Tales of the Flying Mountains Read online

  He felt sick. The words dragged from his throat:

  “Gentlemen, we have received a call. Hashimoto is down.”

  There could be no adding to the silence that followed. But Wisner lost color and von Raaben slowly took off his cap.

  “Not exactly down, yet,” ben Judah went on. “His engine quit on him. But not too suddenly. When it first began misbehaving, he got as high as he could and threw himself into orbit. That’s how we were able to receive his ’cast. He was above the sources of atmospheric interference, though it was still bad enough.”

  D’Andilly half rose. “Pardieu! Why do we sit here? I can go fetch him myself.”

  “If he were in clear space, yes,” ben Judah said. “But he didn’t get that far. There’s still a trace of gas where he is. Frictional resistance—he’s spiraling inward.”

  “How fast?” von Raaben barked.

  “That can only be estimated. We know his approximate altitude, from the orbital velocity as given by Doppler shift of his signal. That is thirty-one-point-five kilometers per second, in the same sense as our own path. On the basis of the average density-altitude relationship in the Jovian atmosphere, the weathermen figure he should … should start burning in five or six hours.”

  “No chance that Stuart or Dykstra or any of the others can give a hand?” asked Wisner.

  “We’ve tried to raise them,” said ben Judah. “No luck, as expected.” Only a tight beam could drive a recognizable message from the Vesta Castle to a scoopship deep in the radio chaos of Jupiter’s air. And the exact position of such a ship was never known—constantly and unpredictably changing, anyway. A broadcast could be received by a man in clear space, over considerable distances. But the parking orbits of those who had taken on full loads and were waiting to rendezvous on dayside were eccentric ellipses, crossing the mother ship’s circle at the space-time point of the meeting. Now Jupiter lay between, a wall to block off any cry. Unless some man still in its neighborhood should find some reason to call, and come around the edge of the radio shadow for that purpose, there was no measurable probability of getting in touch.

  “We could accelerate toward dayside ourselves, couldn’t we, till we can get a ’cast through?” asked the engineer.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Pearson snorted. “We could, sure. But they’d all be far out, farther out than we are now. It would only waste time.”

  “So the problem’s ours,” Wisner said. “Well, I don’t see why you’re looking so down in the nose about it. What the hell, even at one g a scoopship gets from here to the atmospheric fringes inside of two hours. Let’s see … if you got his call a few minutes ago, he must still be on our side of Jupe, and his period just about three hours. You don’t gain much by flitting a high-acceleration curve over such a short distance, seeing that you also have to brake, but you do gain a little. Yes, I think I can meet him in something like two hours. Three at the most, to allow for matching speeds and so forth.… Sure, we can do it. Assume I start out half an hour from this moment at five g’s, and have a curve computed for me. It’ll take me that long to get ready. Got to dope up with stim and gravanol——”

  “No, I shall go,” said d’Andilly, and “Nein, ich,” von Raaben. They began to rise.

  “Sit down!” rapped Pearson.

  Men’s gazes focused on him, the ship’s officers’ with incomprehension, the pilots’ with flaring resentment. The manager clamped his lips together for a space before he asked, “Precisely what do you propose to do?”

  “Equalize velocities, couple air locks, and take him aboard,” said d’Andilly. “Voilà!”

  “Easy in space,” Pearson said. “But do you realize that he’s in atmosphere?”

  “Very thin atmosphere thus far,” the engineer said. “Nearly a vacuum.”

  “He’ll be down where it’s thicker by the time another ship can arrive,” Pearson said.

  “If he has five hours to go before he hits such a density that metal volatilizes,” d’Andilly said, “it will not be too thick three hours from now for a scoopship hull to stand orbital speeds.”

  “No. You can’t do it, I tell you.”

  D’Andilly reddened. “Well, perhaps not. But we must try, or stop claiming to be men.”

  “Very dramatic,” Pearson scoffed. “Too bad the laws of physics don’t sympathize.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, I admit the air friction is slight where he is now. If only we could contact one of the men now diving, rescue would not be hard. But by the time you can reach him, he’ll be down to a level where it’s considerably worse. Oh, the air will still be tenuous, upper stratosphere density or less. Aerodynamic forces will tend to keep the hull aloft, preventing an extremely quick plunge to destruction.

  “But … at thirty-odd KPS, that thin air is equivalent to an Earthside wind of more than hurricane force. It doesn’t much resist the smooth, streamlined shape of a hull with an open gate; they’re designed that way. But how does your screw engine open an air lock against such pressure? How can a tube be extended and secured? You’d accomplish nothing except to generate so much turbulence that your own craft would spin out of control.”

  D’Andilly sank back in his chair.

  “Grapple onto his hull, then, and bring home ship and everything,” von Raaben said.

  “You can’t do that either, for the same reason. The grapnel field doesn’t seize hold till it’s within a centimeter or so of metal. Otherwise the thing would be unmanageable in space. In such a wind, you’d never be able to swing it into contact.”

  “Are you certain of that?” Wisner asked.

  “Certain enough,” Pearson said.

  “That means you aren’t one hundred percent sure. Who could be, with so many unknowns in the equation? Okay, we’ll see. Personally, I think that we three between us might well be able to slap a claw or two on him.”

  “No. You’ll only get tossed against each other in the attempt. I don’t consider suicide heroic.”

  “You just can’t understand, can you?” Wisner said in a soft voice. “Tom Hashimoto is one of ours.”

  “He isn’t, really. He’s not planning to renew his contract.”

  “So what? I’ve drunk his beer too often. His wife’s a hell of a sweet girl. You think I can go back to Ceres and tell her we didn’t even try to rescue her husband?”

  “If it will make you feel better,” Pearson said coldly, “I’ll turn that into an order. You stay put.”

  “Tu chameau pouilleux,” d’Andilly whispered. He climbed erect, with a loud suggestion for the manager’s private recreation. “Let us get started, friends.”

  “Sit down!” Pearson shouted. A vein pulsed in his temple, above the plastic that replaced his right cheek. “Or do you want to face charges of mutiny?”

  “Monsieur le capitaine.” D’Andilly turned to ben Judah. “I appeal to you.”

  “I … no, I am not a diver,” the Israeli croaked. Sweat glittered on his forehead. “I can’t go against a man who knows the subject better than I do.”

  D’Andilly spat on the deck. “He’s no diver himself.”

  Von Raaben tugged at his companion’s sleeve. “Sit. Charles. Contain yourself. This does nothing.” He dragged d’Andilly back into his chair, then looked squarely at Pearson and said:

  “Perhaps you do not know what morale means. I have heard a story about the British in one of their wars with my ancestors. Their army was beaten on the Continent and had to evacuate or be captured. The men were taken onto ships off Dunkirk. Afterward the naval commander whose warships had given what help they could was reproached for taking so great a risk. If we had brought up our own battleships and heavy artillery to the narrows, or if a storm had arisen, he would have lost his entire fleet. Let me tell you what he replied. ‘We could build another fleet in four or five years. But it would have taken us three hundred years to build another tradition.’”

  Pearson’s eyes dropped. He stared for a space at his artificial
hand, inert on the table. Finally he said, “But I do know. I was a space pilot once myself. Not scoopships, no, but prospecting, which is pretty dangerous, too, in a rock cluster. Some good friends of mine died in the same collision that shelved me. I managed to get into an intact compartment, alone. But I’d soon have died too, if the survivors hadn’t risked their necks to search the debris for casualties.

  “But … that was sound doctrine. The ship was a total loss. Nothing more was being hazarded except men, who’d die in any event if they couldn’t pool their efforts to jury-rig sufficient shelter until help came. This case is different. You have to multiply values to be gained or lost by the probability of success or failure. Exposing three ships and three men to a very high chance of destruction, for the sake of one ship and one man whom there’s only the smallest likelihood of saving … no, that’s much too bad economics.”

  “Economics?” d’Andilly exploded.

  “That’s what I said,” Pearson answered. Steel underlay his tone. “The dollar cost of building and outfitting a ship, of training and equipping a man. It’s the only basis we’ve got.

  “Wisner, you’re an asterite born, and von Raaben has been one for a number of years. But I guess I’ll have to spell the facts out for you, Pilot d’Andilly. You’re kept like a fighting cock, because that’s the only way to attract men to your job. So you aren’t aware, I suppose, how thin a margin we asterites live on. Can you imagine what it means to carve a living from airless rocks? Sure, they’re rich in metal; atomic power is cheap and solar power is free; but what is there otherwise? Why raid Jupiter at such enormous effort, if we didn’t have to have those gases to form the basis of chemical synthesis, of our whole chemical industry, which equals our survival?

  “Okay. It’s barely possible that three ships working together could grapple onto Hashimoto’s and haul him into clear space. I don’t believe they could, but I’ll grant a slight possibility. So if you did pull off that stunt, every boy on every asteroid would cheer himself hoarse for you, and every girl would fall into your arms, and every man would curse you for a pack of dangerous idiots. Because any operation which consistently gambled at those odds would soon go broke—and we’ve got to have the operation or the whole Republic dies.

  “Now do you understand?”

  D’Andilly’s look traveled wildly from one pilot to the other. Von Raaben’s face had congealed, Wisner’s fingers twisted together like snakes. But each of them nodded.

  After a time when no one spoke, Pearson turned his head toward ben Judah. The captain stood unmoving, backed against the bulkhead. “Are we still in contact with Hashimoto?” the manager asked.

  “I believe so,” ben Judah said dully.

  “Then I suggest you return to the radio room and offer him what consolation you can. If he has a coreligionist aboard—” Pearson had raised his prosthetic hand a little. He let it fall. The clatter was so loud that he jerked in his seat.

  “I wonder what happened to conk out Tom’s engine?” Wisner muttered.

  “We’ll never know,” the chief engineer said. “That compartment’s sealed off behind a rad shield, remember. It’s only cracked for direct inspection at refueling time, every five years or so—why am I telling you what everybody knows?”

  “I’ll have nightmares thinking it might happen any time, to me or … or anyone.”

  “Me, I shall have nightmares about Tom,” d’Andilly said. “Whirling so utterly helpless, yes, the helplessness is the real horror.”

  “He did not stop to think we could not get him out of orbit,” von Raaben said, “or he might not have bothered.”

  “Well, we could, if he’d gotten into clear space,” Wisner said. “Or, of course, if Jupe’s mass didn’t produce that kind of orbital speed.” His chuckle was without humor. “But then, if Jupe were a minor planet, it wouldn’t have an atmosphere worth exploiting, and this would never have happened in the first place.”

  “If we could slow him somehow,” von Raaben floundered. “By aerodynamic braking? No, he has no control surfaces, and with his engine dead—”

  D’Andilly sprang to his feet. His chair fell over backwards. “Mon Dieu!” he shouted.

  “Huh? What?” Startlement ran around the table.

  “Control surfaces!” d’Andilly chattered. He waved his arms and forgot to put his torrent of words in English.

  “Climb down from the mast, you nut,” Wisner exclaimed. “Do you have an idea?”

  “Oui … yes, yes … the balloon, n’est-ce pas? Dump the gas out, make a drogue. Ha, quick, draw some plans, Monsieur l’ingénieur, time is a-wasteful!”

  “You’re crazy!” Pearson snapped. He, too, leaped up.

  “No, wait,” ben Judah said. Hope kindled in his face. “I do know something about this. The first experimental spacecraft were retrieved in some such way. It might work. And it doesn’t look too risky to the men.”

  “You’d abort this whole cruise,” Pearson said. “Not to mention the whopping cost of the balloon. Even getting Hashimoto’s vessel back, we’d stick the company for a terrific net loss.”

  “Economics can only go so far,” ben Judah said.

  “But don’t you see?” Pearson’s voice turned pleading. “It’s not that I’m inhumane. Dollars and cents are nothing but shorthand for resources and human effort. And the Republic has only so much of either to go around. To us, an unprofitable operation is a socially evil one. We’ve got to operate under economic doctrine!”

  “Not every time.” Ben Judah’s eyes were no longer mild. “If these pilots are willing to go, they shall.”

  Pearson bit his lip. “All right,” he said. “Somebody has to take the blame of all the emotional morons. It may as well be me. I haven’t any family to ostracize. So I directly forbid any attempt.”

  “As captain, I overrule you.”

  “You can’t. This isn’t in your province.”

  “Isn’t it?” ben Judah murmured. His officers, who had crowded close, moved nearer Pearson. The second mate laid a hand on the manager’s thin shoulder. “You heard the captain,” he said.

  Pearson shook himself loose, stumbled back to his chair and buried his face in his hands.

  Presently the gang went aft to begin work. Pearson raised his head. The cabin had grown very still again. Only ben Judah remained, puffing his pipe at the opposite side of the table.

  “I’m sorry, Roy,” the skipper said.

  “I’m sorrier,” Pearson told him. “When we reach Ceres, I’m going to prefer charges against you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I don’t want to. How I don’t want to! But we can’t keep sentimentalists on the payroll, and we need an object lesson. It’s my duty to get you fired.” Pearson rubbed his live hand over his plastic jaw. His voice was empty. “What have I got to live for, except my duty?”

  The atmosphere of a high-gravity planet has a correspondingly high density gradient. Streaking downward, the scoopships hit perceptibly thick air—still thin even by Martian standards, but thick enough to matter at this speed—almost before the pilots realized they were about to do so. Then it was all their drug-stimulated bodies could do to maintain formation.

  There ought to be an art to this, d’Andilly thought amid thunder. Given time, an art could be developed, a whole profession of … droguedragging? His teeth gleamed behind his faceplate, a taut and short-lived grin. God grant this was the last as well as the first occasion the thing was tried!

  Mignonne reared like a whipped horse. The cable had pulled on her. D’Andilly applied sidewise field thrust. Give that line some slack or it’ll yank the guts out of her! But not too much slack, or you’ll lose control of the whole crazy package. Then you and your comrades may tumble into Jupiter ready wrapped in a plastic shroud. Death as a shooting star sounds romantic, but any man of sense prefers to die in bed, at the end of a long and misspent life.

  “Whoa, there!” Wisner’s voice came to d’Andilly’s earphones, barely audible over the int
erference, the wind, and the cry of tormented metal. “You’re pulling on me now.”

  The Frenchman cast a glance outside. They were still so high that heaven was clear. Stars glittered inhumanly serene and a moon rode in an ice-crystal halo, turning the cloud layers far below into snow mountains. That Jovian horizon stretched farther than a man could see; it did not lose itself in curvature but in mists and blacknesses. He saw his companion ships above him, Sky Thief to starboard and Seeadler to port—himself at the lowest point of an equilateral triangle—as shimmering curves where the light struck them, occulting shadows elsewhere.

  The cables trailing aft of the three vessels were harder to see. They’d been smeared with luminous paint; but in this howling, shuddering chaos, one’s head slapped back and forth in the helmet—yes, there. Wisner’s line was too taut, von Raaben’s too slack. More by feel than brain, d’Andilly decided how he should adjust his own place in the formation.

  Mignonne groaned and lurched when he touched the controls. Her Emetts whined, nearly as loudly as the air she split at orbital speed, feeding energy into the drive field. Any change of course under these conditions was like slugging through a brick wall. Sweat stung the pilot’s eyes, half blinding him. His tongue was a block of wood and his nose full of his own stink. Vibration quivered his bones. Wind shrieked and hooted. Now and again there came a great flat smack of noise.

  But … so! He’d completed the shift. The dive proceeded more smoothly.

  The balloon snakedanced at the end of the cables. Deflated, slashed open, rolled in a sausage shape and stuffed into a long metal tube, the thing had not been hard to manage in space. But now when they slanted through atmosphere—D’Andilly hoped the plastic wouldn’t be damaged. But no, that stuff was intended for spatial conditions. The engineers had needed a laser torch to cut it.

  “Tom,” he said into his radio, for the dozenth time. “Tom, are you there? Do you read us?”