Tales of the Flying Mountains Read online

  His heart knocked. I’m not afraid, he assured himself. I can’t be. At least I’d better not be. This isn’t any more dangerous than what I did back home.

  The thing is, though, I was doing those things there.

  “Clear track,” said the dispatcher’s radio voice. Static buzzed around the words. No tricks of modulation could entirely screen out the interference of Jovian electrical storms. “Good gathering, Tom.”

  “Roger,” said Hashimoto, mechanical response to a ritual farewell, “thanks, and out.” His eyes focused on instrument needles, his fingers jumped over switches. The computer clicked and muttered. Otherwise the cockpit was silent, making the beat of blood loud in his ears. He grew conscious of the spacesuit enclosing him, a thick rubbery grip. Its helmet was left off, like its gloves, until such time as an emergency arose. So his nostrils drank smells of machine oil and the ozone tinge that recycled air always has in close quarters. For the minute or two that he traveled in free fall he felt weightlessness: scoopships didn’t waste mass on internal field generators. But there was no dreamlike ease to the sensation, such as he had known in other days. The seat harness held him too tightly.

  The computer gave him his vectors and he applied power. The nuclear reactor aft was noiseless, but the Emetts of the gyrogravitic generators whirred loudly enough to be heard through the radiation bulkhead which sealed off the engine compartment. Field drive clutched at that fabric of relationships that men call space. Acceleration shoved Hashimoto back into his seat. Mary Girl leaped Jupiterward.

  He had a while, then, to sit and think. This interval of approach under autopilot was the worst time. Later the battle with the atmosphere would occupy all of him, and still later there would be the camaraderie of shipboard. But now he could only watch Jupiter grow until it filled the sky. Until it became the sky.

  The trouble is, he realized, I’m so near the end of my hitch. I didn’t count the days and the separate missions at first, when I began this job. But now that there’s only a few more months to go.…

  Three years!

  He hadn’t needed to stay in the Belt that long, as far as his wife was concerned. She wanted desperately to have children, yes, and her frail body would miscarry again and again unless she spent each pregnancy under next-to-zero weight, and obstetrical facilities for that kind of condition existed nowhere but in the Asteroid Republic. (No country on Earth would spend money to establish a geegeeequipped maternity hospital, or an orbital one; anything that increased population, however minutely, was too unpopular these days.) Hashimoto had been more than glad to land a contract with JupeCo that enabled them to move out here. But two healthy children were plenty. Now they wanted to return home.

  However, JupeCo insisted on a minimum of three years’ service, and the bonus he would lose by quitting before the term was over amounted to half his total pay. He couldn’t afford it. No contract that harsh would have been allowable in North America. But once they concluded their war of independence, the asterites had gone their own way.

  It was not Hashimoto’s. He remembered too well how sunset touched the mists of San Francisco Bay and made it a bowl of gold, how gardens lay vivid and trees stood rustling about his house in the Marin County hills, how men moved and spoke and exchanged friendship according to rules worn gentle with long usage. The asterites were as raw and stark as their own flying mountains.

  He did not fear Jupiter because it could kill him. Any untried spaceflitter might do that at home. But it would be horrible to die without having slept once more in the house that had been his grandfather’s, without having walked Earth’s living soil and felt Earth’s wind on his face again.

  Or without seeing his and Mary’s children grow into the heritage that was theirs.

  Throttle down, Hashimoto told his mind. You’ve got work to do.

  The scoopship thrummed around him. Through the low, thick inertrans canopy he looked forward along the flaring nose. By twisting his neck he could have looked aft to the tapered stern. The metal shimmered blue in the light that poured from Jupiter. He could not see that open mouth which was the bow, gaping upon emptiness, but he could well visualize it. He had watched the service crew often enough, to make sure that their periodic inspections of every accessible part were thorough. Mary Girl was getting along in years, as divers went—which wasn’t very far. (She had been Star Pup when passed on to him, but every pilot had the right to name his own craft.) Hashimoto didn’t trust his life to someone else’s estimate of her soundness. Most of his fellows did; but then, most scoopship pilots played a hell-for-leather role that he secretly considered rather childish.

  They were good joes, though, he thought. He must admit he would miss that gang. Often on Earth he would remember escapades and shared laughter.

  And by the Lord Harry, it was something to steal from Jupiter himself and come back to brag about it!

  The ship drove onward.

  Eventually the planet filled his entire vision. But then it was no more a planet, hanging in heaven; it had become the world. It was not ahead but below. Cloudfields stretched limitless underneath him, layered, seething, golden-hued but streaked with the reds and browns, greens and blues of free radicals. To port he saw a continent-sized blot of darkness that was a storm, and shifted course. Deceleration tugged angrily at him, and the planet’s own pull, nearly three times Earth’s. His muscles fought back. The first thin keening of cloven air penetrated to him. The ship quivered.

  He switched off the autopilot and plunged downward on manual. The noise grew until it was thunder, booming and banging, rattling his teeth in the jaws and his brain in the skull. Winds did not buffet this craft traveling at many times supersonic speed, but gigantic air pockets did, back and forth, up and down, till metal groaned. Darkness overwhelmed him as he passed through a cloud bank. He emerged below it, looked up and saw the masses towering kilometer upon kilometer overhead, mountainous, lightning leaping across blue-black cavern mouths and down the faces of roiling slaty cliffs, against a distant sky that was hell-red. Briefly an ammonia storm pelted him, the hull drummed with the blows of gigantic poisonous hailstones. Then he was past, still screaming downward.

  Presently he was too deep for sunlight to touch his eyes. He flew through a darkness that howled. He ceased to be Tom Hashimoto, husband, father, North American citizen, registered Conservative, tennis player, beer drinker, cigarette smoker, detective-story fan, any human identity. He and the ship were one, robbing a world that hit back.

  The instruments, lanterns in utter murk, told him he was at sufficient depth. He leveled off and snapped the intake gate switch. The atmosphere ceased to whistle through the open tube of the hull—for now the tube was closed at the rear. A shock of impact strained him against his harness. The ship bucked and snarled. He reduced the drive to let the atmosphere brake him.

  That air was mostly hydrogen and helium, but rich in methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, water vapor; less full of ethylene, benzene, formaldehyde, and a dozen other organics, but nonetheless offering them in abundance. This far down, none of them were frozen out. The greenhouse effect operated. Jupiter’s surface was warm enough to have oceans like Earth’s. No man had seen them. The weight of atmosphere would have crumpled any hull like tinfoil. Even at this altitude, Mary Girl sped through an air pressure several times that of sea-level Earth.

  Rammed into her open bow by sheer speed, the gases poured through a narrower throat. The wind of their passage operated an ionizer and a magnetic separator. Most of the hydrogen and helium were channeled off into a release duct and thrown away aft. Some of the other gases were too, of course, but there was more where they came from. An enriched mixture flowed—hurtled—through rugged check valves into the after tanks.

  The process did not take long. This was actually not the time of maximum hazard—though ships had been known to break up when the stress proved too much for some flaw in their metal. The dive downward from orbit had killed most of those who had perished, and the climb ba
ck was not always completed. Gales, lightning, hailstorms, supersonics, chemical corrosives, and less well understood traps could be sprung. If the pilot was simply knocked unconscious, or lost control for a couple of minutes, Jupiter ate him.

  A needle crossed the Full mark. The intake gate opened again and the tank valves shut. Hashimoto swung the ship’s nose toward the hidden sky and poured power into the field drive.

  He was once more out in sunlight, a storm-yellow dusk that showed him nothing but a cloud wrack tattered by wind, when his engine began to fail.

  Master Pilot Charles de Gaulle d’Andilly approached the mother ship with a song. What a dive that last one had been! He was still ashiver from it, tumbling end over end in a doomsday blackness until he found an updraft that he rode toward safety. Within the spacesuit, his zipskin sopped sweat. He wanted a drink in the worst way. There were only two kinds of occasion when every cell of a man’s body was absolutely alive, and Jupiter expeditions didn’t take women along.

  He’d compensate himself for that when he got back to Ceres. Few girls could resist a scoopman’s uniform and reputation. Especially when Charles de Gaulle d’Andilly wore them.

  … Dans le jardin d’mon père

  Les lilas sont fleuris.

  Tous les oiseaux du monde

  Y viennent fair’ leur nid.

  Auprès de ma blonde

  Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon.…

  The radio receiver buzzed. He flipped the switch. “Vesta Castle calling ship detected at …” The dispatcher’s voice gave coordinates which indicated him. “Come in, please.”

  “Mignonne responding to Vesta Castle,” said d’Andilly. “Everything okay.”

  “Hi, Chuck. How was the trip?”

  “Rough. Later I shall elaborate my experiences for you at some length. But being me, I had no unconquerable problems. So give me a guide beam to discharge, please.”

  “Roger.” Cartesian axes flickered to life within the globe of a signal ’scope. D’Andilly aligned the dot that represented his own craft and rode on in. Approach must be under his personal control, with Jupiter’s radio interference potentially so great. Nevertheless, he needed to devote little of his mind to it. After a dive, the matching of vectors in space was nothing but relaxation.

  Auprès de ma blonde

  Qu’il fait bon dormir!

  His thoughts drifted back to that certain blonde who was responsible for his having left the United European Space Corps a few years ago. He didn’t blame her. He should have known better than to play games with the daughter of his commanding officer. But she was so very tempting. He might try to find her again, when at last he must retire; Jupiter-diving was not for men past thirty-five or so. No, she was doubtless married by now. Well, there would be many others. And it would be good to stroll along the Seine, nurse an apértif in a café on the Champs-Elysées, dine on civilized food before proceeding to the opera. He had no intention of staying in the Belt forever. With his accumulated pay he could buy into a good small business on Earth and live like a gentleman.

  Not that he regretted his time out here. It had been glorious fun, mostly.

  The Vesta Castle grew before his eyes, a great metal egg with softly glowing ports, the smooth curve broken by turrets, air locks, and boat blisters. Her orbit had carried her near the Jovian terminator line, so that the shrunken sun glared hard by the vast hazy crescent of the planet, but there was still ample light. Shadows lay sharp across the hull. Large though it was, it was dwarfed by the balloon harnessed to the stern. And the latter would double its present radius before it was considered full.

  D’Andilly edged close to the gas bag. He could see stars through it. The plastifilm had to be thin, to save mass. He didn’t worry about ripping it in case of collision. That elastomer was quite incredibly tough, could even bounce back small meteoroids. But one could all too easily start the whole awkward ship-and-balloon system twisting around three simultaneous axes, and have the devil’s own job getting rid of that angular momentum.

  On such a whisper of drive that he felt no weight worth mentioning, he matched velocities. A radar at the balloon’s main valve locked onto him. He followed the beam to within meters of target. A hose snaked out from Mignonne’s stern, its nozzle driven by a miniature geegee and homing on the valve. They coupled. Between them, the pilots of the two ships killed what slight rotation was induced.

  Pumps throbbed, forcing the scoopship’s cargo of Jovian gas into the balloon. The sphere did not expand much; a single load was a small fraction of its total capacity. D’Andilly continued working to balance forces and hold the entire system steady in orbit.

  At the end, he directed the hose to uncouple and retract. Then he slipped smoothly toward his assigned blister on the mother ship. This far spaceward there was seldom need to operate hydro-magnetic screens against solar particle radiation, so approach and contact were simple. While he got out of his harness and suit, the final adjustments of angular momentum were made. The balloon waited quietly for the next arrival.

  Who would not be d’Andilly. He had twenty hours off till he dove again.

  Whistling he climbed through joined air locks into the Vesta Castle. Two maintenance men waited in the companionway to clean his gear. Afterward the ship would be inspected. That was no concern of d’Andilly’s. He gave the tech monkeys a greeting less condescending than compassionate—imagine so dreary a job!—and sauntered to pilot’s country; a short, stocky man, brown hair carefully waved and mustache carefully trimmed, blue eyes snapping in, a hook-nosed square face.

  Ulrich von Raaben, tall, blond, and angular, was emerging from the showers as d’Andilly entered. “Whoof!” he exclaimed. “You smell like an uncleaned brewer’s vat.” He saw the condition of the undersuit that the Frenchman began to strip off, and paused. “Bad down there?”

  “I hit an unobserved storm,” d’Andilly said, as casually as he could manage.

  Von Raaben stiffened. “We shall have a word with the weather staff about that.”

  “Oh, I will report the matter, of course. But they cannot be blamed. It must have risen from the depths faster than normal. Our meteorologists can only observe so far down.”

  “A cyclonic disturbance does not rise for no reason. Surrounding conditions ought to give a clue, at least to the probability of such a thing happening. If they tell us a given region looks calm, and it proves not to be, by heaven, they will have some explanations to make!”

  D’Andilly cocked his head at the other. “You are too Prussian to believe. Where were you born … Milwaukee?” Von Raaben reddened. D’Andilly slapped his back and laughed. “No matter, mon vieux. For a filthy Boche you are quite a good fellow.”

  He ducked under the shower and wallowed in an extravagance of hot water. That was one of numerous special privileges enjoyed by the scoopship pilots. Others included private cabins, an exclusive recreation room, seats at the officers’ mess with wine if desired, high pay, and a dashing uniform that one was free to modify according to taste. In exchange they made a certain number of dives per Earth-year, into Jupiter.

  One must be young and heedless to strike such a bargain. Sensible men, even among the asterites, preferred a better chance of reaching old age. No wonder that scoopship pilots off duty tended to act like ill-disciplined sophomores. Including me, no doubt.

  There are exceptions, to be sure. Like poor Tom Hashimoto. I should take him out with me when we reach Ceres and show him the proper way to valve off accumulated pressure. But no, he is much too married.

  In his own quarters d’Andilly put on lounging pajamas. From there he proceeded to the rec room. He found von Raaben, battered and eagle-decorated military cap shoved back on his head, playing rummy with Bill Wisner. The latter, who affected loud clothes and foul stories, was one of the few native-born asterites aboard. Immigration was still ahead of birth in expanding the population of the Republic.

  “Hi,” Wisner said. “I hear you hit some weather.”

  �
��Yes. I’d best report it before someone else dives into that region.” D’Andilly observed the glasses on the table and headed for the liquor cabinet himself. “Are we the only ones here?”

  “The only divers, yes,” von Raaben said in his meticulous way. “None others are due for several hours, I believe.” The scoopships operated on a staggered but loose schedule, and no one liked to discharge by starlight alone. Those who had completed a flit would assume parking orbits and rendezvous when the Vesta Castle was back in the sunshine.

  “Well, the more for us, then.” D’Andilly poured a stiff drink, tossed it off, and sipped appreciatively at a second. “Ah! Praise be that the cognac is holding out. When we are reduced to asterite booze, then it is time to head for Ceres, and never mind whether the balloon is full or not.”

  “Oh, Comet Blood isn’t that bad,” said Wisner defensively.

  “It is for any man whose palate was not burned out by it in infancy. Your liquor is one excellent reason I shall not remain in the Belt after they shelve me as a diver.”

  “You ought to, though, Chuck,” Wisner said with characteristic patriotism. “The life’s rough and risky, sure. But with any luck at all, you stand to make a fortune. And no bureaucrat’s going to tax most of it away and tell you how you can spend the rest, either.”

  “True. I admire the pioneer spirit, in an abstract fashion. But do you see, I am not interested enough, myself, in wealth or fame or power. There are so many other things to do.”

  “If one lives that long. Well”—von Raaben raised his own glass—“prosit.”

  “May we love all the women we please,” Wisner toasted, “and please all the women we love.”

  D’Andilly was about to propose something equally traditional when the emergency summons cut loose.

  The wardroom was also used for briefings and conferences. Captain ben Judah stood looking down the green length of the table. Roy Pearson sat on his right, the chief engineer on his left, other officers not on watch beyond them. But the three scoopship pilots, clustered at the foot, were those whose eyes he must meet.