Fifth Planet Read online

  ‘I had a bad head all day I’m afraid,’ he answered.

  ‘But we’ve been ringing your number all day.’

  Ye gods, thought Conway, they can’t leave you alone even when you are ill. He wondered whether there was anybody, anywhere, today, who could count his life his own.

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  Only a couple of centuries earlier there were fox-hunting, fire-eating squires in plenty who would have gobbled up on sight whole handfuls of these committee-sitting wallahs. But nowadays not a single fire-eating squire was to be found. The nineteenth century was almost as far back in time as - well, as the time of Achilles.

  ‘I’ve been having a few of these turns lately,’ he excused himself lamely. ‘So I really thought that I ought to go up to town to see my doctor.’

  This seemed to satisfy 'her. It had oome to a pretty pass when one had to satisfy one’s secretary.

  ‘I hope it’s all right,’ her voice faltered.

  ‘Probably a tumour or something,’ he said.

  ‘Oh no, Professor Conway, it’s not as bad as that.’

  Conway wondered if it was as bad as that. ‘What happened today? Did the Chairman send any word through to the office?’

  ‘They decided to refer things to the technical committees. I think there was quite a discussion about it.’

  Of course there had been quite a discussion about it. So they had decided to refer things to the technicians after all - perhaps some day they’d really do something for themselves.

  Alexander Cadogan arrived about half an hour later. He was a slow-spoken, heavily-built chap, bom thirty-five years ago in the State of California, just about a hundred years after California became the rocket-building centre of the world. His head for alcohol was prodigious.

  ‘I’d like you to meet an old friend, Chuck Lamos - Hugh Conway.’

  ‘Glad to meet you. Have you eaten?’ asked Hugh.

  ‘Not yet, but a sandwich will do us fine.’

  ‘A sandwich is all you’ll get, Cathy’s away.’

  ‘Off on a trip?’

  ‘A few days in London. Help yourselves to a drink, boys. I’ll see what I can dig out.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to tell us what happened?’

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  ‘Oh, they decided- to refer things to you chaps after all —

  amazing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Which doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘How soon will we get the green light?’

  ‘You know it will have to go right up to the top before you can get that,’ answered Hugh. ‘You might as well assume you’ve got to go ahead and carry on right now from there.’ ‘I reckon that’s right, they’re not likely to start wiring up the motors themselves,’ grinned Lamos.

  When Conway came back with the sandwiches he found Cadogan pacing up and down with heavy steps in front of the fire, ‘Hugh, it’s going to be one 'hell of a job,’ he said.

  ‘The century’s understatement,’ grunted Lamos. ‘It’s the double requirement that’s the very devil. Big momentum change and rapid momentum change. I suppose there isn’t any chance you’ve got your speeds wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘Come off it,’ grinned Hugh. ‘You know we’ve got things nailed down to within a few per cent - except for the precise velocity of escape from Achilles. But it’s probably not much different from the Earth, give or take a few kilometres a second.’

  ‘Say ten down and ten up, with the necessary safety factor about thirty kilometres a second under high-thrust conditions. How much under low-thrust?’ asked Lamos.

  ‘About two hundred,’ growled Cadogan, as he bit into his sandwich. ‘Not a very nice prospect, is it?’

  ‘As Alex says, it’s going to be one hell of a job.’

  The problem was a far more formidable one than anything that had been attempted before. At first the two engineers were reluctant to accept the fact that there was a basically new situation here. But as the hours passed Conway’s arguments gradually convinced them. It wouldn’t do to use the normal techniques, it wouldn’t do to make the normal sort of trip, like the one to Uranus. Normally it was possible to arrive in the outer parts of the solar system with a practically zero velocity. But if they did this, the Helios

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  system would sweep past them at about seventy kilometres a second. It would be like running to a railway track only to see 'the express train thunder by. Somehow they had to get aboard. And since there was no stopping this particular train it would be necessary for their rocket to develop the same speed. It would be rather like driving a car alongside a train and attempting to jump across from the car. to the train the moment the car had exactly the right speed.

  And, of course, when they wanted to come back home, it would be necessary to do the whole exercise in reverse. Otherwise the landing party would simply be swept away with Helios on its journey through space. All in all, they figured out that a total momentum drive of at least two hundred kilometres per second would be necessary for the whole trip. This was ten times greater than was necessary for a trip to the Moon. Reckoning on a final returning pay- load of ten tons, the all-up weight would exceed 10,000 tons, even if they could manage an exhaust speed as great as twenty kilometres per second. Moreover the trip could not last for more than a few months. So this meant that they couldn’t use an electro-magnetic ion rocket. They’d have to use a free-floating nuclear engine, free-floating in a magnetic field. And, as Cadogan said, those things were real buggers. Especially if you had to have a big thrust, such as they would need to land on Achilles.

  ‘We’ll just have to have two of ’em,’ said Lamos, ‘one inside the other.’

  ‘It’s damn well going back a century,’ grunted Cadogan. ‘I want to be sure there’s no way of avoiding such a bastard.’

  But they decided there wasn’t. There was also the problem of getting started. Somehow they would have to get their machine into orbit around the Earth to begin with.

  ‘That means the best part of a 100,000 tons of lousy chemical fuel,’ mused Lamos. ‘We can do it, but it isn’t going to be a picnic.’

  ‘That’s your worry, not the Committee’s,’ grinned Conway, as he squirted soda into a glass.

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  T)amn all committees, and their mothers, and their grandmothers,’ muttered Cadogan. ‘They wouldn’t be so free with their decisions if they had to do the work.’

  ‘When we’ve got her in orbit,’ went on Lamas, ‘We’ll 'have to strip all the rubbish off her.’

  ‘I see,’ said Conway, ‘so the crew will be able to start with a nice clean ship.’

  ‘That’s right, and I can tell you one thing — they’ll take, it for granted.’

  ‘At least we’ll give ’em some work to do after they’ve landed,’ Cadogan’s lips twisted as the thought struck him as mildly amusing. ‘They’ll have to get rid of the bigger reactor, and that won’t be a nice job,’ he added.

  The plan was to have a two-stage nuclear device, the first stage to get as far as Achilles, and to make the landing. The need for the big thrust wouldn’t do the delicately suspended reactor much good. So the idea was to get rid of it and of all the outer fuel tanks before starting on the homeward trip. Effectively the crew would then have a new rocket unencumbered by excess weight. But the job would be a tough one, even if the atmosphere of Achilles should turn out to be more or less normal. And even if there wasn’t anything to hinder the work - or anybody!

  Who might there be? This question was outside the terms of reference of Conway’s committee. Otherwise he would have been more interested in attending their meetings. But he knew that the general view was that there would be no trouble from an alien intelligence. And any bacteria or viruses there might be were likely to be so different from their terrestrial varieties that there would be little or no interaction. No radio signals were
coming from Achilles. This was already known. This meant, according to the military, that there was no highly intelligent life on the planet. It was just possible that there might be a civilization like that of ancient Rome, not quite sufficiently developed to have discovered the advantages of radio communication, but certainly advanced enough to overwhelm the landing

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  party by sheer weight of numbers. However, the sociologists estimated that the chances against this were about a million to one. It was known, they said, that civilizations such as ■those of Greece and Rome were transitory, lasting for no more than a few thousand years. Even if developments on Achilles were similar to those on the Earth, it was most unlikely that the present moment would just happen to coincide with the brief existence of such a civilization. The arguments looked good. Even so, Conway thought, it would hardly be pleasant to have dinosaurs breathing down your neck while you were trying to do the delicate technical job of stripping your rocket.

  It was to be many months before Cadogan would be able to show Conway the fruits of their conversations that night. But a day was to come the following April when Alex would show him through the gigantic hangars where the Achilles rocket was being assembled. He would see the vast tubes with their thick graphite walls, surrounded by super-cooled magnetic coils. These gave an enormous pinch to the magnetic field at two points on the axis of the rocket. They were necessary to prevent the reaotor from simply drifting away into space, or from drifting the other way towards the inner guts of the rocket. The reactor, in fact, was held captive between the two pinched points. Laterally it was held captive by a weaker field. This was maintained by an outer solenoid. The field could be weaker towards the graphite walls simply because there was no way through it. In contrast there had to be small openings of the field along the axis. The hot plasma surrounding the reactor had to be reflected as it approached the openings, and this of course meant a strong pinch.

  The problem was to prevent the walls from being burnt up, and this was solved by the injection of liquid inert fuel over the whole wall. The rate of injection was controlled by feedback devices which adjusted the flow in accordance with the energy output of the reactor. The greater the output, the faster the flow. What happened was that radiation, intense

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  radiation, from the reactor first vaporized and then ionized the inert fuel, which then streamed outwards along the wall and ultimately formed the jet of the rooket.

  As regards the inert fuel, what they wanted was a low molecular weight, not too low a boiling point, and a high density. Unfortunately the spending of hundreds of thousands of millions of pounds over the years had not succeeded in changing the laws of chemistry, whatever priorities the committees put on their projects. So the best inert fuels were exactly those that could have been deduced from chemical handbooks a century earlier. Ordinary ammonia was as good as anything, with its three atoms of hydrogen to one of nitrogen. After ionization it gave a molecular weight only a little above two. Hydrogen itself would have given a much better molecular weight, but the density was hopelessly low, and it was also difficult to keep vast quantities of hydrogen in a liquid state.

  Successful rocket design had proceeded by increasing the temperature of the sheet of gas close to the walls as it sped on its journey into space. Operating temperatures were now in the neighbourhood of a hundred thousand degrees, which gave the best exhaust speed of about twenty kilometres per second. With such a high operating temperature the walls had to be shielded to prevent evaporation of the graphite, and this meant that they had to be protected by the outflowing gases themselves. If the sheet of gas should become too thin, the walls, and eventually the controls of the motor itself, simply burnt up. If the rapidly-flowing sheet of gas was too thick, more than sufficient to protect the walls, then the inert fuel was used uneconomically. There had to be a fine balance, and this was why the feed-back devices that controlled the flow were so crucial. The reactor itself, suspended in its magnetic field, was of course of the gaseous variety, controlled in its operations only through the magnetic field.

  A further complication had been added to the Achilles ship. To avoid carrying unnecessary weight, storage tanks

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  had to be jettisoned as the inert fuel was used up. The problem was one of geometry. The motors had to be at the rear of the rocket. How does one jettison the fuel storage tanks without jettisoning the motor itself? The problem could not be solved with the motors in a fixed position, they had to be moved steadily backwards as the rear part of the rocket was stripped away. This was done by mounting the whole reactor system on a central shaft, the shaft being screwed backwards as the flight proceeded. Towards the front, but buried deep inside the gigantic structure, was a second smaller, but otherwise identical, rocket. It weighed perhaps a thousand tons. This would be used for the homeward flight. Inside it were the crew’s quarters. There was no question of any observations through port-holes. This was quite unnecessary, for at the front in the extreme outer skin of the rocket was a host of electronic devices, arranged to transmit their information to the crew inside - radio aerials, television cameras, ultra-violet and X-ray ‘eyes’, and three telescopes, one of eighty inches aperture.

  When, many months later, Conway was shown over this vast conglomeration of electronic and nucleonic devices, it seemed almost impossibly complicated. It seemed almost impossible that it should all work correctly. Yet on paper it had looked very straightforward. But Conway knew himself to be one of those strange people to whom calculations on paper appear a lot simpler than the real thing. It always amazed him how complicated a simple electric plug could be made. If he stopped really to think about it, the coils that produced the pinch effect, so critical to the correct operation of the whole affair, were just an application of elementary electricity. Yet, with their cooling equipment, their voltage controls and other feed-back devices, they seemed strange, menacing, and enigmatic.

  Although he could hardly believe it, Conway realized that to most people things were the other way round. It was usually the calculations on paper that seemed obscure. To most people calculations only acquired a meaning when

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  they were translated into material terms. It was a question of the way you saw the world. Conway saw it in terms of the abstractions of the mind, not in terms of concrete everyday things.

  Chapter Five

  Personnel

  Mike Fawsefct looked himself over carefully in the bathroom mirror as he shaved. He was trying to decide whether Cathy could properly be described as demanding. He decided that she could. He heard a disturbance in the bedroom, a waiter was bringing breakfast. He showered quickly, rubbed himself down, slipped on his dressing-gown and pushed open the door.

  ‘Coffee’s almost cold, darling.’

  Cathy was sitting up, her back to the bedhead, a large cup cradled in her hands. She smiled, not because she was amused, or because she was welcoming Mike, but because she was utterly at ease. She looked him over, smiled again and, without realizing it, stretched herself slightly.

  ‘I don’t mind it cold,’ he said.

  ‘The one thing they never seem able to do is to get the coffee hot. The best hotels are the worst.’

  These self-contradictory remarks were somehow typical of Cathy. He wondered if he should broach the subject on his mind. He knew that his name was on the list of possible candidates for the flight to Achilles. But the list was certain to be a long one, and four men would be chosen. He also knew that every candidate would have a completely first- class record, not only Of expeditions into space, but also in their medical and psychological histories. He knew that a straw would decide between those who were chosen and those who were not. A single dissentient voice would be sufficient to rule a man out. This was bound to be the case when someone equally good was available to replace him. One pos
sible, and even likely, voice was that of Cathy’s

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  husband. He wondered if Conway was a vindictive man. After all, he wouldn’t need to be particularly vindictive. It would only be ordinary human nature. He wondered for a moment whether perhaps Conway might not find out; then, looking down at Cathy as she buttered a roll, he dismissed the thought. Nobody he had ever met was more open than Cathy. You took her or you left her. She didn’t care.

  ‘Jam or honey?’ she asked.

  He ignored the question. ‘Cathy, you know I’m up for the big trip?’

  ‘I know. I saw the list among Hugh’s papers.’

  *You don’t think he might do something to stop me?’

  ‘He won’t. I’ll see to that. He’ll do as I say.’

  Cathy leant forward and pushed away the breakfast trolley. She put her hand round Mike’s head and pulled him towards her.

  Tom Fiske was brought up without any difficulties on the sand lots of Scranton, Pa. His parents were entirely unknown, apparently having decided at an early stage in young Tom’s career to part company from him. After spending eleven of his first twelve years in an orphanage, Tom decided to chance his luck as a free-lance operator. He worked in the evening and attended high school by day. So unwilling nowadays are the inhabitants of the highly prosperous countries to engage in any form of physical activity that Tom found very little difficulty in eking out a bare living. In summer there was any amount of gardening to be done. Winter was more difficult, but there were the mails around Christmas time, there was the snow to be cleared in front of people’s homes, and after a couple of years of experience he found that doing leg-work for professional debt collectors could be tolerably profitable. He had a good nose for sniffing out information, he was not regarded with a suspicious eye, his skin was thick perforce, and his legs were fast.

  As he grew older, as he became interested in the other

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  sex, he came to realize that these activities were not very profitable, nor did they carry status. He thought hard about being a professional ball-player, and if the big-time clubs had given him a fair try-out it is possible that he would have made it.