The biggest surprise, even though the advance literature should have prepared him for it, was the presence of gravity. Universe was the first spaceship ever built to cruise under continuous acceleration, except for the few hours of the mid-course ‘turnaround’. When her huge propellant tanks were fully loaded with their five thousand tons of water, she could manage a tenth of a gee – not much, but enough to keep loose objects from drifting around. This was particularly convenient at mealtimes – though it took a few days for the passengers to learn not to stir their soup too vigorously.
Forty-eight hours out from Earth, the population of Universe had already stratified itself into four distinct classes.
The aristocracy consisted of Captain Smith and his officers. Next came the passengers; then crew – non-commissioned and stewards. And then steerage…
That was the description that the five young space scientists had adopted for themselves, first as a joke but later with a certain amount of bitterness. When Hoyd compared their cramped and jury-rigged quarters with his own luxurious cabin, he could see their point of view, and soon became the conduit of their complaints to the Captain.
Yet all things considered, they had little to grumble about; in the rush to get the ship ready, it had been touch and go as to whether there would be any accommodation for them and their equipment. Now they could look forward to deploying instruments around – and on – the comet during the critical days before it rounded the Sun, and departed once more to the outer reaches of the Solar System. The members of the science team would establish their reputations on this voyage, and knew it. Only in moments of exhaustion, or fury with misbehaving instrumentation, did they start complaining about the noisy ventilating system, the claustrophobic cabins, and occasional strange smells of unknown origin.
But never the food, which everyone agreed was excellent. ‘Much better,’ Captain Smith assured them, ‘than Darwin had on the Beagle.’
To which Victor Willis had promptly retorted:
‘How does he know? And by the way, Beagle’s commander cut his throat when he got back to England.’
That was rather typical of Victor, perhaps the planet’s best-known science communicator – to his fans – or ‘pop-scientist’ – to his equally numerous detractors. It would be unfair to call them enemies; admiration for his talents was universal, if occasionally grudging. His soft, mid-Pacific accent and expansive gestures on camera were widely parodied, and he had been credited (or blamed) for the revival of full-length beards. ‘A man who grows that much hair,’ critics were fond of saying, ‘must have a lot to hide.’
He was certainly the most instantly recognizable of the six VIPs – though Floyd, who no longer regarded himself as a celebrity, always referred to them ironically as ‘The Famous Five’. Yva Merlin could often walk unrecognized on Park Avenue, on the rare occasions when she emerged from her apartment. Dimitri Mihailovich, to his considerable annoyance, was a good ten centimetres below average height; this might help to explain his fondness for thousand-piece orchestras – real or synthesized -but did not enhance his public image.
Clifford Greenburg and Margaret M’Bala also fell into the category of ‘famous unknowns’ – though this would certainly change when they got back to Earth. The first man to land on Mercury had one of those pleasant, unremarkable faces that are very hard to remember; moreover the days when he had dominated the news were now thirty years in the past. And like most authors who are not addicted to talk shows and autographing sessions, Ms M’Bala would be unrecognized by the vast majority of her millions of readers.
Her literary fame had been one of the sensations of the forties. A scholarly study of the Greek pantheon was not usually a candidate for the best-seller lists, but Ms M’Bala had placed its eternally inexhaustible myths in a contemporary space-age setting. Names which a century earlier had been familiar only to astronomers and classical scholars were now part of every educated person’s world picture; almost every day there would be news from Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Titan, Japetus – or even more obscure worlds like Carme, Pasipha�, Hyperion, Phoebe…
Her book would have been no more than modestly successful, however, had she not focused on the complicated family life of Jupiter-Zeus, Father of all the Gods (as well as much else). And by a stroke of luck, an editor of genius had changed her original title, The View from Olympus, to The Passions of the Gods. Envious academics usually referred to it as Olympic Lusts, but invariably wished they had written it.
Not surprisingly, it was Maggie M – as she was quickly christened by her fellow passengers – who first used the phrase Ship of Fools. Victor Willis adopted it eagerly, and soon discovered an intriguing historical resonance. Almost a century ago, Katherine Anne Porter had herself sailed with a group of scientists and writers aboard an ocean liner to watch the launch of Apollo 17, and the end of the first phase of lunar exploration.
‘I’ll think about it,’ Ms M’Bala had remarked ominously, when this was reported to her. ‘Perhaps it’s time for a third version. But I won’t know, of course, until we get back to Earth…’
11
The Lie
It was many months before Rolf van der Berg could once again turn his thoughts and energies towards Mount Zeus. The taming of Ganymede was a more than full-time job, and he was away from his main office at Dardanus Base for weeks at a time, surveying the route of the proposed Gilgamesh-Osiris monorail.
The geography of the third and largest Galilean moon had changed drastically since the detonation of Jupiter – and it was still changing. The new sun that had melted the ice of Europa was not as powerful here, four hundred thousand kilometres further out – but it was warm enough to produce a temperate climate at the centre of the face forever turned towards it. There were small, shallow seas – some as large as Earth’s Mediterranean – up to latitudes forty north and south. Not many features still survived from the maps generated by the Voyager missions back in the twentieth century. Melting permafrost and occasional tectonic movements triggered by the same tidal forces operating on the two inner moons made the new Ganymede a cartographer’s nightmare.
But those very factors also made it a planetary engineer’s paradise. Here was the only world, except for the arid and much less hospitable Mars, on which men might one day walk unprotected beneath an open sky. Ganymede had ample water, all the chemicals of life, and – at least while Lucifer shone – a warmer climate than much of Earth.
Best of all, full-body spacesuits were no longer necessary; the atmosphere, though still unbreathable, was just dense enough to permit the use of simple face-masks and oxygen cylinders. In a few decades – so the microbiologists promised, though they were hazy about specific dates – even these could be discarded. Strains of oxygen-generating bacteria had already been let loose across the face of Ganymede; most had died but some had flourished, and the slowly rising curve on the atmospheric analysis chart was the first exhibit proudly displayed to all visitors at Dardanus.
For a long time, van der Berg kept a watchful eye on the data flowing in from Europa VI, hoping that one day the clouds would clear again when it was orbiting above Mount Zeus. He knew that the odds were against it, but while the slightest chance existed he made no effort to explore any other avenue of research. There was no hurry, he had far more important work on his hands – and anyway, the explanation might turn out to be something quite trivial and uninteresting.
Then Europa VI suddenly expired, almost certainly as a result of a random meteoric impact. Back on Earth, Victor Willis had made rather a fool of himself – in the opinion of many – by interviewing the ‘Euronuts’ who now more than adequately filled the gap left by the UFO-enthusiasts of the previous century. Some of them argued that the probe’s demise was due to hostile action from the world below: the fact that it had been allowed to operate without interference for fifteen years – almost twice its design life – did not bother them in the least. To Victor’s credit, he stressed this point and demolished most of the cultists’ other arguments; but the consensus was that he should never have given them publicity in the first place.
To van der Berg, who quite relished his colleagues’ description of him as a ‘stubborn Dutchman’ and did his best to live up to it, the failure of Europa VI was a challenge not to be resisted. There was not the slightest hope of funding a replacement, for the silencing of the garrulous and embarrassingly long-lived probe had been received with considerable relief.