He sat back in the G-seat and looked over his shoulder at his four companions, all of whom were still fumbling in their laps. It struck him as ironic that the portion of a man’s anatomy which was least amenable to the restraints of civilisation should also prove the most troublesome at a time like this, when he was about to prove that his technology was more than equal to the challenge of space.
“A sadist designed this thing,” Martine growled, his breathing amplified by his microphone. “Probably a woman with a chronic case of penis envy.”
“There’s nothing to worry about—unless we suddenly lose pressure,” Tarrant said. As he had expected, his words provoked a renewed flurry of elbow movements, and he smiled in enjoyment of his own touch of sadism. He turned back to make a last-second check on the flight instruments and controls. The Type 7 ship was a de-militarised version of the Type 6B on which he had done his basic training. Removal of the weapons consoles and associated equipment had made it possible to accommodate two extra seats on the flight deck. The resultant gaps in the interior trim had been blanked off with unpainted alloy sheeting, but the work had been neatly executed and the general appearance of the ship left Tarrant reasonably confident about his own safety. He depressed several buttons, caused data about the drive unit to be projected on to the windscreen in front of him, and was examining it when he noticed a cluster of lights moving above the eastern horizon.
“Aircraft on finals,” he announced. “Must be our visitors.”
“That’s correct,” came Miss Orchard’s voice from the small tower. “Can you get off all right?”
“As long as they don’t try to land down wind.” Until that moment Tarrant had been sustaining himself on coffee and pep pills, but his tiredness and apprehension abruptly left him as he reached for the single thrust control lever. The feeling was similar to the one he had got in the early days at the beginning of an interceptor sortie, except that it was magnified and enhanced by the knowledge that when he reached the limits of the stratosphere his flight would have only just begun.
Spaceflight had never really been more than a dream, but it was a dream which had exerted such a powerful influence on men’s minds that they had gone on pursuing it—for a time—even when it had become apparent that the Solar System had nothing more to offer, and that the stars were too far away. This, too, was the ultimate form of the dream—uncluttered by any need for skyscraper tanks of liquid explosive or armies of ground controllers. A man, alone if need be, could step into a craft smaller than Columbus’s Santa Maria, and sail it, if he dared, beyond the atmosphere, beyond the Moon, and across the tides of space. The dream had faded because there was no fitting destination for such travellers, but on this occasion Tarrant had a goal and a purpose, and he could almost see himself as the protagonist in one of his childhood fantasies, riding skywards on a bright plume of fire.
He moved the thrust control lever forward and at once the distant sheds on each side of the airstrip were illuminated by a flare of light from the ship’s exhaust cone. The ship moved along the runway, still heavy, being rocked and jolted by irregularities in the concrete surface. Tarrant advanced the lever in its slot and the twilight outside abated as the pink brilliance, caused by ions recombining in the exhaust, neared its maximum intensity. The runway streamed by, seemingly smoother now that the ship’s wings were creating lift, and the marker lights on each side became continuous wavering glows. Tarrant held the pointed nose down until he had a comfortable margin of air speed, then eased back on the control stick. At once, effortlessly, the ship was airborne and there was nothing visible ahead but a rectangle of sky, sparsely patterned by major stars.
This was the moment, well remembered from his training flights, which offered the headiest satisfaction. He allowed himself to be driven back into the heavily padded seat as the ship burned its way up the invisible slopes of infinity. Unlike the position with first-generation space craft, there was no need to reach an escape velocity—the continuity of thrust available from the ion drive would have made it possible to go into space at walking speed, provided one did not mind the immense waste of energy. But Tarrant, who was in a hurry and also anxious to avoid running the century-old engine at peak output for longer than necessary, chose to get away from the Earth’s greedy embrace in a short time.
By holding the acceleration steady at just over one gravity, he had taken them to the upper edge of the stratosphere in five minutes, and a further five minutes saw the ship spiralling out of the historic orbital levels. The Earth swam away beneath them, a blue immensity whorled with white. As the silence of space descended over the craft, Tarrant—who had been using the skills of an aircraft pilot until then—began refreshing his memory of space flying technique by testing the primary attitude control jets. He was relieved to find they were in a functional condition.
“So this is what it’s like,” Martine said, breaking his silence for the first time. “In a way it’s almost nothing.”
Tarrant looked back at him. “You want to take over?”
“I didn’t mean that. It’s just that there was so little … fuss.”
Tarrant nodded without speaking. People thought of 20th century space exploration with nostalgia because it provided the last perfect example of the Big Project. There was a romance about the long-lost ability to funnel billions of dollars and the energies of tens of thousands of men into the achieving of a single objective—especially a technological objective—and it still coloured racial thinking. Almost unnoticed, against a background of global trauma, the ion drive had been developed and made practical and then abandoned, but not before it had wrought a vast change in the realities of space flight. It had become possible for an individual to climb into a small ship and fly to, say, Venus simply by pointing the nose of the craft at the evening star and keeping going until he caught up with it.
Such a procedure would have been highly inefficient, but a brief session with a slide rule or hand-held calculator would have been sufficient to compensate for planetary movements and produce a reasonably effective flight plan. The same amount of work, coupled with some basic astrogation, made it just as easy to fly to an unseen objective like an asteroid. A final discrepancy of a million kilometres or of a few hours in the rendezvous time—disastrous to a 20th century chemically-driven craft—meant nothing more than an extra set of ad hoc course corrections.
In keeping with the premise that any experienced aircraft pilot could fly a space ship, Tarrant’s astronaut training had been almost totally concerned with learning how to destroy satellites before their automatic defences destroyed him, but he was humanly reluctant to make this clear to Martine and the others.
“There’s no need for any fuss,” he said, “as long as everybody knows what they’re doing.”
He checked that the pressure shell had not begun to leak and that the air regeneration system was functioning, then told Martine and the three volunteers to open their helmets and conserve the oxygen supplies in their suits. Two of the young men—Gerald Osaka and Bram Scotland—were dysteleonics researchers, and the third was a marine biologist called Evan Petersdorff. Their preparation for the flight had consisted of some hours of theoretical instruction almost two years earlier, and their nervousness was evident from the way in which they grinned too easily when they met his eye, and began nodding agreement before he had reached the end of a sentence. They gave the impression of being resourceful and competent, however, and he was satisfied they were level-headed enough to be told the basic facts of life in space.