"Get inside!" Jim turned, and shoved him in the face, closing the door as he did so. Hugh had one startled glimpse of the knife and sagging, lifeless face it pinned. Then the door closed against him, and he heard the lever turn.
Jim turned back at the attackers. Shoving himself away from the bulkhead with legs which were curiously heavy, he plunged toward them, his great arm-long knife, more a bolo than a sword, grasped with both hands. Knives sang toward him, clattered against his breastplate, bit into his legs. He swung—a wide awkward two-handed stroke which gutted an opponent—nearly cut him in two. "That's for Joe!"
The blow stopped him. He turned in the air, steadied himself, and swung again. "That's for Bobo!"
They closed on him; he swung widely, caring not where he hit as long as his blade met resistance. "And that's for me!"
A knife planted itself in his thigh. It did not even slow him up; legs were dispensable in no-weight. "'One for all!'"
A man was on his back now—he could feel him. No matter—there was one before him, too—one who could feel steel. As he swung, he shouted, "All for o—" The words trailed off, but the stroke was finished.
Hugh tried to open the door which had been slammed in his face. He was unable to do so—if there were means provided to do so, he was unable to figure them out. He pressed an ear against the steel and listened, but the airtight door gave back no clue.
Ertz touched him on the shoulder. "Come on," he said. "Where's Joe-Jim?"
"He stayed behind."
"What! Open the door—get him."
"I can't, it won't open. He meant to stay, he closed it himself."
"But we've got to get him—we're blood-sworn."
"I think" said Hugh, with a sudden flash of insight, "that's why he stayed behind." He told Ertz what he had seen.
"Anyhow," he concluded, "it's the End of the Trip to him. Get on back and feed mass to that Converter. I want power." They entered the Ship's boat proper; Hugh closed the air-lock doors behind them. "Alan!" he called out. "We're going to start. Keep those damned women out of the way."
He settled himself in the pilot's chair, and cut the lights.
In the darkness he covered a pattern of green lights. A transparency flashed on the lap desk: DRIVE READY. Ertz was on the job. Here goes! he thought, and actuated the launching combination. There was a short pause, a short and sickening lurch—a twist. It frightened him, since he had no way of knowing that the launching tracks were pitched to offset the normal spinning of the Ship.
The glass of the view port before him was speckled with stars; they were free—moving!
But the spread of jeweled lights was not unbroken, as it invariably had been when seen from the veranda, or seen mirrored on the Control Room walls; a great, gross, ungainly shape gleamed softly under the light of the star whose system they had entered. At first he could not account for it. Then with a rush of superstitious awe he realized that he was looking at the Ship itself, the true Ship, seen from the Outside. In spite of his long intellectual awareness of the true nature of the Ship, he had never visualized looking at it. The stars, yes—the surface of a planet, he had struggled with that concept—but the outer surface of the Ship, no.
When he did see it, it shocked him.
Alan touched him. "Hugh, what is it?"
Hoyland tried to explain to him. Alan shook his head, and blinked his eyes. "I don't get it."
"Never mind. Bring Ertz up here. Fetch the women, too—we'll let them see it."
"All right. But," he added, with sound intuition, "it's a mistake to show the women. You'll scare 'em silly—they ain't even seen the stars."
Luck, sound engineering design, and a little knowledge. Good design, ten times that much luck, and a precious little knowledge. It was luck that had placed the Ship near a star with a planetary system, luck that the Ship arrived there with a speed low enough for Hugh to counteract it in a ship's auxiliary craft, luck that he learned to handle it after a fashion before they starved or lost themselves in deep space.
It was good design that provided the little craft with a great reserve of power and speed. The designers had anticipated that the pioneers might need to explore the far-flung planets of a solar system; they had provided for it in the planning of the Ship's boats, with a large factor of safety. Hugh strained that factor to the limit.
It was luck that placed them near the plane of planetary motion, luck that, when Hugh did manage to gun the tiny projectile into a closed orbit, the orbit agreed in direction with the rotation of the planets.
Luck that the eccentric ellipse he achieved should cause them to crawl up on a giant planet so that he was eventually able to identify it as such by sight.
For otherwise they might have spun around that star until they all died of old age, ignoring for the moment the readier hazards of hunger and thirst, without ever coming close enough to a planet to pick it out from the stars.
There is a misconception, geocentric and anthropomorphic, common to the large majority of the earthbound, which causes them to visualize a planetary system stereoscopically. The mind's eye sees a sun, remote from a backdrop of stars, and surrounded by spinning apples—the planets. Step out on your balcony and look. Can you tell the planets from the stars? Venus you may pick out with ease, but could you tell it from Canopus, if you had not previously been introduced? That little red speck—is it Mars, or is it Antares? How would you know, if you were as ignorant as Hugh Hoyland? Blast for Antares, believing it to be a planet, and you will never live to have grandchildren.
The great planet that they crawled up on, till it showed a visible naked-eye disc, was larger than Jupiter, a fit companion to the star, somewhat younger and larger than the Sun, around which it swung at a lordly distance. Hugh blasted back, killing his speed over many sleeps, to bring the Ship into a path around the planet. The maneuver brought him close enough to see its moons.
Luck helped him again. He had planned to ground on the great planet, knowing no better. Had he been able to do so they would have lived just long enough to open the air-lock.
But he was short of mass, after the titanic task of pulling them out of the headlong hyperbolic plunge around and past the star and warping them into a closed orbit about the star, then into a sub- ordinate orbit around the great planet. He pored over the ancient books, substituted endlessly in the equations the ancients had set down as the laws for moving bodies, figured and refigured, and tried even the calm patience of Chloe.
The other wife, the unnamed one, kept out of his sight after losing a tooth, quite suddenly.
But he got no answer that did not require him to use some, at least, of the precious, irreplaceable ancient books for fuel. Yes, even though they stripped themselves naked and chucked in their knives, the mass of the books would still be needed.
He would have preferred to dispense with one of his wives. He decided to ground on one of the moons.
Luck again. Coincidence of such colossal proportions that one need not be expected to believe it—for the moon-planet was suitable for human terrestrial life. Never mind—skip over it rapidly; the combination of circumstances is of the same order needed to produce such a planet in the first place. Our own planet, under our feet, is of the "There ain't no such animal!" variety. It is a ridiculous improbability.
Hugh's luck was a ridiculous improbability.
Good design handled the next phase. Although he had learned to maneuver the little Ship out in space where there is elbow room, landing is another and a ticklish matter. He would have crashed any spacecraft designed before the designing of the Vanguard. But the designers of the Vanguard had known that the Ship's auxiliary craft would be piloted and grounded by at least the second generation of explorers; green pilots must make those landings unassisted. They planned for it.
Hugh got the vessel down into the stratosphere and straightened it triumphantly into a course that would with certainty kill them all.
The autopilots took over.
Hugh stormed
and swore, producing some words which diverted Alan's attention and admiration from the view out of the port. But nothing he could do would cause the craft to respond. It settled in its own way and leveled off at a thousand feet, an altitude which it maintained regardless of changing contour.
"Hugh, the stars are gone!"
"I know it."
"But Jordan! Hugh—what happened to them?"
Hugh glared at Alan. "I—don't—know—and—I—don't—care! You get aft with the women and stop asking silly questions."
Alan departed reluctantly with a backward look at the surface of the planet and the bright sky. It interested him, but he did not marvel much at it—his ability to marvel had been overstrained.
It was some hours before Hugh discovered that a hitherto ignored group of control lights set in motion a chain of events whereby the autopilot would ground the Ship. Since he found this out experimentally he did not exactly choose the place of landing. But the unwinking stereo-eyes of the autopilot fed its data to the "brain"; the submolar mechanism selected and rejected; the Ship grounded gently on a rolling high prairie near a clump of trees.
Ertz came forward. "What's happened, Hugh?"
Hugh waved at the view port. "We're there." He was too tired to make much of it, too tired and too emotionally exhausted. His weeks of fighting a fight he understood but poorly, hunger, and lately thirst—years of feeding on a consuming ambition, these left him with little ability to enjoy his goal when it arrived.
But they had landed, they had finished Jordan's Trip. He was not unhappy; at peace rather, and very tired.
Ertz stared out. "Jordan!" he muttered. Then, "Let's go out."
"All right."
Alan came forward, as they were opening the air-lock, and the women pressed after him. "Are we there, Captain?"
"Shut up," said Hugh.
The women crowded up to the deserted view port; Alan explained to them, importantly and incorrectly, the scene outside. Ertz got the last door open.
They sniffed at the air. "It's cold," said Ertz. In fact the temperature was perhaps five degrees less than the steady monotony of the Ship's temperature, but Ertz was experiencing weather for the first time,
"Nonsense," said Hugh, faintly annoyed that any fault should be found with "his" planet. "It's just your imagination."
"Maybe," Ertz conceded. He paused uneasily. "Going out?" he added.
"Of course." Mastering his own reluctance, Hugh pushed him aside and dropped five feet to the ground. "Come on—it's fine."
Ertz joined him, and stood close to him. Both of them remained close to the Ship. "It's big, isn't it?" Ertz said in a hushed voice.
"Well, we knew it would be," Hugh snapped, annoyed with himself for having the same lost feeling.
"Hi!" Alan peered cautiously out of the door. "Can I come down? Is it all right?"
"Come ahead."
Alan eased himself gingerly over the edge and joined them. He looked around and whistled. "Gosh!"
Their first sortie took them all of fifty feet from the Ship.
They huddled close together for silent comfort, and watched their feet to keep from stumbling on this strange uneven deck. They made it without incident until Alan looked up from the ground and found himself for the first time in his life with nothing close to him. He was hit by vertigo and acute agoraphobia; he moaned, closed his eyes and fell.
"What in the Ship?" demanded Ertz, looking around. Then it hit him.
Hugh fought against it. It pulled him to his knees, but he fought it, steadying himself with one hand on the ground. However, he had the advantage of having stared out through the view port for endless time—neither Alan nor Ertz were cowards.
"Alan!" his wife shrilled from the open door. "Alan! Come back here!" Alan opened one eye, managed to get it focused on the Ship, and started inching back on his belly.
"Alan!" commanded Hugh. "Stop that! Sit up."
Alan did so, with the air of a man pushed too far. "Open your eyes!" Alan obeyed cautiously, reclosed them hastily.
"Just sit still and you'll be all right," Hugh added. "I'm all right already." To prove it he stood up. He was still dizzy, but he made it. Ertz sat up.
The sun had crossed a sizable piece of the sky, enough time had passed for a well-fed man to become hungry—and they were not well fed. Even the women were outside—that had been accomplished by the simple expedient of going back in and pushing them out. They had not ventured away from the side of the Ship, but sat huddled against it. But their menfolk had even learned to walk singly, even in open spaces. Alan thought nothing of strutting a full fifty yards away from the shadow of the Ship, and did so more than once, in full sight of the women.
It was on one such journey that a small animal native to the planet let his curiosity exceed his caution. Alan's knife knocked him over and left him kicking. Alan scurried to the spot, grabbed his fat prize by one leg, and bore it proudly back to Hugh. "Look, Hugh, look! Good eating!"
Hugh looked with approval. His first strange fright of the place had passed and had been replaced with a warm deep feeling, a feeling that he had come at last to his long home. This seemed a good omen.
"Yes," he agreed. "Good eating. From now on, Alan, always Good Eating."
About the Author
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988), often called the Science Fiction Grand Master, was the author of such ground-breaking novels as STARSHIP TROOPERS, RED PLANET, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND and THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS. He is generally considered the greatest and most influential science fiction writer of the twentieth century. In addition to being a bestselling author, Heinlein's novels won 4 Hugo awards, 3 "retro Hugo" awards, and the first "Grand Master Award" from the Science Fiction Writers of America.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Books by Robert A. Heinlein
Part One: Universe
Part Two: Common Sense
About the Author
Robert A. Heinlein, Orphans of the Sky
(Series: # )
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