Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (7 page)

On the seventh day Bill Holden came into the office where Cochrane
worked feverishly.

"Doctor Cochrane," said Holden, "a word with you!"

"Doctor?" asked Cochrane.

"Doctor!" repeated Holden. "I've just been interviewing my patient.
You're good. My patient is adjusted."

Cochrane raised his eyebrows.

"He's famous," said Holden grimly. "He now considers that everybody in
the world knows that he is a great scientist. He is appreciated. He is
happily making plans to go back to Earth and address a few learned
societies and let people admire him. He can now spend the rest of his
life being the man who discovered the principle by which
faster-than-light-travel will some day be achieved. Even when the furor
dies down, he will have been a great man—and he will stay a great man
in his own estimation. In short, he's cured."

Cochrane grinned.

"Then I'm fired?"

"We are," said Holden. "There are professional ethics even among
psychiatrists, Jed. I have to admit that the guy now has a permanent
adjustment to reality. He has been recognized as a great scientist. He
is no longer frustrated."

Cochrane leaned back in his chair.

"That may be good medical ethics," he observed, "but it's lousy business
practice, Bill. You say he's adjusted to reality. That means that he
will now have a socially acceptable reaction to anything that's likely
to happen to him."

Holden nodded.

"A well-adjusted person does. Dabney's the same person. He's the same
fool. But he'll get along all right. A psychiatrist can't change a
personality! All he can do is make it adjust to the world about so the
guy doesn't have to be tucked away in a straight-jacket. In that sense,
Dabney is adjusted."

"You've played a dirty trick on him," said Cochrane. "You've stabilized
him, and that's the rottenest trick anybody can play on anybody! You've
put him into a sort of moral deep-freeze. It's a dirty trick, Bill!"

"Look who's talking!" said Holden wearily. "I suppose the advertising
business is altruistic and unmercenary?"

"The devil, no!" said Cochrane indignantly. "We serve a useful purpose!
We tell people that they smell bad, and so give them an alibi for the
unpopularity their stupidity has produced. But then we tell them to use
so-and-so's breath sweetener or whosit's non-immunizing deodorant
they'll immediately become the life of every party they attend! It's a
lie, of course, but it's a dynamic lie! It gives the frustrated
individual something to do! It sells him hope and therefore
activity—and inactivity is a sort of death!"

Holden looked at Cochrane with a dreary disinterest.

"You're adjusted, Jed! But do you really believe that stuff?"

Cochrane grinned again.

"Only on Tuesdays and Fridays. It's about two-sevenths true. But it does
have that much truth in it! Nobody ever gets anything done while they
merely make socially acceptable responses to the things that happen to
them! Take Dabney himself! We've got a hell of a thing coming along now
just because he wouldn't make the socially acceptable response to having
a rich wife and no brains. He rebelled. So mankind will start moving to
the stars!"

"You still believe it?"

Cochrane grimaced.

"Yesterday morning I sweated blood in a space-suit out in the crater
beyond Jones' laboratory. He tried his trick. He had a small
signal-rocket mounted on the far side of that crater,—twenty-some
miles. It was in front of the field-plate that established the Dabney
field across the crater to another plate near us. Jones turned on the
field. He ignited the rocket by remote control. I was watching with a
telescope. I gave him the word to fire.... How long do you think it took
that rocket to cross the crater in that field that works like a pipe? It
smashed into the plate at the lab!"

Holden shook his head.

"It took slightly," said Cochrane, "slightly under three-fifths of a
second."

Holden blinked. Cochrane said:

"A signal-rocket has an acceleration of about six hundred feet per
second, level flight, no gravity component, mass acceleration only. It
should have taken a hundred seconds plus to cross that crater—over
twenty miles. It shouldn't have stayed on course. It did stay on course,
inside the field. It did take under three-fifths of a second. The gadget
works!"

Holden drew a deep breath.

"So now you need more money and you want me not to discharge my patient
as cured."

"Not a bit of it!" snapped Cochrane. "I don't want him as a patient! I'm
only willing to accept him as a customer! But if he wants fame, I'll
sell it to him. Not as something to lean his fragile psyche on, but
something to wallow in! Do you think he could ever get too famous for
his own satisfaction?"

"Of course not," said Holden. "He's the same fool."

"Then we're in business," Cochrane told him. "Not that I couldn't peddle
my fish elsewhere. I'm going to! But I'll give him old-customer
preference. I'll want him out at the distress-torp tests this afternoon.
They'll be public."

"This afternoon?" asked Holden. "Distress-torp?"

A lunar day is two Earth-weeks-long. A lunar night is equally
long-drawn-out. Cochrane said impatiently:

"I got out of bed four hours ago. To me that's morning. I'll eat lunch
in an hour. That's noon. Say, three hours from now, whatever o'clock it
is lunar time."

Holden glanced at his watch and made computations. He said:

"That'll be half-past two hundred and three o'clock, if you're curious.
But what's a distress-torp?"

"Shoo!" said Cochrane. "I'll send Babs to find you and load you on the
jeep. You'll see then. Now I'm busy!"

Holden shrugged and went away, and Cochrane stared at his own watch.
Since a lunar day and night together fill twenty-eight Earth days of
time, a strictly lunar "day" contains nearly three hundred forty
Earth-hours. To call one-twelfth of that period an hour would be an
affectation. To call each twenty-four Earth hours a day would have been
absurd. So the actual period of the moon's rotation was divided into
familiar time-intervals, and a bulletin-board in the hotel lobby in
Lunar City notified those interested that: "
Sunday will be from 143
o'clock to 167 o'clock A.M.
" There would be another Sunday some time
during the lunar afternoon.

Cochrane debated momentarily whether this information could be used in
the publicity campaign of Spaceways, Inc. Strictly speaking, there was
some slight obligation to throw extra fame Dabney's way regardless,
because the corporation had been formed as a public-relations device.
Any other features, such as changing the history of the human race, were
technically incidental. But Cochrane put his watch away. To talk about
horology on the moon wouldn't add to Dabney's stature as a phoney
scientist. It didn't matter.

He went back to the business at hand. Some two years before there had
been a fake corporation organized strictly for the benefit of its
promoters. It had built a rocket-ship ostensibly for the establishment
of a colony on Mars. The ship had managed to stagger up to Luna, but no
farther. Its promoters had sold stock on the promise that a ship that
could barely reach Luna could take off from that small globe with six
times as much fuel as it could lift off of Earth. Which was true.
Investors put in their money on that verifiable fact. But the truth
happened to be, of course, that it would still take an impossible amount
of fuel to accelerate the ship—so heavily loaded—to a speed where it
would reach Mars in one human lifetime. Taking off from Luna would solve
only the problem of gravity. It wouldn't do a thing about inertia. So
the ship never rose from its landing near Lunar City. The corporation
that had built it went profitably bankrupt.

Cochrane had been working feverishly to find out who owned that ship
now. Just before the torp-test he'd mentioned, he found that the ship
belonged to the hotel desk-clerk, who had bought it in hope of renting
it sooner or later for television background-shots in case anybody was
crazy enough to make a television film-tape on the moon. He was now
discouraged. Cochrane chartered it, putting up a bond to return it
undamaged. If the ship was lost, the hotel-clerk would get back his
investment—about a week's pay.

So Cochrane had a space-ship practically in his pocket when the public
demonstration of the Dabney field came off at half-past 203 o'clock.

The site of the demonstration was the shadowed, pitch-dark part of the
floor of a crater twenty miles across, with walls some ten thousand
jagged feet high. The furnace-like sunshine made the plain beyond the
shadow into a sea of blinding brightness. The sunlit parts of the
crater's walls were no less terribly glaring. But above the edge of the
cliffs the stars began; infinitely small and many-colored, with
innumerable degrees of brightness. The Earth hung in mid-sky like a
swollen green apple, monstrous in size. And the figures which moved
about the scene of the test could be seen only faintly by reflected
light from the lava plain, because one's eyes had to be adjusted to the
white-hot moon-dust on the plain and mountains.

There were not many persons present. Three jeeps waited in the
semi-darkness, out of the burning sunshine. There were no more than a
dozen moon-suited individuals to watch and to perform the test of the
Dabney field. Cochrane had scrupulously edited all fore-news of the
experiment to give Dabney the credit he had paid for. There were
present, then, the party from Earth—Cochrane and Babs and Holden, with
the two tame scientists and Bell the writer—and the only two reporters
on the moon. Only news syndicates could stand the expense-account of a
field man in Lunar City. And then there were Jones and Dabney and two
other figures apparently brought by Dabney.

There was, of course, no sound at all on the moon itself. There was no
air to carry it. But from each plastic helmet a six-inch antenna
projected straight upward, and the microwaves of suit-talkies made a
jumble of slightly metallic sounds in the headphones of each suit.

As soon as Cochrane got out of the jeep's air-lock and was recognized,
Dabney said agitatedly:

"Mr. Cochrane! Mr. Cochrane! I have to discuss something with you! It is
of the utmost importance! Will you come into the laboratory?"

Cochrane helped Babs to the ground and made his way to the airlock in
the dust-heap against the cliff. He went in, with two other space-suited
figures who detached themselves from the rest to follow him. Once inside
the odorous, cramped laboratory, Dabney opened his face-plate and began
to speak before Cochrane was ready to hear him. His companion beamed
amiably.

"—and therefore, Mr. Cochrane," Dabney was saying agitatedly, "I insist
that measures be taken to protect my scientific reputation! If this test
should fail, it will militate against the acceptance of my discovery! I
warn you—and I have my friend Mr. Simms here as witness—that I will
not be responsible for the operation of apparatus made by a subordinate
who does not fully comprehend the theory of my discovery! I will not be
involved—"

Cochrane nodded. Dabney, of course, didn't understand the theory of the
field he'd bought fame-rights to. But there was no point in bringing
that up. Johnny Simms beamed at both of them. He was the swimmer Babs
had pointed out in the swimming-pool. His face was completely unlined
and placid, like the face of a college undergraduate. He had never
worried about anything. He'd never had a care in the world. He merely
listened with placid interest.

"I take it," said Cochrane, "that you don't mind the test being made, so
long as you don't have to accept responsibility for its failure—and so
long as you get the credit for its success if it works. That's right,
isn't it?"

"If it fails, I am not responsible!" insisted Dabney stridently. "If it
succeeds, it will be because of my discovery."

Cochrane sighed a little. This was a shabby business, but Dabney would
have convinced himself, by now, that he was the genius he wanted people
to believe him.

"Before the test," said Cochrane gently, "you make a speech. It will be
recorded. You disclaim the crass and vulgar mechanical details and
emphasize that you are like Einstein, dealing in theoretic physics only.
That you are naturally interested in attempts to use your discovery, but
your presence is a sign of your interest but not your responsibility."

"I shall have to think it over—," began Dabney nervously.

"You can say," promised Cochrane, "that if it does not work you will
check over what Jones did and tell him why."

"Y-yes," said Dabney hesitantly, "I could do that. But I must think it
over first. You will have to delay—"

"If I were you," said Cochrane confidentially, "I would plan a speech to
that effect because the test is coming off in five minutes."

He closed his face-plate as Dabney began to protest. He went into the
lock. He knew better than to hold anything up while waiting for a
neurotic to make a decision. Dabney had all he wanted, now. From this
moment on he would be frantic for fear of losing it. But there could be
no argument outside the laboratory. In the airlessness, anything anybody
said by walkie-talkie could be heard by everybody.

When Dabney and Simms followed out of the lock, Cochrane was helping
Jones set up the device that had been prepared for this test. It was
really two devices. One was a very flat cone, much like a coolie-hat and
hardly larger, with a sort of power-pack of coils and batteries
attached. The other was a space-ship's distress-signal rocket, designed
to make a twenty-mile streak of red flame in emptiness. Nobody had yet
figured out what good a distress signal would do, between Earth and
moon, but the idea was soothing. The rocket was four feet long and six
inches in diameter. At its nose there was a second coolie-hat cone, with
other coils and batteries.