But this was one of Eldredge’s last statements. He had never fully recovered from the broken legs he received that fateful day in July of ‘73, and his strenuous life since then strained his constitution past the breaking point. On February 2, 1976, he passed away amid a burst of mourning unequaled since Lincoln’s assassination.
His death had no immediate effect on the course of events. The rules of the FSRIB grew, in fact, in stringency as the years passed. So starved and choked did science become, that once more colleges found themselves forced to reinstate philosophy and the classics as the chief studies—and at that the student body fell to the lowest point since the beginning of the twentieth century.
These conditions prevailed more or less throughout the civilized world, reaching even lower depths in England, and perhaps least depressing in Germany, which was the last to fall under the “Neo-Victorian” influence.
The nadir of science came in the spring of 1978, a bare month before the completion of the New Prometheus, with the passing of the “Easter Edict”—it was issued the day before Easter. By it, all independent research or experimentation was absolutely forbidden. The FSRIB thereafter reserved the right to allow only such research as it specifically requested.
~ * ~
John Harman and I stood before the gleaming metal of the New Prometheus that Easter Sunday; I in the deepest gloom, and he in an almost jovial mood.
“Well, Clifford, my boy,” said he, “the last ton of fuel, a few polishing touches, and I am ready for my second attempt. This time there will be no Sheltons among us.” He hummed a hymn. That was all the radio played those days, and even we rebels sang them from sheer frequency of repetition.
I grunted sourly: “It’s no use, boss. Ten to one, you end up somewhere in space, and even if you come back, you’ll most likely be hung by the neck. We can’t win.” My head shook dolefully from side to side.
“Bah! This state of affairs can’t last, Cliff.”
“I think it will. Winstead was right that time. The pendulum swings, and since 1945 it’s been swinging against us. We’re ahead of the times—or behind them.”
“Don’t speak of that fool, Winstead. You’re making the same mistake he did. Trends are things of centuries and millenniums, not years or decades. For five hundred years we have been moving toward science. You can’t reverse that in thirty years.”
“Then what are we doing?” I asked sarcastically.
“We’re going through a momentary reaction following a period of too-rapid advance in the Mad Decades. Just such a reaction took place in the Romantic Age—the first Victorian Period—following the too-rapid advance of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason.”
“Do you really think so?” I was shaken by his evident self-assurance.
“Of course. This period has a perfect analogy in the spasmodic “revivals” that used to hit the small towns in America’s Bible Belt a century or so ago. For a week, perhaps, everyone would get religion and virtue would reign triumphant. Then, one by one, they would backslide and the Devil would resume his sway.
“In fact, there are symptoms of backsliding even now. The L. R. has indulged in one squabble after another since Eldredge’s death. There have been half a dozen schisms already. The very extremities to which those in power are going are helping us, for the country is rapidly tiring of it.”
And that ended the argument—I in total defeat, as usual.
A month later, the New Prometheus was complete. It was nowhere near as glittering and as beautiful as the original, and bore many a trace of makeshift workmanship, but we were proud of it—proud and triumphant.
“I’m going to try again, men”—Harman’s voice was husky, and his little frame vibrant with happiness—”and I may not make it, but for that I don’t care.” His eyes shone in anticipation. “I’ll be shooting through the void at last, and the dream of mankind will come true. Out around the Moon and back; the first to see the other side. It’s worth the chance.”
“You won’t have fuel enough to land on the Moon, boss, which is a pity,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter. There’ll be other flights after this, better prepared and better equipped.”
At that a pessimistic whisper ran through the little group surrounding him, to which he paid no attention.
“Good-by,” he said. “I’ll be seeing you.” And with a cheerful grin he climbed into the ship.
Fifteen minutes later, the five of us sat about the living-room table, frowning, lost in thought, eyes gazing out the building at the spot where a burned section of soil marked the spot where a few minutes earlier the New Prometheus had lain.
Simonoff voiced the thought that was in the mind of each one of us: “Maybe it would be better for him not to come back. He won’t be treated very well if he does, I think.” And we all nodded in gloomy assent.
How foolish that prediction seems to me now from the hindsight of three decades.
The rest of the story is really not mine, for I did not see Harman again until a month after his eventful trip ended in a safe landing.
It was almost thirty-six hours after the take-off that a screaming projectile shot its way over Washington and buried itself in the mud just across the Potomac.
Investigators were at the scene of the landing within fifteen minutes, and in another fifteen minutes the police were there, for it was found that the projectile was a rocketship. They stared in involuntary awe at the tired, disheveled man who staggered out in near-collapse.
There was utter silence while he shook his fist at the gawking spectators and shouted: “Go ahead, hang me, fools. But I’ve reached the Moon, and you can’t hang that. Get the FSRIB. Maybe they’ll declare the flight illegal and, therefore, nonexistent.” He laughed weakly and suddenly collapsed.
Someone shouted: “Take him to a hospital. He’s sick.” In stiff unconsciousness Harman was bundled into a police car and carried away, while the police formed a guard about the rocket-ship.
Government officials arrived and investigated the ship, read the log, inspected the drawings and photograph he had taken of the Moon, and finally departed in silence. The crowd grew and the word spread that a man had reached the Moon.
Curiously enough, there was little resentment of the fact. Men were impressed and awed; the crowd whispered and cast inquisitive glances at the dim crescent of Luna, scarcely seen in the bright sunlight. Over all, an uneasy pall of silence, the silence of indecision, lay.
Then, at the hospital, Harman revealed his identity, and the fickle world went wild. Even Harman himself was stunned in surprise at the rapid change in the world’s temper. It seemed almost incredible, and yet it was true. Secret discontent, combined with a heroic tale of man against overwhelming odds— the sort of tale that had stirred man’s soul since the beginning of time—served to sweep everyone into an ever-swelling current of anti-Victorianism. And Eldredge was dead—no other could replace him.
I saw Harman at the hospital shortly after that. He was propped up and still half buried with papers, telegrams and letters. He grinned at me and nodded. “Well, Cliff,” he whispered, “the pendulum swung back again.”
<
~ * ~
Manly Wade Wellman
MEN AGAINST THE STARS
The road to the planets was marked by beacons— the brief, bright pyres of men and ships that never came back.
~ * ~
In ship No. Fifty-One, half-way from Moon to Mars, four stubbled faces turned to a common, grinning regard as the pounding roar of the rockets died away at last. The skipper the rocketman, the navigator, the spacehand.
“So far so good said the skipper grimly. “We’ve reached speed. But the fuel may decide to go any minute. And that’ll be—that.”
Even as he spoke, the fuel—frightful unstable solution of atomic hydrogen—went. Four men—the flimsy metal shell—the hopes, determination and courage that sought to conquer the stars—all were gone. For an instant a warm, ruby glow, sprinkled wi
th stars of incandescent metal, blossomed in space. The men did not mind. They did not know.
T
allentyre watched Major DeWitt step through the door. DeWitt closed the door. Immediately he slumped back against it, his body drained of some stiffening thing that had held him up. But for the support of the door frame, he would have fallen.
“They won’t go,” DeWitt said hoarsely.
Tallentyre looked at him with wooden, unmoving face. If he moved his face, if he moved himself in the slightest, he felt, he would shatter to dust, like a scratched Prince Rupert’s Drop. Gray, bloodshot eyes in his lean, high-boned face watched his superior motionlessly. The leathery skin of his face did not move.
“They won’t go.” DeWitt looked up at him, his blotched face working. Tallentyre noticed it was hideous. The unshielded sunlight of space here on Luna tanned human skin black in irregular spots. The untanned spots on DeWitt’s face were white as paper, and they wiggled.
Tallentyre sighed sharply, and moved. His gray eyes were cold as fractured steel as he watched DeWitt.
“They won’t go—and I won’t send them!” DeWitt straightened against the door frame and glared at Tallentyre, daring him to challenge the statement. “I can’t—I won’t let them!” His voice rose to a hoarse, grating scream.
Major John Tallentyre faced him stonily. Outside lay the rock-and-pumice paved Luna Spaceport, black and silver under shifting sunlight and shadow. Above, the star-spattered jet of the Eternal Night. The red eye of Mars was low in the east. Tallentyre looked at it for a moment, quietly and thoughtfully. He was cold and icy as the spaceways out there. He, too, was burned to the patchy blackness of space-sun exposure. His gray eyes were startlingly light in that sun-scorched face.
“Keep your voice down, DeWitt. Those mutineers will hear you. You won’t build up their morale by shouting that yours is shot. Straighten up.”
DeWitt shook his head groggily. Tallentyre was his junior here. For a moment, the slap of Tallentyre’s words shot an anger into him that half-roused him, as had been intended. But it faded.
“I,” he grated, “don’t give a damn. I want them to hear me. I won’t send—I won’t let—any more human beings go into that.” His arm gestured weakly toward the starred blackness beyond, his face working. “Fifty-One’s gone. You just saw it blow. Those—mutineers—just saw it blow. The men in Fifty-One though—they didn’t see it.
“Sixty ships, Tallentyre. Sixty of ‘em—and two hundred and forty-two men started from Earth. Fifty-six ships, and two hundred and twenty-two men reached Luna Port. Eighteen men lost on that little hop. Four ships blew their tubes—and that bloody six-man experiment first of all.
“But fifty-six ships landed, and we warped ‘em off to Mars. And how many of those fifty-six got through?” His grating scream roared in the cubbyhole office and pounded through its flimsy metal door. Tallentyre’s eyes moved toward the door.
DeWitt’s roar dropped to a whisper as the man leaned abruptly forward, close to Tallentyre’s moveless, sun-blackened face. “Four. Four got to Mars, my friend. The rest were pretty, red firecrackers in space.”
~ * ~
He straightened slowly from the table, hunching his baggy, greasy uniform back over his shoulders. “I’m in command of this altar of human sacrifices they call Luna Port. And there aren’t going to be any more sacrifices!”
Tallentyre’s eyes stared into his steadily. “You knew men were going to die when you swore to take this duty, De-Witt,” Tallentyre said steadily. “And you swore to uphold your trust. Keep your voice down, please. We’ll reason with those mutineers.”
DeWitt shook his head. His eyes were blazing now with a new determination; the gray-and-black mottling of his face had given way to red-and-black, as willess despair gave way to a different fanaticism. “No!” he roared. “We’ll send ‘em—but we’ll send ‘em back to Earth, where men belong. Duty? Duty hell! I’m not, and will not be, High Priest of human sacrifice. Those ships don’t go.
“And the spineless slugs back on Earth that tell ‘em to do things that can’t be done can come and try it if they want. I’m going to tell those men right now-”
DeWitt swung round and started toward the thin metal door with fanatic stretch of stride. Tallentyre leaped to his feet and gripped DeWitt’s arm.
“Wait,” said Tallentyre.
“Wait for what?” DeWitt sneered, and threw back his head to laugh harshly.
For an instant Tallentyre watched him. Then his fist moved in an invisible blur. DeWitt slumped easily, tiredly, to the floor under Luna’s light pull.
Tallentyre stood for an instant above his fallen superior, the same wooden, moveless set to his lean, leathery face. Then abruptly he trembled, and fell awkwardly beside the fallen man to listen for an instant to his strongly beating heart.
Shuddering, he rose to his feet and looked desperately about the room. A relaxation, from without and within, flooded over him. His eyelids fluttered; he had to bite his lip to keep it from twitching. He slumped back into the desk chair and let his arms hang limply down beside him, staring at the fallen man.
Finally he spoke, very softly, to himself. His eyes were fixed out beyond the double-glass window of the tiny office. Beyond, where the space-black-and-silver of the spaceport blended with the black of space and the silver dust of stars. Mars, a ruby on jet velvet, lay over the horizon—the cruel, jagged horizon of Luna. “Thanks, DeWitt. You—you made me hold together.
“Altar of human sacrifice-? So was Nevada Port once.
But they reached the Moon. Before that—for centuries before that—the air was the Altar of Sacrifice. But those men that died in the air weren’t seeking air. They sought the stars beyond. They didn’t die on the way to the Moon. They died on the way to the stars. They aren’t dying now to reach Mars; again they’re seeking the stars beyond. Someone’s always had to-”
He looked up abruptly. The door on the other side of the office creaked softly. The frightened young face of Noel Crispin, the blond girl who kept the office files, looked in. Her eyes changed as she looked at Tallentyre and then at DeWitt.
“Take care of Major DeWitt,” ordered Tallentyre of the moveless face. He slipped something from the desk drawer into his pocket and rose. “I’ve got to persuade the boys in the vestibule.” He crossed the office in three long strides. His steadiness was back entire when he turned the knob; he stepped into the outer room with an air, almost, of insouciance.
Four men dressed in the rubberized canvas of spacehands stood together in the middle of the vestibule floor. No doubt they had heard most, if not all, of what had passed in the office. Tallentyre looked at them. Two were huge and burly, tough, hard-shelled men who’d try anything once. Two were of a different breed; two who would do anything, at any risk, for some things, things in which they believed. The biggest, the toughest, wore a golden comet. The skipper.
He wasn’t afraid now. He’d simply determined the odds were bad, and he wasn’t having any. The other burly figure looked up to him; what the skipper said was right with him.
The two leaner, wiry men were white-faced. Nerve-shock release was their trouble. Like plane-pilots who’d lived through a crash, they were afraid of their fire-ships. The psychology of the things preyed on them. Nobody had ever been injured in a rocket accident. Nobody, ever. They landed sound—or simply weren’t.
They’d landed. They couldn’t, now, face the thing again. But, like the plane-pilot who’d survived a crash, once started again they’d be all right.
“In six minutes,” said Tallentyre, “Sixty-One takes off to Mars.”
“We’re not going,” said the skipper. “We told DeWitt that.”
“You volunteered,” reminded Tallentyre.
“We didn’t know what we were tackling. Only ten ships had tried then, and two had gotten through. Now we do know. The trip from Earth to this hole—not three hundred thousand miles—was enough. It wasn’t carelessness that snapped those other ships. We know. It
was rotten tubes and rotten fuel. I drove a nitro-wagon in the oil country and felt safe. But not on this buggy. Nitro’s baby’s milk to this stuff. Atomic hydrogen!
“Hu-uh. We don’t go.” He looked at Tallentyre coldly. He meant what he said, and meant to stick with it.
“I suppose there’s no use,” said Tallentyre woodenly, “to say anything about guts and keeping a promise and how much you men mean to this thing. If you don’t go, you know, others won’t.”
“Guff,” grunted the skipper. “It isn’t any use.”
“I call this mutiny,” Tallentyre informed him.
“Call it whatever you damn well like,” growled the skipper. He looked down at the slighter figure of the Spaceport official challengingly. “We don’t blast. And there’s no sense chucking your rank around, either. There’s four of us. And just what in hell do you call it when you klunk out your chief, eh?”
Men Against the Stars - [Adventures in Science Fiction 01] Page 4
