Zach Hughes: Pressure Man

Dom wondered if the strain had blown his mind. “I don’t see signs of an alien ship in the hold,” he said.

“There is no alien,” J.J. said.

“Want to repeat that?” Dom asked.

“There never was an alien,” J.J. said. “The signal came from an Explorer class ship, a drone.”

“At three thousand atmospheres?” Dom asked, examining J.J. closely.

“At a mere ten atmospheres,” J.J. said.

“But the picket ships measured—” Dom began.

“What their instruments were rigged to measure,” J.J. said. “And the transmissions were halted on my orders.”

“I’m trying to understand some of this,” Dom said grimly. Neil was listening with a frown on his face. “You’re telling me we built this ship just to come out here and get a load of Jovian muck?”

“We came out here to win a war,” J.J. said. “Now as I read your specifications, we can vent the load in the hold down to an interior pressure of two thousand atmospheres and go home.”

“I’m waiting for an explanation,” Dom said.

“Did you ever read the Bible?” J.J. asked, grinning.

“Some.”

“Remember the part about manna, my boy? Manna from heaven?”

Well, he was obviously mad. Dom felt a heavy weight of sadness. It was all for nothing. All the work, the brushes with death, the death of Larry, those terrible moments when he felt sure the Firster bomb would go off in his hands before he could jettison it into space, all of it had been done for the sake of a man who was obviously mad.

Manna from heaven. Venus torn full-grown from Jove’s brow.

“Neil,” Dom said, suddenly feeling very tired, “let’s take her home.”

“Roger,” Neil said, looking at J.J. with a mixture of puzzlement and anger.

The ship faced one final test. She had passed many tests to bring them millions of miles on a madman’s quest. She had lifted thousands of tons of water out of the moon’s gravity well. She had brought them through space, and she had resisted the force of pressure. The last test was as crucial as any. If she failed to fight her way upward and beyond the gravity of the gas giant, all the others didn’t count.

Until now her power had been used only to neutralize gravitational attraction in orbit. Now she was called upon to overcome the pull and apply enough force to the hull to move upward and then to attain escape velocity, at more than twice the speed it would have taken her to leave Earth. Most important, she had to stay in one piece, and, if the madman was to be humored, she had to do it with thousands of tons of Jovian atmosphere in her hold.

The computer gave angle of climb, increments of power, times, and the automatics fed it into the engine. Neil followed the motions with his hands, just to get the feel of it. There was a different pitch to the quiet background hum inside her. The acceleration was slight at first. Only instruments could feel it. The ship mushed slowly upward. Full speed could not be attained in the drag of the atmosphere. The upward flight was slow and tedious. It was monitored by thousands of instruments ranging from hull-temperature gauges to nutrino traps measuring the efficiency of the hydroplant.

She was a pure thing of joy, Neil was thinking. He’d flown every type of ship built in the United States and some that were built elsewhere. He’d never flown anything like this one.

“You’re a helluva ship builder,” he told Dom with a grin.

Dom smiled ruefully. Being praised by a man like Neil was pleasant, but it was small compensation. There was, of course, the pride which comes when your own ideas and work bear fruit and prove a successful design. There wasn’t another ship like Folly .

Revealing, of course, that he was thinking of her not as the J.F.K ., but as Folly. J.J.’s Folly .

The tension in the control room was not all engendered by the ticklish task of lifting the ship out of the atmosphere into clear space without straining the laden hull, without burning a thruster tube with too much power. Actually, the lifting went on so long it became routine. It was J.J.’s presence which caused most of the tension. Dom felt a sick disappointment. He had not realized, until the moment of J.J.’s surprise announcement, that he’d been counting heavily on that alien ship. There was a personal element in his disappointment. He had been duped into going on the ultimate treasure hunt, a sublight drive the potential reward, and all the time there had been no treasure. He had been promised the stars, and the payload was Jovian soup, thick soup compressed inside Folly’s cargo hold.

In the ideal world, Folly could have been built in the interest of pure research, to prove that it could be done, to obtain samples of Jovian atmosphere, to merely add to knowledge. In an ideal world, however, there would also be plenty of food. That situation had not existed on the world for decades.

Idle thoughts as the ship lifted. From a long-range viewpoint, pure research paid off. The hydrogen engine which powered the Folly had roots in the early space program. Photographs taken during the first Skylab experiment, a pure research project, gave astrophysicists new and startling information about the sun. Questions raised about traditional ideas of the sun’s power way back in the 1970s led to the breakthrough which allowed Folly to rise against the force of Jovian gravity. Had not scientists doing pure research work at an observatory in Arizona discovered that the sun’s entire globe pulsated, the theories which made the hydrogen drive a reality would have been left unformulated. From a long-range point of view, Skylab was worthwhile, but even then there were people who screamed against the expenditure and wanted, instead, to buy butter, or welfare Cadillacs, for that group of non-achievers who are always a festering portion of human society.

Reactionary thinking, he told himself. The poor are always with us. He was not right-wing enough to be able to forget them, especially in view of the fact that he would soon be one of them, in the same boat with the starving millions. Where had it all gone wrong? All he wanted was to work in space, perhaps do a little bit to help halt man’s galloping breeding, perhaps, eventually, to help man escape the overcrowded planet into richer pastures.

The man who built the Folly was feeling guilty. Enough money had been spent building her to expand the mining on Mars tenfold, to produce enough phosphates to fertilize half of the farmlands of the world. An achievement in pure science had come at the expense of many more needed projects. Once the whole story of Folly was known, the impact would kill the space program. Even if the civil war was won by government forces there would continue to be criticism of Folly as long as man hungered for food.

For a moment Dom wondered if it wouldn’t be best for the hull to fail or a thruster to burn, leaving Folly to perish, never to be seen by human eyes again. But to have Folly plunge into the depths of Jupiter would not erase the knowledge that she had been built. Dead or alive, the ship, the ultimate achievement of the Department of Space Exploration, would be the instrument used by opponents of space spending to cripple the program for decades, perhaps forever.

The man who had engineered Folly went to his cabin as Neil brought her out into space through the thinning zone of frozen ammonia. From his bunk, he felt the power which sent the ship swooping upward and outward past the lonely moons, so powerful she did not feel the burden of Jovian soup in her hold.

He could not hide from his part in it. He went back into the control room. He called the picket ship and said, “It’s over. We’re headed home. Do you have fuel for Mars?”