One Against the Moon (5 page)

At that very moment, though he could no longer sense it, there was a click, audible through the length of the vibrating column of metal, and the first section snapped off. Its great fuel tanks, so full of volatile gases an instant before, had emptied themselves in a fury of chemical combustion. The automatic releases had loosened the whole bottom half, the main fuel section, thrust it into space to fall and shatter upon the desert miles below. At that same split second, another series of relays touched off the second firing section.

The new firing tubes blasted into action. Of a design different from those that preceded it, of a design new to the world of man, the experimental jet burst forth. For an instant it seemed as if the pressure had vanished in the rocket, for a split second the rocket stopped accelerating as it waited for the new impact. Then like a blast of lightning newly released from a storm, a shot of energy flashed through the racing metal body. The giant hand came down on everything within it with a firmness and power not sensed before.

There was a blast now emerging from the tail of the flying rocket something like that of an atomic bomb, but not quite. It was not an explosion, but an atomic reaction. It was a rocket flare of an intensity and heat beyond all the potential of mere chemical reactions. It was atomic fire, chained and harnessed to the tail of a rocket.

The thin white pencil, reduced in length, raced on into the dark stratospheric sky.

Back at Red Sands there was intense excitement in the control dugout. Major Bronck was racing around, anxiously yelling into telephones, watching the checkers, trying to keep track of everything happening at once.

At first the ascent had been neat and according to routine. The crew in the dugout, the radar crew at the main camp, and the one co-operating with them from White Sands itself were checking all right. Then in an instant all three almost lost touch as their objective nearly swooped out of range. The trackers fought to get it back in focus, and one by one finally caught it again, farther and faster than they had planned for.

"It's running wild!" was the way one startled crew chief told the major. "Going up and out like crazy!"

The crew on the tracking telescopes racing around the desert were calling in their story. Visually they had lost it completely. They had gotten a nice set of telescopic photos of the first phase, then they had failed to adjust quickly enough to the unexpected second phase. Now they were sweeping the sky desperately hoping to pick it up again, but without success.

Major Bronck called for a check on the last and surest guide. Among the instruments loaded in the nose of the rocket was a radio tone-signal sender. As a last resort, they should be able to pick up that signal from the rocket itself, confirm the story they were getting from their radar men. But the men at the radio listening posts reported no sound. And when the major asked if they had had it in the first place, the men admitted that they had not. There had never been any buzz on the ether from the rocket at all!

At that moment, the main Red Sands camp got on the phone. A voice from the commander's office wanted to know why the instruments had not been loaded. It seems that the man responsible for them had just turned up at camp. Jackson had reported his jacket stolen, his pass along with it.

Therefore the instruments for whose installation he had been charged with were still reposing in the camp! There had been a series of bungles, the major thought, as he tried to explain the situation. Obviously the rocket had not been checked as it should have been. Obviously whoever had calculated the course and power of the new fuels had erred very considerably.

"But we've still got it on radar. Yes, sir. We'll hold it. We'll definitely see where it comes down, sir."

The major listened, white-faced, to the commander's angry spluttering. "Yes, I know, sir. Top-secret stuff. But even if it lands a thousand miles away, we'll know, we'll spot it. Even if it managed to assume a satellite orbit, we could keep track of it. It's still going straight up. It might make an orbit. If it did, there'd be no chance of it coming down intact for foreign examination. It would probably circle the Earth a few times in a wild ellipse and then burn up in the atmosphere. We won't lose it."

But lose it they did. The radars held it for two hours more, until finally it was beyond even the limits of their extended capacities. It was going up, up, and out, and even at the last there was no sign of it slowing down enough to form an orbit.

When they finally checked it off as permanently lost, they knew they had witnessed the dawn of a new era. This rocket had assumed and passed the escape velocity. It was headed out into the trackless bounds of outer space. It would never return to Earth.

There was even speculation that its last known course might intersect the Moon's orbit. Opinion in Washington, after all the reports were in, was divided on that. But, in spite of the bungling, the rocket had proved a valuable point. From that day onward, rocketry in the United States took a new tack.

Robin Carew was dreaming. He was falling down an elevator shaft, falling swiftly floor after floor. Looking down at him from the space at the top of the high shaft was a gigantic face, leering at him while stretching a giant arm down the shaft trying to reach him.

In his dream he had the curious mixed-up feeling of wishing the giant could catch him and stop his fall and at the same time being afraid that the giant might be successful and crush him in his huge fingers. He was falling, falling, and squirm as he might, the bottom of this terrible shaft was nowhere in sight.

Robin thrashed around, trying to grab a cable, trying to catch one of the innumerable doors as they rushed past. He banged his hand against one, grabbed tight, jerked.

His eyes snapped open, his mind struggled to gain a grasp of where he was. Nothing seemed to make sense. It was dark and he was bumping around in a tiny, tight space. Yet somehow he couldn't get his feet down, he still was falling. Suddenly he felt dizzy and then became aware of the aches all over his body.

He stopped thrashing, let himself rest. He bumped against the tight side again, took the opportunity to stretch his body out straight and found he could not. He was touching both sides of the narrow space.

His eyes found the space not entirely dark. A faint trace of light showed from a couple of spots somewhere in the dark enclosure. He realized where he was. He remembered now the take-off, the pressure. Why, he thought with a shock, the rocket went off. And I'm in it! We must be falling back to the sands now. In a few minutes we'll crash and that will be the end.

He waited awhile, expecting to be snuffed out at any instant. But there was nothing. Just silence. And now a faint rustling sound where something was stirring and squeaking below him. The animals, he thought, are alive in the space below me.

Then it occurred to him that he was not falling back, but perhaps falling away. His mind, which had been numbed from the pain and pressure, began to reassemble what he knew about rockets. And consciously the thought formed—the sensation of free fall is the same as the sensation of weightlessness found in space rockets. He thought he was falling, but was it not just as likely that instead he was simply beyond gravity?

He felt himself over for broken spots, but somehow miraculously he had not been damaged. His eyes burned and he supposed they were bloodshot. A smear of stickiness around his face convinced him he'd suffered a nosebleed. But otherwise he was sound. He patted the jacket he wore and his hand encountered the cylindrical hardness of the flashlight he'd borrowed from the supply truck. He took it out, snapped it on.

The little padded compartment was the same, the door still tightly wedged. He turned the light carefully around it, saw that the faint break in the total darkness before had come from two tiny openings—glass insets. Probably, he thought, the openings for the instruments, possibly the lens spots for cameras.

He switched off his flashlight, put an eye to an opening. The spot of glass was thick but amazingly clear. He caught a glimpse of blue-black sky and a jagged line of misty gray and white, beneath which stretched the edge of a great brown-and-green bowl. He stared at it in puzzlement, watching it as it swung slowly away.

He realized that the rocket had developed a slow spin, that his viewing spot would gradually circle the region around him. And he realized that the great brownish bowl was the Earth.

From the darkness of the sky he realized that he must already be high in the stratosphere, possibly well beyond it. From the curvature of the horizon, he must be far up, several hundred miles, he guessed. And he could see that the curvature was increasing as he watched. The rocket was still traveling upward, traveling at an immense rate of speed. Its last rockets had blasted away and had left it with a heritage of unparalleled speed.

Robin screwed up his eyes again, mentally calculated. He revised his estimate of his height, doubled it, redoubled it. Why, he might be a thousand miles up, two thousand, perhaps many times that! How fast was he traveling?

He didn't know. He couldn't tell. He remembered the talk about atomic fuels he had overheard. Could it be that the inventors had miscalculated? Could it be that he was already in outer space, heading for the void, never to return to Earth?

He screwed his eye again to the outlet. In the short time since he'd first looked the sky had darkened. It was black, jet-black, and the stars were fiery points of white. The Earth now seemed like a ball, a vast ball whose fringes glowed with the pale mistiness of a sun-lit blanket of air. But where he was there was no air. He was beyond any atmosphere. No whistling of atmospheric friction was present in the length of the silent rocket.

And then a blinding white glow poked a piercing beam through the tiny eye-spot. It was the sun, unshielded, brilliant. In a moment the tiny ray vanished as the rocket continued its slow turning, but Robin in that instant had come to realize what had happened.

He was in outer space, beyond Earth, never to return. He was the first man to reach that untracked void that bounded on all the stars and suns of a universe. He was the first—but who would ever know? Who could ever hear of him, whose helpless body, imprisoned in its shining airtight shell, now seemed doomed to float unsuspected forever on the cosmic tides of interplanetary space?

For a moment Robin felt dizzy again, and the falling sensation wracked him. It was the weightlessness, he knew. The sensation of being without weight was the same as that of being in free fall. And he was operating beyond the effects of gravity. Somehow the atomic rocket fuels had been far greater or far more effective than the inventors had calculated. He knew that they had never intended this rocket to be shot beyond Earth's grip—for if they had, they would not have loaded it with the test animals and they would not have placed a parachute-release arrangement in the nose.

However, it now occurred to him he might be wrong about this. He had seen the reference to the parachute on the loading chart, and he now remembered lettering indicating parachute on the body of the rocket just above the little entryway to the topmost cargo compartment. Still, perhaps there was no parachute there.

He squirmed around again, trying to get used to the nauseating sensation of free fall. He felt as if he had to exert conscious effort to keep his stomach from turning inside out. He felt an impulse to scream, to thrash his hands, and he had to remind himself that it was an illusion.

For a while he just rested, floating in the little space, bumping steadily against one wall or another, with barely inches to spare. The tiny burning sunbeam pierced through again and vanished. Robin looked through the peephole.

It was the dead black of outer space now, a black beyond conception, black with nothing in it to reflect. And against it an inconceivable array of brilliant points of light—the stars in numbers beyond any seen through the blanket of atmosphere. White, with some yellows and reds, and a few bluish ones here and there. The Earth moved again into sight and it was distinctly smaller—though still an impressively vast bowl—but beginning distinctly to resemble a monstrous globe in bas-relief, breathtakingly impressive with its living face, its shifting misty veil of air and water vapor.

Robin became aware that he was thirsty. Yes, and hungry too. He took stock of his situation. He felt through his pockets, came up with one of the candy bars he had taken. He hefted it thoughtfully. Should he eat it now or save it?

That raised the question he had been unconsciously avoiding. Save it for what?

If he was indeed heading for the boundless regions of space, then he was a doomed man. If he ate now, it would mean that starvation would come sooner. If he delayed, doled it to himself in small bits, it could only prolong the agony awhile, but would not the result still be the same?

There was the chance, the odd chance, that the rocket somehow might yet return to Earth. It might describe a circle, an arc, finally begin to fall back. If it did so, the parachute would operate and perhaps land Robin in safety.

Somehow it didn't seem likely to Robin, yet that chance existed. If so, it would have to return to Earth before a full starvation period could result in death. Robin had read somewhere that one could go without food for as much as thirty days, but without water for not more than seven or eight. If the rocket were describing an arc or a parabola, then it would surely start its return within less than that week's leeway.

With this in mind, Robin unwrapped the candy bar and ate it. The second one he would save as long as possible. But what about water?

The squeaking of the test animals broke in on his thoughts. Surely they must have been supplied with some sort of food for their flight? Robin switched himself around to face the floor and began to dig at the padding there. He managed to loosen it, pull it to one side, revealing the floor of the compartment. As he had hoped, it was not a metal plate. His own chamber, the one for the instruments, was not a section in itself but only part of a section paneled off by braced plasterboard. And what was more there were already holes drilled through it so that the air in both sections would be equalized.