Operation: Outer Space Part 3

After a moment Cochrane said with a carefully steadied voice:

"My most disparaging opinions of Earth were never as black as this!"

"Wait," said Babs confidently.

Cochrane waited. He had to hold carefully in his mind that this visible abyss, this enormity of purest dark, was not an opening into nothingness but was simply Earth at night as seen from s.p.a.ce.

Then he saw a faint, faint arch of color forming at its edge. It spread swiftly. Immediately, it seemed, there was a pinkish glowing line among the mult.i.tudinous stars. It was red. It was very, very bright. It became a complete half-circle. It was the light of the sun refracted around the edge of the world.

Within minutes--it seemed in seconds--the line of light was a glory among the stars. And then, very swiftly, the blazing orb which was the sun appeared from behind Earth. It was intolerably bright, but it did not brighten the firmament. It swam among all the myriads of myriads of suns, burning luridly and in a terrible silence, with visibly writhing prominences rising from the edge of its disk. Cochrane squinted at it with light-dazzled eyes.

Then Babs cried softly:

"Beautiful! Oh, beautiful!"

And Cochrane shielded his eyes and saw the world new-born before him.

The arc of light became an arch and then a crescent, and swelled even as he looked. Dawn flowed below the s.p.a.ce platform, and it seemed that seas and continents and clouds and beauty poured over the disk of darkness before him.

He stood here, staring, until the steel shutters slowly closed. Babs said in regret:

"You have to keep your hand on the b.u.t.ton to keep the shutters open.

Else the window might get pitted with dust."

Cochrane said cynically:

"And how much good will it have done me to see that, Babs? How can that be faked in a studio--and how much would a television screen show of it?"

He turned away. Then he added sourly:

"You stay and look if you like, Babs. I've already had my vanity smashed to little bits. If I look at that again I'll want to weep in pure frustration because I can't do anything even faintly as well worth watching. I prefer to cut down my notions of the cosmos to a tolerable size. But you go ahead and look!"

He went back to Holden. Holden was painfully dragging himself back into the rocket-ship. Cochrane went with him. They returned, weightless, to the admirably designed contour-chairs in which they had traveled to this place, and in which they would travel farther. Cochrane settled down to stare numbly at the wall above him. He had been humiliated enough by the actions of one of the heads of an advertising agency. He found himself resenting, even as he experienced, the humbling which had been imposed upon him by the cosmos itself.

Presently the other pa.s.sengers returned, and the moonship was maneuvered out of the lock and to emptiness again, and again presently rockets roared and there was further feeling of intolerable weight. But it was not as bad as the take-off from Earth.

There followed some ninety-six hours of pure tedium. After the first accelerating blasts, the rockets were silent. There was no weight.

There was nothing to hear except the droning murmur of unresting electric fans, stirring the air ceaselessly so that excess moisture from breathing could be extracted by the dehumidifiers. But for them--if the air had been left stagnant--the journey would have been insupportable.

There was nothing to see, because ports opening on outer s.p.a.ce were not safe for pa.s.sengers to look through. Mere humans, untrained to keep their minds on technical matters, could break down at the spectacle of the universe. There could be no activity.

Some of the pa.s.sengers took dozy-pills. Cochrane did not. It was against the law for dozy-pills to produce a sensation of euphoria, of well-being. The law considered that pleasure might lead to addiction.

But if a pill merely made a person drowsy, so that he dozed for hours halfway between sleeping and awake, no harm appeared to be done. Yet there were plenty of dozy-pill addicts. Many people were not especially anxious to feel good. They were quite satisfied not to feel anything at all.

Cochrane couldn't take that way of escape. He lay strapped in his chair and thought unhappily of many things. He came to feel unclean, as people used to feel when they traveled for days on end on railroad trains.

There was no possibility of a bath. One could not even change clothes, because baggage went separately to the moon in a robot freight-rocket, which was faster and cheaper than a pa.s.senger transport, but would kill anybody who tried to ride it. Fifteen-and twenty-gravity acceleration is economical of fuel, and six-gravity is not, but n.o.body can live through a twenty-gravity lift-off from Earth. So pa.s.sengers stayed in the clothes in which they entered the ship, and the only possible concession to fastidiousness was the disposable underwear one could get and change to in the rest-rooms.

Babs Deane did not take dozy-pills either, but Cochrane knew better than to be more than remotely friendly with her outside of office hours. He did not want to give her any excuse to tell him anything for his own good. So he spoke pleasantly and kept company only with his own thoughts. But he did notice that she looked rapt and starry-eyed even through the long and dreary hours of free flight. She was mentally tracking the moonship through the void. She'd know when the continents of Earth were plain to see, and the tints of vegetation on the two hemispheres--northern and southern--and she'd know when Earth's ice-caps could be seen, and why.

The stewardess was not too much of a diversion. She was brisk and calm and soothing, but she became a trifle reluctant to draw too near the chairs in which her pa.s.sengers rode. Presently Cochrane made deductions and maliciously devised a television commercial. In it, a moon-rocket stewardess, in uniform and looking fresh and charming, would say sweetly that she went without bathing for days at a time on moon-trips, and did not offend because she used whoosit's antistink.u.m. And then he thought pleasurably of the heads that would roll did such a commercial actually get on the air.

But he didn't make plans for the production-job he'd been sent to the moon to do. Psychiatry was specialized, these days, as physical medicine had been before it. An extremely expensive diagnostician had been sent to the moon to tap Dabney's reflexes, and he'd gravely diagnosed frustration and suggested young Dr. Holden for the curative treatment.

Frustration was the typical neurosis of the rich, anyhow, and Bill Holden had specialized in its cure. His main reliance was on the making of a dramatic production centering about his patient, which was expensive enough and effective enough to have made him a quick reputation. But he couldn't tell Cochrane what was required of him. Not yet. He knew the disease but not the case. He'd have to see and know Dabney before he could make use of the extra-special production-crew his patient's father-in-law had provided from the staff of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe.

Ninety-some hours after blast-off from the s.p.a.ce platform, the rocket-ship turned end for end and began to blast to kill its velocity toward the moon. It began at half-gravity--the red glowing sign gave warning of it--and rose to one gravity and then to two. After days of no-weight, two gravities was punishing.

Cochrane thought to look at Babs. She was rapt, lost in picturings of what must be outside the ship, which she could not see. She'd be imagining what the television screens had shown often enough, from film-tapes. The great pock marked face of Luna, with its ring-mountains in incredible numbers and complexity, and the vast open "seas" which were solidified oceans of lava, would be clear to her mind's eye. She would be imagining the gradual changes of the moon's face with nearness, when the colorings appear. From a distance all the moon seems tan or sandy in tint. When one comes closer, there are tawny reds and slate-colors in the mountain-cliffs, and even blues and yellows, and everywhere there is the ashy, whitish-tan color of the moondust.

Glancing at her, absorbed in her satisfaction, Cochrane suspected that with only half an excuse she would explain to him how the several hundreds of degrees difference in the surface-temperature of the moon between midnight and noon made rocks split and re-split and fracture so that stuff as fine as talc.u.m powder covered every s.p.a.ce not too sharply tilted for it to rest on.

The feeling of deceleration increased. For part of a second they had the sensation of three gravities.

Then there was a curious, yielding jar--really very slight--and then the feeling of excess weight ended altogether. But not the feeling of weight. They still had weight. It was constant. It was steady. But it was very slight.

They were on the moon, but Cochrane felt no elation. In the tedious hours from the s.p.a.ce platform he'd thought too much. He was actually aware of the humiliations and frustrations most men had to conceal from themselves because they couldn't afford expensive psychiatric treatments. Frustration was the disease of all humanity, these days. And there was nothing that could be done about it. Nothing! It simply wasn't possible to rebel, and rebellion is the process by which humiliation and frustration is cured. But one could not rebel against the plain fact that Earth had more people on it than one planet could support.

Merely arriving at the moon did not seem an especially useful achievement, either to Cochrane or to humanity at large.

Things looked bad.

CHAPTER TWO

Cochrane stood when the stewardess' voice authorized the action. With sardonic docility he unfastened his safety-belt and stepped out into the spiral, descending aisle. It seemed strange to have weight again, even as little as this. Cochrane weighed, on the moon, just one-sixth of what he would weigh on Earth. Here he would tip a spring-scale at just about twenty-seven pounds. By flexing his toes, he could jump. Absurdly, he did. And he rose very slowly, and hovered--feeling singularly foolish--and descended with a vast deliberation. He landed on the ramp again feeling absurd indeed. He saw Babs grinning at him.

"I think," said Cochrane, "I'll have to take up toe-dancing."

She laughed. Then there were clankings, and something fastened itself outside, and after a moment the entrance-door of the moonship opened.

They went down the ramp to board the moon-jeep, holding onto the hand-rail and helping each other. The tourist giggled foolishly. They went out the thick doorway and found themselves in an enclosure very much like the interior of a rather small submarine. But it did have shielded windows--ports--and Babs instantly pulled herself into a seat beside one and feasted her eyes. She saw the jagged peaks nearby and the crenelated ring-mountain wall, miles off to one side, and the smooth frozen lava of the "sea." Across that dusty surface the horizon was remarkably near, and Cochrane remembered vaguely that the moon was only one-fourth the size of Earth, so its horizon would naturally be nearer.

He glanced at the stars that shone even through the gla.s.s that denatured the sunshine. And then he looked for Holden.

The psychiatrist looked puffy and sleepy and haggard and disheveled.

When a person does have s.p.a.ce-sickness, even a little weight relieves the symptoms, but the consequences last for days.

"Don't worry!" he said sourly when he saw Cochrane's eyes upon him. "I won't waste any time! I'll find my man and get to work at once. Just let me get back to Earth...."

There were more clankings--the jeep-bus sealing off from the rocket.

Then the vehicle stirred. The landscape outside began to move.

They saw Lunar City as they approached it. It was five giant dust-heaps, from five hundred-odd feet in height down to three. There were airlocks at their bases and dust-covered tunnels connecting them, and radar-bowls about their sides. But they were dust-heaps. Which was completely reasonable. There is no air on the moon. By day the sun shines down with absolute ferocity. It heats everything as with a furnace-flame. At night all heat radiates away to empty s.p.a.ce, and the ground-temperature drops well below that of liquid air. So Lunar City was a group of domes which were essentially half-balloons--hemispheres of plastic brought from Earth and inflated and covered with dust. With airlocks to permit entrance and exit, they were inhabitable. They needed no framework to support them because there were no stormwinds or earthquakes to put stresses on them. They needed neither heating nor cooling equipment.

They were buried under forty feet of moon-dust, with vacuum between the dust-grains. Lunar City was not beautiful, but human beings could live in it.

The jeep-bus carried them a bare half mile, and they alighted inside a lock, and another door and another opened and closed, and they emerged into a scene which no amount of television film-tape could really portray.

The main dome was a thousand feet across and half as high. There were green plants growing in tubs and pots. And the air was fresh! It smelled strange. There could be no vegetation on the rocket and it seemed new and blissful to breathe really freshened air after days of the canned variety. But this freshness made Cochrane realize that he'd feel better for a bath.