for panning. The sandwolves were
tracking him still, and his water was almost gone. Another
day’s march would finish him.
Morrison thought for a moment, then unstrapped his tele­
phone and dialed Public Utility in Venusborg.
The video screen showed a stern, severely dressed woman
 ROBERT SHECKLEY 71

with iron-gray hair. “Public Utility,” she said. “May we be of

service?”
“Hi,” Morrison said cheerfully. “How’s the weather in
Venusborg?”
“Hot,” the woman said. “ How’s it out there?”
“I hadn’t even noticed,” Morrison said, grinning. “Too
busy counting my fortune.”
“You’ve found goldenstone?” the woman asked, her ex­
pression becoming less severe.
“Sure have,” Morrison said. “ But don’t pass the word
around yet. I’m still staking my claim. I think I can use a re­
fill on these.”
Smiling easily, he held up his canteens. Sometimes it
worked. Sometimes, if you showed enough confidence, Public
Utility would fill you up without checking your account.
True, it was embezzling, but this was no time for niceties.
“ I suppose your account is in order?” asked the woman.
“Of course,” Morrison said, feeling his smile grow stiff.
“The name’s Tom Morrison. You can just check—”
“Oh, I don’t do that personally,” the woman said. “ Hold
that canteen steady. Here we go.”
Gripping the canteen in both hands, Morrison watched as
the water, ’ported four thousand miles from Venusborg, ap­
peared as a slender crystal stream above the mouth of his
canteen. The stream entered the canteen, making a wonder­
ful gurgling sound. Watching it, Morrison found his dry
mouth actually was beginning to salivate.
Then the water stopped.
“ W hat’s the m atter?” Morrison asked.
His video screen went blank. Then it cleared, and Morrison
found himself staring into a man’s narrow face. The man was
seated in front of a large desk. The sign in front of him read
Milton P. Reade, Vice President, Accounts.
“ Mr. Morrison,” Reade said, “your account is overdrawn.
You have been obtaining water under false pretenses. That is
a criminal offense.”
“ I’m going to pay for the water,” Morrison said.
72 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c i a l

“When?”
“As soon as I get back to Venusborg.”
“With what,” asked Mr. Reade, “do you propose to pay?”
“With goldenstone,” Morrison said. “ Look around here,
Mr. Reade. The traces are rich! Richer than they were for
the Kirk claim! I’ll be hitting the outcroppings in another
day—”
“That’s what every prospector thinks,” Mr. Reade said.
“Every prospector on Venus is only a day from goldenstone.
And they all expect credit from Public Utility.”
“But in this case—”
“Public Utility,” Mr. Reade continued inexorably, “is not
a philanthropic organization. Its charter specifically forbids
the extension of credit. Venus is a frontier, Mr. Morrison, a
farflung frontier. Every manufactured article on Venus must
be imported from Earth at outrageous cost. We do have our
own water, but locating it, purifying it, then 'porting it is an
expensive process. This company, like every other company
on Venus, necessarily operates on a very narrow margin of
profit, which is invariably plowed back into further expan­
sion. That is why there can be no credit on Venus.”
“I know all that,” Morrison said. “ But I’m telling you, I
only need a day or two more—”
“Absolutely impossible. By the rules, we shouldn't even
help you out now. The time to report bankruptcy was a week
ago, when your sandcar broke down. Your garage man re­
ported, as required by law. But you didn’t. We would be
within our rights to leave you stranded. Do you understand
that?”
“Yes, of course,” Morrison said wearily.
“However, the company has decided to stretch a point in
your favor. If you turn back immediately, we will keep you
supplied with water for the return trip.”
“ I’m not turning back yet. I’m almost on the real stuff.”
“You must turn back! Be reasonable, Morrison! Where
would we be if we let every prospector wander over the desert
 R O B E R T S H E C K L E Y 73

while we supplied his water? There’d be ten thousand men

out there, and we’d be out of business inside of a year. I’m
stretching the rules now. Turn back.”
“No,” said Morrison.
“You’d better think about it. If you don’t turn back now,
Public Utility takes no further responsibility for your water
supply.”
Morrison nodded. If he went on, he would stand a good
chance of dying in the desert. But if he turned back, what
then? He would be in Venusborg, penniless and in debt, look­
ing for work in an overcrowded city. He’d sleep in a commu­
nity shed and eat at a soup kitchen with the other prospectors
who had turned back. And how would he be able to raise the
fare back to Earth? When would he ever see Janie again?
“ I guess I’ll keep on going,” Morrison said.
“Then Public Utility takes no further responsibility for
you,” Reade repeated, and hung up.
Morrison packed up his telephone, took a sip from his mea­
ger water supply, and went on.
The sandwolves loped along at each side, moving in closer.
Overhead, a delta-winged kite found him. It balanced on the
updrafts for a day and a night, waiting for the wolves to fin­
ish him. Then a flock of small flying scorpions sighted the
waiting kite. They drove the big creature upstairs into the
cloud bank. For a day the flying reptiles waited. Then they in
turn were driven off by a squadron of black kites.
The traces were very rich now, on the fifteenth day since
he had left the sandcar. By rights, he should be walking over
goldenstone. He should be surrounded by goldenstone. But
still he hadn’t found any.
Morrison sat down and shook his last canteen. It gave off
no wet sound. He uncapped it and turned it up over his
mouth. Two drops trickled down his parched throat.
It was about four days since he had talked to Public Util­
ity. He must have used up the last of his water yesterday. Or
had it been the day before?
7 4 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c ia l

He recapped the empty canteen and looked around at the

heat-blasted landscape. Abruptly he pulled the telephone out
of his pack and dialed Max Krandall in Venusborg.
Krandall’s round worried face swam into focus on the
screen. “Tommy,” he said, “you look like hell.”
“ I’m all right,” Morrison said. “A little dried out, that’s
all. Max, I’m near goldenstone.”
“Are you sure?” Krandall asked.
“See for yourself,” Morrison said, swinging the telephone
around. “ Look at the stone formations! Do you see the red
and purple markings over there?”
“Traces, all right,” Krandall admitted dubiously.
“There’s rich stuff just beyond it,” Morrison said. “There
has to be! Look, Max, I know you’re short on money, but I'm
going to ask you a favor. Send me a pint of water. Just a pint,
so I can go on for another day or two. We can both get rich
for the price of a pint of water.”
“I can’t do it,” Krandall said sadly.
“You can’t?”
“That’s right. Tommy, I’d send you water even if there
wasn’t anything around you but sandstone and granite. Do
you think I’d let you die of thirst if I could help it? But I
can’t do a thing. Take a look.”
Krandall rotated his telephone. Morrison saw that the
chairs, table, desk, filing cabinet and safe were gone from the
office. All that was left in the room was the telephone.
“ I don’t know why they haven’t taken out the phone,”
Krandall said. “ I owe two months on my bill.”
“ I do too,” said Morrison.
“ I’m stripped,” Krandall said. “ I haven’t got a dime. Don’t
get me wrong. I’m not worried about myself. I can always eat
at a soup kitchen. But I can't ’port you any water. Not you or
Remstaater.”
“Jim Remstaater?”
“Yeah. He was following a trace up north past Forgotten
River. His sandcar broke an axle last week and he wouldn't
turn back. His water ran out yesterday.”
 R O B E R T SHECKLEY 75

“I’d bail him out if I could,” said Morrison.

“And he’d bail you out if he could,” Krandall said. “ But he
can’t and you can’t and I can’t. Tommy, you have only one
hope.”
“W hat’s that?”
“Find goldenstone. Not just traces, find the real thing
worth real money. Then phone me. If you really have golden-
stone, I’ll bring in Wilkes from Tri-Planet Mining and get
him to advance us some money. He’ll probably want fifty per
cent of the claim.”
“That’s plain robbery!”
“ No, it’s just the high cost of credit on Venus,” Krandall
answered. “ Don’t worry, there’ll still be plenty left over. But
you have to find goldenstone first.”
“OK,” Morrison said. “ It should be around here some­
where. Max, what’s today’s date?”
“July thirty-first. Why?”
“Just wondering. I’ll call you when I’ve found something.”
After hanging up, Morrison sat on a little boulder and
stared dully at the sand. July thirty-first. Tomorrow was his
birthday. His family would be thinking about him. Aunt Bess
in Pasadena, the twins in Laos, Uncle Ted in Durango. And
Janie, of course, waiting for him in Tampa.
Morrison realized that tommorow might be his last birth­
day unless he found goldenstone.
He got to his feet, strapped the telephone back in his pack
beside the empty canteens, and set a course to the south.
He wasn’t alone. The birds and beasts of the desert
marched with him. Overhead, the silent black kites circled
endlessly. The sandwolves crept closer on his flanks, their red
tongues lolling out, waiting for the carcass to fall.
“I’m not dead yet!” Morrison shouted at them.
He drew his revolver and fired at the nearest wolf. At
twenty feet, he missed. He went down on one knee, held the
revolver tightly in both hands and fired again. The wolf
yelped in pain. The pack immediately went for the wounded
animal, and the kites swooped down for their share.
76 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c ia l

Morrison put the revolver back in its holster and went on.
He could tell he was in a badly dehydrated state. The land­
scape jumped and danced in front of him, and his footing was
unsure. He discarded the empty canteens, threw away every­
thing but the testing kit, telephone, and revolver. Either he
was coming out of the desert in style or he wasn’t coming out
at all.
The traces continued to run rich. But still he came upon no
sign of tangible wealth.
That evening he found a shallow cave set into the base of a
cliff. He crawled inside and built a barricade of rocks across
the entrance. Then he drew his revolver and leaned back
against the far wall.
The sandwolves were outside, sniffing and snapping their
jaws. Morrison propped himself up and got ready for an all-
night vigil.
He didn’t sleep, but he couldn’t stay awake, either. Dreams
and visions tormented him. He was back on Earth and Janie
was saying to him, “ It’s the tuna. Something must be wrong
with their diet. Every last one of them is sick.”
“ It’s the darnedest thing,” Morrison told her. “Just as soon
as you domesticate a fish, it turns into a prima donna."
“Are you going to stand there philosophizing," Jane asked,
“while your fish are sick?”
“Call the vet.”
“ I did. He’s off at the Blakes' place, taking care of their
dairy whale.”
“All right, I'll go out and take a look.” He slipped on his
face mask. Grinning, he said, “ I don't even have time to dry
off before I have to go out again ”
His face and chest were wet.
Morrison opened his eyes. His face and chest were wet—
from perspiration. Staring at the partially blocked mouth of
the cave, he could see green eyes, two, four, six, eight.
He fired at them, but they didn’t retreat. He fired again,
and his bullet ricocheted off the cave wall, stinging him with
 R O B E R T SHECKLEY 77

stone splinters. With his next shots, he succeeded in winging

one of the wolves. The pack withdrew.
That emptied the revolver. Morrison searched through his
pockets and found five more cartridges. He carefully loaded
the gun. Dawn couldn’t be far away now.
And then he was dreaming again, this time of the Prospec­
tor’s Special. He had heard about it in every little saloon that
bordered the Scorpion. Bristly-bearded old prospectors told a
hundred different stories about it, and the cynical bartenders
chimed in with their versions. Kirk had it in ’89, ordered up
big and special just for him. Edmonson and Arsler received it
in ’93. That was certain. And other men had had it too, as
they sat on their precious goldenstone claims. Or so people
said.
But was it real? Was there such a thing as the Prospector’s
Special? Would he live to see that rainbow-hued wonder, tall
as a church steeple, wide as a house, more precious than
goldenstone itself?
Sure he would! Why, he could almost see it now .. .
Morrison shook himself awake. It was morning. Painfully,
he crawled out of the cave to face the day.
He stumbled and crawled to the south, escorted closely by
wolves, shaded by predatory flying things. His fingers scrab­
bled along rock and sand. The traces were rich, rich!
But where in all this desolation was the goldenstone?
Where? He was almost past caring. He drove his sun­
burned, dried-out body, stopping only to fire a single shot
when the wolves came too close.
Four bullets left.
He had to fire again when the kites, growing impatient,
started diving at his head. A lucky shot tore into the flock,
downing two. It gave the wolves something to fight over.
Morrison crawled on blindly.
And fell over the edge of a little cliff.
It wasn’t a serious fall, but the revolver was knocked from
his hand. Before he could find it, the wolves were on him.
78 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c i a l

Only their greed saved Morrison. While they fought over

him, he rolled away and retrieved his revolver. Two shots
scattered the pack. That left one bullet.
He’d have to save that one for himself, because he was too
tired to go on. He sank to his knees. The traces were rich
here. Fantastically rich. Somewhere nearby . . .
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Morrison said.
The little ravine into which he had fallen was solid golden-
stone.
He picked up a pebble. Even in its rough state he could see
the deep luminous golden glow, the fiery red and purple
flecks deep in the shining stone.
“Make sure,” Morrison told himself. “ No false alarms, no
visions, no wild hopes. Make sure.”
He broke off a chunk of rock with the butt of his revolver.
It still looked like goldenstone. He took out his testing kit and
spilled a few drops of white solution on the rock. The solution
foamed green.
“Goldenstone, sure as sure,” Morrison said, looking around
at the glowing cliff walls. “ Hey, I’m rich!”
He took out his telephone. With trembling fingers he
dialed Krandall’s number.
“Max!” Morrison shouted. “ I've hit it! I’ve hit the real
stuff!”
“ My name is not Max,” a voice over the telephone said.
“ Huh?”
“ My name is Boyard,” the man said.
The video screen cleared, and Morrison saw a thin sallow­
faced man with a hairline mustache.
"I’m sorry, Mr. Boyard,” Morrison said. “ I must have got­
ten the wrong number. I was calling—”
“ It doesn’t matter who you were calling,” Mr. Boyard said.
“ I am District Supervisor of the Venus Telephone Company.
Your bill is two months overdue.”
“ I can pay it now,” Morrison said, grinning.
“ Excellent,” said Mr. Boyard. “ As soon as you do, your
service will be resumed.”
 R O B E R T S H E C K L E Y 79

The screen began to fade.

“ Wait!” Morrison cried. “I can pay as soon as I reach your
office. But I must make one telephone call. Just one call, so
that I—”
“Not a chance,” Mr. Boyard said decisively. “After you
have paid your bill, your service will be turned on immediate­
ly.”
“ I’ve got the money right here!” Morrison said. “ Right
here in my hand!”
Mr. Boyard paused. “ Well, it’s unusual, but I suppose we
could arrange for a special robot messenger if you are willing
to pay the expenses.”
“I am!”
“ Hm. It’s irregular, but I daresay w e.. . Where is the
money?”
“Right here,” Morrison said. “You recognize it, don’t you?
It’s goldenstone!”
“ I am sick and tired of the tricks you prospectors think you
can put over on us. Holding up a handful of pebbles—”
“But this is really goldenstone! Can’t you see it?”
“ I am a businessman,” Mr. Boyard said, “not a jeweler. I
wouldn’t know goldenstone from goldenrod.”
The video screen went blank.
Frantically, Morrison tried to reach the operator. There
was nothing, not even a dial tone. His telephone was discon­
nected.
He put the instrument down and surveyed his situation.
The narrow crevice into which he had fallen ran straight for
about twenty yards, then curved to the left. No cave was visi­
ble in the steep walls, no place where he could build a barri­
cade.
He heard a movement behind him. Whirling around, he
saw a huge old wolf in full charge. Without a moment’s hesi­
tation, Morrison drew and fired, blasting off the top of the
beast’s head.
“ Damn it,” Morrison said. “ I was going to save that bullet
for myself.”
80 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c i a l

It gave him a moment’s grace. He ran down the ravine,

looking for an opening in its sides. Goldenstone glowed at
him and sparkled red and purple. And the sandwolves loped
along behind him.
Then Morrison stopped. In front of him, the curving ravine
ended in a sheer wall.
He put his back against it, holding the revolver by its butt.
The wolves stopped five feet from him, gathering themselves
for a rush. There were ten or twelve of them, and they were
packed three deep in the narrow pass. Overhead, the kites
circled, waiting for their turn.
At that moment, Morrison heard the crackling sound of
’porting equipment. A whirlpool appeared above the wolves'
heads and they backed hastily away.
“Just in time!” Morrison said.
“In time for what?” asked Williams 4, the postman.
The robot climbed out of the vortex and looked around.
“Well, young man,” Williams 4 said, “this is a fine fix
you’ve gotten yourself into. Didn’t I warn you? Didn't I ad­
vise you to turn back? And now look!"
“ You were perfectly right,” Morrison said. “What did
Max Krandall send me?”
“ Max Krandall did not, and could not, send a thing.”
“Then why are you here?”
“ Because it’s your birthday,” Williams 4 said. “ We of the
Postal Department always give special service for birthdays.
Here you are.”
Williams 4 gave him a handful of mail, birthday greetings
from Janie, and from his aunts, uncles, and cousins on Earth.
“Something else here,” W'illiams 4 said, rummaging in his
bag. “ I think there was something else here. Let me see . . .
Yes, here it is.”
He handed Morrison a small package.
Hastily, Morrison tore off the wrappings. It was a birthday
present from his Aunt Mina in New Jersey. He opened it. It
was a large box of salt-water taffy, direct from Atlantic City.
“Quite a delicacy, I’m told,” said Williams 4, who had
 ROBERT SHECKLEY 81

been peering over his shoulder. “ But not very satisfactory un­
der the circumstances. Well, young man, I hate to see anyone
die on his birthday. The best I can wish you is a speedy and
painless departure.”
The robot began walking toward the vortex.
“ Wait!” Morrison cried. “You can’t just leave me like this!
I haven’t had any water in days! And those wolves—”
“ I know,” Williams 4 said. “Do you think I feel happy
about it? Even a robot has some feelings!”
“Then help me.”
“ I can’t. The rules of the Postal Department expressly and
categorically forbid it. I remember Abner Lathe making
much the same request of me in ’97. It took three years for a
burial party to reach him.”
“You have an emergency telephone, haven’t you?” Morri­
son asked.
“Yes. But I can use it only for personal emergencies.”
“Can you at least carry a letter for me? A special delivery
letter?”
“Of course I can,” the robot postman said. “That’s what
I’m here for. I can even lend you pencil and paper.”
Morrison accepted the pencil and paper and tried to think.
If he wrote to Max now, special delivery, Max would have
the letter in a matter of hours. But how long would Max need
to raise some money and send him water and ammunition? A
day, two days? Morrison would have to figure out some way
of holding out.
“ I assume you have a stamp,” the robot said.
“I don’t,” Morrison replied. “ But I’ll buy one from you.
Solidoport special.”
“ Excellent,” said the robot. “We have just put out a new
series of Venusborg triangulars. I consider them quite an es­
thetic accomplishment. They cost three dollars apiece.”
“That’s fine. Very reasonable. Let me have one.”
“There is the question of payment.”
“ Here,” Morrison said, handing the robot a piece of gold-
enstone worth about five thousand dollars in the rough.
82 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c ia l

The postman examined the stone, then handed it back.

“I’m sorry, I can accept only cash.”
“ But this is worth more than a thousand postage stamps!”
Morrison said. “This is goldenstone!”
“ It may well be,” Williams 4 said. “ But I have never had
any assaying knowledge taped into me. Nor is the Venus Pos­
tal Service run on a barter system. I’ll have to ask for three
dollars in bills or coins.”
“I don’t have it.”
“I am very sorry.” Williams 4 turned to go.
“You can’t just go and let me die!”
“I can and must,” Williams 4 said sadly. “I am only a ro­
bot, Mr. Morrison. I was made by men, and naturally I par­
take of some of their sensibilities. That’s as it should be. But
I also have my limits, which, in their nature, are similar to
the limits most humans have on this harsh planet. And, un­
like humans, I cannot transcend my limits.”
The robot started to climb into the whirlpool. Morrison
stared at him blankly, and saw beyond him the waiting wolf
pack. He saw the soft glow of several million dollars' worth
of goldenstone shining from the ravine’s walls.
Something snapped inside him.
With an inarticulate yell, Morrison dived, tackling the ro­
bot around the ankles. Williams 4, half in and half out of the
’porting vortex, struggled and kicked, and almost succeeded
in shaking Morrison loose. But with a maniac’s strength
Morrison held on. Inch by inch he dragged the robot out of
the vortex, threw him on the ground and pinned him.
“You are disrupting the mail service,” said Williams 4.
“That’s not all I’m going to disrupt,” Morrison growled.
“ I’m not afraid of dying. That was part of the gamble. But
I’m damned if I’m going to die fifteen minutes after I’ve
struck it rich!”
“You have no choice.”
“ I do. I’m going to use that emergency telephone of
yours.”
“You can’t,” Williams 4 said. “I refuse to extrude it. And
 1

ROBERT SHECKLEY 83

you could never reach it without the resources of a machine

shop.”
“Could be,” said Morrison. “I plan to find out.” He pulled
out his empty revolver.
“ What are you going to do?” Williams 4 asked.
“ I’m going to see if I can smash you into scrap metal with­
out the resources of a machine shop. I think your eyecells
would be a logical place to begin.”
“They would indeed,” said the robot. “ I have no personal
sense of survival, of course. But let me point out that you
would be leaving all Venus without a postman. Many would
suffer because of your antisocial action.”
“ I hope so,” Morrison said, raising the revolver above his
head.
“Also,” the robot said hastily, “you would be destroying
government property. That is a serious offense.”
Morrison laughed and swung the pistol. The robot moved
its head quickly, dodging the blow. It tried to wriggle free,
but Morrison’s two hundred pounds was seated firmly on its
thorax.
“ I won’t miss this time,” Morrison promised, hefting the
revolver.
“Stop!” Williams 4 said. “It is my duty to protect govern­
ment property, even if that property happens to be myself.
You may use my telephone, Mr. Morrison. Bear in mind
that this offense is punishable by a sentence of not more
than ten and not less than five years in the Solar Swamp
Penitentiary.”
“ Let’s have that telephone,” Morrison said.
The robot’s chest opened and a small telephone extruded.
Morrison dialed Max Krandall and explained the situation.
“ I see, I see,” Krandall said. “All right, I’ll try to find
Wilkes. But, Tom, I don’t know how much I can do. It’s after
business hours. Most places are closed—”
“Get them open again,” said Morrison. “I can pay for it.
And get Jim Remstaater out of trouble, too.”
“ It can’t be done just like that. You haven’t established
84 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c i a l

any rights to your claim. You haven’t even proved that your
claim is valuable.”
“Look at it.” Morrison turned the telephone so that Kran-
dall could see the glowing walls of the ravine.
“ Looks real,” Krandall said. “ But unfortunately, all that
glitters is not goldenstone.”
“What can we do?” Morrison asked.
“We’ll have to take it step by step. I’ll ’port you the Public
Surveyor. He’ll check your claim, establish its limits, and
make sure no one else has filed on it. You give him a chunk
of goldenstone to take back. A big chunk.”
“ How can I cut goldenstone? I don’t have any tools.”
“You’ll have to figure out a way. He'll take the chunk
back for assaying. If it’s rich enough, you’re all set.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Perhaps we better not talk about that,” Krandall said.
“I’ll get right to work on this, Tommy. Good luck!"
Morrison signed off. He stood up and helped the robot to
its feet.
“In twenty-three years of service," Williams 4 said, “this is
the first time anybody has threatened the life of a govern­
ment postal employee. I must report this to the police au­
thorities at Venusborg, Mr. Morrison. I have no choice.”
“ I know,” Morrison said. “ But I guess five or ten years in
the penitentiary is better than dying.”
“ I doubt it. I carry mail there, you know. You will have
the opportunity of seeing for yourself in about six months.”
“What?” said Morrison, stunned.
“In about six months, after I have completed my mail calls
around the planet and returned to Venusborg. A matter like
this must be reported in person. But first and foremost, the
mails must go through.”
“Thanks, Williams. I don’t know how—”
“ I am simply performing my duty,” the robot said as it
climbed into the vortex. “ If you are still on Venus in six
months, I will be delivering your mail to the penitentiary.”
 ROBERT SHECKLEY 85

“I won’t be here,” Morrison said. “So long, Williams!”

The robot disappeared into the ’porting vortex. Then the
vortex disappeared. Morrison was alone in the Venusian twi­
light.
He found an outcropping of goldenstone larger than a
man’s head. He chipped at it with his pistol butt, and tiny
particles danced and shimmered in the air. After an hour, he
had put four dents in his revolver, but he had barely
scratched the highly refractory surface of the goldenstone.
The sandwolves began to edge forward. Morrison threw
stones at them and shouted in his dry, cracked voice. The
wolves retreated.
He examined the outcropping again and found a hairline
fault running along one edge. He concentrated his blows
along the fault.
The goldenstone refused to crack.
Morrison wiped sweat from his eyes and tried to think. A
chisel, he needed a chisel. . .
He pulled off his belt. Putting the edge of the steel buckle
against the crack, he managed to hammer it in a fraction of
an inch. Three more blows drove the buckle firmly into the
fault. With another blow, the outcropping sheared off clean­
ly. He had separated a twenty-pound piece from the cliff. At
fifty dollars a troy ounce, this lump should be worth about
twelve thousand dollars—if it assayed out as pure as it
looked.
The twilight had turned a deep gray when the Public Sur­
veyor ’ported in. It was a short, squat robot with a conserva­
tive crackle-black finish.
“Good day, sir,” the surveyor said. “You wish to file a
claim? A standard unrestricted mining claim?”
“That’s right,” Morrison said.
“And where is the center of the aforesaid claim?”
“ Huh? The center? I guess I’m standing on it.”
“Very well,” the robot said.
Extruding a steel tape, it walked rapidly away from Morri-
8 6 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c ia l

son. At a distance of two hundred yards, it stopped. More

steel tape fluttered as it walked, flew, and climbed a square
with Morrison at the center. When it had finished, the sur­
veyor stood for a long time without moving.
“What are you doing?” Morrison asked.
“I’m making depth-photographs of the terrain,” the robot
said. “It’s rather difficult in this light. Couldn’t you wait till
morning?’
“No!”
“Well, I’ll just have to cope,” the robot said.
It moved and stood, moved and stood, each subterianean
exposure taking longer than the last as the twilight deepened.
If it had had pores, it would have sweated.
“There,” said the robot at last, “that takes care of it. Do
you have a sample for me to take back?”
“ Here it is,” Morrison said, hefting the slab of goldenstone
and handing it to the surveyor. “Is that all?”
“Absolutely all,” the robot said. “ Except, of course, that
you haven’t given me the Deed of Search.”
Morrison blinked. “ I haven’t given you the what?”
“The Deed of Search. That is a government document
showing that the claim you are filing on is free, as per gov­
ernment order, of fissionable material in excess of fifty per
cent of the total mass to a depth of sixty feet. It's a mere for­
mality, but a necessary one.”
“ I never heard of it,” Morrison said.
“ It became a requirement last week," explained the sur­
veyor. “You don’t have the Deed? Then I’m afraid your stan­
dard unrestricted claim is invalid.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“Well,” the robot said, “you could change your standard
unrestricted claim to a special restricted claim. That requires
no Deed of Search.”
“ What does the special restricted part mean?”
“ It means that in five hundred years all rights revert to the
Government of Venus.”
 ROBERT SHECKLEY 87

“All right!” Morrison shouted. “Fine! Good! Is that all?”

“Absolutely all,” the surveyor said. “I shall bring this sam­
ple back and have it assayed and evaluated immediately.
From it and the depth-photographs we can extrapolate the
value and extent of your claim.”
“Send me back something to take care of'the wolves,”
Morrison said. “And food. And listen—I want a Prospector’s
Special.”
“Yes, sir. It will all be ’ported to you—if your claim is of
sufficient value to warrant the outlay.”
The robot climbed into the vortex and vanished.
Time passed, and the wolves edged forward again. They
snarled at the rocks Morrison threw, but they didn’t retreat.
Jaws open and tongues lolling, they crept up the remaining
yards between them and the prospector.
Then the leading wolf leaped back and howled. A gleaming
vortex had appeared over his head and a rifle had fallen from
the vortex, striking him on a forepaw.
The wolves scrambled away. Another rifle fell from the
vortex. Then a large box marked Grenades, Handle With
Care. Then another box marked Desert Ration K.
Morrison waited, staring at the gleaming mouth of the vor­
tex. It crossed the sky to a spot a quarter of a mile away and
paused there, and then a great round brass base emerged
from the vortex, and the mouth widened to allow an even
greater bulge of brass to which the base was attached. The
bulge grew higher as the base was lowered to the sand. When
the last of it appeared, it stood alone in the horizon-to-hori-
zon expanse, a gigantic ornate brass punchbowl in the desert.
The vortex rose and paused again over the bowl.
Morrison waited, his throat raw and aching. Now a small
trickle came out of the vortex and splashed down into the
bowl. Still Morrison didn’t move.
And then it came. The trickle became a roar that sent the
wolves and kites fleeing in terror, and a cataract poured from
the vortex to the huge punchbowl.
8 8 p r o s p e c t o r ’s s p e c ia l

Morrison began staggering toward it. He should have or­

dered a canteen, he told himself thirstily, stumbling across
the quarter of a mile of sand. But at last he stood beneath the
Prospector’s Special, higher than a church steeple, wider than
a house, filled with water more precious than goldenstone it­
self. He turned the spigot at the bottom. Water soaked the
yellow sands and ran in rivulets down the dune.
He should have ordered a cup or glass, Morrison thought,
lying on his back with open mouth.
 1

EARTH

Since we live on Earth, you might very well suppose we know a

great deal about it— and we do. You might even suppose we
know all about it— but we don't. Some very basic discoveries
have been made only in the last couple of decades.
For instance if you look at the map of the world, you will see
that the eastern coast of South America and the western coast
of Africa are amazingly similar. In fact Francis Bacon pointed
this out as long ago as 1620, when the coasts were first being
outlined accurately.
Could it be that Africa and South America were once joined?
That they split apart along the line of the present coasts and
then drifted apart?
The first person to deal thoroughly with this notion of “ conti­
nental drift” was Alfred Lothar Wegener, who published a book
on the subject in 1912. He suggested that the continents, which
are essentially large blocks of granite, floated on the denser ba­
salt that made up the sea bottom and very slowly drifted this
way and that. Originally, he felt, the world contained a single su­
percontinent ("Pan-Gaea” or “ All-Earth” ) which split up and
drifted apart into pieces.
If this were so, it would account for a variety of puzzles.
There are similar species of plants and animals in widely differ­
ent parts of the world. Perhaps they had evolved when those
parts of the world were close together. There are signs of glaci­
ation in the far past in regions which are now tropical— perhaps

89
90 EARTH

they were once polar. Whereas fossils from some rocks on the
continents are up to 600 million years old, fossils from the Atlan­
tic sea bottom are much younger, as though the Atlantic Ocean
had been only recently formed.
Geologists were quite certain, however, that the continental
granite could not drift through basalt, and Wegener’s notions
were dismissed.
The dismissal was only possible, however, because we knew
so little about 70 percent of the Earth's solid surface, that por­
tion which was hidden by the ocean. All we knew about the sea
bottom was an occasional depth, obtained by dropping a plumb
line overboard here and there.
Even so, as long ago as 1853, when soundings were made in
connection with laying a transatlantic cable, it seemed that the
Atlantic was shallower in its middle than at either side. The cen­
tral shallow was named "Telegraph Plateau" in honor of the ca­
ble.
During World War I, Paul Langevin developed a method of
judging distance by the time it takes shortwave sound ("ultra­
sonic waves") to reach an object and be reflected back to its
starting point. This is now called “ sonar."
Sonar was enormously more efficient than plumb lines, and by
1925 sonar soundings showed that a vast undersea mountain
range wound down the center of the Atlantic Ocean through all
its length. Eventually, this was shown to curve into the other
oceans as well and, indeed, to encircle the globe in a long,
winding “ Mid-Oceanic Ridge.”
By 1953, William Maurice Ewing and Bruce Charles Heezen
showed that running down the length of the ridge was a deep
canyon. This was eventually found to exist in all portions of the
Mid-Oceanic Ridge, so it is sometimes called the "Great Global
Rift.”
Such findings increased world consciousness of the exciting
nature of the ocean floor, and the number of science fiction sto­
ries dealing with it— like "Waterclap," published in 1970— in­
creased.
 EARTH 91

The Great Global Rift seems to divide the Earth’s crust into
large plates, which are in some cases thousands of kilometers
across and some 70 to 150 kilometers (40 to 90 miles) deep.
These are called “ tectonic plates,” from the Greek word for
“ carpenter,” since they seem so tightly joined. The study of the
Earth’s crust in terms of these plates is called “ plate tecton­
ics"— a science which is only a quarter of a century old, and
yet without which almost nothing in geology can be understood
properly.
The discovery of the tectonic plates established continental
drift, but not in the Wegener fashion. The continents were not
floating and adrift; they were integral parts of the plate they
rested upon. The plates, however, moved. They did not float;
they were actively pushed apart.
In 1960, Harry Hammond Hess presented evidence in favor
of "sea-floor spreading.” Hot molten rock slowly welled up from
great depths into the Great Global Rift in the mid-Atlantic, for in­
stance, and solidified at or near the surface. This upwelling of
solidifying rock forced the two plates on either side apart, in
places at the rate of from 2 to 18 centimeters (1 to 7 inches) a
year. As the plates moved apart, South America and Africa
were separated and the Atlantic Ocean formed.
The whole history of the Earth can be worked out in terms of
plate tectonics. With tectonic plates moving apart here and
crushing together there, mountains rise, deeps depress, oceans
widen, and continents separate and rejoin.
Every once in a while the continents join into one huge land
mass and then split up again, over and over. The last occasion
on which Pan Gaea seems to have formed was 225 million
years ago, when the dinosaurs were just beginning to evolve;
and it began to break up about 180 million years ago.
As the sea bottom came to be better known through sonar
sounding, human beings began to invade it.
As recently as 1934, Charles William Beebe could only get
down to a point 0.9 kilometers (0.57 miles) below the ocean
surface, and that made headlines. He used a bathysphere, an
92 EARTH

inert thick-walled object, just large enough to hold a man, and

suspended from a surface vessel by a cable.
A maneuverable ship of the abyss, a “ bathyscaphe,” was in­
vented by Auguste Piccard in 1947. It used a heavy ballast of
iron pellets which could be automatically jettisoned in case of
emergency. This took it down while a gasoline-filled balloon pro­
vided buoyancy and stability. In its first test in 1948, an un­
manned bathyscaphe descended 1.4 kilometers (0.85 miles)
below the ocean surface.
On January 14, 1960, Jacques Piccard (son of Auguste) and
Don Walsh took a bathyscaphe to the bottom of the Marianas
Trench, plumbing 11 kilometers (7 miles) below the ocean sur­
face to the deepest part of the abyss. The world of "Water-
clap” seems possible.
 ■>

Waterclap
ISAAC ASIMOV

Stephen Demerest looked at the textured sky. He kept look­

ing at it and found the blue opaque and revolting.
Unwarily, he had looked at the Sun, for there was nothing
to blank it out automatically, and then he had snatched his
eyes away in panic. He wasn’t blinded; just a few after­
images. Even the Sun was washed out.
Involuntarily, he thought of Ajax’s prayer in Homer’s Il­
iad. They were fighting over the body of Patroclus in the mist
and Ajax said, “O Father Zeus, save the Achaeans out of this
mist! Make the sky clean, grant us to see with our eyes! Kill
us in the light, since it is thy pleasure to kill us!”
Demerest thought: Kill us in the light—
Kill us in the clear light on the Moon, where the sky is
black and soft, where the stars shine brightly, where the
cleanliness and purity of vacuum make all things sharp.
— Not in this low-clinging, fuzzy blue.
He shuddered. It was an actual physical shudder that
shook his lanky body, and he was annoyed. He was going to
die. He was sure of it. And it wouldn’t be under the blue, ei­
ther, come to think of it, but under the black—but a different
black.
It was as though in answer to that thought that the ferry
pilot, short, swarthy, crisp-haired, came up to him and said,
“ Ready for the black, Mr. Demerest?”
Demerest nodded. He towered over the other as he did over

93
94 WATERCLAP

most of the men of Earth. They were thick, all of them, and
took their short, low steps with ease. He himself had to feel
his footsteps, guide them through the air; even the impalpa­
ble bond that held him to the ground was textured.
“I’m ready,” he said. He took a deep breath and deliber­
ately repeated his earlier glance at the Sun. It was low in the
morning sky, washed out by dusty air, and he knew it
wouldn’t blind him. He didn’t think he would ever see it
again.
He had never seen a bathyscaphe before. Despite every­
thing, he tended to think of it in terms of prototypes, an ob­
long balloon with a spherical gondola beneath. It was as
though he persisted in thinking of space flight in terms of
tons of fuel spewed backward in fire, and an irregular module
feeling its way, spiderlike, toward the Lunar surface.
The bathyscaphe was not like the image in his thoughts at
all. Under its skin, it might still be buoyant bag and gondola,
but it was all engineered sleekness now.
“My name is Javan,” said the ferry pilot. “Omar Javan."
“Javan?”
“Queer name to you? I’m Iranian by descent; Earthman by
persuasion. Once you get down there, there are no nationali­
ties.” He grinned and his complexion grew darker against the
even whiteness of his teeth. “ If you don’t mind, we'll be start­
ing in a minute. You’ll be my only passenger, so I guess you
carry weight.”
“ Yes,” said Demerest dryly. “ At least a hundred pounds
more than I’m used to.”
“ You’re from the Moon? I thought you had a queer walk
on you. I hope it’s not uncomfortable."
“ It’s not exactly comfortable, but I manage. We exercise
for this.”
“Well, come on board.” He stood aside and let Demerest
walk down the gangplank. “I wouldn’t go to the Moon my­
self.”
“You go to Ocean-Deep.”
 ISAAC ASIMOV 95

“About fifty times so far. That’s different.”

Demerest got on board. It was cramped, but he didn’t mind
that. It might be a space module except that it was more—
—well, textured. There was that word again. There was the
clear feeling everywhere that mass didn’t matter. Mass was
held up; it didn’t have to be hurled up.
They were still on the surface. The blue sky could be seen
greenishly through the clear thick glass. Javan said, “You
don’t have to be strapped in. There’s no acceleration. Smooth
as oil, the whole thing. It won’t take long; just about an hour.
You can’t smoke.”
“ I don’t smoke,” said Demerest.
“ I hope you don’t have claustrophobia.”
“ Moon-men don’t have claustrophobia.”
“All that open—”
“Not in our cavern. We live in a”—he groped for the
phrase—“a Lunar-Deep, a hundred feet deep.”
“A hundred feet!” The pilot seemed amused, but he didn’t
smile. “ We’re slipping down now.”
The interior of the gondola was fitted into angles but here
and there a section of wall beyond the instruments showed its
basic sphericity. To Javan, the instruments seemed to be an
extension of his arms; his eyes and hands moved over them
lightly, almost lovingly.
“ We’re all checked out,” he said, “but I like a last-minute
look-over; we’ll be facing a thousand atmospheres down
there.” His finger touched a contact, and the round door
closed massively inward and pressed against the beveled rim
it met.
“The higher the pressure, the tighter that will hold,” said
Javan. “Take your last look at sunlight, Mr. Demerest.”
The light still shone through the thick glass of the window.
It was wavering now; there was water between the Sun and
them now.
“The last look?” said Demerest.
Javan snickered. “ Not the last look. I mean for the trip.
96 WATERCLAP

. . . I suppose you’ve never been on a bathyscaphe before.”

“No, I haven’t. Have many?”
“Very few,” admitted Javan. “ But don’t worry. It’s just an
underwater balloon. We’ve introduced a million improve­
ments since the first bathyscaphe. It’s nuclear-powered now
and we can move freely by water jet up to certain limits, but
cut it down to basics and it’s still a spherical gondola under
buoyancy tanks. And it’s still towed out to sea by a mother
ship because it needs what power it carries too badly to waste
it on surface travel. Ready?”
“Ready.”
The supporting cable of the mother ship flicked away and
the bathyscaphe settled lower; then lower still, as sea water
fed into the buoyancy tanks. For a few moments, caught in
surface currents, it swayed, and then there was nothing. The
bathyscaphe sank slowly through a deepening green.
Javan relaxed. He said, “John Bergen is head of Ocean-
Deep. You’re going to see him?”
“That’s right.”
“He’s a nice guy. His wife’s with him.”
“She is?”
“Oh, sure. They have women down there. There’s a bunch
down there, fifty people. Some stay for months.”
Demerest put his finger on the narrow, nearly invisible
seam where door met wall. He took it away and looked at it.
He said, “ It’s oily.”
“Silicone, really. The pressure squeezes some out. It’s sup­
pose to. . . . Don’t worry. Everything’s automatic. Every­
thing’s fail-safe. The first sign of malfunction, any malfunc­
tion at all, our ballast is released and up we go.”
“You mean nothing’s ever happened to these bathy­
scaphes?”
“ What can happen?” The pilot looked sideways at his pas­
senger. “Once you get too deep for sperm whales, nothing
can go wrong,”
“Sperm whales?” Demerest’s thin face creased in a frown.
 ISAAC ASIMOV 97

“ Sure, they dive as deep as half a mile. If they hit a bath­

yscaphe—well, the walls of the buoyancy chambers aren’t
particularly strong. They don’t have to be, you know. They’re
open to the sea and when the gasoline, which supplies the
buoyancy, compresses, sea water enters.”
It was dark now. Demerest found his gaze fastened to the
viewport. It was light inside the gondola, but it was dark in
that window. And it was not the darkness of space; it was a
thick darkness.
Demerest said sharply. “Let’s get this straight, Mr. Javan.
You are not equipped to withstand the attack of a sperm
whale. Presumably you are not equipped to withstand the at­
tack of a giant squid. Have there been any actual incidents of
that sort?”
“Well, it’s like this—”
“No games, please, and don’t try ragging the greenhorn. I
am asking out of professional curiosity. I am head safety en­
gineer at Luna City and I am asking what precautions this
bathyscaphe can take against possible collision with large
creatures.”
Javan looked embarrassed. He muttered, “Actually, there
have been no incidents.”
“Are any expected? Even as a remote possibility?”
“Anything is remotely possible. But actually sperm whales
are too intelligent to monkey with us and giant squid are too
shy.”
“Can they see us?”
“Yes, of course. We’re lit up.”
“ Do you have floodlights?”
“ We’re already past the large-animal range, but we have
them, and I’ll turn them on for you.”
Through the black of the window there suddenly appeared
a snowstorm, an inverted upward-falling snowstorm. The
blackness had come alive with stars in three-dimensional ar­
ray, and all moving upward.
Demerest said, “ W hat’s that?”
98 WATERCLAP

“Just crud. Organic matter. Small creatures. They float,

don’t move much, and they catch the light. We’re going down
past them. They seem to be going up in consequence.”
Demerest’s sense of perspective adjusted itself and he said,
“Aren’t we dropping too quickly?”
“No, we’re not. If we were, I could use the nuclear engines,
if I wanted to waste power; or I could drop some ballast. I’ll
be doing that later, but for now everything is fine. Relax, Mr.
Demerest. The snow thins as we dive and we’re not likely to
see much in the way of spectacular life forms. There are
small angler fish and such but they avoid us.”
Demerest said, “ How many do you take down at a time?”
“I’ve had as many as four passengers in this gondola, but
that’s crowded. We can put two bathyscaphes in tandem and
carry ten, but that’s clumsy. What we really need are trains
of gondolas, heavier on the nukes—the nuclear engines—and
lighter on the buoyancy. Stuff like that is on the drawing
board, they tell me. Of course, they’ve been telling me that
for years.”
“There are plans for large-scale expansion of Ocean-Deep,
then?”
“Sure, why not? We’ve got cities on the continental
shelves, why not on the deep-sea bottom? The way I look at
it, Mr. Demerest, where man can go, he will go and he should
go. The Earth is ours to populate and we will populate it. All
we need to make the deep sea habitable are completely ma­
neuverable 'scaphes. The buoyancy chambers slow us, weak­
en us, and complicate the engineering.”
“ But they also save you, don’t they? If everything goes
wrong at once, the gasoline you carry will still float you to
the surface. What would do that for you if your nuclear en­
gines go wrong and you had no buoyancy?”
“ If it comes to that, you can’t expect to eliminate the
chances of accident altogether, not even fatal ones.”
“ I know that very well,” said Demerest feelingly.
Javan stiffened. The tone of his voice changed. “Sorry.
Didn’t mean anything by that. Tough about that accident.”
 ISAAC ASIMOV 99

“Yes,” said Demerest. Fifteen men and five women had

died. One of the individuals listed among the “men” had been
fourteen years old. It had been pinned down to human fail­
ure. What could a head safety engineer say after that?
“Yes,” he said.
A pall dropped between the two men, a pall as thick and as
turgid as the pressurized sea water outside. How could one
allow for panic and for distraction and for depression all at
once? There were the Moon-Blues—stupid name—but they
struck men at inconvenient times. It wasn’t always noticeable
when the Moon-Blues came but it made men torpid and slow
to react.
How many times had a meteorite come along and been
averted or smothered or successfully absorbed? How many
times had a Moonquake done damage and been held in
check? How many times had human failure been backed up
and compensated for? How many times had accidents not
happened?
But you don’t pay off on accidents not happening. There
were twenty dead—

Javan said (how many long minutes later?), “There are the
lights of Ocean-Deep!”
Demerest could not make them out at first. He didn’t know
where to look. Twice before, luminescent creatures had
flicked past the windows at a distance and with the flood­
lights off again, Demerest had thought them the first sign of
Ocean-Deep. Now he saw nothing.
“ Down there,” said Javan, without pointing. He was busy
now, slowing the drop and edging the ’scaphe sideways.
Demerest could hear the distant sighing of the water jets,
steam-driven, with the steam formed by the heat of momen­
tary bursts of fusion power.
Demerest thought dimly: Deuterium is their fuel and it’s
all around them. Water is their exhaust and it’s all around
them.
Javan was dropping some of his ballast, too, and began a
100 WATERCLAP

kind of distant chatter. “The ballast used to be steel pellets

and they were dropped by electromagnetic controls. Any­
where up to fifty tons of them were used in each trip. Conser­
vationists worried about spreading rusting steel over the
ocean floor, so we switched to metal nodules that are dredged
up from the continental shelf. We put a thin layer of iron
over them so they can still be electromagnetically handled
and the ocean bottom gets nothing that wasn’t sub-ocean to
begin with. Cheaper, to o .. .. But when we get out real nu­
clear ’scaphes, we won’t need ballast at all.”
Demerest scarcely heard him. Ocean-Deep could be seen
now. Javan had turned on the floodlights and far below was
the muddy floor of the Puerto Rican Trench. Resting on that
floor like a cluster of equally muddy pearls was the spherical
conglomerate of Ocean-Deep.
Each unit was a sphere such as the one in which Demerest
was now sinking toward contact, but much larger, and as
Ocean-Deep expanded—expanded—expanded, new spheres
were added.
Demerest thought: They’re only five and a half miles from
home, not a quarter of a million.

“ How are we going to get through?” asked Demerest.

The ’scaphe had made contact. Demerest heard the dull
sound of metal against metal but then for minutes there had
been nothing more than a kind of occasional scrape as Javan
bent over his instruments in rapt concentration.
“ Don’t worry about that,” Javan said at last, in belated an­
swer. “There's no problem. The delay now is only because I
have to make sure we fit tightly. There’s an electromagnetic
joint that holds at every point of a perfect circle. When the
instruments read correctly, that means we fit over the en­
trance door.”
“Which then opens?”
‘It would if there were air on the other side, but there isn’t.
There's sea water, and that has to be driven out. Then we en­
ter.”
 ISAAC ASIMOV 101

Demerest did not miss this point. He had come here on

this, the last day of his life, to give that same life meaning
and he intended to miss nothing.
He said, “Why the added step? Why not keep the air lock,
if that’s what it is, a real air lock, and have air in it at all
times?”
“They tell me it’s a matter of safety,” said Javan. "Your
specialty. The interface has equal pressure on both sides at
all times, except when men are moving across. This door is
the weakest point of the whole system, because it opens and
closes; it has joints; it has seams. You know what I mean?”
“ I do,” murmured Demerest. There was a logical flaw here
and that meant there was a possible chink through which—
but later.
He said, “Why are we waiting now?”
“The lock is being emptied. The water is being forced out.”
“By air.”
“ Hell, no. They can’t afford to waste air like that. It would
take a thousand atmospheres to empty the chamber of its
water, and filling the chamber with air at that density, even
temporarily, is more air than they can afford to expend.
Steam is what does it.”
“Of course. Yes.”
Javan said cheerfully, “You heat the water. No pressure in
the world can stop water from turning to steam at a tempera­
ture of more than 374° C. And the steam forces the sea
water out through a one-way valve.”
“Another weak point,” said Demerest.
“ I suppose so. It’s never failed yet. The water in the lock is
being pushed out now. When hot steam starts bubbling out
the valve, the process automatically stops and the lock is full
of overheated steam.”
“And then?”
“And then we have a whole ocean to cool it with. The tem­
perature drops and the steam condenses. Once that happens,
ordinary air can be let in at a pressure of one atmosphere and
then the door opens.”
102 WATERCLAP

“ How long must we wait?”

“Not long. If there were anything wrong, there’d be sirens
sounding. At least, so they say. I never heard one in action.”
There was silence for a few minutes, and then there was a
sudden sharp clap and a simultaneous jerk.
Javan said, “Sorry, I should have warned you. I’m so used
to it I forgot. When the door opens, a thousand atmospheres
of pressure on the other side forces us hard against the metal
of Ocean-Deep. No electromagnetic force can hold us hard
enough to prevent that last hundredth-of-an-inch slam.”
Demerest unclenched his fist and released his breath. He
said, “Is everything all right?”
“The walls didn’t crack, if that’s what you mean. It sounds
like doom, though, doesn’t it? It sounds even worse when I’ve
got to leave and the air lock fills up again. Be prepared for
that.”
But Demerest was suddenly weary. Let’s get on with it, he
thought. I don’t want to drag it out. He said, “ Do we go
through now?”
“We go through.”
The opening in the ’scaphe wall was round and small; even
smaller than the one through which they had originally en­
tered. Javan went through it sinuously, muttering that it al­
ways made him feel like a cork in a bottle.
Demerest had not smiled since he entered the 'scaphe. Nor
did he really smile now, but a corner of his mouth quirked as
he thought that a skinny Moon-man would have no trouble.
He went through also, feeling Javan’s hands firmly at his
waist, helping him through.
Javan said, “It’s dark in here. No point in introducing an
additional weakness by wiring for lighting. But that’s why
flashlights were invented.”
Demerest found himself on a perforated walk, its stainless
metallic surface gleaming dully. And through the perfora­
tions he could make out the wavering surface of water.
He said, “The chamber hasn’t been emptied.”
“You can’t do any better, Mr. Demerest. If you’re going to
 ISAAC ASIMOV 103

use steam to empty it, you’re left with that steam, and to get
the pressures necessary to do the emptying, that steam must
be compressed to about one-third the density of liquid water.
When it condenses, the chamber remains one-third full of
water—but it’s water at just one-atmosphere pressure.. ..
Come on, Mr. Demerest.”

John Bergen’s face wasn’t entirely unknown to Demerest.

Recognition was immediate. Bergen, as head of Ocean-Deep
for nearly a decade now, was a familiar face on the TV
screens of Earth—just as the leaders of Luna City had be­
come familiar.
Demerest had seen the head of Ocean-Deep both flat and
in three dimensions, in black-and-white and in color. Seeing
him in life added little.
Like Javan, Bergen was short and thickset; opposite in
structure to the traditional (already traditional?) Lunar pat­
tern of physiology. He was fairer than Javan by a good deal
and his face was noticeably asymmetrical, with his somewhat
thick nose leaning just a little to the right.
He was not handsome. No Moon-man would think he was,
but then Bergen smiled and there was a sunniness about it as
he held out his large hand.
Demerest placed his own thin one within, steeling himself
for a hard grip, but it did not come. Bergen took the hand
and let it go, then said, “ I’m glad you’re here. We don’t have
much in the way of luxury, nothing that will make our hospi­
tality stand out, we can’t even declare a holiday in your
honor—but the spirit is there. Welcome!”
“Thank you,” said Demerest softly. He remained unsmil­
ing now, too. He was facing the enemy and he knew it. Sure­
ly Bergen must know it also and, since he did, that smile of
his was hypocrisy.
And at that moment a clang like metal against metal
sounded deafeningly and the chamber shuddered. Demerest
leaped back and staggered against the wall.
Bergen did not budge. He said quietly, “That was the
104 WATERCLAP

bathyscaphe unhitching and the waterclap of the air lock fill­

ing. Javan ought to have warned you.”
Demerest panted and tried to make his racing heart slow.
He said, “Javan did warn me. I was caught by surprise any­
way.”
Bergen said, “Well, it won’t happen again for a while. We
don’t often have visitors, you know. We’re not equipped for it
and so we fight off all kinds of big wheels who think a trip
down here would be good for their careers. Politicians of all
kinds, chiefly. Your own case is different of course.”
Is it? thought Demerest. It had been hard enough to get
permission to make the trip down. His superiors back at
Luna City had not approved in the first place and had scout­
ed the idea that a diplomatic interchange would be of any
use. (“Diplomatic interchange” was what they had called it.)
And when he had overborne them, there had been Ocean-
Deep’s own reluctance to receive him.
It had been sheer persistence alone that had made his pre­
sent visit possible. In what way then was Demerest’s case dif­
ferent?
Bergen said, “ I suppose you have your junketing problems
on Luna City, too?”
“Very little” said Demerest. “Your average politican isn’t
as anxious to travel a half-million-mile round trip as he is to
travel a ten-mile one.”
“I can see that,” agreed Bergen, “and it's more expensive
out to the Moon, of course. . . . In a way, this is the first
meeting of inner and outer space. No Ocean-man has ever
gone to the Moon as far as I know, and you're the first
Moon-man to visit a sub-sea station of any kind. No Moon-
man has ever been to one of the settlements on the continen­
tal shelf.”
“ It’s a historic meeting, then,” said Demerest, and tried to
keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
If any leaked through, Bergen showed no sign. He rolled
up his sleeves as though to emphasize his attitude of infor-
 ISAAC ASIMOV 105

mality (or the fact that they were very busy, so that there
would be little time for visitors?) and said, “Do you want cof­
fee? I assume you’ve eaten. Would you like to rest before I
show you around? Do you want to wash up, for that matter,
as they say euphemistically?”
For a moment, curiosity stirred in Demerest; yet not en­
tirely aimless curiosity. Everything involving the interface of
Ocean-Deep with the outside world could be of importance.
He said, “ How are sanitary facilities handled here?”
“ It’s cycled mostly; as it is on the Moon, I imagine. We
can eject if we want to or have to. Man has a bad record of
fouling the environment, but as the only deep-sea station,
what we eject does no perceptible damage. Adds organic
matter.” He laughed.
Demerest filed that away, too. Matter was ejected; there
were therefore ejection tubes. Their workings might be of
interest and he, as a safety engineer, had a right to be
interested.
“ No,” he said, “I don’t need anything at the moment. If
you’re busy—”
“That’s all right. We’re always busy, but I’m the least
busy, if you see what I mean. Suppose I show you around.
We’ve got over fifty units here, each as big as this one, some
bigger—”
Demerest looked about. Again, as in the ’scaphe, there
were angles everywhere, but beyond the furnishings and
equipment there were signs of the inevitable spherical outer
wall. Fifty of them!
“Built up,” went on Bergen, “over a generation of effort.
The unit we’re standing in is actually the oldest and there’s
been some talk of demolishing and replacing it. Some of the
men say we’re ready for second-generation units, but I’m not
sure. It would be expensive—everything’s expensive down
here—and getting money out of the Planetary Project Coun­
cil is always a depressing experience.”
Demerest felt his nostrils flare involuntarily and a spasm of
106 WATERCLAP

anger shot through him. It was a thrust, surely. Luna City’s

miserable record with the PPC must be well known to Ber­
gen.
But Bergen went on, unnoticing. “I’m a traditionalist,
too—just a little bit. This is the first deep-sea unit ever con­
structed. The first two people to remain overnight on the
floor of an ocean trench slept here with nothing else beyond
this bare sphere except for a miserable portable fusion unit to
work the escape hatch. I mean the air lock, but we called it
the escape hatch to begin with—and just enough controls for
the purpose. Reguera and Tremont, those were the men.
They never made a second trip to the bottom, either; stayed
Topside forever after. Well, well, they served their purpose
and both are dead now. And here we are with fifty people
and with six months as the usual tour of duty. I’ve spent only
two weeks Topside in the last year and a half.”
He motioned vigorously to Demerest to follow him, slid
open a door which moved evenly into a recess, and took him
into the next unit. Demerest paused to examine the opening.
There were no seams that he could notice between the adja­
cent units.
Bergen noted the other’s pause and said, “ When we add on
our units, they’re welded under pressure into the equivalent
of a single piece of metal and then reinforced. We can’t take
chances, as I’m sure you understand, since I have been given
to understand that you're the head safe—’’
Demerest cut him off. “Yes,” he said. “We on the Moon
admire your safety record.”
Bergen shrugged. “ We’ve been lucky. Our sympathy, by
the way, on the rotten break you fellows had. I mean that fa­
tal—"
Demerest cut him off again. “Yes,”
Bergen, the Moon-man decided, was either a naturally
voluble man or else was eager to drown him in words and get
rid of him.
“The units,” said Bergen, “are arranged in a highly
 ISAAC ASIMOV 107

branched chain—three-dimensional actually. We have a map

we can show you, if you’re interested. Most of the end units
represent living-sleeping quarters. For privacy, you know.
The working units tend to be corridors as well, which is one
of the embarrassments of having to live down here.
“This is our library; part of it, anyway. Not big, but it’s
got our records, too, on carefully indexed and computed mi­
crofilm, so that for its kind it’s not only the biggest in the
world, but the best and the only. And we have a special com­
puter to handle the references to meet our needs exactly. It
collects, selects, coordinates, weighs, then gives us the gist.
“We have another library, too, book films and even some
printed volumes. But that’s for amusement.”
A voice broke in on Bergen’s cheerful flow. “John? May I
interrupt?”
Demerest started; the voice had come from behind him.
Bergen said, “Annette! I was going to get you. This is Ste­
phen Demerest of Luna City. Mr. Demerest, may I introduce
my wife, Annette?”
Demerest had turned. He said stiffly, a little mechanically,
“ I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Bergen.” But he was staring
at her waistline.
Annette Bergen seemed in her early thirties. Her brown
hair was combed simply and she wore no makeup. Attractive,
not beautiful, Demerest noted vaguely. But his eyes kept re­
turning to that waistline.
She shrugged a little. “Yes, I’m pregnant, Mr. Demerest.
I’m due in about two months.”
“Pardon me,” Demerest muttered. “So rude of me. . . . I
didn’t—” He faded off and felt as though the blow had been
a physical one. He hadn’t expected women, though he didn’t
know why. He knew there would have to be women in Ocean-
Deep. And the ferry pilot had said Bergen’s wife was with
him.
He stammered as he spoke. “ How many women are there
in Ocean-Deep, Mr. Bergen?”
108 WATERCLAP

“Nine at the moment,” said Bergen. “All wives. We look

forward to a time when we can have the normal ratio of one
to one, but we still need workers and researchers primarily,
and unless women have important qualifications of some
sort—”
“They all have important qualifications of some sort,
dear,” said Mrs. Bergen. “You could keep the men for longer
duty if—”
“ My wife,” said Bergen, laughing, “is a convinced feminist
but is not above using sex as an excuse to enforce equality. I
keep telling her that that is the feminine way of doing it and
not the feminist way, and she keeps saying— Well, that's
why she’s pregnant. You think it’s love, sex mania, yearning
for motherhood? Nothing of the sort. She’s going to have a
baby down here to make a philosophical point.”
Annette said coolly, “ Why not? Either this is going to be
home for humanity or it isn’t going to be. If it is. then we’re
going to have babies here, that’s all. I want a baby born in
Ocean-Deep. There are babies born in Luna City, aren’t
there, Mr. Demerest?”
Demerest took a deep breath. "/ was born in Luna City,
Mrs. Bergen.”
“And well she knew it,” muttered Bergen.
“And you are in your late twenties, I think?” she said.
“ I am twenty-nine,” said Demerest.
“And well she knew that, too,” said Bergen with a short
laugh. “You can bet she looked up all possible data on you
when she heard you were coming.”
“That is quite beside the point,” said Annette. “The point
is that for twenty-nine years at least children have been born
in Luna City and no children have been born in Ocean-
Deep.”
“ Luna City, my dear,” said Bergen, “is longer-established.
It is over half a century old; we are not yet twenty.”
“Twenty years is quite enough. It takes a baby nine
months.”
 . ISAAC ASIMOV 109

Demerest interposed, “Are there any children in Ocean-

Deep?”
“No,” said Bergen. “No. Someday, though.”
“In two months, anyway,” said Annette Bergen positively.

The tension grew inside Demerest and when they returned

to the unit in which he had first met Bergen, he was glad to
sit down and accept a cup of coffee.
“ We’ll eat soon,” said Bergen matter-of-factly. “I hope
you don’t mind sitting here meanwhile. As the prime unit, it
isn’t used for much except, of course, for the reception of ves­
sels, an item I don’t expect will interrupt us for a while. We
can talk, if you wish.”
“I do wish,” said Demerest.
“ I hope I’m welcome to join in,” said Annette.
Demerest looked at her doubtfully, but Bergen said to him,
“ You’ll have to agree. She’s fascinated by you and by Moon-
men generally. She thinks they’re—uh—you're a new breed,
and I think that when she’s quite through being a Deep-wom­
an she wants to be a Moon-woman.”
“I just want to get a word in edgewise, John, and when I
get that in, I’d like to hear what Mr. Demerest has to say.
What do you think of us, Mr. Demerest?”
Demerest said cautiously, “ I’ve asked to come here, Mrs.
Bergen, because I’m a safety engineer. Ocean-Deep has an
enviable safety record—”
“ Not one fatality in almost twenty years,” said Bergen
cheerfully. “Only one death by accident in the C-shelf settle­
ments and none in transit by either sub or ’scaphe. I wish I
could say, though, that this was the result of wisdom and care
on our part. We do our best, of course, but the breaks have
been with us—”
“John,” said Annette, “ I really wish you’d let Mr. Demer­
est speak.”
“As a safety engineer,” said Demerest, “I can’t afford to
believe in luck and breaks. We cannot stop Moonquakes or
110 WATERCLAP

large meteorites out at Luna City, but we are designed to

minimize the effects even of those. There are no excuses or
there should be none for human failure. We have not avoided
that on Luna City; our record recently has been”—his voice
dropped—“bad. While humans are imperfect, as we all know,
machinery should be designed to take that imperfection into
account. We lost twenty men and women—”
“I know. Still, Luna City has a population of nearly one
thousand, doesn’t it? Your survival isn’t in danger.”
“The people on Luna City number nine hundred and sev­
enty-two, including myself, but our survival is in danger. We
depend on Earth for essentials. That need not always be so; it
wouldn’t be so right now if the Planetary Project Council
could resist the temptation toward pygmy economics—”
“There, at least, Mr. Demerest,” said Bergen, “we see eye
to eye. We are not self-supporting either, and we could be.
What’s more, we can’t grow much beyond our present level
unless nuclear ’scaphes are built. As long as we keep that
buoyancy principle, we are limited. Transportation between
Deep and Top is slow; slow for men; slower still for materiel
and supplies. I’ve been pushing, Mr. Demerest, for—”
“Yes, and you’ll be getting it now, Mr. Bergen, won't
you?”
“ I hope so, but what makes you so sure?"
“ Mr. Bergen, let’s not play around. You know very well
that Earth is committed to spending a fixed amount of money
on expansion projects—on programs designed to expand the
human habitat—and that it is not a terribly large amount.
Earth’s population is not going to lavish resources in an effort
to expand either outer space or inner space if it thinks this
will cut into the comfort and convenience of Earth’s prime
habitat, the land surface of the planet.”
Annette broke in. “ You make it sound callous of Earth-
men, Mr. Demerest, and that’s unfair. It’s only human, isn’t
it, to want to be secure? Earth is overpopulated and it is only
slowly reversing the havoc inflicted on the planet by the Mad
Twentieth. Surely man’s original home must come first,
 ISAAC ASIMOV 111

ahead of either Luna City or Ocean-Deep. Heavens, Ocean-

Deep is almost home to me, but I can’t want to see it flourish
at the expense of Earth’s land.”
“It’s not an either-or, Mrs. Bergen,” said Demerest ear­
nestly. “ If the ocean and outer space are firmly, honestly, and
intelligently exploited, it can only redound to Earth’s benefit.
A small investment will be lost but a large one will redeem it­
self with profit.”
Bergen held up his hand. “Yes, I know. You don’t have to
argue with me on that point. You’d be trying to convert the
converted. Come, let’s eat. I tell you what. We’ll eat here. If
you’ll stay with us overnight, or several days for that mat­
ter—you’re quite welcome—there will be ample time to meet
everybody. Perhaps you’d rather take it easy for a while,
though.”
“ Much rather,” said Demerest. “Actually, I want to stay
here. . . . I would like to ask, by the way, why I met so few
people when we went through the units.”
“No mystery,” said Bergen genially. “At any given time,
some fifteen of our men are asleep and perhaps fifteen more
are watching films or playing chess or, if their wives are with
them—”
“Yes, John,” said Annette.
“—And it’s customary not to disturb them. The quarters
are constricted and what privacy a man can have is cher­
ished. A few are out at sea; three right now, I think. That
leaves a dozen or so at work in here and you met them.”
“I’ll get lunch,” said Annette, rising.
She smiled and stepped through the door, which closed
automatically behind her.
Bergen looked after her. “That’s a concession. She’s play­
ing woman for your sake. Ordinarily, it would be just as like­
ly for me to get the lunch. The choice is not defined by sex
but by the striking of random lightning.”
Demerest said, “The doors between units, it seems to me,
are of dangerously limited strength.”
“Are they?”
112 WATERCLAP

“If an accident happened, and one unit was punctured— ”

“No meteorites down here,” said Bergen, smiling.
“Oh yes, wrong word. If there were a leak of any sort, for
any reason, then could a unit or a group of units be sealed off
against the full pressure of the ocean?”
“You mean, in the way that Luna City can have its compo­
nent units automatically sealed off in case of meteorite punc­
ture in order to limit damage to a single unit.”
“Yes,” said Demerest with a faint bitterness. “As did not
happen recently.”
“ In theory, we could do that, but the chances of accident
are much less down here. As I said, there are no meteorites
and, what’s more, there are no currents to speak of. Even an
earthquake centered immediately below us would not be
damaging, since we make no fixed or solid contact with the
ground beneath and are cushioned by the ocean itself against
the shocks. So we can afford to gamble on no massive in­
flux.”
“Yet if one happened?”
“Then we could be helpless. You see, it is not so easy to
seal off component units here. On the Moon, there is a pres­
sure differential of just one atmosphere; one atmosphere in­
side and the zero atmosphere of vacuum outside. A thin seal
is enough. Here at Ocean-Deep the pressure differential is
roughly a thousand atmospheres. To secure absolute safety
against that differential would take a great deal of money,
and you know what you said about getting money out of
PPC. So we gamble and so far we’ve been lucky.”
“And we haven’t,” said Demerest.
Bergen looked uncomfortable, but Annette distracted both
by coming in with lunch at this moment.
She said, “ I hope, Mr. Demerest, that you’re prepared for
Spartan fare. All our food in Ocean-Deep is prepackaged and
requires only heating. We specialize in blandness and non­
surprise here, and the non-surprise of the day is a bland
chicken a la king, with carrots, boiled potatoes, a piece of
 ISAAC ASIMOV 113

something that looks like a brownie for dessert, and, of

course, all the coffee you can drink.”
Demerest rose to take his tray and tried to smile. “It
sounds very like Moon fare, Mrs. Bergen, and I was brought
up on that. We grow our own micro-organismic food. It is pa­
triotic to eat that but not particularly enjoyable. We hope to
keep improving it, though.”
“I’m sure you will improve it.”
Demerest said, as he ate with a slow and methodical chew­
ing, “ I hate to ride my specialty, but how secure are you
against mishaps in your air-lock entry?”
“It is the weakest point of Ocean-Deep,” said Bergen. He
had finished eating, well ahead of the other two, and was half
through with his first cup of coffee. “But there’s got to be an
interface, right? The entry is as automatic as we can make it
and as fail-safe. Number one: there has to be contact at every
point about the outer lock before the fusion generator begins
to heat the water within the lock. What’s more, the contact
has to be metallic and of a metal with just the magnetic per­
meability we use on our ’scaphes. Presumably a rock or some
mythical deep-sea monster might drop down and make con­
tact at just the right places; but if so, nothing happens.
“Then, too, the outer door doesn’t open until the steam has
pushed the water out and then condensed; in other words, not
till both pressure and temperature have dropped below a cer­
tain point. At the moment the outer door begins to open, a
relatively slight increase in internal pressure, as by water en­
try, will close it again.”
Demerest said, “But then, once men have passed through
the lock, the inner door closes behind them and sea water
must be allowed into the lock again. Can you do that gradu­
ally against the full pressure of the ocean outside?”
“Not very.” Bergen smiled. “ It doesn’t pay to fight the
ocean too hard. You have to roll with the punch. We slow it
down to about one-tenth free entry, but even so it comes in
like a rifle shot—louder, a thunderclap, or waterclap, if you
114 W ATERCLAP

prefer. The inner door can hold it, though, and it is not sub­
jected to the strain very often. Well, wait, you heard the wa-
terclap when we first met, when Javan’s ’scaphe took off
again. Remember?”
“I remember,” said Demerest. “But here is something I
don’t understand. You keep the lock filled with ocean at high
pressure at all times to keep the outer door without strain.
But that keeps the inner door at full strain. Somewhere there
has to be strain.”
“Yes, indeed. But if the outer door, with a thousand-atmo­
sphere differential on its two sides, breaks down, the full
ocean in all its millions of cubic miles tries to enter and that
would be the end of all. If the inner door is the one under
strain and it gives, then it will be messy indeed, but the only
water that enters Ocean-Deep will be the very limited quanti­
ty in the lock, and its pressure will drop at once. We will have
plenty of time for repair, for the outer door will certainly
hold a long time.”
“ But if both go simultaneously—”
“Then we are through.” Bergen shrugged. “ I need not tell
you that neither absolute certainty nor absolute safety exists.
You have to live with some risk, and the chance of double
and simultaneous failure is so microscopically small that it
can be lived with easily.”
“ If all your mechanical contrivances fail—”
“They fail safe,” said Bergen stubbornly.
Demerest nodded. He finished the last of his chicken. Mrs.
Bergen was already beginning to clean up. “You'll pardon
my questions, Mr. Bergen, I hope.”
“You’re welcome to ask. I wasn’t informed, actually, as to
the precise nature of your mission here. ’Fact finding’ is a
weasel phrase. However, I assume there is keen distress on
the Moon over the recent disaster and as safety engineer you
rightly feel the responsibility of correcting whatever short­
comings exist and would be interested in learning, if possible,
from the system used in Ocean-Deep.”
 ISAAC ASIMOV 115

“ Exactly. But, see here, if all your automatic contrivances

fail safe for some reason, for any reason, you would be alive,
but all your escape-hatch mechanisms would be sealed per­
manently shut. You would be trapped inside Ocean-Deep and
would exchange a slow death for a fast one.”
“It’s not likely to happen but we’d hope we could make re­
pairs before our air supply gave out. Besides we do have a
manual backup system.”
“Oh?”
“ Certainly. When Ocean-Deep was first established and
this was the only unit—the one we’re sitting in now—manual
controls were all we had. That was unsafe, if you like. There
they are, right behind you—covered with friable plastic.”
“In emergency, break glass,” muttered Demerest, inspect­
ing the covered setup.
“Pardon me?”
“Just a phrase commonly used in ancient fire-fighting sys­
tems .. . Well, do the manuals still work, or has the system
been covered with your friable plastic for twenty years to the
point where it has all decayed into uselessness with no one
noticing?”
“ Not at all. It’s periodically checked, as all our equipment
is. That’s not my job personally, but I know it is done. If any
electrical or electronic circuit is out of its normal working
condition, lights flash, signals sound, everything happens but
a nuclear b last.. . . You know, Mr. Demerest, we are as cur­
ious about Luna City as you are about Ocean-Deep. I pre­
sume you would be willing to invite one of our young men—”
“ How about a young woman?” interposed Annette at once.
“ I am sure you mean yourself, dear,” said Bergen, “to
which I can only answer that you are determined to have a
baby here and to keep it here for a period of time after birth,
and that effectively eliminates you from consideration.”
Demerest said stiffly, “We hope you will send men to Luna
City. We are anxious to have you understand our problems.”
“Yes, a mutual exchange of problems and of weeping on
116 WATERCLAP

each other’s shoulders might be of great comfort to all. For

instance, you have one advantage on Luna City that I wish
we could have. With low gravity and a low pressure differen­
tial, you can make your caverns take on any irregular and an­
gular fashion that appeals to your aesthetic sense or is re­
quired for convenience. Down here we’re restricted to the
sphere, at least for the foreseeable future, and our designers
develop a hatred for the spherical that surpasses belief. Actu­
ally it isn’t funny. It breaks them down. They eventually re­
sign rather than continue to work spherically.”
Bergen shook his head and leaned his chair back against a
microfilm cabinet. “You know,” he continued, “when Wil­
liam Beebe built the first deep-sea chamber in history in the
1930s—it was just a gondola suspended from a mother ship
by a half-mile cable, with no buoyancy chambers and no en­
gines, and if the cable broke, good night, only it never did.
. .. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, when Beebe built his
first deep-sea chamber, he was going to make it cylindrical;
you know, so a man would fit in it comfortably. After all, a
man is essentially a tall, skinny cylinder. However, a friend of
his argued him out of that and into a sphere on the very sen­
sible grounds that a sphere would resist pressure more effi­
ciently than any other possible shape. You know who that
friend was?”
“No, I’m afraid I don't.”
“The man who was President of the United States at the
time of Beebe’s descents— Franklin D. Roosevelt. All these
spheres you see down here are the great-grandchildren of
Roosevelt’s suggestion.”
Demerest considered that briefly but made no comment.
He returned to the earlier topic. “ We would particularly like
someone from Ocean-Deep,” he said, “to visit Luna City be­
cause it might lead to a great enough understanding of the
need, on Ocean-Deep’s part, for a course of action that might
involve considerable self-sacrifice.”
“Oh?” Bergen’s chair came down flat-leggedly on all
fours. “How’s that?"
 ISAAC ASIMOV 117

“Ocean-Deep is a marvelous achievement; I wish to detract

nothing from that. I can see where it will become greater
still, a wonder of the world. Still—”
“ Still?”
“Still, the oceans are only a part of the Earth; a major
part, but only a part. The deep sea is only part of the ocean.
It is inner space indeed; it works inward, narrowing constant­
ly to a point.”
“I think,” broke in Annette, looking rather grim, “that
you’re about to make a comparison with Luna City.”
“Indeed I am,” said Demerest. “Luna City represents out­
er space, widening to infinity. There is nowhere to go down
here in the long run; everywhere to go out there.”
“ We don’t judge by size and volume alone, Mr. Demerest,”
said Bergen. “The ocean is only a small part of Earth, true,
but for that very reason it is intimately connected with over
five billion human beings. Ocean-Deep is experimental, but
the settlements on the continental shelf already deserve the
name of cities. Ocean-Deep offers mankind the chance of ex­
ploiting the whole planet—”
“Of polluting the whole planet,” broke in Demerest excit­
edly. “Of raping it, of ending it. The concentration of human
effort to Earth itself is unhealthy and even fatal if it isn’t bal­
anced by a turning outward to the frontier.”
“There is nothing at the frontier,” said Annette, snapping
out the words. “The Moon is dead, all the other worlds out
there are dead. If there are live worlds among the stars, light-
years away, they can’t be reached. This ocean is living.”
“The Moon is living, too, Mrs. Bergen, and if Ocean-Deep
allows it, the Moon will become an independent world. We
Moon-men will then see to it that other worlds are reached
and made alive and, if mankind but has patience, we will
reach the stars. We! We! It is only we Moon-men, used to
space, used to a world in a cavern, used to an engineered en­
vironment, who could endure life in a spaceship that may
have to travel centuries to reach the stars.”
“ Wait, wait, Demerest,” said Bergen, holding up his hand.
118 WATHRCLAP

“Back up! What do you mean, if Ocean-Deep allows it?

What have we to do with it?”
“You’re competing with us, Mr. Bergen. The Planetary
Project Commission will swing your way, give you more, give
us less, because in the short term, as your wife says, the
ocean is alive and the Moon, except for a thousand men, is
not; because you are a half-dozen miles away and we a quar­
ter of a million; because you can be reached in an hour and
we only in three days. And because you have an ideal safety
record and we have had—misfortunes.”
“The last, surely, is trivial. Accidents can happen any time,
anywhere.”
“But the trivial can be used,” said Demerest angrily. “ It
can be made to manipulate emotions. To people who don’t
see the purpose and the importance of space exploration, the
death of Moon-men in accidents is proof enough that the
Moon is dangerous, that its colonization is a useless fantasy.
Why not? It’s their excuse for saving money and they can
then salve their consciences by investing part of it in Ocean-
Deep instead. That’s why I said the accident on the Moon
had threatened the survival of Luna City even though it
killed only twenty people out of nearly a thousand.”
“ I don’t accept your argument. There has been enough
money for both for a score of years.”
“Not enough money. That’s exactly it. Not enough invest­
ment to make the Moon self-supporting in all these years,
and then they use that lack of self-support against us. Not
enough investment to make Ocean-Deep self-supporting ei­
ther. . . .But now they can give you enough if they cut us out
altogether.”
“ Do you think that will happen?”
“ I’m almost sure it will, unless Ocean-Deep shows a states­
manlike concern for man’s future.”
“How?”
“ By refusing to accept additional funds. By not competing
with Luna City. By putting the good of the whole race ahead
of self-interest.”
 ISAAC ASIMOV 119

“Surely you don’t expect us to dismantle—”

“You won’t have to. Don’t you see? Join us in explaining
that Luna City is essential, that space exploration is the hope
of mankind; that you will wait, retrench, if necessary.”
Bergen looked at his wife and raised his eyebrows. She
shook her head angrily. Bergen said, “You have a rather ro­
mantic view of the PPC, I think. Even if I made noble, self-
sacrificing speeches, who’s to say they would listen? There’s a
great deal more involved in the matter of Ocean-Deep than
my opinion and my statements. There are economic consider­
ations and public feeling. Why don’t you relax, Mr. Demer-
est? Luna City won’t come to an end. You’ll receive funds,
I’m sure of it. I tell you, I’m sure of it. Now let’s break this
up—”
“No, I’ve got to convince you one way or another that I’m
serious. If necessary, Ocean-Deep must come to a halt unless
the PPC can supply ample funds for both.”
Bergen said, “ Is this some sort of official mission, Mr. De-
merest? Are you speaking for Luna City officially, or just for
yourself?”
“Just for myself, but maybe that’s enough, Mr. Bergen.”
“I don’t think it is. I’m sorry, but this is turning out to be
unpleasant. I suggest that, after all, you had better return
Topside on the first available ’scaphe.”
“ Not yet! Not yet!” Demerest looked about wildly, then
rose unsteadily and put his back against the wall. He was a
little too tall for the room and he became conscious of life re­
ceding. One more step and he would have gone too far to
back out.
He had told them back on the Moon that there would be
no use talking, no use negotiating. It was dog-eat-dog for the
available funds, and Luna City’s destiny must not be aborted;
not for Ocean-Deep; not for Earth; no, not for all of Earth,
since mankind and the Universe came even before the Earth.
Man must outgrow his womb and—
Demerest could hear his own ragged breathing and the in­
ner turmoil of his whirling thoughts. The other two were
120 WATERCLAP

looking at him with what seemed concern. Annette rose and

said, “Are you ill, Mr. Demerest?”
“I am not ill. Sit down. I’m a safety engineer and I want to
teach you about safety. Sit down, Mrs. Bergen.”
“Sit down, Annette,” said Bergen. “I’ll take care of him.”
He rose and took a step forward.
But Demerest said, “No. Don’t you move either. I have
something right here. You’re too naive concerning human
dangers, Mr. Bergen. You guard against the sea and against
mechanical failure and you don’t search your human visitors,
do you? I have a weapon, Bergen.”
Now that it was out and he had taken the final step, from
which there was no returning, for he was now dead whatever
he did, he was quite calm.
Annette said, “Oh, John,” and grasped her husband's arm.
“ He’s—”
Bergen stepped in front of her. “A weapon? Is that what
that thing is? Now slowly, Demerest, slowly. There's nothing
to get hot over. If you want to talk, we will talk. What is
that?”
“ Nothing dramatic. A portable laser beam."
“ But what do you want to do with it?”
“Destroy Ocean-Deep,”
“ But you can’t, Demerest. You know you can’t. There's
only so much energy you can pack into your fist and any la­
ser you can hold can’t pump enough heat to penetrate the
walls.”
“ I know that. This packs more energy than you think. It’s
Moon-made and there are some advantages to manufacturing
the energy unit in a vacuum. But you’re right. Even so, it's
designed only for small jobs and requires frequent recharg­
ing. So I don’t intend to try to cut through a foot-plus of al­
loy steel. . . . But it will do the job indirectly. For one thing, it
will keep you two quiet. There’s enough energy in my fist to
kill two people.”
“ You wouldn’t kill us,” said Bergen evenly. “ You have no
reason.”
 ISAAC ASIMOV 121

“If by that,” said Demerest, “you imply that I am an un­

reasoning being to be somehow made to understand my mad­
ness, forget it. I have every reason to kill you and I will kill
you. By laser beam if I have to, though I would rather not.”
“What good will killing us do you? Make me understand.
Is it that I have refused to sacrifice Ocean-Deep funds? I
couldn’t do anything else. I’m not really the one to make the
decision. And if you kill me, that won’t help you force the de­
cision in your direction, will it? In fact, quite the contrary. If
a Moon-man is a murderer, how will that reflect on Luna
City? Consider human emotions on Earth.”
There was just an edge of shrillness in Annette’s voice as
she joined in. “Don’t you see there will be people who will say
that Solar radiation on the Moon has dangerous effects?
That the genetic engineering which has reorganized your
bones and muscles has affected mental stability? Consider
the word ‘lunatic,’ Mr. Demerest. Men once believed the
Moon brought madness.”
“ I am not mad, Mrs. Bergen.”
“ It doesn’t matter,” said Bergen, following his wife’s lead
smoothly. “Men will say that you were; that all Moon-men
are; and Luna City will be closed down and the Moon itself
closed to all further exploration, perhaps forever. Is that what
you want?”
“That might happen if they thought I killed you, but they
won’t. It will be an accident.” With his left elbow, Demerest
broke the plastic that covered the manual controls.
“I know units of this sort,” he said. “I know exactly how it
works. Logically, breaking that plastic should set up a warn­
ing flash—after all, it might be broken by accident—and
then someone would be here to investigate, or better yet, the
controls should lock until deliberately released to make sure
the break was not merely accidental.”
He paused, then said, “But I’m sure no one will come; that
no warning has taken place. Your manual system is not fail­
safe because in your heart you were sure it would never be
used.”
122 WATERCLAP

“ What do you plan to do?” said Bergen.

He was tense, and Demerest watched his knees carefully
and said, “ If you try to jump toward me, I’ll shoot at once,
and then keep right on with what I’m doing.”
“ I think maybe you’re giving me nothing to lose.”
“You’ll lose time. Let me go right on without interference,
and you’ll have some minutes to keep on talking. You may
even be able to talk me out of it. There’s my proposal. Don’t
interfere with me and I will give you your chance to argue.”
“But what do you plan to do?”
“This,” said Demerest. He did not have to look. His left
hand snaked out and closed a contact. “The fusion unit will
now pump heat into the air lock and the steam will empty it.
It will take a few minutes. When it’s done, I’m sure one of
those little red-glass buttons will light.”
“Are you going to—”
Demerest said, “Why do you ask? You know that I must
be intending, having gone this far, to flood Ocean-Deep."
“ But why? Damn it, why?”
“ Because it will be marked down as an accident. Because
your safety record will be spoiled. Because it will be a com­
plete catastrophe and will wipe you out. And PPC will then
turn from you, and the glamour of Ocean-Deep will be gone.
We will get the funds; we will continue. If I could bring that
to pass in some other way, I would, but the needs of Luna
City are the needs of mankind and those are paramount.”
“ You will die, too,” Annette managed to say.
“Of course. Once I am forced to do something like this,
would I want to live? I’m not a murderer.”
“ But you will be. If you flood this unit, you will flood all of
Ocean-Deep and kill everyone in it—and doom those who are
out in their subs to slower death. Fifty men and women—an
unborn child—”
“That is not my fault,” said Demerest, in clear pain. “ I did
not expect to find a pregnant woman here, but now that I
have, I can’t stop because of that.”
 ISAAC ASIMOV 123

“But you must stop,” said Bergen. “Your plan won’t work
unless what happens can be shown to be an accident. They’ll
find you with a beam emitter in your hand and with the man­
ual controls clearly tampered with: Do you think they won’t
deduce the truth from that?”
Demerest was feeling very tired. “ Mr. Bergen, you sound
desperate. Listen— When the outer door opens, water under
a thousand atmospheres of pressure will enter. It will be a
massive battering ram that will destroy and mangle every­
thing in its path. The walls of the Ocean-Deep units will re­
main but everything inside will be twisted beyond recogni­
tion. Human beings will be mangled into shredded tissue and
splintered bone, and death will be instantaneous and unfelt.
Even if I were to burn you to death with the laser, there
would be nothing left to show it had been done, so I won’t
hesitate, you see. This manual unit will be smashed anyway;
anything I can do will be erased by the water.”
“But the beam emitter, the laser gun. Even damaged, it
will be recognizable,” said Annette.
“ We use such things on the Moon, Mrs. Bergen. It is a
common tool; it is the optical analogue of a jackknife. I could
kill you with a jackknive, you know, but one would not de­
duce that a man carrying a jackknife, or even holding one
with the blade open, was necessarily planning murder. He
might be whittling. Besides, a Moon-made laser is not a pro­
jectile gun. It doesn’t have to withstand an internal explosion.
It is made of thin metal, mechanically weak. After it is
smashed by the waterclap I doubt that it will make much
sense as an object.”
Demerest did not have to think to make these statements.
He had worked them out within himself through months of
self-debate back on the Moon.
“In fact,” he went on, “how will the investigators ever
know what happened here? They will send ’scaphes down to
inspect what is left of Ocean-Deep, but how can they get in­
side without first pumping the water out? They will, in effect,
124 WATERCLAP

have to build a new Ocean-Deep and that would take—how

long? Perhaps, given public reluctance to waste money, they
might never do it at all and content themselves with dropping
a laurel wreath on the dead walls of the dead Ocean-Deep.”
Bergen said, “The men on Luna City will know what you
have done. Surely one of them will have a conscience. The
truth will be known.”
“One truth,” said Demerest, “is that I am not a fool. No
one on Luna City knows what I planned to do or will suspect
what I have done. They sent me down here to negotiate co­
operation on the matter of financial grants. I was to argue
and nothing more. There’s not even a laser-beam emitter
missing up there. I put this one together myself out of
scrapped p arts... . And it works. I’ve tested it.”
Annette said slowly, “You haven’t thought it through. Do
you know what you’re doing?”
“ I’ve thought it through. I know what I’m doing. . .. And I
know also that you are both conscious of the lit signal. I’m
aware of it. The air lock is empty and time's up, I'm afraid."
Rapidly, holding his beam emitter tensely high, he closed
another contact. A circular part of the unit wall cracked into
a thin crescent and rolled smoothly away.
Out of the corner of his eye, Demerest saw the gaping
darkness, but he did not look. A dank salty vapor issued from
it; a queer odor of dead steam. He even imagined he could
hear the flopping sound of the gathered water at the bottom
of the lock.
Demerest said, “ In a rational manual unit, the outer door
ought to be frozen shut now. With the inner door open, noth­
ing ought to make the outer door open. I suspect, though,
that the manuals were put together too quickly at first for
that precaution to have been taken, and they were replaced
too quickly for that precaution to have been added. And if I
need further evidence of that, you wouldn’t be sitting there so
tensely if you knew the outer door wouldn’t open. I need
 ISAAC ASIMOV 125

touch one more contact and the waterclap will come. We will
feel nothing.”
Annette said, “Don’t push it just yet. I have one more
thing to say, You said we would have time to persuade you.”
“ While the water was being pushed out.”
“Just let me say this. A minute. A minute. I said you
didn’t know what you were doing. You don’t. You’re destroy­
ing the space program, the space program. There’s more to
space than space." Her voice had grown shrill.
Demerest frowned. “What are you talking about? Make
sense, or I’ll end it all. I’m tired. I’m frightened. I want it
over.”
Annette said, “You’re not in the inner councils of the PPC.
Neither is my husband. But I am. Do you think because I am
a woman that I’m secondary here? I’m not. You, Mr. Demer­
est, have your eyes fixed on Luna City only. My husband has
his fixed on Ocean-Deep. Neither of you knows anything.
“ Where do you expect to go, Mr. Demerest, if you had all
the money you wanted? Mars? The asteroids? The satellites
of the gas giants? These are all small worlds; all dry surfaces
under a blank sky. It may be generations before we are ready
to try for the stars and till then we’d have only pygmy real es­
tate. Is that your ambition?
“ My husband’s ambition is no better. He dreams of push­
ing man’s habitat over the ocean floor, a surface not much
larger in the last analysis than the surface of the Moon and
the other pygmy worlds. We of the PPC, on the other hand,
want more than either of you, and if you push that button,
Mr. Demerest, the greatest dream mankind has ever had will
come to nothing.”
Demerest found himself interested despite himself, but he
said, “ You’re just babbling.” It was possible, he knew, that
somehow they had warned others in Ocean-Deep, that any
moment someone would cone to interrupt, someone would try
to shoot him down. He was, however, staring at the only
126 WATERCLAP

opening, and he had only to close one contact, without even

looking, in a second’s movement.
Annette said, “ I’m not babbling. You know it took more
than rocket ships to colonize the Moon. To make a successful
colony possible, men had to be altered genetically and adjust­
ed to low gravity. You are a product of such genetic engi­
neering.”
“Well?”
“And might not genetic engineering also help men to
greater gravitational pull? What is the largest planet of the
Solar System, Mr. Demerest?”
“Jupi—”
“Yes, Jupiter. Eleven times the diameter of the Earth; for­
ty times the diameter of the Moon. A surface a hundred and
twenty times that of the Earth in area; sixteen hundred times
that of the Moon. Conditions so different from anything we
can encounter anywhere on the worlds the size of Earth or
less that any scientist of any persuasion would give half his
life for a chance to observe at close range."
“ But Jupiter is an impossible target.”
“ Indeed?” said Annette, and even managed a faint smile.
“As impossible as flying? Why is it impossible? Genetic engi­
neering could design men with stronger and denser bones,
stronger and more compact muscles. The same principles that
enclose Luna City against the vacuum and Ocean-Deep
against the sea can also enclose the future Jupiter-Deep
against its ammoniated surroundings."
“The gravitational field—”
“Can be negotiated by nuclear-powered ships that are now
on the drawing board. You don't know that but I do.”
“ We’re not even sure about the depth of the atmosphere.
The pressures ”
“The pressures! The pressures! Mr. Demerest, look about
you. Why do you suppose Ocean-Deep was really built? To
exploit the ocean? The settlements on the continental shelf
are doing that quite adequately. To gain knowledge of the
 ISAAC ASIMOV 127

deep-sea bottom? We could do that by ‘scaphe easily and we

could then have spared the hundred billion dollars invested in
Ocean-Deep so far.
“Don’t you see, Mr. Demerest, that Ocean-Deep must
mean something more than that? The purpose of Ocean-
Deep is to devise the ultimate vessels and mechanisms that
will suffice to explore and colonize Jupiter. Look about you
and see the beginnings of a Jovian environment; the closest
approach we can come to it on Earth. It is only a faint image
of mighty Jupiter, but it’s a beginning.
“Destroy this, Mr. Demerest, and you destroy any hope for
Jupiter. On the other hand, let us live and we will, together,
penetrate and settle the brightest jewel of the Solar System.
And long before we can reach the limits of Jupiter, we will be
ready for the stars, for the Earth-type planets circling them,
and the Jupiter-type planets, too. Luna City won’t be aban­
doned, because both are necessary for this ultimate aim.”
For the moment, Demerest had altogether forgotten about
that last button. He said, “Nobody on Luna City has heard
of this.”
“You haven’t. There are those on Luna City who know. If
you had told them of your plan of destruction, they would
have stopped you. Naturally, we can’t make this common
knowledge and only a few people anywhere can know. The
public supports only with difficulty the planetary projects
now in progress. If the PPC is parsimonious it is because pub­
lic opinion limits its generosity. What do you suppose public
opinion would say if they thought we were aiming toward Ju­
piter? What a super-boondoggle that would be in their eyes.
But we continue and what money we can save and make use
of we place in the various facets of Project Big World.”
“ Yes,” said Annette. “ You know now and I have commit­
ted a serious security breach. But it doesn’t matter, does it?
Since we’re all dead and since the project is, too.”
“ Wait now, Mrs. Bergen.”
“ If you change your mind now, don’t think you can ever
128 WATERCLAP

talk about Project Big World. That would end the project
just as effectively as destruction here would. And it would
end both your career and mine. It might end Luna City and
Ocean-Deep, too— so now that you know, maybe it makes no
difference anyway. You might just as well push that button.”
“I said wait—” Demerest’s brow was furrowed and his
eyes burned with anguish. “I don’t know—”
Bergen gathered for the sudden jump as Demerest’s tense
alertness wavered into uncertain introspection, but Annette
grasped her husband’s sleeve.
A timeless interval that might have been ten seconds long
followed and then Demerest held out his laser. “Take it,” he
said. “I’ll consider myself under arrest.”
“You can’t be arrested,” said Annette, “without the whole
story coming out.” She took the laser and gave it to Bergen.
“ It will be enough that you return to Luna City and keep si­
lent. Till then we will keep you under guard."
Bergen was at the manual controls. The inner door slid
shut and after that there was the thunderous waterclap of the
water returning into the lock.

Husband and wife were alone again. They had not dared
say a word until Demerest was safely put to sleep under the
watchful eyes of two men detailed for the purpose. The unex­
pected waterclap had roused everybody and a sharply bowd­
lerized account of the incident had been given out.
The manual controls were now locked off and Bergen said,
“ From this point on, the manuals will have to be adjusted to
fail-safe. And visitors will have to be searched."
“Oh, John,” said Annette. “ 1 think people are insane.
There we were, facing death for us and for Ocean-Deep; just
the end of everything. And I kept thinking: I must keep calm;
I mustn’t have a miscarriage."
“ You kept calm all right. You were magnificent. I mean,
Project Big World! I never conceived of such a thing, but
by—by—Jove, it’s an attractive thought. It’s wonderful.”
 ISAAC ASIMOV 129

“ I’m sorry I had to say all that, John. It was all a fake, of
course. I made it up. Demerest wanted me to make some­
thing up really. He wasn’t a killer or destroyer; he was, ac­
cording to his own overheated lights, a patriot, and I suppose
he was telling himself he must destroy in order to save—a
common enough view among the small-minded. But he said
he would give us time to talk him out of it and I think he was
praying we would manage to do so. He wanted us to think of
something that would give him the excuse to save in order to
save, and I gave it to him. . .. I’m sorry I had to fool you,
John.”
“You didn’t fool me.”
“I didn’t? ”
“ How could you? I knew you weren’t a member of PPC.”
“ What made you so sure of that? Because I’m a woman?”
“Not at all. Because I’m a member, Annette, and that’s
confidential. And, if you don’t mind, I will begin a move to
initiate exactly what you suggested—Project Big World.”
“ Well!” Annette considered that and slowly smiled. “Well!
That’s not bad. Women do have their uses.”
“ Something,” said Bergen, smiling also, “ I have never de­
nied.”
 MARS

From the days when telescopes first began to be trained on it,

Mars has seemed to be a little Earth. Mars is half the diameter
of Earth and has one-tenth the mass. It is half again as far from
the Sun as Earth is.
The smallness of Mars means it can only have a thin atmo­
sphere, but it does have one. Its distance from the Sun means it
must be cooler than Earth, but there seemed reasons to think
that it might not be too cold.
Then, too, Mars has a rotation period of 24.66 days, which is
very close to that of Earth, and it has an axial tip of 25.17°,
again very close to that of Earth. That means it has Earthlike
seasons, each one colder than the corresponding season on
Earth, of course, and lasting nearly twice as long because the
Martian year is nearly twice as long as ours. Also, because
Mars’s orbit is a more eccentric ellipse than that of Earth, the
seasons on Mars are more unequal in length than those of
Earth.
Mars’s surface seemed to the nineteenth-century astrono­
mers to be an interlacing of light and dark— which could mean
land and sea, respectively— and there was no question but that
the planet had ice caps at either pole. On the whole, there were
many similarities between Mars and Earth.
According to the favored nineteenth-century theory of the for­
mation of the Solar system, the planets were formed, in order,
from the outermost to the innermost as the Sun came into being

130
 MARS 131

through the shrinkage of the original cloud of dust and gas. That
meant that Mars was older than Earth.
It was easy to suppose that life might have developed on
Mars and, having had a longer time to develop on an older plan­
et, would have produced an intelligent civilization surpassing
ours.
When Mars made an unusually close approach to Earth in
1877, many telescopes were trained on it, and Giovanni Virginio
Schiaparelli reported observing rather thin dark lines on the
planet's surface, each connecting two larger dark areas. Schia­
parelli called them, in Italian, canali (“ channels” ), the normal
name for long thin bodies of water connecting two larger bodies.
In English, however, the word was translated as “ canals,” the
name given to human-made waterways.
The very name seemed to imply intelligent life on Mars.
The picture created was that of a small planet slowly losing
its water because of the weakness of its gravitational field. The
old and technologically advanced civilization on Mars was des­
perately trying to stave off desiccation by building huge canals
to transport needed water from the last planetary reservoir, the
ice caps.
Percival Lowell was the most ardent proponent of this view­
point and wrote a book on the subject in 1894 that attracted
much attention. Aware of this ferment on the subject, the sci­
ence fiction writer H. G. Wells published The War o f the Worlds
in 1898, the first tale of interplanetary warfare. In the book, the
Martians, giving up their hopeless struggle to keep Mars viable,
decide to emigrate to the lush and watery Earth, taking it over
by force if necessary.
From that time on, science fiction writers took it for granted
that Mars had native life and native intelligence. The canals
were accepted along with the high technology they required.
The Martians might be benevolent or they might be evil, but
they were there.
Astronomers were not so sure. Lowell represented a minority
view, for no other astronomers could see the canals as well as
132 MARS

he could, and some couldn’t see them at all. What’s more, the
more closely Mars was studied, the more forbidding its surface
seemed. The atmosphere was thinner than had been thought;
there was no sign of free oxygen; there was little sign of water
outside the ice caps.
Science fiction writers stuck to their guns, however, and the
Martian canals were taken as fixtures into the 1950s. In 1938,
when Orson Welles did a radio adaptation of The War o f the
Worlds, it proved so realistic that thousands panicked. Few
seemed to doubt that there was advanced intelligent life on
Mars.
And yet the growing austerity of the astronomical view of
Mars was reflected in a few stories in science fiction. “ Hop-
Friend,” published originally in 1962, shows a thin-atmos-
phered, arid planet— but one that still has intelligent life on it.
A definite decision on the matter of the canals could not be
reached, however, until a clearer view of the Martian surface
could be obtained than was possible from Earth. Probes were
the answer. On July 14, 1965, the probe Mariner 4 passed
Mars and sent back twenty photographs of the planet.
There were no canals shown. What was shown were craters,
rather like those on the Moon.
In 1969, more advanced probes, Mariners 6 and 7, passed
Mars. Definitely no canals— and the atmosphere was thinner,
dryer, and colder than even the most pessimistic pre-probe esti­
mates. It seemed that there could not possibly be any form of
advanced life on Mars, let alone intelligent life with great engi­
neering ability. The canals seen by Schiaparelli and Lowell were
apparently optical illusions.
In 1971, the probe Mariner 9 went into orbit around Mars,
and the entire Martian surface was photographed in detail.
There were no canals, but there were enormous volcanoes;
one of them, Olympus Mons, was far huger than anything of the
sort on Earth. Another record was set by Valles Marineris, a
canyon that dwarfed Earth’s Grand Canyon to a toothpick
scratch. And there were markings that looked precisely like
dried river beds.
 MARS 133

Could Mars have been wetter and milder in the past, a world
of rivers and lakes? Could it be in an ice age of sorts right now,
and would it return to a wet, mild climate in the future? The
problem is what has happened to the water if it was there in the
past, for there is certainly no sign of it now outside the ice caps.
One theory is that there is a great deal of water (or, rather, ice)
in the subsoil— a kind of planetary permafrost. In this respect,
“ Hop-Friend’s” picture of underground water is interesting. But
intelligent life doesn’t seem in the cards.
In 1976, the probes Vikings 1 and 2 soft-landed on the Mar­
tian surface and tested the soil for signs of microscopic life. The
results were ambiguous.
The old Mars of canals and engineers is dead, but there is a
new Mars that is just as interesting and will supply a new back­
ground and new plots for science fiction writers.
 Hop-Friend
TERRY CARR

On the tenth day of the construction job out on the edge of

Syrtis Major they found a Marshie watching them. He might
have been there ever since they’d trucked in their equipment
and thrown up a bubble and temporary toilets, but they never
did find out.
The Marshies flicked in and out of sight so rapidly that
you had to be looking right where they appeared to see them
at all, most of the time. They hopped around like fireflies,
stopping for two seconds or two minutes, standing almost still
with their angular birdlike heads cocked to one side, and then
they’d be gone, turning up almost instantly fifteen feet away,
still with their heads cocked looking at you. They were un­
nerving to most of the Earthmen, and a couple of years back
one nervous kid in Iguana, near the Bald Spot, had taken a
shot at one of them—missed him and burned hell out of one
wall of a building. The Marshies hadn’t been around the
Earth towns much since then.
Not that they had ever been especially chummy. The Mar­
shies were partially telepathic and they could manage the
Earth languages well enough, but they seldom bothered. For
the most part they just didn’t seem interested. Every now and
then you’d see one of them pause for a minute in the settle­
ments, and maybe he’d say, “ Hi, Harry,” or “ Nice weather
this year,” but they never stopped to talk about anything.
The Earthmen had been on the planet for over ten years, but

134
 TERRY CARR 135

all the government could tell you about the Marshies was
that they had some towns out in the mountains somewhere,
they were trisexual, and their lifespan was about thirty years.
Walt Michelson had been wondering about them ever since
he’d landed on the planet back with the first wave, when he’d
come with his parents. Michelson had been twelve then, busy
looking around and asking questions every time his eyes lit on
something. When he was fourteen he saw a Marshie—one of
them landed right next to him at his brother’s funeral and
stood completely still for almost ten minutes while the service
droned on. It had been out on the flatlands, where the heavy
brown dust was sometimes two inches deep and you had to
raise your voice to be heard in the thin air. The Marshie had
watched the interment rites silently, standing off to one side,
and when it had all been over he had looked at Michelson
and said “Yes,” and disappeared.
Michelson’s father had been a building contractor—a pret­
ty good one, successful enough that he could have sent Walt
back to Earth by the time he was eighteen. But Walt hadn’t
wanted to go; all he remembered of Earth was how crowded
it was, how many policemen there were, how many laws and
taxes and taboos have built up over the centuries, When he’d
been on Earth his father hadn’t had much money, and that
colored his feelings toward the home planet too, but basically
he liked Mars because there was room here—no walls, real
or legislated, to keep a man standing still. So he’d stayed on
Mars, and learned the building trades, and he was a foreman
this year and would be more next year. He didn’t give a
damn about Earth.
Now he was working on building a town out here at the
base of the hills, on a site which somebody had decided would
be an important trade outpost. Some of the drainage from
the ice cap reached this area, too, so there might be some
chance for agriculture. The city had been planned in detail
back at Dry Puget, but nobody had thought that there were
any Marshies in the area.
136 HOP-FRIEND

They’d noticed him first by the puffs of dust rising in a line

leading from the foothills straight to the building site. The
Marshies traveled in a peculiar half-leaping, half-flying fash­
ion, and when they touched down and jumped off again they
kicked up small clouds of dust. One of the workmen saw
those clouds coming toward them and reported to Michelson,
who got his binocs and watched the Marshie coming. He
wasn’t long in arriving.
He lit right outside the bubble and stood looking for a min­
ute, then disappeared and skipped right in through one of the
air locks where they were removing the dirt from the diggings
inside. He turned up next to the big shovel for a few seconds,
disappeared when one of the men suddenly yelled, reappeared
over by the lumber yard next to the foundation work going on
in the south quarter, then outside the truck depot, and finally
at the door of the contractor’s office where Michelson had
been going over the drawings for the street layout. Michelson
looked up at him and the Marshie cocked his head and stared
back.
The Marshie was a faded orange in color, his body covered
with a heavy fur through which the powerful muscles showed
clearly. His eyes, large and liquid black, were set on the sides
of his head, and his nose and mouth were almost indistin­
guishable under the fur of the face. He had long legs, thin
but powerful, giving him a stature of over seven feet; his
large brown wings folded down over his back softly like a
cloak. He was indistiguishable from any other Marshie that
Michelson had ever seen, but that was undoubtedly because
the Marshies were so seldom around.
As the Marshie continued to stand silently looking at him
Michelson was struck with the humor of the tableau, and he
grinned and nodded. “ Welcome to our humble diggings,” he
said.
The Marshie disappeared, leaving two deep footprints in
the dirt outside the door where he had kicked off. Michelson
got up and went to the door, saw the alien light a couple of
 TERRY CARR 137

times going across the large inner yard, and then he appar­
ently hopped out through the air locks again. Michelson
raised his binocs from the strap around his neck, but he was
unable to track the Marshies’ dust clouds in their erratic
jumps out on the flat. They seemed to head toward the hills
again, but he couldn’t be sure.
Michelson shrugged and turned back to the plans on the
desk. The Marshie was no immediate problem to him; if he
continued to show up, there might be trouble among the con­
struction workers—the Marshies appeared and disappeared
so abruptly that they could upset a whole crew in a few
hours—but for the moment Michelson wasn’t going to worry
about it. He had a more pressing problem.
One of the field men had found that the northeast quarter
was right over a large water deposit and it would require
some pretty drastic structural modifications or maybe aban­
doning part of the site altogether. There was bedrock not too
far down, and the yearly ice-cap drainage collected there; the
water wasn’t enough to be useful as a supply for the planned
city, but the pocket was large enough to undermine any foun­
dations they might try to put in there.
He’d already checked the specifications and found that any
pumping system they could install to periodically drain the
pocket would be in a cost bracket making it necessary to get
an okay from the builder clear back in Dry Puget. And that
could hold up the work long enough to make them miss their
deadline. No, there had to be some way to block the seepage
before the water got to the pocket, so that it could be drained
once and for all.
Damn it, it was just his luck to run into trouble with water
on Mars, where that was the last thing you expected. Well,
tomorrow he’d get together with a couple of the surveyors
and see what could be done.

The Marshie was back the next day, shortly after the sun
rose darkly over the low hills. There was so little light at that
138 HOP-FRIEND

early hour that no one saw him coming and the first thing
they knew of his presence was when he landed for a moment
in an air lock and a driver slammed on his brakes to avoid
hitting him—which wasn’t really necessary, since the Mar-
shie had jumped off again immediately, but a human driver’s
muscular reactions weren’t geared for Marshie pedestrians.
The Marshie skipped on in through the interconnecting locks.
He came down beside Michelson as he was going across
the yard toward the diggings, and Michelson stopped. He
turned and cocked his head at the alien, mocking his stance,
and after a moment said, “I’ll give you a gate pass if you
want.”
The Marshie regarded him with his big dark left eye and
shook his wings lightly. “Hello, Walt,” he said, and skipped
off. Michelson shrugged and went on across the yard, but the
Marshie came back a minute later, touched down and said,
“They aren’t so humble,” and disappeared again.
Mike Deckinger, who was in charge of the trucks, was
nearby and he came over frowning. “ He’s going to drive us
nuts if he keeps that up,” he said. “ We could tighten up the
air lock sequence and maybe keep him out that way.”
Michelson shook his head. “That would just down the
works. Leave him alone; he’s just looking.”
“Yeah, but why?” said Deckinger, and walked off.
Harris and Loening, the two surveyors, were waiting for
Michelson at the diggings. They were good men, both in their
thirties and well trained both on Earth and this planet. Har­
ris was heavyset, with a ruddy, swarthy face and close-
cropped black hair; Loening was taller, broad-shouldered,
with bony, angular features and dark eyes that seemed to
peer out from shadowed caves. Michelson explained the prob­
lem to them.
“ I want to go outside and see if we can trace the drain­
age,” he concluded. “ Find a place where we can dam or re-
channel it.”
“That’ll involve drilling,” Loening said.
 TERRY CARR 139

Michelson raised an eyebrow at him. “Probably. Unless

you want to try a dousing rod.” Loening grunted disgustedly.
“Well, let’s take a walk out there first anyway,” Harris
said. They started back across the yard toward the north air
locks. Since they might be out for some time, they each
donned facemasks and picked up small tanks of oxygen be­
fore they checked through.
The Marshie hopped through ahead of them.
He passed them in the second lock and was waiting for
them when they emerged onto the flat outside. He stood off
about twenty feet, ruffling his wings in a way which seemed
impatient to Michelson, and skipped back and forth past
them as they set off toward the low hills, following the line of
the water as closely as it had been traced in the preliminary
survey. Loening walked stolidly, his head down and frowning,
but Harris didn’t seem to pay any attention to the alien.
Michelson watched for him as he walked, and thought.
This hop-guy seemed a lot more interested in the construc­
tion works than the Marshies had ever been before. What
was that he had said back in the compound? “They aren’t so
humble.” What did that mean?
He’d come in from the hills, and the Marshies were sup­
posed to live somewhere in a mountainous area. This one,
maybe? Perhaps the Marshies were taking a definite interest
in this site because the Earthmen had finally started getting
near their own area.
And if so, just what kind of an interest were they taking?
The water had been traced back to the foot of the hills, but
no further. On foot in the low Martian gravity the Earthmen
made it that far in about half an hour. There was a thin, cold
wind out here which cut through their heavy jackets and ruf­
fled Michelson’s light hair, but it didn’t stir the dust very
much. The air on Mars lacked body; once you got used to it
you could breathe it well enough if you didn’t exert yourself,
but if you wanted to smoke a pipe you had to do it when you
were inside a bubble or it would go out every time.
140 HOP-FRIEND

They stopped and rested at the base of the first hill, where
dry rocks had tumbled down the slope during the ages and
collected at the bottom. Loening loosened his pack and swung
it off his shoulder to the ground. He nodded up at the rising
hills and said, “The first thing to do is scout around there and
chart the rock stratifications.”
“Do you think the drainage comes through the moun­
tains?” Michelson asked him.
“ Might; can’t tell offhand. We’ve been walking on solid
rock for a mile or more—that means the water is under rock
for a ways out there, and the channel could turn off any­
where. Maybe it skirts the hills; that’s one thing I want to
check. If the stratifications here show that these hills rose
during an upheaval, the chances are that the water channel
does go around them.”
Michelson nodded. “Well, we can get the preliminary
scouting done faster if we split up. I’ll try going through the
pass up there.”
Loening and Harris rose with him, and they set off sepa­
rately. As Michelson started up the slope, he heard Harris
call to him, “ If you see our Marshie again, ask him where the
hell the water comes from.”
Michelson grinned back down at him. “ I think I will,” he
said.
He climbed slowly up the rough slope, now and then cut­
ting in his oxygen supply for a few breaths. The rocks here
were bulky and weathered—the kind of weathering that hap­
pened on Mars only with the passage of ages. They stood out
like silent gray beasts against the morning shadows. Michel­
son was soon out of sight of their starting point, but he fol­
lowed the natural pass and made a rough map as he went,
noting the rock formations and what he could see of the
stratifications. It was all a jumble, as far as he could tell;
some of the sheer rocksides seemed to show evidence of hav­
ing been pushed up as Loening had suggested and others
 TERRY CARR 141

didn’t. And the direction of the stratifications varied appar­

ently without pattern. Well, figuring the pattern would be the
surveyors’ job.
At a small level spot he stopped to rest, and as he sat look­
ing over his rough-sketched map he heard a sound and the
Marshie said beside him, “ Most of these hills have been here
for two million years.”
Michelson looked up, carefully registering no outward sur­
prise. “ Whose years?” he said. “Yours or mine?”
The Marshie shook his wings and hopped a little way to
one side, still regarding him with one dark eye. “We do not
count years.”
Michelson nodded at him. “Do you have names?”
“No,” said the Marshie, and disappeared. Michelson wait­
ed for him to show up again, but after a few minutes he
shrugged and stood up to go. It looked like there was still a
lot of area to be covered up here.
The Marshie landed again. “ I am faster than you,” he
said.
“That’s true,” Michelson said. He started walking on up­
ward through the rocks. “Do you live near here?”
“Perhaps,” said the Marshie. “ I am faster than you.”
“Near” could mean fifty miles to a Marshie, Michelson re­
flected. Well, it had been a fair answer then.
“ Where does the water come from?” he said.
The Marshie disappeared.
He didn’t show up again for the rest of the day. Michelson
followed the pass up into the hills for a mile or two, and then
he retraced his steps back down to the point of departure.
Loening was waiting for him, and Harris returned shortly.
They set off again back across the dusty flat to the bubble.
“ It’s a mess,” Loening said. “The rocks vary in age from
maybe a couple thousand years to God knows how old, and
there are fifty different types. It doesn’t tell us much.” He
ran his fingers through his dry brown hair, frowning.
142 HOP-FRIEND

“Our hop-friend told me they were mostly a couple of mil­

lion years old,” Michelson said. “At least in the area where I
was.”
“Yeah?” said Harris. “Did he say anything else?”
Michelson shook his head. “ I asked him about the water,
but he wouldn’t answer me; he just shoved off and disap­
peared. You can’t hold a conversation with someone who’s
liable to be gone at any moment. You get to stuttering.”
“I never talked with a Marshie,” Harris said. “They’re
telepathic, aren’t they? Maybe they take one look into me
and don’t like me.”
“Don’t try to understand them,” Loening said over his
shoulder as he walked on ahead through the dust. “The only
good thing about the damn Marshies is that they stay away
from us most of the time.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Michelson, and the three
men fell silent, conserving their breath for walking.
But Michelson was thinking about the Marshie. Harris was
right—they didn’t usually talk with Earthmen. They would
hop around and watch interestedly, and sometimes they
would say a word or two, usually only enough to acknowledge
your existence, but there was no communication between the
two species. Yet this one was, comparatively, talking a blue
streak. Why?
Michelson was becoming more and more sure that the
Marshies had a settlement somewhere nearby. Back in the
hills, probably—and Michelson was almost willing to bet that
the water drainage ran right through those hills. It figured
that the Marshies would settle somewhere where water was
handy; on Mars that would be a prime requisite for the M ar­
shies as well as the Earthmen. And if the Marshies were up
in those hills, what did they think of the new Earth city being
built right on the edge of the flat?
Maybe they hadn’t decided yet.
The Marshies, come to think of it, knew a lot more about
the Earthmen than they knew about the natives. The Mar-
 TERRY CARR 143

shies had stayed away from the Earth settlements, watching,

and now the Earthmen were accidentally forcing a meeting
between them; that must be shaking up the hoppers. And so,
apparently, they were taking a final look at the Earthmen;
and maybe soon they’d make a decision. He wished he knew
what their alternatives were.

They took a landcar out the next day, loaded with a bum-
drill. The small red sun was still low over the horizon when
they checked through the locks, and they threw a long gray
shadow over the dust as they rode toward the hills. There had
been no sign of the Marshie yet today, but Michelson was
watching for the puffs of dust which would herald his arrival.
They set up the drill half a mile from the hills. It worked
on the same principle as their blasters, boring a small hole
straight down through the dirt and rock and, by the resis­
tance offered, registering the various strata through which it
passed. They found the water fifty feet down, under the layer
of rock which formed the floor of the desert here.
They moved on to the base of the hills and again drilled,
and again they found the water. Loening drew a straight line
on a map of the area, and it passed directly from the building
site through the two drilling points. Extended, it would run
through the mountains.
“ We’ll have to take the drill up into the hills,” Loening
said. “ Flex your muscles—it’s heavy.”
They mounted it on rollers and made the ascent, and when
they had got it to the first level spot in the pass they were all
puffing with exertion despite the oxygen masks they had
donned. They sat and rested while Harris and Loening de­
bated whether to drill here or try moving the drill farther
back into the hills. And the Marshie arrived.
He came down the pass in three quick hops and stopped
next to the drill, which he regarded for a moment in his
cocked-head stance. Then he skipped away and came back a
few minutes later, landing next to Michelson.
144 HOP-FRIEND

“It is not a weapon,” he said.

“ No, it’s a drill,” Michelson said. “We’re looking for wa­
ter.”
“Yes,” said the Marshie, and hopped twenty feet back up
the pass. There he stood motionless, looking at the Earthmen.
Marshies could stand still for hours, completely unmoving,
when they felt like it; only the Marshie’s liquid-dark eyes
moved, flicking from one to another of the Earthmen in turn,
and continually back to rest on the drill which sat before
them. Harris sat staring back at him, but Leoning coldly ig­
nored his gaze, looking almost sullenly down at his feet. Mi­
chelson rose and walked slowly toward the creature.
“We’re trying to find the path of the water,” he said. “Can
you help us?”
The Marshie’s head jerked to one side and the big dark eye
focused on Michelson. After a moment he said, "I know
where the water is.”
“We want to dam the water, to keep it from our city,” Mi­
chelson said. “If you help us, we can be sure we don't divert
it from your own use.”
The Marshie hopped to one side, paused, and hopped off
up the slope out of sight. Michelson waited for several min­
utes, but he did not return. Michelson shrugged and went
back to his companions.
“ I think you’ve frightened him,” Loening said. “They don't
play our games.”
“They haven’t so far,” Michelson admitted. “ But I think
they live in these hills, and they’re going to have to take no­
tice of that city we’re building. It's about time we started co­
operating with each other.”
“ Whether we like it or not?” said Loening.
Michelson nodded. “ If that’s their attitude—or ours. Per­
sonally, I think we might have a lot to offer each other; this
could be the first step.”
“The Marshies don’t step," Loening said. “They hop. They
skitter around like grasshoppers.” His mouth was drawn back
 TERRY CARR 145

in a disgusted grimace. He took a breath and stood up. “Any­

way, you can go on talking about cultural exchange with
grasshoppers, but I think we’d better lug this drill up a bit
further if we want to get anything concrete done today.”
The three men began to attach the pulling straps to their
shoulders, but before they started their further ascent the
Marshie came back. He landed beside them and said immedi­
ately, “I can tell you where the water is. You want to be
friends.”
Michelson dropped the strap and looked at the Marshie,
wondering for a moment if the creature was serious. But of
course it was useless to try to see what was in a hopper’s
mind, as Loening had said. At any rate, no matter how diffi­
cult it was to communicate with the Marshies, they did not
lie.
He turned to Loening and said, “You and Harris take the
drill back down to the landcar—the grasshoppers have land­
ed.”

He spent hours following the Marshie through the hills,

back over five miles into the rocky, desolate terrain. There
was silence in those mountains—not just the silence of a thin
atmosphere, but the silence of emptiness, of desertion. The
gray shadows fell along their path like dull pastel silhouettes,
and the Marshie hopped back and forth past Michelson, si­
lent but seemingly impatient. There was an air of excitement
about this fur-covered creature— an almost childlike eager­
ness in his rough, inhuman voice when he occasionally
stopped and said, “ We will be friends, Walt, when I show you
the water.”
Well, of course he was interpreting the creature’s attitude
in his own terms, and it probably didn’t make sense. But the
Marshie hurried him along the rocky path.
They came down into a small hollow among the rocks, and
the Marshie said, “ Here is the water.” There was an expanse
of mud—the heavy brown dust of Mars, with water flowing
146 HOP-FRIEND

slowly through it. It covered the floor of this tiny valley, and
on its surface Michelson saw a thin green mosslike growth. It
was like an expanse of quicksand, like an antiseptic swamp—
for there were none of the heavier forms of vegetation of
Earth, no insects skimming the surface. Here amid the chill
dark rocks of Mars was a branch of the annual drainage of
the ice cap, and it seemed pitifully anticlimactic to Michel­
son.
“You can stop the water here,” said the Marshie. “ We are
friends?”
Michelson looked around him, across the muddy expanse
at the hills which rose again immediately beyond. “Your
home is back there?” he asked.
“Yes.” The Marshie hopped once, twice, twenty feet at a
time, and hopped back again. “ We are friends?” he said
again.
“Of course,” Michelson said. And then a thought came to
him and he said, “ Do you know what friendship is?”
The Marshie’s eye regarded him softly for a moment. “We
know something of it. But we do not have a word for it.”
Michelson was suddenly aware that this small muddy val­
ley was a strangely unimpressive scene for a meeting of races.
He felt alone and unimportant standing amid the ages-old
rocks of this world with the furry Martian. This was not,
after all, his world; he had lived most of his life here, and had
come to think of it as his home far more than he thought so
of Earth, but here in the quiet gray rock shadows he felt fully
for the first time that this desolate world belonged to the hop­
pers—to the Martians. And without quite realizing what he
was doing he cut in his oxygen supply, though he wasn’t real­
ly short of breath.
The Marshie hopped away without a word, leaving him
alone there.

Harris and Loening surveyed the area thoroughly in the

days that followed, and Michelson sent some men out to be-
 T E R R Y C A R R 147

gin construction of a dam there, meanwhile making prepara­

tions for draining the waterpocket beneath the city. It kept
him busy for several days, and it wasn’t until two weeks later,
when the dam construction was started, that he began to
wonder seriously why the Marshie had not been around
again. No one had seen him out at the dam site either.
Michelson took an aircar out to the site soon after and
checked the progress of the work there. They had moved ma­
chinery in and set up temporary quarters there for the work
crew; the area was bustling with activity. Michelson looked at
the footprints of the workmen in the Martian dust, heard the
noise of the machines and the voices around him, and
thought of that silent day when he had stood here alone with
the Marshie. Two weeks ago . . . it seemed like months.
He left, and took the aircar up to scout the area. The Mar-
shies’ city was supposed to be somewhere farther up the pass;
he hoped he could spot it from the air. He flew low, droning
through the massive rocky crags, watching the ground
through binocs. He had penetrated fifteen miles farther into
the mountains and was almost ready to give up when he
found it.
The dwellings were cut into the rock, in vertical lines up
and down the cliffside. There were perhaps twenty or twenty-
five of them, certainly no more. He landed the aircar at the
base of those cliffs and approached slowly.
He needn’t have bothered; they were empty. Some things
had been left behind—a few small objects, delicately carved
from stone, some pelts of the Marshies’ own fur which had
perhaps been used for added warmth during the winter, one
or two pieces of what might have been furniture—but the
area was definitely deserted. He couldn’t tell offhand how
long the Marshies had been gone, but he was sure it was no
more than two weeks.
He left the dwellings untouched, not even picking up any
of the small stone carvings to bring back with him. Perhaps
later they could send out a government expedition to cata-
148 HOP-FRIEND

logue and study what had been left. He walked slowly back
to his aircar, looking at the depressions in the floor of the
canyon left by the Marshies’ footprints.
A fluttering behind him caused him to turn in surprise, and
he saw a Marshie regarding him calmly. This could have
been the same one, but he seemed a bit more heavily built,
his fur somewhat darker.
“Hello,” Michelson said. “We are friends?”
The Marshie continued to look silently at him for a mo­
ment, his heavy, dark wings folded like shadows around him.
Then he said, “Some of us too are insane.” And he disap­
peared with a quick jump and flutter of brown wings.
After a while Michelson turned and continued walking to
the aircar, leaving the footprints of his boots behind him in
the dust.
 ASTEROIDS

The asteroids were discovered by a combination of purposeful­

ness and accident. By the end of the 1700s, astronomers had
noted the regularity with which the planets were spaced in their
orbits about the Sun and had decided that there ought to be one
between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. A group of astronomers
organized for a systematic search of the heavens, but before
they could begin, Giuseppe Piazzi accidentally discovered
Ceres in the orbital gap. He hadn’t been looking for it. The dis­
covery was made on January 1, 1801.
Ceres turned out to be very small, far smaller than Mercury. It
was only 1000 kilometers (600 miles) across, and astronomers
couldn’t believe that was all there was in the gap. They contin­
ued their search and in the next few years discovered three
more objects in the gap— Pallas, Vesta, and Juno. They were
even smaller than Ceres.
William Herschel suggested they be named "asteroids”
("starlike” ) because they were so small that, when viewed
through a telescope, their images did not expand into an orb, as
was the case with the other planets, but remained starlike
points.
Eventually additional asteroids were discovered, more and
more and more, until by now over 1800 asteroids have had
their orbits plotted and have been given names. Some of the
nearer ones that have been located are only a couple of kilome­
ters in diameter. The total number of asteroids with diameters

149
150 ASTEROIDS

of a kilometer or more has been estimated to be from 40,000 to

100,000. Ceres, the first discovered, remains the largest. Its
mass may be as much as 10 percent of the total asteroidal
mass.
When the first four asteroids were discovered, Heinrich W.
M. Olbers, one of the discoverers, at once suggested that they
were fragments of a planet between Mars and Jupiter, a planet
which had, for some reason, exploded. This view has never
quite lost its popularity, and it is mentioned, for instance, in
“ Barnacle Bull,” which was published in 1960. This view is sup­
ported by only a minority of astronomers, however.
After all, even if all the asteroids were imagined to be co­
alesced into a single body, that body would be even smaller
than our Moon, and it is hard to imagine a body of that size,
made of ordinary planetary materials, exploding. It seems more
likely that the asteroids represent a portion of the original cloud
of dust and gas out of which the Solar system was formed that
somehow never got to coalesce into a planet. It formed many
small bodies instead of one large one perhaps because of the
gravitational interference of the too-near giant planet Jupiter.
Throughout the nineteenth century, it was assumed that the
asteroids were confined to the “ asteroid belt,” the region be­
tween the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. In 1898, however, Gustav
Witt discovered one which had an orbit that carried it inside that
of Mars. It could approach Earth within 25 million kilometers (16
million miles), which is closer than the approach of any of the
major planets. Witt named the asteroid “ Eros,” and it was the
first of what came to be called the “ Earth grazers."
The closest of the Earth grazers so far (if we don’t count
those small bodies that actually collide with Earth) is Hermes,
which was spotted in 1937 and which, it was calculated, might
approach within 320,000 kilometers (200,000 miles) of Earth.
Some asteroids approach the Sun surprisingly closely. There
are asteroids called “ Apollo objects” which approach closer to
the Sun than Venus does, and in 1948 Walter Baade discovered
 A S T E R O ID S 151

Icarus, which actually moves closer to the Sun than Mercury

does.
The Apollo objects have the far end of their orbits in the as­
teroid belt, but in 1978, the first asteroid was discovered with
an orbit that at every point was closer to the Sun than Earth
was.
Asteroids with orbits carrying them beyond the other end of
the asteroid belt— that is, beyond the orbit of Jupiter— are
harder to detect because they tend to be so far away from us.
In 1920, nevertheless, Walter Baade discovered Hidalgo,
which moves beyond the orbit of Jupiter and, at its farthest
point from the Sun, is nearly as far away from it as the orbit of
Saturn is.
An even more startling discovery was made in 1977 by
Charles Kowal. He was studying photographic plates in search
of distant comets and came across an object that seemed of
the correct brightness but proved to be moving unusually slowly
as he watched from night to night. He worked out a possible or­
bit, then searched through all other available photographic
plates that might show such an object in various places in its or­
bit. He came across enough photographs of it to work up a very
accurate orbit.
It turned out that Kowal had discovered a good-sized asteroid
with an orbit that stretched from a point nearly as close to the
Sun as Saturn is to a point nearly as far from the Sun as Uranus
is. Kowal called the new object “ Chiron.”
It may well be that asteroids, while concentrated in the aster­
oid belt, are to be found in fair abundance throughout the Solar
system.
It was taken for granted recently that asteroids were essen­
tially rocky objects, and this is mentioned in “ Barnacle Bull.” It
may not be as simple as all that. About 90 percent of the mete­
orites that reach Earth’s crust are rocky, and 10 percent are
nickel-iron. A few, however, are “ carbonaceous chondrites,”
which are black and crumbly and contain light elements and
152 ASTEROIDS

their compounds— including appreciable quantities of water and

organic material.
Carbonaceous chondrites are particularly apt to crumble,
powder, and burn in the atmosphere. Few survive the trip to
Earth’s surface.
Out in space, though, the carbonaceous chondrites may be
common, and they may be the more common the farther one
goes from the Sun.
In the last few years, careful measurements have been made
of the albedos of the asteroids, that is, of the fraction of the
Sun’s light that they reflect. It turns out that most of the aster­
oids are surprisingly black— as black as carbonaceous chon­
drites.
Perhaps they are carbonaceous chondrites, or objects that
have rocky cores and carbonaceous chondrite outer regions. Of
the twelve largest asteroids, no less than eight seem to have
carbonaceous chondrite surfaces, and that includes Ceres, the
largest asteroid.
In that case, while the asteroids might be the prime mines of
our future space civilization, they may be even more important
as a source of water, organics, and fertilizer for our space set­
tlements than as a source of cement and metals.
 1

Barnacle Bull
POUL ANDERSON (as Winston P. Sanders)

The Hellik Olav was well past Mars, acceleration ended,

free-falling into the Asteroid Belt on a long elliptical orbit,
when the interior radiation count began to rise. It wasn’t seri­
ous, and worried none of the four men aboard. They had been
so worried all along, that a little extra ionization didn’t seem
to matter.
But as the days passed, the Geigers got still more noisy.
And then the radio quit.
This was bad! No more tapes were being made of signals
received— Earth to one of the artificial satellites to Phobos to
a cone of space which a rather smug-looking computer insist­
ed held the Hellik Olav—for later study by electronics engi­
neers. As for the men, they were suddenly bereft of their fa­
vorite programs. Adam Langnes, captain, no longer got the
beeps whose distortions gave him an idea of exterior condi­
tions and whose Doppler frequency gave him a check on his
velocity. Torvald Winge, astronomer, had no answers to his
requests for data omitted from his handbook and computa­
tions too elaborate for the ship’s digital. Per Helledahl, physi­
cist, heard no more sentimental folk songs nor the recorded
babblings of his youngest child. And Erik Bull, engineer,
couldn’t get the cowboy music sent from the American radio
satellite. He couldn’t even get the Russians’ progressive jazz.
Furthermore, and still more ominous, the ship’s transmitter
also stopped working.

153
154 BARNACLE BULL

Helledahl turned from its disassembled guts. Despite all he

could do with racks, bags, magnetic boards, he was surround­
ed by a zero gravity halo of wires, resistances, transistors,
and other small objects. His moon face peered through it
with an unwonted grimness. “I can find nothing wrong,” he
said. “The trouble must be outside, in the boom.”
Captain Langnes, tall and gaunt and stiff of manner, ad­
justed his monocle. “I dare say we can repair the trouble,” he
said. “Can’t be too serious, can it?”
“It can like the devil, if the radar goes out too,” snapped
Helledahl.
“Oh, heavens!” exclaimed Winge. His mild middle-aged
features registered dismay. “If I can’t maintain my meteorite
count, what am I out here for?”
“If we can’t detect the big meteorites in time for the auto­
pilot to jerk us off a collision course, you won't be out here
very long,” said Bull. “ None of us will, except as scrap metal
and frozen hamburger.”
Helledahl winced. “ Must you, Erik?”
“Your attitude is undesirable, Herr Bull,” Captain
Langnes chided. “ Never forget, gentlemen, the four of us,
crowded into one small vessel for possibly two years, under
extremely hazardous conditions, can only survive by main­
taining order, self-respect, morale.”
“ How can I forget?” muttered Bull. “You repeat it every
thirty-seven hours and fourteen minutes by the clock." But he
didn’t mutter very loudly.
“ You had best have a look outside, Herr Bull,” went on the
captain.
“ I was afraid it'd come to that,” said the engineer dismal­
ly. “ Hang on, boys, here we go again.”

Putting on space armor is a tedious job at best, requiring

much assistance. In a cramped air-lock chamber—for lack of
another place—and under free fall, it gets so exasperating
that one forgets any element of emergency. By the time he
 POUL ANDERSON 155

was through the outer valve, Bull had invented three new ver­
bal obscenities, the best of which took four minutes to enun­
ciate.
He was a big blocky redhaired and freckle-faced young
man, who hadn’t wanted to come on this expedition. It was
just a miserable series of accidents, he thought. As a boy,
standing at a grisly hour on a cliff above the Sognefjord to
watch the first Sputnik rise, he had decided to be a spaceship
engineer. As a youth, he got a scholarship to the Massachu­
setts Institute of Technology, and afterward worked for two
years on American interplanetary projects. Returning home,
he found himself one of the few Norwegians with that kind of
experience. But he also found himself thoroughly tired of it.
The cramped quarters, tight discipline, reconstituted food
and reconstituted air and reconstituted conversation, were
bad enough. The innumerable petty nuisances of weightless­
ness, especially the hours a day spent doing ridiculous exer­
cises lest his very bones atrophy, were worse. The exclusively
male companionship was still worse: especially when that all­
female Russian satellite station generally called the Nunnery
passed within view.
“ In short,” Erik Bull told his friends, “if I want to take
vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, I’d do better to sign
up as a Benedictine monk. I’d at least have something drink­
able on hand.”
Not that he regretted the time spent, once it was safely be­
hind him. With judicious embroidering, he had a lifetime
supply of dinner-table reminiscences. More important, he
could take his pick of Earthside jobs. Such as the marine rec­
lamation station his countrymen were building off Svalbard,
with regular airbus service to Trondheim and Oslo. There
was a post!
Instead of which, he was now spinning off beyond Mars,
hell for leather into a volume of space that had already swal­
lowed a score of craft without trace.
He emerged on the hull, made sure his lifeline was fast,
156 BARNACLE BULL

and floated a few minutes to let his eyes adjust. A tiny heat­
less sun, too brilliant to look close to, spotted puddles of un­
diffused glare among coalsack shadows. The stars, unwink­
ing, needle bright, were so many that they swamped the old
familiar constellations in their sheer number. He identified
several points as asteroids, some twinkling as rotation ex­
posed their irregular surfaces, some so close that their rela­
tive motion was visible. His senses did not react to the radi­
ation, which the ship’s magnetic field was supposed to ward
off from the interior but which sharply limited his stay out­
side. Bull imagined all those particles zipping through him,
each drilling a neat submicroscopic hole, and wished he
hadn’t.
The much-touted majestic silence of space wasn't evident
either. His air pump made too much noise. Also, the suit
stank.
Presently he could make sense out of the view. The ship
was a long cylinder, lumpy where meteor bumpers protected
the most vital spots. A Norwegian flag, painted near the
bows, was faded by solar ultraviolet, eroded by microme-
teoric impacts. The vessel was old, though basically sound.
The Russians had given it to Norway for a museum piece, as
a propaganda gesture. But then the Americans had hastily
given Norway the parts needed to renovate. Bull himself had
spent six dreary months helping do that job. He hadn’t been
too unhappy about it, though. He liked the idea of his coun­
try joining in the exploitation of space. Also, he was Ameri­
canized enough to feel a certain malicious pleasure when the
Ivan Pavlov was rechristened in honor of St. Olav.
However, he had not expected to serve aboard the thing!
“O.K., O K .,’’ he sneered in English, “ hold still. Holy Ole,
and we’ll have a look at your latest disease.’’
He drew himself back along the line and waddled forward
over the hull in stickum boots. Something on the radio trans­
ceiver boom . . . what the devil? He bent over. The motion
 POUL ANDERSON 157

pulled his boots loose. He upended and went drifting off

toward Andromeda. Cursing in a lackluster voice, he came
back hand over hand. But as he examined the roughened sur­
face he forgot even to be annoyed.
He tried unsuccessfully to pinch himself.
An hour convinced him. He made his laborious way below
again. Captain Langnes, who was Navy, insisted that you
went “below” when you entered the ship, even in free fall.
When his spacesuit was off, with only one frost burn suffered
from touching the metal, he faced the others across a clut­
tered main cabin.
“Well?” barked Helledahl. “What is it?”
“As the lady said when she saw an elephant eating cab­
bages with what she thought was his tail,” Bull answered
slowly, “if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“ Of course I would!” said Langnes. “Out with it!”
“ Well, skipper . . . we have barnacles.”
A certain amount of chemical and biological apparatus
had been brought along to study possible effects of the what-
ever-it-was that seemed to forbid spacecraft crossing the As­
teroid Belt. The equipment was most inadequate, and be­
tween them the four men had only an elementary knowledge
of its use. But then, all equipment was inadequate in zero
gravity, and all knowledge was elementary out here.
Work progressed with maddening slowness. And mean­
while the Hellik Olav fell outward and outward, on an orbit
which would not bend back again until it was three Astro­
nomical Units from the sun. And the ship was out of commu­
nication. And the radar, still functional but losing efficiency
all the time, registered an ever thicker concentration of mete­
orites. And the tween-decks radiation count mounted, slowly
but persistently.
“ I vote we go home,” said Helledahl. Sweat glistened on
his forehead, where he sat in his tiny bunk cubicle without
touching the mattress.
158 BARNACLE BULL

“Second the motion,” said Bull at once. “Any further dis­

cussion? I move the vote. All in favor, say 'Ja.' All opposed,
shut up.”
“This is no time for jokes, Herr Bull,” said Captain
Lagnes.
“I quite agree sir. And this trip is more than a joke, it’s a
farce. Let’s turn back!”
“Because of an encrustation on the hull?”
Surprisingly, gentle Torvald Winge supported the skipper
with almost as sharp a tone. “Nothing serious has yet hap­
pened,” he said. “We have now shielded the drive tubes so
that the barnacle growth can’t advance to them. As for our
communications apparatus, we have spare parts in ample
supply and can easily repair it once we’re out of this fantastic
zone. Barnacles can be scraped off the radar arms, as well as
the vision parts. What kind of cowards will our people take us
for, if we give up at the first little difficulty?”
“ Live ones,” said Helledahl.
“ You see,” Bull added, “we’re not in such bad shape now,
but what’ll happen if this continues? Just extrapolate the ra­
diation. I did. We’ll be dead men on the return orbit."
“You assume the count will rise to a dangerous level,” said
Winge. “ I doubt that. Time enough to turn back if it seems
we have no other hope. But what you don’t appreciate, Erik,
is the very real, unextrapolated danger of such a course.”
“Also, we seem to be on the track of an answer to the mys­
tery—the whole purpose of this expedition,” said Langnes.
“Given a little more data, we should find out what happened
to all the previous ships.”
“ Including the Chinese?” asked Bull.
Silence descended. They sat in mid-air reviewing a situa­
tion which familiarity did nothing to beautify.
Observations from the Martian moons had indicated the
Asteroid Belt was much fuller than astronomers had believed.
Of course, it was still a rather hard vacuum—but one
 POUL ANDERSON 159

through which sand, gravel, and boulders went flying with in­
decent speed and frequency. Unmanned craft were sent in by
several nations. Their telemetering instruments confirmed the
great density of cosmic debris, which increased as they swung
farther in toward the central zone. But then they quit send­
ing. They were never heard from again. Manned ships sta­
tioned near the computed orbits of the robot vessels, where
these emerged from the danger area, detected objects with
radar, panted to match velocities, and saw nothing but com­
mon or garden variety meteorites.
Finally the Chinese People’s Republic sent three craft with
volunteer crews toward the Belt. One ship went off course
and landed in the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco. After its
personnel explained the unique methods by which they had
been persuaded to volunteer, they were allowed to stay. The
scientists got good technical jobs, the captain started a res­
taurant, and the political commissar went on the lecture cir­
cuit.
But the other two ships continued as per instructions. Their
transmission stopped at about the same distance as the robot
radios had, and they were never seen again either.
After that, the big nations decided there was no need for
haste in such expensive undertakings. But Norway had just
outfitted her own spaceship, and all true Norwegians are
crazy. The Hellik Olav went out.
Winge stirred. “ I believe I can tell you what happened to
the Chinese,” he said.
“ Sure,” said Bull. “They stayed in orbit till it was too late.
Then the radiation got them.”
“ No. They saw themselves in our own situation, panicked,
and started back.”
“So?”
“The meteorites got them.”
“Excuse me,” said Langnes, obviously meaning it the other
way around. “You know better than that, Professor Winge.
160 BARNACLE BULL

The hazard isn’t that great. Even at the highest possible den­
sity of material, the probability of impact with anything of
considerable mass is so low—”
“I am not talking about that, Captain,” said the astrono­
mer. “Let me repeat the facts ab initio, to keep everything
systematic, even if you know most of them already.
“ Modern opinion holds that the asteroids, and probably
most meteorites throughout the Solar System, really are the
remnants of a disintegrated world. I am inclined to suspect
that a sudden phase change in its core caused the initial ex­
plosion—this can happen at a certain planetary mass—and
then Jupiter’s attraction gradually broke up the larger pieces.
Prior to close-range study, it was never believed the asteroi-
dean planet could have been large enough for this to happen.
But today we know it must have been roughly as big as
Earth. The total mass was not detectable at a distance, prior
to space flight, because so much of it consists of small dark
particles. These, I believe, were formed when the larger
chunks broke up into lesser ones which abraded and shattered
each other in collisions, before gravitational forces spread
them too widely apart.”
“What has this to do with the mess we're in?" asked Bull.
Winge looked startled. “ Why . . . that is—” He blushed.
“Nothing, I suppose.” To cover his embarrassment, he began
talking rapidly, repeating the obvious at even greater length:
“ We accelerated from Earth, and a long way beyond, thus
throwing ourselves into an eccentric path with a semi-major
axis of two Astronomical Units. But this is still an ellipse,
and as we entered the danger zone, our velocity gained more
and more of a component parallel to the planetary orbits. At
our aphelion, which will be in the very heart of the Asteroid
Belt, we will be moving substantially with the average mete­
orite. Relative velocity will be very small, or zero. Hence col­
lisions will be rare, and mild when they do occur. Then we’ll
be pulled back sunward. By the time we start accelerating
under power toward Earth, we will again be traveling at a
 POUL ANDERSON 161

large angle to the natural orbits. But by that time, also, we

will be back out of the danger zone.
“Suppose, however, we decided to turn back at this instant.
We would first have to decelerate, spending fuel to kill an
outward velocity which the sun would otherwise have killed
for us. Then we must accelerate inward. We can just barely
afford the fuel. There will be little left for maneuvers. A n d . .
we’ll be cutting almost perpendicularly across the asteroidal
orbits. Their full density and velocity will be directed almost
broadside to us.
“Oh, we still needn’t worry about being struck by a large
object. The probability of that is quite low. But what we will
get is the fifteen-kilometer-per-second sandblast of the un­
countable small particles. I have been computing the results
of my investigations so far, and arrive at a figure for the den­
sity of this cosmic sand which is, well, simply appalling. Far
more than was hitherto suspected. I don’t believe our hull can
stand such a prolonged scouring, meteor bumpers or no.”
“Are you certain?” gulped Helledahl.
“Of course not,” said Winge testily. “What is certain, out
here? I believe it highly probable, though. And the fact that
the Chinese never came back would seem to lend credence to
my hypothesis.”

The barnacles had advanced astoundingly since Bull last

looked at them. Soon the entire ship would be covered, except
for a few crucial places toilfully kept clean.
He braced his armored self against the reactive push of his
cutting torch. It was about the only way to get a full-grown
barnacle loose. The things melded themselves with the hull.
The flame drowned the sardonic stars in his vision but illumi­
nated the growths.
They looked quite a bit like the Terrestrial marine sort.
Each humped up in a hard conoidal shell of blackish brown
material. Beneath them was a layer of excreted metal, chiefly
ferrous, plated onto the aluminum hull.
162 BARNACLE BULL

I’d hate to try landing through an atmosphere, thought

Bull. Of course, that wouldn’t be necessary. We would go
into orbit around Earth and call for someone to lay alongside
and take us o ff. . . But heading back sunward, we’ll have one
sweet time controlling internal tem perature. . . No, I can
simply slap some shiny paint on. That should do the trick. I'd
have to paint anyway, to maintain constant radiation charac­
teristics when micrometeorites are forever scratching our
metal. Another chore. Space flight is nothing but one long
round of chores. The next poet who recites in my presence an
ode to man’s conquest of the universe can take that uni­
verse—every galaxy and every supernova through every last
long light-year—and p u t. . .
I f we get home alive.
He tossed the barnacle into a metal canister for later
study. It was still red hot, and doubtless the marvelously in­
tricate organism within the shell had suffered damage. But
the details of the lithophagic metabolism could be left for
professional biologists to figure out. All they wanted aboard
Holy Ole was enough knowledge to base a decision on.
Before taking more specimens. Bull made a circuit of the
hull. There were many hummocks on it, barnacles growing
upon barnacles. The foresection had turned into a hill of
shells, under which the radio transceiver boom lay buried.
Another could be built when required for Earth approach.
The trouble was, with the interior radiation still mounting—
while a hasty retreat seemed impossible—Bull had started to
doubt he ever would see Earth again.
He scrubbed down the radar, then paused to examine the
spot where he had initially cut off a few dozen samples. New
ones were already burgeoning on the ferroplate left by their
predecessors—little fellows with delicate glasslike shells
which would soon grow and thicken, becoming incredibly
tough. Whatever that silicate material was, study of it should
repay Terrestrial industry. Another bonanza from the Aster­
oid Belt, the modern Mother Lode.
 POUL ANDERSON 163

“ Ha!” said Bull.

It had sounded very convincing. The proper way to exploit
space was not to mine the planets, where you must grub deep
in the crust to find a few stingy ore pockets, then spend fabu­
lous amounts of energy hauling your gains home. No, the as­
teroids had all the minerals man would ever need, in develop­
ing his extraterrestrial colonies and on Earth herself. Freely
available minerals, especially on the metallic asteroids from
the core of the ancient planet. Just land and help yourself.
No elaborate apparatus needed to protect you from your en­
vironment. Just the spaceship and space armor you had to
have anyway. No gravitational well to back down into and
climb back out of. Just a simple thrust of minimum power.
Given free access to the asteroids, even a small nation like
Norway could operate in space, with all the resulting benefits
to her economy, politics, and prestige. And there was the
Hellik Olav, newly outfitted, with plenty of volunteers—
genuine ones—for an exploratory mission, and to hell with
the danger.
“ Ha!” repeated Bull.

He had been quite in favor of the expedition, provided

somebody else went. But he was offered a berth and made the
mistake of telling his girl,
“Ohhhh, Erik!” she exclaimed, enormous-eyed.
After six months in space helping to rig and test the ship,
Bull could have fallen in love with the Sea Hag. However,
this had not been necessary. When he had returned to Earth,
swearing a mighty oath never to set foot above the strato­
sphere again, he met Marta. She was small and blond and
deliciously shaped. She adored him right back. The only flaw
he could find in her was a set of romantic notions about the
starry universe and the noble Norwegian destiny therein.
“Oh, oh,” he said, recognizing the symptoms. In haste:
“Don’t get ideas, now. I told you I’m a marine reclamation
man, from here on forever.”
164 BARNACLE BULL

“But this, darling! This chance! To be one of the conquer­

ors! To make your name immortal!”
“The trouble is, I’m still mortal myself.”
“The service you can do—to our country!”
“Uh, apart from everything else, do you realize that, uh,
even allowing for acceleration under power for part of the
distance, I’d be gone for more than two years?”
“I’ll wait for you.”
“ But—”
“Are you afraid, Erik?”
“Well, no. But—”
“Think of the Vikings! Think of Fridtjof Nansen! Think of
Roald Amundsen!”
Bull dutifully thought of all these gentlemen. “What about
them?” he asked.
But it was a light summer night, and Marta couldn’t imag­
ine any true Norwegian refusing such a chance for deathless
glory, and one thing sort of led to another. Before he recov­
ered his wits, Bull had accepted the job.
There followed a good deal of work up in orbit, readying
the ship, and a shakedown cruise lasting some weeks. When
he finally got pre-departure leave. Bull broke every known
traffic law and a few yet to be invented, on the way to Mar­
ta’s home. She informed him tearfully that she was so sorry
and she hoped they would always be good friends, but she
had been seeing so little of him and had met someone else but
she would always follow his future career with the greatest
interest. The someone else turned out to be a bespectacled
writer who had just completed a three-volume novel about
King Harold Hardcounsel (1015-1066). Bull didn’t remem­
ber the rest of his furlough very clearly.

A shock jarred through him. He bounced from the hull,

jerked to a halt at the end of his lifeline, and waited for the
dizziness to subside. The stars leered.
“ Hallo! Hallo, Erik! Are you all right?”
 POUL ANDERSON 165

Bull shook his head to clear it. Helledahl’s voice, phoned

across the lifeline, was tinny in his earphones. “I think so.
What happened?”
“A small meteorite hit us, I suppose. It must have had an
abnormal orbit to strike so hard. We can’t see any damage
from inside, though. Will you check the outer hull?”
Bull nodded, though there was no point in doing so. After
he hauled himself back, he needed a while to find the spot of
impact. The pebble had collided near the waist of the ship,
vaporizing silicate shell material to form a neat little crater in
a barnacle hummock. It hadn’t quite penetrated to the ferro-
plate. A fragment remained, trapped between the rough
lumps.
Bull shivered. Without that overgrowth, the hull would
have been pierced. Not that that mattered greatly in itself.
There was enough patching aboard to repair several hundred
such holes. But the violence of impact was an object lesson.
Torvald Winge was almost certainly right. Trying to cut
straight across the Asteroid Belt would be as long a chance as
men had ever taken. The incessant bombardment of particles,
mostly far smaller than this but all possessing a similar
speed, would wear down the entire hull. When it was thin
enough to rip apart under stress, no meteor bumpers or
patches would avail.
His eyes sought the blue-green glint of Earth, but couldn’t
find it among so many stars. You know, he told himself, I
don’t even mind the prospect of dying out here as much as I
do the dreariness of it. If we turned around now, and some­
how survived, I’d be home by Christmas. I’d only have wast­
ed one extra year in space, instead of more than three—
counting in the preparations for this arduous cruise. I’d find
me a girl, no, a dozen girls. And a hundred bottles. I’d make
up for that year in style, before settling down to do work I
really enjoy.
But we aren’t likely to survive, if we turn around now.
But how likely is our survival if we keep going—with the
166 BARNACLE BULL

radiation shield failing us? And an extra two years on Holy

Ole? I’d go nuts!
Judas priest! Was ever a man in such an ugly situation?
Langnes peered at the sheaf of papers in his hand. “ I have
drafted a report of our findings with regard to the, ah, space
barnacles,” he said. “I would like you gentlemen to criticize
it as I read aloud. We have now accounted for the vanishing
of the previous ships—”
Helledahl mopped his brow. Tiny beads of sweat broke
loose and glittered in the air. “That doesn’t do much good if
we also vanish,” he pointed out.
“Quite,” Langnes looked irritated. “ Believe me, I am more
than willing to turn home at once. But that is impracticable,
as Professor Winge has shown and the unfortunate Chinese
example has confirmed.”
“I say it’s just as impracticable to follow the original or­
bit,” declared Bull.
“I understand you don’t like it here,” said Winge, “but
really, courting an almost certain death in order to escape
two more years of boredom seems a trifle extreme."
“The boredom will be all the worse, now that we don’t
have anything to work toward,” said Bull.
The captain’s monocle glared at him. “Ahem!” said
Langnes. “ If you gentlemen are quite through, may I have
the floor?”
“Sure,” said Bull. “Or the wall or the ceiling, if you prefer.
Makes no difference here.”
“ I’ll skip the preamble of the report and start with our con­
clusions. ‘Winge believes the barnacles originated as a possi­
bly mutant life form on the ancient planet before it was de­
stroyed. The slower breakup of the resulting superasteroidal
masses gave this life time to adapt to spatial conditions. The
organism itself is not truly protoplasmic. Instead of water,
which would either boil or freeze in vacuo at this distance
from the sun, the essential liquid is some heavy substance we
 POUL ANDERSON 167

have not been able to identify except as an aromatic com­

pound.’ ”
“Aromatic is too polite,” said Bull, wrinkling his nose. The
air purifiers had still not gotten all the chemical stench out.
Langnes proceeded unrelenting: “ ‘The basic chemistry
does remain that of carbon, of proteins, albeit with an exten­
sive use of complex silicon compounds. We theorize the life
cycle as follows. The adult form ejects spores which drift
freely through space. Doubtless most are lost, but such waste­
fulness is characteristic of nature on Earth, too. When a
spore does chance on a meteorite or an asteroid it can use, it
develops rapidly. It requires silicon and carbon, plus traces of
other elements; hence it must normally flourish only on stony
meteorites, which are, however, the most abundant sort.
Since the barnacle’s powerful pseu-denzymatic digestive pro­
cesses—deriving their ultimate energy from sunlight—also
extract metals where these exist, it must eliminate same,
which it does by laying down a plating, molecule by mole­
cule, under its shell. Research into the details of this process
should interest both biologists and metallurgists.
“ ‘The shell serves a double function. To some extent, it
protects against ionizing radiation of solar or cosmic origin.
Also, being a nonconductor, it can hold a biologically gener­
ated static charge, which will cause nearby dust to drift down
upon it. Though this is a slow method of getting the extra
nourishment, the barnacle is exceedingly long-lived, and can
adjust its own metabolic and reproductive rates to the exigen­
cies of the situation. Since the charge is not very great, and
he himself is encased in metal, a spaceman notices no direct
consequences.
“ ‘One may well ask why this life form has never been ob­
served before. First, it is doubtless confined to the Asteroid
Belt, the density of matter being too low elsewhere. We have
established that it is poisoned by water and free oxygen, so no
spores could survive on any planet man has yet visited, even if
168 BARNACLE BULL

they did drift there. Second, if a meteorite covered with such

barnacles does strike an atmosphere, the surface vaporization
as it falls will destroy all evidence. Third, even if barnacle-
crusted meteorites have been seen from spaceships, they look
superficially like any other stony objects. No one has cap­
tured them for closer examination.’ ”
He paused to drink water from a squeeze bottle. “ Hear,
hear,” murmured Bull, pretending the captain stood behind a
lectern.
“That’s why the unmanned probe ships never were found,”
said Helledahl. “They may well have been seen, more or less
on their predicted orbits, but they weren’t recognized.”
Langnes nodded. “Of course. That comes next in the re­
port. Then I go on to say; ‘The reason that radio transmission
ceased in the first place is equally obvious. Silicon compo­
nents are built into the boom, as part of a transistor system.
The barnacles ate them.
“ ‘The observed increase in internal irradiation is due to
the plating of heavy metals laid down by the barnacles. First,
the static charges and the ferromagnetic atoms interfere with
the powerful external magnetic fields which are generated to
divert ions from the ship. Second, primary cosmic rays com­
ing through that same plating produce showers of secondary
particles.
“ ‘Some question may be raised as to the explosive growth
rate of barnacles on our hull, even after all the silicon avail­
able in our external apparatus had been consumed. The an­
swer involves consideration of vectors. The ordinary member
of the Asteroid Belt, be it large or small, travels in an orbit
roughly parallel to the orbits of all other members. There are
close approaches and occasional collisions, but on the whole,
the particles are thinly scattered by Terrestrial standards, iso­
lated from each other. Our ship, however, is slanting across
those same orbits, thus exposing itself to a veritable rain of
bodies, ranging in size from microscopic to sand granular.
 POUL ANDERSON 169

Even a single spore, coming in contact with our hull, could

multiply indefinitely.’ ”
“That means we’re picking up mass all the time,” groaned
Bull. “Which means we’ll accelerate slower and get home
even later than I’d feared.”
“Do you think we’ll get home at all?” fretted Helledahl.
“ We can expect the interference with our radiation shield,
and the accumulation of heavy atoms, to get worse all the
time. Nobody will ever be able to cross the Belt!”
“ Oh, yes, they will,” said Captain Langnes. “Ships must
simply be redesigned. The magnetic screens must be differ­
ently heterodyned, to compensate. The radio booms must be
enclosed in protective material. Or perhaps—”
“ I know,” said Bull in great weariness. “Perhaps antifoul­
ing paint can be developed. Or spaceships can be careened,
God help us. Oh, yes. All I care about is how we personally
get home. I can’t modify our own magnetic generators. I
haven’t the parts or the tools, even if I knew precisely how.
We’ll spin on and on, the radiation worse every hour, till—”
“ Be quiet!” snapped Langnes.
“The Chinese turned around, and look what happened to
them,” underlined Winge. “We must try something different,
however hopeless it too may look.”
Bull braced his heavy shoulders. “See here, Torvald,” he
growled, “what makes you so sure the Chinese did head back
under power?”
“ Because they were never seen again. If they had been on
the predicted orbit, or even on a completed free-fall ellipse,
one of the ships watching for them in the neighborhood of
Earth would have— Oh.”
“ Yes,” said Bull through his teeth. “ Would have seen
them? How do you know they weren’t seen? I think they
were. I think they plugged blindly on as they’d been ordered
to, and the radiation suddenly started increasing on a steep
curve— as you’d expect, when a critical point of fouling up
170 BARNACLE BULL

was passed. I think they died, and came back like comets,
sealed into spaceships so crusted they looked like ordinary
meteorites!”
The silence thundered.
“So we may as well turn back,” said Bull at last. “ If we
don’t make it, our death’ll be a quicker and cleaner one than
those poor devils had.”
Again the quietude. Until Captain Langnes shook his head.
“No. I’m sorry, gentlemen. But we go on.”
“What?” screamed Helledahl.
The captain floated in the air, a ludicrous parody of offi­
cerlike erectness. But there was an odd dignity to him all the
same.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I have a family too, you know. I
would turn about if it could be done with reasonable safety.
But Professor Winge has shown that that is impossible. We
would die anyhow—and our ship would be a ruin, a few bits
of worn and crumpled metal, all our results gone. If we pro­
ceed, we can prepare specimens and keep records which will
be of use to our successors. Us they will find, for we can im­
provise a conspicuous feature on the hull that the barnacles
won’t obliterate.”
He looked from one to another.
“Shall we do less for our country’s honor than the Chinese
did for theirs?” he finished.
Well, if you put it that way, thought Bull, yes.
But he couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud. Maybe they
all thought the same, including Langnes himself, but none
was brave enough to admit it. The trouble with us moral cow­
ards, thought Bull, is that we make heroes of ourselves.
I suppose Marta will shed some pretty, nostalgic tears
when she gets the news. Ech! It’s bad enough to croak out
here; but if that bluestocking memorializes me with a news­
paper poem about my Viking spirit—
Maybe that's what we should rig up on the hull, so they
 POUL ANDERSON 171

won’t ignore this poor barnacled derelict as just another

flying boulder. Make the Holy Ole into a real, old-fashioned,
Gokstad type ship. Dragon figurehead, oars, sail—shields
hung along the side—hey, yes! Imagine some smug Russian
on an Earth satellite, bragging about how his people were the
first into space—and then along comes this Viking ship—
I think I’ll even paint the shields. A face on each one, with
its tongue out and a thumb to its nose—
H oly hopping Ole!
“Shields!” roared Bull.
“W hat?” said Langnes through the echoes.
“ We’re shielded! We can turn back! Right now!”

When the hubbub had died down and a few slide rule cal­
culations had been made, Bull addressed the others.
“It’s really quite simple,” he said. “All the elements of the
answer were there all the time. I’m only surprised that the
Chinese never realized it; but then, I imagine they used all
their spare moments for socialist self-criticism.
“Anyhow, we know our ship is a space barnacle’s paradise.
Even our barnacles have barnacles. Why? Because it picks up
so much sand and gravel. Now what worried us about head­
ing straight home was not an occasional meteorite big enough
to punch clear through the skin of the ship— we’ve patching
to take care of that—no, we were afraid of a sandblast wear­
ing the entire hull paper thin. But we’re protected against
precisely that danger! The more such little particles that hit
us, the more barnacles we’ll have. They can’t be eroded away,
because they’re alive. They renew themselves from the very
stuff that strikes them. Like a stone in a river, worn away by
the current, while the soft moss is always there.
“ We’ll get back out of the Belt before the radiation level
builds up to anything serious. Then, if we want to, we can
chisel off the encrustation. But why bother, really? We’ll
soon be home.”
172 BARNACLE BULL

“No argument there.” Langnes smiled.

“I’ll go check the engines prior to starting up,” said Bull.
“Will you and Torvald compute us an Earthward course?”
He started for the doorway, paused, and added slowly,
“Uh, I kind of hate to say this, but those barnacles are what
will really make the Asteroid Belt available to men.”
“W hat?” said Helledahl.
“Sure,” said Bull. “Simple. Naturally, we’ll have to devise
protection for the radio, and redesign the radiation screen ap­
paratus, as the skipper remarked. But under proper control,
the barnacles make a self-repairing shield against sandblast.
It shouldn’t be necessary to go through the Belt on these te­
dious elliptical orbits. The space miners can take hyperbolic
paths, as fast as they choose, in any direction they please.
“ I,” he finished with emphasis, “will not be among them."
“ Where will you be?” asked Winge.
But Erik Bull was already headed aft to his work. A snatch
of song, bawled from powerful lungs, came back to the oth­
ers. They all knew English, but it took them a moment to get
the drift.
“ ‘Who’s that knocking at my door?’
Said the fair young maiden.
‘Oh, it’s only me, from over the sea,’
Said Barnacle Bill the sailor.
‘I’ve sailed the seas from shore to shore,
I’ll never sail the seas no more.
Now open up this blank-blank door!’
Said Barnacle Bill the sailor.”
 JUPITER

By 1700, it was quite clear that Jupiter was a giant. It could not
look so large in the telescope at the distance it was determined
to be if it weren’t.
The statistics are awesome. Its diameter is 11.2 times that of
the Earth; its area is 125 times that of the Earth; its volume is
1400 times that of the Earth.
Jupiter is made up largely of light materials rather than of
rock and metal as Earth is, so it is only a quarter as dense as
Earth is. Even so, it has 318.4 times the mass of the Earth, and
a gravitational field with an intensity to match.
To be sure, Jupiter is only a planet and it is a pygmy com­
pared to the Sun, possessing only 1 /1040 the mass of the Sun.
If, however, we leave the Sun out of it, then Jupiter alone makes
up 70 percent of all the mass of the Solar system. All the other
planets, satellites, asteroids, meteors, and comets put together
make up 30 percent.
Jupiter has four large satellites, Moon-sized or better, and at
least nine smaller ones. No other planet has so magnificent or
far-flung a planetary system— which is not surprising.
Despite all this, we don’t see Jupiter— not its solid surface.
What we see are clouds. These clouds are whipped into gales
and hurricanes of unimaginable intensity, largely because of Ju­
piter’s rapid rotation. Despite its huge size it makes one turn in
9 hours and 55 minutes as compared to Earth's 24 hours. A
point on Jupiter’s equator travels at a speed of 45,000 kilome-

173
174 JUPITER

ters (28,000 miles) per hour, 27 times as fast as a point on

Earth’s equator travels.
As a result we see the clouds smeared out horizontally, and
this gives Jupiter the appearance of a striped planet.
It is not exclusively striped, however. There is one vast hurri­
cane that has apparently been raging without stop for a long pe­
riod of time. It produces the Great Red Spot, a reddish oval that
was first noted in 1664. This is about 45,000 kilometers
(30,000 miles) long and 13,000 kilometers (8000 miles) wide.
The Earth could be dropped into that hurricane funnel without
touching its sides.
In the nineteenth century, there was one school of thought
which suggested that Jupiter had not yet had time to lose its
store of heat, so that it was incandescent— a kind of miniature
Sun. Its satellites were too far from the Sun to receive much
heat (they, and Jupiter, were 779 million kilometers, or 483 mil­
lion miles from the Sun— 5.2 times the distance of the Earth
from the Sun) but, by this way of thinking, would be warmed in­
stead by Jupiter and might, in that way, be warm enough to
bear life. Science fiction stories were written on that basis well
into the 1930s.
Temperature readings of the visible cloud surface with the so­
phisticated instruments of the twentieth century yielded, how­
ever, a figure of -1 3 5 °C . Jupiter might be hot underneath its
cloud layer, but the heat emerging out of that frigid region was
negligible and would not serve to warm the satellites, which
would therefore have surfaces that could only be frozen waste­
lands.
And what did go on under the atmosphere?
It was to be assumed that Jupiter’s atmosphere was deep,
since otherwise its low density could not be accounted for.
Measurements in the 1930s and afterward showed that it was
largely hydrogen and helium, with an admixture of ammonia and
methane.
It was naturally assumed that somewhere under the atmo­
sphere was a solid surface, a world with continents and oceans.
 JUPITER 175

It would be a horrible world, though, for the ocean was likely to

be liquid ammonia and the continents might be largely ice. Both
would be under an atmospheric pressure equal to a million times
that of our atmosphere and would be subjected to winds of in­
credible fury.
It is a world such as this which is described in "Bridge,”
which was first published in 1952.
On March 2, 1972, however, the first Jupiter probe, Pioneer
10, was launched and on December 3, 1973, it reached its
goal, passing only 135,000 kilometers (85,000 miles) from Jupi­
ter’s surface.
The first thing it discovered was that Jupiter had a magneto­
sphere (belts of electrically charged particles outside its atmo­
sphere) that was both far more voluminous and far more dense­
ly charged than Earth’s was.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, and our Moon have no magneto­
spheres to speak of, and even Earth’s magnetosphere is not en­
ergetic enough to prevent astronauts from passing through. Ju­
piter’s magnetosphere is deadly, however, and encloses three
of the four large satellites. Unless fundamental advances are
made in shielding strategies, this may mean that Jupiter and its
three inner large satellites may simply be unreachable by any­
thing but unmanned probes.
Furthermore, it would appear that the assumption of a sizable
solid core must be put aside. Earlier suggestions of an almost
entirely hydrogen planet now look good.
At best, there would seem to be only a tiny rocky core, and
perhaps none at all. Jupiter would seem to be essentially a ball
of hot liquid hydrogen. Ordinarily, liquid hydrogen boils at only
20 degrees above absolute zero, but under the enormous pres­
sures within Jupiter, it reaches far higher temperatures. Near
the center of Jupiter, in fact, it may be compressed into solid
"metallic hydrogen,” a form capable of conducting an electric
current.
At 950 kilometers (600 miles) below the visible cloud sur­
face, the temperature is 3600 °C. At 2900 kilometers (1800
176 JUPITER

miles) below the surface it is 10,000°C. At 24,000 kilometers

(15,000 miles) below the surface, it is 20,000°C. At the very
center of Jupiter, it is 54,000°C.
There is no doubt that the world of "Bridge" does not exist,
but there may be something else. In the uppermost layers of the
planet, where the temperatures are mild and equable, there is
water, ammonia, methane, colored ammonia hydrosulfide, and
so on.
It is out of molecules such as these that life formed on Earth
more than 3 billion years ago, and life may have formed in the
Jovian ocean similarly, drawing its energy from gigantic electric
storms rather than from Sunlight. Life forms may float in the
vast planetary ocean, lifting in upward-rising currents toward
cooler temperatures and sinking in downward-falling currents
toward warmer ones, swimming against the current to avoid be­
coming too cold or too hot, or shifting from an upward-rising cur­
rent to a downward-falling one, or vice-versa, in order to keep
temperature at the proper figure.
We won’t know until we send a probe down into Jupiter’s at­
mosphere.
And, oh, yes, Voyager 1 in 1979, spotted a thin ring of debris
around Jupiter, active volcanoes on satellite lo, surface cracks
on Europa, craters on Ganymede and Callisto. There is still so
much to learn.
 1

Bridge
JAMES BLISH

A screeching tornado was rocking the Bridge when the alarm

sounded; it was making the whole structure shudder and
sway. This was normal and Robert Helmuth barely noticed
it. There was always a tornado shaking the Bridge. The
whole planet was enswathed in tornadoes, and worse.
The scanner on the foreman’s board had given 114 as the
sector of the trouble. That was at the northwestern end of the
Bridge, where it broke off, leaving nothing but the raging
clouds of ammonia crystals and methane, and a sheer drop
thirty miles to the invisible surface. There were no ultraphone
“eyes” at that end which gave a general view of the area—in
so far as any general view was possible—because both ends of
the Bridge were incomplete.
With a sigh Helmuth put the beetle into motion. The little
car, as flat-bottomed and thin through as a bedbug, got slow­
ly under way on ball-bearing races, guided and held firmly to
the surface of the Bridge by ten close-set flanged rails. Even
so, the hydrogen gales made a terrific sirenlike shrieking be­
tween the edge of the vehicle and the deck, and the impact of
the falling drops of ammonia upon the curved roof was as
heavy and deafening as a rain of cannon balls. As a matter of
fact, they weighed almost as much as cannon balls here,
though they were not much bigger than ordinary raindrops.

177
178 B R ID G E

Every so often, too, there was a blast, accompanied by a dull

orange glare, which made the car, the deck, and the Bridge
itself buck savagely.
These blasts were below, however, on the surface. While
they shook the structure of the Bridge heavily, they almost
never interfered with its functioning, and could not, in the
very nature of things, do Helmuth any harm. Had any real
damage ever been done, it would never have been repaired.
There was no one on Jupiter to repair it.
The Bridge, actually, was building itself. Massive, alone,
and lifeless, it grew in the black deeps of Jupiter.
The Bridge had been well planned. From Helmuth's point
of view almost nothing could be seen of it, for the beetle
tracks ran down the center of the deck, and in the darkness
and perpetual storm even ultrawave-assisted vision could not
penetrate more than a few hundred yards at the most. The
width of the Bridge was eleven miles; its height, thirty miles;
its length, deliberately unspecified in the plans, fifty-four
miles at the moment—a squat, colossal structure, built with
engineering principles, methods, materials, and tools never
touched before—
For the very good reason that they would have been impos­
sible anywhere else. Most of the Bridge, for instance, was
made of ice: a marvelous structural material under a pressure
of a million atmospheres, at a temperature of -94°C. Under
such conditions, the best structural steel is a friable talclike
powder, and aluminum becomes a peculiar transparent sub­
stance that splits at a tap.
Back home, Helmuth remembered, there had been talk of
starting another Bridge on Saturn, and perhaps still later on
Uranus, too. But that had been politicians' talk. The Bridge
was almost five thousand miles below the visible surface of
Jupiter’s atmosphere, and its mechanisms were just barely
manageable. The bottom of Saturn’s atmosphere had been
sounded at 16,878 miles, and the temperature there was be­
low -150°C. There, even pressure-ice would be immovable
 JAMES BLISH 179
and could not be worked with anything except itself. And as
for Uranus . . .
As far as Helmuth was concerned, Jupiter was quite bad
enough.

The beetle crept within sight of the end of the Bridge and
stopped automatically. Helmuth set the vehicle’s eyes for
highest penetration and examined the nearby beams.
The great bars were as close-set as screening. They had to
be in order to support even their own weight, let alone the
weight of the components of the Bridge, the whole webwork
was flexing and fluctuating to the harpist-fingered gale, but
it had been designed to do that. Helmuth could never help
being alarmed by the movement, but habit assured him that
he had nothing to fear from it.
He took the automatics out of the circuit and inched the
beetle forward manually. This was only Sector 113, and the
Bridge’s own Wheatstone-bridge scanning system—there was
no electronic device anywhere on the Bridge, since it was im­
possible to maintain a vacuum on Jupiter—said that the trou­
ble was in Sector 114. The boundary of Sector 114 was still
fully fifty feet away.
It was a bad sign. Helmuth scratched nervously in his red
beard. Evidently there was really cause for alarm—real
alarm, not just the deep, grinding depression which he always
felt while working on the Bridge. Any damage serious enough
to halt the beetle a full sector short of the trouble area was
bound to be major.
It might even turn out to be the disaster which he had felt
lurking ahead of him ever since he had been made foreman of
the Bridge—that disaster which the Bridge itself could not
repair, sending man reeling home from Jupiter in defeat.
The secondaries cut in and the beetle stopped again. Grim­
ly, Helmuth opened the switch and sent the beetle creeping
across the invisible danger line. Almost at once, the car tilted
just perceptibly to the left, and the screaming of the winds
180 B R ID G E

between its edges and the deck shot up the scale, sirening in
and out of the soundless-dogwhistle range with an eeriness
that set Helmuth’s teeth on edge. The beetle itself fluttered
and chattered like an alarm-clock hammer between the sur­
face of the deck and the flanges of the tracks.
Ahead there was still nothing to be seen but the horizontal
driving of the clouds and the hail, roaring along the length of
the Bridge, out of the blackness into the beetle’s fanlights,
and onward into blackness again toward the horizon no eye
would ever see.
Thirty miles below, the fusillade of hydrogen explosions
continued. Evidently something really wild was going on on
the surface. Helmuth could not remember having heard so
much activity in years.
There was a flat, especially heavy crash, and a long line of
fuming orange fire came pouring down the seething atmo­
sphere into the depths, feathering horizontally like the mane
of a Lippizaner horse, directly in front of Helmuth. Instinc­
tively, he winced and drew back from the board, although
that stream of flame actually was only a little less cold than
the rest of the streaming gases, far too cold to injure the
Bridge.
In the momentary glare, however, he saw something—an
upward twisting of shadows, patterned but obviously unfin­
ished, fluttering in silhouette against the hydrogen cataract's
lurid light.
The end of the Bridge.
Wrecked.
Helmuth grunted involuntarily and backed the beetle
away. The flare dimmed; the light poured down the sky and
fell away into the raging sea below. The scanner clucked with
satisfaction as the beetle recrossed the line into Zone ! 13.
He turned the body of the vehicle 180°, presenting its back
to the dying torrent. There was nothing further that he could
do at the moment on the Bridge. He scanned his control
 JAMES BUSH 181

board—a ghost image of which was cast across the scene on

the Bridge—for the blue button marked Garage, punched it
savagely, and tore off his helmet.
Obediently, the Bridge vanished.

II

Dillon was looking at him.

“ Well?” the civil engineer said. “What’s the matter, Bob?
Is it bad?”
Helmuth did not reply for a moment. The abrupt transition
from the storm-ravaged deck of the Bridge to the quiet, plac­
id air of the control shack on Jupiter V was always a shock.
He had never been able to anticipate it, let alone become ac­
customed to it; it was worse each time, not better.
He put the helmet down carefully in front of him and got
up, moving carefully upon shaky legs, feeling implicit in his
own body the enormous pressures and weights his guiding in­
telligence had just quitted. The fact that the gravity on the
foreman’s deck was as weak as that of most of the habitable
asteroids only made the contrast greater and his need for
caution in walking more extreme.
He went to the big porthole and looked out. The unworn,
tumbled, monotonous surface of airless Jupiter V looked al­
most homey after the perpetual holocaust of Jupiter itself.
But there was an overpowering reminder of that holocaust—
for through the thick quartz, the face of the giant planet
stared at him, across only 112,600 miles; a sphere-section oc­
cupying almost all of the sky except the near horizon. It was
crawling with color, striped and blotched with the eternal
frigid, poisonous storming of its atmosphere, spotted with the
deep planet-sized shadows of farther moons.
Somewhere down there, six thousand miles below the
clouds that boiled in his face, was the Bridge. The Bridge was
thirty miles high and eleven miles wide and fifty-four miles
182 B R ID G E

long—but it was only a sliver, an intricate and fragile ar­

rangement of ice crystals beneath the bulging, racing torna­
does.
On Earth, even in the West, the Bridge would have been
the mightiest engineering achievement of all history, could
the Earth have borne its weight at all. But on Jupiter, the
Bridge was as precarious and perishable as a snowflake.
“ Bob?” Dillon’s voice asked. “You seem more upset than
usual. Is it serious?” Helmuth turned. His superior’s worn
young face, lantern-jawed and crowned by black hair already
beginning to gray at the temples, was alight both with love
for the Bridge and the consuming ardor of the responsibility
he had to bear. As always, it touched Helmuth, and reminded
him that the implacable universe had, after all, provided one
warm corner in which human beings might huddle together.
“Serious enough,” he said, forming the words with difficul­
ty against the frozen inarticulateness Jupiter forced upon
him. “ But not fatal, as far as I could see. There's a lot of hy­
drogen vulcanism on the surface, especially at the northwest
end, and it looks like there must have been a big blast under
the cliffs. I saw what looked like the last of a series of fire­
balls.”
Dillon’s face relaxed while Helmuth was talking, slowly,
line by engraved line. “Oh. Just a flying chunk, then."
“I’m almost sure that's what it was. The cross-drafts are
heavy now. The Spot and the STD are due to pass each other
sometime next week, aren't they? I haven't checked, but I
can feel the difference in the storms."
“So the chunk got picked up and thrown through the end
of the Bridge. A big piece?”
Helmuth shrugged. “That end is all twisted away to the
left, and the deck is burst to flinders. The scaffolding is all
gone, too, of course. A pretty big piece, all right. Charity—
two miles through at a minimum.”
Dillon sighed. He, too, went to the window and looked out.
 JAMES BLISH 183

Helmuth did not need to be a mind reader to know what he

was looking at. Out there, across the stony waste of Jupiter V
plus 112,600 miles of space,'the South Tropical Disturbance
was streaming toward the great Red Spot, and would soon
overtake it. When the whirling funnel of the STD—more
than big enough to suck three Earths into deep freeze—
passed the planetary island of sodium-tainted ice which was
the Red Spot, the Spot would follow it for a few thousand
miles, at the same time rising closer to the surface of the at­
mosphere.
Then the Spot would sink again, drifting back toward the
incredible jet of stress fluid which kept it in being—a jet fed
by no one knew what forces at Jupiter’s hot, rocky 22,000-
mile core, under 16,000 miles of eternal ice. During the en­
tire passage, the storms all over Jupiter became especially
violent; and the Bridge had been forced to locate in anything
but the calmest spot on the planet, thanks to the uneven dis­
tribution of the few permanent land masses.
Helmuth watched Dillon with a certain compassion, tem­
pered with mild envy. Charity Dillon’s unfortunate given
name betrayed him as the son of a hangover, the only male
child of a Witness family which dated back to the great Wit­
ness Revival of 2003. He was one of the hundreds of govern­
ment-drafted experts who had planned the Bridge, and he
was as obsessed by the Bridge as Helmuth was—but for dif­
ferent reasons.

Helmuth moved back to the port, dropping his hand gently

upon Dillon’s shoulder. Together they looked at the scream­
ing straw yellows, brick reds, pinks, oranges, browns, even
blues and greens that Jupiter threw across the ruined stone of
its innermost satellite. On Jupiter V, even the shadows had
color.
Dillon did not move. He said at last, “Are you pleased,
Bob?”
184 B R ID G E

“Pleased?” Helmuth said in astonishment. “ No. It scares

me white; you know that. I’m just glad that the whole Bridge
didn’t go.”
“You’re quite sure?” Dillon said quietly.
Helmuth took his hand from Dillon’s shoulder and re­
turned to his seat at the central desk. “You’ve no right to
needle me for something I can’t help,” he said, his voice even
lower than Dillon’s. “ I work on Jupiter four hours a day—not
actually, because we can’t keep a man alive for more than a
split second down there—but my eyes and my ears and my
mind are there, on the Bridge, four hours a day. Jupiter is not
a nice place. I don’t like it. I won’t pretend I do.”
“Spending four hours a day in an environment like that
over a period of years—well, the human mind instinctively
tries to adapt, even to the unthinkable. Sometimes I wonder
how I’ll behave when I’m put back in Chicago again. Some­
times I can’t remember anything about Chicago except vague
generalities, sometimes I can’t even believe there is such a
place as Earth—how could there be, when the rest of the uni­
verse is like Jupiter, or worse?”
“I know,” Dillon said. “ I’ve tried several times to show you
that isn’t a very reasonable frame of mind."
“ I know it isn’t. But I can’t help how I feel. No. I don't
think the Bridge will last. It can't last; it's all wrong. But I
don’t want to see it go. I've just got sense enough to know
that one of these days Jupiter is going to sweep it away."
He wiped an open palm across the control boards, snapping
all the toggles “Off" with a sound like the fall of a double­
handful of marbles on a pane of glass. “ Like that. Charity!
And I work four hours a day, every day, on the Bridge. One
of these days, Jupiter is going to destroy the Bridge. It’ll go
flying away in little flinders into the storms. My mind will be
there, supervising some puny job, and my mind will go flying
away along with my mechanical eyes and ears—still trying to
adapt to the unthinkable, tumbling away into the winds and
 JAMES BUSH 185

the flames and the rains and the darkness and the pressure
and the cold.”
“ Bob, you’re deliberately running away with yourself. Cut
it out. Cut it out, I say!”
Helmuth shrugged, putting a trembling hand on the edge
of the board to steady himself. “All right. I’m all right, Char­
ity. I’m here, aren’t I? Right here on Jupiter V, in no danger,
in no danger at all. The bridge is 112,600 miles away from
here. But when the day comes that the Bridge is swept
away—
“Charity, sometimes I imagine you ferrying my body back
to the cozy nook it came from, while my soul goes tumbling
and tumbling through millions of cubic miles of poison. All
right, Charity, I’ll be good. I won’t think about it out loud;
but you can’t expect me to forget it. It’s on my mind; I can’t
help it, and you should know that.”
“ I do,” Dillon said, with a kind of eagerness. “I do, Bob.
I’m only trying to help, to make you see the problem as it is.
The Bridge isn’t really that awful, it isn’t worth a single
nightmare.”
“Oh, it isn’t the Bridge that makes me yell out when I’m
sleeping,” Helmuth said, smiling bitterly. “ I’m not that rid­
den by it yet. It’s while I’m awake that I’m afraid the Bridge
will be swept away. What I sleep with is a fear of myself.”
“That’s a sane fear. You’re as sane as any of us,” Dillon
insisted, fiercely solemn. “ Look, Bob. The Bridge isn’t a mon­
ster. It’s a way we’ve developed for studying the behavior of
materials under specific conditions of temperature, pressure,
and gravity. Jupiter isn’t Hell, either; it’s a set of conditions.
The Bridge is the laboratory we set up to work with those
conditions.”
“ It isn’t going anywhere. It’s a bridge to no place.”
“There aren’t many places on Jupiter,” Dillon said, miss­
ing Helmuth’s meaning entirely. “We put the Bridge on an
island in the local sea because we needed solid ice we could
186 B R ID G E

sink the caissons in. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have mattered

where we put it. We could have floated it on the sea itself, if
we hadn’t wanted to fix it in order to measure storm veloci­
ties and such things.”
“I know that,” Helmuth said.
“ But, Bob, you don’t show any signs of understanding it.
Why, for instance, should the Bridge go any place? It isn’t
even, properly speaking, a bridge at all. We only call it that
because we used some bridge engineering principles in build­
ing it. Actually, it’s much more like a travelling crane—an
extremely heavy-duty overhead rail line. It isn’t going any­
where because it hasn’t any place interesting to go, that's all.
We’re extending it to cover as much territory as possible, and
to increase its stability, not to span the distance between
places. There’s no point to reproaching it because it doesn't
span a real gap—between, say, Dover and Calais. It's a
bridge to knowledge, and that's far more important. Why
can’t you see that?”
“ I can see that; that’s what I was talking about," Helmuth
said, trying to control his impatience. “I have as much com­
mon sense as the average child. What I was trying to point
out is that meeting colossalness with colossalness—out
here—is a mug’s game. It’s a game Jupiter will always win.
without the slightest effort. What if the engineers who built
the Dover-Calais bridge had been limited to broomstraws for
their structural members? They could have got the bridge up
somehow, sure, and made it strong enough to carry light traf­
fic on a fair day. But what would you have had left of it after
the first winter storm came down the Channel from the
North Sea? The whole approach is idiotic!"
“All right,” Dillon said reasonably. “ You have a point.
Now you’re being reasonable. What better approach have
you to suggest? Should we abandon Jupiter entirely because
it’s too big for us?”
"No," Helmuth said. “Or maybe, yes. I don’t know. I don’t
 JAMES BUSH 187

have any easy answer. I just know that this one is no answer
at all—it’s just a cumbersome evasion.”
Dillon smiled. “You’re depressed, and no wonder. Sleep it
off, Bob, if you can—you might even come up with that an­
swer. In the meantime—well, when you stop to think about
it, the surface of Jupiter isn’t any more hostile, inherently,
than the surface of Jupiter V, except in degree. If you
stepped out of this building naked, you’d die just as fast as
you would on Jupiter. Try to look at it that way.”
Helmuth, looking forward into another night of dreams,
said, “That’s the way I look at it now.”

Ill

There were three yellow “Critical” signals lit on the long

gang board when Helmuth passed through the gang deck on
the way back to duty. All of them, as usual, were concentrat­
ed on Panel 9, where Eva Chavez worked.
Eva, despite her Latin name—such once-valid tickets no
longer meant anything among Earth’s uniformly mixed-race
population— was a big girl, vaguely blond, who cherished a
passion for the Bridge. Unfortunately, she was apt to become
enthralled by the sheer Cosmicness of it all, precisely at the
moments when cold analysis and split-second decisions were
most crucial.
Helmuth reached over her shoulder, cut her out of the cir­
cuit except as an observer, and donned the co-operator’s hel­
met. The incomplete new shoals caisson sprang into being
around him. Breakers of boiling hydrogen seethed seven hun­
dred feet up along its slanted sides—breakers that never sub­
sided, but simply were torn away into flying spray.
There was a spot of dull orange near the top of the north
face of the caisson, crawling slowly toward the pediment of
the nearest truss. Catalysis—
Or cancer, as Helmuth could not help but think of it. On
188 B R ID G E

this bitter, violent monster of a planet, even the tiny specks of

calcium carbide were deadly. At these wind velocities, such
specks imbedded themselves in everything; and at fifteen mil­
lion pounds per square inch, pressure ice catalyzed by sodium
took up ammonia and carbon dioxide, building proteinlike
compounds in a rapid, deadly chain of decay:
H2NCHCO°HNCHCO°HNCHCO°HN...

. CaO Ca Ca
HNCHCO°HNCHCO°HNCHCO°HN...

CaO Ca Ca
HNCHCO°HNCHCO°HN...
For a second, Helmuth watched it grow. It was, after all,
one of the incredible possibilities the Bridge had been built to
study. On Earth, such a compound, had it occurred at all,
might have grown porous, bony, and quite strong. Here, un­
der nearly eight times the gravity, the molecules were forced
to assemble in strict aliphatic order, but in cross section their
arrangement was hexagonal, as if the stuff would become an
aromatic compound if it only could. Even here it was moder­
ately strong in cross section—but along the long axis it
smeared like graphite, the calcium atoms readily surrender­
ing their valence hold on one carbon atom to grab hopefully
for the next one in line —
No stuff to hold up the piers of humanity's greatest engi­
neering project. Perhaps it was suitable for the ribs of some
Jovian jellyfish, but in a Bridge caisson, it was cancer.
There was a scraper mechanism working on the edge of the
lesion, flaking away the shearing aminos and laying down
new ice. In the meantime, the decay of the caisson face was
working deeper. The scraper could not possibly get at the
core of the trouble—which was not the calcium carbide dust,
with which the atmosphere was charged beyond redemption.
 JAMES BUSH 189

but was instead one imbedded sodium speck which was tak­
ing no part in the reaction—fast enough to extirpate it. It
could barely keep pace with the surface spread of the disease.
And laying new ice over the surface of the wound was
worthless. At this rate, the whole caisson would slough away
and melt like butter within an hour under the weight of the
Bridge above it.
Helmuth sent the futile scraper aloft. Drill for it? No—too
deep already, and location unknown.
Quickly he called two borers up from the shoals below,
where constant blasting was taking the foundation of the
caisson deeper and deeper into Jupiter’s dubious “soil.” He
drove both blind fire-snouted machines down into the lesion.
The bottom of that sore turned out to be forty-five meters
within the immense block. Helmuth pushed the red button all
the same.
The borers blew up, with a heavy, quite invisible blast, as
they had been designed to do. A pit appeared on the face of
the caisson.
The nearest truss bent upward in the wind. It fluttered for
a moment, trying to resist. It bent farther.
Deprived of its major attachment, it tore free suddenly and
went whirling away into the blackness. A sudden flash of
lightning picked it out for a moment, and Helmuth saw it
dwindling like a bat with torn wings being borne away by a
cyclone.
The scraper scuttled down into the pit and began to fill it
with ice from the bottom. Helmuth ordered down a new truss
and a squad of scaffolders. Damage of this order took time to
repair. He watched the tornado tearing ragged chunks from
the edges of the pit until he was sure that the catalysis had
stopped. Then, suddenly, prematurely, dismally tired, he took
off the helmet.
He was astounded by the white fury that masked Eva's
big-boned, mildly pretty face.
“You’ll blow the Bridge up yet, won’t you?” she said, even-
190 B R ID G E

ly, without preamble. “Any pretext will do!”

Baffled, Helmuth turned his head helplessly away; but that
was no better. The suffused face of Jupiter peered swollenly
through the picture-port, just as it did on the foreman’s desk.
He and Eva and Charity and the gang and the whole of
satellite V were falling forward toward Jupiter; their un­
eventful cooped-up lives on Jupiter V were utterly unreal
compared to the four hours of each changeless day spent on
Jupiter’s ever-changing surface. Every new day brought their
minds, like ships out of control, closer and closer to that
gaudy inferno.
There was no other way for a man—or a woman—on Jupi­
ter V to look at the giant planet. It was simple experience,
shared by all of them, that planets do not occupy four-fifths
of the whole sky, unless the observer is himself up there in
that planet’s sky, falling, falling faster and faster—
“ I have no intention,” he said tiredly, “of blowing up the
Bridge. I wish you could get it through your head that I want
the Bridge to stay up—even though I'm not starry-eyed to
the point of incompetence about the project. Did you think
that rotten spot was going to go away by itself when you'd
painted it over? Didn't you know that
Several helmeted masked heads nearby turned blindly
toward the sound of his voice. Helmuth shut up. Any dis­
tracting conversation or activity was taboo down here in the
gang room. He motioned Eva back to duty.
The girl donned her helmet obediently enough, but it was
plain from the way her normally full lips were thinned that
she thought Helmuth had ended the argument only in order
to have the last word.
Helmuth strode to the thick pillar which ran down the cen­
tral axis of the shack, and mounted the spiraling cleats
toward his own foreman’s cubicle. Already he felt in anticipa­
tion the weight of the helmet upon his own head.
Charity Dillon, however, was already wearing the helmet;
he was sitting in Helmuth’s chair.
 JAMES BLISH 191

Charity was characteristically oblivious of Helmuth’s en­

trance. The Bridge operator must learn to ignore, to be utter­
ly unconscious of anything happening around his body except
the inhuman sounds of signals; must learn to heed only those
senses which report something going on thousands of miles
away.
Helmuth knew better than to interrupt him. Instead, he
watched Dillon’s white bladelike fingers roving with blind
sureness over the controls.
Dillon, evidently, was making a complete tour of the
Bridge—not only from end to end, but up and down, too. The
tally board showed that he had already activated nearly two-
thirds of the ultraphone eyes. That meant that he had been
up all night at the job; had begun it immediately after last
talking to Helmuth.
Why?
With a thrill of unfocused apprehension, Helmuth looked
at the foreman’s jack, which allowed the operator here in the
cubicle to communicate with the gang when necessary, and
which kept him aware of anything said or done at gang
boards.
It was plugged in.
Dillon sighed suddenly, took the helmet off, and turned.
“ Hello, Bob,” he said. “ Funny about this job. You can’t
see, you can’t hear, but when somebody’s watching you, you
feel a sort of pressure on the back of your neck. ESP, maybe.
Ever felt it?”
“Pretty often, lately. Why the grand tour, Charity?”
“There’s to be an inspection,” Dillon said. His eyes met
Helmuth’s. They were frank and transparent. “A mob of
Western officials coming to see that their eight billion dollars
isn’t being wasted. Naturally, I’m a little anxious to see that
they find everything in order.”
“ I see,” Helmuth said. “ First time in five years, isn’t it?”
“Just about. What was that dust-up down below just now?
Somebody—you, I’m sure, from the drastic handiwork in-
192 B R ID G E

volved—bailed Eva out of a mess, and then I heard her talk

about your wanting to blow up the Bridge. I checked the area
when I heard the fracas start, and it did seem as if she had
let things go rather far, but— What was it all about?” Dillon
ordinarily hadn’t the guile for cat-and-mouse games, and he
had never looked less guileful than now.
Helmuth said carefully, “ Eva was upset, I suppose. On the
subject of Jupiter we’re all of us cracked by now, in our dif­
ferent ways. The way she was dealing with the catalysis
didn’t look to me to be suitable—a difference of opinion, re­
solved in my favor because I had the authority, Eva didn’t.
That’s all.”
“ Kind of an expensive difference, Bob. I’m not niggling by
nature, you know that. But an incident like that while the
commission is here—”
“The point is,” Helmuth said, “are we to spend an extra
ten thousand, or whatever it costs to replace a truss and rein­
force a caisson, or are we to lose the whole caisson—and as
much as a third of the whole Bridge along with it?"
“ Yes, you’re right there, of course. That could be ex­
plained, even to a pack of senators. But—it would be difficult
to have to explain it very often. Well, the board's yours. Bob.
You could continue my spot check, if you’ve time."
Dillon got up. Then he added suddenly, as if it were forced
out of him, “ Bob, I'm trying to understand your state of
mind. From what Eva said, I gather that you've made it fair­
ly public. 1 . . . I don’t think it's a good idea to infect your fel­
low workers with your own pessimism. It leads to sloppy
work. I know that regardless of your own feelings you won't
countenance sloppy work, but one foreman can do only so
much. And you're making extra work for yourself—not for
me, but for yourself—by being openly gloomy about the
Bridge.
“ You’re the best man on the Bridge, Bob, for all your
grousing about the job, and your assorted misgivings. I’d hate
to see you replaced.”
 JAMES BUSH 193

“A threat, Charity?” Helmuth said softly.

“No. I wouldn’t replace you unless you actually went nuts,
and I firmly believe that your fears in that respect are
groundless. It’s a commonplace that only sane men suspect
their own sanity, isn’t it?”
“ It’s a common misconception. Most psychopathic obses­
sions begin with a mild worry.”
Dillon made as if to brush that subject away. “Anyhow,
I’m not threatening; I’d fight to keep you here. But my say-so
only covers Jupiter V; there are people higher up on Gany­
mede, and people higher yet back in Washington—and in
this inspecting commission.
“ Why don’t you try to look on the bright side for a
change? Obviously the Bridge isn’t ever going to inspire you.
But you might at least try thinking about all those dollars pil­
ing up in your account every hour you’re on this job, and
about the bridges and ships and who knows what-all that
you’ll be building, at any fee you ask, when you get back
down to Earth. All under the magic words ‘One of the men
who built the Bridge on Jupiter’!” Charity was bright red
with embarrassment and enthusiasm.
Helmuth smiled. “ I’ll try to bear it in mind, Charity,” he
said. “When is this gaggle of senators due to arrive?”
“They’re on Ganymede now, taking a breather. They came
directly from Washington without any routing. I suppose
they’ll make a stop at Callisto before they come here.
They’ve something new on their ship, I’m told, that lets them
flit about more freely than the usual uphill transport can.”
An icy lizard suddenly was resting in Helmuth’s stomach,
coiling and coiling but never settling itself. The room blurred.
The persistent nightmare was suddenly almost upon him—al­
ready.
“Something .. . new?” he echoed, his voice as flat and non­
committal as he could make it. “Do you know what it is?”
“ Well, yes. But I think I’d better keep quiet about it un­
til— ”
194 B R ID G E

“Charity, nobody on this deserted rock heap could possibly

be a Soviet spy. The whole habit of ‘security’ is idiotic out
here. Tell me now and save me the trouble of dealing with
senators; or tell me at least that you know I know. They have
antigravity! Isn’t that it?”
One word from Dillon, and the nightmare would be real.
“Yes,” Dillon said. “ How did you know? Of course, it
couldn’t be a complete gravity screen by any means. But it
seems to be a good long step toward it. We’ve waited a long
time to see that dream come true— But you're the last man
in the world to take pride in the achievement, so there's no
sense exulting about it to you. I’ll let you know when I get a
definite arrival date. In the meantime, will you think about
what I said before?”
“Yes. I will.” Helmuth took the seat before the board.
“Good. With you, I have to be grateful for small victories.
Good trick, Bob.”
“Good trick, Charity.”

IV
Instead of sleeping—for now he knew that he was really
afraid—he sat up in the reading chair in his cabin. The illu­
minated microfilm pages of a book flipped by across the sur­
face of the wall opposite him, timed precisely to the reading
rate most comfortable for him, and he had several weeks'
worry-conserved alcohol and smoke rations for ready con­
sumption.
But Helmuth let his mix go flat, and did not notice the
book, which had turned itself on, at the page where he had
abandoned it last, when he had fitted himself into the chair.
Instead, he listened to the radio.
There was always a great deal of ham radio activity in the
Jovian system. The conditions were good for it, since there
was plenty of power available, few impeding atmosphere lay­
ers, and those thin, no Heaviside layers, and few' official and
no commercial channels with which the hams could interfere.
 JAMES BUSH 195

And there were plenty of people scattered about the satel­

lites who needed the sound of a voice.
. . Anybody know whether the senators are coming here?
Doc Barth put in a report a while back on a fossil plant he
found here, at least he thinks it was a plant. Maybe they’d
like a look at it.”
“They’re supposed to hit the Bridge team next.” A strong
voice, and the impression of a strong transmitter wavering in
and out; that would be Sweeney on Ganymede. “Sorry to
throw the wet blanket, boys, but I don’t think the senators
are interested in our rock balls for their own lumpy selves.
We could only hold them here three days.”
Helmut thought grayly, Then they’ve already left Callisto.
“Is that you, Sweeney? Where’s the Bridge tonight?”
“ Dillon’s on duty,” a very distant transmitter said. “Try to
raise Helmuth, Sweeney.”
“ Helmuth, Helmuth, you gloomy beetle gooser! Come in,
Helmuth!”
“Sure, Bob, come in and dampen us.”
Sluggishly, Helmuth reached out to take the mike where it
lay clipped to one arm of the chair. But the door to his room
opened before he had completed the gesture.
Eva came in. She said, “ Bob, I want to tell you some­
thing.”
“His voice is changing!” the voice of the Callisto operator
said. “Ask him what he’s drinking, Sweeney!”
Helmuth cut the radio out. The girl was freshly dressed—
in so far as anybody dressed in anything on Jupiter V—and
Helmuth wondered why she was prowling the decks at this
hour, halfway between her sleep period and her trick. Her
hair was hazy against the light from the corridor, and she
looked less mannish than usual. She reminded him a little of
the way she had looked when they first met.
“All right,” he said. “ I owe you a mix, I guess. Citric, su­
gar and the other stuff is in the locker—you know where it is.
Shot cans are there, too.”
196 B R ID G E

The girl shut the door and sat down on the bunk with a
free litheness that was almost grace, but with a determination
which Helmuth knew meant that she had just decided to do
something silly for all the right reasons.
“ I don’t need a drink,” she said. “As a matter of fact, late­
ly I’ve been turning my lux-R’s back to the common pool. I
suppose you did that for me—by showing me what a mind
looked like that is hiding from itself.”
“Eva, stop sounding like a tract. Obviously, you’ve ad­
vanced to a higher, more Jovian plane of existence, but won't
you still need your metabolism? Or have you decided that vi­
tamins are all-in-the-mind?”
“ Now, you’re being superior. Anyhow, alcohol isn't a vita­
min. And I didn’t come to talk about that. I came to tell you
something I think you ought to know.”
“Which is?”
She said, “ Bob, I mean to have a child here.”
A bark of laughter, part sheer hysteria and part exaspera­
tion, jackknifed Helmuth into a sitting position. A red arrow
bloomed on the far wall, obediently marking the paragraph
which supposedly he had reached in his reading, and the page
vanished.
"Women!” he said, when he could get his breath back.
“ Really, Evita, you make me feel much better. No environ­
ment can change a human being much, after all.”
“ Why should it?” she said suspiciously. “ 1 don’t see the
joke. Shouldn’t a woman want to have a child?"
“Of course she should,” he said, settling back. The flipping
pages began again. “ It’s quite ordinary. All women want to
have children. All women dream of the day they can turn a
child out to play in an airless rock garden, to pluck fossils
and get quaintly starburned. How cozy to tuck the little blue
body back into its corner that night, promptly at the sound of
the trick-change bell! Why, it's as natural as Jupiter light—
as Earthian as vacuum-frozen apple pie.”
 JAMES BLISH 197

He turned his head casually away. “As for me, though,

Eva, I’d much prefer that you take your ghostly little pretext
out of here.”
Eva surged to her feet in one furious motion. Her fingers
grasped him by the beard and jerked his head painfully
around again.
“You reedy male platitude!” she said in a low grinding
voice. “ How you could see almost the whole point and make
so little of it— Women, is it? So you think I came creeping in
here, full of humbleness, to settle our technical differences.”
He closed his hand on her wrist and twisted it away.
“W hat else?” he demanded, trying to imagine how it would
feel to stay reasonable for five minutes at a time with these
Bridge robots. “ None of us need bother with games and ex­
cuses. We’re here, we’re isolated, we were all chosen because,
among other things, we were judged incapable of forming
permanent emotional attachments, and capable of such alli­
ances as we found attractive without going unbalanced when
the attraction diminished and the alliance came unstuck.
None of us have to pretend that our living arrangements
would keep us out of jail in Boston, or that they have to in­
volve any Earth-normal excuses.”
She said nothing. After a while he asked gently, "Isn’t that
so?”
“Of course it’s so. Also it has nothing to do with the mat­
ter.”
“ It doesn’t? How stupid do you think I am? I don’t care
whether or not you’ve decided to have a child here, if you
really mean what you say.”
She was trembling with rage. “You really don’t, too. The
decision means nothing to you.”
“Well, if I liked children, I’d be sorry for the child. But as
it happens, I can’t stand children. In short, Eva as far as I’m
concerned you can have as many as you want, and to me
you’ll still be the worst operator on the Bridge.”
198 B R ID G E

“I’ll bear that in mind,” she said. At this moment she

seemed to have been cut from pressure ice. “ I’ll leave you
something to charge your mind with, too, Robert Helmuth.
I’ll leave you sprawled here under your precious book—what
is Madame Bovary to you, anyhow, you unadventurous tur­
tle?^—to think about a man who believes that children must
always be born into warm cradles, a man who thinks that
men have to huddle on warm worlds or they won’t survive. A
man with no ears, no eyes, scarcely any head. A man in ter­
ror, a man crying Mamma! Mamma! all the stellar days and
nights long!”
“Parlor diagnosis!”
“Parlor labeling. Good trick, Bob. Draw your warm woolly
blanket in tight about your brains, or some little sneeze of
sense might creep in, and impair your—efficiency!”
The door closed sharply after her.
A million pounds of fatigue crashed down without warning
on Helmuth’s brain, and he fell back into the reading chair
with a gasp. The roots of his beard ached, and Jupiters
bloomed and wavered away before his closed eyes.
He struggled once, and fell asleep.

Instantly he was in the grip of the dream.

It started, as always, with commonplaces, almost realistic
enough to be a documentary filmstrip—except for the appall­
ing sense of pressure and the distorted emotional significance
with which the least word, the smallest movement was invest­
ed.
It was the sinking of the first caisson of the Bridge. The ac­
tual event had been bad enough. The job demanded enough
exactness of placement to require that manned ships enter
Jupiter's atmosphere itself: a squadron of twenty of the most
powerful ships ever built, with the five-million-ton asteroid,
trimmed and shaped in space, slung beneath them in an im­
mense cat’s cradle.
Four times that squadron had disappeared beneath the
 JAMES BUSH 199

clouds; four times the tense voices of pilots and engineers had
muttered in Helmuth’s ears; four times there were shouts and
futile orders and the snapping of cables and someone scream­
ing endlessly against the eternal howl of the Jovian sky.
It had cost, altogether, nine ships and 231 men, to get one
of five laboriously shaped asteroids planted in the shifting
slush that was Jupiter’s surface. Helmuth had helped to su­
pervise all five operations, counting the successful one, from
his desk on Jupiter V; but in the dream he was not in the con­
trol shack, but instead on shipboard, in one of the ships that
was never to come back—
Then, without transition, but without any sense of disconti­
nuity either, he was on the Bridge itself. Not in absentia, as the
remote guiding intelligence of a beetle, but in person, in an ovu­
lar tanklike suit the details of which would never come clear.
The high brass had discovered antigravity, and had asked for
volunteers to man the Bridge. Helmuth had volunteered.
Looking back on it in the dream, he did not understand
why he had volunteered. It had simply seemed expected of
him, and he had not been able to help it, even though he had
known what it would be like. He belonged on the Bridge,
though he hated it—he had been doomed to go there, from
the first.
And there w as.. . something wrong . .. with the antigrav­
ity. The high brass had asked for its volunteers before the sci­
entific work had been completed. The present antigravity
fields were weak, and there was some basic flaw in the the­
ory. Generators broke down after only short periods of use,
burned out unpredictably, sometimes only moments after
testing up without a flaw—like vacuum tubes in waking life.
That was what Helmuth’s set was about to do. He
crouched inside his personal womb, above the boiling sea, the
clouds raging about him, lit by a plume of hydrogen flame,
and waited to feel his weight suddenly become eight times
greater than normal. He knew what would happen to him
then. It happened.
200 B R ID G E

Helmuth greeted morning on Jupiter V with his customary

scream.

The ship that landed as he was going on duty did nothing

to lighten the load on his heart. In shape it was not distin­
guishable from any of the long-range cruisers which ran the
legs of the Moon-Mars-Belt-Ganymede trip. But it grounded
its huge bulk with less visible expenditure of power than one
of the little intersatellary boats.
That landing told Helmuth that his dream was well on its
way to coming true. If the high brass had had a real anti­
gravity, there would have been no reason why the main jets
should have been necessary at all. Obviously, what had been
discovered was some sort of partial screen, which allowed a
ship to operate with far less jet action than was normal, but
which still left it subject to a sizable fraction of the universal
stress of space.
Nothing less than complete and completely controllable
antigravity would do on Jupiter.
He worked mechanically, noting that Charity was not in
evidence. Probably he was conferring with the senators, re­
ceiving what would be for him the glad news.
Helmuth realized suddenly that there was nothing left for
him to do now but to cut and run.
There could certainly be no reason why he should have to
re-enact the entire dream helplessly, event for event, like an
actor committed to a play. He was awake now, in full control
of his own senses, and still at least partially sane. The man in
the dream had volunteered—but that man would not be Rob­
ert Helmuth. Not any longer.
While the senators were here, he would turn in his resigna­
tion. Direct, over Charity’s head.
“ Wake up, Helmuth,” a voice from the gang deck snapped
 JAMES BUSH 201
suddenly. “ If it hadn’t been for me, you’d have run yourself
off the end of the Bridge. You had all the automatic stops on
that beetle cut out.”
Helmuth reached guiltily and more than a little too late for
the controls. Eva had already run his beetle back beyond the
danger line.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Thanks, Eva.”
“Don’t thank me. If you’d actually been in it, I’d have let it
go. Less reading and more sleep is what I recommend for
you, Helmuth.”
“ Keep your recommendations to yourself,” he snapped.
The incident started a new and even more disturbing chain
of thought. If he were to resign now, it would be nearly a
year before he could get back to Chicago. Antigravity or no
antigravity, the senators’ ship would have no room for unex­
pected passengers. Shipping a man back home had to be ar­
ranged far in advance. Space had to be provided, and a cargo
equivalent of the weight and space requirements he would
take up on the return trip had to be deadheaded out to Jupi­
ter.
A year of living in the station on Jupiter V without any
function—as a man whose drain on the station’s supplies no
longer could be justified in terms of what he did. A year of
living under the eyes of Eva Chavez and Charity Dillon and
the other men and women who still remained Bridge opera­
tors, men and women who would not hesitate to let him know
what they thought of his quitting.
A year of living as a bystander in the feverish excitement
of direct personal exploration of Jupiter. A year of watching
and hearing the inevitable deaths—while he alone stood
aloof, privileged, and useless. A year during which Robert
Helmuth would become the most hated living entity in the
Jovian system.
And, when he got back to Chicago and went looking for a
job— for his resignation from the Bridge gang would auto-
202 B R ID G E

matically take him out of government service— he would be

asked why he left the Bridge at the moment when work on
the Bridge was just reaching its culmination.
He began to understand why the man in the dream had
volunteered.
When the trick-change bell rang, he was still determined to
resign, but he had already concluded bitterly that there were,
after all, other kinds of hells besides the one on Jupiter.
He was returning the board to neutral as Charity came up
the cleats. Charity’s eyes were snapping like a skyful of com­
ets. Helmuth had known that they would be.
“Senator Wagoner wants to speak to you, if you’re not too
tired, Bob,” he said. “Go ahead; I’ll finish up here.”
“He does?” Helmuth frowned. The dream surged back
upon him. NO. They would not rush him any faster than he
wanted to go. “What about, Charity? Am I suspected of un-
Western activities? I suppose you’ve told them how I feel."
“ I have,” Dillon said, unruffled. "But we're agreed that
you may not feel the same after you've talked to Wagoner.
He’s in the ship, of course. I’ve put out a suit for you at the
lock.” Charity put the helmet over his head, effectively cut­
ting himself off from further conversation, or from any fur­
ther consciousness of Helmuth at all.
Helmuth stood looking at him a moment. Then, with a
convulsive shrug, he went down the cleats.
Three minutes later, he was plodding in a spacesuit across
the surface of Jupiter V, with the vivid bulk of Jupiter splash­
ing his shoulders with color.
A courteous Marine let him through the ship's air lock and
deftly peeled him out of the suit. Despite a grim determina­
tion to be uninterested in the new antigravity and any possi­
ble consequence of it, he looked curiously about as he was
conducted up toward the bow.
But the ship was like the ones that had brought him from
Chicago to Jupiter V—it was like any spaceship: there was
 JAMES BUSH 203

nothing in it to see but corridor walls and stairwells, until you

arrived at the cabin where you were needed.
Senator Wagoner was a surprise. He was a young man, no
more than sixty-five at most, not at all portly, and he had the
keenest pair of blue eyes that Helmuth had ever seen. He re­
ceived Helmuth alone in his own cabin—a comfortable cabin
as spaceship accommodations go, but neither roomy nor luxu­
rious. He was hard to match up with the stories Helmuth had
been hearing about the current Senate, which had been in­
volved in scandal after scandal of more than Roman propor­
tions.
Helmuth looked around. “I thought there were several of
you” he said.
“There are, but I didn’t want to give you the idea that you
were facing a panel,” Wagoner said, smiling. “I’ve been
forced to sit in on most of these endless loyalty investigations
back home, but I can’t see any point in exporting such reli­
gious ceremonies to deep space. Do sit down, Mr. Helmuth.
There are drinks coming. We have a lot to talk about.”
Stiffly, Helmuth sat down.
“Dillon tells me,” Wagoner said, leaning back comfortably
in his own chair, “that your usefulness to the Bridge is about
at an end. In a way, I’m sorry to hear that, for you’ve been
one of the best men we’ve had on any of our planetary proj­
ects. But, in another way, I’m glad. It makes you available
for something much bigger, where we need you much more.”
“ What do you mean by that?”
“ I’ll explain in a moment. First, I’d like to talk a little
about the Bridge. Please don’t feel that I’m quizzing you, by
the way. You’re at perfect liberty to say that any given ques­
tion is none of my business, and I’ll take no offense and hold
no grudge. Also, ‘I hereby disavow the authenticity of any
tape or other tapping of which this statement may be a part.’
In short, our conversation is unofficial, highly so.”
“Thank you.”
204 B R ID G E

“It’s to my interest; I’m hoping that you’ll talk freely to

me. Of course my disavowal means nothing, since such for­
mal statements can always be excised from a tape; but later
on I’m going to tell you some things you’re not supposed to
know, and you’ll be able to judge by what I say then that
anything you say to me is privileged. Okay?”
A steward came in silently with drinks, and left again. Hel-
muth tasted his. As far as he could tell, it was exactly like
many he had mixed for himself back in the control shack,
from standard space rations. The only difference was that it
was cold, which Helmuth found startling, but not unpleasant
after the first sip. He tried to relax. “I'll do my best,” he said.
“Good enough. Now: Dillon says that you regard the
Bridge as a monster. I’ve examined your dossier pretty close­
ly, and I think perhaps Dillon hasn’t quite the gist of your
meaning. I’d like to hear it straight from you.”
“I don’t think the Bridge is a monster,” Helmuth said
slowly. “You see, Charity is on the defensive. He takes the
Bridge to be conclusive evidence that no possible set of ad­
verse conditions ever will stop man for long, and there I'm in
agreement with him. But he also thinks of it as Progress per­
sonified. He can’t admit—you asked me to speak my mind,
Senator—that the West is a decadent and drying culture. All
the other evidence that’s available shows that it is. Charity
likes to think of the Bridge as giving the lie to that evidence.”
“The West hasn’t many more years,” Wagoner agreed, as­
tonishingly. “Still and all, the West has been responsible for
some really towering achievements in its time. Perhaps the
Bridge could be considered as the last and mightiest of them
all.”
“ Not by me,” Helmuth said. “The building of gigantic
projects for ritual purposes—doing a thing for the sake of do­
ing it—is the last act of an already dead culture. Look at the
pyramids in Egypt for an example. Or an even more idiotic
and more enormous example, bigger than anything human
beings have accomplished yet, the laying out of the ‘Diagram
 JAMES BUSH 205

of Power’ over the whole face of Mars. If the Martians had

put all that energy into survival instead, they’d probably be
alive yet.”
“Agreed,” Wagoner said.
“All right. Then maybe you’ll also agree that the essence
of a vital culture is its ability to defend itself. The West has
beaten off the Soviets for a century now—but as far as I can
see, the Bridge is the West’s ‘Diagram of Power’, its pyra­
mids, or what have you. All the money and the resources that
went into the Bridge are going to be badly needed, and won't
be there, when the next Soviet attack comes.”
“ Which will be very shortly, I’m told,” Wagoner said, with
complete calm. “ Furthermore, it will be successful, and in
part it will be successful for the very reasons you’ve outlined.
For a man who’s been cut off from the Earth for years, Hel-
muth, you seem to know more about what’s going on down
there than most of the general populace does.”
“Nothing promotes an interest in Earth like being off it,”
Helmuth said. “And there’s plenty of time to read out here.”
Either the drink was stronger than he had expected, or the
senator’s calm concurrence in the collapse of Helmuth’s en­
tire world had given him another shove toward nothingness;
his head was spinning.
Wagoner saw it. He leaned forward suddenly, catching
Helmuth flat-footed. “However,” he said, “it’s difficult for
me to agree that the Bridge serves, or ever did serve, a ritual
purpose. The Bridge served a huge practical purpose which is
now fulfilled—the Bridge, as such, is now a defunct project.”
“Defunct?” Helmuth repeated faintly.
“Quite. Of course we’ll continue to operate it for a while,
simply because you can’t stop a process of that size on a
dime, and that’s just as well for people like Dillon who are
emotionally tied up in it. You’re the one person with any au­
thority in the whole station who has already lost enough in­
terest in the Bridge to make it safe for me to tell you that it’s
being abandoned.”
206 B R ID G E

“But why?”
“Because,” Wagoner went on quietly, “the Bridge has now
given us confirmation of a theory of stupendous impor­
tance—so important, in my opinion, that the imminent fall of
the West seems like a puny event in comparison. A confirma­
tion, incidentally, which contains in it the seeds of ultimate
destruction for the Soviets, whatever they may win for them­
selves in the next fifty years or so.”
“I suppose,” Helmuth said, puzzled, “that you mean anti­
gravity?”
For the first time, it was Wagoner’s turn to be taken
aback. “ Man,” he said at last, “do you know everything I
want to tell you? I hope not, or my conclusions will be
mighty suspicious. Surely Charity didn’t tell you we had anti­
gravity; I strictly enjoined him not to mention it.”
“No, the subject’s been on my mind,” Helmuth said. “ But
I certainly don’t see why it should be so world-shaking, any
more than I see how the Bridge helped to bring it about. I
thought it had been developed independently, for the further
exploitation of the Bridge, and would step up Bridge oper­
ation, not discontinue it.”
“Not at all. Of course, the Bridge has given us information
in thousands of different categories, much of it very valuable
indeed. But the one job that only the Bridge could do was
that of confirming, or throwing out, the Blackett-Dirac equa­
tions.”
“ Which are?”
“A relationship between magnetism and the spinning of a
massive body—that much is the Dirac part of it. The Black­
ett Equation seemed to show that the same formula also ap­
plied to gravity. If the figures we collected on the magnetic
field strength of Jupiter forced us to retire the Dirac equa­
tions, then none of the rest of the information we’ve gotten
from the Bridge would have been worth the money we spent
to get it. On the other hand, Jupiter was the only body in the
solar system available to us which was big enough in all rel-
 JAMES BUSH 207

evant respects to make it possible for us to test those equa­

tions at all. They involve quantities of enormous orders of
magnitudes.
“And the figures show that Dirac was right. They also
show that Blackett was right. Both magnetism and gravity
are phenomena of rotation.
“I won’t bother to trace the succeeding steps, because I
think you can work them out for yourself. It’s enough to say
that there’s a drive generator on board this ship which is the
complete and final justification of all the hell you people on
the Bridge gang have been put through. The gadget has a
long technical name, but the technies who tend it have al­
ready nicknamed it the ‘spindizzy,’ because of what it does to
the magnetic moment of any atom— any atom—within its
field.
“While it’s in operation, it absolutely refuses to notice any
atom outside its own influence. Furthermore, it will notice no
other strain or influence which holds good beyond the borders
of that field. It’s so snooty that it has to be stopped down to
almost nothing when it’s brought close to a planet, or it won’t
let you land. But in deep space .. . well, it’s impervious to
meteors and such trash, of course; it’s impervious to gravity;
and—it hasn’t the faintest interest in any legislation about
top speed limits.”
“You’re kidding,” Helmuth said.
“Am I, now? The ship came to Ganymede directly from
Earth. It did it in a little under two hours, counting maneu­
vering time.”
Helmuth took a defiant pull at his drink. “This thing really
has no top speed at all?” he said. “How can you be sure of
that?”
“ Well, we can’t,” Wagoner admitted. “After all, one of the
unfortunate things about general mathematical formulas is
that they don’t contain cut-off" points to warn you of areas
where they don’t apply. Even quantum mechanics is some­
what subject to that criticism. However, we expect to know
208 B R ID G E

pretty soon just how fast the spindizzy can drive an object, if
there is any limit. We expect you to tell us.”
“ I?”
“Yes, Helmuth, you. The coming debacle on Earth makes
it absolutely imperative for us—the West—to get interstellar
expeditions started at once. Richardson Observatory, on the
Moon, has two likely-looking systems picked out already—
one at Wolf 359, another at 61 Cygni—and there are sure to
be hundreds of others where Earthlike planets are highly
probable. We want to scatter adventurous people, people with
a thoroughly indoctrinated love of being free, all over this
part of the galaxy, if it can be done.
“Once they’re out there, they’ll be free to flourish, with no
interference from Earth. The Soviets haven't the spindizzy
yet, and even after they steal it from us, they won’t dare al­
low it to be used. It’s too good and too final an escape route.
“What we want you to do— now I'm getting to the point,
you see—is to direct this exodus. You've the intelligence and
the cast of mind for it. Your analysis of the situation on
Earth confirms that, if any more confirmation were needed.
And—there’s no future for you on Earth now."
“ You’ll have to excuse me,” Helmuth said firmly. “ I'm in
no condition to be reasonable now; it's been more than I
could digest in a few moments. And the decision doesn't en­
tirely rest with me, either. If 1 could give you an answer in
. . . let me see . . . about three hours. Will that be soon
enough?”
“That'll be fine,” the senator said.

“ And so, that's the story,” Helmuth said.

Eva remained silent in her chair for a long time. “One
thing I don’t understand,” she said at last. “ Why did you
come to me? I’d have thought that you'd find the whole thing
terrifying ”
“Oh, it’s terrifying, all right,” Helmuth said with quiet ex­
ultation. “ But terror and fright are two different things, as
 JAMES BUSH 209

I’ve just discovered. We were both wrong, Evita. I was wrong

in thinking that the Bridge was a dead end. You were wrong
in thinking of it as an end in itself.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“All right, let’s put it this way: The work the Bridge was
doing was worthwhile, as I know now—so I was wrong in be­
ing frightened of it, in calling it a bridge to nowhere.
“ But you no more saw where it was going than I, and you
made the Bridge the be-all and end-all of your existence.
“Now there’s a place to go to; in fact there are places—
hundreds of places. They’ll be Earthlike places. Since the So­
viets are about to win Earth, those places will be more Earth­
like than Earth itself, for the next century or so at least!”
She said, “Why are you telling me this? Just to make
peace between us?”
“ I’m going to take on this job, Evita, if you’ll go along?”
She turned swiftly, rising out of the chair with a marvelous
fluidity of motion. At the same instant, all the alarm bells in
the station went off at once, filling every metal cranny with a
jangle of pure horror.
“Posts!” the speaker above Eva’s bed roared in a distorted,
gigantic version of Charity Dillon’s voice. “Peak storm over­
load! The STD is now passing the Spot. Wind velocity has
already topped all previous records, and part o f the land
mass has begun to settle. This is an A -l overload emergen­
cy.”
Behind Charity’s bellow, the winds of Jupiter made a spec­
trum of continuous insane shrieking. The Bridge was re­
sponding with monstrous groans of agony. There was another
sound, too, an almost musical cacophony of sharp percussive
tones, such as a dinosaur might make pushing its way
through a forest of huge steel tuning forks. Helmuth had nev­
er heard that sound before, but he knew what it was.
The deck of the Bridge was splitting up the middle.
After a moment more, the uproar dimmed, and the speaker
said, in Charity’s normal voice, “Eva, you too, please. Ac-
210 B R ID G E

knowledge, please. This is it. Unless everybody comes on duty

at once, the Bridge may go down within the next hour.”
“Let it,” Eva responded quietly.
There was a brief startled silence, and then a ghost of a hu­
man sound. The voice was Senator Wagoner’s, and the sound
just might have been a chuckle.
Charity’s circuit clicked out.
The mighty death of the Bridge continued to resound in
the little room.
After a while, the man and the woman went to the window,
and looked past the discarded bulk of Jupiter at the near ho­
rizon, where there had always been visible a few stars.
 SATURN

Saturn is only the second-largest planet in the Solar system,

and it is rather dwarfed by Jupiter.
Its diameter is only 0.85 that of Jupiter; its surface area only
0.72 that of Jupiter. Its volume is only 0.61 times that of Jupiter.
It is less dense than Jupiter, too. In fact, it is the least dense
object in the Solar system as far as we know. Its average den­
sity is only 0.71 grams per cubic centimeter, only about an
eighth as dense as Earth is and about half as dense as Jupiter
is. Saturn is actually less dense than water is.
As a result Saturn is only 0.30 times as massive as Jupiter
is— less than a third. It’s not a very good second-largest. Al­
though smaller than Jupiter, it doesn’t manage to turn more
quickly. Its period of rotation is 10.23 hours— 23 minutes longer
than Jupiter’s is.
Moreover, whereas Jupiter has four large satellites, Saturn
has only one— Titan. (Saturn also has nine small satellites, how­
ever.)
To be sure, Titan is the most voluminous satellite in the Solar
system. It is 4.65 times as voluminous as our Moon and 1.37
times as voluminous as Jupiter’s largest satellite, Ganymede.
However, Titan is low in density, as Saturn is, so its mass
doesn't quite live up to its volume. It is 2.9 times as massive as
the Moon, but only 0.94 times as massive as Ganymede.
Yet in one respect Saturn is unparalleled— by Jupiter or by
any other body we know. Some of the material which would or-

211
212 SATURN

dinarily have coalesced into satellites, as the Saturnian system

was formed, was close enough to the planet to be so strongly
influenced by tidal effects as to have been unable to coalesce. It
remained a thick scattering of relatively small particles that
spread throughout a circular orbit about Saturn. In other words,
there are systems of rings about the planet that make it the
most beautiful sight one can see in a telescope.
In the early days when the telescopes were unable to make
out distant things clearly (Saturn is 1428 million kilometers, or
886 million miles from the Sun— or 1.8 times as far from the
Sun as Jupiter is) the rings were a puzzle. Galileo, in 1610, was
unable to make out clearly what he was seeing, for instance.
It was not till 1655 that Christiaan Huygens finally realized
there were rings around Saturn. It was two more centuries be­
fore James Clerk Maxwell showed conclusively that, by gravita­
tional theory, the rings could neither be solid nor liquid, but had
to be a collection of small discrete objects.
Our knowledge of Saturn has not progressed much in the last
century. We have discovered a couple of satellites, the most re­
cent being Janus (discovered in 1967 by Audouin Dolfuss),
which is closest to the planet and is just outside the limits of the
ring system. Janus is not mentioned in "Saturn Rising,” which
was published in 1961, but nothing else in the story has been
outdated.
Titan, on which the final scene of "Saturn Rising" is laid, is an
interesting world. In 1944, Gerard Peter Kuiper detected an at­
mosphere about Titan and found it to consist of methane.
What’s more, it is a substantial atmosphere, very likely denser
than that of Mars. Titan is the only satellite in the Solar system
and the smallest body of any kind known to possess an atmo­
sphere.
Methane can build up into more complex organic molecules,
and it may be these that give Titan its distinctly orange color. Ti­
tan may conceivably have a gasoline ocean and may have built
up some life forms. It will take probe observations of the right
sort, including a soft landing, to tell us what Titan is really like.
 SATURN 213

At the moment of writing, no probe has reached Saturn. Pio­

neer 11 is on the way, however. It is the second Jupiter probe
(which confirmed the findings of Pioneer 10), and it is scheduled
to pass Saturn on September 1, 1979.
The logical guess is that it will show Saturn to be a little sister
of Jupiter. Saturn will have a magnetic field that is neither as
large nor as intense as that of Jupiter. Saturn will also be essen­
tially a ball of liquid hydrogen, but it will not be as hot as Jupiter.
 Saturn Rising
ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Yes, that’s perfectly true. I met Morris Perlman when I was

about twenty-eight. I met thousands of people in those days,
from presidents downward.
When we got back from Saturn, everybody wanted to see
us, and about half the crew took off on lecture tours. I’ve al­
ways enjoyed talking (don’t say you haven’t noticed it), but
some of my colleagues said they’d rather go to Pluto than
face another audience. Some of them did.
My beat was the Midwest, and the first time I ran into Mr.
Perlman—no one ever called him anything else, certainly
never “Morris”—was in Chicago. The agency always booked
me into good, but not too luxurious, hotels. That suited me; I
liked to stay in places where I could come and go as I pleased
without running a gauntlet of liveried flunkies, and where I
could wear anything within reason without being made to feel
a tramp. I see you’re grinning; well, I was only a kid then,
and a lot of things have changed.
It’s all a long time ago now, but I must have been lecturing
at the University. At any rate, I remember being disappoint­
ed because they couldn’t show me the place where Fermi
started the first atomic pile—they said that the building had
been pulled down forty years before, and there was only a
plaque to mark the spot. I stood looking at it for a while,
thinking of all that had happened since that far-off day in
1942. I'd been born, for one thing; and atomic power had

214
 ARTHUR C. CLARKE 215

taken me out to Saturn and back. That was probably some­

thing that Fermi and Co. never thought of, when they built
their primitive latticework of uranium and graphite.
I was having breakfast in the coffee shop when a slightly
built middle-aged man dropped into the seat on the other side
of the table. He nodded a polite “Good morning,” then gave
a start of surprise as he recognized me. (Of course, he’d
planned the encounter, but I didn’t know it at the time.)
“This is a pleasure!” he said. “ I was at your lecture last
night. How I envied you!”
I gave a rather forced smile; I’m never very sociable at
breakfast, and I’d learned to be on my guard against the
cranks, bores, and enthusiasts who seemed to regard me as
their legitimate prey. Mr. Perlman, however, was not a
bore—though he was certainly an enthusiast, and I suppose
you could call him a crank.
He looked like any average fairly prosperous businessman,
and I assumed that he was a guest like myself. The fact that
he had attended my lecture was not surprising; it had been a
popular one, open to the public, and of course well advertised
over press and radio.
“Ever since I was a kid,” said my uninvited companion,
“Saturn has fascinated me. I know exactly when and how it
all started. I must have been about ten years old when I came
across those wonderful paintings of Chesley Bonestell’s,
showing the planet as it would look from its nine moons. I
suppose you’ve seen them?”
“Of course,” I answered. “Though they’re half a century
old, no one’s beaten them yet. We had a couple aboard the
Endeavour, pinned on the plotting table. I often used to look
at the pictures and then compare them with the real thing.”
“Then you know how I felt, back in the nineteen fifties. I
used to sit for hours trying to grasp the fact that this incredi­
ble object, with its silver rings spinning around it, wasn’t just
some artist’s dream, but actually existed—that it was a
world, in fact, ten times the size of Earth.
216 SATURN RISING

“At that time I never imagined that I could see this won­
derful thing for myself; I took it for granted that only the as­
tronomers, with their giant telescopes, could ever look at such
sights. But then, when I was about fifteen, I made another
discovery—so exciting that I could hardly believe it.”
“And what was that?” I asked. By now I’d become recon­
ciled to sharing breakfast; my companion seemed a harmless
enough character, and there was something quite endearing
about his obvious enthusiasm.
“ I found that any fool could make a high-powered astro­
nomical telescope in his own kitchen, for a few dollars and a
couple of weeks work. It was a revelation; like thousands of
other kids, I borrowed a copy of Ingalls' Amateur Telescope
Making from the public library, and went ahead. Tell me—
have you ever built a telescope of your own?”
“No: I’m an engineer, not an astronomer. I wouldn't know
how to begin the job.”
“It's incredibly simple, if you follow the rules. You start
with two disks of glass, about an inch thick. I got mine for
fifty cents from a ship chandler’s; they were porthole glasses
that were of no use because they’d been chipped around the
edges. Then you cement one disk to some flat, firm surface—
I used an old barrel standing on end.
“ Next you have to buy several grades of emery powder,
starting from coarse, gritty stuff and working down to the
finest that’s made. You lay a pinch of the coarsest powder
between the two disks, and start rubbing the upper one back
and forth with regular strokes. As you do so, you slowly circle
around the job.
“You see what happens? The upper disk gets hollowed out
by the cutting action of the emery powder and as you walk
around, it shapes itself into a concave spherical surface. From
time to time you have to change to a finer grade of powder,
and make some simple optical tests to check that your curve’s
right
“ Later still, you drop the emery and switch to rouge, until
 ARTHUR C. CLARKE 217
at last you have a smooth polished surface that you can hard­
ly credit you’ve made yourself. There’s only one more step,
though that’s a little tricky. You still have to silver the mir­
ror, and turn it into a good reflector. This means getting
some chemicals made up at the drugstore, and doing exactly
what the book says.
“ I can still remember the kick I got when the silver film
began to spread like magic across the face of my little mirror.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough, and I wouldn’t
have swapped it for anything on Mount Palomar.
“I fixed it at one end of a wooden plank; there was no need
to bother about a telescope tube, though I put a couple of feet
of cardboard round the mirror to cut out stray light. For an
eyepiece I used a small magnifying lens I’d picked up in a
junk store for a few cents. Altogether, I don’t suppose the
telescope cost more than five dollars—though that was a lot
of money to me when I was a kid.
“ We were living then in a run-down hotel my family
owned on Third Avenue. When I’d assembled the telescope I
went up on the roof and tried it out, among the jungle of TV
antennas that covered every building in those days. It took
me a while to get the mirror and eyepiece lined up, but I
hadn’t made any mistakes and the thing worked. As an opti­
cal instrument it was probably lousy—after all, it was my
first attempt—but it magnified at least fifty times and I
could hardly wait until nightfall to try it on the stars.
“ I’d checked with the almanac, and knew that Saturn was
high in the east after sunset. As soon as it was dark I was up
on the roof again, with my crazy contraption of wood and
glass propped between two chimneys. It was late fall, but I
never noticed the cold, for the sky was full of stars—and they
were all mine.
“ I took my time setting the focus as accurately as possible,
using the first star that came into the field. Then I started
hunting for Saturn, and soon discovered how hard it was to
locate anything in a reflecting telescope that wasn’t properly
218 SATURN RISING

mounted. But presently the planet shot across the field of

view, I nudged the instrument a few inches this way and
that—and there it was.
“It was tiny, but it was perfect. I don’t think I breathed for
a minute; I could hardly believe my eyes. After all the pic­
tures, here was the reality. It looked like a toy hanging there
in space, with the rings slightly open and tilted toward me.
Even now, forty years later, I can remember thinking, It
looks so artificial—like something for a Christmas tree!
There was a single bright star to the left of it, and I knew
that was Titan.”
He paused, and for a moment we must have shared the
same thoughts. For to both of us Titan was no longer merely
the largest moon of Saturn— a point of light known only to
astronomers. It was the fiercely hostile world upon which En­
deavour had landed, and where three of my crewmates lay in
lonely graves, farther from their homes than any of Man­
kind’s dead had ever rested before.
“I don’t know how long I stared, straining my eyes and
moving the telescope across the sky in jerky steps as Saturn
rose above the city. I was a billion miles from New York; but
presently New York caught up with me.
“I told you about our hotel; it belonged to my mother, but
my father ran it—not very well. It had been losing money for
years, and all through my boyhood there had been continuous
financial crises. So I don't want to blame my father for
drinking; he must have been half crazy with worry most of
the time. And I had quite forgotten that I was supposed to be
helping the clerk at the reception desk.
“So Dad came looking for me, full of his own cares and
knowing nothing about my dreams. He found me stargazing
on the roof.
“ He wasn’t a cruel man—he couldn’t have understood the
study and patience and care that had gone into my little tele­
scope, or the wonders it had shown me during the short time
I had used it. I don’t hate him any more, but I’ll remember
 ARTHUR C. CLARKE 219
all my life the splintering crack of my first and last mirror as
it smashed against the brickwork.”
There was nothing I could say. My initial resentment at
this interruption had long since changed to curiosity. Already
I sensed that there was much more to this story than I’d
heard so far, and I’d noticed something else. The waitress
was treating us with an exaggerated deference—only a little
of which was directed at me.
My companion toyed with the sugar bowl while I waited in
silent sympathy. By this time I felt there was some bond be­
tween us, though I did not know exactly what it was.
“ I never built another telescope,” he said. “Something else
broke, besides that mirror—something in my heart. Anyway,
I was much too busy. Two things happened that turned my
life upside down. Dad walked out on us, leaving me the head
of the family. And then they pulled down the Third Avenue
El.”
He must have seen my puzzled look, for he grinned across
the table at me.
“Oh, you wouldn’t know about that. But when I was a kid,
there was an elevated railroad down the middle of Third. It
made the whole area dirty and noisy; the Avenue was a slum
district of bars, pawnshops, and cheap hotels—like ours. All
that changed when the El went; land values shot up, and we
were suddenly prosperous. Dad came back quickly enough,
but it was too late; I was running the business. Before long I
started moving across town—then across country. I wasn’t an
absent-minded stargazer any more, and I gave Dad one of my
smaller hotels, where he couldn’t do much harm.
“It’s forty years since I looked at Saturn, but I’ve never
forgotten that one glimpse, and last night your photographs
brought it all back. I just wanted to say how grateful I am.”
He fumbled in his wallet and pulled out a card.
“ I hope you’ll look me up when you’re in town again; you
can be sure I’ll be there if you give any more lectures. Good
luck—and I’m sorry to have taken so much of your time.”
220 SATURN RISING

Then he was gone, almost before I could say a word. I

glanced at the card, put it away in my pocket, and finished
my breakfast, rather thoughtfully.
When I signed my check on the way out of the coffee shop
I asked, “Who was that gentleman at my table? The boss?”
The cashier looked at me as if I were mentally retarded.
“I suppose you could call him that, sir,” she answered. “Of
course he owns this hotel, but we’ve never seen him here be­
fore. He always stays at the Ambassador, when he’s in Chi­
cago.”
“And does he own that?” I said, without too much irony,
for I’d already suspected the answer.
“ Why, yes. As well as—” and she rattled off a whole string
of others, including the two biggest hotels in New York.
I was impressed, and also rather amused, for it was now
obvious that Mr. Perlman had come here with the deliberate
intention of meeting me. It seemed a roundabout way of do­
ing it; I knew nothing, then, of his notorious shyness and se­
cretiveness. From the first, he was never shy with me.
Then I forgot about him for five years. (Oh, I should men­
tion that when I asked for my bill, I was told I didn't have
one.) During that five years, I made my second trip.
We knew what to expect this time, and weren't going com­
pletely into the unknown. There were no more worries about
fuel, because all we could ever use was waiting for us on Ti­
tan; we just had to pump its methane atmosphere into our
tanks, and we’d made our plans accordingly. One after an­
other, we visited all the nine moons; and then we went into
the rings.
There was little danger, yet it was a nerve-racking experi­
ence. The ring system is very thin, you know—only about
twenty miles in thickness. We descended into it slowly and
cautiously, after having matched its spin so that we were
moving at exactly the same speed. It was like stepping onto a
carousel 170,000 miles across.
But a ghostly kind of carousel, because the rings aren’t sol­
id and you can look right through them. Close up, in fact,
 ARTHUR C. CLARKE 221
they’re almost invisible; the billions of separate particles that
make them up are so widely spaced that all you see in your
immediate neighborhood are occasional small chunks, drift­
ing very slowly past. It’s only when you look into the distance
that the countless fragments merge into a continuous sheet,
like a hailstorm that sweeps around Saturn forever.
That’s not my phrase, but it’s a good one. For when we
brought our first piece of genuine Saturnian ring into the air
lock, it melted down in a few minutes into a pool of muddy
water. Some people think it spoils the magic to know that the
rings—or ninety per cent of them—are made of ordinary ice.
But that’s a stupid attitude; they would be just as wonderful,
and just as beautiful, if they were made of diamond.
When I got back to Earth, in the first year of the new cen­
tury, I started off" on another lecture tour—only a short one,
for now I had a family and wanted to see as much of them as
possible. This time I ran into Mr. Perlman in New York,
when I was speaking at Columbia and showing our movie,
“ Exploring Saturn.” (A misleading title that, since the near­
est we’d been to the planet itself was about 20,000 miles. No
one dreamed, in those days, that men would ever go down
into the turbulent slush which is the closest thing Saturn has
to a surface.)
Mr. Perlman was waiting for me after the lecture. I didn’t
recognize him, for I’d met about a million people since our
last encounter. But when he gave his name, it all came back,
so clearly that I realized he must have made a deep impres­
sion on my mind.
Somehow he got me away from the crowd; though he dis­
liked meeting people in the mass, he had an extraordinary
knack of dominating any group when he found it necessary—
and then clearing out before his victims knew what had hap­
pened. Though I saw him in action scores of times, I never
knew exactly how he did it.
At any rate, half an hour later we were having a superb
dinner in an exclusive restaurant (his, of course). It was a
wonderful meal, especially after the chicken and ice cream of
222 SATURN RISING

the lecture circuit, but he made me pay for it. Metaphorical­

ly, I mean.
Now all the facts and photos gathered by the two expedi­
tions to Saturn were available to everyone, in hundreds of re­
ports and books and popular articles. Mr. Perlman seemed to
have read all the material that wasn’t too technical; what he
wanted from me was something different. Even then, I put
his interest down to that of a lonely, aging man, trying to re­
capture a dream that had been lost in youth. I was right; but
that was only a fraction of the whole picture.
He was after something that all the reports and articles
failed to give. What did it feel like, he wanted to know, to
wake up in the morning and see that great, golden globe with
its scudding cloud belts dominating the sky? And the rings
themselves—what did they do to your mind when they were
so close that they filled the heavens from end to end?
You want a poet, I said—not an engineer. But I’ll tell you
this; however long you look at Saturn, and fly in and out
among its moons, you can never quite believe it. Every so of­
ten you find yourself thinking. It’s all a dream—a thing like
that can’t be real. And you go to the nearest viewport— and
there it is, taking your breath away.
You must remember that, altogether apart from our near­
ness, we were able to look at the rings from angles and van­
tage points that are quite impossible from Earth, where you
always see them turned toward the sun. We could fly into
their shadow, and then they would no longer gleam like sil­
ver—they would be a faint haze, a bridge of smoke across the
stars.
And most of the time we could see the shadow of Saturn
lying across the full width of the rings, eclipsing them so
completely that it seemed as if a great bite had been taken
out of them. It worked the other way, too; on the day side of
the planet, there would always be the shadow of the rings
running like a dusky band parallel to the Equator and not far
from it.
Above all—though we did this only a few times—we could
 ARTHUR C. CLARKE 223

rise high above either pole of the planet and look down upon
the whole stupendous system, so that it was spread out in
plan beneath us. Then we could see that instead of the four
visible from Earth, there were at least a dozen separate rings,
merging one into the other. When we saw this, our skipper
made a remark that I’ve never forgotten. “This,” he said—
and there wasn’t a trace of flippancy in the words—“is where
the angels have parked their halos.”
All this, and a lot more, I told Mr. Perlman in that little
but oh-so-expensive restaurant just south of Central Park.
When I’d finished, he seemed very pleased, though he was si­
lent for several minutes. Then he said, about as casually as
you might ask the time of the next train at your local station:
“ Which would be the best satellite for a tourist resort?”
When the words got through to me, I nearly choked on my
hundred-year-old brandy. Then I said, very patiently and po­
litely (for after all, I’d had a wonderful dinner), “Listen, Mr.
Perlman. You know as well as I do that Saturn is nearly a
billion miles from Earth—more than that, in fact, when we’re
on opposite sides of the sun. Someone worked out that our
round-trip tickets averaged seven and a half million dollars
apiece—and, believe me, there was no first-class accommoda­
tion on Endeavour I or II. Anyway, no matter how much
money he had, no one could book a passage to Saturn. Only
scientists and space crews will be going there, for as far
ahead as anyone can imagine.”
I could see that my words had absolutely no effect; he
merely smiled, as if he knew some secret hidden from me.
“ What you say is true enough now,” he answered, “but
I’ve studied history. And I understand people—that’s my
business. Let me remind you of a few facts.
“Two or three centuries ago, almost all the world’s great
tourist centers and beauty spots were as far away from civil­
ization as Saturn is today. What did—oh, Napoleon, let’s
say—know about the Grand Canyon, Victoria Falls, Hawaii,
Mount Everest? And look at the South Pole; it was reached
for the first time when my father was a boy—but there’s
224 SATURN RISING

been a hotel there for the whole of your lifetime.

“Now it’s starting all over again. You can appreciate only
the problems and difficulties, because you’re too close to
them. Whatever they are, men will overcome them, as they’ve
always done in the past.
“For wherever there’s something strange or beautiful or
novel, people will want to see it. The rings of Saturn are the
greatest spectacle in the known universe: I’ve always guessed
so, and now you’ve convinced me. Today it takes a fortune to
reach them, and the men who go there must risk their lives.
So did the first men who flew—but now there are a million
passengers in the air every second of the day and night.
“The same thing is going to happen in space. It won’t hap­
pen in ten years, maybe not in twenty. But twenty-five is all
it took, remember, before the first commercial flights started
to the moon. I don’t think it will be as long for Saturn.
“I won’t be around to see it—but when it happens, I want
people to remember me. So—where should we build?”
I still thought he was crazy, but at last I was beginning to
understand what made him tick. And there was no harm in
humoring him, so I gave the matter careful thought.
“Mimas is too close,” I said, “and so are Enceladus and
Tethys.” (I don’t mind telling you, those names were tough
after all that brandy.) “Saturn just fills the sky, and you
think it’s falling on top of you. Besides, they aren't solid
enough—they're nothing but overgrown snowballs. Dione and
Rhea are better—you get a magnificent view from both of
them. But all these inner moons are so tiny; even Rhea is only
eight hundred miles across, and the others are much smaller.
“ I don’t think there’s any real argument; it will have to be
Titan. That’s a man-sized satellite—it’s a lot bigger than our
moon, and very nearly as large as Mars. There’s a reasonable
gravity too—about a fifth of Earth’s—so your guests won’t
be floating all over the place. And it will always be a major
refueling point because of its methane atmosphere, which
should be an important factor in your calculations. Every
ship that goes out to Saturn will touch down there.”
 ARTHUR C. CLARKE 225

“And the outer moons?”

“Oh, Hyperion, Japetus, and Phoebe are much too far
away. You have to look hard to see the rings at all from
Phoebe! Forget about them. Stick to good old Titan. Even if
the temperature is two hundred below zero, and ammonia
snow isn’t the sort of stuff you’d want to ski on.”
He listened to me very carefully, and if he thought I was
making fun of his impractical, unscientific notions he gave no
sign of it. We parted soon afterward—I don’t remember any­
thing more of that dinner—and then it must have been fif­
teen years before we met again. He had no further use for me
in all that time; but when he wanted me, he called.
I see now what he had been waiting for; his vision had been
clearer than mine. He couldn’t have guessed, of course, that
the rocket would go the way of the steam engine within less
than a century—but he knew something better would come
along, and I think he financed Saunderson’s early work on
the Paragravity Drive. But it was not until they started build­
ing fusion plants that could warm up a hundred square miles
of a world as cold as Pluto that he got in contact with me
again.
He was a very old man, and dying. They told me how rich
he was, and I could hardly believe it. Not until he showed me
the elaborate plans and the beautiful models his experts had
prepared with such remarkable lack of publicity.
He sat in his wheelchair like a wrinkled mummy, watching
my face as I studied the models and blueprints. Then he said,
“ Captain, I have a job for you... .”
So here I am. It’s just like running a spaceship, of course—
many of the technical problems are identical. And by this
time I’d be too old to command a ship, so I’m very grateful to
Mr. Perlman.
There goes the gong. If the ladies are ready, I suggest we
walk down to dinner through the Observation Lounge.
Even after all these years, I still like to watch Saturn ris­
ing— and tonight it’s almost full.
 URANUS

Uranus is the first planet to have been discovered in modern

times. William Herschel spotted it in 1781 and promptly became
the most famous astronomer in the world.
Uranus, like Jupiter and Saturn, is a “ gas giant,” but it is dis­
tinctly smaller than the other two. The diameter of Uranus is
45,000 kilometers (29,000 miles) which is only one third that of
Jupiter. Its surface area is only one-tenth that of Jupiter and its
volume is only one-thirtieth that of Jupiter. (Lest we lose our
sense of proportion, however, Uranus is still large in comparison
to Earth. It has 47 times the volume of Earth.)
Uranus has a system of five satellites, but none of them is
really large.
One real curiosity about the planet is that the axis of rotation
is tipped much more than that of Earth or Mars, for instance. It
is tilted 97.9°, or slightly more than a right angle. This means
that Uranus rotates on its side, so to speak. Its satellites remain
in the equatorial plane of Uranus, so instead of moving right and
left with respect to the Sun, they move up and down.
No one knows just why Uranus is tipped to this extent.
This is virtually all we know about Uranus almost to the pres­
ent day. It is, after all, at an average distance of 2872 million ki­
lometers (1782 million miles) from the Sun. It is twice as far
from the Sun as Saturn is, four times as far as Jupiter is. It is
quite small and dim in our telescopes compared to Jupiter and
Saturn, and there is little to be made out.

226
 URANUS 227

What we do know today about the planet is accurately por­

trayed in “ The Snowbank Orbit” — which was first published in
1962— with one exception.
Even without the help of a probe, the 1970s sprang a breath­
taking surprise on astronomers.
In 1973, astronomical calculations showed that Uranus would
move in front of a certain 9th magnitude star on March 10,
1977. On that day, James L. Elliot and associates from Cornell
University observed the occultation from an airplane that took
them high enough to minimize the distorting and obscuring ef­
fects of the lower atmosphere.
The notion was to observe just how the starlight was affected
as Uranus reached the star and began to encroach upon it. The
starlight would penetrate Uranus’s upper atmosphere and
would, in this way, yield information about its atmospheric tem­
perature, pressure, and composition.
But some time before Uranus reached the star, the starlight
suddenly dimmed for about seven seconds and brightened.
Then, as Uranus approached still closer, there were several
more brief episodes of dimming, for a second each. Uranus
eventually passed in front of the star, and as the planet moved
away on the other side there was the same dimming of starlight
in reverse.
Something in Uranus’s vicinity was obscuring the star. It could
not be an ordinary set of satellites. With so many dimmings on
both sides of the planet, it had to be a ring system. Uranus has
a series of thin rings, one inside the other; the total number is
now thought to be nine.
Why did it take so long to discover them? The Uranian rings
are very narrow and very sparsely populated; much narrower
and much more sparsely populated than Saturn’s rings are. In
addition, Uranus’s rings are twice as far away from the Sun and
from us. The light reflected from Uranus’s rings is weakened by
distance sixteen times as much as the light reflected from Sat­
urn’s rings.
Finally, whereas the material making up Saturn’s rings is icy
228 URANUS

and reflects a great deal of light, the material making up Uran­

us’s rings is dark, and reflects very little.
All told, Uranus’s rings may reflect as little as 1/3,000,000
as much light as Saturn’s rings do, so it is no wonder that it
took so long to detect them.
Still, from this point on, no science fiction story dealing with
Uranus can fail to mention the rings.
 The Snowbank Orbit
FRITZ LEIBER

The pole stars of the other planets cluster around Polaris and
Octans, but Uranus spins on a snobbishly different axis be­
tween Aldebaran and Antares. The Bull is her coronet and
the Scorpion her footstool. Dear blowzy old bitch-planet,
swollen and pale and cold, mad with your Shakespearean
moons, white-mottled as death from Venerean Plague, spin­
ning on your side like a poisoned pregnant cockroach, rolling
around the sun like a fat drunken floozie with green hair roll­
ing on the black floor of an infinite barroom, what a sweet
last view of the Solar System you are for a cleancut young
spaceman. . . .
Grunfeld chopped that train of thought short. He was
young, and the First Interstellar War had snatched him up
and now it was going to pitch him and twenty other Joes out
of the System on a fast curve breaking around Uranus—and
so what! He shivered to get a little heat and then applied
himself to the occulted star he was tracking through Pros-
pero's bridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetary
diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed—a glint almost
lost in pale green. That meant its light was bulleting 1600
miles deep through the seventh planet’s thick hydrogen atmo­
sphere, unless he were seeing the star on a mirage trajec­
tory—and at least its depth agreed with the time since rim
contact.
At 2000 miles he lost it. That should mean 2000 miles plus

229
230 THE SNOWBANK ORBIT

of hydrogen soup above the methane ocean, an America-wide

layer of gaseous gunk for the captain to play the mad hero in
with the fleet.
Grunfeld didn’t think the captain wanted to play the mad
hero. The captain hadn’t gone space-simple in any obvious
way like Croker and Ness. And he wasn’t, like Jackson, a te­
lepathy-racked visionary entranced by the Enemy. Worry
and responsibility had turned the captain’s face into a skull
which floated in Grunfeld’s imagination when he wasn’t actu­
ally seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk in the dark sockets
were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the worry the
captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing on
the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were
better than one. Grunfeld found the next sizable star due to
occult. Five-six minutes to rim contact. He floated back a
foot from the telescope, stretching out his thin body in the
plane of the ecliptic—strange how he automatically assumed
that orientation in free fall! He blinked and blinked, then
rested his eyes on the same planet he’d been straining them
on.
The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big
bridge spaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-
bright stars, a water-splotched and faded chartreuse tennis
ball on the diamond-spiked bed of night. At eight million
miles she looked half the width of Luna seen from Earth. Her
whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top, where,
Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles
a second - a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him
with ghostly green gangrenous fingers and pulling him over
into a hydrogen Niagara.
Half as wide as Luna. But in a day she'd overflow the port
as they whipped past her on a new miss and in another day
she’d be as small as this again, but behind them, sunward,
having altered their outward course by some small and as yet
unpredictable angle, but no more able to slow Prospero and
her sister ships or turn them back at their 100 miles a second
 FRITZ LE1BER 231
than the fleet’s solar jets could operate at this chilly distance
from Sol. G’by, fleet. G’by, C.C.Y. spaceman.

Grunfeld looked for the pale planet’s moons. Miranda and

Umbriel were too tiny to make disks, but he distinguished
Ariel four diameters above the planet and Oberon a dozen
below. Spectral sequins. If the fleet were going to get a radio
signal from any of them, it would have to be Titania, occult­
ed now by the planet and the noisy natural static of her roil­
ing hydrogen air and seething methane seas—but it had al­
ways been only a faint hope that there were survivors from
the First Uranus Expedition.
Grunfeld relaxed his neck and let his gaze drift down
across the curving star-bordered forward edge of Prospero's
huge mirror and the thin jutting beams of the pot lattice arm
to the dim red-lit gauges below the spaceshield.
Forward Skin Temperature seven degrees Kelvin. Almost
low enough for helium to crawl, if you had some helium.
Prospero's insulation, originally designed to hold out solar
heat, was doing a fair job in reverse.
Aft (sunward) Skin Temperature 75 degrees Kelvin. Close
to that of Uranus’ sunlit face. Check.
Cabin Temperature 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Brr! The cap­
tain was a miser with the chem fuel remaining. And rightly
. . . if it were right to drag out life as long as possible in the
empty icebox beyond Uranus.
Gravities of Acceleration zero. Many other zeros.
The four telltales for the fleet unblinkingly glowed dim­
mest blue—one each for Caliban, Snug, Moth, and Starve­
ling, following Prospero in the astern on slave automatic—
though for months inertia had done all five ships’ piloting.
Once the buttons had been green, but they’d wiped that color
off the boards because of the Enemy.
The gauges still showed their last maximums. Skin 793
Kelvin, Cabin 144 Fahrenheit, Gravs 3.2. All of them hit al­
most a year ago, when they’d been acing past the sun. Grun-
232 THE SNOWBANK ORBIT

feld’s gaze edged back to the five bulbous pressure suits, once
more rigidly upright in their braced racks, that they’d been
wearing during that stretch of acceleration inside the orbit of
Mercury. He started. For a moment he'd thought he saw the
dark-circled eyes of the captain peering between two of the
bulging black suits. Nerves! The captain had to be in his cab­
in, readying alternate piloting programs for Copperhead.
Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the space-
shield—so violently that his body began very slowly to spin in
the opposite direction. This time he’d thought he saw the En­
emy’s green flashing near the margin of the planet—bright
green, viridian, far vivider than that of Uranus herself. He
drew himself to the telescope and feverishly studied the area.
Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much nearer
than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning.
The next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grun-
feld’s mind retreated to the circumstances that had brought
Prospero (then only Mercury One) out here.

II

When the First Interstellar War erupted, the pioneer fleets of

Earth’s nations had barely pushed their explorations beyond
the orbit of Saturn. Except for the vessels of the International
Meteor Guard, spaceflight was still a military enterprise of
America, Russia, England, and the other megapowers.
During the first months the advantage lay wholly with the
slim black cruisers of the Enemy, who had an antigravity
which allowed them to hover near planets without going into
orbit; and a frightening degree of control over light itself. In­
deed, their principal weapon was a tight beam of visible light,
a dense photonic stiletto with an effective range of several Ju-
piter-diameters in vacuum. They also used visible light, in the
green band, for communication as men use radio, sometimes
broadcasting it and sometimes beaming it loosely in strange
abstract pictures that seemed part of their language. Their
 FRITZ LEIBER 233

gravity-immune ships moved by reaction to photonic jets the

tightness of which rendered them invisible except near the
sun, where they tended to ionize electronically dirty volumes
of space. It was probably this effective invisibility, based on
light control, which allowed them to penetrate the Solar Sys­
tem as deep as Earth’s orbit undetected, rather than any
power of travel in time or subspace, as was first assumed.
Earthmen could only guess at the physical appearance of the
Enemy, since no prisoners were taken on either side.
Despite his impressive maneuverability and armament, the
Enemy was oddly timid about attacking live planets. He
showed no fear of the big gas planets, in fact hovering very
close to their turgid surfaces, as if having some way of fuel­
ing from them.
Near Terra the first tactic of the black cruisers, after de­
stroying Lunostrovok and Circumluna, was to hover behind
the moon, as though sharing its tide-lockedness— a circum­
stance that led to a sortie by Earth’s Combined Fleet, En­
gland and Sweden excepted.
At the wholly disastrous Battle of the Far Side, which was
visible in part to naked-eye viewers on Earth, the Combined
Fleet was annihilated. No Enemy ship was captured,
boarded, or seriously damaged—except for one which, appar­
ently by a fluke, was struck by a fission-headed antimissile
and proceeded after the blast to “burn,” meaning that it suf­
fered a slow and puzzling disintegration, accompanied by a
dazzling rainbow display of visible radiation. This was before
the “stupidity” of the Enemy with regard to small atomic
missiles was noted, or their allergy to certain radio wave
bands, and also before Terran telepaths began to claim
cloudy contact with Enemy minds.
Following Far Side, the Enemy burst into activity, harry­
ing Terran spacecraft as far as Mercury and Saturn, though
still showing great caution in maneuver and making no direct
attacks on planets. It was as if a race of heavily armed ma­
rine creatures should sink all ocean-going ships or drive them
234 THE SNOWBANK ORBIT

to harbor, but make no assaults beyond the shore line. For a

full year Earth, though her groundside and satellite rocket-
yards were furiously busy, had no vehicle in deep space—
with one exception.
At the onset of the War a fleet of five mobile bases of the
U.S. Space Force were in Orbit to Mercury, where it was in­
tended they take up satellite positions prior to the prospecting
and mineral exploitation of the small sun-blasted planet.
These five ships, each with a skeleton five-man crew, were es­
sentially Ross-Smith space stations with a solar drive, assem­
bled in space and intended solely for space-to-space flight in­
side Earth’s orbit. A huge paraboloid mirror, its diameter
four times the length of the ship’s hull, superheated at its fo­
cus the hydrogen which was ejected as a plasma at high ex­
haust velocity. Each ship likewise mounted versatile radio­
radar equipment on dual lattice arms and carried as ship's
launch a two-man chemical fuel rocket adaptable as a fusion­
headed torpedo.
After Far Side, this “tin can" fleet was ordered to bypass
Mercury and, tacking on the sun, shape an orbit for Uranus,
chiefly because that remote planet, making its 84-year circuit
of Sol, was currently on the opposite side of the sun to the
four inner planets and the two nearer gas giants Jupiter and
Saturn. In the empty regions of space the relatively defense­
less fleet might escape the attention of the Enemy.
However, while still accelerating into the sun for maximum
boost, the fleet received information that two Enemy cruisers
were in pursuit. The five ships cracked on all possible speed,
drawing on the solar drive’s high efficiency near the sun and
expending all their hydrogen and most material capable of
being vaporized, including some of the light-metal hydrogen
storage tanks—like an old steamer burning her cabin furni­
ture and the cabins themselves to win a race. Gradually the
curving course that would have taken years to reach the outer
planet flattened into a hyperbola that would make the jour­
ney in 200 days.
 FRITZ LEIBER 235

In the asteroid belt the pursuing cruisers turned aside to

join in the crucial Battle of the Trojans with Earth’s largely
new-built, more heavily and wisely armed Combined Fleet—
a battle that proved to be only a prelude to the decisive Battle
of Jupiter.
Meanwhile the five-ship fleet sped onward, its solar drive
quite useless in this twilight region even if it could have
scraped together the needed boilable ejectant mass to slow its
flight. Weeks became months. The ships were renamed for
the planet they were aimed at. At least the fleet’s trajectory
had been truly set.
Almost on collision course it neared Uranus, a mystery-
cored ball of frigid gas 32,000 miles wide coasting through
space across the fleet’s course at a lazy four miles a second.
At this time the fleet was traveling at 100 miles a second. Be­
yond Uranus lay only the interstellar night, into which the
fleet would inevitably vanish.

Unless, Grunfeld told himself.. . unless the fleet shed its

velocity by ramming the gaseous bulk of Uranus. This idea of
atmospheric braking on a grand scale had sounded possible at
first suggestion, half a year ago—a little like a man falling
off a mountain or from a plane and saving his life by drop­
ping into a great thickness of feathery new-fallen snow.
Supposing her solar jet worked out here and she had the
reaction mass, Prospero could have shed her present velocity
in five hours, decelerating at a comfortable one G.
But allowing her 12,000 miles of straight-line travel
through Uranus’ frigid soupy atmosphere—and that might be
dipping very close to the methane seas blanketing the planet’s
hypothetical mineral core— Prospero would have two minutes
in which to shed her velocity.
Two minutes—at 150 Gs.
Men had stood 40 and 50 Gs for a fractional second.
But for two minutes .. . Grunfeld told himself that the only
surer way to die would be to run into a section of the Enemy
236 THE SNOWBANK ORBIT

fleet. According to one calculation the ship’s skin would melt

by heat of friction in 90 seconds, despite the low temperature
of the abrading atmosphere.
The star Grunfeld had been waiting for touched the hazy
rim of Uranus. He drifted back to the eyepiece and began to
follow it in as the pale planet’s hydrogen muted its diamond
brilliance.

Ill

In the aft cabin, lank hairy-wristed Croker pinned another

blanket around black Jackson as the latter shivered in his
trance. Then Croker turned on a small light at the head of
the hammock.
“Captain won’t like that,” plump, pale Ness observed tran­
quilly from where he floated in womb position across the cab­
in. “ Enemy can feel a candle of our light, captain says, ten
million miles away.” He rocked his elbows for warmth and
his body wobbled in reaction like a pollywog's.
“And Jackson hears the Enemy think . . . and Heimdall
hears the grass grow," Croker commented with a harsh man­
ic laugh. “ Isn’t an Enemy for a billion miles, Ness." He
launched aft from the hammock. “ We haven't spotted their
green since Saturn orbit. There's nowhere for them."
“There’s the far side of Uranus," Ness pointed out.
“That’s less than ten million miles now. Eight. A bare day.
They could be there ”
“Yes, waiting to bushwack us as we whip past on our way
to eternity,” Croker chuckled as he crumpled up against the
aft port, shedding momentum. “That's likely, isn't it, when
they didn't have time for us back in the Belt?" He scowled at
the tiny white sun, no bigger a disk than Venus, but still with
one hundred times as much light as the full moon pouring
from it too much light to look at comfortably. He began to
button the inner cover over the port.
“ Don’t do that,” Ness objected without conviction.
 FRITZ LEIBER 237

“There’s not much heat in it but there’s some.” He hugged

his elbows and shivered. “ I don’t remember being warm since
Mars orbit.”
“The sun gets on my nerves,” Croker said. “ It’s like look­
ing at an arc light through a pinhole. It’s like a high, high jail
light in a cold concrete yard. The stars are highlights on the
barbed wire.” He continued to button out the sun.
“You ever in jail?” Ness asked. Croker grinned.
With the tropism of a fish, Ness began to paddle toward
the little light at the head of Jackson’s'hammock, flicking his
hands from the wrists like flippers. “ I got one thing against
the sun,” he said quietly. “It’s blanketing out the radio. I’d
like us to get one more message from Earth. We haven’t tried
rigging our mirror to catch radio waves. I’d like to hear how
we won the battle of Jupiter.”
“If we won it,” Croker said.
“Our telescopes show no more green around Jove,” Ness
reminded him. “We counted 27 rainbows on Enemy cruisers
‘burning.’ Captain verified the count.”
“ Repeat: if we won it.” Croker pushed off and drifted back
toward the hammock. “If there was a real victory message
they’d push it through, even if the sun’s in the way and it
takes three hours to catch us. People who win, shout.”
Ness shrugged as he paddled. “One way or the other, we
should be getting the news soon from Titania station,” he
said. “They’ll have heard.”
“ If they’re still alive and there ever was a Titania Station,”
Croker amended, backing air violently to stop himself as he
neared the hammock. “Look, Ness, we know that the First
Uranus Expedition arrived. At least they set off their flares.
But that was three years before the War and we haven’t any
idea of what’s happened to them since and if they ever man­
aged to set up housekeeping on Titania—or Ariel or Oberon
or even Miranda or Umbriel. At least if they built a station
could raise Earth I haven’t been told. Sure thing Prospero
hasn’t heard anything. . . and we’re getting close.”
238 THE SNOWBANK ORBIT

“I won’t argue,” Ness said. “Even if we raise ’em, it’ll just

be hello-goodby with maybe time between for a battle re­
port.”
“And a football score and a short letter from home, ten
seconds per man as the station fades.” Croker frowned and
added, “ If Captain had cottoned to my idea, two of us at any
rate could have got off this express train at Uranus."
“Tell me how,” Ness asked drily.
“ How? Why, one of the ship’s launches. Replace the fu­
sion-head with the cabin. Put all the chem fuel in the tanks
instead of divvying it between the ship and the launch.”
“I haven’t got the brain for math Copperhead has. but I
can subtract,” Ness said, referring to Prospero's piloting ro­
bot. “ Fully fueled, one of the launches has a max velocity
change in free-fall of 30 miles per second. Use it all in brak­
ing and you’ve only taken 30 from 100. The launch is still go­
ing past Uranus and out of the system at 70 miles a second."
“You didn’t hear all my idea,” Croker said. "You put pig­
gyback tanks on your launch and top them off with the fuel
from the other four launches. Then you've 100 miles of brak­
ing and a maneuvering reserve. You only need to shed 90
miles, anyway. Ten miles a second's the close circum-
Uranian velocity. Go into circum-Uranian orbit and wait for
Titania to send their jeep to pick you up. Have to start the
maneuver four hours this side of Uranus, though. Take that
long at 1 G to shed it "
“Cute," Ness conceded. “ Especially the jeep. But I’m glad
just the same we've got 70 per cent of our chem fuel in our
ships’ tanks instead of the launches. We're on such a bull's-
eye course for Uranus -Copperhead really pulled a miracle
plotting our orbit that we may need a sidewise shove to
miss her. If we slapped into that cold hydrogen soup at our
100 mps - ”
Croker shrugged. “ We still could have dropped a couple of
us,” he said.
“Captain's got to look after the whole fleet." Ness said.
 FRITZ LEIBER 239

“You’re beginning to agitate, Croker, like you was Grun-

feld—or the captain himself.”
“ But if Titania Station’s alive, a couple of men dropped off
would do the fleet some good. Stir Titania up to punch a
message through to Earth and get a really high-speed
retrieve-and-rescue ship started out after us. I f we’ve won the
War.”
“But Titania Station’s dead or never was, not to mention
its jeep. And we’ve lost the Battle of Jupiter. You said so
yourself,” Ness asserted owlishly. “Captain’s got to look after
the whole fleet.”
“Yeah, so he kills himself fretting and the rest of us die of
old age in the outskirts of the Solar System. Join the Space
Force and See the Stars! Ness, do you know how long it’d
take us to reach the nearest star—except we aren’t headed
for her—at our 100 mps? Eight thousand years!”
“That’s a lot of time to kill,” Ness said. “ Let’s play chess.”
Jackson sighed and they both looked quickly at the dark
unlined face above the cocoon, but the lips did not flutter
again, or the eyelids. Croker said, “Suppose he knows what
the Enemy looks like?”
“ I suppose,” Ness said. “ When he talks about them it’s as
if he was their interpreter. How about the chess?”
“Suits. Knight to King Bishop Three.”
“ Hmm. Knight to King Knight Two, Third Floor.”
“ Hey, I meant flat chess, not three-D,” Croker objected.
“That thin old game? Why, I no sooner start to get the po­
sition really visualized in my head than the game’s over.”
“ I don’t want to start a game of three-D with Uranus only
eighteen hours away.”
Jackson stirred in his hammock. His lips worked. “They
.. .” he breathed. Croker and Ness instantly watched him.
“T hey.. .”
“I wonder if he is really inside the Enemy’s mind?” Ness
said.
“ He thinks he speaks for them,” Croker replied and the
240 THE SNOWBANK ORBIT

next instant felt a warning touch on his arm and looked

sideways and saw dark-circled eyes in a skull-angular face
under a battered cap with a tarnished sunburst. Damn,
thought Croker, how does the captain always know when
Jackson’s going to talk?”
“They are waiting for us on the other side of Uranus,”
Jackson breathed. His lips trembled into a smile and his voice
grew a little louder, though his eyes stayed shut. “They're
welcoming us, they’re our brothers.” The smile died. “ But
they know they got to kill us, they know we got to die.”
The hammock with its tight-swathed form began to move
past Croker and he snatched at it. The captain had pushed
off from him for the hatch leading forward.

Grunfeld was losing the new star at 2200 miles into Ura­
nus when he saw the two viridian flares flashing between it
and the rim. Each flash was circled by a fleeting bright green
ring, like a mist halo. He thought he'd be afraid when he saw
that green again, but what he felt was a jolt of excitement
that made him grin. With it came a touch on his shoulder.
He thought, The captain always knows.
“Ambush,” he said. “At least two cruisers."
He yielded the eyepiece to the captain. Even without the
telescope he could see those incredibly brilliant green flickers.
He asked himself if the Enemy was already gunning for the
fleet through Uranus.
The blue telltales for Caliban and Starveling began to
blink.
“They've seen it too,” the captain said. He snatched up the
mike and his next words rang through the Prospero.
“Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with
stinger! Mr. Grunfeld, raise the fleet."
Alt, Croker muttered, “ Rig our shrouds, don't he mean?
Rig shrouds and firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July
rockets.”
 FRITZ LEIBER 241
Ness said, “Cheer up. Even the longest strategic withdraw­
al in history has to end some time.”

IV

Three quarters of a day later Grunfeld felt a spasm of futile

fear and revolt as the pressure suit closed like a thick-fleshed
carnivorous plant on his drugged and tired body. Relax, he
told himself. Fine thing if you cooked up a fuss when even
Croker didn’t. He thought of forty things to recheck. Relax,
he repeated—the work’s over; all that matters is in Copper­
head’s memory tanks now, or will be as soon as the captain’s
suited up.
The suit held Grunfeld erect, his arms at his sides—the
best attitude, except he was still facing forward, for taking
high G, providing the ship herself didn’t start to tumble. Only
the cheekpieces and visor hadn’t closed in on his face—trans­
lucent hand-thick petals as yet unfolded. He felt the delicate
firm pressure of built-in fingertips monitoring his pulses and
against his buttocks the cold smooth muzzles of the jet hypo­
dermics that would feed him metronomic drugs during the
high-G stretch and stimulants when they were in free-fall
again. When.
He could swing his head and eyes just enough to make out
the suits of Croker and Ness to either side of him and their
profiles wavy through the jutting misty cheekpieces. Ahead
to the left was Jackson—just the back of his suit, like a black
snowman standing at attention, pale-olive-edged by the great
glow of Uranus. And to the right the captain, his legs suited
but his upper body still bent out to the side as he checked the
monitor of his suit with its glowing blue button and the man­
ual controls that would lie under his hands during the maneu­
ver.
Beyond the captain was the spaceshield, the lower quarter
of it still blackness and stars, but the upper three-quarters
242 T H E S N O W B A N K O R B IT

filled with the onrushing planet’s pale mottled green that now
had the dulled richness of watered silk. They were so close
that the rim hardly showed curvature. The atmosphere must
have a steep gradient, Grunfeld thought, or they’d already be
feeling decel. That stuff ahead looked more like water than
any kind of air. It bothered him that the captain was still half
out of his suit.
There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld
thought, to fill up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last or­
ders to the fleet, port covers being cranked shut, someone do­
ing a countdown on the firing of their torpedo. But the last
message had gone to the fleet minutes ago. Its robot pilots
were set to follow Prospero and imitate, nothing else. And all
the rest was up to Copperhead. S till. . .
Grunfeld wet his lips. “Captain,” he said hesitantly. “Cap­
tain?”
“Thank you, Grunfeld.” He caught the edge of the skull’s
answering grin. “ We are beginning to hit hydrogen." the qui­
et voice went on. “ Forward skin temperature's up to 9 K."
Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Ura­
nus flared bright green. As if that final stimulus had been
needed, Jackson began to talk dreamily from his suit.
“They're still welcoming us and grieving for us. I begin to
get it a little more now. Their ship's one thing and they're an­
other. Their ship is frightened to death of us. It hates us and
the only thing it knows to do is to kill us. They can't stop it,
they’re even less than passengers ,. .”
The captain was in his suit now. Grunfeld sensed a faint
throbbing and felt a rush of cold air. The cabin refrigeration
system had started up, carrying cabin heat to the lattice
arms. Intended to protect them from solar heat, it would now
do what it could against the heat of friction.
The straight edge of Uranus was getting hazier. Even the
fainter stars shone through, spangling it. A bell jangled and
the pale green segment narrowed as the steel meteor panels
began to close in front of the spaceshield. Soon there was
 F R IT Z L E IB E R 243

only a narrow vertical ribbon of green— bright green as it

narrowed to a thread—then for a few seconds only blackness
except for the dim red and blue beads and semicircles, just
beyond the captain, of the board. Then the muted interior
cabin lights glowed on.
Jackson droned: “They and their ships come from very far
away, from the edge. If this is the continuum, they come
from th e .. . discontinuum, where they don’t have stars but
something else and where gravity is different. Their ships
came from the edge on a gust of fear with the other ships,
and our brothers came with it though they didn’t want
to . . . ”
And now Grunfeld thought he began to feel it—the first
faint thrill, less than a cobweb’s tug, of weight.
The cabin wall moved sideways. Grunfeld’s suit had begun
to revolve slowly on a vertical axis.
For a moment he glimpsed Jackson’s dark profile—all five
suits were revolving in their framework. They locked into po­
sition when the men in them were facing aft. Now at least
retinas wouldn’t pull forward at high-G decel, or spines crush
through thorax and abdomen.
The cabin air was cold on Grunfeld’s forehead. And now
he was sure he felt weight—maybe five pounds of it. Sudden­
ly aft was up. It was as if he were lying on his back on the
spaceshield.
A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the
beams bracing it. He lost weight, then regained it and a little
more besides. He realized it was their torpedo taking off, to
skim by Uranus in the top of the atmosphere and then curve
inward the little their chem fuel would let them, homing
toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the great
gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off
from the other ships—the fleet’s feeble sting. Like a bee’s,
just one, in dying.
The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld's suit be­
gan to close on his face like layers of pliable ice.
244 T H E S N O W B A N K O R B IT

Jackson called faintly, “Now I understand. Their ship— ”

His voice was cut off.
Grunfeld’s ice-mask was tight shut. He felt a small surge
of vigor as the suit took over his breathing and sent his lungs
a gush of high-oxy air. Then came a tingling numbness as the
suit field went on, adding an extra prop against decel to each
molecule of his body.
But the weight was growing. He was on the moon now .. .
now on Mars . . . now back on Earth . . .
The weight was stifling now, crushing—a hill of invisible
sand. Grunfeld saw a black pillow hanging in the cabin above
him aft. It had red fringe around it. It grew.
There was a whistling and shaking. Everything lurched tor-
turingly, the ship’s jets roared, everything recovered, or
didn’t.
The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight,
crushing out thought.

The universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating

in a large black infinity. Something drew back and there was
a dry fiery wind on numb humps and ridges—the cabin air
on his face, Grunfeld decided, then shivered and started at
the thought that he was alive and in free-fall. His body didn't
feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages. Or did it?
He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolv­
ing forward again? If they'd actually come through—
There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting
after frictional heating?
There was a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde
mixed. A few Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by
turbulence?
He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from
ruined retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw noth­
ing. Blind? Or the meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it
were. No wonder if the cabin lights were broken.
The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the
front of his body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped
 F R IT Z L E IB E R 245

forward out of the top of his opening suit.

Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top
of the spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black,
barely convex upward. That must, he realized, be the dark
side o f Uranus.
Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his
suit and pulled himself past the captain’s to the spaceshield.
The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars
above, a curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were or­
biting.
A pulsing, color-changing glow from somewhere showed
him twisted stumps of the radio lattices. There was no sign of
the mirror at all. It must have been torn away, or vaporized
completely, in the fiery turbulence of decel.
New Maxs showed on the board: Cabin Temperature 214,
F, Skin Temperature 907 K. Gravs 87.
Then in the top of the spacefield, almost out of vision,
Grunfeld saw the source of the pulsing glow: two sharp-ended
ovals flickering brightly all colors against the pale starfields,
like the dead fish phosphorescing.
“The torps got to ’em,” Croker said, pushed forward beside
Grunfeld to the right.
“ I did find out at the end,” Jackson said quietly from the
left, his voice at last free of the trance tone. “The Enemy
ships weren’t ships at all. They were (there’s no other word
for it) space animals. We’ve always thought life was a pre­
rogative of planets, that space was inorganic. But you can
walk miles through the desert or sail leagues through the sea
before you notice life and I guess space is the same. Anyway
the Enemy was (what else can I call ’em?) space whales. In­
ertialess space whales from the discontinuum. Space whales
that ate hydrogen (that’s the only way 1 know to say it) and
spat light to move and fight. The ones I talked to, our broth­
ers, were just their parasites.”
“That’s crazy,” Grunfeld said. “All of it. A child’s pic­
ture.”
“Sure it is,” Jackson agreed.
246 T H E S N O W B A N K O R B IT

From beyond Jackson, Ness, punching buttons, said, “Qui­

et.”
The radio came on thin and wailing with static: “Titania
Station calling fleet. We have jeep and can orbit in to you.
The two Enemy are dead—the last in the System. Titania
Station calling fleet. We have jeep fueled and set to go—”
Fleet? thought Grunfeld. He turned back to the board.
The first and last blue telltales still glowed for Caliban and
Starveling. Breathe a prayer, he thought, for Moth and
Snug.
Something else shone on the board, something Grunfeld
knew had to be wrong. Three little words: SHIP ON MAN­
UAL.
The black rim of Uranus ahead suddenly brightened along
its length, which was very slightly bowed, like a section of a
giant new moon. A bead formed toward the center, bright­
ened, and then all at once the jailyard sun had risen and was
glaring coldly through its pinhole into their eyes.
They looked away from it. Grunfeld turned around.
The austere light showed the captain still in his pressure
suit, only the head fallen out forward, hiding the skull fea­
tures. Studying the monitor box of the captain's suit, Grun­
feld saw it was set to inject the captain with power stimulants
as soon as the Gravs began to slacken from their max.
He realized who had done the impossible job of piloting
them out of Uranus.
But the button on the monitor, that should have glowed
blue, was as dark as those of Moth and Snug.
Grunfeld thought. Now he can rest.
 NEPTUNE

The discovery of Neptune is one of the great dramatic stories of

science. Once Uranus was discovered, its orbit was calculated,
and it was expected that Uranus would follow that orbit. It would
have to if Newton’s law of gravitation was correct, and astrono­
mers were sure it was.
Uranus did not follow the orbit, however, but deviated very
slightly. One possibility was that there was an unknown planet
beyond Uranus whose gravitational attraction was not taken into
account in calculating Uranus’s orbit. Two astronomers, John
Couch Adams and Urbain J. J. Leverrier, independently calculat­
ed where the unknown planet ought to be in the sky if it were to
have the proper effect on Uranus.
The spot was observed and the planet was found and named
“ Neptune.”
Neptune is virtually Uranus's twin except for being consider­
ably farther from the Sun. Neptune is, on the average, 4501 mil­
lion kilometers (2792 million miles) from the Sun, or 1.6 times as
far from the Sun as Uranus is. It is just a shade smaller than
Uranus, and has a volume only 0.91 times that of Uranus. It is,
however, distinctly denser than Uranus is, so that Neptune is 1
1/6 times as massive as Uranus. Neptune is the third most
massive planet.
It may be, judging from Neptune’s density, that it is the least
gassy of the four “ gas giants” and that it has a sizable rocky
core. We can only guess; we don’t know. In fact, we know very

247
248 N E P T U N E

little about the planet other than the facts I've just stated. It is a
small, dim, and featureless globe even in large telescopes, and
we will have to wait for probes to learn more. Nor have we
made any startling discoveries from our Earth-based studies
comparable to those of the rings of Uranus.
Neptune has two satellites, one of them a large one, Triton,
and the other one, Nereid, a small one with a very eccentric or­
bit. Nereid seems surely to be a captured asteroid, which indi­
cates that, even as far from the Sun as Neptune is, there are
asteroids to be found and captured. (Saturn's outermost satel­
lite, Phoebe, is also very likely a captured asteroid, as are Jupi­
ter’s eight outermost satellites.)
The picture of Neptune in “ One Sunday in Neptune” is in ac­
cord with what we know today; it was first published in 1969.
However, since it was written before the first landings on the
Moon, it is a little too sanguine about the occurrence of life in
the Solar system. We already know, for instance, that life does
not exist on the Moon and Venus, and very likely doesn’t on
Mars.
 One Sunday in Neptune
ALEXEI PANSHIN

Ben Wiseman and I were the first people to land on Neptune,

but he doesn’t talk to me anymore. He thinks I betrayed him.
The assignment to Triton Base, an opportunity for me, was
for him simply one final dead end. I couldn’t yet see the lim­
its of my life, but he could see the limits of his. His life was
thin, and he had a hunger for recognition.
He was a man of sudden enthusiasm, haphazardly pro­
duced. He knew next to nothing about biology, but having a
great deal of time to stare at the green bulk of Neptune in
our sky, he had conceived the idea that there was life on the
planet, and he had become convinced that if he proved it he
would have the automatic security of a place in the reference
library. His theory was lent a certain force by the fact that
we had found life already on our own Moon, on Venus and
Mars, on Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, and even on Gany­
mede. Not on Mercury—too small, too close, too hot. Not on
Pluto—too small, too far, too cold. But the odds seemed good
to him, and the list of names he would join short enough to
give him the feeling of being distinguished.
“ Life is insistent,” Ben said. “ Life is persistent.”
He approached me because he had no one else. He was an
extremely difficult man. At the age of thirty-five, he still
hadn’t discovered the basic principles of social dealing. On
first acquaintance he was too close too quickly. Then he took
anything less than total reciprocation as betrayal. The more
favorable your initial response to him, the greater wound he
249
250 O N E S U N D A Y IN N E P T U N E

felt when he was inevitably betrayed. He had no friends, of

course.
I betrayed him early in our acquaintance, something I was
unaware of until he told me. After that he was always stiff
and generally guarded, but since he found me no worse than
the general run of humanity, and since the company on Tri­
ton numbered only twenty, he used me to talk to. I was will­
ing to talk to him, and in this case I was willing to listen.
Triton, Neptune’s major satellite, is a good substantial
base. It comes close to being the largest moon in the Solar
System, and it is two fingers larger than Mercury. It's the
last comfortable footing for men in the Solar System, and the
obvious site for a major base.
With Operation Springboard complete and our first star-
ship on its way to a new green and pleasant land, major activ­
ity had ceased at Triton Base. We twenty were there to main­
tain and monitor. Some of us, like me, were there because we
were bright young men with futures. Some, like Ben Wise­
man, were there because no one else would have them.
But in general life was a bore. Maintenance is a bore.
Monitoring is a bore. Even the skies are dull. Neptune is
there, big and green. Uranus can be found if you look for it.
But the Sun is only a distant candle flame flickering palely in
the night and the inner planets are impossible to see. You feel
very alone out there.
I was interested in Ben's suggestion. Mike Marshall, our
leader, had dropped the morale problem on me in one of his
fits of delegation, and since I was bored myself I was in favor
of any project that might give us something to do on Sun­
days.
1 said, “This is a good idea, Ben. There's one problem,
though. We don't have the equipment for an assault like that.
You know how tight the budget is. too. I could ask Mike.”
“ Don't ask Mike!”
“ Well, I’d have to ask Mike. And he could ask. But I don’t
think we’d get what we have to have.”
 A L E X E I P A N S H IN 251
“ But it’s much simpler than that,” Ben said. “The Uranus
bathyscaphe is still on Titania. It’s old, of course, but there is
no reason it couldn’t be used here. The two planets are prac­
tically twins. Opposition is coming up. The bathyscaphe
could be brought here for almost nothing. I thought you
could requisition it through your department.”
That was Ben for you. A very strange man. I think he sup­
posed that I would very quietly requisition the bathyscaphe
that had been used to probe the atmosphere ocean of Uranus,
and just not say anything to Mike. Then he and I would slip
quietly over to Neptune on our weekends. If he could have
obtained and operated the machine by himself, I’m sure he
would have preferred that.
“ If the equipment is still on Titania, we may be able to get
it,” I said. “I’ll ask Mike when I take up department oper­
ations with him tomorrow.”
“ Don’t ask Mike.”
“ Look, Ben. If you want this at all, it has to go through
Mike. There’s no other way. You know that.”
“ No,” he said. “Just forget the whole thing. I’m sorry I
brought the subject up.”
Ben was jealous of his ideas. If they passed through too
many hands, they lost their savor for him. This was a good
idea, or so it seemed to me, but he would prefer to let it lapse
than to have the rest of our little colony involved.
I talked to Mike the next day. Mike was another odd one.
At some previous time, he may have had drive, but he no
longer cared very deeply. He delegated as much responsibil­
ity as he possibly could. He worked erratically. And he greet­
ed my proposal with no great interest.
“ Who cares if we find life on Neptune? We already know
that ammonia-methane worlds can support life, and none of
it has been very interesting after the novelty wears off.”
“That’s true,” I said, “but do you suppose I care one way
or the other if we find another strange kind of minnow? The
important thing is that it would give as many of us as turned
252 O N E S U N D A Y IN N E P T U N E

out to be interested something constructive to do. It’s a pro­

ject I could enjoy.”
“Do you think anybody else would?” Mike asked. “ How
many first landings have there been? If you count everything,
there must have been fifty or sixty. Who remembers them
all? Who cares?”
“The point isn’t whether anybody else would be interest­
ed,” I said. “This isn’t for outsiders. Mike, this morning I got
out of my chair and I found that my rear end had gone to
sleep. I want something to do.”
It took argument, but Mike finally agreed to find out if the
bathyscaphe was available. It turned out to be, and it arrived
at Triton Base aboard ship some seven months later. That
wasn’t so very long. We didn’t have anything else to do. We
didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Ben, of course, was hopping mad, mostly with me. I'd sto­
len his idea. I’d ruined his idea. I'd betrayed his trust. I'd
spoiled things.
“ It’s the last time I ever tell you anything," he said. As he
had said more than once before.
The project turned out to be far more of a success than I
had ever anticipated. Our job was to keep contact with the
starship, which we did adequately, and to keep a large, empty
house in order, which we did inadequately. Not that anybody
cared.
After the bathyscaphe arrived, however, schedules started
being observed. People cared whether or not they were re­
lieved on time. There was less dust in corners, less dirt on
people. Minor illness fell off dramatically. And my rear end
stopped going to sleep on me. Even Mike, of all people, be­
came interested.
It was all very much like the boat you built in your base­
ment when you were fourteen. It was what we did in our
spare time. It was the Project.
Ben was in and Ben was out. Ben worked sometimes and
sometimes he didn’t. He didn’t feel the venture was quite his
 A L E X E I P A N S H IN 253
anymore, but he couldn’t bring himself to stay away. So even
he wound up involved.
Everybody else cared a lot. There was work to do. The
bathyscaphe had to be overhauled completely. That took a lot
of spare time. And when we were done, there was every pros­
pect of even more spare time being whiled away in months
and months of exploration.
Like all the outer planets except Pluto, which is a mis­
placed moon, Neptune is a gassy giant. At one time, it was
expected to have a layer of ice and a rocky core beneath its
atmosphere. In fact, however, it has no solid surface. It’s all
atmosphere, a murky green sea of hydrogen and helium and
methane and ammonia. There are clouds and snowstorms,
but no place to put your feet. More than anything else, it is
like the oceans of Earth, and the vehicle we intended to use to
explore its unknown depths was a fantastic cross between a
dirigible and the bathyscaphes of Piccard and his successors.
Neptune was no well-tended garden, safe and comfortable,
but in fact it was more easily accessible than are Earth’s hos­
tile ocean deeps with their incredible pressures.
The planet was only a step away from us on Triton, closer
than the Moon is to Earth. It was possible for the bathy­
scaphe to reach Neptune under its own power, but not for it
to return up the gravity well. Consequently we decided to use
a mother ship, like a tender for a helmet diver, that would
drop the bathyscaphe and then recover it. In a way I was sor­
ry because I found the idea of a hydrogen-filled balloon
chugging its way through space amusing.
In time, we were ready to make our first probe. The ques­
tion then became one of who would be the two of us to go
first. It was a painful question. Should it be settled by rank?
Should it be settled by amount of work contributed? Should
it be settled by lot? As the day of readiness came closer, the
issue became more acute. Each method of choice had its
champions. By and large we were polite about the subject,
but there was one fistfight between Arlo Harlow, who had
254 O N E S U N D A Y IN N E P T U N E

worked particularly hard, and Sperry Donner, who was sec­

ond-in-command, which was terminated when both partici­
pants discovered they actually had no particular enthusiasm
for fistfighting.
Mike finally settled the issue. The first trip would be Ben
and me because we were responsible. After that, it would be
alphabetically by pairs. He told me later that he had been in­
tending to be strictly alphabetical, but that would have
thrown Ben into the last pair, which was one problem, and
would have made Ben the partner of Roy Wilimczyk, which
was another.
“This seemed the best solution,” he said. “ If anybody can
cope with him, it’s you.”
“Thank you,” I said, and he understood that I didn’t mean
it.
Ben was frankly mellow that week—mellow for Ben. This
means that about forty percent of the time he was his obnox­
ious ingratiating self instead of his normal obnoxious unin­
gratiating self. He even forgave me.
Finally, on a Sunday that was as brisk and bright and sun­
ny as a day ever gets on Triton, four of us set off toward the
great green cotton candy boulder that filled a full ten degrees
of sky. Ben and I didn’t wait to see it grow. Long before the
ship was in a parking orbit, Ben and I were in the cabin of
the bathyscaphe and the whole was enclosed in a drop cap­
sule.
I was piloting our machine. Ben was to supervise the moni­
toring equipment that would record our encounters with the
planet.
We weren’t lowered over the side in the tradition of
Earth’s oceans. We were popped out like a watermelon seed.
We were strapped in and blind. I had my finger on the man­
ual switch and had no need to trigger it. The rockets did what
rockets do. The drop capsule peeled away automatically.
Then when our lights came on, we were deep in a green
murk. It wasn’t of a consistency. There were winds or eddies,
call them whichever you choose. Our lights probed ahead.
 A L E X E I P A N S H IN 255

Sometimes we could see for considerable distances—yards.

Often we could only see a few feet. We had the additional
eyes of radar which looked in circles about us and saw noth­
ing except once what I took to be an ammonia snowstorm
and avoided. Other sensors listened to the sound of the plan­
et, took its temperature and pulse. Its temperature was very,
very cold. Its pulse was slow and steady.
I feathered my elevators and found that the bathyscaphe
worked as I had been assured that it did. The turboprops
drove us steadily through the green. I was extremely glad to
have my instruments. They told me I was right-side up, a fact
I would not otherwise have known. And they kept me con­
nected to our mother ship.
“I hope you are keeping in mind why we are here,” Ben
said.
“ I am,” I said. “ However, until we know the planet better,
I think one place will be about as likely as the next. I haven’t
seen any whale herds yet.”
“No,” said Ben, “but it doesn’t mean they’re not out there.
They may simply be shy. After all, the existence of the Great
Sea Serpent wasn’t definitely established until the last ten
years. I’d settle for something smaller, though.”
We had collecting plates out. They might well demonstrate
the presence of the same sort of soupy life that was found on
Uranus. Ben kept busy with his monitoring. I kept busy with
my piloting.
I had helped on this venture because I was bored, thor­
oughly tired of doing nothing in particular. I had come to
Neptune with only the mildest interest in proving Ben’s case.
Now, however, I began to feel pleased to be where I was. The
view, as we drove ourselves through the currents of this gassy
sea, was monotonous, monochromatic, but weirdly beautiful.
This was another sort of world than any I had been used to. I
liked it. It may sound funny, but I respected it for being itself
in the same way that you respect a totally ugly girl who has
come to terms with herself.
I was pleased that men should be here in this last dark cor-
256 O N E S U N D A Y IN N E P T U N E

ner of the Solar System, and glad that I was one of the men.
There is a place in reference books for this, too, if only in a
footnote with the hundreds of other people who have made
first contacts.
It was a full five hours before we were back aboard our
mother ship. Arlo Harlow helped us out of the bathyscaphe.
“How did it go?” he said.
“We won’t know until we check through the data,” Ben
said. “We didn’t see anything identifiable. Not where he
drove.”
I said, “You’ll have to see it for yourself. I don’t think I
can describe it for you. You’ll see. It’s a real experience.”
Arlo said, “ Mike wants to talk to you. He’s got news.”
Ben and I went forward to talk to Mike back at Triton
Base. The satellite was invisible ahead of us—with Neptune
full, Triton was necessarily a new moon, and dark.
“Hello, Mike,” I said. “Arlo says you have news. Did the
starship check in?”
“No,” he said. “The news is you. You two are a human in­
terest story. The last planet landing in the Solar System.
Hold on. The first fac sheet has already come through. The
headline is ‘N eptune R eached.' It begins, ‘In these days of
groups and organizations and institutions, in these days when
man’s first ship to the stars casts off with a crew of ten thou­
sand, stories of individual human courage seem a thing of the
distant past.’ And it ends, ‘If men like these bear our colors
forward, the race of man shall yet prevail."'
“ I like that,” Ben said. “That’s very good.”
Mike said, “There’s also a story that wants to know why
money was ever spent on such pointless flamboyance as this
landing.”
“Tell them in the first place that there wasn’t any land­
ing,” I said. “ We were in Neptune, not on it. Then make the
point that the bathyscaphe was left over from the Uranus
probe and that we put it in shape ourselves.”
“ I did that,” Mike said. “They got it in the story. The first
 A L E X E I P A N S H IN 257

one. The writer applauds your courage in chancing your life

in such a primitive and antiquated exploratory vehicle.”
“ Oh, hell,” I said.
“ Listen. They have some questions they want answered.
They want to know why you went. Why did you go, Bob?”
“Tell them that it seemed like a good idea at the time,” I
said.
“I can’t give them that.”
“ We wanted to find out whether there was life on Nep­
tune,” Ben said.
“Did you find any?”
“As far as we know, we didn’t,” I said.
“Then I can’t give them that. Try again.”
I thought. After a moment, I said, “Tell them that we
didn’t think it was right for men to go to the stars without
having touched all the bases here.”
As “touch all the bases,” that line has passed into the fa­
miliar quotation books.
Ben and I are in the history books, too—in the footnotes
along with the hundreds of other people who made first land­
ings. If you count the starships, that list would run into the
thousands.
Ben isn’t happy buried in the footnotes, and he and I don’t
speak anymore. He’s mad at me. He never discovered life on
Neptune, and nobody, it is clear, is ever likely to. On the oth­
er hand, I’m the author of one of history’s minor taglines. He
finds that galling.
It isn’t a great distinction to bear, I’ll admit, but there have
been dark nights in my life when I’ve lain awake and won­
dered whether or not I would leave any ripples behind me.
That line is enough of a ripple to bring me through to morn­
ing.
 PLUTO

Pluto, like Neptune, was predicted before it was found. The dis­
crepancies in the orbit of Uranus were not entirely corrected by
taking Neptune into consideration. Could there be still another
planet beyond Uranus, one that was even farther from the Sun
than Neptune is? Percival Lowell was particularly assiduous in
his searchings but had found nothing by the time of his death in
1916.
Others at his observatory continued the search, off and on:
and finally in 1930 Clyde William Tombaugh located the planet.
It was considerably farther than Neptune and considerably
smaller, and it could only be seen as a spot of light.
Still, its orbit could be calculated, and it was found to be a
very odd one. Pluto’s orbit is the most eccentric ellipse of any
of the major planets.
When Pluto is at its farthest from the Sun, it is 1.6 times as
far away as Neptune. It is as much farther beyond Neptune as
Neptune is beyond Uranus. But when Pluto swoops in to the
near end of its orbit, it is actually some 50 million kilometers (30
million miles) closer to the Sun than Neptune is.
Right now Pluto is approaching perihelion and is moving in
closer to the Sun than Neptune is. For some twenty years (a pe­
riod repeated every two and a half centuries) Neptune, not Plu­
to, will be the farthest planet, something that is mentioned in
“ Wait It Out.”
There is no danger of Pluto colliding with Neptune as it

258
 p l u t o 259

passes within Neptune’s orbit, however, for Pluto’s orbit is in a

plane that is considerably tilted compared to Neptune’s. That
means that Pluto passes far below Neptune as it crosses orbits.
Still, this crossing of orbits is so strange that some astrono­
mers have speculated that Pluto was once a satellite of Nep­
tune and had been kicked free in some catastrophe.
This notion was strengthened by the fact that Pluto was not a
gas giant. In fact, it proved to be rather small. As the decades
passed after its discovery, and as small bits of information were
gathered, the estimates of its size shrank. At first it seemed
pretty certain that it was at least as large as Earth, but eventu­
ally it was decided that it was only as large as Mars. A Mars­
sized world might easily have once been a satellite of Neptune.
Then, too, Pluto’s light grew dimmer and brighter regularly,
and it was decided that this represented its period of rotation,
with one hemisphere being icier and brighter than the other. If
so, Pluto’s period of rotation equaled 6.39 days.
If we disregard Mercury and Venus as having had their rota­
tion periods interfered with by the Sun’s tidal effect, it turns out
that Earth, Mars, Uranus, and Neptune all have rotation periods
in the region of 24 hours, while Jupiter and Saturn have rotation
periods in the region of 10 hours. A rotation period of 6.39 days
is very slow— but if Pluto had once been revolving about Nep­
tune, it might have had a period of revolution of 6.39 days, and
the tidal forces of Neptune might have slowed the rotation till it
was equal to the period of revolution.
Astronomers continued to think for a while that Pluto had to
have a mass large enough to affect the orbits of Neptune and
Uranus; and as it shrank in size, estimates of its density came
to be many times as great as that of platinum. This high density
is referred to in “ Wait It Out,” which was first published in
1968.
However, such high densities were really unthinkable and
quickly went by the board. It had to be decided that Pluto was
not only no larger than Mars, but no more massive either.
Then, on June 22, 1978, James W. Christy, examining photo-
260 P L U T O

graphs of Pluto, noticed a distinct bump on one side. He exam­

ined other photographs and finally decided that Pluto had a sat­
ellite. The satellite was only 20,000 kilometers (12,500 miles)
from Pluto. Considering how close together the two objects
were and how far away from us, it isn’t surprising we tended to
see them as a single object.
The satellite, named “ Charon,” circles Pluto in 6.39 days,
which is just the time it takes for Pluto to turn on its axis. The
two bodies have apparently slowed each other by tidal action,
until each faces the same side to the other. They revolve about
a common center of gravity like the two halves of a dumbbell
about an invisible shaft.
From the distance of separation and the time of revolution, it
can be showed that both bodies together have only about one-
eighth the mass of our Moon. Pluto is far smaller than anyone
had thought. Pluto is now thought to be about 3000 kilometers
(1850 miles) in diameter and Charon about 1200 kilometers
(750 miles) in diameter.
From now on, no one can write a science fiction story about
Pluto without taking its very small size into account and without
mentioning its satellite, which, although small, is larger com­
pared to the planet it circles than any other satellite in the Solar
System. Pluto-Charon make up the closest approach to a dou­
ble planet in the system.
One thing is now clear. Pluto cannot explain the discrepan­
cies in the motions of Uranus and Neptune. If there is an expla­
nation, it must involve another planet, a larger one, and one that
is still undiscovered. Does it exist? Perhaps probes will eventu­
ally tell us.
 Wait It Out
LARRY NIVEN

Night on Pluto. Sharp and distinct, the horizon line cuts

across my field of vision. Below that broken line is the dim
gray-white of snow seen by starlight. Above, space-blackness
and space-bright stars. From behind a jagged row of frozen
mountains the stars pour up in singletons and clusters and
streamers of cold white dots. Slowly they move, but visibly,
just fast enough for a steady eye to capture their motion.
Something wrong there. Pluto’s rotation period is long:
6.39 days. Time must have slowed for me.
It should have stopped.
I wonder if I may have made a mistake.
The planet’s small size brings the horizon close. It seems
even closer without a haze of atmosphere to fog the distances.
Two sharp peaks protrude into the star swarm like the filed
front teeth of a cannibal warrior. In the cleft between those
peaks shines a sudden bright point.
I recognize the Sun, though it shows no more disk than any
other, dimmer star. The sun shines as a cold point between
the frozen peaks; it pulls free of the rocks and shines in my
eyes.
The Sun is gone, the starfield has shifted. I must have
passed out.
It figures.
Have I made a mistake? It won’t kill me if I have. It could
drive me mad, though.

261
262 W A IT IT O U T

I don’t feel mad. I don’t feel anything, not pain, not loss,
not regret, not fear. Not even pity. Just: What a situation.
Gray-white against gray-white: the landing craft, short and
wide and conical, stands half-submerged in an icy plain below
the level of my eyes. Here I stand, looking east, waiting.
Take a lesson: this is what comes of not wanting to die.

Pluto was not the most distant planet. It had stopped being
that in 1979, ten years ago. Now Pluto was at perihelion, as
close to the Sun—and to Earth—as it would ever get. To ig­
nore such an opportunity would have been sheer waste.
And so we came, Jerome'and Sammy and I, in an inflated
plastic bubble poised on an ion jet. We’d spent a year and a
half in that bubble. After so long together, with so little pri­
vacy, perhaps we should have hated each other. We didn’t.
The UN psycho team must have chosen well.
But—just to be out of sight of the others, even for a few
minutes. Just to have something to do, something that was
not predictable. A new world could hold infinite surprises. As
a matter of fact, so could our laboratory-tested hardware. I
don’t think any of us really trusted the Nerva-K under our
landing craft.
Think it through. For long trips in space, you use an ion jet
giving low thrust over long periods of time. The ion motor on
our own craft had been decades in use. Where gravity is ma­
terially lower than Earth's, you land on dependable chemical
rockets. For landings on Earth and Venus, you use heat
shields and the braking power of the atmosphere. For landing
on the gas giants—but who would want to?
The Nerva-class fission rockets are used only for takeoff
from Earth, where thrust and efficiency count. Responsive­
ness and maneuverability count for too much during a
powered landing. And a heavy planet will always have an at­
mosphere for braking.
Pluto didn’t.
For Pluto, the chemical jets to take us down and bring us
back up were too heavy to carry all that way. We needed a
 L A R R Y N IV E N 263

highly maneuverable Nerva-type atomic rocket motor using

hydrogen for reaction mass.
And we had it. But we didn’t trust it.
Jerome Glass and I went down, leaving Sammy Cross in
orbit. He griped about that, of course. He’d started that back
at the Cape and kept it up for a year and a half. But someone
had to stay. Someone had to be aboard the Earth-return vehi­
cle, to fix anything that went wrong, to relay communications
to Earth, and to fire the bombs that would solve Pluto’s one
genuine mystery.
We never did solve that one. Where does Pluto get all that
mass? The planet’s a dozen times as dense as it has any right
to be. We could have solved that with the bombs, the same
way they solved the mystery of the makeup of the Earth,
sometime in the last century. They mapped the patterns of
earthquake ripples moving through the Earth’s bulk. But
those ripples were from natural causes, like the Krakatoa
eruption. On Pluto the bombs would have done it better.
A bright star-sun blazes suddenly between two fangs of
mountain. I wonder if they’ll know the answers, when my vig­
il ends.

The sky jumps and steadies, and—

I’m looking east, out over the plain where we landed the
ship. The plain and the mountains behind seem to be sinking
like Atlantis: an illusion created by the flowing stars. We
slide endlessly down the black sky, Jerome and I and the
mired ship.
The Nerva-K behaved perfectly. We hovered for several
minutes to melt our way through various layers of frozen gas­
es and get ourselves something solid to land on. Condensing
volatiles steamed around us and boiled below, so that we set­
tled in a soft white glow of fog lit by the hydrogen flame.
Black wet ground appeared below the curve of the landing
skirt. I let the ship drop carefully, carefully. . . and we
touched.
It took us an hour to check the ship and get ready to go
264 W A IT IT O U T

outside. But who would be first? This was no idle matter.

Pluto would be the solar system’s last outpost for most of fu­
ture history, and the statue to the first man on Pluto would
probably remain untarnished forever.
Jerome won the toss. All for the sake of a turning coin,
Jerome’s would be the first name in the history books. I re­
member the grin I forced! I wish I could force one now. He
was laughing and talking of marble statues as he went
through the lock.
There’s irony in that, if you like that sort of thing.
I was screwing down my helmet when Jerome started
shouting obscenities into the helmet mike. I cut the checklist
short and followed him out.
One look told it all.
The black wet dirt beneath our landing skirt had been dirty
ice, water ice mixed haphazardly with lighter gases and ordi­
nary rock. The heat draining out of the Nerva jet had melted
that ice. The rocks within the ice had sunk, and so had the
landing vehicle, so that when the water froze again it was
halfway up the hull. Our landing craft was sunk solid in the
ice.
We could have done some exploring before we tried to
move the ship. When we called Sammy he suggested doing
just that. But Sammy was up there in the Earth-return vehi­
cle, and we were down here with our landing vehicle mired in
the ice of another world.
We were terrified. Until we got clear we would be good for
nothing, and we both knew it.
I wonder why I can’t remember the fear.
We did have one chance. The landing vehicle was designed
to move about on Pluto’s surface; and so she had a skirt in­
stead of landing jacks. Half a gravity of thrust would have
given us a ground effect, safer and cheaper than using the
ship like a ballistic missile. The landing skirt must have
trapped gas underneath when the ship sank, leaving the
Nerva-K engine in a bubble cavity.
 L A R R Y N IV E N 265

We could melt our way out.

I know we were as careful as two terrified men could be.
The heat rose in the Nerva-K, agonizingly slow. In flight
there would have been a coolant effect as cold hydrogen fuel
ran through the pile. We couldn’t use that. But the environ­
ment of the motor was terribly cold. The two factors might
compensate, or—
Suddenly dials went wild. Something had cracked from the
savage temperature differential. Jerome used the damper
rods without effect. Maybe they’d melted. Maybe wiring had
cracked, or resistors had become superconductors in the cold.
Maybe the pile—but it doesn’t matter now.
I wonder why I can’t remember the fear.
Sunlight—

And a logy, dreamy feeling. I’m conscious again. The same

stars rise in formation over the same dark mountains.
Something heavy is nosing up against me. I feel its weight
against my back and the backs of my legs. What is it? Why
am I not terrified?
It slides around in front of me, questing. It looks like a
huge amoeba, shapeless and translucent, with darker bodies
showing within it. I’d guess it’s about my own weight.
Life on Pluto! But how? Superfluids? Helium II contami­
nated by complex molecules? In that case the beast had best
get moving; it will need shade come sunrise. Sunside tem­
perature on Pluto is all of 50° Absolute.
No, come back! It’s leaving, flowing down toward the
splash crater. Did my thoughts send it away? Nonsense. It
probably didn’t like the taste of me. It must be terribly slow,
that I can watch it move. The beast is still visible, blurred be­
cause I can’t look directly at it, moving downhill toward the
landing vehicle and the tiny statue to the first man to die on
Pluto.
After the fiasco with the Nerva-K, one of us had to go
down and see how much damage had been done. That meant
266 W A IT IT O U T

tunneling down with the flame of a jet backpack, then crawl­

ing under the landing skirt. We didn’t talk about the implica­
tions. We were probably dead. The man who went down into
the bubble cavity was even more probably dead; but what of
it? Dead is dead.
I feel no guilt. I’d have gone myself if I’d lost the toss.
The Nerva-K had spewed fused bits of the fission pile all
over the bubble cavity. We were trapped for good. Rather, I
was trapped, and Jerome was dead. The bubble cavity was a
hell of radiation.
Jerome had been swearing softly as he went in. He came
out perfectly silent. He’d used up all the good words on light­
er matters, I think.
I remember I was crying, partly from grief and partly from
fear. I remember that I kept my voice steady in spite of it.
Jerome never knew. What he guessed is his own affair. He
told me the situation, he told me goodbye, and then he strode
out onto the ice and took off his helmet. A fuzzy white ball
engulfed his head, exploded outward, then settled to the
ground in microscopic snowflakes.
But all that seems infinitely remote. Jerome stands out
there with his helmet clutched in his hands: a statue to him­
self, the first man on Pluto. A frost of recondensed moisture
conceals his expression.
Sunrise. I hope the amoeba—

That was wild. The sun stood poised for an instant, a white
point-source between twin peaks. Then it streaked upward—
and the spinning sky jolted to a stop. No wonder I didn’t
catch it before. It happened so fast.
A horrible thought. What has happened to me could have
happened to Jerome! I wonder—
There was Sammy in the Earth-return vehicle, but he
couldn’t get down to me. I couldn’t get up. The life system
was in good order, but sooner or later I would freeze to death
or run out of air.
 L A R R Y N IV E N 267

I stayed with the landing vehicle about thirty hours, taking

ice and soil samples, analyzing them, delivering the data to
Sammy via laser beam; delivering also high-minded last mes­
sages, and feeling sorry for myself. On my trips outside I kept
passing Jerome’s statue. For a corpse, and one which has not
been prettified by the post-surgical skills of an embalmer, he
looks damn good. His frost-dusted skin is indistinguishable
from marble, and his eyes are lifted toward the stars in
poignant yearning. Each time I passed him I wondered how I
would look when my turn came.
“You’ve got to find an oxygen layer,” Sammy kept saying.
“Why?”
“To keep you alive! Sooner or later they’ll send a rescue
ship. You can’t give up now!”
I’d already given up. There was oxygen, but there was no
such layer as Sammy kept hoping for. There were veins of
oxygen mixed with other things, like veins of gold ore in rock.
Too little, too finely distributed.
“Then use the water ice! That’s only poetic justice, isn’t it?
You can get the oxygen out by electrolysis!”
But a rescue ship would take years. They’d have to build it
from scratch, and redesign the landing vehicle too. Electroly­
sis takes power, and heat takes power. I had only the batter­
ies.
Sooner or later I’d run out of power. Sammy couldn’t see
this. He was more desperate than I was. I didn’t run out of
last messages; I stopped sending them because they were
driving Sammy crazy,
I passed Jerome’s statue one time too many, and an idea
came.
This is what comes of not wanting to die.
In Nevada, three billion miles from here, half a million
corpses lie frozen in vaults surrounded by liquid nitrogen.
Half a million dead men wait for an earthly resurrection, on
the day medical science discovers how to unfreeze them safe­
ly, how to cure what was killing each one of them, how to
268 W A IT IT O U T

cure the additional damage done by ice crystals breaking cell

walls all through their brains and bodies.
Half a million fools? But what choice did they have? They
were dying.
I was dying.
A man can stay conscious for tens of seconds in vacuum. If
I moved fast, I could get out of my suit in that time. Without
that insulation to protect me, Pluto’s black night would suck
warmth from my body in seconds. At 50° Absolute, I’d stay
in frozen storage until one version or another of the Day of
Resurrection.
Sunlight—

—And stars. No sign of the big blob that found me so sin­

gularly tasteless yesterday. But I could be looking in the
wrong direction.
I hope it got to cover.
I’m looking east, out over the splash plain. In my peripher­
al vision the ship looks unchanged and undamaged.
My suit lies beside me on the ice. I stand on a peak of
black rock, poised in my silvered underwear, looking eternal­
ly out at the horizon. Before the cold touched my brain I
found a last moment in which to assume a heroic stance. Go
east, young man. Wouldn’t you know I’d get my directions
mixed? But the fog of my breathing-air hid everything, and I
was moving in terrible haste.
Sammy Cross must be on his way home now. He'll tell
them where I am.
Stars pour up from behind the mountains. The mountains
and the splash plain and Jerome and 1 sink endlessly beneath
the sky.
My corpse must be the coldest in history. Even the hopeful
dead of Earth are only stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures.
Pluto’s night makes that look torrid, after the 50° Absolute
heat of day seeps away into space.
A superconductor is what I am. Sunlight raises the tern-
 L A R R Y N IV E N 269

perature too high, switching me off like a damned machine at

every dawn. But at night my nervous system becomes a su­
perconductor. Currents flow; thoughts flow; sensations flow.
Sluggishly. The one hundred and fifty-three hours of Pluto’s
rotation flash by in what feels like fifteen minutes. At that
rate I can wait it out.
I stand as a statue and a viewpoint. No wonder I can’t get
emotional about anything. Water is a rock here, and my
glands are contoured ice within me. But I feel sensations: the
pull of gravity, the pain in my ears, the tug of vacuum over
every square inch of my body. The vacuum will not boil my
blood. But the tensions are frozen into the ice of me, and my
nerves tell me so. I feel the wind whistling from my lips, like
an exhalation of cigarette smoke.
This is what comes of not wanting to die. What a joke if I
got my wish!
Do you suppose they’ll find me? Pluto’s small for a planet.
For a place to get lost in, a small planet is all too large. But
there’s the ship.
Though it seems to be covered with frost. Vaporized gases
recondensed on the hull. Gray-white on gray-white, a lump
on a dish of refrozen ice. I could stand here forever waiting
for them to pick my ship from its surroundings.
Stop that.
Sunlight—
Stars rolling up the sky. The same patterns, endlessly roll­
ing up from the same points. Does Jerome’s corpse live the
same half-life I live now? He should have stripped, as I did.
My God! I wish Fd thought to wipe the ice from his eyes!
I wish that superfluid blob would come back.
Damn. It’s cold.
 Nikita Eisenhower Jones
ROBERT F. YOUNG

Near the southern fringe of Pluto’s Great Ice Plain there is a

range of mountains which resembles a Brobdingnagian man
lying upon his back, staring eternally up at the stars. It be­
gins with a lofty mesa, the prominences of which, when seen
against the brooding star-specked sky, suggest a silhouetted
profile. A brief ridge, comparable to a massive neck, leads to
the range proper, the first great swell of which is easily iden­
tifiable as the upper section of a vast chest; then the range
proper levels off for a hundred miles, drops gradually into a
stomachlike plateau, and bifurcates finally into two thigh-like
ridges, both of which terminate, some two hundred miles far­
ther on, into almost identical footlike tors.
When the range is viewed from above—say from a height
of about three hundred miles--the illusion is even stronger.
Looking down you see an anthropomorphic formation of
peaks and crevices and chimneys, of rocks and snow and ice.
Two relatively smaller ranges, stretching out at near right an­
gles on either side of the mother range, bring to mind out-
flung arms, and at the extremity of each is a deposit of mo­
raine startlingly suggestive of a human hand. The face is an
elusive pattern of shadows that changes subtly with each fit­
ful play of starlight.
Now Pluto, as every schoolboy knows, is not a mountain­
ous planet. It has, to be sure, interminable stretches of ice-
clad hills that conceivably could have been mountains—a

270
 ROBERT F . Y O U N G 271

hundred thousand Plutonian years ago. There are even, in the

polar regions, eminences high enough to pass for frustrated
foothills. In the region of the Great Ice Plain, however—with
the glaring exception of the mountains in question—there is
nothing but an endless succession of eroded ice ridges, souve­
nirs, no doubt, of the long-ago age when the wind still blew
and the snow still fell. So it is odd to a degree that makes
even mentioning the fact redundant that on a planet where
the geology was not generally conducive to mountains that
mountains should exist in a region where it was not conducive
to them at all.
What planetary stress created the Brobdingnagian Moun­
tains, or whatever they really are (if they are anything be­
sides a massive upheaval of rocks and ice) constitutes a mys­
tery that will probably never be resolved. But any mystery
that can foster stories—be they legends or fairy tales, or
both—has not endured in vain. The Brobdingnagian Moun­
tains have fostered at least a hundred such stories, and you
have merely to choose the one you think throws the most
light upon their true origin. I am a romantic myself, and I
prefer the romantic version—the one retired spacemen tell
over their drinks-too-many in every spaceport bar from Al­
pha Centauri 4 to Betelgeuse 29. It is a true story, up to a
point; whether it is true or not beyond that point is a question
I am not qualified to answer.
You can judge best for yourself.

He had corkscrew hair and he was as black as space and

his smile was as wide as the world. At the age of twelve he
was five feet one—and five feet one was all he was ever going
to be. He had the broad nose and the sloping forehead usual­
ly associated with his race; but in the almost feminine line of
his lips there was a hint of sensitivity, and deep in his dark-
brown eyes the latent tinder of intelligence awaited the right
combination of flint and steel to bring it to life. His name
was Nikita Eisenhower Jones.
272 N IK IT A E IS E N H O W E R J O N E S

Malaita, the island of his birth, had been the last of the
Solomons to accept the white man’s civilization. Now his
people raised cucumbers and beans as well as yams and ku-
mara, and collected comic books instead of heads. They still
lived in the bush, but they gave their children white men’s
names and sent them to the British mission schools along the
coast and wore dresses and slacks instead of lava-lavas and
spoke English instead of Beche-de-Mer.
In the schools the children learned among other things that
the world was round, that it was one of nine planets orbiting
the sun, that the sun was a star and that there were a zillion
others roughly similar to it in the cosmos; that God had cre­
ated the whole works and that old Kuvi-Kavi, who lived back
in the bush and preached a different version of Genesis, was a
liar of the first magnitude. But the children went right on lis­
tening to old Kuvi-Kavi’s version anyway. Not that they had
anything against the white man’s version: it was just that old
Kuvi-Kavi’s packed a harder punch.
It went something like this:
In the beginning the world was water and the sky was
without light. There were two gods— Kamikau, the rain god,
and Murabongu, the sea god—and they hated each other cor­
dially. Finally Kamikau got sick of riding around in the dark
sky on his lonely rain cloud and caused land to emerge from
the sea and caused coconut trees and yams and sweet pota­
toes to grow upon the land. From an armful of darkness and
two cat’s-eye shells he created the First Mary and brought
her to life by blowing his breath into her mouth. Then he
built the First Fire, and there was light and warmth. Mean­
while, Murabongu, the sea god, had become angry over the
invasion of his domain, and now he emerged from the deeps
to do battle with Kamikau. For ages the two gods battled in
the light of the First Fire, while the First Mary watched from
the scrub. At last the sea god tired and Kamikau was able to
subdue him. He cut off Murabongu’s head and cooked the
rest of him over the First Fire, and he and the First Mary sat
 R O B E R T F . Y O U N G 273

down to the First Feast. When they finished eating, Kamikau

picked up the head and flung it high into the sky where it be­
came the moon. Next he picked up the heart of the First Fire
and flung it even higher into the sky where it became the sun.
Finally he scattered the embers throughout the heavens
where they became the stars. Not long afterward the first
man was born of god and woman, and nineteenth- and twen­
tieth-century ambassadors of civilization were assured of a
good crop of native laborers, and twenty-first-century expo­
nents of Western culture were provided with an excellent
market for used comic books.
Nikita Eisenhower Jones was thirteen years old when a
space comic first swam into his ken. It was like Keats first
looking into Chapman’s Homer. The round gaily colored
planets and the sleek ships plying the immensities between
them did something to his Melanesian soul that had never
been done to it before, and he knew that henceforth he would
never be the same again. Marrying a Mary and settling down
in a vine-covered grass hut in the bush and raising yams and
sweet potatoes and pickaninnies and working forty hours a
week in the copra factory might be enough for his fellows,
but it was not enough for him. He wanted the stars.
The space comic was the first of many. Obtaining them
was no problem—by this time there were more comic books
on the island than there were coconuts—and as the mission
schools had long since given up assigning homework to their
lackadaisical pupils, he had plenty of time to read. Space
comics, however, were far from being ideal nourishment for a
burgeoning young mind such as Nick’s, and the time came
when they failed utterly either to satisfy his curiosity or to
titillate his imagination, whereupon he began visiting the mis­
sion-school library and availing himself of its limited supply
of space books. Most of them were outdated and did not go
beyond the first satellite launchings, but one of them dealt
with the first Russian expedition to the moon, and reading it,
his ambition was kindled anew. Once upon a time, Malaita
274 N IK IT A E IS E N H O W E R JO N E S

had represented the whole universe in his mind: now it shrank

beneath his feet to a mere speck of land, and planets of every
size and color whirled dizzily round his head.
The mission schools covered only the elementary grades,
and most of the islanders dropped out before completing
them. But not Nick. The books he had read had done more
than ignite his imagination: they had ignited the latent intel­
lectual tinder, too, and the blaze that ensued greedily con­
sumed every branch of knowledge he could lay his hands on.
He shone forth like a nova among his schoolmates in every
endeavor save one: like them, he was utterly incapable of pro­
nouncing the letter “x,” and whenever he said words such as
“six” and “fix,” they came out “sikkis” and "fikkis.”
Noting his enthusiasm, and his marks, the headmaster
urged him to take advantage of the British Solomon Islands
Protectorate’s new educational program, under which any eli­
gible Solomon Islander could pursue his studies, expenses
paid, in either the United States or Great Britain. Nick did
so, and passed the eligibility examination without trouble. He
chose the United States because of its more active role in the
space race, and a few months later found himself in the Big
Rock Candy Country.
By the time he graduated from high school he had man­
aged to become a citizen. This automatically disqualified him
for any further aid from the BSIP, but he had decided that
being a permanent resident of the United States would be to
his advantage in carrying out his plans. His next step was to
apply for admittance to the Von Braun Space Academy. His
size had already caused him considerable discomfiture in
high school—the average American male now stood six feet
two in his stocking feet but he had not dreamed it would be
a detriment to his becoming a spaceman. On the contrary, he
had thought it would stand him in good stead. Theoretically,
he was right; practically, he was not. The public wanted he­
roes for its tax dollars, and the public's conception of a hero
had not deviated one iota from the moment Matt Dillon had
 R O B E R T F . Y O U N G 275

first stalked down the cathodic streets of Dodge and shot up

the first of a long line of drunks, card sharps, gunmen, ne’er-
do-wells and sadomasochists. To be a hero, you had to be tall.
You had to be big. You had to be handsome. Above all, you
had to be a father figure. Small wonder then that when Ni­
kita Eisenhower Jones applied for admission to the Academy
he was laughed out the door.
But there are more ways of getting into space than becom­
ing a pilot or an astronaut. This was not true in the begin­
ning, of course, but by this time there were U.S. bases on
Ganymede, the third moon of Jupiter, and on Miranda, the
fifth moon of Uranus, and bases require personnel. In his
Melanesian heart Nick knew that next to a well-filled wallet,
the one thing white men cherish most is a well-filled stomach.
So he became a cook. Not a good cook. Not even an excellent
cook. But a superb cook. When he put in his application at
the Planet Exploratory Agency—the joint civilian-military
project that had superseded the Civilian Space Agency—and
gave a demonstration of his prowess, he was laughed at, but
he wasn’t laughed out the door, and some months later PEA
assigned him to the Miranda base, where, it was rumored,
the most significant leap of all was about to take place—i.e.,
the Pluto shot.
According to section 20 of the Interplanetary Code set up
by the U.N. in the latter part of the twentieth century, the
first nation to plant its flag on a planet (said operation to be
performed by human, rather than robotic, hands) could auto­
matically claim that planet and all its satellites. In the case of
a satellite, the entire planetary system could be claimed—
with the exception, of course, of the Earth-moon system. The
Soviet Union had long since planted its flag on the moon, and
had followed the planting with the establishment of a huge
moon base. After the code was set up, the United States
pulled a coup by bypassing the moon, Mars and the asteroid
belt, and planting its flag and setting up a base on Gany­
mede, thereby gaining title to the Jovian system. A Russian
276 N IK IT A E IS E N H O W E R JO N E S

planting and base on Enceladus, the second moon of Saturn,

soon followed, and was followed in turn by a U.S. planting
and base on Miranda. Strategically speaking, the Miranda
base was the most valuable one of all, because the Uranian
system, while it was the seventh from the sun, marked the ap­
proximate halfway point between Earth and Pluto—or
would, when opposition took place—and while Pluto, owing
to the plane of the ecliptic, did not bring the nearer stars ap­
preciably closer, the nation that reached it first would be the
psychological winner of the solar-system race.
The Miranda base, Nikita Eisenhower Jones decided, was
not precisely what he had had in mind on that distant day
when he had laid aside the space comic and gazed up through
the foliage of a banyan tree at a suddenly expanded sky. It
was enclosed by a huge transparent pressure dome, and con­
sisted of the oxygen-producing plant, the machine shop, the
living quarters, the kitchen-dining-room-bar and the supply
building. At one point on the perimeter of the dome stood the
airtight tower, and several hundred yards from the tower, the
Starhope pointed its proud nose at the brooding star-specked
sky.
But the base was only partially responsible for his lack of
enthusiasm. Most of it accrued from the sense of frustration
that overcame him whenever he gazed through the roof of the
dome at the stars. He had experienced the sense first when he
had seen the huge mass of Jupiter in the viewport of the shut­
tle ship, and he had experienced it again—more poignantly
this time—when he had glimpsed beringed Saturn, silvery
and magnificent, against the black backdrop of the immensi­
ties. And whenever Miranda's rotation brought awesome
Uranus into view, the sense was so overwhelming that he had
to turn his eyes away. He did not understand the reason for
his frustration, but one thing he did understand: being a part
of the conquest of space was not enough—
He had to be the conqueror.

His day began at 0300 hours when he rose to prepare the

 R O B E R T F . Y O U N G 277

morning meal. At 0600 hours, when his work in the kitchen

was caught up, he joined the maintenance crew in the Star-
hope in the unofficial capacity of water boy, handing and
fetching them tools and materials, good-naturedly smiling at
their constant jokes about his height, and religiously watch­
ing every move they made. At 1100 hours he returned to the
kitchen and prepared the noon meal, and at 1400 hours he re­
joined the maintenance crew and handed, fetched, smiled and
watched till 1700 hours. The evening meal was at 1830
hours. Generally it took him an hour to clean up afterwards,
and you’d have thought by then that his day would be done.
But it wasn’t. There were still his duties as bartender to be
fulfilled.
The bar was strictly a morale item. The base was supplied
with enough whiskey to permit each member of the crew to
have two shots per night; but even if there had been no liquor
available, the bar would have been a popular gathering place
in view of the fact that the next nearest one was over a billion
and a half miles away. To bring it into being, Nick simply
folded up the aluminum chairs and piled them in one corner
of the dining room, then he elevated the eating table to a
height of three feet and aligned it with the nearest wall, leav­
ing enough space behind it for him to walk back and forth.
Finally he went out to the kitchen, unlocked the liquor chest
and brought in the evening’s ration.
In addition to Nick, there were fourteen men stationed at
the base: Colonel Dennison, the commanding officer; the
eight-man base maintenance crew; the four-man ship’s main­
tenance crew; and Captain Cohill, the pilot of the Starhope.
Two of the men— Blake and Barnaby—were teetotalers, and
enjoyed a phenomenal popularity with the others, especially
Captain Cohill. The way everybody hung around them and
did them favors, you’d have thought they were a pair of pret­
ty girls instead of a pair of burly grease monkeys. It was ob­
vious from the start, though, that Captain Cohill had the in­
side track so far as their affections were concerned, and
when, not long before the Great Event was scheduled to take
278 N IK IT A E IS E N H O W E R J O N E S

place, he promised them souvenirs from Pluto’s landscape if

and when he came back, the others didn’t stand a chance,
and dropped out one by one.
Colonel Dennison usually spent the evening standing at the
end of the bar, and Captain Cohill had a system all worked
out for his benefit. First he would hang around Blake, his
back to the colonel, and Blake would order his two shots in a
double-shot glass. Not long afterwards, the two of them
would leave, and the double-shot glass would be sitting there
on the bar, drained to the last drop. Half an hour or so later,
Captain Cohill would come in with Barnaby, and the proce­
dure would be repeated. Finally Cohill would come in just be­
fore closing time—usually after everyone else had left—and
order his own ration. By the time he finished drinking it he
was ready—if not willing—to go to bed.
He struck up a warm friendship with Nick right from the
start, calling him Keeper of the Golden Keys, Noble Bush­
man with the Heart of Gold, and King Solomon of the
Spaceways, as the mood suited him, cautioning Nick never to
reveal his duplicity to Colonel Dennison. Nick had a warm
smile reserved just for him. and the two of them had many a
pleasant conversation on the Captain's third visitation each
evening. They were never at a loss for something to talk
about: Captain Cohill’s reminiscences about his various girl
friends would have sufficed in themselves to keep the bar­
room bright with conversational cheer, and in addition to his
reminiscences there were Nikita's endless questions about the
Starhope, the physique of which Captain Cohill knew almost
as thoroughly as he did the physiques of his girl friends.
Nick’s curiosity about the ship was insatiable. “ Big fella
ship belong you,” he said one night (he invariably employed
Beche-de-Mer when conversing with the men because he
knew instinctively that it would be nothing in his favor for
them to know he could speak English—with the exception of
pronouncing his “ X’s”—better than they could.) “ Big fella
ship,” he said, “you push'm up how?”
 R O B E R T F . Y O U N G 279

Cohill swirled—or tried to swirl—the final dram of rye

filming the bottom of his shot glass. “You don’t push’m up
no how,” he said. “You just go along for the ride.” When
Nick looked at him uncomprehendingly, he went on; “All
they need the pilot for is to plant the flag. The ship operates
itself.”
“You no push’m on?”
“ Oh, sure, you have to start it. That is,” he amended, “you
have to tell it what you want it to do. There’s a little perforat­
ed card you feed into its brain box before you blast off and
another one that you feed into it when you’re ready to come
back. They’re all ready—hanging on the Christmas tree, so
to speak, just waiting for you to use them.” He signed. “A
kid could do it. Even you could do it.”
Nick smiled. He went into the kitchen, returned several
minutes later with a quart can of whiskey. He set it on the
bar, opened it. Disbelievingly, Cohill watched while he filled
his shot glass to the brim. “Drink’m up,” Nick said.
Cohill’s big fingers plucked the glass from the bar; he
raised it to his lips. “ Noble Keeper of the Golden Keys, I sa­
lute you,” he said, and downed the shot.
Nick poured him another. “Head belong you he savvee lit­
tle bit too much,” he said. “ Head belong you he savvee ration
belong Blake and he savvee ration belong Barnaby. He no
savvee ration belong Nikita.”
Cohill smote the center of his forehead with the palm of
his hand. “Well I’ll be damned!” he said. “You would rate a
ration at that, seeing as how you’re a member of the crew.
And you’ve been saving it all this time. Saving it—for me!”
His face grew radiant, especially his nose. “ King Solomon of
the Spaceways, I salute you!” he said, and downed the sec­
ond.
Nick poured him one more and took the can back to the
kitchen and locked it in the chest. “Sun he come up many
times,” he said, returning.
Cohill shook his head ruefully. “ Not so many times,” he
280 N IK IT A E IS E N H O W E R J O N E S

said. “Not for me, anyway.” When Nick looked at him ques-
tioningly, he let the cat out of the bag, hoping it would obtain
him another drink: “ I’m blasting off day after tomorrow,” he
said. “At 0430, to be exact.” In view of the fact that Colonel
Dennison was going to release the information the next day
and in view of the fact that it would come as no surprise to
most of the men, the breach of security was but a minor one.
It came as no surprise to Nick either, but he didn’t let on.
He didn’t go back to the kitchen and get the can of whiskey
either. Cohill sighed. “And I thought you were my friend,”
he said.
“ Nikita good fella friend belong you,” Nick said. “Come
along bar sun he go down long time little bit, you see.”
Cohill beamed. “ King Sholomon, I shalute you,” he said,
and staggered out into the night.
Nick’s smile did not diminish. If anything, it grew wider.
Before he turned in that night (he slept in a small room off
the kitchen), he stepped outside and looked at the stars. Pluto
was a smidgin of light no larger than a flyspeck. hanging low
on the horizon; but to him it was diamond-bright and beauti­
ful—the cynosure of the heavens. After a while he went back
inside and lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes and tried
to sleep.

Next night the bar was full all evening. Everyone wanted
to toast Captain Cohill and wish him Godspeed, and during
the course of the evening, everyone, including Colonel Denni­
son, did. Unfortunately for Cohill, however, the colonel never
once left his side, and he was limited to his own ration, the
two shots of which he dispatched in the first five seconds.
Throughout the remainder of the proceedings he kept glanc­
ing at the clock and licking his lips.
Colonel Dennison lingered till after everyone else had gone.
Just before he left he came over and shook Cohill’s hand,
placing his other hand on Cohill’s shoulder. “ Yours is a mis­
sion fraught with peril,” he said sententiously. “ But know
that we here at the base who only stand and wait are with
 ROBERT F, Y O U N G 281

you in the spirit if not the flesh, and that when you plant the
flag, our hands as well as yours will be upon the staff. Fare­
well, Captain. Godspeed!”
After he had gone, Nick dimmed the lights. Cohill was
standing at the end of the bar, staring into a glass that had
been empty hours ago. When he raised his eyes, Nick saw the
naked fear in them, and his smile grew even wider than the
world. He hurried into the kitchen, and this time when he re­
turned, he bore two quart cans of whiskey.
Cohill’s hand trembled as he tossed off the first three
shots; after that, though, it steadied, and some of the fear
faded from his eyes. He seemed inordinately eager to talk
about his girl friends, and Nick, far from objecting, encour­
aged him. He dwelt longest on the red-headed nurse he had
met on his last furlough. “Stacked, by God!” he said.
“Stacked like a starship! And beautiful as space. Hair the
color of Mars-light; eyes as blue as the belt of Orion; skin as
golden as the sun .. . Afterward, though, she was the same as
all the others.” He stared at his empty glass. Nick filled it
again, “ ’s funny,” Cohill went on. “The minute that happens,
they change. They’re not any good any more.” He downed
the shot. “ It was the same way with Iphigenia.”
Nick made no comment, but puzzlement must have shown
in his brown eyes; either that, or Cohill wanted to talk about
Iphigenia. “She was the starship I made my first solo in,” he
explained. “Tall, graceful, delicate—far lovelier than a real
woman. A thousand times nobler. And yet when she gave me
what I wanted I found out I didn’t really want it after all. I
wanted something else, I don’t know what, and I hated her
for not giving it to me. ’s funny,” he repeated.
Nick looked at him keenly, filled his glass again. Still he
said nothing. “ I hate ’em all,” Cohill said, tossing off the
shot. “They’re all alike, every one of them!” He raised his
eyes to the thick-paned window behind the bar and gazed at
the distant silhouette of the Starhope. “ I hate you too!” he
shouted suddenly, and flung his glass at the panes.
The glass shattered, fell to the floor. Imperturbably, Nick
282 N IK IT A E IS E N H O W E R JO N E S

produced another, set it on the bar and filled it. Cohill’s ac­
tion had been more revelatory than a thousand words. He did
not drink because he feared death—he drank because he
wanted it and couldn’t get it. He had become a pilot because
he wanted it, and had pretended to himself that what he real­
ly wanted was the stars—
Abruptly Nick wondered why he really wanted the stars.
Cohill’s outburst seemed to have calmed him. He raised
the new glass to his lips, “Keeper of the Golden Keesh, I sha-
lute you,” he said, and downed the whiskey.
Nick smiled and filled the glass again. “ Big fella marster
colonel,” he said. “He say’m good-by sun he come up?”
Cohill shook his head. “No more good-bys. Tomorrow
morning I go straight to the ship when the CQ wakes me.
The colonel and all the off-duty pershonnel will be in the
tower for the countdown.”
“ Big fella marster colonel, he say’m good-by over talk-
talk?”
Cohill looked at him blankly for a moment. Then: “Oh,
you mean the radio.” He shook his head again. "No. I repeat
the last ten seconds of the countdown so they’ll know I'm all
right. Thash all.”
Nick relaxed, not visibly, but inside him where the tight
knot of worry was. It was a point that had bothered him: a
spacesuit concealed your physical characteristics, but a radio
did not do the same for your voice. Carrying on even a brief
conversation might have betrayed him, but counting from ten
to zero on the heels of someone else's words should give him
no trouble.
He poured Cohill another shot. “ Good old King Sholo-
mon.” Cohill said, downing it.
Nick continued to pour. Cohill to drink. The man had an
alcoholic threshold as high as the moon. “ Did I tell you about
Iphigenia?” he asked presently. When Nick continued to
smile warmly at him without answering, he went on:
“Stacked, by God! Beautiful's space. Hair the color Marsh-
light; eyes blue’s Orion's belt; skin's golden as the shun.” He
 R O B E R T F . Y O U N G 283

stared into the glass which Nick had just filled. “I tell you,
Nick, she wash a woman!—but she washn’t any good.” He
drank the whiskey. When he lowered his arm, his elbow
missed the bar and he nearly went down. He righted himself
with difficulty. “ We went on a trip together, you know.”
Half a can later, it was all over, and the captain was slum­
bering peacefully on the floor. Nick trussed him expertly,
stuffed a bar rag in his mouth, secured it and dragged him
into the kitchen. Doubled up, he fitted nicely into the flour
bin. Avoiding the sentry, Nick made his way across the
grounds to Cohill’s private quarters and let himself inside.
Cohill’s spacesuit was hanging on the wall. He checked its
gauges and connections, then tried it on for size. He found
that by stuffing the feet with several odds and ends of Co-
hill’s clothing he could manage it quite nicely. Finally he took
off the suit, laid it on the bed, and armed with a length of
rope, squatted down by the door to await the coming of the
CQ.

“There he is now,” Colonel Dennison said. “Right on

time.”
The other men in the tower room followed his eyes. 0430
represented dawn Earth time, but dawn was an unknown
quality on Miranda, and the spacesuited figure walking slow­
ly toward the locks was hardly more than a ghostly blur.
“ Looks kind of insignificant, doesn’t he, sir,” Barnaby said.
“ Man is an insignificant creature when you use only his
stature for a criterion,” said the colonel. “ But when you use
his imagination as well, he is bigger than the cosmos.” The
colonel still believed that civilization was on the level.
“Yes sir, that’s true,” Barnaby said.
The spacesuited figure was obscured by the locks now.
When it emerged a moment later at the tower’s base, it
waved one arm in an awkward farewell to the men gazing
down from above. Then it started walking slowly across the
ice-clad plain toward the Starhope.
Colonel Dennison began to fidget. He knew of course that
284 N IK IT A E IS E N H O W E R JO N E S

you had to walk slowly with only Miranda’s tenuous gravity

to hold you down, but it seemed to him that Cohill was over­
doing it. It began to look as though the spacesuited figure
would never reach the ship, but finally it did. Slowly, it start­
ed up the metal Jacob’s ladder—
The officer in charge of countdown raised the mike to his
lips. “Zero plus ten minutes.”
Cohill should have been in the ship by now, strapping him­
self into the pilot’s seat, but the spacesuited figure was only
halfway up the ladder. The colonel resisted an impulse to
grab the mike out of the countdown officer’s hand and shout,
“ Hurry up, for God’s sake hurry up!” There was plenty of
time, he reassured himself: countdown schedules always al­
lowed for unanticipated delays. Still and all, though—
He was relieved when the figure finally disappeared
through the Starhope s locks. “ Zero plus five minutes,” the
countdown officer said.
Plenty of time, the colonel reassured himself again. After
all, Cohill was a seasoned pilot and ought to know what he
was doing if anybody did. A good dependable man, if ever
there was one. He drank, sure, but lots of pilots drank. Cohill
kind of overdid it sometimes, though—
“Zero plus four minutes—”
—Take that business of his drinking Barnaby's and Blake's
rations. The colonel had been hep to what was going on, but
he had overlooked it because he figured that a man with Co-
hill's responsibilities needed an extra drop or two—
“Zero plus three minutes—
—to relax. The colonel had been careful not to let on he
knew. That was the kind of commanding officer he was. Un­
derstanding, Kind Mag—
“ Zero plus two minutes—”
-Magnanimous. Most commanding officers would have
lowered the boom. But not him. He, Colonel Dennison, un­
derstood men. He knew when to look the other way and when
not to. He knew
 R O B E R T F . Y O U N G 285

“ Zero plus one minute . . . fifty-nine seconds—”

—He knew that the two main pursuits of off-duty space­
men were women and whiskey, and that when you deprived
them of both you were asking for trouble. The colonel stood
up a little straighter—
“Zero plus ten seconds—”
He listened eagerly for the next voice. It followed promptly
on the heels of the countdown officer’s: “Ten seconds.” For
some reason it sounded strained and unnatural.
“ Nine.”
“Nine.”
(Slightly guttural, too.)
“Eight.”
“Eight.”
(Had Cohill been drinking?)
“Seven.”
“Seven.”
(Impossible!)
“ Six.”
“ Sikkis.”
(S ikkis?)
“Five.”
“ Five.”
(Where had he heard that atrocious mispronunciation be­
fore?)
“ Four.”
“Four.”
(Wildly, the colonel searched his mind.)
“Three.”
“Three.”
(Suddenly he remembered: the other night he had asked
the messboy how much coffee there was left—)
“Two.”
“ T w o.”
(— and the messboy had replied, “Sikkis bokkises,” )
“One.”
286 N IK IT A E IS E N H O W E R JO N E S

“One.”
(Good Lord!)
“Zero.”
“Zero.”
“Wait!” the colonel shouted, but he was too late. The Star-
hope had already become a star.

In trajectory, a spaceship is like a painted ship upon a

painted ocean. There is no perceptible movement anywhere.
The stars and the immensities between them compose the in­
ner surface of a gigantic sphere, and in the precise center of
the sphere the ship hangs poised like a shining needle, its
wake a bright thin thread trailing behind it.
In the heart of the ship, if it is a manned one, sits the pilot.
Day after day he sits there. Week after week. He has no
function. He is a passenger, really. A flag man. The inverted
bowl of the viewscope rims his head at eye level, and on its
transparent inner surface he can see infinity, but he can do
nothing about it, save look at it. The viewscope is a dunce
cap, really, a dunce cap several sizes too big for his head
which has slipped down over his eyes and which he lacks the
inclination to raise. And the pilot's seat is the dunce stool on
which he sits while the mechancial pupils carry out their
tasks under the guidance of the mechanical teacher.
The man in this case was a small black one who had read a
comic book underneath a banyan tree one day and had never
been the same since. His name was Nikita Eisenhower
Jones. . .
After leaving Miranda, Nick activated the radio long
enough to inform the base that they would find Captain Co­
hill in the flour bin and the CQ in the closet of Cohill’s room,
then he turned it off in the middle of a furious outburst by
Colonel Dennison and sat back to enjoy the ride.
Pluto was a pale yellow at first, but as the weeks passed, it
transmuted gradually to a glinting blue. Neptune, far away
on its orbit, did not enter into the picture at all, and Nick
 R O B E R T F . Y O U N G 287

would have had no eyes for it if it had. Pluto, and Pluto

alone, had reality.
Eagerly he watched it grow on the inner surface of the
dunce cap. It was not a large planet—indeed, it was only a
refugee moon—but with nothing save the distant stars to
compare it to, it seemed larger than Saturn, larger even than
Jupiter. True, it had no shining rings, no glowing red streak;
but it was beautiful in its own right, and as he watched, its
beauty grew and grew, and the sense of frustration he had
known for so long gave way before a sense of pride.
Why pride? he wondered—and again he wondered why he
really wanted the stars. To Cohill, they spelled death. What
did they spell to him, deep in his unconscious where his true
self lurked?
He shook his head. He did not know.
Turnover took him completely by surprise when it finally
came. He had been expecting it momentarily in one part of
his mind, but the rest of his mind had been so absorbed with
the blue-glinting sphere snowballing toward him that his
awareness was blunted. For a moment he could not under­
stand where the planet had disappeared to, and panic touched
him; then, remembering, he pulled down the viewscope mir­
ror and looked through it at the opposite hemisphere of the
scope. He saw the incandescent rapiers of the braking rockets
lancing down, and the gouts of half-melted ice exploding
from the surface. Again, absorption with his destination
usurped him, and he did not notice the red flashes of the
alarm signal, nor become aware of the insistent ringing of the
bell, till it was too late. Possibly he wouldn’t have had time to
lower the third foot, which had failed to obey the impulse of
the Starhope's brain, in any case.
As crashes go, it was not a spectacular one. But it was an
effective one insofar as his hopes of ever returning to Mir­
anda were concerned. The Starhope fell on its side, the im­
pact springing both the inner and the outer locks. Hearing
the crescendoing hiss of escaping air, he wriggled quickly into
288 N IK IT A E IS E N H O W E R JO N E S

Cohill’s spacesuit. He barely had time to seal the helmet be­

fore the interior of the ship became a vacuum with a mean
temperature of -3 5 0 degrees Fahrenheit.
He tried the radio first, found it dead. Then for a long
while he could not think. Finally he got the flag and managed
to squeeze through the locks with it. Some distance from the
ship he held the base of its staff to the ice and turned on the
tiny motor that activated the roots. The steel roots penetrated
deeply into the ice and spread out, and the steel staff and its
flexible-foil flag became a new feature of the Plutonian land­
scape.
Nick raised his eyes then—and saw the plain. He turned—
and saw the plain. He turned again, and again, and every
time he turned he saw the vast glinting emptiness rolling
away in wave after frozen wave to the dark star-flecked edge
of space.
He dropped his eyes and went back to the ship, intending
to re-enter it. But during his absence, it had settled still fur­
ther, and the sprung locks had closed. He tried to open them,
but the re-entry switch was dead—as dead as he was shortly
going to be.
He turned away and started walking out over the plain. He
did not intend to go far, but he was not thinking clearly, and
he must have covered a quarter of a mile before he stopped
and turned around. His shocked eyes took in nothingness.
Blue-glinting nothingness. Both the ship and the flag had
blended into the ice-bejeweled landscape.
He started back in the direction from which he thought he
had come. A half hour passed, and the blue-glinting plain re­
mained unchanged. He reversed his direction. To no avail.
The ship and the flag were lost. Or perhaps it was he who
was lost. He shurgged his shoulders. It did not matter. He
would never see Miranda again anyway. Miranda or Malaita.
He went on walking. His heating unit was not functioning
properly, and he could feel the in-creeping cold in his hands
and feet. That did not matter either: there was only about a
 R O B E R T F . Y O U N G 289

two-hour supply of oxygen left in his tanks, and if the cold

didn’t get him, asphyxiation would. After a while he began
thinking that perhaps Pluto was inhabited. There might even
be cities. Perhaps if he looked long enough he might find one.
He looked and he looked. He was surprised when he came to
the jungle. It was a Malaitan jungle—no question about
that—though what it was doing on Pluto he could not fath­
om. He plunged into it eagerly, and the familiar trees rose re­
assuringly around him. He was overjoyed when he came to
the yam patch, and he dropped down on his hands and knees
and began digging in the rich dark soil with his hands.
After a while his fingers began to hurt, and raising them
before his eyes he saw to his surprise that they were encased
in thick unwieldy gloves. The yam patch faded away then,
and the trees; and the plain came back, blue-glinting and ma­
levolent, with the cold stars glittering above it.
He lay down upon his back and looked up at the stars. He
was very tired. One of the stars was the sun, perhaps, but he
had no idea which one it was. The heart of the First Fire that
Kamikau, millennia before, had thrown into the sky. He
smiled wanly. Old Kuvi-Kavi’s cosmogony was badly in need
of revision. It accounted for the moon and the sun and the
stars, but how about the planets? Whose heads were they?
And suddenly Nikita Eisenhower Jones understood—in the
last lucid moment ever to be granted to him—why he had
wanted the stars.
He could have laughed if he had had the strength. It was
ironic really. And it proved once and forever that the essen­
tial nature of man—regardless of his creed or color-Hiad not
changed since the first primate had climbed down from the
trees and taken up residence in a cave; that, while man’s
goals might seem noble on the surface, they were basically no
different from the selfish goals of his ancestors.
But perhaps the time might come when he would rise
above himself and act out of nobler motives. And against that
time, his primitive yearning for the stars would stand him in
290 N IK IT A E IS E N H O W E R JO N E S

good stead. The conquest of the solar system was a part of a

bridge that would eventually connect it with other systems;
perhaps when the bridge was a finished product, man would
be a finished product too.

He felt quite comfortable now—and warm, too, if you

could call numbness warmth. But the lucid moment had
passed. What name you gammon along me, big fella marster
God? he said. What name you gammon along me? Big fella
sun he long way too much. Kaikai, he stop no m ore. . .
Around him, the plain stretched away to the dark and sound­
less sea of space, and above him the stars shone coldly down.
He raised his arms with the last residue of his strength and
tried to touch them . . . and as he did so he felt the ground
stir beneath his back. Slowly, the plain, the ice, the very bed­
rock, became a cold integral part of him. He saw the blue-
glinting mountains of his shoulders spreading massively away
into the pale distances and he became aware of the cold,
crushing weight of his vast blue-glinting body. He felt the
awesome breath of absolute zero reach out and touch his
Brobdingnagian face. Lying there, he became mankind—
mankind straining agonizingly outward, his attenuated body
light-years long, reaching hungrily for the stars, and brushing
their cold cruel light with his tense yearning fingertips.
 COMETS

Except for the Sun and Moon and the five bright planets (Mer­
cury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) the only members of the
Solar system ever noted by human beings in pretelescopic days
were occasional comets.
Because the comets came and went irregularly, because they
had irregular shapes that could be imagined to resemble
swords, or wailing women with loose streaming hair, they were
thought to be omens of disaster, and their presence in the sky
panicked populations.
One early scientific look at comets was by Aristotle in the
fourth century b.c. Since he believed that the heavenly bodies
all moved in absolutely regular motions and were otherwise
changeless, he could not believe that the comets were heavenly
bodies. He felt they were flaming gases that were part of the at­
mosphere. Of course, he felt the atmosphere extended to the
Moon’s orbit, so that comets could be atmospheric and yet still
not be very close to Earth’s surface.
It was not till 1577 that Tycho Brahe, by failing to measure
the parallax of a bright comet, demonstrated them to exist be­
yond the orbit of the Moon, perhaps far beyond.
Then the telescope was invented and made possible closer
and more accurate observations of positions and movements.
Isaac Newton worked out his law of gravitation, which made it
possible to determine what the movements must be. Finally, in
1705, Newton’s friend Edmund Halley calculated the orbit of a

291
292 C O M E T S

comet for the first time— and it has been known as Halley’s
comet ever since.
It turned out that Halley’s comet moved in a very elongated
cigar-shaped orbit that brought it quite near the Sun at one end,
but took it far beyond the orbit of Saturn, then the farthest-
known planet, at the other.
By 1930, when Pluto was discovered, a planet was finally
found whose orbit carried it beyond the extreme recession of
Halley’s comet, but by then it was well known that other comets
looped around the Sun in such a way as to recede to distances
many times that of even Pluto. It is for this reason that “ The
Comet, the Cairn and the Capsule" is placed last in the book.
The first hint as to the chemical structure of comets came in
the 1860s, when William Huggins analyzed the spectrum of one
and found that it contained carbon compounds. As the decades
passed, it seemed to make sense that the comets consist of
the lighter elements, as the outer planets did. After all, the com­
ets are creatures of the outer regions of the Solar system,
where the light elements and their compounds are not boiled off
by the heat of the Sun.
In 1949, Fred Lawrence Whipple suggested that the comets
were made up for the most part of icy materials in which rocky
or metallic particles might be embedded as dust grains or small
pebbles. That might be the structure all the way through, or in
some cases there might be a rocky core.
As comets move around the Sun, the ices vaporize when the
comets pass near the Sun. The dust particles are freed, sur­
round the comet with a haze, and are swept back by the Solar
wind into a long tail facing away from the Sun. With each pas­
sage around the Sun, cometary mass is lost until, after a period
short in comparison with the duration of the Solar system, the
comet wastes away altogether. It may become nothing but dust
that spreads throughout the cometary orbit; or a rocky core
may be left that will continue to circle the Sun without forming a
tail and with only the merest haze to distinguish it from an aster­
oid.
 C O M E T S 293

Whipple’s theory has looked increasingly good with the

years, and “ The Comet, the Cairn and the Capsule” pictures a
Whipple-like comet with considerable accurate detail.
But if comets are so short-lived, why do so many still circle
the Sun? In 1950, Jan Hendrik Oort suggested that there is a
kind of “ cometoid belt” about the Sun, at a distance of one or
two light-years. This contains as many as 100 billion tiny bodies
made of hard-frozen icy materials.
Every once in a while, one of them, influenced by the gravita­
tional pull of the nearer stars, will move away from the Solar
system altogether, or will drop in toward the Sun. Those that
enter the planetary regions will return periodically, and may be
influenced by planetary attractions to remain there permanently.
Once within the planetary system, a comet’s lifetime is short—
but new ones are always coming in.
“ The Comet, the Cairn and the Capsule” was first published
in mid-1972 and must therefore have been written in late 1971.
Between the writing and publication Pioneer 10 was sent prob­
ing in March 1972, toward Jupiter. Pioneer 10 carried a mes­
sage to the stars very much like the one described in the story,
which is thus a startling and reasonably accurate prediction of
something that was actually to happen.
To be sure, no comet ever observed has been found to have
a distinctly hyperbolic orbit (one that would indicate it had come
from another stellar system, would move around the Sun once,
and would then leave forever). Still— you can never tell. The
next large comet to appear may be such an object.
 The Comet,
the Cairn and the Capsule
DUNCAN LUNAN

Three was the magic number in the design of the spaceship

Newtonian. At launch, there had been three reaction mass
tanks side by side in what older designers still called “Titan
III configuration.” A and B tanks had given their all to re-
dezvous orbit insertion and been jettisoned, taking with them
the auxiliary thrust chambers and large segments of radiation
shielding. (The turbines and as much as possible of the pump
system were on this side of the shielding, and of course the
helium feed tanks were right up this end, so EVA repair was
at least possible, if needed.) There remained the sustainer
motor, pile, shielding, C tank, then the service module and
crew sphere, flanked by two modified lunar shuttles. One was
topped by a capsule (Penetration Module), the other by a
winged Earth Lander. When the Lander was sunward and its
shadow fell on the crew sphere, it made the ship look like a
ceremonial trident hanging in space.
Inside the ship, three was anything but a magic number.
Paxton and Schemer had taken to sleeping in the Lander and
Penetration Module, respectively, to get away from Sullivan
and each other. It might be because, for the first time ever,
they were traveling at a velocity which would take them out
of the Solar System unless diminished; the psychologists at
Mission Control had no other explanation for the unforeseen
development; but the clash of personalities had arisen three

294
 D U N C A N L U N A N 295

weeks out from Earth, and escalated over the weeks follow­
ing. In the last few days they had been meeting only to col­
lect their rations at feeding time, and had spoken only during
routine checks.
It might, Schemer thought, have something to do with the
visual aspect of what lay ahead. The comet was now putting
on its full display, less than a week from perihelion, and the
Newtonian was now very close indeed. The awesome specta­
cle of the tail, millions of miles long and beginning to curve
as the nucleus gained speed, was foreshortened out of exis­
tence; they saw only the shock wave of the coma, spraying
out from the bright spot of the nucleus, then pushed back by
solar wind into a great plume against the stars. The ship’s
slow rotation wound the head around the forward window
like the sweep of a celestial radar, but from the side windows
only a faint mist could be seen, fading off into invisibility.
Something so big but only seen from a distance was disturb­
ing, as if the head too might vanish as they approached it.
By now, however, more detail was showing. They could see
shells and smoky patterns in the gas coming off the nucleus,
and the bright star of the nucleus itself had become a sunlike
disk with spikes projecting from it. Behind the nucleus lay a
tunnel of shadow, blurring away at its edges till it vanished
into the glowing haze of the tail. Now the coma filled all the
sky ahead, and was beginning to move across the field of
view; it was time for the Newtonian to match orbit. Hyper­
bolic orbit, rare indeed, this comet was a stranger to the So­
lar System, and would never return.
The three astronauts strapped into their couches and got
down to work, with a minimum of conversation. Mission
Control, far enough away in any case to have little effect on
the quarrels, was taking a business attitude—the mission had
to go on, whatever the clash of personalities. The ship’s rota­
tion was halted, last refinements were applied to the burn
computations, and the Newtonian turned away from the com­
et. The burn was a relatively short one at max chamber tem-
296 T H E C O M E T , T H E C A IR N A N D T H E C A P S U L E

perature, to boost the hydrogen jet past the comet altogether.

If those superheated ions impinged on the coma, burning into
those fragile shells, all the scientific objectives could be frus­
trated. There was no chance the crew would let that happen,
taking out their resentments on the celestial body: each man’s
specialty was now taking absolute priority, as far as he was
concerned.
They were much nearer the comet when Schemer saw it
next, from the observation turret on the crew sphere, when
the ship turned back to face it. The fuming gases around it
seemed motionless, but after some minutes changes could be
detected. The dazzling spikes around the nucleus were no
longer sharp, but still too blurred overall by intervening gas
and ice crystals for the telescope to resolve them. Probing
with radar and laser beams, Paxton could tell even less about
them; he was getting a general reflection from a layer about
double the size of the nucleus, which by visual estimate was
six hundred miles across. Schemer suspected that the spikes
were internal reflections in a cloud of ice fragments orbiting
the nucleus, but the changing light patterns he detected
might just be due to the movement of gases out and back.
“At any rate,” he reported, “ I can't see any obvious haz­
ards to Penetration.”
“ Radar seems to confirm that,” Paxton broadcast. “The
boundary layer I’m getting seems to be quite clearly defined.
If we’re following the programmed approach, we won’t run
suddenly into any problems.”
They waited, still moving slowly toward the comet, for the
signal to journey to Earth and the reply to amble back. A
great deal of power was going into the Newtonian signal, to
overcome their narrow separation from the sun. Interference
had proved unexpectedly serious, and Sullivan’s clamp-down
on personal messages had been the first source of friction
aboard. It wasn’t as if they were overworking fuel cells, with
power coming direct from the pile, and Schemer suspected
that Sullivan, himself unmarried, was actively jealous of their
 D U N C A N L U N A N 297

daily hook-ups to their homes. Mission Control should have

realized that a man without a wife and children could be
most homesick of all and arranged someone to talk personally
to the mission commander, but Schemer could hardly suggest
that on open circuit with Sullivan right beside him. So Sulli­
van kept all radio time for business, and Schemer and Paxton
lost a valued link with home.
The Mission Control bleep sounded. “Roger, no visible
hazards. We agree that you should prepare for Penetration.
Confirm launch readiness for final go/no-go decision. Over.”
Bleep.
“Okay, Dave,” said Schemer, speaking directly to Paxton
for the first time today. He didn’t have much against Paxton,
really, but he always felt he was talking across Sullivan when
he addressed him. Perhaps the same feeling accounted for
Paxton’s incivility to him. “ Why don’t you move across into
the PM, and I’ll follow you through.” He put the lens caps
back on the turret instruments and stowed them for the next
deceleration, then pulled himself feet-first back into the cen­
ter section of the sphere. Sullivan didn’t speak as he worked
his way across, so neither did he.
Personnel selection had been almost wholly successful, he
conceded as they checked out the Penetration Module. In
space fiction (he’d never had time to read any, but he knew
just what it was like) at least one member of the crew had to
be a maniac, an agoraphobe, or something equally hard to
detect, bent on aborting the mission five minutes after liftoff.
But though the longest space flight yet had fallen down on
compatibility, the conflict didn’t even touch the mission pro­
gram. After his unreasonable ruling on the signals, Sullivan
had found it necessary to impose his authority in a string of
minor matters, probably because he knew he had been unrea­
sonable. He, Paxton and Schemer had worked up a real dis­
like of one another, but they weren’t thinking of curtailing
the flight.
There was a way to curtail the flight, but it was intended
298 T H E C O M E T , T H E C A IR N A N D T H E C A P S U L E

for more serious difficulty than this. After perihelion they

had an “abort window,” a chance to fire the motor and drop
right back, returning to Earth three months later. Otherwise,
riding outward with the comet as they studied it, they would
make their separation burn not far from Earth’s orbit and
meet Earth itself nine months later. Fifteen months’ voyage,
or six; and they were going for fifteen, without hesitation.
There could still be a scientific payoff if they had to abort.
The Lander’s cargo space contained a payload at present, a
much less sophisticated payload than the PM ’s. If Penetra­
tion of the comet proved impossible, they could launch a nu­
clear device which, hopefully sinking to the nucleus before
detonation, would supply some of the data they hoped to get
less violently from Penetration, and the experimental pack­
age—in effect, a complete space probe—they would leave be­
hind.
The checks went through without incident, and they re­
ceived a go for launch. They counted down the separation,
and Paxton turned the craft for Sullivan's visual inspection.
Then they moved out laterally, and Sullivan turned the New­
tonian around once more. The final burn was gentle, the flar­
ing gases missing the PM and the comet, bringing the space­
ship to rest in the observation station it would hold for the
next fourteen days. The PM traveled on with its original mo­
mentum, toward the hazed brilliance of the cometary nucle­
us.
There was no spectacle or sensation when they entered the
coma. Like the end of the rainbow, the smoky plumes of gas
receded and dissolved before them. But little by little the
glow around the nucleus spread above them and below, wax­
ing brighter and separating into bars and columns like auro­
ras. Now the spikes were breaking up, visually, into discrete
sources—tens, dozens, hundreds—each one brilliantly reflect­
ing the sunlight along spikes to its own. By the time the
streamers of haze completely surrounded the capsule, the nu-
 D U N C A N L U N A N 299

cleus ahead was a lattice of light beams, with what seemed to

be a second sun at its heart.
“ We’re going to slow the ship,” Paxton reported, activating
fly-by-wire. “ Much of what looked solid from outside is sepa­
rating now. There’s a huge shell of ice fragments, probably
orbiting in clusters, though gravity’s so low you can’t detect
it. If the nucleus itself was move massive, we’d probably get a
ring, like Saturn’s. As it is, I don’t see any problems in con­
tinuing Penetration. We can treat this stuff as weightless and
stationary.”
They burned their chemical motors to slow up; only briefly,
for gravitational acceleration was negligible. Making less
than five hundred miles an hour, the PM traveled into the
three-dimensional ice field.
The “descent” was okay; they could see the solid surface
they were making for, and bodies in their path separated vi­
sually and on radar in plenty of time to be avoided. Waves of
sun-driven gases passed them from the huge bergs, too ten­
uous to affect visibility.
“ By dead reckoning, we’re two hundred miles inside,” Pax­
ton radioed. The PM ’s signals were being relayed through the
Newtonian to Earth (another reason for the ship’s sunward
position), and they’d had loss of signal several times as they
passed floating masses. “The concentration of material is in­
creasing, and we’re cutting speed right now with another thir­
ty-second burn. As well as ice masses, we’re now seeing dark
rocky fragments, from which all the gases must have sub­
limed away. They’re all of considerable size, up to hundreds
of feet across. Our micrometeor counters have not registered
any significant increases in impacts, and I’d deduce from that
that the smaller rock fragments are being carried out into the
tail by sunlight pressure and solar wind. This would seem to
confirm the origin of meteors along cometary orbits.”
“Roger, Dave,” Mission Control said eventually. “We’re
happy with your fuel consumption, as indicated by Mike’s
300 T H E C O M E T , T H E C A IR N A N D T H E C A P S U L E

last set of figures, but there’s some anxiety here about your
frequent use of vernier and braking engines. Your last burn
should reduce the need for frequent restarts. Of course, each
engine should be able to take several hundred separate burns,
but we’d like you to keep to fewer, longer burns if possible.”
This was a problem they had foreseen. In a stronger gravi-
tity field, descending, they could keep the motors burning
steadily at low thrust; but for such an approach to the comet,
with the drawn-out Penetration through the rock and ice
field, they’d have to come in much too fast. Conversely, if
they’d started slowly enough to make the Penetration on atti­
tude control jets, it would have taken far too long. But by
now the situation had changed.
“ We’re nearing shoals, that’s the best way I can put it,”
said Paxton. “There’s a lot of loose stuff ahead, forming an
inclined plane across our line of Penetration. I’d say it's ma­
terial which broke away from the nucleus in the first major
solar heating, before the coma began to form and scatter the
incident radiation. This ahead of us is the lighter stuff, begin­
ning to drift backward as the cloud of new fragments takes
up a conical shape. Its transverse velocity is pretty well negli­
gible, and we should go through without trouble. We’re going
now to continuous vernier burn.”
Tail-first, motors idling, they slid through the final barrier.
Paxton held the ship confidently on fly-by-wire, turning the
gimballed verniers for brief bursts to avoid denser clouds of
fragments. Visibility was poorer now, w'ith so many reflecting
surfaces around that they were back to the lattice effect, soft­
ened now by the greater density of gases. Then suddently the
jeweled reefs were above them, and they began their final
braking.
“ We’re now in the lee of the stone nucleus, starting our fi­
nal approach. The body looks to be loosely compacted chunks
of rock and ice, with gravity very low. The streams of gas and
pieces breaking away are all coming from the area under di-
 D U N C A N L U N A N 301

rect sunlight, the surface appears stable along a broad strip

toward the terminator.”
“I’m getting a really bright radar echo from about two-
thirds of the way up the terminator,” Schemer added. “ We
have enough fuel to select that for our touchdown.”
Paxton began the course change. “ If it’s an anomaly, we’ll
want a look at that.”
The radar anomaly stayed conspicuous as the PM closed
with it. “That’s a bright echo,” Schemer said. “It could al­
most be a metal outcrop.”
“ I’ll land as close to it as I can. There’s a promising site
right next to the thing. I can see it now. It does look like met­
al. Put the radar into landing mode.”
“Landing mode activated.”
The icy horizon came up around them as Paxton throttled
back. Ignoring the feeble attraction of the nucleus, he was
flying the ship all the way to the surface. He shut off the
braking engine and let the remnants of their approach veloc­
ity take them down. Schemer was calling off the approach
figures, so he didn’t see the anomaly come into view.
Paxton did, and he interrupted the commentary. “Control,
the anomaly is artificial. I say again, the anomaly is an artifi­
cial object. We are go for touchdown, well within fuel re­
serves. . . . Contact light!”
“Contact light is on,” Schemer confirmed. “The PM has
landed. Our inclination is three degrees, repeat three degrees.
Fuel and oxidizer residuals as follows . . . ”
They were through the landing checks and had given them­
selves go for a three-minute stay when the Earth reaction
came back. “ We’re getting pretty bad interference on your
signal now, especially in the final stage of descent. Repeat de­
scription of the anomaly, repeat description of the anomaly.”
Bleep.
“I say again, the anomaly is an artificial object, repeat ar­
tificial. Now here we go for the details.” Turning to the
302 T H E C O M E T , T H E C A IR N A N D T H E C A P S U L E

right, Paxton could just see the thing from his couch. “It
looks like the bottom half of a totem pole. I’d say there are
three distinct sections, one on top of the other. The bottom
one is gold, or covered in gold foil, cylindrical, with heat radi­
ator panels projecting. The one above that is roughly spheri­
cal, black and silver, with solar cell panels on the surface and
projecting antennas. The top section is hexagonal for three-
fourths of the way up, then it becomes a straight cylinder of
lesser diameter. It too is gold, and some of the panels of the
hexagon have solar cells. There are connecting rods from it
on one side, anchoring it to the bottom section. I don't think
they touch the sphere at all.”
“We have your landing status report," said Mission Con­
trol. “On the basis of that, we’ll give you go to stay for twelve
hours. Let us have your computer readout, and we'll assess
status for the full mission.” Bleep.
“Roger,” said Schemer. “Secondary antenna is now de­
ployed and locked on Newtonian for telemetry. Computer
readout begins in three seconds—two, one, mark!" He
pressed the switch and the transmission light went on.
The reply to Paxton’s description came back. “ We copy the
appearance of the object, Dave. Can you estimate the func­
tion or purpose of the device?" Bleep.
Paxton was still staring to the right. “The more I look at it,
the more I think it’s not one device but three. The three sec­
tions certainly don’t add up to a unit like the three segments
of the PM. Nor, I think, is any one of the sections a space­
craft in itself. I’d say each of them is a scientific package like
the one in our cargo compartment. Over."
“We have your computer readout," said Mission Control.
“ You are go to stay for the full mission." Bleep.
“Great. Now let me see this thing." Schemer pushed off
his straps and sat up on his couch, then rose and turned to see
out of the port. Paxton sat up more slowly. They both looked
out in silence until Control came back on.
“ Dave, we could accept that some other national group
 D U N C A N L U N A N 303

might have reached the comet some days ahead of us. But
there hasn’t been time for three complete scientific payloads
to be landed even if three ships the size of Newtonian could
be launched in secret.” Bleep.
“ Roger, Control, that confirms our assessment,” said Pax­
ton. Schemer glanced at him in surprise. “ We’re looking at
objects from outside the Solar System altogether, like the
comet itself. Sometime in the past, when this nucleus swung
past another sun, there was another landing here—maybe
more than one.”
“ If that’s true, said Schemer, “then the object might be
millions of years old. This is a fast comet, but over interstel­
lar distances. . . ”
“Not less than a million years,” Paxton agreed. “Well, let’s
eat.”
“ Huh? Oh, yes.” Their program called for a meal and then
a sleep period. The discovery had knocked Schemer out of
the routine, though he hadn’t been thinking of going outside.
The Penetration descent had left him fatigued, but he could
have looked at the object a long time yet. “Okay, you break
out the food packs and I’ll get some pictures out of the win­
dow.”
He even took some shots out of the other windows, of the
comet’s surface, and the bright columns of gas rising past the
sun’s disk from over the horizon. The sublimation mechanism
was his speciality, was what he’d come here to study, but it
was taking place in his thoughts.

Next “day” they depressurized the command module, and

Paxton made his way carefully down the side of the ship.
Gravity was so low that effectively they were still in free-fall,
but the exhausts had softened the surface enough for the
landing legs to grip. Schemer waited in the hatch while Pax­
ton collected a contingency sample from the surface, sending
it back up on his line; then he opened up the cargo section
and began passing down the research tools. After he descend-
304 T H E C O M E T , T H E C A IR N A N D T H E C A P S U L E

ed himself, they were to start taking cores and putting down

probes into the comet, but obviously that had to wait. Taking
the cameras, they maneuvered on their jet packs toward the
object.
It was roughly the same height as the Penetration Module,
but all three sections were greater than it in diameter.
Schemer had thought, in the capsule, it was somewhat small­
er; but sizes and distances were hard to judge. The irregular
horizon was close everywhere, but there was a big outcrop of
ice behind the object; and light reflected from the crag lit up
the side away from the sun, giving the structure a luminous
ethereality. Close up, they could see that the bottom section
was clear of the surface. In the shadow beneath it their torch­
es found a great golden spike, driven deep into the frozen
gases of the comet.
“Whoever put down the first one, meant it to hold,” said
Paxton to Earth. “ From the taper on the length we can see,
which is about four feet, I would estimate that the spike
would hold through at least one stellar passage even on the
sunward side of the comet. Maybe the makers knew where
the comet was going next, somewhere relatively close, and de­
cided to use it as an interstellar probe. These radiator panels
imply that there was a big power plant in here, enough to
carry a signal over interstellar distances, maybe beaming its
accumulated data once it got well out from the star again. It
could be storing information to do that again right now, but
the panels are at exactly the temperature of our surround­
ings, so I’d guess the pile’s wholly inert. It's had millions of
years to cool right down,”
“ Better say tens of millions, or even hundreds,” Schemer
corrected from above. "Once the probe was beyond use to its
makers, it served as an anchorage for other people’s. The
spheroid was welded to its top, covering the antenna unit.”
“And the top section added later still,” said Paxton.
“ When I said the three didn’t make anything in combination,
I was wrong. What we have here is a cairn.”
 D U N C A N L U N A N 305

“ Fantastic.” Schemer was floating by the upper unit tak­

ing pictures. “These upper two could still be active, Dave,
since they have solar cells. Maybe they’re recording data on
us right now.”
“ If the solar cells are still active after a million years in the
interstellar dark, they’re pretty good,” said Paxton. “ But if
they have omnidirectional antennas, maybe we’ll pick up
something when we’re tracking our own instrument pack­
age.”
“That would be fantastic! If we could compare their trans­
missions with our probe’s, we could maybe decode them.
Then perhaps we could interrogate them about the planetary
systems they originally passed through. It would be an inter­
stellar probe for us—a time probe as well as a space one!”
“ Great,” said Paxton. “If we could get the second probe’s
recording of the third probe’s system, we’d get some actual
data about the people who put the third probe here.”
But on closer examination, these were mere dreams. All
three probes were inert, so thoroughly frozen that the ice
crystals frosting them couldn’t be brushed off. Schemer and
Paxton didn’t apply any force for fear that the whole struc­
ture would shatter; the metals must be nightmarishly brittle.
There didn’t seem to be any prospect of taking the probes
apart, not even of removing data recorders that might be
slowly warmed and interrogated. They couldn’t find any ac­
cess panels, not surprisingly; their own probe was a sealed
unit, almost all solid-state, so its power would last as long as
possible on the outward swing from the sun. They had no
burning or cutting tools to force a way into the cairn; like
their predecessors, they could only photograph the exterior
and leave their own instruments in turn.

The work went on: studying the comet, as intended, as well

as the unexpected marker it carried. Schemer ranged farther
sunward day by day, taking rock and ice samples, studying
the gas flow from the surface and the effects of the coma on
306 THE COMET, THE CAIRN AND THE CAPSULE

sunlight and solar wind. Using a one-man jet platform, he

penetrated the region where fragments were splitting off the
comet, even landing there as the violence of the outbursts di­
minished. The comet was receding swiftly from the sun now,
preceded by the vast length of the tail which would soon con­
tract.
They were coming up to activation time for the automatic
station they would leave behind. One question remained to be
settled, however. It seemed fitting to add the package to the
top of the cairn, but it had been planned to anchor it to the
ice—like the lowest unit of the cairn, though to less depth. In
that position it was to “listen” for tremors in the comet as the
sunward face stabilized, and obviously these would be affect­
ed by transmission through the cairn. It would also measure
the rate of ice fall as the coma gases froze and their crystals
were drawn back to the nucleus. That was less of a problem,
because the precipitation on the upper face of the probe could
be corrected for the height of the cairn, to give the values for
the comet’s surface. However, Mission Control had been
holding up the decision.
When they did return to the subject, they had something
very different in mind. “ From the dimensions you've given us
for the cylinder atop the cairn, it would be possible to grip it
with the landing legs of the PM."
Schemer and Paxton looked at each other. Paxton raised
his eyebrows. “That would be possible. Control," he replied.
“ We could lower the PM to the top of the cairn on the atti­
tude control jets, and tighten up the jacks on the landing legs.
We might even get a weld, with two metal surfaces pressed
together in vacuum there; but I wouldn’t expect the grip to
hold if we tried to pull the cairn out of the ice.”
“Surely that’s not what they have in mind,” said Schemer
as they waited for the signals to course out and back.
“ I can’t think what else they want,” said Paxton. “ We
couldn’t use the central engine, but the four verniers could be
angled sufficiently to keep the flames from impinging on the
 DUNCAN LUNAN 307

cairn. Maybe they want us to bring back the top section, but
we haven’t enough fuel even for that.”
Schemer nodded. Neither of them put his own feelings into
words; by now, they were of one mind concerning the cairn.
Mission Control replied. “As you may imagine, Dave,
there’s a big demand from scientists, and indeed from the
public and their elected representatives, that the cairn be re­
trieved for study. The only way we can figure to do this in­
volves sacrificing the backup capability of the PM and the
Lander, so the final decision will rest with Bob Sullivan as
mission commander. What we plan is for Bob to come down
to you in the Lander and set the nuclear device in the ice at
the edge of the current breakup zone. We calculate that an
explosion at that point has the best chance of blasting the
cairn out of the nucleus. Then we hope that you’d be able to
get remote control of the PM and slow up the cairn with the
vernier engines. With your present fuel reserves, it should re­
turn to the vicinity of the sun within a hundred years. We’d
like to know whether you have any additional comments be­
fore we go to Bob for his decision.” Bleep.
Paxton looked at Schemer. “You tell them,” he said, look­
ing sickened. “I can’t.”
Schemer swallowed hard. “ Nothing to add, Control.
Over.”
After weighing up all the factors, Sullivan accepted the
plan—surprising neither Paxton nor Schemer. His solo Pene­
tration of the comet posed no real problems, because he knew
what to expect. Only the landing might have been tricky, and
for that he would have a talk-down. In due course they saw
the bright flare of the Lander motors descending through the
inclined belt of debris (bigger fragments now, more widely
spaced), and with Schemer on the PM radar and Paxton out­
side, they talked him down without trouble.
Atop its booster, identical to the PM ’s, the winged Lander
made an equilateral triangle with the PM and the cairn. Sul­
livan went through the routine checks, which took him quite
308 THE COMET, THE CAIRN AND THE CAPSULE

a while on his own, then suited up immediately for EVA.

Paxton helped him out, and together they drifted across to
the cairn. Schemer was already there waiting for them. They
floated slowly up the structure, both scientists trying to read
the mission commander’s mind.
At the top of the cairn Sullivan cut his jets and hung there,
sinking imperceptibly in the gravity of the nucleus. “ I
thought it might be an anticlimax,” he said at last, “but that
is absolutely beautiful. Not just in itself, though it has a
strange unity of its own, but in all that it stands for.”
“So it’s got to you as well,” Schemer said, inadequately.
“Yeah. Do you think it will survive disruption of the nucle­
us?”
“I doubt it.” Paxton pointed to the ice bulk beyond. “That
berg alone could crush it, just with the wallop it would pack
tumbling over. That bomb is going to break loose everything
on this side of the nucleus, maybe break the whole comet
apart. 1 don’t think we’ll ever find the cairn again. There’ll be
nothing left of it to find.”
“They only asked us whether it could be set up,” Schemer
said. “Not whether we thought it would work, or whether we
should even try to retain the cairn. Earth wants, and Earth
grabs. They’d sooner smash the cairn than let it go, if they
can’t have it.”
Sullivan shook his head. Outside his helmet, the effect was
just detectable. “ Yeah. It’s too bad.”
“Come and see what Dave has been doing," said Schemer.
“What Dave has been doing?” Sullivan asked as they
floated toward the PM. “Wait a minute. You fellows have
been falling behind on the EVA program.”
“ I've been doing most of that lately," Schemer said weari­
ly. “Sure it might have been a little risky, working so far
from the ship on my own, but I stayed high enough with the
platform to be in touch with Dave, except when I dropped to
take samples. If I hadn’t called again in thirty minutes, he’d
have come for me.”
The PM was before them, the four panels folded down
 DUNCAN LUNAN 309

from the cargo hold like the armored ruff of some giant rep­
tile. Paxton hung over the first of them, indicating his pains­
taking work on the interior of the panel.
“ I brought down the rendezvous laser, unshipped from its
housing, and refocused it,” he said. “We can’t use it to cut
into the cairn, because we haven’t a long enough power line;
but it can engrave these panels, before we blow them clear.
We were going to mount them around our probe, on top of
the cairn. On this one I’ve put the sun, the Earth’s orbit and
the comet’s, and the Newtonian’s path to the comet and back.
I put the Moon beside the Earth so they could identify Earth
in this second diagram at the side.” He had shown the plan­
ets of the Solar System to scale, with their distances from the
sun in astronomical units. “I’ve marked Earth E and the sun
S, so ES is the astronomical unit, and I’ve put our numbers
up to twenty-one along the bottom here so they can work
them out. I couldn’t figure any way to give them the actual
distances, but as least they can chart the Solar System to
scale.
“The next two”—he pointed across—“are star charts,
north and south. I haven’t put much stress on constellation
figures because it’ll be who knows how long before the comet
goes through another inhabited system, but I’ve shown the
relative positions of the Milky Way, the Galactic Poles, M-
thirty-one, M-thirteen and other globulars, the Hyades, the
Pleiades and the Magellanic Clouds. With those points of ref­
erence, people should be able to place where we are and
when; even the open clusters should be good markers for a
Galactic Year or so, provided they can be identified. That’s
for the scientists, the message is ‘Here we are’ and it doesn’t
matter that astronomical distances make it here we were.”
Drifting around the hull, Sullivan met him again at the
fourth panel. “This one should give them the identification.
That’s the Milky Way, with the cross in it showing our posi­
tion now. There are the Magellanics, and there’s Andromeda.
I’ve started dotting in some globular clusters to show what
they are, and then the Pleiades and the rest are obviously
310 THE COMET, THE CAIRN AND THE CAPSULE

open clusters, by elimination. Then down here I’m going to

put a stylized man, woman and child, to show what life is like
on the Earth right now.”
“Dave, those are incredible,” said Sullivan at last.
“I’ve put a lot into them,” said Paxton. “If you didn’t feel
as we do about the cairn, I might not have shown them to
you. We could have blown them off and you’d never have
known.”
“Nobody will ever know if we blow up the comet.” said
Sullivan. “That’s what you’re trying to tell me. We have a
chance here to add to what other intelligent races have be­
gun, to make ourselves known to still others, perhaps, far
from here in space and time. Or we can disrupt the comet
and try to keep the cairn for ourselves." He fell silent for a
moment, accepting that as mission commander the decision
was his. “ Well, I’ve always heard that it was bad luck to
break the chain. But at this stage if we don't plant the bomb
we’ll obviously be disobeying Mission Control. Can we get
around that?”
“ We could mount the PM on the cairn, as ordered." said
Schemer, “and take pictures to prove it. The ship will tell the
next explorers of the comet still more about us. But before
that, while Dave finishes the fourth panel, we tell Control
that we're planting the bomb sunward, where they want it.
But in fact we’ll take it up with us for the first stage of the
ascent, and cast it off when it has enough speed to leave the
comet altogether. The excess fuel that we use for that first
burn will cancel the excess we didn't use planting the
charge.”
“All right,” said Sullivan. “ You go back inside and tell
Mission Control we're moving the Lander sunward. While
Dave’s finishing the panel. I'll take another look at that in­
credible thing over there.”
They moved the PM, instrument package and all, to hover
above the cairn, and this time Sullivan talked them down.
With the legs pushed inward to grip the top cylinder, the PM
looked entirely right sitting up there—shiny and new, still to
 DUNCAN LUNAN 311

acquire the frost film of the lower components. They drew

out the probe’s antennas and instrument booms (the only
frost-deposit record they would get this way) and activated
the package. They were ready to tell Mission Control this
was to get a clear location signal after the explosion, but they
had lost touch with Earth. They could still hear the Newtoni­
ans automatic beacon, but the high-gain antennas out there
had drifted off the planet, the nucleus or both. Probably the
nucleus sensors had wandered off along the illusory spikes.
The brilliant lattice overhead was opening now, beginning to
separate into discrete objects reflecting the sunlight.
Paxton and Schemer backed out of the capsule, bringing
their few belongings. It was strange to come out of the hatch
so high above the comet’s surface; the original cairn was hid­
den by the bulk of the PM booster. “That’s it, I guess,” said
Paxton with a last glance at his artwork.
“ I guess so.” Sullivan had been talking pictures of the new
cairn, twice as high as before with the ship poised on top of
it. “ I wish I’d had more time here.”
They gathered at the Lander hatch, pulled themselves
through into the cabin. Sealing it up and pressurizing, they
left ice and vacuum behind for the last time. Down through
the prelaunch checks, without hitch to the moment of liftoff;
a pause at low thrust, as with the PM, to free the landing legs
from the ice, then up and away, through the roll maneuver
onto course for the Newtonian.
Central engine at low thrust, verniers flaring one way and
another, the Lander made its way up through the inclined
plane of fragments. Beyond it, coasting outward, they let the
bomb go. It drew ahead on its own solid charge, fast enough
to separate entirely from the comet. Sharing all its outward
velocity from the sun, by the time the comet next came to a
solar system the device would be too far away to be associat­
ed with it.
“I wonder if we’ll ever tell what really happened?” mused
Schemer, watching it go.
“ We might someday,” said Sullivan. “Once people see the
312 THE COMET, THE CAIRN AND THE CAPSULE

pictures we’re bringing back, they may turn against the

Space Agency for having tried to kill the comet. The admin­
istration may be glad to hear then that we didn’t plant the
bomb.”
A floating iceberg was growing in their path. They started
their second burn, the verniers pushing the ship aside to miss
the obstacle. Threading a path through the satellites of the
nucleus, the motors fired again and again, until one of them
cracked.
A cluster of red lights came on, the warning buzzer sound­
ed and the ship was tumbled by the asymmetric thrust gener­
ated by the burn-out. Cutoff was automatic, and fly-by-wire
brought the ship back into the burn attitude.
“Rate of approach to nearest hazard," Sullivan demanded.
“Distance one point four miles, three minutes to impact,"
Schemer replied smartly.
“Number three vernier has gone,” said Sullivan. “ We’ll
take a systems check on the others before we burn. Give me
it from item thirty-one, Dave.”
Out of touch with Mission Control, they had to get them­
selves through the emergency. They completed the check
with a minute and a half to spare and made the next burn on
the central engine alone. The approaching ice cliff, spread
with gemlike points, slid past.
Sullivan studied the reefs ahead. “ We'll have to take some
way off this thing,” he declared. “Set up a twenty-second
burn for the central engine, Dave." He drew back the hand
grip for a 180-degree rotation.
“ We’re going to be late back to the Newtonian," said
Schemer as they decelerated.
"Mission Control will sweat,” Sullivan agreed. “ Thev
think an atom bomb’s going off down here. But they won’t
tell your families until they do hear from us, I expect."
De-Penetration was much harder now. With one vernier
out of action, more work would fall on the central engine and
the three verniers remaining; so there was a greater risk of
 DUNCAN LUNAN 313

another chamber failure. Either they could angle the ship for
each burn, loading work onto the central engine, or roll to
bring the other verniers to bear when the missing one was
needed. To conserve fuel in the attitude-control thrusters, in
fact, they would have to use the verniers as much as possible;
but with all those roll maneuvers, they could get off the New­
tonian beam; and if they emerged low on fuel there was no
one over there to come and get them. Control was a three-
man job, and the team clicked smoothly together.
Schemer, on radar and communications, kept them headed
in the right direction. They emerged into the coma in ap­
proximately the right place, and not long afterward the New­
tonian’s radio link locked onto them again. The Lander
moved out toward clear space, the head behind them shrink­
ing now as the new debris from the nucleus drifted into stron­
ger sunlight and began adding its gases to the swelling tail.
“ We were getting worried about you fellows for a while
there,” said Control. “ But you should get back to the Newto­
nian and move out some way before the explosion.” Bleep.
“ Roger, Control,” said Sullivan. “What will we tell them
when there’s no detonation?” he asked the others.
“No detonation,” said Paxton.
“ Right,” said Sullivan, and they all chuckled, relaxed after
the strain of the ascent.
Their hostility to one another was gone, Schemer realized;
hadn’t reared its head even after the stress was removed. The
discovery of the cairn had overshadowed it and dissolved it.
That was the reason—though it hadn’t reached Earth yet—
why the cairn had to remain intact, singing or silent, on its
way between the stars. They had fulfilled the original objec­
tives of their mission; and though photographs alone might
never reveal the secrets of the cairn, they were bringing back
the big reassurance that man wasn’t alone in the immensity
of space and time—and that was payload enough.
 NOTES ABOUT THE AUTHORS

POUL ANDERSON
Born in 1926, Poul Anderson is one of the most honored and m ultitalented
science fiction writers in the world. His alm ost seventy sf and fantasy
books include such notable works as Brain Wave (1954), The H igh Cru­
sade (1960), and Tau Zero (1970). He has also produced several series of
great appeal, most especially his Nicholas Van Rijn stories. In a writing
career that now exceeds thirty years he has been a Guest of H onor at nu­
merous sf conventions and has won five H ugo Awards for his short fiction:
“ The Longest Voyage” (1961), “ No Truce with Kings" (1964). "T he
Sharing of Flesh" (1969), the beautiful “Queen of Air and D arkness"
(1972, N ebula Award 1971), and the haunting “ G oat Song" (1973. N eb u ­
la 1972). H e lives and works in California.

ISAAC ASIMOV
Born in 1920 in Russia, Isaac Asimov has been one of the leading figures
in science fiction since the early 1940s. He received both the H ugo and
N ebula awards for his novel The Gods Them selves (1973 and 1974), but is
best known for the Foundation Trilogy and "I. R obot" and other stories on
the future of artificial intelligence. He was the Guest of Honor a t the 1955
W orld Science Convention. The author of more than 200 books and a lead­
ing science writer, his most recent efforts include In M em ory Yet Green
and Opus 200.

JAMES BUSH
The late (1921-1975) Jam es Blish was a noted sf w riter and critic who
m ade a number of im portant contributions to the field. As an author, he
has left us (from among more than twenty-five books) the notable macro-
historical Cities in Flight series of novels (collected in one volume in 1969);
the Hugo Award-winning A Case o f Conscience (1958), one of the very
best fusions of religious philosophy and science fiction; and the excellent

314
 NOTES ABOUT THE AUTHORS 315

P antropy series of stories collected as The Seedling S tars (1956). H e was

also one of the pioneer literary critics within sf, and his best efforts (before
1970) can be found in The Issue at H and (1964) and M ore Issues at H and
(1970), both published under the pseudonym W illiam Atheling, Jr.

TERRY CARR
T erry C a rr’s excellence as an editor and anthologist (the Ace Specials, one
of the leading Best of the Y ear series in both science fiction and fantasy,
and the Universe series, am ong m any others) has tended to obscure his own
writing talent. In addition to the selection in this volume, his outstanding
short fiction includes “The Dance of the C hanger and the T hree” (1968),
“O zym andias” (1972), and “ T ouchstone” (1964). Circue (1977) is an ex­
cellent and powerful novel.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Born in Som erset, England, in 1917, A rthur C. C larke has been a m ajor
figure in science fiction for more than twenty-five years. Best known for his
novel C hildhood’s E nd (1953) and for his co-authorship of the screenplay
of 2001: A Space Odyssey, he has m aintained a high level of excellence in
his m ore than twenty sf novels and collections. Among his m any outstand­
ing works are Rendezvous with R am a, which won the N ebula in 1973 and
the H ugo in 1974, San d s o f M ars (1952), and A gainst the F all o f N ight
(1953). H e is also a talented short story writer, and his “ M eeting with M e­
dusa” won the N ebula A w ard in 1972. An early champion of space travel,
he m ade m ajor contributions to the propagation of the possibilities of space
flight in such nonfiction books as The E xploration o f Space (1951). H e is
a form er chairm an of the British Interplanetary Society.

FRITZ LEIBER
Born in Chicago in 1910, the son of the noted Am erican actor of the same
nam e, Fritz Leiber is one of the very few writers who has achieved success
in both fantasy and science fiction. Among his almost thirty books and nu­
m erous stories, the following have won m ajor sf awards: The Big Time
(H ugo 1958), The W anderer (H ugo 1965), the story “ Gonna Roll the
Bones” (N ebula 1967, Hugo 1968), the story “ Ship of Shadows” (Hugo
1970), and the story “ 111 M et in L ankhm ar” (N ebula 1970, Hugo 1971).
E qually good are his novels Conjure W ife (1953) and Gather, Darkness
(1951). His best short fiction (including fantasy) can be found in The Best
o f F ritz Leiber (1974).

DUNCAN LUNAN
T he editors know very little about M r. L unan, except th at he lives in Scot­
land and has w ritten some very interesting science fiction, including stories
316 N O T E S A B O U T T H E A U T H O R S

like “H ere Comes the Sun” (1971), “ How to Blow U p A steroids” (1973),
and “The Moon of Thin R eality” (1970). The great m ajority of his A m eri­
can publications have been in I f and Galaxy.

LARRY NIVEN
Born in Los Angeles in 1938, L arry Niven is widely considered one of the
leading writers of “ h a rd ” science fiction. Since his first sf story in 1964, he
has m aintained a consistency of excellence difficult to equal. Am ong the
honors he has won are the H ugo A w ard for the now classic N eutron S ta r
(1967); the N ebula A w ard (1970) and H ugo (1971) for Ringworld; and
the H ugo for his story “ Inconstant M oon” in 1972. His Known Space se­
ries, which includes such books and collections as W orld o f P ta w s (1966),
Protector (1973), and Tales o f Known Space (1975), is one of the best
constructed and carefully thought out of its type. H e achieved considerable
commercial success with his collaborations with Jerry Pournelle. especially
the best-selling L u cifer’s H am m er (1977).

ALAN E. NOURSE
Born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1928, Alan E. N ourse is a practicing physi­
cian as well as an outstanding science fiction writer. His m edical training is
reflected in some of his sf, most notably in books like The Blade R unner
(1974), The M ercy M an (1968), and R x fo r Tom orrow (1971). Among his
many excellent shorter works are the frequently reprinted “ N ightm are
B rother” (1953), “ A M iracle Too M any" (1964), "T he Coffin C ure"
(1957), and “ H ard Bargain” (1958).

ALEXEI PANSHIN
Born in 1940, Alexei Panshin moved from the ranks of fandom (he won a
Hugo for fan writing in 1967) to the heights of professional success when
his novel R ite o f Passage won the N ebula Award in 1968. His other book-
length work includes three novels in the Anthony Villiers series: Starw ell.
The Thurb Revolution (both 1968). and M asque W orld (1969), his excel­
lent short story collection, Farewell to Yesterday's Tom orrow (1975),
which contains his best short fiction, including "H ow Can We Sink W hen
We Can Fly?” (1971), and "Sky Blue" (1972). He is also a noted critic,
producing one of the first book-length studies of a m ajor sf w riter, Heinlein
in Dimension (1968), and most recently, S F in D imension (1978), a collec­
tion of critical essays.

ROBERT SHECKLEY
Born in New York City in 1928, Robert Sheckley has been one of the pre­
mier short story writers in science fiction for nearly thirty years. During
 N O T E S A B O U T T H E A U T H O R S 317

the 1950s his work was featured in G alaxy Science Fiction, and helped to
m ake th a t m agazine the leader in the field in th a t decade. His short fiction
can be found in eight collections, but he richly deserves a “ Best o f . .
book. H is novels include Dimension o f M iracles (1968), The S ta tu s Civil­
ization (1960), and Im m o rta lity, Inc. (1959).

THEODORE L. THOMAS
Born in 1920, Ted T hom as is one of the m ost underrated of modern sf
w riters. As L eonard Lockhard, he has produced a series of excellent stories
on legal them es, which is natural, since he is a practicing lawyer. Notewor­
thy stories include “ Early Bird” (1973), “Satellite Passage” (1958), “ The
D octor” (1967), “ The W eather M an” (1962), “ Decem ber 28th” (1959),
and the excellent “ The F ar Look” (1956). His novels include two collabo­
rations with K ate W ilhelm , The Clone (1965), and The Year o f the Cloud
(1970).

ROBERT F. YOUNG
Born in Silver Creek, New York, in 1915, R obert F. Young has been quiet­
ly producing an impressive body of science fiction short stories for more
than twenty-five years, and his work has been acclaim ed by such writers as
F ritz Leiber and A vram Davidson. A m aster of the short story, his lack of
novel-length work has held down his reputation. H e has had a num ber of
stories selected in Best of the Y ear collections, including “ Clay Suburb”
(1975), “ N ot to Be Opened— ” (1951), “ Jungle D octor” (1955), “ The
Dandelion G irl” (1961), “ G hosts” (1973), and “The Y ears” (1972).
Am ong his most interesting work are three related stories extrapolating the
“ car culture” of the U nited States: “ C hrom e Pastures” (1956), “T hirty
Days H ad Septem ber” (1957), and “ Rom ance in a Tw enty-First Century
U sed-C ar L ot” (1960).
 The Weather on the Sun
Theodore L. Thomas
Brightside Crossing
Alan E. Nourse
Prospector's Special
Robert Sheckley
Waterclap
Isaac Asimov
Hop-Friend
Terry Carr
Barnacle Bull
Poul Anderson
(Winston P Saunders)
Bridge
James Blish
Saturn Rising
Arthur C. Clarke
The Snowbank Orbit
Fritz Leiber
One Sunday in Neptune
Alexei Panshin
Wait It Out
Larry Niven
Nikita Eisenhower Jones
Robert F. Young
The Comet, the Cairn and the Capsule
Duncan Lunan

Jacket design © by Irving Freeman

Harper &Row, Publishers

10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
Lya Korda