MEN INTO SPACE
By Murray Leinster
COPYRIGHT © 1960 BY ZIV TELEVISION PRODUCTIONS, INC.
[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_All rights reserved_
BERKLEY EDITION, OCTOBER, 1960
_BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by
The Berkley Publishing Corporation
101 Fifth Avenue, New York 3, New York_
Printed in the United States of America
_IN OUTER SPACE_
There was no sensation of weight. Nothing weighed anything. Nothing
could be considered light or heavy. The difference in weight between
a copper penny and the ship itself was imaginary. They had different
masses, but both would weigh the same--zero. McCauley suddenly turned
off the silent air-circulator of the cabin. He struck a match. The
flame flared, but not as a rising leaf-shape. It was a perfect ball of
incandescence. But it did not continue to burn. It went out, and a ball
of white smokiness remained where the flame had been....
_MEN INTO SPACE_
_1_
(When Ed McCauley was a very young officer--in fact, a new-made
first lieutenant, space travel was restricted to robots. They did
good work, for robots, but it wasn't enough. No man had ever gone
up in a rocket. Nobody had ever gone up--let alone land safely. So
the time came when somebody had to. And in those very early days
McCauley volunteered for the job and managed to get it.)
First Lieutenant Ed McCauley opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling,
wondering drowsily why this morning seemed so much more satisfying
and important than any other. He'd had a good sleep, even though he
remembered vaguely that he'd had a hard time dropping off. Now the
sunlight came through the window blind in slatted streaks, the wall was
a pale tan, and he was lying on an iron cot, his uniform neatly draped
over a chair. Then he heard voices and the clattering of china, and
suddenly he remembered where he was and what was important about today.
Today was the day of the shoot. The rocket shoot. It wasn't going to
be big and spectacular, with a multiple-stage giant looming so high
that a man couldn't see the payload capsule on top without his neck
creaking. There'd be no giant gantry crane hovering over a slim but
monstrous missile with its hundreds of plugged-in wires recording
the performances of some tens of thousands of separate parts, all of
which had to work perfectly if one part were to be any good. Even the
electric wires had to pull clear perfectly when the gantry crane rolled
back a matter of seconds before the end of the count down.
No. This shoot wouldn't be spectacular. There weren't even any
reporters around. Official Service cameramen would record what
happened; and if all went well there'd be plenty of excitement about
it later, and if all didn't go well it wouldn't matter too much. This
time there was no publicity buildup. Nobody'd be disappointed if things
went wrong. The only person who'd feel badly was First Lieutenant Ed
McCauley, and he wouldn't feel it too keenly. In fact, he wouldn't feel
anything.
He'd be dead.
He considered the idea for a moment, but when a person is First
Lieutenant McCauley's age, dying is something that happens to somebody
else. You can't imagine it happening to you. It's a sort of reverse of
being born, but you can't imagine that either, though it happened.
He sat up and kicked his feet over the side of the cot. He felt a
little bit relieved. He was excited, now that he remembered what was
in the works for today, but it wasn't a solemn feeling. He got up and
looked at himself in the small square mirror over the washstand. He
looked exactly as he always did. He felt the same way. Well-l, maybe
a little more awake and alive than usual, because he'd been horribly
afraid that something would happen and the shoot would be called off.
But it hadn't--so far.
He went down the hall to the showers, trailing a towel over his
shoulder. He showered, thinking zestfully about the prospects. There'd
be no trouble about the weather. At this base clouds were exceptional
and a cloud cover that hindered even visual tracking was almost
unknown. Suddenly he wanted to sing, but he restrained himself. As
lucky as he felt, it might sound like showing off.
The door of the shower room opened and somebody came in.
"Hi, National Hero. You in there?" It was Randy's voice, slightly
sardonic.
"Ain't nobody here but us chickens, boss," McCauley answered
cheerfully. "Nary a hero."
Randy grunted.
"How d'you feel, Ed?"
"Wet," said McCauley. He turned off the shower and began to towel
himself. When he emerged, Randy searched his face, his anxiety showing
on his own.
"Nope," said McCauley, "the condemned man's got a good appetite for
breakfast. Quit worrying about me, Randy!"
"If you'd only slipped on your soap and broken your doggone neck,"
Randy complained, "a good guy might've gotten a chance to take your
place!"
McCauley grinned. Randy would give his eyeteeth to take his place
today. Anybody would. McCauley still worried that even now something
would spoil things, but he'd been worrying for months. He'd been jumpy
ever since the rumor first went around that sometime soon somebody was
going up in a rocket and coming down again. Nobody ever had. Up to this
morning it was still waiting to be done. But somebody--in fact, he
himself--should do it today. This was why today was the most special
day of his life.
Back in his quarters he shaved, marveling at the luck of the man he saw
in the mirror. Three--four--five months ago he'd been telling himself
that he didn't have a chance of being picked, even though he was sure
he'd put in for it as soon as anybody had. He'd hoped he'd been the
first to apply, but actually he was one of two hundred. They'd winnowed
the applicants, though, and four months ago twenty were left, and then
only ten. Now there was only himself in first place, with four other
bitterly envious characters--Randy was one of them--wishing he'd break
his neck so they could go in his place.
But nothing like that would happen if he could help it. Washing the
shaving soap off his face, he found himself praying that everything
would go all right. He didn't think of asking that he come down safely;
after all, he could insure his safety by backing out. He just asked
that he'd be all right when they checked him over, and that the count
down would go all right, and that he'd get up to where the sky turned
purple and then black and he saw the stars shining bright, with the sun
among them as the nearest and greatest star of all. And he prayed that
he'd do the right things while he was up there so the shoot would be a
success.
He settled his uniform and went to breakfast. Randy had ordered for him
and was waiting. Randy still looked worried. He'd tried hard for the
job for himself, but now he was afraid that his friend McCauley might
not check out. That the rocket might not check out. That when he got
up there something might go wrong. That coming down would be bad.
"Soft-boiled," said McCauley appreciatively, breaking an egg. "My
favorite fruit!"
"Do you really feel okay, Ed?" asked Randy.
McCauley grinned again, which was answer enough. Maybe he felt too
good. He probably should tone down a little. After all, this shoot
with a man as the payload wasn't a pleasure trip. It was research. It
was an operation to verify other research. The medicos believed they
knew what the psychological, physiological, and emotional effects of
long-continued weightlessness would be. They needed to know how a
normal man like McCauley would react to the unparalleled environment
of nearer space. It was high-altitude research, primarily to enable
planes to fly faster. A plane could be powered right now so that its
wings would melt at sea level because of the heat its speed produced.
The only way to reach theoretical top speed in a plane was to fly it
away up. There was a thermal barrier to really high-speed flight. The
only way around this barrier was over it, and it was necessary to
find out how a man would make out in that detour. The Service had a
long-established custom of spending a dollar instead of a man; now it
had not to spend a man perhaps, but to risk one. And McCauley was the
man.
He felt remarkably good, knowing that presently he should be where no
man had ever been before, seeing with his own eyes that the earth was
round. It struck him suddenly that everybody else in the world had only
indirect evidence for believing this. He'd be the first man to know
this for a fact simply because he'd gone up to where he would see the
earth as a ball.
"No shivers?" asked Randy presently, as if in envy. "Wouldn't you
rather not and say you did? I'll take over for you!"
"Don't tempt me!" said McCauley, pushing his cup across the table. "And
how about some more coffee?"
Randy grunted. Maybe he'd been ordered to do some kidding, so McCauley
wouldn't get the wind up. But it didn't matter to Ed. If only
everything went all right at the blockhouse everything would have to
go all right all along the line. But the chance that things might
be fouled up there made him want to keep his fingers crossed. Yes.
The blockhouse was the big hurdle. Anything that happened after that
wouldn't be failure on his part. He wanted to pray again, this time
about the blockhouse. But he didn't.
The two men left the officers'-quarters building together. There was a
jeep waiting, with Sergeant Hall at its wheel.
"Mornin', Lieuten't. How you feeling?"
The sergeant looked at McCauley with the same combination of envy and
anxiety that Randy had shown--envy for what McCauley had ahead of him,
anxiety for whether he felt all right so that he could go through with
it.
"Look!" said McCauley, annoyed. "I'm all right! There's nothing to
worry about! The thing's been done before with instruments, dummies,
monkeys, and now it's me. I'm just another ape. That's all! For the
love of Saint Aloysius stop worrying!"
Sergeant Hall let in the clutch.
"Okay, Lieuten't," he said mildly. "I was just going to wish you good
luck."
"Cross your fingers against the medics," said McCauley dourly. "I never
liked doctors. I've got to get by some of them."
He settled back in the jeep and it went bolting out into the already
blazing sunlight beyond the shadow of the building.
The landscape wasn't pretty--sun-baked clay and sand on the road,
and mesquite and more mesquite all around. The sunshine was hotter
here than anywhere else in the world. It was still long before noon,
but already the horizon shimmered in the heat and occasional little
sand-devils rose up half-heartedly and then subsided as if it were too
hot even for whirlwinds. Far away there were the mountains. McCauley
had gone over there once, and they'd towered impossibly toward the sky.
But presently he'd have trouble picking them out because they'd be
so small and the ground so nearly flat. Heat beat up from the ground
and through the windshield. After a quarter of an hour he could see
the spindly launching tower--no gantry cranes here!--above one of the
ridges over which the jeep went rolling, kicking up a monstrous cloud
of yellow dust behind it.
McCauley didn't mind the heat. He felt remarkably aware of being alive
and breathing, of the sunlight, and of a wrinkle in his pants on the
jeep seat. After a little he saw the flat roof of the blockhouse. Then
he felt scared. He was afraid of the blockhouse. There'd be a last
checkup to make sure he was perfectly all right, perfectly normal, no
more tense than the doctors decided was allowable, and so on. His heart
began to pound a little and he agonized over it. If they decided it was
acting queer....
He found himself praying again. Please, God, don't let them find
anything wrong with me! I want so much to do this!
Randy didn't look at him. A good guy, Randy. He'd know it was panic
over those doggone doctors poking stethoscopes at him and going off to
mutter together about what they'd heard.
"Randy, if I look scared, it's because I am," McCauley said between
his teeth. "There's a medic in that blockhouse who wanted his
brother-in-law to get this job. He'd be just the kind to mess me up
now!"
Randy offered a cigarette. McCauley shook his head.
The blockhouse was sunk in the dry earth. It was concrete, yards thick,
with nothing visible from this side except a deep-sunk door in the
wall. On the other side there was a narrow slit to look out of, and
there were periscopes and in a pit over yonder the close-by trackers.
There were other trackers in other spots--as far away as the mountains.
But there wasn't much of anything to be seen here.
... No. There was the rocket. One of the new big Aerobees. Nothing
fancy about it. The Atlas and the long-distance jobs generally
got all the publicity these days. But the Aerobees were solid and
workmanlike, veteran performers. Fancy hardware broke the records and
was what people meant when they talked about missiles and rockets, but
Aerobees were the workhorses that went up without fanfare, got the
information they were sent up for, and got it back down again. It was
an Aerobee that had proved matter-of-factly that most of the stuff in
the textbooks about the upper air simply wasn't so. Aerobees were the
first to disprove the belief that the tropopause was a motionless,
featureless calm belt up aloft. Aerobees brought back conclusive
evidence of vertical currents in that supposed utter calm, currents
that shot upward at three hundred meters per second. And it was
Aerobees that brought back proof of ultraviolet light reaching Earth
on its dark side, so the theory boys could go quietly mad figuring out
where the light came from.
Yes. The pointed nose and sleek shape of the Aerobee was a comfort,
standing by its straight-up launching tower. McCauley'd seen dozens of
shoots of Aerobees. He felt the affection a man feels for something
that does its job competently and casually, day in and day out, when
called upon to do it.
The jeep stopped. Randy got out and McCauley followed him. The sergeant
opened his mouth but thought better of it. He drove away without saying
anything more about luck.
The doorway of the blockhouse was cool. Inside, as the door closed
behind him, McCauley felt the air-conditioned chill and the clatter
of the place almost as if he'd been struck a blow. There were people
everywhere. Practically everybody wore a phone headset and chest
microphone and everybody was talking to somebody somewhere else, paying
no attention to anyone nearby.
McCauley stood still, waiting to be told where to go. Somebody called
to him:
"The docs aren't ready for you yet, Lieutenant. You're early."
"Okay," McCauley said. "Where'll I go to get out of the way?"
It didn't look as if anybody else could possibly wait around in the
blockhouse without further fouling up the already-present confusion.
"Let's go look at the transportation," Randy suggested.
McCauley shrugged and followed Randy outside. It was comforting that
nobody paid any attention to him. At least the people in charge of the
shoot weren't worrying about his not being okayed for the job.
In the sunshine again, he saw familiar things. The close-by trackers
in their pits, sunk below ground level in case something blew. The
telemeter receivers looked like huge wire bowls, decorated with rolls
of toilet tissue, aimed at the sky. They moved back and forth, testing.
They'd get back telemetered information and sort it out and make
tapes of it, and whoever read those tapes would know more about what
was happening than McCauley did. A telemetering system will sample a
practically indefinite number of instrument readings three hundred
times a second and send back the information in wild banshee howls or
else in scratchy noises that sound like all the static in the world
coming out of one loud-speaker.
Even so, things were better than they used to be, for there was a
time when not nearly so much information got back. For that matter,
McCauley'd heard about the tame German scientist--formerly of
Peenemünde--who used to stand out in the open behind the blockhouse
when those first rockets went up, sweating and squinting and saying,
"Goot!" "Goot!" as long as he could see that things were going well,
and sputtering despairingly and unintelligibly in German when they went
wrong.
They went wrong pretty often in the beginning, back ten years or so
ago. There was the time a rocket went up and simply vanished. All the
trackers lost it and nobody had the least idea where it'd gone. All the
men sat around biting their nails and wondering where in blazes it was.
Finally there'd been a telephone call from a woman in Alamogordo. She'd
managed to reach someone with authority to route her call though to the
blockhouse.
"Ah hear you folks are shootin' up rockets," she said in an indignant
drawl. "Well, you-all better come an' get your rocket outa my backyard
right now!"
It had landed in her backyard, many miles away, and it had missed her
house by no more than twenty feet.
Another time--a long, long while ago--a V-2 tied itself into knots and
headed for Mexico. When it came down near Juarez, all the Mexicans for
miles around came on the run with hacksaws. After they'd cut off pieces
of it for "space souvenirs," there wasn't much left to be hauled back
to base....
McCauley followed Randy around to the front. They walked over the hot
sandy ground to the launching tower. There was a fuel truck there, and
the sickly-sweet but bitter smell of hydrazine. The fueling gang wore
plastic coveralls with hoods and clear plastic faceplates. McCauley
knew this process; he'd helped with it. But today he kept carefully
out of the way. The fueling gang was finicky about its work. Each man
was extravagantly careful not to spill a drop of hydrazine, because if
somebody stepped on a drop that had spilled and then, later on, stepped
on a drop of nitric that had spilled, he'd have a hotfoot to end all
hotfoots--on that foot, anyhow, because he wouldn't have it any longer.
The hydrazine topped off. The truck went away, with everything
carefully closed up lest a drop of anything spill on to the ground. The
fueling gang went to change coveralls, for they wore coveralls of a
different color when they were going to load up the nitric acid. Never
the twain--hydrazine and nitric--should meet until pumped together into
a rocket engine.
The Aerobee was tall and sleek and smooth and streamlined, but now
there were ladders leaning against it. Somebody was working through a
door in the sidewall. McCauley went around and glanced at the guide
rail. The Aerobee used a short-time booster to start up. The booster
ran up the rail to the top of the launching tower and then landed
somewhere nearby. But the Aerobee would keep on going. By the time it
reached the top of the tower and the end of the guide rail, it should
be going fast enough for its fins to have some grip on the air. When
the air got too thin to be of any use, the steam-jets working from the
fin tips should guide it.
The nitric acid truck came slowly into position. It didn't cross
the track the hydrazine truck had taken, and stopped in an
entirely different place; the fueling crew reappeared, in their
different-colored plastic coveralls. The precautions taken against the
premature introduction of hydrazine and nitric acid were remarkable.
McCauley let himself look up once at the nose-cone. He'd tried it on
for size before. In it, he was going to have to take the launching jolt
of more gees than any jet pilot has to be prepared for. But he felt a
serene confidence that he could do it.
Then somebody called:
"Hey! Lieutenant! They want you back at the blockhouse!"
McCauley turned back obediently. The fuel gang was pumping in the
nitric as he left. It stank, and he knew that if the smell gets under
the faceplate of your hood you throw back the hood and faceplate
together and gasp for breath. He realized that he wasn't breathing too
easily. The doctors were going to make their final check on him, and
what they said would be it. He felt the familiar panicky conviction
that they'd find something wrong with him. For instance, panic would be
something wrong.
He caught hold of himself as he and Randy entered the blockhouse.
Somehow the confusion and busyness of everybody there were reassuring.
On the way to where the doctors waited, he heard people talking into
telephones about wind velocities and barometric pressures and how in
thunder did that civilian automobile get into the test area? Somebody
had to get it out fast, because there was a shoot on, in case nobody'd
heard. The last was pure sarcasm.
Anyhow the technical crew thought he was all right. So McCauley
submitted himself to the doctors in a sort of truculent readiness to
put up an argument if they said anything critical of his condition or
his readiness to go where nobody had ever gone before. With everything
else all ready, they'd have a nerve to suggest anything but a go-ahead!
They took his blood pressure and did a cardiogram, and they put a tape
around his chest and a stylus drew a crazy curve which showed the
way he was breathing. Then they took samples of his breath and his
blood and other body fluids, and his temperature and the electrical
resistance of his skin and forty-seven other things. They'd done all
this before. They'd done it while he was resting and while he was
taking hard exercise, when he was tired and when he'd just waked up
from a good night's sleep.
They had blown-up pictures of every square inch of his skin, so they
could check for sputters at high altitude. A sputter might occur if
a cosmic particle at just the right speed happened to hit him. He
hadn't any privacy left. The docs knew everything about him, except
that he was absolutely the right person for man's first ascent in a
pure rocket, and his return to Earth in one piece. No rocket had ever
landed intact, of course. They smashed. Invariably. But a way had been
worked out to get instruments back unshattered. That was the way he'd
land.
One of the doctors nodded.
"With that pulse rate your system's pumping out plenty of adrenalin.
That's good!"
McCauley relaxed a little. He watched as they checked his reflexes. He
could tell that they looked all right, anyway. They gave him a pencil
and timed him while he did a page of IQ stuff. In the past few weeks
they'd established his personal norm for all sorts of things, and now
they were checking to see whether anticipation pushed him too far
off normal. He began to sweat when he realized that he needed to act
exactly as usual, and they knew it, and he sweated more because of it.
They checked him over as they would a guinea pig before an experiment,
only he was the guinea pig. But he was desperately anxious for all this
to be over and for the experiment to start.
Presently they finished and looked at each other and nodded. Then one
of them said, "You'll do," and McCauley went almost sick with relief.
Then, infuriatingly, he knew from their expressions that they'd looked
for exactly that reaction. He couldn't do anything they wouldn't
analyze and think about. And he burned a little, but it was all right.
Everything was all right!
When Ed came out to the main part of the blockhouse again, Randy knew
from his expression that he'd been checked out for the flight, but he
asked politely:
"Mother and child doing well?"
By that time McCauley wanted to hug somebody for sheer joy, but instead
he said sedately,
"The doc says I'm a boy."
But just the same he was almost weak from the reaction to the ending of
his fears about what the doctors might decide. He looked at his watch.
Just about on schedule. Over in a corner somebody with a headphone
and chest mike was marking off items on a list he had before him. He
said, "Telemeter circuits," and paused. A voice evidently sounded in
his headphones, because he made a checkmark with his pencil. Then he
said, "Tracker circuits," and waited, and made another checkmark. As
McCauley walked on to where his voice was drowned out, he was still
saying toneless things into his chest mike and making checkmarks after
unhearable replies.
Randy closed the door of the cubicle where McCauley would put on the
grav-suit. It was skin-tight and festooned all over with stray bits of
equipment. Randy helped him get into it.
"Lucky son-of-a-gun!" he said conversationally. "How do the Irish get
all the breaks?"
"Clean living," McCauley told him, "and a drag with the top brass."
It wasn't so, of course. Not the top brass part, anyhow.
His arm caught in the right sleeve and Randy helped him straighten
it. There were peculiar tubes built into the fabric. They were all
hooked to a grav-valve that would let compressed air into them at a
suitable pressure to tighten the suit and fight the tendency of his
blood and inner organs to be left behind when his bones and flesh were
accelerated by the full thrust of the rocket. A man wasn't built to
stand the acceleration he had to take. But the grav-suit would make up
the difference.
He turned slowly around, and Randy inspected everything with the
jealous care of somebody who'll never forgive himself if anything goes
wrong. Presently he said:
"Flip it--but be careful!"
McCauley touched the test-stud. The tubes expanded. The suit tightened.
It felt as if it were going to try to squeeze his whole body out
through the neck. He lifted his hand and the squeezing stopped. Randy
screwed up the test-stud so it couldn't flip on by accident. He felt
of the chute-pack that was part of the suit, with the wide straps that
went around McCauley's body and thighs. He checked the four trailing
cables--each with a different-shaped plug on its end--that would pass
along all the suit-instrumentation news to the telemeter transmitter.
Then Randy nodded worriedly and gave McCauley a cigarette.
"It looks okay," he said. But he fretted.
"Everything's okay," said McCauley.
He puffed contentedly. When the cigarette was half-smoked, somebody
tapped on the door.
"You can get aboard, Lieutenant."
McCauley stood up. Randy opened the door for him and he went ambling
clumsily through the blockhouse toward the exit. He heard a toneless
voice say: "Crash wagon two"; then the man listened and made a
checkmark. Somebody else snapped: "Tell the idiot that we're trying to
keep him out of range of a few tons of hardware that'll be coming down
out of the sky presently. Sit on his head!" That would be the official
response to the civilian motorist's objection to being kept safely off
the test site when a shoot was on.
McCauley went on out into the open air. He felt weighty and clumsy
and cumbersome. He went around the blockhouse and into the blazing
sunshine. The fueling crew was finished, but they hadn't left. They
waited to watch him go aboard. There was a ladder leaning against the
Aerobee. McCauley plodded heavily to the foot of it. He put his foot on
the first rung and turned to Randy.
"Here I go."
"Yeah," said Randy. He didn't smile. He couldn't. But he did have a
fine air of nonchalance as he said, "See you soon."
There was no handshake. It would have been too much like saying
good-by. McCauley started up the ladder.
It was a long climb; and three-quarters of the way up, with all the
assorted gimmicks and the clumsy chute-pack banging against his
buttocks, he began to breathe fast. Once he stepped on a trailing
cable. He looked down and was annoyed to find that the height bothered
him--a man who would presently be up many miles higher than any man had
ever been before. And this was only tens of feet, yet he felt giddy! He
didn't look down again.
He reached the door in the nose-cone and climbed in. He'd practiced
it. He felt easier when he was inside. Up here, on top of several tons
of rocket fuel, he felt safer because there was a floor under him. He
grimaced at the foolishness of it. Rocket fuel is highly explosive;
a rocket works because a continuous explosion is taking place in its
engine. But McCauley felt safer sitting on enough hydrazine and nitric
to blow him to atoms than coming up a narrow, springy ladder.
Laboriously he settled himself. The acceleration chair had been
tailored to fit him in this suit. He got the trailing cables clear and
made himself comfortable. Then he waited. He could stir a little, but
not much. It was, of course, extremely comforting to be able to move
his feet in even limited swings.
The nose-cone door darkened. Somebody reached in and plugged the cables
into their proper sockets. He hauled straps from nowhere and buckled
them.
"Here's your helmet, Lieutenant," he said.
"Thanks," said McCauley.
He put it on. Air began to flow past his face and he knew that all the
gadgets in his suit were hooked in, and that back in the blockhouse
they could count his breaths and tell how deep they were, they were
getting a continuous cardiogram to tell how his heart was working, and
they had a running record of his blood pressure. If he panicked now
they'd know it. The man outside the nose-cone door poked around like
a hen fussing over a solitary chick. McCauley wished he'd go away. A
voice sounded in the helmet earphones.
"_Checking phones. Do you hear me?_"
"Sure," said McCauley. "I hear all right."
The phones clicked and were silent. The nose-cone door closed and
McCauley was alone. Somehow he felt naked, because he knew that
everything he felt and almost everything he thought was going on record
via telemeter in the blockhouse. It was dark here.... No, two small
electric bulbs were glowing. One was a spare. He saw the stuff laid out
for later.
He knew what went on outside, but it was what was going on inside
him that disturbed him. He didn't want the instruments in his suit
to report anything wrong. He wanted to do this job right! For that
reason he was consciously patient while he knew that men clinging to
the launching tower were pulling away the last-minute cords that had
been reporting everything functioning just right. Then everybody'd
be getting out of the way. The Aerobee stood silent and still above
a concrete pit filled with water. Somebody would use a last few
seconds to coil up a cable that should have been put away before.
In seconds now, though, everyone would pop out of sight. Over by the
mountains they'd be working the trackers there to make sure they were
all right. There'd be the warning blast. It ought to be about now.
Ten--nine--eight--
A voice came into the helmet phones.
"_Forty seconds more, Lieutenant. Everything's going fine so far!_"
McCauley had a momentary impulse to try to make some crack or other
that would be appropriate, express how he felt, and so on. But he
didn't feel as he'd expected to. And anything like that would sound
like showing off. So he just answered matter-of-factly:
"That's good."
He waited. And waited. And waited. And waited.
The voice in his helmet phones said abruptly:
"_Ten seconds ... Nine ... Eight ... Seven ... Six ... Five ...
Four ... Three ... Two ... One...._"
During the last second McCauley remembered to put his arms in the
armrests, because the acceleration was going to be all he could take.
_All._ If his arms hung down, the blood would engorge his fingers and
swell them to uselessness. He was already scrounged down in place, and
he had his chin in the chinrest of the helmet--the whole helmet had a
fitting to support it--so if he blacked out his tongue wouldn't slide
back down his throat and strangle him.
Something hit him. It hit him all over at the same instant, as if he
were being slammed in a million places by a million six-ounce gloves
all at once. Something grabbed his legs and squeezed his belly and
blew air in his face, and the roar was numbing, but he didn't remember
hearing it begin. He'd expected all of it but he reacted by quite
automatically getting raging mad. He knew he was on the way up and he
felt thrilled and furious and he hurt all over, simultaneously.
It was agony, but if he could have grinned he'd have done it.
Everything had gone off all right! Nothing was wrong! It was too late
for anything to stop the shoot now! It was happening!
His stomach felt terrifically tight against the corset-like front of
the grav-suit. The legs squeezed--hard! That puff of wind was extra air
pressure to protect his lungs. He suffered, and he was half blind, and
he fought for breath, but that extra air pressure helped a lot. All the
blood tried to come down out of his brain and his cheeks sagged and his
ears would have flopped down if it weren't for the headphones holding
them flat against his head.
Suddenly things were easier. The booster'd burned out and dropped
off. McCauley remembered to grunt, to say that he hadn't lost
consciousness in the first intolerable getaway acceleration. The two
small electric bulbs had seemed to turn reddish. He made a mental note
to mention it presently. The pressure was still monstrous. He seemed
to weigh tons--actually he did weigh an appreciable part of one--but
his weight was less than it had been. That first slamming was the
take-off, lasting barely seconds though it felt like long minutes. This
second-stage acceleration would last more than a minute. It would seem
like hours.
It did. McCauley's muscles were already getting weary of lifting
his whole chest for breathing when a voice said in the phones:
"_Beautiful shoot! Beautiful! Everything's going fine!_" He grunted
in acknowledgment. It would be too much effort to talk. Also he felt
an obscure anger, which was his body's reaction to the unreasonable
suffering imposed upon it. A little green light flashed, and he was
supposed to grunt at it, and he did.
He grunted a second time when it flashed again. Quickly. A third and
fourth and fifth time. Something would be learned from the quickness
with which he could respond to signals during this second-stage thrust.
A pause, and the green light flashed and kept on flashing too fast for
him to respond, and he said, "Cripes!" very wearily. Then it stopped.
The roaring went on and on, and abruptly there were violent coughings
below. Instantly his head tried to split wide open because the
acceleration ceased between two heartbeats, while his heart kept on
trying to pump blood against a static head which was many times normal,
and suddenly there was no static head at all. There was no gravity to
be pumped against. There was no weight to anything. Then his heart
tried to adjust to that, and it skipped beats, and all his insides that
had been dragged downward now rose up and tried to climb out of his
throat.
He gagged and swallowed.
"Okay!" he panted. "In free fall! The light changed to reddish but it's
back to normal. I feel fighting mad. Over."
"_First puzzle_," said a brisk voice in the headphones.
McCauley reached out into the arrangement of objects before him. He
took out a puzzle. It wasn't complicated, but he had to recognize it
and then remember how to do it. He tossed it aside, finished, and his
working time was undoubtedly recorded. The voice said:
"_Name two things in the same class among these: robin, shovel, tree,
ibis, shark._"
McCauley answered. Again the time was noted. This was straight IQ
stuff, to see how soon and how well his brain was functioning after the
beating he'd taken in the booster-stage take-off and the second-stage
acceleration of the rocket itself. He knew what it was all about,
even when they told him to solve puzzle six, and then four, and then
asked more silly questions. He responded as well as he could, with
no idea how good that was. But he felt a great irrational anger and
indignation. When he was asked to recite a paragraph of prose he'd
memorized for the exact purpose of reciting it, on demand, he recited
it. But he was unreasonably angry. It was his body's response to the
suffering just past.
Presently he snapped:
"Doggone it, I want to see something!"
"_Go ahead_," said the voice from the ground. "_But keep on talking. It
doesn't matter what you say. Talk._"
He pressed the button that slid the port shutters aside. The shutters
were necessary. There'd been terrific heat outside when the nose-cone
flung upward through the denser lower atmosphere near ground level. He
looked eagerly out.
For a moment he couldn't speak. He saw the horizon as an almost white
line against a star-specked black sky. It was curved! There were
innumerable flecks of whiteness--they'd be clouds--below him; they grew
thicker farther away. He saw the ocean, which was hundreds of miles
away. The world visibly tilted downwards, downhill away from him. He
looked below and it was paradoxically a bowl. Quite close he saw a
fleeting, rushing, tormented spurt of vapor which vanished instantly.
It was a steam-jet correcting yaw or spin or tumbling, up here where
the air was so thin that the fins themselves could take no grip on it.
Years ago, when a WAC corporal made the first flight up to the then
incredible height of two hundred and fifty miles, the machine turned
end for end five times as it rose, and its tumbling made no difference.
It was practically in a vacuum. McCauley was higher than that, already.
But this Aerobee pointed straight, balanced by little puffings of
steam. It didn't even rotate.
He could see stars all around, and then he turned to the one filtered
port and looked at the sun through it. It was a monstrous brilliance,
with writhing fire-fringes around its edges. He saw Mercury off to
its right. It was the first time in his life that he'd ever seen that
planet, and he'd had to get out of the atmosphere to do it. Not one
person in ten thousand has ever seen the sun's closest satellite, even
as a tiny speck of light in the sky. But McCauley saw it, not hidden by
the daytime sky. There was no air here to speak of. At this height a
man not in a pressure-tight cabin, trying to breathe what few molecules
of air were present, would die in thirteen seconds because of anoxia
and explosive decompression. He'd die no more quickly out between the
galaxies.
"_Keep talking_," said the voice in the headphones. "_Keep talking,
man!_"
McCauley found himself stammering. What he said wasn't particularly
coherent, and he knew his taped speech would be studied to find out
exactly what mental state he was in. The headphones asked questions.
Could he see this? Could he see that? He answered yes and no. The voice
asked him to write something. He did, not looking at it. He stared
out at the monstrousness of the universe, with Earth merely a dimpled
gigantic ball below him.
He had no weight, but he did not notice. He gazed and gazed and
exulted, and absent-mindedly obeyed the orders which came insistently
to his ears. He wanted to saturate his mind and his memory with the
sight that nobody had ever seen before, except in pictures taken at
this height by robots.
Presently the sky wasn't totally black with innumerable tiny lights in
it. It was a deep, dark purple. The stars seemed fainter. He said so.
"_Right_," said the voice in his helmet. "_You reached peak altitude
minutes ago. You're well on the way back down, now. We're going to turn
the rocket over._"
He realized the absolute silence about him by the fact that now he
heard trivial, insignificant noises. Steam-jets came on--hydrogen
peroxide sprayed into a catalysis chamber where it broke down instantly
into steam and gas. The product rushed out the fin-tip jets. The
universe visibly turned upside down; the sky was down beyond his feet,
and the singular, unfamiliar object which was Earth could be seen only
when he craned his neck to look upward.
He felt no difference, of course. He'd had no weight before, and he had
none now. The appearance of Earth changed so gradually that he didn't
really realize that he was approaching it. But he knew it in his mind,
and he resented bitterly that he had passed the high point of this
achievement and was now bound back toward the commonplace, the ordinary.
He made an effort to become his normal self. "Now I suspect I'm getting
scared," he said wryly into his helmet mike. If he admitted it he'd
be ashamed and so could fight it. But he found that he wasn't really
scared. He was apprehensive, as one is when approaching a dentist's
chair. He felt reluctant, because he knew that after he got down he'd
be due for ghastly, tedious days during which the doctors would go over
him almost with microscopes to hunt for sputters--the burned, exploded
patches that would show up where cosmic-ray particles not slowed by air
went through his body. There shouldn't be any, but there could be some.
Robot instruments said no sputters. But a man had to come up here to
make sure.
He felt something--a featherweight of pull toward the pointed tip of
the nose-cone. The rocket had hit air which slowed it enough so he
noticed it. He was astounded that he'd come back so far so fast. True,
he was still almost unthinkably high by the standards of other men, but
he'd been out in space!
Earth was deplorably near. At twenty miles up--a hundred-odd thousand
feet--the processes for landing him should begin. He settled himself
in his seat against what was coming.... He suddenly realized that he'd
been talking, though he didn't remember what he'd said. Undoubtedly,
though, he'd said everything that came into his head. He stopped. The
headphone voice said encouragingly, "_You're okay!_"
"So far!" he answered.
There was the story about the optimist who fell off a skyscraper.
Twenty stories earthward he saw someone looking out a window and
called, "Everything's fine so far!" Yes....
There was an explosion and he started. Then others. They came from
small, half-pound explosive charges set at carefully chosen places on
the rocket. They were there to wreck its streamlined shape; to make
it an irregular, dynamically inefficient object which would offer
enormously increased resistance to its own fall through the air.
Technically it was considered that the terminal speed-of-fall of the
shattered rocket would be less than that of a man falling free without
a parachute. What was that? A hundred and fifty miles an hour, or a
hundred and twenty? McCauley tensed himself.
It seemed that something broke loose. The rocket reeled. It plunged.
It turned end over end and McCauley was flung intolerably this way
and that against the straps that held him in his seat. A wallop
nearly snapped his neck. But this was the way it was supposed to be.
Streamlined, the rocket would have struck nose-first and buried itself
in small fragments in the sandy soil below. This way....
It mushed. It wabbled. It tumbled as crazily as a maple leaf and as
dizzily. McCauley steeled himself to endure it. "_Sixteen more miles of
this!_" he thought.
But it was nearly over. There was another flash of explosive, this
time nearby, and the nose-cone flew violently apart and a blast of
wind hit him. Then there was a thump--a terrific thump--and a no less
bone-shaking bump, and his acceleration seat was ejected and he was
flying free through nothingness. Then the straps miraculously came
loose and he was turning end for end; Earth and sky were playing
merry-go-round in all directions simultaneously, while something
ungainly and monstrous writhed crazily away from him and toward the
agile Earth. And then there was a jolt and a jerk and another jerk....
He swung widely, but right-side up, beneath a perfectly commonplace
government-issue parachute a mere three miles high. He was sore and
bruised and shaken and dizzy, but everything was perfectly all right.
He'd been ejected from the falling rocket just as instruments had been
ejected hundreds of times before, and an ordinary parachute had opened
to let him sink tranquilly and safely to the ground, just as it had
done with the instruments.
He was remarkably close to solidity now. He got his breath and saw the
mountains and the vast, ridged, sun-baked, mesquite-dotted ground of
the rocket site. He could see the officers'-quarters building where
he'd had breakfast this morning. He spotted the blockhouse, with the
spindling launching tower from which he had departed so recently.
Then he saw a trail of dust flowing across the ground below. It was the
pickup gang. He'd been tracked every second, and they'd be underneath
when he touched ground. Randy would be there, and the other men who'd
give their eyeteeth to have taken his place. But they'd be gloating
because he'd gotten back all right. They'd be grinning, swearing,
exultant, overjoyed....
It suddenly occurred to McCauley that it would be intolerable if they
weren't glad. He didn't feel proud himself. He hadn't done anything.
He'd just gone for a ride that they'd made possible. But all the same
he was filled to bursting with the goodness of what had happened.
He saw the whole thing in perspective now. Swinging below the
parachute, he could estimate with fine precision just what had taken
place. It had become possible for a man to go up to the edge of
emptiness, to where he could look with his own eyes upon the sun and
stars in their own unshielded splendor. And because a man could do it,
a man had to.
And he'd been the man.
He felt overwhelmingly good as he settled, swaying, under the white
blossom of nylon cloth, with the pickup gang streaking in half a dozen
vehicles toward the place where he would land. Long plumes of yellow
dust followed each one.
Earth came floating up to meet him.
_2_
(When Ed McCauley was still a reasonably young officer, there were
many commonplace things that hadn't been done yet. Satellites
circled the earth from west to east and across both poles and with
other assorted orbits. There were artificial satellites in orbit
even around the sun, and every so often somebody put up a new one
for some new purpose. There'd been a landing on the moon--by
robot--and a robot station there spasmodically reported temperatures
and cosmic-ray frequency, and a surprising number of moonquakes.
But even so, many things hadn't yet been done. Man had circled the
earth in capsules, but not yet had any man lifted his own rocketship
from Earth and set himself in orbit. Still less had any man risen
into space as the captain of his ship and brought it back to earth.
Until such a thing was done, it would be absurd to speak of
spaceships. Missiles, yes. Satellites, yes. But a ship had to take
off and land on its own before men could say there is such a thing
as a spaceship.)
Young Major McCauley arrived at Quartermain Base in an Air Transport
ship which stopped briefly to drop him off and toss out a mail sack
which was instantly taken in charge by two side-armed noncoms and
hauled away. Then the Transport ship bellowed vociferously and took
off across the incredibly level pebbly plain, lifted and retracted its
wheels, and soared up into the infinitely blue sky of this part of
the world. It left McCauley standing in a vast emptiness, except for
unimpressive base buildings. He felt singularly lonely.
Nobody paid any attention to him. There was nobody left around. In a
way it was a relief, because McCauley had experienced much too much
attention once upon a time, and he wanted no more of it. He'd done a
job in an Aerobee once, and now he was to try something in an X-21 that
a lot of people would have liked to try in his place. He preferred not
to be reminded of either thing. So quite uncomplainingly he trudged
across the sun-baked flat ground toward the base buildings. All around
there was astounding flatness. The low hills that rose at the far side
of this dry lakebed were conspicuous here, whereas in more rolling
country they'd never be noticed. There was a row of hangars. McCauley
picked one out with his eyes and guessed that the new ship might be
inside it.
He reached the building behind the flagpole and shifted his bag from
one hand to the other. He went in, mopping his forehead as the door
closed behind him and the sharp chill of air conditioning hit him.
He went to report in. The CO wasn't around. He was over in Laurelton,
the town where most of the men went when they got a pass. The OD was
off somewhere. But quarters had been assigned to Major McCauley. The
noncom in charge of the CO's office obligingly got up to show him the
way.
"Any orders for me?" asked McCauley. "I don't suppose I'm supposed to
sit and twiddle my thumbs."
The noncom looked at a file and said there weren't any.
"It doesn't look too lively around here," said McCauley, "I'm supposed
to have an interest in the X-21. Could I take a look at her?"
The noncom did a double take.