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

by Leonard Wibberley

  "There is going to be hell to pay for this," said O'Hara, eying these headlines. And then he began wondering grimly what it would be like back at his old post writing editorials for the paper in Boston. He shuddered at the prospect.

  CHAPTER XIII

  By the time the astonished members of the President's cabinet had assembled in the White House, official confirmation of the launching of the Grand Fenwick rocket had come through. It came from the U. S. Ambassador to Switzerland, through the legation in Berne, which had sent a messenger scurrying to Grand Fenwick to check on the report as soon as it came over the Swiss radio.

  The President confronted his cabinet grimly with this official confirmation received by telephone by the Secretary of State.

  "There is no sense in trying to tone down or underplay in any way the massive defeat we have suffered at the hands of Grand Fenwick by their incredible success," he said. "We have been concentrating all our resources on making a lunar landing for the past ten years. We have had every facility available to us and unlimited funds. We have been beaten by a nation of five thousand people using a secondhand rocket and with a budget of only fifty million dollars—which they got from us. You've seen the headlines in the New York tabloids, I suppose."

  They nodded glumly.

  "Well, that's the kind of reaction we can expect from the whole nation," said the President. "And I might add, the whole world. We have suffered a tremendous blow to our prestige and, whether we deserve it or not, will have to endure it. What I want to know is why nobody informed me of what was happening in Grand Fenwick.

  "Why do I always have to be taken by surprise like this? Why does the administration and the whole nation have to suffer this sudden and overwhelming assault on its prestige? Wasn't there anyone in this room—anyone among you gentlemen who are concerned with every phase of our foreign affairs, our military defense and our space program—anyone at all who had an inkling of what was going on in Grand Fenwick?"

  The cabinet members looked uneasily at each other but made no reply.

  "I don't understand it," said the President. "I may live the rest of my life and never understand it. How can this little nation keep such a momentous project secret right up to the last second so as to astound the world, and we, a very big nation indeed, seem to be incapable of keeping anything secret at all? That's what I'd like to know."

  The Secretary of State cleared his throat. The major fault, he felt, rested with him, and his New England upbringing demanded that he accept the blame.

  "They didn't try to keep it a secret, Mr. President," he said. "They plainly, publicly and many times announced that they were going to try to send a rocket to the moon. Nobody believed them. The fault, if it is anybody's, is primarily mine. In his initial letter asking for a loan, the Count of Mountjoy stated plainly that the object of the loan was to enter the space race by devising a rocket to send to the moon. And to buy a fur coat for the Duchess Gloriana XII."

  "A fur coat for the Duchess?" echoed the President, who had not been aware of this paragraph in Mountjoy's letter.

  "Yes," said the Secretary of State. "Five million dollars for a rocket and fifty thousand dollars for a fur coat. How was I to take that seriously?

  "I consulted with my advisers and we came to the conclusion that the request was only a blind—that the real objective was to install bathtubs in the Castle of Grand Fenwick, while at the same time providing us with an excuse for lending the money by bringing a third and neutral power into the space race. Five million was ridiculous for rocket research. So I upped it to fifty million."

  The President covered his face with his hands and groaned. "You made them take forty-five million more?" he asked.

  "Yes," said the Secretary of State, "I did. We never lend a sum as small as five million," he added. "It is too paltry."

  "I don't understand about this fur coat," said the President after a little silence.

  "I don't understand about it either," said the Secretary of State. "I find that I am incapable of divining the intentions of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, and I feel that I should tender my resignation, effective at whatever time is convenient to yourself."

  The President shook his head wearily. "I don't think that is necessary," he said. "I'm not looking for scapegoats and I don't think that you are any more to blame than any of the rest of us here. What I still don't understand is how at no time at all did any of us—even our highly specialized technical staffs—suspect that Grand Fenwick was seriously engaged in rocket research."

  "There was an invitation to the rocket launching addressed to yourself through me," said the Secretary of Defense. "I assumed that it would be a propaganda launching—that at the last moment it would be canceled or a misfire would be staged, and so did not bother to reply."

  "Why did you assume that?" asked the President.

  "What else was there to assume, Chief?" asked the Secretary of Defense. "How were we to suspect that they were actually going to launch a rocket to the moon? What clues did we have that we could take seriously?

  "There was a grant of fifty million dollars. That's not enough to get a manned rocket to the moon and back again, starting from scratch. There was Kokintz. Well, to be sure he is the outstanding man in his field. But could we assume that one lone man was a match for the corps of top physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers we have at our disposal who have been working on the project for more than a decade? Certainly not. There weren't any grounds to suspect for one moment that they were actually engaged in rocket research. Why, they didn't even go through the basic step of orbiting a sputnik first."

  "Not even as much as a wine bottle," said the Secretary of State.

  "A wine bottle?" cried Dr. Fritz Meidel, who had also been summoned to the meeting. "A wine bottle! Oh my God! "

  "What about a wine bottle?" demanded the President, turning on him.

  "When we were checking Hotfoot off Ascension Island a couple of months ago," said Dr. Meidel, "a wine bottle fell out of the sky into the ocean and we picked it up. We figured that it had been dropped by one of the planes providing an umbrella overhead."

  "Well, hadn't it?" asked the President.

  "I don't think so—now," said Dr. Meidel. "I remember the label on the wine bottle. It was Pinot Grand Fenwick. I thought at the time it was odd that one of our plane pilots should be carrying a bottle of so rare a wine in his plane. But I had too many things to attend to and it all slipped my mind."

  "Now that it has all come back to your mind," said the President testily, "what about the wine bottle?"

  "It wasn't just a wine bottle, Mr. President," said Dr. Meidel. "It was a sputnik—put into orbit by Grand Fenwick. It can have been nothing else."

  "You mean they orbited a wine bottler demanded the President, aghast.

  "Yes," said Dr. Meidel. "It's as good an object for orbiting as a solid gold sphere—and costs less."

  "What happened to it?" asked the President after a moment of shocked silence.

  "Senator Ridgeway took it home and gave it to one of his kids as a souvenir."

  The President groaned. "That about puts it in a nutshell," he said. "Grand Fenwick orbits a wine bottle. It is picked up as a souvenir for a school kid. Grand Fenwick announces its plans to send a rocket to the moon. Everybody believes they're actually installing bathtubs. Grand Fenwick invites us to the launching of the rocket. We don't even bother to reply. Then Grand Fenwick launches the rocket—and here we all are, caught flatfooted. Completely unprepared."

  "The Russians are in the same boat," said the Secretary of State tentatively. "It's a terrible blow to us. But it's a terrible blow to them too. I don't think that anyone can fairly accuse me of being unpatriotic. But in a way I'm glad Grand Fenwick succeeded. If we'd made it first, or the Russians had made it first…" He shrugged and did not finish the sentence, knowing that the purport of what he had in mind was clear enough.

  "The trouble with the Russians," said the Secretary of Defense, "is th
at they will probably never announce to their people that Grand Fenwick reached the moon."

  "That's true," said Dr. Meidel. "There has been very little mention in the Russian press even of the various big successes we have achieved so far. They may decide to utterly suppress the Grand Fenwick feat as being too much of a blow to their prestige for them to absorb."

  "We are getting a little ahead of ourselves," said the Defense Secretary. "The Grand Fenwick rocket hasn't got to the moon yet. It won't get there for about nine days. Anything can happen to it in the meantime."

  The President turned to Dr. Meidel. "What do you think?" he asked. "What are its chances?"

  "I can't say," said Dr. Meidel. "I haven't enough to go on. I have only what I heard over the radio and read in these papers here. But the basic problem of space exploration has always been fuel. Our fuels are all of the combustion type—dependent upon burning oxygen with various other chemicals to provide thrust. The oxygen has to be taken with the rocket because there isn't any in outer space.

  "If Grand Fenwick has indeed devised a nuclear fuel, they are twenty years ahead of our research and Russia's too. I'd say that if they have a nuclear fuel they can get to the moon and back again as readily as I can board a train, go to New York and return."

  "From what you've heard and read about this in the last couple of hours, is this fuel feasible?" asked the President.

  "Certainly," said Dr. Meidel.

  "Do you believe that Grand Fenwick has such a fuel?"

  "Made from a hogshead of wine and a barrel full of iron filings," grumbled the Defense Secretary, who was in a bad temper.

  "Mr. President," said Dr. Meidel, ignoring the Defense Secretary, "will you use that telephone there to find out whether the Grand Fenwick rocket is still on its way?" The President looked at him dubiously, pressed a button on the telephone and was connected with O'Hara.

  "Is the Grand Fenwick rocket still climbing?" he asked, listened for a few seconds, grunted, and put the telephone down.

  "It's still on its way," he said. "The last report is from Woomera in Australia and says the rocket is maintaining a steady speed away from the earth. The speed is still one thousand miles an hour."

  "Then I'd say that Grand Fenwick has a nuclear fuel as is claimed," said Dr. Meidel. "The speed is the real clue. We have to blast off at tremendous speeds to get up sufficient acceleration to carry us beyond earth's gravity. Our rockets actually fire charges which project them forward like artillery shells. A speed of a thousand miles an hour with an oxygen-based fuel would be ridiculous. The oxygen would all be gone before the rocket got out of the gravitational pull of the earth.

  "Plainly the Grand Fenwick rocket has plenty of power available and is just keeping up sufficient thrust to overcome gravity and yet remain below a speed that would provide friction problems for the Saturn. It's quite probable that they'll make it to the moon. About getting back I don't know. There are a thousand hazards involved which they seem to be blithely ignoring."

  "What kind of hazards?" asked the President.

  "Well," said Dr. Meidel, "there's the nature of the moon's surface to start with. What is it like? Is it buried under a mile of fine dust as some think?

  "Even if it is solid, how solid is it? It is composed, at least in part, of hard, igneous rocks or of some crumbling material which might cause the rocket to tip over on its side on landing so that it could not be launched again?

  "Then there's the matter of temperature. On the side of the moon exposed to the sun, the temperatures are like those of an electric furnace. On the night side, they are far below anything experienced on earth—even in our polar regions. If the rocket is exposed to the furnace heat of the lunar day followed—without any cooling period—by the absolute cold of lunar night, there is a possibility of the metal collapsing or cracking into a thousand pieces.

  "These are some of the hazards. And these, as you know, Mr. President, are some of the reasons why our own lunar project has gone forward slowly and cautiously. Our plan has been, and remains, to orbit several space stations around the moon, first with instruments and then with men, to report on landing conditions. We will land ahead of our own astronauts all the instruments and apparatus needed for their safety when they themselves land on the moon.

  "Whatever Grand Fenwick has done, I do not see that we could have proceeded in any other way, or should proceed in any other way. The Russians' program, as far as we know (and we know a great deal about it), follows pretty closely to our own approach." He smiled wryly. "Science does not bow to economic philosophies," he said. "Capitalist and Communist have to solve the same scientific problem in the same manner."

  The President felt a prickle of irritation at the last remark, which struck him as being smug. "Grand Fenwick seems to have discovered differently," he snapped. "They just went ahead with a simple plan—to land on the moon—with our money and our rocket." The Defense Secretary was about to remark that it was their wine, but sensing the atmosphere was wrong, held his peace.

  The President glared around at the members of the cabinet, for he well knew what the public reaction was going to be. The public wasn't now going to be satisfied with the cautious step-by-step approach, involving the expenditure of billions, which the United States had followed to date. Nor was the public going to be mollified by the fact that the Soviet Union hadn't gotten to the moon either. The great question to which an answer was going to be demanded was going to be: How can Grand Fenwick get to the moon with fifty million dollars when the United States can't get there with a hundred times that expenditure? And the question immediately following that would be: When will the United States send a manned rocket to the moon?

  The President put that question squarely to Dr. Meidel. "Just when can we expect to land on the moon?" he asked.

  "In a year's time, Mr. President," replied the scientist smoothly.

  "What about next week?" demanded the President.

  "Next week?"

  "Yes. Haven't we got anything ready to send to the moon now—faster than the Grand Fenwick rocket, so that we can get there first? Just what have we got? A whole lot of plans and instruments and data and no rocket that will do the job?"

  "We have the rocket, Mr. President," said Dr. Meidel. "We've had it for two years. But it would be unscientific to dump all our careful preparations and just take off for the moon merely to get there ahead of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. Unscientific and extremely wasteful."

  "Unscientific and extremely effective," the President snapped. "I don't want to underestimate the value of your work and of the various scientists associated with you. I know that it’s all very important—to scientists. I don't pretend for one moment that it isn't important to humanity either. But I am not the President of a nation of scientists but of people who have been paying out high taxes for a long time for space research and who will want to know (and rightly) how come we were beaten. They'll want to know how Grand Fenwick got there with last year's wine crop, and we couldn't get there with the whole United States economy.

  "The prestige value of making the first lunar landing is enormous. It is quite beyond anybody's ability to calculate. The American people have the right to that prestige and sorely need it in the world today. And so I ask you—why can't we send a manned rocket to the moon right now and get there ahead of Grand Fenwick? I'd like to hear what you gentlemen have to say on that subject."

  "You already have my views," said Dr. Meidel "I think It would be the foolish throwing away of enormous research benefits in favor of—of a childish gesture."

  The President grunted and looked at the Secretary of State. "What do you think?" he asked.

  "I think it is already too late, Mr. President," he said. "A country as big as ours entering into a sort of spatial footrace with a little nation like Grand Fenwick is undignified, to say the least. If we got to the moon first, we would be the big bully that pushed the little boy aside and snatched the prize. World reaction would be unfavorable to us and I
think justly so.

  "Furthermore, Mr. President, let us not lose sight of what has been always a larger objective with us—our constantly reiterated and sincere desire to internationalize the conquest of space. If we compete with Grand Fenwick now, we give the lie to all that has been said with sincerity, before the United Nations and the world."

  The others nodded their agreement.

  "We get a black eye, but we have to take it," said the Secretary of State. "We can legitimately point out that the Grand Fenwick triumph was made possible by United States funds. It looks very bad for us now, I know. There's going to be a lot of angry public reaction. But later our aid will loom larger without any special propaganda effort on our part. Nations will begin to appreciate that our funds don't always have a tag attached to them; and in the long run it is possible that we may benefit, internationally, from Grand Fenwick having gotten to the moon first more than if we had got there first ourselves. As you know, Mr. President, in international affairs, it's the long run that matters. Short-term gains arc soon forgotten and not worth the effort"

  The President grunted a dubious approval of these arguments and turned to the Defense Secretary. "What do you think?" he asked.

  "I have to look at this from the point of view of the Russian reaction," said the Defense Secretary. "Getting to the moon isn't just a scientific and propaganda achievement. It's a military achievement. The moon represents a huge space platform that can be used for military purposes. I think we've fooled around with the scientific aspects far too long and in far too great a detail and forgotten the military aspects. You can bet the Russians will attempt a lunar landing as soon as they can now. And I think we should do the same.

  "Dr. Meidel tells us that they've been taking the slow, deliberate scientific approach as we have been doing. This alters the whole thing. They'll want to get there as fast as they can, to establish a national claim to the moon. They won't give a hoot for the Grand Fenwick claim. They're likely to argue that Grand Fenwick's success will inevitably lead to our making an all-out assault. I say that we should get a manned rocket to the moon and we should get it there as fast as we can. Tomorrow, if that is possible."