City at World's End

Chapter 15 MISSION FOR EARTH

He would not show fear. They expected him to do so, they were watching him with sidelong glances of interest and amused expectation. But Kenniston clenched his fists inside his jacket pockets, and resolved fiercely to disappoint them.

He was afraid, yes. It was one thing to read and talk and speculate on flying space. It was another and much more frightening thing to do it, to step off the solid Earth, to rush and plunge and fall through the world-less emptiness.

He stood there with Gorr Holl and Piers Eglin in the bridge of the Thanis, looking ahead through the curving view windows, and a cold sickness clutched at his vitals.

“It isn’t the way I expected it to be,” he said unsteadily. “Only those stars ahead—”

He fought against the impulse to clutch for support. He wouldn’t do that, while the bronzed star-men behind him were curiously watching him.

The deep humming and slight quivering of the great fabric around him were the only evidence that the Thanis was moving.

Directly ahead, Kenniston looked at a depthless black in which fierce stars flared like lamps. The blue-hot beacon of Vega centered that vista, and up from it blazed the stars of the time-distorted Lyre and Aquila, crossed on the upper left by the glittering sun-drift of the Milky Way.

Only that section of sky ahead was clear. The rest of the firmament, ex-tending back from it, was an increasingly blurred vista of warped star-light whose rays seemed to twitch, jerk and dance.

Gorr Holl nodded toward the bank of controls behind which four men sat. “You know the principle of propulsion? Reaction rays many times faster than light, pushing back against the cosmic dust of space.”

Kenniston sighed. “I feel ignorant as a child. The possibility of such rays was wholly unsuspected, in my day. And Einstein’s equations proved that if matter moved faster than light, it would expand indefinitely.”

Gorr Holl uttered a rumbling chuckle. “Your Einstein was a great scientist, but we’ve opened up new fields of knowledge since then. The mass control that prevents that expansion, and other things.”

Kenniston was only half listening. He was looking at the blue-white eye of Vega, glaring arrogantly at him from the great drift of spangled stars. And looking at it somehow made him sense their awful speed, their nightmare fall through the infinite.

It was worse than the takeoff, and he had not thought that anything could be worse than that. If he lived forever, he would never forget those last still minutes, strapped into a recoil chair, trying to relax and not succeeding, listening to ringing alarm bells, watching the blinking of lights, feeling the deep quivering of the ship as it gathered itself for the outward leap, his heartbeats choking him and the icy sweat running, trying to tell himself that it was no different from taking off in a plane… And then the lift, the pressure, the instinctive gasp for breath, the terrible claustrophobia of being shut into a moving thing over which he had no control.

He could not know yet by what mastery of science the occupants of the ship were shielded from the enormous pressures of that acceleration.

Yet shielded they were, for the pressure was not so much worse than that in a fast ascending elevator. It was the knowledge that Earth was falling irretrievably away that made the lift horrible. He could hear the whisper and the hiss and then the scream of air against the cleaving hull, and then almost at once it was gone. He was in space. And he was sick with the age-old fear of abysses and of falling. He thought of the emptiness that lay beneath his feet, beyond that thin floor of metal, and he shut his teeth hard on his tongue to keep from screaming.

“Don’t think about it,” Gorr Holl had said. “And remember, there’s a first time for all of us! I thought I wouldn’t live through my own first takeoff.” He had helped Kenniston get to his feet. “Let’s go up on the bridge. You might as well get it all over with at once.”

And so they had come to the bridge, and Kenniston had looked into outer space where the great Suns burned unveiled and there was neither air nor cloud to hide them. And he had got hold of himself, because he was too proud to do what he wanted to do, which was to get down on his belly and whimper like a dog.

He tried now to visualize the ordeal that awaited him there at Vega where he must plead the cause of little Middletown to the Governors of the stars. How could he make people who traveled casually in ships like this one, understand the passionate devotion of his own people to their little, ancient planet?

Yet if he failed to do so, he would fail the people of Middletown, who had such hope in his mission. That was what he had to think about—not space, nor his sensations about it, but the task he had ahead of him.

He glanced at Gorr Holl and said, “I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.”

They left Piers Eglin there and went below again, and when they were in the main corridor, alone, Kenniston said, “All right, Gorr. I want to know what I’ve got myself in on.”

The big Capellan nodded. “Let’s join Magro and Lal’lor. They’re waiting for us.”

He led Kenniston along companionways and narrow corridors, to a cabin only two doors from his own. And it was a relief for Kenniston to be in a closed place without windows, so that he need not look at the staggering, crushing emptiness of space, where only the proud Suns had any right to be. There was a wild thrill to it, underneath the fear—but a twentieth century man couldn’t take much of it at first.

Lal’lor’s massive gray form was bent over a table littered with sheets of complicated symbols. Margo, who was sprawled in the bunk, explained to Kenniston, “He works theorems for amusement. He even claims he knows what all those figures mean.”

Lal’lor’s small eyes twinkled in his flat, featureless face. He thrust the sheets aside and said, “Sit down, Kenniston. So we are to be allies now, as well as friends.”

“I wish,” said Kenniston, “that someone would tell me just what this alliance means. Remember, I’m gambling the fate of my people on faith, without knowing a damned thing.”

“There’s nothing sinister about it,” said Gorr Holl. He eased his furry bulk onto the corner of Lal’lor’s table, which was quite strong enough to hold him. “As I told you, we all have the same problem, and the solution to that problem revolves around a man and a process.”

He paused. “By a peculiar freak, Kenniston, you have been thrown with us rather than with your own kind. The human races spread out from Earth so long ago, and have continued to move and spread, constantly expanding, that they have lost all sense of identification with their old birthworld, or any other. The universe is their home, not a planet.”

Kenniston was beginning to understand that better with every passing minute. The impersonal magnitudes of space, many times recrossed, would tend to sever a man from the old narrow ways of thought. Carol had been right about that.

Gorr Holl went on. “But we of the humanoid races don’t have that background. When the humans came to our worlds, we were nearly all barbarians, and quite happy in our barbarism. Well, they civilized us, and now we are accepted as equals. But we’re still more primitive in thought than they, we still cling to our native worlds, and whenever it becomes necessary to move us, we balk—just as your people are balking now, though we have learned to be less violent. In the end, of course, we’ve always given in. But in the last few years we’ve hung on more desperately because we’ve had something to hope for—this process of Jon Arnol’s.”

“Hold on,” said Kenniston. “All I know of Jon Arnol is his name. What exactly is this process? You said it was a process for the rejuvenation of cold and dying planets?”

Lal’lor answered that. “Arnol’s plan is this—to start a cycle of matter-energy transformation similar to the hydrogen-helium transformation which gives a Sun its energy—to start such a nuclear cycle operating deep inside a cold planet.”

Kenniston stared at him, completely stunned. “But,” he said at last,

“that would be equivalent to creating a giant solar furnace deep inside a planet!”

“Yes. A bold, brilliant idea. It would solve the problem of the many cold and dying worlds within the Federation—since, as you know, a planet may live on its interior heat long after the parent Sun’s heat has decreased.”