Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (2 page)

Of course, Cochrane reminded himself with conscious justice, of course
there was the very great value of moon-mail cachets to devotees of
philately. There was the value of the tourist facilities to anybody who
could spend that much money for something to brag about afterward. There
were the solar-heat mines—running at a slight loss—and various other
fine achievements. There was even a nightclub in Lunar City where one
highball cost the equivalent of—say—a week's pay for a secretary like
Babs. And—

The panel changed its red glowing sign. It said: "
Take-off forty-five
seconds.
"

Somewhere down below a door closed with a cushioned soft definiteness.
The inside of the rocket suddenly seemed extraordinarily still. The
silence was oppressive. It was dead. Then there came the whirring of
very many electric fans, stirring up the air.

The stewardess' voice came matter-of-factly from below him in the
upended cylinder which was the passenger-space.

"We take off in forty-five seconds. You will find yourself feeling very
heavy. There is no cause to be alarmed. If you observe that breathing is
oppressive, the oxygen content of the air in this ship is well above
earth-level, and you will not need to breathe so deeply. Simply relax in
your chair. Everything has been thought of. Everything has been tested
repeatedly. You need not disturb yourself at all. Simply relax."

Silence. Two heart-beats. Three.

There was a roar. It was a deep, booming, numbing roar that came from
somewhere outside the rocket's hull. Simultaneously, something thrust
Cochrane deep into the foam-cushions of his contour-chair. He felt the
cushion piling up on all sides of his body so that it literally
surrounded him. It resisted the tendency of his arms and legs and
abdomen to flatten out and flow sidewise, to spread him in a thin layer
over the chair in which he rested.

He felt his cheeks dragged back. He was unduly conscious of the weight
of objects in his pockets. His stomach pressed hard against his
backbone. His sensations were those of someone being struck a hard,
prolonged blow all over his body.

It was so startling a sensation, though he'd read about it, that he
simply stayed still and blankly submitted to it. Presently he felt
himself gasp. Presently, again, he noticed that one of his feet was
going to sleep. He tried to move it and succeeded only in stirring it
feebly. The roaring went on and on and on....

The red letters in the panel said: "
First stage ends in five seconds.
"

By the time he'd read it, the rocket hiccoughed and stopped. Then he
felt a surge of panic. He was falling! He had no weight! It was the
sensation of a suddenly dropping elevator a hundred times multiplied. He
bounced out of the depression in the foam-cushion. He was prevented from
floating away only by the straps that held him.

There was a sputter and a series of jerks. Then he had weight again as
roarings began once more. This was not the ghastly continued impact of
the take-off, but still it was weight—considerably greater weight than
the normal weight of Earth. Cochrane wiggled the foot that had gone to
sleep. Pins and needles lessened their annoyance as sensation returned
to it. He was able to move his arms and hands. They felt abnormally
heavy, and he experienced an extreme and intolerable weariness. He
wanted to go to sleep.

This was the second-stage rocket-phase. The moon-rocket had blasted off
at six gravities acceleration until clear of atmosphere and a little
more. Acceleration-chairs of remarkably effective design, plus the
pre-saturation of one's blood with oxygen, made so high an acceleration
safe and not unendurable for the necessary length of time it lasted.
Now, at three gravities, one did not feel on the receiving end of a
violent thrust, but one did feel utterly worn out and spent. Most people
stayed awake through the six-gravity stage and went heavily to sleep
under three gravities.

Cochrane fought the sensation of fatigue. He had not liked himself for
accepting the orders that had brought him here. They had been issued in
bland confidence that he had no personal affairs which could not be
abandoned to obey cryptic orders from the secretary of a boss he had
actually never seen. He felt a sort of self-contempt which it would have
been restful to forget in three-gravity sleep. But he grimaced and held
himself awake to contemplate the unpretty spectacle of himself and his
actions.

The red light said: "
Second stage ends ten seconds.
"

And in ten seconds the rockets hiccoughed once more and were silent, and
there was that sickening feeling of free fall, but he grimly made
himself think of it as soaring upward instead of dropping—which was the
fact, too—and waited until the third-stage rockets boomed suddenly and
went on and on and on.

This was nearly normal acceleration; the effect of this acceleration was
the feel of nearly normal weight. He felt about as one would feel in
Earth in a contour-chair tilted back so that one faced the ceiling. He
knew approximately where the ship would be by this time, and it ought to
have been a thrill. Cochrane was hundreds of miles above Earth and
headed eastward out and up. If a port were open at this height, his
glance should span continents.

No.... The ship had taken off at night. It would still be in Earth's
shadow. There would be nothing at all to be seen below, unless one or
two small patches of misty light which would be Earth's too-many great
cities. But overhead there would be stars by myriads and myriads, of
every possible color and degree of brightness. They would crowd each
other for room in which to shine. The rocket-ship was spiralling out and
out and up and up, to keep its rendezvous with the space platform.

The platform, of course, was that artificial satellite of Earth which
was four thousand miles out and went around the planet in a little over
four hours, traveling from west to east. It had been made because to
break the bonds of Earth's gravity was terribly costly in fuel—when a
ship had to accelerate slowly to avoid harm to human cargo. The space
platform was a filling station in emptiness, at which the moon-rocket
would refuel for its next and longer and much less difficult journey of
two hundred thirty-odd thousand miles.

The stewardess came up the ramp, moving briskly. She stopped and glanced
at each passenger in each chair in turn. When Cochrane turned his open
eyes upon her, she said soothingly:

"There's no need to be disturbed. Everything is going perfectly."

"I'm not disturbed," said Cochrane. "I'm not even nervous. I'm perfectly
all right."

"But you should be drowsy!" she observed, concerned. "Most people are.
If you nap you'll feel better for it."

She felt his pulse in a businesslike manner. It was normal.

"Take my nap for me," said Cochrane, "or put it back in stock. I don't
want it. I'm perfectly all right."

She considered him carefully. She was remarkably pretty. But her manner
was strictly detached. She said:

"There's a button. You can reach it if you need anything. You may call
me by pushing it."

He shrugged. He lay still as she went on to inspect the other
passengers. There was nothing to do and nothing to see. Travellers were
treated pretty much like parcels, these days. Travel, like television
entertainment and most of the other facilities of human life, was
designed for the seventy-to-ninety-per-cent of the human race whose
likes and dislikes and predilections could be learned exactly by
surveys. Anybody who didn't like what everybody liked, or didn't react
like everybody reacted, was subject to annoyances. Cochrane resigned
himself to them.

The red light-letters changed again, considerably later. This time they
said: "
Free flight, thirty seconds.
"

They did not say "free fall," which was the technical term for a rocket
coasting upward or downward in space. But Cochrane braced himself, and
his stomach-muscles were tense when the rockets stopped again and stayed
off. The sensation of continuous fall began. An electronic speaker
beside his chair began to speak. There were other such mechanisms beside
each other passenger-chair, and the interior of the rocket filled with a
soft murmur which was sardonically like choral recitation.

"
The sensation of weightlessness you now experience
," said the voice
soothingly, "
is natural at this stage of your flight. The ship has
attained its maximum intended speed and is still rising to meet the
space platform. You may consider that we have left atmosphere and its
limitations behind. Now we have spread sails of inertia and glide on a
wind of pure momentum toward our destination. The feeling of
weightlessness is perfectly normal. You will be greatly interested in
the space platform. We will reach it in something over two hours of free
flight. It is an artificial satellite, with an air-lock our ship will
enter for refueling. You will be able to leave the ship and move about
inside the Platform, to lunch if you choose, to buy souvenirs and mail
them back and to view Earth from a height of four thousand miles through
quartz-glass windows. Then, as now, you will feel no sensation of
weight. You will be taken on a tour of the space platform if you wish.
There are rest-rooms—.
"

Cochrane grimly endured the rest of the taped lecture. He thought sourly
to himself: "
I'm a captive audience without even an interest in the
production tricks.
"

Presently he saw Bill Holden's head. The psychiatrist had squirmed
inside the straps that held him, and now was staring about within the
rocket. His complexion was greenish.

"I understand you're to brief me," Cochrane told him, "on the way up. Do
you want to tell me now what all this is about? I'd like a nice dramatic
narrative, with gestures."

Holden said sickly:

"Go to hell, won't you?"

His head disappeared. Space-nausea was, of course, as definite an
ailment as seasickness. It came from no weight. But Cochrane seemed to
be immune. He turned his mind to the possible purposes of his journey.
He knew nothing at all. His own personal share in the activities of
Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe—the biggest advertising agency in
the world—was the production of the Dikkipatti Hour, top-talent
television show, regularly every Wednesday night between eight-thirty
and nine-thirty o'clock central U. S. time. It was a good show. It was
among the ten most popular shows on three continents. It was not
reasonable that he be ordered to drop it and take orders from a
psychiatrist, even one he'd known unprofessionally for years. But there
was not much, these days, that really made sense.

In a world where cities with populations of less than five millions were
considered small towns, values were peculiar. One of the deplorable
results of living in a world over-supplied with inhabitants was that
there were too many people and not enough jobs. When one had a good job,
and somebody higher up than oneself gave an order, it was obeyed. There
was always somebody else or several somebodies waiting for every job
there was—hoping for it, maybe praying for it. And if a good job was
lost, one had to start all over.

This task might be anything. It was not, however, connected in any way
with the weekly production of the Dikkipatti Hour. And if that
production were scamped this week because Cochrane was away, he would be
the one to take the loss in reputation. The fact that he was on the moon
wouldn't count. It would be assumed that he was slipping. And a slip was
not good. It was definitely not good!

"
I could do a documentary right now
," Cochrane told himself angrily,
"
titled 'Man-afraid-of-his-job.' I could make a very authentic
production. I've got the material!
"

He felt weight for a moment. It was accompanied by booming noises. The
sounds were not in the air outside, because there was no air. They were
reverberations of the rocket-motors themselves, transmitted to the
fabric of the ship. The ship's steering-rockets were correcting the
course of the vessel and—yes, there was another surge of power—nudging
it to a more correct line of flight to meet the space platform coming up
from behind. The platform went around the world six times a day, four
thousand miles out. During three of its revolutions anybody on the
ground, anywhere, could spot it in daylight as an infinitesimal star,
bright enough to be seen against the sky's blueness, rising in the west
and floating eastward to set at the place of sunrise.

There was again weightlessness. A rocket-ship doesn't burn its
rocket-engines all the time. It runs them to get started, and it runs
them to stop, but it does not run them to travel. This ship was floating
above the Earth, which might be a vast sunlit ball filling half the
universe below the rocket, or might be a blackness as of the Pit.
Cochrane had lost track of time, but not of the shattering effect of
being snatched from the job he knew and thought important, to travel
incredibly to do something he had no idea of. He felt, in his mind, like
somebody who climbs stairs in the dark and tries to take a step that
isn't there. It was a shock to find that his work wasn't important even
in the eyes of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe. That he didn't
count. That nothing counted ...

There was another dull booming outside and another touch of weight. Then
the rocket floated on endlessly.

A long time later, something touched the ship's outer hull. It was a
definite, positive clanking sound. And then there was the gentlest and
vaguest of tuggings, and Cochrane could feel the ship being maneuvered.
He knew it had made contact with the space platform and was being drawn
inside its lock.

There was still no weight. The stewardess began to unstrap the
passengers one by one, supplying each with magnetic-soled slippers.
Cochrane heard her giving instructions in their use. He knew the
air-lock was being filled with air from the huge, globular platform. In
time the door at the back—bottom—base of the passenger-compartment
opened. Somebody said flatly: