"Mr. Coving to see you, sir."
"Send him in."
Rayburn Coving was probably the best rocket-fuel man in the world. He
had a little of his sandy hair left, not much, and his forehead was
permanently creased from frowning. "I'm afraid that new benzoic
derivative is a failure, Chief. It piles up corrosion in the tubes too
fast. They'd be clogged halfway through the trip."
One hundred and twenty thousand dollars up the spout. Joshua sighed.
"Well, I suppose the chance of success was worth it. The added power in
relatively smaller space would have solved so many other problems."
"I'm sorry it failed."
Joshua smiled. "To paraphrase a certain American inventor--we're finding
any number of ways you can't go to the Moon. What now, Coving?"
"Back to the old method--and the other problems. None of them are
insurmountable, though. A little more time--"
"Yes--a little more time." Joshua grimaced inwardly. He was talking to
Coving as though they had years--not as though their time had run out.
He was even in debt for Coving's labor; overdrawn on it without enough
money to pay.
The moment of weakness--of deep-down weariness--passed. Joshua Lake
stiffened as he had stiffened so many times before. As he had stiffened
when Zornoff's alloys had flunked out and the first trip to the bank had
been made necessary. The first trip to the bank. Joshua smiled wryly.
The bank people had been cordial then. Even servile. Later it had been
different. Now--
"You were saying, Mr. Lake--?"
"Have you seen Morton lately? What's the latest on the radar relay
equipment?"
"No major bugs, I think. It's coming along famously."
"Good!" For two hundred odd thousand it certainly should, Joshua felt.
"Let me know how you make out, Coving."
"I will, Chief. I'll get the order in for the new chemicals
immediately."
"Eh--oh, yes. Do that. Do that by all means."
Coving left. Joshua Lake put his head against the back rest of the chair
and closed his eyes. He dozed, drifting into a haze from weariness.
_It's been so long--so very long. Seven years--eight--ten. Ten years.
Good heavens! Was it possible? It didn't seem that long. Ten years to
make a dream succeed._
_Or fail._
Joshua slept and again--as in the past--his rest was plagued with
visions. The torment of his days took many forms in an alert
subconscious too taut to relax. He had seen before him mountains too
steep to cross--chasms too deep and wide to bridge. Often, when a great
problem was solved, he would look back, nights later, to see the
mountain or the chasm from the other side.
Now his vision was different. No mountain before him, but a face--the
stern craggy face of an obstacle in his path.
Lee Gorman.
The face was of clay--yet it lived. The eyes were cold, disdainful. And
a weird, green creation of Joshua's own mind was sketching Gorman in the
numbers, signs, and symbols of a rocket that would never reach the Moon.
Joshua awoke with a start and found Lucy bending over him. "You didn't
answer the buzzer, Mr. Lake. I was worried."
"I must have dozed off, Lucy. Sorry."
"I'm going home now--if there's nothing else."
"Nothing else. I'm going home myself. Good night."
Joshua paused beside his car in the parking lot to stare at the lighted
windows of the big hangar. The second shift had come on. They would work
all night; then, tomorrow, they would line up with the others at the pay
window. But there wouldn't be any money. The next night the hangar
windows would be dark.
He got into the car and drove home.
Myra was waiting for him. She took his hat. After he kissed her, she
said, "Your eyes are red, dear. You've been working much too hard. Shall
we have dinner in the patio?"
"That would be nice."
Joshua had little to say during the meal, and Myra was quiet
also--adjusting herself, as she had always done, to his mood. Finally,
she said, "That will be all, Bertha. Leave the coffee pot."
The maid left. A slight chill was coming in off the desert. Joshua
shivered and said, "We're through, Myra."
"Through? I don't understand."
"The Moon trip. I can't swing it. The money's run out. There's no place
I can raise another dime."
"But you've worked so hard--and so long! And you are so close to
success."
"We've made a lot of progress, but the rocket isn't ready yet. Now it's
too late."
They were silent for a time. Then Myra said, "In a way, I'm glad. You
should have stopped long ago. You aren't strong enough to stand this
pace forever. Now we can go away--get a small place somewhere. That Moon
rocket was killing you, Joshua."
Joshua pondered the point. "Killing me? No, I don't think so. I think it
has been keeping me alive."
"Don't say that, dear! You make it sound so--so brutal! Year in and
year out. Fighting disappointment--failure. Aging before my eyes while I
sit here night after night!"
_Fighting disappointment--failure._ Yes. That was the kind of fight it
had been. How many failures? The first big one had come six years
before....
"Acceleration, Monsieur, must be achieved in the first two thousand
miles of flight. After that, the speed of the ship remains constant. You
follow me?" Tardeau, the half-mad French genius had explained it so
logically. And Joshua had believed in him. That's where you made your
big gamble in a project of this kind. You selected your men and then
believed in them. Others dissented, of course. There are always
dissenters. And always points that could not be proven or disproven on
the drawing boards or in the test pits....
* * * * *
"I follow you, Henri. The booster units will be in three sections."
"Exactly, Msieu. The primary--ah, booster, as you say, breaks free at
twelve miles. That one, and the secondary, we control with radar. We
touch a button and Voila! they are free!"
"In case of the men in the ship blacking out, I think you said."
"Exactly. But the third will be disengaged from within the ship and she
will be free as a bird to fly to your most illusive Moon!"
"And the return?"
"There we have a much lighter ship, Monsieur. The smaller boosters will
lift her easily. The return trip will be slower--much slower, but she
will return!"
Michael Bernard was the dissenter. "The Frenchman's crazy! Mad as a
hatter, Chief."
"You think it won't work, then?"
"Too damn complicated. A dozen units of time and mechanism have to mesh
perfectly. The odds are against that happening. After all, you've got to
remember, what we're attempting has never been done before."
"But if it did work--?"
"It would be a beauty."
"Better than your idea of a single booster?"
"If it worked--yes. The weight problem would be solved. Five men could
ride the rocket. But--"
"Let's try it, Mike. Let's believe in our destiny."
"Okay--you're the boss. But destiny's a hard thing to lay out and
analyze on a drawing board."
A man and his dream....
The radar equipment had failed. Burdened with the weight of exhausted
booster sections, the rocket curved back into the clutches of gravity.
It crashed on the fringe of the Amazon jungles.
Five Moon pioneers dead. Three uninsured, dependent families. Joshua
provided for them, but the critical newspapers overlooked that point.
One editorial observed that Joshua Lake would get a rocket to the Moon
and back if it took every able-bodied man in the country. The project
would have died right there if Joshua had needed money. No bank in the
nation would have loaned him a dime. Fortunately he was not yet broke.
He started over.
_Fortunately?_
* * * * *
At times he had wondered. But always, his faith had returned to buoy him
up....
Joshua reached out and took Myra's hand. He looked up into the sky. "You
may be wrong, my dear. Possibly it's the other way. A man's ambition--"
he smiled. "Lee called it an obsession once. A man's dream can keep him
alive."
"But why does it have to be so hard? Why can't one of the big
corporations help you? They'll profit from your success!"
"At least I had no competition in the fulfillment of my dream."
They were silent for a time; then Myra said, "But now you can rest.
We'll go away. We don't need much money. We'll have a garden. You can
lie in the sun."
He laughed softly; not with humor; rather from a quiet, new-welling
courage. "We're talking as though it were all over--finished, done with.
That isn't right."