_How do you fill a pipette and measure out
a half c.c. of hydrochloric acid into a test
tube--from a quarter million miles away?_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories December 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The real problem, of course, is not quite that simple. You don't
literally fill a pipette or use a test tube; you activate metering
circuits that force tiny, ground-glass plungers a measured distance
into reagent pumps. You send signals that close some valves and open
others, and apply heat and adjust temperatures, and filter solutions,
and send the product to a spectrometer that determines what you've got
and how much.
Then you have to code it and get the information from the moon to earth.
James Cochran had seen the equipment work through hundreds of checkout
analyses. But he didn't understand it. He was a chemist, and he
had drawn up the specifications for the chemical analyzers of the
Prospector, but it had been the electronic boys who dreamed up the
remote mechanization and the telemetry equipment that would allow him
to sit before a complex panel at the Center and direct his chemical
laboratory on the moon to learn what the moon was made of. Some of
the light-headed technicians who worked on the project had dubbed it
Operation Green Cheese, but Cochran had more respect for the complexity
of the effort.
It was Sunday midnight. The beginning of countdown was forty hours
away. Cochran's crew had finished the chemical checkout, but in the
assembly hangar technicians still swarmed about the Prospector, giving
final-check to the power and telemetry components.
Jim Cochran signed off the last of the check reports and dropped them
in the slot for delivery to the Project Director. He turned off the
lights over his own desk and went out to the hangar. Under the blaze
of fluorescent lights the device looked like some monstrous insect.
The differential housings over the worm-screw drives gleamed like a
red, segmented carapace. The blue appendages of the solar cell boxes
were extended as if in some frantic appeal. The radar dish and the
helical antenna extended mutely upward. And, like a furious proboscis,
the exploratory drill, which would pierce the moon's skin to a depth of
five hundred feet, seemed to gnaw at the concrete floor of the hangar.
Sam Jarvis, supervisor of electronic checkout, saw Jim Cochran enter
and came over to him with a broad, weary grin. "AOK, so far! This
package is going to be perfect. If only the rocket boys will set up a
bird that will take it to the moon--"
"They'd better," said Jim. "I don't think I could ever go through this
again if they dump the Prospector in the drink."
* * * * *
Sam turned back to look at the robot machine and the swarming
technicians. "Yes, you could," he said. "All of us have gone through
heartbreak time and again the past five years, watching them blow up,
or fall back and burn in the atmosphere because the motors didn't
ignite. Or seeing them get all the way to the moon and have some
five-dollar transistor conk out. But we always have at it again. You
will, too. You're new, but you're one of us now. You never back out
when you've come this far."
Watching the Prospector, Jim knew Sam was right. It had taken some
persuasion to bring him to this point, however. Until a couple of
years ago he had believed he would be content with ivory-tower plastics
research for the rest of his life. The persuasion had been applied when
Mary's brother, Allan Wright, had made the astronaut team.
Allan and Jim had grown up together. There was no other person Jim felt
closer to except Mary and their two children. Allan had dreamed of
space when they were kids, and when he was fifteen, he said, "I'm going
out there. I don't know how. But, somehow, I'm going out there."
Now, he had been selected to captain the first Apollo voyage. He had
been born for that purpose, he said.
But while he was still in the general pool of astronauts he had opened
his campaign to get Jim into the space program. "They need the best
brains they can get," Allan said. "You haven't got any right to sit in
a musty old plastics lab while guys with half your ability try to get
us into space. NASA will take you tomorrow!"
Jim didn't try to tell him that his plastics lab wasn't exactly musty,
or that he didn't think of himself as one of the best brains in the
country. But Mary sided with Allan; she was almost as excited about
space as he was. In the end, Jim went to NASA. Within days, he had
been assigned to head the development of the Prospector chemical
mechanization.
It had been something of a jolt to pull up all the roots he had so
carefully put down for him and his family, and move to the hectic,
bustling, space-frontier community of the Center. But he wasn't sorry.
It put something new in the blood, something men had never known before.
Space!
The great Saturn lifted slowly, on a vast blossom of fire, with snowy
lox streaming down its sides. Then it was gone, a twinkle of fire high
above, among the stars. That was all.
Mary and Jim Cochran continued to stare at the fading twinkle, and
finally they turned away. Allan had obtained permission to be in the
blockhouse during the firing. It hadn't been necessary for Jim to be
there. He didn't want to know the instant-by-instant telemetry reports
which told whether or not the flight was successful. Sam or Allan would
call him when they knew. That would be soon enough for him.
"Let's drive down to the beach and watch the moon from there," said
Mary. "We can't just turn around and go home, like--like nothing had
happened."
Jim smiled in the darkness. Mary was as eager as he was for the success
of the flight. And she didn't have his fear of failure, that kept
him from wanting to know the maybe-yes, maybe-no indications that the
telemetry would first show.
"Sure," he said, "that's a good place to watch it."
The moon.
* * * * *
They watched its reflection thrashing on the water as the breakers
rolled across, under, and around it. It was the same image that men
had watched and wondered about and feared--for a half million years.
The first creatures that had any semblance of manhood had sat on their
haunches on this same shore and watched the same moon and the same
water.
And felt the same fears, Jim thought.
He didn't know whether it was fear or not, but there was some sense of
awesome mystery that filled him when he looked at the moon. It had been
that way all his life. He remembered how it was when he was a boy and
he walked through the fields at night on his way home. He had to pass
Cramer's Pond, and when the moon was up its light from the sky and its
reflection from the pond seemed to fill the whole earth with a cold,
silver light. He always hurried past the pond on such nights.
Mary felt it, too. "I wonder why the moon makes people feel the way
they do."
"How does it make people feel?"
"Oh, kind of--kind of--_you_ know!"
Jim laughed aloud. This was a typical Mary Cochran explanation. But it
told him all he needed to know. What she said was quite true. He _did_
know.
The baying of dogs on a wintery, moonlit night.
The madness called lunacy.
Seeds must be planted just so, in relation to the moon, or the crop
will fail.
Men had always felt strange things about the moon. Would a Saturn
missile and a mechanical monster in its nose be able to destroy all
that?
Jim started the car. "Let's get back. I've _got_ to know how the
flight's going!"
* * * * *
They were still in the blockhouse, but the tension was relaxed. They
were talking and watching the meters and cathode ray tubes without the
strain and fear of failure. Jim knew the answer even before Sam and
Allan walked up to him and slapped him on the back.
"Where the devil did you go?" said Sam. "I thought you were going to be
right behind me when we fired, and you weren't here at all!"
"It's like your first baby, you want to be there, and you don't. Was it
a good shot?"
"Was it a good shot?" Allan's face became ecstatic. "We've never had a
better one. On course all the way!"
The Project Director, Emil Hennesey was behind them. His face was
bleak. "I expected you to be here for the firing, Cochran," he said.
"It seems to display little interest in your end of the project that
you didn't feel it necessary to show up."
Jim looked at him steadily and shrugged without answer. Hennesey was
one guy whose presence on the space team Jim couldn't figure out. He
was an ex-Major, and he had no capacity for dreaming. Men, machines,
transistors, rockets--they were all the same thing, merely objects to
be made to obey.
"You are aware of your next sequence of duties, I trust?" said Hennesey.