Mission to Universe Read online

  From this came the mathematics of his phase physics.From the mathematics of phase physics, with Lee as translator, had come first the theory, then the actuality, of the phase ship.

  In the pure sense of the word, thought Ben now, this phase ship about him never moved. It merely oscillated between two conditions—one, during the so-called phase shift, in which it existed everywhere in the universe at once, and another in which, as now, it existed with maximum determination at some particular point in that universe.

  Practically speaking, the phase ship “moved” by going from maximum probabilities of existence at one position in the universe, through universality, to maximum probabilities of existence at another position.

  Since all points in the universe were the same to it in universal condition, there was therefore no theoretical reason why the phase shift could not cross the width of the galaxy

  as easily as going from Earth’s surface to Earth orbit. But that was only theoretically. In practice, the more ordinary physical distance there happened to be separating the point of departure and the point of destination, the more involved and extended was the calculation required to make the move with precision.

  This could be somewhat offset by making longer jumps to less precise destinations—to larger and larger general areas, rather than exact points. But even this became impractical eventually. A jump of three hundred light years with the hope of landing anywhere within a sphere forty light years in diameter took several days to calculate. A jump twice that distance with the same factor of uncertainty took as many weeks in calculation. It reached a point where probable error began to equal, then exceed, probable distance shifted.

  So, it was not the distances outside the walls of the phase ship that concerned her crew, but the time spent calculating within those walls. And this circumstance was allowing them to shut their minds to the vastness of the interstellar space about them, now. They were able to maintain an emotional illusion that they were inhabiting at most a remote and slightly detached bit of their own native Earth. And that brought Ben back to the inexorable train of thought originally suggested by the sight of the stowaway cat.

  Ben got up restlessly from his desk and began to pace the short distance of the office floor back and forth several times before he became aware of what he was doing. Catching himself up short, guiltily, he was returning to his desk when there was a knock on the door leading to the Control Section.

  He went to the door and opened it Lee stood there.

  “Ready to shift to Achemar at Saturn-equivalent distance,” said Lee, briefly.

  “Oh, yes,” said Ben, stepping into Control Section. He paused, sniffing at the air, suddenly aware of something that had been nagging at his olfactory nerves for some time. “Does something smell?” The odor was flat and heavy, if barely perceptible, like the odor of machine oil.

  “It’s in the recycled air,” said Lee apologetically. “I’ve been working on it. I’ll get back on it as soon as we change shifts and Walt takes over as DO, after this shift to Achemar orbit”

  “I’ll come have a look at it with you,” said Ben. The recycler had proved to be a fallible piece of equipment Kirk’s remark the first day about resupplying the automat had led Ben to investigate. He had discovered, as he had suspected, that the shortage was all in foods taken from the freeze-dried supplies brought aboard, and none in recycled food. However, he had also discovered that it was not merely an emotional squeamishness that was involved in the crew’s avoidance of the recycled foods. Those foods actually left an odd, unnatural, and unpleasant aftertaste in the mouth.

  —A little, he suddenly recognized, like the flat, oily odor in the air now. Yet, tests of the food had found it safely edible—he put the matter out of his mind with a sudden effort. It was time now to order the shift, and there was a particular reason to be interested in this one jump. Observation Section believed they had evidence that in Achemar they had finally discovered a star with at least one planet.

  “Ready to shift,” Lee was repeating now.

  “Shift then,” Ben said . . . and the routine went off in regular fashion. He felt the slight wave of nausea and stared hopefully with Lee and Coop at the overhead TV screen.

  It showed only stars.

  “Too much to expect we’d land right on top of it,” said Lee, framing the thought aloud that must be that moment in the minds of everyone aboard. There had been a general, unconscious, emotional deterioration of the crew these last two weeks. They were, Ben had thought a little stir-crazy.

  “Never mind,” said Ben. “Search for it—” he broke off as Walt stepped in through the entrance from the Calculations Section.

  “I relieve you, Captain,” said Walt, emotionlessly to Lee.

  “Thank you, Captain,” said Lee, with equal formality—formality, however, that, Ben’s ear was pleased to recognize, was acquiring the un-self-consciousness of habit. “Present orders are to search for the satellite of Achemar.”

  “Search for the satellite of Achemar,” repeated Walt. “Very well.”

  Lee stepped across to a shelf against the wall on which rested the Control logbook, and entered in it the time of his relief and the passing on of his orders.

  “Good,” said Ben, as Lee signed the logbook and tamed away. “Let’s have a look at that recycler—you can write up your personal logbook later, Captain.”

  Forty minutes later, on the lower deck, Ben was as wringing wet as if he had been trapped in a swamp. Condensation moisture dripped from all surfaces in the fifteen-feet-square recycler room, and the atmosphere was moist to the point of fogging. Lee, stripped to the waist and thoroughly soaked, turned from the section of the recycler he had partially dismantled. They were both now so plunged in the odor he ignored it.

  “No good,” Lee said to Ben, wiping his forehead and his beaded eyebrows with an only slightly less damp forearm. “I’ll have to shut down before I dismantle any further.”

  “Shut down?” said Ben. “The emergency tanks only hold enough air for twelve hours.”

  “I can get it apart and together again in twelve hours,” said Lee. “That’s not what’s worrying me.” He gestured at the recycler. “The problem is where to lay out the parts as I dismantle. There isn’t enough room down here to work—even if we shifted stores to the top deck to open up the storerooms.”

  “What’s wrong with the recycler?” asked Ben. It was in the odds that there would turn out to be at least one bug in the ship’s machinery—he had not expected it to be the recycler.

  “I don’t know,” said Lee, frowning. “It’s too complicated for one thing. Something in there’s not working right—and it’s bolixing up the rest of the machinery. I won’t be able to tell until I get it apart. If the recycler won’t work, we’re done for.”

  “Yes,” said Ben. He thought, scowling. “Maybe we could rig up a pressurized addition to the ship, out beyond the airlock." He became thoughtful again.

  “There’s the pressure domes,” suggested Lee. “But they’re designed for housing under atmosphere on a planet’s surface. I don’t know if they’d take the exposure to vacuum.”

  Ben nodded.

  “Well,” said Lee, smiling a little crookedly. “Maybe Achemar will turn out to have a fine, Earth-like planet for us to set down on.”

  “Maybe,” said Ben.

  The worsening of the smell in the air and the taste in the food was gradual, but noticeable, in the hours that followed. Ben was in his office with Nora, Lee, and Walt,making plans to attach one of the pressurized buildings to the airlock as a work area to permit the tearing down of the recycler. The rest of the off-duty personnel were clearing the main storeroom below deck, which would be used in any case.

  “The point is,” Nora was saying, “we’re a hundred light-years from home here. If we had to make it back in twelve hours—if the recycler couldn’t be put back together once it was torn down—we couldn’t make it in a minimum of three calculations and jumps in that time.”
/>   “If I take it apart, I can put it back at least as good as it was,” said Lee. “Only ”

  “Only,” said Walt, calmly, “if a part gets lost or damaged because of the working conditions, we’re out of luck, is that it?”

  Lee nodded.

  “The point is—” he was beginning, when there was a knock on the door to Control Section.

  “Come in!” snapped Ben.

  The door burst open. Kirk Walish stood framed in theo pening. His eyes glittered on Ben.

  “We’ve found it!” he said—and for a moment not even Ben noticed the omission of the “sir.”

  “Found? —Achemar’s planet?” snapped Ben.

  “Yes,” said Kirk, almost glaring at him in triumph. “Just the other side of Achemar, itself. We can calculate the shift to orbit the planet in fifteen minutes!”

  Ben throttled down the excitement within him. He forced himself to a glacial, almost a ponderous calm.

  “Captain Bone,” he said, turning to Walt. “You’re Duty Officer.”

  “Yes sir,” said Walt, getting to his feet. “Please make the next shift as soon as possible to orbit this satellite of Achemar.”

  “Yes sir,” said Walt. He went out, his bulk herding Kirk before him back into the Control Section, and the door closed behind them both.

  “Now,” said Ben, icily, seeing Lee and Nora alight with the same excitement he now had under control within himself, “shall we get back to the immediate and more important problem? —In spite of all objections,” he said, turning to Nora, “I think we can use a pressurized dome attached to the airlock. Tell-tales can be set up to warn us of any loss of air pressure—and whatever cracking occurs isn’t going to be bad enough so that we’ll be losing parts into space.”

  He looked at Lee.

  “Don’t you agree?” he said.

  “Yes... I guess so,” said Lee, reluctantly. “Of course, if there’s a chance that this planet of Achemar’s could turnout to have a surface where we could set the ship down for repair—”

  “Suppositions are a little beside the point right now,” said Ben harshly, “don’t you think? For now suppose we stick to what we know is possible, out here in space.”

  “Yes . . . of course,” said Lee. He looked crestfallen. Ben sympathized with him but dared not show.it. Behind the harsh mask of his face, his mind was wrestling mightily with the same possibility Lee had mentioned. But Lee and the others had not spent the last few years envisioning all the things that could go wrong in a set-down on an alien world. If there was an accident—if for some reason the ship became trapped down there—in dealing with the unknown, anything was possible. Also the others had not yet grasped that the phase ship was essentially a creature of space and really safe only as long as it stayed in space. The most attractive and Earth-like planet could harbor traps for them, and Achemar’s satellite, under a blue-hot star like Achemar, was not likely to be Earth-like.

  “All right, then,” said Ben, “you’ll need gravity, and the ship’s artificial gravity won’t apply to the pressure dome . . . ” They continued discussing their problems until Walt re-entered the room.

  “Ready to shift,” announced Walt.

  “Thank you,” said Ben, rising. “Come along. There’s room in the Control Section for all of us to watch.”

  He led the way into the Control Section.

  “Prepare to shift,” he told Walt. Walt turned away to give orders.

  “Match! . . . Match! . . . Match!” came the voices of the different Sections.

  “Ready to shift,” announced Walt.

  “Shift, then,” said Ben.

  They shifted. Everyone in the Control Section stared up at the screen.

  On it Achemar—brightest star of the constellation Eridanus—was a blue-hot pinprick of light casting as much light from the black sky of space as the sun of Earth, seen from Venus-orbit. In its harsh and pitiless light the barren planet they all now saw centered on the screen looked like a coin punched from a single piece of slagged and brutalized metal.

  “Captain,” said Ben to Walt, “have Observation find out as much as possible about surface conditions on that world. Then join us in my office again while we work out our means for repairing the recycler.”

  He led the way back into his office and both Lee and Nora followed him. Some fifteen minutes later the teams changed, and with the coming on duty of the third team, Lee took over as Duty Officer and left the office temporarily, being replaced by Walt.

  Shortly thereafter, Lee came back in from the Control Section with a piece of paper that he put on the desk in front of Ben.

  “Surface Conditions on the world—Achemar One, we’re calling it—” said Lee, as Ben ran his eye down the paper. “Gravity’s only a little more than Earth’s and the temperature at the equator’s not bad at all, up to twenty degrees Centigrade, practically sixty degrees Fahrenheit And there’s even an atmosphere of sorts, even if it’s not breathable—mostly nitrogen.”

  There was a running undercurrent of excitement in Lee’s voice as he reeled this off.

  “I see,” said Ben. Well, he had come to the decision at last Repair of the recycler in space, even with the pressure dome, would be a risky and extremely difficult procedure. Down on the planetary surface Lee had described, it ought to be little more difficult than doing the job back on the surface of Earth. —In the face of this argument, there was only the excitement to be felt in Lee and the others, the excitement over the prospect of actually setting down on a different world, which could lead to foolish actions and danger. That, and his own fears of the unknown.

  But—it had to be faced sometime. What was it Kirk had said about the stowaway cat? As a kitten it had needed to be blooded, brought face to face with the hunt and the kill by which it would learn to survive. As a crew he and the others aboard would have to be blooded, sooner or later, on some strange world. It might as well be now.

  “All right,” said Ben. He turned to Walt “Prepare a shift to a working area on the surface of the planet below us.”

  “Right away,” said Walt.

  There was a glint of excitement even in Walt’s normally emotionless face. Lee was smiling happily—and so was Nora. Looking out from behind the mask of his features with a coolness of despair inside him, for the first time Ben felt the loneliness of his command settle upon him in its full weight and measure.

  Chapter 4

  Half an hour later they shifted down to within fifty feet of the equatorial surface of Achemar One and settled the rest of the way in a continuing series of automatically shortening shifts as the ship approached the ground. Ben felt the curious, faint sensation of the ship finally settling imperceptibly under its own weight to the gravity of Achemar One.

  That ground, seen in the TV of Ben’s desk, was mainly a whitish sand, here and there blown clear of the underlying rock. The distant blue-white light of Achemar gave the hilly surrounding landscape a ghastly look, like a surrealistic scene illuminated by glaring fluorescent lights. He leaned over to the intercom—he was once more alone in the office—and keyed to Lee down in the recycler room.

  “All right, Captain Ruiz,” he said. “You can start your teams attaching the pressure dome outside the ship and dismantling the recycler.”

  “Yes sir,” replied the voice of Lee.

  Ben let the lever under his fingers fly back up into “off” position. He got up and went out into the corridor on the women’s side of the ship, from which the hatchway to the lower deck had its most direct connection to the corridor of the airlock. Looking down the corridor, he could see space-suited bodies manhandling the deflated dome into position to put it out the airlock as soon as the inner lock, which was now closing before Ben’s gaze, should be securely shut.

  Ben turned and went down to the lower deck.

  Lee’s crew of workers had already been busy tearing down the recycler while the ship was being brought down to surface. Now, individuals began to carry parts up, ready to be transferred
to the dome, which was swelling like a balloon,just outside the hatch.

  The work went quickly. The parts of the recycler were almost all made of the new—and exceedingly expensive—magnesium alloy that made up so much of the phase ship.The loads of those carrying parts upstairs to the attached dome were therefore bulky, but light. In the narrow corridors and stairs, there were more than enough hands to do the work. Still, it gave Ben a mild attack of conscience to be standing about idle when everyone else was so busy.

  He went back upstairs to his office, so that at least his idleness would be less apparent. He had laid on himself the task of keeping a personal log as well as the official log of the phase ship, and he was working at this at the table setup for that purpose in the now deserted Special Supply room, when there was the sound of knuckles on the half-open door. He looked up to see Jay Tremple, Kirk Walish’s teammate on the first Observation Team, standing in the doorway.

  “Permission to go ashore, sir,” said Jay, with a grin on his lean face under the red hair.

  “What?” Ben stared forbiddingly at him. It did not seem to bother the lean Observation Section man.

  “They don’t need us to carry,” said Jay. He produced what seemed to be a roll of colored cloth from behind his back and shook it out. Ben found himself staring at a homemade flag, about the size of a pillowcase. Looking more intently at it, Ben saw that it was in fact a pillowcase—with the stars and stripes painted upon it. “Matt Duncan and I thought as long as no one needed us we’d step outside in spacesuits and claim this world by planting a flag on the Mil out there.” He gestured in the direction of the airlock and the rocky upthrust beyond that Ben had seen on his desk TV screen.

  “Matt?” said Ben, astonished. For Matt was one of the most level-headed among the crew.

  “Matt and ,” said Jay Tremple a little impatiently. “It’s all right isn’t it?” He was actually, Ben saw, standing on one foot ready to go.