Jeff Sutton (4 page)

Crag grinned. "They tell me the first
thousand miles are the hardest."

"Amen. After that I won't worry."

The countdown had begun. Crag looked out the
side port. Tiny figures were withdrawing from the base of the rocket. The
engine of a fuel truck sounded faintly,
then
died
away. Everything seemed unhurried, routine. He found
him
self admiring
the men who went so matter-of-factly about the job of hurling a rocket into the
gulfs between planets. Once, during his indoctrination, he had watched a Thor
firing . . . had seen the missile climb into the sky, building up to orbital
speed. Its launchers had been the same sort of men-unhurried, methodical,
checking the minutiae that went into such an effort. Only this time there was a
difference. The missile contained men.

Off to one side he saw the launch crew moving
into an instrumented dugout. Colonel Gotch would be there, puffing on his pipe,
his face expressionless, watching the
work of many years come
to . . . what?

He
looked around the cabin for the hundredth time. Larkwell and Nagel were
strapped in their seats, backs horizontal to the floor, looking up at him. The
tremendous
forces of acceleration applied at right angles to
the spine-transverse g—was
far more tolerable than in any other position.
Or so the space medicine men said. He hoped they were right, that in this
position the body could withstand the hell ahead. He gave a last look at the
two men behind him. Larkwell wore an owlish expression. His teeth were clamped
tight, cording his jaws. Nagel's face was intent, its
lines
rigid. It gave Crag the odd impression of an alabaster sculpture.
Prochaska, who occupied the seat next to him facing the
control
panels, was testing his safety belts.

Crag
gave him a quick sidelong glance. Prochaska's job
was in many respects as difficult as his
own.
Perhaps more so.
The sallow-faced electronics
chief bore the responsibility of monitoring the drones—shepherding, first Drone
Able, then its sisters to follow—across the vacuum gulfs and, finally, into
Arzachel, a pinpoint cavity in the rocky wastelands of the moon. In addition,
he was charged with monitoring, repairing and installing all the communication
and electronic equipment, no small job in itself. Yes, a lot depended on the
almost fragile man sitting alongside him. He looked at his own harnessing,
testing its fit.

Colonel
Gotch came on the communicator. "Pickering's in orbit," he said
briefly.
"No details yet."

Crag
sighed in relief. Somehow Pickering's success augured well for
their own
attempt. He gave a last check of the communication
gear. The main speaker was set just above the instrument panel, between him and
Prochaska. In addition, both he and the Chief—the title he had conferred on Prochaska
as his special assistant—were supplied with insert earphones and lip
microphones for use during high noise spec-trums, or when privacy was desired.
Crag, as Commander, could limit all communications to his own personal headgear
by merely flipping a switch. Gotch had been the architect of that one. He was
a man who like
private lines.

"Five minutes to zero,
Commander."

Commander!
Crag liked that. He struggled against his harnessing to glance back over his
shoulder. Nagel's body, scrunched deep into his bucket seat, seemed pitifully
thin under the heavy harnessing. His face was bloodless, taut. Crag momentarily
wondered what strange course of events had brought him to the rocket. He didn't
look like Crag's picture of a spaceman.
Not at all.
But then, none of them looked like supermen. Still, courage wasn't a matter of
looks, he told himself. It was a matter of action.

He
swiveled his head around farther. Larkwell reclined next to Nagel with eyes
closed. Only the fast rise and fall of
his
chest
told of his inner tensions—that and the hawk-like grip of his fingers around
the arm
rests
. Worried, Crag thought. But we're all
worried. He cast a sidelong glance at Prochaska. The man's face held enormous
calm. He reached over and picked up the console mike, then sat for what seemed
an eternity before the countdown reached minus one minute. He plugged in his
ear-insert microphone.

"Thirty
seconds . . ." The voice over the speaker boomed. Prochaska suddenly
became busy checking his instruments.
Jittery
despite
his seeming calm, Crag thought.

"Twenty
seconds . . ." He caught himself checking his controls, as if he could
gain some last moment's knowledge from the banks of levers and dials and knobs.

"Ten
. . . nine . . . eight . . ." He experimentally pulled at his harnessing,
feeling somewhat hypnotized by the magic of the numbers coming over the
communicator.

"Three . . . two . .
."

Crag said, "Ready on
one."

He
punched a button. A muted roar drifted up
from the
stem.
He listened for a moment.
Satisfied, he moved the cut-in
switch. The
roar
increased, becoming almost deafening in the
cabin
despite its soundproofing. He tested the radio and
steering rockets
and
gave a last sidelong glance at Prochaska. The
Chief
winked. The act made him feet better. I should be
nervous,
he thought, or just plain damned scared. But
things
were
happening too fast. He adjusted his lip mike
and
reached
for the controls, studying his hand as he did
so.
Still steady.
He
stirred the controls a bit and the roar became
hellish. He
chewed his Hp and took a deep breath, exhaling
slowly.

He said, "Off to the
moon."

Prochaska
nodded.
Crag moved the controls. The cabin
seemed
to
bob,
wobble,
vibrate
. A high hum came from some
where.
Re
glanced
downward through the side port. The
Aztec seemed
to
be hanging in mid-air just above the desert
floor. Off to one side he could see the
concrete controls dugout. The tiny figures had vanished.

He
thought:
Gotch
is sweating it out now.
In
the past rockets had burned on the
pad .
blown
up.
in
mid-air plunged off
course and had to be destroyed. The idea brought his head up with a snap. Was
there a safety .officer down there with a finger on a
button
.
.
prepared
to destroy the Aztec if it wavered
in flight?

He
cut the thought off and moved the main power switch, bringing the control full
over. The ship bucked, and the desert dropped away with a suddenness that
brought a siege of nausea. He tightened his stomach muscles like the space
medicine doctors had instructed.

The
first moment was bad. There was unbelievable thunder, a fraction of a second
when his brain seemed to blank, a quick surge of fear.
Up .
.
up
. The Aztec's rate of acceleration climbed
sharply. At a prescribed point in time the nose of the rocket moved slightly
toward the east. It climbed at an impossibly steep slant, rushing up from the
earth. Crag swept his eyes over the banks of instruments, noted the positions
of the controls, tried to follow what the faint voice in his earphone was
telling him. Dials with wavering
needles .
.
knobs
with blurry numerals a cacophony of noise, fight and
movement—all this and more was crowded into seconds.

The
rocket hurtled upward, driven by the tidal kinetic energy generated by the
combustion of high velocity exhaust, bom in an inferno of thousands of degrees.
Behind him giant thrust chambers hungrily consumed the volatile fuel, spewing
the high-pressure gases forth at more than nine thousand miles per hour. The
crushing increased, driving
him
against the back of his seat. His heart
began laboring became a sledge hammer inside his chest wall.

He
lost all sense of motion. Only the almost unendurable weight crushing his body
downward mattered. He managed a glimpse of the desert through the side port. It
lay far below, its salient details erased. The roar of the giant motors became
muted. There was a singing in his ears, a high whine he didn't like.

The Aztec began to tilt,
falling off to the right.

He
cast a quick glance at the engine instruments. A red light blinked. Number
three was delivering slighdy less thrust than the others. Somewhere in the
complex of machinery a mechanical sensing device reacted. Engines one and two
were throttled back and the rocket straightened. A second device shifted the
mix on engine three, bringing thrust into balance. All three engines resumed
full power.

"Twenty-five
thousand feet," Prochaska chattered. His voice was tinny over the small
insert earphone provided for communications, especially for those first few
hellish moments when the whole universe seemed collapsed into one huge noise
spectrum.
Noise and pressure.

"Forty-five thousand .
. ."

They
were moving up fast now—three g, four
g,
five g.
Crag's body weight was equal to 680 pounds. The dense reaches of the
troposphere—the weather belt where storms are bom—dropped below them. They
hurtled through the rarefied, bitterly cold and utterly calm stratosphere.

"Eighty thousand feet
. . ."

Crag
struggled to move his body. His band was leaden- on the controls, as if all
life had been choked from it. A hot metal ball filled his chest. He couldn't
breathe. Panic until he remembered to breathe at the top of his lungs.

At eighteen miles a gale of
wind drove west. Rudders on the Aztec compensated, she leaned slightly into the
blast, negating its drift. The winds
ceased .
   
.
rudders
shifted

. .
the
rocket
slanted skyward.
Faster .
.
  
faster
.

Prochaska called off
altitudes almost continuously, the chattering gone from his voice. Crag was
still struggling against the pinning weight when it decreased, vanished. The

firestream
from the tail pipe gave a burst of smoke and died.
Brennscfduss—
burnout.

The
Aztec hurtled toward the cosmic-ray laden ionosphere, driven only by the
inertial forces generated in the now silent thrust chambers. The hard
components of cosmic rays —fast mesons, high energy protons and neutrons—would
rip through the ship.
If
dogs and monkeys can take it, so can man.
That's what Gotch had said. He hoped Cotch was right
Somewhere
,
now, the first stage would fall away. It would follow them, at ever greater
distances, until finally its trajectory would send it plunging homeward.

"Cut
in." Frochaska's voice was a loud boom in the silence. A strident voice
from the communicator was trying to tell them they were right on the button.
Crag moved a second switch. The resultant acceleration drove him against the
back of his seat, violently expelling the air from his hmgs. He fought against
the increasing gravities, conscious of pressure and noise in his ears; pressure
and noise mixed with fragments of voice. His lips pulled tight against his
teeth. The thudding was his heart He tightened his stomach muscles, trying to ease
the weight on his chest. A mighty hand was gripped around his lungs, squeezing
out the as. But it wasn't as bad as the first time. They were piercing the
thermosphere where the outside temperature gradient would zoom upward toward
the 2,000 degree mark.