“I’ve got company.” he said. “I think this is in Professor Sessui’s department. There’s a ball of light – oh, about twenty centimetres across – running along the tape just below me. It’s keeping at a constant distance, and I hope it stays there. But I must say it’s quite beautiful – a lovely bluish glow, flickering every few seconds. And I can hear it on the radio link.”
It was a full minute before Kingsley answered in a reassuring tone of voice.
“Don’t worry – it’s only St. Elmo’s Fire. We’ve had similar displays along the tape during thunderstorms; they can make your hair stand on end aboard the Mark I. But you won’t feel anything – you’re too well shielded.”
“I’d no idea it could happen at this altitude.”
“Neither did we. You’d better take it up with the Professor.”
“Oh – it’s fading out – getting bigger and fainter – now it’s gone – I suppose the air’s too thin for it – I’m sorry to see it go -”
“That’s only a curtain raiser,” said Kingsley. “Look what’s happening directly above you.”
A rectangular section of the star-field flashed by as Morgan tilted the mirror towards the zenith. At first he could see nothing unusual, so he switched off all the indicators on his control panel and waited in total darkness.
Slowly his eyes adapted, and in the depths of the mirror a faint red glow began to burn, and spread, and consume the stars. It grew brighter and brighter and flowed beyond the limits of the mirror; now he could see it directly, for it extended halfway down the sky. A cage of light, with flickering, moving bars, was descending upon the earth; and now Morgan could understand how a man like Professor Sessui could devote his life to unravelling its secrets.
On one of its rare visits to the equator, the aurora had come marching down from the Poles.
47. Beyond the Aurora
Morgan doubted if even Professor Sessui, five hundred kilometres above, had so spectacular a view. The storm was developing rapidly; short-wave radio – still used for many non-essential services – would by now have been disrupted all over the world. Morgan was not sure if he heard or felt a faint rustling, like the whisper of falling sand or the crackle of dry twigs. Unlike the static of the fireball, it certainly did not come from the speaker system, because it was still there when he switched off the circuit.
Curtains of pale green fire, edged with crimson, were being drawn across the sky, then shaken slowly back and forth as if by an invisible hand. They were trembling before the gusts of the solar wind, the million-kilometre-an-hour gale blowing from Sun to Earth – and far beyond. Even above Mars a feeble auroral ghost was flickering now; and sunward, the poisonous skies of Venus were ablaze. Above the pleated curtains long rays like the ribs of a half-opened fan were sweeping around the horizon; sometimes they shone straight into Morgan’s eyes like the beams of a giant searchlight, leaving him dazzled for minutes. There was no need, any longer, to turn off the capsule illumination to prevent it from blinding him; the celestial fireworks outside were brilliant enough to read by.
Two hundred kilometres; Spider was still climbing silently, effortlessly. It was hard to believe that he had left earth exactly an hour ago. Hard, indeed, to believe that earth still existed; for he was now rising between the walls of a canyon of fire.
The illusion lasted only for seconds; then the momentary unstable balance between magnetic fields and incoming electric clouds was destroyed. But for that brief instant Morgan could truly believe that he was ascending out of a chasm that would dwarf even Valles Marineris – the Grand Canyon of Mars. Then the shining cliffs, at least a hundred kilometres high, became translucent and were pierced by stars. He could see them for what they really were – mere phantoms of fluorescence.
And now, like an airplane breaking through a ceiling of lowlying clouds, Spider was climbing above the display. Morgan was emerging from a fiery mist, twisting and turning beneath him. Many years ago he had been aboard a tourist liner cruising through the tropical night, and he remembered how he had joined the other passengers on the stern, entranced by the beauty and wonder of the bioluminescent wake. Some of the greens and blues flickering below him now matched the plankton-generated colours he had seen then, and he could easily imagine that he was again watching the byproducts of life – the play of giant, invisible beasts, denizens of the upper atmosphere…
He had almost forgotten his mission, and it was a distinct shock when he was recalled to duty.
“How’s power holding up?” asked Kingsley “You’ve only another twenty minutes on that battery.”
Morgan glanced at his instrument panel. “It’s dropped to ninety-five percent – but my rate of climb has increased by five percent. I’m doing 220 klicks.”
“That’s about right, Spider’s feeling the lower gravity – it’s already down by ten percent at your altitude.”
That was not enough to be noticeable, particularly if one was strapped in a seat and wearing several kilos of spacesuit. Yet Morgan felt positively buoyant, and he wondered if he was getting too much oxygen.
No, the flow-rate was normal. It must be the sheer exhilaration produced by that marvellous spectacle beneath him – though it was diminishing now, drawing back to north and south, as if retreating to its polar strongholds. That, and the satisfaction of a task well begun, using a technology that no man had ever before tested to such limits.
This explanation was perfectly reasonable, but he was not satisfied with it. It did not wholly account for his sense of happiness – even of joy. Warren Kingsley, who was fond of diving, had often told him that he felt such an emotion in the weightless environment of the sea. Morgan had never shared it, but now he knew what it must be like. He seemed to have left all his cares down there on the planet hidden below the fading loops and traceries of the aurora.
The stars were coming back into their own, no longer challenged by the eerie intruder from the poles. Morgan began to search the zenith, not with any high expectations, wondering if the Tower was yet in sight. But he could make out only the first few metres, still lit by the faint auroral glow, of the narrow ribbon up which Spider was swiftly and smoothly climbing. That thin band upon which his own life – and seven others’ – now depended was so uniform and featureless that it gave no hint of the capsule’s speed; Morgan found it difficult to believe that it was flashing through the drive mechanism at more than two hundred kilometres an hour. And, with that thought, he was suddenly back in his childhood, and knew the source of his contentment.
He had quickly recovered from the loss of that first kite, and had graduated to larger and more elaborate models. Then, just before he had discovered Meccano and abandoned kites forever, he had experimented briefly with toy parachutes. Morgan liked to think that he had invented the idea himself, though he might well have come across it somewhere in his reading or viewing. The technique was so simple that generations of boys must have rediscovered it.
First he had whittled a thin strip of wood about five centimetres long, and fastened a couple of paper-clips on to it. Then he had hooked these around the kite-string, so that the little device could slide easily up and down. Next he had made a handkerchief-sized parachute of rice paper, with silk strings; a small square of cardboard served as payload. When he had fastened that square to the wooden strip by a rubber band – not too firmly – he was in business.
Blown by the wind, the little parachute would go sailing up the string, climbing the graceful catenary to the kite. Then Morgan would give a sharp tug, and the cardboard weight would slip out of the rubber band. The parachute would float away into the sky, while the wood-and-wire rider came swiftly back to his hand, in readiness for the next launch.
With what envy he had watched his flimsy creations drift effortlessly out to sea! Most of them fell back into the water before they had travelled even one kilometre, but sometimes a little parachute would still be bravely maintaining altitude when it vanished from sight. He liked to imagine that these lucky voyagers reached the enchanted islands of the Pacific; but though he had written his name and address on the cardboard squares he never received any reply.
Morgan could not help smiling at these long-forgotten memories, yet they explained so much. The dreams of childhood had been far surpassed by the reality of adult life; he had earned the right to his contentment.