For those who vicariously live among the great there was the Washington column. “Local jewellers report a sharp, unseasonal drop in sales. Insiders attribute it to panic among the ranks of Dan (Heads-I-Win-Tails-You-Lose) Holland and his little Dutch Boys over the fearless expose of his machinations by crusading Senator (Fighting Bob) Hoyt. Similar reports in the trade from the West Coast, where Wilson (Wheel-Chair) Stuart and the oh-so-visionary-but-where’s-the-dough pseudo-scientists of the A.S.F.S.F. hang out. Meanwhile Danny Boy remains holed up in his swank ten-room penthouse apartment claiming illness. Building employees say however that not one of his many callers during the past week has carried the little black bag that is the mark of the doctor! . . . What man-about-Washington has bought an airline ticket and has his passport visaed to Paraguay, a country where officials are notorious for their lack of co-operation in extradition proceedings—if their palms are properly greased?”
For lovers of verse there was a quatrain by one of the country’s bestloved kindly humourists. His whimsical lines ran:
They say Dan Holland will nevermore
Go anywhere near a hardware store.
He’ll make a detour by train or boat
Because he knows he should cut his throat.
Novak smiled sourly at that one, and heard a great tooting of horns. It went on, and on, and on, and on. Incredulously he clocked it for three solid minutes and then couldn’t take any more. He pulled on his pants and strode from the pre-fab into a glare of headlights. There were jalopies, dozens of them, outside the fence, all mooing.
Nearing ran to him. “You ought to be in bed, Dr. Novak!” he shouted. “That doctor told us not to let you——”
“Never mind that! What the hell’s going on?” yelled Novak, towing Nearing to the gate. The two guards were there—husky kids, blinking in the headlights. They’d been having trouble filling the guard roster, Novak knew. Members were dropping away faster every day.
“Kids from L.A.!” Nearing shouted in his ear. “Came to razz us!”
A rhythmical chant of “O-pen up!” began to be heard from the cars over the horns.
Novak bawled at them: “Beat it or we’ll fire on you!” He was sure some of them heard it, because they laughed. One improbably blonde boy in a jalopy took it personally and butted his car into the rocket field’s strong and expensive peripheral fence. It held under one car’s cautious assault, but began to give when another tanker joined the blonde.
“All right, Eddie!” Novak shouted to the elder of the gate guards. “Take your shotgun and fire over their heads.” Eddie nodded dumbly and reached into the sentry box for his gun. He took it out in slow motion and then froze.
Novak could understand, even if he couldn’t sympathize. The glaring headlights, the bellowing horns, the methodical butting of the two mastodans, the numbers of them, and their ferocity. “Here,” he said, “gimme the goddam thing.” He was too sore to be scared; he didn’t have time to fool around. The shotgun boomed twice and the youth of America shrieked and wheeled their cars around and fled.
He handed back the shotgun and told Eddie: “Don’t be scared, son.” He went to the phone in the machine shop and found it was working tonight. People had been cutting the ground line lately.
He got the Stuart home. “Grady? This is Dr. Novak. I want to talk to Mr. Stuart right away and please don’t tell me it’s late and he’s not a well man. I know all that. Do what you can for me, will you?”
“I’ll try, Dr. Novak.”
It was a long, long wait and then the old man’s querulous voice said: “God almighty, Novak. You gone crazy? What do you want at this time of night?”
Novak told him what had happened. “If I’m any judge,” he said, “we’re going to be knee-deep in process servers, sheriff’s deputies, and God-knows-what-else by tomorrow morning because I fired over their heads. I want you to dig me up a real, high-class lawyer and fly him out here tonight.”
After a moment the old man said: “You were quite right to call me. I’ll bully somebody into it. How’re you doing?”
“I can’t kick. And thanks.” He hung up and stood irresolutely for a moment. The night was shot by now—he’d had a good, long rest anyway——
He headed for the refractories lab and worked on the heat of composition. He cracked it at six a.m. and immediately started to compound the big batch of materials that would fuse into the actual throat-liner parts and steering vane. It was a grateful change of pace after working in grams to get going on big stuff. He had done it by ten-thirty and got some coffee.
The lawyer had arrived: a hard-boiled, lantern-jawed San Francisco Italian named DiPietro. “Don’t worry,” he grimly told Novak. “If necessary, I’ll lure them on to the property and plug ’em with my own gun for trespassing. Leave it in my hands.”
Novak did, and put in an eighteen-hour stretch on fabricating pieces of the throat liner. Sometime during the day Amy Stuart brought him some boxes and he mumbled politely and put them somewhere.
With his joints cracking, he shambled across the field, not noticing that his first automatic gesture on stepping out of the shop into the floodlight area was to measure the Prototype with his eye in a kind of salute.
“How’d it go?” he asked DiPietro.
“One dozen assorted,” said the lawyer. “They didn’t know their law and even if they did I could have bluffed them. The prize was a little piece of jail-bait with her daddy and shyster. Your shotgun caused her to miscarry; they were willing to settle out of court for twenty thousand dollars. I told them our bookkeeper will send his bill for five hundred dollars’ worth of medical service as soon as he can get around to it.”
“More tomorrow?”
“I’ll stick around. The word’s spread by now, but there may be a couple of die-hards.”
Novak said: “Use your judgment. Believe I can do some work on the servos before I hit the sack.”
The lawyer looked at him speculatively, but didn’t say anything.
XVII.
A morning came that was like all the other mornings except that there was nothing left to do. Novak wandered disconsolately through the field, poking at this detail or that, and Amy came up to him.
“Mike, can I talk to you?”
“Sure,” he said, surprised. Was he the kind of guy people asked that kind of question?
“How are the clothes?”
“Clothes?”
“Oh, you didn’t even look. Those boxes. I’ve been shopping for you. I could see you’d never have time for it yourself. You don’t mind?”
There it was again. “Look,” he said, “have I been snapping people’s heads off?”
“Yes,” she said in a small voice. “You didn’t know that, did you? Do you know you have a week-old beard on you?”
He felt it in wonder.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “The things you’ve accomplished. Maybe nobody ever saw anything like it. It’s finished now, isn’t it?”
“So it is,” he said. “I didn’t think—just installing the last liner segment and hooking on the vane. Mechanical oper——
“God, we’ve done it!” He leaned against one of Proto’s delta fins, shaking uncontrollably.
“Come on, Mike,” she said, taking his arm. She led him to his camp cot and he plunged into sleep.
She was still there when he woke, and brought him coffee and toast. He luxuriated in the little service and then asked abashedly: “Was I pretty bad?”
“You were obsessed. You were a little more than human for ten days.”
“Holland!” he said suddenly, sitting full up. “Did anybody—”
“I’ve notified him. Everything’s going according to plan. Except—you won’t be on the moon ship.”
“What are you talking about, Amy?”
She smiled brightly. “The counter-campaign. The battle for the public being waged by those cynical, manipulating, wonderful old bastards, Holland and my father. Didn’t you guess w
hat my part in it was? I’m a pretty girl, Mike, and pretty girls can sell anything in America. I’m going to be the pilot—hah! pilot!—of the first moon ship. So gallant, so noble, and such a good figure. I’m going to smile nicely and male America will decide that as long as it can’t go to bed with me, the least it can do is cheer me on to the Moon.”
She was crying. “And then I showed I was my father’s daughter. The cynical Miss Stuart said we have a fireworks display in the takeoff, we have conflict and heroism, we have glamour, what we need is some nice refined sex. Let’s get that dumb engineer Novak to come along. A loving young couple making the first trip to the Moon. Irresistible. Pretty girl, handsome man—you are handsome without that beard, Mike.” She was crying too hard to go on. He mechanically patted her shoulder.
Her sobs abated. “Go on,” he said.
“Nothing to go on about. I told ’em I wouldn’t let you go. I love you too much.”
His arm tightened around her. “That’s all right,” he said. “I love you too much to let you go without me.”
She turned her tear-stained face to him. “You’re not going to get noble with me——” she began. And then: “Ouch! Mike, the beard!”
“I’ll shave,” he said, getting up and striding to the lab sink.
“Don’t cut yourself, Mike,” she called after’ him. “But—please hurry!”
There was one crazy, explosive week.
There was something in it for everybody. It was a public relations man’s dream of heaven.
Were you a businessman? “By God, you have to give the old boy credit! Slickest thing I ever heard of—right under the damn Reds’ noses, stuck right out there in the desert and they didn’t realise that a rocket ship was a rocket ship! And there’s a lot of sense in what Holland had to say about red tape. Makes you stop and wonder—the armed services fooling around for twenty years and not getting to first base, but here this private club smacks out a four-bagger first time at bat. Illegal? Illegal? Now mister, be sensible. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not any admirer of the late F.D.R., but he did get us the atom bomb even if he did practically hand it to the Reds right after. But my point is, F.D.R. didn’t go to Congress with a presidential message that we were going to try to make an atomic bomb. He just quietly diverted the money and made one. Some things you have to do by the book; others you just plain can’t. For my money, Dan Holland’s a statesman.”
Were you a girl? “Oh, that dreamy man Mike! It just chills me when I think of him flying all the way to the Moon, but it’s kind of wonderful, too. Did you ever notice the way he’s got kind of a dimple but not quite on the left when he smiles?”
Were you a man? “Amy’s got real looks and class. Brains, too, they tell me, and God knows, she’s got guts. The kind of girl you’d want to marry, if you know what I mean. He’s a lucky guy.”
Were you old folks? “Such a lovely couple. I don’t know why more young people aren’t like that nowadays. You can see how much they’re in love, the way the look at each other. And the idea of them going to the Moon! I certainly never thought I’d see it in my time, though of course I knew that some day . . . Perhaps their rocket ship won’t work. No, that’s absurd. Of course it’ll work. They look so nice when they smile at each other!”
Were you young folks? “I can’t get over it. Just a pair of ordinary Americans like you and me, a couple of good-looking kids that don’t give a damn and they’re going to shoot off to the Moon. I saw them in the parade and they aren’t any different from you and me. I can’t get over it.”
Were you a newspaper publisher? “Baby, this is it! The perfect cure for that tired feeling in the circulation department. I want Star-Banner-Bugle-and-Times-News to get Mike-and-Amy conscious and stay that way. Pictures, pictures, pictures. Biographies, interviews with roommates, day-by-day coverage, our best woman for Amy and our best man for Mike. The hell with the cost; the country’s on a Mike-and-Amy binge. And why shouldn’t it be? A couple of nice young kids and they’re going to do the biggest thing since the discovery of fire. A landmark in the history of the human race! And confidentially, this is what a lot of the boys have been waiting for with Bennet. Naturally only a dirty Red rag would attack a fellow-publisher, but I don’t see any ethical duty to keep me from sawing off a limb Bennet crawled out on all by himself. He’s mouse-trapped. To keep his hard core of moron readership he’s got to keep pretending that Proto’s still a fake and Holland’s still a crook and only taper off slowly. I’m almost sorry for the dirty old man, but he made his bed.”
Were you a congressman? “Hmmm. Very irregular. In a strict sense illegal. Congress holds the purse strings. Damn uppity agencies and commissions. Career men. Mike and Amy. Wonder if I could get photographed with them for my new campaign picture. Hmmm.”
On the fourth day of the crazy week they were in Washington, in Holland’s office.
“How’s it going?” he demanded.
“I don’t know how MacArthur stood it at his age,” Amy muttered.
There was a new edition to Holland’s collection of memorabilia on the wall behind his desk: a matted and framed front page from the New York Times.
HOLLAND BREAKS SILENCE, CALLS ASFSF NO FRONT
SAYS CLUB HAS MOON SHIP READY TO MAKE TRIP
WILSON STUART DAUGHTER, ENGINEER TO PILOT
The agitation of the Times was clearly betrayed in the awkwardly rhyming second line.
“The Air Force gentlemen are here, Mr. Holland,” said the desk intercom.
“Send them in, Charlie.”
Three standard-brand Air Force colonels, one general and an off-brand captain walked in. The captain looked lost among his senior officers, six-footers all. He was a shrimp.
“Ah, gentlemen. General McGovern, Colonels Ross, Goldthwaite, and Behring. And the man you’ve been waiting to meet, Captain Dilaccio. Gentlemen, you know Amy and Mike, of course. Please be seated.”
They sat, and there was an ugly pause. The general exploded, almost with tears in his voice: “Mister Holland, for the last time. I will be perfectly frank with you. This is the damn’dest, most unreasonable thing I ever heard of. We have the pilots, we have the navigators, we have the experience, and we ought to have the moon ship!”
Holland said gravely: “No, General. There’s no piloting involved. The landing operation simply consists of putting the throat-vane servo on automatic control of the plumb bobs and running in the moderator rods when you hit. The navigation is child’s play. True, the target is in motion, but it’s big and visible. And you have no experience in moon ships.”
“Mister Holland——” said the general.
Holland interrupted blandly. “And even if there were logic on your side, is the public deeply interested in logic? I think not. But the public is deeply interested in Amy and Mike. Why, if Amy and Mike were to complain that the Air Force had been less than fair with them—”
His tone was bantering, but McGovern broke in, horrified: “No, no, no, no, Mr. Holland! They aren’t going to do anything like that, are they? Are you?”
Holland answered for them. “Of course not, General. They have no reason to do anything like that—do they?”
“Of course not,” the general said glumly. “Captain Dilaccio, good luck.” He and the colonels shook hands with the puny little captain and filed out.
“Welcome to the space hounds,” Novak told Dilaccio, trying to be jovial.
The captain said indistinctly: “Pleasure’m sure.”
On the flight back to Barstow he didn’t say much else. They knew had been chosen because he was (a) a guided-missile specialist, (b) single and with no close relations, (c) small and endowed with a singularly sluggish metabolism. He was slated for the grinding, heartbreaking, soul-chilling job of surviving in a one-man pressure dome until the next trip brought him company and equipment.
On the seventh day of the crazy week, Daniel Holland heard somebody behind him say irritably: “Illegal? Illegal? No more illegal than Roosevelt taking funds
and developing the atomic bomb. Should he have gone to Congress with a presidential message about it? It was the only way to do it, that’s all.”
Holland smiled faintly. It had gone over. The old clichés in their mouths have been replaced by new clichés. The sun blazed into his eyes from the polished shell of the moon ship, but he didn’t turn or squint. He was at least a sub-hero today.
He caught a glimpse of MacIlheny as the band struck up the sedate, eighteenth-century “President’s March.” MacIlheny was on the platform, as befitted the top man of the A.S.F.S.F., though rather far out on one of the wings. MacIlheny was crying helplessly. He had thought he might be the third man, but he was big-bodied and knew nothing about guided missiles. What good was an insurance man in the Moon?
The President spoke for only five minutes, limiting himself to one humourous literary allusion. (“This purloined letter—stainless steel, thirty-six-feet, plainly visible for sixty miles.”) Well, he was safely assured of his place in history. No matter what miracles of statesmanship in war or peace he performed, as long as he was remembered he would be remembered as President during the first moon flight. The applause was polite for him, and then slowly swelled. Amy and Mike were walking arm in arm down a hollow column of M.P.s, Marines and A.F.P.s. Captain Dilaccio trailed a little behind them. The hollow column led from the shops to the gantry standing beside Proto.
Collected Short Fiction Page 210