Prelude to Space (3 page)

In the decade before the Second World War, Oberth’s German disciples had perfected
the liquid-fuelled rocket. At first they too had dreamed of the conquest of space,
but that dream had been forgotten with the coming of Hitler. The city over which Dirk
so often gazed still bore the scars from the time, thirty years ago, when the great
rockets had come falling down from the stratosphere in a tumult of sundered air.

Less than a year later had come that dreary dawn in the New Mexico desert, when it
seemed that the River of Time had halted for a moment, then plunged in foam and spray
into a new channel toward a changed and unknown future. With Hiroshima had come the
end of a war and the end of an age: the power and the machine had come together at
last and the road to space lay clear ahead.

It had been a steep road, and it had taken thirty years to climb—thirty years of triumphs
and heartbreaking disappointments. As he grew to know the men around him, as he listened
to their stories and their conversations, Dirk slowly filled in the personal details
which the reports and summaries could never provide.

“The television picture wasn’t too clear, but every few seconds it steadied and we
got a good image. That was the biggest thrill of my life—being the first man to see
the other side of the Moon. Going there will be a bit of an anti-climax.”

“—most terrific explosion you ever saw. When we got up, I heard Goering say: ‘If
that’s
the best you can do, I’ll tell the Fuehrer the whole thing’s a waste of money.’ You
should have seen von Braun’s face—”

“The KX 14’s still up there: she completes one orbit every three hours, which was
just what we’d intended. But the blasted radio transmitter failed at take-off, so
we never got those instrument readings after all.”

“I was looking through the twelve-inch reflector when that load of magnesium powder
hit the Moon, about fifty kilometers from Aristarchus. You can just see the crater
it made, if you have a look around sunset.”

Sometimes Dirk envied these men. They had a purpose in life, even if it was one he
could not fully understand. It must give them a feeling of power to send their great
machines thousands of miles out into space. But power was dangerous, and often corrupting.
Could they be trusted with the forces they were bringing into the world? Could the
world itself be trusted with them?

Despite his intellectual background, Dirk was not altogether free from the fear of
science that had been common ever since the great discoveries of the Victorian era.
He felt not only isolated but sometimes a little nervous in his new surroundings.
The few people he spoke to were invariably helpful and polite, but a certain shyness
and his anxiety to master the background of his subject in the shortest time kept
him away from all social entanglements. He liked the atmosphere of organization, which
was almost aggressively democratic, and later on it would be easy enough to meet all
the people he wished.

At the moment, Dirk’s chief contacts with anyone outside the Public Relations Department
were at mealtimes. Interplanetary’s small canteen was patronized, in relays, by all
the staff from the Director General downwards. It was run by a very enterprising committee
with a fondness for experimenting, and although there were occasional culinary catastrophes,
the food was usually very good. For all that Dirk could tell, Interplanetary’s boast
of the best cooking on South-bank might indeed be justified.

As Dirk’s lunch-time, like Easter, was a movable feast, he usually met a fresh set
of faces every day and soon grew to know most of the important members of the organization
by sight. No one took any notice of him: the building was full of birds-of-passage
from universities and industrial firms all over the world, and he was obviously regarded
as just another visiting scientist.

His college, through the ramifications of the United States Embassy, had managed to
find Dirk a small service flat a few hundred yards from Grosvenor Square. Every morning
he walked to Bond Street Station and took the Tube to Waterloo. He quickly learned
to avoid the early-morning rush, but he was seldom much later than many senior members
of Interplanetary’s staff. Eccentric hours were popular at Southbank: though Dirk
sometimes remained in the building until midnight, there were always sounds of activity
around him—usually from the research sections. Often, in order to clear his head and
get a little exercise, he would go for a stroll along the deserted corridors, making
mental notes of interesting departments which he might one day visit officially. He
learned a great deal more about the place in this way than from the elaborate and
much-amended organization charts which Matthews had lent him—and was always borrowing
back again.

Frequently Dirk would come across half-opened doors revealing vistas of untidy labs
and machine-shops in which gloomy technicians sat gazing at equipment which was obviously
refusing to behave. If the hour was very late, the scene would be softened by a mist
of tobacco-smoke and invariably an electric kettle and a battered tea pot would occupy
places of honor in the near foreground. Occasionally Dirk would arrive at some moment
of technical triumph, and if he was not careful he was likely to be invited to share
the ambiguous liquid which the engineers were continually brewing. In this way he
became on nodding terms with a great many people, but he knew scarcely a dozen well
enough to address them by name.

At the age of thirty-three, Dirk Alexson was still somewhat nervous of the everyday
world around him. He was happier in the past and among his books, and though he had
traveled fairly extensively in the United States, he had spent almost all his life
in academic circles. His colleagues recognized him as a steady, sound worker with
an almost intuitive flair for unraveling complicated situations. No one knew if he
would make a great historian, but his study of the Medicis had been acknowledged as
outstanding. His friends had never been able to understand how anyone of Dirk’s somewhat
placid disposition could so accurately have analyzed the motives and behavior of that
flamboyant family.

Pure chance, it seemed, had brought him from Chicago to London, and he was still very
much conscious of the fact. A few months ago the influence of Walter Pater had begun
to wane: the little, crowded stage of Renaissance Italy was losing its charm—if so
mild a word could be applied to that microcosm of intrigues and assassinations. It
had not been his first change of interest, and he feared it would not be his last,
for Dirk Alexson was still seeking a work to which he could devote his life. In a
moment of depression he had remarked to his Dean that probably only the future held
a subject which would really appeal to him. That casual and half-serious complaint
had coincided with a letter from the Rockefeller Foundation, and before he knew it
Dirk had been on the way to London.

For the first few days he was haunted by the specter of his own incapacity, but he
had learned now that this always happened when he started a new job and it had ceased
to be more than a nuisance. After about a week he felt that he now had a fairly clear
picture of the organization in which he had so unexpectedly found himself. His confidence
began to return, and he could relax a little.

Since undergraduate days he had kept a desultory journal—usually neglected save in
occasional crises—and he now began once more to record his impressions and the everyday
events of his life. These notes, written for his own satisfaction, would enable him
to marshal his thoughts and might later serve as a basis for the official history
he must one day produce.

“Today, May 3, 1978, I’ve been in London for exactly a week—and I’ve seen nothing
of it except the areas around Bond Street and Waterloo. When it’s fine Matthews and
I usually go for a stroll along the river after lunch. We go across the “New” bridge
(which has only been built for about forty years!) and walk up or down river as the
fancy takes us, crossing again at Charing Cross or Blackfriars. There are quite a
number of variations, clockwise and counter-clockwise.

“Alfred Matthews is about forty, and I’ve found him very helpful. He has an extraordinary
sense of humor, but I’ve never seen him smile—he’s absolutely deadpan. He seems to
know his job pretty well—a good deal better, I should say, than McAndrews, who is
supposed to be his boss. Mac is about ten years older: like Alfred, he graduated through
journalism into public relations. He’s a lean, hungry-looking person and usually speaks
with a slight Scots accent—which vanishes completely when he’s excited. This should
prove something, but I can’t imagine what. He’s not a bad fellow, but I don’t think
he’s very bright. Alfred does all the work and there’s not much love lost between
them. It’s sometimes a bit difficult keeping on good terms with them both.

“Next week I hope to start meeting people and going further afield. I particularly
want to meet the crew—but I’m keeping out of the scientists’ way until I know a bit
more about atomic drives and interplanetary orbits. Alfred is going to teach me all
about this next week—so he says. What I also hope to discover is how such an extraordinary
hybrid as Interplanetary was ever formed in the first place. It seems a typically
British compromise, and there’s very little on paper about its formation and origins.
The whole institution is a mass of paradoxes. It exists in a state of chronic bankruptcy,
yet it’s responsible for spending something like ten millions a year (£, not $). The
Government has very little in its administration, and in some ways it seems as autocratic
as the B.B.C. But when it’s attacked in Parliament (which happens every other month)
some Minister always gets up to defend it. Perhaps, after all, Mac’s a better organizer
than I imagine!

“I called it ‘British,’ but of course it isn’t. About a fifth of the staff are American,
and I’ve heard every conceivable accent in the canteen. It’s as international as the
United Nations secretariat, though the British certainly provide most of the driving
force and the administrative staff. Why this should be, I don’t know: perhaps Matthews
can explain.

“Another query: apart from their accents, it’s very difficult to see any real distinction
between the different nationalities here. Is this due to the—to put it mildly—supranational
nature of their work? And if I stay here long enough, I suppose I shall get deracinated
too.”

“I was wondering,” said McAndrews, “when you were going to ask that question. The
answer’s rather complicated.”

“I’ll be very much surprised,” Dirk answered dryly, “if it’s quite as involved as
the machinations of the Medici family.”

“Perhaps not; we’ve never used assassination yet, though we’ve often felt like it.
Miss Reynolds, will you take any calls while I talk with Dr. Alexson? Thank you.

“Well, as you know, the foundations of astronautics—the science of space travel—had
been pretty well laid at the end of the Second World War. V. 2 and atomic energy had
convinced most people that space could be crossed, if anyone wanted to do it. There
were several societies, in England and the States, actively promulgating the idea
that we should go to the Moon and the planets. They made steady but slow progress
until the 1950s, when things really started to get moving.

“In 1959, as you may—er—just remember, the American Army’s guided missile ‘Orphan
Annie’ hit the Moon with twenty-five pounds of flash-powder aboard. From that moment,
the public began to realize that space travel wasn’t a thing of the distant future,
but might come inside a generation. Astronomy began to replace atomic physics as the
Number One science, and the rocket societies’ membership lists started to lengthen
steadily. But it was one thing to crash an unmanned projectile into the Moon—and quite
another to land a full-sized spaceship there and bring it home again. Some pessimists
thought the job might still take another hundred years.

“There were a lot of people in this country who didn’t intend to wait that long. They
believed that the crossing of space was as essential for progress as the discovery
of the New World had been four hundred years before. It would open up new frontiers
and give the human race a goal so challenging that it would overshadow national differences
and put the tribal conflicts of the early twentieth century in their true perspective.
Energies that might have gone into wars would be fully employed in the colonization
of the planets—which could certainly keep us busy for a good many centuries. That
was the theory, at any rate.

McAndrews smiled a little.

“There were, of course, a good many other motives. You know what an unsettled period
the early 50s was. The cynic’s argument for space flight was summed up in the famous
remark: ‘Atomic power makes interplanetary travel not only possible but imperative.’
As long as it was confined to Earth, humanity had too many eggs in one rather fragile
basket.

“All this was realized by an oddly assorted group of scientists, writers, astronomers,
editors, and businessmen in the old Interplanetary Society. With very small capital,
they started the publication
Spacewards
, which was inspired by the success of the American National Geographic Society’s
magazine. What the N.G.S. had done for the Earth could, it was argued, now be done
for the solar system.
Spacewards
was an attempt to make the public shareholders, as it were, in the conquest of space.
It catered to the new interest in astronomy, and those who subscribed to it felt that
they were helping to finance the first space flight.

“The project wouldn’t have succeeded a few years earlier, but the time was now ripe
for it. In a few years there were about a quarter of a million subscribers all over
the world, and in 1962 ‘Interplanetary’ was founded to carry out full-time research
into the problems of space flight. At first it couldn’t offer the salaries of the
great government-sponsored rocket establishments, but slowly it attracted the best
scientists in the field. They preferred working on a constructive project, even at
lower pay, to building missiles for transporting atomic bombs. In the early days,
the organization was also helped by one or two financial windfalls. When the last
British millionaire died in 1965, he balked the Treasury of almost all his fortune
by making it into a Trust Fund for our use.