The Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  Two freight-rockets came in, picked up by radar and guided to landings by remote control. The Lunar City beam receiver picked up music aimed up from Earth and duly relayed it to the dust-heaps which were the buildings of the city. The colonists and moon-tourists became familiar with forty-two new tunes dealing with prospective travel to the stars. One work of genius tied in a just-released film-tape drama titled “Child of Hate” to the Lunar operation, and charmed listeners saw and heard the latest youthful tenor gently plead, “Child of Hate, Come to the Stars and Love.” The publicity department responsible for the masterpiece considered itself not far from genius, too.

  There was confusion thrice and four and five times confounded. Cochrane came in to dispute furiously with Holden whether it was better to have a psychopathic personality on the space-ship or to have a legal battle in the courts. Cochrane won. Jones arrived, belligerent, to do battle for technical devices which would cost money.

  “Look!” said Cochrane harassedly. “I’m not trying to boss you! Don’t come to me for authority! If you can make that ship take off I’ll be in it, and my neck will be in as much danger as yours. You buy what will keep my neck as safe as possible, along with yours. I’m busy raising money and fighting off crackpots and dodging lawsuits and getting supplies! I’ve got a job that needs three men anyhow. All I’m hoping is that you get ready to take off before I start cutting out paperdolls. When can we leave?”

  “We?” said Jones suspiciously. “You’re going?”

  “If you think I’ll stay behind and face what’ll happen if this business flops,” Cochrane told him, “you’re crazy! There are too many people on Earth already. There’s no room for a man who tried something big and failed! If this flops I’d rather be a frozen corpse with a happy smile on my face—I understand that in space one freezes—than somebody living on assisted survival status on Earth!”

  “Oh,” said Jones, mollified. “How many people are to go?”

  “Ask Bill Holden,” Cochrane told him. “Remember, if you need something, get it. I’ll try to pay for it. If we come back with picture-tapes of outer space—even if we only circumnavigate Mars!—we’ll have money enough to pay for anything!”

  Jones regarded Cochrane with something almost like warmth.

  “I like this way of doing business,” he said.

  “It’s not business!” protested Cochrane. “This is getting something done! By the way. Have you picked out a destination for us to aim at?” When Jones shook his head, Cochrane said harassedly; “Better get one picked out. But when we make out our sail-off papers, for destination we’ll say, ‘To the stars.’ A nice line for the news broadcasts. Oh, yes. Tell Bill Holden to try to find us a skipper. An astrogator. Somebody who can tell us how to get back if we get anywhere we need to get back from. Is there such a person?”

  “I’ve got him,” said Jones. “He checked the ship for me. Former moon-rocket pilot. He’s here in Lunar City. Thanks!”

  He shook hands with Cochrane before he left. Which for Jones was an expression of overwhelming emotion. Cochrane turned back to his desk.

  “Let’s see…That arrangement for cachets on stamps and covers to be taken along and postmarked Outer Space. Put in a stipulation for extra payment in case we touch on planets and invent postmarks for them…”

  He worked on, while Babs took notes. Presently he was dictating. And as he talked, frowning, he took a fountain-pen from his pocket and absently worked the refill-handle. It made ink exude from the pen-point. On the moon, the surface tension of the ink was exactly the same as on earth, but the gravity was five-sixths less. So a drop of ink of really impressive size could be formed before the moon’s weak gravity made it fall.

  Dictating as he worked the pen, Cochrane achieved a pear-shaped mass of ink which was quite the size of a large grape before it fell into his waste-basket. It was the largest he’d made to date. It fell—slow-motion—and splashed—violently—as he regarded it with harried satisfaction.

  More time passed. A moon-rocket arrived from Earth. There were new tourists under the thousand-foot plastic dome. Out by the former Mars-ship Jones made experiments with small plastic balloons coated with a conducting varnish. In a vacuum, a cubic inch of air at Earth-pressure will expand to make many cubic feet of near-vacuum. If a balloon can sustain an internal pressure of one ounce to the square foot, a thimbleful of air will inflate a sizeable globe to that pressure. Jones was arranging tiny Dabney field robot-generators with tiny atomic batteries to power them. Each such balloon would be a Dabney field “plate” when cast adrift in emptiness, and its little battery would keep it in operation for twenty years or more.

  Baggage came up from Earth for Johnny Simms. It was mostly elephant-guns and ammunition for them. Johnny, as the heir to innumerable millions back on earth, had had a happy life, but hardly one to give him a practical view of things. To him, star-travel meant landing on such exotic planets as the fictioneers had been writing about for a hundred years or so. He really looked upon the venture into space as a combined big-game expedition and escape from Lunar City. And he did look forward, too, to freedom from his family’s legal representative and the constant reminder of ethical and moral values which Johnny preferred happily to ignore.

  Film-tape came up, and cameras to use it in. Every imaginable item an expedition to space could use or even might use, was thrust upon Spaceways, Inc. Manufacturers yearned to have their products used in connection with the hottest news story in decades. There was a steady trailing of moon-jeeps from the airlocks of Lunar City to the ship.

  The time of lunar sunset arrived—503:30 o’clock, half-past five hundred and three hours. Time was measured from midnight to midnight, astronomical fashion. The great, blazing sun whose streamer prominences, even, were too bright to be looked at with the naked eye—the sun neared and reached the horizon. There was no change in the star-studded sky. There were no sunset colorings. The incandescent brightness on the mountains was not lessened in the least. Only the direction of the stark black shadows shifted.

  The glaring sun descended. Its motion was almost infinitely slow. Its disk was of the order of half a degree of arc, and it took a full hour to be fully obscured. And then there was at first no difference in the look of things save that the Mare Imbrium—the solidified, arid Sea of Showers—was as dark as the shadows in the mountains.

  They still gleamed brightly. For a very long time the white-hot sunshine glowed on their flanks. The brightness rose and rose, and blackness followed it. At long last only the topmost peaks of the Apennines blazed luridly against a background of stars whose light seemed feeble by comparison.

  Then it was night indeed. But the Earth shone forth, a half-globe of seas and clouds and continents, vast and nostalgic in the sky. And now Earthshine fell upon the moon. It was many times brighter than moonlight ever was upon the Earth. Even at lunar sunset the Earthlight was sixteen times brighter. At midnight, when the Earth was full, it would be bright enough for any activity. Actually, the human beings on Luna were nearly nocturnal in their habits, because it was easier to run moon-jeeps in frigidity and keep men and machines warm enough for functioning, than it was to protect them against the more-than-boiling heat of midday on the moon.

  So the activity about the salvaged space-ship increased. There were electric lights blazing in the demi-twilight, to guide freight vehicles with their loads. The tourist-jeeps went and returned and went and returned. The last shipload of travelers from Earth wanted to see the space-craft about which all the world was talking.

  Even Cochrane presently became curious. There came a time when all the paper-work connected with what had happened was done with, and conditional contracts drawn up on everything that could be foreseen. It was time for something new to happen.

  Cochrane said dubiously:

  “Babs, have you seen the ship?”

  She shook her head.

  “I think we’d better go take a look at it,” said Cochrane. “Do you know, I’ve been acti
ng like a damned business man! I’ve only been out of Lunar City three times. Once to the laboratory to talk, once to test a signal-rocket across the crater, and once when the distress-torp went off. I haven’t even seen the nightclub here in the City!”

  “You should,” said Babs matter-of-factly. “I went once, with Doctor Holden. The dancing was marvelous!”

  “Bill Holden, eh?” said Cochrane. He found himself annoyed. “Took you to the nightclub; but not to see the ship!”

  “The ship’s farther,” explained Babs. “I could always be found at the nightclub if you needed me. I went when you were asleep.”

  “Damn!” said Cochrane. “Hm…You ought to get a bonus. What would you rather have, Babs, a bonus in cash or Spaceways stock?”

  “I’ve got some stock,” said Babs. “Mr. Bell—the writer, you know—got in a poker game. He was cleaned out. So I gave him all the money I had—I told you I cleared out my savings-account before we came up, I think—for half his shares.”

  “Either you got very badly stuck,” Cochrane told her cynically, “or else you’ll be so rich you won’t speak to me.”

  “Oh, no!” said Babs warmly. “Never!”

  Cochrane yawned.

  “Let’s get out and take a look at the ship. Maybe I can stow cargo or something, now there’s no more paper-work.”

  Babs said with an odd calm:

  “Mr. Jones wanted you out there today—in an hour, he said. I promised you’d go. I meant to mention it in time.”

  Cochrane did not notice her tone. He was dead-tired, as only a man can be who has driven himself at top speed for days on end over a business deal. Business deals are stimulating only in their major aspects. Most of the details are niggling, tedious, routine, and boring—and very often bear-trapped. Cochrane had done, with only Babs’ help, an amount of mental labor that in the offices of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe would have been divided among two vice-presidents, six lawyers, and at least twelve account executives. The work, therefore, would actually have been done by not less than twenty secretaries. But Babs and Cochrane had done it all.

  In the moon-jeep on the way to the ship he felt that heavy, exhausted sense of relaxation which is not pleasurable at all. Babs annoyed him a little, too. She was late getting to the airlock, and seemed breathless when she arrived.

  The moon-jeep crunched and clanked and rumbled over the gently undulating lava sea beneath its giant wheels. Babs looked zestfully out of the windows. The picture was, of course, quite incredible. In the relatively dim Earthlight the moonscape was somehow softened, and yet the impossibly jagged mountains and steep cliffsides and the razor-edged passes of monstrous stone,—these things remained daunting. It was like riding through a dream in which everything nearby seemed fey and glamorous, but the background was deathly-still and ominous.

  There were the usual noises inside the jeep. The air had a metallic smell. One could detect the odors of oil, and ozone, and varnish, and plastic upholstery. There were the crunching sounds of the wheels, traveling over stone. There was the paradoxic gentleness of all the jeep’s motions because of the low gravity. Cochrane even noted the extraordinary feel of an upholstered seat when one weighs only one-sixth as much as back on Earth. All his sensations were dreamlike—but he felt that headachy exhaustion that comes of overwork too long continued.

  “I’ll try,” he said tiredly, “to see that you have some fun before you go back, Babs. You’ll go back as soon as we dive off into whatever we’re diving into, but you ought to get in the regular tourist stuff up here, anyhow.”

  Babs said nothing. Pointedly.

  The moon-jeep clanked and rumbled onward. The hissing of steam was audible. The vehicle swung around a pinnacle of stone, and Cochrane saw the space-ship.

  In the pale Earthlight it was singularly beautiful. It had been designed to lure investors in a now-defunct promotion. It was stream-lined, and gigantic, and it glittered like silver. It stood upright on its tail-fins, and it had lighted ports and electric lights burned in the emptiness about it. But there was only one moon-jeep at its base. A space-suited figure moved toward a dangling sling and sat in it. He rose deliberately toward an open airlock-hatch, and the other moon-jeep moved soundlessly away back toward Lunar City.

  There was no debris about. There was no cargo waiting to be loaded. Cochrane did see a great metal plate, tilted on the ground, with a large box attached to it by cables. That would be the generators and the field-plate for a Dabney field. It was plainly to remain on the moon. It was not underneath the ship. Cochrane puzzled tiredly over it for a moment. Then he understood. The ship would lift on its rockets, hover over the plate—which would be generating its half of the field—and then Jones would switch on the apparatus in the ship itself. The forward, needle-pointed nose of the ship would become another generator of the Dabney field. The ship’s inertia, in that field, would be effectively reduced to a fraction of its former value. The rockets, which might give it an acceleration of a few hundred feet per second anywhere but in a Dabney field, would immediately accelerate the ship and all its contents to an otherwise unattainable velocity. The occupants of the rocket would lose their relative inertia to the same degree as the ship. They should feel no more acceleration than from the same rocket-thrust in normal space. But they would travel—

  Cochrane felt that there was a fallacy somehow, in the working of the Dabney field as he understood it. If there was less inertia in the Dabney field—why—a rocket shouldn’t push as hard in it, because, it was the inertia of the rocket-gases that gave the rocket-thrust. But Cochrane was much too tired to work out a theoretic objection to something he knew did work. He was almost dozing when Babs touched his arm.

  “Space-suits, Mr. Cochrane.”

  He got wearily into the clumsy costume. But he saw again that Babs wore the shining-eyed look of rapturous adventure that he had seen her wear before.

  They got out of the moon-jeep, one after the other. The sling came down the space-ship’s gleaming side. They got in it, together. It lifted them.

  The vast, polished hull of the space-ship slid past them only ten feet away. The ground diminished. They seemed less to be lifted than to float skyward. And in this sling, in this completely unreal ascent, Cochrane roused suddenly. He felt the acute unease which comes of height. He had looked down upon Earth from a height of four thousand miles with no feeling of dizziness. He had looked at Earth a quarter-million miles away with no consciousness of depth. But a mere fifty feet above the surface of the moon he felt like somebody swinging out of a skyscraper window.

  Then the airlock opening was beside them, and the sling rolled inward. They were in the lock, and Cochrane found himself pushing Babs away from the unrailed opening. He was relieved when the airlock closed.

  Inside the ship, with the space-suits off, there was light and warmth, and a remarkably matter-of-fact atmosphere. The ship had been built to sell stock in a scheme for colonizing Mars. Prospective investors had been shown through it. It had been designed to be a convincing passenger-liner of space.

  It was. But Cochrane found himself not needed for any consultation, and Jones was busy, and Bill Holden highly preoccupied. He saw Alicia Keith—but her name was Simms now. She smiled at him but took Babs by the arm. They went off somewhere.

  Cochrane waited for somebody to tell him what to look at and to admire. He saw Jamison, and Bell, and he saw a man he had not seen before. He settled down in a deeply upholstered chair. He felt neglected. Everybody was busy. But mostly he felt tired.

  He slept.

  Then Babs was shaking his arm, her eyes shining.

  “Mr. Cochrane!” she cried urgently. “Mr. Cochrane! Wake up! Go on up to the control-room! We’re going to take off!”

  He blinked at her.

  “We!” Then he started up, and went five feet into the air from the violence of his uncalculated movement. “We? No you don’t! You go back to Lunar City where you’ll be safe!”

  Then he heard a peculi
ar drumming, rumbling noise. He had heard it before. In the moonship. It was rockets being tested; being burned; rockets in the very last seconds of preparation before take-off for the stars.

  He didn’t drop back to the floor beside the chair he’d occupied. The floor rose to meet him.

  “I’ve had our baggage brought on board,” said Babs, happily. “I’m going because I’m a stockholder! Hold on to something and climb those stairs if you want to see us go up! I’m going to be busy!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The physical sensations of ascending to the ship’s control-room were weird in the extreme. Cochrane had just been wakened from a worn-out sleep, and it was always startling on the moon to wake and find one’s self weighing one-sixth of normal. It took seconds to remember how one got that way. But on the way up the stairs, Cochrane was further confused by the fact that the ship was surging this way and swaying that. It moved above the moon’s surface to get over the tilted flat Dabney field plate on the ground a hundred yards from the ship’s original position.

  The Dabney field, obviously, was not in being. The ship hovered on its rockets. They had been designed to lift it off of Earth—and they had—against six times the effective gravity here, and with an acceleration of more gravities on top of that. So the ship rose lightly, almost skittishly. When gyros turned to make it drift sidewise—as a helicopter tilts in Earth’s atmosphere—it fairly swooped to a new position. Somebody jockeyed it this way and that.

  Cochrane got to the control-room by holding on with both hands to railings. He was angry and appalled.

  The control-room was a hemisphere, with vertical vision-screens picturing the stars overhead. Jones stood in an odd sort of harness beside a set of control-switches that did not match the smoothly designed other controls of the ship. He looked out of a plastic blister, by which he could see around and below the ship. He made urgent signals to a man Cochrane had never seen before, who sat in a strap-chair before many other complex controls with his hands playing back and forth upon them. A loudspeaker blatted unmusically. It was Dabney’s voice, highly agitated and uneasy.