As he climbed on to the platform, Dirk studied the astronomer carefully. He had paid little attention to him until now: indeed, apart from his chance meeting with Hassell he had had few opportunities of studying any of the crew.
Taine was a slightly plump young man who seemed scarcely in the middle twenties, though he was actually just under thirty. Astronautics, thought Dick, certainly catches them young. No wonder that Richards, at thirty-five, was considered quite an old crock by his colleagues.
When he spoke, Taine’s voice was dry and precise and his words carried clearly throughout the hut. He was a good speaker, but had an annoying habit of juggling with pieces of chalk—which he frequently missed.
“I needn’t tell you very much about the Moon as a whole,” he said, “since you’ve already read or heard quite enough about it in the past few weeks. But I’ll discuss the place where we intend to land, and say what we hope to do when we get there.
“First of all, here’s a view of the whole Moon. (Slide One, please.) Since it’s full, and the sun is shining vertically on the center of the disc, everything looks flat and uninteresting. The dark area here at the bottom right is the Mare Imbrium, in which we’ll be landing.
“Now this is the Moon when she’s nine days old—which is how you’ll see her from Earth when we arrive. As the sun’s shining at an angle, you’ll see that the mountains near the center show up very clearly—look at those long shadows they throw.
“Let’s go closer and examine the Mare Imbrium in detail. The name, by the way, means ‘Sea of Rains,’ but of course it isn’t a sea and it doesn’t rain there or anywhere else on the Moon. The old astrologers called it that in the days before the invention of the telescope.
“You’ll see from this close-up that the Mare is a fairly flat plain bounded at the top (that’s the south, by the way) by this really magnificent range—the lunar Apennines. To the north we have this smaller range, the Alps. The scale here gives you an idea of the distances: that crater, for example, is about fifty miles across.
“This area is one of the most interesting ones on the Moon, and certainly has the finest scenery, but we can only explore a small region on our first visit. We shall land about here (Next Slide, please), and this is a drawing of the area under the greatest magnification we can use. It’s as you’d see it with the naked eye from a distance of two hundred miles away in space.
“The exact spot for the landing will be decided during the approach. We’ll be falling slowly for the last hundred miles and should have time to select a suitable area. Since we’re coming down vertically on shock absorbers, and holding off against the rockets until the last moment, we need only a few square yards of reasonably horizontal surface. Some pessimist has suggested that we may descend on what turns out to be dry quicksand, but this doesn’t seem at all likely.
“We will leave the ship in couples, roped together, while one remains aboard to relay messages back to Earth. Our spacesuits carry air for twelve hours, and will insulate us against the whole range of temperatures encountered on the Moon—that is, from boiling point to a couple of hundred degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. Since we’ll be there during the daytime, we won’t run into the low temperatures unless we stay in shadow for long periods.
“I can’t hope to mention all the work we intend to do during our week on the Moon, so I’ll merely touch on some of the highlights.
“First of all, we’re taking some compact but very powerful telescopes and hope to get clearer views of the planets than have ever been possible before. This equipment, like much of our stores, will be left behind for future expeditions.
“We are bringing back thousands of geological—I should say ‘selenologicar—samples for analysis. We’re looking for minerals containing hydrogen, since once we can establish a fuel extraction plant on the Moon, the cost of voyages will be cut to a tenth or even less. More important still, we can start thinking of trips to the other planets.
“We’re also taking a good deal of radio gear. As you know, the Moon has enormous possibilities as a relay station and we hope to investigate some of these. In addition we shall be making all sorts of physical measurements which will be of the greatest scientific interest. One of the most important of these is the determination of the Moon’s magnetic field in order to test Blackett’s theory. And, of course, we hope to get a splendid collection of photographs and films.
“Sir Robert has promised you that I’m going to ‘let my hair down.’ Well, I don’t know about that but you may be interested in what I, personally, think the lines of development will be in the next decade or so.
“First of all, we have to establish a semi-permanent base on the Moon. If we’re lucky in our first choice, we may be able to build it where we make our initial landing. Otherwise we’ll have to try again.
“Quite extensive plans have been drawn up for such a base. It would be self-contained as far as possible, and would grow its own food supplies under glass. The Moon, with its fourteen days continuous sunlight, should be a horticulturist’s paradise!
“As we learn more about the Moon’s natural resources, the base will be expanded and developed.
We expect mining operations at an early date—but they will be to provide materials for use on the Moon. It will be far too expensive to import any but very rare substances to Earth.
“At the present time, journeys to the Moon are extremely costly and difficult because we have to carry fuel for the return trip. When we can refuel on the Moon, we shall be able to use much smaller and more economical machines. And, as I remarked just now, we’ll be able to go to the planets.
“It sounds paradoxical, but it’s easier to make the forty-million-mile journey from a lunar base to Mars than it is to cross the quarter of a million miles between Earth and Moon. It takes much longer, of course—about two hundred and fifty days—but it doesn’t take more fuel.
“The Moon, thanks to its low gravitational field, is the stepping-stone to the planets—the base for the exploration of the solar system. If everything goes smoothly, we should be making plans for reaching Mars and Venus about ten years from now.
“I don’t propose to speculate about Venus, except to say that we’ll almost certainly make a radar survey of her before we attempt a landing. It should be possible to get accurate radar maps of the hidden surface, unless her atmosphere is very odd indeed.
“The exploration of Mars will be very much like the exploration of the Moon in some respects. We may not need spacesuits to go around in, but we’ll certainly need oxygen equipment. The Martian base will be up against the same problems as the Lunar one, though in a much less acute form. But it will have one disadvantage—it will be a long way from home and will have to rely much more on its own resources. The almost certain presence of some kind of life will also affect the settlement in ways we can’t predict. If there is intelligence on Mars—which I doubt—then our plans may have to be changed completely; we may not be able to stay there at all. The possibilities as far as Mars is concerned are almost endless; that’s why it’s such an interesting place.
“Beyond Mars, the scale of the solar system opens out and we cannot do much exploring until we have faster ships. Even our ‘Prometheus’ could reach the outer planets, but she couldn’t get back and the journey would take many years. However, by the end of the century, I believe we may be getting ready to go to Jupiter and, perhaps, Saturn. Very probably these expeditions will start from Mars.
“We cannot of course hope to land on those two planets: if they have solid surfaces at all, which is doubtful, they are thousands of miles down beneath an atmosphere we dare not enter. If there is any form of life inside those subarctic infernos, I don’t see how we can ever contact it—or how it can ever know anything about us.
“The chief interest on Saturn and Jupiter lies in their systems of moons. Saturn has at least twelve, Jupiter at least fifteen. What’s more, many of them are fair-sized worlds—bigger than our Moon. Titan, Saturn’s largest sa
tellite, is half as big as Earth, and it’s known to have an atmosphere, though not a breathable one. They are all very cold indeed, but that is not a serious objection now that we can get unlimited quantities of heat from atomic reactions.
“The three outermost planets won’t concern us for quite a long time to come—perhaps fifty years or more. We know very little about them at the moment, in any case.
“That’s all I’m going to say now. I hope I’ve made it clear that the journey we’re taking next week, though it seems so tremendous by our present standards, is really only the first step. It’s exciting and interesting, but we must keep it in its true perspective. The Moon’s a small world, and in some ways not a very promising one, but it will lead us eventually to eight other planets, some bigger than the Earth, and more than thirty moons of various sizes. The total area we’re opening up for exploration in the next few decades is at least ten times that of the land surface of this planet. That should provide room for everybody.
“Thank you.”
Taine stopped abruptly, without any rhetorical flourishes, like a broadcaster caught out by the studio clock. There was dead silence in the hut for perhaps half a minute as his audience came slowly back to earth. Then there was a polite trickle of applause, which slowly grew as more and more of Taine’s listeners discovered that they were still standing on the solid ground.
The reporters, stamping their feet and trying to restore their circulations, began to file out into the open. Dirk wondered how many had realized, for the first time, that the Moon was not a goal but a beginning—the first step upon an infinite road. It was a road, he now believed, along which all races must travel in the end, lest they wither and die upon their little, lonely worlds.
For the first time one could now see the “Prometheus” as a whole. “Alpha” had at last been hoisted into position upon “Beta’s” broad shoulders, giving her a somewhat ugly, hunch-backed appearance.
Even Dirk, to whom all hying machines looked very much alike, could not now have confused the great ship with anything else that had ever ridden the skies.
He followed Collins up the ladder of the movable gantry for his last look at the interior of the spaceship. It was evening and there were few people about. Beyond the warning ropes some photographers were trying to get shots of the machine with the sun going down behind it. The “Prometheus” would make an impressive sight silhouetted against the fading glory of the western sky.
“Alpha’s” cabin was as bright and tidy as an operating theater. Yet there were personal touches: here and there articles which obviously belonged to the crew had been stowed away in niches where they were firmly secured by elastic bands. Several pictures and photographs had been pasted against convenient walls, and over the pilot’s desk a plastic frame carried a portrait of (So Dirk assumed) Leduc’s wife. Charts and mathematical tables had been secured at strategic spots where they could be quickly consulted. Dirk suddenly remembered, for the first time in days, his visit to the training mock-up in England, where he had stood before this same array of instruments in a quiet London suburb. That seemed a lifetime ago, and more than half a world away.
Collins walked over to a tall locker and swung open the door.
“You haven’t seen one of these before, have you?” he asked.
The three flaccid spacesuits hanging from their hooks looked like creatures of the deep sea, dredged up from the darkness into the light of day. The thick, flexible covering yielded easily at Dirk’s touch, and he felt the presence of reinforcing metal hoops. Transparent helmets like large goldfish bowls were secured in recesses at the side of the locker.
“Just like diving suits, aren’t they?” said Collins. “As a matter of fact, ‘Alpha’ is more like a submarine than anything else—though our design problems are a lot easier, as we haven’t such pressures to contend with.”
“I’d like to sit in the pilot’s position,” said Dirk abruptly. “Is it all right?”
“Yes, as long as you don’t touch anything.”
Collins watched with a slight smile as the other settled himself down in the seat. He knew the impulse, having yielded to it himself more often than once.
When the ship was under power, or standing vertically on the Moon, the seat would have swung forwards through a right angle from its present position. What was now the floor beneath Dirk’s feet would then be the wall in front of him, and the periscope eyepiece which his boots now had to avoid would be conveniently placed for his use. Because of this rotation—so unfamiliar to the human mind—it was hard to capture the sensations which the ship’s pilot would have when he occupied this seat.
Dirk rose and turned to go. He followed Collins in silence to the airlock, but paused for a moment at the thick oval door for a last look around the quiet cabin.
“Good-bye, little ship,” he said in his mind. “Good-bye—and good luck!”
It was dark when they stepped out on to the gantry, and the floodlights spilled pools of brilliance upon the concrete below. A cold wind was blowing, and the night blazed with stars of which he would never know the names. Suddenly Collins, standing in the gloom beside him, caught his arm and pointed silently to the horizon.
Almost lost in the faint afterglow of the sunset, the two-day-old sickle of the New Moon was sliding down into the west. Clasped in its arms was the dimly luminous disk which still awaited the advent of day. Dirk tried to picture the great mountains and the wrinkled plains still waiting for the sun to rise upon them, yet already ablaze with the cold light of the almost full Earth.
Millions upon millions of times the Earth had waxed and waned above that silent land, and only shadows had ever moved upon its face. Since the dawn of terrestrial life, perhaps a dozen craters had crumbled and decayed, but it had known no other change than this. And now at last, after all these ages, its loneliness was coming to an end.
9
Two days before take-off, Luna City was probably one of the calmest and least agitated spots on Earth. All preparations had been completed except the final fueling and some last-minute tests. There was nothing to do except wait until the Moon moved to its appointed place.
In the great newspaper offices all over the planet, subeditors were busily preparing their headlines, and writing possible alternative stories which could be quickly trimmed to fit all but the most stubborn facts. Perfect strangers in buses and trains were liable to swap astronomical knowledge at the slightest provocation. Only a very spectacular murder was likely to receive the attention it normally commanded.
In every continent, long-range radar sets were being tuned up to follow “Alpha” on its journey into space. The little radar beacon aboard the spaceship would enable its position to be checked at every moment of the voyage.
Fifty feet underground at Princeton University, one of the world’s greatest electronic computers was standing by. Should it be necessary for any reason for the ship to change its orbit, or to delay its return, a new trajectory must be calculated through the shifting gravitational fields of Earth and Moon. An army of mathematicians would take months to do this; the Princeton calculator could produce the answer, already printed, in a few hours.
Every radio amateur in the world who could operate on the spaceship’s frequency was giving his equipment a last-minute check. There would not be many who could both receive and interpret the hyperfrequency, pulse-modulated signals from the ship, but there would be a few. The watchdogs of the ether, the Communications Commissioners, were standing by to deal with any unauthorized transmitters which might try to break into the circuit.
On their mountain tops, the astronomers were preparing for their private race—the contest to see who would get the best and clearest photographs of the landing. “Alpha” was far too small to be seen when it reached the Moon—but the flare of the jets as they splashed across the lunar rocks should be visible at least a million miles away.
Meanwhile the three men who held the center of the world’s stage gave interviews when they f
elt like it, slept long hours in their huts, or relaxed violently at table-tennis, which was about the only form of sport that Luna City provided. Leduc, who had a macabre sense of humor, amused himself by telling his friends the useless or insulting things he had left them in his will. Richards behaved as if nothing of the slightest importance had happened, and insisted on making elaborate social engagements for three weeks’ time. Taine was seldom seen at all; it transpired later that he was busily writing a mathematical treatise which had very little to do with astronautics. It was, in fact, concerned with the total possible number of games of bridge, and the length of time it would take to play them all.
Very few people indeed knew that the meticulous Taine could, had he wished, have made much more money out of fifty-two pieces of card than he was ever likely to from astronomy. Not that he would do at all badly now, if he came back safely from the Moon.
Sir Robert Derwent lay completely relaxed in his armchair, the room in darkness save for the pool of light from the reading lamp. He was almost sorry that the two or three days’ margin for last-minute hold-ups had not been required. It was still a night and a day and a night again before the take-off—and there was nothing to do but wait.
The Director-General did not like waiting. It gave him time to think, and thought was the enemy of contentment. Now, in the quiet hours of the night, as the greatest moment of his life approached, he was revisiting the past in search of his youth.
The forty years of struggle, of success and heartbreak, still lay in the future. He was a boy again, at the very beginning of his university career, and the Second World War which had stolen six years of his life was still no more than a threatening cloud on the horizon. He was lying in a Shropshire wood on one of those spring mornings that had never come again, and the book he was reading was the one he still held in his hands. In faded ink upon the fly-leaf were the words, written in a curiously half-formed hand: “Robert A. Derwent. 22 June 1935.”
Prelude to Space Page 14
