Zach Hughes: Pressure Man

At times the fighting was deadly and fierce, but the real battle was being fought in the minds of the uncommitted masses. The propaganda flow from both sides promised milk and honey in the future.

Dom knew exactly what Doris meant about feeling guilty. While the world faced the crisis, he found the days of waiting on Mars to be the happiest of his life. While they were not pulling watch they were free to explore. The trip to the top of the planet’s highest mountain was only one of several excursions which they enjoyed while the water was being offloaded. Since a jumper is self-powered by the heat of the sun, it was not at all wasteful to travel. Dom was an old Mars hand, knew the best times to view the huge rift system to get a maximum show of light and shadow, knew the best vantage point atop Olympus Mons, and enjoyed it anew because of the delight which Doris showed.

There was time, during the waiting period, to talk with the crew of the Callisto Explorer , who had seen the alien ship dive into Jupiter. Those men had seen the ship, had heard the weak signals which were still being transmitted from just inside the gaseous atmosphere. On watch, Dom could speak directly to the picket ship on duty out near the gas giant. While keeping radio watch on the signals, the ship was taking atmosphere samples from the larger moons of Jupiter’s thirteen-satellite system. Dom often talked with the skipper.

The signal was too weak to be picked up by Kennedy’s receivers, but the picket ship could relay it. Dom made dozens of recordings for study. The alien was broadcasting on one of the natural frequencies, 1420 megahertz. The signal was simple and brief, so brief it still defied attempts at decoding. Still, he felt closer to the goal to be able to listen to the relay from the picket ship.

In talking with crew who had done picket duty, Doris was impressed by the words of one young spacer.

“When you’re in close,” he said, “she swallows up all of space and looms over your head so that you wake up in a cold sweat thinking that she’s come unstuck and is falling down on top of you.”

Every man who had been near Jupiter had been awed by her.

One of the things Dom liked best about Mars was the feeling of togetherness which permeated the population. Everyone felt the friendliness—temporary visitors, spacers, permanent settlers, scientists. The harshness of the surface, the millions of miles which separated them from home, the odd, small look of the sun, covering only two-thirds of the area of sky which an Earth-viewed sun covered, all seemed to draw people closer together. In spite of the armed guard which surrounded the Kennedy at all times, it was difficult to believe that the Earthside war could affect Mars. Dom expressed the belief that if a Firster fanatic could penetrate the service and get all the way to Mars he would be impressed that feel the sense of accomplishment shared by all spacers, would forget his beliefs and become just a spacer. That he was wrong was evidenced by an attempt to attach a limpet mine to the Kennedy’s number four port thruster by an enlisted spacer with twelve years’ service. Caught in the act, the man took two space marines with him into the small but growing Mars Station Cemetery.

The incident seemed to kill the glow of contentment and happiness which Dom had felt since Doris said yes that night in the main control room. To think that the lunacy of Earth could contaminate Mars depressed him. He was glad when the hold was closed and pressurized and the Kennedy once again stood ready.

The longest leg of the journey lay ahead of them. Roughly, they had traveled one half of an astronomical unit to reach Mars, about one half the distance between Earth and the sun, or about forty-seven million miles. The distance between Mars and Jupiter was roughly three and three-quarters astronomical units, in the neighborhood of three hundred and sixty million miles. When dealing with such figures the mind refused to accept the vastness of space and tended to think of the journey in terms of months. Distance becomes relative when expressed in terms of time. Dom liked to remember that it had taken the pioneers almost as long to travel from the midwest to the Pacific coast by wagon train as it now took a ship to move from the orbit of Mars to the orbit of Jupiter. Kennedy , with her unlimited power for acceleration, was at her best over long distances. She could pick up speed faster, cruise faster, and slow faster than conventional ships.

After a thorough inspection of the ship, although no Mars personnel had boarded her, they settled into the comfortable routine which had been established during the last weeks of the run to Mars. Jensen’s powerplant pushed and then rested. Acceleration continued well past the midway point. A picket ship was still on duty near Jupiter, and the watch on both ships, glad for company in the vastness of space, talked back and forth, using relatively low power as the distance between them grew steadily less, so that their often informal conversations could not be monitored back on Earth.

At turnaround time, Neil and Jensen swung the mass of the Kennedy and the reverse thrust began to kill the forward speed.

On Earth, the situation had reached an uneasy stability. Both sides had suffered heavy casualties. The defense line was holding on the Chicago-Corpus Christi line, and DOSEWEX was holding out. The propaganda war was still raging, and the masses were beginning to mutter about the shortage of food and consumer goods. Some of the most severe battles had been fought in the grain belt of the great plains. Large areas of fertile farmland had been devastated. There would be difficulty in planting spring crops.

It was no longer possible to brush off the senator from New Mexico with contempt, for he had emerged as the man who was clearly in control of the radical forces, and he was now more often than not referred to by his name, John V. Shaw. He had proved himself to be not only a skillful organizer, but a brilliant military tactician. Shaw was preaching the gospel of revolt to the masses, promising to pull in all the slackers from space, to beat the spaceship hulls into plowshares in order to produce food under a new form of freedom. The exact form of this new freedom was not spelled out. It was clear, however, that the senator’s message was a vital one as food supplies became more and more scarce.

It seemed to the crew of the Kennedy that it was only a matter of time before the hungry millions began to flock to Shaw’s cause. Starvation is the most powerful of persuasions, and vast segments of the metropolitan east faced severe hunger as winter approached.

Time was critical. J.J. talked of a swift completion of their mission, a long run home, an arrival during the Christmas season.

“I think you’re being optimistic, J.J.,” Dom said. “You’re allowing only a short time for the descent into the atmosphere, the location of the ship, and bringing her out.”

“We’ll do it,” J.J. said.

“It’s a big planet,” Art said.

“We can home in on the radio signal,” J.J. said. “We won’t have any trouble locating the ship.”

“There’s always trouble in a new situation,” Neil said. “Keep in mind that we’ll be testing a new and untried ship under severe conditions.”

“What’s to test?” J.J. asked. “It’s a very simple proposition. She does it or she doesn’t. She goes in. That much we know. She’d have to go in to test the hull, so why fool around? We go in. If she doesn’t implode, we come out. Why worry?”

“That’s fine to say,” Ellen said.

“We will not dive in without testing the hull,” Dom said in a firm voice. J.J. looked at him. “I’m not going to lower myself to the level of a Firster,” Dom said. “I value my life. I value each life aboard this ship. So we’ll poke our nose in, test the compression qualities of the hull, and then we’ll lower in easy stages.”