[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction June 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I
"An error is a denial of reality, but mistakes are mere mental
malfunctionings. In an emergency, a mistake may be made because of
the need for precipitate action. There is no time to choose the best
course: something must be done at once. Most mistakes, however,
are made without any such exterior pressure. One accepts the
first-imagined solution to a problem without examining it, either
out of an urgent desire to avoid the labor of thinking, or out of
impassioned reluctance to think about the matter at hand when
prettier and more pleasurable other things can be contemplated...."
_The Practice of Thinking_
Fitzgerald
It turned out afterward that somebody had punched the wrong button in
a computer. It was in a matter in which mistakes are not permissible,
but just as nothing can be manufactured without an ordinary hammer
figuring somewhere in the making or the making-ready-to-make, so
nothing can be done without a fallible human operating at some stage of
the proceedings. And humans make mistakes casually, off-handedly, with
impartial lack of malice, and unpredictability. So....
Calhoun heard the tape-speaker say, "_When the gong sounds, breakout
will follow in five seconds._" Then it made solemn ticking noises while
Calhoun yawned and put aside the book, "The Practice of Thinking," that
he'd been studying. Study was a necessity in his profession. Besides,
it helped to pass the time in overdrive. He went to the control-desk
chair and strapped in. Murgatroyd the _tormal_ uncoiled his tail from
about his nose and stood up from where he was catching twenty winks. He
padded to the place under Calhoun's chair where there were things to
grab hold of, if necessary, with four black paws and a prehensile tail.
"_Chee_," said Murgatroyd conversationally in his shrill treble.
"I agree," Calhoun told him gravely. "Stone walls do not a prison make,
nor Med Ship hulls a cage. But it will be good to get outside for a
change."
The tape-speaker ticked and tocked and ticked and tocked.
There was the sound of a gong. A voice said measuredly,
"_Five--four--three--two--one--_"
The ship came out of overdrive. Calhoun winced and swallowed. Nobody
ever gets used to going into overdrive or coming out of it. One is
hideously dizzy for an instant, and his stomach has a brief but violent
urge to upchuck, and no matter how often one has experienced it, it
is necessary to fight a flash of irrational panic caused by the two
sensations together.
But after an instant Calhoun stared about him as the vision-screens
came to life. They showed the cosmos outside the Med Ship. It was a
perfectly normal cosmos--not at all the cosmos of overdrive--but it
looked extremely wrong to Calhoun. He and Murgatroyd and the Med Ship
were in emptiness. There were stars on every hand, and they were of
every conceivable color and degree of brightness. But every one of them
was a point of light, and a point only.
This, obviously, was not what he'd expected. These days ships do not
stop to view the universe from the monstrous loneliness which is
Between-the-Stars. All ships go into overdrive as near their port
of departure as they can. Usually it is something like five or six
planetary diameters out from the local spaceport. All ships come out
of overdrive as near their destinations as computation makes possible.
They do not stop to look at scenery on the way. It isn't good for
humans to look at stars when there are only stars to see. The sight
has a tendency to make them feel small. Too small. Men have been known
to come out of such an experience gibbering.
Calhoun scowled at the sight of Between-the-Stars. This was not good.
But he wasn't frightened--not yet. There should have been a flaming
sun somewhere nearby, and there should have been bright crescents
or half-disks or mottled cloudy planets swimming within view. The
sun should have been the star Merida, and Calhoun should land in
commonplace fashion on Merida II and make a routine planetary health
check on a settled, complacent population, and presently he should head
back to Med Headquarters with a report containing absolutely nothing of
importance. But he couldn't do any of these things. He was in purely
empty space. It was appalling.
* * * * *
Murgatroyd jumped up to the arm of the control-chair, to gaze wisely at
the screens. Calhoun continued to scowl. Murgatroyd imitated him with a
_tormal's_ fine complacency in duplicating a man's actions. What he saw
meant nothing to him, of course. But he was moved to comment.
"_Chee_," he said shrilly.
"To be sure," agreed Calhoun distastefully. "That is a very sage
observation, Murgatroyd. But I deplore the situation that calls for it.
Somebody's bilged on us."
Murgatroyd liked to think that he was carrying on a conversation. He
said zestfully:
"_Chee-chee! Chee-chee-chee!_"
"No doubt," conceded Calhoun. "But this is a mess! Hop down and let me
try to get out of it."
Murgatroyd disappointedly hopped to the floor. He watched with bright
eyes as Calhoun annoyedly went to the emergency-equipment locker and
brought out the apparatus designed to take care of a state of things
like this. If the situation wasn't too bad, correcting it should be
simple enough. If it was too bad, it could be fatal.
The average separation of stars throughout the galaxy, of course, is
something like four or five light-years. The distance between sol-type
stars is on an average very much higher, and with certain specific
exceptions habitable planets are satellites of sol-type suns. But only
a fraction of the habitable planets are colonized, and when a ship has
traveled blind, in overdrive, for two months or more its pilot cannot
simply look astern and recognize his point of departure. There's too
much scenery in between. Further, nobody can locate himself by the use
of star-maps unless he knows where something on the star-map is, with
reference to himself. Which makes a star-map not always useful.
But the present blunder might not be serious. If the Med Ship had
come out into normal space no more than eight to ten light-years from
Merida, Calhoun might identify that sun by producing parallax. He
could detect relative distances for a much greater range. But it was to
be hoped that his present blunder was small.
He got out the camera with its six lenses for the six vision-screens
which showed space in all directions. He clamped it in place and
painstakingly snapped a plate. In seconds he had everything above third
magnitude faithfully recorded in its own color, and with relative
brightnesses expressed in the size of the dots of tint. He put the
plate aside and said:
"Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd."
He pressed the short-hop button and there was dizziness and nausea
and a flash of fear--all three sensations momentary. Murgatroyd said,
"_Chee_" in a protesting tone, but Calhoun held down the button for an
accurate five minutes. He and Murgatroyd gulped together when he let
up the button again and all space whirled and nausea hit as before. He
took another plate of all the heavens, made into one by the six-lensed
camera. He swung the ship by ninety degrees and pressed the short-hop
button a second time. More dizziness and panic and digestive revolt. In
five minutes it was repeated as the ship came out to normal space yet
again.
"_Chee-chee!_" protested Murgatroyd. His furry paws held his round
little belly against further insult.
"I agree," said Calhoun. "I don't like it either. But I want to know
where we are--if anywhere."
He set up the comparator and inserted the three plates. Each had
images of each of the six vision-screens. When the instrument whirred,
each of the plates in turn was visible for part of a second. Extremely
remote stars would not jiggle perceptibly--would not show parallax--but
anything within twenty light-years should. The jiggling distance could
be increased by taking the plates still farther apart. This time,
though, there was one star which visibly wavered in the comparator.
Calhoun regarded it suspiciously.
"We're Heaven knows where," he said dourly. "Somebody really messed us
up! The only star that shows parallax isn't Merida. In fact, I don't
believe in it at all! Two plates show it as a sol-class sun and the
third says it's a red dwarf!"
On the face of it, such a thing was impossible. A sun cannot be one
color as seen from one spot, and another color seen from another.
Especially when the shift of angle is small.
Calhoun made rough computations. He hand-set the overdrive for
something over an hour's run in the direction of the one star-image
which wabbled and thereby beckoned. He threw the switch. He gulped, and
Murgatroyd acted for a moment as if he intended to yield unreservedly
to the nausea of entering overdrive. But he refrained.
* * * * *
There was nothing to do but kill time for an hour. There was a
micro-reel of starplates, showing the heavens as photographed with the
same galactic co-ordinates from every visited sol-class star in this
sector of the galaxy. Fewer than one in forty had a colonized planet,
but if the nearest had been visited before, and if the heavens had been
photographed there, by matching the stars to the appropriate plate he
could find out where he was. Then a star-map might begin to be of some
use to him. But he had still to determine whether the error was in his
astrogation unit, or in the data fed to it. If the first, he'd be very
bad off indeed. If the second, he could still be in a fix. But there
was no point in worrying while in overdrive. He lay down on his bunk
and tried to concentrate again on the book he'd laid aside.
"_Human error, moreover_," he read, "_is never purely random. The mind
tends to regard stored data as infallible and to disregard new data
which contradicts it...._" He yawned, and skipped. "... _So each person
has a personal factor of error which is not only quantitative but
qualitative...._"
He read on and on, only half absorbing what he read. But a man who
has reached the status of a Med Ship man in the Interstellar Medical
Service hasn't finished learning. He's still away down the ladder of
rank. He has plenty of studying ahead of him before he gets very far.
The tape-speaker said, "_When the gong sounds, breakout will be five
seconds off._" It began to _ticktock_, slowly and deliberately.
Calhoun got into the control seat and strapped in. Murgatroyd said
peevishly, "_Chee!_" and went to position underneath the chair. The
voice said, "_Five--four--three--two--one--_"
The little Med Ship came out of overdrive, and instantly its emergency
rockets kicked violently and Murgatroyd held desperately fast. Then the
rockets went off. There'd been something unguessable nearby--perhaps
cometary debris at the extremest outer limit of a highly eccentric
orbit. Now there was a starfield and a sun within two light-hours. But
if Calhoun had stared, earlier, when there was no sun in sight at all,
now he gazed blankly at the spectacle before him.
There was a sun off to starboard. It was a yellow sun--a sol-type
star with a barely perceptible disk. There were planets. Calhoun saw
immediately one gas-giant near enough to be more than a point, and a
sliver of light which was the crescent of another more nearly in line
toward the sun. But he gazed at a belt, a band, a ribbon of shining
stuff which was starkly out of all reason.
It was a thin curtain of luminosity circling this yellow star. It was
not a ring from the breakup of a satellite within Roche's Limit. There
were two quite solid planets inside it and nearer to the star. It
was a thin, wide, luminous golden ribbon which looked like something
that needed a flatiron to smooth it out. It looked something like an
incandescent smoke ring. It was not smooth. It had lumps in it. There
were corrugations in it. An unimaginable rocket with a flat exhaust
could have made it while chasing its tail around the sun. But that
couldn't have happened, either.
Calhoun stared for seconds.
"Now," he said, "I've seen everything!" Then he grunted as realization
came. "And we're all right, Murgatroyd! It's not our computers that
went wrong. Somebody fed them wrong data. We arrived where we aimed
for, and there'll be a colonized planet somewhere around."
He unlimbered the electron telescope and began a search. But he
couldn't resist a closer look at the ribbon in space. It had exactly
the structure of a slightly wabbly wrinkled ribbon without beginning
or end. It had to be a complex of solid particles, of course, and
an organization of solid particles cannot exist in space without
orbital motion. But orbits would smooth out in the course of thousands
of revolutions around a primary. This was not smoothed out. It was
relatively new.
"It's sodium dust," said Calhoun appreciatively. "Or maybe potassium.
Hung out there on purpose. Particles small enough to have terrific
surface and reflective power, and big enough not to be pushed out of
orbit by light-pressure. Clever, Murgatroyd! At a guess it'll have been
put out to take care of the climate on a planet just inside it. Which
would be--there! Let's go look!"
He was so absorbed in his admiration that the almost momentary
overdrive-hop needed for approach went nearly unnoticed. He even
realized--his appreciation increasing--that this cloud of tiny
particles accounted for the red-dwarf appearance on one of the plates
he'd taken. Light passing through widely dispersed and very small
particles turns red. From one position, he'd photographed through this
dust cloud.
The ribbon was a magnificent idea--the more magnificent because of
its simplicity. It would reflect back otherwise wasted sun-heat to
a too-cold planet and make it warmer. There was probably only an
infinitesimal actual mass of powder in the ring, at that. Tens or
scores of tons in all. Hardly more.
The planet for which it had been established was the third world out.
As is usual with sol-class systems, the third planet's distance from
the sun was about a hundred twenty million miles. It had icecaps
covering more than two-thirds of its surface. The sprawling white
fingers of glaciation marked mountain chains and highlands nearly
to the equator. But there was some blue sea, and there was green
vegetation in a narrow belt of tropicality.
Calhoun jockeyed the Med Ship to position for a landing call. This was
not Merida II, but there should be a colony here. That glowing ribbon
had not been hung out for nothing.
"Med Ship Esclipus Twenty," he said confidently into the spacephone
mike. "Calling ground. Requesting co-ordinates for landing. My mass is
fifty tons. Repeat, five-oh tons. Purpose of landing, to find out where
I am and how to get where I belong."
There was a clicking. Calhoun repeated the call. He heard murmurings
which were not directed into the transmitter on the planet. He heard an
agitated, "_How long since a ship landed?_" Another voice was saying
fiercely, "_Even if he doesn't come from Two City or Three City, who
knows what sickness_--" There was sudden silence, as if a hand had been
clapped over the microphone below. Then a long pause. Calhoun made the
standard call for the third time.
"_Med Ship Esclipus Twenty_," said the spacephone speaker grudgingly,
"_You will be allowed to land. Take position_--" Calhoun blinked at
the instructions he received. The co-ordinates were not the normal
galactic ones. They gave the local time at the spaceport, and the
planetary latitude. He was to place himself overhead. He could do it,
of course, but the instructions were unthinkable. Galactic co-ordinates
had been used ever since Calhoun knew anything about such matters. But
he acknowledged the instructions. Then the voice from the speaker said
truculently: "_Don't hurry! We might change our minds! And we have to
figure settings for an only fifty-ton ship, anyhow._"
Calhoun's mouth dropped open. A Med Ship was welcome everywhere, these
days. The Interstellar Medical Service was one of those overworked,
understaffed, kicked-around organizations which is everywhere taken for
granted. Like breathable air, nobody thought to be grateful for it--but
nobody was suspicious of it, either.
The suspicion and the weird co-ordinates and the ribbon in space
combined to give Calhoun a highly improbable suspicion. He looked
forward with great interest to this landing. He had not been ordered to
land here, but he suspected that a Med Ship landing was a long, long
time overdue.
"I forgot to take star-pictures," he told Murgatroyd, "but a ribbon
like this would have been talked about if it had been reported before.
I doubt star-pictures would do us any good. The odds are our only
chance to find out where we are is to ask." Then he shrugged his
shoulders. "Anyhow this won't be routine!"
"_Chee!_" agreed Murgatroyd, profoundly.