Earth could not stop the Enemy's
remorseless advance from outer
space. Neither could the Enemy!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The pole stars of the other planets cluster around Polaris and Octans,
but Uranus spins on a snobbishly different axis between Aldebaran and
Antares. The Bull is her coronet and the Scorpion her footstool. Dear
blowzy old bitch-planet, swollen and pale and cold, mad with your
Shakespearean moons, white-mottled as death from Venerean Plague,
spinning on your side like a poisoned pregnant cockroach, rolling
around the sun like a fat drunken floozie with green hair rolling on
the black floor of an infinite bar-room, what a sweet last view of the
Solar System you are for a cleancut young spaceman....
Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young and
the First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was going
to pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curve
breaking around Uranus--and so what! He shivered to get a little heat
and then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking through
_Prospero's_ bridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetary
diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed--a glint almost lost in
pale green. That meant its light was bulleting 1600 miles deep through
the seventh planet's thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeing
the star on a mirage trajectory--and at least its depth agreed with
the time since rim contact.
At 2000 miles he lost it. That should mean 2000 miles plus of hydrogen
soup above the methane ocean, an America-wide layer of gaseous gunk for
the captain to play the mad hero in with the fleet.
Grunfeld didn't think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. The
captain hadn't gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker and
Ness. And he wasn't, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionary
entranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned the
captain's face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld's imagination
when he wasn't actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk in
the dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the
worry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing
on the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were better
than one. Grunfeld found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-six
minutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope,
stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic--strange how
he automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked and
blinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he'd been straining
them on.
The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big bridge
spaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-bright stars, a
water-splotched and faded chartreuse tennis ball on the diamond-spiked
bed of night. At eight million miles she looked half the width of Luna
seen from Earth. Her whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top,
where, Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles a
second--a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him with ghostly
green gangrenous fingers and pulling him over into a hydrogen Niagara.
Half as wide as Luna. But in a day she'd overflow the port as they
whipped past her on a near miss and in another day she'd be as small
as this again, but behind them, sunward, having altered their outward
course by some small and as yet unpredictable angle, but no more able
to slow _Prospero_ and her sister ships or turn them back at their 100
miles a second than the fleet's solar jets could operate at this chilly
distance from Sol. G'by, fleet. G'by, C.C.Y. spaceman.
* * * * *
Grunfeld looked for the pale planet's moons. Miranda and Umbriel were
too tiny to make disks, but he distinguished Ariel four diameters above
the planet and Oberon a dozen below. Spectral sequins. If the fleet
were going to get a radio signal from any of them, it would have to be
Titania, occulted now by the planet and the noisy natural static of
her roiling hydrogen air and seething methane seas--but it had always
been only a faint hope that there were survivors from the First Uranus
Expedition.
Grunfeld relaxed his neck and let his gaze drift down across the
curving star-bordered forward edge of _Prospero's_ huge mirror and the
thin jutting beams of the port lattice arm to the dim red-lit gages
below the spaceshield.
Forward Skin Temperature seven degrees Kelvin. Almost low enough for
helium to crawl, if you had some helium. _Prospero's_ insulation,
originally designed to hold out solar heat, was doing a fair job in
reverse.
Aft (sunward) Skin Temperature 75 degrees Kelvin. Close to that of
Uranus' sun-lit face. Check.
Cabin Temperature 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Brr! The Captain was a miser
with the chem fuel remaining. And rightly ... if it were right to drag
out life as long as possible in the empty icebox beyond Uranus.
Gravities of Acceleration zero. Many other zeros.
The four telltales for the fleet unblinkingly glowed dimmest blue--one
each for _Caliban_, _Snug_, _Moth_, and _Starveling_, following
_Prospero_ in line astern on slave automatic--though for months inertia
had done all five ships' piloting. Once the buttons had been green,
but they'd wiped that color off the boards because of the Enemy.
The gages still showed their last maximums. Skin 793 Kelvin, Cabin
144 Fahrenheit, Gravs 3.2. All of them hit almost a year ago, when
they'd been ace-ing past the sun. Grunfeld's gaze edged back to the
five bulbous pressure suits, once more rigidly upright in their braced
racks, that they'd been wearing during that stretch of acceleration
inside the orbit of Mercury. He started. For a moment he'd thought
he saw the dark-circled eyes of the captain peering between two of
the bulging black suits. Nerves! The captain had to be in his cabin,
readying alternate piloting programs for Copperhead.
Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield--so
violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite
direction. This time he'd thought he saw the Enemy's green flashing
near the margin of the planet--bright green, viridian, far vivider than
that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly
studied the area. Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much
nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The
next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfeld's mind
retreated to the circumstances that had brought _Prospero_ (then only
_Mercury One_) out here.