Revolt on Alpha C Read online

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  Copyright 1955 by Robert Silverberg

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

  in any form, except by a reviewer, without the permission

  of the publisher.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  By the Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghamton, New York

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALLOG CARD NO. 55-5219

  First Printing

  FOR MY PARENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  THE STOPOVER AT Pluto was brief, but for Larry Stark it seemed to be much too long. The Carden and its crew had spent a week on the cold, small planet at the outermost edge of the solar system, making the necessary change-over to overdrive. This was the second stop on the journey that would take him to the fourth planet of the star Alpha Centauri, four and a half light-years away.

  The conversion of the Carden for interstellar travel was necessary if they wanted to cross that gulf of space in less than a decade. Standard drive was limited to use within the solar system, and it operated at a comparatively slow maximum speed of 100,000 miles per second. The overdrive installed on Pluto would enable the Carden to travel the trillions of miles to Alpha C in a little over two weeks; without the drive the trip would take years.

  Larry was impatient to get on to Alpha C. The stop at Mars had been made in order to pick up Harl Ellison, like Larry a newly graduated cadet of the Space Patrol Academy. They were making their Final Cruise—the traditional post-graduation space cruise, at the end of which they would be awarded their commissions as officers of the Patrol.

  Most of the Cruises had been to points within the solar system. But Larry, and Harl, who had studied at the Martian branch of the Academy, and Heitor van Haaren and three other Earth Academy cadets, had been chosen to go on the first Interstellar Cruise in Academy history. They were on their way to the primitive fourth planet of Alpha Centauri, where four small Earth colonies struggled for existence amid a prehistoric environment.

  Larry had secretly hoped that his father, Commander Stark of the Space Patrol, would use his influence to get him assigned to the coveted Interstellar Cruise. But Larry had not dared mention the matter, knowing that his father’s code of honor would allow no such thing, and had earned his way abroad by finishing first in his class at the Academy. His father had been tremendously proud; Larry came from a long line of Space Patrol commanders, and his father was determined that his son would keep up the tradition. It was hard to tell which one was more happy when the notification came that Larry had been chosen for the Cruise.

  The trip to Mars had been full of excitement, but the novelty of life in space lost some of its glitter during the nine-day journey to Pluto for the changeover to overdrive. Still, ahead of him lay Alpha C IV, a young world peopled by giant dinosaurs, and the delay on Pluto nearly exhausted Larry’s patience.

  At last the overhauling of the Carden was finished and he could say good-by to the bleak, snow-covered world. The crew of the Carden made quick farewells to the colonists who lived under the dome on Pluto and trotted back across the snow to the ship to await blastoff.

  Larry stared out the port while stowing his things for blastoff. He looked at the white blanket of snow, broken here and there by jagged splinters of rock towering high above, and at the black sky with the sun a bright dash of light, hard and brilliant without any appearance of warmth. This was the sun, Larry knew, as it appeared from the uttermost depths of its realm.

  He compared the Plutonian landscape with the view of Mars as he recalled it from the brief glimpse he had had. Mars was starkly monotonous, without trees, all bleak and barren for vast distances, a brick-red desert with scraggly patches of green. Neither Mars nor Pluto was suitable for human life except under the protection of a dome. But ahead of him was Alpha Centauri IV, where the air was fresh and warm and the forests thrived with growing things.

  Larry cushioned himself in his acceleration cradle and braced against the shock of blastoff, as the Carden escaped from Pluto’s grip. The great roar of the jets filled the cabin and an invisible fist bashed Larry down against the cradle. The Carden sprang up away from Pluto, stood for a moment on a fiery tail, and then headed outward to the stars.

  Now the long haul started, the fifteen-day trip from Pluto to Earth’s nearest stellar neighbor.

  Actually Alpha Centauri was not the closest star: Proxima Centauri, an insignificant star with no planets, was slightly closer to Earth. But around Alpha C there whirled eleven planets, of which one—the fourth from the sun—was inhabitable by human beings. A colony had been planted there some 125 years before, and one on a planet of the bright star Sirius, about twice as far from Earth as Alpha C.

  In the twentieth century the great Einstein had pointed out that it was impossible for a moving body to exceed the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. The Lorentz-Fitzgerald equations showed the strange effects which would take place when a body approached the speed of light,

  But “impossible” is a word not found in the vocabulary of most scientists.

  The Huxley discovery of 2183 gave man the path to the stars. Until then, faster-than-light travel was impossible. And, with traveling speeds limited to the velocity of light, it would take almost five years to make the trip to Alpha C; nine years, round-trip.

  Huxley’s discovery was a method of warping space, a new drive principle called “overdrive.”

  Larry’s main duty aboard ship was to serve as radio operator, the specialty which he had chosen while in the Academy. Once a day he transmitted the ship’s log, dictated by grizzle-haired, iron-faced Captain Reinhardt, a stern old spaceman who reminded Larry of his father and whom he had once nearly addressed as “Dad” in an absent-minded moment.

  Larry would transmit the log regularly to the Space Bureau, which required daily contact with all ships in space. The rest of his working day was devoted to taking care of the radio instruments and picking up occasional messages beamed to the ship.

  His schedule allowed him frequent free hours which he usually spent in his cabin, along with Harl Ellison, the Martian cadet he bunked with. Ellison was short, a head shorter than Larry, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, and sturdy. Like all Martians he was heavily tanned.

  “We enter overdrive sometime tomorrow,” Larry said as he entered the cabin. “Reinhardt entered it in today’s log.”

  “Quiet!” Harl said. “If I know anything about Earthmen this whole ship’s probably wired for sound, and you know you’re not supposed to be telling me what’s in the log.” Harl s voice was deep and booming, a low growl emanating from somewhere in his huge chest, Larry smiled and sprawled out on his berth. “I doubt it,” he said. “Why would they want to wire us for sound? Don’t they trust us?”

  Harl leaned back and closed the book he had been studying. “I know Earthmen,” he repeated. “They’re probably listening to us right now.”

  There was a knock on the door of the cabin. Harl and Larry exchanged glances.

  “Come in.” Larry called.

  The door opened and Olcott, the pilot, a veteran spaceman, entered.

  “I got your note,” he said. “What did you want to talk to me about, Larry?”

  “It’s this: I’ve been looking through the textbooks, and none of them answers a question I’m puzzled about. Why does overdrive work?”

  Olcott chuckled and sat down. “Why? Why does it work? No one knows that, Larry—not even old Huxley himself. No one knows exactly how electricity works, either, or magnetism, but we manage
to control them.” I thought maybe you could help me out, Olcott. They don’t teach us too much about overdrive at the Academy.”

  Harl nodded. “They sort of passed over it at the Martian Academy too, Larry. They seemed uneasy.”

  “It’s pretty simple,” Olcott said. “We don’t know why it works, but we know how it works. It’s a spacewarp. Look: it folds space over on itself, making sort of an accordion pleat where we go through.”

  He picked up a sheet of paper on which Larry had been doing some equations. “Here. Imagine space as this piece of paper. You have to travel from one side of the paper to the other, and the distance is four inches. Got the picture?”

  “Yes, but space isn’t flat—”

  “Never mind that for a moment,” Olcott put in. “Just follow me. Now, instead of making this journey all the way across the flat surface, you find some way of folding up the edges so where you are and where you want to be are right next to each other. Then you just cross over, and you’ve made your trip of four inches without moving more than a couple of millimeters.

  “So what the Huxley Drive does is to go outside the normal three dimensions—to go above them, in a way—and cause that folding effect. Then we just cross from one edge to the other, and we’ve made our journey in hardly any time at all.”

  Olcott stood up as if to leave. “By the way, we enter overdrive tomorrow, in case you haven’t heard. I suppose it’s all right to tell you.”

  “Why don’t we ever use overdrive within the solar system?” Larry asked.

  Harl suppressed a laugh. “And you’re number one in the Earth Academy? Use your head, Larry—it’s like using an H-Bomb to kill a rabbit, to use the Huxley Drive to go from Earth to Mars.”

  “Harr’s right,” Olcott said. “It’s not very precise. It’s hard to pin your distances down to a few million miles. If you tried to go from Earth to Mars, more likely than not you’d end up near Jupiter, or maybe you’d come out of overdrive right inside Mars itself—and that would destroy the whole planet. So overdrive is never used within the system.”

  “That’s why we stop off at Pluto before heading out, eh?”

  “That’s it. Pluto is the last outpost of the system, and then there’s nothing but space for four light-years. So all outbound ships stop off there and have their drive mechanisms changed; the standard one is removed and a Huxley Drive installed. Then we stop back there on the return trip.”

  Larry nodded. “Does space look any different in overdrive?”

  “I’m afraid not. It’s riot very strange. You wouldn’t be able to see anything, but there’s nothing to see anyway. It’s empty out there; empty and black and cold. It’s space, Larry, and space is a lonely thing.”

  “I know,” Larry said, looking hard at the old spaceman’s tired face. “I know.”

  The final leg of the journey, that to Alpha C, was scheduled to last fifteen days. Of that time, some six days were being used to get clear of Pluto, and seven days would be used to coast into Alpha C IV. The remaining two days would be spent in overdrive, and in those days they would cover four light-years, or twenty-five million million miles. The Carden would range out through the vast emptiness and come out of overdrive a few million miles from its destination.

  Larry was fast learning to appreciate the great loneliness of the spacemen. A spaceship was a world in itself, a tiny metal world floating between the stars. There was no comer candy store, no evening paper, no game of ball in the street.

  There were long hours of staring at the velvet blackness of space, and hours of study, and hours of work. And in the evening, the same group would gather all the time. A spaceship is a small world, with five or ten or a dozen people, or maybe twenty or thirty. But no more. Never any strangers, never anyone new moving into the block. A small, quiet, self-contained, self-sufficient world.

  And the men of space, Larry found, those gods in gray uniforms, they felt the loneliness. But it was part of them; no, it was them. Space filtered in and mingled with the calcium in their bones.

  Space meant waiting. Larry discovered that traveling in space meant long periods in the ship, broken by a few moments on this world, a few hours on that He had been on Mars a day, had seen that broken and twisted half-dead world, and then had pulled up stakes again. Then it was Pluto, a weird world of frozen fields, and then back to space again.

  And now the long haul, the big trip. To the next star.

  Out ahead was Alpha C. Larry stood staring out into the long night of space as if to search for the planet that lay somewhere ahead.

  It was July 7, six days out from Pluto. The visiphone crackled to life and the announcement filled the ship.

  Prepare for overdrive. We enter overdrive in ten seconds.

  Larry and Harl hastily strapped themselves into their acceleration cradles, not knowing any other way of preparing for overdrive. Nine. Eight.

  The voice pounded out the seconds over the visiphone. Seven. Six. Five.

  “Empty out there. Empty and black and cold,” Olcott had said. Larry wondered what would happen to the ship as it shifted to overdrive. Four. Three.

  Larry looked across the cabin at Harl. They grinned. Larry felt the excitement pounding in him, just as it had the first time he had blasted off from Earth. Once again he was moving into the Unknown.

  Two. One.

  Swiftly there came a twist and a squeak and the ship seemed to spin around Larry’s head for a minute. Then all grew still.

  The Carden had erupted into overdrive.

  CHAPTER 2

  OVERDRIVE PROVED TO be nothing unusual after the first twisting shock of conversion, and life proceeded as usual aboard the Carden.

  The only difference, so far as Larry was concerned, was that during overdrive it was impossible to use the radio equipment, and so he was on relief for the two days the Carden would spend on the Huxley Drive. As soon as he found this out, he headed for the rear jet section, where huge O’Hare would be sitting, strumming his electronic guitar and bellowing out the songs of space.

  O’Hare was a tubemonkey, a member of that lower class of spacemen who tended the jets, did menial work, and rarely came forward to join in the society of the ship. He was an immense red-haired man with intense blue eyes and a powerful bass voice, who spent most of his free time playing his intricate electronic guitar and singing. He had become friendly with Larry before blastoff from Earth, and the two had remained close friends despite the silent disapproval of some of the officers, who did not like cadets mingling with tubernonkeys.

  “I’ve got two days off,” Larry told Harl. “Radio won’t be able to make contact with anyone till we’re out of overdrive. I’m heading back to the jets.”

  Harl, bent over a textbook, merely nodded, and Larry went out. He strode down the familiar corridor and into the lead-walled jet section, where he saw O’Hare and. his two assistants carrying things from wall to wall far at the other side of the jet chamber.

  “Pat!” Larry called. The big Irishman put down whatever he had been carrying and came over.

  “Ho, laddy! You draw a blank during overdrive, don’t you? It’s a soft life you radiomen lead.” The giant was stripped to the waist and sweating. “We were just stowing some fuel pellets when you showed up.” He lifted his hand to his mouth as a megaphone and yelled to the two men still working. “Boggs! Grennell! Knock off and come over here.”

  They came. They were both big, husky men—though not as big as O’Hare. They greeted Larry curtly.

  Grennell was a squat, broad-shouldered fellow with sharp features and an ugly red sear on one cheek. Boggs was tall, with close-cropped hair and thick, vein-corded forearms.

  O’Hare lowered himself to the floor and propped himself up against the lead-lined walk

  “How come Reinhardt hasn’t reassigned you for these two days?” O’Hare asked. “He hates to waste a man.”

  “I’ll say,” Grennell agreed. “He’ll work you till you drop.”

  Larry frowned. The jetm
en were forever grumbling about the captain. This was one thing he found hard to take; his training all through life, from his father and later at the Academy, taught him to respect his officers.

  “Maybe he just forgot about me. He—”

  But O’Hare wasn’t listening. He was rippling his hand, his great veined hand, over the controls of the guitar. A few chords drifted out. He looked off into the distance and began to sing, mournfully, in his resonant basso.

  Oh, Mars is dry and bare of life—

  Gone the race of Mars.

  Peace on the world of the god of strife—

  Gone the race of Mars.

  Grennell picked up the melody there. His voice was deep and hard, but underneath was the mixture of melodiousness and rough tenderness which creeps into the voices of all spacemen. Grennell sang the plaintive minor refrain.

  The towers stand in the desert—

  Bone-dry and dusty, all.

  The race that built them also’s dust,

  Faces to the wall.

  The visiphone clicked.

  All hands to quarters, came the announcement.

  Larry looked around uneasily. He knew he had to get back to his cabin; being out against orders would get him in trouble. The first rule, when the back-to-quarters signal was given, was to get back to quarters.

  But none of the tubemonkeys were moving, none showed the slightest sign of having heard the announcement, and Larry decided to follow their example and ignore the warning. There was bound to be a second call for back-to-quarters, and he could leave then. He knew how these men felt about Captain Reinhardt’s authority, and he did not want to displease them by seeming too easily ordered around.

  “That’s pretty gloomy music,” Boggs said, making one of his rare contributions to the conversation.

  O’Hare gave no answer, but began strumming harder and faster, and wild chords leaped from the instrument. He threw his head back and roared.