9
William looked up from his book. It was at least a month since he had ceased being vaguely surprised at having Anthony enter.
He said, “ Anything wrong?”
“Who can say? They’re coming in for the soft landing. Is the Mercury Computer in action?”
William knew Anthony knew the Computer status perfectly, but he said, “By tomorrow morning, Anthony.”
“ And there are no problems?”
“None at all.”
“Then we have to wait for the soft landing.”
“Yes.”
Anthony said, “Something will go wrong.”
“Rocketry is surely an old hand at this. Nothing will go wrong.”
“So much work wasted.”
“It’s not wasted yet. It won’t be.”
Anthony said, “Maybe you’re right.” Hands deep in his pockets, he drifted away, stopping at the door just before touching contact. “Thanks!”
“For what, Anthony?”
“For being—comforting.”
William smiled wryly and was relieved his emotions didn’t show.
10
Virtually the entire body of personnel of the Mercury Project was on hand for the crucial moment. Anthony, who had no tasks to perform, remained well to the rear, his eyes on the monitors. The robot had been activated and there were visual messages being returned.
At least they came out as the equivalent of visual—and they showed as yet nothing but a dim glow of light which was, presumably, Mercury’s surface.
Shadows flitted across the screen, probably irregularities on that surface. Anthony couldn’t tell by eye alone, but those at the controls, who were analyzing the data by methods more subtle than could be disposed of by unaided eye, seemed calm. None of the little red lights that might have betokened emergency were lighting. Anthony was watching the key observers rather than the screen.
He should be down with William and the others at the Computer. It was going to be thrown in only when the soft landing was made. He should be. He couldn’t be.
The shadows flitted across the screen more rapidly. The robot was descending—too quickly? Surely, too quickly!
There was a last blur and a steadiness, a shift of focus in which the blur grew darker, then fainter. A sound was heard and there were perceptible seconds before Anthony realized what it was the sound was saying—“Soft landing achieved! Soft landing achieved!”
Then a murmur arose and became an excited hum of self-congratulation until one more change took place on the screen and the sound of human words and laughter was stopped as though there had been a smash collision against a wall of silence.
For the screen changed; changed and grew sharp. In the brilliant, brilliant sunlight, blazing through the carefully filtered screen, they could now see a boulder clear, burning white on one side, ink-on-ink on the other. It shifted right, then back to left, as though a pair of eyes were looking left, then right. A metal hand appeared on the screen as though the eyes were looking at part of itself.
It was Anthony’s voice that cried out at last, “The Computer’s been thrown in.”
He heard the words as though someone else had shouted them and he raced out and down the stairs and through a Corridor, leaving the babble of voices to rise behind him.
“William,” he cried as he burst into the Computer room, “it’s perfect, it’s—”
But William’s hand was upraised. “Shh. Please. I don’t want any violent sensations entering except those from the robot.”
“You mean we can be heard?” whispered Anthony.
“Maybe not, but I don’t know.” There was another screen, a smaller one, in the room with the Mercury Computer. The scene on it was different, and changing; the robot was moving.
William said, “The robot is feeling its way. Those steps have got to be clumsy. There’s a seven-minute delay between stimulus and response and that has to be allowed for.”
“But already he’s walking more surely than he ever did in Arizona. Don’t you think so, William? Don’t you think so?” Anthony was gripping William’s shoulder, shaking it, eyes never leaving the screen.
William said, “I’m sure of it, Anthony.”
The Sun burned down in a warm contrasting world of white and black, of white Sun against black sky and white rolling ground mottled with black shadow. The bright sweet smell of the Sun on every exposed square centimeter of metal contrasting with the creeping death-of-aroma on the other side.
He lifted his hand and stared at it, counting the fingers. Hot—hot—hot—turning, putting each finger, one by one, into the shadow of the others and the hot slowly dying in a change in tactility that made him feel the clean, comfortable vacuum.
Yet not entirely vacuum. He straightened and lifted both arms over his head, stretching them out, and the sensitive spots on either wrist felt the vapors—the thin, faint touch of tin and lead rolling through the cloy of mercury.
The thicker taste rose from his feet; the silicates of each variety, marked by the clear separate-and-together touch and tang of each metal ion. He moved one foot slowly through the crunchy, caked dust, and felt the changes like a soft, not quite random symphony.
And over all the Sun. He looked up at it, large and fat and bright and hot, and heard its joy. He watched the slow rise of prominences around its rim and listened to the crackling sound of each; and to the other happy noises over the broad face. When he dimmed the background light, the red of the rising wisps of hydrogen showed in bursts of mellow contralto, and the deep bass of the spots amid the muted whistling of the wispy, moving faculae, and the occasional thin keening of a flare, the ping-pong ticking of gamma rays and cosmic particles, and over all in every direction the soft, fainting, and ever-renewed sigh of the Sun’s substance rising and retreating forever in a cosmic wind which reached out and bathed him in glory.
He jumped, and rose slowly in the air with a freedom he had never felt, and jumped again when he landed, and ran, and jumped, and ran again, with a body that responded perfectly to this glorious world, this paradise in which he found himself.
A stranger so long and so lost—in paradise at last.
William said, “It’s all right.”
“But what’s he doing?” cried out Anthony.
“It’s all right. The programming is working. He has tested his senses. He has been making the various visual observations. He has dimmed the Sun and studied it. He has tested for atmosphere and for the chemical nature of the soil. It all works.”
“But why is he running?”
“I rather think that’s his own idea, Anthony. If you want to program a computer as complicated as a brain, you’ve got to expect it to have ideas of its own.”
“Running? Jumping?” Anthony turned an anxious face to William. “He’ll hurt himself. You can handle the Computer. Override. Make him stop.”
And William said sharply, “No. I won’t. I’ll take the chance of his hurting himself. Don’t you understand? He’s happy. He was on Earth, a world he was never equipped to handle. Now he’s on Mercury with a body perfectly adapted to its environment, as perfectly adapted as a hundred specialized scientists could make it be. It’s paradise
