01 - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Read online

  BUCK ROGERS

  IN THE 25th CENTURY

  Buck Rogers - 01

  Addison E. Steele

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  PROLOGUE: 1987

  The spaceship, standing tall and proud in the early morning sunlight at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was the most advanced production of Free World technology. Its lines were clean. Its command module was functional, efficient, manufactured to the micromillimeter by the most brilliant engineers, the most expensive machinery, and with the most sophisticated techniques that mankind had ever conceived.

  Its engines were a dream, designed for maximum power efficiency, control, economy, smoothness of operation, and versatility of performance.

  The engineers had said it was impossible to design engines that would meet all those criteria. The comptrollers had said it was far too expensive. The politicians had said, “Our priorities are all wrong! We need to rebuild the cities, feed starving nations, clean up the air and the oceans, the rivers and the land.”

  The politicians were then invited to attend secret high-level briefings. Limousines that burned black gold at the rate of five miles to the gallon, black gold that cost almost four dollars a gallon in 1987, carried them through back streets past hushed onlookers on Pennsylvania Avenue, to the White House. A presidential aide greeted them under the front portico and guided them to an executive conference room.

  The presidential aide disappeared shortly after the politicians arrived. He returned, now, carrying briefing materials that he distributed to the senators. Each senator received a packet. Each packet had a warning notice rubber-stamped on its cover in glaring incandescent red:

  These materials are classified maximum security. They may not be taken with you. The information they contain may not be quoted, cited, or referred to by you in public or in private, in any medium or manner, directly or indirectly, under maximum legal penalty.

  The senators were given a few minutes to familiarize themselves with the contents of the briefing packets. No discussion was permitted.

  The presidential aide disappeared still again and then returned in advance of the President himself.

  The President was neatly dressed, freshly shaved, smiling, optimistic. He was a convincing actor—but senators are good actors, too. They saw through his bright exterior.

  The President made an opening statement. The senators responded with questions. What they had learned at State, at the Pentagon, at Intelligence, here at the White House—all pointed in one direction. The President did not need to plead, did not need to exert any of the famous charm—or the infamous pressure-tactics—that had brought him to his elevated position.

  The President told the senators the bald truth, and they went back to the Senate and voted money.

  NASA and all of NASA’s contractors then worked feverishly for months, around the clock.

  And now the spaceship stood glittering in the morning sunlight. Inland, rows of palmettos and calamander trees hissed softly in a light zephyr. Out to sea, over the Atlantic, gulls swooped and hovered in the clear, salt-tanged air. There were no fishing boats, no rich men’s yachts, no sight-seeing craft in the takeoff lane.

  Reaction materials, engine exhausts, staging particles might drop there. Anyone caught beneath a rocket as it thundered into the sky was in dire peril of catching a thousand-ton cylinder of metals and plastics and more exotic materials in his startled little lap.

  Inside the spaceship, one man worked alone through the checklist of switches and controls, safety measures, computer programs, instrument readouts, telemetering connections, knobs, dials, indicators. His earphones brought him a constant stream of instructions and questions and comments from Mission Control. Into a tiny microphone he almost whispered the readings and responses that Mission Control expected.

  Hundreds of tiny probes picked up his skin temperature, blood pressure, respiration rate, eyeball motion, heart action, muscle tension, nerve conditions, even his brain waves. Inside the Mission Control tower these and scores more were displayed on video tubes that glowed with an eerie light while automatic pens traced out a permanent record of the astronaut’s condition on long sheets of paper that rolled slowly past their tips—lines in red, green, blue, black, purple, crossing and re-crossing each other as they danced and jiggled across the endlessly unrolling plain of pale turquoise squares.

  High over the Atlantic a complex game of hide-and-seek was taking place. American space satellites were linked into the spaceship-Mission Control net, ready to relay telemetered information, take observations, provide data. Simultaneously, foreign hunter-killer satellites sought out the American instrumentation and communication satellites, invisible laser beams flashing when one came into range; a destroyed satellite would not plummet, meteorlike, to Earth. It would remain in orbit, calmly circling the Earth for years or even centuries until its path slowly decayed and it burned up in the thicker air closer to the surface. But meanwhile, it would be dead.

  At the same time, foreign spy-satellites tried electronically to tap into the communication between the astronaut in his ship and the hundreds of engineers and flight controllers who sat at their consoles reading their instruments and dials, switching their toggles and knobs, checking off their logbooks… and listening to the near-whispered words of the pilot in the spaceship, whispering back answers to his questions, checking and double- and triple-checking every variable in the procedure.

  There was one funny thing about it all.

  The astronaut—blue-eyed, short-haired, muscled with the lithe strength of a trained gymnast rather than the bulging brute power of a weight-lifter—sometimes hummed a little tune under his breath. It was an old tune. It was the tune of a song written before the astronaut’s father was ever born, written when his grandfather was a little boy. It was a funny, infectious tune, and it had words to it that occasionally broke through the humming, to the startlement of NASA flight controllers and, we can be certain, to the absolute bafflement of anybody sitting on another continent, sifting through the static and electronic background noise of a spy satellite orbiting over Cape Canaveral, Florida and eavesdropping on the exchanges between the astronaut and his flight controllers.

  He was singing, now and then, a funny little song about a wonderful town, a toddling town, a town where a man even danced with his wife. Chicago, that was the town. Chicago.

  The world teetered between poverty and wealth, between famine and plenty, between tyranny and freedom; it teetered between peace and war.

  High over the Atlantic an enemy hunter-killer satellite zeroed in on an American telemetry relay satellite. The hunter-killer automatically adjusted its sights and focussed its laser-projector preparatory to disabling the relay satellite. At the same time an American counter-hunter-killer satellite detected the enemy device and switched on its thrusters to bring itself into better range.

  At the same moment that the enemy hunter-killer switched on its laser, the American satellite thrust itself against the enemy device and knocked it tumbling from its course.

  And at the same time that these actions were taking place, a swarm of small meteorites spun silently and invisibly on their course above the Earth’s atmosphere.

  No one knows how many meteors are scattered through the solar system, no one has even made a reasonable estimate. We know there are a lot of them, but whether that means thousands, millions, billions, or even more, is anybody’s guess. Meteors are not large objects like comets. They don’t move in regular orbits, or if they do, those orbits are seldom known to astronomers.

  There are too many meteors, and most of them are too small, and too dim, to be seen f
rom Earth. The largest of them is likely as large as a small planetoid; the smallest, the size of a grain of monosodium glutamate.

  And at the same time that the enemy and American satellites were engaging in their deadly game of orbital musical chairs high above the Atlantic Ocean, a swarm of meteors swept past—their orbit a mystery but their present position not much more than a thousand miles above the Atlantic, not far downrange from the launching pads of Cape Canaveral.

  The automatic program-sequencer at Mission Control was methodically ticking off the final seconds of the countdown for the day’s dramatic launch. The chief capsule communicator was whispering the words so they ghosted into the ears of the astronaut who half-sat, half-lay, all alone in the capsule of the most advanced spaceship ever built by human hands.

  “Ten.”

  The astronaut took a final look at his checklist, saw the proper mark in every square on the pasteboard page.

  “Nine.”

  The chief flight controller duplicated the astronaut’s actions, nodding to himself in satisfaction.

  “Eight.”

  Aboard the spaceship the astronaut clicked down the cover on his checklist and turned his eyes back to his real-time booster-condition readout dials.

  “Seven.”

  The direct-coupled communications system carried the same readout information to Mission Control. Six.

  A thousand miles overhead, the communications satellite, unaware of its near brush with death from the enemy hunter-killer machine, picked up the information from the spaceship and sent it speeding at the speed of radio waves—which is to say, at the speed of light—back to Cape Canaveral and simultaneously to NASA-Houston. Thus the system showed its multiple-redundancy, an almost foolproof method of making sure that nothing went wrong.

  “Five.”

  In Cape Canaveral and in Houston, hundreds of pairs of engineers’ eyes were glued to green oscilloscope screens, working as if by sheer will power, to make sure that wiggling and wavering lines kept within established limits of tolerance.

  “Four.”

  Within the VIP viewing stand, dozens of generals and admirals and congressmen and senators strained their eyes to catch the first flaring burst of flame as the rocket’s engines picked up their ignition.

  “Three.”

  The chief administrator of NASA, a confirmed atheist from the age of nine, breathed a silent prayer for the safety of the pilot and the success of the mission. The administrator didn’t know what the outcome would be; if the administrator had known, that prayer might have been worded somewhat differently.

  “Two.”

  Aboard the spaceship, the astronaut turned his head ninety degrees and peered out the window for the last time before lift-off. His lips were moving, forming the sounds of the lyrics of a funny little song that had been written when his grandfather was a little boy.

  “Chicago.”

  “One!”

  “Chicago.”

  “Zero!”

  “That toddlin town!”

  An enemy spy-satellite picked up the last phrase and dutifully transmitted it to a ground station on another continent, where a scientific intelligence monitoring officer raised her dark eyebrows and an expression of puzzlement replaced the usual one of intelligent concentration on her regular features.

  The great orange and golden and red flower bloomed suddenly, for the moment silently, on the great launching pad at Cape Canaveral. For an instant the spaceship disappeared, not merely to the dazzled eyes of the VIP delegation watching with naked orbs, but even to the eyes of more sensible and responsible workers watching the launch on closed-circuit television monitors.

  Inside the cabin, the astronaut pressed into his acceleration couch under the giant hand of monstrous G-forces that endless months of training had only half-prepared him to encounter. His steely blue eyes closed with the strain. His flesh sagged. His hands pressed against the rests designed for them.

  His pressure suit prevented his body from being squeezed out and crushed flat beneath the pressure, but the torso of the suit itself spread and stretched.

  Even the astronaut’s own name, stitched carefully onto a patch of duracloth and attached to his spacesuit, distorted. It would have taken a keen eye to read the name at this strange moment.

  The name was Rogers. The pilot’s personnel dossier listed him as William Rogers, Captain, United States Air Force, on loan to NASA in connection with a classified special project under direct White House sponsorship and authority.

  Captain Rogers’ friends had a shorter name for him, a name that he’d carried from childhood. Nobody knew whether it referred to a bronco or a dollar, but everybody called him Buck.

  On closed-circuit video monitors in Florida and Texas, the spaceship reappeared, riding on top of the growing ball of orange-gold flame for a few seconds, balancing there on its tail, then lofting away into the sunny Florida morning.

  There was a brief exchange between Captain Rogers and Mission Control. The spaceship was cleared for staging.

  The automatic sequencer clicked in; the ship’s computers raced through their stored programs, electrons flowing silently and invisibly along silicon-etched microcircuits, through gates and switches, taking instrument readouts, tripping relays, setting indicators. Triplicated computers in Florida and Texas performed the same operations, compared results, found agreement, turned all lights green.

  The first stage of the ship dropped away and the second stage engine ignited. For a second time, Captain Rogers felt the giant hand of the space deity crush him against his acceleration couching. For the second time his weight multiplied, his body flattened, then the engine cut off and Buck resumed his task of checking instruments and adjusting controls.

  The satellites continued their deadly game: jets puffed, verniers squirted, satellites turned and slid silently through their orbits. Laser beams flashed invisibly, sometimes finding a target, sometimes not.

  Higher above the planet, a swarm of meteors, millions or billions of years old, swept silently ahead.

  Buck Rogers’ ship, its earlier stages exhausted and jettisoned, its command capsule and auxiliary module resembling a sleek silvery dart, left the Earth’s atmosphere and continued on its course.

  Buck’s mission was no quick expedition to the moon and return. Lunar exploration had been conducted almost two decades before. Scientist-astronauts had brought back their samples, conducted their experiments, drawn their conclusions, buttressed those conclusions with masses of data, and abandoned the dead, silent moon to the solitude which had ruled her for billions of years.

  Buck was to be gone from earth for months, exploring the planets and the deep vacuum between them. He would return to Earth carrying the records both of longest duration for a space flight beyond earth, and greatest distance covered by any traveler off the face of the Earth. His exploits would cover not millions but billions of miles. His was the dream of Verne and Wells, of Tsiolkovsky and Goddard and Von Braun and Ley, of Hamilton and Williamson and Gernsback and Campbell and Brackett.

  The outside of Buck Rogers’ spaceship was suddenly struck by a swarming hail of tiny meteors. Inside the ship they first set up a racket like a fistful of gravel dropping onto a tin-roofed shack. In seconds the sound had increased in intensity until it resembled that of a machine gun firing at top speed, then to that of a battlefield where rifles and machine guns fired constantly, their ceaseless chatter punctuated by the occasional thud of a howitzer, crash of a recoilless rifle, whumpf of a heavy mortar lobbing its deadly freight over fortifications to drop it remorselessly on the enemy from above.

  Inside the command capsule, Buck Rogers had little time to contemplate the syncopation of meteors rattling and thudding against the hull of his ship. The steady orbit of the craft was jolted and shaken by the countless tiny and great impacts. The ship threatened to lose headway and tumble end-for-end.

  The meteors must have carried some weird electrical charge, for suddenly the inside of the ship b
egan to dance with scintillating lights. The very atmosphere within the ship was transformed into a seething kaleidoscope of brilliantly glowing gasses. Every hue in the spectrum was there, from strange greenish chartreuses to bizarre purplish reds and blues, from dancing, pulsating yellows and golds to heavy, torpid grays, ochres, and blacks.

  Trapped in his acceleration couch, Buck could only watch in consternation as the life-support controls of the ship went mad. Ion-counters and radiation fluctuated wildly. Pressure rose and dipped, rose and dipped until he felt he was trapped in the center of a giant vacuum chamber. The temperature rose briefly to a dangerous high, then dropped almost instantaneously to absolute zero.

  Buck Rogers, still lying in his acceleration couch, his space suit surprisingly intact, lay suddenly motionless as a statue of polished marble.

  If any hand had touched him he would have felt as cold and as stiff as the unliving.

  But he was not a statue, nor a corpse.

  He was a man in a state of stasis. Not merely frozen, but trapped in a state of timeless preservation, he lay with unseeing eyes, unbeating heart, unmoving hands, unthinking brain.

  His ship tumbled on through space. It might collide by accident with some other object in its course, but space is vast and even the largest objects in it fill only the smallest percentage of its volume.

  Buck’s ship might collide with some other object, but all of the laws of statistics said that it wasn’t very likely. No, far more likely it would just tumble on, and on, and on.

  Its planned journey of five months would stretch to years, then to decades, even to centuries. To Buck, lying within the metal-and-plastic sarcophagus that was his spaceship, the time meant no more than it does to an ordinary corpse lying buried safely in an earthly grave.

  But Buck Rogers was not dead.

  Buck Rogers’ ship tumbled on and on through the limitless reaches of the solar system. What strange sights Buck might have seen had he been observing as the ship passed the asteroid belt and the great-gas-liquid giants with their titanic atmospheres and families of rings and moons, he could not know. For all practical purposes, Buck Rogers was a dead man—but dead men do not rise from their tombs!