by Jerry
This was probably the first time in history that Angel had attempted to stay sober. But it was a wonderful party they were giving in his honor (two floors of the Waldorf plus the ballroom) and people kept insisting that he wouldn’t get another chance at a drink for months and maybe never and everyone was so pleasant that good resolutions were very hard to hold—especially for a dashing young officer who had never tried to make any before.
The occasion was gala and his hand was sore from being pumped by brasshats and newsmen and senators. For at zero four zero eight of the dawning, First Lieutenant Cannon Gray, U.S.A., was taking off for the Moon.
It was in all the papers.
Several times Colonel Anthony, a veritable old maid of a flight surgeon, had tried to pry his charge loose and steer him to bed and, while Angel seemed willing and looked blue eyed and agreeable, he always vanished before the hall was reached. Really, it was not Angel’s fault.
No less than nineteen frail, charming and truly startling young ladies, all professing undying passion and future faithfulness, had turned up one after the other and it was something of a task making each one unaware of the other eighteen and confirmed in her belief in his lasting fidelity.
Such strains should not be placed upon young men about to fly two hundred and forty thousand miles straight up. And it takes hours to say a proper good-by. And it takes more hours to be respectful to brass. And it takes time, time, time to drink up all the toasts shoved at one. All in all it was a very exhausting evening.
Not until zero one zero six did Colonel Anthony manage to catch the collapsing Angel in such a way as to keep him. Wrapped in the massive grip of Colonel Anthony, Angel said, “Candrin four oh eigh—snore!”
The golden head dropped on the Colonel’s eagle and Angel slept.
Cruelly, it was no time at all before somebody was slapping Angel awake again, standing him on his feet, getting him into a uniform, wrapping him up in furs, weighing him down with equipment and generally tangling up a dark, dismal and thoroughly confused morning.
Angel was aware of a howling headache. Small scarlet fiends, especially commissioned by the Prince of Darkness for the purpose, played a gay chorus with red hot hammers just behind Angel’s eyes. He was missing between his chin and his knees and his feet wandered off on various courses.
A FLIGHT major and two sergeants undeniably capped with horns, danced in high anxiety around him and managed to touch him in all the places that hurt.
He was in horrible condition and no mistake.
And the watch on his wrist gleamed as hugely as a steeple clock and said, “Zero three fifty-one,” in an unnecessarily loud voice.
The corridor was at least half the distance to Mars and Angel kept hitting the walls. The casual chairs with which he collided all apologized profusely.
A potted palm fell on him and then became a general who, with idiotic pomposity said, “Fine morning, fine morning lieutenant. You look fit. Fit, sir. No clouds and a splendid full moon.”
He felt the call, one which generals too old for command can never resist, to give a young officer the benefit of a wealth of experience but, fortunately, his aide swiftly interposed.
The aide was brilliant with the usual aide’s enthusiam for paper glory and distaste for generals. Angel knew him well. The aide, in Angel’s day at the Point, had been an Upperclassman, a noted grind, a shuddery bore and the darling of his seniors. He didn’t look any better to Angel this morning.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said the aide sidewise to the general, “but we’ve just time to brief him as we ride down. Here, this way lieutenant.” And, abetted by the usherlike habit peculiar to the breed of aides, he got Angel into the car.
“Now,” said the aide to Angel, who was hard put to stifle his groans and shivers at the unearthly hour, “you have been thoroughly briefed. But there must be a quick resume unless you think you are thoroughly cognizant of your duties.”
Angel would have answered but the sound came out as a groan.
“Very well,” said the aide, just as though his were the really important job and Angel was just a sort of paperweight, very needful to aides but not at all important. “The staff is terribly interested in your surveys.
“You will confine yourself wholly to this one task. It has been thought wisest to entrust a topographer with this first mission because, after all, that’s the way things are done. We’ve insufficient reconnaissance to send up a main body.”
Angel would have added that he was a guinea pig. They didn’t even know if he could really get to the moon. But aides talk like that and lieutenants somehow let them.
“As soon as you have completed a survey of an elementary sort you will televise your maps, then send a complete set in a pilot rocket and return if you are able. But you are not to risk bringing the maps back personally.”
They were little enough sure he’d ever get there, much less get back.
“You will phone all data back to us. Our tests show that the wave can travel much further than that. Anything you may think important, beyond maps and perhaps geology, you are permitted to note and report.
“Under no circumstances are you to attempt to change any control settings in your ship. Everything is all prenavigated and proper setting will be phoned to you for your return.
“All instructions are here in this packet.”
Angel shoved the brown envelope into his jacket and felt twinges of pain as he did so.
“My boy,” said the general, getting a word in there somehow, “this is a glorious occasion. You have been chosen for your courage and loyalty and it is a great honor. A great honor, my boy. You will, I am sure, be a credit to your country.”
Angel didn’t mean it to be a groan but that is the way it came out. They had chosen him because he was the smallest man ever to enter West Point, his height having been waived because of the lump of tin—the Congressional Medal of Honor, no less—he had won as an enlisted man (under age) in the war.
They had needed a topographer who wouldn’t subtract from pay load. Space travel was to begin with seeming to create a demand for a race of small men. But he didn’t tell the general this and they came to the end of the ride.
THE aide expertly ushered Angel out into the bleak blackness of the take-off field, where every officer and newspaperman who could wangle it was all buttoned up to the ears and massed about the whitish blob of the ship.
The flight surgeon took over and protected Angel from the back swats and got him through to the ladder. The two smallish master sergeants—Whittaker and Boyd—were waiting at the top in the open door of the ship. Metal glinted beyond them in the lighted interior.
Whittaker was methodically chewing a huge wad of tobacco and Boyd was humming a bawdy tune as he stared up at the romantically round and glowing moon in the west. They were taking off away from it for reasons best known to the U.S. Navy navigators who had set the course.
A commander was hurrying about, muttering sums, and he paused only long enough to glare at Angel. “Don’t touch those sets!” he growled, and rushed off to take station at the pushbutton which, when all was well, would fire the assist rockets under the carriage on the rails. These were keyed in with the ship’s rockets. The commander glared at his ticking standard chronometer.
The flight surgeon said, “Well, you’ve got a week to sober up, boy. You won’t like this take-off.”
Angel gave him a green smile. It hadn’t been the champagne. It was the apricot cordial that Alice had brought him to take along. “I’ll be fine,” said Angel, managing a ghost of his lovely smile.
“Board!” shouted the commander.
Angel went up the ladder, Whittaker spat out his chaw and lent a hand. Boyd was standing by on the stage and, more to avert the necessity of having to see Angel’s poor navigation than from interest, turned a powerful navy night glass on the Moon. Boyd was very fond of Angel in a cussing sort of way.
But Angel made it without help and had just turned to give the faces,
white blurs there in the floodlights, a parting wave to the click of cameras when Boyd yelled.
“Oh, my aching Aunt!”
There was so much amazed fear in that shout that everyone stared at Boyd and then turned to find what he saw. Angel found Boyd shoving the glasses at him.
“Look, lieutenant!”
Angel hadn’t supposed himself able to see a thousand-dollar bill, much less the clear Moon. And then he jumped as if he’d been clipped with a bullet.
The commander was howling at them to batten down but Angel stood and stared, glasses riveted to the lunar glory.
Those with sharper eyes could see it now. And a wail went up interspersed with awful silences. Even the testy commander turned to stare, looked back to the ship and then whipped about to snatch a quartermaster’s glass from his gunner. He took one look and froze in silence.
Every face was uplifted now, the field was stunned. For there on the moon in print which must have been a hundred miles high, done in lampblack, were the letters—
USSR
CHAPTER II
Take-Off
FOR some days Angel languished in bachelor officers’ quarters, all out of gear. He had been nerved up to a job and then it hadn’t come off. The frustration resulted in lack of any desire for animation of whatever kind.
It was the sort of feeling one gets when he says good-by, good-by, to all his friends at the curb and then, just as he starts off in the car, runs out of gas and has to call a garage.
His room was littered with newspapers which he had long since perused. The mess-boy brought stacks in every now and then until bed and furniture seemed to be constructed badly of newsprint.
His own personal tragedy was such that he hardly cared for the details. Instead of being the first man to fly to the Moon he was again just a simple lieutenant with nothing more than his deserved reputation for angelic wickedness. It came very hard to him, poor chap.
But it came very hard to the world as well. For events had transpired which made any former event including World War II a petty incident.
The world had been conquered without firing any other shots than those needed to propel Russian forces to the Moon. The head of the Russian state had promptly issued manifestoes in no uncertain terms demanding that all armies and navies be scrapped everywhere and Russian troops admitted as garrisons to every world capital. Russia had plans.
One by one countries had begun to fly the hammer and sickle without ever seeing a single Red army star.
For it was obvious to everyone. Even statesmen. All Russia had to do was launch atom bombs from the Moon at any offender to destroy him wholly.
The mystery of how Russia had solved the atom bomb and had so adroitly manufactured all the plutonium it could ever need was solved when a Russian scientist stated for the press that he had needed but one year and the S my the report. Everybody began to quiet down, for at first there had been talk of traitors and selling the secret.
But now that it was at last obvious that there never had been any secret and that self-navigating missiles could be very easily launched from the Moon at any Earth target and that, such was the gravity difference, it would be nearly impossible to bomb-saturate the Moon from Earth, even the die-hards could see they were whipped.
A demand on Washington had come from Russia for the entire U.S. atom stockpile and Congress was debating right now, without much enthusiasm, a law to give it up.
It had been very striking the way the morale of the world had collapsed, seeing up there in the sky those giant letters, U.S.S.R. Communists in every land had begun to crawl out from under dubious cover and prepare welcomes for Russian troops (and the Russians had been bidding the foreign communists to crawl right back again).
To understate the matter, there was some little consternation in the nations and peoples of the world. And whatever labor thought about it they at least remembered that of all the civilized nations of Earth, Russia had been the only one after World War II to employ, use, exploit (and let die) slaves.
And then, just as surrender was being accomplished, the U.S. Naval Intelligence, working with the State Department, had done some interception and unscrambling and decoding which again gave everyone pause. By great diligence and watchfulness they had managed to tap in on the Moscow-Moon circuit to discover that all was not well.
Angel had been reading about the Moon commander. The man was General Slavinsky and at first reading Angel had decided, with a bitterness not usually found in celestial sprites, that he hated the trebly-damned intestines of General Slavinsky.
Slavinsky was known as the “Avenger of Stalingrad” and had been a very popular general in his own country. The Germans, however, had not liked him, jealous no doubt of the thorough sadism of the Russian.
When Slavinsky had not been winning battles he had been butchering prisoners and he had turned his men loose to loot in many a neutral town and conquered province. Slavinsky evidently had himself all mixed up with Genghis Khan, complete with pyramids of skulls.
The pictures in the papers showed Slavinsky to be a big, powerful man, meticulously uniformed, always smoking cigarettes. Typical corporal-made-good, Slavinsky had been Moscow’s favorite peasant. About as cultured as a bull, he was quite proud of his refinement. And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia’s most trusted post, the Moonbase.
It was here that dictatorship displayed its weakness. Bred by force out of starvation, the Russian state had very scant background of tradition. And trustworthy military forces are trustworthy only by their tradition. Slavinsky owed no debt to anyone but the Russian dictator. The Russian people would not know one dictator from another.
IT DEVELOPED, when Slavinsky was well dug in, that he had been a Trotskyite since boyhood arid the murder of his ideal in Mexico had left him festering very privately. At least that was a fine excuse.
Once there Slavinsky began to make certain demands on Moscow. Moscow was beginning to be acrimonious about it. The dictator had ordered Slavinsky home and Slavinsky had told the dictator where he could stuff Moscow. Moscow was now threatening to withhold needed supplies.
U.S. Naval Intelligence and the State Department were very interested and rumors flew amongst the personnel of the U.S. Moon Expedition that something was about to break.
Angel lay on his back, feet against the wall-paper and gloomed. When a knock came on the door he supposed it was another load of papers and sadly said, “Come in.”
But it was a colonel who stood there and Angel very hastily bounced up to sharp attention.
“We’re having callers, son,” said the Colonel. “Be down in the court in five minutes.”
Disinterestedly, Angel got himself into a blouse and wandered out. He wondered if he would ever feel human and normal again. All his life he had been a somewhat notorious but really rather unimportant runt and the big chance to be otherwise had passed, it seemed, forever.
He hardly noticed his fellow officers as he lined up in the court. Most of them were of the Moon gang, destined to go, once upon a time, in various capacities on the abandoned expedition. None of them looked very cheerful.
There was hardly a ripple or a glance when the big Cadillac drew up at the curb. Their senior barked attention and the officers drew up. Only then, when ordered to see nothing and be robot, did Angel note that the car had the SecNav’s flag on it.
Four civilians, namely the secretary of state, the secretaries of defense, war and the navy, alighted, followed by a five star admiral and a five star general. They were a dispirited group and they cast wilted glances over the lines of young officers.
The colonel in command of the detachment fell in with them behind the secretary of state and proceeded with this strange inspection.
Finally the group drew off and stood beside the Cadillac talking in low tones until they nodded agreement and then waited.
The colonel sang out, “Lieutenant Gray!”
Angel started from his trance, came to attenti
on, paced front and center and automatically saluted the group. The colonel looked baffled as he came forward.
In a voice the others could not overhear, the colonel said, “I have no idea why they chose you, Angel. They were looking specifically for the tamest officer here. God knows how or why, but you won. They couldn’t have looked at the records f”
“Thank you, sir,” said Angel.
The colonel gave him a hard look and led him off to the car.
They didn’t say anything to him. Angel got in beside the driver and, when the doors had shut behind the rest, they moved off at a dispirited speed.
Nothing was said until they arrived in the driveway of the White House and then the general told Angel to follow them.
The abashed lieutenant alighted on the gravel, looked up at the big hanging lantern and the door, then quickly went after his superiors. This was all very deflating stuff to him. The closest he had ever come to the President was leaving his card in the box for the purpose in the Pentagon Building—and he doubted that the President ever read the cards dropped by officers newly come to station or passing through.
He hardly saw the hall and was still dazed when the general again asked his name, sotto voce.
“Mr. President,” said the five star, “may I introduce First Lieutenant Cannon Gray.”
Angel shook the offered hand and then dizzily found a chair like the rest. All eyes were on him. Nobody was very sure of him, that was a fact. Nobody liked what he was doing.
“Lieutenant Fay—” began the President.
“Gray, sir.”
“Oh yes, of course. Lieutenant Gray, we have brought you here to ask you to perform a mission of vital importance to your country. You may withdraw now without stigma to yourself when I tell you that you may not return from this voyage.
“We considered it useless to ask for volunteers since then we would have had to explain a thing which I believe we all agree is the most humiliating thing this country has ever had to do. We are not prepared just now for publicity. You may withdraw.”