"Tom?"
"Yes Ruth."
"Good luck," she said. "From all of us."
_Even Jason?_ he wanted to ask, but instead said merely, "Thanks."
He fitted the cumbersome helmet over his head and sealed it to the
joints on his suit. A touch of a button on the control panel pumped
the compartment's air into storage cylinders. Then Tom stood up and
unlocked the hatch directly over his seat.
Reaching for the handholds just outside the hatch, he pulled himself
through, and after a weightless comic ballet managed to plant his
magnetized boots on the skin of the ship. Then, standing, he looked
out at the universe.
Oddly, he felt none of the overpowering emotion he had once expected
of this moment. Grandeur, terror, awe--no, he was strangely calm.
The stars were only points of light on a dead-black background; the
Earth was a fat crescent patched with colors; the sun, through his
heavily-tinted visor, was like the pictures he had seen at planetarium
shows, years ago.
As he secured a lifeline to the grip beside the hatch, Tom thought that
he felt as though someone had stuck a reverse hypodermic into him and
drained away all his emotions.
Only then did he realize what had happened. Jason, the engineer,
the leader, the man who thought of everything, had made Arnoldsson
condition his mind for this. No gaping at the universe for the first
man in space, too much of a chance to take! There's a job to be done
and no time for human frailty or sentiment.
_Not even that_, Tom said to himself. _He wouldn't even allow me one
moment of human emotion._
But as he pushed away from the ship and floated ghost-like toward the
largest of the satellite packages, Tom twisted around for another look
at Earth.
_I wonder if she looked that way before the war?_
* * * * *
Slowly, painfully, men had attempted to rebuild their civilization
after the war had exhausted itself. But of all the things destroyed by
the bombs and plagues, the most agonizing loss was man's sources of
energy.
The coal mines, the oil refineries, the electricity-generating plants,
the nuclear power piles ... all shattered into radioactive rubble.
There could be no return to any kind of organized society while men
had to scavenge for wood to warm themselves and to run their primitive
machines.
Then someone had remembered the satellite.
It had been designed, before the war, to collect solar energy and beam
it to a receiving station on Earth. The satellite packages had been
fired into a 24-hour orbit, circling the Earth over a fixed point on
the Equator. The receiving station, built on the southeastern coast
of the United States, saw the five units as a single second-magnitude
star, low on the horizon all year, every year.
Of course the packages wavered slightly in their orbits, but not enough
in eighteen years to spread very far apart. A man could still put them
together into a power-beaming satellite.
If he could get there.
And if they were not damaged.
And if he knew how to put them together.
Through months that stretched into years, over miles of radioactive
wilderness, on horseback, on carts, on foot, those who knew about the
satellite spread the word, carefully, secretly, to what was left of
North America's scientists and engineers. Gradually they trickled into
the once-abandoned settlement.
They elected a leader: Jason, the engineer, one of the few men who knew
anything about rockets to survive the war and the lunatic bands that
hunted down anyone suspected of being connected with pre-war science.
Jason's first act was to post guards around the settlement. Then he
organized the work of rebuilding the power-receiving station and a
man-carrying rocket.
They pieced together parts of a rocket and equipment that had been
damaged by the war. What they did not know, they learned. What they
did not have, they built or cannibalized from ruined equipment.
Jason sent armed foragers out for gasoline, charcoal and wood. They
built a ramshackle electricity generator. They planted crops and hunted
the small game in the local underbrush. A major celebration occurred
whenever a forager came back towing a stray cow or horse or goat.
They erected fences around the settlement, because more than once they
had to fight off the small armies of looters and anti-scientists that
still roved the countryside.
But finally they completed the rocket ... after exhausting almost every
scrap of material and every ounce of willpower.
Then they picked a pilot: Thomas H. Morris, age 41, former historian
and teacher. He had arrived a year before the completion of the rocket
after walking 1,300 miles to find the settlement; his purpose was to
organize some of the scientists and explore the bombed-out cities to
see what could be salvaged out of man's shattered heritage.
But Tom was ideal for the satellite job: the right size--five-six and
one-hundred thirty pounds; no dependents--wife and two sons dead of
radiation sickness. True, he had no technical background whatsoever;
but with Arnoldsson's hypnotic conditioning he could be taught all that
it was necessary for him to know ... maybe.
Best of all, though, he was thoroughly expendable.
So Jason made a deal with him. There could be no expeditions into the
cities until the satellite was finished, because every man was needed
at the settlement. And the satellite could not be finished until
someone volunteered to go up in the rocket and assemble it.
It was like holding a candy bar in front of a small child. He accepted
Jason's terms.
* * * * *
The Earth turned, and with it the tiny spark of life alone in the
emptiness around the satellite. Tom worked unmindful of time, his eyes
and hands following Jason's engineering commands through Arnoldsson's
post-hypnotic directions, with occasional radio conferences.
But his conscious mind sought refuge from the strangeness of space,
and he talked almost constantly into his radio while he worked, talked
about anything, everything, to the girl on the other end of the
invisible link.
"... and once the settlement is getting the power beamed from this
contraption, we're going to explore the cities. Guess we won't be
able to get very far inland, but we can still tackle Washington,
Philadelphia and New York ... plenty for us there."