5
(It seemed there wasn’t much left to do in the way of space pioneering. There was a Space Platform, and there were bases on the moon, and drone ships had been out to Mars and sunward past Venus. There were new and better fuels, and the problem involving the Van Allen belts of highly charged atomic particles seemed to have been solved. It looked as if the rest of the job of conquering space would be just plain, slogging hard work of a strictly routine nature. This process would be improved a little, and that would be developed a little further, and progress toward the stars would be made by inches. But things never work out simply. There is always something unexpected and usually disastrous turning up. Just when things looked brightest, somebody worked out the causes of solar flares and devised a way to predict them. It looked like a neat and unimportant triumph of pure theory. But when it was closely examined, it meant that the end of all space travel was approaching.)
They called Colonel Ed McCauley back from the moon when Doctor Bramwell peevishly refused to go along with the Venus shoot unless the assigned crew was fired and replaced by more respectful men. The top brass felt that McCauley might be able to get along with Bramwell and get the job done. It was a highly necessary job. There was a sun-flare maximum coming up, but if the Bramwell-Faraday screen could be improved enough, it might not matter. Men might continue to occupy the Space Platform, and activities at the bases on the moon might continue. All the men now in space might not have to return to Earth to stay until the flares died down—if they ever did. In effect, if the Bramwell-Faraday screen could be built up to adequate strength, man’s conquest of space might continue. If the screen couldn’t be built up, space travel must stop.
And Doctor Bramwell was the key man in the project. He’d devised the screen in the first place, and was more likely to be able to improve it than anyone else. But he was not an amiable person. So, since he was a civilian and couldn’t be given orders, when he said peevishly that he would not go along with the original crew, the men first assigned to the Venus shoot were removed—swearing luridly—and Colonel Ed McCauley came back from the moon to see what he could do.
He had one interview with Bramwell, and was very respectful. Part of the respect was genuine, and part was diplomacy. Bramwell did have one of the two or three best brains on Earth, but his personality gave McCauley reason to be disturbed.
After the interview he consulted higher-ranking officers. He did not think Bramwell was psychologically qualified to take part in the Venus shoot. He thought the scientist would do better work if he stayed home and directed somebody on the ship by tight-beam radio. McCauley spoke forcefully. But Bramwell happened to have a near-monopoly of the kind of brains that were required. And the psychological factor that made McCauley doubtful made the doctor as temperamental as any prima donna. The high brass knew all the reasons for McCauley’s protest. But if Bramwell felt himself pushed aside, he’d sulk. If he sulked, he wouldn’t do his best work. And his best work was an essential. So McCauley was ordered to make do with Bramwell somehow.
McCauley shrugged dubiously. He asked for Major Randy Hall to be assigned as his second-in-command. Randy gloated when his appointment came through, but McCauley shook his head gloomily.
“There’s no reason to feel good about it,” he told Randy dourly, in the almost completed Venus ship. “I’ll be glad if you go along, but that’s not the idea. You’re appointed to be the man who’ll be fired if Bramwell demands it.”
Randy blinked. The cramped, inconvenient, gadget-filled interior of the Venus ship looked glamorous, when you thought of where it was going and what had to be done in it.
“The fact is,” said McCauley, “—and the big brass knows it—the fact is that Bramwell’s scared. He’s terrified at the idea of going out into space. But he’s ashamed to admit it. He’d rather die than let anyone know he’s in a panic. He’s probably trying to keep from admitting it even to himself. So he’s making trouble to delay the moment of truth. He’s trying to keep from facing the fact that he either has to go or else admit he won’t.”
“He’s afraid of going?” asked Randy incredulously.
“Just as some people are afraid of heights, or spiders, or income-tax forms,” said McCauley distastefully. “There’s nothing disgraceful about being scared. If he’d only admit it, he could fight it or accept it. In either case he’d be all right. But he insists to himself that he’s not only a brainy man but a normally courageous one. So he insists he’ll go, and he won’t let anybody go in his place, but he can’t make himself believe he’ll go. So he sets up all sorts of obstacles—crazy ones—ridiculous ones. He doesn’t realize it, but he may subconsciously be trying to postpone the shoot until it’s too late to make it. If that happens he won’t have to face the fact that he’s scared.”
Randy grimaced.
“And you expect me....”
“To keep him busy,” said McCauley. “Try to fix things so that it’ll be take-off time before he realizes it. Keep him away from me so he can’t pick a quarrel and insist that I be fired. Make yourself the one he’ll insist he can’t stand, when what he can’t stand is the trip.”
Randy grimaced again.
“You’re a rat,” he said resignedly. “But suppose I charm him so he doesn’t insist that I be thrown out?”
“Fine!” said McCauley. “There’ll be a crew of only two, with him as the third. I’d rather have you than anybody else. But Bramwell’s devising excuses for refusing to go. You could be one excuse.”
“I’ll polish some apples,” said Randy, “and fearlessly mixing metaphors, I’ll beard him in his den. Maybe I can get so popular he won’t want anybody fired.”
“Good luck to you,” said McCauley skeptically. “You’ll need it!”
He plunged into the remaining preparations for the shoot, and Randy went to take over the job of keeping Bramwell from meeting the various people who passionately wanted to have nothing to do with him.
The basic problem the Venus shoot was to attack was at once simple but apparently hopeless. From time to time the sun displays “flares”; these are violent upsurgings of its photosphere, not in the nature of sunspots but somehow associated with them. A flare may begin without obvious warning and in fifteen minutes become monstrously violent, throwing off highly ionized fragments of molecules at the highest speeds material particles can attain. Some of these particles, in time, reach Earth; magnetic storms and auroral displays are the consequences of their arrival. They are harmless to people who live at the bottom of the planet’s ocean of air.
But they are not harmless to the crew of a ship in space, or to the staff of that combined way station and observatory which is the Space Platform, or to the occupants of the bases on the moon. The Space Platform itself was set in orbit only three thousand miles out from Earth because of the Van Allen belts of just such particles that have been swung into paths around the earth and form invisible rings more or less resembling the visible rings of Saturn. At three thousand miles out these particles are not deadly. Farther out they are.
It was not until the Bramwell-Faraday screen was devised that it became possible for a man to land upon the moon. With the screen, a man could survive passing through the Van Allen belts in screened ships and set up moon bases. But the margin of safety was not great. It was enough, but barely so.
The Venus shoot was planned because this state of affairs would not last. Astrophysicists had developed a system for predicting solar flares. Then they’d found evidence and, later, proof that the flare frequency was due for an enormous and probably permanent rise. Dense clouds of flare particles would be released. The Van Allen bands would be intensified. Within a year, any man who went beyond Earth’s protecting atmosphere could expect to get a fatal dose of radiation burns within an hour’s exposure, a flare particle being “radiation” in the same sense as the particles thrown off by radioactive materials. The Bramwell-Faraday screen had to be improved, or else. And the only way to know that it was improved was to try it against stronger and stronger streams of the deadly particles until it failed—or worked. Which meant that somebody had to go out to where flare particles were abundant.
So McCauley labored on the ship that was already nearly set to dive sunward. It would be equipped with the screen that had made Earth-moon travel possible. It would have on board Bramwell, who’d designed the screen to begin with. It would plunge into flare-particle radiation of such intensity that the ship’s crew might survive—with the present screen on full—but this was by no means certain. The ship would dive sunward to Venus, swing around that planet, and drift back out to the orbit of Earth. On the way, Bramwell would try to adapt his screen to protect the ship and himself in it. It was a highly melodramatic proceeding, and Bramwell looked very heroic.
But he was a most unpleasant man. Having met him, McCauley estimated his personal attractiveness as much less than one-tenth the personal charm of an irritated skunk.
Ten days after his assignment to the Venus shoot, Randy came to McCauley with a sort of grim humor in his expression.
“I took Bramwell over the ship,” he said. “Since he’s going to live and work in it, he thought he ought to see it.”
“That’s reasonable,” admitted McCauley.
Randy held up his hand and ticked off on his fingers.
“Item. He drinks a glass of orange juice, a large one, every night before retiring. A supply of orange juice must be provided.”
“All right,” said McCauley. “Anything else?”
“Item,” said Randy. “He is extremely annoyed by noise. He must have a working area that is lined with soundproof material and has a soundproof door so he can have absolute quiet.”
McCauley grunted.
“If you can think of anything quieter than space with one’s rockets off.... But okay. What else?”
“Item. He suspects he’s allergic to the vegetation in the air-freshening system,” said Randy. “I promised it would be checked.”
“We’ll make impressive allergy tests for him,” said McCauley. “If that’s all....”
“It isn’t,” said Randy. “He wants a bunk with a hard mattress. He won’t use the acceleration chair except for take-off.”
McCauley stared.
“But didn’t you tell him?...”
“I,” said Randy wryly, “am polishing apples. I want to go on this shoot even if he does, which means I want to go very badly. No. I didn’t tell him that in free-fall flight with no gravity a steel plate is as comfortable as a down pillow. Why start an argument with a man in a blue funk?... He showed me the reference library he insists he has to take with him. It weighs eight hundred pounds.”
“There,” said McCauley, “he has to lose! We can’t take eight hundred pounds of excess weight. We simply can’t do it!”
Randy grinned.
“I showed him a moon-base microfilm reader and offered him the equivalent of four tons of books on half a dozen reels. He couldn’t refuse to buy. He only named half a dozen book titles not already on film, and they’re being filmed now.”
“Anything else?”
“Not so far,” said Randy. “He’s scared and ashamed of being scared. I don’t think he’ll actually get up nerve enough to back out, but I’m sure he’ll never get the nerve to go. When he finds out the actual take-off time I look for trouble.”
“What kind?”
“Maybe hysterics,” said Randy. “I’m almost sorry for the guy, but not quite. A man with his brains ought to face the fact that he feels timid, and either fight it or admit it. Especially, a man ought to realize that other people can tell what’s the matter with him.”
McCauley considered, frowning.
“For your information only,” he said, “take-off will be 1400 hours Tuesday, neither plus nor minus. We’ll have to stop at the Platform to refuel, and the Platform has a schedule. We’ll need to swing very close to Venus for its pull to change our course, and Venus has a schedule. And we’ll need to meet Earth farther along in its orbit, and Earth has a schedule. None of them can be changed to humor Bramwell’s psychological idiosyncrasies. We take off at 1400 hours Tuesday!”
But Randy shook his head.
“Oh, oh! Friend Ed, we’re in trouble!”
“He won’t go?”
“He won’t go,” said Randy. “I’m just learning how to handle him. I believed I could trick him into committing himself so firmly that he’d go, no matter how much something inside of him was screaming that it didn’t want to. But Tuesday’s too early. I don’t think there’s a chance to get him either to go or admit he won’t. Not by Tuesday.”
“That’s too bad,” said McCauley grimly. “We need him for our crew—him or a reasonable facsimile. Do you know what they used to do when they needed sailors?”
“Pressed them,” said Randy. “Press gangs grabbed them. But that was the law then. It isn’t now.”
“I wasn’t thinking of a press gang,” said McCauley. “Much more often, a man got shanghaied. We’ve got to have that souped-up Bramwell screen!”
More days passed. Doctor Bramwell announced firmly that he would not be ready to take off on the Venus shoot on Tuesday at 1400 hours. It was pointed out to him that all the computations for the Venus shoot were based on that time for departure. Doctor Bramwell said firmly that he would not be ready to leave at that time. It was suggested that he name someone who could take his place and work out the improved screen, of course on the basis of his advice and suggestions tight-beamed out to the Venus ship. Doctor Bramwell said indignantly that nobody else was capable of doing his work. But he would not be ready to depart at 1400 hours on Tuesday.
There was a complete impasse. He was immovable. The shoot had to be made at a certain time. He refused to be ready at that time. Preparations for the shoot went on. He calmly and ponderously ignored them.
At 1400 hours on Tuesday a hundred and eighty feet of streamlined, fire-spouting metal plunged skyward from Cape Canaveral. At eighty thousand feet, the first stage dropped off; at seventy miles, the second stage. The third stage, which was the Venus ship, went whipping on out into space. It circled Earth once, gradually overtaking the Space Platform as it floated serenely in emptiness three thousand miles out from the Earth’s surface. With tiny, finicky jettings of rocket fuel, and the use of steam-jets for final maneuvering, McCauley brought the Venus ship into contact with the Space Platform.
There was swift and efficient action. Men in space suits swarmed out of the brilliantly sunlit, faceted artificial moon. They connected fuel hoses and topped off the Venus ship’s tanks. They floated a second-stage unit out and bolted it in place. They painstakingly got a giant first-stage unit out of the ship lock and set it where it belonged. At the Space Platform, the Venus ship regained the fuel and the ability to accelerate that it had used up getting there.
One and a quarter hours after contact, McCauley reported back to Canaveral that all was well, that Doctor Bramwell was in excellent condition and making no complaints, and that all instruments and equipment had functioned perfectly during the trip from Earth. Then he backed the reenlarged Venus ship away from the Platform.
There was a long, long pause while he adjusted the nose of the ship with micrometric accuracy to an exact, particular spot and made sure that it stayed there. The ship had drifted a good mile from the Platform when he stabbed home the rocket-firing button.
As usual, the instantly following sensation was that of a roof falling in on one and several other roofs falling in on top of it. The Venus ship accelerated for seventy-eight seconds, its nose pointed sunward. McCauley’d set the rocket timer for that length of firing.
When the rockets died, he floated weightless in a ship which had no weight. His head tried to split wide open and let his aching brains run out. His hands were puffy and swollen. His eyes felt as if they were on fire. Beside him, Randy groaned and then growled.
“Doggone the man who invented rockets,” said Randy painfully.
“See how Bramwell’s doing,” grunted McCauley. “I’ve got to see how we made out.”
His headache went slowly away as he checked the ship’s line of motion against Earth, growing small behind him, and Venus and the sun ahead. It was reasonably satisfactory. He checked the ship’s velocity by the inertia computer and by a tight-beam query back to Earth. His query went back on microwave with a beautifully accurate piezocrystal regulating his frequency. His speed could be determined by the Doppler effect. Both the inertia computer and the Doppler reading indicated that his velocity would need a slight boost later. A time and duration of rocket firing would be computed. So far, though, so good.
“We’d better set up housekeeping,” said McCauley. “How’s Bramwell?”
“Pulse and respiration okay,” reported Randy. “But I bet he busts a button when he wakes up.”
McCauley eased out of his acceleration chair. He ached in every bone and muscle from the effects of the two successive take-offs. But he cast an accustomed eye about the ship. It was not a big ship, and Bramwell’s stipulated soundproof cabin took up a large part of it. It was, actually, not much more than an oversized moonship. But there were features to be arranged that the short-voyage ships from Earth to moon did not bother with.
McCauley floated over to the packed-up air system. In a space voyage up to a week in length, it is as economical of weight to carry air as to purify it. But the Venus shoot would last much, much longer than a week. So McCauley unpacked the air system. The vegetation had been padded lest it be bruised or broken in the take-offs. He set up the unit and started the hydroponic pump. Randy adjusted the drinkables unit. McCauley set out meals to thaw, in readiness for dinner. Randy put the sanitary facilities and the waste-disposal unit in operation. In effect, the ship had had to be decommissioned as a livable vessel while it was being flung out from Earth as a projectile. Now, in far space and going even farther, the two men transformed it into one of those specialized environments that supply men in emptiness with everything they require except day, night, weight, up, down, normal sounds, and a feeling of belonging where they are.
One homey touch appeared before the recommissioning of the ship was complete. McCauley opened a very small box and took from it an infinitesimal yellow object that stirred as he handled it. It was a tiny canary which had been stowed in the equivalent of a canary-sized acceleration chair. Now it struggled desperately in his hand.
“You’ll do, Mr. Perkins,” said McCauley. “You’re all right!”
He put the panting little creature—Mr. Perkins—into a cage hardly larger than itself. It let out a bewildered chirp when he released it. It struggled wildly, in panic because there was no up or down. McCauley captured it and put its groping claws against the perch. They gripped it. He set up a curiously intricate device inside the cage.
“He’ll do,” he said in satisfaction. “And it looks as if his food-and-water system is going to work, even in no-gravity. That was a job to design!”
He checked two larger devices with extreme care. One was the flare-particle counter, designed to make an audible click for every hundred, every thousand, or every ten-thousand flare-particle penetrations registered. McCauley set it for hundreds. It clicked every three or four seconds, which was a high concentration but still within the tolerance limit. The other device was the oxygen-supply flutter valve. The plants in the air system would absorb carbon dioxide from the air as the men’s breaths produced it, and release oxygen to replace it. But it was not quite a hundred per cent replacement. From time to time more oxygen had to be added from storage tanks to keep the air volume constant and the oxygen percentage right. The flutter valve took care of all this. It made a curiously irritable, buzzing sound when it worked.
The ship went on. Ahead and off to the right lay the steady, last-quarter crescent of Venus. Above and below and on every hand there were stars. Nobody on Earth ever sees the stars as they appear in space. At the bottom of Earth’s atmosphere, the keenest eye can see no more than three thousand stars at any one time. Out here one could count as many in a circle no larger than the sun’s disk. They shone in innumerable colors. The Milky Way was not a filmy mist across the heavens, but a ribbon of jewels set in pure light; Earth was a glamorous blue-green gem with white spots at its top and bottom, and the moon was a shining smaller circle.
Randy looked outside, as McCauley did. Then Randy yawned, to hide the awe that every man feels when he looks upon the immensity that men impertinently intend to conquer.
“Well, now,” said Randy. “We’re well started and maybe a bit of a nap is sensible. Anyhow, Bramwell’s sleeping sweetly. Should I loose him?”
“Wait till he wakes,” said McCauley. “Things feel pretty good,” he added.
Randy was silent, and they savored the feel of the ship together. It was strictly a feeling for technically-minded men. There were innumerable instruments, and all of them registered well within the limits of what it was proper for such instruments to read. The ship was on course, floating in immensity. It had ample reserves of fuel. It had left the Space Platform with all its take-off-from-Earth fuel replaced. Besides, having been launched from the Platform at the proper instant, it had the Platform’s orbital speed converted to sunward velocity and reinforced by blasts from the new first-stage booster which was not yet fully expended. The replaced second-stage had not been touched, and there was a third stage in reserve. The air system was functioning. The oxygen flutter valve made a consoling noise toward the ship’s stern. It sounded like a staccato Bronx cheer. There was plenty of oxygen stored under tremendous pressure. There were resources of food. And there was all the equipment that Bramwell could possibly need for the development and replacement of the ship’s present Bramwell-Faraday screen, so that men could stay in space and go farther and farther from home.
It was while they felt the fine contentment of men with a job to do and the material for doing it that Bramwell awoke. At the beginning he was starkly bewildered. He remembered drinking his glass of orange juice the night before. But he remembered nothing more until he found himself trussed up in an acceleration chair, in no-weight, in space, in the one situation he’d been unable to nerve himself to face.
When he realized what had happened to him, he went into blind, screaming, fighting hysterics.
They were three days on their way when McCauley said patiently:
“I’ve told you. You can use the communicator back to Earth and protest that you were kidnaped. You can arrange for us to be arrested when we return. But we can’t turn back. It isn’t possible. I wouldn’t if I could. Anyhow you’re not nearly as scared as you were. You can think straight, now, certainly! And you can see how ridiculous you’ll look if you become known as the man who had to be shanghaied for a space trip because he’d neither the nerve to go nor the intestinal fortitude to admit the fact and let another man try to do his work. If you want to be known as a complete ass, you can. But do you?—Do you want to be known as an utter ass?”
Bramwell glared at him. Nobody can stay panicked for days on end. If a man had had a Damoclean sword hanging over his head for days, he’d wind up accustomed to it. He wouldn’t like it, but he couldn’t stay scared. Fear is an emergency mechanism to increase the pulse rate and release adrenalin and tone the muscles for combat or flight. It is inherently a limited response. It has a maximum duration.
And Bramwell was now past the limit of the time a man can stay hysterically terrified. He didn’t like space. He didn’t like no-weight. But most devastatingly and bitterly—now that he was no longer terrified—he was ashamed. McCauley and Randy had seen him in babbling, incoherent frenzy. His dignity was utterly gone. And he hated Randy and McCauley poisonously because they’d seen what he would not admit to himself—that he was afraid. It was humiliation to face them. It was an intolerable rasping-raw of his vanity to be in their presence. They knew he’d been afraid and that he’d bluffed to hide it. They’d seen him crack up when he found himself in space. He was shamed beyond endurance. Therefore he raged, and therefore he hated them irreconcilably.
McCauley went on as patiently as before:
“You can do your work now, and it will never be known that you had to be forced to it like a scared little boy. Or you can not do it, and it won’t get done, and the history books will say that men once started for the stars but had to come home because Doctor Bramwell’s pride prevented him from working on the problem he was the only man who could solve.”
Randy, watching, nodded to himself. McCauley was doing a good job of argument. That last “only man who could” was flattery, and Bramwell ought to respond to it.
“I shall charge,” said Bramwell spitefully, “that you two prevented me from doing my work by imposing impossible working conditions on me!”
“Name possible ones,” said McCauley patiently, “and you’ll get them if they’re available.”
The canary, Mr. Perkins, chirped from its cage. The bird was upside down in relation to Bramwell, but it seemed to have adjusted admirably to the conditions of space travel.
“The soundproofed room,” said Bramwell triumphantly, “is ridiculously small. I need more space. But above all I need quiet! I need to be isolated from the society of fools and from noises I cannot endure!”
Mr. Perkins chirped again. The canary was still bewildered, but at least it could see now, and it’d found out how to get at its food and water, and it felt quite cheerful.
“... And you might start,” rasped Bramwell, “by strangling that blasted canary! I abominate canaries!”
“Things are looking up, Ed,” Randy said cheerfully. “There can’t be anything very much wrong with a man who hates dogs, children, and canary birds!”
But McCauley had begun thoughtfully to examine the layout of the interior of the ship.
They were two weeks on the way toward Venus. The flare-particle counter clicked every second and a half. The sun’s disk, ahead, was appreciably larger and Venus was a thinner crescent than before. Earth was a small object, though still larger than Venus, and the moon was very small indeed. At this distance the Space Platform was, of course, invisible. But the changes inside the ship were more marked than those outside.
The interior of the ship was now divided into two parts. McCauley and Randy had pulled down the small cubicle made of soundproofing material that had been built for Bramwell to work in. They had used the same material to wall off a full half of the ship. There was a door in the wall, and part of the air-freshening system operated through sound baffles so that the air in the walled-off space was changed, quite silently, with the same regularity as the air in the forward end of the ship, where McCauley and Randy did their work.
But McCauley was vaguely disturbed. It had developed gradually, but he did not feel right. Even though he could not become physically exhausted in a total absence of gravity, he felt dull and weary. There were measurements of flare-particle frequency to be recorded, both from outside the ship where the Bramwell-Faraday screen did not operate, and from inside where it did. The figures were curiously difficult to copy. But there was no reason for him to feel weak and stupid. The air system worked perfectly. The food was adequate. The ship moved steadily, silently, perfectly on its way at a certain number of miles per second, which was increasing a trifle because of the sun’s gravitational field. Everything seemed perfect. But he didn’t feel right. Randy was not himself, either. And Mr. Perkins sang only half-heartedly.
The canary began, now, what started out to be a beautifully executed trill, but which died away after half a dozen tremolos.
“Mr. Perkins isn’t in good voice today. What’s troubling him?” Randy spoke with a certain effort.
McCauley concentrated on the report he was filling out. He shook his head and looked again; he was startled.
“Look here!” he said sharply. “We had the screen on when we left the Platform. It kept out the radiation when we went through the Van Allen belt. But now we’re nearer the sun. Stuff’s coming through the screen! It’s been coming through for days! And we haven’t noticed it! What’s the matter with us?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Randy listlessly.
“We’re not on the ball,” said McCauley. “We’ve got to do something about this!”
He rose from his chair. It took but the slightest of effort, and he floated free. He reached out his hand to the wall and directed the motion of his whole body. He approached the soundproof barrier that now divided the ship into two separate parts. He caught a handhold on the door and knocked.
Minutes later the door opened. There was no gravity, so Bramwell did not stand in the opening. He floated there, scowling. He and McCauley faced each other, very much like swimmers, except that they swam in air.
“Radiation’s coming through the screen,” said McCauley. “It shouldn’t. Not this early, anyhow. Shouldn’t something be done? I’m ordered to consult you about all adjustments of the screen.”
He was vaguely dissatisfied with himself for asking. He should not have to ask anyone for instructions. He was ordered to in this case, but decisions were his job.
“Turn it up!” said Bramwell peevishly. Then he seemed to notice that he had not been actively unpleasant. He moved quickly to correct the omission. “How many times,” he demanded furiously, “have I told you not to disturb me! Noise upsets me! Leave me alone! Isn’t it enough that I have to share the ship with clods, without having you bang on my door?” He glared around the forward part of the ship. Mr. Perkins sang again, a half-hearted attempt at a warble. “Noise! Noise! Noise!” rasped Bramwell.
He pulled the door shut. McCauley floated lethargically to the screen unit and made an adjustment.
Nothing important apparently happened, but something ceased to happen so often. The sharp, slightly irregular clicking of the particle counter seemed to stop. It was a full five seconds before it clicked again, six before it clicked a second time, and five before it clicked a third.
“I wish,” said McCauley lethargically, “that I’d been a little more on the job. Why didn’t we notice the radiation count going up, Randy?”
“Bramwell complains if we touch the side of the ship because it makes noises inside his sanctum,” Randy answered. “Maybe we’ve been trying not to think for fear the noise would disturb him.”
McCauley considered the comment carefully, which was itself an indication that he was not up to par.
“No,” he said slowly, “it’s not that. But we don’t feel right. Maybe we’d better take our temperatures. It would be ghastly if we were getting sick! Bramwell couldn’t feed himself, let alone get the ship around Venus!”
With some effort he found a clinical thermometer. But they did not have any fever. In fact, their temperatures were considerably lower than the 98.6° F. which is considered the norm for men in good health.
They were two weeks and five days on their way. McCauley shook his head to clear his mind. He reread what he had just written in the ship’s log, vaguely puzzled because it did not seem to make sense. With enormous effort he checked each word and found that he had left one out here and another one there. With great determination he put them in. Somewhere in his mind there was a feeling that he needed to do something very urgently, but he could not think what it was.
“Randy,” he said, and something in his brain noted that his voice was plaintive, “I can’t seem to think straight! There’s something I ought to do! What is it?”
Randy shook his head. He floated in the straps of his acceleration chair; not that the chair was needed, but because it held him still so that there was no possible chance of his striking against the unmuffled wall of the ship and so sending a solid-conduction sound back to Bramwell.
“I don’t know,” said Randy flatly. “I don’t feel too bright myself.”
The soundproof door of the after compartment opened. Bramwell came out. Somehow he looked pathetic and frustrated, but he essayed rage.
“I have to have silence!” he cried ferociously. “You are making noises! I cannot think! And I must think! I have to have silence!”
McCauley said numbly:
“I’m sitting here, and Randy’s in his chair. There’s no noise.”
“There is noise, or why can’t I think? You are doing something to keep me from thinking!... That canary! It has been singing! That’s it! You must wring its neck so I can think!”
“No,” said McCauley, “it hasn’t been singing. It hasn’t sung for a long time. It did, but it doesn’t any more. Why?”
“Something is the matter!” insisted Bramwell desperately. “I’m stupid! I’m as stupid as you! And I must use my brains!”
“You’ve got everything we can give you,” said McCauley without particular emphasis. “We can’t seem to do our work right either.”
“There is some new condition we do not know about,” Bramwell said, in a sort of puny panic. “There is something in space which is working to destroy us! Here! Send this message back to Earth!” McCauley took the slip of paper on which words were written in an erratic, spidery hand. “But I think you are making noises!”
Bramwell pulled himself back into his soundproof half of the ship. The door closed behind him, but not quite in time to cut off the beginning of an agitated whimpering sound.
McCauley pushed the beam-on button. He should have checked the time, Earth time, to see if Canaveral were on the side of Earth from which it could pick up the beamed message from space. It wasn’t, but he didn’t think to check. He read, in a monotone, the message Bramwell had written out:
I feel the purpose impossible probable effect similar to X-rays with this is vital to further but I have no instruments.
Bramwell.
He was vaguely puzzled but he read it faithfully. Then, without checking for reception, he turned off the transmitter. He went back to the painful task of trying to make the ship’s log entry at which he’d been working for a long time. He assured himself that though the message did not mean anything to him, they’d understand it back on Earth.
But they didn’t. It didn’t get back to Earth. The Venus ship had been pointed very accurately so that the parabolic reflector for the tight beam to Earth was perfectly aligned. But Bramwell had protested the faint, faint hum of the gyros which kept the ship pointed correctly. McCauley had turned them off. He’d meant to re-align the ship for each period of communication, but his mind was confused and he forgot.
Earth had received no message from the Venus ship for six days past. There was consternation in the Space Service.
It wouldn’t have lessened any had Bramwell’s message been picked up. He’d meant to say that he felt that achievement of the Venus ship’s purpose was impossible because of something which doomed the men in it. He thought it probable that some previously unnoticed effect of radiation, perhaps similar to X-rays, was destroying their capacity to think. This effect should be studied. It was vital to further space exploration. But he had no instruments that could detect it.
They were three weeks out from Earth. The Bramwell-Faraday screen was turned up to full strength, and still the radiation counter clicked and clicked. It now indicated a higher frequency of radiation-particle penetration than was experienced in any of the Van Allen bands around Earth. Bramwell was a pitiable figure. Enough of his mental capacity remained to inform him of his intellectual degeneration. Now and again he popped into the forward part of the ship, trying to catch McCauley or Randy at some activity that was stealing his brain power away. When he failed to do so, he reacted with rages that would have been alarming except that he had not the energy for anything more than words.
McCauley struggled against a massive indifference. One part of his mind stood aside and knew that the occupants of the ship were doomed, but he could not care. Mr. Perkins no longer moved about its cage. Its feathers fluffed, the bird might be dead on its perch. McCauley tried painstakingly to write up the ship’s log, but what he wrote was confused, meaningless. Even his handwriting grew steadily more illegible.
Then, at three weeks and one day, the leak alarms rang stridently. They made a frightful clamor all over the ship. The few compartment doors closed tightly.
“Leak,” muttered McCauley to himself. “Prob’ly meteorite. Got to get in suit and fix leak....”
Fighting an overwhelming lethargy, he floated toward the space suit rack, missed it by yards, doggedly made his way back to it, and numbly began to get into a suit. Randy worked at the same task. He stopped to rest.
“Randy,” said McCauley protestingly. “Get in suit! Leak!”
He himself was incredibly feeble. Had there been weight in the ship, he could not have lifted his helmet to his head. He settled it over his shoulders, but his fingers failed to turn the thumbnuts tight. Even so, there was the familiar feel of air blowing across his face.
Strength came to him. Not instantly, but with the first breaths of air from the suit tank his head seemed to clear a little. After more breaths, his hands moved assuredly. He began to realize the change in himself and gulped down deep lungfuls of the dry, curiously flat-smelling stored air.
Randy hadn’t finished getting into his suit; he seemed to have gone to sleep. But when McCauley approached him in the space suit, Randy’s eyes turned toward him incuriously.
McCauley thrust him into the space suit and clamped down the helmet. Randy suddenly stared.
“Something’s been wrong with the ship’s air!” snapped McCauley, feeling more like himself every second. “It’s no good! Breathe deep, Randy! Breathe deep!”
Randy obeyed. His eyes cleared.
“Bramwell!” snapped McCauley. “Get him in a suit! He hasn’t sense enough to do it himself!”
He flung himself at the control board. The leak was....
But there was no leak. The leak alarm had rung, but every pressure indicator in every part of the ship showed the same figure. It was.... McCauley gazed incredulously at the dials. The ship’s interior pressure was 12.8 pounds to the square inch as against a normal 14.7. The difference was enough to set off the leak alarm, but a thinning of the air like this was not enough to cause the stupidity, the lethargy, the confused and helpless thinking which McCauley—marveling—realized had appeared during the past three weeks.
He heard a howling noise between the clamors of the gongs. It was Bramwell.
“You’re making a noise!” wailed Bramwell. “I can’t have a noise! I must have quiet....”
McCauley spoke crisply into the transmitter, sending a tight-beam message back to Earth. It would be minutes before it was received, as against the less-than-two-second lag in a message sent from the moon to Earth.
“We were suffering from oxygen starvation,” said McCauley briskly. “The plants in the air-system’s hydroponic garden absorbed carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen, but not quite cent per cent. There was a steady small loss of oxygen in the ship, caused by the use of oxygen as well as carbon by the growing plants. This small loss should have been made up by the addition of oxygen to keep the volume of the ship’s air constant. But it happened that the oxygen flutter valve became jammed....”
He heard an explosive sigh of relief behind him, but he carefully did not look up at Bramwell. Bramwell was very silent these days, and he practiced extreme self-control. He realized now that he’d let too many things bother him. But he was still bothered, and horribly so, by the memory of his inability to make up his mind to face the journey in space, or to arrange for somebody to substitute for him, so he’d had to be shanghaied. He was even more bothered by the memory of his behavior when he found himself in a ship off for a swing in to Venus and out again. McCauley and Randy ignored these past happenings, and Bramwell would never be able to bring himself to mention them. But he was very much ashamed.
The thing that disturbed him most, however—the thing that made him extremely conscientious and extremely self-controlled—was the consequences of not facing things and of trying to cover up his own shortcomings. When he got over his hysterics he wanted to get even with McCauley and Randy by defying them. But he hadn’t dared defy them openly. He’d been peevish and ashamed and humiliated. To him the bronx cheer of the oxygen flutter valve had seemed a mockery. But he still felt superior to pieces of machinery. So when the flutter valve went “Tht-tht-tht-tht!” at him, he angrily turned it off. And the human race almost had to stay on Earth forever because of it. The three of them came very close to dying.
McCauley continued talking matter-of-factly into the transmitter.
“As a result of the jammed valve, there was a steady lowering of the oxygen content of the air, but the carbon dioxide content did not increase. The air was getting closer and closer to pure nitrogen all the time, but we didn’t notice, because a person feels suffocated by an excess of carbon dioxide rather than by a lack of oxygen. We were all dying quite comfortably when the leak alarm went off because the air pressure was dropping as the oxygen left us. When the alarm went off, we found the trouble and brought the oxygen concentration up to what it should be. We think there should be no more trouble. In fact....”
He stood up and handed the microphone to Bramwell. Bramwell hesitated a moment. Then he spoke.
“I have to report that the problem of a stronger Bramwell-Faraday screen field seems to be solved. This particular accident suggested a theory. Quite coincidentally, the theory resembled one aspect of charged-particle theory. It led to an idea. The new screen has a very gratifying reflex action which uses the velocity of the flare particles themselves to increase the screen’s resistance. The charged particles are tricked into defeating themselves. I will have a detailed account of the theory and the apparatus shortly.”
Mr. Perkins, in its cage against the wall, burst into song. The canary began with a trill and went on to a warble; then Mr. Perkins essayed a glocken. He accomplished it triumphantly. Bramwell scowled at it from habit. But then he carefully smoothed out his forehead as he handed the microphone back to McCauley. He nodded at the tiny cage.
“Not bad,” he admitted. “Not bad at all!”
The Venus ship got back to its rendezvous with Earth some four months and eighteen days after take-off. At that time, this was the longest space journey ever made by man. But it was not only the longest trip. As a result of it, the reflex Bramwell screen had been developed along a new principle: The higher the velocity of a charged particle, the firmer the screen’s resistance to its passage. Since the screen could stop even the highest-energy cosmic particles, the effect of such particles upon living matter could be determined by comparing exposed organisms—human beings and all other living things on Earth—to other organisms shielded from cosmic radiation. The ship, too, had made some close-range infrared photographs of Venus and prepared a fairly complete map of the planetary features underneath the cloud bank. The length of Venus’ day was established. The....
It was a highly successful expedition from all standpoints.
But Randy insisted that the most remarkable result was the change in Bramwell. There was no doubt that Bramwell had one of the best brains in the solar system. Even when they disliked him most, both McCauley and Randy had respected his brains. But after Bramwell found out that they’d never refer to the way he acted before and immediately after he was shanghaied, the fact that he was so ashamed of himself improved him as far as human society was concerned.
He improved so much, in fact, that by the time they got back to Earth, McCauley and Randy were not much more polite to him than they were to each other.
Which was high honor.