The first great rocket flight into space, bearing
intrepid pioneers to the Moon. The world's ecstasy
flared into red mob-hate when President Stanley
canceled the flight. How did he get that way?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The crowd gathered to make a curious noise this cold grey morning
before the scheduled Birth. They arrived in gleaming scarlet
tumble-bugs and yellow plastic beetles, yawning and singing and ready.
The Birth was a big thing for them.
He stood alone up in his high office tower window, watching them with
a sad impatience in his grey eyes. His name was William Stanley,
president of the company that owned this building and all those other
work-hangars down on the tarmac, and all that landing field stretching
two miles off into the Jersey mists. William Stanley was thinking about
the Birth.
The Birth of _what_? Stanley's large, finely sculptured head felt
heavier, older. Science, with a scalpel of intense flame would slash
wide the skulls of engineers, chemists, mechanics in a titanic
Caesarian, and out would come the Rocket!
"Yezzir! Yezzir!" he heard the far-off, faint and raucous declarations
of the vendors and hawkers. "Buy ya Rocket Toys! Buy ya Rocket Games!
Rocket Pictures! Rocket soap! Rocket teethers for the tiny-tot! Rocket,
Rocket, Rocket! _Hey!_"
Shutting the open glassite frame before him, his thin lips drew tight.
Morning after morning America sent her pilgrims to this shrine. They
peered in over the translucent restraint barrier as if the Rocket were
a caged beast.
He saw one small girl drop her Rocket toy. It shattered, and was folded
under by the moving crowd's feet.
"Mr. Stanley?"
"Uh? Oh, Captain Greenwald. Sorry. Forgot you were here." Stanley
measured his slow, thoughtful steps to his clean-topped desk.
"Captain," he sighed wearily, "you're looking at the unhappiest man
alive." He looked at Greenwald across the desk. "That Rocket is the
gift of a too-generous science to a civilization of adult-children
who've fiddled with dynamite ever since Nobel invented it. They--"
He got no further. The office door burst inward. A tall, work-grimed
man strode swiftly in--all oil, all heat, all sunburnt, wrinkled
leather skin. Rocket flame burnt in his dark, glaring eyes. He stopped
short at Stanley's desk, breathing heavily, leaning against it.