Still sprawling, I looked back at the
Figurão
. A cloud of dust and sand was spurting from beneath her forepart. Some of the grit was pattering on my helmet. As I watched, the forepart swayed, and then lifted clear of the ground. Most of the loose stuff had been blown away, and I could see the ship better now; well enough to guess what Camilo was trying to do. The three lowermost steering-jets were blasting fiercely as they lifted her nose. I could see the idea, but I doubted whether he would get enough thrust out of those small jets to push her back to the vertical.
He turned up the power, and she lifted a little more on the two exposed legs of the tripod; no longer nose-down, but tilted a little above the horizontal.
I judged he had the jets on full power. They were holding her up; making a third supporting leg, but they weren’t raising her nose any further. I suddenly understood why he had been so anxious to have the platform out of her, and the fuel, and the rest of the stuff, too. Freed of them, she might just have had power enough, but with most of the gear still aboard, she was still inclined only very slightly above the horizontal. The jets kept on roaring and gushing, but still they gave her no more lift. I wondered if it was the leg that had broken through the crust that was keeping her anchored. Clearly she was not going to be able to make it....
Then the main drive fired! Crazy... crazy!
I suppose he thought that, if he could tear the buried leg free, the side-jets would be able to tilt her nose skyward.
She leapt forward, almost horizontal, and with the pediment of the trailing leg dragging a furrow through the sand, like a huge plough-share. She dipped by the head, bounced her belly on the sand, rose again on the supporting side-jets, and he let the main drive have it again.
By God, it was well tried! For a moment I thought he had done it. She lifted until the foot of the trailing leg was barely touching the sand. She was accelerating fast, but at such an angle to me that I could see little more than a cloud of dust with an exhaust flare in the middle of it.
She must, I suppose, have dipped again - and touched. I can’t say. All I saw was the silver shape leaping suddenly above the dust cloud, turning over and over in the air, with her drive still flaring. She fell back into the dust, and bounced to appear again; she didn’t go so high, and she was spinning differently this time. Then once more she disappeared, and the dust and the sand sprayed up, looking like a shell-burst at sea....
I put down my head, hugged myself to the ground, and waited. ... She was, I guessed, nearly three miles away by now, but that was unpleasantly close for the kind of explosion I was expecting. I held my breath as I waited ... and waited....
The explosion did not come.
At last, I looked up, cautiously. Of the
Figurão
herself I could see nothing. There was just a dust-cloud - with a red flare still burning steadily in the middle of it.
I went on waiting. Nothing happened except that the lighter dust was blown away, and the cloud grew smaller. After some more minutes I risked standing up. Scarcely taking my eyes from the spot, I made my way back to the platform. I found it half-buried in sand thrown up by the
Figurão
’s blast, but it lifted all right, and the sand slid off as I tilted it and slid it away to a safer distance, to land again.
For over an hour I sat on the platform, watching. Gradually the loose sand and dust had been blown away, and I could see the silver glint of the ship herself, and the steady flame from her tubes.
I realized that somehow, perhaps on the first bounce, the main drive had been reduced to a pretty low power, or the ship would have gone a lot further and fared a lot worse, but I still did not know whether she was going to blow up or not - and, if not, how long the fuel would continue to burn at the present setting.
Perhaps Camilo had been able to check the power at the moment of the first bounce, but he could have had no chance after that. One could not imagine that, even strapped to the couch as he would be, either he himself or the gimbal system could have withstood what the
Figurão
had been through....
And at that thought I was suddenly swept by the terrifying realization that, whether the ship blew up or not, I was now alone....
Almost in the same moment I became aware again of the hostile desert all around. I began to feel the awfulness of utter desolation stalking in on me once more....
I pulled the two-man dome off the platform and set it up. Flimsy though it was, one could find some illusion of protection inside it. The howling of the wilderness was not quite so close to my elbow; the prowling of the agoraphobic monsters was kept a little further off....
The day wore on. The puny red sun declined and disappeared. The constellations shone out, familiar still, for against the panorama of the heavens the leap from Earth to Mars is the tiniest of hops. One day, I am sure, the constellations will look different, when our hops have indeed become great leaps - for me that is an article of faith - but it won’t be for a long time yet....
The night closed down. Through the dome’s small windows all but the stars was dark - except at one point where, across miles of sand, I could see the glow of the
Figurão
’s main jet, still flaring where she lay.
I broke open a packet of rations, and ate some food. I felt no hunger, but the familiarity of the simple act of eating held some comfort. The food did me good, too. It gave me strength, and I felt better able to resist. Then, suddenly, I became aware of silence....
Looking out of the window again, I saw that the flare of the rocket-tube had vanished. There was nothing but blackness and the stars. All sound had ceased, and left such a silence as was never known on Earth. Nor was it just that, not just the negative absence of sound; the silence was hard, positive, a quality of eternity itself. It rang in one’s ears until they sought relief by hearing sounds that did not exist; murmurings, far-off bells, sighs not so far off, tickings, whispers, faint ululations....
A bit of verse that my grandfather used to quote came into my mind:
... for all the night
I heard their thin gnat-voices cry
Star to faint star across the sky,
and I seemed to hear them, too: they had no words, they were on the threshold of sound, but they encouraged me....
And, God knows, I needed encouragement, crouched there in my flimsy dome....
The voices cry - but the elemental terrors prowl. We need numbers to sustain us; in numbers we can dispel the terrors; alone, we are weak, mutilated. Taken from our pool of corporate strength we gasp, we wriggle defencelessly while the terrors circle round, slowly closing in....
Perhaps the voices are just sirens - but I think not. I think they are the calls of destiny, leading, not luring, onward and outward. I think we shall, we must, follow them - but not like this! Never again like this! Not, oh God - alone...!
The little sun rode over the horizon like a delivering knight. I almost knelt in worship of him as he drove the fingering terrors from my side - not away, but further off, giving me the room, and the courage, to move.
I had meant to eat again, but I could not wait for that. I craved only for the security of the ship. I put my helmet on with shaking hands, packed the dome aboard the platform, lifted to a few feet, and sped across the sand towards the
Figurão
as fast as I could.
Two of the tripod legs were twisted and bent, and the third torn off, but the hull was surprisingly little damaged I had to clear a lot of sand to get at the airlock as the ship now lay. Much of it I managed to blow away with the platform’s jets, but the rest I had to scrape out.
The lock worked perfectly. Inside the ship there was far less damage than I had expected - except to poor Camilo.
I take some pride in having been able to force myself outside again to bury him, as I had buried Raul. I knew that it must be done at once if I were to be able to face it at all so, somehow, I did it. And then hurried back....
It was after that that the gap comes - a long gap, according to the calendar-clock. It looks as if I spent some part of it trying to repair the radio-transmitter; for some reason I seem to have rigged up a light to shine out of each port; the platform is still outside, but not quite as I left it when I first came in.... Probably there are other things... I don’t know ... I can’t remember....
Perhaps someone will come....
I have food enough for nearly three years....
Food enough - but not, I fear, spirit enough....
There is a letter here for my dear Isabella. Give it to her, please....
After George Troon had read the message, he pushed it across to his second-in-command. Arthur Dogget took it, considered it, and then nodded slowly.
‘So it’s out at last. I’d give a lot to see the Rio papers today. Apoplectic’ll be an understatement for ‘em,’ he said, with some satisfaction. ‘Ought to be fun. Two hundred million Brasileiros all steamed up and demanding immediate action. What do you think’ll happen?’
Troon shrugged.
‘As far as we are concerned, no change. Even a million million wrathful Brasileiros can’t affect celestial mathematics. The powers that be have still got to wait for next conjunction before they can come after us. Meanwhile, I suppose the government will throw a few Ministers to the wolves, and assure everybody that retribution is well in hand.’
‘They’re lucky they’ve only got six months of it to weather. What surprises me is that they managed to keep it dark so long,’ Arthur said. ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘as far as I’m concerned, the thing that matters is that we beat ‘em to it - such as it is - and that’s one thing they can’t undo.’
‘No,’ Troon nodded in agreement, ‘there’s nothing they can do about that.’
The two of them turned as if by common consent to look out of the window.
The prospect there was an average Venusian day. The sky was simply a luminous white mist. Visibility was that within a layer of thin cloud, changing range quite rapidly as the mist drove along in a twenty-mile-an-hour wind. Most of the time one could see the sparse, high reeds that began forty yards away from the dome. They were slightly bent, and rippled in the wind like stiff hairs. Now and then the mist cleared enough for some minutes to reveal the tall, astonishingly flexible trees that someone had named feather- tops, swinging back and forth in great arcs, two hundred yards away. The ground itself, both near and further, was covered with a matting of pale succulent tendrils, the Venusian equivalent of grass. Even at its clearest, it was not a view to inspire. Almost a monochrome study; shadowless, with only here and there a fleshy stalk showing a faint flush of pink, or a slight tinting of green to break the monotony of pallor. And over all, and all the time, there was the mist condensing; drops of water running down the etiolated stems, showers of them torn from the plants by sudden gusts of wind, endless rivulets of them trickling down the window-panes.
‘It’s all very well for us,’ Arthur remarked. ‘We’ve been financed to do what we wanted to do - make the first successful landing. Now, as far as I’m concerned, anybody can have it, and welcome.’
Troon shook his head.
‘We weren’t financed just to make a record, Arthur - nor just to give it away again. Part of our contract is to hold on to it.’
‘Maybe if your Cousin Jayme could see what it’s like he’d think again,’ Arthur suggested.
‘Not Jayme,’ said Troon. ‘He knows what he’s doing, always did. The trouble is that, like his old man, he has such big ideas that you only see bits of them. No, he’s satisfied, he’s pleased.’
Arthur Dogget looked out of the window again, and shook his head.
‘If he’s pleased with this, there must be a lot more to it than we can see,’ he said.
‘I’ve no doubt. He and his old man are campaigners in a big way - kind of civilian field-marshals, and with complete confidence in themselves. The old man was never a bit impressed by the mere size of a job he took on, so he always kept his head - Jayme’s the same way.’
‘One of the things I’ve never understood,’ Arthur said, ‘is how a cousin of yours, and an Aussie citizen, comes to have a Brazzie name like Jayme Gonveia?’
‘Oh, that isn’t too difficult. When my grandfather, Geoffrey Trunho, died on the first expedition to Mars, he left three children: Anna, George, and Geoffrey, my father, who was born either posthumously, or at least after his father reached Mars. My Aunt Anna subsequently married one Henriques Polycarpo Gonveia - old man Gonveia, in fact - she emigrated with him to Australia, and Jayme is their son.
‘Now, Jayme’s grandfather Gonveia was a friend of my grandfather’s, and when my grandfather failed to return from Mars, it was this Grandpa Gonveia who did most of the agitation for a second Martian expedition. In the end he got together a group who put up half the money for it, and shamed the Brazilian government into finding the rest. And his highly speculative share in the success of the expedition there in 2101 was half of the exclusive rights to any botanical finds. To everyone’s surprise, some were actually made, along the bottom of the
canali
rifts, and he promptly bought the other fellow out of the half-share.
‘For about twenty years his experts grew, developed, and adapted the seeds and plants, and then, as a result, Grandpa Gonveia and his two sons and daughter set out to conquer the world’s deserts - which they are still doing. João, the eldest son, took North Africa for his territory;, Beatriz went to China, and my Uncle Henriques went off, as I said, to Australia.
‘Anna’s brother, my Uncle George, stayed in Brazil, and his son, Jorge Trunho, is a Commander in the Space Force there.
‘My own father was sent to Australia to school, and then to Sao Paulo University. After taking his degree, he returned to Australia, married the daughter of a shipowner there, and was soon sent to manage his father-in-law’s office in Durban. At the time of the Second African Rising, when the Africans threw out the Indians, he was accidentally killed in a riot. My mother, left with me, still a small baby, went home to live in Australia where she changed our name back to its original form of Troon.’