by Isaac Asimov
Oldbury said, 'He discovered America just the same.
You can't deny that fact.'
'That had nothing to do with his ideas. It was strictly accidental. He was such an intellectual fraud that when his actual voyage showed his map was wrong, he falsified his log rather than change his ideas. His ideas died hard - they never died till he did, in fact. And so do yours. I could talk myself blue in the face and leave you still convinced that Columbus was a great man because he thought the Earth was round when everyone else said it was flat.'
'Have it your way,' mumbled Oldbury. He was caught in lassitude and in the memory of the chicken soup his mother made when he was a child. She used barley. He remembered the smell of the kitchen on Saturday morning - French-toast morning - and the look of the streets after an afternoon of rain and the--
Lars Nilsson had the transcripts before him, with the more significant portions marked off on the tape by the psychologists.
He said, 'Are we still receiving them clearly?'
He was assured that the receiving devices were working perfectly.
'I wish there were some way to avoid listening to their conversations without their knowledge,' he said. 'I suppose that's foolish of me.'
Godfrey Mayer saw no point in denying the other's diagnosis. 'It is', he agreed, -'quite foolish. Look at it as merely additional information necessary to the study of human reaction to space. When we were testing human response to high-g acceleration, did you feel embarrassed to be caught looking at the recording of their blood-pressure variations?'
'What do you make of Davis and his odd theories? He worries me.'
Mayer shook his head. 'We don't know what we ought to be worried about as yet. Davis is working off aggressions against the science that has placed him in the position he finds himself in.'
'That's your theory?'
'It's one theory. Expressing the aggressions may be a good thing. It may keep him stable. And then again, it may go too far. It's too soon to tell. It may be that Oldbury is the one who's in greater danger. He's growing passive.'
'Do you suppose, Mayer, that we may find that Man just isn't suited for space? Any man?'
'If we could build ships that would carry a hundred men in an Earth-like environment, we'd have no trouble. As long as we build ships like this one' - he jerked a thumb over his shoulder in a vague directional gesture - 'we may have a great deal of trouble.'
Nilsson felt vaguely dissatisfied. He said, 'Well, they're in their third day now and still safe so far.'
'We're in the third day now,' said Davis harshly. 'We're better than halfway there.'
'Umm. I had a cousin who owned a lumberyard. Cousin Raymond. I used to visit him sometimes on the way home from school,' Oldbury reminisced.
Unaccountably his line of thought was interrupted by the fleeting memory of Longfellow's 'The Village Blacksmith', and then he remembered that it contained a phrase about 'the children coming home from school' and wondered how many people among those who rattle off so glibly, 'Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands' knew that the 'smithy' was not the smith but the shop in which the smith worked.
He asked, 'What was I saying?'
'I don't know,' retorted Davis irritably, 'I said we're more than halfway there and we haven't looked at the Moon yet.'
'Let's look at the Moon, then.'
'All right, you adjust the 'scope. I've done it long enough. Damn it, I've got blisters on my rump.' He moved jerkily in the enclosing confines of the bucket seat, as though to get a slightly new section of rear end in contact with cushioned metal. 'I don't know that it's such a blasted fine idea to spin the damned ship and have gravity press us down. Floating a little would take the weight off and be relaxing.'
'There's no room to float,' sighed Oldbury, 'and if we were in free fall, you'd be complaining of nausea.'
Oldbury was working the controls of the 'scope as he spoke. Stars moved past the line of vision.
It wasn't difficult. The engineers back home in Trenton -no, in New Mexico, really; on Earth, anyway - the engineers had schooled them carefully. Get it almost right. Get it pointed away from Earth, one hundred and eighty degrees.
Once it is nearly right, then let the light meters take over. The Moon would be the brightest object in the vicinity and it would be centred in unstable equilibrium. It would take a few seconds for the meters to scan the rest of the sky and switch the 'scope back to Earth, but in those few seconds, switch back to manual and there, you have it.
The Moon was crescent. It would have to be in opposite phase to Earth as long as the ship sped along a course that was almost on the line connecting the two worlds. - But the crescent was a bloated one, as if it were part of a cheap calendar illustration. Oldbury thought there should be two heads, leaning towards one another, short straight hair against longer waved hair, silhouetted against the Moon. Except that it would have to be a full Moon.
Davis snorted. 'It's there, at any rate.'
'Did you expect it wouldn't be?'
'I don't expect anything in space. Anything yes or anything no. No one's been in space, so no one knows. But at least I see the Moon.'
'You see it from Earth, if it comes to that.'
'Don't be so sure what you see from Earth. For all anyone can tell from Earth, the Moon is only a yellow painted patch on a blue background with a shade that's drawn back and forth across it by clockwork.'
'And stars and planets also run by clockwork?'
'Same as they are in a planetarium. Why not? And a telescope shows more stars painted on--'
'With a built-in red shift?'
'Why not?' challenged Davis. 'Only we're halfway to the Moon and it looks bigger and maybe we'll find it exists. I'll reserve judgement on the planets and the stars.'
Oldbury looked at the Moon and sighed. In a few days they would be edging around it, moving past and over the hidden side.
He said, 'I never did believe the story about the man in the Moon. I never saw him. What I saw was the face of a woman - two eyes, rather lopsided, but very sad. I could see the full Moon from my bedroom window and she always made me feel sad, yet friendly, too. When clouds drifted past, it was the Moon - she - that always seemed to be moving, not the clouds, but still she didn't go away from the window. And you could see her through the clouds, even though you could never see the Sun through clouds, not even through little clouds, and it was so much brighter. Why is that, dad - uh - Davis?'
Davis said, 'What's wrong with your voice?'
'Nothing's wrong with my voice.'
'You're squeaking.'
Oldbury, with an effort of will, forced his voice an octave lower. 'I'm not squeaking!'
He stared at the small clocks in the dashboard, two of them. It wasn't the first time. One of them gave the time by Mountain Standard, and in that he wasn't interested. It was the other, the one that measured the number of hours elapsed in flight, that caught at him periodically. It said sixty-four and a fraction and in red, working backwards, were the hours remaining before they were to land on Earth again. The red was marked off now at one hundred forty-four and a fraction.
Oldbury was sorry that the time left to go was recorded. He would have liked to work it out for himself. Back in Trenton he used to count the hours to summer vacation, working it out painfully in his head during geography lessons - always geography lessons, somehow - so many days, then so many hours. He would write the result in tiny numbers in his exercise book. Each day the number would grow smaller. Half the excitement of approaching summer vacation was in watching those numbers grow smaller.
But now the numbers grew smaller by themselves as the sweep second hand went round and round, slicing time by minutes, paper-thin sections of time like corned beef peeling off in the big slicer in the delicatessen.
Davis's voice impinged on his ear suddenly: 'Nothing seems to be going wrong so far.'
Oldbury said confidently, 'Nothing will go wrong.'
'What makes you so
sure?'
'Because the numbers just get smaller.'
'Huh? How's that again?'
For a moment Oldbury was confused. He said, 'Nothing.'
It was dim in the ship in the light of the crescent Moon only. He dipped into sleep again, skin-diving fashion, half-conscious of the real Moon and half dreaming of a full Moon at a window with a sad woman-face, being driven motionlessly by the wind.
'Two hundred thousand miles,' said Davis. 'That's almost eighty-five per cent of the way there.'
The lighted portion of the Moon was speckled and pimpled and its horns had outgrown the screen. Mare Crisium was a dark oval, distorted by the slanting view, but large enough to put a fist into.
'And nothing wrong,' Davis went on. 'Not one little red light on a single instrument dial.'
'Good,' said Oldbury.
'Good?' Davis looked about to stare at Oldbury and his eyes were squinting in suspicion. 'In every previous try, nothing went wrong till they got out this far, so it's not good yet.' 'I don't think anything will go wrong.'
'I think it will. Earth isn't supposed to know.'
'Isn't supposed to know what?'
Davis laughed and Oldbury looked at him wearily. He felt queerly frightened at the other's gathering monomania. Davis was not a bit like the father Oldbury remembered so queerly (only he remembered him younger than he was now, with all his hair and a sound heart).
Davis's profile was sharp in the moonlight. He said, 'There may be a lot in space we're not supposed to know. There are a billion light-years ahead of us. Only, for all we know, there's a solid black wall instead, just on the other side of the Moon, with stars painted on it and planets moving all squint-eyed so that smart cockerels on Earth can figure out all sorts of fancy orbits and theories of gravitation out of it.'
'A game to test our minds?' said Oldbury. His memory brought that out of Davis's previous remarks - or were they his own? - with something of a wrench. This whole business with the ship seemed distant.
'Why not?'
'It's all right,' Oldbury soothed anxiously. 'It's all right so far. Some day, you'll see, it will be all right all the way out.'
'Then why do every one of the recording devices go wrong past two hundred thousand miles? Why? Answer me that!'
'We're here this time. We'll adjust them.'
Davis said, 'No, we won't.'
'A sharp memory of a story he had encountered in early teenhood stirred Oldbury into excitement. 'You know, I once read a book about the Moon. The Martians had set up a base on the other side of the Moon. We could never see them, you see. They were hidden, but they could observe us--'
'How?' asked Davis sourly. 'There was two thousand miles' thickness of Moon between Earth and the other side.'
'No. Let me start from the beginning.' Oldbury heard his voice go squeaky again, but he didn't mind. He wanted to get out of his seat so he could jump up and down because just remembering the story made him feel good, but for some reason he couldn't. 'You see, it was in the future, and what Earth didn't know was--'
'Will you shut up?'
Oldbury's voice cut off at the interruption. He felt hurt, stifled. Then he said, subdued, 'You said Earth isn't supposed to know and that's why the instruments went off and the only new thing we're going to see is the other side of the Moon and if the Martians--'
'Will you let up with your stupid Martians?'
Oldbury fell silent. He was very resentful against Davis. Just because Davis was grown up didn't make it all right for him to holler like that.
His eyes drifted back to the clock. Summer vacation was only one hundred and ten hours away.
They were falling towards the Moon now. Free fall. Speeding down at cataclysmic velocity. Moon's gravity was weak, but they had fallen from a great height. And now, finally, the view on the Moon began to shift and, very slowly, new craters were coming into view.
Of course, they would miss the Moon and their speed would sweep them safely around. They would move across half the Moon's surface, across three thousand miles of it in one hour; then back they would hurl to meet the Earth once more.
But Oldbury sadly missed the familiar face in the Moon. There was no face this close, only ragged surface. He felt his eyes brimming as he watched morosely.
And then, suddenly, the small cramped room within the ship was full of loud buzzing and half the dials on the panel before them clamoured into the red of disorder.
Oldbury cowered back, but Davis howled in what seemed almost triumph. 'I told you! Everything's going wrong!'
He worked at the manuals uselessly. 'No information will get back. Secrets! Secrets!'
But Oldbury still looked at the Moon. It was terribly close and now the surface was moving quickly. They were starting the swing in earnest and Oldbury's scream was high-pitched. 'Look! Lookathat!' His pointing finger was stiff with terror.
Davis looked up and said, 'Oh, god! Oh, god--' over and over again, until finally the 'scope blanked out and the dials governing it showed red.
Lars Nilsson could not really go paler than he was, but his hands trembled as they clenched into fists.
'Again! It's a damned jinx. For ten years, the automation hasn't held out. Not on the unmanned flights. Not on this. Who's responsible?'
There was no use trying to fix responsibility. No one was responsible, as Nilsson admitted with a groan almost at once. It was just that at the crucial moment - once again -things had failed.
'We've got to pull them through this somehow,' he said, knowing that the outcome was questionable now.
Still, what could be done was being put into operation.
Davis said, 'You saw that, too, didn't you?'
'I'm scared,' whimpered Oldbury.
'You saw it. You saw the hidden side of the Moon as we went past and you saw there wasn't any! Good Lord, just sticks, just big beams holding up six million square miles of canvas. I swear it, canvas!' He laughed wildly till he choked into breathlessness.
Then he said hoarsely, 'For a million years mankind has been looking at the biggest false front ever dreamed of. Lovers spooned under a world-size stretch of canvas and called it Moon. The stars are painted; they must be. If we could only get out far enough, we could scrape some off and carry them home. Oh, it's funny.' He was laughing again.
Oldbury wanted to ask why the grown-up was laughing. He could only manage a 'Why - why--' because the other's laughter was so wild that it froze the words into thick fright in his throat.
Davis said, 'Why? How the devil should I know why? Why does Television City build false-front houses by the streetful for its shows? Maybe we're a show, and the two of us have stumbled way out here where the gimcrack scenery is set up instead of being on stage-centre where we're supposed to be. Mankind isn't supposed to know about the scenery, either. That's why the information devices always go wrong past two hundred thousand miles. Of course, we saw it.'
He looked crookedly at the big man beside him. 'You know why it didn't matter if we saw it?'
Oldbury stared back out of his tear-stained face. 'No. Why?'
Davis said, 'Because it doesn't matter if we see it. If we get back to Earth and say that the Moon is canvas propped up by wood, they'd kill us. Or maybe lock us up in a madhouse for life if they felt kindhearted. That's why we won't say a word about this.'
His voice suddenly deepened with menace. 'You understand? Not a word!'
'I want my mother,' whined Oldbury plaintively.
'Do you understand! We keep quiet. It's our only chance to be treated as sane. Let someone else come out and find out the truth and be slaughtered for it. Swear you'll keep quiet! Cross your heart and hope to die if you tell them!'
Davis was breathing harshly as he raised a threatening arm.
Oldbury shrank back as far as his prison-seat would let him. 'Don't hit me. Don't!'
But Davis, past himself with fury, cried, There's only one safe way,' and struck at the cowering figure, and again, and again--
Godfrey Mayer sat at Oldbury's bedside and said, 'Is it all clear to you?' Oldbury had been under observation for the better part of a month now.
Lars Nilsson sat at the other end of the room, listening and watching. He remembered Oldbury as he had appeared before he had climbed into the ship. The face was still square, but the cheeks had fallen inwards and the strength was gone from it.
Oldbury's voice was steady, but half a whisper. 'It wasn't a ship at all. We weren't in space.'
'Now we're not just saying that. We showed you the ship and the controls that handled the images of the Earth and the Moon. You saw it.'
'Yes. I know.'
Mayer went on quietly, matter-of-factly, 'It was a dry run, a complete duplication of conditions to test how men would hold out. Naturally, you and Davis couldn't be told this or the test would mean nothing. If things didn't work out, we could stop it at any time. We could learn by experience and make changes, try again with a new pair.'
He had explained this over and over again. Oldbury had to be made to understand if he was ever to learn to live a useful life again.
'Has a new pair been tried yet?' asked Oldbury wistfully.
'Not yet. They will be. There are some changes to be made.'
'I failed.'
'We learned a great deal, so the experiment was a success in its way. Now listen - the controls of the ship were designed to go wrong when they did in order to test your reaction to emergency conditions after several days of travel strain. The breakdown was timed for the simulated swing about the Moon, which we were going to switch about so that you could see it from a new angle on the return trip. You weren't intended to see the other side and so we didn't build the other side. Call it economy. This test alone cost fifty million dollars and it's not easy to get appropriations.'
