Prelude to Space (22 page)

“It’s a pity they can’t charge a pound a head,” said Collins thoughtfully as he looked
at the queue.

“Perhaps they are,” answered Professor Maxton. “We might at least put up a collecting
box for impecunious atomic engineers.”

The dome of the twelve-inch reflector—the only instrument which was not privately
owned and which actually belonged to Interplanetary—was closed and the building was
locked. Professor Maxton drew out a bunch of master keys and tried them one by one
until the door opened. The nearest in line immediately broke ranks and started to
pour toward them.

“Sorry,” shouted the Professor, as he slammed the door behind them, “it’s out of order!”

“You mean it
will
be out of order,” said Collins darkly. “Do you know how to use one of these things?”

“We should be able to figure it out,” answered Maxton, with just a shade of uncertainty
in his voice.

Dirk’s very high opinion of the two scientists began to fall abruptly.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “that you’re going to risk using an instrument
as complicated and expensive as this without knowing anything about it? Why, it would
be like someone who didn’t know how to drive getting into an automobile and trying
to start it!”

“Goodness, gracious,” protested Collins, though with a slight twinkle in his eye.
“You don’t think
this
thing is complicated, do you? Compare it with a bicycle, if you like—but not a car!”

“Very well,” retorted Dirk, “just try and ride a bicycle without any practice beforehand!”

Collins merely laughed and continued his examination of the controls. For some time
he and the Professor exchanged technical conversation which no longer impressed Dirk,
since he could see that they knew very little more about the telescope than he did
himself.

After some experimenting, the instrument was swung round to the Moon, now fairly low
in the southwest. For a long time, it seemed to Dirk, he waited patiently in the background
while the two engineers looked to their full. Finally he got fed up.

“You
did
invite me, you know,” he remonstrated. “Or have you forgotten?”

“Sorry,” apologized Collins, giving up his position with obvious reluctance. “Have
a look now—focus up with this knob.”

At first Dirk could see only a blinding whiteness with darker patches here and there.
He slowly turned the focusing knob, and suddenly the picture became clear and sharp,
like some brilliant etching.

He could see a good half of the crescent, the tips of the horns being out of the field.
The edge of the Moon was a perfect arc of a circle, without any sign of unevenness.
But the line dividing night and day was ragged, and broken in many places by mountains
and uplands which threw long shadows across the plains below. There were few of the
great craters he had expected to see, and he guessed that most of them must lie in
the part of the disk that was still unlit.

He focused his attention upon a great oval plain bordered with mountains, which reminded
him irresistibly of a dried-up ocean bed. It was, he supposed, one of the Moon’s so-called
seas, but it was easy to tell that there was no water anywhere in that calm, still
landscape spread out beneath him. Every detail was sharp and brilliant, save when
a ripple like a heat-haze made the whole picture tremble for a moment. The Moon was
sinking into the horizon mists, and the image was being disturbed by its slanting,
thousand-mile passage through the Earth’s atmosphere.

At one point just inside the darkened area of the disk a group of brilliant lights
shone like beacon fires blazing in the lunar night. They puzzled Dirk for a moment,
until he realized that he was looking upon great mountain peaks which had caught the
sun hours before the dawning light had struck into the lowlands around their bases.

He understood now why men had spent their lives watching the shadows come and go across
the face of that strange world which seemed so near yet which, until his generation,
had been the symbol of all that could never be attained. He realized that in a lifetime
one could not exhaust its wonders; always there would be something fresh to see as
the eye grew more skilled in tracing out that wealth of almost infinite detail.

Something was blocking his view and he looked up in annoyance. The Moon was descending
below the level of the dome; he could lower the telescope no farther. Someone switched
on the lights again and he saw that Collins and Maxton were grinning at him.

“I hope you’ve seen all you want to,” said the Professor. “We had ten minutes apiece—
you
have been there for twenty-five and I’m darned glad the Moon set when it did!”

“Tomorrow we launch the ‘Prometheus.’ I say ‘we,’ because I find it no longer possible
to stand aside and play the part of a disinterested spectator. No one on Earth can
do that; the events of the next few hours will shape the lives of all men who will
ever be born, down to the end of time.

“Someone once pictured humanity as a race of islanders who have not yet learned the
art of making ships. Out across the ocean we can see other islands about which we
have wondered and speculated since the beginning of history. Now, after a million
years, we have made our first primitive canoe; tomorrow we will watch it sail through
the coral reef and vanish over the horizon.

“This evening I saw, for the first time in my life, the Moon’s glittering mountains
and great dusky plains. The country over which Leduc and his companions will be walking
in less than a week was still invisible, waiting for the sunrise which will not come
for another three of our days. Yet its night must be brilliant beyond imagination,
for the Earth will be more than half-f in its sky.

“I wonder how Leduc, Richards and Taine are spending their last night on Earth? They
will, of course, have put all their affairs in order, and there’ll be nothing left
for them to do. Are they relaxing, listening to music, reading—or just sleeping?”

James Richards was doing none of these things. He was seated in the lounge with his
friends, drinking very slowly and carefully, while he regaled them with entertaining
stories of the tests he had been given by crazy psychologists trying to decide if
he was normal, and if so, what could be done about it. The psychologists he was libeling
formed the largest—and most appreciative—part of his audience. They let him talk until
midnight; then they put him to bed. It took six of them to do it.

Pierre Leduc had spent the evening out at the ship, watching some fuel evaporation
tests that were being carried out on “Alpha.” There was very little point in his being
present, but although gentle hints had been dropped from time to time, no one could
get rid of him. Just before midnight the Director-General arrived, exploded good-naturedly
and sent him back in his own car with strict orders to get some sleep. Whereupon Leduc
spent the next two hours in bed reading
La Comédie Humaine
.

Only Lewis Taine—the precise, unemotional Taine—had used his last night on Earth in
ways that might have been expected. He had sat for hours at his desk preparing drafts
and destroying them one by one. Late in the evening he had finished; in careful long-hand
he transcribed the letter which had cost him so much thought. Then he sealed it and
attached a formal little note:

Letter and note he placed in a large envelope which he addressed to Maxton. Then he
picked up the bulky file of alternative flight orbits and began to make pencil notes
in the margins.

He was himself again.

The message which Sir Robert had been expecting arrived soon after dawn by one of
the high-speed mail-planes which, later in the day, would be carrying the films of
the launching back to Europe. It was a brief official minute, signed only with a pair
of initials which the whole world would have recognized even without the help of the
words: “10, Downing Street” which ran along the head of the paper. Yet it was not
entirely a formal document, for beneath the initials the same hand had written: “Good
luck!”

When Professor Maxton arrived a few minutes later, Sir Robert handed him the paper
without a word. The American read it slowly and gave a sigh of relief.

“Well, Bob,” he said, “we’ve done our share. It’s up to the politicians now—but we’ll
keep pushing them from behind.”

“It’s not been as difficult as I feared; the statesmen have learned to pay attention
to us since Hiroshima.”

“And when will the plan come up before the General Assembly?”

“In about a month, when the British and American governments will formally propose
that ‘all planets or celestial bodies unoccupied or unclaimed by non-human forms of
life, etc. etc., be deemed international areas freely accessible to all peoples, and
that no sovereign state be permitted to claim any such astronomical bodies for its
exclusive occupation or development…’ and so on.”

“And what about the proposed Interplanetary Commission?”

“That will have to be discussed later. At the moment the important thing is to get
agreement on the first stages. Now that our governments have formally adopted the
plan—it will be on the radio by the afternoon—we can start lobbying like hell. You’re
best at this sort of thing—can you write a little speech on the lines of our first
Manifesto—one that Leduc can broadcast from the Moon? Emphasize the astronomical viewpoint,
and the stupidity of even attempting to carry nationalism into space. Think you can
do it before take-off? Not that it matters if you can’t, except that it may leak out
too soon if we have to radio the script.”

“O.K.—I’ll get the rough draft checked over by the political experts, and then leave
you to put in the adjectives as usual. But I don’t think it will need any purple passages
this time. As the first message to come from the Moon, it will have quite enough psychological
punch by itself!”

Never before had any part of the Australian desert known such a population density.
Special trains from Adelaide and Perth had been arriving throughout the night, and
thousands of cars and private aircraft were parked on either side of the launching
track. Jeeps were continually patrolling up and down the kilometer-wide safety zones,
shooing away too inquisitive visitors. No one at all was allowed past the five-kilometer
mark, and at this point the canopy of circling aircrafts also came to an abrupt end.

The “Prometheus” lay glittering in the low sunlight, throwing a fantastic shadow far
across the desert. Until now she had seemed only a thing of metal, but at last she
was alive and waiting to fulfill the dreams of her creators. The crew was already
aboard when Dirk and his companions arrived. There had been a little ceremony for
the benefit of the newsreels and television cameras, but no formal speeches. These
could come, if they were needed, in three weeks’ time.

In quiet, conversational tones the loud-speakers along the track were saying: “Instrument
check completed: launching generators running at half speed: one hour to go.”

The words came rolling back across the desert, muffled by distance, from the further
speakers: “One hour to go—hour to go—go—go—go…” until they had died away into the
northwest.

“I think we’d better get into position,” said Professor Maxton. “It’s going to take
us some time to drive through this crowd. Take a good look at ‘Alpha’—it’s the last
opportunity you’ll have.”

The announcer was speaking again, but this time his words were not intended for them.
Dirk realized that he was overhearing part of a world-wide sequence of instructions.

“All sounding stations should be ready to fire. Sumatra, India, Iran—let us have your
readings within the next fifteen minutes.”

Many miles away in the desert, something went screaming up into the sky, leaving behind
it a pure white vapor trail that might have been drawn with a ruler. While Dirk watched,
the long milky column began to writhe and twist as the winds of the stratosphere dispersed
it.

“Met rocket,” said Collins, answering his unspoken question. “We’ve got a chain of
them along the flight path, so we’ll know pressures and temperatures all the way up
to the top of the atmosphere. Just before the take-off, the pilot of ‘Beta’ will be
warned if there’s anything unusual ahead of him. That’s one worry that Leduc won’t
have. There’s no weather out in space!”

Across Asia, the slim rockets with their fifty kilograms of instruments were climbing
through the stratosphere on their way to space. Their fuel had been exhausted in the
first few seconds of flight, but their speed was great enough to carry them a hundred
kilometers from the Earth. As they rose—some in sunlight, others still in darkness—they
sent back to the ground a continual stream of radio impulses, which would be caught
and translated and passed on to Australia. Presently they would fall back to Earth,
their parachutes would blossom, and most of them would be found and used again. Others,
not so fortunate, would fall into the sea or, perhaps, end their days as tribal gods
in the jungles of Borneo.

The three-mile drive along the crowded and very primitive road took them nearly twenty
minutes, and more than once Professor Maxton had to make a detour into the no-man’s-land
which he himself had put out of bounds. The concentration of cars and spectators was
greatest when they came to the five kilometer mark—and ended abruptly at a barrier
of red-painted poles.

A small platform had been erected here from old packing cases, and this improvised
stand was already occupied by Sir Robert Derwent and several of his staff. Also present,
Dirk noticed with interest, were Hassell and Clinton. He wondered what thoughts were
passing through their minds.