“I see.”
“First they may as well save fuel by letting Jupiter pull them out of the ecliptic plane and aim them at the goal.” Vogel spoke absently, his attention on the image. Soon it would be invisibly small.
“Yes, yes, I know that,” Sumarokov said. “Everybody does.” Enthusiasm thrust irritation aside. “I mean the technology will improve. Jets will be screened. Fuel will be less important. And it will be humans, not machines, who go to the stars.”
“If machines do not become as intelligent as humans, or more so.”
“That will never happen. I know some neuropsychology. Consciousness, creative thought, that is not merely a business of electrons in circuits. It is something the entire living human organism does.”
“Well, maybe. But all of us here would be in a bad way without our robots.”
Talk broke off. Both men were watching the starcraft too hungrily.
When it was gone from them they went back inside, and presently back to work, as if awakened from a dream.
Yet the work had its fascination, establishing a settlement in the Jovian System, coordinated with the outposts on the asteroids — steps in the industrialization of space, until the wealth of the planets flowed to Mother Earth and humans need no longer maim and defile her.
Such was the hope of the far-seeing. The hope of most people concerned in the endeavor was to make a profit. And this was right and necessary. No civilization, whatever its social and economic arrangements, ran continue forever throwing resources into a void. It must eventually start to reap some kind of material return.
— Eight and a half years after the spacecraft left Sol, its first laserborne messages arrived from Alpha Centauri. What they revealed was wonderful. Three years later, transmissions ended. The unforeseeabilities of navigating among rock swarms between two suns had overwhelmed the computers. The vessel perished in a collision. Its wreckage became another small heavenly body.
By then, however, the first ships designed to carry human crews were taking their first flights.
CHAPTER 1
“Man down.”
Ricardo Nansen was floating weightless, looking out a viewscreen, when the alarm shrilled and the words followed. He never tired of this sight. As the ship orbited into morning and the sun rose red from a peacock band along the edge of the planet, blue-and-white marbled beauty drove night backward across the great globe. He could almost have been at Earth. But the sun was Epsilon Eridani, there was no moon, and here Sol shone only after dark, a second-magnitude star in Serpens Caput. That fact turned splendor into a miracle.
The call snatched him from it. He took off, arrowing along a corridor. Captain Gascoyne’s voice rang from every intercom: “Pilot Nansen, prepare to scramble.”
“On my way, sir,” he replied. “Who’s in trouble?”
“Airman Shaughnessy. Wrecked. And that was the only flyer currently operating.”
Mike Shaughnessy! shocked through Nansen. The man was his best friend in the crew.
This shouldn’t have happened. Aircraft, like spaceboats, had been tested for reliability, over and over, under the harshest available stresses, before the expedition set forth. Thus far they had come handily through everything they met. And Shaughnessy had simply been on his way back to Main Base after delivering supplies to a team of biologists on an offshore island.
At least he lived. Nearly eleven light-years from home, any human life became boundlessly precious.
Second Engineer Dufour waited at the launch hay of Nansen’s craft to help him make ready. Ordinarily that wasn’t needful, but urgency ruled today. While she got him dressed and otherwise outfitted, he kept his attention on the intercom screen at the site. His briefing snapped out at him, verbal, pictorial, mathematical.
Information was scant. Shaughnessy had radioed a report of sudden, total engine failure. He didn’t think he could glide to a landing and was going to bail out. Minisatellite relays carried his message to the ship. When she swung above his horizon, her optics found him at the wreckage. Evidently he’d guided his motorchute to chase the crashing flyer. His communications were dead, though, even the transceiver built into his backpack. He seemed unhurt, but who could tell? Certain it was that his tanked air would shortly give out.