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wears the sign, and then afterwards, everyone will know they went there and
were a part of it."
"You mean like the badge we get when we finish summer camp?" Amanda said.
"Something like that."
Amanda thought for a moment. "Was the sword-badge mission that Grandpa went on
an important one?"
'Very important."
"Why?"
Doreen sighed, and then smiled as she saw Carol getting anxious. "You tell
her, Carol," she suggested.
"You know far more about these things than I ever will." Amanda shifted her
gaze to her mother.
"You know what planets are out in space, yes?" Carol asked. Amanda nodded.
"Well, there are lots of great big rocks out in space too, as well as
planets."
"And moons?"
"And moons too. Some of them are bigger than whole cities. Most of them move
around the Sun in nice, steady circles like planets do, but there are some
that move all over the place, so you can never be exactly sure where they're
going to go next. . . . Anyway, a long time ago, when your grandfather was a
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spaceman . . ."
"How long ago?"
"Just about thirty years. It was in 2045."
Amanda's eyes widened. "That's a long time!"
"Yes . . . Anyhow, one of the biggest of these rocks they're called
meteors was coming nearer from a long way away in space, and it looked as if
it was going to crash into the Earth. If it had, it would have killed millions
of people and caused all kinds of terrible damage."
"And did it?"
Carol shook her head. "That was why Grandpa's mission was sent. They went in a
big spaceship and met the giant rock a long way from Earth, while it was still
farther away than Mars. They fixed some big, powerful motors to it to drive it
away into space again so that it wouldn't come anywhere near Earth at all. . .
."
"Why couldn't they just have blown it up?"
"Then the pieces might just have kept on coming, and crashed into the Earth
anyway. So they decided to drive it away instead. The plan worked just fine,
and millions of people who might have been killed were saved."
Amanda turned her face to stare at the picture again with a new respect. "So
why did they make the badge a sword?" she asked. Doreen put a hand to her brow
and shook her head. The questions were exhausting just to listen to.
"Because the name of the mission was
Damocles
," Carol said. "And that's also the name of an old, old story about a sword."
"What kind of story? Did it have wizards and dragons in it?"
"Oh, it's too long a story to go into now. Why don't you ask our computer to
tell it to you when we get home? He'll tell you all the details. I've
forgotten most of them." Carol sat back in her chair to close the subject.
"We'll have to be going soon, too. Now, how about putting Grandpa's picture
back where it came from, and tidying up Grandma's jewelry in there?"
"Did Grandpa go on more important missions after that one?" Amanda asked.
"That's enough, Amanda." Carol's voice caught, taking on an edge of sharpness
that was enough to make Amanda pull a face and disappear back into the
bedroom. "I'm sorry," Carol said to Doreen.
"It's all right," Doreen replied. But her eyes were misty.
The
Damocles mission had gone down as one of the most tragic mysteries in the
history of space exploration. Communications with the vessel were lost when it
was a few weeks short of its scheduled rendezvous with the approaching meteor.
Presumably the members of the mission decided to press on regardless and
accomplished their objective, for the threat to Earth never materialized. But
nobody ever found out for sure why the communications had failed, or what
happened after that. The ship exploded on the first leg of its return trip,
and all members of the mission were lost.
* * *
Two hours after the last shuttle had transferred its load of personnel and
equipment, and detached, the fleet carrier
Guam fired its main drives and began climbing out of low orbit toward where
Nomad was riding fifteen thousand miles farther up. The
Guam was less than five years old and had been built in orbit as a mother ship
for satellite hunter-killers and orbital interceptors, and as a mobile base
for surface-bombardment operations. It climbed for over thirty hours until it
was in a parallel orbit standing twenty miles off from the strange alien
construction. For a while it waited; nothing happened. The time came for
Guam to assume a more active role.
Major Carol Waverley, U.S. Space Force Communications Specialist, attached to
Second Fleet Group, watched the main display screen from her post on the
Guam
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's control deck while the robot probes that had been dispatched earlier sent
back the first views of
Nomad to be obtained from close-up. The atmosphere was tense and expectant, as
the rest of the control deck's officers and crew watched silently from their
consoles and stations around the room. From the raised bridge overlooking the
deck at one end, General George Medford, commander of the
Guam and acting director of local operations around
Nomad
, brooded from the center of a knot of aides and advisors.
Each of the twelve concave dishes defining
Nomad
's external geometry was supported at the rear by a pylon in the form of a
slender cone almost a half mile long, joining it perpendicularly at its center
like a dinner plate balanced on a tapering candle. The twelve pylons projected
symmetrically outward from the structure's central nucleus, their surfaces
exhibiting a mild concave sweep from the base to the tip. The nucleus itself
consisted of twelve flat, cylindrical housings supporting the bases of the
pylons, protruding from a tangle of huge toroids wreathing the core at various
angles among an agglomeration of curving and merging surfaces and structural
members that seemed to produce a form that was basically spherical, although
no spherical shape was actually visible. Standing amid it all was a squat
turret capped by a system of terraces and ridges that culminated in a
flattened dome. The dome housed what appeared to be a docking bay, two hundred
feet or more across, situated behind a pair of gaping doors, which were open.
The view currently on the main screen was being transmitted from a probe that
had passed between the rims of the dishes and was scanning the inside of the
docking bay with a searchlight from a point fifty feet outside the doors. So
far, no response had been evoked from
Nomad by radar beams, lasers, optical beacons, radio, infrared, or X-rays.
"The bay goes back in about fifty feet," the voice of the operations
controller reported from his console below and to one side of the bridge.
"There are tiers of platforms around the sides, with doors leading through to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]