Читать книгу Wings of Icarus - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 3

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It all began one evening last Summer, in July, 3042. I was at home when my audio-visual buzzed. It was my boss, Jonathan Edwards, Director of Raw Materials, Branch 2.

“Pleasure, or business, Chief?” I asked him.

“Business. Sorry. Your holiday is cancelled.” I’d never seen him so grim before; ordinarily he’s a smiling sort of fellow. “I want you to look up Navigator 1410, Interplanetary Transport Service. Evans. He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?”

“Chick Evans? He sure is. But I haven’t seen him for ages.”

“He’s in the city,” the boss told me. “On holiday. But that’s over. I’ve drafted him. I want you to report with him at once. This is important, Alan.”

Nobody would question my boss when he was in a mood like this. So I made inquiries.

“I’m to bring him to Federal Supply Building?”

“Yes, right away,” said Edwards.

The instrument clicked off. Fortunately, Chick was at home. His pug-nosed freckled face, with the shock of tousled red hair above it, was clear on the mirror-grid.

“Well, how are you, Alan? Glad to see you. I just got in on holiday.”

“That’s cancelled,” I said. “My boss, Jonathan Edwards, has drafted you. We’re to report at once. I’ll fly right over.”

Chick Evans was not a bit pleased and he did not mind saying so. He is a belligerent little fellow, three years younger than I am. I am twenty-six. My name is Alan Frane. As persons know from the Government newscasters who have given this Neptune affair plenty of publicity, I am Junior Technician in the Raw Materials Division, producing the Nullo-grav units—the electronic counter-charged metallic plates which nullify gravitational force.

Chick Evans did not like laboratory work. He went in for Navigation and got a job on the Earth-Moon run handling one of the ore-freighters which take food and supplies to the Moon-colonists and bring back cargoes of the semi-refined ores.

Evans was waiting for me when I flew over.

“This better be good,” he observed as he climbed into my roller. “I don’t like being drafted.”

He was getting himself all worked up to give my boss a piece of his mind. But he did not. There was an air of grim tenseness in Edwards’ little office-cubby. One could not miss it.

Edwards sat at his big oval desk with a sheaf of teletyped flimsies before him. Just one other man in the room remained in the room with Edwards, a small hunched fellow with a shock of white hair. He was Peter Green, Chief Advisory Chemist. Green nodded at me and shook hands gravely with Chick Evans. Then he spoke to the boss.

“You’d better isolate us, Edwards. We’ve got to talk plainly.”

Chick Evans and I exchanged startled glances as the barrage-current went into the metal walls of the room with a faint hiss. Not until then did Green venture to speak.

“Do you young men know enough to keep your mouths shut?” he inquired.

Edwards answered for us.

“They do,” he said.

Green’s fingers riffled the sheaf of teletyped flimsies.

“This is what I’ve got to tell you. Here are the latest reports from our mines in the Andes and from the Moon. We’re faced with a drastic raw materials shortage. Our supply of Uradonite is giving out.”

Uradonite. Nobody had to tell Chick Evans and me what that would mean. The whole space-flying industry was dependent upon the volatile-active element Z-470. Nullo-grav units had made vessels weightless. But that could not provide propulsion. Then came the Mansfield cyclotronic engine, a power unit by which the immensely heavy atoms of Z-470 were broken down into electronic streams, the rocket-streams by which all space-flyers are propelled.

“We’re using too much Uradonite,” Edwards was saying. “The rapidly expanding Space-transportation Industries need more all the time. The Moon as you know is our chief source of supply—and the veins there are drying up—”

“Drying up?” the little chemist Green exclaimed. “They are almost dry now. Take a look at Macdonald’s latest report This shipment of semi-refined ore that just came in today from him—the lowest grade he’s ever sent. What am I supposed to do with stuff like that? Refine down a ton of it to get a pound of commercial Uradonite?”

Chick Evans and I could only stare at each other, numbed. The news certainly hit Chick between the eyes. He was a space-flyer.

“Why, good grief,” he murmured, “Without Uradonite we’d be grounded—Earth-bound. If we can’t send flyers to Venus, Mars, the Moon, how are our colonists going to make out?”

Now that this thing is over, the truth may be told.

When Venus, Mars and the Moon were first explored and colonized, scientists were surprised to find Earthmen seemingly were the only human beings in the Solar System. On Mars only did living things approach the genus known as homo sapiens. We have some fifty million people abroad now. Most of them were born in the colonies. A dozen generations had passed since their ancestors had migrated from Earth to those other worlds.

“Fifty million persons,” Chick Evans groaned. “Great Scott! we couldn’t bring them back home. That would take ten years and we’d have to triple the number of space-flyers.”

“And thus need that much more Uradonite,” Edwards agreed grimly. “That’s the danger now—our colonists will be marooned.”

“And no more Uradonite to fly them,” growled Edwards, in grim tones.

We stared at each other in consternation. It was Green, the scientist, who broke the silence.

“Our colonists will be marooned,” he said. “What can they do without medical supplies or tools with which to work? If they don’t have these things from us they’ll die. Then again, what will the Earth do? We must have their botanicals, their ores and the myriad things they send to us. Vast industries will collapse. It means economic disaster. What a catastrophe!”

Evans and I continued to stare at Edwards and him, white-faced.

Earth-bound. What an ignominious end to man’s achievements. Like the waxen wings of Icarus, which melted in the sun, ours too seemed destined to vanish.

Finally Chick Evans spoke up hoarsely.

“What do you want us to do?” he asked.

“This situation took us entirely by surprise,” said Edwards. “We thought we had enough Uradonite to last for centuries. Suddenly, without warning, the diggings on the Moon have dried up. We’ve sent exploratory vessels out beyond Mars to several of the alien-world Moons and the planetoids. Some came back, some didn’t. And they found nothing.”

“And now you want Alan and me to take up the search?” asked Chick Evans.

“You’re the best Navigator available, Evans. And you, Frane, are our best technician. Here’s the proposition. The Interplanetary Research Society has been building a new-type flyer. There’s a fellow named William Boyle in charge of it. A fairly small ship, but with immensely powerful cyclotronic units. We hope it will develop ultra-velocity as he claims. Boyle has volunteered for the trip.”

“The trip?” I echoed.

“We want three volunteers. A last chance, with the future of the space-flying industry and the welfare of millions of our colonists at stake. More Uradonite must be found. Out beyond Mars, Jupiter or Neptune are likely places, but keep looking until you find Uradonite. Well, how about it? Will you go?”

Chick Evans and I pondered. Despite the stirring appeal we could not help it. This proposition from a routine commercial flight. We would take an untried, new type of ship, hurling ourselves into the vast unknown and keep on searching. Maybe we would get back but, more likely, we wouldn’t. There are too many chances of meeting some kind of hideous death.

But I guess I nodded agreement, for Chick Evans grinned.

“You give us the ship, Mr. Edwards, and I’ll navigate us to Pluto and beyond,” he said.

“What better adventure could I have on my vacation?”

The Society For Interplanetary Research certainly rushed that little ship to completion in a hurry.

We went down to the Montauk shop the next day. The ship lay in its cradle in the center of the big room, and workmen were swarming all over it.

We also met William Boyle. He was a big fellow, as tall as I am, which is something over six feet, and more heavily built. A man of perhaps thirty, he had a shock of wavy black hair and a rugged, heavy-featured face. Quite a handsome fellow. He seemed likeable enough, efficient, with a complete knowledge of details here.

Our first sight of the new spaceship startled Chick Evans and me. Evans had been used to the big commercial Earth-moon transports. He stared, crest-fallen.

“By Jupiter,” he murmured. “So that’s our death-trap. Why there’s hardly room to die in it decently.”

The ship had a glistening, green-black alumite cylinder, certainly no more than seventy feet from its broad fin-tail to its stubby nose. The middle of it bulged unduly. The fins were thick and narrow. A small glassite turret reared up just behind its nose.

It was astonishingly small, but in its squat heavy lines conveyed an unmistakable aspect of power. The Nullo-grav plates lined its hull top and bottom. The rocket vents were in triple banks along the hull, with clusters of them for acceleration at the sides of the tail, and others for retardation in the bow.

“Just about all power plant,” I observed.

“Exactly,” Boyle agreed. “That’s all we need—power to get where we’re going.”

“How about getting back?” I asked.

He laughed.

“Well, yes, that’s necessary, isn’t it?”

We trudged around it, and then he led us into the lower exit port. There was a small cat-walk here, dim with shaded tube-light. The interior resounded with the thumps and hissing torches of the workmen.

“I’ll say, you’ve sacrificed everything for speed,” Chick Evans commented. “There is a place for us to sleep, I suppose?”

“Speed and safety,” said Boyle. “Every mechanism is up to commercial standard, pressure, ventilating and power units, all based on the assumption that we’ll attain ten times commercial velocity. We have a new development of the standard Mansfield engine. A double disintegrating time-rate. Rocket-stream pressure is built up and then released. In effect, that’s a series of high-pressure electronic explosions, instead of the normal, steady-flow principle.”

“Well, I hope it works,” said Evans.

The immense power plant was on the center of the hull, forty Mansfield units, banked twenty on each side. Gleaming, sleek engines, every part as carefully made as the bearings of a chronometer. Beyond the middle-bow cubbies for the interior workings of the ship there was a small instrument and supply room. Three tiny sleeping cubbies, with spiral stairs which led up into the control turret.

We mounted the spiral.

“Very neat,” observed Evans as Boyle showed us the banks of dials and instruments. Quite obviously every device of modern Interplanetary transportation was here. And there were several new instruments, which Boyle now explained.

“If this vessel lives up to its laboratory calculations, we’ll certainly have no trouble getting out to Jupiter, at least,” I declared.

“We will attain a maximum velocity of eleven times normal,” said Boyle.

I stared at him.

“How can you predict that about an untried ship?”

“I have made careful calculations,” he answered and turned away as though that ended the subject. Evans and I grinned at each other.

But I will say the more we examined that little ship, the more confidence we had in it. We were around the shop most of the time during the week that followed.

At last the Nomad, as we had named it now, was ready. Then came the night of our departure. There was no celebration, just the gathering of a few grim-faced officials.

At the runway, as we were ready to go aboard, Jonathan Edwards shook hands with us.

“Do your best.” That was all he said.

Then the porte closed. Up in the turret, Chick Evans took the control seat, his slight body hunched down as, with skilled fingers, he caressed the levers.

“Well, here we go,” he grinned. “Good luck to us.”

The Uradonite gas-streams hissed into action. The Nomad quivered, slid upward along its short roller-bearing runway. The weightless vessel lifted from the downward thrust of the rocket-streams. We had just a glimpse of the waving group of officials.

And then we slid upward into the starlight.