Interstellar travel -- Fiction; Science fiction; Television programs -- Fiction
Sunshine blinked, and then shone again in the ports around the saloon
walls. The second shining came from a different direction--as if
somebody had switched off one exterior light and turned on another--and
at a different angle to the floor.
Cochrane reached the communicator. He felt no weight. He strapped
himself into the chair. He switched on the vision-phone which sent
radiation along the field to a balloon two hundred odd light-years from
Earth--that was the balloon near the glacier planet--and then switched
to the field traveling to a second balloon then the last hundred
seventy-odd light-years back to the moon, and then from Luna City down
to Earth.
He put in his call. He got an emergency message that had been waiting
for him. Seconds later he fought his way frantically through no-weight
to the control-room again.
"Jamison! Bell!" he cried desperately. "We've got a broadcast due in
twenty minutes! I lost track of time! We're sponsored on four continents
and we damwell have to put on a show! What the devil! Why didn't
somebody--"
Jamison said obviously from a blister-port where he swung a squat
star-telescope from one object to another:
"Noo-o-o. That's a gas-giant. We'd be squashed if we landed
there--though that big moon looks promising. I think we'd better try
yonder."
"Okay," said Jones in a flat voice. "Center on the next one in, Al, and
we'll toddle over."
Cochrane felt the ship swinging in emptiness. He knew because it seemed
to turn while he felt that he stayed still.
"We've got a show to put on!" he raged. "We've got to fake something--."
Jamison looked aside from his telescope.
"Tell him, Bell," he said expansively.
"I wrote a script of sorts," said Bell apologetically. "The story-line's
not so good--that's why I wanted a castaway narrative to put in it,
though I wouldn't have had time, really. We spliced film and Jamison
narrated it, and you can run it off. It's a kind of show. We ran it as a
space-platform survey of the glacier-planet, basing it on pictures we
took while we were in orbit around it. It's a sort of travelogue.
Jamison did himself proud. Alicia can find the tape-can for you."
He went back to his cameras. Cochrane saw a monstrous globe swing past a
control-room port. It was a featureless mass of clouds, save for
striations across what must be its equator. It looked like the Lunar
Observatory pictures of Jupiter, back in the Sun's family of planets.
It went past the port, and a moon swam into view. It was a very large
moon. It had at least one ice-cap--and therefore an atmosphere--and
there were mottlings of its surface which could hardly be anything but
continents and seas.
"We've got to put a show on!" raged Cochrane. "And now!"
"It's all set," Bell assured him. "You can transmit it. I hope you like
it!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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