Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (10 page)

There was confusion thrice and four and five times confounded. Cochrane
came in to dispute furiously with Holden whether it was better to have a
psychopathic personality on the space-ship or to have a legal battle in
the courts. Cochrane won. Jones arrived, belligerent, to do battle for
technical devices which would cost money.

"Look!" said Cochrane harassedly. "I'm not trying to boss you! Don't
come to me for authority! If you can make that ship take off I'll be in
it, and my neck will be in as much danger as yours. You buy what will
keep my neck as safe as possible, along with yours. I'm busy raising
money and fighting off crackpots and dodging lawsuits and getting
supplies! I've got a job that needs three men anyhow. All I'm hoping is
that you get ready to take off before I start cutting out paperdolls.
When can we leave?"

"We?" said Jones suspiciously. "You're going?"

"If you think I'll stay behind and face what'll happen if this business
flops," Cochrane told him, "you're crazy! There are too many people on
Earth already. There's no room for a man who tried something big and
failed! If this flops I'd rather be a frozen corpse with a happy smile
on my face—I understand that in space one freezes—than somebody living
on assisted survival status on Earth!"

"Oh," said Jones, mollified. "How many people are to go?"

"Ask Bill Holden," Cochrane told him. "Remember, if you need something,
get it. I'll try to pay for it. If we come back with picture-tapes of
outer space—even if we only circumnavigate Mars!—we'll have money
enough to pay for anything!"

Jones regarded Cochrane with something almost like warmth.

"I like this way of doing business," he said.

"It's not business!" protested Cochrane. "This is getting something
done! By the way. Have you picked out a destination for us to aim at?"
When Jones shook his head, Cochrane said harassedly; "Better get one
picked out. But when we make out our sail-off papers, for destination
we'll say, 'To the stars.' A nice line for the news broadcasts. Oh, yes.
Tell Bill Holden to try to find us a skipper. An astrogator. Somebody
who can tell us how to get back if we get anywhere we need to get back
from. Is there such a person?"

"I've got him," said Jones. "He checked the ship for me. Former
moon-rocket pilot. He's here in Lunar City. Thanks!"

He shook hands with Cochrane before he left. Which for Jones was an
expression of overwhelming emotion. Cochrane turned back to his desk.

"Let's see ... That arrangement for cachets on stamps and covers to be
taken along and postmarked Outer Space. Put in a stipulation for extra
payment in case we touch on planets and invent postmarks for them ..."

He worked on, while Babs took notes. Presently he was dictating. And as
he talked, frowning, he took a fountain-pen from his pocket and absently
worked the refill-handle. It made ink exude from the pen-point. On the
moon, the surface tension of the ink was exactly the same as on earth,
but the gravity was five-sixths less. So a drop of ink of really
impressive size could be formed before the moon's weak gravity made it
fall.

Dictating as he worked the pen, Cochrane achieved a pear-shaped
mass of ink which was quite the size of a large grape before it fell
into his waste-basket. It was the largest he'd made to date. It
fell—slow-motion—and splashed—violently—as he regarded it with
harried satisfaction.

More time passed. A moon-rocket arrived from Earth. There were new
tourists under the thousand-foot plastic dome. Out by the former
Mars-ship Jones made experiments with small plastic balloons coated with
a conducting varnish. In a vacuum, a cubic inch of air at Earth-pressure
will expand to make many cubic feet of near-vacuum. If a balloon can
sustain an internal pressure of one ounce to the square foot, a
thimbleful of air will inflate a sizeable globe to that pressure. Jones
was arranging tiny Dabney field robot-generators with tiny atomic
batteries to power them. Each such balloon would be a Dabney field
"plate" when cast adrift in emptiness, and its little battery would keep
it in operation for twenty years or more.

Baggage came up from Earth for Johnny Simms. It was mostly elephant-guns
and ammunition for them. Johnny, as the heir to innumerable millions
back on earth, had had a happy life, but hardly one to give him a
practical view of things. To him, star-travel meant landing on such
exotic planets as the fictioneers had been writing about for a hundred
years or so. He really looked upon the venture into space as a combined
big-game expedition and escape from Lunar City. And he did look forward,
too, to freedom from his family's legal representative and the constant
reminder of ethical and moral values which Johnny preferred happily to
ignore.

Film-tape came up, and cameras to use it in. Every imaginable item an
expedition to space could use or even might use, was thrust upon
Spaceways, Inc. Manufacturers yearned to have their products used in
connection with the hottest news story in decades. There was a steady
trailing of moon-jeeps from the airlocks of Lunar City to the ship.

The time of lunar sunset arrived—503:30 o'clock, half-past five hundred
and three hours. Time was measured from midnight to midnight,
astronomical fashion. The great, blazing sun whose streamer prominences,
even, were too bright to be looked at with the naked eye—the sun neared
and reached the horizon. There was no change in the star-studded sky.
There were no sunset colorings. The incandescent brightness on the
mountains was not lessened in the least. Only the direction of the stark
black shadows shifted.

The glaring sun descended. Its motion was almost infinitely slow. Its
disk was of the order of half a degree of arc, and it took a full hour
to be fully obscured. And then there was at first no difference in the
look of things save that the
Mare Imbrium
—the solidified, arid Sea of
Showers—was as dark as the shadows in the mountains.

They still gleamed brightly. For a very long time the white-hot sunshine
glowed on their flanks. The brightness rose and rose, and blackness
followed it. At long last only the topmost peaks of the Apennines blazed
luridly against a background of stars whose light seemed feeble by
comparison.

Then it was night indeed. But the Earth shone forth, a half-globe of
seas and clouds and continents, vast and nostalgic in the sky. And now
Earthshine fell upon the moon. It was many times brighter than moonlight
ever was upon the Earth. Even at lunar sunset the Earthlight was sixteen
times brighter. At midnight, when the Earth was full, it would be bright
enough for any activity. Actually, the human beings on Luna were nearly
nocturnal in their habits, because it was easier to run moon-jeeps in
frigidity and keep men and machines warm enough for functioning, than it
was to protect them against the more-than-boiling heat of midday on the
moon.

So the activity about the salvaged space-ship increased. There were
electric lights blazing in the demi-twilight, to guide freight vehicles
with their loads. The tourist-jeeps went and returned and went and
returned. The last shipload of travelers from Earth wanted to see the
space-craft about which all the world was talking.

Even Cochrane presently became curious. There came a time when all the
paper-work connected with what had happened was done with, and
conditional contracts drawn up on everything that could be foreseen. It
was time for something new to happen.

Cochrane said dubiously:

"Babs, have you seen the ship?"

She shook her head.

"I think we'd better go take a look at it," said Cochrane. "Do you know,
I've been acting like a damned business man! I've only been out of Lunar
City three times. Once to the laboratory to talk, once to test a
signal-rocket across the crater, and once when the distress-torp went
off. I haven't even seen the nightclub here in the City!"

"You should," said Babs matter-of-factly. "I went once, with Doctor
Holden. The dancing was marvelous!"

"Bill Holden, eh?" said Cochrane. He found himself annoyed. "Took you to
the nightclub; but not to see the ship!"

"The ship's farther," explained Babs. "I could always be found at the
nightclub if you needed me. I went when you were asleep."

"Damn!" said Cochrane. "Hm ... You ought to get a bonus. What would you
rather have, Babs, a bonus in cash or Spaceways stock?"

"I've got some stock," said Babs. "Mr. Bell—the writer, you know—got
in a poker game. He was cleaned out. So I gave him all the money I
had—I told you I cleared out my savings-account before we came up, I
think—for half his shares."

"Either you got very badly stuck," Cochrane told her cynically, "or else
you'll be so rich you won't speak to me."

"Oh, no!" said Babs warmly. "Never!"

Cochrane yawned.

"Let's get out and take a look at the ship. Maybe I can stow cargo or
something, now there's no more paper-work."

Babs said with an odd calm:

"Mr. Jones wanted you out there today—in an hour, he said. I promised
you'd go. I meant to mention it in time."

Cochrane did not notice her tone. He was dead-tired, as only a man can
be who has driven himself at top speed for days on end over a business
deal. Business deals are stimulating only in their major aspects. Most
of the details are niggling, tedious, routine, and boring—and very
often bear-trapped. Cochrane had done, with only Babs' help, an amount
of mental labor that in the offices of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and
Fallowe would have been divided among two vice-presidents, six lawyers,
and at least twelve account executives. The work, therefore, would
actually have been done by not less than twenty secretaries. But Babs
and Cochrane had done it all.

In the moon-jeep on the way to the ship he felt that heavy, exhausted
sense of relaxation which is not pleasurable at all. Babs annoyed him a
little, too. She was late getting to the airlock, and seemed breathless
when she arrived.

The moon-jeep crunched and clanked and rumbled over the gently
undulating lava sea beneath its giant wheels. Babs looked zestfully out
of the windows. The picture was, of course, quite incredible. In the
relatively dim Earthlight the moonscape was somehow softened, and yet
the impossibly jagged mountains and steep cliffsides and the razor-edged
passes of monstrous stone,—these things remained daunting. It was like
riding through a dream in which everything nearby seemed fey and
glamorous, but the background was deathly-still and ominous.

There were the usual noises inside the jeep. The air had a metallic
smell. One could detect the odors of oil, and ozone, and varnish, and
plastic upholstery. There were the crunching sounds of the wheels,
traveling over stone. There was the paradoxic gentleness of all the
jeep's motions because of the low gravity. Cochrane even noted the
extraordinary feel of an upholstered seat when one weighs only one-sixth
as much as back on Earth. All his sensations were dreamlike—but he felt
that headachy exhaustion that comes of overwork too long continued.

"I'll try," he said tiredly, "to see that you have some fun before you
go back, Babs. You'll go back as soon as we dive off into whatever we're
diving into, but you ought to get in the regular tourist stuff up here,
anyhow."

Babs said nothing. Pointedly.

The moon-jeep clanked and rumbled onward. The hissing of steam was
audible. The vehicle swung around a pinnacle of stone, and Cochrane saw
the space-ship.

In the pale Earthlight it was singularly beautiful. It had been designed
to lure investors in a now-defunct promotion. It was stream-lined, and
gigantic, and it glittered like silver. It stood upright on its
tail-fins, and it had lighted ports and electric lights burned in the
emptiness about it. But there was only one moon-jeep at its base. A
space-suited figure moved toward a dangling sling and sat in it. He rose
deliberately toward an open airlock-hatch, and the other moon-jeep moved
soundlessly away back toward Lunar City.

There was no debris about. There was no cargo waiting to be loaded.
Cochrane did see a great metal plate, tilted on the ground, with a large
box attached to it by cables. That would be the generators and the
field-plate for a Dabney field. It was plainly to remain on the moon. It
was not underneath the ship. Cochrane puzzled tiredly over it for a
moment. Then he understood. The ship would lift on its rockets, hover
over the plate—which would be generating its half of the field—and
then Jones would switch on the apparatus in the ship itself. The
forward, needle-pointed nose of the ship would become another generator
of the Dabney field. The ship's inertia, in that field, would be
effectively reduced to a fraction of its former value. The rockets,
which might give it an acceleration of a few hundred feet per second
anywhere but in a Dabney field, would immediately accelerate the ship
and all its contents to an otherwise unattainable velocity. The
occupants of the rocket would lose their relative inertia to the same
degree as the ship. They should feel no more acceleration than from the
same rocket-thrust in normal space. But they would travel—

Cochrane felt that there was a fallacy somehow, in the working of the
Dabney field as he understood it. If there was less inertia in the
Dabney field—why—a rocket shouldn't push as hard in it, because, it
was the inertia of the rocket-gases that gave the rocket-thrust. But
Cochrane was much too tired to work out a theoretic objection to
something he knew did work. He was almost dozing when Babs touched his
arm.

"Space-suits, Mr. Cochrane."

He got wearily into the clumsy costume. But he saw again that Babs wore
the shining-eyed look of rapturous adventure that he had seen her wear
before.

They got out of the moon-jeep, one after the other. The sling came down
the space-ship's gleaming side. They got in it, together. It lifted
them.