And in ten seconds the rockets hiccoughed once more and were silent, and
there was that sickening feeling of free fall, but he grimly made
himself think of it as soaring upward instead of dropping--which was the
fact, too--and waited until the third-stage rockets boomed suddenly and
went on and on and on.
This was nearly normal acceleration; the effect of this acceleration was
the feel of nearly normal weight. He felt about as one would feel in
Earth in a contour-chair tilted back so that one faced the ceiling. He
knew approximately where the ship would be by this time, and it ought to
have been a thrill. Cochrane was hundreds of miles above Earth and
headed eastward out and up. If a port were open at this height, his
glance should span continents.
No.... The ship had taken off at night. It would still be in Earth's
shadow. There would be nothing at all to be seen below, unless one or
two small patches of misty light which would be Earth's too-many great
cities. But overhead there would be stars by myriads and myriads, of
every possible color and degree of brightness. They would crowd each
other for room in which to shine. The rocket-ship was spiralling out and
out and up and up, to keep its rendezvous with the space platform.
The platform, of course, was that artificial satellite of Earth which
was four thousand miles out and went around the planet in a little over
four hours, traveling from west to east. It had been made because to
break the bonds of Earth's gravity was terribly costly in fuel--when a
ship had to accelerate slowly to avoid harm to human cargo. The space
platform was a filling station in emptiness, at which the moon-rocket
would refuel for its next and longer and much less difficult journey of
two hundred thirty-odd thousand miles.
The stewardess came up the ramp, moving briskly. She stopped and glanced
at each passenger in each chair in turn. When Cochrane turned his open
eyes upon her, she said soothingly:
"There's no need to be disturbed. Everything is going perfectly."
"I'm not disturbed," said Cochrane. "I'm not even nervous. I'm perfectly
all right."
"But you should be drowsy!" she observed, concerned. "Most people are.
If you nap you'll feel better for it."
She felt his pulse in a businesslike manner. It was normal.
"Take my nap for me," said Cochrane, "or put it back in stock. I don't
want it. I'm perfectly all right."
She considered him carefully. She was remarkably pretty. But her manner
was strictly detached. She said:
"There's a button. You can reach it if you need anything. You may call
me by pushing it."
He shrugged. He lay still as she went on to inspect the other
passengers. There was nothing to do and nothing to see. Travellers were
treated pretty much like parcels, these days. Travel, like television
entertainment and most of the other facilities of human life, was
designed for the seventy-to-ninety-per-cent of the human race whose
likes and dislikes and predilections could be learned exactly by
surveys. Anybody who didn't like what everybody liked, or didn't react
like everybody reacted, was subject to annoyances. Cochrane resigned
himself to them.
The red light-letters changed again, considerably later. This time they
said: "_Free flight, thirty seconds._"
They did not say "free fall," which was the technical term for a rocket
coasting upward or downward in space. But Cochrane braced himself, and
his stomach-muscles were tense when the rockets stopped again and stayed
off. The sensation of continuous fall began. An electronic speaker
beside his chair began to speak. There were other such mechanisms beside
each other passenger-chair, and the interior of the rocket filled with a
soft murmur which was sardonically like choral recitation.
"_The sensation of weightlessness you now experience_," said the voice
soothingly, "_is natural at this stage of your flight. The ship has
attained its maximum intended speed and is still rising to meet the
space platform. You may consider that we have left atmosphere and its
limitations behind. Now we have spread sails of inertia and glide on a
wind of pure momentum toward our destination. The feeling of
weightlessness is perfectly normal. You will be greatly interested in
the space platform. We will reach it in something over two hours of free
flight. It is an artificial satellite, with an air-lock our ship will
enter for refueling. You will be able to leave the ship and move about
inside the Platform, to lunch if you choose, to buy souvenirs and mail
them back and to view Earth from a height of four thousand miles through
quartz-glass windows. Then, as now, you will feel no sensation of
weight. You will be taken on a tour of the space platform if you wish.
There are rest-rooms--._"
Cochrane grimly endured the rest of the taped lecture. He thought sourly
to himself: "_I'm a captive audience without even an interest in the
production tricks._"
Presently he saw Bill Holden's head. The psychiatrist had squirmed
inside the straps that held him, and now was staring about within the
rocket. His complexion was greenish.
"I understand you're to brief me," Cochrane told him, "on the way up. Do
you want to tell me now what all this is about? I'd like a nice dramatic
narrative, with gestures."
Holden said sickly:
"Go to hell, won't you?"
His head disappeared. Space-nausea was, of course, as definite an
ailment as seasickness. It came from no weight. But Cochrane seemed to
be immune. He turned his mind to the possible purposes of his journey.
He knew nothing at all. His own personal share in the activities of
Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe--the biggest advertising agency in
the world--was the production of the Dikkipatti Hour, top-talent
television show, regularly every Wednesday night between eight-thirty
and nine-thirty o'clock central U. S. time. It was a good show. It was
among the ten most popular shows on three continents. It was not
reasonable that he be ordered to drop it and take orders from a
psychiatrist, even one he'd known unprofessionally for years. But there
was not much, these days, that really made sense.
In a world where cities with populations of less than five millions were
considered small towns, values were peculiar. One of the deplorable
results of living in a world over-supplied with inhabitants was that
there were too many people and not enough jobs. When one had a good job,
and somebody higher up than oneself gave an order, it was obeyed. There
was always somebody else or several somebodies waiting for every job
there was--hoping for it, maybe praying for it. And if a good job was
lost, one had to start all over.
This task might be anything. It was not, however, connected in any way
with the weekly production of the Dikkipatti Hour. And if that
production were scamped this week because Cochrane was away, he would be
the one to take the loss in reputation. The fact that he was on the moon
wouldn't count. It would be assumed that he was slipping. And a slip was
not good. It was definitely not good!
"_I could do a documentary right now_," Cochrane told himself angrily,
"_titled 'Man-afraid-of-his-job.' I could make a very authentic
production. I've got the material!_"
He felt weight for a moment. It was accompanied by booming noises. The
sounds were not in the air outside, because there was no air. They were
reverberations of the rocket-motors themselves, transmitted to the
fabric of the ship. The ship's steering-rockets were correcting the
course of the vessel and--yes, there was another surge of power--nudging
it to a more correct line of flight to meet the space platform coming up
from behind. The platform went around the world six times a day, four
thousand miles out. During three of its revolutions anybody on the
ground, anywhere, could spot it in daylight as an infinitesimal star,
bright enough to be seen against the sky's blueness, rising in the west
and floating eastward to set at the place of sunrise.
There was again weightlessness. A rocket-ship doesn't burn its
rocket-engines all the time. It runs them to get started, and it runs
them to stop, but it does not run them to travel. This ship was floating
above the Earth, which might be a vast sunlit ball filling half the
universe below the rocket, or might be a blackness as of the Pit.
Cochrane had lost track of time, but not of the shattering effect of
being snatched from the job he knew and thought important, to travel
incredibly to do something he had no idea of. He felt, in his mind, like
somebody who climbs stairs in the dark and tries to take a step that
isn't there. It was a shock to find that his work wasn't important even
in the eyes of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe. That he didn't
count. That nothing counted ...
There was another dull booming outside and another touch of weight. Then
the rocket floated on endlessly.
A long time later, something touched the ship's outer hull. It was a
definite, positive clanking sound. And then there was the gentlest and
vaguest of tuggings, and Cochrane could feel the ship being maneuvered.
He knew it had made contact with the space platform and was being drawn
inside its lock.
There was still no weight. The stewardess began to unstrap the
passengers one by one, supplying each with magnetic-soled slippers.
Cochrane heard her giving instructions in their use. He knew the
air-lock was being filled with air from the huge, globular platform. In
time the door at the back--bottom--base of the passenger-compartment
opened. Somebody said flatly:
"Space platform! The ship will be in this air-lock for some three hours
plus for refueling. Warning will be given before departure. Passengers
have the freedom of the platform and will be given every possible
privilege."
The magnetic-soled slippers did hold one's feet to the spiral ramp, but
one had to hold on to a hand-rail to make progress. On the way down to
the exit door, Cochrane encountered Babs. She said breathlessly:
"I can't believe I'm really here!"
"I can believe it," said Cochrane, "without even liking it particularly.
Babs, who told you to come on this trip? Where'd all the orders come
from?"
"Mr. Hopkins' secretary," said Babs happily. "She didn't tell me to
come. I managed that! She said for me to name two science men and two
writers who could work with you. I told her one writer was more than
enough for any production job, but you'd need me. I assumed it was a
production job. So she changed the orders and here I am!"
"Fine!" said Cochrane. His sense of the ironic deepened. He'd thought he
was an executive and reasonably important. But somebody higher up than
he was had disposed of him with absent-minded finality, and that man's
secretary and his own had determined all the details, and he didn't
count at all. He was a pawn in the hands of firm-partners and assorted
secretaries. "Let me know what my job's to be and how to do it, Babs."
Babs nodded. She didn't catch the sarcasm. But she couldn't think very
straight, just now. She was on the space platform, which was the second
most glamorous spot in the universe. The most glamorous spot, of course,
was the moon.
Cochrane hobbled ashore into the platform, having no weight whatever. He
was able to move only by the curious sticky adhesion of his
magnetic-soled slippers to the steel floor-plates beneath him. Or--were
they beneath? There was a crew member walking upside down on a floor
which ought to be a ceiling directly over Cochrane's head. He opened a
door in a side-wall and went in, still upside down. Cochrane felt a
sudden dizziness, at that.
But he went on, using hand-grips. Then he saw Dr. William Holden looking
greenish and ill and trying sickishly to answer questions from West and
Jamison and Bell, who had been plucked from their private lives just as
Cochrane had and were now clamorously demanding of Bill Holden that he
explain what had happened to them.
Cochrane snapped angrily:
"Leave the man alone! He's space-sick! If you get him too much upset
this place will be a mess!"
Holden closed his eyes and said gratefully:
"Shoo them away, Jed, and then come back."
Cochrane waved his hands at them. They went away, stumbling and holding
on to each other in the eerie dream-likeness and nightmarish situation
of no-weight-whatever. There were other passengers from the moon-rocket
in this great central space of the platform. There was a fat woman
looking indignantly at the picture of a weighing-scale painted on the
wall. Somebody had painted it, with a dial-hand pointing to zero pounds.
A sign said, "_Honest weight, no gravity._" There was the stewardess
from the rocket, off duty here. She smoked a cigarette in the blast of
an electric fan. There was a party of moon-tourists giggling foolishly
and clutching at everything and buying souvenirs to mail back to Earth.
"All right, Bill," said Cochrane. "They're gone. Now tell me why all the
not inconsiderable genius in the employ of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and
Fallowe, in my person, has been mobilized and sent up to the moon?"
Bill Holden swallowed. He stood up with his eyes closed, holding onto a
side-rail in the great central room of the platform.
"I have to keep my eyes shut," he explained, queasily. "It makes me ill
to see people walking on side-walls and across ceilings."
A stout tourist was doing exactly that at the moment. If one could walk
anywhere at all with magnetic-soled shoes, one could walk everywhere.
The stout man did walk up the side-wall. He adventured onto the ceiling,
where he was head-down to the balance of his party. He stood there
looking up--down--at them, and he wore a peculiarly astonished and
half-frightened and wholly foolish grin. His wife squealed for him to
come down: that she couldn't bear looking at him so.
"All right," said Cochrane. "You're keeping your eyes closed. But I'm
supposed to take orders from you. What sort of orders are you going to
give?"
"I'm not sure yet," said Holden thinly. "We are sent up here on a
private job for Hopkins--one of your bosses. Hopkins has a daughter.
She's married to a man named Dabney. He's neurotic. He's made a great
scientific discovery and it isn't properly appreciated. So you and I and
your team of tame scientists--we're on our way to the Moon to save his
reason."
"Why save his reason?" asked Cochrane cynically. "If it makes him happy
to be a crackpot--"
"It doesn't," said Holden, with his eyes still closed. He gulped. "Your
job and a large part of my practice depends on keeping him out of a
looney-bin. It amounts to a public-relations job, a production, with me
merely censoring aspects that might be bad for Dabney's psyche.
Otherwise he'll be frustrated."
"Aren't we all?" demanded Cochrane. "Who in hades does he think he is?
Most of us want appreciation, but we have to be glad when we do our work
and get paid for it! We--"
Then he swore bitterly. He had been taken off the job he'd spent years
learning to do acceptably, to phoney a personal satisfaction for the
son-in-law of one of the partners of the firm he worked for. It was
humiliation to be considered merely a lackey who could be ordered to
perform personal services for his boss, without regard to the damage to
the work he was really responsible for. It was even more humiliating to
know he had to do it because he couldn't afford not to.
Babs appeared, obviously gloating over the mere fact that she was
walking in magnetic-soled slippers on the steel decks of the space
platform. Her eyes were very bright. She said:
"Mr. Cochrane, hadn't you better come look at Earth out of the quartz
Earthside windows?"
"Why?" demanded Cochrane bitterly. "If it wasn't that I'd have to hold
onto something with both hands, in order to do it, I'd be kicking
myself. Why should I want to do tourist stuff?"
"So," said Babs, "so later on you can tell when a writer or a scenic
designer tries to put something over on you in a space platform show."
Cochrane grimaced.
"In theory, I should. But do you realize what all this is about? I just
learned!" When Babs shook her head he said sardonically, "We are on the
way to the Moon to stage a private production out of sheer cruelty.
We're hired to rob a happy man of the luxury of feeling sorry for
himself. We're under Holden's orders to cure a man of being a crackpot!"
Babs hardly listened. She was too much filled with the zest of being
where she'd never dared hope to be able to go.
"I wouldn't want to be cured of being a crackpot," protested Cochrane,
"if only I could afford such a luxury! I'd--"
Babs said urgently:
"You'll have to hurry, really! They told me it starts in ten minutes, so
I came to find you right away."
"What starts?"
"We're in eclipse now," explained Babs, starry-eyed. "We're in the
Earth's shadow. In about five minutes we'll be coming out into sunlight
again, and we'll see the new Earth!"
"Guarantee that it will be a new Earth," Cochrane said morosely, "and
I'll come. I didn't do too well on the old one."
But he followed her in all the embarrassment of walking on
magnetic-soled shoes in a total absence of effective gravity. It was
quite a job simply to start off. Without precaution, if he merely tried
to march away from where he was, his feet would walk out from under him
and he'd be left lying on his back in mid-air. Again, to stop without
putting one foot out ahead for a prop would mean that after his feet
paused, his body would continue onward and he would achieve a
full-length face-down flop. And besides, one could not walk with a
regular up-and-down motion, or in seconds he would find his feet
churning emptiness in complete futility.
Cochrane tried to walk, and then irritably took a hand-rail and hauled
himself along it, with his legs trailing behind him like the tail of a
swimming mermaid. He thought of the simile and was not impressed by his
own dignity.
Presently Babs halted herself in what was plainly a metal blister in the
outer skin of the platform. There was a round quartz window, showing the
inside of steel-plate windows beyond it. Babs pushed a button marked
"_Shutter_," and the valves of steel drew back.
Cochrane blinked, lifted even out of his irritableness by the sight
before him.
He saw the immensity of the heavens, studded with innumerable stars.
Some were brighter than others, and they were of every imaginable color.
Tiny glintings of lurid tint--through the Earth's atmosphere they would
blend into an indefinite faint luminosity--appeared so close together
that there seemed no possible interval. However tiny the appearance of a
gap, one had but to look at it for an instant to perceive infinitesimal
flecks of colored fire there, also.
Each tiniest glimmering was a sun. But that was not what made Cochrane
catch his breath.
There was a monstrous space of nothingness immediately before his eyes.
It was round and vast and near. It was black with the utter blackness of
the Pit. It was Earth, seen from its eight-thousand-mile-wide shadow,
unlighted even by the Moon. There was no faintest relief from its
absolute darkness. It was as if, in the midst of the splendor of the
heavens, there was a chasm through which one glimpsed the unthinkable
nothing from which creation was called in the beginning. Until one
realized that this was simply the dark side of Earth, the spectacle was
one of hair-raising horror.
After a moment Cochrane said with a carefully steadied voice:
"My most disparaging opinions of Earth were never as black as this!"
"Wait," said Babs confidently.
Cochrane waited. He had to hold carefully in his mind that this visible
abyss, this enormity of purest dark, was not an opening into nothingness
but was simply Earth at night as seen from space.
Then he saw a faint, faint arch of color forming at its edge. It spread
swiftly. Immediately, it seemed, there was a pinkish glowing line among
the multitudinous stars. It was red. It was very, very bright. It became
a complete half-circle. It was the light of the sun refracted around the
edge of the world.
Within minutes--it seemed in seconds--the line of light was a glory
among the stars. And then, very swiftly, the blazing orb which was the
sun appeared from behind Earth. It was intolerably bright, but it did
not brighten the firmament. It swam among all the myriads of myriads of
suns, burning luridly and in a terrible silence, with visibly writhing
prominences rising from the edge of its disk. Cochrane squinted at it
with light-dazzled eyes.
Then Babs cried softly:
"Beautiful! Oh, beautiful!"
And Cochrane shielded his eyes and saw the world new-born before him.
The arc of light became an arch and then a crescent, and swelled even as
he looked. Dawn flowed below the space platform, and it seemed that seas
and continents and clouds and beauty poured over the disk of darkness
before him.
He stood here, staring, until the steel shutters slowly closed. Babs
said in regret:
"You have to keep your hand on the button to keep the shutters open.
Else the window might get pitted with dust."
Cochrane said cynically:
"And how much good will it have done me to see that, Babs? How can that
be faked in a studio--and how much would a television screen show of
it?"
He turned away. Then he added sourly:
"You stay and look if you like, Babs. I've already had my vanity smashed
to little bits. If I look at that again I'll want to weep in pure
frustration because I can't do anything even faintly as well worth
watching. I prefer to cut down my notions of the cosmos to a tolerable
size. But you go ahead and look!"
He went back to Holden. Holden was painfully dragging himself back into
the rocket-ship. Cochrane went with him. They returned, weightless, to
the admirably designed contour-chairs in which they had traveled to this
place, and in which they would travel farther. Cochrane settled down to
stare numbly at the wall above him. He had been humiliated enough by the
actions of one of the heads of an advertising agency. He found himself
resenting, even as he experienced, the humbling which had been imposed
upon him by the cosmos itself.
Presently the other passengers returned, and the moonship was maneuvered
out of the lock and to emptiness again, and again presently rockets
roared and there was further feeling of intolerable weight. But it was
not as bad as the take-off from Earth.
There followed some ninety-six hours of pure tedium. After the first
accelerating blasts, the rockets were silent. There was no weight.
There was nothing to hear except the droning murmur of unresting
electric fans, stirring the air ceaselessly so that excess moisture from
breathing could be extracted by the dehumidifiers. But for them--if the
air had been left stagnant--the journey would have been insupportable.
There was nothing to see, because ports opening on outer space were not
safe for passengers to look through. Mere humans, untrained to keep
their minds on technical matters, could break down at the spectacle of
the universe. There could be no activity.
Some of the passengers took dozy-pills. Cochrane did not. It was against
the law for dozy-pills to produce a sensation of euphoria, of
well-being. The law considered that pleasure might lead to addiction.
But if a pill merely made a person drowsy, so that he dozed for hours
halfway between sleeping and awake, no harm appeared to be done. Yet
there were plenty of dozy-pill addicts. Many people were not especially
anxious to feel good. They were quite satisfied not to feel anything at
all.
Cochrane couldn't take that way of escape. He lay strapped in his chair
and thought unhappily of many things. He came to feel unclean, as people
used to feel when they traveled for days on end on railroad trains.
There was no possibility of a bath. One could not even change clothes,
because baggage went separately to the moon in a robot freight-rocket,
which was faster and cheaper than a passenger transport, but would kill
anybody who tried to ride it. Fifteen-and twenty-gravity acceleration is
economical of fuel, and six-gravity is not, but nobody can live through
a twenty-gravity lift-off from Earth. So passengers stayed in the
clothes in which they entered the ship, and the only possible concession
to fastidiousness was the disposable underwear one could get and change
to in the rest-rooms.
Babs Deane did not take dozy-pills either, but Cochrane knew better than
to be more than remotely friendly with her outside of office hours. He
did not want to give her any excuse to tell him anything for his own
good. So he spoke pleasantly and kept company only with his own
thoughts. But he did notice that she looked rapt and starry-eyed even
through the long and dreary hours of free flight. She was mentally
tracking the moonship through the void. She'd know when the continents
of Earth were plain to see, and the tints of vegetation on the two
hemispheres--northern and southern--and she'd know when Earth's
ice-caps could be seen, and why.
The stewardess was not too much of a diversion. She was brisk and calm
and soothing, but she became a trifle reluctant to draw too near the
chairs in which her passengers rode. Presently Cochrane made deductions
and maliciously devised a television commercial. In it, a moon-rocket
stewardess, in uniform and looking fresh and charming, would say sweetly
that she went without bathing for days at a time on moon-trips, and did
not offend because she used whoosit's antistinkum. And then he thought
pleasurably of the heads that would roll did such a commercial actually
get on the air.
But he didn't make plans for the production-job he'd been sent to the
moon to do. Psychiatry was specialized, these days, as physical medicine
had been before it. An extremely expensive diagnostician had been sent
to the moon to tap Dabney's reflexes, and he'd gravely diagnosed
frustration and suggested young Dr. Holden for the curative treatment.
Frustration was the typical neurosis of the rich, anyhow, and Bill
Holden had specialized in its cure. His main reliance was on the making
of a dramatic production centering about his patient, which was
expensive enough and effective enough to have made him a quick
reputation. But he couldn't tell Cochrane what was required of him. Not
yet. He knew the disease but not the case. He'd have to see and know
Dabney before he could make use of the extra-special production-crew his
patient's father-in-law had provided from the staff of Kursten, Kasten,
Hopkins and Fallowe.
Ninety-some hours after blast-off from the space platform, the
rocket-ship turned end for end and began to blast to kill its velocity
toward the moon. It began at half-gravity--the red glowing sign gave
warning of it--and rose to one gravity and then to two. After days of
no-weight, two gravities was punishing.
Cochrane thought to look at Babs. She was rapt, lost in picturings of
what must be outside the ship, which she could not see. She'd be
imagining what the television screens had shown often enough, from
film-tapes. The great pock marked face of Luna, with its ring-mountains
in incredible numbers and complexity, and the vast open "seas" which
were solidified oceans of lava, would be clear to her mind's eye. She
would be imagining the gradual changes of the moon's face with nearness,
when the colorings appear. From a distance all the moon seems tan or
sandy in tint. When one comes closer, there are tawny reds and
slate-colors in the mountain-cliffs, and even blues and yellows, and
everywhere there is the ashy, whitish-tan color of the moondust.
Glancing at her, absorbed in her satisfaction, Cochrane suspected that
with only half an excuse she would explain to him how the several
hundreds of degrees difference in the surface-temperature of the moon
between midnight and noon made rocks split and re-split and fracture so
that stuff as fine as talcum powder covered every space not too sharply
tilted for it to rest on.
The feeling of deceleration increased. For part of a second they had the
sensation of three gravities.
Then there was a curious, yielding jar--really very slight--and then the
feeling of excess weight ended altogether. But not the feeling of
weight. They still had weight. It was constant. It was steady. But it
was very slight.
They were on the moon, but Cochrane felt no elation. In the tedious
hours from the space platform he'd thought too much. He was actually
aware of the humiliations and frustrations most men had to conceal from
themselves because they couldn't afford expensive psychiatric
treatments. Frustration was the disease of all humanity, these days. And
there was nothing that could be done about it. Nothing! It simply wasn't
possible to rebel, and rebellion is the process by which humiliation and
frustration is cured. But one could not rebel against the plain fact
that Earth had more people on it than one planet could support.
Merely arriving at the moon did not seem an especially useful
achievement, either to Cochrane or to humanity at large.
Things looked bad.