11
The others got the space tug into the platform's lock and did things toit, in the way of loading, that its designers never intended, while Joewas calling Earth for calculations. The result was infuriating. TheMoonship had taken off for the Moon on the other side of the Platform'sorbit, when it had a velocity of more than 12,000 miles an hour in thedirection it wished to go. The Platform and of course the space tug wasnow on the reverse side of the Platform's orbit. And of course they nowhad a velocity of more than 12,000 miles per hour away from thedirection in which it was urgently necessary for the space tug to go.They could wait for two hours to take off, said Earth, or waste the timeand fuel they'd need to throw away to duplicate the effect of waiting.
"But we can't wait!" raged Joe. Then he snapped. "Look here! Suppose wetake off from here, dive at Earth, make a near-graze, and let itsgravity curve our course! Like a cometary path! Figure that! That's whatwe've got to do!"
He kicked off his magnetic-soled shoes and went diving down to theairlock. Over his shoulder he panted an order for the radar-duty man torelay anything from Earth down to him there. He arrived to find Haneyand Mike in hot argument over whether it was possible to load on anextra ton or two of mass. He stopped it. They would.
"Everything's loaded?" he demanded. "Okay! Space suits! All set? Let'sget out of this lock and start blasting!"
He drove them into the space tug. He climbed in himself. He closed theentrance port. The plastic walls of the lock bulged out, pulled backfast, and the steering rockets jetted. The space tug came out of thelock. It spun about. It aimed for Earth and monstrous bursts ofrocket-trail spread out behind it. It dived.
Naturally! When a ship from the Platform wanted to reach Earth foratmosphere-deceleration, it was more economical to head away from it.Now that it was the most urgent of all possible necessities to get awayfrom Earth, in the opposite direction to the space tug's present motion,it was logical to dive toward it. The ship would plunge toward Earth,and Earth's gravity would help its rockets in the attainment of frenziedspeed. But the tug still possessed its orbital speed. So it would notactually strike the Earth, but would be carried eastward past its disk,even though aimed for Earth's mid-bulge. Yet Earth would continue topull. As the space tug skimmed past, its path would be curved by thepull of gravity. At the nearest possible approach to Earth, the tugwould fire its heaviest rockets for maximum acceleration. And it wouldswing around Earth's atmosphere perhaps no more than 500 mileshigh--just barely beyond the measurable presence of air--and come out ofthat crazy curve a good hour ahead of the Platform for a correspondingposition, and with a greater velocity than could be had in any otherway. Traced on paper, the course of the tug would be a tight parabola.
The ship dived. And it happened that it had left the Platform andplunged deep in Earth's shadow, so that the look and feel of things wasthat of an utterly suicidal plunge into oblivion. There was the seemingof a vast sack of pure blackness before the nose of the space tug. Shestarted for it at four gravities acceleration, and Joe got hisheadphones to his ears and lay panting while he waited for the figuresand information he had to have.
He got them. When the four-gravity rockets burned out, the tug's crewpainstakingly adjusted the ship's nose to a certain position. They flungthemselves back into the acceleration chairs and Joe fired a six-gblast. They came out of that, and he fired another. The three blastsgave the ship a downward speed of a mile and a half a second, andEarth's pull added to it steadily. The Earth itself was drawing themdown most of a 4,000-mile fall, which added to the speed their rocketsbuilt up.
Down on Earth, radar-bowls wavered dizzily, hunting for them to feedthem observations of position and data for their guidance. Back on thePlatform, members of the crew feverishly made their own computations.When the four in the Space tug were half-way to Earth, they weretraveling faster than any humans had ever traveled before, relative tothe Earth or the Platform itself. When they were a thousand miles fromEarth, it was certain they would clear its edge. Joe proposed andreceived an okay to fire a salvo of Mark Tens to speed the ship stillmore. When they burned to the release-point and flashed away past theports, the Chief and Haney panted up from their chairs and made theirway aft.
"Going to reload the firing-frames," gasped the Chief.
They vanished. The space tug could take rockets from its cargo and setthem outside its hull for firing. No other ship could.
Haney and the Chief came back. There was dead silence in the ship, savefor a small, tinny voice in Joe's headphones.
"We'll pass Earth 600 miles high," said Joe in a flat voice. "Maybecloser. I'm going to try to make it 450. We'll be smack over enemyterritory, but I doubt they could hit us. We'll be hitting better thansix miles a second. If we wanted to, we could spend some more rocketsand hit escape velocity. But we want to stop, later. We'll ride it out."
Silence. Stillness. Speed. Out the ports to Earthward there was purestblackness. On the other side, a universe of stars. But the blacknessgrew and grew and grew until it neatly bisected the cosmos itself, andhalf of everything that was, was blackness. Half was tiny colored stars.
Then there was a sound. A faint sound. It was a moan. It was a howl. Itwas a shriek.... And then it was a mere thin moan again. Then it wasnot.
"We touched air," said Joe calmly, "at six and a quarter miles persecond. Pretty thin, though. At that, we may have left a meteor-trailfor the populace to admire."
Nobody said anything at all. In a little while there was light ahead.There was brightness. Instantly, it seemed, they were out of night andthere was a streaming tumult of clouds flashing past below--but theywere 800 miles up now--and Joe's headphones rattled and he said:
"Now we can give a touch of course-correction, and maybe a trace ofspeed...."
Rockets droned and boomed and roared outside the hull. The Earth fellaway and away and presently it was behind. And they were plunging onafter the Moonship which was very, very, very far on before them.
It was actually many hours before they reached it. They couldn't affordto overtake it gradually, because they had to have time to work in aftercontact. But overtaking it swiftly cost extra fuel, and they hadn't toomuch. So they compromised, and came up behind the Moonship at betterthan 2,000 feet per second difference in speed--they approached it asfast as most rifle-bullets travel--and all creation was blotted out bythe fumes of the rockets they fired for deceleration.
Then the space tug came cautiously close to the Moonship. Mike climbedout on the outside of the tug's hull, with the Chief also in spaceequipment, paying out Mike's safety-line. Mike leaped across two hundredyards of emptiness with light-years of gulf beneath him. His metal solesclanked on the Moonship's hull.
Then the vision-screen on the tug lighted up. Lieutenant Commander Brownlooked out of it, quietly grim. Joe flicked on his own transmitter. Henodded.
"_Mr. Kenmore_," said Brown evenly, "_I did not contact you beforebecause I was not certain that contact could be made. How manypassengers can you take back to the Platform?_"
Joe blinked at him.
"I haven't any idea," he said. "But I'm going to hitch on and use ourrockets to land you."
"_I do not think it practicable_," said Brown calmly. "_I believe theonly result of such a course will be the loss of both ships with allhands. I will give you a written authorization to return on my order.But since all my crew can't return, how many can you take? I have tenmarried men aboard. Six have children. Can you take six? Or all ten?_"Then he said without a trace of emphasis, "_Of course, none of them willbe officers._"
"If I tried to turn back now, I think my crew would mutiny," Joe saidcoldly. "I'd hate to think they wouldn't, anyhow! We're going to hook onand play this out the way it lies!"
There was a pause. Then Brown spoke again. "_Mr. Kenmore, I washoping you'd say that. Actually--er--not to be quoted, youunderstand--actually, intelligent defiance has always been in thetraditions of the Navy. Of course, you're not in the Navy, Kenmore, butright now it looks like the Na
vy is in your hands. Like a battleship inthe hands of a tug. Good luck, Kenmore._"
Joe flicked off the screen. "You know," he said, winking at Mike, "Iguess Brown isn't such a bad egg after all. Let's go!"
In minutes, the space tug had a line made fast. In half an hour, the twospace craft were bound firmly together, but far enough apart for therocket blasts to dissipate before they reached the Moonship. Mikereturned to the tug. A pair of the big Mark Twenty rockets burnedfrenziedly in emptiness.
The Moonship was slowed by a fraction of its speed. The deceleration washardly perceptible.
There were more burnings. Back on Earth there were careful measurements.A tight beam tends to attenuate when it is thrown a hundred thousandmiles. It tends to! When speech is conducted over it, the lag betweencomment and reply is perceptible. It's not great--just over half asecond. But one notices it. That lag was used to measure the speed anddistance of the two craft. The prospect didn't look too good.
The space tug burned rocket after rocket after rocket. There was noeffect that Joe could detect, of course. It would have been likenoticing the effect of single oar-strokes in a rowboat miles from shore.But the instruments on Earth found a difference. They made very, very,very careful computations. And the electronic brains did thecalculations which battalions of mathematicians would have needed yearsto work out. The electronic calculations which could not make a mistakesaid--that it was a toss-up.
The Moon came slowly to float before the two linked ships. It grewslowly, slowly larger. The word from Earth was that considering therockets still available in the space tug, and those that should havebeen fired but weren't on the Moonship, there must be no more blastsjust yet. The two ships must pass together through the neutral-pointwhere the gravities of Earth and Moon exactly cancel out. They must falltogether toward the Moon. Forty miles above the lunar surfacesuch-and-such rockets were to be fired. At twenty miles, such-and-suchothers. At five miles the Moonship itself must fire its remainingfuel-store. With luck, it was a toss-up. Safety or a smash.
But there was a long time to wait. Joe and his crew relaxed in the spacetug. The Chief looked out a port and observed:
"I can see the ring-mountains now. Naked-eye stuff, too! I wonder ifanybody ever saw that before!"
"Not likely," said Joe.
Mike stared out a port. Haney looked, also.
"How're we going to get back, Joe?"
"The Moonship has rockets on board," Joe told him. "Only they can'tstick them in the firing-racks outside. They're stowed away, allshipshape, Navy fashion. After we land, we'll ask politely for rocketsto get back to the Platform with. It'll be a tedious run. Mostlycoasting--falling free. But we'll make it."
"If everything doesn't blow when we land," said the Chief.
Joe said uncomfortably: "It won't. Not that somebody won't try." Then hestopped. After a moment he said awkwardly: "Look! It's necessary that wehumans get to the stars, or ultimately we'll crowd the Earth until wewon't be able to stay human. We'd have to have wars and plagues and suchthings to keep our numbers down. It--it seems to me, and I--think it'sbeen said before, that it looks like there's something, somewhere,that's afraid of us humans. It doesn't want us to reach the stars. Itdidn't want us to fly. Before that it didn't want us to learn how tocure disease, or have steam, or--anything that makes men different fromthe beasts."
Haney turned his head. He listened intently.
"Maybe it sounds--superstitious," said Joe uneasily, "but there's alwaysbeen somebody trying to smash everything the rest of us wanted. Asif--as if something alien and hateful went around whisperinghypnotically into men's ears while they slept, commanding themirresistibly to do things to smash all their own hopes."
The Chief grunted. "Huh! D'you think that's new stuff, Joe?"
"N-no," admitted Joe. "But it's true. Something fights us. You can makewild guesses. Maybe--things on far planets that know that if ever wereach there.... There's something that hates men and it tries to make usdestroy ourselves."
"Sure," said Haney mildly. "I learned about that in Sunday School, Joe."
"Maybe I mean that," said Joe helplessly. "But anyhow there's somethingwe fight--and there's Something that fights with us. So I think we'regoing to get the Moonship down all right."
Mike said sharply: "You mean you think this is all worked out inadvance. That we'd be here, we'd get here----"
The Chief said impatiently, "It's figured out so we can do it if we gotthe innards. We got the chance. We can duck it. But if we duck it, it'sbad, and somebody else has to have the chance later. I know what Joe'ssaying. Us men, we got to get to the stars. There's millions of 'em, andwe need the planets they've got swimming around 'em."
Haney said, "Some of them have planets. That's known. Yeah."
"Those planets ain't going to go on forever with nobody using 'em,"grunted the Chief. "It don't make sense. And things in general do makesense. All but us humans," he finished with a grin. "And I like us,anyhow. Joe's right. We'll get by this time. And if we don't--some otherguys'll have to do the job of landing on the Moon. But it'll bedone--as a starter."
"I can see lots of mountains down there. Plain," Mike said quietly.
"What's the radar say?"
Joe looked. Back at the Platform it had shown the curve of the surfaceof Earth. Here a dim line was beginning to show on the vertical-planescreen. It was the curve of the surface of the Moon.
"We might as well get set," said Joe. "We've got time but we might aswell. Space suits on. I'll tighten up the chain. Steering rockets'll dothat. Then we'll take a last look. All firing racks loaded outside?"
"Yeah," said Haney. He grinned wrily. "You know, Joe, I know what Iknow, but still I'm scared."
"Me, too," said Joe.
But there were things to do. They took their places. They watched outthe ports. The Moon had seemed a vast round ball a little while back.Now it appeared to be flattening. Its edges still curved away beyond asurprisingly nearby horizon. The ring-mountains were amazingly distinct.There were incredibly wide, smooth spaces with mottled colorings. Butthe mountains....
When the ships were 40 miles high the space tug blasted valorously, andall the panorama of the Moon's surface was momentarily hidden by theracing clouds of mist. The rockets burned out.
Haney and the Chief replaced the burned-out rockets. They were gigantic,heavy-bore tubes which they couldn't have stirred on Earth. Now theyloaded them into the curious locks which conveyed them outside the hullinto firing position.
The ring-mountains were gigantic when they blasted again! They were only20 miles up, then, and some of the peaks rose four miles from theirinner crater floors.
The ships were still descending fast. Joe spoke into his microphone.
"Calling Moonship! Calling----" He stopped and said matter-of-factly,"I suggest we fire our last blast together. Shall I give the word?Right!"
The surface of the Moon came toward them. Craters, cracks, frozenfountains of stone, swelling undulations of ground interrupted withoutrhyme or reason by the gigantic splashings of missiles from the sky ahundred thousand million years ago. The colorings were unbelievable.There were reds and browns and yellows. There were grays and dustydeep-blues and streaks of completely impossible tints in combination.
But Joe couldn't watch that. He kept his eyes on a very special gadgetwhich was a radar range-finder. He hadn't used it about the Platformbecause there were too many tin cans and such trivia floating about. Itwouldn't be dependable. But it did measure the exact distance to thenearest solid object.
"Prepare for firing on a count of five," said Joe quietly. "Five ...four ... three ... two ... one ... fire!"
The space tug's rockets blasted. For the first time since they overtookthe Moonship, the tug now had help. The remaining rockets outside theMoonship's hull blasted furiously. Out the ports there was nothing buthurtling whitenesses. The rockets droned and rumbled and roared....
The main rockets burned out. The steering rockets still boomed. Joe hadthrown
them on for what good their lift might do.
"Joe!" said Haney in a surprised tone. "I feel weight! Not much, butsome! And the main rockets are off!"
Joe nodded. He watched the instruments before him. He shifted a control,and the space tug swayed. It swayed over to the limit of the tow-chainit had fastened to the Moonship. Joe shifted his controls again.
There was a peculiar, gritty contact somewhere. Joe cut the steeringrockets and it was possible to look out. There were more gritty noises.The space tug settled a little and leaned a little. It was still. Thenthere was no noise at all.
"Yes," said Joe. "We've got some weight. We're on the Moon."
They went out of the ship in a peculiarly solemn procession. About themreared cliffs such as no man had ever looked on before save in dreams.Above their heads hung a huge round greenish globe, with a white polarice-cap plainly visible. It hung in mid-sky and was four times the sizeof the Moon as seen from Earth. If one stood still and looked at it, itwould undoubtedly be seen to be revolving, once in some twenty-fourhours.
Mike scuffled in the dust in which he walked. Nobody had emerged fromthe Moonship yet. The four of them were literally the first human beingsever to set foot on the surface of the Moon. But none of them mentionedthe fact, though all were acutely aware of it. Mike kicked up dust. Itrose in a curiously liquid-like fashion. There was no air to scatter it.It settled deliberately back again.
Mike spoke with an odd constraint. "No green cheese," he said absurdly.
"No," agreed Joe. "Let's go over to the Moonship. It looks all right. Itcouldn't have landed hard."
They went toward the bulk of the ship from Earth, which now was a basefor the military occupation of a globe with more land-area than allEarth's continents put together--but not a drop of water. The Moonshipwas tilted slightly askew, but it was patently unharmed. There werefaces at every port in the hull.
The Chief stopped suddenly. A sizable boulder rose from the dust. TheChief struck it smartly with his space-gloved hand.
"I'm counting coup on the Moon!" he said zestfully "Tie that, you guys!"
Then he joined the others on their way to the Moonship's main lock.
"Shall we knock?" asked Mike humorously. "I doubt they've got adoor-bell!"
But the lock-door was opening to admit them. They crowded inside.
Commander Brown was waiting for them with an out-stretched hand. "Gladto have you aboard." And there was a genuine smile creeping across hisface.
* * * * *
Joe talked with careful distinctness into a microphone. His voice took alittle over a second to reach its destination. Then there was a pause ofthe same length before the first syllable of Sally's reply came to himfrom Earth.
"I've reported to your father," said Joe carefully, "and the Moonshiphas reported to the Navy. In a couple of hours Haney and the Chief andMike and I will be taking off to go back to the Platform. We got rocketsfrom the stores of the Moonship."
Sally's voice was surprisingly clear. It wavered a little, but there wasno sound of static to mar reception.
"Then what, Joe?"
"I'm bringing written reports and photographs and first specimens ofgeology from the Moon," Joe told her. "I'm a mailman. It'll probably besixty hours back to the Platform--free fall most of the way--and thenwe'll refuel and I'll come down to Earth to deliver the reports andsuch."
Pause. One second and a little for his voice to go. Another second andsomething over for her voice to return.
"And then?"
"That's what I'm trying to find out," said Joe. "What day is today?"
"Tuesday," said Sally after the inevitable pause. "It's ten o'clockTuesday morning at the Shed."
Joe made calculations in his mind. Then he said:
"I ought to land on Earth some time next Monday."
Pause.
"Yes?" said Sally.
"I wondered," said Joe. "How about a date that night?" Another pause.Then Sally's voice. She sounded glad.
"It's a date, Joe. And--do you know, I must be the first girl in theworld to make a date with the Man in the Moon?"
COMBAT MISSION!
_Joe Kenmore's mission was as dangerous as it sounded simple:_
"DELIVER SUPPLIES AND ATOMIC WEAPONS TO THE SPACE PLATFORM. THEN PREPARE FOR MAN'S FIRST EXPEDITION TO THE MOON."
Joe had helped launch the first Space Platform--that initial rung in man's ladder to the stars. But the enemies who had ruthlessly tried to destroy the space station before it left Earth were still at work. They were plotting to stop Joe's mission!
Cover painting by Robert Schulz
+--------------------------------------------------------------+| Transcriber's Note || || The chemical symbol for carbon dioxide has been shown as || CO_2 to depict a subscript 2. || || In the following words, the hyphen has been removed to || conform to majority use in text. || brain-storm || loud-speaker || || The following words with and without a hyphen were left as || such because of equal prevalence of both forms: || half-way halfway || pay-load payload || rocket-lift rocketlift || sun-lamps sunlamps || hand-hold handhold || pin-points pinpoints || || "overall" and "over-all" were left as such since the writers || are different (The narrator and a character). || || The following typos have been corrected: || Adorning Adoring || level lever || runing running || shed Shed || thiry-nine thirty-nine || |+--------------------------------------------------------------+
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