"Mike?--but he looked okay to me."
"And to everybody. But he owed Bryson a lot, and Bryson was anxious to
dispose of Max. So Kovak turned the plans of the robbery over to
Bryson's boys in exchange for a quitclaim on the money he owed, and
Bryson just forwarded it all on to the police. They were waiting for us
when we showed up."
That cleared Gainer, Alan thought in some relief. "How did you find all
this out?"
"Bryson himself told me."
"What!"
"I guess he didn't know exactly who besides Max was in on the deal.
Anyway, he certainly didn't know I was part of the group," Hollis said.
"Old man Bryson was laying off some bets with me and he let something
slip about how he tipped the police to Max. Then he told me the whole
thing."
"And Kovak?"
"Dead," Hollis said bluntly. "Bryson must have figured that if he'd sell
Max out he'd sell anybody out, so Kovak got taken care of. He was found
yesterday. Heart failure, the report said. Bryson has some good drugs.
Say, kid--any word yet on what's going to happen to all Max's dough?"
Alan thought a moment before replying. "I haven't heard a thing. I guess
the government inherits it."
"That would be too bad," Hollis said speculatively. "Max was well
loaded. I'd like to get my hands into some of that dough myself. So
would Bryson and his bunch, I'll bet."
Alan said nothing. When he was through eating, he paid the check and
they left, Hollis heading north, Alan south. In three days, Hawkes' will
would go through the courts. Alan wondered if Bryson, who seemed to be
York City's major criminal syndic man, would try to angle some share of
Max's money.
A Bryson man did show up at the hearing--a slick-looking operator named
Berwin. His claim was that Hawkes had been affiliated with Bryson a
number of years ago, and that Hawkes' money should revert to Bryson by
virtue of an obscure law of the last century involving the estates of
professional gamblers killed in criminal actions.
The robocomputer who was in charge of the hearing pondered the request a
few moments; then relays clicked and the left-hand panel on the computer
face lit up with a bright red APPLICATION DENIED signal.
Berwin spoke for three minutes, ending up with a request that the
robocomputer disqualify itself from the hearing and allow itself to be
replaced by a human judge.
The computer's decision was even quicker this time. APPLICATION DENIED.
Berwin tossed Alan's side of the courtroom a black look and yielded
ground. Alan had engaged a lawyer recommended once by Hawkes, a man
named Jesperson. Briefly and concisely Jesperson cited Alan's claim to
the money, read the terms of the will, and stepped back.
The computer considered Jesperson's plea a few moments, reviewing the
brief which the lawyer had taped and fed to the computer earlier. Time
passed. Then the green panel lit, and the words, APPLICATION GRANTED.
Alan smiled. Bryson had been defeated; Max's money was his. Money that
could be turned toward intensified research on the hyperdrive.
"Well, son?" Jesperson asked. "How does it feel to be a millionaire?"
_Chapter Sixteen_
At the time, he had been much too excited and flustered to answer
anything. But, as the next twelve months went by, he learned that being
a millionaire was quite pleasant indeed.
There were headaches, of course. There was the initial headache of
signing his name several hundred times in the course of the transfer of
Hawkes' wealth to him. There were also the frequent visits from the
tax-collectors, and the payment to them of a sum that staggered Alan to
think about, in the name of Rotation Tax.
But even after taxes, legal fees, and other expenses, Alan found he
owned better than nine hundred thousand credits, and the estate grew by
investment every day. The court appointed a legal guardian for him, the
lawyer Jesperson, who was to administer Alan's money until Alan reached
the biological age of twenty-one. The decision was an involved one,
since Alan had undeniably been born three hundred years earlier, in
3576--but the robojudge that presided over that particular hearing
cited a precedent seven hundred years old which stated that for legal
purposes a starman's biological and not his chronological age was to be
accepted.
The guardianship posed no problems for Alan, though. When he met with
Jesperson to discuss future plans, the lawyer told him, "You can handle
yourself, Alan. I'll give you free rein with the estate--with the
proviso that I have veto power over any of your expenditures until your
twenty-first birthday."
That sounded fair enough. Alan had reason to trust the lawyer; hadn't
Hawkes recommended him? "I'll agree to that," Alan said. "Suppose we
start right now. I'd like to take a year and travel around the world. As
my legal guardian you'll be stuck with the job of managing my estate and
handling investments for me."
Jesperson chuckled. "You'll be twice as wealthy when you get back!
Nothing makes money so fast as money."
Alan left the first week in December, having spent three weeks doing
virtually nothing but sketching out his itinerary. There were plenty of
places he intended to visit.
There was London, where James Hudson Cavour had lived and where his
hyperdrive research had been carried out. There was the Lexman Institute
of Space Travel in Zurich, where an extensive library of space
literature had been accumulated; it was possible that hidden away in
their files was some stray notebook of Cavour's, some clue that would
give Alan a lead. He wanted to visit the area in Siberia that Cavour had
used as his testing-ground, and from which the last bulletin had come
from the scientist before his unexplained disappearance.
But it was not only a business trip. Alan had lived nearly half a year
in the squalor of Hasbrouck--and because of his Free Status he would
never be able to move into a better district, despite his wealth. But he
wanted to see the rest of Earth. He wanted to travel just for the sake
of travel.
Before he left, he visited a rare book dealer in York City, and for an
exorbitant fifty credits purchased a fifth-edition copy of _An
Investigation into the Possibility of Faster-than-Light Space Travel_,
by James H. Cavour. He had left his copy of the work aboard the
_Valhalla_, along with the few personal possessions he had managed to
accumulate during his life as a starman.
The book dealer had frowned when Alan asked for the volume under the
title he knew. "_The Cavour Theory_? I don't think--ah, wait." He
vanished for perhaps five minutes and returned with an old, fragile,
almost impossibly delicate-looking book. Alan took it and scanned the
opening page. There were the words he had read so many times: "The
present system of interstellar travel is so grossly inefficient as to be
virtually inoperable on an absolute level."
"Yes, that's the book. I'll take it."
His first stop on his round-the-globe jaunt was London, where Cavour had
been born and educated more than thirteen centuries before. The
stratoliner made the trip across the Atlantic in a little less than
three hours; it took half an hour more by Overshoot from the airport to
the heart of London.
Somehow, from Cavour's few autobiographical notes, Alan had pictured
London as a musty old town, picturesque, reeking of medieval history. He
couldn't have been more wrong. Sleek towers of plastic and concrete
greeted him. Overshoots roared by the tops of the buildings. A busy
network of bridges connected them.
He went in search of Cavour's old home in Bayswater, with the nebulous
idea of finding some important document wedged in the woodwork. But a
local security officer shook his head as Alan asked for directions.
"Sorry, lad. I've never heard of that street. Why don't you try the
information robot up there?"
The information robot was a blocky green-skinned synthetic planted in a
kiosk in the middle of a broad well-paved street. Alan approached and
gave the robot Cavour's thirteen-century-old address.
"There is no record of any such address in the current files," the
steely voice informed him.
"No. It's an old address. It dates back to at least 2570. A man named
Cavour lived there."
The robot digested the new data; relays hummed softly within it as it
scanned its memory banks. Finally it grunted, "Data on the address you
seek has been reached."
"Fine! Where's the house?"
"The entire district was demolished during the general rebuilding of
London in 2982-2997. Nothing remains."
"Oh," Alan said.
The London trail trickled out right then and there. He pursued it a
little further, managed to find Cavour's name inscribed on the honor
role of the impressive London Technological Institute for the year 2529,
and discovered a copy of Cavour's book in the Institute Library. There
was nothing else to be found. After a month in London, Alan moved on
eastward across Europe.
Most of it was little like the descriptions he had read in the
_Valhalla's_ library. The trouble was that the starship's visits to
Earth were always at least a decade behind, usually more. Most of the
library books had come aboard when the ship had first been commissioned,
far back in the year 2731. The face of Europe had almost totally
altered since then.
Now, shiny new buildings replaced the ancient houses which had endured
for as much as a thousand years. A gleaming bridge linked Dover and
Calais; elsewhere, the rivers of Europe were bridged frequently,
providing easy access between the many states of the Federation of
Europe. Here, there, monuments of the past remained--the Eiffel Tower,
absurdly dwarfed by the vast buildings around it, still reared its
spidery self in Paris, and Notre Dame still remained as well. But the
rest of Paris, the ancient city Alan had read so much of--that had long
since been swept under by the advancing centuries. Buildings did not
endure forever.
In Zurich he visited the Lexman Institute for Space Travel, a
magnificent group of buildings erected on the royalties from the Lexman
Spacedrive. A radiant statue sixty feet high was the monument to
Alexander Lexman, who in 2337 had first put the stars within the reach
of man.
Alan succeeded in getting an interview with the current head of the
Institute, but it was anything but a satisfactory meeting. It was held
in an office ringed with mementoes of the epoch-making test flight of
2338.
"I'm interested in the work of James H. Cavour," Alan said almost
immediately--and from the bleak expression that appeared on the
scientist's face, he knew he had made a grave mistake.
"Cavour is as far from Lexman as possible, my friend. Cavour was a
dreamer; Lexman, a doer."
"Lexman succeeded--but how do you know Cavour didn't succeed as well?"
"Because, my young friend, faster-than-light travel is flatly
impossible. A dream. A delusion."
"You mean that there's no faster-than-light research being carried on
here?"
"The terms of our charter, set down by Alexander Lexman himself, specify
that we are to work toward improvements in the technique of space travel.
It said nothing about fantasies and daydreams. No--ah--hyperdrive
research is taking place at this institute, and none will take place so
long as we remain true to the spirit of Alexander Lexman."
Alan felt like crying out that Lexman was a bold and daring pioneer,
never afraid to take a chance, never worried about expense or public
reaction. It was obvious, though, that the people of the Institute had
long since fossilized in their patterns. It was a waste of breath to
argue with them.
Discouraged, he moved on, pausing in Vienna to hear the opera--Max had
always intended to spend a vacation with him in Vienna, listening to
Mozart, and Alan felt he owed it to Hawkes to pay his respects. The
operas he saw were ancient, medieval in fact, better than two thousand
years old; he enjoyed the tinkly melodies but found some of the plots
hard to understand.
He saw a circus in Ankara, a football game in Budapest, a nullgrav
wrestling match in Moscow. He journeyed to the far reaches of Siberia,
where Cavour had spent his final years, and found that what had been a
bleak wasteland suitable for spaceship experiments in 2570 was now a
thriving modern city of five million people. The site of Cavour's camp
had long since been swallowed up.
Alan's faith in the enduring nature of human endeavor was restored
somewhat by his visit to Egypt--for there he saw the pyramids, nearly
seven thousand years old; they looked as permanent as the stars.
The first anniversary of his leaving the _Valhalla_ found him in South
Africa; from there he travelled eastward through China and Japan, across
the highly industrialized islands of the Far Pacific, and from the
Philippines he returned to the American mainland by jet express.
He spent the next four months travelling widely through the United
States, gaping at the Grand Canyon and the other scenic preserves of the
west. East of the Mississippi, life was different; there was barely a
stretch of open territory between York City and Chicago.
It was late in November when he returned to York City. Jesperson greeted
him at the airfield, and they rode home together. Alan had been gone a
year; he was past eighteen, now, a little heavier, a little stronger.
Very little of the wide-eyed boy who had stepped off the _Valhalla_ the
year before remained intact. He had changed inwardly.
But one part of him had not changed, except in the direction of greater
determination. That was the part that hoped to unlock the secret of
faster-than-light travel.
He was discouraged. His journey had revealed the harsh fact that nowhere
on Earth was research into hyperdrive travel being carried on; either
they had tried and abandoned it as hopeless, or, like the Zurich people,
they had condemned the concept from the start.
"Did you find what you were looking for?" Jesperson asked.
Alan slowly shook his head. "Not a hint. And I really covered ground."
He stared at the lawyer a moment. "How much am I worth, now?"
"Well, offhand--" Jesperson thought for a moment. "Say, a million three
hundred. I've made some good investments this past year."
Alan nodded. "Good. Keep the money piling up. I may decide to open a
research lab of my own, and we'll need every credit we've got."
But the next day an item arrived in the morning mail which very much
altered the character of Alan's plans for the future. It was a small but
thick package, neatly wrapped, which bore as return address the name
_Dwight Bentley_, with a London number.
Alan frowned for a moment, trying to place the name. Then it came back
to him--Bentley was the vice-provost of the London Institute of
Technology, Cavour's old school. Alan had had a long talk with Bentley
one afternoon in January, about Cavour, about space travel, and about
Alan's hopes for developing a hyperspace drive.
The parcel was the right size and thickness to contain a book. Alan slit
the fastenings, and folded back the outer wrapper. A note from Bentley
lay on top.
_London
3rd November 3877_
_My dear Mr. Donnell:_
_Perhaps you may remember the very enjoyable chat you and I had one
day at this Institute last winter, on the occasion of your visit to
London. You were, I recall, deeply interested in the life and work
of James H. Cavour, and anxious to carry on the developments he had
achieved in the field of space travel._
_Several days ago, in the course of an extensive resurveying of the
Institute's archives, the enclosed volume was discovered very
thoroughly hidden in the dusty recesses of our library. Evidently
Mr. Cavour had forwarded the book to us from his laboratory in
Asia, and it had somehow become misfiled._
_I am taking the liberty of forwarding the book on to you, in the
hopes that it will aid you in your work and perhaps ultimately bring
you success. Would you be kind enough to return the book to me c/o
this Institute when you are finished with it?_
_Cordially,
Dwight Bentley_
Alan let the note slip to the floor as he reached for the enclosed book.
It was leather-bound and even more fragile than the copy of _The Cavour
Theory_ he had purchased; it looked ready to crumble at a hostile
breath.
With mounting excitement he lifted the ancient cover and turned it over.
The first page of the book was blank; so were the second and third. On
the fourth page, Alan saw a few lines of writing, in an austere, rigid
hand. He peered close, and with awe and astonishment read the words
written there:
_The Journal of James Hudson Cavour. Volume 16--Jan. 8 to October
11, 2570._
_Chapter Seventeen_
The old man's diary was a curious and fascinating document. Alan never
tired of poring over it, trying to conjure up a mental image of the
queer, plucky fanatic who had labored so desperately to bring the stars
close to Earth.
Like many embittered recluses, Cavour had been an enthusiastic diarist.
Everything that took place in his daily life was carefully noted
down--his digestion, the weather, any stray thoughts that came to him,
tart observations on humanity in general. But Alan was chiefly
interested in the notations that dealt with his researches on the
problem of a faster-than-the-speed-of-light spacedrive.
Cavour had worked for years in London, harried by reporters and mocked
by scientists. But late in 2569 he had sensed he was on the threshold of
success. In his diary for January 8, 2570, he wrote:
"The Siberian site is almost perfect. It has cost me nearly what remains
of my savings to build it, but out here I will have the solitude I need
so much. I estimate six months more will see completion of my pilot
model. It is a source of deep bitterness in me that I am forced to work
on my ship like a common laborer, when my part should have ceased three
years ago with the development of my theory and the designing of my
ship. But this is the way the world wants it, and so shall it be."
On May 8 of that year:
"Today there was a visitor--a journalist, no doubt. I drove him away
before he could disturb me, but I fear he and others will be back. Even
in the bleak Siberian steppes I shall have no privacy. Work is moving
along smoothly, though somewhat behind schedule; I shall be lucky to
complete my ship before the end of the year."
On August 17:
"Planes continue to circle my laboratory here. I suspect I am being
spied on. The ship is nearing completion. It will be ready for standard
Lexman-drive flights any day now, but installation of my spacewarp
generator will take several more months."
On September 20:
"Interference has become intolerable. For the fifth day an American
journalist has attempted to interview me. My 'secret' Siberian
laboratory has apparently become a world tourist attraction. The final
circuitry on the spacewarp generator is giving me extreme difficulties;
there are so many things to perfect. I cannot work under these
circumstances. I have virtually ceased all machine-work this week."
And on October 11, 2570:
"There is only one recourse for me. I will have to leave Earth to
complete the installation of my generator. The prying fools and mockers
will not leave me alone, and nowhere on Earth can I have the needed
solitude. I shall go to Venus--uninhabited, uninhabitable. Perhaps they
will leave me alone for the month or two more I need to make my vessel
suitable for interstellar drive. Then I can return to Earth, show them
what I have done, offer to make a demonstration flight--to Rigel and
back in days, perhaps----
"Why is it that Earth so tortures its few of original mind? Why has my
life been one unending persecution, ever since I declared there was a
way to shortcut through space? There are no answers. The answers lie
deep within the dark recesses of the human collective soul, and no man
may understand what takes place there. I am content to know that I shall
have succeeded despite it all. Some day a future age may remember me,
like Copernicus, like Galileo, as one who fought upstream successfully."
The diary ended there. But in the final few pages were computations--a
trial orbit to Venus, several columns of blastoff figures, statistics on
geographical distribution of the Venusian landmasses.
Cavour had certainly been a peculiar bird, Alan thought. Probably half
the "persecutions" he complained of had existed solely inside his own
fevered brain. But that hardly mattered. He had gone to Venus; the diary
that had found its way back to the London Institute of Technology
testified to that. And there was only one logical next step for Alan.
Go to Venus. Follow the orbit Cavour had scribbled at the back of his
diary.
Perhaps he might find the Cavour ship itself; perhaps, the site of his
laboratory, some notes, anything at all. He could not allow the trail to
trickle out here.
He told Jesperson, "I want to buy a small spaceship. I'm going to
Venus."
He looked at the lawyer expectantly and got ready to put up a stiff
argument when Jesperson started to raise objections. But the big man
only smiled.
"Okay," he said. "When are you leaving?"
"You aren't going to complain? The kind of ship I have in mind costs at
least two hundred thousand credits."
"I know that. But I've had a look at Cavour's diary, too. It was only a
matter of time before you decided to follow the old duck to Venus, and
I'm too smart to think that there's any point in putting up a battle.
Let me know when you've got your ship picked out and I'll sit down and
write the check."
But it was not as simple as all that. Alan shopped for a ship--he wanted
a new one, as long as he could afford it--and after several months of
comparative shopping and getting advice from spaceport men, he picked
the one he wanted. It was a sleek glossy eighty-foot job, a Spacemaster
3878 model, equipped with Lexman converters and conventional ion-jets
for atmosphere flying. Smooth, streamlined, it was a lovely sight as it
stood at the spacefield in the shadow of the great starships.
Alan looked at it with pride--a slender dark-green needle yearning to
pierce the void. He wandered around the spaceport and heard the fuelers
and oilers discussing it in reverent tones.
"That's a mighty fine piece of ship, that green one out there. Some
lucky fellow's got it."
Alan wanted to go over to them and tell them, "That's my ship. Me. Alan
Donnell." But he knew they would only laugh. Tall boys not quite
nineteen did not own late-model Spacemasters with price-tags of cr.
225,000.
He itched to get off-planet with it, but there were more delays. He
needed a flight ticket, first, and even though he had had the necessary
grounding in astrogation technique and spacepiloting as an automatic
part of his education aboard the _Valhalla_, he was rusty, and needed a
refresher course that took six weary months.
After that came the physical exams and the mental checkup and everything
else. Alan fumed at the delay, but he knew it was necessary. A
spaceship, even a small private one, was a dangerous weapon in unskilled
hands. An out-of-control spaceship that came crashing to Earth at high
velocity could kill millions; the shock wave might flatten fifty square
miles. So no one was allowed up in a spaceship of any kind without a
flight ticket--and you had to work to win your ticket.
It came through, finally, in June of 3879, a month after Alan's
twentieth birthday. By that time he had computed and recomputed his
orbit to Venus a hundred different times.
Three years had gone by since he last had been aboard a spaceship, and
that had been the _Valhalla_. His childhood and adolescence now seemed
like a hazy dream to him, far in the back of his mind. The _Valhalla_,
with his father and Steve and all the friends of his youth aboard, was
three years out from Earth--with seven years yet to go before it reached
Procyon, its destination.
Of course, the Crew had experienced only about four weeks, thanks to the
Fitzgerald Contraction. To the _Valhalla_ people only a month had passed
since Alan had left them, while he had gone through three years.
He had grown up, in those three years. He knew where he was heading,
now, and nothing frightened him. He understood people. And he had one
great goal which was coming closer and closer with each passing month.
Blastoff day was the fifth of September, 3879. The orbit Alan finally
settled on was a six-day trip at low acceleration across the
40,000,000-odd miles that separated Earth from Venus.
At the spaceport he handed in his flight ticket for approval, placed a
copy of his intended orbit on file with Central Routing Registration,
and got his field clearance.
The ground crew had already been notified that Alan's ship was blasting
off that day, and they were busy now putting her in final departure
condition. There were some expressions of shock as Alan displayed his
credentials to the ground chief and climbed upward into the control
chamber of the ship he had named the _James Hudson Cavour_, but no one
dared question him.
His eyes caressed the gleaming furnishings of the control panel. He
checked with the central tower, was told how long till his blastoff
clearance, and rapidly surveyed the fuel meters, the steering-jet
response valves, the automatic pilot. He worked out a tape with his
orbit on it. Now he inserted it into the receiving tray of the autopilot
and tripped a lever. The tape slid into the computer, clicking softly
and emitting a pleasant hum.
"Eight minutes to blastoff," came the warning.
Never had eight minutes passed so slowly. Alan snapped on his viewscreen
and looked down at the field; the ground crew men were busily clearing
the area as blastoff time approached.
"One minute to blastoff, Pilot Donnell." Then the count-down began,
second by second.
At the ten-seconds-to-go announcement, Alan activated the autopilot and
nudged the button that transformed his seat into a protective
acceleration cradle. His seat dropped down, and Alan found himself
stretched out, swinging gently back and forth in the protecting hammock.
The voice from the control tower droned out the remaining seconds.
Tensely Alan waited for the sharp blow of acceleration.
Then the roaring came, and the ship jolted from side to side, struggled
with gravity for a moment, and then sprang up free from the Earth.
Some time later came the sudden thunderous silence as the jets cut out;
there was the dizzying moment of free fall, followed by the sound of the
lateral jets imparting longitudinal spin to the small ship. Artificial
gravity took over. It had been a perfect takeoff. Now there was nothing
to do but wait for Venus to draw near.
The days trickled past. Alan experienced alternating moods of gloom and
exultation. In the gloomy moods he told himself that this trip to Venus
was a fool's errand, that it would be just another dead end, that Cavour
had been a paranoid madman and the hyperspace drive was an idiot's
dream.
But in the moments of joy he pictured the finding of Cavour's ship, the
building of a fleet of hyperdrive vessels. The distant stars within
almost instantaneous reach! He would tour the galaxies as he had two
years ago toured Earth. Canopus and Deneb, Rigel and Procyon, he would
visit them all. From star to bright star, from one end of the universe
to the other.
The shining oval of Venus grew brighter and brighter. The cloud layer
that enveloped Earth's sister planet swirled and twisted.
Venus was virtually an unknown world. Earth colonies had been
established on Mars and on Pluto, but Venus, with her harsh
formaldehyde atmosphere, had been ignored. Uninhabited, uninhabitable,
the planet was unsuitable for colonization.
The ship swung down into the cloud layer; floating wisps of gray vapor
streamed past the orbiting _Cavour_. Finally Alan broke through,
navigating now on manual, following as best he could Cavour's old
computations. He guided the craft into a wide-ranging spiral orbit three
thousand feet above the surface of Venus, and adjusted his viewscreens
for fine pickup.
He was orbiting over a vast dust-blown plain. The sky was a fantastic
color, mottled blues and greens and an all-pervading pink, and the air
was dull gray. No sun at all penetrated the heavy shroud of vapor that
hung round the planet.
For five hours he scouted the plain, hoping to find some sign of
Cavour's habitation. It was hopeless, he told himself; in thirteen
hundred years the bitter winds of Venus would have destroyed any hint of
Cavour's site, assuming the old man had reached Venus successfully.
But grimly Alan continued to circle the area. Maybe Cavour had been
forced to land elsewhere, he thought. Maybe he never got here. There
were a million maybes.
He computed his orbit and locked the ship in. Eyes pressed to the
viewscreen, he peered downward, hoping against hope.
This trip to Venus had been a wild gamble from the start. He wondered if
Max Hawkes would have covered a bet on the success of his trip. Max had
been infallible when it came to hunches.
_Well_, Alan thought, _now I've got a hunch. Help me one more time, Max,
wherever you are! Lend me some of your luck. I need it, Max._
He circled once more. The Venusian day would last for three weeks more;
there was no fear of darkness. But would he find anything?
_What's that?_
He leaped to the controls, switched off the autopilot, and broke out of
orbit, going back for a return look. Had there been just the faintest
metallic glint below, as of a spaceship jutting up from the sand?
Yes.
There was a ship down there, and a cave of some sort. Alan felt
strangely calm. With confident fingers he punched out a landing orbit,
and brought his ship down in the middle of the barren Venusian desert.
_Chapter Eighteen_
Alan brought the _Cavour_ down less than a mile away from the scene of
the wreckage--it was the best he could do, computing the landing by
guesswork--and climbed into his spacesuit. He passed through the airlock
and out into the windswept desert.
He felt just a little lightheaded; the gravity was only 0.8 of
Earth-norm, and besides that the air in his spacesuit, being perpetually
renewed by the Bennerman re-breathing generator strapped to his back,
was just a shade too rich in oxygen.
In the back of his mind he realized he ought to adjust his oxygen flow,
but before he brought himself to make the adjustment the surplus took
its effect. He began to hum, then to dance awkwardly over the sand. A
moment later he was singing a wild space ballad that he thought he had
forgotten years before. After ten feet he tripped and went sprawling
down in the sand. He lay there, trickling the violet sands through the
gloves of his spacesuit, feeling very lightheaded and very foolish all
at the same time.
But he was still sober enough to realize he was in danger. It was an
effort to reach over his shoulder and move the oxygen gauge back a
notch. After a moment the flow levelled out and he felt his head
beginning to clear.
He was marching through a fantastic baroque desert. Venus was a riot of
colors, all in a minor key: muted greens and reds, an overbearing gray,
a strange, ghostly blue. The sky, or rather the cloud layer, dominated
the atmosphere with its weird pinkness. It was a silent world--a dead
world.
In the distance he saw the wreckage of the ship; beyond it the land
began to rise, sloping imperceptibly up into a gentle hill with bizarre
sculptured rock outcroppings here and there. He walked quickly.
Fifteen minutes later he reached the ship. It stood upright--or rather,
its skeleton did. The ship had not crashed. It had simply rotted away,
the metal of its hide eaten by the sand-laden winds over the course of
centuries. Nothing remained but a bare framework.
He circled the ship, then entered the cave a hundred feet away. He
snapped on his lightbeam. In the darkness, he saw----
A huddled skeleton, far to the rear of the cave. A pile of corroded
equipment; atmosphere generators, other tools now shapeless.
Cavour had reached Venus safely. But he had never departed.
To his astonishment Alan found a sturdy volume lying under the pile of
bones--a book, wrapped in metal plates. Somehow it had withstood the
passage of centuries, here in this quiet cave.
Gently he unwrapped the book. The cover dropped off at his touch; he
turned back the first three pages, which were blank. On the fourth,
written in the now-familiar crabbed hand, were the words: _The Journal
of James Hudson Cavour. Volume 17--October 20, 2570----_
* * * * *
He had plenty of time, during the six-day return journey, to read and
re-read Cavour's final words and to make photographic copies of the
withered old pages.
The trip to Venus had been easy for old Cavour; he had landed precisely
on schedule, and established housekeeping for himself in the cave. But,
as his diary detailed it, he felt strength ebbing away with each passing
day.
He was past eighty, no age for a man to come alone to a strange planet.
There remained just minor finishing to be done on his pioneering
ship--but he did not have the strength to do the work. Climbing the
catwalk of the ship, soldering, testing--now, with his opportunity
before him, he could not attain his goal.
He made several feeble attempts to finish the job, and on the last of
them fell from his crude rigging and fractured his hip. He had managed
to crawl back inside the cave, but, alone, with no one to tend him, he
knew he had nothing to hope for.
It was impossible for him to complete his ship. All his dreams were
ended. His equations and his blueprints would die with him.
In his last day he came to a new realization: nowhere had he left a
complete record of the mechanics of his spacewarp generator, the key
mechanism without which hyperspace drive was unattainable. So, racing
against encroaching death, James Hudson Cavour turned to a new page in
his diary, headed it, in firm, forceful letters, _For Those Who Follow
After_, and inked in a clear and concise explanation of his work.
It was all there, Alan thought exultantly: the diagrams, the
specifications, the equations. It would be possible to build the ship
from Cavour's notes.
The final page of the diary had evidently been Cavour's dying thoughts.
In a handwriting increasingly ragged and untidy, Cavour had indited a
paragraph forgiving the world for its scorn, hoping that some day
mankind would indeed have easy access to the stars. The paragraph ended
in midsentence. It was, thought Alan, a moving testament from a great
human being.
The days went by, and the green disk of Earth appeared in the
viewscreen. Late on the sixth day the _Cavour_ sliced into Earth's
atmosphere, and Alan threw it into the landing orbit he had computed
that afternoon. The ship swung in great spirals around Earth, drawing
ever closer, and finally began to home in on the spaceport.
Alan busied himself over the radio transmitter, getting landing
clearance. He brought the ship down easily, checked out, and hurried to
the nearest phone.
He dialed Jesperson's number. The lawyer answered.
"When did you get back?"
"Just now," Alan said. "Just this minute."
"Well? Did you----"
"Yes! I found it! I found it!"
* * * * *
Oddly enough, he was in no hurry to leave Earth now. He was in
possession of Cavour's notes, but he wanted to do a perfect job of
reproducing them, of converting the scribbled notations into a ship.
To his great despair he discovered, when he first examined the Cavour
notebook in detail, that much of the math was beyond his depth. That was
only a temporary obstacle, though. He hired mathematicians. He hired
physicists. He hired engineers.
Through it all, he remained calm; impatient, perhaps, but not overly so.
The time had not yet come for him to leave Earth. All his striving would
be dashed if he left too soon.
The proud building rose a hundred miles from York City: _The Hawkes
Memorial Laboratory_. There, the team of scientists Alan had gathered
worked long and painstakingly, trying to reconstruct what old Cavour had
written, experimenting, testing.
Early in 3881 the first experimental Cavour Generator was completed in
the lab. Alan had been vacationing in Africa, but he was called back
hurriedly by his lab director to supervise the testing.
The generator was housed in a sturdy windowless building far from the
main labs; the forces being channelled were potent ones, and no chances
were being taken. Alan himself threw the switch that first turned the
spacewarp generator on, and the entire research team gathered by the
closed-circuit video pickup to watch.
The generator seemed to blur, to waver, to lose substance and become
unreal. It vanished.
It remained gone fifteen seconds, while a hundred researchers held their
breaths. Then it returned. It shorted half the power lines in the
county.
But Alan was grinning as the auxiliary feeders turned the lights in the
lab on again. "Okay," he yelled. "It's a start, isn't it? We got the
generator to vanish, and that's the toughest part of the battle. Let's
get going on Model Number Two."
By the end of the year, Model Number Two was complete, and the tests
this time were held under more carefully controlled circumstances. Again
success was only partial, but again Alan was not disappointed. He had
worked out his time-table well. Premature success might only make
matters more difficult for him.
3882 went by, and 3883. He was in his early twenties, now, a tall,
powerful figure, widely known all over Earth. With Jesperson's shrewd
aid he had pyramided Max's original million credits into an imposing
fortune--and much of it was being diverted to hyperspace research. But
Alan Donnell was not the figure of scorn James Hudson Cavour had been;
no one laughed at him when he said that by 3885 hyperspace travel would
be reality.
3884 slipped past. Now the time was drawing near. Alan spent virtually
all his hours at the research center, aiding in the successive tests.
On March 11, 3885, the final test was accomplished satisfactorily.
Alan's ship, the _Cavour_, had been completely remodeled to accommodate
the new drive; every test but one had been completed.
The final test was that of actual performance. And here, despite the
advice of his friends, Alan insisted that he would have to be the man
who took the _Cavour_ on her first journey to the stars.
Nine years had passed, almost to the week, since a brash youngster named
Alan Donnell had crossed the bridge from the Spacer's Enclave and
hesitantly entered the bewildering complexity of York City. Nine years.
He was twenty-six now, no boy any more. He was the same age Steve had
been, when he had been dragged unconscious to the _Valhalla_ and taken
aboard.
And the _Valhalla_ was still bound on its long journey to Procyon. Nine
years had passed, but yet another remained before the giant starship
would touch down on a planet of Procyon's. But the Fitzgerald
Contraction had telescoped those nine years into just a few months, for
the people of the _Valhalla_.
Steve Donnell was still twenty-six.
And now Alan had caught him. The Contraction had evened out. They were
twins again.
And the _Cavour_ was ready to make its leap into hyperspace.
_Chapter Nineteen_
It was not difficult for Alan to get the route of the _Valhalla_, which
had been recorded at Central Routing Registration. Every starship was
required by law to register a detailed route-chart before leaving, and
these charts were filed at the central bureau. The reason was simple: a
starship with a crippled drive was a deadly object. In case a starship's
drive conked out, it would keep drifting along toward its destination,
utterly helpless to turn, maneuver, or control its motion. And if any
planets or suns happened to lie in its direct path----
The only way a ship could alter its trajectory was to cut speed
completely, and with the drive dead there would be no way of picking it
up again. The ship would continue to drift slowly out to the stars,
while its crew died of old age.
So the routes were registered, and in the event of drive trouble it was
thus possible for a rescue ship to locate the imperilled starship. Space
is immense, and only with a carefully registered route could a ship be
found.
Starship routes were restricted information. But Alan had influence; he
was easily able to persuade the Routing Registration people that his
intentions were honorable, that he planned to overtake the _Valhalla_ if
they would only let him have the coordinates. A bit of minor legal
jugglery was all that was needed to give him access to the data.
It seemed there was an ancient regulation that said any member of a
starship's crew was entitled by law to examine his ship's registered
route, if he wanted to. The rule was intended to apply to starmen who
distrusted their captains and were fearful of being shipped off to some
impossibly distant point; it said nothing at all about starmen who had
been left behind and were planning to overtake their ships. But nothing
prohibited Alan from getting the coordinates, and so they gave them to
him.
The _Cavour_ was ready for the departure. Alan elbowed his way through
the crowd of curious onlookers and clambered into the redesigned control
chamber.
He paused a moment, running his fingers over the shiny instrument panel
with its new dials, strange levers, unfamiliar instruments. Overdrive
Compensator. Fuel Transmuter. Distortion Guide. Bender Index. Strange
new names, but Alan realized they would be part of the vocabulary of all
future spacemen.
He began to work with the new controls, plotting his coordinates with
extreme care and checking them through six or seven times. At last he
was satisfied; he had computed a hyperdrive course that would loop him
through space and bring him out in only a few days' time in the general
vicinity of the _Valhalla_, which was buzzing serenely along at near the
speed of light.
That was practically a snail's pace, compared with hyperdrive.
The time for the test had come. He spoke briefly with his friends and
assistants in the control tower; then he checked his figures through one
last time and requested blastoff clearance.
A moment later the count-down began, and he began setting up for
departure.
A tremor of anticipation shot through him as he prepared to blast off on
the first hyperdrive voyage ever made. He was stepping out into the
unknown, making the first use ever of a strange, perhaps dangerous means
of travel. The drive would loop him out of the space-time continuum,
into--_where?_--and back again.
He hoped.
He punched down the keys, and sat back to wait for the automatic pilot
to carry him out from Earth.
Somewhere past the orbit of the moon, a gong told him that the Cavour
drive was about to come into play. He held his breath. He felt a
twisting sensation. He stared at the viewscreen.
The stars had vanished. Earth, with all its memories of the last nine
years, was gone, taking with it Hawkes, Jesperson, York City, the
Enclaves--everything.
He floated in a featureless dull gray void, without stars, without
worlds. _So this is hyperspace_, he thought. He felt tired, and he felt
tense. He had reached hyperspace; that was half the struggle. It
remained to see whether he would come out where he expected to come out,
or whether he would come out at all.
* * * * *
Four days of boredom. Four days of wishing that the time would come to
leave hyperspace. And then the automatic pilot came to life; the Cavour
generator thrummed and signalled that it had done its work and was
shutting down. Alan held his breath.
He felt the twisting sensation. The _Cavour_ was leaving hyperdrive.
Stars burst suddenly against the blackness of space; the viewscreen
brightened. Alan shut his eyes a moment as he readjusted from the sight
of the gray void to that of the starry reaches of normal space. He had
returned.
And, below him, making its leisurely journey to Procyon, was the great
golden-hulled bulk of the _Valhalla_, gleaming faintly in the black
night of space.
He reached for the controls of his ship radio. Minutes later, he heard a
familiar voice--that of Chip Collier, the _Valhalla's_ Chief Signal
Officer.
"Starship _Valhalla_ picking up. We read you. Who is calling, please?"