Murray Leinster - Proxima Centauri

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Proxima Centauri

THE ADASTRA, FROM a little distance, already shone in the light of the

approaching sun. The vision disks which scanned the giant space ship’s outer

skin relayed a faint illumination to the visiplates within. They showed the

monstrous, rounded bulk of the metal globe, crisscrossed with girders too

massive to be transported by any power less than that of the space ship

itself. They showed the whole, five-thousand-foot globe as an ever so faintly

glowing object, seemingly motionless in midspace.

In that seeming, they lied. Monstrous as the ship was, and apparently

too huge to be stirred by any conceivable power, she was responding to power

now. At a dozen points upon her faintly glowing side there were openings. From

those openings there flowed out tenuous purple flames. They gave little light,

those flames—less than the star ahead—but they were the disintegration blasts

from the rockets which had lifted the Adastra from the surface of Earth and

for seven years had hurled it on through interstellar space toward Proxima

Centauri, nearest of the fixed stars to humanity’s solar system.

Now they hurled it forward no more. The mighty ship was decelerating.

Thirty-two and two-tenths feet per second, losing velocity at the exact rate

to maintain the effect of Earth’s gravity within its bulk, the huge globe

slowed. For months braking had been going on. From a peak speed measurably

near the velocity of light, the first of all vessels to span the distance

between two solar systems had slowed and slowed, and reach a speed of maneuver

some sixty million miles from the surface of the star.

Far, far ahead, Proxima Centauri glittered invitingly. The vision disks

that showed its faint glow upon the space ship’s hull had counterparts which

carried its image within the hull, and in the main control room it appeared

enlarged very many times. An old, whitebearded man in uniform regarded it

meditatively. He said slowly, as if he had said the same thing often before:

“Quaint, that ring. It is double, like Saturn’s. And saturn has nine moons.

One wonders how many planets this sun will have.”

The girl said restlessly: “We’ll find out soon, won’t we? We’re almost

there. And we already know the rotation period of one of them! Jack said that—

”

Her father turned deliberately to her. “Jack?”

“Gary,” said the girl. “Jack Gary.”

“My dear,” said the old man mildly, “he seems well disposed, and his

abilities are good, but he is a Mut. Remember!”

The girl bit her lip.

The old man went on, quite slowly and without rancor: “It is unfortunate

that we have had this division among the crew of what should have been a

scientific expedition conducted in the spirit of a crusade. You hardly

remember how it began. But we officers know only too well how many efforts

have been made by the Muts to wreck the whole purpose of our voyage. This Jack

Gary is a Mut. He is brilliant, in his way. I would have brought him into the

officers’ quarters, but Alstair investigated and found undesirable facts which

made it impossible.”

“I don’t believe Alstair!” said the girl evenly. “And, anyhow, it was

Jack who caught the signals. And he’s the one who’s working with them, officer

or Mut! And he’s human, anyhow. It’s time for the signals to come again and

you depend on him to handle them.”

The old man frowned. He walked with a careful steadiness to a seat. He

sat down with an old man’s habitual and rather pathetic caution. The Adastra,

of course, required no such constant vigilance at the controls as the

interplanetary space ships require. Out here in emptiness there was no need to

watch for meteors, for traffic, or for those queer and yet inexplicable force

fields which at first made interplanetary flights so hazardous.

The ship was so monstrous a structure, in any case, that the tinier

meteorites could not have harmed her. And at the speed she was now making

greater ones would be notified by the induction fields in time for observation

and if necessary the changing of her course.

A door at the side of the control room opened briskly and a man stepped

in. He glanced with conscious professionalism at the banks of indicators. A

relay clicked, and his eyes darted to the spot. He turned and saluted the old

man with meticulous precision. He smiled at the girl.

“Ah, Aistair,” said the old man. “You are curious about the signals,

too?”

“Yes, sir. Of course! And as second in command I rather like to keep an

eye on signals. Gary is a Mut, and I would not like him to gather information

that might be kept from the officers.”

“That’s nonsense!” said the girl hotly.

“Probably,” agreed Alstair. “I hope so. I even think so. But I prefer to

leave out no precaution.”

A buzzer sounded. Alstair pressed a button and a vision plate lighted. A

dark, rather grim young face stared out of it.

“Very well, Gary,” said Alstair curtly.

He pressed another button. The vision plate darkened and lighted again

to show a long corridor, down which a solitary figure came. It came close and

the same face looked impassively out. Aistair said even more curtly: “The

other doors are open, Gary. You can come straight through.”

“I think that’s monstrous!” said the girl angrily as the plate clicked

off. “You know you trust him! You would have to! Yet every time he comes into

officers’ quarters. you act as if you thought he had bombs in each hand and

all the rest of the men behind him!”

Aistair shrugged and glanced at the old man, who said tiredly, “Aistair

is second in command, my dear, and he will be commander on the way back to

Earth. I could wish you would be less offensive.”

But the girl deliberately withdrew her eyes from the brisk figure of

Aistair with its smart uniform, and rested her chin in her hands to gaze

broodingly at the farther wall. Alstair went to the banks of indicators,

surveying them in detail. The ventilator hummed softly. A relay clicked with a

curiously smug, self-satisfied note. Otherwise there was no sound.

The Adastra, mightiest work of the human race, hurtled on through space

with the light of a strange sun shining faintly upon her enormous hull. Twelve

lambent purple flames glowed from holes in her forward part. She was

decelerating, lessening her speed by thirty-two point two feet per second per

second, maintaining the effect of Earth’s gravity within her bulk.

Earth was seven years behind and uncounted millions of billions of

miles. Interplanetary travel was a commonplace in the solar system now, and a

thriving colony on Venus and a precariously maintained outpost on the largest

of Jupiter’s moons promised to make space commerce thrive even after the dead

cities of Mars had ceased to give up their incredibly rich loot. But only the

Adastra had ever essayed space beyond Pluto.

She was the greatest of ships, the most colossal structure ever

attempted by men. In the beginning, indeed, her design was derided as

impossible of achievement by the very men who later made her building a fact.

Her framework beams were so huge that, once cast, they could not be moved by

any lifting contrivance at her builders’ disposal. Therefore the molds for

them were built and the metal poured in their final position as a part of the

ship. Her rocket tubes were so colossal that the necessary supersonic

vibrations-to neutralize the disintegration effect of the Caidwell field—had

to be generated at thirty separate points on each tube, else the

disintegration of her fuel would have spread to the tubes themselves and the

big ship afterward, with even the mother planet following in a burst of

lambent purple flame. At full acceleration a set of twelve tubes disintegrated

five cubic centimeters of water per second.

Her diameter was a shade over five thousand feet. Her air tanks carried

a reserve supply which could run her crew of three hundred for ten months

without purification. Her stores, her shops, her supplies of raw and finished

materials, were in such vast quantities that to enumerate them would be merely

to recite meaningless figures.

There were even four hundred acres of food-growing space within her,

where crops were grown under sun lamps. Those, crops used waste organic matter

as fertilizer and restored exhaled carbon dioxide to use, in part as oxygen

and in part as carbohydrate footstuffs.

The Adastra was a world in herself. Given power, she could subsist her

crew forever, growing her food supplies, purifying her own internal atmosphere

without loss and without fail, and containing space within which every human

need could be provided, even solitude.

And starting out upon the most stupendous journey in human history, she

had formally been given the status of a world, with her commander empowered to

make and enforce all needed laws. Bound for a destination four light-years

distant, the minimum time for her return was considered to be fourteen years.

No crew could possibly survive so long a voyage undecimated. Therefore the

enlistments for the voyage had not been by men, but by families.

There were fifty children on board when the Adastra lifted from Earth’s

surface. In the first year of her voyage ten more were born. It had seemed to

the people of Earth that not only couid the mighty ship subsist her crew

forever, but that the crew itself, well-nourished and with more than adequate

facilities both for amusement and education, could so far perpetuate itself as

to make a voyage of a thousand years as practicable as the mere journey to

Proxima Centauri.

And so it could, but for a fact at once so needless and so human that

nobody anticipated it. The fact was tedium. In less than six months the

journey had ceased to become a great adventure. To the women in particular,

the voyage of the big ship became deadly routine.

The Adastra itself took on the semblance of a gigantic apartment house

without newspapers, department stores, new film plays, new faces, or even the

relieving annoyances of changeable weather. The sheer completeness of all

preparations for the voyage made the voyage itself uneventful. That meant

tedium.

Tedium meant restlessness. And restlessness, with women on board who had

envisioned high adventure, meant the devil to pay. Their husbands no longer

appeared as glamorous heroes. They were merely human beings. The men

encountered similar disillusioninents. Pleas for divorce flooded the

commander’s desk, he being legally the fount of all legal action. During the-

eighth month there was one murder, and in the three months following, two

more.

A year and a half out from Earth, and the crew was in a state of semi-

mutiny originating in sheer boredom. By two years out, the oflicers’ quarters

were sealed off from the greater part of the Adastra’s interior, the crew was

disarmed, and what work was demanded of the mutineers was enforced by force

guns in the hands of the officers. By three years out, the crew was demanding

a return to Earth. But by the time the Adastra could he slowed and stopped

from her then incredible velocity. she would be so near her destination as to

make no appreciable difference in the length of her total voyage. For the rest

of the time the members of the crew strove to relieve utter monotony by such

vices and such pastimes as could be improvised in the absence of any actual

need to work.

The officers’ quarters referred to the underlings by a term become

habitual, a contraction of the word "multineers.” The crew came to have a

queer distaste for all dealing with the officers. But, despite Alstair, there

was no longer much danger of an uprising. A certain mental equilibrium had—

very late—developed.

From the nerve-racked psycholgy of dwellers in an isolated apartment

house, the greater number of the Adastra’s complement came to have the

psychology of dwellers in an isolated village. The difference was profound. In

particular the children who had come to maturity during the long journey

through space were well adjusted to the conditions of isolation and of

routine.

Jack Gary was one of them. He had been sixteen when the trip began, son

of a rocket-tube engineer whose death took place the second year out. Helen

Bradley was another. She had been fourteen when her father, as designer and

commanding officer of the mighty globe, pressed the control key that set the

huge rockets into action.

Her father had been past maturity at the beginning. Aged by

responsibility for seven uninterrupted years, he was an old man now. And he

knew, and even Helen k±iew without admitting it, that he would never survive

the long trip back. Aistair would take his place and the despotic authority

inherent in it, and he wanted to marry Helen...

She thought of these things, with her chin cupped in her hand, brooding

in the control room. There was no sound save the humming of the ventilator and

the infrequent smug click of a relay operating the automatic machinery to keep

the Adastra a world in which nothing ever happened. A knock on the door. The

commander opened his eyes a trifle vaguely. He was very old now, the

commander. He had dozed.

Aistair said shortly, “Come in!” and Jack Gary entered.

He saluted, pointedly to the commander. Which was according to

regulations, but Aistair’s eyes snapped.

“Ah, yes,” said the commander. “Gary. It’s about time for more signals,

isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jack Gary was very quiet, very businesslike. Only once, when he glanced

at Helen, was there any hint of anything but the formal manner of a man intent

on his job. Then, his eyes told her something, in an infinitely small fraction

of a second, which changed her expression to one of flushed content.

Short as the glance was, Aistair saw it. He said harshly: “Have you made

any progress in. deciphering the signals, Gary?”

Jack was setting the dials of a pan-wave receptor, glancing at penciled

notes on a calculator pad. He continued to set up the reception pattern.

“No, sir. There is still a sequence of sounds at the beginning which

must be a form of call, because a part of the same sequence is used as a

signature at the close. With the commander’s permission I have used the first

part of that call sequence as a signature in our signals in reply. But in

looking over the records of the signals I’ve found something that looks

important.”

The commander said mildly: “What is it, Gary?”

“We’ve been sending signals ahead of us on a tight beam, sir, for some

months. Your idea was to signal ahead, so that if there were any civilized

inhabitants on planets about the sun, they’d get an impression of a peaceful

mission.”

“Of course!” said the commander. “It would be tragic for the first of

interstellar communications to be unfriendly!”

“We’ve been getting answers to our signals for nearly three months.

Always at intervals of a trifle over thirty hours. We assumed, of course, that

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Murray Leinster - Proxima Centauri

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