Fifth Planet Read online

  At the age of eighteen he had a serious discussion with himself. Candour compelled him to admit that he was getting nowhere. It was true he was eating, but only in hamburger joints, reeking of evaporated fats. There seemed no hope at all of making the sort of moolah that would enable him to buy a house on one of the hills to the west of the town, where he might raise a family in peace, and in contemplation of the American scene. Actually this was not entirely true. Tom’s real enemy was not the under-privilege of birth but a genuine ignorance of what to do. He was handicapped neither by physical shortcomings, nor by low intelligence, but by sheer lack of know-what. There had never been a time since about the year 1950 when a ‘young man who knew’ could not make himself a million dollars by the time he was twenty. Luck made no difference, but know-what certainly did.

  So it came about that the U.S. Army found itself with a raw recruit on its hands. Tom enlisted, and so avoided the draft, shortly before his nineteenth birthday. At that age he was a rather gangly youngster, just about six feet tall, with a close-cropped head that would have grown a shock of red hair if it had been given time to do so. His face was mildly freckled, and his ears stuck out sufficiently to give him a slightly aggressive look, without being really noticeable. The psychological tests he was given were really a waste of time, for the readiness of his smile in the face of past experience manifestly showed that he had the right temperament. At that time there was a gap in his front teeth - one of them had been knocked out in a gang fight about five years earlier.

  But they did give him tests, physical as well as psychological. Although the results, especially the physical results, were abnormally good, nobody took very much notice of

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  that. His whole background was too amorphous for him to

  be taken seriously at that stage. He was first sent on a tour of duty in Bolivia. This did little to help his future career, except perhaps to give him a catholic outlook on things in general. Then he was hauled back to the U.S. and given an eight-months’ training as an electronics maintenance engineer. He survived the course and got the first break of his life by being sent to winter at the Mount Erebus Station in Antarctica. After three summer months he volunteered to see the winter through at this remote spot, according to some the nearest in its inhospitajlity to the satellites of Jupiter. On the way back to base camp the following spring he and three other colleagues were overtaken by a series of furious storms. These would not have mattered but for a series of freakish mishaps to their equipment. Even in this day and age it is possible to run close to disaster on the Antarctic Plateau. They managed to make base, but only after a desperate struggle. The doctor who examined Tom was first astonished and then suspicious. His condition when compared with that of the other three men appeared to be too good. At first it seemed to indicate that Tom had somehow, managed to avoid pulling his weight. When further investigation proved this to be by no means true a thorough report on Tom was made to Washington. The report rated an electronic check-over. This meant that the whole of Tom’s past history, so far as it was known to the Army, that is to say so far as it had been committed to punched cards, was fed into an electronic computer. The computer delivered its report; Tom was well within the range of physical and mental characteristics required for a candidate to space school. He was accordingly sent to the Department of Space Medicine at Santa Barbara, California.

  The normal physical tests, endurance and reaction times, showed up nothing particularly unusual, nothing much different from hundreds of other well-coordinated cadets. But the results were sufficiently satisfactory for him to proceed to more advanced training. This meant acceleration

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  tests. It was then that something really unusual began to emerge. It wasn’t that Tom liked being accelerated at x times gravity any more than anyone else, but his recovery time was quite abnormally quick. After prolonged acceleration he could return to coordinated physical and mental activity long before the normal recruit. From the emergence of this freak ability it was. only a question of time before Tom got his first trip into space. It was a routine flight to the Moon, in which he performed well enough to graduate as an astronaut.

  Now it was a question of the long haul. Lots of young fellows had started equally as well as Tom, but it was another matter as the flights became more numerous and longer in duration. Tom simply took it all in his stride. A gap in performance slowly opened out between him and the average man. The longer time went on, the wider the gap became.

  It seems whatever the human race sets itself to do there will always be a few rare individuals who manage to perform almost unnaturally well, as if they were not members of the species at all. So far as space flight was concerned, Tom was one of these. He was a natural, his name a cert for the trip to Achilles. He wouldn’t be the leader, he didn’t have the right educational or social background, but if anyone stood the course it would be Tom Fiske. And if he needed any further recommendation, he now had a girl, 36-25-36, five feet six and a half inches, green eyes, fine hair dyed blonde, the secretary of a big noise in the top organization, the Rand Corporation. This was judged by the psychiatrists to give him additional stability.

  During the months that followed Cathy Conway had

  several assignations with Mike Fawsett. Inevitably serious rows with Conway followed in the wake of these arrangements. For his part, and for his own sake, Fawsett kept the affair as much throttled down as he could. He knew that the moment of decision was not far away.

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  Hugh Conway had no intention of raising the matter of the choice of the Achilles crew with Cathy. He intended that she should raise it herself. All he had to do was to leave the relevant committee papers lying around in his study. She would be sure to find them.

  It worked out as he planned. She did raise the subject, but in a manner that simply took his breath away. Late one evening, when they were going to bed, Cathy turned to him, entirely naked, candidly and boldly, and said, ‘You’re going to make sure that Mike gets in, aren’t you?’ Strangely, it shattered his confidence. He himself might be a clever fellow, but surely his wife was unique. Had any woman ever before had the sheer gall to look seductive simply to demand — yes, demand - that her husband should do a favour to her lover. Conway doubted it.

  ‘I’m not going to lift a finger to help that Fawsett stumble- bum, if that’s what you’re getting at.’

  ‘You know what it means, Hugh. It means we’re finished if you don’t. I’m not going to go on living with a mean- minded man.’

  ‘You think it’s mean-minded to refuse to help a man who’s seduced my wife, do you ?’

  ‘He didn’t seduce me,’ began Cathy indignantly. Then her voice trailed away as she realized that she had fallen into a small trap.

  ‘You’re quite shameless. Look at you now,’ went on Conway.

  ‘IfNI can’t undress in front of my husband, who can I undress in front of?’ It was the usual story. In any matter sexual Cathy had the perfect defence, on anything else she was worse than hopeless. ‘But you’re quite right,’ she went on, ‘the way you stare at me it isn’t decent. After ten years it’s abnormal. There must be something wrong with you.’ Acting up the part she grabbed a dressing-gown and slipped it around her shoulders.

  ‘How can you expect things to go on working if you’re always sleeping around with some nuke or other?’ he asked.

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  Cathy’s face reddened slightly, ‘I don’t sleep around with nukes.’ And of course she didn’t. ‘If you’re going to be nasty, I’ll tell you this. If you’d sleep around a bit we would get along a lot better. You ought to see a psychiatrist. It ain’t natural the way you are always looking at me. Anyway, how can you know I’m so good if you never go out with anybody else?’

  Conway didn’t know whether to get mad or to laugh.

  ‘
And you know what I’m like. You’ve known right from the beginning. You can’t make a leopard change its spots.’

  There was justice in this. He had known. Before he married Cathy various people had told him in measured asides that she was classified in her psychological record as a pseudonympho. He’d never really known the technical meaning of this term - by now he’d simply come to associate it with someone like Cathy. He’d known perfectly well what she was like and he?d made the masculine error of supposing that he could change her. In this he had really been unfair. It was perhaps because he could think so that their marriage had lasted for so long, three times as long as the average. Many of his friends would also 'have subscribed to the view that he was abnormal.

  ‘Don’t you realize that I couldn’t get Fawsett into the party even if I wanted to. I’m not choosing the crew.’

  ‘Rubbish!’

  ‘I mean it. You know perfectly well that these things are only settled at the top.’

  Cathy pondered this for a moment, and then said, ‘But you could do your best.’

  ‘All I can do is to promise not to do my worst.’

  She sat on the edge of the bed looking down for a moment and shook the mop of brown curls. When she looked up at him her eyes were ablaze with indignation, ‘But it’s your planet,’ she burst out.

  Instantly the shadow of Mike Fawsett vanished like a puff of smoke. Cathy’s lips were as compulsive as they had

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  ever been. Afterwards, she fell almost instantly asleep. Conway was left with 'his brain racing.

  There was nothing for it but to go back to his study again. He moved the light blanket gently around Cathy’s shoulders and tiptoed from the room, pausing for a moment to listen to her breathing as he always did. It was as steady and regular as that of a child. With a clear perception he realized that Cathy was abnormal in the sense that she lived more in the present than a normal person. The past had some meaning for her but not a great deal, while the future was still dim and inconsequential. Once Fawsett was on his way across space she would forget all about him. But of course the trouble would arise again with increased emphasis on his return, if he returned. Conway would have found this analysis ironic if he had known just what was going to happen to Cathy.

  Down in the study he rummaged among 'his papers. Because his private estimate was that the crew of the Achilles ship had no more than a fifty per cent chance of survival, let alone success, his inner wish had been to recommend Fawsett strongly for a place in the crew. But he had been tormented inside himself by the story of David and Uriah, except of course that things weren’t quite the same way round in this case. After all, Fawsett wanted to go. But this had hardly seemed sufficient. It seemed somehow wrong to send a man to what might be his death when you yourself stood to profit from that death. So until tonight he had been balanced in his mind as to what he should do. But now he was decided. Cathy had settled the matter for him. He was damned if he was going to lose his wife because of a scruple, for he knew that she would surely leave him if he should black-ball Fawsett.

  Conway’s doubts were based on many arguments, none of them very conclusive, but adding together to a solid amount of evidence. Now he had one more thread, a thread as yet unknown to anyone else. He had a crucial new result from his observations. If it had been almost anyone else, the news

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  would already have flashed around the world. Since about the year i960 scientists had announced their discoveries almost before they had made them. Not that Conway was close, but he believed in having a little time to digest his own work before it was mauled over in public. He knew what the newspapers would do with this one. Shuffling his notes he came to what he wanted. To the inexpert eye it was just a pen tracing, a thin line that rose and fell in a complicated and apparently unpredictable way as it moved down the length of a long strip of paper. It was the spectrum of Achilles. Most of the complicated behaviour of the line towards the right-hand end of the strip was due to the presence of water vapour in the atmosphere of Achilles. What Conway had been looking for were slight modifications of this water vapour pattern. His finger found the relevant place. There really couldn’t be any doubt about it. They were the bands of chlorophyll.

  Chapter Six

  The Russian Ship

  Conway’s discovery caused a major stir, as he had anticipated it would. It meant that there must be some sort of plant life on Achilles. Previously they 'had only had the very green colour of the planet to go by, strongly suggesting the presence of plant life, although there was just the bare possibility that it might come from a green inorganic salt.

  Speculations on the possibilities of there also being animal life were now rife. The lack of radio signals was of course again given prominence, but it was pointed out that weak signals could not be detected because of the masking effect of Helios itself. The angular separation of Achilles from the star, as seen from the Earth, was only about three degrees. Radio waves emitted by the star, random noise without any coherent signal, slopped into even the biggest radio dishes, producing a completely effective jamming of any weak signal from Achilles. So there was this possibility, but it wasn’t taken very seriously. After all, a terrestrial television transmitting station could easily have been detected, if it had been sited on the approaching planet.

  But although the public wasn’t much worried, military planners took matters more seriously. It was inevitable that they should do so, for it is the nature of military planning that one must take all possibilities seriously, however absurd they may be.

  The argument was: if there was someone on Achilles who was planning an invasion of the Earth, then that someone might have deliberately damped down all forms of radio emission. They might not wish; to give their presence away.

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  When it was pointed out that the Earth itself had given its presence away, for instance by more than a hundred television channels in Europe and the United States alone, the psychologists pointed out that this was an outcome of terrestrial tension. A more developed society, with less tension, might well have stayed its hand. It might have waited to see if it could pick up any signals from the other fellow before making any signals of its own. There were no radio astronomers among the military planners or psychologists, otherwise they would have pointed out that that was precisely what they themselves had been trying to do for over a century.

  It was therefore inevitable that plans should be drawn up to meet a potential invasion from space. The Achilles project was not only exploratory, it took over the functions of an advanced patrol. And the crew would be briefed accordingly.

  A beneficial result of all this was that some genuine cooperation between East and West was plainly desirable. In fact, it is well known from psychological studies that adjustments in human society take place in such a way as to maintain a state of constant tension. In plain terms, if for some reason current problems disappear then new ones must quickly be invented. Similarly, if troubles mount up, the new ones proceed to devalue the old ones. Knowing all this could be demonstrated by strict mathematics, everybody at the top suspected that the danger of a space invasion would be over-emphasized. The top generals felt that the mathematical psychologists were taking them for a ride, and the psychologists themselves thought that this was probably so, although they couldn’t be sure. This is not as absurd as it may sound. Mathematical psychology is of course based on what used to be known as the theory of games. And it is essential to the theory of games that there should be at least two sides. This assumption runs through the whole mathematical structure. The trouble in the present case was that no one knew whether there was another side or not. Nobody

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  quite knew how the mathematics went, strictly speaking, if there was complete uncertainty about the existence of an opponent. The result was a state of conf
usion. Everybody suspected that they were being taken for a trip, but no one was quite sure how.

  It was inevitable that there should be summit meetings. For many, many years these had been disguised as intimate family gatherings. The Russian President, at the moment Vladimir Kaluga, would depart from Moscow for New York or for Paris accompanied by his two sons and three daughters, the daughters being accompanied by their husbands and their children, and their servants, interpreters, general hangers-on and advisers. They would be met at the airport by the Euro-American President and his wife, in this case Lee and Martha Kipling. It was an interesting difference of culture that the Russian President was always a widower and the Euro-American President always a married man. In their respective territories these qualities were regarded as a sign of vigour.

  The party would be moved safely, to Nantucket Island perhaps, or to some chateau on the Loire. There they would get down to business, their families forgotten. It was the only way to achieve a comparatively sane interchange of ideas. At an official summit meeting, held in the full glare of international publicity, all previous positions must necessarily be maintained. All official contacts were reduced to the state of intellectual trench warfare. Only when they were ostensibly in the bosoms of their families could the leaders of either side deviate by a hair’s breadth from the implacably straight paths along which they were set by their respective communities. Even if you lost your shirt you must still preserve your face, as one highly-paid political commentator put it.

  Even so, world publicity would do what it could to impede their every movement. Wherever they were situated, whether in the fastness of a Rhineland castle, or on a farm near the banks of the Shenandoah, newsmen would

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  swarm into ‘the district, and 'helicopters would plant television cameras on every available vantage point. A small child, at the age of innocence, would not be allowed to pick a bunch of. flowers without its picture being instantly transmitted to the waiting multitudes in the pulsating world outside. In spite of the modem newfangled devices it was all very much as it had been in medieval times. Except that monarohs were then described in a flowing language of some magnificence; they were not referred to boldly as Lee, Vlad, and Marty.