western horizon Earth hung, blue-green and glamorous, just above the
crests of many ring mountains. It was a little past first quarter, and
it gave only the faintest of light to the tortured and splintered rock
formations outside Grimaldi Base. When Earth was full, there would be
bright earthlight on the moon, and the moon's surface would look much
stranger than any painter of fantastic pictures could imagine.
Inside the base, McCauley was going toward his office when a hand
touched his arm. It was Kent. He looked forbidding and grim.
"I'd like to speak to you, sir," he said formidably.
McCauley waved him into the tiny office and closed the door.
"What's it all about?" he asked. He touched a switch and a desk light
glowed. He touched another, but nothing in particular seemed to happen.
"I've forgotten," he said mildly, "any unpleasant things I may have
felt it necessary to say a few hours ago."
"It's Holmes, sir," said Kent, his lips tightly pressed together. "He
didn't play fair, sir. When we split that extra air tank he cheated on
it. He gave me more than he took himself. And when I was stuck with an
avalanche ready to finish me any second, he...."
His voice rose shrilly. He complained bitterly that Holmes had saved
his life at least four times.
"He had to," McCauley pointed out. "I said I'd court-martial whichever
of you came in, if one came in alone."
"That's the devil of it," said Kent bitterly. "He didn't do it that
way! He didn't do it grudgingly. Doggone him, he made me ashamed! If
it weren't that I'm hanged if I'll ask any man to overlook things like
I've done to him--and he's done to me--if I wouldn't be asking him to
overlook so much, I'd...."
McCauley waited. But Kent did not finish. Instead he said savagely:
"As a matter of self-respect, sir, I have to report that Holmes ought
to be commended officially for several acts beyond the call of duty,
sir--and for a man he hates and who has hated him. That's all, sir!"
He turned to go out.
"Hold it!" McCauley spoke sharply. "You will listen to something.
This is an order!" He threw a switch and said: "I recorded your
recommendation, Kent. But you will listen to this!"
There was that minute whirring noise a tape recorder makes when it's
beginning its run. Kent stiffened. A voice came out of a speaker. But
it was not Kent's voice, it was Holmes'. And Kent, staring, heard
Holmes saying stiltedly and urgently that Kent had behaved in a highly
admirable manner that rated official commendation. He'd risked his life
for Holmes on several occasions, and if it weren't that he wouldn't ask
any man to forgive him things like he'd done to Kent....
McCauley snapped off the recorder. The sound ceased.
"Holmes came in here first," said McCauley dryly. "His and your
recommendations will have due attention. And I'm not going to suggest
that you go and shake hands with him, but I think he might like it."
Kent's mouth opened and closed.
"B ... but ..." he stammered.
"Get out of my office!" roared McCauley. "I've got work to do!"
_5_
(It seemed there wasn't much left to do in the way of space
pioneering. There was a Space Platform, and there were bases on the
moon, and drone ships had been out to Mars and sunward past Venus.
There were new and better fuels, and the problem involving the Van
Allen belts of highly charged atomic particles seemed to have been
solved. It looked as if the rest of the job of conquering space
would be just plain, slogging hard work of a strictly routine
nature. This process would be improved a little, and that would be
developed a little further, and progress toward the stars would be
made by inches. But things never work out simply. There is always
something unexpected and usually disastrous turning up. Just when
things looked brightest, somebody worked out the causes of solar
flares and devised a way to predict them. It looked like a neat and
unimportant triumph of pure theory. But when it was closely
examined, it meant that the end of all space travel was
approaching.)
They called Colonel Ed McCauley back from the moon when Doctor Bramwell
peevishly refused to go along with the Venus shoot unless the assigned
crew was fired and replaced by more respectful men. The top brass felt
that McCauley might be able to get along with Bramwell and get the job
done. It was a highly necessary job. There was a sun-flare maximum
coming up, but if the Bramwell-Faraday screen could be improved enough,
it might not matter. Men might continue to occupy the Space Platform,
and activities at the bases on the moon might continue. All the men now
in space might not have to return to Earth to stay until the flares
died down--if they ever did. In effect, if the Bramwell-Faraday screen
could be built up to adequate strength, man's conquest of space might
continue. If the screen couldn't be built up, space travel must stop.
And Doctor Bramwell was the key man in the project. He'd devised the
screen in the first place, and was more likely to be able to improve it
than anyone else. But he was not an amiable person. So, since he was a
civilian and couldn't be given orders, when he said peevishly that he
would not go along with the original crew, the men first assigned to
the Venus shoot were removed--swearing luridly--and Colonel Ed McCauley
came back from the moon to see what he could do.
He had one interview with Bramwell, and was very respectful. Part of
the respect was genuine, and part was diplomacy. Bramwell did have one
of the two or three best brains on Earth, but his personality gave
McCauley reason to be disturbed.
After the interview he consulted higher-ranking officers. He did not
think Bramwell was psychologically qualified to take part in the Venus
shoot. He thought the scientist would do better work if he stayed
home and directed somebody on the ship by tight-beam radio. McCauley
spoke forcefully. But Bramwell happened to have a near-monopoly of the
kind of brains that were required. And the psychological factor that
made McCauley doubtful made the doctor as temperamental as any prima
donna. The high brass knew all the reasons for McCauley's protest.
But if Bramwell felt himself pushed aside, he'd sulk. If he sulked,
he wouldn't do his best work. And his best work was an essential. So
McCauley was ordered to make do with Bramwell somehow.
McCauley shrugged dubiously. He asked for Major Randy Hall to be
assigned as his second-in-command. Randy gloated when his appointment
came through, but McCauley shook his head gloomily.
"There's no reason to feel good about it," he told Randy dourly, in
the almost completed Venus ship. "I'll be glad if you go along, but
that's not the idea. You're appointed to be the man who'll be fired if
Bramwell demands it."
Randy blinked. The cramped, inconvenient, gadget-filled interior of the
Venus ship looked glamorous, when you thought of where it was going
and what had to be done in it.
"The fact is," said McCauley, "--and the big brass knows it--the fact
is that Bramwell's scared. He's terrified at the idea of going out into
space. But he's ashamed to admit it. He'd rather die than let anyone
know he's in a panic. He's probably trying to keep from admitting it
even to himself. So he's making trouble to delay the moment of truth.
He's trying to keep from facing the fact that he either has to go or
else admit he won't."
"He's afraid of going?" asked Randy incredulously.
"Just as some people are afraid of heights, or spiders, or income-tax
forms," said McCauley distastefully. "There's nothing disgraceful about
being scared. If he'd only admit it, he could fight it or accept it.
In either case he'd be all right. But he insists to himself that he's
not only a brainy man but a normally courageous one. So he insists
he'll go, and he won't let anybody go in his place, but he can't make
himself believe he'll go. So he sets up all sorts of obstacles--crazy
ones--ridiculous ones. He doesn't realize it, but he may subconsciously
be trying to postpone the shoot until it's too late to make it. If that
happens he won't have to face the fact that he's scared."
Randy grimaced.
"And you expect me...."
"To keep him busy," said McCauley. "Try to fix things so that it'll be
take-off time before he realizes it. Keep him away from me so he can't
pick a quarrel and insist that I be fired. Make yourself the one he'll
insist he can't stand, when what he can't stand is the trip."
Randy grimaced again.
"You're a rat," he said resignedly. "But suppose I charm him so he
doesn't insist that I be thrown out?"
"Fine!" said McCauley. "There'll be a crew of only two, with him as the
third. I'd rather have you than anybody else. But Bramwell's devising
excuses for refusing to go. You could be one excuse."
"I'll polish some apples," said Randy, "and fearlessly mixing
metaphors, I'll beard him in his den. Maybe I can get so popular he
won't want anybody fired."
"Good luck to you," said McCauley skeptically. "You'll need it!"
He plunged into the remaining preparations for the shoot, and Randy
went to take over the job of keeping Bramwell from meeting the various
people who passionately wanted to have nothing to do with him.
The basic problem the Venus shoot was to attack was at once simple
but apparently hopeless. From time to time the sun displays "flares";
these are violent upsurgings of its photosphere, not in the nature of
sunspots but somehow associated with them. A flare may begin without
obvious warning and in fifteen minutes become monstrously violent,
throwing off highly ionized fragments of molecules at the highest
speeds material particles can attain. Some of these particles, in time,
reach Earth; magnetic storms and auroral displays are the consequences
of their arrival. They are harmless to people who live at the bottom of
the planet's ocean of air.
But they are not harmless to the crew of a ship in space, or to the
staff of that combined way station and observatory which is the Space
Platform, or to the occupants of the bases on the moon. The Space
Platform itself was set in orbit only three thousand miles out from
Earth because of the Van Allen belts of just such particles that have
been swung into paths around the earth and form invisible rings more or
less resembling the visible rings of Saturn. At three thousand miles
out these particles are not deadly. Farther out they are.
It was not until the Bramwell-Faraday screen was devised that it became
possible for a man to land upon the moon. With the screen, a man could
survive passing through the Van Allen belts in screened ships and set
up moon bases. But the margin of safety was not great. It was enough,
but barely so.
The Venus shoot was planned because this state of affairs would not
last. Astrophysicists had developed a system for predicting solar
flares. Then they'd found evidence and, later, proof that the flare
frequency was due for an enormous and probably permanent rise. Dense
clouds of flare particles would be released. The Van Allen bands
would be intensified. Within a year, any man who went beyond Earth's
protecting atmosphere could expect to get a fatal dose of radiation
burns within an hour's exposure, a flare particle being "radiation" in
the same sense as the particles thrown off by radioactive materials.
The Bramwell-Faraday screen had to be improved, or else. And the only
way to know that it was improved was to try it against stronger and
stronger streams of the deadly particles until it failed--or worked.
Which meant that somebody had to go out to where flare particles were
abundant.
So McCauley labored on the ship that was already nearly set to dive
sunward. It would be equipped with the screen that had made Earth-moon
travel possible. It would have on board Bramwell, who'd designed the
screen to begin with. It would plunge into flare-particle radiation of
such intensity that the ship's crew _might_ survive--with the present
screen on full--but this was by no means certain. The ship would dive
sunward to Venus, swing around that planet, and drift back out to the
orbit of Earth. On the way, Bramwell would try to adapt his screen
to protect the ship and himself in it. It was a highly melodramatic
proceeding, and Bramwell looked very heroic.
But he was a most unpleasant man. Having met him, McCauley estimated
his personal attractiveness as much less than one-tenth the personal
charm of an irritated skunk.
* * * * *
Ten days after his assignment to the Venus shoot, Randy came to
McCauley with a sort of grim humor in his expression.
"I took Bramwell over the ship," he said. "Since he's going to live and
work in it, he thought he ought to see it."
"That's reasonable," admitted McCauley.
Randy held up his hand and ticked off on his fingers.
"Item. He drinks a glass of orange juice, a large one, every night
before retiring. A supply of orange juice must be provided."
"All right," said McCauley. "Anything else?"
"Item," said Randy. "He is extremely annoyed by noise. He must have
a working area that is lined with soundproof material and has a
soundproof door so he can have absolute quiet."
McCauley grunted.
"If you can think of anything quieter than space with one's rockets
off.... But okay. What else?"
"Item. He suspects he's allergic to the vegetation in the
air-freshening system," said Randy. "I promised it would be checked."
"We'll make impressive allergy tests for him," said McCauley. "If
that's all...."
"It isn't," said Randy. "He wants a bunk with a hard mattress. He won't
use the acceleration chair except for take-off."
McCauley stared.
"But didn't you tell him?..."
"I," said Randy wryly, "am polishing apples. I want to go on this shoot
even if he does, which means I want to go very badly. No. I didn't
tell him that in free-fall flight with no gravity a steel plate is as
comfortable as a down pillow. Why start an argument with a man in a
blue funk?... He showed me the reference library he insists he has to
take with him. It weighs eight hundred pounds."
"There," said McCauley, "he has to lose! We can't take eight hundred
pounds of excess weight. We simply can't do it!"
Randy grinned.
"I showed him a moon-base microfilm reader and offered him the
equivalent of four tons of books on half a dozen reels. He couldn't
refuse to buy. He only named half a dozen book titles not already on
film, and they're being filmed now."
"Anything else?"
"Not so far," said Randy. "He's scared and ashamed of being scared. I
don't think he'll actually get up nerve enough to back out, but I'm
sure he'll never get the nerve to go. When he finds out the actual
take-off time I look for trouble."
"What kind?"
"Maybe hysterics," said Randy. "I'm almost sorry for the guy, but not
quite. A man with his brains ought to face the fact that he feels
timid, and either fight it or admit it. Especially, a man ought to
realize that other people can tell what's the matter with him."
McCauley considered, frowning.
"For your information only," he said, "take-off will be 1400 hours
Tuesday, neither plus nor minus. We'll have to stop at the Platform
to refuel, and the Platform has a schedule. We'll need to swing very
close to Venus for its pull to change our course, and Venus has a
schedule. And we'll need to meet Earth farther along in its orbit, and
Earth has a schedule. None of them can be changed to humor Bramwell's
psychological idiosyncrasies. We take off at 1400 hours Tuesday!"
But Randy shook his head.
"Oh, oh! Friend Ed, we're in trouble!"
"He won't go?"
"He won't go," said Randy. "I'm just learning how to handle him. I
believed I could trick him into committing himself so firmly that he'd
go, no matter how much something inside of him was screaming that it
didn't want to. But Tuesday's too early. I don't think there's a chance
to get him either to go or admit he won't. Not by Tuesday."
"That's too bad," said McCauley grimly. "We need him for our crew--him
or a reasonable facsimile. Do you know what they used to do when they
needed sailors?"
"Pressed them," said Randy. "Press gangs grabbed them. But that was the
law then. It isn't now."
"I wasn't thinking of a press gang," said McCauley. "Much more often, a
man got shanghaied. We've got to have that souped-up Bramwell screen!"
* * * * *
More days passed. Doctor Bramwell announced firmly that he would not be
ready to take off on the Venus shoot on Tuesday at 1400 hours. It was
pointed out to him that all the computations for the Venus shoot were
based on that time for departure. Doctor Bramwell said firmly that he
would not be ready to leave at that time. It was suggested that he name
someone who could take his place and work out the improved screen, of
course on the basis of his advice and suggestions tight-beamed out to
the Venus ship. Doctor Bramwell said indignantly that nobody else was
capable of doing his work. But he would not be ready to depart at 1400
hours on Tuesday.
There was a complete impasse. He was immovable. The shoot had to
be made at a certain time. He refused to be ready at that time.
Preparations for the shoot went on. He calmly and ponderously ignored
them.
* * * * *
At 1400 hours on Tuesday a hundred and eighty feet of streamlined,
fire-spouting metal plunged skyward from Cape Canaveral. At eighty
thousand feet, the first stage dropped off; at seventy miles, the
second stage. The third stage, which was the Venus ship, went whipping
on out into space. It circled Earth once, gradually overtaking the
Space Platform as it floated serenely in emptiness three thousand miles
out from the Earth's surface. With tiny, finicky jettings of rocket
fuel, and the use of steam-jets for final maneuvering, McCauley brought
the Venus ship into contact with the Space Platform.
There was swift and efficient action. Men in space suits swarmed out
of the brilliantly sunlit, faceted artificial moon. They connected
fuel hoses and topped off the Venus ship's tanks. They floated a
second-stage unit out and bolted it in place. They painstakingly got
a giant first-stage unit out of the ship lock and set it where it
belonged. At the Space Platform, the Venus ship regained the fuel and
the ability to accelerate that it had used up getting there.
One and a quarter hours after contact, McCauley reported back to
Canaveral that all was well, that Doctor Bramwell was in excellent
condition and making no complaints, and that all instruments and
equipment had functioned perfectly during the trip from Earth. Then he
backed the reenlarged Venus ship away from the Platform.
There was a long, long pause while he adjusted the nose of the ship
with micrometric accuracy to an exact, particular spot and made sure
that it stayed there. The ship had drifted a good mile from the
Platform when he stabbed home the rocket-firing button.
As usual, the instantly following sensation was that of a roof falling
in on one and several other roofs falling in on top of it. The Venus
ship accelerated for seventy-eight seconds, its nose pointed sunward.
McCauley'd set the rocket timer for that length of firing.
When the rockets died, he floated weightless in a ship which had no
weight. His head tried to split wide open and let his aching brains run
out. His hands were puffy and swollen. His eyes felt as if they were on
fire. Beside him, Randy groaned and then growled.
"Doggone the man who invented rockets," said Randy painfully.
"See how Bramwell's doing," grunted McCauley. "I've got to see how we
made out."
His headache went slowly away as he checked the ship's line of motion
against Earth, growing small behind him, and Venus and the sun ahead.
It was reasonably satisfactory. He checked the ship's velocity by
the inertia computer and by a tight-beam query back to Earth. His
query went back on microwave with a beautifully accurate piezocrystal
regulating his frequency. His speed could be determined by the Doppler
effect. Both the inertia computer and the Doppler reading indicated
that his velocity would need a slight boost later. A time and duration
of rocket firing would be computed. So far, though, so good.
"We'd better set up housekeeping," said McCauley. "How's Bramwell?"
"Pulse and respiration okay," reported Randy. "But I bet he busts a
button when he wakes up."
McCauley eased out of his acceleration chair. He ached in every bone
and muscle from the effects of the two successive take-offs. But he
cast an accustomed eye about the ship. It was not a big ship, and
Bramwell's stipulated soundproof cabin took up a large part of it. It
was, actually, not much more than an oversized moonship. But there were
features to be arranged that the short-voyage ships from Earth to moon
did not bother with.
McCauley floated over to the packed-up air system. In a space voyage
up to a week in length, it is as economical of weight to carry air as
to purify it. But the Venus shoot would last much, much longer than
a week. So McCauley unpacked the air system. The vegetation had been
padded lest it be bruised or broken in the take-offs. He set up the
unit and started the hydroponic pump. Randy adjusted the drinkables
unit. McCauley set out meals to thaw, in readiness for dinner. Randy
put the sanitary facilities and the waste-disposal unit in operation.
In effect, the ship had had to be decommissioned as a livable vessel
while it was being flung out from Earth as a projectile. Now, in far
space and going even farther, the two men transformed it into one
of those specialized environments that supply men in emptiness with
everything they require except day, night, weight, up, down, normal
sounds, and a feeling of belonging where they are.
One homey touch appeared before the recommissioning of the ship
was complete. McCauley opened a very small box and took from it an
infinitesimal yellow object that stirred as he handled it. It was a
tiny canary which had been stowed in the equivalent of a canary-sized
acceleration chair. Now it struggled desperately in his hand.
"You'll do, Mr. Perkins," said McCauley. "You're all right!"
He put the panting little creature--Mr. Perkins--into a cage hardly
larger than itself. It let out a bewildered chirp when he released it.
It struggled wildly, in panic because there was no up or down. McCauley
captured it and put its groping claws against the perch. They gripped
it. He set up a curiously intricate device inside the cage.
"He'll do," he said in satisfaction. "And it looks as if his
food-and-water system is going to work, even in no-gravity. That was a
job to design!"
He checked two larger devices with extreme care. One was the
flare-particle counter, designed to make an audible click for every
hundred, every thousand, or every ten-thousand flare-particle
penetrations registered. McCauley set it for hundreds. It clicked every
three or four seconds, which was a high concentration but still within
the tolerance limit. The other device was the oxygen-supply flutter
valve. The plants in the air system would absorb carbon dioxide from
the air as the men's breaths produced it, and release oxygen to replace
it. But it was not quite a hundred per cent replacement. From time to
time more oxygen had to be added from storage tanks to keep the air
volume constant and the oxygen percentage right. The flutter valve took
care of all this. It made a curiously irritable, buzzing sound when it
worked.
The ship went on. Ahead and off to the right lay the steady,
last-quarter crescent of Venus. Above and below and on every hand
there were stars. Nobody on Earth ever sees the stars as they appear
in space. At the bottom of Earth's atmosphere, the keenest eye can
see no more than three thousand stars at any one time. Out here one
could count as many in a circle no larger than the sun's disk. They
shone in innumerable colors. The Milky Way was not a filmy mist across
the heavens, but a ribbon of jewels set in pure light; Earth was a
glamorous blue-green gem with white spots at its top and bottom, and
the moon was a shining smaller circle.
Randy looked outside, as McCauley did. Then Randy yawned, to hide the
awe that every man feels when he looks upon the immensity that men
impertinently intend to conquer.
"Well, now," said Randy. "We're well started and maybe a bit of a nap
is sensible. Anyhow, Bramwell's sleeping sweetly. Should I loose him?"
"Wait till he wakes," said McCauley. "Things feel pretty good," he
added.