Space Pioneers Read online

  In other words, we don’t have a Pegasus to fly us up to the crystal spheres, and suppose the planet or star or the Moon is on the other side of that crystal sphere. And what if it’s some sort of magic fire (cue Wagner; I don’t care if it’s anachronistic) and there’s nothing to land on. And suppose the aliens, I mean the gods, don’t want you there?

  Columbus (I told you he’d be back) didn’t know there was a continent in his way to Asia, and also operated with a conception of the size of the Earth that was way off. How do you know we aren’t way off now?

  We’ve known about the speed of light and relativistic effects for barely more than a century. Do we know the whole story? What do you mean the Earth goes around the Sun? Next, you’ll be saying the Earth is flat and we’re way beyond that old nonsense now!

  Suppose I concede that we can never reach the stars, except maybe by a robot probe that will still be working somehow centuries after it was sent out at a pathetically sublight velocity. Supposed I concede that, as some spoilsports have argued, all stories about starflight are fantasy masquerading as science fiction?

  Even if it’s true. Fantasy is fun (“Hey, Conan, get your broadsword and run outside and chase off that dragon before he takes a bite out of the starship’s hyperdrive unit.”) In fact, I don’t concede anything of the kind, but so what? Stories of apace exploration and pioneering are jolly good fun, and even if we’re limited to starships of the mind, I say, keep ’em coming, and with the fascinatingly strange aliens be handy.

  While we’re waiting and hoping for real starships, there’s a bunch of terrific stories right here, following this introduction. Not all are set in interstellar space and some even tell how the space age began—in a way that didn’t happen. But that doesn’t matter because they’re still good stories.

  Back in the 1950s, Gnome Press issued a series of sf anthologies, each of which purported to give a loose future history, in spite of the stories all having been written independently by different writers. It didn’t always work, but in any case, that’s not what I’m trying to do in Space Pioneers. This theme is deep in the very heart of science fiction, from Jules Verne and Cyrano de Bergerac to whatever Star Trek spinoff is on the telly this week, and I could easily have assembled another collection of as many good stories. (Buy this book, helping it to sell out, and maybe Baen will let me do just that. And I promise not to give you another history lesson.)

  And while we’re riding in our paper starships, maybe some new breakthrough in physics, or mathematics. or even sewing machines (read Fredric Brown’s What Mad Universe and you’ll get it) will mean that we can go to the stars after all. We can take along a stack of recent issues of Scientific American for ballast. Or maybe give them to aliens we meet, though that might start the first interstellar war. But consider Magellan, who was killed by unfriendly natives while attempting to circumnavigate the globe, and though the voyage was finished (successfully) by his second in command, he’s still famous (can you name his second in command?), and has the Straits of Magellan and the Magellanic Clouds named after him. Not bad for a dead guy who didn’t finish the job.

  Still here, Mr. Columbus? Well, pull up a chair, Chris, and have a cup of Colombian coffee. Show us that party trick with an egg we’ve been hearing about.

  —Hank Davis

  THIRD STAGE

  by Poul Anderson

  This tale of men and their machines challenging the space frontier, by one of the very best SF writers of the 20th Century, amazingly (and it did appear in the February, 1962 Amazing Stories) has, until now, never been reprinted in an anthology or collection, as far as I have been able to determine, (it did reappear in an offshoot magazine of Amazing, but that impermanent curtain call was over four decades ago) and it’s a pleasure to bring it back to entertain new readers three generations later. But did I say entertain? Of course, it does that . . . but watch out for the gut-punch of an ending. . . .

  Not long after sunset, a storm far out to sea veered in a direction the Weather Bureau computers had called improbable. By midnight there was rain over Cape Canaveral and Buckler, roused from his bed, said the shot would likely have to be postponed. But the rain soon slacked off and technical crews beneath the arc lights could find no harm done their bird. At dawn there was only an overcast sky, beneath which a muggy breeze came sighing through the gantries and across the field. The final decision, whether to abort or go ahead, was left to the men who must actually ride the rocket. “Why on earth shouldn’t we take her?” Swanberg shrugged. “Or off earth, for that matter.” Holt nodded, a quick jerky movement: “Yeah, think’a fifty million women who might have to watch Enis Preston today, if we aren’t on the TV.”

  When Swanberg noticed a passing thought, he seldom let it go in a hurry. He was a large, squinting, tow-headed man with a friendly slow voice. As they left the briefing room and started toward the rocket, he went back to Holt’s remark. “Do you really think this flight is such a big production, Jim?”

  “Sure.” His companion made a wide gesture at buildings, machines, and bare concrete. “Didn’t you know? We’re clean-limbed American boys bound forth to Ride Out the Lethal Space Storms.”

  “But, uh, it isn’t that interesting. Just a routine orbital flight. Not as if we were the first men around the moon, or even the first Americans—”

  “But we are the first men of any stripe, chum, to head into the Van Allen belt and stay a while. Haven’t you watched TV-Time? Don’t you know how far the new radiation screen puts us ahead of those Russian nogoodniks?” Holt shifted his helmet to the other arm. “No, I guess you’re uninformed, Bill. All you ever did was help develop the gadget. Probably spent your spare time with a book or some such anachronism. Downright subversive, I calls you.”

  Swanberg chuckled. He didn’t like rapid-fire New York accents; the taut, status-scrabbling, publicity-wise types who infested the space project got on his nerves; but he made an exception for Holt. “Really, though,” he said, “I don’t get the reason for the ballyhoo. This hop is nothing but the last test of a long series. If the news services want something significant to report, why don’t they do a piece on . . . oh, the ion feedback work, or—”

  Holt spat. “You misunderstand, Bill. You think the news programs are to enlighten the people. Actually, they’re to sell cigarets.”

  “Bitter today, aren’t you?”

  “Me? Christ, no. What have I got to be bitter about? A laugh a minute, every time I lift up mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh the video transmission. You’re the soured old gaffer, not me.”

  “Could be.” Swanberg sighed. He made no secret of wanting to go back to Idaho, where he spent every vacation as it was, tramping the mountains and the forests. But how do you get a job remotely comparable—in interest and importance; to hell with pay—that far from anyplace? When he looked at the rocket where it stood waiting, tower high, iceberg massive, but with speed and grace, upwardness, built into every flowing line, he forgot climate and office politics and his dreary little tract house and the desperate gaiety of Laura’s farewell. There was only the bird, about to fly.

  Holt, brisk even in the blue spacesuit, reached the pad first. He gave his helmet to one of the technicians, who slipped it over his head and made it fast. All the techs were enlisted men this morning. Swanberg noticed. Though civilians like Holt and himself had been infiltrating the project in ever greater numbers since the organizational shakeup of ’63, the Pentagon was fighting a valiant rearguard action. At that, he’d rather have generals breathing down his neck than the reporters who’d invaded his privacy during the past few days. Swanberg was by nature an obliging soul, but after while he began to resent being told what pose to assume on his own patio. . . . The helmet went on him too. He stared through clear polydene at a last-minute bustle which had become muffled and vague in his ears.

  “How’s that, sir?” asked a voice in the ’phone. “Comfortable?”

  “Fine.” Swanberg went almost absent-mindedly through the c
heck routines. Not until he was rising in the cage with Holt, seeing the rocket’s clifflike immensity slide past him, monster first stage, lanceolate second stage, and the capsule in the nose which would carry him around the world and through the radiation zone and back, not until then did he fully realize that the talking and planning and trying and failing and starting over again were likewise past, that today he personally was going up.

  He’d done so before, of course, nowhere near as often as Holt, the test pilot, but several times, in connection with trying out some electronic development in which he had had a part. Not even a night along the upper Kootenai was as beautiful as the night above this gray heaven. He had envied the voyageurs who first saw the loneliness of the high West, until he became one of today’s voyageurs—if only his journeys could be oftener! He pulled his mind back to practicalities, squeezed through the capsule airlock after Holt and strapped himself into his adjoining seat. Though the Aeolus three-stager was by now the most reliable workhorse in the whole American space program, there would be a dull couple of hours to go through, checking and testing, before blastoff.

  He threw a glance at Holt. The pilot’s dark sharp features were misted. Sweat? Swanberg felt a slight shock. When he listened closely, he detected a note of shrillness in Holt’s responses on the intercom. But Holt couldn’t be scared; he wouldn’t do this, time after time after time, if he was scared; why, merely thinking of his responsibilities, his own wife and kids, would—high-strung, that was it. Of course. Swanberg tried to relax and concentrate on his own job.

  “Stage Two dropped on schedule. A-OK,” said the voice from above. There was no need; telemetered instruments had registered the fact clearly enough in the control blockhouse. But Tom Zellman was glad of the words. They were a much-needed dramatic touch. Blastoff had been great, as always, vapor clouds and immense boneshaking roar and sudden, accelerating climb of the giant. But since then there had been little to see down here. He had had his cameramen pan in on the faces of the ground crew—visible through a thick glass panel between their work space and the TV booth—until he felt his audience was sick of it. His roving reporters elsewhere on the base had gotten nothing interesting from the scientists. The interviews amounted to a bunch of young crewcuts and old Herr Doktors saying yes, we sent men on the final test of the radiation screen, but not to check on the screen itself; our unmanned shots gave us enough such data; only because man is the one instrument whose observations are not limited to those for which someone designed him. What kind of show was that? Especially when the Dodgers-White Sox game would soon start on another network.

  Zellman signaled for the view to cut back to him. He beamed and said resonantly: “A-OK. Everything’s fine up there, Laura Swanberg, Jane Holt, and all your kids. Everything’s fine, Mr. and Mrs. America.” He deepened his tone. “Cold thousands of miles above the green fields of their native land, two young men are entering the deadly radiation current which boils eternally around our planet. Trusting their lives to an invisible shield of pulsed magnetic energies—and to God,” he remembered to add, “they are going to circle the globe for ten lonely hours. If they succeed . . . if they come home again unharmed to their loved ones . . . then the way is open for Americans to explore the Solar System, unafraid of those lethal blasts from the sun which—” He saw the Number Two cameraman holding his nose and barely suppressed a scowl. That smart aleck would hear from Tom Zellman after this was over “—which have so long limited the time and places our ships could venture beyond the atmosphere.” Well, maybe the corn syrup was getting too thick at that. Zellman flipped a switch and projected a still pic onto a screen for transmission.

  It was a cutaway view of a standard Aeolus third stage. Because a good deal of the innards had still been secret when the drawing was made, the artist had relied considerably on his imagination. Joe Blow wouldn’t know the difference anyway. The capsule was shown blasting with its spin jets as well as the main rocket motor. Actually, Zellman supposed, those small swiveling nozzles were only to aim it in the right direction. The real thrust would come from the stern jet. And would hardly be used at the present time. Maybe a bit of push here and there, to get Stage Three into precisely the correct orbit. But generally speaking, Stage Two did that job. The main task of the Stage Three motor was to bring the capsule down again—to brake orbital velocity until the ship spiraled into atmosphere and its parachute could take over.

  However, the clip was a good dramatic pic. Zellman left his desk and pointed at the two human figures. “That’s Jimmy Holt piloting the spaceship. The ground crew is standing alertly by, ready to take over if he needs help. A giant computer clicks madly,” (or does it whirr, or flash lights, or what?) “digesting the information sent down by radio instruments. Powerful remote-control impulses are sent back, guiding, helping. But in the last analysis, the pilot controls the ship. How do you like that, Pete and Hughie? That’s your dad there, riding that rocket like a cowboy rides a bronco. Next to him Billy Swanberg peers at the radiation shield meters. If the screen should fail—but no, little Julie, that isn’t going to happen. Your father is going to come back to you, safe and sound—”

  “Preparing to assume final orbit,” said the dry voice. There went a hissing and crackling undertone of static.

  “That was Jimmy Holt,” explained Zellman. “Jimmy Holt, preparing for the last delicate touch of jets that will throw him into the heart of the densest Van Allen belt.” He glanced at the clock. The damn capsule ought to be stabilized or whatever you called it in another few minutes. Then he could turn the program over to Harry while he got lunch. He’d missed breakfast and his belly was growling. Good Lord! Suppose the sound mikes picked that up?

  The idea worried him so much that for a while, a whole thirty or forty seconds, the fact didn’t register on him, what it meant, Holt speaking again: “The main jet doesn’t respond. The goddam thing won’t fire. What’s gone wrong?”

  The vision scope showed Earth like a globe of itself, so enormous against blackness that Holt’s eyes joined his middle ear canals in making weightlessness appear to be a meteor’s fall. Any minute now, any second, they’d hit the ground and spatter . . . He shook off the illusion. Stop that, you schnook. You’ve been orbital often enough to know better. I wish to God we were headed down. No, we’re stuck in the sky like Mohammed’s coffin. Like half a dozen other dead guys in capsules that never returned, still whirling around the world. I wonder if we’ll see one of ’em.

  He pulled his gaze from the scope. Bill Swanberg could sit for hours mooning over how pretty Earth was. Holt had other business on hand. He’d long ago stopped getting any kicks from the scenery. (Oh, no denying it had beauty, the vast round ball, softly blue, banded with white clouds, blazoned with green and dusky continents . . . crowned by uncountably many stars, guarded by the Horned Goddess herself . . . but the cabin here wasn’t big enough to swing a kitten, it clicked and whickered, ventilators blew continuous gusts in your face, the air stank of oil and man, and you really had no time to look at anything but the meters.) He had never been glamor-struck by the spaceships anyhow. When routine psychophysical exams showed he had a natural aptitude for piloting, he’d snapped at the offer from Canaveral, because that was an even quicker route to executive rank than the engineering in which he had trained. A pilot who knew his way around people and watched his chances could step into some very fat jobs after a few years.

  If he lived that long, of course.

  Holt glanced at Swanberg. Unhelmeted, the electronics man’s broad freckled face glittered with sweat. Little droplets broke off and floated in the air currents. But he proceeded doggedly with his instrumental checks. From time to time he told Base his results, in a perfectly cool tone. Bill was a good joe, Holt thought. The phrase struck him funny. He started to laugh but stopped himself in time.

  “That’s about everything,” Swanberg finished.

  “You’re getting near our horizon,” said the man down at Canaveral. Static hissed and sputter
ed around his words. “I think we can figure out what your trouble is, though, before you’re gone from line of sight.”

  “Hope so,” Swanberg drawled. “Hate to wait out another half-orbit or thereabouts, wondering whether it’s gremlins or trolls.” He hesitated. “Standing by, then,” he said. “Over and out.” He cut off the transmitter.

  Traveling eastward at miles per second, the capsule was once again over the night side. Earth’s disc had become a crescent, its darkness edged with sunlight and tinged by moonlight. Had the tracking stations in that hemisphere been prepared, continuous contact would have been maintained. But they weren’t. No one had expected this to be anything but a milk run.

  “How’s the rad screen holding out?” Holt asked, to drown the machinery noises. His throat felt caught between cold fingers.

  “Fine,” Swanberg said. “Hardly an electron more is getting through than ’ud get through half an Earth atmosphere.”

  Suddenly his calm was intolerable. Holt pounded the control panel with his fist, softly and repeatedly. His thin body rebounded in the harness. “What’s gone wrong?” he groaned. “Why won’t the main jet fire?” In a rush of resentment: “Goddam Rube Goldberg monstrosity. Five million things to go haywire. Why can’t they design ’em simple and right?”

  “They’re working on it,” said Swanberg. “But a spaceship has a lot of separate functions to perform, you know. You and I are Rube Goldberg monstrosities too. It doesn’t take much to make us stop functioning—one blood clot can do it.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I guess so.” Holt tensed his tongue to spit, but recalled where he was. “So much for that God guff,” he said. “I can’t believe in a God who’s that lousy an engineer.”

  “I daresay a molecule of fuel could make a similar objection as it burns,” Swanberg answered. “No religion worth a hoot ever promised us happiness. We do get a fighting chance, though. Does a man really want more?”