Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  “Your folks know about it?” Mel asked.

  “I sent postcards.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Art Pelsudski.”

  “What’s the trip for?” Mel figured that he knew the answer. He just wanted to hear the kid’s way of saying it.

  “I had to see Moon Rocket One.”

  The words fitted perfectly Mel Robbins’s picture of how it had been. When you were fifteen or sixteen, a dream could be a shining demon, a driving jet of intense interest. You had a couple of dollars and the dope you could get out of books. No skill—and without it you were nothing. That was your poverty. You had only that wealth of glittering wonder. It was not worn thin by too much time spent close to the thing you wanted to do. When you thought of advancing science being perverted toward a final destruction, even that was glamorous; there was no stark shadow of worry nor a recurrent idea that your efforts were better left unmade.

  This Art Pelsudski—Robbins wondered how he had managed to remember such a name for even ten seconds—had run out on his family and school, had thumbed and blundered his way almost across the whole United States, just to see the first real spaceship.

  Robbins figured that, in his own day, he would have done it himself, if there had been an MR-1 then. In fact, for those times, he had done almost the equivalent. Too young for the Second World War, he had hung around an airfield in Kansas. Starry-eyed and humble, he had badgered a fighter pilot into giving him his mascot—a black doll made of large wooden beads held together with cord. He still had the doll.

  As he remembered, Robbins’s thin, dark face softened even more. The kid saw and seemed reassured.

  “Say—you’re Colonel Mel Robbins!” he burst out suddenly. “The man who’s going up in MR-1 to try to circle the Moon! I’ve saved a lot of your pictures from the papers. Doctor Ernest Carnot must be here, too. Could I see him, maybe?”

  “He’s coming this way from the mess-trailer,” Mel said. “All you have to do is look.”

  Young Pelsudski got one glimpse of the plain, middle-aged man with the bent nose. Then a pair of MPs spotted the kid and took him by the arms. Mel saw the mask of fright and sullenness drop over that scabbed face again.

  “How did he get inside the wire?” Carnot asked mildly.

  “Search me,” Mel answered. “With half a chance, he would have tried to stow away. Too bad he can’t—with all that enthusiasm!”

  Mel Robbins had too many practical preoccupations to spend any more time thinking about the youngster just then.

  “Hansen’s gang will be charging the cameras and checking instruments today,” Carnot said. “While we give all the fuel pumps a final going over.”

  ~ * ~

  So Carnot and Robbins climbed and crawled through pipelike servicing tunnels aboard MR-1, which was not a single rocket but five separate ones, sleeved into one another. The smallest, at the spaceship’s domed top, where the tiny passenger compartment was, fitted into the second smallest, and so on, up to the largest rocket, which would provide the take-off thrust—the first step in building tremendous speed.

  For Robbins and Carnot, their present work was routine and completely familiar, yet with a subdued anticipation behind it. Tomorrow held the answers to many questions. Carnot, the ship’s designer, whose life was too valuable to risk, might not find them out as well as Robbins; but there was chance of an accident’s happening so swiftly that Robbins would never know of anything happening at all.

  They had lunch in the mess-trailer with a trim, dark-haired girl, the newspaperwoman Robbins had married. She had been in Los Angeles for a day, conferring with radio people, and had just flown her private plane back to camp. Mel Robbins hardly listened to the business subjects she now talked about, but he listened to her voice. He loved his Norma, and she loved him; but they were different in many ways, and sometimes they even lost the thread of each other’s personalities.

  “Terra Firma has enough wonder left in it for me, Mel,” Norma used to say. “But you are the first man I ever knew who reached for the Moon and planets and really thought he could have them. Maybe you can, at that. . . .”

  Now they had one more night together and one more breakfast in the house-trailer where they were living, in camp.

  During the bustle and tension of early morning, Robbins saw the kid again. He was sitting under an awning, with a guard near him. The bandages now over his sunburn helped make him look ridiculous and dejected; but when Robbins grinned at him and said, “What’s the name? I forgot,” he showed joy.

  “Art Pelsudski,” he answered. “Say—let me wish you luck, Colonel Robbins! Just think—in four days you’ll be looking down on the other side of the Moon, that nobody’s ever seen! The old theory may be right. Maybe the Moon has been drawn out of shape by the pull of Earth’s gravity in one direction—it may bulge on the hemisphere which always faces Earth, and be hollow on the other. Maybe some air is cupped there. There might be lakes and trees and cities in a tremendous valley. Nobody knows ...”

  “Nobody does,” Robbins agreed.

  The theory was ancient, weak, and too romantic and pat in the way that its supposed marvels hid behind the unknown. It was the look in the kid’s eyes that interested Mel most. In it was the worship of great things of metal and power, and the driving love of unreached distance and mystery.

  After that brief meeting, Pelsudski vanished from Robbins’s thoughts once more. The fueling of MR-1, the last preparations, and the thread of personal fear in him held his attention.

  The flight was set for almost midday, when the Moon was nearly new and to Sunward. Solar gravity would help a little to draw the spaceship along its course.

  Once, at the last moment, when he was trying to think of something jaunty to say to his wife, Mel did remember the boy.

  “Norm,” he said, “you don’t look much like the girls on the covers of science-fiction magazines. But a young friend of mine might be watching us. He’s a purist. To him all science glitters. His heroes are big and strong, his heroines beautiful and soft. So let’s make this kiss his way. He hitchhiked out from Long Island City.”

  Robbins’s words had turned out to be more serious than he had intended. Norma didn’t seem to take them as a joke, either.

  “Good enough, you bum,” she said, her voice unsteady. “Maybe I’m juvenile, too. . . . Well, so long, darlin’, until eight or nine days go by. . . “

  ~ * ~

  Waving backhand, he climbed the ladder toward the entrance port of MR-1. For a second he lived for Art Pelsudski, or maybe more for his enthralled, Earthbound self of fifteen years ago. Or was that the same? The news people who were present didn’t matter. Perhaps he should be wearing his lightweight vacuum armor over his slacks and sweat shirt for more drama—okay, call it corn. But this trip, in the sealed passenger compartment, he wouldn’t be needing the armor.

  The fierce desert sunshine was cut off when he climbed through the port. It was cooler here. For a moment, now, with his nerves wearied from tensions and dulled to enthusiasms, he hated the great, rimed tanks of liquid hydrogen and oxygen that he was climbing past in the semidarkness. He was thinking:

  “If politicians didn’t put so many restrictions on research, we wouldn’t be doing this with chemical fuels. We’d already have an atomic motor, simpler and safer . . .”

  Mel knew that in part he was just grumbling, against that other— that recurrent—fear. Now a guided missile could come not only from the other side of the Earth; it could also be launched from deep in space. That idea grated against other hopes. But a scientist did not quit working, any more than he willed his pulse to stop.

  Mel Robbins found Carnot in the domed and padded passenger compartment. The thick quartz glass of the windows was leaded and darkened against the cosmic rays and ultraviolet of the void. The older man grinned mildly in the dim light.

  “My last look-around,” he said. Probably he didn’t like being left behind, and maybe there was in him something of th
e same mood that Robbins had. “We’re selling the eternal enigma, I suppose—first. Then, whatever comes out. Oh—you’ll make this trip all right, Mel.”

  Mel heard the receding click of Carnot’s feet on the ladder as he sealed himself inside the compartment, dogging down the airtight hatch. Then he took the small microphone-speaker unit that was corded to the wall.

  “This is Robbins,” he said into the mike. “I’m strapping myself to the floor padding now. Prone, a man can stand about nine gravities of acceleration. It won’t be that bad. Now all I do is wait. You don’t trust the firing and direction of a spaceship to a pilot. Clocks time everything.”

  His words were being rebroadcast by a hundred stations. He didn’t mention that he felt as if he were near an atom bomb about to explode.

  “Hear that rising hum?” he said. “The main stabilizing gyroscope is starting. That slobbering noise is the rotary fuel pump of the largest rocket, going into action.”

  Then came the roar of hidden flame and creaks and crackles in the structure of MR-1, loaded with hundreds of tons of ticklish fuel. Such sounds described themselves. He didn’t have to.

  “I can feel a little wobble,” he said, close to the mike. “That means the ship is fire-borne—off the ground. The thrust feels gentle, at first. . . .”

  The sense of weight grew with awful steadiness, pushed his jowls toward his ears, made his heart labor and the flesh of his cheeks feel tight.

  He spoke at broken intervals: “. . . end of first minute . . . Fifteen miles altitude. . . Acceleration is about half a mile per second, every minute—not too hard to take. We’ll use a little over seven miles per second, maximum velocity. That means a total firing time, for all the rockets, of only fifteen minutes. Then MR-1 just coasts on. Speed can’t hurt anyone—only too fast a change in speed. The Earth goes around the Sun at eighteen miles a second, and we can’t even feel the motion…”

  He talked on, mixing the announcement of events with bits of lecturing, as he was supposed to do:

  “. . . vision dims under high acceleration, but I can see that there’s more light in the compartment, now. The ship has climbed out of the atmosphere. There’s no air to cut down the sun’s brightness. . . . Hear that clatter? Largest rocket, empty, released to fall. Watch your heads! The sounds of the smaller rockets, vibrating through the ship, will be shriller. . . .”

  Once he said, “Are you listening, Norma? Hi, Carnot!” Then he joshed a little: “Say—this is kind of dull: Everything happens just as we expected. . . .”

  ~ * ~

  The rockets burned themselves out in succession and dropped away, and Mel announced the end of each.

  “So!” he said at last. “The tubes of the smallest rocket, in which I’m riding, have cut themselves off, though there is still dry-powder fuel in reserve. The sudden silence hits you. All you can hear is the hum of automatic cameras, and cosmic-ray instruments, and the click of hot metal contracting. Space, outside, is pretty cold. . . . But there’s a scorched smell here. The sudden lack of thrust makes your stomach feel funny. . . . I’m already quite a way from Earth. This initial speed can gobble up even astronomical distance in a hurry.”

  Mel Robbins was silent for a minute. Then he spoke again:

  “I’ve removed a section of floor padding that covers a window. There are no rockets below to block the view, now. The Earth is a grayish-green mound, with nothing clear in it. The white areas must be clouds, though they don’t look like clouds. I can see the atmosphere as a sort of bluish fringe. Beyond it the sky is black, the stars sharp as needles. It’s a beautiful view. . . .”

  Robbins didn’t express his private thoughts—that looking back at Earth from space was a symbolic moment to him, once dreamed up, and then built for. Well, he was happy about it. “Fella,” he thought silently, addressing his past self, “you waited a long time.” So Robbins was looking back in another sense, too.

  He was aware that his meeting with a boy named Pelsudski had something to do with the way his mind was rambling, just as did the knowledge that progress was trying to find its way through a period in history when growth could be real, or could mean The End.

  Vagaries went through his head, stray thoughts to be chuckled at or taken half seriously. If he had been able to look at the Earth from space, long ago, it would have been sheer glory. Now it was something less. Some of the charm rubbed off just by your becoming a man. Was that justice to a young visionary? His perfect height was never quite reached, even in realization.

  Mel even felt a bit sheepish over his success. In a way he’d been two people, and wasn’t this moment more the creation of his boyhood? If he had always been the plodder he was now, he wouldn’t be out here. But the boy changed, and so was cheated. Why couldn’t success come when the appreciation of it could be highest? The timing was wrong, somewhere.

  Robbins shrugged and returned his attention to the mike.

  “Gravity is dropping off fast, with increasing distance from the Earth,” he said. “I feel light—it’s like falling. I think I’m going to be slightly ill…”

  By snapping a small switch on the microphone-speaker unit in his hand, Robbins could have let Norma or Carnot talk to him. But he didn’t want either their too serious, or perhaps playful, sympathy. In avoiding it, he showed a certain playfulness himself.

  Prone once more, he just kept on talking about anything that came to mind, repeating what had been in the papers and on the radio:

  “. . . MR-1 should go up, Moonward, at slowing speed against Earth gravity, for nine-tenths of the two hundred and forty thousand miles distance; then it will be in the sphere of the lunar pull. It is aimed not to hit the Moon but to swing naturally in a half orbit around it, like a rock on a string of gravitation, or like a comet looping around the Sun. After that, it will start tumbling back toward Earth. . . .”

  Mel talked on until the spacesickness really got him. He had strapped himself down again; but he felt as if he had lost his stomach. He never remembered just when it was that he shut off the mike. In his misery, he managed at last to sleep fitfully, and for once he had nightmares. He hurtled and fell. Or he struggled across sun-blasted deserts, thumbing to leering motorists who never stopped.

  At intervals of wakefulness he radioed: “All okay.” After some hour» it became true. Spacesickness could pass, like seasickness.

  The first words he got from Norma were, “What are you doin’, Mel?” with a warm laugh.

  In their apartment in L.A., she used to call to him from the kitchen with that same phrase. He knew that now she meant to remind him of the memory.

  ~ * ~

  Her voice was coming up to him on an aimed radio beam, and nobody else could hear it. But the beam stabbing down from MR-1 wasn’t so narrow; besides, everything he said was for broadcast. Well, why should he care about the lack of privacy? Things had gone very well. The worst dangers were over. He felt relaxed and gay.

  “I’m doing the tricks from the imaginative fiction about space, hon,” he chuckled, when he had switched to transmission. “Shaking water out of a bottle—it does form into chains of globes that drift through the air with almost no weight at all. I can float up to the ceiling without any trouble. . . .I love you, honey. . . .Wish you liked to see things like the Sun with its corona visible. . . .”

  Norma laughed again. Her voice turned very gentle. “Happy, Mel?” she asked. “You’ve got what you want?” There was fondness in her tone, mothering, and mild feminine cynicism, mixed with satisfaction. Part of her seemed forever out of his reach. But he felt fond, too.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Time passed. Robbins talked on the radio—to everybody, to Norma, to Carnot. He slept. He ate chocolate and food concentrates. He inspected the air purifiers and the cameras and instruments, which could be reached by unlatching sections of padding from the walls and floor.

  The Moon grew to a pock-marked crescent, hideous with nearness. The turnabout came at last. Lazily MR-1’s heavier base rolle
d around till it faced the smaller world. It was in the gentle grip of lunar gravitation. For a while it swung like a slow pendulum.

  Mel talked to his microphone:

  “I can now see part of the hemisphere that is always hidden from view on Earth. So far it shows the same kind of craters as the visible hemisphere and the same kind of mares—’seas.’ Though they aren’t seas, but airless deserts of lava, sprinkled, it is supposed, with volcanic pumice. The same kind of stuff that people used to scour kettles with...”

  Robbins spieled into the mike until the vast bulk of the satellite began to eclipse the Earth. MR-1 was now curving behind Luna. Radio communication would be eclipsed, too.

  He changed to reception.

  “Can you hear me, Mel?” Norma’s voice was already thready and full of weird echoes. Her tone was a little taut.

  He moved the switch again and said, “Yes, still ... So long for a couple of hours, Norm . . .”