From the Ocean from teh Stars (45 page)

yourself instantly on another planet. It's a short cut, as you said—in this
case through the thirty-seventh dimension."

"And it leads to your world?"

"Oh no—you couldn't live here. But there are plenty of planets like
Earth in the universe, and we've found one that will suit you. We'll establish bridgeheads like this all over Earth, so your people will only have to
walk through them to be saved. Of course, they'll have to start building
up civilization again when they reach their new homes, but it's their only
hope. You have to pass on this message, and tell them what to do."

"I can just see them listening to me," said Bill. "Why don't you go and
talk to the president?"

"Because yours was the only mind we were able to contact. Others
seemed closed to us: we don't understand why."

"I could tell you," said Bill, looking at the nearly empty bottle in
front of him. He was certainly getting his money's worth. What a re
markable thing the human mind was! Of course, there was nothing at all original in this dialogue: it was easy to see where the ideas came
from. Only last week he'd been reading a story about the end of the
world, and all this wishful thinking about bridges and tunnels through
space was pretty obvious compensation for anyone who'd spent five years
wrestling with recalcitrant rockets.

"If the sun does blow up," Bill asked abruptly—trying to catch his
hallucination unawares—"what would happen?"

"Why, your planet would be melted instantly. All the planets, in fact,
right out to Jupiter."

Bill had to admit that this was quite a grandiose conception. He let
his mind play with the thought, and the more he considered it, the more
he liked it.

"My dear hallucination," he remarked pityingly, "if I believed you,
d'you know what I'd say?"

"But you
must
believe us!" came the despairing cry across the light-
years.

Bill ignored it. He was warming to his theme.

"I'd tell you this.
It would be the best thing that could possibly hap
pen.
Yes, it would save a whole lot of misery. No one would have to
worry about the Russians and the atom bomb and the high cost of living.
Oh, it would be wonderful! It's just what everybody really wants. Nice of
you to come along and tell us, but just you go back home and pull your
old bridge after you."

There was consternation on Thaar. The Supreme Scientist's brain,
floating like a great mass of coral in its tank of nutrient solution, turned

slightly yellow about the edges—something it had not done since the Xantil invasion, five thousand years ago. At least fifteen psychologists had nervous breakdowns and were never the same again. The main computer in the College of Cosmophysics started dividing every number in its memory circuits by zero, and promptly blew all its fuses.

And on Earth, Bill Cross was really hitting his stride.

"Look at
me"
he said, pointing a wavering finger at his chest. "I've spent years trying to make rockets do something useful, and they tell me I'm only allowed to build guided missiles, so that we can all blow each other up. The sun will make a neater job of it, and if you did give us another planet we'd only start the whole damn thing all over again."

He paused sadly, marshaling his morbid thoughts.

"And now Brenda heads out of town without even leaving a note. So you'll pardon my lack of enthusiasm for your Boy Scout act."

He couldn't have said "enthusiasm" aloud, Bill realized. But he could still think it, which was an interesting scientific discovery. As he got drunker and drunker, would his cogitation—whoops,
that
nearly threw him!—finally drop down to words of one syllable?

In a final despairing exertion, the Thaarns sent their thoughts along the tunnel between the stars.

"You can't really mean it, Bill! Are
all
human beings like you?"

Now that was an interesting philosophical question! Bill considered it carefully—or as carefully as he could in view of the warm, rosy glow that was now beginning to envelop him. After all, things might be worse. He could get another job, if only for the pleasure of telling General Porter what he could do with his three stars. And as for Brenda—well, women were like streetcars: there'd always be another along in a minute.

Best of all, there was a second bottle of whisky in the Top Secret file. Oh, frabjous day! He rose unsteadily to his feet and wavered across the room.

For the last time, Thaar spoke to Earth.

"Bill!" it repeated desperately. "Surely all human beings can't be like you!"

Bill turned and looked into the swirling tunnel. Strange—it seemed to be lighted with flecks of starlight, and was really rather pretty. He felt proud of himself: not many people could imagine
that.

"Like me?" he said. "No, they're not." He smiled smugly across the light-years, as the rising tide of euphoria lifted him out of his despondency. "Come to think of it," he added, "there are a lot of people much worse off than me. Yes, I guess I must be one of the lucky ones, after all."

He blinked in mild surprise, for the tunnel had suddenly collapsed

upon itself and the whitewashed wall was there again, exactly as it had
always been. Thaar knew when it was beaten.

"So much for
that
hallucination," thought Bill. "I was getting tired
of it, anyway. Let's see what the next one's like."

As it happened, there wasn't a next one, for five seconds later he
passed out cold, just as he was setting the combination of the file cabinet.

The next two days were rather vague and bloodshot, and he forgot
all about the interview.

On the third day something was nagging at the back of his mind: he
might have remembered if Brenda hadn't turned up again and kept him
busy being forgiving.

And there wasn't a fourth day, of course.

☆
VENTURE TO THE MOON

THE STARTING LINE

The story of the first lunar expedition has been written
so many times that some people will doubt if there is anything fresh to be said about it. Yet all the official reports and eyewitness ac
counts, the on-the-spot recordings and broadcasts never, in my opinion,
gave the full picture. They said a great deal about the discoveries that
were made—but very little about the men who made them.

As captain of the
Endeavour
and thus commander of the British
party, I was able to observe a good many things you will not find in the
history books, and some—though not all—of them can now be told. One
day, I hope, my opposite numbers on the
Goddard
and the
Ziolkovski
will give their points of view. But as Commander Vandenburg is still on
Mars and Commander Krasnin is somewhere inside the orbit of Venus, it looks as if we will have to wait a few more years for
their
memoirs.

Confession, it is said, is good for the soul. I shall certainly feel much
happier when I have told the true story behind the timing of the first
lunar flight, about which there has always been a good deal of mystery.

As everyone knows, the American, Russian, and British ships were assembled in the orbit of Space Station Three, five hundred miles above
the Earth, from components flown up by relays of freight rockets. Though
all the parts had been prefabricated, the assembly and testing of the ships took over two years, by which time a great many people—who did not
realize the complexity of the task—were beginning to get slightly impa
tient. They had seen dozens of photos and telecasts of the three ships floating there in space beside Station Three, apparently quite complete
and ready to pull away from Earth at a moment's notice. What the pictures didn't show was the careful and tedious work still in progress as
thousands of pipes, wires, motors, and instruments were fitted and sub
jected to every conceivable test.

There was no definite target date for departure; since the moon is al-

ways at approximately the same distance, you can leave for it at almost
any time you like—once you are ready. It makes practically no differ
ence, from the point of view of fuel consumption, if you blast off at full moon or new moon or at any time in between. We were very careful to
make no predictions about blast-off, though everyone was always trying
to get us to fix the time. So many things can go wrong in a spaceship,
and we were not going to say good-by to Earth until we were ready down
to the last detail.

I shall always remember the last commanders' conference, aboard
the space station, when we all announced that we were ready. Since it
was a co-operative venture, each party specializing in some particular
task, it had been agreed that we should all make our landings within the same twenty-four-hour period, on the preselected site in the Mare Im-
brium. The details of the journey, however, had been left to the individual commanders, presumably in the hope that we would not copy each other's
mistakes.

"I'll be ready," said Commander Vandenburg, "to make my first
dummy take-off at 0900 tomorrow. What about you, gentlemen? Shall
we ask Earth Control to stand by for all three of us?"

"That's O.K. by me," said Krasnin, who could never be convinced
that his American slang was twenty years out of date.

I nodded my agreement. It was true that one bank of fuel gauges
was still misbehaving, but that didn't really matter; they would be fixed by
the time the tanks were filled.

The dummy run consisted of an exact replica of a real blast-off, with
everyone carrying out the job he would do when the time came for the genuine thing. We had practiced, of course, in mock-ups down on Earth,
but this was a perfect imitation of what would happen to us when we
finally took off for the moon. All that was missing was the roar of the
motors that would tell us that the voyage had begun.

We did six complete imitations of blast-off, took the ships to pieces to
eliminate anything that hadn't behaved perfectly, then did six more. The
Endeavour,
the
Goddard,
and the
Ziolkovski
were all in the same state of
serviceability. There now only remained the job of fueling up, and we
would be ready to leave.

The suspense of those last few hours is not something I would care
to go through again. The eyes of the world were upon us; departure time
had now been set, with an uncertainty of only a few hours. All the final
tests had been made, and we were convinced that our ships were as ready as humanly possible.

It was then that I had an urgent and secret personal radio call from

a very high official indeed, and a suggestion was made which had so
much authority behind it that there was little point in pretending that it wasn't an order. The first flight to the moon, I was reminded, was a co
operative venture—but think of the prestige if
we
got there first. It need
only be by a couple of hours. . . .

I was shocked at the suggestion, and said so. By this time Vandenburg
and Krasnin were good friends of mine, and we were all in this together. I made every excuse I could and said that since our flight paths had already been computed there wasn't anything that could be done about it.
Each ship was making the journey by the most economical route, to
conserve fuel. If we started together, we should arrive together—within
seconds.

Unfortunately, someone had thought of the answer to that. Our three
ships, fueled up and with their crews standing by, would be circling
Earth in a state of complete readiness for several hours before they actu
ally pulled away from their satellite orbits and headed out to the moon.
At our five-hundred-mile altitude, we took ninety-five minutes to make one circuit of the Earth, and only once every revolution would the mo
ment be ripe to begin the voyage. If we could jump the gun by one revolu
tion, the others would have to wait that ninety-five minutes before they
could follow. And so they would land on the moon ninety-five minutes
behind us. . . .

I won't go into the arguments, and I'm still a little ashamed that I
yielded and agreed to deceive my two colleagues. We were in the shadow
of Earth, in momentary eclipse, when the carefully calculated moment
came. Vandenburg and Krasnin, honest fellows, thought I was going to
make one more round trip with them before we all set off together. I have
seldom felt a bigger heel in my life than when I pressed the firing key
and felt the sudden thrust of the motors as they swept me away from my
mother world.

For the next ten minutes we had no time for anything but our instru
ments, as we checked to see that the
Endeavour
was forging ahead along
her precomputed orbit. Almost at the moment that we finally escaped
from Earth and could cut the motors, we burst out of shadow into the
full blaze of the sun. There would be no more night until we reached the
moon, after five days of effortless and silent coasting through space.

Already Space Station Three and the two other ships must be a
thousand miles behind. In eighty-five more minutes Vandenburg and
Krasnin would be back at the correct starting point and could take off
after me, as we had all planned. But they could never overcome my