Starman's Quest Part 29

The trip to Venus had been easy for old Cavour; he had landed precisely on schedule, and established housekeeping for himself in the cave. But, as his diary detailed it, he felt strength ebbing away with each pa.s.sing day.

He was past eighty, no age for a man to come alone to a strange planet.

There remained just minor finis.h.i.+ng to be done on his pioneering s.h.i.+p--but he did not have the strength to do the work. Climbing the catwalk of the s.h.i.+p, soldering, testing--now, with his opportunity before him, he could not attain his goal.

He made several feeble attempts to finish the job, and on the last of them fell from his crude rigging and fractured his hip. He had managed to crawl back inside the cave, but, alone, with no one to tend him, he knew he had nothing to hope for.

It was impossible for him to complete his s.h.i.+p. All his dreams were ended. His equations and his blueprints would die with him.

In his last day he came to a new realization: nowhere had he left a complete record of the mechanics of his s.p.a.cewarp generator, the key mechanism without which hypers.p.a.ce drive was unattainable. So, racing against encroaching death, James Hudson Cavour turned to a new page in his diary, headed it, in firm, forceful letters, _For Those Who Follow After_, and inked in a clear and concise explanation of his work.

It was all there, Alan thought exultantly: the diagrams, the specifications, the equations. It would be possible to build the s.h.i.+p from Cavour's notes.

The final page of the diary had evidently been Cavour's dying thoughts.

In a handwriting increasingly ragged and untidy, Cavour had indited a paragraph forgiving the world for its scorn, hoping that some day mankind would indeed have easy access to the stars. The paragraph ended in midsentence. It was, thought Alan, a moving testament from a great human being.

The days went by, and the green disk of Earth appeared in the viewscreen. Late on the sixth day the _Cavour_ sliced into Earth's atmosphere, and Alan threw it into the landing orbit he had computed that afternoon. The s.h.i.+p swung in great spirals around Earth, drawing ever closer, and finally began to home in on the s.p.a.ceport.

Alan busied himself over the radio transmitter, getting landing clearance. He brought the s.h.i.+p down easily, checked out, and hurried to the nearest phone.

He dialed Jesperson's number. The lawyer answered.

"When did you get back?"

"Just now," Alan said. "Just this minute."

"Well? Did you----"

"Yes! I found it! I found it!"

Oddly enough, he was in no hurry to leave Earth now. He was in possession of Cavour's notes, but he wanted to do a perfect job of reproducing them, of converting the scribbled notations into a s.h.i.+p.

To his great despair he discovered, when he first examined the Cavour notebook in detail, that much of the math was beyond his depth. That was only a temporary obstacle, though. He hired mathematicians. He hired physicists. He hired engineers.

Through it all, he remained calm; impatient, perhaps, but not overly so.

The time had not yet come for him to leave Earth. All his striving would be dashed if he left too soon.

The proud building rose a hundred miles from York City: _The Hawkes Memorial Laboratory_. There, the team of scientists Alan had gathered worked long and painstakingly, trying to reconstruct what old Cavour had written, experimenting, testing.

Early in 3881 the first experimental Cavour Generator was completed in the lab. Alan had been vacationing in Africa, but he was called back hurriedly by his lab director to supervise the testing.

The generator was housed in a st.u.r.dy windowless building far from the main labs; the forces being channelled were potent ones, and no chances were being taken. Alan himself threw the switch that first turned the s.p.a.cewarp generator on, and the entire research team gathered by the closed-circuit video pickup to watch.

The generator seemed to blur, to waver, to lose substance and become unreal. It vanished.

It remained gone fifteen seconds, while a hundred researchers held their breaths. Then it returned. It shorted half the power lines in the county.

But Alan was grinning as the auxiliary feeders turned the lights in the lab on again. "Okay," he yelled. "It's a start, isn't it? We got the generator to vanish, and that's the toughest part of the battle. Let's get going on Model Number Two."

By the end of the year, Model Number Two was complete, and the tests this time were held under more carefully controlled circ.u.mstances. Again success was only partial, but again Alan was not disappointed. He had worked out his time-table well. Premature success might only make matters more difficult for him.

3882 went by, and 3883. He was in his early twenties, now, a tall, powerful figure, widely known all over Earth. With Jesperson's shrewd aid he had pyramided Max's original million credits into an imposing fortune--and much of it was being diverted to hypers.p.a.ce research. But Alan Donnell was not the figure of scorn James Hudson Cavour had been; no one laughed at him when he said that by 3885 hypers.p.a.ce travel would be reality.

3884 slipped past. Now the time was drawing near. Alan spent virtually all his hours at the research center, aiding in the successive tests.

On March 11, 3885, the final test was accomplished satisfactorily.

Alan's s.h.i.+p, the _Cavour_, had been completely remodeled to accommodate the new drive; every test but one had been completed.

The final test was that of actual performance. And here, despite the advice of his friends, Alan insisted that he would have to be the man who took the _Cavour_ on her first journey to the stars.

Nine years had pa.s.sed, almost to the week, since a brash youngster named Alan Donnell had crossed the bridge from the s.p.a.cer's Enclave and hesitantly entered the bewildering complexity of York City. Nine years.

He was twenty-six now, no boy any more. He was the same age Steve had been, when he had been dragged unconscious to the _Valhalla_ and taken aboard.

And the _Valhalla_ was still bound on its long journey to Procyon. Nine years had pa.s.sed, but yet another remained before the giant stars.h.i.+p would touch down on a planet of Procyon's. But the Fitzgerald Contraction had telescoped those nine years into just a few months, for the people of the _Valhalla_.

Steve Donnell was still twenty-six.

And now Alan had caught him. The Contraction had evened out. They were twins again.

And the _Cavour_ was ready to make its leap into hypers.p.a.ce.

_Chapter Nineteen_

It was not difficult for Alan to get the route of the _Valhalla_, which had been recorded at Central Routing Registration. Every stars.h.i.+p was required by law to register a detailed route-chart before leaving, and these charts were filed at the central bureau. The reason was simple: a stars.h.i.+p with a crippled drive was a deadly object. In case a stars.h.i.+p's drive conked out, it would keep drifting along toward its destination, utterly helpless to turn, maneuver, or control its motion. And if any planets or suns happened to lie in its direct path----

The only way a s.h.i.+p could alter its trajectory was to cut speed completely, and with the drive dead there would be no way of picking it up again. The s.h.i.+p would continue to drift slowly out to the stars, while its crew died of old age.

So the routes were registered, and in the event of drive trouble it was thus possible for a rescue s.h.i.+p to locate the imperilled stars.h.i.+p. s.p.a.ce is immense, and only with a carefully registered route could a s.h.i.+p be found.

Stars.h.i.+p routes were restricted information. But Alan had influence; he was easily able to persuade the Routing Registration people that his intentions were honorable, that he planned to overtake the _Valhalla_ if they would only let him have the coordinates. A bit of minor legal jugglery was all that was needed to give him access to the data.

It seemed there was an ancient regulation that said any member of a stars.h.i.+p's crew was ent.i.tled by law to examine his s.h.i.+p's registered route, if he wanted to. The rule was intended to apply to starmen who distrusted their captains and were fearful of being s.h.i.+pped off to some impossibly distant point; it said nothing at all about starmen who had been left behind and were planning to overtake their s.h.i.+ps. But nothing prohibited Alan from getting the coordinates, and so they gave them to him.

The _Cavour_ was ready for the departure. Alan elbowed his way through the crowd of curious onlookers and clambered into the redesigned control chamber.

He paused a moment, running his fingers over the s.h.i.+ny instrument panel with its new dials, strange levers, unfamiliar instruments. Overdrive Compensator. Fuel Trans.m.u.ter. Distortion Guide. Bender Index. Strange new names, but Alan realized they would be part of the vocabulary of all future s.p.a.cemen.

He began to work with the new controls, plotting his coordinates with extreme care and checking them through six or seven times. At last he was satisfied; he had computed a hyperdrive course that would loop him through s.p.a.ce and bring him out in only a few days' time in the general vicinity of the _Valhalla_, which was buzzing serenely along at near the speed of light.

That was practically a snail's pace, compared with hyperdrive.

The time for the test had come. He spoke briefly with his friends and a.s.sistants in the control tower; then he checked his figures through one last time and requested blastoff clearance.