Prelude to Space (6 page)

“With chemically propelled rockets we have achieved much, but to conquer space, and
not merely to make short-lived raids into it, we must harness the limitless forces
of atomic energy. At present, atomically driven rockets are still in their infancy:
they are dangerous and uncertain. But within a few years we shall have perfected them,
and mankind will have taken its first great stride along the Road to Space.”

The voice had grown louder; there was a throbbing background of music. Then Dirk seemed
to be suspended motionless in space, a few hundred feet from the ground. There was
just time for him to pick out a few scattered buildings and to realize that he was
in a rocket that had just been launched. Then the sense of time returned: the desert
began to drop away, with accelerating speed. A range of low hills came into view and
was instantly foreshortened into flatness. The picture was slowly rotating, and abruptly
a coastline cut across his field of vision. The scale contracted remorselessly, and
with a sudden shock he realized that he was now seeing the whole coast of Southern
Australia.

The rocket was no longer accelerating, but was sweeping away from Earth at a speed
not far short of escape velocity. The twin islands of New Zealand swam into view—and
then, at the edge of the picture, appeared a line of whiteness which for a moment
he thought was a cloud.

Something seemed to catch at Dirk’s throat when he realized that he was looking down
upon the eternal icewalls of the Antarctic. He remembered the
Discovery
, moored not half a mile away. His eye could encompass in a moment the whole of the
land over which Scott and his companions, less than a lifetime ago, had struggled
and died.

And then the edge of the world reared up before him. The wonderfully efficient gyro-stabilization
was beginning to fail and the camera wandered away into space. For a long time, it
seemed, there was blackness and night; then, without warning, the camera came full
upon the sun and the screen was blasted with light.

When the Earth returned, he could see the entire hemisphere spread beneath him. The
picture froze once more and the music stilled, so that he had time to pick out the
continents and oceans on that remote and unfamiliar world below.

For long minutes that distant globe hung there before his eyes; then, slowly, it dissolved.
The lesson was over, but he would not soon forget it.

On the whole, Dirk’s relations with the two young draftsmen who shared the office
were cordial. They were not quite sure of his official position (that, he sometimes
thought, made three of them) and so treated him with an odd mixture of deference and
familiarity. There was one respect, however, in which they annoyed him intensely.

It seemed to Dirk that there were only two attitudes to adopt towards interplanetary
flight. Either one was for it, or one was against it. What he could not understand
was a position of complete indifference. These youngsters (he himself, of course,
was a good five years older) earning their living in the very heart of Interplanetary
itself, did not seem to have the slightest interest in the project. They drew their
plans and made their calculations just as enthusiastically as if they were preparing
drawings for washing machines instead of spaceships. They were, however, prepared
to show traces of vivacity when defending their attitudes.

“The trouble with you, Doc,” said the elder, Sam, one afternoon, “is that you take
life too seriously. It doesn’t pay. Bad for the arteries and that sort of thing.”

“Unless some people did a bit of worrying,” retorted Dirk, “there’d be no jobs for
lazy so-and-sos like you and Bert.”

“What’s wrong with that?” said Bert. “They ought to be grateful. If it wasn’t for
chaps like Sam and me, they’d have nothing to worry about and would die of frustration.
Most of ’em do, anyway.”

Sam shifted his cigarette. (Did he use glue to keep it dangling from his lower lip
at that improbable angle?)

“You’re always agitating about the past, which is dead and done with, or the future,
which we won’t be around to see. Why not relax and enjoy yourself for a change?”

“I
am
enjoying myself,” said Dirk. “I don’t suppose you realize that there are people who
happen to like work.”

“They kid themselves into thinking they do,” explained Bert. “It’s all a matter of
conditioning. We were smart enough to dodge it.”

“I think,” said Dirk admiringly, “that if you keep on devoting so much energy to concocting
excuses to avoid work, you’ll evolve a new philosophy. The philosophy of Futilitarianism.”

“Did you make that up on the spur of the moment?”

“No,” confessed Dirk.

“I thought not. Sounded as if you’d been saving it up.”

“Tell me,” Dirk asked, “don’t you feel any intellectual curiosity about anything?”

“Not particularly, as long as I know where my next pay check’s coming from.”

They were pulling his leg, of course, and they knew he knew it. Dirk laughed and went
on:

“It seems to me that Public Relations has overlooked a nice little oasis of inertia
right on its own doorstep. Why, I don’t believe you care a hoot whether the ‘Prometheus’
reaches the Moon or not!”

“I wouldn’t say that,” protested Sam. “I’ve got a fiver on her.”

Before Dirk could think of a suitably blistering reply, the door was thrown open and
Matthews appeared. Sam and Bert, with smoothly co-ordinated motions that eluded the
eye, were instantly hard at work among their drawings.

Matthews was obviously in a hurry.

“Want a free tea?” he said.

“It depends. Where?”

“House of Commons. You were saying the other day that you’d never been there.”

“This sounds interesting. What’s it all about?”

“Grab your things and I’ll tell you on the way.”

In the taxi, Matthews relaxed and explained.

“We often get jobs like this,” he said. “Mac was supposed to be coming, but he’s had
to go to New York and won’t be back for a couple of days. So I thought you might like
to come along. For the record, you can be one of our legal advisers.”

“This is very thoughtful of you,” said Dirk gratefully. “Who are we going to see?”

“A dear old chap named Sir Michael Flannigan. He’s an Irish Tory—very much so. Some
of his constituents don’t hold with these new-fangled spaceships—they’ve probably
never really got used to the Wright Brothers. So we have to go along and explain what
it’s all about.”

“No doubt you’ll succeed in allaying his doubts,” said Dirk as they drove past County
Hall and turned on to Westminster Bridge.

“I hope so; I’ve got a line which I think should fix things very nicely.”

They passed under the shadow of Big Ben and drove for a hundred yards along the side
of the great Gothic building. The entrance at which they stopped was an inconspicuous
archway leading into a long hall which seemed very remote from the bustle of traffic
in the square outside. It was cool and quiet, and to Dirk the feeling of age and centuries-old
traditions was overwhelming.

Climbing a short flight of steps, they found themselves in a large chamber from which
corridors radiated in several directions. A small crowd was milling around, and people
sat in expectant attitudes along wooden benches. On the right a reception desk was
flanked by a stout policeman in full regalia, helmet and all.

Matthews walked up to the desk, and collected a form which he filled in and handed
to the policeman. Nothing happened for some time. Then a uniformed official appeared,
shouted a string of quite incomprehensible words, and gathered the forms from the
policeman. He then vanished down one of the corridors.

“What on earth did he say?” hissed Dirk in the silence that had suddenly descended.

“He said that Mr. Jones, Lady Carruthers, and someone else whose name I couldn’t catch,
aren’t in the House at the moment.”

The message must have been generally understood, for groups of disgruntled constituents
began to drift out of the chamber, foiled of their prey.

“Now we’ve got to wait,” said Matthews, “but it shouldn’t be long, as we’re expected.”

From time to time in the next ten minutes other names were called, and occasionally
members arrived to collect their guests. Sometimes Matthews pointed out a notable
of whom Dirk had never heard, though he did his best to disguise the fact.

Presently he noticed that the policeman was pointing them out to a tall young man
who was very far from his conceptions of an elderly Irish baronet.

The young man came over to them.

“How do you do?” he said. “My name is Fox. Sir Michael is engaged for a few moments,
so he asked me to look after you. Perhaps you’d care to listen to the debate until
Sir Michael’s free?”

“I’m sure we would,” Matthews replied, a little too heartily. Dirk guessed that the
experience was not particularly novel to him, but he was delighted at the chance of
witnessing Parliament in action.

They followed their guide through interminable corridors and beneath numberless archways.
Finally he handed them over to an ancient attendant who might very well have witnessed
the signing of Magna Carta.

“He’ll find you a good seat,” promised Mr. Fox. “Sir Michael will be along for you
in a few minutes.”

They thanked him and followed the attendant up a winding stairway.

“Who was that?” asked Dirk.

“Robert Fox—Labour M.P. for Taunton,” explained Matthews. “That’s one thing about
the House—everyone always helps everybody else. Parties don’t matter as much as outsiders
might think.” He turned to the attendant.

“What’s being debated now?”

“The Second Reading of the Soft Drinks (Control) Bill,” said the ancient in a funereal
voice.

“Oh, dear!” said Matthews. “Let’s hope it
is
only for a few minutes!”

The benches high in the gallery gave them a good view of the debating chamber. Photographs
had made his surroundings quite familiar to Dirk, but he had always pictured a scene
of animation with members rising to cry “On a point of order!” or, better still, “Shame!”
“Withdraw!” and other Parliamentary noises. Instead, he saw about thirty languid gentlemen
draped along the benches while a junior minister read a not-very-enthralling schedule
of prices and profits. While he watched, two members simultaneously decided that they
had had enough and, with little curtseys to the Speaker, hastily withdrew—no doubt,
thought Dirk, in search of drinks that were not particularly soft.

His attention wandered from the scene below and he examined the great chamber around
him. It seemed very well preserved for its age, and it was wonderful to think of the
historic scenes it had witnessed down the centuries, right back to——

“Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?” whispered Matthews. “It was only finished in 1950,
you know.”

Dirk came back to earth with a bump.

“Good heavens! I thought it was centuries old!”

“Oh, no: Hitler wrote off the earlier chamber in the Blitz.”

Dirk felt rather annoyed with himself for not remembering this, and turned his attention
once more to the debate. There were now fifteen members present on the Government
side, while the Conservative and Labour parties on the Opposition benches could only
muster a baker’s dozen between them.

The paneled door against which they were sitting opened abruptly, and a smiling round
face beamed at them. Matthews shot to his feet as their host greeted them with many
apologies. Out in the corridor, where voices could be raised again, introductions
were effected and they followed Sir Michael through yet more passages to the restaurant.
Dirk decided that he had never seen so many acres of wooden paneling in his life.

The old baronet must have been well over seventy, but he walked with a springy step
and his complexion was almost cherubic. His tonsured pate made the resemblance to
some medieval abbot so striking that Dirk felt he had just stepped into Glastonbury
or Wells before the dissolution of the monasteries. Yet if he closed his eyes, Sir
Michael’s accent transported him instantly to metropolitan New York. The last time
he had encountered a brogue like that, its owner had been handing him a ticket for
passing a “Stop” sign.

They sat down to tea and Dirk carefully declined the offer of coffee. During the meal
they discussed trivialities and avoided the object of the meeting. It was only broached
when they had moved out on to the long terrace flanking the Thames which, Dirk could
not help thinking, was a scene of much greater activity than the debating chamber
itself. Little groups of people stood or sat around, talking briskly, and there was
much coming and going of messengers. Sometimes the members would,
en masse
, disengage themselves apologetically from their guests and dash off to register their
votes. During one of these lacunae, Matthews did his best to make Parliamentary procedure
clear to Dirk.

“You’ll realize,” he said, “that most of the work is done in the committee rooms.
Except during important debates, only the specialists or the members who are particularly
interested are actually in the Chamber. The others are working on reports or seeing
constituents in their little cubbyholes all over the building.”

“Now, boys,” boomed Sir Michael as he returned, having collected a tray of drinks
on the way, “tell me about this scheme of yours for going to the Moon.”

Matthews cleared his throat, and Dirk pictured his mind running rapidly through all
the possible opening gambits.

“Well, Sir Michael,” he began, “it’s only a logical extension of what mankind’s been
doing since history began. For thousands of years the human race has been spreading
over the world until the whole globe has been explored and colonized. The time’s now
come to make the next step and to cross space to the other planets. Humanity must
always have new frontiers, new horizons. Otherwise it will sooner or later sink back
into decadence. Interplanetary travel’s the next stage in our development, and it
will be wise to take it before it’s forced upon us by shortage of raw materials or
space. And there are also psychological reasons for space flight. Many years ago someone
likened our little Earth to a goldfish bowl inside which the human mind couldn’t keep
circling forever with stagnation. The world was big enough for mankind in the days
of the stagecoach and the sailing ship, but it’s far too small now that we can round
it in a couple of hours.”