“I checked everything.”
“I’m sure of it. And I think it’s well worth a trial. Anything else to offer?”
“Well,” Stravol said, “I’ve got a kind of live ventilating system I think should be useful. Otherwise, as I said, Than’s ship strikes me as the type we should build; my own’s hopelessly cumbersome.”
“I have to agree,” Tanol said regretfully. ‘‘But I’d like to try putting together a lighter-than-water ship sometime, maybe just for local travel. If the new world is bigger than ours, it might not be possible to swim everywhere you might want to go there.”
“That never occurred to me,” Lavon exclaimed. “Suppose the new world is twice, three times, eight times as big as ours? Shar, is there any reason why that couldn’t be?”
“None that I know of. The history plates certainly seem to take all kinds of enormous distances practically for granted. All right, let’s make up a composite design from what we have here. Tanol, you’re the best draftsman among us, suppose you draw it up. Lavon, what about labor?”
“I’ve a plan ready,” Lavon said. “As I see it, the people who work on the ship are going to have to be on the job full-time. Building the vessel isn’t going to be an overnight task, or even one that we can finish in a single season, so we can’t count on using a rotating force. Besides, this is technical work; once a man learns how to do a particular task, it would be wasteful to send him back to tending fungi just because somebody else has some time on his hands.
“So I’ve set up a basic force involving the two or three most intelligent hand-workers from each of the various trades. Those people I can withdraw from their regular work without upsetting the way we run our usual concerns, or noticeably increasing the burden on the others in a given trade. They will do the skilled labor, and stick with the ship until it’s done. Some of them will make up the crew, too. For heavy, unskilled jobs, we can call on the various seasonal pools of idle people without disrupting our ordinary life.”
“Good,” Shar said. He leaned forward and rested linked hands on the edge of the table—although, because of the webbing between his fingers, he could link no more than the fingertips. “We’ve really made remarkable progress. I didn’t expect that we’d have matters advanced a tenth as far as this by the end of this meeting. But maybe I’ve overlooked something important. Has anybody any more suggestions, or any questions?”
“I’ve got one,” Stravol said quietly.
“All right, let’s hear it.”
“Where are we going?”
There was quite a long silence. Finally Shar said: “Stravol, I can’t answer that yet. I could say that we’re going to the stars, but since we still have no idea what a star is, that answer wouldn’t do you much good. We’re going to make this trip because we’ve found that some of the fantastic things that the history plates say are really so. We know now that the sky can be passed, and that beyond the sky there’s a region where there’s no water to breathe, the region our ancients called ‘space.’ Both of these ideas always seemed to be against common sense, but nevertheless we’ve found that they’re true.
“The history plates also say that there are other worlds than ours, and actually that’s an easier idea to accept, once you’ve found out that the other two are so. As for the stars—well, we just don’t know yet, we haven’t any information at all that would allow us to read the history plates on that subject with new eyes, and there’s no point in making wild guesses unless we can test the guesses. The stars are in space, and presumably, once we’re out in space, we’ll see them and the meaning of the word will become clear. At least we can confidently expect to see some clues —look at all the information we got from Lavon’s trip of a few seconds above the sky!
“But in the meantime, there’s no point in our speculating in a bubble. We think there are other worlds somewhere, and we’re devising means to make the trip. The other questions, the pendant ones, just have to be put aside for now. We’ll answer them eventually—there’s no doubt in my mind about that. But it may take a long time.”
Stravol grinned ruefully. “I expected no more. In a way, I think the whole project is crazy. But I’m in it right out to the end, all the same.”
Shar and Lavon grinned back. All of them had the fever, and Lavon suspected that their whole enclosed universe would share it with them before long. He said:
“Then let’s not waste a minute. There’s a huge mass of detail to be worked out still, and after that, all the hard work will just have begun. Let’s get moving!”
The five men arose and looked at each other. Their expressions varied, but in all their eyes there was in addition the same mixture of awe and ambition: the composite face of the shipwright and of the astronaut.
Then they went out, severally, to begin their voyages.
It was two winter sleeps after Lavon’s disastrous climb beyond the sky that all work on the spaceship stopped. By then, Lavon knew that he had hardened and weathered into that temporarily ageless state a man enters after he has just reached his prime; and he knew also that there were wrinkles engraved on his brow, to stay and to deepen.
“Old” Shar, too, had changed, his features losing some of their delicacy as he came into his maturity. Though the wedge-shaped bony structure of his face would give him a withdrawn and poetic look for as long as he lived, participation in the plan had given his expression a kind of executive overlay, which at best gave it a mask-like rigidity, and at worst coarsened it somehow.
Yet despite the bleeding away of the years, the spaceship was still only a hulk. It lay upon a platform built above the tumbled boulders of the sandbar which stretched out from one wall of the world. It was an immense hull of pegged wood, broken by regularly spaced gaps through which the raw beams of the skeleton could be seen.
Work upon it had progressed fairly rapidly at first, for it was not hard to visualize what kind of vehicle would be needed to crawl through empty space without losing its water; Than and his colleagues had done that job well. It had been recognized, too, that the sheer size of the machine would enforce a long period of construction, perhaps as long as two full seasons; but neither Shar and his assistants nor Lavon had anticipated any serious snag.
For that matter, part of the vehicle’s apparent incompleteness was an illusion. About a third of its fittings were to consist of living creatures, which could not be expected to install themselves in the vessel much before the actual takeoff.
Yet time and time again, work on the ship had had to be halted for long periods. Several times whole sections needed to be ripped out, as it became more and more evident that hardly a single normal, understandable concept could be applied to the problem of space travel.
The lack of the history plates, which the Para steadfastly refused to deliver up, was a double handicap. Immediately upon their loss, Shar had set himself to reproduce them from memory; but unlike the more religious of his ancestors he had never regarded them as holy writ, and hence had never set himself to memorizing them word by word. Even before the theft, he had accumulated a set of variant translations of passages presenting specific experimental problems, which were stored in his library, carved in wood. But most of these translations tended to contradict each other, and none of them related to spaceship construction, upon which the original had been vague in any case.
No duplicates of the cryptic characters of the original had ever been made, for the simple reason that there was nothing in the sunken universe capable of destroying the originals, nor of duplicating their apparently changeless permanence. Shar remarked too late that through simple caution they should have made a number of verbatim temporary records—but after generations of green-gold peace, simple caution no longer covers preparation against catastrophe. (Nor, for that matter, did a culture which had to dig each letter of its simple alphabet into pulpy water-logged wood with a flake of stonewort encourage the keeping of records in triplicate.)