by Jerry
“All right,” I said slowly. Helen wasn’t yet in sight. “I’m just getting a little used to the idea. You must admit, brother, that you’ve just made one tall statement.”
“I know,” he said patiently, “that’s just the point. I have to explain how I came to go.” So we sat there on the bench, in the prosaic daylight, and I watched two squirrels play on the sun-dappled grass while Martin Beck told me how he came to make the first round trip to the moon.
“I was a Pfc in infantry,” Beck said. “Just one of a million dogfaces with an M-1 and sore feet. Were you in service?”
“Navy; South Pacific and the Philippine Sea,” I said shortly.
“Oh, sure; sometimes I forget there was a war out there too. Well, this was Germany. My outfit was in the Bulge deal at Christmas of 1944, and we made out all right. But about three weeks after the first of the year our luck ran out—anyway mine did. I got separated from a night patrol, got lost in the dark and a snowstorm and at daylight found I’d ended up in a bunch of Krauts.
“In a way that wasn’t too bad. I mean it happened to thousands of dogfaces, like in any war. I was put in a boxcar and shipped east with a lot of other half-frozen GI’s, to one of the standard model military prison camps. I never had any idea where it was, except that it was one of those picture-book parts of Germany which look like there’d never been any war.
“I guess the camp was about like any other one—not good, not bad. I will say it wasn’t any Dachau and the Krauts didn’t kick us around. Maybe they were beginning to see the handwriting and figured to play it smart. Of course one of the worst things about any of those places is that you nearly go nuts with nothing to do. Me, I didn’t even have much of anybody to write to back home.”
“Then one day they started picking out guys and sending them to the commandant’s office, one at a time. They all came back with the same story—they’d been asked a hundred screwy questions that didn’t seem to make sense and then released. None of them answered anything—or anyway they said they didn’t. Of course we all knew the Geneva setup—name, rank and serial number, no more. Nobody knew what the deal was and all we could figure was that they were looking for somebody who would rat, though everybody was agreed that nothing like that had been put right on the table.
“Then finally they tapped me. There was a bare office with a desk that had a civilian behind it, and a straight chair in front of it where I sat. The Kraut behind the desk spoke better English than I do when he started in to ask me those same silly questions. All I answered was ’Yes,’ ‘No,’ or I don’t know.’ There was no prodding or shoving around or anything like that. He just kept on asking the questions and whatever you said he filled in on the forms he had in front of him. I got the notion that it was some kind of intelligence or aptitude test—you know, one of those things where no matter what your answers are, the white-coat boys did it all up and get their answer. The fellow finally took his forms and went away and I just sat there and waited. After quite a while the guy came back to the desk, but this lime he just sat there and smoked and didn’t say a word. I began to get a little nervous and sweat in the palms of my hands. Then I tried to ask him questions, but he was tighter than I was—he didn’t even say ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ ”
“What did you figure then?” I asked.
“I just couldn’t even guess,” he said slowly. ’’That was the hell of it.”
“Any way, I never went back to the stockade. I never got to see any of the other guys or say a word to anybody.
“In less than an hour after that I was on my way, in the back seat of one of those big, slick Mercedes-Benz jobs, with a guard on each side of me and another one up front with the driver.”
“You didn’t have any idea where you were,” I said, “or where you were going?”
“Not an inkle. In the first place, like I said, we didn’t know where the camp was. Then this was a real cloudy day and I didn’t have any notion which way we were driving. We drove plenty fast, but it was five or six hours before we got to where we were going, and it was dark. Believe me, that place was tight. It was all timber around there. There was a high steel fence across the road—I imagine the fence was charged. Then farther on there were two more steel fences, about a quarter mile apart. These birds who had me really got a security check at each gate; it was no once-over-lightly.
“They put me in what I guess was a barracks, but for officers. It was a real layout—my room was really fixed up and it had one of these modernistic bathrooms that would knock your eye out. And the chow—man! I’d been living on GI rations and then the prison-camp slum, so you can see how I felt.
I never ate at the top spots, but I’d bet none of ’em’s got anything on the chow they put out to me in that place. I still didn’t get it, naturally, but I had a kind of creepy feeling that I was in a spot something like the guy they’re going to hang in the morning.
“I had everything, in a way. There was a big phonograph with a couple hundred records, cards, beer and wine in a private refrigerator—though I really don’t drink much, just a dollop now and then or at a party—Kraut magazines and fancy books. You’d never have guessed they had a war on.
I yakked at the waiters that I wanted to talk to somebody, but they acted deaf and dumb when it came to that angle.
“This lasted for a couple of days and then I found out the score. This guy that came to see me wore a uniform, but it wasn’t like any of the Kraut army stuff I’d seen. He spoke good English, but like he’d learned it out of books. We had a couple of pretty long talks, or maybe you’d call them arguments; anyway I was arguing, and I won’t try to tell you all that was said—for one thing I don’t remember it myself. But one of the first things he said stuck in my mind like a bur. He said, in that cold schoolbook voice, ’You are a very fortunate man. For a variety of reasons, most of which you would not understand, you have been selected to make a rocket trip to the moon. As far as is known, you will be the first human being to do so. You are to be congratulated!’ Just like that. Bro-ther!”
“But——” I began to interrupt, and again he waved the weary hand, but this time a bit more impatiently.
” Look, this is about the place where people begin to look at me sideways and start to edge away. Now, if you don’t want——”
“Sorry,” I said hastily. “Go right ahead.”
“Well, I argued until I was out of breath, but it didn’t change a thing. I began to see that these guys might be nuts, but that just the same they weren’t kidding about this deal. Of course we knew as much as anybody about the V-2’s that were giving London hell, and there were rumors that the Germans were getting set with something that would make the V-2 seem like a midget, but then you know how cheap army talk is.
“Two days later they took me out for a look at the ship. Man! You know, people have a foggy notion what these things ought to look like and how big they have to be. And the first time you really see one it’s like a sock between the eyes. She was maybe as high as a fifteen- or twenty-story building and thick accordingly, but she didn’t look anything like those torpedo-shaped pictures you see in the magazines; it was more like a bundle of enormous gas tanks, and radar antennae, and other ding-fods that I’d never seen before. She was supported by a steel scaffolding and there was an elevator to take you up to the passenger hatch in the control room, which was at the very top of the thing. The whole rig was set in a pit maybe fifty feet deep and the size of a small lake—to concentrate and partly contain the initial blast. That morning a flock of guys were still working on her, part of them pumping in fuel from tank trucks.
“Hegel—he was my boy—took me up to the control cabin where I was to ride and began to explain things to me. At first I couldn’t have been less interested. I’d already decided I was a dead duck anyway, so what the hell? But the guy had all the patience in the world. And then I began to figure a little different angle. If there was any percentage at all in coming out of this deal, then I’d better learn t
o do all I could to help the odds—if any. Of course, ninety per cent of the controls and gadgets were either automatic or robot-controlled, but the rest of it had to be manipulated by hand—an emergency oxygen system, for instance, and some of the jets which were strictly for changing course. These Krauts were great ones for figuring out every last detail.
“Hegel explained what I needed to know, but he also knew that nobody could remember all the stuff, especially in an emergency. All the hand controls and switches were not only numbered but painted in different colors, with no two alike. On one bulkhead were signs in both German and English, with letters an inch high, telling exactly which gadget to pull or push or turn, and when and how. It looked like they hadn’t forgotten anything, but that didn’t make me feel any better.
“Then—this is just for the laugh—you know what these guys do? All of a sudden they get in a doctor and give me a complete physical check. Can you tie that one? I might not last five seconds when that thing took off, and if I made that it was still a thousand-to-one shot I’d never make it all the way. But these birds still had to go by the book—their book. No wonder they lost the war.”
“The take-off,” I said. “I’ve been wondering what that was like. You read and hear so much about it, but it’s really all guesswork or theory. Nobody really knows anything.” It suddenly occurred to me that I was believing every word the fellow said, at least momentarily.
“I’m coming to that part,” Beck said, “and believe me, I know. Or to put it another way, I was there but I don’t know.
“I was strapped onto a sort of bodyfitting couch made of foam rubber, and after they strapped me in it was quite a while before the actual blast-off. Hegel and his boys had to have time to get back to the ground and in the clear. Man, I died a thousand times while I lay there and waited for it to happen. I know exactly what it feels like to sit in the electric chair—and wait. It only happens once, and you don’t get any chance to rehearse. Of course I had complete access to the harness. I could have loosed myself if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t. I had sense enough to know that I had to follow the routine to have any chance at all. There was a squawker on the bulkhead and all of a sudden it began to talk. You know, like in the A-bomb tests—‘Ten seconds,’ then the backwards count, ’Eight, seven six, five, four, three, two——’
“I heard the two count, but not the one—that came exactly with the blastoff. For a split second I knew I was being tom in two and after that I don’t remember. I was just out. Of course it passed eventually, but when I came out of the black I was sick. Not especially sick to my stomach, just sick all over and everywhere. I couldn’t have moved to loosen the straps if I’d wanted to.
“There was a big clock on the bulkhead, but the time didn’t mean a thing to me. I knew what time the take-off had been and the clock showed about six hours past that, but what did that prove? Maybe it had been twelve, or even twenty-four, hours plus six. There was no way to know how long I had been out and, brother, right then I couldn’t have cared less!”
For a very long moment he was silent, as though suddenly occupied with his own thoughts. Well, he had every right to be. I waited, still watching the squirrels absent-mindedly.
Of course the terrible sickness gradually passed. I have an idea it began to pass when I went completely out of the earth’s gravity field, when the stress stopped, but I don’t really know. Like I said, Hegel had told me how it would be and I give him credit, he wasn’t too far wrong; but all the telling in the world can’t give you the same feeling as being there.
Take this nongravity deal. He’d explained that too and I was sure I could handle it—if I ever got that far. It’s a little, but only a little, like swimming. It’s easy for somebody to tell you how, but it’s different when you’re out there on your own. The first thing I did when I unstrapped was to slam my head into a switch panel and knock myself cold as a herring.”
He pointed briefly to an inch-long scar above his left temple.
I eventually got the hang of it; I had to, like the guy who has to swim or drown. I had to get the hang of it if I wanted to eat, and I had to eat if I expected to keep on living at all.
“I know—you’re wondering how scared I was. Well, I can’t even begin to tell you how scared I was, at first. But you know they say the human race can get used to anything. Maybe that’s not a hundred per cent true, but it’s close—and some things come easier to some people than to others. Look at the guys who made it through the Jap prison camps. Look at the people who outlasted Buchenwald and Dachau. That ride was something like battle. At first you’re so dam scared you’re almost paralyzed. Then when nothing happens to you, you begin to relax. It isn’t anything you figure out in your mind; it’s just something that happens—always provided you don’t go clear off your rocker before you begin to ease in.”
“But that tremendous speed,” I couldn’t help asking, “how was that?”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand. There wasn’t any speed, the way you mean it. You know that nonmoving feeling you get in an airplane-motion only in relation to slower-moving objects, and the higher up in the air you get, the less the sensation of speed. It was like that with me, only more so, on account of the absence of gravity and because there just wasn’t anything close enough to establish a feeling of relativeness—if that’s the word.
“There was only one thing that gave me an idea that anything at all was happening or that I was going anywhere. I guess I didn’t tell you, but there weren’t any portholes or windows or anything like that in the ship. Still there was a way to see out. At four points around the control room, lenses were let through the wails of the hull. They weren’t more than an inch or so in diameter at the outside end—to reduce chances, I learned later, of being smashed by meteorites. And if by chance one did get broken an automatic pressure gate slammed the opening shut. On the inside there was a double eyepiece on the order of those old stereoscope outfits through which people used to look at postcards of Niagara Falls. Of course this was a complicated optical gimmick, which magnified like a pair of binoculars, but the effect was the same. The outer lens was a wide-angle job and the four of them, as near as I could tell, covered a full three hundred sixty degrees. That was the way I could tell I was going somewhere—the earth got smaller and the moon got bigger as the clock hands crawled around.”
I waited while he got another smoke going, and I noticed that his hands were shaking a little.
“I remembered, from a long time back, seeing the moon coming up like a big orange plate out of the Atlantic, sitting on the sand at Jones’ Beach with a certain girl. I remembered an October afternoon when the sky was so blue and close I felt I could reach up and crush it like a silk scarf, and the moon was a sliver of pale yellow nothing, ’way over there in one corner. But brother! right now she was the biggest ball of rock you can ever imagine, all mountain peaks and craters and enormous gulfs of rock, just rock—from where I sat.
“I began to tense up again about then. There was something I had to do right, and at the right time, and it would either work or it wouldn’t; I had been briefed exactly. When the gong began to hammer and then stopped—it was preset, of course—I was to wait five seconds and then pull a certain switch. I was half asleep when the gong let go, but I really poured myself into the safety belt at the instrument panel. I thought I’d go nuts before the gong stopped—they’d given it plenty of time; then I counted five and pulled. That time, too. I thought I was getting torn apart, but it only lasted a few seconds, while the jets were firing. You see, this was necessary to correct course and throw that dog into a big loop around the moon itself. At another signal of the same kind as I came around I had to do it again, this time to put myself back on my original course—in reverse, to get back to base.
“I guess I ought to tell you—I don’t want to misrepresent one small detail—that at the time I didn’t know a thing about all this technical stuff and the reasons behind it. Not that I know anything about t
he really technical stuff now, except that in the last few years, since this happened. I’ve read just about everything a layman can absorb without being an astronomer, a physicist or a mathematician. I’ve been to the moon, and I don’t really know a thing about it except what I’ve read. I m like the guy who takes a plane to Paris, buys a couple of drinks in the terminal at Le Bourget and catches the next plane back to La Guardia. He’s an expert on Paris and the Parisians—he’s been there, hasn’t he? Only me, I didn’t even get a chance to land on the moon for that long.
Well, I knew I was in the big moon loop, all right, because the rock ball stayed visible from the same eye port. It didn’t seem to move and I didn’t seem to move, but the scenery kept changing. Ever drive a horse around a teed grinder in a continuous circle, when you were a kid on the farm? Same thing.
“You know it’s a fact that the astronomers here have never seen the other side of the moon. Well, I got positive news for them, except that none of them seem interested. I know; I’ve tried. The other side is just like this side except that the mountains and craters are scattered around in different ways. It’s a round ball—why wouldn’t it be the same except more of it? Stands to reason.
“I—well, I guess that’s about all the story.”
“But, good Lord!” I complained. “I mean, what happened when you landed, and where was it?”
“Oh, that?” Beck said, as though that was the most inconsequential part of the whole thing—and maybe it was. “In a way I had to bring the dog in by hand, but that didn’t amount to anything. Anybody who could drive a Model A Ford could do what I did. There was a chance, of course, that something, somewhere, might have miscued and on the way back we’d land in some ocean; but give Hegel and his boys credit—it didn’t. I was to hand-fire the retarder jets at given readings on the earth-side altimeter, and that’s what I did. She didn’t come in exactly like a feather, or a ton of bricks it was more like ten thousand tons. But then, she didn’t have a hundredth of the weight there was when she took off. Both the first- and second-stage blast-off apparatus had been long gone, and all the liquid fuel, which is the bulk of the weight in that kind of a ship.
