Imperial Earth

  And there were no toilet facilities — these were all in an adjacent cubicle, which serviced the four cabins around it. Well, it was only going to be for a few weeks...

  Duncan's spirits rose somewhat after he had gained enough confidence to start exploring his little world. He quickly learned to visualize his location by following the advice printed on the shipboard maps; it was convenient to think of Sirius as a cylindrical tower with ten floors. The fifty cabins were divided between the sixth and seventh floors. Immediately below, on the fifth level, was the lounge, recreation and dining area.

  The territory above these floors was forbidden to passengers. Going upward, the remaining levels were Life Support, Crew Quarters, and — forming a kind of penthouse with all-round visibility — the Bridge. In the other direction, the four levels were Galley, Hold, Fuel, and Propulsion. It was a logical arrangement, but it would take Duncan some time to discover that the Purser's Office was on the kitchen level, the surgery next to the freight compartment, the gym in Life Support, and the library tucked away in an emergency airlock overlapping levels Six and Seven...

  During the circumnavigation of his new home, Duncan encountered a dozen other passengers on a similar voyage of exploration, and exchanged the guarded greetings appropriate among strangers who will soon get to know each other perhaps all too well. He had already been through the passenger list to see if there was anyone on board he knew and had found a few familiar Titanian names, but no close acquaintances. Sharing cabin L.3, he had discovered, was a Dr. Louise Chung; but the parting with Marissa still hurt too much for the ‘Louise’ to arouse more than the faintest flicker of interest.

  In any event, as he found when he returned to L.3, Dr. Chung was a bright little old lady, undoubtedly on the far side of a hundred, who greeted him with an absent-minded courtesy which, even by the end of the voyage, never seemed to extend to a complete recognition of his existence. She was, he soon discovered, one of the Solar System's leading mathematical physicists, and the authority on resonance phenomena among the satellites of the outer planets. For half a century she had been trying to explain why the gaps in Saturn's rings were not exactly where all the bet theories demanded.

  The two hours ticked slowly away, finally seeming to move with a rush toward the expected announcement: "This is Captain Ivanov speaking at minus five minutes. All crew members should be on station or standby, all passengers should have safety straps secured. Initial acceleration will be one hundredth gravity — ten centimeters second squared. I repeat, one hundredth gravity. This will be maintained for ten minutes while the propulsion system undergoes routine checks."

  And suppose it doesn't pass those checks? Duncan asked himself. Do even the mathematicians know what would happen if the Asymptotic Drive started to malfunction? This line of thought was not very profitable, and he hastily abandoned it.

  "Minus four minutes. Stewards check all passengers secured."

  Now that instruction could not possibly be obeyed. There were three hundred twenty-five passengers, half of them in their cabins and the other half in the two lounges, and there was no way in which the dozen harassed stewards could see that all their charges were behaving. They had made one round of the ship at minus thirty and ten minutes, and passengers who had cut loose since then had only themselves to blame. And anyone who could be hurt by a hundredth of a gee, thought Duncan, certainly deserved it. Impacts at that acceleration had about the punch of a large wet sponge.

  "Minus three minutes. All systems normal. Passengers in Lounge B will see Saturn rising."

  Duncan permitted himself a slight glow of self-satisfaction. This was precisely why, after checking with one of the stewards, he was now in Lounge B. As Titan always kept the same face turned toward its primary, the spectacle of the great globe climbing above the horizon was one that could never be seen from the surface, even if the almost perpetual overcast of hydrocarbon clouds had permitted.

  That blanket of clouds now lay a thousand kilometers below, hiding the whole world that it protected for the chill of space. And then suddenly — unexpectedly, even though he had been waiting for it — Saturn was rising like a golden ghost.

  In all the known universe, there was nothing to compare with the wonder he was seeing now. A hundred times the size of the puny Moon that floated in the skies of Earth, the flattened yellow globe looked like an object lesson in planetary meteorology. Its knotted bands of cloud could change their appearance almost every hour, while thousands of kilometers down in the hydrogen-methane atmosphere, eruptions whose cause was still unknown would lift bubbles larger than terrestrial continents up from the hidden core. They would expand and burst as they reached the limits of the atmosphere, and in minutes Saturn's furious ten-hour spin would have smeared them out into long colored ribbons, stretching halfway round the planet.

  Somewhere down there in that inferno, Duncan reminded himself with awe, Captain Kleinman had died seventy years ago, and so had part of Grandma Ellen. In all that time, no one had attempted to return. Saturn still represented one of the largest pieces of unfinished business in the Solar System — next, perhaps, to the smoldering hell of Venus.

  The rings themselves were still so inconspicuous that it was easy to overlook them. By a cosmic irony, all the inner satellites lay in almost the same plane as the delicate, wafer-thin structure that made Saturn unique. Edge on, as they were now, the rings were visible only as hairlines of light jutting out on either side of the planet, yet they threw a broad, dusky band of shadow along the equator.

  In a few hours, as Sirius rose above the orbital plane of Titan, the rings would open up in their full glory. And that alone, thought Duncan, would be enough to justify this voyage.

  "Minus one minute..."

  He had never even heard the two-minute mark; the great world rising out of the horizon clouds must have held him hypnotized. In sixty seconds, the automatic sequencer in the heart of the drive unit would initiate its final mysteries. Forces which only a handful of living men could envisage, and none could truly understand, would awaken in their fury, tear Sirius from the grip of Saturn, and hurl her sunward toward the distant goal of Earth.

  "... ten seconds... five seconds... ignition!"

  How strange that a word that had been technologically obsolete for at least two hundred years should have survived in the jargon of astronautics! Duncan barely had time to formulate this thought when he felt the onset of thrust. From exactly zero his weight leaped up to less than a kilogram. It was barely enough to dent the cushion above which he had been floating, and was detectable chiefly by the slackening tension of his waist belt.

  Other effects were scarcely more dramatic. There was a distinct change in the timbre of the indefinable noises which never cease on board a spacecraft while its mechanical hearts are operating; and it seemed to Duncan that, far away, he could hear a faint hissing. But he was not even sure of that.

  And then, a thousand kilometers below, he saw the unmistakable evidence that Sirius was indeed breaking away from her orbit. The ship had been driving into night on its final circuit of Titan, and the wan sunlight had been swiftly fading on the sea of clouds far below. But now a second dawn had come, in a wide swathe across the face of the world he was soon to leave. For a hundred kilometers behind the accelerating ship, a column of incandescent plasma was splashing untold quintillions of candlepower out into space and across the carmine cloudscape of Titan. Sirius was falling sunward in greater glory than the sun itself.

  "Ten minutes after ignition. All drive checks complete. We will now be increasing thrust to our cruise level of point two gravities — two hundred centimeters second squared."

  And now, for the first time, Sirius was showing what she could do. In a smooth surge of power, thrust and weight climbed twenty-fold and held steady. The light on the clouds below was now so strong that it hurt the eye. Duncan even glanced at the still-rising disc of Saturn to see if it too showed any sign of this fierce new sun. He could now hear, faint but unmis
takable, the steady whistling roar that would be the background to all life aboard the ship until the voyage ended. It must, he thought, be pure coincidence that the awesome voice of the Asymptotic Drive sounded so much like that of the old chemical rockets that first gave men the freedom of space. The plasma hurtling away from the ship's reactor was moving a thousand times more swiftly than the exhaust gases of any rocket, even a nuclear one; and how it created that apparently familiar noise was a puzzle that would not be solved by any naïve mechanical intuition.

  "We are now on cruise mode at one-fifth gee. Passengers may unstrap themselves and move about freely — but please use caution until you are completely adapted."

  That won't take me very long, thought Duncan s he unbuckled himself; the ship's acceleration gave him his normal, Titan weight. Any residents of the Moon would also feel completely at home here, while Martians and Terrans would have a delightful sense of buoyancy.

  The lights in the lounge, which had been dimmed almost to extinction for better viewing of the spectacle outside, slowly brightened to normal. The few first-magnitude stars that had been visible disappeared at once, and the gibbous globe of Saturn became bleached and pale, losing all its colors. Duncan could restore the scene by drawing the black curtains around the observation alcove, but his eyes would take several minutes to readapt. He was wondering whether to made the effort when the decision was made for him.

  There was a musical "Ding-dong-ding," and a new voice, which sounded as if it came from a social stratum several degrees above the Captain's, announced languidly: "This is the Chief Steward. Will passengers kindly note that First Seating for lunch is at twelve hundred. Please do not attempt to make any changes without consulting me: Thank you." A less peremptory "Dong-ding-doing" signaled end of message.

  Looking at the marvels of the universe made you hungry, Duncan instantly discovered. It was already 1150, and he was glad that he was in the First Seating. He wondered how many starving passengers were now converging upon the Chief Steward, in search of an earlier time slot.

  Enjoying the sensation of man-made weight which, barring accidents, would remain constant until the moment of mid-voyage, Duncan went to join the rapidly lengthening line at the cafeteria. Already, his first thirty years of life on Titan seemed to belong to another existence.

  12

  Last Words

  For one moment more, the achingly familiar image remained frozen on the screen. Behind Marissa and the children, Duncan could see the two armchairs of the living room, the photograph of Grandfather (as usual, slightly askew), the cover of the food-distribution hatch, the door to the main bedroom, the bookcase with the few but priceless treasures that had survived two centuries of interplanetary wandering... This was his universe. It held everything he loved, and now he was leaving it. Already, it lay in his past.

  It lay only three seconds away, yet that was enough. He had traveled a mere million kilometers in less than half a day; but the sense of separation was already almost complete. It was intolerable to wait six seconds for every reaction and every answer. By the time a reply came, he had forgotten the original question and had started to say something else. And so the attempted conversation had quickly degenerated into a series of stops and starts, while he and Marissa had stared at each other in dumb misery, each waiting for the other to speak... He was glad that the ordeal was over.

  The experience brought home to him, as nothing else had yet done, the sheer immensity of space. The Solar System, he began to suspect, was not designed for the convenience of Man, and that presumptuous creature's attempts to use it for his own advantage would often be foiled by laws beyond his control. All his life, Duncan had assumed without question that he could speak to friends or family instantly, wherever he might be. Yet now — before he had even passed Saturn's outer moons! — that power had been taken from him. For the next twenty days, he would share a lonely, isolated bubble of humanity, able to interact with his fellow passengers, but cut off from all real contact with the rest of mankind.

  His self-pity lasted only a few moments. There was also an exhilaration — even a freedom — in this sense of isolation, and in the knowledge that he was setting forth on one of the longest and swiftest voyages that any man could make. Travel to the outer planets was routine and uneventful — but it was also rare, and only a very small fraction of the human race would ever experience it. Duncan remembered a favorite Terran phrase of Malcolm's, usually employed in a different context, but sound advice for every occasion: "When it's inevitable, relax and enjoy it." He would do his best to enjoy this voyage.

  Yet Duncan was exhausted when he finally climbed into his bunk at the end of his first day in space. The strain of innumerable farewells, not only to his family but to countless friends, had left him emotionally drained. On top of this, there were all the nagging worries of departure: What had he forgotten to do? What vital necessities had he failed to pack? Had all his baggage been safely loaded and stowed? What essential good-byes had he overlooked? It was useless worrying about these matters now that he was speeding away from home at a velocity increasing by twenty-five thousand kilometers an hour, every hour, yet he could not help doing so. Tired though he was, his hyperactive brain would not let him sleep.

  It takes a real genius to make a bed that can be uncomfortable at a fifth of a gravity, and luckily the designers of Sirius had not accepted this challenging assignment. After thirty minutes or so, Duncan began to relax and to get his racing thoughts in order. He prided himself on being able to sleep without artificial aids, and it looked as if he would be able to dispense with electronarcosis after all. That was, of course, supposed to be completely harmless, but he never felt properly awake the next day.

  You're falling asleep, he told himself. You won't know anything more until it’s time for breakfast. All your dreams are going to be happy ones...

  A sound like a small volcano clearing its throat undid the good work of the last ten minutes. He was instantly wide awake, wondering what disaster had befallen Sirius. Not until several anxious seconds had passed did he realize that some antisocial shipmate had found it necessary to visit the adjacent toilet.

  Cursing, he tried to recapture the broken mood and to return to the threshold of sleep. But it was useless; the myriad voices of the ship had started to clamor for his attention. He seemed to have lost control of the analytical portion of his brain, and it was busy classifying all the noises from the surrounding universe.

  It had been hours since he had really noticed the far-off, ghostly whistling of the drive. Every second Sirius was ejecting a hundred grams of hydrogen at a third of the velocity of light — a trifling loss of mass, yet it represented meaningless millions of gigawatts. During the first few centuries of the Industrial Revolution, all the factories of Earth could not have matched the power that was now driving him sunward.

  That incongruously faint and feeble scream was not really disturbing, but it was overlaid with all sorts of other peculiar sounds. What could possibly cause the "Buzz... click, click... buzz," the soft "thump... thump... thump," the "gurgle, hisssss," and the intermittent "whee-wheee-whee" which was the most maddening of all?

  Duncan rolled over and tried to bury his head in the pillows. It made no difference, except that the higher-pitched sounds got filtered out and the lower frequencies were enhanced. He also became more aware of the steady pulsation of the bed itself, at just about the ten cycles per second nicely calculated to produce epileptic fits.

  Hello, that was something new. It was a kind of dispirited "ker-plunk, her-plunk, ker-plunk" that might have been produced by an ancient internal combustion engine in the last stages of decrepitude. Somehow, Duncan seriously doubted that i.c. engines, old or new, were to be found aboard Sirius.

  He rolled over on the other side — and then became conscious of the slightly cold airstream from the ventilator hitting him on his left cheek. Perhaps if he ignored it, the sensation would sink below the threshold of consciousness. However, the v
ery effort of pretending it wasn't there focused attention upon the annoyance.

  On the other side of the thin partition, the ship's plumbing once again advertised its presence with a series of soft thumps. There was an air bubble somewhere in the system, and Duncan knew, with a deadly certainty, that all the engineering skills aboard the Sirius would be unable to exorcise it before the end of the voyage.

  And what was that? It was a rasping, whistling sound, so irregular that no well-adjusted mechanism could possibly have produced it. As Duncan lay in the darkness, racking his brains to think of an explanation, his annoyance slowly grew to alarm. Should he call the steward and report something had gone wrong?

  He was still trying to make up his mind when a sudden explosive change in pitch and intensity left him in no doubt as to the sound's origin. Groaning and cursing his luck, Duncan resigned himself to a sleepless night.

  Dr. Chung snored...

  * * * * *

  Some was gently shaking him. He mumbled "Go away," then swam groggily upward from the depths of slumber.

  "If you don't hurry," said Dr. Chung, "you're going to miss breakfast."

  13

  The Longest Voyage

  "This is the Captain speaking. We will be performing a final out-of-ecliptic velocity trim during the next fifteen minutes. This will be your last opportunity for a good view of Saturn, and we are orienting the ship so that it will be visible through the B Lounge windows. Thank you."

  Thank you, thought Duncan, though he was a little less grateful when he reached B Lounge. This time too many other passengers had been tipped off by the stewards. Nevertheless, he managed to obtain a good vantage point, even though he had to stand.