This trip to Venus had been a wild gamble from the start. He wondered if Max Hawkes would have covered a bet on the success of his trip. Max had been infallible when it came to hunches.
Well, Alan thought, now I’ve got a hunch. Help me one more time, Max, wherever you are! Lend me some of your luck. I need it, Max.
He circled once more. The Venusian day would last for three weeks more; there was no fear of darkness. But would he find anything?
What’s that?
He leaped to the controls, switched off the autopilot, and broke out of orbit, going back for a return look. Had there been just the faintest metallic glint below, as of a spaceship jutting up from the sand?
Yes.
There was a ship down there, and a cave of some sort. Alan felt strangely calm. With confident fingers he punched out a landing orbit, and brought his ship down in the middle of the barren Venusian desert.
Chapter Eighteen
Alan brought the Cavour down less than a mile away from the scene of the wreckage—it was the best he could do, computing the landing by guesswork—and climbed into his spacesuit. He passed through the airlock and out into the windswept desert.
He felt just a little lightheaded; the gravity was only 0.8 of Earth-norm, and besides that the air in his spacesuit, being perpetually renewed by the Bennerman re-breathing generator strapped to his back, was just a shade too rich in oxygen.
In the back of his mind he realized he ought to adjust his oxygen flow, but before he brought himself to make the adjustment the surplus took its effect. He began to hum, then to dance awkwardly over the sand. A moment later he was singing a wild space ballad that he thought he had forgotten years before. After ten feet he tripped and went sprawling down in the sand. He lay there, trickling the violet sands through the gloves of his spacesuit, feeling very lightheaded and very foolish all at the same time.
But he was still sober enough to realize he was in danger. It was an effort to reach over his shoulder and move the oxygen gauge back a notch. After a moment the flow levelled out and he felt his head beginning to clear.
He was marching through a fantastic baroque desert. Venus was a riot of colors, all in a minor key: muted greens and reds, an overbearing gray, a strange, ghostly blue. The sky, or rather the cloud layer, dominated the atmosphere with its weird pinkness. It was a silent world—a dead world.
In the distance he saw the wreckage of the ship; beyond it the land began to rise, sloping imperceptibly up into a gentle hill with bizarre sculptured rock outcroppings here and there. He walked quickly.
Fifteen minutes later he reached the ship. It stood upright—or rather, its skeleton did. The ship had not crashed. It had simply rotted away, the metal of its hide eaten by the sand-laden winds over the course of centuries. Nothing remained but a bare framework.
He circled the ship, then entered the cave a hundred feet away. He snapped on his lightbeam. In the darkness, he saw—
A huddled skeleton, far to the rear of the cave. A pile of corroded equipment; atmosphere generators, other tools now shapeless.
Cavour had reached Venus safely. But he had never departed.
To his astonishment Alan found a sturdy volume lying under the pile of bones—a book, wrapped in metal plates. Somehow it had withstood the passage of centuries, here in this quiet cave.
Gently he unwrapped the book. The cover dropped off at his touch; he turned back the first three pages, which were blank. On the fourth, written in the now-familiar crabbed hand, were the words: The Journal of James Hudson Cavour. Volume 17—October 20, 2570—
He had plenty of time, during the six-day return journey, to read and re-read Cavour’s final words and to make photographic copies of the withered old pages.
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 passing day.
He was past eighty, no age for a man to come alone to a strange planet. There remained just minor finishing to be done on his pioneering ship—but he did not have the strength to do the work. Climbing the catwalk of the ship, 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 ship. 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 spacewarp generator, the key mechanism without which hyperspace 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 ship 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 ship swung in great spirals around Earth, drawing ever closer, and finally began to home in on the spaceport.
Alan busied himself over the radio transmitter, getting landing clearance. He brought the ship 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 ship.
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 sturdy 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 spacewarp generator on, and the entire research team gathered by the closed-circuit video pickup to watch.