The Past Through Tomorrow

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Coster frowned. “All right, I guess.”

  Harriman noted that the engineer’s desk baskets were piled high with papers which spilled over onto the desk. Before Harriman could answer, Coster’s desk phone lit up and a feminine voice said sweetly, “Mr. Coster—Mr. Morgenstern is calling.”

  “Tell him I’m busy.”

  After a short wait the girl answered in a troubled voice, “He says he’s just got to speak to you, sir.”

  Coster looked annoyed. “Excuse me a moment, Mr. Harriman—O.K., put him on.”

  The girl was replaced by a man who said, “Oh, there you are—what was the hold up? Look, Chief, we’re in a jam about these trucks. Every one of them that we leased needs an overhaul and now it turns out that the White Fleet company won’t do anything about it—they’re sticking to the fine print in the contract. Now the way I see it, we’d do better to cancel the contract and do business with Peak City Transport. They have a scheme that looks good to me. They guarantee to—”

  “Take care of it,” snapped Coster. “You made the contract and you have authority to cancel. You know that.”

  “Yes, but Chief, I figured this would be something you would want to pass on personally. It involves policy and—”

  “Take care of it! I don’t give a damn what you do as long as we have transportation when we need it.” He switched off.

  “Who is that man?” inquired Harriman.

  “Who? Oh, that’s Morgenstern, Claude Morgenstern.”

  “Not his name—what does he do?”

  “He’s one of my assistants—buildings, grounds, and transportation.”

  “Fire him!”

  Coster looked stubborn. Before he could answer a secretary came in and stood insistently at his elbow with a sheaf of papers. He frowned, initialed them, and sent her out.

  “Oh, I don’t mean that as an order,” Harriman added, “but I do mean it as serious advice. I won’t give orders in your backyard,—but will you listen to a few minutes of advice?”

  “Naturally,” Coster agreed stiffly.

  “Mmm… this your first job as top boss?”

  Coster hesitated, then admitted it.

  “I hired you on Ferguson’s belief that you were the engineer most likely to build a successful Moon ship. I’ve had no reason to change my mind. But top administration ain’t engineering, and maybe I can show you a few tricks there, if you’ll let me.” He waited. “I’m not criticizing,” he added. ‘Top bossing is like sex; until you’ve had it, you don’t know about it.“. Harriman had the mental reservation that if the boy would not take advice, he would suddenly be out of a job, whether Ferguson liked it or not.

  Coster drummed on his desk. “I don’t know what’s wrong and that’s a fact. It seems as if I can’t turn anything over to anybody and have it done properly. I feel as if I were swimming in quicksand.”

  “Done much engineering lately?”

  “I try to.” Coster waved at another desk in the corner. “I work there, late at night.”

  “That’s no good. I hired you as an engineer. Bob, this set-up is all wrong.

  The joint ought to be jumping—and it’s not. Your office ought to be quiet as a grave. Instead your office is jumping and the plant looks like a graveyard.”

  Coster buried his face in his hands, then looked up. “I know it. I know what needs to be done—but every time I try to tackle a technical problem some bloody fool wants me to make a decision about trucks—or telephones— or some damn thing. I’m sorry, Mr. Harriman. I thought I could do it.”

  Harriman said very gently, “Don’t let it throw you, Bob. You haven’t had much sleep lately, have you? Tell you what—we’ll put over a fast one on Ferguson. I’ll take that desk you’re at for a few days and build you a set-up to protect you against such things. I want that brain of yours thinking about reaction vectors and fuel efficiencies and design stresses, not about contracts for trucks.” Harriman stepped to the door, looked around the outer office and spotted a man who might or might not be the office’s chief clerk. “Hey, you! C’mere.”

  The man looked startled, got up, came to the door and said, “Yes?”

  “I want that desk in the corner and all the stuff that’s on it moved to an empty office on this floor, right away.”

  The clerk raised his eyebrows. “And who are you, if I may ask?”

  “God damn it—”

  “Do as he tells you, Weber,” Coster put in.

  “I want it done inside of twenty minutes,” added Harriman. “Jump!”

  He turned back to Coster’s other desk, punched the phone, and presently was speaking to the main offices of Skyways. “Jim, is your boy Jock Berkeley around? Put him on leave and send him to me, at Peterson Field, right away, special trip. I want the ship he comes in to raise ground ten minutes after we sign off. Send his gear after him.” Harriman listened for a moment, then answered, “No, your organization won’t fall apart if you lose Jock—or, if it does, maybe we’ve been paying the wrong man the top salary… okay, okay, you’re entitled to one swift kick at my tail the next time you catch up with me, but send Jock. So long.”

  He supervised getting Coster and his other desk moved into another office, saw to it that the phone in the new office was disconnected, and, as an afterthought, had a couch moved in there, too. “We’ll install a projector, and a drafting machine and bookcases and other junk like that tonight,” he told Coster. “Just make a list of anything you need—to work on engineering. And call me if you want anything.” He went back to the nominal chief-engineer’s office and got happily to work trying to figure where the organization stood and what was wrong with it.

  Some four hours later he took Berkeley in to meet Coster. The chief engineer was asleep at his desk, head cradled on his arms. Harriman started to back out, but Coster roused. “Oh! Sony,” he said, blushing, “I must have dozed off.”

  “That’s why I brought you the couch,” said Harriman. “It’s more restful. Bob, meet Jock Berkeley. He’s your new slave. You remain chief engineer and top, undisputed boss. Jock is Lord High Everything Else. From now on you’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about—except for the little detail of building a Moon ship.”

  They shook hands. “Just one thing I ask, Mr. Coster,” Berkeley said seriously, “bypass me all you want to—you’ll have to run the technical show—but for God’s sake record it so I’ll know what’s going on. I’m going to have a switch placed on your desk that will operate a sealed recorder at my desk.”

  “Fine!” Coster was looking, Harriman thought, younger already.

  “And if you want something that is not technical, don’t do it yourself. Just flip a switch and whistle; it’ll get done!” Berkeley glanced at Harriman. “The Boss says he wants to talk with you about the real job. I’ll leave you and get busy.” He left.

  Harriman sat down; Coster followed suit and said, “Whew!”

  “Feel better?”

  “I like the looks of that fellow Berkeley.”

  “That’s good; he’s your twin brother from now on. Stop worrying; I’ve used him before. You’ll think you’re living in a well-run hospital. By the way, where do you live?”

  “At a boarding house in the Springs.”

  “That’s ridiculous. And you don’t even have a place here to sleep?” Harriman reached over to Coster’s desk, got through to Berkeley. “Jock—get a suite for Mr. Coster at the Broadmoor, under a phoney name.”

  “Right.”

  “And have this stretch along here adjacent to his office fitted out as an apartment.”

  “Right. Tonight.”

  “Now, Bob, about the Moon ship. Where do we stand?”

  They spent the next two hours contentedly running over the details of the problem, as Coster had‘ laid them out. Admittedly very little work had been done since the field was leased but Coster had accomplished considerable theoretical work and computation before he had gotten swamped in administrative details. Harriman, though no engineer
and certainly not a mathematician outside the primitive arithmetic of money, had for so long devoured everything he could find about space travel that he was able to follow most of what Coster showed him.

  “I don’t see anything here about your mountain catapult,” he said presently.

  Coster looked vexed. “Oh, that! Mr. Harriman, I spoke too quickly.”

  “Huh? How come? I’ve had Montgomery’s boys drawing up beautiful pictures of what things will look like when we are running regular trips. I intend to make Colorado Springs the spaceport capital of the world. We hold the franchise of the old cog railroad now; what’s the hitch?”

  “Well, it’s both time and money.”

  “Forget money. That’s my pidgin.”

  “Time then. I still think an electric gun is the best way to get the initial acceleration for a chem-powered ship. Like this—” He began to sketch rapidly. “It enables you to omit the first step-rocket stage, which is bigger than all the others put together and is terribly inefficient, as it has such a poor mass-ratio. But what do you have to do to get it? You can’t build a tower, not a tower a couple of miles high, strong enough to take the thrusts—not this year, anyway. So you have to use a mountain. Pikes Peak is as good as any; it’s accessible, at least.

  “But what do you have to do to use it? First, a tunnel in through the side, from Manitou to just under the peak, and big enough to take the loaded ship—”

  “Lower it down from the top,” suggested Harriman.

  Coster answered, “I thought of that. Elevators two miles high for loaded space ships aren’t exactly built out of string, in fact they aren’t built out of any available materials. It’s possible to gimmick the catapult itself so that the accelerating coils can be reversed and timed differently to do the job, but believe me, Mr. Harriman, it will throw you into other engineering problems quite as great… such as a giant railroad up to the top of the ship. And it still leaves you with the shaft of the catapult itself to be dug. It can’t be as small as the ship, not like a gun barrel for a bullet. It’s got to be considerably larger; you don’t compress a column of air two miles high with impunity. Oh, a mountain catapult could be built, but it might take ten years—or longer.”

  “Then forget it. We’ll build it for the future but not for this flight. No, wait—how about a surface catapult. We scoot up the side of the mountain and curve it up at the end?”

  “Quite frankly, I think something like that is what will eventually be used. But, as of today, it just creates new problems. Even if we could devise an electric gun in which you could make that last curve—we can’t, at present —the ship would have to be designed for terrific side stresses and all the additional weight would be parasitic so far as our main purpose is concerned, the design of a rocket ship.”

  “Well, Bob, what is your solution?”

  Coster frowned. “Go back to what we know how to do—build a step rocket.”

  5

  “MONTY—”

  “Yeah, Chief?”

  “Have you ever heard this song?” Harriman hummed, “The Moon belongs to everyone; the best things in life are free—,” then sang it, badly off key.

  “Can’t say as I ever have.”

  “It was before your time. I want it dug out again. I want it revived, plugged until Hell wouldn’t have it, and on everybody’s lips.”

  “O.K.” Montgomery took out his memorandum pad. “When do you want it to reach its top?”

  Harriman considered. “In, say, about three months. Then I want the first phrase picked up and used in advertising slogans.”

  “A cinch.”

  “How are things in Florida, Monty?”

  “I thought we were going to have to buy the whole damned legislature until we got the rumor spread around that Los Angeles had contracted to have a City-Limits-of-Los-Angeles sign planted on the Moon for publicity pix. Then they came around.”

  “Good.” Harriman pondered. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. How much do you think the Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles would pay for such a picture?”

  Montgomery made another note. “I’ll look into it.”

  “I suppose you are about ready to crank up Texas, now that Florida is loaded?”

  “Most any time now. We’re spreading a few snide rumors first.”

  Headline from Dallas-Fort Worth Banner:

  “THE MOON BELONGS TO TEXAS!!!”

  “—and that’s all for tonight, kiddies. Don’t forget to send in those box tops, or reasonable facsimiles. Remember—first prize is a thousand-acre ranch on the Moon itself, free and clear; the second prize is a six-foot scale model of the actual Moon ship, and there are fifty, count them, fifty third prizes, each a saddle-trained Shetland pony. Your hundred word composition ‘Why I want to go to the Moon’ will be judged for sincerity and originality, not on literary merit. Send those box-tops to Uncle Taffy, Box 214, Juarez, Old Mexico.”

  Harriman was shown into the office of the president of the Moka-Coka Company ("Only a Moke is truly a coke"— "Drink the Cola drink with the Lift"). He paused at the door, some twenty feet from the president's desk and quickly pinned a two-inch wide button to his lapel.

  Patterson Griggs looked up. “Well, this is really an honor, D. D. Do come in and—” The soft-drink executive stopped suddenly, his expression changed. “What are you doing wearing that?” he snapped. “Trying to annoy me?”

  “That” was the two-inch disc; Harriman unpinned it and put it in his pocket. It was a celluloid advertising pin, in plain yellow; printed on it in black, almost covering it, was a simple , the trademark of Moka-Coka’s only serious rival.

  “No,” answered Harriman, “though I don’t blame you for being irritated.

  I see half the school kids in the country wearing these silly buttons. But I came to give you a friendly tip, not to annoy you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I paused at your door that pin on my lapel was just the size—to you, standing at your desk—as the full Moon looks when you are standing in your garden, looking up at it. You didn’t have any trouble reading what was on the pin, did you? I know you didn’t; you yelled at me before either one of us stirred.”

  “What about it?”

  “How would you feel—and what would the effect be on your sales—if there was ‘six-plus’ written across the face of the Moon instead of just on a school kid’s sweater?”

  Griggs thought about it, then said, “D. D., don’t make poor jokes. I’ve had a bad day.”

  “I’m not joking. As you have probably heard around the Street, I’m behind this Moon trip venture. Between ourselves, Pat, it’s quite an expensive undertaking, even for me. A few days ago a man came to me—you’ll pardon me if I don’t mention names? You can figure it out. Anyhow, this man represented a client who wanted to buy the advertising concession for the Moon. He knew we weren’t sure of success; but he said his client would take the risk.

  “At first I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about; he set me straight. Then I thought he was kidding. Then I was shocked. Look at this—” Harriman took out a large sheet of paper and spread it on Griggs’ desk. “You see the equipment is set up anywhere near the center of the Moon, as we see it. Eighteen pyrotechnics rockets shoot out in eighteen directions, like the spokes of a wheel, but to carefully calculated distances. They hit and the bombs they carry go off, spreading finely divided carbon black for calculated distances. There’s no air on the Moon, you know, Pat —a fine powder will throw just as easily as a javelin. Here’s your result.” He turned the paper over; on the back there was a picture of the Moon, printed lightly. Overlaying it, in black, heavy print was:

  “So it is that outfit—those poisoners!”

  “No, no, I didn’t say so! But it illustrates the point; six-plus is only two symbols; it can be spread large enough to be read on the face of the Moon.”

  Griggs stared at the horrid advertisement. “I don’t believe it will work!”

  “A
reliable pyrotechnics firm has guaranteed that it will—provided I can deliver their equipment to the spot. After all, Pat, it doesn’t take much of a pyrotechnics rocket to go a long distance on the Moon. Why, you could throw a baseball a couple of miles yourself—low gravity, you know.”

  “People would never stand for it. It’s sacrilege!”

  Harriman looked sad. “I wish you were right. But they stand for skywriting—and video commercials.”

  Griggs chewed his lip. “Well, I don’t see why you come to me with it.” he exploded. “You know damn well the name of my product won’t go on the face of the Moon. The letters would be too small to be read.”

  Harriman nodded. “That’s exactly why I came to you. Pat, this isn’t just a business venture to me; it’s my heart and soul. It just made me sick to think of somebody actually wanting to use the face of the Moon for advertising. As you say, it’s sacrilege. But somehow, these jackals found out I was pressed for cash. They came to me when they knew I would have to listen.

  “I put them off. I promised them an answer on Thursday. Then I went home and lay awake about it. After a while I thought of you.”

  “Me?”

  “You. You and your company. After all, you’ve got a good product and you need legitimate advertising for it. It occurred to me that there are more ways to use the Moon in advertising than by defacing it. Now just suppose that your company bought the same concession, but with the public-spirited promise of never letting it be used. Suppose you featured that fact in your ads? Suppose you ran pictures of a boy and girl, sitting out under the Moon, sharing a bottle of Moke? Suppose Moke was the only soft drink carried on the first trip to the Moon? But I don’t have to tell you how to do it.” He glanced at his watch finger. “I’ve got to run and I don’t want to rush you. If you want to do business, just leave word at my office by noon tomorrow and I’ll have our man Montgomery get in touch with your advertising chief.”

  The head of the big newspaper chain kept him waiting the minimum time reserved for tycoons and cabinet members. Again Harriman stopped at the threshold of a large office and fixed a disc to his lapel.