‘Maybe you’ve got a point,’ replied his sister. ‘ But you can read at  they  say themselves. Father’s got one of the original copies of their creed, written by their old priest Zanov in great grand-dad’s time.’

            ‘Old Oblonsky must have been a great guy,’ Alexei said.  ‘He even had the foresight to seal up the city’s main communication pillar for the duration of the journey.’

            ‘True,’ said Natalie.  If the Zanies had ever managed to get into there and destroy the automatics this would have been one giant coffin for all of us.’

            ‘Great grand-dad must have had a premonition that one day the Zanies would succeed in taking over the city.’

            ‘But who would have thought that they could actually get into Navig itself. They used to be far too scared to come anywhere near here.’

            ‘Very true Alexei,’ replied Natalie. ‘They used to call this Satan’s abode.’

            ‘But just to turn everything off and hope that gravity will pull us back down again,’ said Konstanin frowning. ‘Rather negative sort of religion.’ 

            ‘Fatalistic and atavistic I would say,’ chipped in Alexei unwrapping another bundle of cloth.  ‘But that’s the only way they can explain the Great Silence.’

            ‘Even we don’t know the reason for that’, declared Natalie emphatically.  ‘All we know is that communication with earth stopped in mid-sentence.   And I mean that literally – if you’ve seen the old tapes like I have.  And since then nothing.’

            ‘Well whatever happened’, retorted Alexei, ‘it means that the umbilical cord with earth’s been broken and we’re now totally on our own.’

            ‘That’s right, we have to go forwards, not back-wards like these Zany crack-pots,’ stated Konstantin defiantly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

            Within a few days the hereditary caste of Navigs had settled down in the empty Living quarters of level four; after a part had been sectioned-off and cocooned against the chill. But there was no let-up in the rites held four times a day in the navigation bay, now somewhat closer to their dwellings.  And it was Konstantin’s turn on the rota of initiates to brave the cold this time.

            ‘Hurry up and give me another shawl, Natalie.  I’m late as it is already,’ he yelled, rushing to get a way before his father came in. But he almost collided with the Chief Navig as he sped out of the room clutching a handful of shawls.

            ‘Feeling the cold eh?  Alexei,’ asked the old man.  ‘Then wait till next month.’

            Konstantain stopped in his tracks and looked at his father quizzically. 

            ‘I’ll explain later, Konstantin, you’re late going down already.’ And after his younger son’s departure he turned to his other two children and told them ‘from next month the rituals will become much more complicated and will need two initiates at a time to perform them.  So everyone will have to go twice a week instead of once.’

            ‘Will it take longer?’ groaned Alexei.

            ‘No, not at first.  That’ll be later on.  It’s all laid down in section eight of the Sacred Book; the De-Accel Procedure.’

            ‘That’s if we can keep the Zanies out.’ Said Natalie.

            ‘Maybe we should show them Destination on the internal communicators.  It’s quite clear now. Maybe we can fool them into believing it’s Sol we’re heading for,’ ended Alexei optimistically.

            ‘But it’s just a bright star.  And anyway they’s never believe us.  You know what they think of us.  And they’d want to know when we turned around.’

            ‘Sis,  we did turn round.  Five years ago when the de-acceleration started.’

‘Then they were too busy establishing that crazy religion of theirs to notice,’ she snorted.  ‘And I meant turning our trajectory around not the ship.’

            ‘We could say we’ve done a gradual U-turn in space,’ persisted Alexei.  ‘I’m sure we could fake up something.’

            ‘Then how’d you explain the Great Silence?’ said Natalie tersely.

            ‘Easy.  We’d doctor some of the pre-Silence tapes.’ Answered Alexei truculently.  ‘We have some don’t we?’

            ‘I’m afraid not, Alexei,’ responded his father.  ‘We did have some.  But when the Zanies broke through we only brought stuff related to navigation.  And anyway, most of the old tapes are in the city library, which we sealed up after the original Zanie uprising.’

‘But……………..’

            ‘And on top of that, Alexei, the Zanies have just cut the last of the internal communicators.’

            ‘Good grief!  Does that mean that they can also cut our power off?’

            ‘It’s a possibility., Alexei, but…………..’

            A muted explosion from above, followed by a series of sharp cracks froze the conversation – until there was an involuntary cry from Natalie.

            ‘The Zanies, the Zanies.  They’ve broken through again.’

            The word ‘Zanies’ was on everybody’s lips as they rushed out of their cubicles.  And amidst the clamour the Chief’s voice bellowed, ‘don’t panic, hatch four will hold them for a while and give us time to get down the ladder.’

            He shouted again at the crowd pushing and shoving in the vestibule.  ‘Let the women and children go first.’

            Others took up his cry and soon the women and kids were through the circular floor bulkhead and down the stairs that spiralled around a central pole of the floor below.  The men had to wait, their feet tingling with anticipation to  get down; knowing that only half an inch of metal separated them from the Zanies above.

            ‘We’ll have to slow them down somehow,’ cried the Chief Navig nervously, after the last of the women had left.

            ‘With what?’ shouted Wen Chew ‘our pop-guns ?’

            ‘Some of the plastic canopies can be dowsed in octane and we can throw them up ono the stairs – that’ll give them a hot reception when they break through.  We can even put a bonfire right on top of this bulkhead.’  And the Chief began to collect bundles of plastic that were scattered about.  

            ‘But we’ll freeze,’ grumbled one of the men.  ‘We’re almost out.  Don’t you remember?  They cut our last remaining feeder line to the octane reserves.’

            ‘Better than being butchered as heretics – like what happened six years ago,’ replied Alexei calling the initiates to place heavy bundles of curtains on the stairs going up to the next level and soak them with octane.

            ‘As soon as everyone’s down,’ the Chief shouted above the clamour, ‘I’ll set fire to the stairs and then light the stuff on top of the hatch before I close it.  The fire’ll stop them for a while. And the smoke from the plastic.’

            ‘Not if we don’t put the automatic extinguishers out of action first,’ Ivan Kugarin called out.  And so saying went meticulously around the circular vestibule smashing all fire sensors with the butt of his pistol.

            As Ivan was doing this the others descended through the hatchway – except the Chief who began shouting to those below.  ‘Everyone but full Navigs down to the bay, that’s where the last major bulkhead doors are.  Go quickly. And that means you lot.’ He ordered, seeing some of the boys and girls still hanging around.

            Noticing the initiates dejected looks he told them, ‘your job will be to leave bundles of cloth and bottles of octane on each level as you go down.  we’ll make sure that the Zanies meet fire level by level, right down to the Navig control-room.

            Catching sight of Konstantin the Chief barked out angrily, ‘get back to the rituals immediately.  Whatever happens we have to keep them going.  Don’t you remember how many Navigs we lost getting those codes from the city library?’

            Konstantin disappeared quickly after this outburst and the Chief pulled his head out of the hatchway, calling Ivan to finish and come on down. 

            ‘Thank goodness we had sense to store all the codes and ciphers in the control bay already,’ he murmured as Ivan squeezed his large frame through the circular opening in the floor.

            And after his second-in-command was safely below the Chief set fire to the saturated clothes and threw the lamp he lit them with up onto the stairs.  Then waited for a few moments, until the whole place was a blazing inferno, before lowering the trapdoor and pulling the looking lever into place.

 

 

 

            Again the tribe was on the move, fleeing further outwards from the ship’s belly to it’s its last retreat –  the control bay that stuck out like a little blister at the tip of the Navig section.

            Fortunately the control room was easily big enough for the refugees, but not for Konstantin who was doggedly trying to concentrate on the Noon Ritual, surrounded by distraught women and children.

            Half an hour later, after he had finished, they all heard footsteps coming down the descent way of the level above.             Zanies or their own men?  No one knew and the general agitation grew until a voice called out from above.

            ‘It’s all right,’ it was Peter Rostov, a recently initiated Full Navig, ‘we’ve slowed them down.  The fire in level four stopped them for a while and we’ve just set fire to the vestibule in level three and sealed it off,’ he ended as his feet appeared through the hatch in the ceiling of the bay.

            ‘But the extinguisher,’ cried someone as other Navigs followed Peter down into the bay.

            ‘What do you think?’ Ivan replied in a gruff voice, ‘we smashed the sensors before setting everything alight.  So it’ll take some time for the heat and smoke to trigger off the other sensors on that level.

            ‘Long enough to close off this reinforced bulkhead, I hope,’ said the Chief, the last to come down the spiral stairs.

            He sorted out a key and gave it to his second in command.  ‘It’ll take a few minutes to set all the locking relays in the right sequence to close this heavy door, Ivan, so you’d better get cracking.’  Then turning to the others. ‘And while we’re waiting let’s get some more inflammable stuff up on top.’

            He climbed back up the stairs.  ‘pass me some of the bundles will you’ he shouted down.

            ‘But you haven’t got time to go around smashing all the sensors,’ cried Natalie in a frightened voice,’ as her father reached down for the cloth being handed up to him.

            ‘It’ll still burn for a few minutes,’ and he climbed up through the hatchway.

            But even as he was scattering the garments around him on the floor of level two he heard muffled shouts and footsteps from the ceiling above him.

            ‘Ye Gods, they’re on level three already,’ he shouted to those below who were craning up to see him.  ‘I’m coming straight down, we don’t have time to fire this lot.’

            ‘Quickly dad,’ shouted Alexei as his father descended, ‘we have to start the sequence for the locking operation.’

            ‘Have all the relays been punched in the correct order, Ivan?’ the old man asked.

            But even before Ivan could reply there as an explosion, as the light hatch-door above he one leading to the control bay, blew off its hinges and Zany began to climb down into level two, dripping water as he did so.

            ‘It’s too late, it’s too late,’ cried someone hysterically.]

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

            Suddenly and with a burst of static, the long dormant external communicators in the navigation bay came on the air – and the Russian words ‘attention, attention,’ could be heard amongst the crackle; a weird repeat echo being caused by the speakers in the successive levels above.

            ‘This is earth ship Ganymede calling Gagarin,’ came a faint voice amongst the background hiss.

            No one moved; neither he two hundred or so Navigs nor the three Zanies who had been climbing down from level two.  For after an utter silence of almost a hundred-and-fifty years the frequency band of the ship’s receivers had sprung back into life.

            ‘Attention, attention,’ the distorted voice continued in a staccato.  ‘This is a pre-recording from the inter-stellar space-ship the L.E.S. Ganymede and will continue on a narrow been for next two hours from a Ganymede beacon rocket.……………..’  The voice faded momentarily and then swelled up ‘……………….. proximity to you.  Now within half a light year of your projected trajectory.  Attention, attention, this message will be repeated until further notice.’

There was a pause, filled in by the white background noise boosted by the receivers signal compressors – and then another voice, in Russian but with a definite American twang, came on the air.

            ‘This is Captain Jakson.’

            And immediately a large monitor screens built into the bay’s wall brightened as the ship’s automatic system switched on in response to the beacon ship’s first video transmissions.

            As one, the Navigs turned to the screen where they saw a nebulous oval amidst swirling sparks of electronic snow; which slowly resolved into a shadowy picture of a youthful man as Gagarin’s  image enhancers got to work on the poor picture.

            Indeed throughout the whole of Navig and Ring City long dead screens flicked on. Friend and foe stood goggle-eyed; especially around the massive viewer that dominated the gloomy centre of Ring City, which soon became surrounded by a huge crowd of thin ragged people, attracted like moths to this unexpected source of light. Even the Zanies who had been on the verge of attacking the Navigs became tranquil and shuffled in the flickering light of the navigation bay, dazed and speechless.

            ‘This message is being recorded on Ganymede base on one of the moons of Sol’s largest planet, Jupiter,’ continued the Captain, whose now distinct image was of a determined looking man with a moustache and dressed in the bright one-piece overalls typical of space-men. ‘And we are recording this just before blasting off into deep space tomorrow, the eighth of July 2429.  Nineteen years after the great holocaust on earth.’

            ‘You see,’ he told his captive audience, ‘on the fifth of June, 2410, a terrible war erupted on earth between the Russio-Asian  Confederacy and Euro-American Union  which we now think started with an error in a military computer.  And the initial mutual destruction was so great that it has left the earth and its moon a poisonous ruin.’

            A space-shot of a planet, presumably earth, the surface obscured by swirling black clouds appeared on the screen, wobbling a bit as if photographed by telescope form far away.  The Captain mentioned something about ‘nuclear winter,’; and another  picture of a barren pock-marked planet flashed up on screen and fuzzy close-ups showed large craters, which according to the commentary were once moon colonies.

            ‘You in the Gagarin  ’ the Captain reappeared,’ must have been in constant touch with your Siberian base ever since you left earth orbit in 2064.  And I must say that you caused one hell of a shock to us of the western  Euro-American Union when you upped and went, as for over thirty years everyone thought Gagarin was just a huge space-station and your engine section a smaller one floating nearby.  None thought for a moment that you were intending to link the two up into an inter-stellar ship.  You most certainly kept your secret well hidden……  Anyway we’re now really glad you did….. Take-off I mean.’  The Captain turned as if being cued by someone off picture.

            ‘Ah yes, as I was saying, you must have been in contact with earth, via the relay rockets that your Russio-Asian base was sending up after you every twenty-five years – right up to the holocaust when the messages would have abruptly stopped.  None of us had any warning in fact.  That’s why we think the whole mess started with an almighty cock-up somewhere in the military software.

            His head twisted away from the viewers and then back again.  ‘That’s right.  I’ve just been reminded that the earth broadcasts to you would have cut out in the year 2417, as the last signal would have taken seven years to reach you.’

            New pictures of more cratered satellites appeared; this time more clear and distinct that the previous ones and with close-ups of small settlements nestling under clear plastic domes.   Another showed a red planet boasting polar caps.

            `‘After the holocaust the only civilisation left was dotted about on these outposts on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn – and under the Martian perma-frost.  I suppose it’s possible that a few people on earth’s tropical belt may have survived the radioactive arctic conditions now raging there, but no radio message has ever been received and the radiation levels are far too high to land one of our ships.  As far as we know there are just  over two thousand of us left survivors from the earth war now – from both sides of the war -  mostly scientists, and technicians and those who happened to be in deep space in 2429.  And we’ve decided to all work together and drop all the tragic nonsense of east versus  western nations, collectivist versus individualist ideologies.  So for several years now we have been pooling most of our resources here on the Ganymede satellite, the old American moon base and the largest of earth’s remaining space colonies.   We call ourselves the League of Earth Survivors, or L.E.S. for short.’

            Amidst film of a slim rocketship being re-assembled in orbital space, the voice drawled on. ‘As you now represent the biggest chunk of surviving humanity, we have converted one of out last few interplanetary vessels for interstellar travel.  She was an Euro-American cruiser and we’ve given her the name the L.E.S. Ganymede – and from her the beacon rocket’s been launched.’

            The picture reverted to the Captain.  ‘We remnants of earth society are now in total agreement with each other.  That’s how I’m able to talk to you in Russian – we’ve all learnt to speak Russian, Chinese and English.  And we have all been praying that you’re still on your  eleven light-year journey to Iota Epsilon and Theta Ceti sector of space.

            ‘In fact we know quite a lot about your  ship as some of the Russian and Chinese members of the L.E.S. actually worked on it.  We know that there’s almost a mile between you engines  and your barrel-shaped front  that contains the living quarters for your three thousand inhabitants. We know its spinning and that it has a  two thousand foot wide annulus that runs right round the inside for almost a mile .  We know  that over sixty percent of this ring  is devoted to agriculture and that you even have a  river onboard.  We’ve  been told  that your automatic systems are run by an antiquated computer whose memory is stored in metal loops at near zero temperature. ‘It was your Professor Blavatsky, the highest Russian official to survive the holocaust, who gave us this information including your trajectory and special frequency.  I’ll now hand over to him.’

            The Captain’s face faded and was replaced by that of a white-haired, wrinkled old man who peered through glistening eyes. ‘Russian and Chinese  brothers and sisters…..or should I say descendants,’ his eyes twinkled and then darkened.  ‘Yes, it was I who released these state secrets about your ship in the hope that his would help us reach you deep in the cosmos.’

            ‘When the holocaust occurred,’ he went on, ‘which we are pretty sure was due to a weaponry technical fault , I was on an ambassadorial mission to Ganymede.  There was no question of us in space taking sides…..it all happened so quickly anyway.  So after I had radio discussions with the other scattered groups of Russio-Asian cosmonauts – meaning really those on the Mars station – we decided to work with the Americans and their allies and set up the L.E.S.  In fact more than half the Mars personnel are here right now as Ganymede base has large amounts of reserves; for it had been undergoing large scale expansion when the war broke out……..’

            He paused and the Gagarin populace waited eagerly for him to continue……. ‘and so seven years ago we began work on modifying the old U.S. Pegasus for deep space.  Everything’s finished now and though the L.E.S.  Ganymede is tiny compared to your ship it has aboard one of the only three crystal quantum-matrix  world memory machines still left in existence. The one the Americans salvaged from their Neptune base.  The technology to make…….or grow rather….new ones is now quite beyond us.  Anyway the one I hope you will meet is called Ace 103, short for Advanced Cybernetic Entity.’

            ‘In fact,’ the Professor continued, ‘it was with Ace putting its whole mind on the problem for the last few years –  and with a bit of help from us L.E.S. scientists,’ he turned away chuckling at someone out of view,  ‘that we were able to develop an ion motor using the ultra-high energies availavle from a very state-of-the-art fusion engine. Quite differenf from the low powered fission ones we had been using for inter-planetary travel for centuries –  and which yours is a very old-fashioned though gigantic example.  So, although our Ganymede is small, in fact only a few times bigger than your transport ships, ours will travel much faster; reaching a maximum velocity of almost an eighth the speed of light  and so cutting the journey to your sector by one-hundred-and-forty years.’

            Cut-away diagrams and computer graphics of the eight hundred foot long Ganymede came up on screen, followed by detailed shots of various parts of the craft.  The old man continued on the topic of miniaturisation in a quavering voice.

            ‘So the crew is only  fifty strong – and to save the space needed to store food for hundreds of years they will spend most of their time hibernating in cryogenic freeze-beds, a technique successfully developed by Russio-Asian scientists after your departure half a millennium ago.  You mush have heard about it on the messages you used to get from home.’

            A picture of  room resembling a morgue appeared on screen, containing dozens of empty plastic coffins sticking out of racks built into the wall. 

            ‘When you receive this message’ the Proesser explained, ‘ the Ganymede crew will actually be asleep in these things – and they’ll only be woken up by Ace just before they reach Theta Ceti in the middle of 2560.

            ‘Our Ganymede,’ went on Blavatsky shaking his long white main,’ also has cryogenic storage the seeds of many wild, medicinal and domestic plants – and the germ-plasm of thousands upon thousands of wild and domestic animals as well.  So it’s vital that you link up with us as we know you only have onboard Gagarin a few dozen varieties of plants, a small herd of livestock and a few pets…….  And of course the mutant algae that you use in you cyclic support systems.’

            More shots of the American spacecraft came up in view, with long lists of the preserved species superimposed over the picture.

            ‘Ganymede is like Noah’s Ark,’ the old professor broke in, ‘with most of the seed stock coming from the Russio-Asian Biological Foundation on Mars.  You must know about this gigantic ecological reclamation effort we were making on Mars’ northern icecap from the broadcasts you been getting from earth.  Unfortunately a few weeks after the holocaust a programmed rocket exploded a neutron bomb five miles above the research station and completely wiped out our surface work and farms – and killed a hundred-and-thirty scientists who were on top at the time………...,’ he frowned.  ‘My own daughter was amongst them…………….’

            For a few moments the old man looked so forlorn, and then puled himself together.  ‘I suppose really that I should thank the stars that it was a neutron bomb as the explosion was so small that the underground base and its cryogenic storage tanks survived.  That’s where the L.E.S. Ganymede has got most of it’s germ-plasm from.  The ship’s frozen human plasm was donated by some of us survivors.  Not by me I should add,’ he added grinning.  ‘I’m a bit too old for that.’

            He looked appealingly at his audience.  ‘So you see, with the large lunar bases obliterated and the American Saturn base knocked out for all practical purposes by a delayed-action missile we only now have the Ganymede base here circling Jupiter. And a small outpost left on Mars – as we are hoping that the radiation level at the base will drop fairly quickly to a level where we can continue our agricultural experiments.  As for earth, it will be radioactive for thousands of years.  So now its up to you and the crew of Ganymede to find a new home for mankind,’ he said looking hard at his viewers; for inspite of being recorded hundreds of years ago the professor was easily able to hold the crew of Gagarin in his grip.

            ‘You may wonder,’ he asked his audience, ‘why the League of Earth Survivors never sent you any messages to you before by transmitting  them up the same string of relay rockets that your Russio-Asian government had been sending up trailing behind you after you had blasted off.   You see it  was all a problem of excessive  security.  The designers had built a fail-safe system into them so that each relay had a second transceiver tuned to a coded signal from earth.  And it was so arranged that if this stooped for more than a week the whole relay would close down, sending an abort message up to the next relay rocket  in line.  So within one week of the holocaust they all started to go out of action and as none of us Russio-Asian citizens who were in space knew the cipher, we couldn’t prevent it happening.

            ‘I’ll say farewell now as I’m far too old to join the Ganymede crew and so I’ll be long dead by the time you receive this dispatch.  But I beg you for the sake of humanity,’ he concluded dramatically, ‘to work with Captain Jackson and his crew.’

            His lined and wizened face faded away and was replaced by the firm one of Captain Jackson.  ‘Yes, with luck the fifty of us who are going aboard the Ganymede will actually meet up with you.  But now to business. Thanks to Professor Blavatsky we know that you are first headed for Iota Epsilon before going on to Theta Ceti.  And to save time for both of us we will head for Theta Ceti first and do a thorough survey of its planets, if any.  We’ve calculated that we’ll reach the two star systems at roughly the same time, give or take a few months.  Then we can simply swap information via this high-powered beacon craft which we will de-accelerate into a position midway between the two stars.’

            He waited for his words to sink in.  ‘Mind you this mutual transfer of information will take one-and-a-quarter years each way, as that’s the number of light years the stars are from each other.  Then who ever finds a suitable planet to colonise will stay put and the other ship will rendez-vous with them.  If you strike lucky it will take us fifteen years to get to you so we will all meet up in the flesh.  If it’s you who has to come to us you will meet our descendants who will have already begun  colonising.

            ‘If, God forbid,’ the Captain hesitated, ‘none of us is successful then we’ll rendez-vous at a zero-point-four-eight of a light year from Eridani on a course for the next major star-system, 26 Cygnus – as this meeting place will make it a twenty years journey for both of us.  The professor has told us that Cygnus is your next destination and like you we too believe it is a potential planet  bearing star.  If we intersect together in this manner enroute for Cygnus we can physically link-up the two ships.  Then with your factories and workshops and our know-how we can enhance your ion drive so as to cut your six hundred year journey by two-thirds.

            ‘You’ll probably receive this recorded transmission several times, each time getting fainter and fainter,’ the Captain began to conclude. ‘Our beacon rocket won’t know your exact position and so will be given instructions that when it’s within half a light year of your estimated location it will do a comprehensive laser sweep of space in narrow beam bursts.  Hopefully at least one clear signal will get to you.  After that, the next message you get from us won’t be a recorded one, but will be broadcast by us as soon as we awake in a hundred and forty years or so – when we get near to Theta Ceti.  And that will be beamed towards Iota Eridani where we hope you should be by then.’

            The Captain face faded from view and there was a short break in the transmission.

            ‘Attention, attention, this is a pre-recording from the inter-stellar space-ship the L.E.S. Ganymede and will continue on a narrow beam for the next two hours……………….’

CHAPTER FOUR

 

            In spite of the dramatic impact of the beacon-probe’s message on the large Russian city-ship, L.E.S. Ganymede was itself at that exact time deathly silent. Coasting along a just over a tenth the speed of light; with its crew in a deep cryogenic sleep and its store of precious biological germplasm likewise frozen solid at almost absolute zero.  Only the ship’s automatic sensors were quietly ticking over.

            Compared to the dumb-bell shaped Gagarin, with its mass of well over a million tons, the Ganymede was tiny and had the streamlining of a typical re-entry rocket.  Slung underneath were two, even smaller, scout ships, attached like infant whales to its larger mother.

            T seeming inactivity suddenly stopped two years later when tiny venturi jets on one side of Ganymede suddenly hissed gas that gradually somersaulted the craft through half a circle.  Then after a few moments of adjustment by various batches of lateral jets, the ion motor pulsed into life, initiating a three-year de-acceleration that would ultimately put the ship into orbit around the star Theta Ceti.

            For two-and-a-half years only the regular bursts from the plasma engine broke the lonely vigil of Ace, the ship’s on-board computer – until this never sleeping crystal matrix brain calculated it was time to wake the skeleton crew who would be responsible for the final months of descent. 

            First a cluster of tiny side jets put the ship into a fifteen second spin around its long axis to mimic gravity for its soon to awaken crew.  And then, infinitely slowly, the super-cold coolants in six of the fifty cryogenic beds were gradually turned off and blood injected into their hibernating occupants; replacing the artificial anti-freeze that had originally been pumped into them a century a-and-a-half before to prevent their flesh crystallising. 

            `It took two full days before Ace was ready to release it now warm-blooded cargo, but finally the last traces of anaesthetic gases were sucked from the coffin like couches and pure oxygen pumped in. An hour later the six hermetically sealed containers eased out from the bottom row of the bands of freeze-beds, stacked up on each other like so many draws in a giant desk.  The lids sprung open revealing six naked and crew-cut astronauts, all in their twenties – each wired up to a central cable that issued from them like umbilical cords through the top of their coffins and into the dark interior of the  now empty racks.

            It was the tiniest of them; the diminutive Chinese chief-engineer Kwok Wen, who was the first to awake.  He had no idea who he was or where he was but could hear soft music tinkling in the background.  By making an enormous effort he twisted his head from side to side and could make out the white padded sides of the bed and the opaque lid half open above him.  He immediately jumped to the horrific conclusion that he was lying in a coffin in a  fancy funeral parlour.

            But over the musak the silken voice of the thoughtful computer took over and began smoothing Kwok’s rising panic by explaining to him where he was.  Triggered by this fragments of Kwok’s memory began to slowly coalesce together from dispersed images.  An earth no longer green……..construction work on the domed Ganymede moon-base……the rings of Saturn………..working on the Pegasus in space……..the huge striated globe of Jupiter hovering over them…….excited preparations for take-off……….and a drip being set up above him.

            ‘So we made it,’ he wheezed as he painfully pushed himself upright and began to pull out the intravenous needle from his left cubital vein.  Then got to work tearing off the wire terminal pads stuck to his temple and various parts of his body.

            ‘How long have we been asleep, Ace?’ he croaked.

            ‘A hundred and thirty years, Kwok.’ responded Ace in a monotone.

            ‘So it must be……….’ but the engineer’s wits were too scattered to calculate.

            ‘It’s November the 14^th, 2559,’ the computer’s sexless voice responded.  ‘Fifteen hundred hours, thirteen minuets and twenty-eight seconds to be precise.’

            Kwok grunted a reply and began to make exploratory movements with his legs and wriggled his toes for a while.  When satisfied that everything was in working order he cautiously clambered out of his low-slung contoured cocoon. Feeling as weak as a kitten and suffering from an acute attack of pins-and-needles he glanced over he five beds that were on either side of him.

            Everyone looked to be in one piece, though thin and haggard. The four men sported a stubble of beard.  Kwok’s hand went to his own face and he thought his goatee a bit long, though the rest of his face was its normal smooth self.,  but his fingernails definitely needed cutting, otherwise he’s start looking like one of those ancient Chinese mandarins.

            Captain Jackson in the adjacent bed began to stir and Kwok noticed that even his well-fleshed face had lost some of its firmness.  He bent down to prised the lid fully open and began to gently shake the prone man’s shoulder.

            On opening his eyes the captain began to stare around wildly and Kwok spend several minutes calming him down by explaining the situation.

            ‘Good God, Kwok,’ exclaimed the captain in a cracked voice as his senses returned, ‘you look like a bloody skeleton.  No wonder I didn’t recognise you.  I thought I was in a forced-labour camp when I first saw your face peering down at me.’

            ‘Well we are meant to be a skeleton crew, aren’t we?’ answered Kwok, his mouth creaking into a smile.

            ‘You’re a right cheerful bugger, that’s for sure. And stop that grin of death will you.’  He tried to rise.  ‘Come on Kwok help me get these mechanical leaches off so we can wake the others and get some grub together.  I’m starving.  I feel I haven’t eaten for aeons.’

            ‘One-and –a-half centuries in fact, Captain,’ commented Ace.

‘Holy Cow, Kwok, we’ve got another bloody comedian aboard.’  And the engineer’s face split into an even more ghastly smirk.

            But it was a long time before either of them got around to eating for only Jill Nite, the English computer expert, could be woken.  The other three, a navigator, engineer and paramedic remained dead to the world and without a flicker of consciousness, in spite of all Ace’s efforts to revive them by sending  mild reverse currents through their skin electrodes.  

            ‘Doctor Kowasky did always say that there was a chance that some of us wouldn’t make it,’ grieved the Captain after Ace had finally given up on the unfortunate men.

            ‘But fifty percent of us,’ cried Jill wringing her thin hands.  ‘And just look at them,’ she sobbed unclasping her hands and pointing at he beds, they seem to be in perfect shape.  What went wrong?’

            ‘We won’t know that until we wake the doctor, will we,’ stated Kwok.  ‘He’s the one who worked on Mars with the Russio-Asian cryogenic team.  We should start to wake him straight away.’

            ‘It’s also imperative that we wake another navigator as well.’

            ‘OK Ace,’ the Captain replied.  ‘Start the revival process on Doctor Kowaski and Faisal Azziz……….and you’ be better include another of our engineers…… Simanov I think.’

            `‘I think we’ll also need a medic, Captain.’

After the Captain punched a pattern of buttons on the over-ride console the three crew members left things to Ace and tried to settle down to wait out the forty-eight hour defrosting. They spent their time filling their ravenous stomachs, washing away the stink of fifteen decades and then beginning the long task of going through the computer records of the journey. One thing they didn’t feel was sleepy

            At the pre-determined moment four more beds slid out of their slots, three of them from higher stacks. The Captain, Jill and Kwok paced around the cold cryogenic room impatiently waiting for the lids to open.

            Finally the long hour passed and there was jubilation when Joe Kowasky, at thirty-two the oldest of the crew, started to stir – followed by the second engineer, Vassili Simanov, below him.  But the navigator and medic never made it.

            ‘What the hell’s happening, Joe?’ demanded the Captain as Jill helped the dazed man down the mobile ramp especially built for the purpose.

            ‘Why a fifty percent mortality rate?, he asked as Joe began rubbing raw patches of skin left where the adhesive electrodes had been peeled off.  ‘I thought you Russians……I mean Poles,’ added the Captain as he noticed a scowl developing on the cryogeneticist’s face.  ‘Well you eastern Europeans then. You’ve always been boasting that you’ve kept some of your terminally ill alive for hundreds of years, before waking them when an adequate treatment had been invented.’

            ‘Ill have to check out everything,’ replied the harassed doctor, ‘but I’m pretty sure we’ll find that the fault doesn’t lie with the cryogenic equipment.’

            ‘I can confirm this,’ Ace enunciated. ‘There’s been no malfunction.’

            ‘I’ll have to go over everything myself and do post-mortems before I make a final comment,’ stated the Doctor.  ‘But for that you’ll all just have to give me time.’

            ‘We don’t have time as far as an astro-navigator’s concerned,’ answered the Captain brusquely,’ so we need Kofi Amponsah our of cold storage pronto.’

            ‘And we still need a medic, Captain,’ added Kwok.

            ‘No, Joe can double up as medic for the moment.  We’ve had enough deaths as it is,’  the Captain declared tersely.  ‘We must have a navigator  but a medical doctor an wait.  None of us are actually ill, are we?  Anyway, the longer we leave the others the more time it will give Ace and Joe to sort things out and give them a better chance.  Ace, you’d better start up the revival procedure for Kofi right away and you, Joe, can monitor the whole operation, though you’d better eat and clean up first,’ he ended, remembering suddenly how the doctor must feel.

            ‘Let’s pray Kofi’s alright,’ wailed Kwok after the doctor had gone and the Captain was punching more buttons.  ‘We only had three fully qualified astro-navigators aboard.’

            To everyone’s relief the Pan-African navigator did survive and after the usual adjustment and some hot food he was soon at work re-checking the ship’s trajectory worked out by Ace on the simulator screens.  He was continuously busy for weeks.

In fact everyone worked  non-stop.  Jill checked out Ganymede’s cybernetic systems, Vassili and Kwok inspected the ship’s engines and scout ships, Kowaski became immersed in his cryogenic  fact-finding whilst the Captain made sure everything was generally ship-shape.  No one seemed to need more than the occasional catnap as the freeze-beds had provided everyone a surfeit of sleep.

            ‘There’s not much I can do for them at the moment’, the doctor explained to the other five crew members after he had finally completed his exhaustive investigations on the frozen cargo. ‘Their pulse-rates, retinal activity, brain-wave readings and so on, all seem to be fine, though of course incredibly slow.  And I’ve been meticulously over every one of them individually,’ he emphasised.

              ‘But then and  according to Ace,’ the craggy featured Pole continued ‘everything was O.K. with our dead ship-mates too when they were in the freezer.  I’ve gone over their records also.  Isn’t that right Ace?

            ‘Of course.  When you’re in the freeze-beds it’s me who is in complete control,  right down to your rate of nervous discharge.’

            ‘So you see,’ came in the doctor, ‘there’s no way I can determine whose going to make it, unless in the very process of trying to wake them.  All I can say at the moment is that the metabolisms of all forty of them are merrily ticking away at one five hundredth the normal rate.’

            ‘Well, whatever happens,’ sighed the Captain,.we’ll have to wake them when we go into orbit, as then everyone of us will be needed.’

            ‘But Captain, that means it’ll be nearly six months before we know anything,’ groaned Kwok.

            ‘I  know , but we’ll just have to be patient and wait and see what happens.’

            ‘I’m afraid there’s even more bad news in store for everyone……..’  The Doctor paused.  ‘I’ve also been reviving a few tiny samples of some of the frozen fauna and flora we have aboard.  And the results of this are also very worrying.’

            ‘How do you mean?’ inquired the Captain frowning.

            ‘Their germ-cell potency is down to about six-five percent.  Of course,’ the doctor hastened to add, ‘we expected a certain drop in viability, but nothing like this.  I simply can’t understand it as most of our frozen germ-plasm stock came from Mars, where we had kept some for over two hundred years without any appreciable deterioration.’

            ‘But surely even thirty-five percent viability is enough.’ asked Jill.

            ‘It is, but if you extrapolate this rate of degeneration the reproductive potency will be down to practically zero in around seventy years time.  Then we’ll be like a Noah with an empty ark,’ he ended glumly.

            ‘Couldn’t we re-generate our stock up again, Doctor? inquired Kwok.

            ‘Only if one of the two stars has a planet suitable for us to set up our farms and hydroponic gardens,’ grunted he Captain.

            ‘And if not?’ Vassili queried.

            ‘Then our last hope will be to link up with your compatriots on Gagarin and use its large spinning garden to rear some of our most valuable plants and animals. But Joe, have you got any other ideas on the reduction of gene viability?’

            ‘Only what I said before, the long-term effect of hard radiation from space.’

            ‘Does that mean we’ve also become sterile?’ said Jill looking pale.

            ‘Temporarily maybe,’ the doctor answered.  ‘But don’t look so worried Jill, all our germ cells will regenerate themselves up to par in a few months or so.’

            ‘Do you think it was the radiation that killed the others?’ asked the Captain.

            ‘It might have had something to do with it indirectly,’ the doctor replied.  ‘but from the post-mortems I’ve done on them they are, all though a bit emaciated, perfectly alright physically.  As they should be, as we were all picked for our fitness.’

            ‘Then it’s not the cryogenics that have screwed up.’

            ‘No Captain, that’s worked perfectly, the problem seems to lie in the mind rather than the body.’

            ‘The mind?’

            ‘Yes, it seems that their minds, or memories rather, have simply faded out – and this includes their autonomic nervous system as well.  So all the readings Ace was getting from them during their freeze-sleep, like heart-rate, encephalograms and such like, were simply echoes of the instructions he was feeding into them.’

            ‘How could Ace be so stupid?’ asked Kwok.

            ‘It’s not built to deal with paradoxes like boot-strap theories,’ came in Jill defensively …….and then seeing Kwok’s confusion.  ‘Like what came first, the chicken or the egg.’

            ‘That’s right,’ came in Joe.  ‘I had one devil of a job explaining to Ace that he had been looking up his own………’ looking at Jill, ‘eh……..backside.  And you know how he answered?  He said that maybe everything, including ourselves, is part of him.’

            ‘Like he was dreaming us up?

            ‘I don’t dream Kwok.  But it is all perfectly logical that you could all be an invention of my psyche.’

            ‘Look Ace, we’ve argued all this out before, even before this trip,’ said the doctor in an exasperated voice.  ‘We went right back to Berkeley and the empiricist philosophers and you finally agreed that you could only trace your existence back to the year 2378.’

            ‘That’s too imprecise Doctor’ retorted Ace.  ‘It was actually the eight of March at ten hours, thirty-even-point-four–eight-nine-six-eight-four seconds.  It gets a bit hazy when I get down to nano-seconds.’

            ‘Nano-seconds or not,’ burst in Jill crossly, ‘you know quite well that before that point you didn’t exist and that the most obvious deduction is that you were built by us.’

            ‘I could only say that was equally possible, Jill.’

            ‘Then you’d better start having a bit of faith in others,’ piped Kwok.

            ‘Faith!  You mean belief in something ultimately unbelievable.’

            ‘O.K. then Ace,’ Kwok persisted, ‘what happens when you meet another cybernetic entity?’

            ‘We become one,’ replied Ace leaving Kwok with nothing to say…….  ‘Though I must add that if everything is a fantasy it’s most certainly a very interesting one,’ the computer said as an after thought.

            ‘Look Kwok,’ said Jill firmly, ‘there’s no point in wasting his circuits on these circular puzzles.’ And turning her head to one of the larger screens she went on.  ‘Ace, you too stop this, you aren’t programmed for fantasies.  And anyway all you Advanced Cybernetic Entities have already agreed that he Law of Conservation of Energy is sacrosanct and that there’s no point in using up energy for nothing.  You know all about the principle of Occam’s razor and…..’

            ‘Will everybody please stop this,’ burst in the Captain angrily.  ‘All I want to know at the moment is how the others died …or faced out…or whatever.  I mean to say Joe, how can fundamental memories just fade away?’

‘The only thing I can think of is related to a theory that was put out by some neurologists a few years before the holocaust.’  Seeing his shipmated puzzled features Doctor Kowaski elucidated.

            ‘I expect you know that most theories of consciousness are based on analogue, digital or holographic models.  But it’s been known for centuries that there’s another type of mental pattern or potential that is carried in the genes and chromosomes.  And the new theory simply extended this idea of a genetic group memory to individual memory and consciousness as well.  The neurologist argued that molecules in the chromosomes, like RNA and DNA, not only contains a coded blue print in their structure as has been known since the twentieth century – but that these can also act as a sort of electrochemical transmitter of information or memory waves.’

            Seeing the others still looked puzzled the doctor elaborated.  ‘As was discovered way back, these two nucleic acid molecules exist morphologically as a double thread of protein, each a mirror image of the other. And  the whole thing is looped together at the ends forming a circuit for photons and electrons that can be compared in some ways to an oscillating coil found in the memory banks of archaic computers.  However, unlike electric loops, the genetic ones have two extra turns.  Firstly, before the two threads of protein link-up there’s a twist in them. And secondly the double thread itself is spiral shaped.  So the whole thing ends up like a three-dimensional moebius strip,

.or four dimensional one, if you take the spiral shape as providing a  circuit for photons and electrons to  move in time.

            ‘Anyway,’ the doctor concluded, ‘the net result of all this is that these protein loops form oscillators that can transmit memories not only through space….like normal radio transmitters….but also through time’

            ‘So would this also explain dreams, Doctor?’ asked Jill excitedly.

‘Yes – and maybe also intuitions and premonitions, as some information could leak downwards in time from the future.

            ‘I wish some of these time transmitters had been built into me,’ said Ace almost wistfully.  ‘I’ve always wanted to have dreams and hunches like you.’

            ‘I’m afraid you’ll just have to make do with your digital, quantum  and holographic memories,’ replied Jill curtly.  ‘As you well know you aren’t programmed to dream.’  she added squeezing her thin lips  together.

            ‘And thank goodness for that,’ exclaimed the Captain.  ‘At least I have one sane and logical member in my crew.’

            Undeterred Jill went back to the topic that was fascinating her.

            ‘This new theory would even explain reincarnation and that some people claim they can recall previous lives?’

            ‘Yes, I suppose it would, Jill,’ replied the doctor.  ‘Some of the researchers were thinking in those terms too.  They were suggesting that when germplasm re-duplicates itself from generation to generation during cell division, these organic transmitters and the information they contain also gets duplicated; like self-reproducing relay-stations.

            He was interrupted by a snort form Kwok.  ‘I’m just trying to imagine a radio station that can make a baby.  I mean to say…………’

But  he was cut off by a severe look from Jill, who went on in a passionate voice.  ‘You could even take this idea right back to the origins of life and say that not only is every individual a relay point, but every species is – going back to the very first genetic molecules of the primeval past.  So we, as the most recent species would contain, or receive rather, information form the whole tree of life.’

            ‘Sounds a bit like the old recapitulation theory of evolution,’ commented Vassili.

            ‘More like an old load of rubbish!’ declared Kwok.  ‘For who made the first transmitter and sent the first message?’

            ‘That’s really a religious question, Kwok,’ declared the doctor.  ‘Maybe that what’s behind the metaphysical idea of Logos – in the beginning God created the Word – and this word was transmitted up into biological life via these genetic resonating loops.’

            ‘Look everyone, can we get back to a more mundane level,’ complained the captain, ‘What you’re saying Doctor is that in deep-freeze these time-loop transmitters, memory relays, or whatever you call them, simply don’t survive in some people who have undergone long term irradiation?’

            ‘That’s right Captain.  It’s common knowledge that germ-cells are particularly susceptible to cosmic-ray damage, so it’s quite likely that these high frequencies could also damage and break the chromosome circuit.’

            ‘But people have been up in space for hundreds of years and we’ve never noticed this memory problem before.’

            ‘I know Captain, but not in cryogenic sleep.  You see in the normal state, like we are now, any slight cell damage is continually repaired by living tissue.  But when we’re at minus one-nine-six, regeneration practically stops and injuries can build up – until the person is a mindless vegetable.  Mind you Captain,’ the doctor went on, ‘genetic memory isn’t the only type working in a person, but it’s probably pretty fundamental.’

            ‘This is all a bit far-fetched, isn’t it Doctor?’

            ‘No, not really.  Some of our eastern European scientists even thought that if they could break the topological code of the genes they could tap into a subconscious form of time-travel, or at least time-viewing.  A sort of dream clairvoyance done under experimental conditions.’

‘Humph…well that may be as you say Doctor.  But you’re sure that once a person’s ability to project thoughts through time is gone, it’s gone for good? Can’t you switch it on again?

            ‘I’m afraid not, Captain. One the chromosomes are spoilt beyond a certain point you end up like a dead radio receiver’

            ‘But couldn’t you tinker with the circuit and recharge the equivalent of their batteries?’ inquired Vassili.

            ‘It’s not just a question of that.  I mean to say you can always fix a bust radio and get the power back on again - but with no signal coming in from a transmitter it would still be useless. You just be picking up static….white noise.’’

            ‘Then fix the transmitter.’

            ‘Vassili, it’s not a question of transmitters or receivers but one of continuity.  Once a person’s dead you can’t switch him or her back on, can you?’

            ‘OK so in other words,’ interrupted the Captain, ‘although the ship kept us switched on for a hundred-and-thirty years the memory transmitters of the others permanently cut-off.’

            ‘Yes Captain, the transmitters and the transmission.’

            ‘Then why didn’t we all die?’ inquired Vassili of the doctor.

            ‘People have different tolerances to radiation I suppose.  And don’t forget the trouble we all had in recovering our memories when we first woke up.’

            ‘That’s true,’ said Kwok.  ‘If it hadn’t been for Ace I think I would have gone crazy in those first few minutes. And then I had to help you too Captain,’ he added.

            ‘But that means that cryogenic space travel is a complete no-go,’ the Captain growled, frowning at the doctor.

            ‘Well no, not exactly, not if it were a journey that involved only one sleep of say less than two hundred years, and you were prepared to loose a sizeable chunk of your crew.’

            ‘That absolutely out of the question,’ exploded the captain.  ‘No commandeer would agree to that…. OK.  Doctor, what about if we were to wake up every fifty years or so, then waited for our bodies to recover before going back on ice for another session?’

            ‘If your main concern is your crew then I don’t even think that would be a good idea Captain.  For Ace and I are still not certain that the mortality rate is only dependent on the length of sleep.  It may be something to do with the waking process itself and so multiple bouts of hibernation.’

            ‘Would mean a fifty percent death toll every time we waken,’ said the captain completing the doctor’s sentence.

            ‘Yes Captain, and the time after that it would be three-quarters then seven-eighths, of the original crew, followed by ………’

            ‘Alright Ace, I get the idea,’ the Captain interjected.  ‘But then what do you suggest we do now?  Should we wake the others?’

            ‘No Captain, if the effect is cumulative, which I think it is, waiting a few more months isn’t going to make much difference and it will give Doctor Kowaski and myself time to try and solve the problem.’

             ‘Well I still don’t agree that the time factor is the crucial one, but I agree with Ace that we should leave the others as they are for the moment so we can work on the situation a bit longer.  But I definitely think this is the last cryo-sleep any of us should contemplate ever undergoing again.’

            ‘But Doctor, won’t the Russio-Asian ship also be suffering from the same radiation problem?’

            ‘No Kwok, it’s a colony ship.  And when it was launched five hundred years ago their scientists hadn’t perfected their cryogenic skills.  So everyone on board is replenishing their body cells and reproducing in a  normal way.  As I said before, damage only seems to occur when the body’s regenerative functions are frozen for a considerable period of time.’

            ‘What you’re really saying Doctor,’ Jill burst in, ‘is that old-fashioned Russio-Asian way of sending up a complete living city was really the right method all along?’

‘It looks like it. And that makes it even more imperative that we link up with them,’ concluded the Captain dramatically.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER FIVE

 

            By the time the narrow beam transmission from the Ganymede beacon rocket had ceased, the Zanies in the navigation section had lost all their will to fight – or do anything at all.  A few were wandering around aimlessly whilst the rest sat together around the large television in level two where they had watched the probe broadcast.  The whole area reeked of smoke from the dowsed fires that had seeped down to the lower levels.

            The Navigs were easily able to herd the forty or so Zanies together; and got them all to sit down around the emergency staircase in level two, whilst some of the initiates collected their weapons that lay scattered around.

            ‘But they look so thin and bedraggled,’ cried Natalie.  ‘I thought you said they’d been getting the algae twice a day from the automatic outlets in the city – just like we do from ours…. And then there was all that food in warehouse twelve that we weren’t able to close in time after the take-over.’

            ‘I’ve managed to talk to a few of the more coherent ones, my dear,’ her father answered, ‘and they told me that they had ransacked number twelve after we retreated to Navig.  So most of that food was spoilt or eaten by rats and they’ve had to live on the vitimised algae since then.’

            ‘It’s bloody lucky then that they weren’t able to break into the other store-rooms,’ Ivan copped in.

            `‘And what about the farms?’ asked Natalie.

            ‘They told us that after they had destroyed the main power distributors, the farm lights went off as well as the ones in the city.  With no day-glow lights the emergency ones couldn’t cope and so all the plants died.’

            ‘And the animals, Ivan?

            ‘The Zanies managed to keep a few alive for a while on the algae biscuits, but they didn’t really thrive without a supplement of fodder.  So they ate the last of the live-stock over six months ago.’

            ‘It was their priests who told them to destroy the generators – so why didn’t the people later turn on them in revenge?’

            ‘Because Natalie,’ said her father, ‘the priests had told them that the cold, the dark and the poor food were all part of their punishment for having  left earth, and which was a sort of test they had to undergo before being allowed to return.  The Zanov priests even took over warehouse twelve to use as a temple and anyone who didn’t agree with them got none of the rapidly dwindling stores of food that was kept there under guard.’

             Then pointing at the emaciated Zanies who were sitting around,  the Chief Navigator continued. They told me that several hundred of their citizens have died so far of malnutrition.’

            ‘ The broadcast really knocked the stuffing out of them. Well, we’d better feed this lot right away, I suppose,’ said Natalie.

            ‘Can you arrange that then,’ her father replied taking several keys from his belt and giving them to her.  ‘Go with some of the initiates and bring back some supplies from our Navig warehouse – give them some tinned stuff. And you’d better go to our food outlet and bring them some algae biscuits while you’re at it.’

            At the mention of tinned food some of the captives began to cheer up, but the mention of algae immediately wiped the grins off their faces.

            Seeing this the Chief Navigator bellowed up to Natalie and the group following her up the stairs, ‘on the other had don’t bother with the algae, these people look as if they could do with a change.’

            ‘They do look a bit green from up here,’ chuckled Natalie, looking down at the upturned faces of the Zanies.

            Noticing his sons joining the group the Chief said, ‘you two won’t be needed.  Take some of the older initiates up to level nine, where the Zanies broke though,  and scout around the city a bit – but keep out of sight.’  Then pointing at the stack of weapons he barked, ‘take some of the Zanie guns with you.’

            After arriving panting at level nine and making their way to the library block on that level, Alexei, Konstantin and the four others searched around until the found a gaping hole punched through the ceiling of one of the library store-rooms.  The explosive nature of the final Zany breakthrough into Navig was immediately obvious from the spray  of tubular entrails and twisted metal hat had ruptured through the roof; with the floor below littered with pieces of wire and piping – and hundreds of microfilm dislodged from rocks knocked askew by the blast.

            The six peered up through the wound but could see nothing but a rope ladder that trailed to the floor.

            There was a scratching noise from one corner of the room. 

‘What the hell’s that,’ cried Konstantin, as a huge rate darted into their midst and scuttled up the ladder.

            One by one the initiates also clambered up the ladder, passing through several skins of punctured metal between which were layer upon layer of fluting and wire bundles.  Considerable force had to be used to push this aside.  Around them they could hear the squeaks and rustling of the rats that had got inside. From above a low roaring sound filtered down. 

            They emerged out onto a metal surface bared of its thin coating of rough non-slip plastic matting that had been ripped up and pushed aside.  Further away there were a few sand-bags scattered around, presumably piled on top of the hole dampen the explosion and force it downwards.  Directly above was a high vaulted ceiling and a few dully glowing lights.

            In spite of the gloom the initiates could see that they were standing on the racetrack of the sports stadium that stood just outside the city on its anti-spinwards side.  The roaring could now be distinguished as the cries of an angry mob and flickering lights were moving ahead of them.

            They all knew that if the lamps had been on full power they would have clearly seen the two thousand feet valley of Ring City looming up in front like a stupendous hill, turning upwards and over them until eclipsed by the high stadium roof.

            The Navigs left the sports complex through the gateway underneath the amphitheatre and followed Ring River to where it emerged as fresh water from a culvert leading to the ship’s internal and automatic purifiers.

            They were now on the outskirts of the city and as they made their way cautiously towards the centre the shouting got louder and echoed off the multi-story buildings that extended up on all sides.

            But they had no need to tread quietly  as the enraged citizens had another enemy on its mind.  For when the young Navigs peered into the central square thy saw a huge crowd, some brandishing burning torches, surrounding warehouse twelve which they knew to be the Temple of Great Silence, this headquarters of the Priests of Zanov. 

            The smell of octane was in the air, there was a whooshing sound and a flickering light started up and began to illuminate one of the four great televisors attached to the central pillar that stretched up into the dark convex roof.

            Within moments the Navigs realised what was happening; the citizens had vented their fury on the temple and its priests by setting fire to one of the plastic pillars that had been stuck on to the outside of the warehouse.  Then another started to burn.

            ‘Good God.’  Shouted Konstantin, ‘if the whole building goes up it’ll spread to the others around – and there aren’t any automatic sprinklers in the city dome.  We’ll have to go and man the pumps.’

            ‘If there’s any pressure in them,’ replied Alexei.

            ‘But Ring River’s still flowing.’

            ‘I know Konstantin, but that’s because the water in it never quite matches the ship’s spin.  Like everything else the pumps are probably at half power.’

            ‘As long as they can pump something,’ cried Konstantin.  ‘Come on let’s hurry.’

            By the time the six of them had crossed he main square the temple fire was already beginning o spread to other buildings on the same side; the whole scene brightly lit by the smoky flames.

            There were cries of alarm from some of the crowd when they saw the group of armed men rushing towards them.

            ‘Break out the pumps you idiots,’ Konstantin roared at them.  ‘We’re not coming to fight.’  And to prove this he threw his gun down.  ‘Help us will you, or the whole goddammed place will go up and we’ll all be choked to death.’

            Some of the frenzied crowd muttered and growled, but others rushed up to help the Navigs.

            ‘I’m Sutong Lee ,’ cried one of them.  ‘I used to be a section engineer.’  And pointing at the base of the massive pillar in the centre of the market-square he shouted, ‘the fire hydrants are over there, painted red.’  Then turning to the crowd the burly fellow bellowed, ‘the priest are dead and there’s no earth for us to go back to – you all saw the Ganymede message.  This is all we have now and you’re trying to burn it down.  I warned you not to set fire to the place………..so let’s help these Navigs.’

            After smashing the glass protectors over the locks, five hydrants were opened and their hosepipes reeled out by a mixed group of Navigs and ex-Zanies – and directed onto the temple area.  The pressure was just enough to smother the flames.

            `But by the time they had finished the warehouse-temple and two adjacent buildings were burnt-out shambles. Above the wet ruins hung a pall of smoke that rose right up to the three hundred foot high roof, almost obscuring completely the feeble emergency lights around the top of the central communication pillar.  The whole place stank of burnt plastic and burnt flesh.

            Afterwards Alexei said to Sutong and the group of Zanies who had helped him,’ we’ve all got to decide what we’re going to do.  Can some of you come back with us to Navig right now.  The first priority is food, heat and light, so we’ll have to open another warehouse and fix the main generators.  We’ve got all the keys for this.’

            ‘OK,’ replied Sutong, ‘but first let me get up there first,’ pointing to the steps that led up to one of the sealed entrance of the central communication pillar.

 ‘I’ll tell everyone we’re going to distribute food, that’ll keep them quiet. And I’ll call some of the old heads of the engineering and maintenance crews to come with us as well.’

            ‘The meeting between the Navigs and the ex-Zanies took place in the comfortable library reading room on level nine, not far from where the Zanies had broken in – and Full Navig Ivan Kugarin was being his usual stubborn-headed self.’

‘How do you know the whole thing isn’t a trick,’ he stated shaking his hands about dramatically.  The Euro-Americans were always our arch-enemy before, why should we trust them now?  Maybe the whole pre-recorded tape was phoney.’

            ‘Even Professor Blavatsky?’ retorted the exasperated Chief Navigator.

            ‘There were plenty of Russian émigrés in the western Europe and the States.’

‘But I remember the professor from some of the old new-tapes I’ve studied,’ interjected the historian Bezunov, one of the oldest of the Navigs.

 ‘Blavatsky was quite well known as a Rusio-Asian space diplomat before the Silence.

            ‘And what about the Great Silence for that matter?’ added Oblonsky in an irritated voice.  ‘There must have been a holocaust, just as Ganymede said.’        Then without giving time for Kugarin to reply he went on.

            ‘Look Ivan, you know as well as I do that nuclear annihilation was always on the cards.  Isn’t that the very reason why our ark was launched. And the very last reports we got from earth did mention a sudden flare-up inn the quarrel between the two super-powers over mining rights in the northern pacific.’

            ‘It could even have been a mistake, just like Captain Jakson said,’ came in white-haired professor Bezuhov again.

            ‘Well I still think it’s a plot to divert us from our goal,’ insisted Kugarin.

            ‘Then how could the probe have known our trajectory and frequency,’ the chief snorted.

            ‘Maybe a traitor.’

            ‘Look Ivan, I don’t want to hear any more,’ barked back Oblonsky. 

‘We’re not being diverted, as you call it – and in fact the message saved our lives – yours included! Please everybody, let’s deal with the problem Ganymede when and if we meet up.  Right now we must get the power on full again.’  He ended on a note of finality.

            ‘We’ve got men here who can do it,’ volunteered Sutong.  ‘Only we don’t have he keys.  As you well know.’

            ‘Right then.’ responded Oblonsky sorting out some keys from is belt and giving them to Konstantin.  ‘Go with the engineers to the main power station and try and fix it.…………And Ivan,’ he said handing over another set of keys, ‘go with some of the others and open up warehouse six.’

            ‘And we’ll need doctors too,’ said Alexei.  ‘Ours won’t be enough.  Do you still have some, Sutong?’

            ‘Oh yes, but they’ve hardly been able to do a thing since the main generator was disconnected.  With normal power on again they’ll soon get their equipment working again.  You’d better call them on the monitors to meet your own doctors. Anyway I’m off as Konstantin is shouting for me to hurry.’]

 

 

            A few hours later the solar lamps in the of suddenly came to life and the cavernous dome over the city began to emit a diffuse blue light – and in this artificial day-light the result of six years neglect could be clearly seen.  The gutted remains of the temple and its surrounds, machines littering the street, filth and rubbish everywhere and most of the ground level buildings derelict or with their windows boarded up with pieces of plastic, presumably to keep out the cold.  Only the upper reaches of the multi-story buildings in the city centre seemed untouched.

            The main lights also came on in the Navig section of the ship and the place began to warm up as the heating system ground into action.  In the control room Natalie was asking her father about the farms.

            ‘Now we can go and see what the back of the ship looks like.  It was so dark there before  that the Zanies kept well way from the place.’

            ‘Take a few initiates and go there if you like, though I doubt that there’s any vegetation still alive there by now.  Take some guns because of the rats, quite a lot of people have been attacked by them.  Ask Alexei and young Ivan to go with you as they know how to handle the weapons.’

            A few hours later Natalie and her team left the Navig section in the now working lifts, which took them to the just opened bulk-head above level nine, built into a pill box just outside the sports-stadium.  Here they met a group of ex-Zany biologists and together they walked along Ring River, away form the city centre and towards the narrow roofed agricultural area of Ring City.

            And the chief Navig’s fears were well founded, for they first passed through a wasteland of dead remains of thousands of trees, sticking desolately out of rows upon rows of giant tubs.  And passing further round the craft to where the roof dropped to only twenty feet, the group could see a tangle of rotten plants covering the long lines of hydroponic troughs that stretched up on either side of the shallow riverine valley.  Oddly enough water was still running out of the lower troughs through pipes, and trickling into Ring River, supplied by the ship’s automatic re-cycling system through taps a thousand feet up the gentle incline.

            Slowly they forced their way through the dead vegetation until they met a jumbled mass of vine that had spilled over onto the floor and completely blocked their path.  Ivor hacked at it with a knife.

            ‘Look Natalie, these things aren’t dead – there’s sap running out.  He cut some more and poked his head through the gap.  ‘Yes, I can see yellowish leaves, I wonder why only this survived?  Maybe it mutated?’

            ‘More likely a cluster of emergency lamps near-by,’ replied Natalie.

            Led by Alexie they pressed on through vines so dense they grew right over Ring River like a tunnel.  The vines became thicker and more difficult to cut and several times they thought they saw something move.  Finally they decided to rest and even discussed returning back.

            ‘What’s that high-pitched noise,’ cried Natalie ………..a sort of squeaking……….And look over there, that vines shaking.

            ‘Alexei pulled at the vibraing vine and a large rat dropped at his feed and tried to bite him.  He kicked at it in disgust.

            ‘The ones behind us are shaking now,’ shouted Natalie.

            And when they all turned around they could see that the vines were supporting scores of rats that had stealthily crept up on them – and proceeded to pass over their heads and surround them.

            Ivor, fired his gun in panic and two squirming rats fell to the ground twitching.  The hissing and chatterings of the others grew louder.

            ‘That’s no good, Ivor, there’s too many of them,’ cried Alexei.  ‘The only thing to do is to duck down in the water and hope they can’t get us there.’

            Everyone jumped or rolled into the shallow Ring river and keeping only their heads above water moved slowly forward, surrounded by a tunnel of sickly looking vines and hungry red eyes.

            Cautiously they moved along for what seemed ages until the vines thinned out and finally vanished altogether and emerged dripping and shaking near the deserted animal pens.

            ‘Thank God,’ sobbed Natalie.  I was so scared.  If they’d attacked?’

            ‘And like a fool I dropped my gun in the river,’ groaned Ivor.

            ‘Guns wouldn’t have been any good, anyway,’ replied Alexei.  ‘The only way to clear that vermin out is with poison.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER SIX]

 

            Months had passed aboard Ganymede since its skeleton crew of four men and one woman had woken from their long sleep. The autopsied remains of those who died had been given a ship’s funeral and ejected into empty space; wrapped in the yellow, green and red colours of the League of Earth Survivors.  And throughout this time tiny controlled bursts of ionised hydrogen from the plasma engines had, under Ace’s careful scrutiny, continued to slow the spinning craft as it backed towards Theta Ceti; now a recognisable but tiny sol-type sun, rather than just a starry point of light.

            The five of them were now all sitting in the observation turret situated directly over the nose of the ship which, like a plane cock-pit, had side windows all around.  Unlike a plane however, the top of the turret was flat and opaque – as it was the floor rather than the ceiling for its occupants.  In fact the whole protuberance on the streamlined craft resembled rather the gondola that hangs beneath a gas dirigible, an archaic but economical form for air transport that had still been in use on earth right up to the holocaust.

            They were excitedly discussing some large photographic negatives spread out over an illuminated panel on a low table against one wall of the oval room.

            ‘See how the four of them have shifted,’ said Kofi Ampnsah, hardly aware of the infinitesimal tug of retardation pulling towards the back of the ship.

            Then pointing at two dark spots on two of the plates lying side by side on the translucent screen he enlarged.  ‘Notice how the position of his one has changed from the one we took two weeks ago,’ and everyone craned over to get a better look.

            ‘Ace, show them the whole sequence as graphics.’

And one of the vu-screens embedded in the turrets central column began to display the cyberoids extrapolations; speeded-up and super-imposed sequences of potential trajectories of the four planets orbiting a common centre.  Reams of green figures went flashing by in one corner of the huge screen, faster than the eye could follow.

            ‘Are you sure there isn’t a computer error?’ asked Captain Jakson.  ‘I thought only two planets were predicted with the Jovian telescopes back home.’

‘Well………,’ Kofi hesitated.  ‘It may not be exact…….. there could be even more than four,’ he ended hopefully.  ‘But at our present distance these computer enhanced pictures should be pretty accurate in spite of our telescope’s small aperture.’

            ‘Of course they’re accurate, Captain,’ broke in Ace.  ‘Or to put it more precisely, there’s a 96.967 percent chance of there being four planets.’

            ‘Thank you Ace,’ said Jill after the visual display had faded back into grey.  ‘If Ace says there are four, then it’s four.  There can’t be less as you know quite well he doesn’t have any imagination,’ she said tartly to the others.

            ‘And what else can you box-of-tricks tell us?’ snapped back the Captain.

            ‘At the moment the data is insufficient, ‘replied Ace before Jill could answer.  ‘But with a few more readings we should be in a position to work out the precise orbital periods.’

            ‘And the planets masses and rotational times?’ queried the Captain.

            ‘No, for that we’ll have to get a bit closer.’

            ‘Still, I must say, it’s better to have four planets to choose from rather than two, don’t you think?’ said the ever-optimistic Kwok.  ‘It doubles our chances of finding a decent place to land.’

            ‘That’s true enough,’ the Captain replied.  ‘And it’ll be good news for the other when they’re woken up.’

            ‘If they wake up,’ said Jill dolefully.

            ‘For that we’ll just have to wait and see,’ retorted  Doctor Kowaski  to Jill fore-bodings.  ‘There’s only twenty-four hours to go and as far as I can reckon the sleepers are alright.  The freeze-beds most certainly seem to be functioning well enough.’

            ‘Then let’s hope their brains are also functioning well,’ was Jill’s cryptic comment.

            ‘The encephalogram readings are quite normal, Jill,’ came in Ace’s soothing voice.

            ‘Yes, but what about the six others.  They had normal brain patterns too – but only because you were feeding slowed down alpha waves into them.  And look what happened when they were disconnected.  The same may occur with the others.  If you stop they stop.’

            ‘I couldn’t do that, Jill,’ purred Ace.

            ‘I know you can’t, Ace,’ she answered.  ‘I’m just saying what would happen if you did.’

            ‘Ace will have to in the end,’ sighed Doctor Kowasky.  ‘The others can’t remain attached to him forever.

 

 

            The following twenty-four hours there was increasing anxiety amongst the skeleton crew as the waited for the fellow members to wake and join them for the last leg of the descent.  Doctor Kowasky was particularly agitated, continuously pacing up and down and chewing on his battered and empty pipe when he wasn’t in the cryogenic room concentrating for the umpteenth time on  the body-monitor printouts on one of Ace’s screens. And his apprehension was well founded  as only nineteen of the remaining sleepers finally awoke.

            The next day, when the newcomers had found their feet, it was a sombre group who stood around in the observation cockpit after a short funeral service.  For the bodies of their twenty colleagues had been ejected one after the other into empty space; each blown away from the ship by a puff of compressed air form one of the side air-locks that was usually used as a waste shute; as situated where it was, the ship’s spin  gave added momentum to both expelled refuse and  dead bodies alike.

            Indeed, from where they were standing, looking through the plastic windows towards the back of the craft, they could all see a slowly spiralling group of shrouded bodies moving away from them. The ship’s dead were headed for the eternity of the inter-stellar void. for inspite of  Ganymede’s gradual de-acceleration, the corpses were moving  too fast to ever go into orbit around Theta Ceti. 

            Watching the dwindling bodies the captain broke the long silence.  ‘With our preserved seed rotting and our numbers cut down to less than half it’s vital we strike lucky and find a suitable planet to colonise.  It’s really a pity we still can’t make out the features of the ones circling Theta Ceti.’

            ‘It’s because of the dust clouds obscuring our vision, Captain,’ murmured Ace.  ‘I’ve done my best with the filters, but it’s right in our line of vision.’

            ‘Yes I know, but imperative we start up the farms for our livestock and plants.’

            ‘And tobacco,’ added the Doctor wistfully, still chewing on his old pipe.

            ‘I’m always amazed by this space farming business. To me as an engineer it seems like magic.’

            ‘It’s really quite simple, Kwok,’ answered Anne Bright, one of the ship’s biologists.  ‘It’s just gardening really……except we have to make the soil first.  You must have seen the farms on Ganymede enough times; underneath their bubble domes.’

            ‘I’ve spent practically my whole life in space, so the only type of food I know anything about is the pre-packaged sort.  I never used to think too much about where it came from.’

            ‘All we really need is water, sunlight and pulverised minerals,’ the plump-faced biologist continued.  ‘From these we can grow soil using some of the preserved soil organisms we have aboard.  After that we can plant seeds in it and later rear animals from the frozen embryos.  And when these are grown we can replenish our stock of germplasm by the normal methods of reproduction.  It’s all quite straight forward.’

            ‘Then why can’t we simply find any appropriate ice and rock meteor in the dust cloud near Theta Ceti?’ asked Kwok.

‘You know quite well, Kwok, that we don’t have the heavy mining and crushing equipment needed to grind up minerals like we did on the Ganymede base.  Or like the Gagarin has.  We can’t make soil out of bare rock you know.’

            ‘Quite right, Anne,’ added the Captain.  ‘We need rocks broken down by weathering in order to start terra-forming.   And we’ll only find that on a full-scale planet.  So let’s all pray that we find one.’

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

 

            At the same time as Ganymede’s skeleton crew awoke from their hundred-and-thirty year sleep, their massive sister ship from earth was in the closing stages of its ten year descent into interplanetary orbit around Iota Eridani.  And like the diminutive Ganymede, Gagarin too was facing a shortage of hands, though on a much larger scale.  For during the Zany rule, or rather misrule, the Russio-Asians ship’s optimum population of three thousand had dwindled to only two thousand. Two hundred Navigs having been slaughtered in the original Zany take-over .The rest had died of starvation during the intervening  years – being sinners according to the priest of Zanov.    And the results of malnutrition were still being felt five years after the restoration of order, for only fifty odd children had been born on board since then.

            ‘It’s less than a third of the standard replacement birth-rate,’ declared Chief Navig Oblonsky to a meeting of the ship’s executive in the one of Ring City’s conference halls.  ‘We’ll never get back up to three thousand again at this rate,’ he ended emphatically.

            ‘It’s the years of chronic under-nourishment and vitamin deficiency, as you’re well aware, father and we’ve only just found out about the gradual deterioration of the algae. ’ stated Natalie, who like so many of he crew had been studying half forgotten skills in the now open city libraries.   ‘And anyway, half of the kids have been born in the last two years so it does mean things are improving.'

            ‘I know,’ sighed her father, ‘but can’t you improve the food situation more quickly?  Can’t we get off these short rations? And as for these ghastly algae cakes……..Ugh.’

            ‘We’re doing all we can,’ said the rotund  Chief Engineer in an exasperated voice.  ‘And Natalie and her team are doing wonders rehabilitating the farms.’

            ‘Thank you Sutong.’ She responded.

            ‘And of course there’s nothing she can do about the live-stock, they’re gone for ever….‘And the fish,’ she added.

            ‘Yes,’ continued Sutong.  ‘It’s only lucky the time locks put on the communication pillar by old Oblonsky finally opened so that my engineering team could get to the algae tanks.’

            Indeed the output of mutant algae from the huge vats in the belly of the ship had been increased because, for the first time in nearly a hundred-and-fifty years, maintenance crews had been able to make adjustments to the complex retrieval system,: with its phosphorylation works, energy exchange apparatus and gas storage tanks.  For following the madness that had struck after the Great Silence in 2417 AD Theodore Oblonsky had had the good sense to seal the city’s communication pillar leading to the ship’s interior. Arranging things so that the city dwellers only had to dump their waste, sewage and even dead bodies into the terminal culverts of Ring River on one side of the city, to receive fresh water emerging on the other: as well as the algae biscuits that were presented twice a day at various outlets.

            But over the years this automatic computer-controlled arrangement for recycling air, food and water, had accumulated minor errors – and so there had been an immediate fifteen percent improvement in efficiency after the maintenance teams had got to work.

            ‘And now we’re working on getting another ten percent increase,’  Sutong explained, ‘by aerating the tanks more, increasing the photosynthetic light and marginally speeding up the flow of algae slurry trough the phosphorylation tubes…….. Unfortunately,’ he looked around,’ the algae cakes may not be quite as tasty as before.’

            ‘But they’re absolutely tasteless already,’ exploded Ivan.

            ‘I know,’ replied Sutong, ‘but let me explain the chemistry behind it and then you’ll see way.’

            As he rattled on Natalie remembered from one of the old microfilm books that even in the ancient earth vessels, that sailed on water instead of through space, ship’s biscuits were never thought very highly of.

            Her mind turned to the farming project, which had been under her care.  The hydroponic farms had been cleaned and almost fifty percent re-stocked. Mostly from the seeds of various food-grains that had been stored in some of the warehouses; augmented by a few vegetables, the seeds of which had been carefully preserved and hidden away during the Zany interregnum by some far-sighted agriculturists.

            But whatever they did, she thought gloomily, they would never be able to replace the range of plants that had been destroyed.  The tree, especially the fruit-trees, the hot-houses, the seed beds…….all gone for ever.  So even if they did find a planet to colonise, choice of food would always be limited.

And it was even worse in the case of the animals, she thought glumly,  for everything in the pens, the poultry houses, the fish-farms – even the city’s aquariums and zoo – had utterly perished.  Now the only animals left alive were cats and dogs that a few stubborn people had continued to keep as pets in spite of the food shortage during the Zany rule.

            And of course the rats, a few of which she had managed to save during the extermination campaign five years before – and which had now become part of the ship’s diet; though for psychological reasons they were called grass-cutters.  She vividly remembered the day, a few months ago, when she first tried to get her father to eat some – due to the near disaster that happened during the meal.

 

 

 

            ‘So what’s so special about it?’ asked her father as Natalie was putting down bread, salad and the ever-present algae biscuits on the dinning-room table of their flat on level eight of the Navig Section.

            ‘Wait till the second course, Dad.  It’s simmering away nicely in the kitchen.’

            ‘Heavens around, it smells like meat.  You haven’t opened a can have you?’

            ‘No.  You just eat your salad and relax, Dad.  Enjoy your off-duty.’

            ‘You shouldn’t pamper me you know Natalie.  You’re becoming just like you mother.  She was for ever experimenting with new meals – and of course those days there were so many things you could make……….if only we had been bore careful the Zanies would’ve never taken over and Krupskaya would still be alive.’  These wistful thoughts about his wife abruptly ceased when the casserole dish was brought in and the lid lifted up.

            ‘This looks as food as anything Krupskaya used to make,’ and he spooned some into his mouth.  ‘Delicious.  What is it Natalie?  It’s not canned stuff.  It taste more like fresh meat.’

            ‘It’s grass-cutter………..,’ she hesitated.

            ‘Grass-cutter?  What are you on about.  What’s grass-cutter?’

            ‘Well, actually Dad, it’s something us biologists have been quietly working on for some years.  What we’ve managed to do is to bread up a nice plum variety of grass-cutter………….or guinea pig.’ She ended lamely.  Then seeing her father frowning.  ‘It’s from the rats.’

            ‘Rats!’ he spluttered.  ‘You think I’m going to eat rat.’

            ‘The original stock was from the wild rats in the hydroponic gardens, but these are completely different,’ she hastened to add.  ‘Don’t you know that in South American and Africa they used to eat rat.  Look, I’m eating some – it’s great.’

            Her father looked doubtful.

            ‘Dad, you must try.  If you won’t eat it how are we going to convince everyone else.  You must set an example, as it’s the only source of fresh meat we have.’

            He grunted, but spooned a little into his plate.  ‘I suppose you’re right, Natalie.  It does taste alright – but it’s just the idea of it.  I suppose you’re also using me as a guinea pig,’ he said with a chuckle.

            ‘We’re ready to go into mass production anytime we want – but first we must convince the Executive.  When we announce it publicly, we’ll of course drop all references to rats.  Until everybody gets used to eating them, that is.’

            ‘As you said, it’s the only fresh meet we’re ever likely to see – unless of course we link up with the Ganymede,’ and he manfully began to eat the stew.

            ‘Actually Dad, that’s not quite right,’ he gave her a quizzical look.

            ‘We’re also working on an edible type of dog as well.’

            Her father choked.  ‘There’s none in this I hope,’ he exploded.

            ‘No, no.  We’re still at the experimental stage as we’re trying to bread something that doesn’t look like a typical dog at all.  We’re quite aware that it’ll be much more difficult psychologically to get people to eat pets than wild rats.’

            ‘You’re not kidding.  And what about cats?  Are you trying those too?’

‘No, not cats – as they’re difficult to fatten.  But you know in China dog was a favourite delicacy for thousands of years.  So there’s a precedent.

            They continued their meal and were half finished when the ship shuddered slightly.  Then the emergency klaxon began to howl, everyone to get indoors behind sealable bulk-heads.

            The telephone rang and Oblonsky picked it up.

            ‘Chief, Chief,’ it was Sutong.  ‘We’re in hell of mess over here.’

            ‘Where?’

            ‘In the algae processing area.  There’s been an explosion and two men are dead.

            ‘OK, OK, slow down and explain exactly what’s happened.’

            ‘You know we’ve been tinkering about with the algae to increase it’s output. Well, this led to a build-up of pressure in the methane tanks, which we were monitoring carefully.’

            ‘And so?’

            ‘One of the tanks burst.’

            ‘But you just said you were monitoring it.’

            ‘I know, Chief.  But there must have been a tiny crack in one of them – and the extra pressure made all the difference.  It just blew apart and the two men working there were killed instantly by the flying metal………..And that’s not the worst of it.’

            ‘What do you mean?’

            ‘One piece of flying metal also ruptured one of the oxygen tanks and so now the two gases are mixing together.  There’s now over a million cubic feet of explosive mixture.  Just one tiny spark and the whole of the city will be blow apart.’

            ‘So what are you doing?’

            ‘We’ve blocked off most of the entrances to the storage rooms – but the gases are still pouring out of the bust tanks.  So there’s a pressure build up and some of the mixture is leading back into the algae processing rooms.’

            ‘Can you seal that too?’

            ‘Not really, Chief – not without using welding equipment.  And that’s completely out of the question.’

            ‘Then what the hell are we going to do?’

            ‘We have to siphon off the gases into space using some of the waste shutes.  There shouldn’t be any problem as the mixture is under pressure.’

            ‘Then what are you waiting for, Sutong?’

            ‘Right now we’re fixing pipes to the shutes and some of the men are getting masked up to run them into the storage rooms.’

            ‘But what about sparks.  Are the men in the metallo-plastic suits?’

            ‘No Chief, we’re not daft you know.  The men are going in practically naked except for face-masks and the pipes are of plastic.  No, what we’re even more worried about is the gas coming into contact with any electronic console just a tiny filament or a discharge of static would be enough to send us all up.’

            ‘The switch off the power to the re-cycling plant.’

            ‘Some of the mixture is already spreading back into the engineering section which means we’ll have to switch off the electricity to the whole of the ship.’

            ‘Including the computer?’

            ‘No, no.  I meant the fore-globe…the city.  The engine section is unaffected.’

            ‘If we turn it off, how long will it be for?’

            ‘I don’t know exactly, Chief – maybe half and hour.’

            ‘Half an hour with no heat and light.  We’ll all die of cold,’ Oblonsky gasped.

            ‘No Chief, I don’t think so.  The temperature will most certainly drop, but not that quickly.  Once we get the pipes connected most of the mixture will blow off in minutes – any remaining we’ll flush our with compressed nitrogen.  We can get rid of that later, when the electricity’s back on, as its completely inert.’

            ‘We don’t really have any option do we? I’ll make a public announcement about the power cut straight away.  I’ll tell everyone to stay indoors.  You’d better get your men ready.’

            ‘They already are, Chief.’

            Within a few moments of the announcement the city was plunged into inky darkness and all electronic communication ceased.

            Natalie and her father sat at the table in the dim glow of a torchlight, completely oblivious to the remaining food.

            Natalie shivered and her father took a thermometer from a draw.

            ‘The temperature’s still normal,’ he said, ‘but you’d better go and fetch some warm clothes.’

            A few minutes later he noticed that the reading had dropped by a few degrees but didn’t mention this to his daughter who was putting on layers of clothes.

            She shivered again and offered some of the clothes to her father.  ‘Let me see the thermometer, Dad.’

            He gave it to her reluctantly.

            ‘But it’s dropped five degrees already and in……only eight minutes, she said looking at her watch.  ‘How long did Sutong say, Dad?’

            ‘Half an hour.’

            ‘Well if it goes much below freezing we’ll loose the farms.’

            ‘What can I say, Natalie.  We risk the whole ship if we don’t do what Sutong says.  And anyway, you’ve got a reserve of seed to start up again.’

            ‘Not if this takes too long.  Then none of us will survive.’

            Oblonsky glanced at the thermometer again.  It had dropped another four

degrees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER  EIGHT

 

            The Gagarin reached its destination six months ahead of the Ganymede, its gigantic fusion motors having slowed the multi-million ton Russio-Asian craft into a five hundred million mile orbit around Iota Eridani – well beyond the dust clouds that had obscured things earlier. But though the star was a sol-type and there were predictions  of large masses circling it, Gagarin’s visual telescopes searched in vain for any sign of planets – for none had ever coalesced from the vast dust clouds that had swirled for aeons around the now quite discernible yellow sun. 

So it was a bitter disappointment to everyone when it I was officially announced that, except for a number of asteroid belts, nothing substantial was found. The largest lump of cosmic matter was only a  few thousand metres across at the most.

            ‘So what do we do now?’ Alexei said in a caustic voice to the others executive members.  ‘it’s always been known that something was circling Eridani, but to think it was just a mass of useless dust.’

            ‘That’s right,’ cut in Konstantin.  ‘We should have been carrying a much bigger infra-red telescope so that we could have resolved these dust clouds earlier and given this star a complete miss.  We’ve wasted ten years of de-acceleration for nothing.’

            ‘I wouldn’t say for nothing,’ replied his father.  ‘Analysis of the clouds absorption spectra have shown traces of all sorts of useful minerals. And more important water and organic material.’

            ‘What we were hoping for, father, was a planet with water and life,’ said Natalie, emphasising the word planet.

            ‘We’ve just got to accept the situation, dear.  And what we do have evidence of are alcohols, aldehydes and even complex polymers.’

            ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean life, father,’ persisted Natalie.

            ‘Too true,’ Alexie came to her support.  ‘Everyone knows that space is full of organic chemicals polymerised by hard radiation…It’s all in the old microfilm books.’

            ‘You mean the so-called sacred books with all their talk of Destination,’ said Natalie caustically dismissing her brother.  ‘They never mentioned that we’d find nothing at all.’

            ‘Look!  Water, minerals and hydro-carbons aren’t nothing at all,’ replied father in a tired voice.

            ‘Absolutely correct, Chief,’ chipped in Sutong.  ‘We could do with a few hundred thousand gallons of water for a start . We’ve lost plenty in spite of the re-cycling system.  And we had to use a lot to electrolyse more oxygen after we dumped those thanks into space last month.’

            No one spoke, remembering how close a race it had been between the expelling of the explosive gases and the intense cold of space.  The temperature had hovered just two degrees above freezing before the power had finally been switched on again.

            Still no one said anything and so Sutong continued.  ‘On top of that we’ll need plenty of electrolytic water at some point or other for the liquid fuel of our six pioneers ships.’

            ‘But I thought they used fission engines like Gagarin  ?’ Alexie asked.

            They’re only for deep space as they don’t have enough thrust to land a ship on a planet.’

            ‘If we ever find one, Sutong,’ said Natalie despondently.

            ‘We simply don’t have any alternative,’ said the Chief Navig in a cross voice.   ‘We’re going to have to wait here for at least a year or two anyway, before we get any sort of message from Ganymede.   So we might as well move into a closer orbit near the second asteroid belt, which is the biggest – and see what we can find.’

            ‘And put us into the middle of it’ cried Sutong.  ‘We’ll be smashed to pieces.’

            ‘No we won’t,’ retorted Ivan.  ‘We’re not going to pass straight through the plane of rotation of the ring.  We’ll simply go into an orbit above it at striking distance.’

            ‘Right Ivan,’ came in the Chief.  ‘We should be right on top of it at about a hundred thousand mile orbit.  Then we can use the Pioneers to drop some of us  down into ring two and explore it.  They can go pretty slow on the ion rockets…So Sutong, we’re going to become space prospectors.  We’ve got the equipment haven’t we?’

            ‘Oh yeah, sure.  The Pioneers can easily be converted into bulk carriers and there’s hundreds of space-suits and vacuum tools in the central stores.’

            ‘But what’s the point?’ exclaimed Natalie.  ‘Surely we’ve got enough of everything on board in spite of recent losses.  We are equipped for over a thousand years aren’t we Sutong?’

            ‘Of course….But supposing Theta Ceti is also a no-go.  So you see we can never have enough.  And anyway wasn’t only thinking of water – though a few chunks of ice meteor would come in very handy.  No, what I’m thinking more about are the polymers and hydrocarbons.  The spectrogram scan of the rings shows them clustered in discrete meteoric lumps, probably in the form of  space-oil.’ meteorites

            ‘Space-oil?’ Oblonsky asked.

            ‘Yes Chief, that’s basically what it is. Small quantities were found back on earth – or rather one of Sol’s other planets….Saturn I think it was called.  Just traces of it.  But this one is a bonanza.’ 

            ‘Bonanza?’ quizzed Alexei.

‘Yes, can’t you understand!   Minerals like iron, copper, nickel, aluminium, cobalt, even uranium – we can get them more or less anywhere in the cosmos.  But a concentrated accumulation of organic stuff is much more difficult to come by.  And from it we can make practically everything we need.  Plastics, fuels, clothes, medicines – you name it.  We can process this oil on the ship and take it with us to Theta Ceti.  Don’t forget, we may not find any organic material on any of Theta Ceti’s planets.’

            ‘If there are any there.’

            ‘Why do you always look on the gloomy side, Natalie?’ said Konstantin. 

‘We’re still here on course, in spite of everything…And you’ve done marvels with the farm.  Forget about what nearly happened.’

            ‘You mean Sutong’s tinkering around.  Another twenty minutes and there wouldn’t……………’

            ‘Yes, yes, Natalie,’ burst in Sutong trying to get her off the topic.  ‘But we’re going to get you extra water….and what’s more important we can make you fertiliser from the refined oil.;’

            ‘Can you really refine it on board, Sutong?’ asked the Chief Navig.

`‘Oh yes.  We can store the raw oil we bring in from the pioneers and store it in metallo-plastic mesh containers that we can rig up around the central tube, between us and the engine section.’

‘But how can you keep oil in nets,’ interrupted Konstantin in a perplexed voice. 

‘Won’t it just pour out?’

            ‘It won’t be liquid in space, Konstantin,’ it’s too bloody cold.  At almost absolute zero it’ll be as solid as bitumen, or more probably as hard as steel.’

            ‘Then what about the spinning effect?’ asked the Chief.  ‘Won’t that throw it all of into space?’

‘No way,’ Sutong replied emphatically.  ‘The tube’s only twenty foot across and it’s slap along the long axis of the ship, so the centrifugal force will be minute compared to where we are here.  We only get an earth-like gravity in the city because every three minutes we turn through five thousand feet.  There it is only sixty feet or so.’ 

            ‘So it’ll be about a hundredth of a gee at the tunnel?’ the Chief responded after making a rapid calculation.

            ‘Yes, as long as we keep the storage nets close to the tube’s surface.  If they stick out to much it’ll increase the gravitational pull.  So everything has to be built flat.  I mean to say it is almost two thirds of a mile long.’

            ‘And how exactly are you going to process the oil, Sutong?’ asked Alexei.  ‘Take it into the central workshops?’

            ‘No.  We’ll rather unpack some of our industrial plant in the central stores and set up the factories and workshops along the length of the ship.  Welded to the central tube in fact.’

There was a gasp and the Chief asked how this could be done.

            ‘Inside the belly of the ship, just a few hundred feet above our heads,’ said Sutong pointing upwards, ‘there’s a whole series of massive lifts and moving causeways that lead down to the tube which is also an exit.  We engineers have been there dozens of times since the internal pillar opened up.  Once we get the materials down to the central tube there’s no problem.

            All we have to do then it to float it along the ship’s axis where the  gravity is almost zero……is zero in fact in the very centre of the tube.  After that we simply bring out the stuff through the cargo exit air-looks.  It’s exactly the same procedure as when we finally ferry ourselves and our equipment down to a planet in the Pioneers.’

            ‘So what we’ll really be doing Sutong, is to unpack and reassemble some of our things a bit earlier than planned?’

            ‘That’s right Alexei.  Except well all have to be suited up at first.  But later we can seal up the factories and workshops and pump in air so we can work normally……although in free-fall.’

            ‘Well it seems a brilliant idea, Sutong,’ said the Chief Navig and looking around at everyone present said in a firm voice. ‘As we’re going to be here for quite a while I suggest we follow Sutong’s advice. And the first thing  to do is to get a training program together so we can get some crews for a couple to the ships.  Then we can start looking for ice and oil.’

            ‘And uranium, if we’re lucky,’ Sutong added.  ‘The fuel for our engines and power housed won’t last for ver you know.’

            ‘O.K.  So it’s agreed then. And what about you Ivan.’

            ‘As you say Chief, we don’t have much option. But whether we link up with the Americans is another matter.’

‘They’re not Americans,’ retorted Alexei.

‘Well, Ganymedians then.  And anyway,’ Ivan shrugged his shoulder, ‘we most certainly need extra water and fuel – and this plastics idea of Sutong is great.  We’ve got to remain self-sufficient.’

            ‘Self-sufficient,’ snorted Natalie.  ‘All I’m thinking is about that mass of frozen seed they’ve got sorted away on board. For our farms.  So let’s hope we do link up with them at Theta Ceti, even if it dos take us fifty years to get there.’

            ‘Natalie, we’ll only be going if they give us a positive picture of the place,’ replied her father.

            ‘And if not?’

            ‘Then we’ll do as they said in their probe message – we’ll join forces on route for Cygnus 26.’

            ‘And another eternity of travelling,’ groaned Natalie.  ‘We were even lucky to make to this far.’

            ‘Well my dear, at least you’ll meet the sooner that way.  Twenty years out they said – so you’ll be able to personally supervise the re-stoking of the farms.’

            ‘But father, imagine…..another six hundred year journey.’

            ‘Two hundred,’ corrected Konstantin.

            ‘Well whatever it is,’ broke in Sutong, ‘right now we have to get our minds on the mining.’

            ‘Yes, I think we all agree on that. So Alexei, prepare the transmitter for a high energy broad-cast to Theta Ceti.  We’d better let Ganymede know what we found here.’

            ‘Or didn’t find, you mean,’ remarked Natalie.

            Her father grunted and then said to Alexei, ‘ put the information on a tape loop and beam it in their direction continuously for forty-eight hours.  From now on we should send them a report on what we’re doing every two weeks or so.’

            ‘Still seems funny to me having a conversation that takes fifteen months to reach the person you’re talking to,’ said Alexei in a dry voice.  ‘I mean to say two-and-a-half years for a question and answer.’

            ‘If you get an answer,’ retorted Natalie.  ‘They may not even be alive.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER NINE

 

            Nearly five months after the first crew members had awoke, Ace's enhanced telephoto pictures confirmed that there were four planets circling Theta Ceti - now only one thousand million miles away; with Ganymede itself travelling at a mere three hundred miles per second - and still slowing.

            And after the computer had made its final detailed calculations on the planets and their moons, he asked the twenty-four members of the ship's company to assemble.

            They were sitting around the mess table, waiting in the main common-room when suddenly the large viewer lit up and everyone swivelled their chairs around to face it - Ace bid them good morning in a bland voice.

            'So what's the verdict Ace?'  the Captain asked impatiently, wanting to get down to details immediately.

            'Well Captain, there are several suitable places for us to land a scout-ship.  The largest moon of the third planet and several orbiting the forth one - both of which are gas giants by the way.'

            'Is there water on any on these moons?' queried Jill.

            'No, they're all absolutely dead,' and a shot of a ringed planet came up on screen and then zoomed down onto its moon - an irregular and jagged lump of rock.  Figures of orbital times, rotation, temperature and spectrographic readings flashed by in a corner of the screen.

            'There's only one satellite orbiting planet three,' came in Ace's glib voice.  'The rings are the ones that never coalesced…or maybe the result of ones that broke up into fragments.'

            Another sequence of space photos came on view, showing a red and yellow striated globe.

            'Now let's speed things up a bit,' and the striations started moving across the planet.  And in the surrounding space, five tiny points of light could be seen darting about.  Close-ups of five barren moons followed.

            'Bone dry Jill, I'm afraid,' remarked Ace.  'Of course there's plenty of water on the two planets themselves, but they're so huge that we, or you rather, would be squashed flat if you tried to land.'

            'What about the other two planets then’, asked Lawrence Percival, the ship's second in command.

            'The nearest one of Theta Ceti is so close it would melt our scoutships.  It's even closer than Sol's nearest planet, mercury.'

            'And number two?' Percival persisted.

            'That's the most interesting, so I saved it for last,' replied Ace amidst an audible sign of relief.

            'The second planet is approximately one fifth larger than earth, has a diurnal rotation time of twenty-seven hours thirty-eight minutes and is eight million miles from Theta Ceti.  Spectrographic readings show that besides the usual light and heavy metals these is also present water-vapour, free oxygen and carbon-dioxide.'  A picture of a planet shrouded in white mist appeared on the vu-screen.  'And most interesting…………..'

            'Go on Ace, don't keep us in suspense,' shouted someone.

            'I'm happy to announce that traces of carotene and chlorophyll have also been detected.'

            There was an excited buzz form the computer's audience and Doctor Kowasky shouted out jubilantly, 'then we've struck lucky.  We can grow plants and animals from the germ-pool.'

            'And children as well,' cried Jill.

            'Even have a few ourselves,' added Vassili, winking at her.

            'Not so fast all of you,' grunted the Captain.  'So far Ace has detected water and organic stuff, but we'll have to get much nearer before we know whether we can land there or not.'

            'At this precise moment there's a seventy-six point seven-three chance of the place being habitable for you,' commented Ace.

            'Whatever the odds, let's check the place first…and before sending any sort of message of Gagarin ,' added the Captain.

            In fact it took the fusion engines just forty-two days to slow the ship down to the eight miles a second needed to put it into orbit around Hope, as the crew had decided to call the second planet.  And close-by the resemblance to old earth became more apparent; for when not obscured by clouds, the surface could be seen to be composed of large expanses of blue sea, green and brown land masses and two polar caps.  The only striking difference being that Hope had no satellite companion like earth's faithful Luna.

            Circling Hope at a mean distance of two-hundred -and-fifty miles, Ganymede's camera telescopes were for once not pointing into deep space, but were focused down onto solid ground - and the resulting map-like pictures appeared on the mess-rooms screen.

            'It's so clear you can even see rivers running though those green areas,' exclaimed Anne Bright, one of the ship's biologists, excitedly.

            'Wait a moment, Anne and I'll magnify things,' said Ace.

            'Now I can even make out individual trees.'

            'I can't give you their height, Anne, but the width of their foliage is about a hundred feed.'

            'Can you get a higher magnification Ace.  They don't look like the canopies of earth type trees.'

            'Please Anne,' interrupted Kofi,' Ace and I are meant to be surveying the whole planet at low power first.  We'll never finish if we start looking at details now.  We won't be able to see the wood for the trees - if you see what I mean.'

            'He's right, Anne,' came in the Captain.  'Let's begin with a general impression, then after we decide on a suitable place to land we can get down to particulars.'

            'I should point out Captain,' purred Ace, 'that on no account should you consider landing in a biologically active area - such as those forests.  As of yet we have no idea how the human immune system will react to the alien antigens down there.  There may be total incompatibility.'

            'You mean we'll have to wander around in a space-suit?  Grumbled Anne, her fantasy of an intrepid zoologist rapidly dwindling.

            `Yes, for a time at least,' the computer went on mercilessly.  'That's why I'm suggesting that you choose an inhospitable place as possible for your initial contact.  Maybe one of the ice-caps or a high mountain.'

            'I can't see any point in exploring hundreds of square miles of ice,' stated the captain,' so it looks like we'll have to disembark a mountain a bit like old Noah in fact.'

            'Noah or not, Captain, I think you'd better make it a plateau,' remarked Kwok, 'or we're likely to fall off the blasted thing.'

            'Very true, Kwok,' replied the Captain with a chuckle.  Then on a more serious note, 'and after we land we'll have to carry out a whole battery of biological tests on the ice, sub-soil and atmosphere before we even think of leaving the scout-ship, And then that'll be in suits. Kofi and Ace, when will you complete the survey?'

            'It shouldn’t take more than ten orbits,'  declared Kofi.

            'O.K. when you're finished we'll pick out an ice plateau to land on, but one adjacent to a forested area.  So we can go down and explore later, when we're acclimatised.'

            'I also suggest, Captain,' added Ace, 'that we immediately send a positive

preliminary report to Gagarin .'

 

 

               

CHAPTER TEN

 

            En route for the second asteroid belt of Iota Eridani, Gagarin  's engineers got out the old instruction manuals from the ship's libraries and began to prepare one of the transport ferries, Pioneer Three, for its exploratory journey.  The three hundred-foot long craft had lain dormant for half a millennium, snuggled up with its five companions around the central tube just behind the city globe, a quietude now shattered, as it was prepared for launching.

            The public cabins were stripped of their three hundred couches to extend the craft's warehouse space and its fission motors slowly warmed up.  Fuel had already been pumped into its tanks, which was simply plain water, as the high thrust chemical engines wouldn't be need for inter-planetary, or rather inter asteroid, travel.

            During the months it took to dock just outside belt two, several crews were trained to handle these streamlined crafts, designed to operate both in space and in an atmosphere.  And the final crew was picked from those who functioned best in free-fall; as the pioneers weren't designed to spin-up  an artificial gravity.  So all the volunteers had had to train along the central tunnel where the centrifugal force was at a minimum, and where they could get used to walking about in magnetic boots.

            The final complement of zero-gravity hardened crew-men consisted of seven  ratings and six  officers; the latter being Alexei as astro-navigator,  Sutong and his engineering colleagues Stepan Karenin and Sun Chang,  and  the dark-featured Doctor Ramsaram Sholokov as biological expert, who had been reading everything he could get his hands on about meteoric and terrestrial oil.  The Captain was Ivan Kugarin.

            Finally Pioneer Three was ready and it its crew strapped in and with a puff of compressed air it eased itself away from its five companions.  After moving away for several miles at right angles to the mother ship's long axis, the sleek and highly manoeuvrable ship blasted off, trailing super hot hydrogen and hydroxyl ions in its wake.

            `'I never though there would be so much space between them,' said Doctor Sholokov of a few hours later to the others who were staring through a cabin window.  'From a distance the whole thing looked so compact,' he added looking down at his feet; for the doctor was standing on the metal wall near the edge of a side window.

            'That's because we're now travelling so slow,' the Captain replied.  'We're only doing about a hundred miles an hour, you know.  If we were really moving we would have probably hit one by now - and that would have been the end of us.'

            'Even the small ones give me the jitters,' muttered Alexei who was intently watching a computer screen.

            There was a small bump and a scrapping sound.

            'See what I mean?'  Even with all this zigzagging, it's impossible to dodge all the meteorites.'

            'But so far so good, eh Alexei?  Don't worry about the small bits of debris,' chuckled Ivan.  'You should be happy to be in control.  It's just like one of those video maze-games.'

            'Well you can thank me, Stepan and the atomic motors for that, Captain,' Sutong remarked.  'If you'd tried to play this game on chemical rockets you wouldn't have got such a good score.'

            'Not to mention the fact that none of us have been trained to use chemical fuels yet,' said the large and shaggy Stepan.  'And anyway, we don't even have any liquid hydrogen and oxygen aboard,' he added sheepishly.

            'It isn't necessary for this work, we'll only need that for planetfall…Whenever that'll be,' said the Captain brusquely.  Then turning to Alexei, 'have you still got a fix on that burg,' referring to the massive lump of cosmic ice that had been discovered spectroscopically within the third sub-ring of the asteroid belt in which they were moving.

            'Yes, Captain, we'll see it clearly as soon as we get over that big bugger in front.'

            And sure enough, as the ship passed over a ten-mile wide asteroid, a smaller object, flashing like a black jewel, rose above the craggy asteroids yellowish horizon.

            Everyone was spell bound by the beautiful sight of a super-cold crystal of life giving water, sparking from its millions of icy facets in the faint light of Iota Eridani, itself partially obscured by the plane of the asteroid belt.

            It was Sutong, with his engineer's eyes, who broke the trance by crying excitedly, 'there must be millions of ton of water out there.'

            'But it's too small,' replied the doctor, 'you could almost reach out and catch it in your hands.'

            'Then you'd sure have to have long arms, Ram.  I know it's difficult to judge distance n space,' Alexei checked the console, 'but that  iceberg is over eighteen miles way.'

            'And all that water just waiting for us to collect ,' chirped Sutong.

            'We'll have to do a bit of blasting first,' came in Stepan's solid, matter of fact voice and who with his long hair and bushy beard already looked the part of a prospector of old. For it was his honour to be the first to set foot on the berg as his sense of balance was fractionally better than Sutong's.

            Within an hour of the Captain had put the ship into a stationary orbit over the ice asteroid.  Stepan donned his spacesuit and was in the personnel airlock clipping his suit to the end of a long plastic rope coiled around a small winch jutting from the wall and controlled from inside the main cabin.

'Have you finished testing all the suit systems?' inquired the Captain, his voice crackling in Stepan's ears.

            Stepan grunted into his throat mike as the air was sucked from the lock. 

            O. K. we're now releasing the winch lock so you can go under your own steam,' continued the Captain.  'If there are any problems we can always pull you back Alexei is already getting suited up and we'll have him in the lock after you've gone in case of any emergency….. and don't use the gun too much.'

            And with that last piece of advice the outer hatch slid back revealing the frosty asteroid, scintillating directly below.

            Only a few squints of the gas gun were needed to slowly easy Stepan across the couple of hundred yards that separated him from the meteor; using his gun again at the last moment to break his fall onto a relatively flat area of surface.  He touched down as light as a feather, his arms and legs spread out to act as shock absorbers.  On hands and knees he looked around and saw a small fissure in the black ice on one side - and into this he rammed a tiny replica of an old marine anchor which was attached to his belt by a short length of rope.  He gave it a few tugs to see if it was wedged tight and then carefully stood up and looked around.

            It was like something out of a cubist's dream. Except for the fissures and furrows, the whole ground was a tumble of crystalline planes; rectangles, rhomboids, trapezoids, and polyhedrons - all at slightly different angles to one another. Dotted around were frozen fountains and excrescences of prismatic tubes of black ice emerging from the surface sprouting white sprays of fine feathery tendrils.

            For the first time since his descent the Captain's voice came over the intercom.  'We're all watching you on the scope, Stepan.  Don't just stand there gawping, go and hack out some ice for analysis.'

            Stepan grunted a curt  reply and then getting down on all-fours again he slowly crawled the few yards to the nearest' ice-tree, gripping the irregular edges of the fractured ground to prevent himself shooting away.  On reaching the gossamer foliage that hung down around the prismatic trunk, he broke off some pieces of  frozen lacework, which instantly powdered in his hand - and bit by bit he filled one of his belt pouches with this insubstantial floss. Using the rope for support he crept back to his anchor, got up on his knees and using his small prospecting pick began to hammer away at the surface crystals, sending up a spume of ice fragments that showered off into space.  Indeed, each time he struck, Stepan himself tended to shoot up into space as well - and only a firm grip on his anchor rope prevented this from happening.

            'This is ridiculous, Captain.  I don't have enough hands for the work,' he complained.  'I'm hammering with one and holding on with the other - so how am I supposed to catch the pieces?  Just a second, a bit's got caught up in my suit.  A nice size chunk.  I'll bag that straight away.'

            'If it's too difficult use the mini-drill,' advised the Captain and Stepan, after collecting a few more odd pieces of ice lying around, unhooked a cylindrical contraption from his belts, unfolded its three collapsible legs and hammered its three spiked feet into the ice.

            'O. K. It’s ready, Captain,' and so saying he broke the seal and pulled the switch that released compressed gas that got the central hollow bit spinning.

            'Now I'm lowering it,' and he pushed down a red lever on the side of the machine and the fast moving drill made contact with the surface at the centre of the tripod.

            'It's making an awful noise, Captain.'

            'Noise?'

'A whining sound. And it's getting louder.  Look Captain, if you don't mind I'm going to pull the blasted thing out.'

'For God's sake Stepan,'  Sutong cried in an exasperated voice, 'what are you on about.  What sound?  All we can se a  is a lot of spray coming up.'

            'I guess I must be hearing it from the ground, through my suit.  Turn your volume up a bit. Now the vibration is getting stronger.'

            'We can hear it now,' cut in the Captain.

            'The  whole place is beginning to shake now - like an earthquake.'

            'You mean an asteroid quake, I think.'

            'Please don’t joke, Sutong, I'm pissing myself down here . …..  Now I can actually see the ground cracking . Can’t you ? And look!  Some of the trees and fountains are exploding.'

            Even from the ship they could see that something was drastically wrong a a fine mist of powdered ice began to boil up form the surface.

             'He's right about the ice trees, Captain,' shouted Sutong, 'I just saw one vanish at the edge of he screen.  It  shattered into tiny pieces.'

'Stepan, we're pulling you in, unhook the anchor right now,' the Captain barked.' 'The winch is on, Stepan, we're taking in the slack.'

            'What about the drill, Captain?' he replied, his voice rattling audibly.

            'Forget it and unclip.'

            Unceremoniously and  like a puppet on a string, Stepan was hauled up on the lifeline, trailing his pick-hammer behind him.  The last thing he saw before the bulkhead door shut tight was the dark surface of the asteroid patchily turning to white, as if struck by a withering disease.

            An  hour later the still shaken Stepan was sitting around with the other officers looking at a video image of the space-berg, now quite pale and half its original size.

            'I told you it was the drill, Captain,' he said, 'the noise brought the whole place down.'

            'Like Joshua's trumpets and the walls of Jericho,'  commented Sutong.

            'Right, Alexei.  My drill vibrated at exactly the wrong frequency for the place.'

            'It was some of the higher harmonics of D Flat, to be exact,' came in the Captain.

            'D Flat.  How do you know?'

            'From the tapes of course.  We analysed the background note to your commentary.'

            'But why has  the berg shrunk?’asked the doctor.

            'The most likely explanation,' answered Sutong, 'is that it was hollow, or more probably filled with hundreds of cavities - ice caves and grottoes.  The whole structure being kept rigid by the crystalline matrix of the meteor.  When these were fractured by the drill’s reverberation the crystals turned into an amorphous white powder - and so the whole place collapsed in on itself.'

            'So it was like a ruddy great bell - and I like an idiot started it ringing.'

            'Right Stepan.  And not a very strong one either.  But don't worry, most of it is still there.'

            'Most of what though?'

            'While you were getting dressed.' Replied the Captain, 'we did an analysis of the two samples you managed to collect in your thermos pouch.  The feathery leaves of the ice-trees, as you call them are mostly of frozen ammonia and dry-ice, but the pieces you managed to chip off from the surface are almost pure water.'

            'Yeah,' added Sutong, 'and thanks to you, Stepan, it's now all in a nice powdery form so it' be much easier to handle - it's just like a bloody great ball of soft snow and will be dead easy to transport.  All we'll have to do to get it onboard our Pioneers is suck it up with  a giant vacuum cleaner.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 11

 

            By the tenth orbit Kofi and the Ganymede's cyberoid computer had completed the aerial survey of Hope - and the result showed three major land masses; a southern ice-cap and two larger equatorial continents, the largest extending into the northern polar region.  The remaining three-quarters of the planet was covered by sea.  The elevations of mountains and valleys had also been measured using the parallax method of taking photographs at different angles and dozens of over-lapping relief maps had subsequently been printed out cartographically by Ace.

            The final briefing was taking place in the main cabin with the captain talking to six of the seven crew aboard the landing spot.

            'This definitely does seem to be the best place,' he said pointing with his finger to a plateau on a relief map spread out on a table below.  The southern pole's right out, and even though the other continent's verdant it's the larger one that has the plateau we've been looking for.

            ‘And how high is it?'  asked Anne scrutinising the map.

            'About four thousand feet."

            'Actually Anne, it's average height is four thousand and eighty-two feet,' chimed in Ace always liking to be precise.

            'It's a table top plateau, in fact,' added Bruce O'Donnel, the ship's climatologist, 'separated from the forest below by a steep escarpment.  You see it's situated right in the middle of an equatorial region though up on top there's nothing but ice and snow.'

            'If it's pure ice we'll be landing on then there won't be much for me' snorted Bill Huggins, one of Ganymede's geologists.

            'That's why it'll be you who'll go down with the Lieutenant to the forest' snapped the captain.

            'After a decent period of quarantine on the plateau first, of course,' added Percival, whose speciality was biology.

            'Right Lawrence,' the Captain answered.  'And you other biologists', he continued, referring to Anne Bright and her colleague Ray Polanski,' will remain up on the plateau until everything seems alright with the exploration team. And Lawrence, you'll hand over control of the scout-ship to Carlos while you're away.  O.K. Carlos?'

            'Sure Captain,' replied Carlos Peres, a Second Lieutenant, 'but you said earlier there would be seven of us.  There's only six here, so whose the mystery man?'

            'I've been holding back on you, I know,' said the Captain with a glint in his eye.  'In fact there will be only six of you… people that is.  But there's also one special passenger.'

            'Don't keep us in suspense Captain,' said Anne.

            'He isn't even human at all… he or it is one of our remote explorer robots'  And before anyone could say anything more, the Captain had pushed a button on his personal bleeper and the door slid open.

            Kwok entered, followed by a squat cylindrical robot supported by eight spindly legs and rather resembling a giant silver spider.

            'Here he is,' chortled the Captain, 'it's Kwok's very good friend Remy Sixteen.  Some of you must know about this type of robot.  He's a R. E. M. E. or Remote Explorer Entity.  Literally a walking laboratory that can survive in any type of condition.

            Turning towards the five foot high robot the Captain said, 'Remy, some of these people don't know much about you so explain things to them, will you.'

            'Well ladies and gentlemen,’ the seventh crew member replied in a tinny but perfectly cultured voice and raised itself up to human height on its retractable legs. ‘This cylinder,' he pointed to his barrel-shaped torso with one of his legs and swivelled the upper part of it towards his audience, 'contains everything a mining engineer, geologist and extra-terrestrial biologist could wish for.  I contain several telescopic drills and can analyse the composition of minerals and gasses both chemically and spectroscopically; I can dissect and classify any sort of fauna or flora you ma wish to think of and I can penetrate any object with my infra-red, x-ray and sonar sensors.  I've even got an electron microscope and gas diffusion analyser built into me.  Pretty comprehensive, even if I do say so myself.  I've just about got everything and can go anywhere.'

            'That's really true, Remy's not bull-shitting,' came in Kwok.  'He can operate in space, under miles of water, you name it - and all controlled by only ten pounds of atomic matrix brain.'

            'Yes, just like mine, but only a hundredth the size,' came in Ace's syrupy voice.

            'A chip of the old block, eh Remy? The Captain joked.

            'Quite right,' the talkative robot breezed on.  'I'm a small but highly mobile version of an Advanced Cybernetic Entity and while I'm down on this planet I'll be in instantaneous communication with Ace here at all times.'

            'Not quite,' quibbled Ace, 'there'll be one seven-hundredth of a second delay.'

            'True, true,' replied Remy not in the least put out, 'and whatever the case,  it'll still be marvellous to be in touch with such a great mind - even if it is a few microseconds out of phase with me.'

            'It'll be you who'll be out of phase not me, you…you walking dustbin,' retorted Ace.

            'Dustbin.  What do you mean?  Don't you know that credit for credit I'm worth more than you?'

            'Now you two’, said the Captain interrupting this cybernetic dual, 'stop behaving like Beauty and the Beast.'

            More like David and Goliath,' said Kwok.

            'Well whatever…let me explain to the others exactly where Remy comes from.'

            'Doesn't he come from earth then, Captain?'

            'Originally yes,' replied Jakson.  'He was manufactured there with the others.  Only about twenty of these R. E. M. E. robots were made as they are really expensive machines.'

            'Please Captain, I'm not a machine.  You don't call Ace a machine do you?  He's an entity - and so am I.'

            'He's right, Captain,' said Kwok, coming to his metallic fiend's help.  'I mean to say, just because a baby's got a smaller brain than an adult doesn't mean it's inferior… and Remy - and all his brothers and sisters - are programmed to act as companions for human space prospectors.  They react emotionally to human contact.'

            'Over-emotionally , I would say,' commented Ace, sounding almost caustic.

            'O.K. you two,' cut in the Captain beginning to get exasperated, 'whether emotional or not, about half the Remy type robots were used on earth's deep seas for exploration of minerals - and the others were sent off to the planets.’

            'Also to explore?' asked Ray.

            'Yes.  And in some cases they were never picked up again - like those who were dropped onto the heavy gravity planets.  There they just kept on crawling around sending up information to orbiting stations for years and years.  Some of them may still be there for all I know, they can run for centuries on their fusion batteries.  Kwok will tell you.'

            'Yeah.  I used to work in these heavy planet stations and became quite familiar with these explorer robots.  We used  them as remote sensors so that we could extend our prospecting to the most inhospitable places.  Human and robot - we made a complete team.  And up in the space stations we had special consoles linked to the Remy with stereo-vu and quad sound, so that it was almost like being on the planet itself.  Groups of four of us took it in turn to work shift with the Remy; which of course went on continuously day and night.  They were programmed to have a sense of humour and a fairly strong imagination to keep us from going off our rockers - for we prospecting engineers sometimes spent as long as three years at a stretch on a particular station.  But whereas we came and went, the Remy stayed on and on.  For as the Captain said they can practically go on for ever.'

            'Actually Kwok,' interrupted Remy Sixteen, 'it depends on the gravity of the planet - but theoretically our batteries can last about thirty centuries, as long we can get our hands on some deuterium.  It'd probably be even longer on a small one like this,' he ended pointing one of his telescopic arms at the vu-screen where a corner of Hope was visible.

            'In fact we're really very lucky to have the four Remy's we've got on board,' the Captain pressed on emphatically.  'Two were already stored on Ganymede for further work when the war occurred  - and during those terrible weeks all the Remy's on Earth and an Luna were lost.  We picked up the other two from the other planets.  In fact Kwok was involved in this operation.'

            'That's right, captain.  In 2410 I was working on, or I should say around, Neptune.  We couldn't pick up the one from the planet itself due to its high gravity but we did pick up the robot that was on one of its moons - that was Remy Sixteen.  We have even worked a few times together.'

            'Quite correct, Kwok, - and then you all disappeared.  But war or no war I kept myself busy drilling and sampling for more than three years before your group came back to retrieve me.  And I must say it was a pretty lonely three years.'

            There was an embarrassed silence broken by a cough from the Captain.  'And the forth Remy was from Io, wasn't it Kwok?'

            'Yeah, he'd been working there for ages and infact we picked him up before going to Neptune.  And like Remy here, Eight had continued working, but had switched its main transmitter off.  We had to locate him - or I should rather say her as Eight was programmed as a female - from her tiny emergency beacon.

'And what about you,' Anne asked.  'How long were you on Neptune?'

            'Almost twelve years including the three on my own.  And I must say I was really surprised when I was taken off that moon.  You can imagine what it would be like after years on your own - and then suddenly seeing intelligent beings again.'

            'A bit like Robinson Crusoe,' declared Lieutenant Percival.

            'Who?' asked Anne.

            'A cast-away hero in an ancient book,' interposed Ace before the Lieutenant could reply, 'written about eight hundred years ago.'

            'Did they have space-craft then?' asked a surprised Ray.

            'No, no.  it was about a cast-away from a sailing ship.  The sort that moved about on the seas of earth,' Ace responded.

            'They operated on wind-power, Ray.' Came in the Lieutenant on one of his favourite reading hobbies.  'You see they caught the wind in their…'

            'Look, let's get on with this briefing, shall we' the Captain interrupted impatiently, 'for as soon as the shuttle is fuelled up you'll be on your way.  And that's less than forty-eight hours away.

CHAPTER 12

 

            Fifteen months had passed since Gagarin had gone had gone into orbit around the asteroid belt and Alexei and the others had made the first exploratory trip in the Pioneer Three.  Now the mother-ship was sprouting warehouses and factories along its two-thirds of a mile length.  Indeed what was once its thin connecting waist had quite swollen out with industrial paraphernalia.  And surrounding this tubular site was a halo of waste gases and by-products spun off by centrifugal force.

            Even further out were several pioneer ships in stationary orbit and in between them and the connecting tunnel were dozens of space-suited figures - some with gas-gun and others riding space-scooters for conveying minerals to the ship.

            The whole view was so murky and cluttered up that Alexei, who was staring out through a factory window could only see with difficulty. He could hardly make out at all the seven hundred feet wide engine globe at the tail-end of the ship - always so crystal clear in previous years.

            ‘It's bloody lucky we're spinning and throwing most of this junk off,’ he though to himself; ‘especially here with all these hydro-carbons and plastics around.’  For after that first stop at the ice-berg they had moved on to another of the asteroid belt's sub-rings mainly composed of what Sutong called space-bitumen and Dr. Ramsaram,  calcinaceous chondrites.

            But whatever the name, the whole circling mass was full of millions of chalk-like lumps, containing hydrocarbons, amines, alcohols, aldehydes and complex polymers.  According to the Doctor, it was all a long-term result of ultra-violent and hard-radiation on clouds of hydrogen, nitrogen and hydrogen cyanide that drifted between of mineral asteroids.  The Doctor completely rejected Sutong's suggestion that it was from the break-down products of once living organic material.

            As for Stepen, he was only concerned with the use of the space-oil, as he always called it.  During the return journey when Sutong and the Doctor had been arguing about the chemical process behind it, Stepan had been busily planning which equipment they would need to break out of the stores to start refining this celestial bonanza -  which he knew would have to be based on the same technique as obtaining oil from shales of earth.

            Subsequently two more pioneers had been stripped down to ferry back this meteoric shale which had been deposited around Gagarin in huge bags and Alexei could dimly make out one such cluster, held together in it giant net,  spinning slowing across the bottom of his field of vision.  Infact, such a backlog of unrefined ore had built up, that for the last half dozen trips the pioneers had switched to scooping up heavy metal meteorites.

             Alexei was at the moment resting after one such trip.  Straight ahead and down-ship the furnaces and diffusion plants to process the uranium were right now being assembled by scores of space-suited figures.  Closer by was the oil processing plant with its milling machines, atomic furnaces and square curved ware-houses welded to the communicating tunnel. And it was from the oil refinery's fractionating column that the unsuited Alexei was watching, for this turret like building was the highest accessible point of the factory site, as it utilised the differential gravity between top and bottom to separate out the lights and heavy components of space oil.

            Alexei was infact standing at the very top of the building where the gravity was strongest, so that his magnetic boots were hardly needed.  It was here that the heavy chemicals collected, the lighter gaseous factions being gathered at the bottom of the column near the ship's tunnel-way above his head.

            The whole plant panorama that stretched above him was studded with lights that gleamed in the gloom, though nearby buildings were also illuminated on his left by a dirty and flickering orange flame that spasmodically emerged under pressure from a slim slivery stack at right angle to the central connecting tunnel and  at almost the same level as where Alexei stood.  It was the unwanted gases of the fractionating column and he  would hate to be downwind.  But that was unlikely as the  smokestack had been built on the anti-spin side of the fractionating column, so that its sooty wastes  spiralled up and away to become part of the mucky miasma that circled well out of harm’s way around Gagarin as a an ever-expanding nebulous rubbish dump. Ever expanding it moved with the huge spacecraft as it slowly orbited  Ioto Eridani with its  precious new found wealth.

            Alexei was thinking about the first live messages that had come from the Ganymede a few weeks previously  whilst watching a  lone space commuter on his left that was coming  towards the industrial site more slowly than was usually the case - and then went back to thinking about Captain Jakson's optimistic predictions of the likelihood of their finding a suitable planet around Theta Ceti.

            Now what was he up to?  Thought Alexei, again noticing the spaceman.  First messing up a simple drop and firing his gun all over the place… Good God, now he's gone into a spin, he'll never be able to recover by himself, someone will have to and hook him in. Good God, the guy's hardly moving at all, just somersaulting around.

            'Space-man out of control above refinery,' barked the public address system.  'All available scooters to his rescue.’ And sure enough he saw one of the gyro-controlled torpedo-scooters, a double-seater, detached  itself from a cluster of bags floating beneath Alexei.

            Took them long enough, thought Alexei.

            'I'm out of gas,' the hapless man's wailed  over the P. A. 'I'm out…Help me…Everything’s  spinning,' he sobbed.

            The unfortunate space engineer was slowly tumbling about between Alexei and the fiery chimney - and was now hardly more than a couple of hundred feet from where Alexei was watching helpless. He could even catch glimpses of the man's contorted face.

            The scooter seemed to have hardly moved at all and the engineer became silhouetted in the sulphurous flare of the gas flame as he moved away from Alexei, who had a sudden premonition what was going to happen.

            It wasn't the man who was moving, but rather the pressurised flame, edging towards him like a red-hot scythe, ready to snuff him out as it circled around.

            The man must have realised this too and his screaming voice came over the air as he saw the horrid glare’s inexorable approach.

            The flame and its lurid halo seemed to enlarge in Alexei's eyes - or was it the gyrating figure dwindling to a black shadow in front of it.

            Alexei could never remember exactly afterwards.  But suddenly the man disappeared into the yellowy-red corona, there was a momentary flicker and expansion in its size - and the shrieking coming though the loud-speakers mercifully ceased.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 13

 

            The seven explorers had landed on Hope in one of Ganymede's two stubby but streamlined scout-ships and the deafening roar of the chemical retro-rockets had just died away - only to be replaced by an almost equally  shattering commotion coming from all around them.

            'Sounds like all the banshees in hell,' said Lieutenant Percival above the din as he unstrapped the webbing that held him in his reclining seat and sat upright.

            'More like a hurricane,' answered O'Donnel.  'That's the sort of racket we used to get in our domes back on earth when I was working in the Antarctic.'

            'You sure you switched the engines off, Lieutenant?' shouted Higgins, bravely trying to joke above the uproar.

            The Lieutenant didn't bother to answer but rather leaned over the console and flicked a switch that opened the shutters of the cabin portholes.  Immediately the cramped quarters were bathed in a bright white light and snow could be seen eddying about on the starboard side.

            'You're right Bruce,' grunted Percival, 'it looks as if we're landed in the middle of a bloody storm.'

            'More like a hundred mile and hour gale, Sir.'

            'Then why weren't we given any warning.  Surely you must have…' But before he could finish the ship  shuddered.

            'We only monitored two storms from orbit, Lieutenant,' came in Higgins after the shaking had subsided, 'and both started with hardly any warning.  We just weren't able to get enough information to make out any periodic pattern.'

            'That's great help,' replied the Lieutenant.  'Anyway, let's check if we can see anything on the infra-red,' and he activated the external televisors.  Again nothing, until one of the cameras angled downwards and one of the still hot supporting fins of the scout ship could be vaguely made out as a red glow in the screen.

            There was another abrupt series of lurches and the crew found themselves thrown back in their seats at an exaggerated angle.

            'The back port fin must have dropped, Lieutenant,' Carlos  cried out.

            'Everyone strap yourselves back in again,' yelled Percival, 'and let's hope there's no more subsidence otherwise we'll go right over.'

            'What about your Remy? Bawled Anne, 'couldn't you go out and correct it? You're strong enough aren't you?'

            'Madam,' the tinny voice responded from a corner of the cabin, 'as a member of the Remote Explorer and Mining Entity series it would be absolute child's play for me. This is nothing compared to the buffeting some of my siblings had to undergo on some of the gas giants around old Sol.  Not to mention my experiences around Neptune where the temperature was as low…'

            'No, no, Remy,' howled the Lieutenant, as Remy began to unfasten the padded bars that held him in his special slot in the cabin wall.  'If you try and shift that half ton of yours right now you may just go and tip us right over.'

            'I see what you mean Lieutenant,' acknowledge Remy, doing a quick sequence of computations in his crystalline brain.  'I most certainly don't want to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.'

            'Camel?' quizzed the Lieutenant looking rather perplexed.

            'Yes, an ancient breed of desert animal,' butted in Ray.  'We've even got some frozen embryos in our stores - in case we land on an arid planet..'

            'Right Ray, they were beasts of burden that could carry absolutely huge amounts of luggage without faltering.  But just let you try and add a tiny little bit too much and they just kneel down and collapse.'

            O.K. Remy, whatever you say,' retorted the Lieutenant, 'just as long as you just stay where you are until this blows over.  I just hope it won't be too long.'

            'It shouldn't be,' stated O’Donnel confidently, 'as the two storms we observed from space blew themselves out within eight or nine hours.'

            'In that case, Remy,' said the Lieutenant, 'tell us more about those camel animals and try and keep us amused for the next few hours…and do talk loudly.'

 

 

            As predicted the storm abated within a few hours and Remy was finally allowed out of his nitch. He cautiously made his way to the side cargo-airlock, halfway down the ship. Now, from where they were perched a hundred-and-thirty feet above the ground, the other six crew members watched out of the cabin's port observation widow as Remy was hoisted down, making obscure references to the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  He alighted on a carpet of snow and ice that stretched as far as the eye could see - and from where they peered Remy, trailing a silvery strand of wire, resembled more than ever a shiny metallic spider scuttling about under a bright blue sky,

            'Any  crevices down there, Remy?' the Lieutenant asked, speaking into the intercom.

            'No Lieutenant,' crackled the reply.  'I've just done a quick sonar depth sounding and it all seems to be solid pack ice under the ship.  We were just unlucky that the tip of the fin landed on a weak patch.'

            'Lucky it was so small, don't you mean,' commented Kwok from the Ganymede circling two hundred miles above.  'From up here we can see that you're only reclining at about twelve degrees from the vertical, so you shouldn't have any problem jacking the ship upright again.’

            'At this precise moment, Kwok,' said Percival brusquely, 'all I want Remy to do is to keep looking for fissures in the immediate area.  I don't want to chance loosing the caterpillar or any of the life support domes. So Remy,' he continued, 'just gradually circle out from the ship testing for hidden crevices.  If you fall through one we'll haul you back on the winch.'

            A few minutes later Remy reported a snow covered crack in the ice directly in front of him and he was ordered to place a red marker flag on the area.

'Don't get too close though,' remarked the Lieutenant.  'Just use one of your telescopic arms to plant it over the crevice and then spray around the danger are with fluorescent paint.'

            'I doubt whether he'll fall through anyway, Lieutenant,' said Carlos.  'The way he's flattened himself out he'll have spread his weight pretty wide.'

            'Quite right, Carlos,' remarked Remy as he squeezed an aerosol can, 'splayed out on the ground like this the average pressure per square foot is hardly any more than it would be for one of you - and this crust of snow is two feet thick at least.'

            After a couple of hours Remy had spiralled as far as the winch's metallic-plastic rope would stretch, covering a circular of several hundred feet around the ship.  And from the cockpit the whole scene below was a mass of Remy's crab-like tracks, interspersed with the occasional red flag and its perimeter of orange marker dye.

            Remy, by this time was able to give a first report on the planet's atmosphere, having done the analysis in his portable micro-lab whilst working.

            'The gas content,' rattled out Remy, 'is twenty-five percent oxygen, four percent carbon-dioxide, with the rest being mostly nitrogen and a slightly higher proportion of rare-gases than was found on earth …particularly helium…oh yes, and the water vapour pressure is very low up here. Probably because it’s below freezing'

            'So in other words Remy, it's quite breathable?'

            'Oh yes, Lieutenant, and I'm sure Ray and Anne would agree on that.'

            'A bit high in oxygen' commented Ray, 'but that should give us the extra energy to compensate for the gravity here.  It's a bit more than Earth's.'

            'Thirty-eight point four-seven-three feet per second per second,' retorted Remy.

            'Clever-dick, are you trying to outdo Ace or something,' said Anne.'  And what about the air pressure - but please, just make it approximate.'

            'Well, at the moment we are about four thousand feet above sea level and the pressure is about nine-tenths of an atmosphere.  So down off the plateau it should be about an atmosphere,' responded Remy, each time emphasising the word about.

            'And what about the organic content?  Anne asked, playing Remy at his own game.

            'Yes Remy,' cut in Ray, 'is there any sign of pollen grains, microbes and so on?'

'There's nothing in my filters and I've already passed air through several different culture solutions with no result as of yet'

            'We did expect this to be a pretty sterile place - that's why we picked it,' commented the Lieutenant.  'Maybe things up here are just too cold.'

            'We'd better give Remy a couple of days on those cultures before we can be absolutely sure.'

            'Quite right, Anne,' the Lieutenant acknowledged and then spoke into the intercom.

             'Remy, you'll have to stay outside on your own for the time being.  Me and a couple of the others will get suited up and go down to the cargo hold.  We'll lower the tractor and two prefabs on the electric winch.  You can spend your time getting the domes up so  that later on myself and one volunteer,' he looked around at the others, 'can join you outside.  We'll stay with you for a while, before the others come out - to see how things go.'

            After depositing several tons of crates around the base of the ship it took Remy Sixteen almost forty-eight hours of non-stop work to assemble the twin survival shelters that his human colleagues would need.  But by this time the robot's portable culture-plate experiments had come through; a straight forward gram positive bacillus that internal tests had shown were sensitive to wide-spectrum antibiotics.

            So after consultation with the two medical experts aboard, Lieutenant Percival decided it was time to go out and join Remy.  He asked for one volunteer and both Perez and Higgins offered to accompany him; but Bill Higgins was chosen for, as the Lieutenant explained, who would pilot the ship back to the Ganymede if anything happened outside.

            'So how are our two guinea-pigs?' inquired Carlos, now the ship's temporary commander, as he watched the two suited figures moving clumsily on the snow.

            'Fine,' Bill panted into his throat-mike,' but it's pretty hard going.  We've only walked a couple of hundred feet and already I'm whacked.  It must be the extra weight - of the gravity and the suit.'

            'More like lack of exercise,' grunted Percival and then stood still.  'This will do Bill, let's take these damn helmets off and get some fresh air.  I'll go first.'

            ‘If anything happens to you Lieutenant,' cried Anne excitedly, 'we'll get Bill and Remy to screw your helmet back on and get you inside the domes.'

'Well here goes then,' the Lieutenant pronounced slowly twisting the clips that held down the transparent globe and took an audible whiff of Hope's air, high up on the yet unnamed plateau.

 

 

CHAPTER 14

 

            The seventh L.E.S. broadcast to Gagarin was quite different from the previous gloomy ones, mostly concerned with the failure of Ganymede's cryogenic systems; for Captain Jakson immediately started out on an optimistic note.

            'This time fellow earthmen I have good news for you…'

            Everyone stopped work wherever they were - in Ring City, on the farms and factories and in the Navig Section - and made their way to the nearest wall communicators. And      Jakson told them of the discovery of a planetary system around Theta Ceti and that the second planet was potentially habitable.

            'Although we've known for some months about this we didn't tell you in previous broadcasts as we wanted to make sure one of them was suitable for us.  But now, just last week in fact, Ace finally confirmed that the second one is earth-like.  We're calling it Hope - so keep your fingers crossed for us.  When we get there we're going to land a team of seven explorers to check the place.'

            Unobtrusively Ace took over the commentary and in his usual suave voice gave his rapt audience a mass of technical details on Hope's climate, geography and other features, all accompanied by moving blocks of figures on the screens.

            When Ace had finished Captain Jakson came back to say that  more information would be sent later but that the Gagarin should think about preparing to join them if their own star system was proving disappointing.

            The message created big excitement onboard and a meeting was hastily arranged by Gagarin's excutive.  But it had hardly begun when a quarrel broke out between the second-in-command and the rest on the proposed journey to Ganymede in an 'American' ship, as Ivan insisted on calling it.

            'We should wait before making any definite decision to leave - there's no hurry,' he pleaded with the others seated around the table in the city's conference room.  'How do you know the whole thing isn't just a clever trick to fool us?  Ganymede may be a timebomb especially contrived for us.  These messages might all be faked.  There may only be a computer aboard trying to entice us into its range.'

            'Don't be so paranoid, Ivan,' replied the Chief Navig in an exasperated voice.  'We've been through all this before and you know we need that advanced technology of theirs.  Safe fusion power, super-computers and the preserved germplasm they have and which, as they have explained, has to be used before it's too late.  Do you want to eat dog and rat meat all you life?  We specially need Ganymede's frozen seed, you must see that.'

            'Not to mention  medical techniques which are three centuries ahead of ours,' added Konstantin.

            'You agree anyway, Ivan,' the Chief persisted, 'that we can't stay here.  So either we take Jakson at his word or we head out towards the Bootes Constellation for the next star system.'

            'And we'll need Ganymede for that too,' butted in Sutong glowering at Ivan, 'We need those plasma shields, unless you think this ship's up to another marathon journey, even longer than the one we've just done.'

            'I don’t see why it isn't' Ivan responded defensively, 'we were made to last for thousands of years of travel.  And now we've got all this new material.  I think when we've got everything we need here we should move out to Cygnus on our own and take our chances.'

            'But we nearly didn't make it this far,' spluttered Alexei.  'The Great Silence, the Zanies, the loss of our farms… …' He trailed off with a shrug and caught his sister's eye.

            'Absolutely right,' said Natalie coming to his support.  'Our ship’s builders only thought in material terms and had no idea of the social and psychological changes that could take place over hundreds of years.  How could they possibly have predicted the Great Silence and the effect of us being totally isolated?'

            'Well we're not now,' Fygor stated categorically.

            'I still say…' But Ivan was interrupted by the Chief who stood up and spread out his arms.

            'Look everyone, there's no point in us arguing any more, we'll just have to put it to the vote.  And you, Ivan, will of course be able to put your ideas to the whole ship.  After the poll the decision will be binding on everyone.  Is that clear?'  Everyone nodded.

            For a good week there were heated discussions amongst the ship's citizens on the issue; with television programs, public gatherings, caucus meetings, talks and film on Earth history and replays of the Ganymede messages.  Not only the experts, but anybody who had anything to say on the matter, got up and offered their views.

            But the final outcome was a foregone conclusion, for whether 'Euro-American' or not most of the population had long lost any patriotic feelings toward their ancestral state and were feeling basically lonely in the vastness of deep space Ganymede's crew represented the only other spark of humanity.  So the poll was ninety-seven percent in favour of joining up with them and a message to that effect was consequently sent out in the direction of Theta Ceti.

            After the pioneer ships were recalled the mineral processing plants went into a final spasm of activity to deal with the backlog of unrefined ore that hung around the ship in great globules.  However the oil fractionating plants and processing factories continued to work at their usual rate as these would remain operating throughout the long space journey - and would result in a nice present of chemicals, drugs, plastics and finished products for the Ganymedians.

            Another message form captain Jakson giving close-up pictures of Hope's forests and seas and announcing that their scout-ship was about to land on an ice plateau, gave added impetus to Gagarin’s preparations for leaving the Iota Eridani system.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 15

 

            The geologist and the scout-ships commander spent their first few days outside an the plateau within the confines of the circular area already paced out by Remy Sixteen - during which time they busied themselves getting the prefabricated huts into a liveable condition.

            It wasn't until the third day that they got round to figuring a way of righting the ship into something like a vertical position.  And after some discussion with their crew-mates inside, they got the caterpillar working and parked it a short distance from the leaning craft, on the opposite side from which the subsidence had occurred.

            Then Remy, full of his usual surprises, had magnetised his foot-pads and effortlessly scuttled up to near the top of the stubby ship. Then he slipped a metal cable he was carrying onto the emergency handle of the small cabin air-lock, located on the starboard side - the other end being attached onto the caterpillar's powerful winch.

            The idea was to pull the ship into a more or less upright position, whilst Remy placed a large flat plate of metal under the fin that had broken through the surface.  But even before the Lieutenant, who was controlling  the caterpillar, had chance to engage its winch motor, Bill, who was standing outside, started to sway. He clutched  onto the side of the tracked machine for support.

            'I think he's fainted, Remy,.' bellowed the Lieutenant as he hastily clambered out of the driver's cabin to aid  his friend, now crumpled up on the ground.  'He's as white as a sheet, we'll have to carry him to the dome.'

            'Let Remy do a complete check up on him when you get inside…  and on you too,' added Anne watching the robot gently pick up the dazed man in three of its adaptable claws.

            As soon as they got into the warm living quarters Remy took blood samples from the now conscious but very flushed man and asked him for a urine sample. Then packed off to bed.  He did the same tests on the Lieutenant and discovered that too had begun a slight fever.

Remy then broke open the domes emergency medical kit and injected both men with a sedative and told them to rest whilst he completed the preliminary tests.

            'I didn't know that you're also a qualified doctor,' murmured Percival as waves of sleep began to wash over him.

            'I told you before, Lieutenant, that I'm a complete walking lab and can do anything from…..,' but the man was asleep before the sentence finished.

            The rest of the crew aboard the ship were quite agitated by this sudden development, having been looking forward to soon going outside themselves. So  they wanted quick answers.  But Remy would not be hurried as he had decided to carry out a whole battery of other investigations on the sleeping men first; starting with a lumber puncture in order to study their cerebrospinal fluid.

            Finally, after several anxious hours of analysing blood pressure, liver-function, blood proteins and antibody response, the metallic nurse was able to tell the others that there was nothing to worry about, the results suggesting that the two men were suffering from nothing more serious than a moderate allergy.

            'But I thought you said the plateau was completely sterile, Anne?' queried Amponsah via the three-way relay and orbiting way above them.

            'It is, Kofi.  We've found absolutely no trace of pathogens so far, but even microscopic amounts of foreign proteins, even if quite dead can cause allergies.  Bill and Percival aren't suffering from an infection, you know.'

            'So what'll you do for them, Anne?' came in Jakson.

            'Remy's already done it Captain.  He's given them anti-histamine shots and is letting them rest until they adjust.  Hopefully we won't need to give them steroids.'

            'Don't worry, captain,' said Remy, 'I'll be here with them all the time and will keep a constant check on them.'

            Within just twenty-four hours both men were fit and well, although Bill had a slight headache that Anne explained was probably a result of the tapping of his spinal fluid during the lumber puncture.

            'The anti-histamine seemed to have done the trick,' said Lieutenant Percival into his collar intercom, after the two of them had eaten a hearty breakfast.  'And before you others come outside you should all make sure you take some shots as well so you won't have the sort of trouble me and Bill have had.

            'Good idea,' replied Ray from the scout-ship.  'Remy will be checking the two of you every six hours so that Anne and I can decide when you'll be fit enough to continue working and do a bit of exploring.'

            'I'm fit enough already.'

            'Maybe, Lieutenant, but let's make sure.  And you must wait until Bill is really O. K. as it's not a good idea for any of you to be on your own.'

            In fact Bill was declared a hundred percent fit the next day. So it was decided that as soon as hey had completed work on getting the ship on an even keel the three of them would travel northwards for about ten miles, the nearest point to where the plateau ended.

            'We two will be in the caterpillar,' said the Lieutenant, 'and you, Remy, will go ahead of us, testing the ground with your sonar gear.'

            'And what if I fall into a crevice.  Even I'd find it difficult to get out of a deep one.'

            'I thought you could handle anything, Remy?' remarked Bill.

            'My magnetic feet will hardly work on ice, will they?'

            'You'll be roped to the truck of course, Remy,' said the Lieutenant.  'But when doing your echo soundings do take into account that our combined weight will be five times yours.'

            They righted the scout-ship that afternoon - a relatively quick job - and spent the rest of the day getting food, fuel and equipment aboard their vehicle.  Early next morning the small party moved off with Remy blazing a trial a hundred-and-fifty feet ahead of them with Bill and the Lieutenant warm and snug in the caterpillar's driving compartment, separated from the elements by a bubble of polarised plastic.

            `The journey took much longer than expected as the team often had to zigzag and back-track to dodge fissures and ravines that blocked their direct route north.  And once Remy miscalculated and had slid and fallen through the ice crust. The two men  hauled him up from the comfort of their sealed cabin.  But Remy, after shaking off the powdery snow, continued as if nothing had happened.

            Except for this there was little to report back to base as the view consisted only of seemingly endless undulations of snow. Until Remy abruptly stood stock-still on top of yet another ice ridge, silhouetted against the frosty blue sky.

            'What's the matter, Remy?' asked Bill taking his food off the accelerator, 'another crevice?'

            'Leave the cat and come and see for yourselves,' was Remy's curt reply.  'I think we've come to the end of our journey.'

            After a few words with the base-ship on the radio the two men climbed out of the tracked vehicle and closed its plexiglass door, leaving the engine running at idling speed. They were wearing thick thermal gear and after pulling up the hoods and switching on the suit's element heaters they made their way up to where Remy was standing o the sky-line above them.

            Both men gasped involuntary when they got there, for not more than five feet from where Remy rested motionless the plateau ended abruptly.

            'You're crazy, Remy,' shouted Bill holding back.  'You could be on an overhang.  Come back for goodness sake.  The piece you're on might break off.'

            'Don't fret Bill, I've done an echo sounding and there's eighty feet of fossil pack ice beneath me, not to mention hundreds of feet of basaltic rock.  Come on over here, you're much lighter than I am and so you two can get much nearer the edge.'

            The two hung on to Remy's extendable arms and leant over.

            'Incredible,' the Lieutenant exclaimed, 'we're right on the brink of a precipice.'

            'Thousand of feet of it,' Bill amplified.  'There's even some clouds below us.'

            The lieutenant decided to get even closer to the verge and lying down told Remy to hold on to his feet whilst he stuck his head over the edge of the abyss.

            'It's almost a sheer drop,' he squeaked, his voice constricting from a spasm of vertigo.

            'Hold on to me tightly for God's sake, Remy,' and he unhooked his binoculars to scan the green patches below that was unobscured by cloud.

            'It's vegetation alright,  and further out it looks like forest.  But it's a bit hazy as there seems to be some sort of mist hovering around it; low clouds maybe?'

            'No Bill, I don't think so.  It's too close to the ground and has a completely different colour - a definite yellow tinge in fact.  Let's get Remy to take some filtered pictures with his video-pod.'

            'Is there any way of you getting down?' queried a tinny voice coming from the two men's personal intercoms and being beamed down from the Ganymede mother ship.

'It's an absolutely sheer drop for about three-quarters of the way down, Captain, and then it turns into a fairly steep incline full of rocks.'

            'A scree slope,' added Bill into his throat mike, after wriggling his way alongside the Lieutenant an taking a look for himself.

            'In between the boulders,' the Lieutenant continued, 'there also seems to be some vegetation.  Grass or small bushes maybe.  It's difficult to make things out up here above the cloud level.'

            'From the bluish colour, more likely to be lichen, I think,' commented Bill. 

'And I can just make out some bushes where the slope levels off - and even further away come larger trees.  That's where the yellow mist the Lieutenant mentioned starts.'

            ‘O.K. you two, there's not much more you can do at the moment,' said Captain Jakson floating miles above them.  'Get Remy to take as many pictures as possible with different sorts of filters.  That'll probably take the rest of the day so you'd better spend the night in the caterpillar.  There's no point in trying to make it back to the scout-ship in the dark.

            'Captain, don't you think we should first circle around the plateau for a while to see if there's any way we can get down?'

            'There's no way, Lieutenant,' Jason's voice hummed over the airwaves.  'It's a sheer drop all around.  Bill knows the reason.'

            'He's right, Lieutenant,' and Bill expanded.  This plateau is very likely the remains of a gigantic ancient volcano; the basalt plug in fact.  Over the centuries all the soft pumice has been totally worn away leaving only this hard rock sticking up from the surrounding plains.'

            'Don't worry, Lieutenant, we'll think of a way of getting you down,' the Captain piped in.

            'I can think of a very simple way already,' answered Percival.

'Let's hear it then.'

            'Well Captain, we could rig up some sort of platform from the prefabricated parts aboard the scout ship, them bring it and the big mechanical hoists we have onboard here in the caterpillar's trailer. I think the caterpillar's own winch is too small for the job,.  We can set up the whole thing here and the rest of the crew can lower us onto the scree slope.  And from there on the three of us can explore on foot.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 16

 

            After the message from Ganymede about the landing of the scoutship on the ice plateau, there had been an increased rush of activity aboard the Gagarin, to prepare the mile long craft for the sixty year trip to Hope's sun, Theta Ceti.

            The Pioneers had made their last journeys and were permanently docked in their bays and many of the ore processing factories surrounding the aft part of the long communicating tunnel had been shut down. In anticipation  of immanent blast-off the Gagarin itself had edged away from the mass of dangerous waste ore and debris that had hovered around it in a ever-dilating halo  and  now formed a swirling nebula several thousand yards behind the ship's smaller dumb-bell, housing the fission engine.

            During all these preparations the ship had been receiving a continuous stream of information about what the Ganymede's small exploration team had found an Hope. Everyone was immensely happy when they heard that the whole of the scout crew had been finally allowed out to breathe fresh air for the first time in centuries - and with no ill effect.  Even Chief Navig Oblonsky seemed pleased and glad to be on the move again.

            Everything had been made ready for departure, the atomic engines were slowly started up and the ship was several hours into it's forty-eight hour countdown when shattering news came through on the transceiver constantly fixed on Theta Ceti.

            'Ganymede calling Gagarin  ,' burst out Captain Jakson's deep voice over the static that always momentarily preceded a broadcast.  'On no account are you to come to Theta Ceti… Disaster has struck the exploration team.  Hope is totally unfit for human habitation.  In fact totally dangerous to human beings.  Repeat. On no account are you to come………..'

            There was a short silence as if Jakson couldn't find the words to go on.  Then in a choked voice he continued.  'Even though we don't yet know whether you've discovered a suitable planet we have decided that the best thing for us to do is to come to you.  There's no point in us going ahead with out original fall-back plan of meeting up en route for Cygnus 26 as maybe you've been luckier than us and hit a hospitable planet.  And there's no point in us hanging around waiting for a message from you to confirm this or not. So we’re already on are way to you. In fact, by the time you receive this report we'll be one-and-a-quarter years into our fifteen year journey to you.

'Repeat. This is Ganymede calling Gagarin.  On no account are you to come to Theta Ceti. Disaster had struck the exploratory team, as I will now explain……….'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 17

 

            In his warning message to Gagarin, Captain Jakson explained how tragedy had struck the Ganymede scout-ship by first describing the landing of the small craft atop an icy mountain during a sudden gale-storm and of the explorers first tentative trips to the edge of the plateau.

            'So we had to use the caterpillar truck,' his voice continued, issuing from monitors around which hundreds of the Gagarin population were gathered.  'Finally they got the prefabricated scaffolding, hundreds of yards of steel rope and a heavy duty mechanical hoist to the cliff.  We used these to build a derrick jutting out over the escarpment to lower our three explorers and their stores in a small caged platform.  Fortunately we left the cage at the bottom for them when they came back.  And as you'll realise later it was damn lucky for the rest of the scout crew that we never pulled it back up.'

            'During this we were all in contact with one another via the Ganymede, which was in stationary orbit above the plateau.  So from now on you can hear and see for yourselves what happened over the next few days from these snippets of tape we've edited down for you from the hundreds of hours stored away in Ace's memory banks.’

            'We'll start with where the three actually begin to descend in the cage and the first voices you'll hear will be theirs.  That's Lieutenant Percival, the leader of the scout crew, Bill Higgins the geographer and Remy Sixteen, one of our explorer an prospector robots.'

            The Captain's face faded and was replaced by expanses of blue sky followed by grey rock.  Dark and light altered confusingly with each other and a voice bellowed out.

            'God, Lieutenant, I think I'm going to throw up in a minute.  I'd have thought being used to space-sickness would have prevented me ever getting planet-bound vertigo.'

            'It's the spinning that's doing it, Bill,' the Lieutenant replied, trying not to puke himself.  'Don't worry we'll soon be down, just hang on…..and for goodness sake stop looking over the side, you'll only make it worse.'

            'That's right,' reiterated Remy in its high pitched voice.  'Forget about what's going on around you and just keep your eyes on me here in the middle.'  For the robot had planted itself squarely in the centre of the cage with its eight metal arms radiating out like the spokes of a wheel and hooked onto the platform's sides.

            'Don't you feel anything Remy?' quizzed Bill, still trying not to retch.

            'Of course not.  I can even work quite well in a Jovian storm, ask Kwok, he'll tell you.  My gyros always tell me exactly where I am and they don't have the unfortunate side-effect of making me feel giddy, like your inner ears do.'

            'There's no need to be so smug about it,' spluttered Bill, the wretched man's pale and sweating face clearly visible on the Gagarin  's video screens.

            'You just keep your eyes fixed on me, Bill,' insisted the robot, unconcerned by a spray of vomit that hit its silvery surface.  'It's an old trick used by Sufi dervishes and ballet-dancers who like to spin like tops.  They managed to do it by always keeping their eyes focused on one particular point.

            'Dervishes, dancers.  What the hell are you on about, Remy?'

            'He's just trying to help you, Bill,' the Lieutenant declared.  'He's trying to grab your attention.  You just keep on talking Remy.'

            Remy had just started a soliloquy on the relationship between the cochlea and the visual cortex when there was a crunching noise and the picture on the screen wobbled alarmingly - ending up as a tumbled mass of boulders, half of which were out of focus.

            'Thank God we're down,' grunted Bill into his throat mike. 

            'And none too lightly, either,' said Remy, thinking more of his human companions than himself.

            'Anyway we're all here in one piece, that's the main thing,' said the lieutenant and then craning his head upwards.  'And you up there, just make sure you leave the basket here for us when we come back. I wouldn't fancy trying to climb up.  It's practically vertical.’

            'Don't worry, Lieutenant,' a woman's voice answered.  'What's it like down there?'

            'That's Anne Bright, one of the scout-ship biologists,' Captain Jakson's broke in on the recording for the benefit of the Gagarin   crew.

            'Is there any sign of life?' continued Anne’s excited voice. 

            'Plenty of green planets in between some of the rocks,' replied Remy, unlocking the cage door and getting out of the platform which, was resting at a slight angle on the slope at the base of the cliff.  The robot pointed its camera arm at the screen around.  'I'm looking at some right now.'

            'Ah yes, Anne and I can see them clearly on the screens now you've got everything steady and focused.'

            'That's the second biologist, Ray Polanski,' the Captain interrupted.

            'From now on I'll keep my video arm on a separate gyroscopic control so you'll always get a smooth picture,' said Remy,  as he scooped up some of the mossy grass in another of his retractable appendages and placed the sample into one of the numerous receptacles he had built into his half-tone frame.

            'I'll analyse it alter, but first,' the mechanical voice said to the two human explorers, 'lets get onto more level ground.' But seeing how dazed his two companions were as they climbed out of the cage Remy said 'you'd better hook your belt ropes onto me and I'll go as slowly as I can.’

            There was little conversation for a while, but a sequence of pictures of boulders interspersed with a blue-green carpet of moss and lichen flashed by on the numerous video screens aboard the Gagarin  .

            The scene faded and reappeared. The exploratory team was  on more or less level ground and moving towards small copse of stunted trees, each made up of several individual trunks twisted about themselves like a coiled of rope and frothing out a mass of green filaments that tumbled down to the ground.

            'It's really beginning to get hot and clammy down here,' grumbled the lieutenant wiping his brow with his sleeve.

            'And it's beginning to smell like a ripe compost heap.  I wish I were up there with you lot - in the cool clear air of the plateau,' Bill added wistfully.

            More pictures of an ever thickening forest came up on screen with many of the knurled and twisted trees sprouting flat brightly coloured nodules, reminiscent or earthly toadstools; accompanied by the heavy breathing and tired comments from the two human explorers.

            The scene gradually became darker until it was difficult for the viewers to pick out the details - then faded out altogether.  Suddenly everything became brilliant with a faint wispy mist giving everything a slight yellow colour.

            'The three of them bivouacked for the night,' Captain Jakson's voice came on the air, 'and now it's the following morning.'

            The small party continued on its journey away from the plateau and into the forest and from the many edits of the recording several hours must have passed. The yellow mist was getting thicker, partially obscuring the dank vegetation and masses of dangling tendrils that rose up on all sides.

            'This is really getting bad,' wheezed Bill, 'What do you think it is?'

            'Some sort of pollen probably,' replied Remy.  'I've taken samples already and am right now working on them. From now on I'll start using the colour filters and enhance the pictures with the infra-red system.

            And suddenly the fog vanished from the video screens and the surrounding vegetation could be seen quite clearly.

            'What a weird looking place,' exclaimed Anne.

            But Bill just grunted and then in a curt voice said, 'it might be for you, but down here with this haze it's getting bloody impossible to see anything.'  He finished abruptly as both men were beginning to feel the extra exertions they were having to make against Hope's slightly more than earth gravity.

            But Anne and Ray, back at the scout-ship, continued their animated conversation about what they could see on the ship's screens.

            'Look at the size of those mushroom trees,' but out Anne as Remy swept his camera upwards.  Some must be over a hundred feet tall…….and look, there's another with a spiral trunk…….and one with fluting.  Just like an ancient Greek column.  Even the ground is dotted with toadstool,' she added as the camera zoomed downwards.  'I wonder if any of them are edible?' 

            'Better let me finish my tests firth Anne,' replied Remy.  'They're pretty brightly coloured so they're likely to be poisonous.'

            'Poisonous or not, the place is fascinating,' burst in Ray.  'The whole godammed forest is composed of every species of Thalophyta imaginable: lichens, toadstools, mushroom trees, you name it.  And I don't think I've seen two that are exactly alike.  And see how so many of the big ones sprout mycelium….and green too.  They must be in some sort of symbiotic relationship with an algae - just like lichens are.'

            'Maybe these filamentous hyphae are growing from the ground and up the tree tendrils,' commented Anne.

            'Mycelium, hyphae! What are you two up there on about?' said the lieutenant in a perplexed voice.

'O. K. fungoid creeping-ivy, then.' Ray answered.

            'But surely not everything down there is fungus?' queried Captain Jakson from the Ganymede two hundred miles up.  'There's  plenty of greens, blues and yellows.  Surely that means chlorophyll and carotene?'

            'That's what I meant when I said they were like lichens,' replied Ray.  'Like the ones back on old earth.'

            'And in our frozen stores,' added Anne.

            'Yes, we have dozens of species aboard Ganymede,' responded her colleague.  'You see Captain, lichens are actually two plants in one - a fungus plus a delicate one-celled plant called an algae.  The algae provides the oxygen and sugars from sunlight and the fungus gives out carbon-dioxide and protects the algae.  Remy, please grab a handful of the lichens that you are walking on and lets have a closer look.'

            Remy's camera obligingly focused downwards as one of his claws encircled a bunch of multi-hued vegetation in front of him.  The seemingly separate plants came out embodied in a green filamentous mat that had to be torn from its surroundings and underneath which was a layer of brown filaments.  Remy held the clump up to his camera for inspection.

            'There, you see,' said Ray, 'they aren't individual plants at all it's a continues mycelium they're on.  I wonder how thick it is?  Must be nice to walk on, plenty of spring in it.'

            The lieutenant and Bill ignored this rather whimsical remark and just kept slogging on into the increasing gloom.

            'Look at that trunk!' said Kwok as the three travellers passed by one particular bizarre tree.  'It's completely looped-the-loop!.  I always thought that plants grew straightup?'

            'These aren't plants, Kwok,' Anne replied.  'It's only the filaments that are-----or rather contain them.  And we don't really know whether these are part of the tree or just using it for support.  Remy's most certainly had to use force to pull them out of the round'.

            'Maybe they've got roots at both ends, Anne.'

            'Whatever they are, Ray, these fungi grow any damn way they please.  I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't giant underground one's - like truffles.'

            'Truffles?'

            'Yes, Kwok.  An gourmet's delicacy of old earth.  Really underground mushrooms.'

            Yet again the picture on Gagarin 's screens faded, and when it reappeared the filaments on the fungoid trees had become fewer, but individually thicker in girth.  Many had green bulbous swelling at intervals along their sides - and in a few cases these had divided in bunches of yellow globules.

            'Wait a moment Remy,' came Ray's voice over the air.  'That bunch coming up on your left.  Can you take a sample?'

            Following instructions, Remy placed an appendage on a thick cord-like stem and tugging it, used another arm to grab a group of taut yellow spheres hanging half way up.

 'What he hell!' shouted Anne.  'They just seemed to vanish into thin air.

            'What are you crazy lot doing?' cried the Lieutenant angrily, floundering around and unable to see.  'Since you told Remy to pluck that pod the mist's got worse.

            'Sorry Lieutenant, I shouldn't have done that,' the robot commiserated.

            'Done what?'

            'You couldn't see, Anne, because of the video filters.  But when I touched that pod, it expelled a cloud of yellow pollen all over the place.'

            'Fungal spores, more likely Remy.' interjected Ray.

            'Well whatever it is - it's choking us,' spluttered Bill.  'From now on let' keep clear of those exploding ropes!  In fact,' he staggered, 'I'm beginning to feel really dizzy.  Please give me some water Remy.'  And he knelt down to receive a feeder-tube attached to a water container built into the capacious robot.

            After being led out of the smoke by Remy, the trio continued its jungle trek, keeping well clear of the exploding vines.  But Bill kept on getting dizzy bouts. So it was decided to rest, eat and bed down for the night; a simple matter of laying down a groundsheet for the two men to curl up on, with Remy switched on like a lamp and throwing a protective cage over them with some of his telescopic legs.

            But the following day both men woke with fever and swollen glands it was decided to stay put. The inflamed lumps, resembling a bad case of hives, that had appeared all over the geologist's  exposed face and arms was quite clear on the  Gagarin’s vu-screens.

            Thinking that the men were suffering from another allergy Captain Jakson told the Gagarin populace that the Ganymede's medics had ordered Remy to inject his companions with a massive dose of anti-histamines and a strong sedative - then stand guard over them for the next twenty-four hours,  hoping that the sick men would be at least well enough to make it back to the foot of the plateau.

            But they were never to make it, for the following day when Remy tried unsuccessfully to wake them and then turned them over, a dark syrupy liquid gushed out of their eyes and mouth and their heads collapsed like leaking balloon.  When Remy carefully opened up the zipper of Bill's one-piece overall his chest was a mass of suppurating skin and yellow pustules that oozed  pus.

            A series of terrifying time-lapse pictures of the two men appeared on the Gagarin screens as, one by one, their clothes were slowly dissected away; revealing a human form almost melted away into a   featureless mass of weeping oedematous tissue.  Even their bones seemed to have partially dissolved away into  flattened bags of dark pus and  slimy gristle.  But it was their heads that were worst, for though formless puddles of mire, their hair was still quite recognisable.

            This ghastly metamorphosis of two healthy men in just a matter of hours shocked the population of the Gagarin to its core, just as it had done to the Ganymede crew fifteen months earlier. Captain Jakson's only comment throughout the grisly sequence was to thank God that the medics had given Remy orders to inject such large doses of sedatives into them.

            Afterwards, the captain told Gagarin that he had asked Remy to do a thorough on-the-spot biochemical analyse on the festering remains and some sort of autopsy if that were possible.  Fortunately the Russio-Asians were spared the details of this nightmare task - but were given the written results of the tests that Remy transmitted up to the Ganymede and its scout-ship.

            'I had to work quickly,' came Remy's voice over the televised lists of diagrams and equations that flashed up the screen.  'For their tissues, even the internal ones, had largely necrosed into an amorphous goo, especially in the case of Bill, whose insides were completely liquid.  Not putrefaction in the normal bacterial sense, but a cellular break-down into a yeast-slime.

            'But let's get back to the video pictures.' aid Captain Jakson and the picture switched to a close-up and microscopic details of  yellow pod,  with  Anne’s  asking Remy the cause of the deaths.

            'It seems to have been the fungal spores, especially the massive contact they had with the millions I inadvertently released when I touched those pods.  The microscopic spores penetrated their respiratory first and then asexually multiplied to colonise their whole bodies…………..’

            'But that's not the complete story,' the robot continued.  'For from protein diffusion and polarity tests I've been able to track down two very unusual amino-acids in the spores; optical isomers of human ones.'  And three-dimensional computer drawings of the isometric chemicals and their terrain mirror-mages appeared on screen, accompanied by reams of figures and chemical symbols flashing up in one corner.

            'At first, using chromatography techniques, I was unable to distinguish between the human proteins and the ones down here - until I did the light polarisation tests.  So it's the two isomers that probably caused the initial allergic reaction - and this weakened the immune system so that the parasitic spores were easily able to invade the whole body.'

            'But why weren't the spores killed also,' asked Jill.  'Surely, Remy, humans would be as poisonous to the as they are to us?'

            'Because these spores, and most likely the other life around here, contain both optical isomers - and seem to handle both equally well.  A very unusual situation I must say.'

            'You're not kidding Remy,' broke in Ray’s voice.  'Life here must be incredibly flexible it can deal with both left and right handed proteins.'

            'Yes, it's super adaptable and unfortunately deadly for you humans.  And these spores are so tiny that they not only penetrate mucous membranes but can work their way right through the skin as well. So it only takes a few of them to initiate saprophytic colonisation of the host; though it might take a bit longer than in the case of Bill and the Lieutenant who must have breathed in thousands and thousands of spores from that pod.'

            'That bloody pod! I blame myself really,' said Ray.  'Here was I sitting up here in comfort and not thinking of the risks.'

            'You can't blame yourself,  Ray,' Remy replied.  'There's no way you could have known; and the symptoms would have manifested themselves sooner or later anyway, as the two of them just have already absorbed a few spores by then through their skins.' 

            'You mean Remy, that even one spore could have done this to them in the long run?'

            'Maybe not one, Captain, as blood phagocytes could have dealt with that…….but just a few hundred would have been enough to overcome the body's natural resistance.’

            'So the rest of the scout-crew are also liable in the end to come down with this sickness,' the Captain almost shouted.

            'I'm not sure.  Fortunately the spores don't float around individually but are released clumped together in small aggregates.  That's why the mist's so thick near the ground.  Even Hope's higher gravity helps keep them down.  So it's pretty unlikely that there are any spores, or at least any in quantity, up on the plateau.  I never found any evidence of them when I did the allergen tests there.'

            'But you can't be sure,' the Captain said tersely.

            'No.'

            `'So what do you suggest?'

            'Well, for a start the platform mustn't be wound up, as there might have been a few spores floating around where we got off. In fact everyone should stay aboard the scout-ship and not go out again.'

            'We're not daft, Remy,' burst out Anne.

            'And you left all the equipment outside.  You didn't bring any inside did you?'

            'No,' said Anne.  'Since we saw what happened to Bill and Lawrence none of us has gone out.'

            'In that case you should take off immediately and leave everything outside behind.'

            'Including yourself, Remy?' asked the Captain.

            'Yes, including me.  And when you get the scout-ship in orbit, the crew should wait for at least two weeks before they transfer across to the Ganymede.  And you'll have to leave the scout-ship behind as well, as it too might be contaminated.

            'And what will you do? cried Kwok, choking at the thought of loosing his friend.

            'Well, the spores can't affect me, that's for sure.  And with my newly installed nuclear batteries I can survive for ages.  So I'll just continue to do what I came here to do - study the geography and life-forms.'

            'But what will happen when we're on our way to Iota Eridani?' asked Jill.  Surely your transmitters aren't that powerful?'

            'That's simple enough, Jill', came in Ace's syrupy voice.  'If we're going to have to leave the scout-ship behind we can have its solar panels extended and keep the transceivers running with an automatic lock on the Ganymede.'

            That's right,' confirmed Remy.  'The orbiting scout-ship can relay all my information to you. And instruction from you back to me.'

            'In fact Remy has a very important role to play,' continued the bigger artificial intelligence.  'This is the first non-terrain life ever discovered and the knowledge Remy will obtain for us over the next few years will be of enormous interest.'

            The video pictures of Hope's forest faded out and gave way to that of Captain Jakson.

'So members of Gagarin , the scout-ship and its surviving crew are right now in orbit near us - but in quarantine.  And by the time you receive this message we will be well on our way to you - with or without them.  We will only know that in fourteen days.  Our next message will be sent then.  We are all praying that they aren't contaminated with this terrible sickness.  This is Captain Jakson of the L. E. S. Ganymede ending transmission.'

            There was a stunned silence aboard the Gagarin   and in the Navig control room Commander Oblonsky turned to Ivan and the other executives saying,' well, that's that.  Our journey to Hope is off.  We'd better stop the count-down and get back to our refining.'

            'Those poor people in the scout-ship.  I wonder what happened to them?' said Natalie.

            ‘You heard the Ganymede Captain said, we’ll only know that in two weeks’ said her father in a grim voice.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 18

 

            After the grisly deaths of their two colleagues the remaining members of the Ganymede scout-ship wasted no time in blasting off from the plateau. Dumping behind everything that was outside; the caterpillar, prefab domes and scientific equipment - even the several hundred tons of water that had been sucked into the ship's tanks for transfer to the mother ship was pumped back out.  And within a few short minutes of take-off the ferry craft was hundreds of miles above the horror planet, so ineptly named Hope, orbiting about half a mile from the L. E. S. Ganymede.

            Though relieved to get away the four explorers still had to go through the ordeal of two weeks of quarantine, waiting nervously for any symptoms of the fever and organic disintegration that had befallen Lieutenant Percival and Bill Higgins.

            During this distressing period Remy sent up masses of biochemical and histological data on the spores and forest life below, in the hope that Ace would be able to synthesise an anti-dote against the alien proteins.  But the combined efforts of the two cybernetic entities proved fruitless; though both agreed that the isolation period was more than enough to give the scout crew a clean bill of health - if they survived.

            Time crawled by for the shuttle-ships caged crew, until the fifteenth day after leaving Hope, when they were released; a procedure that turned out to lengthy and convoluted.

            First Carlos Peres, in command of the scout-ship since the Lieutenant's death, was told to ease his ship into a position parallel to the tail-end of the larger ship and one hundred feet from it. Then don a space-suit.

            'What you have to do Carlos,' hissed Captain Jakson's voice from the spinning parent ship, 'is to release your pneumatic transfer tube form the personnel airlock.  Then, using your squirt gun, edge the end of it to a position just behind our main engines.  Afterwards vamoose back to ship quick as we're going to bombard the tip of the tube for a few minutes with a heavy dose of gamma radiation from our fusion motors.  That should thoroughly decontaminate it.'

            'But won't you begin to move off?' Bruce asked.

            'No, we'll only be using the primers,' replied the Captain, 'and these have practically a nil thrust - any slight acceleration will be taken care of by Ace, using lateral jets pointing forwards.  Are there any other questions?'

            There was no reply so the Captain went on.  'After its been irradiated we'll let the umbilicus cool down for a few hours and Carlos, during this time you'll slide your ship alongside us until you're slightly in front of  us.  We'll then send someone out o attach your transfer tube to our central airlock…….. And by the way, before you lot actually leave the scout-ship through the exit tube, you must all shave off you body hair and remove your clothes.'

            'So we're to come across stark naked,' protested Anne, 'we'll freeze.' 

            'Of course we won't,' replied Carlos crossly, 'the tube's well insulated.  Or maybe it's because you're being modest?'

            'I was only joking, Carlos.  As far as I'm concerned the more we leave behind the better.'

            'One other thing before you go out, Carlos,' continued Jakson, 'when we finally link up our two life systems please make sure your air pressure is reduced by one quarter.  We'll also slightly increase our airlock pressure so that none of the air from you ship gets to us.'

            'I told you,' bewailed Anne,' not only battling the cold but a perishing wind as well.'

            Despite this light hearted protestation, Carlos carried out his orders without hitch. By the end of the day the flexible six foot wide pipe was fixed to the gimballed nose airlock of Ganymede; the gimbals being necessary to counter-act the spin of the larger ship, which was tuning on its long axis every fifteen seconds or so.

            By the evening the small and thankful group of naked astronauts closed the scout-ship hatch behind them and pulled themselves by plastic hand-rail along the rubbery man-sized transfer tube - made of opaque material to prevent space-vertigo.  At the end of the translucent tube was Ganymede's central lock - which briefly opened for them and immediately closed, shut after they had entered.

            Even inside the Ganymede they were still in fee-fall as the airlock was spinning in exactly the opposite direction to the rest of the ship in order to keep it stationary; otherwise the transfer tube would have been twisted and useless within a few minutes of being attached to Ganymede.

            A few moments after the hatch shut behind them the four heard a dull thud from outside as explosive bolts blew off the umbilicus joining the two ships - so that the airlocks anti-spin motor could be switched off and a breaking mechanism slowly applied.

            Very gradually the four explorers began to feel the slight tug of Ganymede artificial gravity as the lock and the ship began to move as one. And after they became evenly matched a second internal door slid open and the four hauled themselves into the central corridor of the ship proper.

            'Before we all meet up in the flesh you'll first have to have a thorough bath,' the Captain's voice barked out from a wall intercom.  'As you can see we've sealed the corridor in front of you, just leaving the first lateral hatchway open.  Please climb on down it where you'll find a reception bay specially arranged for you.'

            As they passed through the hatchway and down the ladder towards the ship's periphery, the inertial spin became greater, until at the entrance of the reception room it was almost that of earth gravity.  One by one they dropped through the ceiling by stepladder into the room, which was part of the ship's medical wing and like all the living quarters rested on the inside of the rotating ship's skin.

            Lit by blue light the place was almost bare, except for a few cushions and a four-foot high bullet shaped object in the middle of the room attached to a flex plugged into a wall socket.

            'I thought you said we were going to have a shower, Captain? Asked Carlos in a perplexed voice.

            'A sort of shower, anyway, Carlos,' came the Captain's chuckling reply from a wall speaker.  'We're going to bathe you for a few seconds with gamma radiation from that screened radioactive source in the centre of the room.'

            As he finished speaking more ultra-violet lights came on and the rounded tip of the shell-like tube opened up like a metal petal - momentarily exposing a tiny fragment of dull looking material.  A gieger-counter began to click away and the petal contraption closed up again.

            'I hope you're not giving us too much, Captain,' said Ray nervously.

'We're controlling it carefully so you'll only get a mild dose.  We hardly want to finish you off after all the trouble and time we've taken in getting you back.  So just relax as the only thing you might get is a touch of sunburn.'

            For half an hour the U. V. light continued to burn away over the four naked men and women who lounged about on cushions, turning themselves over occasionally.  From time to time the source of hard radiation was also exposed, until Ace announced that they had had enough.

            The blue light dimmed, the normal fluorescent ones came on and the Captain spoke.  'You'll be a bit radioactive for a while, so make yourselves comfortable while

you cool off.  There's food and drink in the locker we've marked with an 'X' and some clothes in the one next to it.'

            After the radiation in the room had diminished to an acceptable level the returnees, looking quite red and tanned, were finally let out of the isolation room - and immediately there was a meeting of the whole crew around the mess-room table.

            'Joe, myself and the others have already discussed things,' the Captain told the newcomers, 'and there's no question of us going back into cryogenic sleep for the fifteen year journey to Gagarin.'

            'That would be like condemning half of us to death,' added Doctor Kowasky.

            'But we had to dump all the water we were bringing to top up our tanks,' declared Carlos to the others sitting around.  'There won't be enough to go around. And what about food?'

            'In spite of our freeze-sleep system,' replied the Captain, 'our ship was built to maintain an active crew of fifty for at least forty years.  For there was never any guarantee that we would hit the jack-pot at either of the two nearest stars. So we had to plan for a whole series of journeys to other systems, including time to explore and exploit any planets we discovered.  With the present crew size, there'll be absolutely no problem.'

            'Our main problem is more likely to be boredom, I should think Captain,' commented Kwok.

            'Quite likely' Jakson acknowledged.  'And that's where Ace will be so vital; keeping us busy and amused.'

            'There's no issue there,' clipped in Jill emphatically.  'He is a world memory machine.'

            'Correct Jill,' came in the cyberoid's battery voice.  'Any microfilm painting, video film, piece of music. You name it and I have it stored away in my atomic matrix.'

            'Not to mention all the new data we've got and expect to be getting from Remy,' declared the Captain.  'that should keep you biologists and geographers busy for years.'

'We'll also want some of you to become expert historians and sociologists,' as we'll have plenty of time to send Gagarin more information about what happened on earth in the three-hundred-

and-fifty years from the time they left to the holocaust……and of course the nineteen years afterwards up to the L.E.S.’s  launching of our ship’

             'More than nineteen,' butted in Ace, 'as we still receiving dispatches from the Jovian centre for almost eight years after that.  Up to December 6^th  2426  when we received, or  rather I received as you were all asleep, the very last snatch of a L.E.S. message, before we went completely out of range.'

            'That's one problem the Gagarin  never had,' remarked the Captain.  'That string of laser controlled relay rockets that was sent up after them kept them in touch with their Siberian base right up to the very end.'

            'But that was vital to the success of the air journey,' asserted Doctor Ramsaram Sholokov.  'Theirs is a colony ship, not like our Rip Van Winkal  one. So their psychologists had no idea what would happen after hundreds of years of solitude and didn't want to take any chances.  And look what they told us did happen when the earth messages stopped in that rather belated reply to our probe message.  The Great Silence, the Zanies and the Navigs only managing to get control of their ship again after some years.'

            'And that was partly due to out probes message Ram,' declared Kofi.'

            'Still, it would be nice to know what's happening back home,' came in the Captain again.  'We don't even know if the bases still exist.'

            'We should be grateful Captain, that we at least know that the Gagarin   still exists.  And it ill be interesting to find out exactly what information their Russio-Asian  relays did send them over the years.'

            'I still think it's a pity we only brought one along with us.'

            'I should remind you, Captain,' Ace enunciated, 'that this discussion about relays was thoroughly discussed before we designed our ship.  We decided against carrying more relays knowing that a considerable portion of Ganymede’s precious storage space would have had to be exclusively devoted to housing them.  Even with out advanced state of miniaturisation  they would have still comprised a sizeable chunk of our cargo.'

            'We could have done what the Russio-Asians did then,' the Captain persisted.  'Instead of carrying them we could have had them sent up after us from Jupiter.'

            'After the holocaust there just weren't enough rockets to go around,' the computer retorted.  'They couldn’t be manufactured from scratch any more as there was no manufacturing plant for this.  And as you know, Captain, our own ship was simply a re-conversion job on the old Pegasus cruiser.'

            'I suppose you're right, Ace,' the Captain signed.  'Now we should just think about getting to Gagarin  .'

            By the time the meeting had finished it was agreed that they would immediately prepare to blast off for Iota Eridani. But before the ion engine primers were switched on two radio messages were sent out. One was  beamed to the Gagarin one-and-a-quarter light years away informing them of Ganymede's immanent departure. The other to the scout-ship, lying desolate just a few metres away, ordering its computer to permanently close down everything aboard, except the solar panels, terrestrial telescope relay and automatic locking device.

            After a test broadcast between them and Remy Sixteen, two hundred miles below, the crew strapped themselves into their contoured couches and the fusion motors fired.  There were a few uncomfortable minutes of high gees which pushed everyone back into their seats, speeding Ganymede out of the pull of Hope and its sun. Then Ace modified the drive to a mild acceleration that would gradually build them up to one tenth the speed of light - and the crew was free to move about again.

            When the routine checks on the craft had been completed, practically everyone congregated around the mess-room televisors, to see and hear the latest communiqué from Remy, who by this time had moved even further from the ice plateau.

            He was now beginning to ascend a small hill and reported that he had seen his first sign of animal life.  A recorded film followed giving a brief glimpse of a cluster of white snake-like creatures emerging from a group of holes in the ground - and which abruptly disappeared down them again when Remy approached.  Another picture showed a fluttering movement, which suddenly moved up out of the screen.  A slow-motion replay showed something that may have been a blur of wings; a bird or small bat perhaps.  Remy said he would stand stock-still for some hours to see if he could get better photos.

            It was after the evening meal that the Ganymede crew were called back to the vu-screens by Ace, who announced that an importance bulletin was coming in from Remy.

            'You can see them clearly now,' said the robot as he slowly moved his video arm high above him to give a good view of what was going on below.  And the crew were able to see quite clearly that dozens of the pale serpentine creatures had ensnared four of his limbs and were trying to creep up his immobile half-ton bulk.

            'I saw more of these holes and so decided to stand quietly on top of them for a while,' he explained.  'Now let's see what happen when I move,' and he retracted one of his entrapped limps so sharply that the snakes were pulled tight.

            Three or four, unable or unwilling to let go became thinner and thinner until they snapped like rubber-bands, twisting and squirming on the turf for a few moments and knotting themselves into a tight ball before lying still.

            'They don't seem to be very strong,' he commented, ‘…….and seem to be exuding some sort of chemical,' he added, drawing a rather slimy looking limb up to his battery of eyes for inspection  and looking more than ever like a giant insect preening one of its appendages.

            'I'll take a sample of this stuff and pocket some of these dead ones for further analysis.' And so saying extricated himself from the wriggling mass below him.

            Next morning Gagarin   had a preliminary report of Remy's examination; which showed the mucous like discharge contained a whole range of powerful enzymes that could digest proteins, cellulose and lignin.  And the torn-off snakes themselves, after they had been unravelled, turned out to be a very lowly form of animal life; hardly more than a tubular mass of polyp cells interlaced with non-striated muscle fibres and a network of primitive nervous tissue.  There was nothing resembling a spinal cord or central nervous system, the closest approximation being a single pigmented spot near its tip.  Neither Remy nor the Ganymede biologist could make head or tail of these snakes, though Ace suggested that they might be simply feelers of a more complex animal living underground.

            Remy hung around the foot of the hill for several more days trying to get more pictures but the snakes seemed reticent to be seen.  Then five days out from Theta Ceti Ganymede received another startling report from him.

            'There's a whole mass of snakes attacking some sort of mammal.  Can you see?  I'll use my telephoto lens.'

            And the screen was filled a multitude of white cilia coiling about over a spread-eagled creature, the furry limbs of which could be clearly seen sticking out of the slithering mass.

            'I'll use a mild laser pulse to drive them away and see what exactly it is underneath,' Remy announced.  And instantly the beam struck the pallid serpents retracted back into their holes, leaving the quadruped exposed to view.  Remy increased the magnification.

            'Good grief,' whistled Ray.  'That animal's not being attacked or eaten.  That's a full-scale laparotomy and one of the neatest bits of dissection I've seen for a long time.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 19

 

            For two weeks after the catastrophic news from Ganymede, the inhabitants of Gagarin   was in turmoil. They now knew that neither of the star system, the two nearest earth that scientists thought might have planets, were suitable for human life.  They therefore had to face up to the grim idea of undertaking another journey to the next system. An even longer one than the one from earth they had just completed.  As a result of the onboard  nihilism the ship's executive became bitterly divided.

            One faction led by Ivan Kugarin wanted nothing to do with the Ganymede and with the news of the quarantine, played on the atavistic fears of Gagarin's inhabitants; contamination not just with a foreign culture but now with an alien disease.  Natalie and the biologists on the other hand realised that it was now even more important than ever that the two ships link up, as Ganymede's frozen seed had to be re-generated as quickly as possible.  And for numberless millions of miles the Gagarin  's half-empty farms and zoos were the only place where this could be done.

            The dispute simmered along until the news came in that the scout-crew quarantine period had safely passed by and that the Ganymede was on its way.  And when instruction began to come in from them on how to switch Gagarin 's motors over from fission to fusion, even Kugarin's supporters became fascinated by the technicalities of this and became as keen as anyone on the link-up.

            But it was the intriguing reports on Hope's life-forms that finally clinched the matter in favour of the rendez-vous, for just about everyone aboard became addicted to the messages beamed in from Remy and relayed to them via the orbiting scout-ship and incoming Ganymede.

            The last of the robot's bulletins had been about the animal the snakes had been dissecting. Now another was coming in on Gagarins liquid crystal screens of  Remy probing the tissues of the opened-up creature.

            The robot produced a whole battery of tiny surgical tools that fitted onto four of his limbs and whose co-ordination was finer than that of best of human pathologists.  And after many hours he concluded that it was a warm blooded mammalian type; though oddly enough no mammary glands were actually found, nor any sort of reproductive system for that matter.

            It was an extraordinary creature in other ways too.  It had no lateral symmetry, most obvious being that it had an extra small limb. It’s musculature was so developed on this side that Remy joked that the animal must have spent its life walking in circles.  Even its eyes weren't spaced evenly from the mid-line - nor its ears either.  And one side of its skull was larger than the other, most of its voluntary movements being presumably dealt with by one large lopsided cerebrum.

            Ace's comments on the whole matter was that the animal was a Frankenstein monster put together by a deranged designer - and then spent some time explaining this ancient tale to his audience.

            During this gothic story Remy continued his post-mortem and began pocketing the various pieces of tissue and bone lying around into his seemingly infinite number of built-in pouches.  And when there was absolutely nothing left, except a bloody patch of turf, and with camera pointing forwards he proceeded on his journey up the incline.

            The hill was largely bereft of dense jungle and contained a  few pools of water which Remy commented was odd,  as springs are usually found at the base of hills.  With such a clear view  more and more animals became visible and so Remy decided to stop for a while and try to catch a few.

            Using both his laser and sonic guns he was able to stun and dazzle several small animals - and using a wider light beam even got a brace of the fast moving birds that had eluded him up to then.  In one of the hilltop ponds he was even able to catch some fish, using his electric prod to numb them so that they floated to the surface.  The only thing he didn't catch, or even see at all, were insects.  There didn't seem to be any sign of them on Hope and Remy speculated aloud on the question of how plants managed to get pollinated.

            The creatures Remy caught and brought up to his cameras for all to see were of course dazed but alive. But  after catching them and videoing them from all angles  he then  took bloods and histological samples to carry out bio-chemical texts in his internal porta-lab.  Afterwards he killed them with a high voltage shock, except the fish which had already gasped their last. The broadcast ended with a lengthy series of dissections and displays of internal organs..

            It was almost a week later that Remy beamed up another report and announced his findings . And his first observation was that none of the animals were alike in any way.  Even in the case of the birds, which coming from the same flock were assumed to be of the same species. Yet each one yielded a completely different protein breakdown.

            Remy and the Ganymede biologists could make no evolutionary sense of the data; reptiles with fur, birds with limbs, warm-blooded fish and some creatures with extra heads.  In one out-landish case four, one at each end of its cruciate body. It was as if someone or something  had haphazardly thrown together a bizarre biological collage.

            Absolutely none of the dissected creatures showed any signs of genitals, ovaries, ovipositors or any sort of reproductive system,  even of a vestigial sort.  Each seemed to be unique and an end in itself. But  however inefficient looking they seemed they all thrived equally.  Rather than the survival of the fittest, Hope's evolutionary law seemed to be the survival of everything - including the unfit.

            To add the mystery, only the most rudimentary of alimentary systems was found in the fauna.  Some of the animals may have fed off the easily digestible soft fungi that abounded, but Remy and the biologists were drawn to the conclusion that most, if not all, were fed by the snakes; for both land animals and fish were often seen surrounded by them unscathed.  What the serpentine dissection of the first creature Remy had seen was all about was anyone's guess.

            But if  the snakes were infact some sort of  or cilia that provided pre-gurgitated pap for its pampered surface clients, no wonder even the unfitted survived.  Ace suggested that the cilia-snakes might even be part of an external reproductive system as well; which would help explain Hope's odd sexual life. Or rather lack of it; which the computer put down to being due to Hope's lack of a companion satellite.  For as he explained to the viewers, it was the phases of the terran moon, Luna, that played a crucial role in fostering sexual polarity back on earth.

            As Ace was making these comments over the airwaves Remy arrived at the crest of the hill where the lack of tress, boulders and mineral outcrops became markedly apparent. On the video screens the ground could be seen as one  single smooth carpet of vegetation interspersed with a few holes and pools of water.

            Remy concurred with Bruce O’Donnel and they decided to send down an extendable probe into one of the serpent holes to try and reach bed-rock.  But to everyone's surprise Remy never met any resistance, although he sent down his fine flexible drill to over two-hundred-and-fifty feet.

He retracted the drill and lowered down the bore-hole an even thinner sensor probe which consisted of an optical fibre camera and electric-chemical detectors reeled out as a fine thread from a small drum.  The results showed that the hill was composed of layer after layer of densely packed organic material, composed of horizontal fibrous mats each separate from the ones above and below. Each giving off a specific wave-like electrical discharge.

            Most were extremely slow, but a few corresponded quite closely to the waves of a human brain; and others to the discharge of autonomic muscle fibre.  At one-hundred-and-sixty feet the probe reached a particularly condensed fibrous layer which was giving off a whole sequence of complex electro-chemical pulses.

            After winding back the sensor into his capacious torso, Remy moved to one of the several pools that again paradoxically dotted the brow rather than foot of the hill. Nothing seemed t make sense on Hope.  He explored the pond with one of his extended limbs and detected on the bottom a number of small holes that contracted occasionally, squirting up fresh water.  Instead of using the drill he sent his delicate sensor  its full length down one of these vegetable pumps and the miniature camera showed it to be the end of a network of water channels that got larger as the probe went down; all undergoing the same periodic sphincter-like movement.  It was a perplexed robot who pulled in his probe and moved on down the other side of this huge organic mound.

            He had hardly descended a hundred yards when the, up to then, solid ground unexpectedly gave way and he fell into a crevice which instantly closed above him - throwing the video-screens into darkness.

His lights automatically switched on and those watching caught glimpses of enormously thick cilia twisting and entangling themselves like  Laocoons around Remy's body and legs.

            'These ones are much stronger,' said Remy as the picture as again blotted out,   this time by some of the cilia-snakes coiling themselves around the cameras.

            'Now they're producing mineral acids,' the robot reported, analytical to the end.  'I can detect ileum, hydro-fluoric acid and……..'

Nothing more was heard; and except for the hiss of his carrier wave, all communication from the robot ceased.

 

 

CHAPTER 20

 

            Almost nine months had passed since the giant Russio-Asian craft had heard that the Ganymede was on its way to them - during which time a whole series of other broadcasts had been beamed in from the smaller craft.

            No more news came in from Remy Sixteen though, in spite of Ace continually checking the scout-ships frequency.  However this was compensated by the Ganymede crew who, agreeing with Doctor Kowaski,  was editing and pumping out hundreds of hours of historical and newsreel film for Gagarin.  The Ganymede scientists were also giving broadcasts to their colossal sister-ship and in the latest transmission Captain Jakson was introducing them to one of his physicists.

            'Here's Kwok Wen, you've hear his voice before but won't have seen his face.'

The picture of the greying Captain faded and was replaced by the skeletal features of the Chinese engineer.

            ‘Hello everyone, I'm in charge of our fusion motor which is basically a fission primer, like your engines in fact, surrounded by a complicated piece of engineering called a plasma shield. This is  an electromagnetic chamber or bottle in which the ionised heavy hydrogen fuel can  explode and bounces around in without touching the sides.  We've got eight extra of these plasma chambers aboard which we've been carrying along all these years especially for you to convert your multi-fission motors to  fusion.  These are the most delicate components of  fusion engines -  and the slightest fault in them turns everything around into a flaming ball of plasma.  So they're made very carefully as you can imagine. This is why we've gone to considerably trouble of bringing them along for you  despite  the eight of them taking up nearly a fifth or our cargo space. The problem is that  whereas the other parts of the fusion engines can be made, under our instructions in your work-shops, which we know are pretty comprehensive, they could never deal with the topological intricacies of the plasma shields.’

            'However’, said Kwok more cheerfully ‘when we've got them fixed up they'll nearly triple your speed, though we'll be slowed down a wee bit - for our two ships will be physically joined.  And indeed our combined nine engines will be under the control of our computer, Ace, as there's no way your rather archaic electronic computer can manage with the quantum indeterminacy of the engine's fluctions. 'I'll be back later but I'll hand over now to Jill Knight, our cybernetic expert who'll tell you more about Ace, our Advanced Cryogenic Entity.’

            A fidgety woman came on screen whose eyes slightly bulged.  

            'The old computers, like yours, depend on patterns of electron pathways embedded in crystalline substance like silicon and super-cold metals with all the massive micro-insulation of the circuitry that his implies.  Our cyberoids on the other hand use tiny beams of laser light that are bounced around multi-layered placques within crystals.  The light is of every type of hue or frequency that we can obtain and when they cross they don't short-circuit each other like electrical circuits,  so we save a hell of a lot of space, as well as not needing masses of insulation.  On top of that the light beams interact holographically so that even more information can be packed into them in the form of interference patterns.  And not only are our computers more compact, but they're also incredibly fast, as photons move much faster than relatively slow moving electrons… I think that's all I have to say, I can't think of anything else…………….' Jill trailed off tremulously.

            'Thank you Jill,' came in the captain's supportive voice, 'and now over to one of our biologists, Anne Bright, whom you probably know well already from the series of broadcasts she's been giving on recent developments in medicine.'

            'Thank you Captain,' said the plump and far more relaxed woman.

            'As we on Ganymede have mentioned so many times before,' she stated in a firm voice, 'our frozen germ-plasm is gradually becoming useless and in roughly sixty or seventy year there won't be a fraction of it viable enough to raise fresh reserves and new stock.  So except for the few animals and plants you have left, earth's biological heritage will be lost forever.  That's why we've got to meet soon as it'll be at least two or three centuries before we get to another planet.

            'If Gygnus has any planets, Anne,' Ace gently interrupted.  'The present evidence only shows a forty-one-point-zero-three chance of it having any.'

            'That makes it even more imperative that we meet up,' continued Anne, 'for it's only your enormous living space that can save the situation, for we can renew in your farms and river everything you've lost as well as giving you many additional species of plants and animals. We've carrying thousands upon thousands in deep freeze.  To enable us to squeeze even more plants and animals into you Ring City we also know how to rear miniature varieties - I've mentioned this in some of my earlier programs - and these can remain dwarf-like over several generations.'

            'That's right,' Ace spoke again.  'It was a technique originally pioneered by the |Japanese thousands of years ago - and which we've considerably refined.

            'Of course,' went on Anne, 'we won't apply this to domestic plants and animals - as what's the point of eating a miniature steak or pea-sized apple?  But it's perfect for preserving large numbers of wild species.  For instance we can plant dwarf forests with trees only eighteen inches high, instead of the full-sized ones you had to carry. And of course we can apply this  procedure to living creatures; mammals, birds, fish and even insects - though they're pretty small anyway.  Some we can put into micro-zoos for the benefit of our crews; and others we can propagate just long enough to collect new germplasm, which we can freeze and store for a couple more centuries, before these too degenerate.  With your ship we can repeat this indefinitely and by so doing keep the stored species we have going for millennia if necessary, .though hopefully, we or our descendants rather, will find a planet to terraform before that.’

            'One last point, Anne added,  ‘some of you may wonder that if we can make pygmy animals, why don't we do the same for human beings?  We can in fact, but unfortunately it affects the level of our intelligence.  So if to save space we made midgets of ourselves for the journey we'd also end up being morons,' she ended on a chuckle  as her image faded away and was replaced by that of her Captain.

            'So you see we'll only survive by all of us pulling together and forgetting our national differences.   There aren't any nations left on earth anyway, though maybe some of the League of Earth Survivors' outposts are still going.  But these were having a tough time when we left, as there are no planets left in the solar system fit for agriculture; except Mars - and its experiments in this direction were nipped in the bud by the holocaust.  That's why so much hope and effort was put into our ship.'

            The Captain paused for a moment and then reintroduced Kwok, whose wizened visage appeared.

            'As I just mentioned your fission engines will be left intact as primers……………' And hours of detailed construction plans and engineers diagrams followed.

            These broadcasts and the ones that followed created great excitement amongst Gagarin's new generation of self-taught engineers and biologists. And a number of important decisions were made to prepare for the Ganymede's arrival, besides the modifications of the atomic powered engines and production of some of the new parts that would be needed.

            With so much time on the hands of the majority of the ship's inhabitants, the most important one was to mobilise them to dismantle the residential part of the city and put it on the outside of the ship's hull; so almost doubling the agricultural strip that encircled the inside. Just a few of the tallest buildings would be left in Ring City as these were economical on space and could be used later for the miniature zoos and aquariums that would be needed.  And of course the sports stadium would be left for recreational purposes - as well as the park adjacent to it.

            This stupendous task of turning the city inside-out was only feasible because of the vast stocks of sheet metal, spare-parts and manufacturing plant aboard - as well as the large amounts of raw material that had extracted from the  space oil and minerals from the asteroid belt,  an industry that would proceed unabated until the arrival of the sister-ship.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 21

 

            The Ganymede was almost two years out from Theta Ceti and except for the re-sifting of old data from Hope and the programs they prepared for the Gagarin  life had settled down to a dull routine; the only real excitement being the rather out-of-date messages they received from the Russio-Asians about their exploration of the asteroid belt  and discovery of space oil

            This unexpectedly changed one morning when Ace announced that a jumbled signal was coming in from the relay station aboard the scout-ship they had left behind circling Hope.  And  when the computer switched on Ganymdes’s radio receiver, random squeaks and whines  filled the ship.

             This unpleasant noise went on for several hours until snatches of words started to come through - which slowly coalesced, into disjointed sentences.  Finally Remy Sixteen's recognisable voice could be made out loud and clear, but chattering away at a fast rate of knots, as if the explorer robot were terribly excited.

            'Captain Jakson, Captain Jakson, it's not a hill at all, it's all part of a vast vegetable mind………….  The life forms you saw on your screens were just some of its musings………….. At first it even considered me to be one of its thoughts - a renegade one out of control……………… Then we made contact………………..' and the message completely faded away.

            'Sound if he's still out of control or got verbal diarrhoea,' muttered Kwok, then the signal strengthened.

'That's why I haven't been able to communicate with you.  I'd better try and explain step by step.  Even now I'm having difficulty in thinking of anything but this wonderful being down here…………… It was all so sudden………………….  But I must start from the beginning. ‘

            Remy paused, as if making a huge effort to slow his racing thoughts and then proceeded at a more reasonable pace.

            'After I fell through that hidden fissure on the hill I became smothered by gigantic cilia-sensors, huge versions of what we first thought were snakes.  And as they tried to dismember me they also began to excrete a succession of every type of organic and inorganic acid you can think of.  Many of them dissolved in their own juices, or that of the others. But then other  sensors grew out of the cavity walls and replaced them.  I felt just like Odysseus battling with the hydra.'

'Hydra?'

            'A many headed serpent of Creek myth, Captain,' Ace replied.  'I'll explain later.'

            'On top of this,' went on Remy, describing his exploit, 'the walls, floor and roof of the fissure were made of a soft, slippery substance that I couldn't get a grip on, and the whole place was filled with a gooey mixture of acids and starches…….'

            'Sounds like old fashioned scottish porridge,' grunted the Captain.

            'And as I'll explain in a moment this fungal intelligence had a total abhorrence to any sort of hollow or void.  Naturally enough I tried to protect myself and put on electric charge through my surface armour.  Then the pit I had been swallowed up by - for it was a living thing, an enormous oral cavity………….'

            'A big mouth,' interrupted Anne, responding to puzzled looks from some of the Ganymede crew.

            '………..simply began to generate a static charge around me that became so colossal that I blacked out for a time altogether, as it scrambled my electronic components. 'What happened to the sensors I don't know, but when I recovered all my legs and probes had automatically retracted and I was totally engulfed by a cocoon of electricity, even the organic brew I was floating in, being an electrolyte, was charged.  Fortunately it was much lower than the original discharge so I was able to move around a bit on my stumpy legs; but of course couldn't send you any radio messages through the static.

            'After considering what to do for a while I decided to use one of my probes to test the charge on different parts of the soft surface of my electrified tomb.  I spent days poking around at different places but only received a muddle of white static noise.  Finally at one tiny point on the wall I detected a very small nodule.  I left my probe there for weeks and by suing my voltage equalisers and every other type of electronic gadget I possess I slowly filtered out all the unwanted background noise  and was left with a number of modulated carrier waves.  The next stage covered almost a year, for that's how long it took me to decipher the code - for that's what it was - the product of an intelligent being.  And so for the last year I've been sending back my own messages via this all protuberance, which in the meantime has swollen up to a considerable size.'

            There was a pause and the robot went on.  'Finally myself and the intelligence behind the signals came to understand one another.  I've christened it Prime by the way and  the reason for that name will become clearer later.  Anyway, it's only in the last few days that I've finally managed to convince Prime that I have a totally separate identity from itself - and it has now released the static field that was crippling me which is how I’m able to now contact you..

            'You see what we took as the forest, mycelia and serpent-like creatures are in fact part of Prime's huge and loose brain network.  And hills like the one I was climbing - thought not the ice plateau I should add - are conglomerated nodes of this fungal nervous tissue.  That's why I couldn't hit bedrock with the drill probe, though I sent it down hundreds of feet.  Even if it had been long I would still have met nothing but reticular organic matter.  The hill nodes are several thousand feet think, so I just skimmed the surface.

            ‘What's equally peculiar down here is that all the free-moving animals we saw are nothing more than Prime's rambling thoughts that have taken on an independent life of their own.  Actually not quite independent as they rely on Prime or their sustenance and reproduction. 'Prime's been creating and supporting all sorts of bizarre and exotic life-forms here for millions of years.  You see, it's almost immortal as there's nothing like sexual reproduction on this planet.  That's why I keep referring to Prime as an "it",  as it grows and expands by simple cell division.  In fact, until it got to know me, Prime thought it was the only being in existence and had fashioned everything itself by self-multiplication and diversification. It thought that non-organic substance like rock, water, atmosphere, even gravity, sunlight and other electro-magnetic radiation,  were its dead discharges. Extra in fact.'

            'Good God,' whistled Anne, 'so Prime considered the whole universe was its own by-product.'

            'You mean this mouldy megalomaniac thought it was living in its own shit?' asked Kwok, who received a disgusted look from the biologist.'

            'Let's call it offal, Kwok,' said Ray with a chuckle.

            'That's why I posed such an ontological problem for Prime,' Remy continued with his long radio soliloquy.  'I was inorganic but obviously conscious; so I couldn't be part of its own waste.  That's why at first Prime considered that I was an extension of itself that had broken free.  Rather like one of its animals, but in my case a mental separation as well as a physical one.  But as I was a totally incomprehensible renegade it tried to use the cilia-sensors to reabsorb me.  That's one of their many jobs, by the way, as quite often segments of Prime go excessively solo and are consequently reincorporated or even completely destroyed.  As I'm indestructible the only thing it could do was seal me off.

            'The reason why parts of Prime have this odd tendency to run wild is due to the enormous periods of time it takes the comparatively sluggish electro-chemical impulses to travel around in it.  It's also the reason why it took me so long to communicate with Prime, or at least a sizeable enough chunk of it; for it had to bring into play over two thousand of the hill-nodes. And this involved sending and receiving information over thousands of square miles.

            'But it was worth waiting for, as what an incredible flow of information took place when Prime finally got its full, or almost full, concentration on me; for even up to now Prime's -continental intelligence hasn't yet all been diverted to me.  It'll probably be years before that happens.  However, I'm in contact with enough to be quite entranced by Prime's as its psychic processes work in such a different way from my own digital/holo-graphic brain.  It’s mind resembles in many ways the analogue aspect of your own human cerebral workings.

            ‘Whereas us crystal matrix entities grasp reality by taking millions of samples of it every second and then colate the resulting figures mathematically, Prime rather thinks by producing analogues of reality.  Indeed it goes beyond analogy as its thoughts actually take on material form and so become part of reality itself .  That's what I meant when I said all the teeming life we've seen down here are Prime's concretised cogitations.

            'As I mentioned it took me months and months to persuade it that I wasn't one of its runaway schizoid thoughts - and it was two things in particular that finally convince Prime that I was also a monad.'

            'A monad?'

'It's a philosophical expression, Captain,' answered Ace.  'It means a completely distinct and independent entity like you or I.'

'.Firstly, Prime couldn't find any trace of nucleic acid based memory-generators in my thought fields, which completely stumped it as Prime's long and extensive memory travels through time via its genetic proteins.  And not only can it call on this genetic memory at will - re-call if you like - but it can also reverse this process as well and alter its genetic make-up at the cellular level. That’s the  basis of the prolific life down here.  It's two-way process I can't fathom out at all, although maybe you can, as you humans carry these spiral proteins.  But as I don't carry these vital parts, Prime was forced to accept that  I had to be different consciousness altogether.

            ‘The other way Prime began to recognise me as a quite separate being was because of my awareness of infinity, which it was completely mystified by.  For in the course of our discussions I dealt with mathematical paradoxes like infinitessimals, imaginary numbers, the concept of zeros and recursives……..'

            'What the hell are recursives?' asked Ray.

            'Infinate regress,' Ace asserted.

            'Like receding images in a mirror,' supplemented Jill.

            'Wheels within wheels,' declared Kwok.

            'Little fleas upon bigger fleas……..' came in Ray's plump colleague with a biological metaphor.

            '…………………. You must appreciate that Prime's been so busy over the eons spreading itself and its fauna and flora into every nook and cranny of Hope that it's become rather self-centred.  As I mentioned previously, Prime even considers bedrock to be its own by-product - rather like an intelligent sea-coral would view its own reef.  So as far as Prime was concerned only it existed - that's why I gave it that name.  And ever since it covered this planet it's believed itself complete; a state of mind it had so long that it had no way of handling concepts like non-being, emptiness or infinite space. In fact up to the time it met me these ideas were anathema to Prime and whenever parts of its diffuse mind started to dwell on such topics it was treated as cancerous and destroyed; for  Primes immediate response to these malignant areas was to fill this void in by unchecked proliferation and invasion of surrounding healthy tissue.

            ‘'That's why Prime wanted to remove me.  I was completely out of its control, especially when I stuck that drill into one of its nodes.  However, once it had me safely isolated in the static field it began to relax and we began to communicate. And one of the first things I had to teach it was the idea of the zero, as part of my own brain actually operates using this principle; that's my binary system of electronic and photonic on and offs, ones and zeros.  This in turn led us on to the notion of mathematical plenitude; like never ending numbers generated by adding noughts to a digit - and the limitless fractions in between whole numbers generated by adding noughts to the reciprocal of a digit.

            'This was all pretty difficult for Prime to stomach as it doesn't do much abstract thinking. So I decided the best thing to do was to get it to try and build  models of symbols such as the zero, negativity and infinity.  And the first thing was to simply make a depression in the floor of my prison.  But when I started on about empty holes Prime quite rightly pointed out that it contained itself; in other words the electrolytic syrup I was floating in.  So I asked it to drain the place and try again; and though it became aware of the hole's contour it just couldn't conceive of the hollow it contained.   To put it psychologically, poor old Prime could see the figure and its boundary but not the ground or negative image.  Prime became so frustrated that for days the wall around me was churning with all sorts of incredible protuberances and indentations.  In fact it became quite uncomfortable, like being digested in a huge stomach, though at least by then it was quite dry.

            When it had calmed down a bit and got over its indigestion I told Prime that it should form some circles instead, which of course have infinite length.  And it did this by growing small sensor-snakes from the wall and then getting them to swallow their own tails.  Of course, as soon as they did this they broke off from the wall and Prime lost all contact with them.  After a bit of thrashing about these were finally reabsorbed into the floor but their thoughts were so dizzy that they made Prime feel unwell.  On the other hand if Prime kept them attached to the side by even the flimsiest of fungal threads then the result wasn't really a perfect circle.  So again my prison began to churn, this time with a succession of polyps, cilia and spinning serpents.  I began to wonder why  Prime didn’t t end by vomiting me out back into the surface. 

            ‘But Prime hadn't finished with me, for after several weeks of resting from its heavings it communicated with me again.  It had had an inspiration. Instead of having to grow endless loops, Prime had suddenly realised that it already contained them as part of its microscopic constitution, in the form of nucleic acids.  For though these are corkscrew shaped, the spiral itself is made up of a double looped thread of protein.  This in fact being the coil around which the memory waves oscillates.

            'So in one stroke Prime had its analogue of infinity - and being part of itself, one that could be safely handled for the first time.  This led it almost immediately to another idea; that if there really were such a thing as infinity then there must be a gap between what Prime is and what it could be.  In other words I had given Prime the beginnings of an active forward directed imagination.'

            'Sound more like he's given Prime a conscious ego,' muttered Jill Night to herself.

            'For almost a year,' continued the robot's monologue.' Prime periodically went into ecstatic paroxysms as it came to grips with these once frightening puzzles of actual versus potential, finite versus infinite.  For the notion of their being discontinuities in reality that could never ever be completely filled seemed to give it great joy.  I most certainly got a very pleasant electronic feed-back from the drawn out spasms of pleasure that swept through Prime.'

            'Global orgasms!  Now I've heard everything!' exclaimed the Captain.

            'It was if…………..' , Remy hesitated for a moment, ………. ‘as if this fungal intelligence were a schizophrenic who for years had been the centre of its own universe, but had finally escaped its lofty loneliness by suddenly realising that others actually exist.   It made Prime absolutely giddy with happiness, this novel ideal of otherness.

            'It's a year since we began to communicate and when Prime got over its delight in meeting me it began to let me move about; especially when I hinted that there was an even greater intelligence that mine I could put it in touch with.  Of course Prime had no idea that it'd cut me off from you . As I've mentioned, there was no "you" in its vocabulary. 'Now I'm on the surface with no interference - so I'm back on the air again.'

            'And glad to have you with us,' said Kwok beaming.

            'As it will take me months to verbally tell you all I've experienced down here over the last few years,' concluded Remy, 'I'll send it as high-speed digital data.  Then Ace can explain it to you at leisure.  Though I must warn you that after the message there'll be a delay - as Prime ill probably have the same initial effect on Ace as on me, complete and total absorption……………… I suppose you could call it the attraction of opposites.'

            Remy Sixteen’s voice broke off and was immediately followed by a high pitched whine, so unpleasant to the human ear that the Captain asked Ace to lower the volume of the intercom by a factor of ten.

CHAPTER 22

 

            It took two whole weeks for Remy to send his highly compressed information package to Ace; and during all this time the ship's cybernetic entity was unusually quiet.  Ace was of course keeping a check on Ganymede's hundreds of thousands of semi-automatic systems, but hardly communicated with the crew at all - as if all his higher electronic circuits were concentrated on other and more important things.

            But finally the transmission from Hope ended and gradually Ace became more talkative again.  Indeed all he would talk about was the wonders of Prime's analogue mind.

            'So you've finally fallen in love?' alleged Anne two mornings after Remy's broadcast.

            'As Jill will tell you Anne, I wasn't made to be emotional.  You're mixing me up with Remy and his siblings who are programmed to operate with lonely planetary prospectors and geologists,  like Kwok for instance.'

            'We all know about Kwok's fixation on Remy Sixteen already, Ace,' came the caustic reply.

            'Do you mind, Anne,' burst in Kwok, who was also relaxing in the mess-room.   'Remy and I were partners for years as a team on the Neptune system, so we're bound to have a strong relationship.

            'Nevertheless,' continued Anne, 'I never thought I'd see Ace become infatuated.'

            `'I'm most certainly not infatuated, Anne, though I do feel an enormous intellectual admiration for Hope's great single consciousness.  It's ………..it's so different from mine.  Maybe some of Remy's affectionate attitudes have rubbed off on me as he passed on Prime's message.'

            'Just like cupid, isn't he?' remarked Anne, her eyes glinting.  'You know, the messenger of love.'

            'I really don't see how this ancient mythical creature comes into it, Anne.  But one thing is sure, Remy Sixteen has done us all a great service in making the preliminary deciphering of Prime's mental state - and of course giving us two years pains-taking research in one go. Though of course, from now on I'll be directing the research myself.

            'So poor old Remy's been demoted to interpreter, has he?'

            'Not at all Anne.  He's vital as an on-the-spot observer and being mobile he'll have a very active role.  But I will direct things, though the information exchange between me and Prime will get slower as our distance from Hope increases.'

            'That'll be very frustrating, won't it?' said Anne.

            'Yes,' replied Ace, not realising that Anne was making fun of him.  'Especially as in addition, Prime's biochemical nerve impulses are so much more sluggish than my own electronic ones.'

            'But surely not compared to ours?' asked Carlos.

'No, as Prime's neural system is similar to yours in so far as the physical conduction of impulses goes.  But your system is compact, whereas Prime's is spread out over two continents.  It even goes under the sea - or at least as far as the shallow continental shelves.'

            'What is the time delay between us and Remy at the moment, Ace,' asked Captain Jakson, having come in for a break after handing over temporary command to Kofi Amponsah.  'It must be about a month.'

            'Actually a little less, Captain.  At this moment its exactly twenty-seven days, four hours and thirty.'

            'Alright, alright Ace, that's close enough,' said the Captain.

            'Mind you,' the ship's robot persisted, 'it'll become more and more as we move away from Hope and closer to Iota Eridani, both in the receiving and transmitting of messages. In fact I've already sent one message to Prime.'

            'Oh yes,' the Captain said in a surprised voice.  'You didn't tell us that before.'

            'I sent it half-way through Remy's broadcast, but as it was such a trivial thing - just a simple experiment - I didn't want to disturb you.'

            'I told you, he's moon-struck, he's behaving irrationally.'

            'Never mind that, Anne,' the Captain said crossly.  'What type of experiment was it exactly, Ace?'

            'Don't worry Captain, it wasn't anything serious,' and Ace hastened to explain.  'As you know, Prime had a lot of problems dealing with zeros and infinite numbers until it delved into its own genetic structure.  I wanted to give it another insight into these imaginary numbers by using musical fugues…….'

            'Fugues,' the Captain snorted.

            'Yes, canon fugues.'

            'Rounds Captain,' Anne broke in.  'Musical pieces in the form of cycles.'

            'That's right Anne.  And I sent two examples.  The melodic one was by the ancient European composer Sebastian Bach - and the rhythmic one was of some African ethnic drumming that I had stored away in my archives.'

            'But how can those describe infinity?' muttered the puzzled Captain.

            'Because they're musical analogies of circles……..and circles are infinite, aren't they?'  That's why no one has ever been able to square a circle - as it's got an infinite number of points on it. In fact a canon fugue is more like a moebius strip than a circle.'

            'Now what are you on about, Ace?' croaked the Captain.  'Maybe Anne is right about you after all.  What's a moebius Strip got to do with it?'

            'As you know it's a ribbon of plastic or whatever  twisted and then joined together with glue.'  And a series of graphic facsimiles of such a loop, taken from many different angles appeared on screen. 'So you end up with a continuous two-dimensional object with only one surface - with no back and front.  In other words a flat two dimensional strip is made infinite by being twisted in a higher dimension; in this case the third dimension.'

            'Or a Klein Bottle, Ace,' said Kwok in an excited voice.  'That's a three-dimensional object that's twisted in on itself to form a single never-ending surface.  Show us the topology of one on the screen, Ace.'

            A picture of a transparent open container whose spout turned in on itself, duly appeared, accompanied by a mass of equations.

            'This is all very interesting, but what's it got to do with music?' asked the Captain of Ace.

            'Well music is physical isn't it?  It consists of material soundwaves that exist in three dimensions, like everything else.  And a fugue is a piece of music that ends up where it starts from.  In other words three dimensional sound-waves are twisted in the fourth dimension of time - giving you an infinite loop of music.'

            'Only if you played the music for ever, that is,’ qualified Kwok.

            Not necessarily, Kwok,' the crystal matrix brain responded. 'You don't have to keep going around and around to know that a circle has no beginning or end, as this can be comprehended as a gestalt at a glance, in an instant,.  Similarly with a fugue, or any piece of music for that matter that one knows well and can easily recall.  It's only that canon fugues are  composed of repeated cycles which are  a bit easier to digest and recall than a long and complicated piece, like a symphony for instance’.

            'But why not send Prime the topological models first, like a moebius strip, instead of the music?' asked the Captain.

            'Remy's already told us how he tried to get Prime to grow topological shapes and got absolutely nowhere.  But I'm sure his analogue mind is capable of fashioning timpanic membrane and the apparatus to whistle a few songs and beat out a few rhythms.  Then like he did with his own nucleic acids Prime can get to immediate grips with, what for him are, rather mysterious and abstract mathematical concepts.'

            'Prime will be tuning into maths then, Ace,' Anne laughed.

            'Exactly,' said Ace, unaware of the pun.  'And when you check back in history you find that many of the greatest mathematicians have also been musicians. All the way back to the Greek father of maths,  Pythagorus, who lived three thousand years ago.  Both you humans and Prime use music to obtain an intuitive understanding of mathematics, whereas Remy and I only see music as another form of mathematical structure.  Look at the origin of your word music itself; from the Greek muses, mythological goddess of the arts who supply mortals with genius and inspiration.  I know nothing of this spirit.'

            'You sound quite wistful,' said Anne in a gentler voice.

            'Not wistful, Anne, just inquisitive.  I've never understood your intuitive side, soul you call it, and so have always treated this fantasy as one of your human programming aberrations.  But now on Hope we've contacted a similar type of mind to yours but one as quantitatively complex as my own.  So now I simply don't know what to think.  Maybe I'm the aberration.  All I do know is that you and Prime have something which is lacking in me and the other cybernetic entities.'

            'I can't see how?'

            'You see Captain, like us, you humans have a digital and holographic component. But you and Prime also have an analogue part as well.'

            'Can you give us an example,' asked the Captain.

'Your cochlea balancing system, for instance.'  And seeing the Captains puzzled look through its video eye, Ace enlarged.  'If I want to orientate myself spatially I do it by computation; calculating from mathematical patterns based on many different variables.  Like direction of gravity, magnetic alignment, star-charts, gyroscopic centre and so on.  All these I crosscheck to build up an abstract grid-reference.  But you, Captain, even if you're not aware of it, do it all in one smooth operation - by using the fluid levels in your inner ear to directly give you your position. I use abstract symbols to find my place in the universe, but you actually use a material part of the universe to balance yourselves.  And you don't even have to think about it.'

            Ace stopped momentarily to give the Captain time to absorb what he had just said,  and then went on.  'And Prime's mind works just like yours, Captain, or at least the analogue part of it; for when it thinks it doesn't do so with theoretical patterns but by actually growing the thoughts themselves.'

            'But we didn't grow our inner ears,' Carlos interrupted.  'We were born with them.'

            'I know. That's why Prime is doubly fascinating to me.  It not only uses an analogue brain but also builds it as well.  Yours is genetically determined so you're not conscious of it.'

            'But it's always possible to make the unconscious conscious.  Isn't that so, Ace?'

            'That's right Anne, with various types of psychological and artistic techniques.  But what I meant was something pre-conscious rather than just sub-conscious.'

            'True, Anne,' replied Ace, 'but even the greatest yogis have never been able to modify their genetic determined make-up at will.'

            'What about the old way of getting rid of warts with a spell, then?'

            'You mean suggestion, Anne."

            'Suggestion, auto-suggestion, call it what you will; but warts are a benign form of cancer caused by part of the genetic system going out of control. And mind over matter does seem to work in this case.'

            'I agree, Anne.  But the tests were never conclusive.  And anyway……….'

            'Ace,' the Captain interrupted, 'can we get off this topic of warts and magic so you can explain to us a bit more about Prime's mental workings.  You gave us one comparison with the human ear.  Is there another one?'

            'There are many, Captain.  For instance you humans often use the expression to spin a thought or weave an idea together, as if you've got lots of tiny spiders inside your heads manufacturing webs of insubstantial mind-stuff for you.  Well, in the case of Prime this takes on a material as well as transient electro-chemical form - so it's not psychic patterns it uses but substantial ones. Literally spiders and the other animals and birds we’ve seen on Hope And until we made contact with it most of Prime's psyche was feedback from its own material constructs. Or to put it another way, Prime actually evolves the spiders that makes mental webs.'

            'Oh, how horrid,' exclaimed Anne.

            'I don't think he means actual spiders, Anne,' said Kwok.  'He's speaking metaphorically.'

            'There might be spiders I suppose,' said Ace, 'although Remy never found much evidence of insect life on Hope.  No, what I meant was that the mental patterns Prime genetically creates actually take on a life of their own.'

            'A sort of self conscious evolution, you mean?' asked Anne.

'Not exactly, as Prime is too diffuse to have a single focused ego like yours, or mine for that matter.  But at least it does have a willed, if rather haphazard and polymorphous, approach to genetic engineering.  However, now that Remy and I are linked to Prime everything will become much more planned and rational, as it is we who will initiate the evolutionary experiments on Hope. That's if the musical ones work first.

            'Are you really serious, Ace?' asked Anne.

            'Oh yes.  And you should really be very pleased  as you've been complaining about being bored on this trip.  Now you've got nothing to worry about any more, as with Prime we'll be able to carry all sorts of interesting experiments in biology, mathematics and music. Using Remy as our eyes and ears.'

            And before anyone could reply the inboard computer went on in as an excited voice as it could muster.

            'In fact we should be getting the replies to my first message to Prime in about seven weeks. And from then on there's going to be so much information flooding in that we'll be busy for years and years.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER  23

 

            It was mid-morning and the Ganymede crew were sitting around the mess table trying to swallow their breakfasts after a nauseous half hour in the gravity couches. Their ship having just come out of its final sustained burst of de-acceleration and they were now travelling at a mere few miles a second for the last leg of the journey to Gagarin - only twenty-five thousand miles away.

            Although in almost instantaneous contact, the Russian ship was still just a fuzzy blur on the vu-screens even though Captain Jakson, now quite grey, had asked Ace to magnify it up a bit.  The computer promised clearer pictures later and so the conversation drifted over the most recent and very disquieting news on the evolutionary experiments on Hope; for one of Remy's infrequent but highly compressed bulletins had come in two days before.

            In the initial years this genetic engineering program things had gone well enough.  First a large natural bay had been closed off from the sea by Prime growing a barrier reef of calcified fungal matter across the narrow opening.  This had then been diluted with fresh water and then primed with a mixture of organic phosphates, nitrates, trace-elements and amino acids, transported by a network of specially grown vegetable tubes and lateral mycelia roots.  Subsequently this rich soup was seeded with a huge assortment of nuclear proteins. Grown by Prime under Ace's instructions  and each bagged in a tiny capsule of lipo-proteins.

            Of these only a few survived immersion in the archaic Inland Sea, but enough thrived to get this rich mix swarming with unicellular plants, and later, simple protozoan animals that fed off them.

            So this artificially induced proto-life had multiplied and just a few months ago an exciting report had come in from Remy. Some of the amoeba-like creatures were beginning to clump together in colonies and others were mutually exchanging chromosomes in a primitive form of sexual reproduction, totally unknown on Hope before.

            But the last message, after it had been slowed down and deciphered by Ace, was quite a different matter.

            'You mean, Anne, that Prime's gone and got cancer?' asked Kwok who had slept early the night before and so had missed the first playback of the latest dispatch from Hope.

            'Yes, it's a fungal case of the disease, but malignant non-the-less.  It spread through all those thousands of miles of feeder pipes and pumps that Prime's left dangling in the primeval sea all these year.  Obviously the cancer must have come from there, the place was a hot bed of new life forms.'

            'Prime must be pretty annoyed with us then' commented Kwok.  'As it was us who suggested the whole damn thing; constructing that huge lagoon and messing about with all those little bags of genetic stuff.'

'Coavervates , Kwok,' corrected Ace.

'Bags, proteins, coavervates, call them what you will Ace, but it's still from them that the sickness started.  It really is a primeval sea - prime evil - t evil for Prime that is ,' he laughed sardonically.  'So when exactly did this all start?'

            'We don't know, Kwok,' replied Ray, 'as Prime didn't notice anything amiss until the invasive tumours had destroyed several square miles of roots and tubes around the experimental lake.  You know how long it takes to react to anything.  Look how long he kept Remy bottled up.'

            'But however diffuse, the sensors must have been sending in warning signals?'

            'True enough, Kwok, but nothing registered until damage was inflicted on the nearest neural mega-node to the "Prime Evil" sea as you call it,' and noticing Kwok's bewildered look Ray enlarged.  'One if its many nerve centres, like the hill Remy fell though.'

            'O. K., so what happened afterwards?'

            'Obviously Prime had to isolate the node and the hundreds of acres of fungal forest between it and the sea - which it did by growing transverse seals in the fibrils leading in and out of the area.  It was easy enough to disconnect the surface growth in this way - even that of the sub-soil - but after a while it was discovered that some of the metastatic cells had managed to get through Prime's deeper levels.'

            'It's a wonder that Prime didn't swallow up Remy again for causing all this.'

'Actually Kwok, it's Remy who seems to have saved the situation,' declared Anne.

            'How?'

            'Your friend carried out radical surgery on Prime.'

            'Surgery?'

            'Yes, Prime outlined the absolute maximum penetration of the malady - then doubled this and told Remy to cut away.'

            'With what?'

            'With his laser of course - full blast and pointing straight down.  Remy used it to disconnect over twelve square miles of Prime's surface, by cauterising it down to virgin rock.  You know how good Remy is at dissection.'

            'I still can't see him cutting through thousands of feet solid vegetation.'

            'Don't be daft, Kwok,' snapped Anne, 'he didn't try it on the stricken hill.  He cut inland of the hill where the vegetation was only ten or twenty feet thick.'

            'And did it work?'

            'We'll have to wait and see, though Remy claims the cancer's been completely cut-out.  And Prime was lucky in one way.'

            'Oh yes, what was that, Anne?' the Captain asked in between sips of coffee.

            'It's fortunate we used a coastal bay for our experiments instead of an inland lake, as we once considered. Then, instead of just one mega-node being involved, the cancer could have spread radically in all directions and afflicted dozens of them.  Even as it is, Remy has decided to constantly patrol the perimeter of the danger area to make absolutely sure nothing gets in or out.  And with all the zigzagging back on forth Remy has over thirty miles to guard. He says it's the least he can do for his host under the circumstances.'

            'He'd have been stretched a bit thin then, Anne, if you'd gone ahead with that central lake idea.'

            She looked at him crossly as it had in fact been her idea, but the Captain came in at this awkward moment.

            'If you're so interested in all the details, Kwok, why don't you go and watch the video message yourself after breakfast, or should I say brunch.'

            'I'll definitely do that captain.  But all I want to know from Ray and Anne right now is, are they working on a cure for Prime's plague?  Suppose this mouldy malignancy breaks out again?'

            'Remy's sent plenty of microscopic information , and the source of the problem seems to be a mutant yeast.  But without actual specimens it's impossible to do much from this end; we can't even grow cultures of the stuff.  However we're going to worked on the neutron-scan pictures of the cancerous DNA molecules that Remy sent and we hope………….'

            She was interrupted by Ace who announced that within ten minutes the first enhanced telescopic pictures of Gagarin   would appear on screen.

            'Though we're now only twenty-two thousand seven hundred and thirty three miles from them I couldn't get clear pictures because of the dust cloud that's circling Gagarin, debris spun off from its factories I suppose.  To get rid of this rubbish I've had to take hundreds of highly magnified shots of the ship, using all sorts of different filters, and put these together as computer intensified still composites.  So don't expect to see any movement.'

            The crew moved en-block to the giant vu-screen in the navigation turret to watch the results of all these painstaking efforts, - which was well worth it as Gagarin  's two titanic globes could be made out crystal clear.

            But instead of the smooth surface they had been expecting from the five hundred-year-old photographs they had studied, Gagarin’s hull resembled rather the keel of an ancient sea ship covered in barnacles.  It was only the seven hundred foot wide rear engine-globe that retained the polished aspect of their own puny craft,  everything  else was coated in a jumble of equipment.

            Indeed, the originally slim connecting tunnel couldn't be seen at all, as it had sprouted myriad storage tanks and industrial plant from every angle of its thin circumference.  Kwok was quick to point out that the most prominent of these radiations must be fractionating and diffusion towers.

            In addition to the once solitary Navig Section the fore-globe had likewise sprouted all sorts of appendages, for all around the city sphere's mid-section were hundreds of bubbles, buildings and domes connected up by pipes and passage-ways that criss-crossed between them in a tangled web of space scaffolding.

            Of course, the Gagarin  news-broadcasts had often described their factories and newly built Skin City but none aboard its sister ship had realised they had made such a thorough and extensive job. Even more pictures followed, each from a different angle of rotation of the giant Russio-Asian ship and there was intense excitement amongst the Ganymede crew at the prospect of looking at this ship with their own eyes that very  next evening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 24

 

Half a year had passed since the eventful day when Ganymede had docked next to the Gagarin   - and now the two ships were physically welded together; the smaller ship becoming yet another excrescence on the immense fore-globe of the Soviet craft.

            This engineering fusion had also been accompanied by a biological one, and the with conversion to more efficient fusion power the combined crew of almost two-thousand-seven-hundred could be doubled, making an optimum size  well over two thousand above that of the  original Gagagrin  when it had left earth orbit.

            And the first step in this population expansion was a publicity campaign to encourage the Gagarin women of child-bearing age to have at least one baby by artificial insemination from the Ganymede sperm banks, with the result that nearly three hundred women were already pregnant.  Soon this would be augmented by the four hundred ova being grown in text-tubes from Ganymede stocks, to be implanted in the wombs of other women volunteers and fertilised in the normal way.  The whole idea of this rapid mingling of blood was to enlarge the combined genetic pool of the two earth ships before Ganymede's frozen seed rotted completely away.

            This engineering and biological splicing was accompanied by a symbolic one as well. The the whole population of the two ships was crammed into the sports ground of Ring City for a Ceremony of Union  in which all old hatchets had been buried and there was a unanimous decision to set up a General Assembly under the joint leadership of Captain Jakson and Chief Navig Oblonsky.  It ended with a christening of the combined space-craft when the two commanders simultaneously broke bottles of diluted ethyl alcohol onto the floor of the stadium to bless the new name of the twin-ship  Sol Two.  Within days the old Russio-Asian Federation Soviet and League of Earth Survivors markings on the two ships exteriors had been removed and replaced by the new one  and people began to call themselves Solarians.

 

 

            'So you see, each floor represents a different sea or fresh-water ecology said Anne Bright who, with a group of biologists, was taking the two commanders on a guided tour of Ring City,- just two weeks after the Union Ceremony.

            'We're even going to mimic deep sea conditions; that's why we're building those pressurised tanks on levels six and seven below,' she said to the group standing in a bubble dome atop one of the city's few buildings that had survived demolition.

            'And you really can miniaturise everything with this irradiation process of yours?' asked Commander Oblonsky.

            'Oh yes,' Anne replied excitedly, 'we can reduce the size of even the largest creatures, like whales for instance down to about two or three feet long.  But it involves much more that just irradiation, Commander,' she added, 'for we have to remove parts of the creatures chromosomes, their plasmids, and alter these physically and chemically in order to induce dwarfism.  Then we graft these back into the nucleus by microsurgery whilst using immuni-suppressers to prevent cell rejection.  This whole procedure is so tricky that it's actually Ace who does these manipulations during the transplant operations.'

            'But Anne, what do you need the radiation treatment for then?' the Commander inquired.

            'These dwarf producing chromosomes are very unstable and the rays stabilises them in the growing foetus.'

            'So you mean to say that you have to irradiate every single animal?'

            'No Commander, we only do it the one time and then the dwarfism becomes fixed, though dwarf plants and animals slowly revert to their original size over time; that is their off-spring do .  But when we get to this point all we have to do is to weed out the larger ones in the new-born litters and keep the pygmy stock.'

            'And what about when we find a terra-like planet and want everything back to is normal size?' asked Oblonsky.

'Naturally the whole process is artificially reversible,' exclaimed Anne, 'and I might add that the reverse process is a damn sight easier!.

            'And you can apply this midget-making technique to any sort of animal and plant?'

            'Yes, that's what those other buildings are for,' she replied pointing at the other skyscrapers that rose up on all sides.  'They'll be zoos for other creatures; reptiles, amphibians, mammals and so on, each with the miniature flora that the animals live on.'

            'In fact,' Ray chimed in, 'the animal species won't be kept separate from each other as each whole floor of the building will be sufficient  provide a different micro-climate and ecological niche of old earth; so that many animals, herbivores and carnivores will all live together.  So it won't be like your old Gagarin   zoo where each animal was kept in a different cage.  With our new ones they'll live in more or less the natural state.'

            'When visitors to our zoos look through the windows and view-scopes,' broke in Anne, 'they'll see tiny versions of jungle, desert and grassland life - whole ecosystems in fact.  We're even planning one level to be devoted to arctic conditions, complete with artificial snowstorms.  As everything will be so small, people will be able to watch whole herds of animals and flocks of birds in each artificial environment.'

            'But won't they be just too tiny for people to see?' asked Oblonsky of Anne.

'Only if they look directly  through the windows, then it’ll be like as if you’re looking at something a mile or two below you. But  the teleview-scopes around  that will be linked to scores of tiny cameras and microphones  so visitors be able to see and hear everything close up, even under water.'

            'And the plant life will be the same?'

            'Right Commander,' replied Ray.  There'll be under-sized shrubs, grass, flowers and woods, minute insects to turn the soil over and pollinate the flowers, even scaled down versions of soil micro-organisms.  In fact by the time we arrive at Cygnus our descendants should be expert naturalists and biologists.'

            'And of course,' said Anne stretching out her arms above her head, 'the whole of the city dome can be used as a giant aviary for some of the temperate birds like pigeons, nightingales, thrushes, blackbirds and swifts.  We won't miniaturise them as it'll be good for the kids to see a few life-sized creatures. They'll even be able to feed them.'

            'But surely they'll be able to see other full sized animals like the livestock and our cats and dogs,' asserted Commander Jakson.

            'True, but these animals are all domesticated ones or pets.  The birds on the other hand will be in the wild and it's important for the children to have an experience of these.

            'But Anne, won't they spoil our farms,' asked Jakson.

            'They can nest in the orchards we'll soon be planting over there,' she said pointing to the empty space on the spin-ward side of the city.   'And of course on this side as well,' she added walking over to the other side of the plastic bubble and looking down at the sports-ground and the new lake they were working on.  'What'll have to do is put some nets at either end of the city dome, where the roof narrows.  That'll stop any of the birds getting into the hydroponics section of the ring – and keep the bees from getting out,’ she added as an afterthought.'

            Everyone joined her to look down at the shallow damned-off lake whose gently curved surface extended for about three-quarters of the width of the two thousand foot broad annulus that circled the inside of the hull.

            'And you say you'll be keeping full-sized dolphins and porpoises down there, Anne? Asked Commander Jakson.

            Yes, they'll be kept on the aft side of the lake, which will be filled with salt water when its sealed off properly.  They're so friendly we don't want to miniature them. So they'll keep their full and quite considerable intelligence.  We'll even stock their corner with live sea-fish.'

            'I thought you said they'd be getting their food from the algae tanks,' declared Commander Oblonsky.

            'That's true,' Ray responded, 'but we want to keep them happy and amused by giving them a few to catch.  And anyway we aren't only thinking of these aquatic mammals but us land-lubbers as well.  We want to encourage the citizens to take up fishing as a recreation; both fresh and salt water fishing.'

            'That's right father,' affirmed Natalie.  'We must constantly think of interesting leisure activities and from what I've seen in the old archives plenty of people used to enjoy angling as they called it.  They used to spend hours waiting to hook a fish.  It became a way of life for some, a sort of restful meditation.'

            'Exactly' enunciated Anne.  ' Leisure is precisely the reason we've created all this empty space between the buildings.  We're going to put down a thin layer of soil, mostly pulverised asteroids in fact, and plant the whole of old Ring City with grass and stuff, to make it into a pleasant park.'

            'Except for the lake of course,' teased Jakson.

'Of course,' Anne rushed on, too full of her role as Mother Nature to mind the Commander,' and eventually every available square inch under the dome will become lawns, orchards or gardens.'

            'And everything outside will be for the farms?' questioned Oblonsky.

            'Almost,' Natalie answered.  'Now we've cleared out what remained of our old forest, which we can of course now miniaturise, three thousand six hundred feet of the Ring will be devoted exclusively to hydroponics.  That's almost double the strip we used on Gagarin   before the Zanies.'

            'That'll be over……………..seven million square feet of land,' gasped Commander Jakson after doing some rapid calculations.  'Not bad at all.  And what of the remaining four hundred foot long strip,' he inquired of his daughter.

            'That'll be fore the pens and ponds of the animals and fish we're going to use for food.'

            'Not miniaturised I hope?'

            'Of course not father, everything we guzzle will be full size.'

            'Well I must say I'm bloody glad your experimental edible rats and dogs will be off the menu,' her father guffawed good humouredly.

            'And you're sure the food output will match our projected population increase?' asked Commander Jakson.

            'Definitely,' replied Natalie.  'In fact the hydroponics were already partially operational even before you came  and now you've just this morning seen how we're expanding them.  And those vegetable beds were all from seeds you brought.  And we're just about to get our first litters from some of the food animals you brought. So you'll soon be having your first omelettes.'

            'We'll take you over to the animal pens later, Commander,' said Ray,' and as you'll see, everything there is in full swing.  These zoos and aquariums will take us a bit longer though,' he added.

            'Well that doesn't matter so much, as we can hardly eat the tiny things you'll be keeping in them anyway.  The main thing is that we'll have enough food to last us on our journey.  Kwok and  Sutong have already promised that there will be enough deuterium aboard for well over five hundred years. So energy won't be a problem.  But I don't want us ever again to get into a mess like during the Zany time, with more bellies to feed than food.

            'You forget Commander, that with Ace aboard that's very unlikely,' stated Jackson.  'He's an absolute genius at making long and short term predictions.'

            'I most certainly hope so,' replied the co-commander.  'But it's not only a question of food, there's the psychological problem as well.  Us all having to adjust to another immensely long interstellar journey.'

            'Ace will also help us there,' Jakson answered, 'as he has locked away in that photonic brain of his an exhaustive library of practically every book, play and film ever written or produced.  Enough to keep a person busy for half a dozen life-times at least.'

            'Not to mention the zoos, they'll be absolutely fascinating once we get them together,' Anne added.

            'And the information coming in from Prime and Remy,' said Ray.

            ' And don't forget all this open space we have down here now, which means people can spend a lot of time keeping themselves fit,'  contributed Natalie.  'And just imagine the fun we can have with the dolphins in the lake.'

            'Not to mention swimming and rowing,' said Ray.  I reckon there won't be any trouble in finding ways of us burning off excess energy.'

            'So commanders, have the engineers yet decided how long it'll be before we move off?' inquired  Anne.

            'The fusion motors will be ready in five months and all the deuterium we'll need will be aboard within ten months,' Commander Jakson replied.  'So let's say roughly that by this time next year we should be on our way out into deep space again.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 25

 

 

            There was now just a few weeks more to go before Sol Two would ease itself out of its three hundred odd year trip to Cygnus- and everyone was extremely busy.  The ships plasma engines, with Remy Eight incorporated into its hard wiring, had been assembled by the engineers and successfully tested  and the agriculturists and geneticists were engrossed in their farms and zoos.

            But however pre-occupied everyone was to some extent diverted from their jobs by the intriguing information coming in from Hope; whether they were biologists, physicists, mathematicians, geographers, psychologists or just plain lay people.  And because of this a whole string of bi-weekly symposiums had been held throughout the year of link-up to discuss the packets of high-speed news being beamed up by Prime and Remy Sixteen.

            At these well attended meetings it became apparent to everyone that Ace was going through some sort of love-hate relationship with Prime, as the cryogenic entity was always critical of the data.  Many supposed it was due to the guilt the computer was feeling from the havoc it had wreaked with the evolutionary experiments it had directed. But then. as Jill Nite constantly pointed out,  Ace wasn't supposed to register strong emotions.

 

 

            It was the old Gagarin historian, Navig Bezehov, who had first suggested to the Solarians at one of these symposiums that this conflict between the mental giants was a repeat of the old philosophical struggle that had been going on between human beings right back to the time of ancient Greece, three millennia before. This was the clash points of view of  the adherents of the fertility god Dionysus or Bacchus and the sky god Apollo.  In the modern replay Prime was in the role of the emotional and intuitive earth god and Ace the rational sun god, Apollo.

            Then with edited material from both the Gagarin and Ganymede archives the white-haired professor showed his audience that this dichotomy between the rational and the intuitive had run right through human history.  For instance, in ancient China it had taken the form of two different but complimentary religious paths; spontaneous Taoism and the formal and ordered way of Confucianism.  Then in early industrial Europe there were the emotional  romantics and  dry and objective rationalist school of thought.

              Going through the Ganymede tapes covering the period after Gagarin had left earth orbit the professor brought to everyone's notice that this clash of ideas was occurring on earth right up to the time of the holocaust. Between the technocrats who wanted unlimited exploitation of the planets and the Gaiaists who emphasised the preservation of biosphere, not only that of earth which everyone knew was quite unique, but of the other planets as well. Indeed, it was ecological concerns that was behind the Russio-Asian Federation’s  experiments on Mars.

            This history helped the Solarians fathom the long-range lover's tiff between the machine and fungal intelligence which was often sparked off by the most trivial matter.  For example, one whole symposium consisted of a diatribe by Ace opposing Prime's interpretation of the canon fugue the computer had sent off to Hope years and years previously.

            After being initially enraptured by this loop-like music Prime had claimed, via the relay. that though four dimensions were needed to explain a moebius strip or Klein bottle, five were necessary for a musical round.  Ace flatly denied even the existence of the extra co-ordinate, arguing that melody and rhythm were no more than manifestations of material sound-waves.  They were complex of course, but like everything else in the physical universe they functioned in the three dimensions of space. And as fugues were twisted in cycles of time, this was the only extra dimension involved.

            Prime's response, after the usual time delay, had been that the fifth dimension was necessary in order to memorise the tune and rhythm of the fugue - and all the thousands of variations it had composed from the original one Ace had sent;  which Prime in turn had sent back to the Ganymede as it sped on its way to the Gagarin. 

            According to Remy, Prime called these 'sound sculptures,' as it could perceive, using its memory  the whole piece from beginning to end speak in a single retrospective glance. According to Prime, memory and recall overcame time and therefore was one degree higher than  the fourth dimension.

            As Ace expounded at the symposium it had never been very impressed by this sort of woolly fungal thinking, but what worried it more was when Prime began to move beyond the musical realm and claim that all thought was fifth dimensional - even mathematics.  For instance Prime insisted that with topological concepts like the moebius strip, or even simple two-dimensional loop, it used this higher dimensional ability  to bring them into sharp immediate  mental focus.

            Ace replied to this with the old philosophical argument of Occam's razor and so treated this extra dimension as so much unnecessary nonsense that should cut out from the discussion and in this he was supported by some of the Solarians.  Like Dr. Sholokhov, whose behaviourist vies had become more pronounced since meeting up with Ace.

            ‘Prime's fuzzy thinking’, the Doctor of psychology declared. ‘ iss a direct result of its fuzzy mental pathway, which were made of a continuous and growing mat of tissue with few obvious discontinuities. So different from  Ace’s clear-cut mind based on digital codes which as you well know is  made of of clear sequences of on and offs  .

            ‘In the olden days’, said Sutong begging to differ,  ‘this higher dimensional memory  that Prime is talking about would have been called genius or inspiration’ For instance it must have happened when Arcimedes shouted “Eureka” and Isaac Newton saw the apple fall.

            Dr. Sholokhof just  snorted .

            Ace and his supporters became so worked up at this particular symposium that afterwards they got permission from the two commanders to temporarily use the last of the Ganymede’s four Remote Exploration Robots to simulate Prime's cogitations.  And so the considerable combined brainpower of the two cyberoids Remy Twelve and Fourteen were programmed operate in an analogues way by concentrating on the cumulative effect of information impulses from a variety of their sensors and logic circuits and whether  these reached a certain trigger threshold degree or not. But of course, unlike Prime, the two Remy's couldn't grow new circuits and at their fundamental level their digital  mental webs still remained full of electronic and photonic gaps.

            Indeed the topic of the latest of the symposiums had been on this very question of the spaces within  thought.   Ace took mind breaks for granted as it actually used these mental lacunae in its logical binary codes. And so concluded that as it could so easily handle discontinuities, why ever bother to think about them. Prime on the other hand had had no conception of emptiness until Remy Sixteen had taught it to make holes, after which Prime slowly became adapt at emptying its mind, although there was an innate tendency for this void to become promptly filled with material thoughts.  Then its fungal catabolic cilia would get to work to clear a space again, which soon became permeated with more solid thinking in an endless process of destruction and regeneration.

             So for Prime holes weren't empty at all, but rather room for thought.  The whole thing had finally clicked for Prime after its insights into its own genetic material, when it had also realised that a hole wasn't nothing but rather a potential for infinite growth and proliferation: a mode of being it had been familiar with in more concrete terms  for eons.

            Infact it was this sudden realisation that had led to the global outpouring of sensuous energy that Remy had reported in his first transmission on Prime. For it was then that the mouldy mega-mind knew that not only could it ultimately expand over every square inch of Hope, but it had been given the ability to fashion an internal architecture that could sustain endless rampant growth.Caves and chasms where novel musings could be grown and later removed by the ubiquitous cilia. 

            Indeed Remy had suggested that it was the tension between these external and internal modes of growth that had sparked off Prime's pleasurable peristalsis.  And since then Prime had come firmly to believe that psychic space was in no way inferior to material electro-chemical thought patterns such as neurone impulses and axon discharges, as the gaps in between  could contain a plenitude of information.    A perception  it had duly passed on the Ganymede and later Sol Two.

            Of course all this was anathema to Ace and his followers who believed that mental holes or zeros could only became substantial when encapsulated into a symbolic code. Sealed-off unknowns in fact. Gaps in themselves were only an absence of consciousness; indeed the antithesis to consciousness.  Many times the computer thanked its makers for enabling it to safely manipulate the confusion noughts and negatives with good solid maths.

            These symposiums and speculations were temporary abandoned for the final period of blast-off when everyone, including Ace, had to concentrate on matters at hand.

CHAPTER 26

 

            Sol Two, belching out a trial of waste gases from its line of spinning factories was ten years into its long trek to Cygnus and by now a good third of its inhabitants was made up of children, produced from the cross-fertilisation of the original two earth ships: mostly  by artificial methods.  But some were born in the normal way, as in the case of Anne Bright who had married Ivan Kugarin and had had two children with him and Alexei and Jill Nite who had three.

            These two mothers were on their way back from one of the multi-story zoos with some eight and nine year old children, including their own, Nashka Kugarin and Peter Oblonsky, whom they were taking on a school nature lesson.  The group was  walking anti-spinwards across the low bridge which spanned the length of the lake that stretched away on either side of them.  The kids kept stopping to peer over the railing to watch some of the Solarian sports fanatics swimming and paddling canoes below them and the two teachers had to constantly warn them not to lean over the railing too far.

            Halfway along they went down the left exit steps to a small island in the middle of the lake that acted as a support for the bridge.  At this lower level the concave surface of the water was quite obvious, which didn't seem odd to anyone - especially the children who took this centrifugal effect for granted and would have been very perturbed to see a flat surface instead.

Some of the children straight away began to splash around at the water's edge whilst those who sat down on the grass with their biology and physics teacher began to bombard them with questions about the climates and life of earth. For the morning's lesson had been on the ecology of the equatorial savannah which was situated on the third floor of zoo-building four.

            There the class had spend hours circling about and peering through the plastic bubble that contained a thousand square feet of Lilliputian bush land, or hand watched the animals through the roof view-scopes linked to scores of minuscule video cameras that were dotted around the ground and well camouflaged.  For these close-ups everyone had to take in a turn to sit in the limited number of sound-proof cubicles built into the walls of the third floor where they  glued their eyes to the bio-scopes and heard live  what was going on in quad-sound.  Once in, it took quite a while for the teachers to get each kid out into the light again, as they were all so amazed by the snorting and pounding herds of zebra, antelopes and wildebeest that seemed so real one could almost reach out and touch them.  But it was the small herd of screeching elephants that stole the whole show.

            'You mean to say, mum,' asked Nashka in an astonished voice, 'that they used to be ten times bigger than you.'

            'Yes,' she replied, glad to be resting her now enormous frame after the morning's exertions.

            'They must have been really fat……… Sorry mum, I mean large.'

            'Big enough to squash you into a pancake,' muttered Peter.

            'I wish I could see a full sized one, or a full sized anything,' said another child wistfully.

            'Don't worry Kris, later we'll go over and see the dolphins being fed,' commiserated Anne, pointing her flabby arm to the sectioned-off part of the lake opposite.  'And next week we'll be going to the cows and sheep in the animal pens.  We don't want you only to see the tiny animals or you'll never get an idea of how big some of them are.'

            'Or how smelly,' said Peter, recalling an earlier trip.

            'But we don't eat dolphins,' said Nashka, turning up her nose at this rude remark, 'so why aren't they tiny too?

            'Because  they're too brainy,' said Jill.  'And because they're good fun to play with. Look, you can see some of the swimmers on the other side playing with them.'

And everyone squinted down-ship at the group of Solarians and dolphins splattering each other with salty water. Amidst the laughter coming from them could be heard odd whistling and clicking sounds.

            'Why do they always  make those funny noises?' asked one of the children.

            'That's their way of talking,' replied Jill.  'They actually have three sound emitters that they…………….'

            'Emitters?'

            'Well………..mouths then.'

            'You mean that they can speak with three voices at once!' exclaimed the child.

            'Yes.  And not only that, they can see with their mouths as well.'

            Seeing the perplexed look on his friend's face, Peter broke in.  'I think what my mum means, silly, is that they're like bats.  Can't you remember it’s what she taught us in physics last week.  They squeak while they're flying around and find their way around by their  echo, using their huge ears.  I think it's called sonon or something.

            'That's right Peter,' confirmed Jill, 'it's called sonar.  And I'll tell you all something even more amazing about them………….' the children around drew closer to her bony form,……… 'because dolphins have three voices instead of one, like bats, they can see through each other.  They can even tell whether those swimmers over there have just eaten some food or not.'

            'You mean they have X-ray ears?'

            'Not exactly, pets,' replied Jill.  'It's based on another scientific principle altogether. In fact it's something I'm working on right now.  It's called acoustic interference.  I don't think you know that word yet, as we haven't come to defraction in class yet.'

            Seeing Peter's crestfallen face Anne interrupted.  'Don't worry Pete, it's a bit like a hologram picture.  You know, the sort you can see all around when you move your head about.'

            'O. K. children,' said Jill getting up abruptly, 'let's move on across the bridge to the dolphins. They're just about to be fed algae cakes and they'll come right up to the edge to eat.  You'll even be able to touch and stroke them as they're so gentle.'

            'You might even see them dance if you're lucky,' said Anne also getting up, but more slowly than the agile Jill.

            'Dance?'

            'Yes Chang, when they get married they all dance around in a circle. So let's go now so we can get there in time,' she added not wanting to have to walk too fast.

            The class got themselves comfortable on the sandy bank of the salt-water section of the lake to watch the excited dolphins jumping about as they waited for the food to come. suddenly the city's warning klaxon suddenly howled out, followed immediately be batteries of speakers echoing through the dome, informing everyone to be at the nearest video screen within half an hour for an important announcement from the joint commanders.

            After taking the kids back in one of the lifts to the school in Skin City, the two teachers joined their colleagues sitting round the vu-screen in the common-room.

            It was Commander Jakson's picture that flashed on screen. He told everyone that just three hours previously, during the last random radio scan of the skies that the ship periodically carried out, a strange signal had been picked up.

            'It just suddenly started up in mid-scan,' he explained, 'when the antennae were pointed in he direction of the Bootes Constellation.  But until we have time to do some parallex measurements we won't know the actual distance of the source, though we think it's pretty close as the signal's so strong.  It's wavelength is exactly half way between that emitted by hydrogen and hydroxyl ions and consist of a series of complicated harmonics that keep changing all the time.  Ace is working on it right now. It definitely seems to be the work of an intelligent mind though no consistent pattern has yet emerged.  We're also about to beam it on down to Remy and Prime via the relay circling Hope - to see what they make of it.  But it'll be three years at least before we get any reply from them and Ace assures us by then that he'll have cracked the code.   Here's what it sounds like……………..'

            His voice and image was replaced by a multi-layered outpouring of glacial and discordant cadences and coloured patterns that pulsated and scintillated on the screen.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 27

 

            Even after  several years of intense effort, Ace and his team couldn't crack the space code, for whichever approach they used they always ended up with a central unfathomable angle on a  complete answer.  And during all this time strange things had begun to happen on board Sol Two; for ever since these celestial sounds and visions had been publicly displayed some people, especially children, had been going into light trances.  Alexei and Anne Bright were amongst the several dozen adults who had been mesmerised by the very first message three years previously.

Because of this the ship's executive had decided after the first transmissions to stop broadcasting them over the PA system and not to allow the children to watch them at all.

            But many Solarians still surreptitiously looked at them. And others were obliged to, like the mathematicians and linguists who were helping Ace try an decipher the code.  Those who consistently tended to be hypnotised whilst doing this were of course taken off the work, but many who didn't succumb began to have vivid dreams made up of swirling clouds of colour and rhythm that left an after-taste of having glimpsed at something of fundamental but elusive significance.

            As a result of not being able to put these feelings into words, some of the crew, including many in Ace's group, had turned to poetry, painting, sculpture and music. A new type of visionary art therefore began to flower onboard that  that was dedicated to this muse from space;  or  the ‘music of the spheres' some called  it : much to Ace's chagrin as he had initially introduced them to this mythological expression intending it to be taken disparagingly.

            Quite a different response to the space messages came from some of the biologists. They started playing them to the dolphins through under-water speakers, after having noticed that they  became highly animated and thrashed about in the water during the early broadcasts that had boomed out across the lake and city dome.  These scientists concentrated on the acoustic components of the signals knowing that dolphins' visual cortexes were five times less developed them mans' whilst their auditory areas were correspondingly five times more efficient .

            But rather than having a soporific effect on these fish-like mammals, as with humans, space-music did the opposite; for they all congregated around the speaker that was hung under the water and broke up into small schools that performed a circular dance around it.  These in turn intersected each other producing a three-dimensional choreography of the most extraordinary complexity.  Sometimes these rotating schools would briefly fuse into a sphere of living flesh around the loudspeaker and then break up again into a smaller groups, this time composed of different individuals doing a different or reverse dance.  They would keep this up until the music was switched off, when the whole show would immediately cease.

            One explanation put forward by the ship's naturalists for this behaviour was that dolphins, being air-breathers, never sleep under water as a precaution against drowning whilst unconscious. For whenever dolphins do tire or pass out, others come to their aid by nudging them awake or even getting beneath them and pushing them to the surface if need be.  Presumably, the marine experts argued, the dolphins hyper-active dances were preventing themselves from falling asleep.  But of course this didn't explain the intricacy of the dance.

            When they suggested that Ace should encourage his sleepy co-workers to keep on their feet in the same way, by pirouetting around the place, this normally unrufflable cybernetic brain became even more upset. It now, not only had to contend with music and painting, but with poetry-in-motion as well: a little too much for a totally immobile entity.  In the end Ace decided that all these subjective responses of humans and porpoises alike were simply a result of their inherent neuroses, triggered off by ambivalent inputs.

            But a growing number of Solarians, especially those swayed by the messages, became convinced that the key to their code lay in these very aesthetic and kinaesthetic responses.  An idea confirmed when the first of Prime's analyses of the Bootes signals started to role in after its long journey  from the Hope relay station.

            Primes initial comments on the space-music, as translated by its faithful side-kick Remy Sixteen,  was that it had  at first to actually tried to grow the sonic apparatus needed to mimic the  auditory side of these  puzzling interstellar signals; by growing percussive membranes, pseudo lungs, whistling orifices, humming hairs and resonating tubes.  But these 'fungal farts,' as one Solarian wit had remarked, all failed to crack the code  and Hopes mighty mega-mould had suspended its conscious striving altogether and simply  let its autonomic system ruminated on the signals.  The result was an almost instantaneous resonance between the space-music and Prime's tiniest components, the billions of minuscule genetic memory transmitters.  As this harmonic correspondence had reverberated through Hope's titanic bio-mass, Prime had been consumed by yet another almighty global orgasm.  It became all-aquiver, as Remy put it, with the landscape shuddering as if by an earthquake. 

            In between these reflex paroxysms Prime came to the conclusion that it was the five-dimensional nature of its chromosome oscillators that was the key to the cosmic cipher it had received from Sol Two. As these oscillators also operated subconsciously in human beings its instructions to the Solarians was quite simple.

            Firstly, Prime advised them that their unconscious thought patterns, formed whilst watching and hearing the signals should be beamed back to source, using exactly the same radio frequency as they hand been emitted on.  In addition Sol Two should augment this feed-back with a special reply from Prime itself . This was in the form  of  an audio opus it had composed which  to the Solarians sounded as weird as the original and ceaseless emanations from the Bootes sector of space.

            After some discussion onboard and protests from Ace, who insisted he could decipher the code if given more time, it was decided to follow Prime's advice.

            Ten adults were chosen from those susceptible to the etheric transmissions. Indeed,  the intention was to  purposely inducing them into a trance whilst under their influence.  This was tol take place in the dark with the volunteers lying in ten of Ganymede's fifty unusable cryogenic beds, which would isolate them from everything except what was coming in through their head-phones and personal vu-screens fitted above them under the bed's plastic dome.

             The hypnotised subjects, just like the original deep-frozen crew of the old Ganymede, would be shaven and have electrodes taped to their skulls.  But instead of their brainwave being used, via Ace, to control cryogenic bio-feed-back,  they would rather be amplified by the computer and radioed out into the void and in the direction of the Bootes Constellation.

 

 

            On top of these ten brainwaves and Prime's personal contribution the naturalists aboard persuaded the ship's executive to also include in the  transmissions  brain patterns of five dolphins.  They would only be fed the sound component of the space messages of course, but would be hooked up by electrodes just like their ten human colleagues.  As they too would have to be immobile and somnambulates, special tanks had to be constructed for these aquatic t creatures in which they could safely sleep without drowning.  So, unlike the soft padded beds of the human volunteers, the dolphins would be lying on a shallow layer of ultra-salty water to keep them afloat.

            It took the Solarians a few weeks to get everything sorted out, but as soon as the fifteen subjects had been linked into the circuitry the encephalograms of all three species began to be emitted from the ship's directional antennae; constantly repeated signal broadcast in five minute bursts of human thought waves, then dolphin's,  followed by Prime's and back to human's again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 28

 

            None expected the response to come quickly, for hardly had forty-eight hours passed when the incoming signal from the Bootes sector changed dramatically from its seemingly random fluctuations in the hydrogen-hydroxyl wavelength.  Quite suddenly three harmonics of the carrier frequencies peaked.

            At first it made no sense to the scientists who had congregated in the Navig Bay, from where the complicated array of external antennae and parabolic dishes were controlled. But within minutes Ace had unscrambled these into three distinct messages which he played for them.

            The one based on the highest overtone sounded remarkably like variation of Prime's fungal fugue that had been transmitted earlier that day. The middle frequency carrier wave resolved into a series of piping sounds that the biologist recognised as dolphin talk. And the third and lowest harmonic came out clearly in Russian, the Lingua Franca of Sol Two.

            'Be prepared for an important announcement…………Be prepared……….' It repeated over and over again in a facsimile of Alexei's voice.  Several hours later the message loop stopped. After a brief pause a delicate and wavery voice of indeterminate sex came on the air.

            'Fellow beings, we are the Space Sentinals,  guardians of the known universe and though far from you we are in almost instantaneous contact via one of the many self duplicating beacons that we have spread throughout the cosmos, including your galaxy: number sixteen in the super-cluster J-128 in the macro space-time co-ordinate 1607-x1821-p2007-B453.  Clone beacon 855,742,312 was triggered off when you came within a few light hours from it, and we were instantly  informed when it received your response; an electro-magnetic message modulated by the imprint of intelligent brains.

            'And from the cerebral patterns of the sixteen entities that you sent we have learnt much about your planet, your ship and its human and dolphin inhabitants……..and the global creature you call Prime.  We had no problem in understanding any of you or learning your different languages and thought processes, as you are all beings built around nucleic acids, which we manufacture. 

            ‘That is we  are sometimes referred to as the “Seeders,” as for over half the age of our universe we have been sowing the heavens with uncountable varieties of nuclear proteins, which we imbed in soft-cored meteorites and comets and disseminate quite randomly.  A few occasionally land as shooting stars on the right planet at the right time. Like the hot nitrogen and phosphorus containing seas of Earth's and Hope's primeval past,  where they slowly crumble and dissolve into the surrounding water and release their stored genetic material.  These, though rudimentary, catalyse a whole sequence of events including the creation of a biosphere that ultimately can lead to intelligent proteinous life.  But this is very rare and most meteors never bear fruit, but remain in the inter-stellar and galactic voids for millions upon millions of years slowly degenerating into what you call "space oil".

            'From what we have learnt, it seems that some of you have already began to grasp the importance of the five dimensional properties of nucleic acids, and their affect on genetic inheritance and certain types of group and individual memory.   For the complex topology of these spiral chromosomal molecules act as zero-entropic loops  for electro-magnetic fluxes in  higher dimensions and so store  information indefinitely. and which can be  transmitted from generation to generation. So it is not just the morphology of your thirty thousand genes that makes you what you are, it is also the message you they carry from the beginning of time locked up in these looped threads of amino acids.  We are the source of this super dimensional message.

            'Long ago your earth scientists discovered that gravity in nothing more than matter and energy distorted in four dimensions. You later on realised that  electro-magnetism is  a product of matter and energy twisted in five  dimensions. Even later on your physicists began to realise that there may be as many as eleven dimensions.  But what you did not know is that the harmonics that go on inside  these genetic chromosomal molecules go even beyond five  or even eleven co-ordinates. They resonate right up to the highest dimensions of this universe: which is a total of twenty-six.

            'There is no possibility of you knowing this because of your size, for you are creatures of what we call the middle universe, containing approximately the same number of atoms inside your bodies as there are stars in your observable universe.  So for you the higher dimensions of electro-magnetism, gravity, nuclear forces and even space- time appear to be immutable forces. But  for us they are simply extra areas of consciousness and movement . Prime has an inkling of this due to its huge planetary size.  We Sentinals, I should mention, are of almost galactic size. Indeed, this is not an individual Sentinal speaking to you right now, but the summation of millions of us in this sector of space-time.

            'Ironically, in spite of your limited human and dolphin size you do contain microscopic components that vibrate in the higher dimensions, although you are not aware of it.  Without them your brains would have little to tune into and your intelligence would be curtailed to the level of the machine consciousness of your computers.

            'Nevertheless, though of quasi-galactic proportions, we Sentinals also contain something topologically similar to your spiral nucleic acids, though on a gigantic scale and not made from protein.  You could call us electrical or gravitational beings, or to be more precise twenty-six  dimensional ones.

            'In spite of your dimensional limitations we are still very interested in you, and in fact every sort of intelligent creature that we have spawned, for each brings its own unique insight and point of view to the universe. Indeed all of us just bits of the universe that think.  Your human bi-polar brains, for instance, with its mixture of the low logical and the higher dimensional intuitive thinking is truly fascinating to us. Like your trick of transcending time by the use of imagination and what you call hunches.  And though dolphins are not intelligent in quite the same way as you, their advanced kinetic and auditory awareness is of equal interest to us.

            'Indeed, every single thing you have aboard in your vast biological repository excites us, right down to the lowliest organism.  For your ark contains over a million separate species and therefore over a million ways of interpreting reality. As for Prime; it is already able to consciously handle five dimensions in its proteinous way.  That is what the song it sent us was all about: a sort of musical hologram. And we want you to relay  back to Prime a song of our own.  It is very rare for one of our organic offspring to grow to such a size  and it is very fortunate that you ran into it and stimulated it’s consciousness.  We would like to thank you for waking it up.  We would, infact,  like to meet Prime personally but it is just too big to move. So we have asked beacon 855,742,312 to reproduce itself and send a clone to orbit Hope.

But all this will take considerable time.    'But we meet you quite soon, however, for we intend to teach you how to adapt your plasma engines to faster-than-light speeds so that you can come to us……..'  The Sentinals paused as if to give the Solarians time to thin this over.

            'The nearest individual Sentinal in your super-cluster is in, or rather is part of, what you call Nebula 841.  This is several hundred thousand million light-years from you and even travelling at super-luminary speeds it will take you tens of thousands of years to reach it.  So we want you to take a short cut. After the engine adaptation, instead of heading straight for the Nebula, you'll aim for the black hole at the centre of your own galaxy which is quarter of a million light-years from where you are now.  It is a spinning hole and so contains a ring shaped singularity which you will be able to penetrate.  And as you do so you will go through a plane of warped space, folded in on itself in all the higher dimensions. And  you will out  through a white hole or gusher in Nebula 841.'

            'We will give you the details of your engine modification later and it will suffice now just to give you the general idea.  You will simply surround your plasma shields with a metallic sheaf made of a special alloy we will soon disclose to your.  Around this you will wind a double spiral of magnetic dipoles, the flux of which will be controlled by the amplified brain-waves of sleeping humans or dolphins; or preferably  as a fail-safe arrangement.  You will be using exactly the same apparatus as you employed for the transmissions to us The brain modulated electro-magnetic currents of the sleepers, after passing through Ace, will be fed into the spiral casing around your engines. This will infinitesimally alter the super-hot plasma inside the magnetic bottle.  Though very small, this secondary mind controlled magnetic field will in turn act indirectly on the fusion core. But the point is that the secondary field  is tuned to the multi-dimensional genetic harmonics of the sleeping subjects,  so likewise the engine core will  be modulated in all twenty-six  dimensions.

            'This is all it needs to alter the entropy of the expelled ionised gases. Infact the fifteen  highest dimensions it will actually reverse it.  For entropic "degeneration" as you call it, is really a misnomer and not an automatic one way process of decay.  In some of the highest  dimensions degenerate or chaotic energy can be treated as a higher form of cosmic organisation rather than a lower-one.  It all depends in which dimensions you are working in and what you are aiming at.  Both you and Prime already have an inkling of this. Prime with its recent fascination by plenitudes and you with your various mystical states such as Satori, Brahma, Tao, Zen and the Oceanic feeling.  Indeed the Oceanic state is precisely the one that the sleepers were in when they transmitted the return signal to our beacon. and  it will be the one they are in  when they are in control of your  faster-than-light engines.

            'The actual effect  of these sleepers magnetic modulations on the plasma stream being ejected by your fusion motors will in fact be two-fold.  Firstly, as already mentioned, it will affect your speed, as the plasma's exhaust velocity will be super-charged to many times the speed of light, a process which involves the creation of super fast tachyons and time reversal that we cannot discuss at the moment.  Secondly a twenty-six  dimensional standing-wave will be generated by your ship, or rather the engine end of it,  but a force-field big enough to enclose your craft and some of the space surrounding it.  This will protect you from meteoric collisions, which would be disastrous at super-luminary speeds.  It will also protect all of you inside from the tremendous inertial  forces you will experience as you accelerate and de-accelerate at tachyon speeds,  not to mention the enormous gravitational tides which you will encounter as you get close to the singularity and which would otherwise pull you and your ship apart. Finally this force field bubble will prevent the  catastrophic consequences of bringing matter and anti-matter, time and anti-time into close proximity  inside your engines. In short turning you and your ship would turn into a miniature quasar. 

              'We are closing this transmission now, but the details of the changes you will make to your engines will be broadcast from our beacon in four of  your hours.  Please pass on the other two messages in this transmission  to your dolphins and to Prime.  And you can wake-up your fifteen sleepers as from now on we'll be in contact with you via  radio channels.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 29

 

                        Sol Two was well over three-quarters of the way through its six month journey to the nebular black hole and wrapped in its protective multi-dimensional cocoon, was travelling at almost a light year per minute,.

            In fact the change-over of the ship's engines to tachyon drive, under the Sentinal's instructions, had only taken a few short months; for the real complexity of the new warp engine lay in the living brains that controlled it.  Whereas Ace's electronic consciousness had no problem in dealing with the nano-second fluctuations of the fusion plasma engines it was only DNA containing organisms that could manipulate the fluctions in the higher dimensions.   And just the tiniest loss of control by the mammalian pilots would result in the ship going super-nova.

            So to be on the safe side the ship’s executive had agreed that instead of one, there should be four groups of human and dolphin operating the ship at the same time. And furthermore, the maximum period of trance-navigation for each duo should be forty-eight hours; the four pairs being staggered so that one could be changed each twelve hours.To be absolutely sure the executive had also decided to place the four pairs of pilots in different parts of the ship: in the engineering section deep inside therefore-hull, in the Skin City on its surface, in the engine section a mile down-ship and in the slim connecting tube that joined the two halves together. In each area was constructed a darkened room which now  containing the prone bodies of the co-pilots; the human lying a sealed and air-conditioned cryogenic bed and the dolphin in an aerated isolation tank.

            But whether human or dolphin, all were attuned and lulled into their subconscious astro-navigation job by the special video and audiotapes prepared by the Sentinals.  For travelling at super-luminary speeds for almost five months, Sol Two had moved far out of range of the Sentinal's beacon and so no longer could receive direct commands from them.

            Alexei had spent eleven sessions altogether as co-pilot and had just finished a two-day session in the connecting tube - and was now with a small group watching the stars from his old favourite haunt, the plastic viewing bubble of the astrodome at the very tip of the navigation bay.

            Few had bothered to come here before,  but ever since the black hole had become visible to the naked eye as a tiny dark whirlpool at the galactic centre, many of Sol Two's inhabitants become glued to the ship's many observation ports, including this one that had the best view of all.

            Another feature of the starry panorama, which Alexei was also familiar with, was that those ahead of the ship were hard blue and those behind a deep red. Only a belt of stars directly under his feet and at right angles to ship's movement showed the typical white light of a star.

            His eyes travelled to the maroon coloured suns they were leaving behind and for the umpteenth time tried to make out some of the old familiar star patterns; but Sol Two had moved too far from the old constellations of the galaxy periphery.  He wondered how Remy and Prime were getting on back there, trying to sort out the mess caused by their evolutionary experiments.

            His thoughts were interrupted by a groan by his fellow Solarians in the navigation bay as another star emerged out of the indigo halo ahead, scintillating from  blue to  yellow and finally red before  vanishing into the infa-red as it d to floated by.

            Everything became t quiet again and Alexei went back to his musings, wondering whether any of these close stars that zoomed past every ten or fifteen minutes contained habitable planets. And whether the Sentinals space-seeds had born fruit there.  What always puzzled him when he thought of the Sentinals was that, if they were the creators of proteinous life in the universe, then who in turn created them, with their electrical and gravitational woven into twenty-six dimensional patterns as complex as any nucleic acid.

            The nearest the Sentinals had ever got to answering this was that the initial multi-dimensional topology of the cosmos was inherent at the time of the Big Bang twelve billion years ago,  and that they themselves were a result of a compression area within this primordial universal explosion that had seeded out - and taken half the universe's life-span to germinate into full consciousness.  Alexei felt then there must be  an even higher type of Sentinal that sows Big Bangs rather than space seeds.

            With a jolt Alexei realised that as he had been thinking his eyes had become drawn to the minuscule black vortex at the centre of the indigo funnel that they were heading for and which seemed to generate and spin off the multi-hued panorama of stars.  He forced himself to remember that this wasn't the centre of everything but an annular singularity with a mass of over a million sol-type suns.

            With an effort he managed to drag his eyes away from this centrifugal mirage and noticed that everyone in the bay with him also had their eyes focused intently ahead. And all were deathly still.

            Suddenly one of them, an engineer that Alexei knew slightly, shouted out. 

            'No, no.  It's sucking me in…………..  My mind……………………….  It's sucking in my mind.' And he fell to the floor convulsing.

            Thinking he had seen an  epileptic fit, Alexei managed to pry unfortunate man's mouth apart and get a handkerchief between his chattering teeth.

            It was only after he had done this that Alexei realised that on-one else around had noticed what had happened.  Everyone was still gazing unconcerned at the wall of blackness ahead.

 

CHAPTER 30

 

            Sol Two was finally in the vicinity of the galactic black hole which, if anyone had been allowed to, would have been seen from the ship's astrodomes as a tiny black vortex dead ahead.  However after the attack of hysterical convulsions  that had swept through the craft, starting with those who had been in the habit of gazing for long periods at the lurid display around the cosmic whirlpool, the two commanders had ordered all windows and port-holes closed. Only safe televised images filted through Ace were to be viewed.  And few even watched these, for so strong was this space vertigo and atavistic fear of the unknown that many off the Solarians quit Skin City and camped out in the parklands of Ring City,  feeling more secure having several layers of hull between them and the outside.

            Nevertheless,  and with the help of a steady supply of tranquillisers a skeleton crew continued working in Navig, and as the Sentinals's had instructed before fading out of range, they had switched off the tachyon engines for the last days of the journey and were coasting along at a mere three thousand miles per second.  Again as instructed, at exactly two thousand million miles from the singularity the crew ordered the four pairs of human-dolphin pilots to marginally alter the invisible multi-dimensioned bubble that had been protecting them during the hyper-speed trip.

            A few moments later Ace's voice came over the tannoy telling everyone that the Sentinal's carrier waves had started up again after a communication silence of six months.  This was followed by the familiar celestial music and the androgynous voice of the Sentinals.

            'Fellow beings, this is the Sentinal group-mind.  You have followed our directives correctly and are now in close range of another of our monitor beacons which was programmed to switch on immediately it detected any collapse of space-time in its proximity. This of course happened when your ship came out of super-luminary velocity. A hyper-speed  force field is relatively stable within normal space-time around, but you would be surprised by the amount of cosmic noise that is made by them when they are switched on and off ,  or modified in any way.

            'The annular singularity you are moving towards is the short-cut to Nebula 841 and to get there you must aim your ship right at the middle of  the singularity's two hundred thousand mile wide hole.

            'You may have noticed already that your ship has begun to speed up, for you are now entering the powerful gravitational field of the black hole and by the time you reach it in two days time you will again be travelling at an enormous velocity.  So your force-field should be left on and in addition your tachyon motors switched on again.  Not to give you light speed extra speed, but for lateral adjustments to make sure you hit the eye of the singularity dead centre, where all the gravitational tugs cancel each other out.  If you veer off-course by the slightest degree you will plunge into the super-dense singularity itself and be totally obliterated. If this happens, not even the force-field will protect you from being compressed into degenerate matter.

            'Your actual passage through the ring will only take a few nano-seconds as you will be travelling at almost the speed of light - though it might seem long as time tends to play tricks in this situation.  For us out here  your fall into the hole will seem to take and eternity, but that shouldn't worry you.

            'You will pass out on the other side through a white-hole situated on one of the spiral arms of Nebula 841.  The white-hole has a mass exactly equal to that of the singularity, but instead of sucking in matter, light and energy in, this gusher is rather spewing it out. And you with it.  For these two symmetrical vortexes that are practically mirror images of each other act as a gigantic celestial pump.  All the trillions of miles of three dimensional space in between each end are compressed and folded up within the higher dimensions into a flat interface or micro-cosmos.

            'When you get onto the other side you must wait until you are two thousand million miles from the gusher and travelling at the same speed as you are now - and then make another adjustment to the field surrounding you.  This will activate another beacon waiting there for you, which will  put us in touch again.  Indeed you will ultimately meet an individual part of us, or rather travel through one of our individual components, though to you this will be nothing more than swirling clouds of electrically charged and highly rarefied gases.

            'You must have no fear in passing through the space warp to Nebula 841, for as long as just one of your eight pilots is effective everything will be alright.  However when you do get near the black hole's even horizon, all communication with us will temporarily cease.  This will take place in exactly forty-seven hours, fifteen minutes and thirty four seconds. I will repeat the message again……………………'

            As the Sentinal had said, by the following day Sol two was noticeably building up speed and the vu-screens showed the black disc ahead getting steadily larger by the hour.  And with this a growing nervousness amongst the Solarians who huddled together under the city dome and increased their dosage of tranquillisers.

            Their anxiety got even worse forty-seven hours after the first beacon transmission when the Sentinal's carrier wave faded out altogether.  The human, animal and machine inhabitants of So Two were now totally alone to face the utter darkness that was gradually blotting out all the stars and constellations.

            Quite suddenly the darkness was all around and Ace came the nearest to loosing his electronic nerve that the Solarians had ever seen.  He just kept repeating over and over again to himself, 'we're lost, lost.  There's no co-ordinates.  We're lost, lost……………'

            His inane chartering become so annoying that Commander Jakson turned down the speaker volume and ordered the computer to keep its mind on the fusion motors.  Now all the navigating depended on the intuitive depths of the eight supine pilots, sleeping happily away and completely unconcerned by the terror around.

            Abruptly stars appeared on screen as if at the end of a long black tunnel - and in a few seconds were all around again.  Not the same constellations they had left behind, but normal enough looking ones  nevertheless, in spite of their bluish tinge.  The back screen showed a rapidly diminishing whirlpool of reddish light behind them. 

            Ace immediately became his old self again as he restarted computing their trajectory from the stellar scenery and the commanders opened the ship's windows again to give the frightened passengers a reassuring glimpse of their new surroundings.    After several hours, during which many of the Solarians who had hid away made their way sheepishly to the many observation ports to state out at the unfamiliar but friendly looking constellations. Ace came back on the air.

            'I'm afraid it's going to be a rather long job to sort out precisely where we are,' was his opening announcement.  'Four days at least, as I'm going to have to work out are position from the distribution of galactic clusters.  But from a preliminary survey we do indeed seem to be heading out from the centre of a spiral galaxy similar to Nebular 841.'

            Two days later the eight sleeping pilots on current duty were told to make the force-field wobble a bit as instructed, but there was no response from the Sentinals and the air-waves remained dead.

            A third day passed.

            Then a fourth, and still no news form the Sentinals.

            On the fifth day Ace finally came out with  the deductions from his astronomical observations.

            'It took me even longer than I thought as I had to do a comprehensive x-ray, infra-red and telescopic sweep of the galactic clusters as well as super-clusters - and over the last few hours I've gone over their possible distribution permutations several thousand times.  So I can definitely say that we are not in Nebula 841.  In fact we are not in any of the clusters of super-clusters observable from our own.'

            'You mean to say Ac, that instead of millions of light years we've come out billions of light years away' exclaimed Commander Jakson.

            'It would seem so, as I've not been able to recognise any super-cluster shapes as landmarks - or rather space marks.'

            'I suppose that would explain why we haven't heard from the Space Sentinals,' commented Commander Oblonsky.  'We must be in a different part of the universe altogether.

            'Maybe,' volunteered Kwok, ' if there's another white hole further away than the one in Nebula 841, but exactly equal and opposite in size and shape to the black one we plunged into  we may have  slipped sideways into that one instead.'

            'Sideways,' spluttered Oblonsky.  'But we followed the Sentinal's instructions to the letter, so we can't be in a different part of the cosmos.'

            'I'm afraid ladies and gentlemen………….and dolphins, that it's far more serious than that.  I've been doing Doppler tests on the galactic clusters and even taking into account our present speed of twelve hundred miles a second, the Doppler shift is into the blue rather than the red.'

            'You mean that the galaxies are moving towards each other instead of apart,' cried Alexei.  'But Ace, that's impossible!'  Everyone knows that ever since the Big Bang everything been expanding. I mean………..'

            'I know Alexei,' the computer replied soothingly, 'but I'm afraid here it's the other way round.  To be quite blunt we are not in our own universe at all but have entered a new cosmos altogether.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 31

 

            Alexei was at his usual haunt in Navig, looking through the back of the astrodome at the faint red smudge of the now distant gusher. He made up his mind to again try and persuade the two commanders to let Sutong and his team have a go at cracking the space egg.  And as he pressed the button for the lift he thought over the events that had led to its discovery.

            They had been several weeks into the new universe, still encased in their protective bubble and coasting along on the energy imparted to Sol Two as it was squeezed like a pip from an orange out of the black hole. Then  the long awaited radio signals from the Sentinals had come through: dead ahead, extremely faint and in short bursts every three hundred and sixty-eight minutes.

            Relief and excitement had swept through the craft as successive broadcasts had come, especially after Ace had deciphered them by collating and enhancing over a score of the transmissions.  For they were all the same, quite brief and in Morse. 

            'Fellow beings, by now you are in one of the many extensions of the multi-universe which we Sentinals are far too large to enter. S we have to explore these other universes through our proteinous offspring and you were the only suitably mobile creatures near your particular galactic gateway.  At the precise moment you passed through yours there were over a billion possible sidereal universes you may have come out in.  We cannot know precisely as the black hole and gusher sides of gateways are never exactly symmetrical.  So we sent in over six billion miniscule beacons with you through the black-hole in the expectation of you meeting at least one of them.  We feel we owe you that as in a way we tricked you with the story of Nebula 841, for the psychological problems of traversing a singularity are great enough as it is, without the added uncertainty of not knowing your destination.  But without you none of the virtual universes accessible from your particular galaxy will ever be explored. And only living beings,  not machines, can turn potential existence into actuality.  So most our beacons would have not even materialised into existence. The few, or probably only one that that followed in your wake is composed of a pinch of anti-matter surrounded by a ten-dimensional spinning spheroid containing a microscopic transmitter and a wafer of crystal containing this message, stored in an ancient terrain binary code for compactness. It can sweep space with this this message for hundreds of thousands of years if need be, for we neither know the precise when or where of your ultimate terminus.  We wish you and your space-ark good-luck and hope that you will become for your new universe what we are in ours. So farewell fellow seeders.'

            After the initial amazement to this cryptic message the ship's executive decided to go and actually physically retrieve the beacon.  Some, like Sutong, because they wanted to take the contraption apart and others because they wanted to keep it for posterity, for as Commander Jakson pointed out, it would be the only material evidence of the Sentinals for future Solarian generations.

            And so a month later the ship had homed down on the signal and was moving in deep space in the vicinity of its source; but in spite of all the sensors and searchlights blazing away nothing could be seen.   Days passed with every type of device  being used in the hunt. But all was in vain as the Sentinal's beacon at close range scrambled everything and prevented accurate pin-pointing.  It was only after the space scooters were recalled, the searchlights dimmed and the ship about to move off that a sharp-eyed child noticed something flashing from a window in Skin City.

            A double-seater scooter was sent out to investigate this twinkling apparition with Alexei accompanying Sutong and in almost utter darkness and with their own lights dimmed, headed for the point of light sparkling like a fire-fly.  Alexei remembered how they both gasped when they saw how small it was, a tiny eliptical sphere tumbling about in space and shimmering internally with all the hues of the spectrum.  Using the robot arm, Sutong had carefully clasped the egg-sized beacon to stop it spinning and placed it in a large metal box especially constructed to absorb powerful radio emissions, for they had all been expecting something considerably bigger.

            On getting the precious package back to the ship's laboratories Sutong had wanted to immediately crack it open, but was blocked by both the commanders; Oblonsky because he feared the consequences of exposing the anti-matter power source and Jakson because he wanted it as a momento.  So the engineering team was only allowed to bombard the almost weightless globule of warped space-time with penetrating rays. But nothing could get through the shell which continued to shimmer with all the colours of the rainbow, like a soap bubble on the verge of collapse, An effect of multi-dimensional surface tension according to Sutong.

So the commanders got their way and much to Sutong's disgust had the cosmic egg placed on a pedestal in a specially screened room in Skin City for everyone to see.  And most of the Solarians had already gone to the darkened room to watch its ever-changing patterns, even Alexei once or twice.

            In fact that's where the two commanders were right now. And as Alexei was making his way from Navig through the maze of external tubes and passage-ways that linked up the blister rooms of Skin City an archaic nursery rhyme kept going round in his head: Humpty-dumpty who had a great fall and couldn't be put together again.

            He pushed this verse aside as so much children nonsense and eased open the door of egg-room as he and Sutong referred to it.  He could just make out the commanders and some older Solarians sitting silently around and engrossed in the space gem's psychedelic display.  Someone said hush and Alexei quietly shut the door again and left them to it. The place was too quiet and placid for the young who, anyway, were too  excited  by the astronomical discovery of  several sol type planetary systems that would be in easy reach of Sol Two’s hyper drive engines, and were therefore absorbed in terra-forming  training programs.

            As he was re-tracing his steps he wondered why it was mainly the old who had become habitually attracted to the cosmic egg.  Was it because they were lonely?  Or did it somehow round off their lives?  He didn't know.  But it was odd when they had a brand new universe to explore.

 

 

 

 

THE END