Prelude to Space (13 page)

“I think I must be a hybrid,” smiled Dirk. “I like to sit in my back-garden—but I
also like the wanderers to drop in now and then to tell me what they’ve seen.”

He broke off abruptly, then added: “What about sitting down for a drink somewhere?”

He felt tired and thirsty and so, for the same reason, did Hassell.

“Just for a moment, then,” said Hassell. “I want to get back before five.”

Dirk could understand this, though as it happened he knew nothing of the other’s domestic
preoccupations. He let Hassell navigate him to the lounge of the Cumberland, where
they sat down thankfully behind a couple of large beers.

“I don’t know,” said Dirk with an apologetic cough, “if you’ve heard of my job.”

“As a matter of fact I have,” said Hassell with an engaging smile. “We were wondering
when you were going to catch up with us. You’re the expert on motives and influences,
aren’t you?”

Dirk was surprised, as well as a trifle embarrassed, to discover how far his fame
had spread.

“Er—yes,” he admitted. “Of course,” he added hastily, “I’m not primarily concerned
with individual cases, but it’s very useful to me if I can find just how people got
involved in astronautics in the first place.”

He wondered if Hassell would take the bait. After a minute, he began to nibble and
Dirk felt all the sensations of an angler watching his float twitching, at long last,
on the surface of some placid lake.

“We’ve argued that often enough at the Nursery,” said Hassell. “There’s no simple
answer. It depends on the individual.”

Dirk generated an encouraging silence.

“Consider Taine, for example. He’s the pure scientist, looking for knowledge and not
much interested in the consequences. That’s why, despite his brains, he’ll always
be a smaller man than the D.-G. Mind you—I’m not criticizing. One Sir Robert’s probably
quite enough for a single generation!

“Clinton and Richards are engineers and love machinery for its own sake, though they’re
much more human than Taine. I guess you’ve heard how Jimmy deals with reporters he
doesn’t like—I thought so! Clinton’s a queer sort of fellow and you never know exactly
what’s going on in his mind. In their cases, however, they were chosen for the job—they
didn’t go after it.

“Now, Pierre’s just about as different from the rest as he could be. He’s the kind
who likes adventure for itself—that’s why he became a rocket pilot. It was his big
mistake, though he didn’t realize it at the time. There’s nothing adventurous about
rocket flying: either it goes according to plan—or else,
Bang!
”

He brought his fist down on the table, checking it in the last fraction of an inch
so that the glasses scarcely rattled. The unconscious precision of the movement filled
Dirk with admiration. He could not, however, let Hassell’s remarks go unchallenged.

“I seem to remember,” Dirk said, “a little contretemps of yours which must have given
you a certain amount of—er—excitement.”

Hassell smiled disparagingly.

“That sort of thing happens once in a thousand times. On the remaining nine hundred
and ninety-nine occasions, the pilot’s simply there because he weighs less than the
automatic machinery that could do the same job.”

He paused, looking over Dirk’s shoulder, and a slow smile came across his face.

“Fame has its compensations,” he murmured. “One of them is approaching right now.”

A hotel dignitary was wheeling a little trolley toward them, wheeling it with the
air of a high-priest bringing a sacrifice to the altar. He stopped at their table,
and produced a bottle which, if Dirk could judge from its cobwebbed exterior, was
considerably older than he himself.

“With the compliments of the management, sir,” said the official, bowing toward Hassell,
who made appreciative noises but looked a little alarmed at the attention now being
concentrated on him from all sides.

Dirk knew nothing of wines, but he did not see how any skill in that complicated art
could have made the smooth liquid slide more voluptuously down his throat. It was
such a discreet, such a well-bred wine that they had no hesitation in toasting themselves,
then Interplanetary, and then the “Prometheus.” Their appreciation so delighted the
management that another bottle would have been forthcoming immediately, but Hassell
gracefully refused and explained that he was already very late, which was perfectly
true.

They parted in a high good humor on the steps of the Underground, feeling that the
afternoon had come to a brilliant
finale
. Not until Hassell had gone did Dirk realize that the young pilot had said nothing,
absolutely nothing, about himself. Was it modesty—of merely lack of time? He had been
surprisingly willing to discuss his colleagues; it seemed almost as if he was anxious
to divert attention from himself.

Dirk stood worrying over this for a moment: then, whistling a little tune, he began
to walk slowly homeward along Oxford Street. Behind him, the sun was going down upon
his last evening in England.

For thirty years the world had been slowly growing used to the idea that, some day,
men were going to reach the planets. The prophecies of the early pioneers of astronautics
had come true so many times since the first rockets climbed through the stratosphere
that few people disbelieved them now. That tiny crater near Aristarchus, and the television
films of the other side of the Moon were achievements which could not be denied
.

Yet there had been some who had deplored or even denounced them. To the man in the
street, interplanetary flight was still a vast, somewhat terrifying possibility just
below the horizon of everyday life. The general public, as yet, had no particular
feelings about space flight except the vague realization that “Science” was going
to bring it about in the indefinite future
.

Two distinct types of mentality, however, had taken astronautics very seriously indeed,
though for quite different reasons. The practically simultaneous impact of the long-range
rocket and the atomic bomb upon the military mind had, in the 1950s, produced a crop
of blood-curdling prophecies from the experts in mechanized murder. For some years
there had been much talk of bases on the Moon or even—more appropriately—upon Mars.
The United States Army’s belated discovery, at the end of the Second World War, of
Oberth’s twenty-year-old plans for “space-stations” had revived ideas which it was
a gross understatement to call “Wellsian.”

In his classic book
, Wege zur Raumschiffahrt,
Oberth had discussed the building of great “space-mirrors” which could focus sunlight
upon the Earth, either for peaceful purposes or for the incineration of enemy cities.
Oberth himself never took this last idea very seriously, and must have been surprised
at its solemn reception two decades later
.

The fact that it would be very easy to bombard the Earth from the Moon, and very difficult
to attack the Moon from the Earth, had made many uninhibited military experts declare
that, for the sake of peace
, their
particular country must seize our satellite before any war-mongering rival could reach
it. Such arguments were common in the decade following the release of atomic energy,
and were a typical by-product of that era’s political paranoia. They died, unlamented,
as the world slowly returned to sanity and order
.

A second and perhaps more important body of opinion, while admitting that interplanetary
travel was possible, opposed it on mystical or religious grounds. The “theological
opposition,” as it was usually termed, believed that man would be disobeying some
divine edict if he ventured away from his world. In the phrase of Interplanetary’s
earliest and most brilliant critic, the Oxford don C. S. Lewis, astronomical distances
were “God’s quarantine regulations.” If man overcame them, he would be guilty of something
not far removed from blasphemy
.

Since these arguments were not founded on logic, they were quite irrefutable. From
time to time Interplanetary had issued counterblasts, pointing out that the same objections
might very well have been brought against all explorers who had ever lived. The astronomical
distances which twentieth-century man could bridge in minutes with his radio waves
were less of a barrier than the great oceans must have seemed to his Stone Age ancestors.
No doubt in prehistoric times there were those who shook their heads and prophesied
disaster when the young men of the tribe went in search of new lands in the terrifying,
unknown world around them. Yet it was well that the search had been made before the
glaciers came grinding down from the Pole
.

One day the glaciers would return; and that was the least of the dooms that might
descend upon the Earth before its course was run. Some of these could only be guessed,
but one at least was almost certain in the ages ahead
.

There comes a time in the life of every star when the delicate balance of its atomic
furnaces must tilt, one way or the other. In the far future the descendants of Man
might catch, from the safety of the outermost planets, a last glimpse of their birthplace
as it sank into the fires of the detonating Sun
.

One objection to space flight which these critics brought forward was, on the face
of it, more convincing. Since Man, they argued, had caused so much misery upon his
own world, could he be trusted to behave on others? Above all, would the miserable
story of conquest and enslavement of one race by another be repeated again, endlessly
and forever, as human culture spread from one world to the next?

Against this there could be no fully convincing answer: only a clash of rival faiths—the
ancient conflict between pessimism and optimism, between those who believed in Man
and those who did not. But the astronomers had made one contribution to the debate
by pointing out the falseness of the historical analogy. Man, who had been civilized
only for a millionth of the life of his planet, was not likely to encounter races
on other worlds which would be primitive enough for him to exploit or enslave. Any
ships from Earth which set out across space with thoughts of interplanetary empire
might find themselves, at the end of their voyage, with no greater hopes of conquest
than a fleet of savage war-canoes drawing slowly into New York harbor
.

The announcement that the “Prometheus” might be launched within a few weeks had revived
all these speculations and many more. Press and radio talked of little else, and for
a while the astronomers made a profitable business of writing guardedly optimistic
articles about the Solar System. A Gallup poll carried out in Great Britain during
this period showed that 41 per cent of the public thought interplanetary travel was
a good thing, 26 per cent were against it, and 33 per cent had not made up their minds.
These figures—particularly the 33 per cent—caused some despondency at Southbank and
resulted in many conferences in the Public Relations Department, which was now busier
than it had ever been before
.

Interplanetary’s usual trickle of visitors had grown to a mighty flood bearing upon
its bosom some very exotic characters. Matthews had evolved a standard procedure for
dealing with most of these. The people who wanted to go on the first trip were offered
a ride in the Medical Section’s giant centrifuge, which could produce accelerations
of ten gravities. Very few accepted this offer, and those who did, when they had recovered,
were then passed to the Dynamics Department, where the mathematicians administered
the
coup de grâce
by asking them unanswerable questions
.

No one, however, had found an effective means of dealing with the genuine cranks—though
they could sometimes be neutralized by a kind of mutual reaction. It was one of Matthews’s
unfulfilled ambitions to be visited simultaneously by a flat-earther and one of those
still more eccentric people who are convinced that the world is on the inside of a
hollow sphere. This would, he was sure, result in a highly entertaining debate
.

Very little could be done about the psychic explorers (usually middle-aged spinsters)
who were already perfectly well acquainted with the Solar System and all too anxious
to impart their knowledge. Matthews had been optimistic enough to hope, now that the
crossing of space was so close at hand, that they would not be so eager to have their
ideas tested by reality. He was disappointed, and one unfortunate member of his staff
was employed almost full time listening to these ladies give highly colored and mutually
incompatible accounts of lunar affairs
.

More serious and significant were the letters and comments in the great newspapers,
many of which demanded official replies. A minor canon of the Church of England wrote
a vigorous and much publicized letter to
The London Times,
denouncing Interplanetary and all its works. Sir Robert Derwent promptly went into
action behind the scenes and, as he put it, “trumped the fellow with an archbishop.”
It was rumored that he had a cardinal and a rabbi in reserve if attacks came from
other quarters
.

No one was particularly surprised when a retired brigadier, who had apparently spent
the last thirty years in suspended animation in the outskirts of Aldershop, wanted
to know what steps were being taken to incorporate the Moon into the British Commonwealth.
Simultaneously, a long-dormant major-general erupted in Atlanta and asked Congress
to make the Moon the Fiftieth State. Similar demands were to be heard in almost every
country in the world—with the possible exception of Switzerland and Luxembourg—while
the international lawyers realized that a crisis of which they had long been warned
was now almost upon them
.

At this moment Sir Robert Derwent issued the famous manifesto which had been prepared
many years ago against this very day
.