Читать книгу The Plurality of Worlds - Brian Stableford - Страница 5

CHAPTER TWO

The first and more unexpected agony was the sound of the rocket’s ignition. Thomas had known that it would be louder than any sound he had experienced before, and had suspected that its pressure might be oppressive, but he had not anticipated the seeming fury with which it pounded his eardrums, drowning out all other sensation and thought.

Then affinity took hold of him—or, more accurately, the rising ethership slammed into his back, while the affinity that bound him to the Earth fought against the force of the rocket’s explosive levitation, trying with all its might to hold him down. He had known that this sensation, too, would be bad, having experienced similar phenomena during the test launches. Those vessels had only ascended into the atmosphere, though, no higher that the summit of a mountain. His body had suffered no lingering ill-effects at all—but this pressure was twice as powerful, and he felt that it was crushing him.

Thomas heard a gasp as Field tried and failed to scream; the clergyman was the only crew member who had not taken any part in the testing program. The scientist could imagine the thought that must be possessing the Puritan’s brain: if God had made the affinity between man and Earth so strong, how could he possibly intend that men should ever attempt to break the bond? But the pressure passed, to be gradually replaced by a very different sensation: that of weightlessness. Thomas had a fine mathematical brain—near equal to his father’s, Dee said—and he had long applied his methods to the artillerist’s art of ballistics; he constructed a picture in his mind of the trajectory of the rocket as it curved away from the ground it had left behind, aiming for a circular orbit about its world.

Only a handful of men as yet, had circumnavigated the globe in ships, and none of them was an Englishman—although Drake had sworn that if he had not been invited to take his place on the Queen Jane he would have made the attempt in the Pelican. Now, five Englishmen were about to circle the world not once but several times, in a matter of hours rather than months.

“Make sure your tethers are secure, lads,” he said—for Field’s benefit rather than that of his experienced crewmen. “Cleave to your couches if you can, and take care not to release anything into the cabin.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said de Vere, with a slight hint of mockery—but Thomas ignored him.

“Ready, Sir Francis?” he said.

“Aye, Tom,” was Drake’s entirely sincere reply. Drake had to supervise the course of the ethership while Thomas deployed the sampling bottles mounted to collect the pure ether that would soon be surrounding the ship, using mechanical arms to maneuver them into double-doored lockers. From there, if all went well, they could be brought inside without breaching the integrity of the hull. Thomas worked unhurriedly, but not without urgency; Drake was equally concentrated on his work.

Raleigh was closest to a porthole; he was looking out with avid interest, watching the curve of the globe’s horizon.

“I can’t see England at all, curse the clouds!” he said, “but I can see a landmass that must be Africa, and more ocean than I ever hoped to see in a lifetime. The mystery of the Austral continent will soon be solved—or perhaps we’ll see Dante’s purgatory, towering above the ocean hemisphere in solitary splendor.”

“Papist nonsense,” muttered Field, who sounded as if he had spent a stint in Purgatory himself.

“Thank the Lord we have not collided with one of the Romanists’ crystal spheres,” Raleigh said, mischievously. “That would have been cause enough for protest.”

“Nor can I see Plato’s spindle of necessity,” de Vere put in, craning his neck to see through another porthole. “Does anyone hear the sirens intoning the music of the spheres?”

“We’re not as high as all that,” Thomas said, without breaking his concentration. “The planets are a great deal further away than the moon, which is still a long way off. The first of the Classic philosophers’ questions to be settled is the nature of space. If the void theorists are right, ours will have to be a brief excursion.”

“Now there,” observed de Vere, “Puritans and Papists are in rare accord. There’s not an atomist in either orthodox company—they’re plenarists all, save for the occasional rogue. Remind me, please, Reverend Field: is it still orthodox to believe that the ether marking the extent of space is the breath of God?” Whatever his faults, de Vere had been well-tutored in Classics by Arthur Golding; he knew that the notion of gods breathing ether as humans breathed air was a pagan idea, of which Christian theology was bound to disapprove, in spite of the Vatican’s approval of selected Aristotelian ideas.

“It is not a question,” Field retorted, icily, “on which the Good Book has any pronouncement to make.” His tone did not seek to conceal his awareness that de Vere was suspected of Catholic sympathies, nor the fact that he was Foxe’s eyes and ears, alert for any advantageous whiff of heresy.

Even so, Raleigh—whom similar suspicion deemed to have atheistic tendencies—felt sufficiently liberated to say: “Was it God’s negligence, do you suppose, or that of his amanuensis Moses, that left the point unclarified? It would be a great convenience to us, would it not, if the statutes of Leviticus had pronounced upon the permissibility or abomination of ether-breathing?”

“Hold your blasphemous tongue, sir!” the clergyman exclaimed. “God revealed to man what man had need to know.”

Thomas, who was busy capturing a bottle of ether within the transfer-hold, found time to think that God had been a trifle vague when it came to the necessities of mathematics, navigation and engineering, let alone the still-impregnable mysteries of physiology. “Got it!” he said, as his manipulative endeavors bore fruit. “The Master’s contraption worked beautifully.”

“Did we decide who was to be first to inhale from the bottle?” de Vere asked, with a mischievous glance in Field’s direction. “Should we draw lots, or it is a clergyman’s prerogative to breathe the intangible sustenance of God?”

“If a lungful of void were likely to strike a man dead on the spot,” Raleigh said, “it might be best to give the task to a man of faith, under God’s dutiful protection.”

“Easy, lads,” Thomas said, as his nervous fingers groped at the interior catch of the hold. “It’s not faith in God that’s required here, but faith in the plenum, and the life-supporting virtue of the ether. Even if I lacked such faith, though, I doubt that I’d be struck dead by a single draught of nothingness.”

“You might be in more danger of drunkenness,” said Drake. “If ether is vaporous nectar, as some say, it might play tricks with your senses.”

“Aye,” Thomas agreed, extracting the sealed bottle from its cradle, “so it might. But as my father used to say: let’s try it and see.” He closed his mouth and set the bottle to his nose, released the stopper and breathed deep. He knew, even before his lungs responded to the intake, that the void theorists were incorrect; had the space beyond the atmosphere been empty, and the Earth’s air aggregated about it by affinity alone, he would not even have been able to remove the stopper; pressure would have held it firmly in place. The plenarists were correct, it seemed; there was no void, and space was full—but full of what?

Had God really intended humankind to be forever Earthbound, ether might have been a poison, and air a protective insulation against it—but Thomas found that it was not. Nor was it a deliriant, as Drake had hypothesized. He was mildly disappointed to discover that breathing ether was very much like breathing air. “It has no discernible odor,” he declared, pensively, “and it’s not cold. That’s odd, I think, for mountain air is as cold as it is thin. This is a little thin, I suppose, but so far as I can tell, it shares the virtues of the....”

He would have said “air we usually breathe” had he not been seized by a sudden fit of dizziness. Recumbent on his couch, he was in no danger of fainting, but he could not speak while his senses were reeling.

“What is it, Tom?” Drake asked, anxiously. He was not the only man present who was Thomas’ senior, but Field was only a year older and Drake was a full five; Drake was the only one with the remotest pretension to serve as a father figure.

“Nothing to do with the ether,” Thomas judged, perhaps a trifle too hastily. “The effect of moving while weightless, I think. A momentary vertigo.”

“There really is an Austral continent,” Raleigh informed them. “Or a sizeable island, at least. Can we claim it in the name of Queen Jane from up here, do you suppose, or must we direct a privateer to plant a banner on its shore when we land?” His voice faltered very slightly as he pronounced the last word; they all knew that landing their tiny craft would be every bit as difficult and dangerous and freeing it from the Earth’s affinity.

“Never mind the Austral continent,” said de Vere. “Can we—do we—press on to the moon?”

“There’s more than the breathability of the ether to be taken into account on that score, Ned,” Raleigh told him, bidding for the intellectual high ground in their private conflict. “There’s the fuel, and the maneuverability of the ship to test. We’ve time in hand. Will they be able to see us in England with the aid of one of your father’s telescopes, Tom, when we’ve overflown the Americas and crossed the Atlantic?”

“We won’t pass over England on the second round trip,” Thomas told him. “They might see us in Rome, though. That’ll make the pope bite his tongue, won’t it, Mr. Field?”

“The pope refuses to look through a telescope,” Field replied, less stiffly than Thomas had expected, “for fear of what he might see.”

“There’s nothing in the moons of Jupiter to frighten a pious man,” Raleigh observed, dryly, “and infinite space is no more visible than finite space.”

“The pope has no need to deny the infinity of space,” de Vere put in, striking back at Raleigh’s presumption of superior knowledgeability. “It’s not a Copernican doctrine. Nicholas of Cusa proposed it, on the grounds that God’s creative power could not be limited. He argued for the plurality of worlds on exactly the same basis.”

“You’re a true scholar, Ned,” Drake said, amiably. “Where do you stand on the dispute as to whether the inhabitants of the other worlds must be identical to ourselves, being made in the same divine image, or whether they must be infinitely various in form and nature, so as not to limit the creativity of the divine imagination?”

“Some might be giants and some tiny,” de Vere observed, “in proportion to the sizes of their worlds.”

Raleigh laughed. “But in which proportion, Ned?” he asked. “Will the Selenites be dwarfs because their world in smaller than ours, or giants, because the force of affinity does not stunt their growth?”

“The fuel stores are still in place and the controls check out,” Drake reported. “No leaks at all—we have fuel enough to take us to the moon and back, and the means to control its deployment.”

“And the attitude of the ship can be adjusted with appropriate precision,” Thomas agreed. “Who’d like to sniff the second bottle of ether when I’ve brought it through?”

“I will,” Raleigh said. “No offence, Tom, but you breathe like a mathematician. I’ve a better nose than you; if ether has a bouquet, however subtle, I’ll feel it on my palate.”

“Fine,” said Thomas, clicking the catch on the second hold—but as soon as he took hold of the bottle, he realized that Master Dee’s “contraption” had not worked as well on the second occasion as it had on the first. The outer hatch of the lock had not closed; there was now a gap in the hull the size of a man’s forearm.

“Don’t panic, lads,” he was quick to say. “If there were a void outside, we’d be in trouble, but so long as the pressure of the ether’s not so very different from the pressure of the air in the cabin, there won’t be much exchange. He fumbled as he tried to secure the inner hatch, however. The ether that Thomas had breathed had been clear, empty of any other apparent substance, but the ether that streamed in through the temporary opening in the hull was cloudy, as if wood-smoke were adrift in it. This was no mere smoke or mist, however, for it was formed into an approximate shape—Thomas could not decide whether it was more like a moth or an artist’s conception of an angel—and it moved as if with purpose, descending upon Thomas’ face like a veil.

“Look out, Tom!” Raleigh cried—but the warning was futile.

Thomas tried to hold his breath, but he was unprepared. Fear made him inhale sharply—and the invader took the opportunity to wriggle up his nose like an eel burrowing into soft sand. Thomas felt its ghostly presence pass, slick but not cold. He expected it to move down his trachea, or perhaps his esophagus, but instead it seemed to move into the space of his skull, diffusing into the nooks and crannies of his brain.

This time, the Queen Jane’s captain did sense a sweet and cloying odor—and when the vertigo took hold of him again, it did not relent. Supine as he was on his couch, he lost consciousness almost immediately.