The Red Journey Back (11 page)

As for the
Comet
 . . . 
!

I’ve
got to confess that fond as I was of the old
Albatross
,
it really wasn’t a patch on Dr. K.’s job. Of course, it’s understandable
enough—Dr. K. had had much longer to work on it than poor old Doctor Mac had
had, and he had bags more money. There were what are called “Very Big Interests”
behind Dr. K., and he had much of Doctor Mac’s research to build on and improve
on. We know all that, and it doesn’t take away one whit of poor old Mac’s
achievement, but the
Comet
really was something all the same. If you can picture the
Albatross
as, say, a good solid seagoing tramp,
with just a bit of a homemade touch about it, then the
Comet
was almost a full-fledged liner.

To
begin with, it was a different shape altogether from our old craft. The
Albatross
had a kind of bulbous nose, then
tapered away to the tail—we used to say it was like a fish, and so it was, of
course, but maybe it would be better to compare it to a kind of gigantic
tadpole. The
Comet
wasn’t a bit like that: it was very long and slender, and went to a most
delicate point at the nose end, then bulged out very slightly in the middle and
went to another long slope- away at the back—like a cigar, really. In fact, it
was much more like the usual idea of a rocket than the
Albatross
ever was, and with three huge fins, set like arrow feathers, which had enormous
extending
brackets
,
I suppose you could call them, which folded out when you weren’t in space, and
made it possible for the whole affair to stand up on end on a kind of gigantic
tripod.

That
was the other thing, you see: the old
Albatross
had rested at an angle on a huge launching ramp, but the
Comet
stood right up on its tail, as it
were—straight up into the air. On Earth, when we first saw it, it was held in a
kind of framework of steel girders—a kind of scaffolding. But Dr. K. explained
that that was only for additional strength—it was quite possible, because of
the smaller gravity pull on Mars, for the
Comet
to take off from its own resting
position on the tripod for the return journey. You see, the beauty of it all
was that as you were approaching Mars (or anywhere else for that matter—the
Moon or Venus or what have you), you could turn the whole rocket around in
space and land on the surface very gently (braking like mad, of course, with
the jets)
tail first.

One
other thing I ought to say (without being technical, for I don’t know enough—it’s
only that I couldn’t help being kind of interested), and that is that the
Comet
used the idea, same as Doctor Mac
had, of two separate fuels, but in a rather different way. In the
Albatross
, the two fuels were fired off through
the same sets of
tuyères
,
with one auxiliary set of
tuyères
to start
off the second fuel, of course, once you were out a bit in space, but then
everything going through the main set once the first fuel had cut off. In the
Comet
there were really two distinct rockets altogether. Fixed to the tail, on top of
the
Comet’s
own
jets, and underneath the tripod, was a huge “booster” rocket, as Dr. K. called
it. This could be fired off by remote control from the spaceship’s cabin—and it
was this that whipped up the colossal power to make the
Comet
rise from the ground—and even quite slowly, at first, again unlike the
Albatross
,
which whizzed off zoom from the word go. Then, when you were well away from
Earth’s surface, and the booster fuel had burned itself out, in one operation
the whole contrivance fell away from the
Comet’s
tail
and back down to Earth, and the
Comet’s
own
jets came into action and there you were—on your way.

I
should maybe add, lest you’re worrying about a great chunk of spent booster
rocket coming wham out of the sky one day and biffing you on the head (R.I.P.),
that as the spent booster fell away a special mechanism released a fairly
sizable parachute, so that the whole thing floated down and there were no
chances of serious accidents—at least you had time to see it, I mean, and could
jolly well get out of the way pronto!

And
the other thing was—just to complete the whole picture—that the
Comet
carried inside her all the component
parts of a second booster, so that when you landed on Mars and were happily
perched up on the tripod, the very first thing you did was fix this whole
prefabricated contrivance onto the tail again, and there you were—all set for a
take-off the moment you wanted to. And since it was Mars we were going to on
this trip, and it had the smaller gravity pull, this booster didn’t have to be
anything like as big and powerful as the one needed to shift us from Earth, so
that was all right, and cut down on the weight the
Comet
had to carry.

So
that’s that. (Phew! my hand’s all tired and cramped from writing all this—the
trouble is that you get carried away and go on for longer than you first meant.
Yd
better stop now and pick up again
later on.
 . . .
)

Here
we are, then—next day, and in fine fighting trim, all ready for another spell
at the desk.

You
know all about the
Comet
now—at least, maybe not
all
about it, but enough to be going on with: later on, Dr. K. will be publishing a
book of his own going into all the real technical details. He’s also going to
explain how it was that just about the time when we were due to set off, Mars
was fortunately coming around toward one of its “nearest-to-earth” positions.
We were jolly lucky in this, I must say—otherwise the journey would have taken
much longer than the one in the old
Albatross
,
even allowing for the improvements in the
Comet
. As it was, it still was a
little
longer, because of all kinds of
complicated difficulties about the orbits of Earth and Mars being elliptic and
not absolutely circular, and things like “aphelions” and “perihelions” nosing
in to mess things up a bit.
 . . .
Anyway,
I don’t really know anything about all this, except that I’ve heard Dr. K. and
the others talking about it and seen them working the whole business out with
adding machines and such (and I looked up the words themselves in a scientific
dictionary, so the spelling’s all right at least).

We
had a hectic time getting ready. There were endless conferences and sessions
with Dr. K., who had, of course, agreed wholeheartedly to the rescue expedition
idea, once all the facts had been put before him, and was almost as excited as
old J.K.C. himself, both by the thought of seeing his rocket in full blast and
by the thought of going to Mars for the first time. For our part, we were
desperately keen to get started for the sake of Uncle Steve and poor old Doctor
Mac: it wasn’t as if we knew what was what up there in Mars, you know—we had
simply no idea; except, of course, that something pretty serious was afoot, and
that somehow we were the only ones who could do anything about it. Maybe it was
even too late—we didn’t know that either: we just felt we had to get going.

And
because we were all so eager, things were arranged in double-quick time. We had
barely a week in Chicago before the whole business was cut and dried and we
were ready to start. Dr. K.’s men had been working all around the clock on the
last touches to the
Comet
—the
place was such a den of activity as I’d never seen in my life before. Of
course, because of the rush and turmoil, there were a hundred and one little
improvisations—Dr. K. didn’t have time, for instance, to complete his own
apparatus for feeding us on the journey (he’d worked out a real master plan for
dealing with this side of things), so we had simply to make do again with
Doctor Mac’s old “toothpaste” method—that is to say, normal food being
impossible to handle in a spaceship because of the lack of weight, we had to
feed from concentrates which were made up into paste form and packed into
plastic tubes, just like toothpaste tubes, and you simply put the nozzle thing
into your mouth and squeezed
 . . . 
! Still,
we didn’t mind this in the least: it was like old times for one thing, and for
another it made us feel that Doctor Mac was somehow with us in spirit at least
on this bigger job than his own old pioneering effort.

So
everything was somehow arranged at last. For the last few days before the take-off
we all moved out of Chicago altogether—went to live in the workmen’s huts miles
out in the open country, close to where the rocket itself was.

I
ought to say at this stage who exactly was going, I suppose.

Well,
naturally, there was Dr. K.—that was an absolute must. And ourselves—another
must, because of Uncle Steve’s last message, the whole reason for the voyage at
all (I mean Jacky and Mike and Yours Truly, of course). Then there was
Katey—Katey Hogarth; for our parents had made her promise to go, to look after
us (as if it made a pennyworth of difference!). Dr. K. wasn’t very keen on the
idea—quite charming and all that, full of old-world courtesy and such; but you
could see that women in spaceships just wasn’t his idea of what was what—it
wasn’t, as he put it, “a true feminine occupation, my dear.” But when Mike’s
mother and father joined in, and said that
they
wanted Katey to go too, or they’d
hold back on permission for Mike to go, well, there was nothing else for it,
and Dr. K. had to give in.

We
wanted one more. Dr. K. half considered taking one of his assistants; but most
of them were married men, with vast families, and besides, if anything did happen
to us in space, someone had to be about who could carry on Dr. K.’s research
work back home in Chicago.

Of
course, there was only one answer, and that was—

Archie
Borrowdale!

He
was exactly right—had all the technical qualifications because of his work with
Mr. Mackellar, and so would be a great help to Dr. K. on the journey. And he
was an expert shot, as it happened—he’d spent his student holidays in the
Scottish Highlands after the stags, and was terrific with a gun; and you never
knew, maybe the Vivores would have to be dealt with by guns—maybe they were
different from the old Terrible Ones, which weren’t in the least affected by
bullets.

And
to crown all, of course, he was Katey’s fiancé, which was a bit of all right
for her, and for him too, for he wouldn’t have liked her to go tearing off
forty or fifty millions of miles away while he stayed biting his fingernails at
home. Besides, we three—Jacky and Mike and me—we thought he was all right as
well!

So
there we were. In the last two days there was an odd sort of “slowing up” of
things. We had lived at such a pace for so long that when everything was
virtually over except the shouting we hardly knew what to do with ourselves.

Dr.
K. had gone off somewhere or other to make some last-minute contacts and arrangements.
All the work on the rocket had been done—the fuels were loaded, all the stores
were packed aboard. We had plenty of food, of course, for we had to consider
that Doctor Mac and Uncle Steve would be with us on the return journey—and
besides, Dr. K. was a very careful man, and had loaded up plenty of additional
supplies for “unforeseen emergencies,” as he put it.

So
it only remained to wait for the moment of the set-off as it had been fixed
according to certain weather conditions and other technical whatnots by Dr.
K.—and that moment was still two days ahead (and at something like five o’clock
in the morning—brrrr!).

So—we
moped; we simply moped and moped. We were, in fact, nearly bored stiff—if you
can believe that—on the very eve of setting off on a trip to Mars! Every now
and again, of course, if we stopped to think of it, we’d get a queasy kind of
falling-away feeling in the pits of our stomachs, like going down in an
elevator suddenly; but for the most part we just
didn’t
think of it, somehow—there was a queer kind of numbness in us and even (in
Jacky, I mean) a hint of
tears
.
 . . .
Ah
well! the way of the world, you know. Nothing ever does work out quite the way
you think it will.
 . . .