"You're Space Exploration personnel," said the major with the same
coolness. "You will be used to instruct naval personnel, and your space
tug will be asked to go along to the Platform as an auxiliary vessel.
For purposes of assisting in the landing of the Moonship at the
Platform, you understand. You'll haul her away from the Platform when
she's refueled and supplied, so she can start off for the Moon. But the
occupation of the Moon will be strictly Navy."
Joe's expression became carefully unreadable. "I think," he said evenly,
"I'd better not comment."
Major Holt nodded. "Very wise--not that we'd repeat anything you did
say. But the point is, Joe, that just one day before the Moonship does
take off, the United Nations will be informed that it is a United States
naval vessel. The doctrine of the freedom of space--like the freedom of
the seas--will be promulgated. And the United States will say that a
United States naval task force is starting off into space on an official
mission. To attack a Space Exploration ship is one thing. That's like a
scientific expedition. But to fire on an American warship on official
business is a declaration of war. Especially since that ship can shoot
back--and will."
Joe listened. He said, "It's daring somebody to try another Pearl
Harbor?"
"Exactly," said the major. "It's time for us to be firm--now that we can
back it up. I don't think the Moonship will be fired on."
"But they'll need me and my gang just the same," said Joe slowly, "for
tugboat work at the Platform?"
"Exactly," said the major.
"Then," Joe said doggedly, "they get us. My gang will gripe about being
edged out of the trip. They won't like it. But they'd like backing out
still less. We'll play it the way it's dealt--but we won't pretend to
like it."
Major Holt's expression did not change at all, but Joe had an odd
feeling that the major approved of him.
"Yes. That's right, Joe," his father added. "You--you'll have to go
aloft once more, son. After that, we'll talk it over."
Sally hadn't said a word during the discussion, but she'd watched Joe
every second. Later, out on the porch of the major's quarters, she had a
great deal to say. But that couldn't affect the facts.
The world at large, of course, received no inkling of the events in
preparation. The Shed and the town of Bootstrap and all the desert for
a hundred-mile circle round about, were absolutely barred to all
visitors. Anybody who came into that circle stayed in. Most people were
kept out. All that anyone outside could discover was that enormous
quantities of cryptic material had poured and still were pouring into
the Shed. But this time security was genuinely tight. Educated guesses
could be made, and they were made; but nobody outside the closed-in area
save a very few top-ranking officials had any real knowledge. The world
only knew that something drastic and remarkable was in prospect.
Mike, though, was able to write a letter to the girl who'd written him.
Major Holt arranged it. Mike wrote his letter on paper supplied by
Security, with ink supplied by Security, and while watched by Security
officers. His letter was censored by Major Holt himself, and it did not
reveal that Mike was back on Earth. But it did invite a reply--and Mike
sweated as he waited for one.
The others had plenty to sweat about. Joe and Haney and the Chief were
acting as instructors to the Moonship's crew. They taught practical
space navigation. At first they thought they hadn't much to pass on, but
they found out otherwise. They had to pass on data on everything from
how to walk to how to drink coffee, how to eat, sleep, why one should
wear gravity harness, and the manners and customs of ships in space.
They had to show why in space fighting a ship might send missiles on
before it, but would really expect to do damage with those it left
behind. They had to warn of the dangers of unshielded sunshine, and the
equal danger of standing in shadow for more than five minutes, and----
They had material for six months of instruction courses, but there was
barely a week to pass it on. Joe was run ragged, but in spite of
everything he managed to talk at some length with Sally. He found
himself curiously anxious to discuss any number of things with his
father, too, who suddenly appeared to be much more intelligent than Joe
had ever noticed before.
He was almost unhappy when it was certain that the Moonship would take
off for space on the following day. He talked about it with Sally the
night before take-off.
"Look," he said awkwardly. "As far as I'm concerned this has turned out
a pretty sickly business. But when we have got a base on the Moon, it'll
be a good job done. There will be one thing that nobody can stop!
Everybody's been living in terror of war. If we hold the Moon the cold
war will be ended. You can't kick on my wanting to help end that!"
Sally smiled at him in the moonlight.
"And--meanwhile," said Joe clumsily, "well--when I come back we can do
some serious talking about--well--careers and such things. Until
then--no use. Right?"
Sally's smile wavered. "Very sensible," she agreed wrily. "And awfully
silly, Joe. I know what kind of a career I want! What other fascinating
topic do you know to talk about, Joe?"
"I don't know of any. Oh, yes! Mike got a letter from his girl. I don't
know what she said, but he's walking on air."
"But it isn't funny!" said Sally indignantly. "Mike's a person! A fine
person! If he'll let me, I'll write to his girl myself and--try to make
friends with her so when you come back I--maybe I can be a sort of
match-maker."
"That, I like!" Joe said warmly. "You're swell sometimes, Sally!"
Sally looked at him enigmatically in the moonlight.
"There are times when it seems to escape your attention," she observed.
* * * * *
The next morning she cried a little when he left her, to climb in the
space tug which was so small a part of today's activity. Joe and his
crew were the only living men who had ever made a round trip to the
Platform and back. But now there was the Moonship to go farther than
they'd been allowed. It was even clumsier in design than the Platform,
though it was smaller. But it wasn't designed to stay in space. It was
to rest on the powdery floor of a ring-mountain's central plain.
Let it get off into space, and somehow get to the Platform to reload.
Then let it replace the rockets it would burn in this take-off and it
could go on out to emptiness. It would make history as the first
serious attempt by human beings to reach the Moon.
Joe and his followers would go along simply to handle guided missiles if
it came to a fight, and to tow the Moonship to its wharf--the
Platform--and out into midstream again when it resumed its journey. And
that was all.
The Moonship lifted from the floor of the Shed to the sound of hundreds
of pushpot engines.
Then the space tug roared skyward. Her take-off rockets here substituted
for the pushpots. Her second-stage rockets were also of the nonpoisonous
variety, because she fired them at a bare 60,000 feet. They were
substitutes for the jatos the pushpots carried.
She was out in space when the third-stage rockets roared dully outside
her hull.
When the Moonship crossed the west coast of Africa, the space tug was
400 miles below and 500 miles behind. When the Moonship crossed Arabia,
the difference was 200 miles vertically and less than 100 in line.
Then the Moonship released small objects, steadied by gyroscopes and
flung away by puffs of compressed air. The small objects spread out.
Haney and Mike and the Chief had reloaded the firing racks from inside
the ship, and now were intent upon control boards and radar. They
pressed buttons. One by one, little puffs of smoke appeared in space.
They had armed the little space missiles, setting off tiny flares which
had no function except to prove that each missile was ready for use.
By the time the two space craft floated toward India, above an area from
which war rockets had been known to rise, there were more little weapons
floating with them. One screen of missiles hurtled on before the space
tug, and another behind. Anything that came up from Earth would
instantly be attacked by dozens of midget ships bent upon suicide.
Radar probed the space formation, but enemies of the fleet and the
Platform very wisely did no more than probe. The Moonship and its
attendants went across the Pacific, still rising. Above the longitude of
Washington, the space tug left its former post and climbed, nudging the
Moonship this way and that. And from behind, the Platform came floating
splendidly.
Tiny figures in space suits extended the incredibly straight lines which
were plastic hoses filled with air. Very, very gently indeed, the great,
bulbous Platform and the squat, flat Moonship came together and touched.
They moored in contact.
And then the inert small missiles that had floated below, all the way
up, flared simultaneously. Their rockets emitted smoke. In fine
alignment, they plunged forward through emptiness, swerved with a
remarkable precision, and headed out for emptiness beyond the Platform's
orbit. Their function had been to protect the Moonship on its way out.
That function was performed. There were too many of them to recover, so
they went out toward the stars.
When their rockets burned out they vanished. But a good hour later, when
it was considered that they were as far out as they were likely to go,
they began to blow up. Specks of flame, like the tiniest of new stars,
flickered against the background of space.
But Joe and the others were in the Platform by then. They'd brought up
mail for the crew. And they were back on duty.
The Platform seemed strange with the Moonship's crew aboard. It had been
a gigantic artificial world with very few inhabitants. With twenty-five
naval ratings about, plus the four of its regular crew, plus the space
tug's complement, it seemed excessively crowded.
And it was busy. There were twenty-five new men to be guided as they
applied what they'd been taught aground about life in space. It was
three full Earthdays before the stores intended for the journey to the
Moon and the maintenance of a base there really began to move. The tug
and the space wagons had to be moored outside and reached only by space
suits through small personnel airlocks.
And there was the matter of discipline. Lieutenant Commander Brown had
been put in command of the Platform for experience in space. He was
considered to be prepared for command of the Moonship by that
experience. So now he turned over command of the Platform to Brent--he
made a neat ceremony of it--and took over the ship that would go out to
the Moon. He made another ceremony out of that.
In command of the Moonship, his manner to Joe was absolutely correct. He
followed regulations to the letter--to a degree that left Joe blankly
uncomprehending. But he wouldn't have gotten along in the Navy if he
hadn't. He'd tried to do the same thing in the Platform, and it wasn't
practical. But he ignored all differences between Joe and himself. He
made no overtures of friendship, but that was natural. Unintentionally,
Joe had defied him. He now deliberately overlooked all that, and Joe
approved of him--within limits.
But Mike and Haney and the Chief did not. They laid for him. And they
considered that they got him. When he took over the Moonship, Lieutenant
Commander Brown naturally maintained naval discipline and required
snappy, official naval salutes on all suitable occasions, even in the
Platform. And Joe's gang privately tipped off the noncommissioned
personnel of the Moonship. Thereafter, no enlisted man ever saluted
Lieutenant Brown without first gently detaching his magnet-soled shoes
from the floor. When a man was free, a really snappy salute gave a
diverting result. The man's body tilted forward to meet his rising arm,
the upward impetus was one-sided, and every man who saluted Brown
immediately made a spectacular kowtow which left him rigidly at salute
floating somewhere overhead with his back to Lieutenant Brown. With a
little practice, it was possible to add a somersault to the other
features. On one historic occasion, Brown walked clanking into a
storeroom where a dozen men were preparing supplies for transfer to the
Moonship. A voice cried, "Shun!" And instantly twelve men went floating
splendidly about the storeroom, turning leisurely somersaults, all
rigidly at salute, and all wearing regulation poker faces.
An order abolishing salutes in weightlessness followed shortly after.
It took four days to get the transfer of supplies properly started. It
took eight to finish the job. Affixing fresh rockets to the outside of
the Moonship's hull alone called for long hours in space suits. During
this time Mike floated nearby in a space wagon. One of the Navy men was
a trifle overcourageous. He affected to despise safety lines. Completing
the hook-on of a landing rocket, he straightened up too abruptly and
went floating off toward the Milky Way.
Mike brought him back. After that there was less trouble.
Even so, the Moonship and the Platform were linked together for thirteen
full days, during which the Platform seemed extraordinarily crowded. On
the fourteenth day the two ships sealed off and separated. Joe and his
crew in the space tug hauled the Moonship a good five miles from the
Platform.
The space tug returned to the Platform. A blinker signal came across the
five-mile interval. It was a very crisp, formal, Navy-like message.
Then the newly-affixed rockets on the Moonship's hull spurted their
fumes. The big ship began to move. Not outward from Earth, of course.
That was where it was going. But it had the Platform's 12,000 miles per
hour of orbital speed. If the bonds of gravitation could have been
snapped at just the proper instant, that speed alone would have carried
the Moonship all the way to its destination. But they couldn't. So the
Moonship blasted to increase its orbital speed. It would swing out and
out, and as the Earth's pull grew weaker with distance the same weight
of rockets would move the same mass farther and farther toward the Moon.
The Moonship's course would be a sort of slowly flattening curve,
receding from Earth and becoming almost a straight line where Earth's
and the Moon's gravitational fields cancelled each other.
From there, the Moonship would have only to brake its fall against a
gravity one-sixth that of Earth, and reaching out a vastly shorter
distance.
Joe and the others watched the roiling masses of rocket fumes as the
ship seemed to grow infinitely small.
"We should've been in that ship," said Haney heavily when the naked eye
could no longer pick it out. "We could've beat her to the Moon!"
Joe said nothing. He ached a little inside. But he reflected that the
men who'd guided the Platform to its orbit had been overshadowed by
himself and Haney and the Chief and Mike. A later achievement always
makes an earlier one look small. Now the four of them would be
forgotten. History would remember the commander of the Moonship.
Forgotten? Yes, perhaps. But the names of the four of them, Joe and
Haney and the Chief and Mike, would still be remembered in a language
Joe couldn't speak, in a small village he couldn't name, on those
occasions when the Mohawk tribe met in formal council.
The Chief grumbled. Mike stared out the port with bitter envy.
"It was a dirty trick," growled the Chief. "We shoulda been part of the
first gang ever to land on the Moon!"
Joe grimaced. His crew needed to be cured of feeling the same way he
did.
"I wouldn't say this outside of our gang," said Joe carefully, "but if
it hadn't been for us four that ship wouldn't be on the way at all.
Haney figured the trick that got us back to Earth the first time, or
else we'd have been killed. If we had been killed, Mike wouldn't have
figured out the metal-concrete business. But for him, that Moonship
wouldn't even be a gleam in anybody's eye. And if the Chief hadn't blown
up that manned rocket we fought in the space wagons, there wouldn't be
any Platform up here to reload and refuel the Moonship. So they left us
behind! But just among the four of us I think we can figure that if it
hadn't been for us they couldn't have made it!"
Haney grinned slowly at Joe. The Chief regarded him with irony. Mike
said, "Yeah. Haney, and me, and the Chief. We did it all."
"Uh-huh," said the Chief sardonically. "Us three. Just us three. Joe
didn't do anything. Just a bum, he is. We oughta tell Sally he's no good
and she oughta pick herself out a guy that'll amount to something some
day." He hit Joe between the shoulders. "Sure! Just a bum, Joe! That's
all! But we got a weakness for you. We'll let you hang around with us
just the same! Come on, guys! Let's get something to eat!"
The four of them marched down a steel-floored corridor, their
magnetic-soled shoes clanking on the plates. Their progress was
uncertain and ungainly and altogether undignified. Suddenly the Chief
began to bawl a completely irrelevant song to the effect that the
inhabitants of the kingdom of Siam were never known to wash their
dishes. Haney chimed in, and Mike. They were all very close together,
and they were not at all impressive. But it hit Joe very hard, this
sudden knowledge that the others didn't really care. It was the first
time it had occurred to him that Haney and Mike and the Chief would
rather be left behind with him, as a gang, than go on to individual high
achievement in a first landing on the Moon.
It felt good. It felt _real_ good.
* * * * *
But that, and all other sources of satisfaction, was wiped out by news
that came back from the Moonship a bare six hours later.
The Moonship was in trouble. The sequence and timing of its rocket
blasts were worked out on Earth, and checked by visual and radar
observation. The computations were done by electronic brains the
Moonship could not possibly have carried. And everything worked out. The
ship was on course and its firings were on schedule.
But then the unexpected happened. It was an error which no machine could
ever have predicted, for which statistics and computations could never
have compensated. It was a _human_ error. At the signal for the final
acceleration blast, the pilot of the Moonship had fired the wrong set of
rockets.
Inexperience, stupidity, negligence, excitement--the reason didn't
matter. After years of planning and working and dreaming, one human
finger had made a mistake. And the mistake was fatal!
When the mistake was realized, they'd had sense enough to cut loose the
still-firing rockets. But the damage had been done. The ship was still
plunging on. It would reach the Moon. But it wouldn't land in
Aristarchus crater as planned. It would crash. If every rocket remaining
mounted on the hull were to be fired at the best possible instant, the
Moonship would hit near Copernicus, and it would land with a terminal
velocity of 800 feet per second--540 miles an hour.
It could even be calculated that when the Moonship landed, the explosion
ought to be visible from Earth with a fairly good telescope. It was due
to take place in thirty-two hours plus or minus a few minutes.
11
The others got the space tug into the platform's lock and did things to
it, in the way of loading, that its designers never intended, while Joe
was calling Earth for calculations. The result was infuriating. The
Moonship had taken off for the Moon on the other side of the Platform's
orbit, when it had a velocity of more than 12,000 miles an hour in the
direction it wished to go. The Platform and of course the space tug was
now on the reverse side of the Platform's orbit. And of course they now
had a velocity of more than 12,000 miles per hour away from the
direction in which it was urgently necessary for the space tug to go.
They could wait for two hours to take off, said Earth, or waste the time
and fuel they'd need to throw away to duplicate the effect of waiting.
"But we can't wait!" raged Joe. Then he snapped. "Look here! Suppose we
take off from here, dive at Earth, make a near-graze, and let its
gravity curve our course! Like a cometary path! Figure that! That's what
we've got to do!"
He kicked off his magnetic-soled shoes and went diving down to the
airlock. Over his shoulder he panted an order for the radar-duty man to
relay anything from Earth down to him there. He arrived to find Haney
and Mike in hot argument over whether it was possible to load on an
extra ton or two of mass. He stopped it. They would.
"Everything's loaded?" he demanded. "Okay! Space suits! All set? Let's
get out of this lock and start blasting!"
He drove them into the space tug. He climbed in himself. He closed the
entrance port. The plastic walls of the lock bulged out, pulled back
fast, and the steering rockets jetted. The space tug came out of the
lock. It spun about. It aimed for Earth and monstrous bursts of
rocket-trail spread out behind it. It dived.
Naturally! When a ship from the Platform wanted to reach Earth for
atmosphere-deceleration, it was more economical to head away from it.
Now that it was the most urgent of all possible necessities to get away
from Earth, in the opposite direction to the space tug's present motion,
it was logical to dive toward it. The ship would plunge toward Earth,
and Earth's gravity would help its rockets in the attainment of frenzied
speed. But the tug still possessed its orbital speed. So it would not
actually strike the Earth, but would be carried eastward past its disk,
even though aimed for Earth's mid-bulge. Yet Earth would continue to
pull. As the space tug skimmed past, its path would be curved by the
pull of gravity. At the nearest possible approach to Earth, the tug
would fire its heaviest rockets for maximum acceleration. And it would
swing around Earth's atmosphere perhaps no more than 500 miles
high--just barely beyond the measurable presence of air--and come out of
that crazy curve a good hour ahead of the Platform for a corresponding
position, and with a greater velocity than could be had in any other
way. Traced on paper, the course of the tug would be a tight parabola.
The ship dived. And it happened that it had left the Platform and
plunged deep in Earth's shadow, so that the look and feel of things was
that of an utterly suicidal plunge into oblivion. There was the seeming
of a vast sack of pure blackness before the nose of the space tug. She
started for it at four gravities acceleration, and Joe got his
headphones to his ears and lay panting while he waited for the figures
and information he had to have.
He got them. When the four-gravity rockets burned out, the tug's crew
painstakingly adjusted the ship's nose to a certain position. They flung
themselves back into the acceleration chairs and Joe fired a six-g
blast. They came out of that, and he fired another. The three blasts
gave the ship a downward speed of a mile and a half a second, and
Earth's pull added to it steadily. The Earth itself was drawing them
down most of a 4,000-mile fall, which added to the speed their rockets
built up.
Down on Earth, radar-bowls wavered dizzily, hunting for them to feed
them observations of position and data for their guidance. Back on the
Platform, members of the crew feverishly made their own computations.
When the four in the Space tug were half-way to Earth, they were
traveling faster than any humans had ever traveled before, relative to
the Earth or the Platform itself. When they were a thousand miles from
Earth, it was certain they would clear its edge. Joe proposed and
received an okay to fire a salvo of Mark Tens to speed the ship still
more. When they burned to the release-point and flashed away past the
ports, the Chief and Haney panted up from their chairs and made their
way aft.
"Going to reload the firing-frames," gasped the Chief.
They vanished. The space tug could take rockets from its cargo and set
them outside its hull for firing. No other ship could.
Haney and the Chief came back. There was dead silence in the ship, save
for a small, tinny voice in Joe's headphones.
"We'll pass Earth 600 miles high," said Joe in a flat voice. "Maybe
closer. I'm going to try to make it 450. We'll be smack over enemy
territory, but I doubt they could hit us. We'll be hitting better than
six miles a second. If we wanted to, we could spend some more rockets
and hit escape velocity. But we want to stop, later. We'll ride it out."
Silence. Stillness. Speed. Out the ports to Earthward there was purest
blackness. On the other side, a universe of stars. But the blackness
grew and grew and grew until it neatly bisected the cosmos itself, and
half of everything that was, was blackness. Half was tiny colored stars.
Then there was a sound. A faint sound. It was a moan. It was a howl. It
was a shriek.... And then it was a mere thin moan again. Then it was
not.
"We touched air," said Joe calmly, "at six and a quarter miles per
second. Pretty thin, though. At that, we may have left a meteor-trail
for the populace to admire."
Nobody said anything at all. In a little while there was light ahead.
There was brightness. Instantly, it seemed, they were out of night and
there was a streaming tumult of clouds flashing past below--but they
were 800 miles up now--and Joe's headphones rattled and he said:
"Now we can give a touch of course-correction, and maybe a trace of
speed...."
Rockets droned and boomed and roared outside the hull. The Earth fell
away and away and presently it was behind. And they were plunging on
after the Moonship which was very, very, very far on before them.
It was actually many hours before they reached it. They couldn't afford
to overtake it gradually, because they had to have time to work in after
contact. But overtaking it swiftly cost extra fuel, and they hadn't too
much. So they compromised, and came up behind the Moonship at better
than 2,000 feet per second difference in speed--they approached it as
fast as most rifle-bullets travel--and all creation was blotted out by
the fumes of the rockets they fired for deceleration.
Then the space tug came cautiously close to the Moonship. Mike climbed
out on the outside of the tug's hull, with the Chief also in space
equipment, paying out Mike's safety-line. Mike leaped across two hundred
yards of emptiness with light-years of gulf beneath him. His metal soles
clanked on the Moonship's hull.
Then the vision-screen on the tug lighted up. Lieutenant Commander Brown
looked out of it, quietly grim. Joe flicked on his own transmitter. He
nodded.
"_Mr. Kenmore_," said Brown evenly, "_I did not contact you before
because I was not certain that contact could be made. How many
passengers can you take back to the Platform?_"
Joe blinked at him.
"I haven't any idea," he said. "But I'm going to hitch on and use our
rockets to land you."
"_I do not think it practicable_," said Brown calmly. "_I believe the
only result of such a course will be the loss of both ships with all
hands. I will give you a written authorization to return on my order.
But since all my crew can't return, how many can you take? I have ten
married men aboard. Six have children. Can you take six? Or all ten?_"
Then he said without a trace of emphasis, "_Of course, none of them will
be officers._"
"If I tried to turn back now, I think my crew would mutiny," Joe said
coldly. "I'd hate to think they wouldn't, anyhow! We're going to hook on
and play this out the way it lies!"
There was a pause. Then Brown spoke again. "_Mr. Kenmore, I was
hoping you'd say that. Actually--er--not to be quoted, you
understand--actually, intelligent defiance has always been in the
traditions of the Navy. Of course, you're not in the Navy, Kenmore, but
right now it looks like the Navy is in your hands. Like a battleship in
the hands of a tug. Good luck, Kenmore._"
Joe flicked off the screen. "You know," he said, winking at Mike, "I
guess Brown isn't such a bad egg after all. Let's go!"
In minutes, the space tug had a line made fast. In half an hour, the two
space craft were bound firmly together, but far enough apart for the
rocket blasts to dissipate before they reached the Moonship. Mike
returned to the tug. A pair of the big Mark Twenty rockets burned
frenziedly in emptiness.
The Moonship was slowed by a fraction of its speed. The deceleration was
hardly perceptible.
There were more burnings. Back on Earth there were careful measurements.
A tight beam tends to attenuate when it is thrown a hundred thousand
miles. It tends to! When speech is conducted over it, the lag between
comment and reply is perceptible. It's not great--just over half a
second. But one notices it. That lag was used to measure the speed and
distance of the two craft. The prospect didn't look too good.
The space tug burned rocket after rocket after rocket. There was no
effect that Joe could detect, of course. It would have been like
noticing the effect of single oar-strokes in a rowboat miles from shore.
But the instruments on Earth found a difference. They made very, very,
very careful computations. And the electronic brains did the
calculations which battalions of mathematicians would have needed years
to work out. The electronic calculations which could not make a mistake
said--that it was a toss-up.
The Moon came slowly to float before the two linked ships. It grew
slowly, slowly larger. The word from Earth was that considering the
rockets still available in the space tug, and those that should have
been fired but weren't on the Moonship, there must be no more blasts
just yet. The two ships must pass together through the neutral-point
where the gravities of Earth and Moon exactly cancel out. They must fall
together toward the Moon. Forty miles above the lunar surface
such-and-such rockets were to be fired. At twenty miles, such-and-such
others. At five miles the Moonship itself must fire its remaining
fuel-store. With luck, it was a toss-up. Safety or a smash.
But there was a long time to wait. Joe and his crew relaxed in the space
tug. The Chief looked out a port and observed:
"I can see the ring-mountains now. Naked-eye stuff, too! I wonder if
anybody ever saw that before!"
"Not likely," said Joe.
Mike stared out a port. Haney looked, also.
"How're we going to get back, Joe?"
"The Moonship has rockets on board," Joe told him. "Only they can't
stick them in the firing-racks outside. They're stowed away, all
shipshape, Navy fashion. After we land, we'll ask politely for rockets
to get back to the Platform with. It'll be a tedious run. Mostly
coasting--falling free. But we'll make it."
"If everything doesn't blow when we land," said the Chief.
Joe said uncomfortably: "It won't. Not that somebody won't try." Then he
stopped. After a moment he said awkwardly: "Look! It's necessary that we
humans get to the stars, or ultimately we'll crowd the Earth until we
won't be able to stay human. We'd have to have wars and plagues and such
things to keep our numbers down. It--it seems to me, and I--think it's
been said before, that it looks like there's something, somewhere,
that's afraid of us humans. It doesn't want us to reach the stars. It
didn't want us to fly. Before that it didn't want us to learn how to
cure disease, or have steam, or--anything that makes men different from
the beasts."
Haney turned his head. He listened intently.
"Maybe it sounds--superstitious," said Joe uneasily, "but there's always
been somebody trying to smash everything the rest of us wanted. As
if--as if something alien and hateful went around whispering
hypnotically into men's ears while they slept, commanding them
irresistibly to do things to smash all their own hopes."