The Mouse On The Moon: eBook Edition (The Grand Fenwick Series 2)

by Leonard Wibberley

  But the Secretary didn't want to read about the fur coat and putting the folder down, looked dazedly at Wendover.

  "They can't be serious," he said.

  "They are serious," said Wendover calmly. "That is to say, Mountjoy is serious, though I suspect that this is all a plan of his own, and that he is applying for something for which he has not got specific authorization. He is a wildly imaginative and ambitious man. He is a firm believer in personal connivance as an instrument of government."

  "That's outrageous," said the Secretary of State.

  It was the method of Disraeli in procuring the Suez Canal and of President Jefferson in obtaining the Louisiana Purchase," said Wendover quietly. "In neither case was the legislature consulted until the object was accomplished. Mountjoy fancies he comes from the same mold—and he may be right."

  "But even supposing he obtained this money," said the Secretary, "and I'm not for a moment conceding that he will, what chance does a tiny state like Grand Fenwick, lacking any technological development at all—a state that is utterly and completely agricultural—have of developing a rocket capable of going to the moon when we ourselves have failed time and again?"

  "Mountjoy is a statesman of the European mould," said Wendover, "which means that his stated objective in putting forward a plan is not necessarily the main one, nor is it necessarily one which he really intends to implement."

  "Put that in plain terms," said the Secretary of State testily.

  "Well, sir," said Wendover, "you realize that I am guessing—but guessing from a knowledge of Mountjoy and the foreign and domestic problems of Grand Fenwick."

  "In the final analysis we all guess," said the Secretary. "Go ahead."

  "Mountjoy has been frustrated many times in the past in attempts to put into effect many programs he has had for the development of the Duchy," said Wendover. "These programs have included modernizing the highway system in the Duchy, putting up a tourist hotel of some distinction, revamping the plumbing in the castle of Grand Fenwick and putting modern plumbing in the houses of the people. Getting a hot bath in Grand Fenwick, sir, is still a three-hour project involving heating water in pots over an open fire. In all these projects he has been defeated by the Opposition, led by Mr. David Bentner who is the leader of what we will call the party of the people—not communist. Definitely anti-communist. But opposed to modern innovations that call for an increase in taxes.

  "Now with regard to this application for a loan of five million dollars to send a rocket to the moon, I would say that Mountjoy's real objective is to get funds (without an increase in domestic taxes) to revamp the whole plumbing arrangement in the castle of Grand Fenwick and also get a start on his highway program and his tourist hotel."

  "Then why doesn't he apply for this kind of assistance which we are usually willing to give to backward nations?" interrupted the Secretary of State.

  "You unwittingly hit on the reason when you spoke about backward nations, sir," said Wendover. "No country likes to think of itself as a backward nation, particularly a country as proud of its history as Grand Fenwick. If Mountjoy applied directly to the United States for a loan to improve the—er—facilities in Grand Fenwick, he would bring down the wrath of the whole nation on his ears, for he would be making a national admission that his country was backward.

  "He therefore hit upon this rocket pretext which lets him out and serves our purposes as well—as he explains in his letter."

  "I don't agree that it serves our purposes at all," said the Secretary. "I don't agree with that in the slightest."

  "I speak subject to your own more intimate knowledge of the whole situation, sir," said Wendover. "I don't pretend to be able to discuss the world picture with any degree of authority."

  "Go ahead," said the Secretary. "Say what you have in mind."

  "Well, as Mountjoy points out, it is part of the basic policy of this country to obtain, through the United Nations, international control of the moon, so that the quarrels of the earth are not extended to the moon, and the moon does not become a second Berlin, divided between East and West.

  "However, if an agreement were achieved with the Russians on international control of the moon, it would really be bi-national control of the moon. It would be basically an agreement between two nations—the United States and Russia, each with its own point of view, and these points of view are likely to come into conflict at any moment. We might call it international control, but it wouldn't be. It would be basically another Berlin situation—East versus West.

  "We, on our part, want to avoid that. We can't avoid it unless there is at least one other party involved. That would give it some kind of international flavor. If we could go before the United Nations and say that in our desire that the moon should be internationalized, we had advanced funds for research in getting a manned rocket to the moon to another nation outside our sphere of influence and with which we have no close connection, then we would have demonstrated our sincerity in attempting to get international lunar control. Mountjoy suggests this path though, as I have said, his real objective is probably to get a hot bath for himself and some decent roads in Grand Fenwick. But it is a path—an approach—which is very useful to us. It serves our purpose. And it serves it without detracting in the slightest from our national achievement if and when we get to the moon, or our national bargaining position."

  "But Grand Fenwick?" said the Secretary of State. "Nobody is ever going to believe that we are serious in offering Grand Fenwick money to get to the moon. Grand Fenwick hasn't got a chance."

  "They wouldn't believe it if we offered the money to any other small country,” said Wendover. But Grand Fenwick—Grand Fenwick is different."

  "Why?" demanded the Secretary.

  "Because of Dr. Kokintz," said Wendover. "He is the world's outstanding physicist and he lives in Grand Fenwick. There is just enough in that for people to suspect that he may be engaged in some kind of research regarding—well, rocket fuels. The man who invented the quadium bomb commands world respect. There is enough world respect for Dr. Kokintz for people to think—even Russia—that our offer to Grand Fenwick is sincere. And it would be sincere. It is a gesture only, of course. But it is a sincere gesture, costing only five million dollars which will do much to convince the world of our ardent desire to obtain a true international control of the moon—and of outer space when that field is opened up."

  "And the fur coat?" asked the Secretary.

  "That is undoubtedly a genuine objective of Mountjoy's," said Wendover. "But we have again to look for an ulterior motive, Mountjoy being, as I have stated, a statesman of the European kind. His ulterior motive, I would guess, is that with the presentation of the fur coat, which is tied in with the whole loan, he may be able to mitigate a great deal of the hostility which may develop when what he has done is discovered, because of the people's deep affection for the Duchess. As I said at the beginning, sir, I believe that Mountjoy has far exceeded his authority in applying for this sum. But if he gets what he asks for, and people start getting plenty of hot water in their homes and a good road through the Duchy and decent sanitation, and the Duchess gets a fur coat, then most of that hostility will disappear and he may well become for a while a national hero."

  "You think we should grant this request for funds then?" asked the Secretary of State.

  "Oh yes, sir," said Wendover. "Mountjoy is actually doing us a service. He makes it possible for us, with the expenditure of only five million dollars, to put the Russians in a position where they can hardly refuse true international exploration and control of space. That's not as much as one of our big rockets costs, I think, sir."

  The Secretary was silent for a while, marveling at the mental subtleties of the Count of Mountjoy. There surely must be, he pondered, something in the business of diplomacy not merely as a career for one man but as a career for a whole family through scores of generations. "Lord," he said to himself, "if only we were not so handicapped in this country by a n
ational love of being forthright and honest. What wonders we could achieve for the good of the world. Here is this trained statesman in a little country who writes me a letter on a single sheet of paper in which he carefully disguises his objectives and gains every one of them."

  Aloud, he said to Wendover, "Give me a memorandum on this subject and I'll take it up with the President. You can recommend an outright grant. It would look better when we report to the United Nations if we say it was a gift with no strings attached. In any case, we have no hope of getting it back again. But five million dollars is ridiculous. It is too small. It would lack conviction when we go before the United Nations with the announcement. Better make it fifty million dollars. That would make it sound like a more genuine offer for funds for lunar research."

  "Fifty million!" exclaimed Wendover. "But, sir, whatever would they do with the surplus?"

  "That's their problem," said the Secretary, almost savagely. "They can rehouse everybody in Grand Fenwick for all I care, and buy them all automobiles. They may want to start a university over there. Anyway, it's their problem, as I say. My problem is not to jeopardize the success of this whole effort by being niggardly. In any case, we give so much money to nations which are wavering between us and the communists, it will be a pleasure to make a substantial gift to a nation whose principles are unshakable and coincide entirely with our own."

  CHAPTER V

  It was several days before Dr. Kokintz found time to develop the pictures he had taken of the bobolinks. During the interim he was busy with his inquiry into the physical and chemical properties of Pinot Grand Fenwick. In any case Dr. Kokintz was among those millions of people whose peculiarity it is that having taken a picture they cannot somehow bring themselves to go ahead and develop it. It was only under the gentle prodding of Tully Bascomb that he finally turned to the negatives, which he had had all the time in the pocket of his jacket, mixed the necessary chemicals and started to develop the plates.

  The results were a disappointment. The center of each negative was fogged and there were little streaks all over the negatives, radiating out from the fogged area, which Dr. Kokintz assumed were made by scratches on the emulsion. These scratches, he believed, were his own fault, resulting from keeping the negatives in the plate holders so long in his pocket. The fogging of the center of each negative he laid to a light leak in the camera, but after examining the camera thoroughly he could find no light leak. In this predicament he called Tully to the darkroom where he was working.

  "We must take the pictures of the bobolinks again," he said, showing him the negatives. "This was a bad batch of film. Light got in and ruined the negatives."

  "It was all new film," said Tully. "None of it more than a month old. It's guaranteed for a year."

  "Well, as you see, they are all spoiled," replied Kokintz. "Tomorrow we take some more shots."

  "Okay," said Tully. "The bobolinks have established themselves in the big beech. I left the shelter from which we shot the pictures standing, so they have become accustomed to it. That will make it easier. They are most active at dawn, so we are likely to get our best pictures then."

  "Yes," said Kokintz. "Yes. Meanwhile I will go over the camera again to ensure that there is nothing the matter with it."

  When Tully had left, Kokintz slipped one of the fogged negatives into a light frame to study it. The fogged area in the center looked like a sunburst and its formation puzzled him. Out from it, like rays of the sun, came a series of streaks. The effect was not, on closer inspection, that of a normal light leak. He took a small jeweler's magnifying glass, set it on the negatives and peered through it.

  "Very strange," he said to himself. "Very strange indeed. This is more like a radioactive effect. But the plates have not been near any radioactive material."

  He thought about where the plates had been stored, recalled that he had had them in his jacket and his overcoat and started looking for the jacket, finding it thrown over the back of a chair. He took the jacket over to a workbench and emptied everything out of the pockets and was dismayed at the number of articles he found. There were eight mechanical pencils, each with a different colored lead for Dr. Kokintz found the physical effort of writing a complete bore and to relieve the tedium wrote sometimes in red, sometimes in violet, sometimes in green and so on.

  In addition there were several stubs of pencils he had picked up at one time or another and put into his pockets. There were numerous pieces of paper containing notes he had jotted down—some of them on birds, some of them equations involving the relationship between time and energy and time and space (Dr. Kokintz was deeply interested in the Einstein theory of the unified field but was beginning to suspect that an unknown dimension was lacking in the Einstein concept of the universe); there was a shriveled portion of an apple out of which he recalled he had taken a bite a week earlier, several packets of birdseed, an envelope containing a spoonful of sandy soil (to be analyzed for its mineral content), a yo-yo with a knot in the string (representing a promise made to a child the day before), and a letter from the President of the University of Pennsylvania (representing a promise to prepare a paper on the evidence of the spontaneous appearance of hydrogen atoms in outer space).

  All these items he laid out on the bench before him, and then fell to examining the fogged negatives again. He glanced from the negatives to the assortment of articles he had taken from his pockets and then took them all, together with the spoiled negatives, into his darkroom.

  Meanwhile the Count of Mountjoy impatiently awaited the reply to his letter to the United States Secretary of State. There were times when he was horrified at what he had done—at the extent to which he had exceeded his authorization by the Council of Freemen. At such times he saw himself tried for high treason, found guilty, and condemned to spend the rest of his life either as a political exile from Grand Fenwick or as a prisoner in the dungeons of the castle.

  During his low periods he was exceedingly nervous and irritable and hard put to remain pleasant during his daily visits to the Duchess Gloriana. She noted his mood but concluded that it arose out of his anxiety over his son, Vincent of Mountjoy, a man of twenty-five years of age, who physically resembled his father the Count, being tall and lean and handsome, but bore no mental resemblance to him at all.

  Vincent of Mountjoy took his mental qualities from his dead mother. He had no interest in political intrigue, all his love being reserved for engineering. He had, to satisfy his father, taken a degree in political science at Oxford, but had then studied engineering at the University of Sheffield in England—a university which the Count thought of in terms of a trade or technical school, an institution summoned into being to turn farmers' sons and butchers' boys into high-class mechanics.

  "How the devil can they call themselves a university when they neglect the liberal arts and teach only techniques?" the Count demanded of his son when he learned that he was going to Sheffield after Oxford. "A university which deliberately prepares its students to earn a living is an outrageous fraud on education," the Count continued. "The proper aim of any university should be to prepare men to live like gentlemen—versed in the classics and part of the company of the immortals."

  These arguments were without avail, Vincent took his bachelor of science in engineering at Sheffield, his master's degree in engineering at the University of London, and then his doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh, after which he returned to Grand Fenwick in obedience to his father, who wanted to make a statesman of him.

  He was by no means happy there and would have left after a few weeks were he not counseled by Tully Bascomb to remain at least a year in the Duchy.

  "You have been abroad a long time and know very little of Grand Fenwick," said Tully. "You ought to learn something about it. Stay a year. These offers of employment with United States Steel, General Electric, Aluminium Ltd. and the other big companies will still be available to you. But you owe Grand Fenwick and your father at least a year of your life. After
all this is the nation of your birth and your father supplied you with the money for your education."

  "But Grand Fenwick has nothing for me," said Vincent. "I’m completely out of place here. It will just be wasting a year—that's all."

  If you waste only one year out of your lifetime, and that to please your father, the wastage is very small," said Tully. "And who knows? Things may change in Grand Fenwick."

  "If they haven't changed in six hundred years, they are hardly likely to change now," snapped Vincent. But he agreed to stay.

  The decision was made a little more tolerable by Cynthia Bentner, daughter of David Bentner. She was pretty and good-natured and a very good listener. And although her education had not gone beyond that offered by the one public school in Grand Fenwick, she had a built-in common sense and ability to understand people that often surprised Vincent.

  He spent a great deal of time in her company—sometimes walking with her and sometimes just sitting in the Bentner kitchen while she went about her work (her mother was dead so she was housekeeper to her father). He talked of all his problems, his ambitions and his frustrations, and some times he didn't talk at all but just found it restful to be with her.

  Occasionally they quarreled. The quarreling was all on his part, the result of his frustrations. Once he called her "stupid" and said she had no more education than one of the sheep on the mountainside. "You have a brain but you don't do more with it than bake apple pies," he said at the close of one of these quarrels and left her. But he came back some days later and apologized.

  "I didn't mean that about your education," he said. "I was angry with myself and took my anger out on you."

  "But you are quite right," said Cynthia. "I'm not educated. I just had the ordinary education we have here in Grand Fenwick and I wasn't one of the top students. But I don't think everybody has to have a thorough education. There is a lot of work to be done in the world that doesn't require education. There are a lot of needs that have to be filled that don't call for education at all."