Campbell, John W Jr - The Space Beyond

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THE SPACE BEYOND -- John W. Campbell, Jr.

Edited by Roger Elwood

Introduction by Isaac Asimov

Afterword by George Zebrowski

BIG, BIG, BIG

by Isaac Asimov

The thing about John Campbell is that he liked things big. He liked big men

with big ideas working out big applications of their big theories. And he

liked it fast. His big men built big weapons within days; weapons that were,

moreover, without se"ous shortcomings, or at least, with no shortcomings that

could not be corrected as follows: "Hmm, something's wrong-oh, I see-of

course." Then, in two hours, something would be jerry-built to fix the jerry-

built device.

- The big applications were, usually, in the form of big weapons to fight big

wars on tremendous scales. Part of it was, of course, Campbell's conscious

attempt to imitate and surpass Edward E. ("Doc") Smith. The world-shaking,

escalating conflicts in Campbell's stories, as in The Space Beyond in this

collection, is a reflection of the escalating conflict on the printed page

between John and Doc.

A great deal of Campbell's science is sheer gobble-dygook that you must not

take seriously. You have to read it as a foreign language that the characters

understand and for which the action and the astronomical background serve as a

translation.

In some places, Campbell is deliberately and bullheaded-ly wrong and one can

never be sure whether he actually believes the nonsense, or whether he is

doing it just to irritate and provoke his readers into thinking hard.

In the December 1934 Astounding Stories, John Campbell, writing under the

pseudonym, Karl van Campen, published "The Irrelevant," hi which the heroes

were rescued from a deadly interplanetary dilemma by working

out a method for creating energy out of nothing. In this way, they defied the

law of conservation of energy which, it can be argued, is the most fundamental

law of the universe.

Campbell did this by arguing that the quantity of energy produced by a change

in velocity was different according to the frame of reference you chose for

it, and that by switching from one frame to another you could create more

energy than you consumed.

This is dead wrong. I won't argue the reasons here because I don't want to

start a controversy. The argument that began with "The Irrelevant" continued

in the letter columns of Astounding for an incredible length of time, with

Campbell (always writing letters under the name of Karl van Campen)

maintaining his views against all attacks-as in later years, he would

maintain, with equal unswerving vigor, all attacks against his equally

indefensible views in favor of dianoetics the Hieronymus machine, the Dean

drive, and so on. He might stop arguing points and allow them to drop into

oblivion, but he would never openly admit he was wrong.

"The Irrelevant" was the only story that John ever published under the van

Campen pseudonym, but Marooned was a sort of never-published (till now) sequel

under the same pseudonym, and it made use, in the end, of the same fallacy of

a broken law of conservation of energy. I don't even feel guilty about giving

away the climax in that story because I don't want anyone to be fooled by it.

It doesn't work. You have been warnedl

Yet, on the other hand, John's incredibly vivid imagination would sometimes

strike gold and would inspire other writers into striking gold also. The great

writers of the Golden Age in Astounding were more Campbell than themselves. I

admit, freely and frequently, that this was so in my case. Other writers are

perhaps more reluctant to do so.

Campbell's hand is, I believe, quite obvious in the early work of the greatest

of all writers of the Golden Age, Robert A. Heinlein. All, included hi this

volume, became "Sixth Column" by Heinlein, published under the pseudonym of

Anson MacDonald, hi the January, February, and March 1941 issues of

Astounding.

The example of Campbell's golden prescience that struck me most forcibly in

the stories of this collection occurs in The Space Beyond. There, Campbell

mentions that lithium bombarded with protons gives off alpha particles and

that beryllium bombarded with alpha particles gives off protons and that the

two mixed together can keep each other going in a "self-maintaining atomic

explosion."

Actually, this is not so. It takes a high-energy proton to initiate the

lithium reaction and beryllium releases low-energy protons; at any rate,

protons with too low an energy to break down the lithium. And the same is true

in reverse for the alpha particles.

Nevertheless, the suggestion is remarkable. It was made in the mid-thirties

and surely not many people were then thinking of the possibility of a nuclear

chain reaction, which is what Campbell was suggesting. Eventually, not many

years after The Space Beyond was written, a practical nuclear chain reaction

was discovered, that of uranium fission. It was practical precisely because it

worked under the impetus of tow-energy neutrons.

Campbell's brightness in seeing the importance of the nuclear chain reaction

may well explain the most remarkable of his predictive visions. During World

War II, he kept insisting that nuclear power would be developed before the

war's end. Once he heard of the discovery of uranium fission, his

understanding of nuclear chain reactions made the atomic bomb seem to him a

natural consequence. This was also true for the physicist, Leo Szilard, but

for practically no one else.

Campbell went on to inspire a series of stories by other authors on the

subject of power through uranium fission, the most notable being "Blowups

Happen" by Robert A. Heinlein, "Nerves" by Lester del Rey, and "Deadline" by

Cleve Cartmill. (These all appeared in Astounding, in the September 1940,

September 1942, and March 1944 issues respectively.)

Campbell was eventually investigated by a suspicious American government for

knowing too much, but it was easy for him to demonstrate that he didn't know

too much -it was the world that knew too little.

With characteristic cosmic-optimism, Campbell carried nuclear power forward to

its extremes without ever considering its danger. To control nuclear power

meant, to

Mm in All, the ability to cure disease miraculously; although, alas, the

reality has shown us that radiation is the most deadly potential producer of

disease the world has ever known.

In fact, there is a peculiar blind spot in prediction that affects us all,

even Campbell. One sees the extrapolations of the present in a straight-line

way. One misses the surprises.

In All, Campbell lists the few chemical specifics humanity had developed by

the early 1930s and moves directly forward to nuclear panaceas-without ever

foreseeing the antibiotics. And yet, I distinctly remember sitting with him in

his office once, before antibiotics had been discovered, and listening to him

tell me that since almost all pathogenic bacteria were destroyed in the soil,

there must be substances in soil bacteria that would destroy harmful germs and

cure disease.

In a way, Campbell's vision of nuclear power was self-defeating. Lured by his

success there, he went on to attempt to lead the way into a morass of semi-

mystical pathways, through psi and related subjects, from which he never

entirely emerged.

Campbell's love of bigness showed itself at its most glamorous and remarkable

in his tendency to describe astronomical bodies of the largest variety in

dramatic but utterly realistic prose. It is here, for instance, that he shines

in The Space Beyond and in Marooned.

But there, Campbell was, at times, betrayed. In the forty years since these

stories were written, astronomy has made strides (thanks to radio telescopes

and planetary probes) that not even Campbell could have foreseen, and the

result has been to dwarf even the most liberal imaginations of earlier

generations.

Campbell describes the super-giant stars vividly and beautifully in The Space

Beyond and, indeed, they steal the show in that novelette. Making them

Cepheids adds to the supernal glory (even though Campbell has the notion, it

seems, that the more massive a Cepheid the shorter its period, when it is the

reverse that is true).

However, no such super-star could exist by modern notions-or, indeed, by the

astronomical notions of the time at which the story was written. In the 1920s,

Arthur

S. Eddington advanced the mass-luminosity law which made it quite dear that

stars very much more massive than our Sun could not exist. The radiation

pressure from within would cause them to explode at once. In the case of a

star as large as those Campbell describes, the result would be an immediate

supernova.

Furthermore, even if a star as massive as Campbell's super-giants could be

imagined to hang together, thb rate of consumption of hydrogen fuel that would

be required to keep it glowing at its incredible level would probably drag it

through its entire stay in the main sequence for a hundred thousand years. It

would only be during that stay that planets could form and evolve in a fashion

that would produce life" as we know it and if they had formed when the star

itself had (at the appropriately colossal distance), there would simply have

been no time for the planet to evolve any life at aM, to say nothing of

advanced intelligences.

Imagine what Campbell could have done had he been able to write the story a

generation later. In place of such super-giant stars, even groups of them, he

could have had a quasar-an entire galactic center of millions of stars

interacting in some fashion to form something as far beyond a star as a star

is beyond a planet.

Or he could have imagined his stars collapsing (as they would surely have

done) into black holes. Given an area in space where there were black holes by

the dozens, whatever problems would have arisen, as sure as Campbell was

Campbell, they would have been solved.

Or perhaps, he would have had his environment filled with a white hole-that

area in space where the matter endlessly pushing into a black hole somewhere

else is emerging hi great gouts of radiating energy. Perhaps a quasar is a

white hole and he could have combined concepts and driven through space and

time by using the cosmic ferry of a black hole.

And if, since these stories were written, our knowledge of the Universe has

increased a thousandfold, our knowledge of our own Solar system has been

refined ten-thousandfold. We have mapped, in detail, the hidden side of the

Moon, and men have stood upon our satellite's surface. Unmanned probes have

landed on Mars and Venus,

and the surfaces of Mars and Mercury have been mapped in detail, as well as

those of the tiny Martian satellites, Phobos and Deimos. Jupiter has been seen

at short distances, and a probe is gliding its way to Saturn even as I write.

How does Marooned seem in the light of all this?

We-must begin by forgetting about "synthium" that beautiful example of one

mainstay of early science fiction-the wonder-metal. Element 101 has indeed

been discovered since Campbell wrote Marooned but it is named mendelevium and

it is unstable, as are all elements beyond atomic number 83. Even if it were

stable, we know what its properties would be like, and they would be nothing

like those of synthium. In fact, the properties of no conceivable metal in the

real world would be like those of synthium.

Next, there is another old standby-the difficulty of getting past the asteriod

belt. I used that one myself in my very first published story "Marooned Off

Vesta." The asteroid belt, however, is a paper tiger. The material in it is

strewn so widely over so vast a volume that any spaceship going through it is

not at all likely to see anything of visible size. The Jupiter-probes, Pioneer

10 and Pioneer 11, went through without trouble and detected less dust than

had been expected.

Still a third commonplace of science fiction was its tendency toward water-

oxygen chauvinism. Almost every world encountered in science fiction stories

had its water ocean and its oxygen atmosphere.

Campbell needed an atmosphere for Ganymede, so he gave it one, but I think he

knew better. Any gases in the vicinity of that satellite exist only in traces.

However, Campbell was probably correct in placing quantities of ice on its

surface. The low density of Ganymede and of its sister-world Callisto make the

presence of such materials very likely. Campbell makes the ices those of water

and carbon dioxide. It is likely, however, that frozen •ammonia is there

rather than frozen carbon dioxide.

And what about Jupiter? Campbell suggests that this could only be explored

with something like synthium since without it, ships could not pass the

asteroid belt and could not even penetrate to the depths of Earth's own ocean.

Not so, for within a quarter-century after the

story had been written, not only had the asteroid belt been shorn of its

terrors, but human beings had made it down to the deepest abyss of the ocean

in bathyscaphes-and without synthium.

But Jupiter itself is a harder nut, and Campbell portrays its giant

intractable nature gloriously well. He is wrong in details, inevitably. He

describes its atmosphere as mostly nitrogen and water with helium and "some

hydrogen." Later on, he describes the hydrogen content as "a minute trace" and

places a rather larger quantity of free oxygen there.

Undoubtedly, there is water in the Jovian atmosphere; it has been detected. So

has helium been detected, but not nitrogen, and certainly not oxygen. Ammonia

and methane, which Campfoell doesn't mention, are present, but the major

component is hydrogen. In fact, all of Jupiter is at least 90 percent

hydrogen, mostly in the liquid form.

Campbell correctly assumes there is a greenhouse effect in Jupiter's

atmosphere; that solar radiation is trapped and that the temperature is higher

than it might otherwise be. But he has his heroes in the arctic zone where he

describes it as fiercely cold.

Thanks to Jupiter-probe data, gathered in 1974, however, we believe that the

temperature of Jupiter rises steadily as one penetrates the atmosphere. Six

hundred miles below the cloud layer, the temperature is already 3600 C. It

seems quite likely that by the time the ship had penetrated to a depth at

which the atmosphere had become dense enough to resist further penetration,

the problem would be heat and not cold.

But what's the difference? Whenever a story is placed at the edge of science

as it is known at the time, and whenever the author allows his imagination to

steer him forward as. best it can, making intelligent or dramatic

extrapolations-the advance of real science is bound to outmode him in spots.

This must be accepted, and to be wise after the event, as I have been here, or

to shine in 'hindsight, as I do, is of no significance.

The question is this: Were Campbell's extrapolations, whether right or wrong,

nevertheless intelligent and dramatic? And the answer is: A thousand times,

yes!

Campbell might be outwritten by many others, in and out of science fiction, in

terms of characterization, plot, and dialog, but no one ever outdid him in

visualizing the grandeur of the Universe.

MAROONED

In August 2133, Robert Randall discovered synthium. He announced simply that

he had created element 101, which had, according to his modest report,

"unusually interesting properties." Since civilization has been based on

metals for the past seven thousand years, and syn-thium's "unusually

interesting properties" included such things as its unheard of (and, because

they had no machines at the time capable of determining it) undeter-minedly

great tensile strength, and its crystalline, transparent allotropic form with

a strength only slightly less, RandaU was most unnecessarily modest in his

claims.

That was several years after the last expedition to Jupiter had been destroyed

by the customary meteor, and the last of Stephenson's three ships was

tastefully draped over an asteroid. Naturally there were half a dozen

expeditions trying to get the Interplanetary Committee's consent to a new

expedition. Bar Corliss had been trying patiently for four and a half years.

Jinimie Mattorn had been trying to get permission for-four of their "Explorer"

type ships. They'd been turned down regularly and with punctuality by the

Committee, because parium was the latest word in strong materials at the time-

something like two and a quarter million pounds to the square inch. Good, but

not good enough to stop a really determined meteor, of course-and most of

those found out Jupiter's way were very determined.

Then too, parium fuel tanks had a nasty habit of "failing" when one of the

overanxious explorers loaded a twenty-ton tank with thirty^seven tons.

All in all, Jupiter kept pretty much to himself. Only one ship got past the

asteroid belt-they couldn't dodge out of the plane of the ecliptic in those

days, because that meant taking more fuel for the dodging. Erickson did it He

fell back into the Minor Orbits some six years later, and the bodies of the

crew were retrieved by the tow-cruiser "Maximum," which pleased the widows to

some extent.

But Randall's mild "unusual properties" hid a world

of high-explosive punch. Since all of the explorer's gang was looking for the

slightest thing in that line, undoubtedly they all read the line. Somewhere or

other, though, Bar Corliss had met Randall. He read the thing, and he suddenly

got a mental picture of Randall: a little sandy-haired man with pale-blue eyes

and a pale-sandy mustache, rather moth-eaten in appearance, slightly stained

by weather and his favorite pipe, wearing clothes apparently made by the

American Packaging Bag company, fitted by the oldest of tailors, Guess and

Gosh, and dyed by Laboratory Fumes. And he remembered him as the discoverer of

triconite-familiarly known as "tricky-nite" and described by him as a "rather

powerful explosive."

So Corliss wandered down to Pittsburgh and American Metals. Randall had a

piece of the stuff, paper thin and impossibly strong. Corliss looked at it,

and grunted. It was the early product, not the refined stuff they turn out

today, and it looked like a poorly tanned pig's hide with the measles. Randall

went into one of his quiet raptures about it, and tried to demonstrate its

strength. He was rather handicapped, because he'd already broken most of the

testing machines trying it out, and they hadn't built a new one yet. But

Corliss wasn't slow in getting the possibilities. Corliss had more money than

he could spend then anyway, so he found out what American Metal's total

possible production of synthium would be, and ordered it for the next six

months.

Jimmie Mattorn got there two days later, and Nord-deutscher Rakete, two and a

half later-they couldn't get in touch with their American representative. So

Corliss wasn't without competition on the thing. Norddeutscher, finding they

couldn't get more than a scrap of synthium from American Metals, bought German

rights to the stuff, and wanted to start making it, and get a rocket under

way.

Corliss was already moving.

That was probably why the things happened as they did. When Corliss built that

ship, he hadn't the faintest idea of the strength he put in it, because he

didn't have the ghost of an idea of the strength of synthium. Besides, he had

carefully drawn plans for a parium ship-four of them actually-and so he just

made them out of synthium instead. He did make a test tank, and broke down his

pumps trying to break the tank. That was all he cared

about though, so he let it go. He was in too much of a faurry.

He'd probably have forgotten something in the rush if be hadn't planned on his

parium ships for so long. If he'd known how long he'd have for planning

afterwards, he'd probably have spent less before. He certainly wouldn't •have

backed out.

You can weld synthium-they could then. But you can't cut it with any saw, or

tool. So the "Mercury" was slapped together in a remarkable hurry. The

synthium plates had to be cast and heat-treated because Corliss wouldn't wait

while rolls and machines were built of it to bend and work it. So he allowed a

little extra size over his original parium blueprints-he found out two years

later that cast and heat-treated synthium was stronger than rolled-and plowed

ahead.

The Germans were at his heels all the way. But his crew-with plenty of money

and no budget-got four ships together in slightly less time than the German

crew did. They loaded them up so fast that they had to get some of their

supplies at the terrific rates prevailing on old Luna.

But the Committee didn't know that; they saw four new ships, of a very strong

metal, with very strong fuel tanks of unusual capacity, and a remarkably

different course laid out that would take men around the asteroid belt- and

the plans were stamped.

Automatically, they turned down the Norddeutscher people when they applied

"until the success or failure of the present expedition has been determined."

The Norddeutscher people had a long wait. And then, of course, when Corliss'

fate was settled they couldn't get approval of their ships, or, for that

matter, any lupiter-bound ships. Corliss settled that for once and for all

with the result of his expedition. They couldn't have gotten men anyway,

probably, for none had the desire to have their ship christened "Mahomet's

Coffin" for so excellent a reason.

Corliss got off Earth in May 2134. The Corliss Jupiter Expedition was

underway. A fleet of four tiny ships, each of five-thousand-ton mass, each

looking, with their raw, unpainted synthium, like a farmer-boy's unsuccessful

effort toward a home-grown and tanned football, mottled with green and yellow

and pink.

They were remarkable looking things, stubby, thick-bellied, and quite hideous,

with their weirdly-shaped wing-attachments sticking out forlornly at a broken

angle.

But they lifted off at ten A.M., May 17, 2134.

Bar Corliss looked at Brad Warren, second in command, with a sour, exaggerated

grimace. "Great gang of planners we are," he commented.

Brad Warren grinned back at him. "Forget something, Bar?"

"Only a few minor things-like soap, and coffee extract and antiseptics.

Nothing really important of course-" Bar chuckled. "Wouldn't the Norddeutscher

crowd like to know that!"

Brad gestured out the port toward the blinding light and the- sharp shadows of

Luna. Half a mile distant loomed the dome of Lunar Metals and Mines No. 3.

"When do we break loose?"

"Don't say the words," moaned Corliss. "Break loose, I mean. That's what the

clerk in the L.M. and M. keeps saying. And, dear God, has he been breaking me

loose. I've got to have the stuff. It's my own fault we haven't got it-and is

he 'breaking me loose' from plenty of cash. Only 22.50 a pound for coffee

extract. Only a dollar a cake for five-cent laundry soap. And as for the water

we've got to have for fuel-!" Bar shook his head and looked piously upward.

"May God bless him-nobody else ever will."

Brad grinned without sympathy. "You knew it was coming on that score; how else

could you get away from old Earth? Even when the famous 'Irrelevant' disproved

the law of conservation of energy in interplanetary work, she didn't disprove

the fact that you needed a lot of kick to dimb away from Earth. We've still

got to climb out most of the way from Earth, so far as gravity goes."

"Uhmmm-but considering they generate power here directly from sunlight in the

Davison photocells, get their water by cooking out the water of

crystallization of the deeper rocks, and have plenty, you'd think they could

sell it for less than thirty-two cents a gallon.

"What's the latest figures on water at Phobos? Interplanetary Minerals sent

anything yet?"

"Uhm," said Brad. "It's down. It seems they found it

wasn't selling well. Three and a half a gallon on Mars, and seventeen and a

quarter on Phobos."

"That's not so stiff. It'll change, though, by the time we get there. And we

need tens of thousands of gallons of it!"

"Well, you still won't be broke," grinned Brad, "and you know damn well the

kick you get out of this is worth it. Anyway-we lift off here any time you say

now. We're loaded with everything, I guess."

"Make it two hours then. That is-two hours and whatever more is needed for

aligning of orbits and so forth. How long did you say we'd have to wait on

Phobos?"

"RandaU was very timely in his invention. Jupiter and Mars will be right, in

about three months. If we take off as you say, we ought to wait about three

months, three days and four hours."

"It could be worse," sighed Bar.

Two hours, forty-seven minutes and thirty-three seconds later, the "Mercury"

and her escorting squadron of three ships got underway. Pale-blue flames

flared for a few seconds as they trembled, soundless in the vacuum of Moon's

surface; then they rose in slow sweeps, rocketing upward, and away. They were

visible to the men watching in the protecting glass and steel of the L.M. and

M. company. But finally, they were lost in the haze of stars that obscured

almost all the heavens, flaring brightly despite the glaring yellow sun.

The steady drone of the great rocket tubes of infusible tungovan grumbled and

echoed and murmured to itself in the metal shells of the ships. The rockets

were mar-velously well-designed. There was little wasted energy here, and

therefore, little noise. Noise is the audible warning of waste energy. They

could not afford wastage of the precious burden of fuel, so there was almost

no noise, only the smooth, carefully engineered flow of gases rushing through

ground, honed and polished rocket tubes, designed as nearly as possible for

absolute stream flow.

To all new spacers, rocket tubes are flimsy-looking things. The metal is less

than an eighth of an inch thick, flimsy, tinny in appearance. It would seem

that those incredibly powerful and light engines, rocket engines, would

certainly burst anything so slight. That again illustrates the refinements of

rocket engineering. It is a well-known

fact that the greater the velocity of a fluid stream, the less the side-

pressure. Those tubes were designed for the greatest possible velocity,

naturally, and since that meant almost no side-pressure, tons of metal could

be shaved from the rocket tubes. Only the great pressure blocks seemed, and

were, capable of resisting strain bracing the egg-shaped combustion chambers.

Hour after hour the tubes moaned and droned. They were running almost white

hot, but they were polished more carefully than the finest telescope mirrors,

and they were in vacuum jackets equally polished, so that almost no heat

escaped from them-for heat, where it isn't wanted, is not only a nuisance, but

a warning of inefficiency.

Presently, the song of the fuel pumps started. They had been feeding the tubes

on the original pressure hi the tanks at first, but now this was falling. Pure

hydrogen and oxygen were 'being taken from the tanks at seven tons, pressure,

and stepped up to the necessary eight for efficient running in the tubes. It

was a gas-but under that pressure, denser than water.

That might have warned them, had they stopped to think then. But it was a

hastily conceived and carried out thing, throughout. They'd raced against time

all the way. When, after seven days they landed on Mars North City field with

wings spread and the parachute air-brake spread to stop them, the ships needed

repair and final adjustment, so much so that the three-month wait on Mars was

no ordeal of monotony. There were plenty of trained mechanicians at Mars North

City to help them, and still it was more of an ordeal of labor. And still

there wasn't any time for recalculation that might have stopped the expedition

then and there.

They loaded up with water-fuel-that is, hydrogen and oxygen gases, at Mars

North City where the gases were cheap, and pulled out to Phobos running heavy.

They replaced the burned fuel there, and at last the "Mercury" and her

companions pulled out on the real trip.

So far they had gone. This trip out to Mars and her moons was old, charted and

laid out by a pair of generations and more of space travel. Over a hundred and

fifty years of exploration, over seventy years of commercial exploitation of

the Minor Planets, and still no human being had passed beyond the magic ring

of the Planetoids.

You have seen a scale map of our system. You know the dimensions. Forty,

seventy, one hundred and one hundred-forty millions of miles are the orbits of

the Minor Planets. Then-the Great Gulf. It's five hundred million to Jupiter,

nine hundred million to Saturn, a billion and three quarters to Uranus. When

the Lord made this system, he used two scales. Maybe he started out with one,

and didn't like the looks of the dinky little system he got -planets with

diameters measured in thousands of miles, orbits with diameters measured in

millions. Maybe he threw that scale away, and decided to start all over with

something worth while. The dust specks he /had, he just forgot, and worked

with a scale reading hi billions instead of millions for the orbits, and he

used tens of thousands of miles for planet diameters.

At any rate, there are two systems really, the Inner System, and the Outer

System, and they're as different as two entirely strange systems might be.

Four, seven, ten and fourteen tens of millions for the Inner System. Four,

eight, seventeen, twenty-eight hundreds of millions for the Outer System.

The "Mercury" was trying to be the Messenger of the Gods, from the Lesser Gods

to Mighty love. And she was the first ship that really stood a chance of

crossing that gulf.

That's quite a hill, there between the Inner and Outer systems. Nearly four

hundred million miles-and every blasted mile of it uphill-with old Sol

dragging, dragging, dragging on the other end. Four hundred million miles of

uphill climb had stopped exploration for a hundred and fifty years and more.

The "Mercury" lifted off Phobos, with her train of three service ships,

distinctly heavy. She staggered as she pulled loose of Mar's gravity. Then she

shifted into high for the climb. Hour after hour the tubes moaned. Then day

after day they coasted, slowing their pace steadily as Sol pulled with his

infinitely untiring grip to stop them. Then for more hours, the tubes droned

and hummed, and then they began to spit and bark unevenly, and the ships

lurched and staggered like mad motes in a beam of light, skittering and

dancing lest some unheeding, trundling rock, weighing perhaps a thousand

quadrillion tons, brush them along with it.

And all day long and all night long, though the only

night here was the nose of the ugly foot-ball thing they called a ship, there

was a steady rain of terrific, sharp pings as tiny, invisibly small planetoids

crashed against the synthium wall. They were going at almost the same speed-as

space speeds go-so the incredible, never-tested strength of synthium turned

those shocks. They were going at almost the same speed-there wasn't much more

difference in their speed than the speed the mightiest shells of Man's armory

attained, about a mile and a half a second. But they were made of only plain,

high-grade nickel-steel armor-plating, the natural alloy of meteors, and the

ships were made of synthium.

So somehow, after three horrible days in there, the men took off their

space^armor suits again, and gobbled a little food (they couldn't eat with

those suits on, of course) and then flopped down to rest.

And through the ships the steady, peaceful thrum and drone of the smoothly

working tubes made sweet music to them. The soft regular chuck-shug-pssiii of

the air circulators and the fuel pumps sounded steady and sweet.

For the "Mercury" was through the Magic Ring, and cruised at last hi that

terra incognita, the no-man's-land beyond the Inner System.

When sleep had restored them, their watches were sharp, sharper than ever

before. For they began to sense the difference. This space was different-it

was the Great Space, the space where things the size of Mars were satellites,

and gravitative control-fields of planets reached out thirty million miles. It

was the Space of the Giants.

And day by day, the Sun. dwindled, grew tinier. And day by day they saw the

pinpoint of Jupiter sweeping into position. Jupiter was huge-but this was the

Great Space. It was still a pinpoint to their eyes.

They let a bit of hydrogen into the vacuum surrounding the rocket tubes now,

so the shields weren't such good insulators, and they put a special soft black

paint on the outside sheath, so radiation was better, and the ships began to

warm up a bit.

And the sun dwindled four hundreds of millions of miles behind, and Jupiter

became a respectable disc, an unchanging disc.

They shut off their rocket tubes then, because most of the fuel was gone. In

fact, they had enough left to permit a landing on one of Jupiter's little

satellites, and, by put-

ting all the fuel in one ship, the smallest, enough to fall back to Earth

safely. But the ships began to get cold. Out there, a planet like Earth would

have a temperature in the neighborhood of two-hundred and thirty degrees below

zero. Those ships were well insulated-but they had to burn a good bit of fuel

to permit life in them, even so.

Ill

"Yes, I agree that Ganymede has an atmosphere," Bar argued tensely, "and that

it may be thick enough to permit us to halt almost entirely by atmospheric

friction instead of by rocket power-highly important saving of fuel of course.

But-Ganymede's only six hundred and sixty thousand from the surface of the

blasted planet, and with the gravitative field Jup's got, that's no distance.

If we go in so far before we stop, we might not be able to get back at all, if

we can't find water there."

"But, Bar, we can save enough fuel by air-braking to a stop to permit us to

pull out from that close approach with our little ship, if necessary."

"Uhmmmmm-maybe. I suppose we'd better. I know there's no real chance of

collecting water on that chunk of rock called Number Nine, fifteen million

miles out from Jupiter though it is." Then in sudden decisiveness, after a

moment of thought, he said, "Shift'er over."

Brad turned to his calculated data, and presently the rocket tubes on one side

moaned loudly, a driving acceleration came again as the weight-warning bell

echoed dully through the ship. Bar Corliss was calling off figures into the

microphone, sending instructions to the three other ships, now within ten

thousand miles of the "Mercury."

The Mercury turned, and the great disc of Jupiter shifted till it was more

nearly straight ahead once more; almost directly before them, the tiny disc of

Ganymede, three thousand two hundred miles in diameter, loomed. It was ringed

with a fat, bright ring, the halo of an atmosphere.

"That atmosphere must be pure hydrogen," said Corliss thoughtfully. "It's cold

as the hinges of hades out there."

"Hydrogen, hell. That planet's too light to hold pure hydrogen with the tug

and cross tug of old Jupiter down there. It's more likely something heavy and

useless like nitrogen."

"We'll know quick enough. We ought to get there in eighteen hours the way

Jup's pulling us now."

The rockets were silent, yet the ships were moving faster

and faster. Mighty Jupiter was dragging at them. Slowly their course bent, and

Ganymede shifted across the windows till it was directly under the nose of the

ship. It was enlarging swiftly now-more and more swiftly. Slowly, slowly

Jupiter's pull dragged the ship over till Ganymede passed the center spot of

the windows, and hung off to the other side. The ship seemed destined to pass

between Ganymede and Jupiter. Then, the throw hesitated, as Ganymede began to

loom; a great round moon, dimly silvered, it hung for a moment as it grew

swiftly, and abruptly the ship was being pulled to the satellite. Ganymede's

gravity was greater than Jupiter's at last!

The thin bright ring of atmosphere expanded, the satellite grew till it seemed

evident the ship would touch the atmospheric rim, and plow on.

"Wings," called Corliss at last. Motors hummed into action, and a slow grating

squeal of gears and racks sounded in the ship. The rocket trembled to the push

of the motors. It was rotating slowly as the powerful collapsible wings thrust

out.

"Put her on high-lift angles, and throw out the airbrakes," suggested Brad. "I

think we're a bit high. We'll need a lot of resistance in the first passage to

cut our speed to an orbital velocity."

For an instant the rockets flared again, pushing the ships back into a path

closer to the satellite. Then, soon, there came a thin high scream, the first

sound to penetrate the walls of the ship from the outside since the asteroids

had been passed, a scream so thin and cold and shrill the sleeping men woke

and joined the active watch. There was a new acceleration now, an acceleration

due not to the rockets, but to the great metal wings, spread and screaming in

the thin air outside, an acceleration actually that thrust them to the side

away from the planet, for the wings, cutting the thin, thin air at more than

three miles a second, were helping to hold the ship down to the planet where

there was air to stop them, while behind, the great air-brake was tugging,

tugging to stop them.

They couldn't hold the planet the first circle, and swung up, away again,

falling out of the atmosphere as their grip on the thinning air weakened,

weakened, and finally broke.

But they'd broken their hyperbolic orbit to an extended ellipse, and turned

the ship so their momentum fought not only Ganymede's strain, but mighty

Jupiter's as well. They were back in Ganymede's atmosphere hi two days,

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THESPACEBEYOND--JohnW.Campbell,Jr.EditedbyRogerElwoodIntroductionbyIsaacAsimovAfterwordbyGeorgeZebrowskiBIG,BIG,BIGbyIsaacAsimovThethingaboutJohnCampbellisthathelikedthingsbig.Helikedbigmenwithbigideasworkingoutbigapplicationsoftheirbigtheories.Andhelikeditfast.Hisbigmenbuiltbigweaponswithindays;wea...

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Campbell, John W Jr - The Space Beyond

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