Journey Into Space (2 page)

What prompted Jet to think that my journal might throw light on the mystery I cannot say, but it was bound to have revealed it sooner or later. We merely learned the truth all the quicker; at least, we believe it to be the truth.

Anyhow, at Jet’s suggestion I took the book from my locker, intending to open it at the pages where it had served as the log. But I never got that far. As I flipped the pages something caught my eye that astounded me.

“What is it, Doc?” demanded Jet.

I carefully examined the open page before I made any reply. I just had to be sure that what I saw was really there. “Today
is
November 20th, isn’t it?”

“Yes, on Earth anyway. What about it?”

“I’ve made no entry today--not since take-off anyway.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“A great deal, I think. Here, in my handwriting, is an account of everything we have done since take-off from the Moon, including a fairly comprehensive description of what we saw on the other side.”

Jet almost snatched the book out of my hand. He glanced at the entry and turned the leaf over. Then he turned another and another.

He looked up. “There’s not only an entry here for today’s date,” he said, “but for tomorrow’s, too, and the next day and the
next.”
He turned to me angrily. “What is this, Doc --a joke?”

“If it is, it’s not me playing it.”

“It’s your book, isn’t it? And this is your handwriting. Who else could have written this stuff?”

“I don’t deny that the writing there is mine--or, at least, it’s identical with mine--but I swear I have no recollection of writing a word of it.”

Jet made no reply. He was reading avidly and, as he did so, his expression changed and his ill temper, normally so foreign to Jet, left him. After a few minutes he looked up. “No, Doc, you couldn’t have written this,” he said slowly. “Not since take-off anyway. You just haven’t had the time. And yet the description of the surface of the other side of the Moon is correct in every detail.”

“You mean he wrote it
before
take-off? Before we even saw the other side?” Mitch was putting in his two-cents-worth now.

“Yes,” said Jet. “That’s just what I mean.” “But how the devil could he describe things he had never seen?”

“The same way as he has described the events of tomorrow, and the next day--when they haven’t happened yet.”

Mitch’s mouth fell open. Lemmy gave a grunt of surprise. Heaven knows what I did. I don’t remember. Probably just stared wide-eyed at Jet. Of us all, he alone was calm and self-composed.

“Here, gentlemen,” he said, “I believe we have the answer. If Doc would be so kind as to read his journal to us, I think it will explain a lot of things. Would you oblige us, Doc?”

I took the book from him. “Where shall I start?”

“With today’s entry. After we had encircled the Moon.”

I found the place and began to read. It was a weird experience. There before me, in what I could only accept as my own handwriting, the facts were set out, yet I could not recall writing them nor remember any of the events recorded.

“It is now more than two hours since we left the Moon and found ourselves in these new and frightening circumstances.   . .”

The two sentences that followed were enough to show that the circumstances referred to were not those we were experiencing at that moment.

This is my personal account of what happened to the four men who travelled in the first man-made vehicle to reach the Moon. If any other member of the crew were to write a similar account of our adventures, his would probably differ from mine in many ways. But in one respect his would be the same. Of the most momentous happenings neither of us would have any recollection whatever; the only proof (if it is proof) of their occurrence being their inclusion in my journal.

As I write, it is on the cards that we may never reach Earth at all. If we do, landing without the aid of the motor will be difficult and dangerous, and there is every likelihood that we shall crash. The fuel we have in the tanks is not likely to explode (there’s hardly enough of it) so much of the equipment, although damaged beyond any further use, should be recoverable. Consequently, unless the ship burns itself out, this narrative will survive the impact and sooner or later the truth will be revealed and accepted or rejected accordingly. My bet is that it will be the latter. Be that as it may, I will continue to write it during the four and a half days of life we probably have left to us.

If my story is to be complete, I must go back a year or so; before take-off from Earth; before Luna was even built.

The first Intimation I had that something big was afoot was when I received a radiogram from my Scots friend Jet Morgan asking me to meet him in, of all places, Adelaide. I’d known Jet for some years for he often came out to New Mexico where I was employed as director of space medicine at the U.S. high-altitude rocket research grounds at Poker Flats.

In the twenty or so years since the capture of the first German V2, experiments in high altitude rockets had gone on at a spanking pace. In 1957, the first rocket to push its nose up and out of the Earth’s atmosphere was launched. By 1960, at colossal expense, another and much more powerful rocket, the A24--a hefty, three-stage affair--had reached free orbit some 750 miles above the Earth’s surface. It had been intended to bring it back to base by remote control, but at the crucial moment something went wrong with the missile’s intricate inside and it failed to respond. As there was no way of getting a mechanic up there to put the fault right, it remained where it was and, to the best of my knowledge, it’s there still.

The launching of the A24 set the world buzzing with excitement. Since World War II there had been constant reports in the press that space travel was just around the corner. The existence of an artificial satellite proved it--or so most people thought. But they hadn’t reckoned with a few facts. In the first instance, the placing of a rocket out in space had drained the research department of virtually all its money. In the second, before space travel could become a reality, it was necessary to construct, at the cost of millions upon millions of dollars, a huge space station, also travelling in free orbit, to use as a spring board for the long distance ships. For, in the light of the knowledge of that time, no rocket could be built that would reach even the Moon in one jump. Moon ships would have to be assembled out in space, and every tiny part of them would first have to be ferried up from Earth to the assembly point. And before the first ship could be constructed, the space station itself had to be put together, and that, too, would have to be ferried out, piece by piece.

The cost would be astronomical--no single government on Earth could afford it. Space travel would, it seemed, have to be left to our descendants, unless, of course, some way could be found to reduce cost. With the type of liquid fuel rocket then in vogue, there was little hope of that; an entirely new form of propulsion was needed.

But if none of us ever expected to see space travel a reality in our time (and, I may add, least of all me) there was no reason why much of the necessary groundwork to make the dream possible should not be carried out. And that’s how I came to be at Poker Flats. As director of space medicine research it was my responsibility, among other things, to design space suits for high-altitude pilots, study the effect of long period gravity-less conditions on the human body (a very difficult task) and the effect of high gravity conditions as well (which was easy).

It was our work at Poker Flats, in conjunction with similar research centres in England, that made superstratosphere passenger flight possible. The principle of the superstrato-ship is simple. At take-off, it is powered by turbo-jet engines and, under their propulsion, quickly reaches supersonic speed and a height of some 40,000 ft. At that elevation the air is so thin that the turbo-jets cannot function, so they are cut out and liquid fuel rockets take over the job of driving the ship higher and higher into the atmosphere. By the time the rockets are cut out, it is well over the Atlantic, 100 miles high, and travelling at approximately 1700 mph.

The rest of the journey is unpowered and consists of a gentle glide downwards towards the American coast--rather as a shell, once it has reached maximum height, begins to drop towards its target. The whole trip, from take-off to touch down, takes a little under two hours, enabling passengers to breakfast in London at 7 am and reach New York at 4 am, in time for another breakfast, if they have a mind for it, three hours after landing.

To all intents and purposes, all passengers travelling on the superstratosphere run journey through space and travel high enough above our atmosphere to see the stars shining in the middle of the afternoon.

Jet Morgan was a pilot on the Atlantic run and three times a week he coaxed his ship to the edge of space. He lived for his work and for his interest in astronautics. Almost every moment of his life was filled with one or the other. He was a leading light of the International Interplanetary Society and flew all over the world to attend their conferences, give lectures or open astronautic exhibitions.

I have lost count of the number of nights Jet and I sat up discussing rockets, space ships and interplanetary travel. I know we must have made, principally for our own amusement, drawings of dozens of ships, satellite stations and fancy rockets of all kinds. Our plans and models were complete to the smallest detail, from space suits, living quarters, air conditioning, food containers and pressure couches to motors, meteor bumper and solar mirror.

Moon ships, ferry ships and space station were all systematically dealt with. When it came to designing the radio, televiewer and radar equipment, we were enthusiastically joined by Lemmy Barnet, Jet’s first radio operator on the Atlantic run, who, although he did not share our enthusiasm for space travel as such, could never resist the challenge to design some special piece of radio apparatus for any purpose we cared to name. Between the three of us we once constructed a working model of a ship, complete with crew’s quarters, that took off, climbed three miles, turned itself over and landed gently on its tail in exactly the way a real ship would have landed on the Moon. The whole operation was radio controlled.

The hours I spent in the centrifuge and the days I spent watching other guinea pigs undergoing its cruel pressure proved, without a doubt, that it was possible for a man to stand more gravities than he would ever need to experience during a journey to the Moon or planets--should any genius invent a ship economical enough to get him there.

The pressurised suits were, as far as I could tell, quite adequate but, of course, it was impossible to test them under full outer-space conditions. We had a fair idea of how man would react under the long, gravity-less periods he would have to spend in space but, for obvious reasons, could never put these theories to a practical test either. So we just continued working and hoped that in the not too distant future our efforts would help launch the first Moon-bound ship on its way. Our hopes were not very high.

Then came the blow. With the first rocket to reach free orbit revolving, uselessly, 700 miles or so above the Earth’s surface, all work other than on missiles of a military nature was stopped. I guess Washington considered further research on theoretical space travel to be a waste of time and, further, that, with elections coming up in just a few months, a little widely publicised economy in public funds would not come amiss.

Something like half the personnel at Poker Flats was fired. But space medicine, even when it was for military purposes only, was still an important factor in rocket research so I retained my position although my field was narrowed down so much I was thinking of handing in my resignation.

Then I received the call from Jet whom I had not seen for nearly a month and who had, or so I thought then, no reason whatsoever for being anywhere near Australia. His presence there intrigued me and as the tone of his message was urgent I had little trouble in persuading myself to fly out to Adelaide to see what was going on. I was due for a vacation anyway.

I packed my bags and left New Mexico for New York a week later. I made the journey across the world in two stratospheric hops--New York to Bombay, Bombay to Melbourne--and reached the Australian city the same day. From Melbourne I travelled to Adelaide by aircraft and found Jet waiting to meet me.

He gave me no time to ask questions. I had hardly greeted him when I was swept to another comer of the airfield where a helicopter, its blades already rotating, was waiting. My baggage was bundled inside and I took my seat next to Jet who sat at the controls. Within a few seconds we were in the air, heading over the city towards the irrigated, agricultural land to the north. Five minutes later the pink, sandy wastes of the Australian bush were passing below us.

Jet, in the small pilot’s seat, his long legs stretched out before him, seemed taller than ever. His mop of black hair from which he gained his nickname, was as unruly as ever and there was a glint of good humour in his boyish, grey eyes.

He put the craft on its course, set the automatic pilot, leant leisurely back in his seat and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

“Well, Doc, how do you like Australia?” he said at last.

“I’ve hardly had time to form any opinion about it,” I told him.

“Not very different from New Mexico, do you think?”

“Not really, but there’s a deal more of it.”

“How would you like to work in this part of the world?”

“Me? What at?”

“Space medicine research, plus the opportunity to put many of your theories into practice.”

“Is there another rocket proving ground out here then-- besides Woomera?”

“You might call it that. Launching ground would be a better description.”

“It amounts to the same thing.”

“Not exactly. This is something quite new. It has revolutionized the whole business of rocket construction.”