Starman's Quest Read online

  _Chapter Eighteen_

  Alan brought the _Cavour_ down less than a mile away from the scene ofthe wreckage--it was the best he could do, computing the landing byguesswork--and climbed into his spacesuit. He passed through the airlockand out into the windswept desert.

  He felt just a little lightheaded; the gravity was only 0.8 ofEarth-norm, and besides that the air in his spacesuit, being perpetuallyrenewed by the Bennerman re-breathing generator strapped to his back,was just a shade too rich in oxygen.

  In the back of his mind he realized he ought to adjust his oxygen flow,but before he brought himself to make the adjustment the surplus tookits effect. He began to hum, then to dance awkwardly over the sand. Amoment later he was singing a wild space ballad that he thought he hadforgotten years before. After ten feet he tripped and went sprawlingdown in the sand. He lay there, trickling the violet sands through thegloves of his spacesuit, feeling very lightheaded and very foolish allat the same time.

  But he was still sober enough to realize he was in danger. It was aneffort to reach over his shoulder and move the oxygen gauge back anotch. After a moment the flow levelled out and he felt his headbeginning to clear.

  He was marching through a fantastic baroque desert. Venus was a riot ofcolors, all in a minor key: muted greens and reds, an overbearing gray,a strange, ghostly blue. The sky, or rather the cloud layer, dominatedthe atmosphere with its weird pinkness. It was a silent world--a deadworld.

  In the distance he saw the wreckage of the ship; beyond it the landbegan to rise, sloping imperceptibly up into a gentle hill with bizarresculptured rock outcroppings here and there. He walked quickly.

  Fifteen minutes later he reached the ship. It stood upright--or rather,its skeleton did. The ship had not crashed. It had simply rotted away,the metal of its hide eaten by the sand-laden winds over the course ofcenturies. Nothing remained but a bare framework.

  He circled the ship, then entered the cave a hundred feet away. Hesnapped on his lightbeam. In the darkness, he saw----

  A huddled skeleton, far to the rear of the cave. A pile of corrodedequipment; atmosphere generators, other tools now shapeless.

  Cavour had reached Venus safely. But he had never departed.

  To his astonishment Alan found a sturdy volume lying under the pile ofbones--a book, wrapped in metal plates. Somehow it had withstood thepassage of centuries, here in this quiet cave.

  Gently he unwrapped the book. The cover dropped off at his touch; heturned back the first three pages, which were blank. On the fourth,written in the now-familiar crabbed hand, were the words: _The Journalof James Hudson Cavour. Volume 17--October 20, 2570----_

  * * * * *

  He had plenty of time, during the six-day return journey, to read andre-read Cavour's final words and to make photographic copies of thewithered old pages.

  The trip to Venus had been easy for old Cavour; he had landed preciselyon schedule, and established housekeeping for himself in the cave. But,as his diary detailed it, he felt strength ebbing away with each passingday.

  He was past eighty, no age for a man to come alone to a strange planet.There remained just minor finishing to be done on his pioneeringship--but he did not have the strength to do the work. Climbing thecatwalk of the ship, soldering, testing--now, with his opportunitybefore him, he could not attain his goal.

  He made several feeble attempts to finish the job, and on the last ofthem fell from his crude rigging and fractured his hip. He had managedto crawl back inside the cave, but, alone, with no one to tend him, heknew he had nothing to hope for.

  It was impossible for him to complete his ship. All his dreams wereended. His equations and his blueprints would die with him.

  In his last day he came to a new realization: nowhere had he left acomplete record of the mechanics of his spacewarp generator, the keymechanism without which hyperspace drive was unattainable. So, racingagainst encroaching death, James Hudson Cavour turned to a new page inhis diary, headed it, in firm, forceful letters, _For Those Who FollowAfter_, and inked in a clear and concise explanation of his work.

  It was all there, Alan thought exultantly: the diagrams, thespecifications, the equations. It would be possible to build the shipfrom Cavour's notes.

  The final page of the diary had evidently been Cavour's dying thoughts.In a handwriting increasingly ragged and untidy, Cavour had indited aparagraph forgiving the world for its scorn, hoping that some daymankind would indeed have easy access to the stars. The paragraph endedin midsentence. It was, thought Alan, a moving testament from a greathuman being.

  The days went by, and the green disk of Earth appeared in theviewscreen. Late on the sixth day the _Cavour_ sliced into Earth'satmosphere, and Alan threw it into the landing orbit he had computedthat afternoon. The ship swung in great spirals around Earth, drawingever closer, and finally began to home in on the spaceport.

  Alan busied himself over the radio transmitter, getting landingclearance. He brought the ship down easily, checked out, and hurried tothe nearest phone.

  He dialed Jesperson's number. The lawyer answered.

  "When did you get back?"

  "Just now," Alan said. "Just this minute."

  "Well? Did you----"

  "Yes! I found it! I found it!"

  * * * * *

  Oddly enough, he was in no hurry to leave Earth now. He was inpossession of Cavour's notes, but he wanted to do a perfect job ofreproducing them, of converting the scribbled notations into a ship.

  To his great despair he discovered, when he first examined the Cavournotebook in detail, that much of the math was beyond his depth. That wasonly a temporary obstacle, though. He hired mathematicians. He hiredphysicists. He hired engineers.

  Through it all, he remained calm; impatient, perhaps, but not overly so.The time had not yet come for him to leave Earth. All his striving wouldbe dashed if he left too soon.

  The proud building rose a hundred miles from York City: _The HawkesMemorial Laboratory_. There, the team of scientists Alan had gatheredworked long and painstakingly, trying to reconstruct what old Cavour hadwritten, experimenting, testing.

  Early in 3881 the first experimental Cavour Generator was completed inthe lab. Alan had been vacationing in Africa, but he was called backhurriedly by his lab director to supervise the testing.

  The generator was housed in a sturdy windowless building far from themain labs; the forces being channelled were potent ones, and no chanceswere being taken. Alan himself threw the switch that first turned thespacewarp generator on, and the entire research team gathered by theclosed-circuit video pickup to watch.

  The generator seemed to blur, to waver, to lose substance and becomeunreal. It vanished.

  It remained gone fifteen seconds, while a hundred researchers held theirbreaths. Then it returned. It shorted half the power lines in thecounty.

  But Alan was grinning as the auxiliary feeders turned the lights in thelab on again. "Okay," he yelled. "It's a start, isn't it? We got thegenerator to vanish, and that's the toughest part of the battle. Let'sget going on Model Number Two."

  By the end of the year, Model Number Two was complete, and the teststhis time were held under more carefully controlled circumstances. Againsuccess was only partial, but again Alan was not disappointed. He hadworked out his time-table well. Premature success might only makematters more difficult for him.

  3882 went by, and 3883. He was in his early twenties, now, a tall,powerful figure, widely known all over Earth. With Jesperson's shrewdaid he had pyramided Max's original million credits into an imposingfortune--and much of it was being diverted to hyperspace research. ButAlan Donnell was not the figure of scorn James Hudson Cavour had been;no one laughed at him when he said that by 3885 hyperspace travel wouldbe reality.

  3884 slipped past. Now the time was drawing near. Alan spent virtuallyall his hours at the research center, aiding in the successive tests.

  On March 11, 3885, the final test was a
ccomplished satisfactorily.Alan's ship, the _Cavour_, had been completely remodeled to accommodatethe new drive; every test but one had been completed.

  The final test was that of actual performance. And here, despite theadvice of his friends, Alan insisted that he would have to be the manwho took the _Cavour_ on her first journey to the stars.

  Nine years had passed, almost to the week, since a brash youngster namedAlan Donnell had crossed the bridge from the Spacer's Enclave andhesitantly entered the bewildering complexity of York City. Nine years.

  He was twenty-six now, no boy any more. He was the same age Steve hadbeen, when he had been dragged unconscious to the _Valhalla_ and takenaboard.

  And the _Valhalla_ was still bound on its long journey to Procyon. Nineyears had passed, but yet another remained before the giant starshipwould touch down on a planet of Procyon's. But the FitzgeraldContraction had telescoped those nine years into just a few months, forthe people of the _Valhalla_.

  Steve Donnell was still twenty-six.

  And now Alan had caught him. The Contraction had evened out. They weretwins again.

  And the _Cavour_ was ready to make its leap into hyperspace.