by Jerry
And I? Well, few elementary textbooks provide the delicious shivers of a Machen or a James. Yet over and over, with profound unease, I read a simple passage in a high school Elements of Geology:
When the Earth was torn out of the gassy fabric of the sun by some errant star, its surface solidified quickly. Within fifteen thousand years, Earth was solidly encrusted, although this crust from time to time collapsed inward upon a core which contracted a little as it cooled. Such collapses, perhaps six or seven of them, formed Earth’s mountains. . . .
But the core is liquid still, molten at prodigious temperatures. If volcanos have not already been convincing, to descend deep into any mine is to learn that the core of the earth is a furnace.
GANYMEDE PLEASURE CLUB
A pretty thought!
In fact, it might be as well to heed my friend Griffenhoek. It would be improper of him, it would be maniacal, to act against us. Still, perhaps we should try a little harder to make sense. Otherwise, someday. . . .
Tick-tick-tick-tick.
THE SPACE MAN
Oliver Saari
This moving autobiography of a rocket pilot gives us a keenly intuitive glimpse of the future. A future that will break sharply with tradition and bring us an entirely new model of hero.
SEEING the restaurant full of people, Lantry felt a foolish panic, a strong impulse to rush back up to the hotel room. Fie was relieved to find the big man already seated at the table.
“Hi, Lantry,” said Burns, his broad face breaking into a smile of genuine friendliness. “I was beginning to think you’d fallen through that open window you’re so fond of.”
“I’ve been putting off coming down here,” sighed Lantry, sinking into a chair with obvious relief.
“We could go up—”
“No. The Doctor says I have to crawl out of my hole sometime.”
He tried to ignore the fact that people were turning to look at him, their whispers spreading like ripples through the room. They were nice people, curious but friendly, and Lantry knew he’d remember their interest. But now it was hard to take.
“How about a drink?” Burns said, finishing the olive off a martini.
“We’d better eat first,” said Lantry cautiously. “Tonight I want to stay conscious.”
He ordered a steak, thinking: tomorrow it’s S-rations and the centrifuge—after which space itself would be a relief, except for the loneliness. They ate in silence. Lantry didn’t feel like talking now . . . what was left to say? How it felt to be going out there alone again? The words would be hard to find for that.
“Tired?” Burns seemed to read his mind the way he often did.
“A little.”
“We don’t have to talk,” Burns said, leaning his massive frame back in a chair that creaked threateningly. “Lord knows you’ve given me stuff for a dozen articles already. Let’s just call this a send-off. Isn’t there anyone else you’d have liked to see?”
“No. My father and mother both passed away during my last trip.”
“You’ve mentioned a brother.”
“I saw him at the farm. He couldn’t take time off to come here—it’s harvest time.”
Burns looked down at his big knuckles engulfing the martini glass.
“What made you start it, Lantry?” he said without looking up.
“I don’t know,” Lantry stalled. “What makes bullfighters fight bulls?”
“Sure. ‘Who pushed Columbus?’ ”
“It isn’t the same thing,” snapped Lantry, irritated.
“All right, then, who pushed Lantry?”
“Sorry, Jeff. I’m a little touchy on that Columbus stuff.” He remembered a little rural school, a long time ago, where he’d written a schoolboy’s essay on exploring space, and the kids had named him Chris Columbo.
“Tell me about it,” said Burns.
Lantry could feel himself responding to the question. It was one he’d asked himself often enough—and sometimes he hadn’t known the answer!
“How about you, Burns? Would you go if you weren’t—you know—if you had the chance?”
“Yes!”
The other’s big, powerful frame was tense, his muscles moving under the light suitcoat. Lantry winced as he saw the knuckles turn white over the martini glass. The wide-set brown eyes had a deep look, like space itself. Now I know why I liked the articles he wrote, Lantry thought. Suddenly he wanted very badly to talk.
“Do you want the whole thing—story of my life? It might be dull.”
“I’ll take the chance,” said Burns.
O.K. (said Lantry), you asked for it.
I was the second of two children. That isn’t many for a North Dakota farm family, but my Pa got taken sick about the time I was born. My brother was five years older than I, a bookish sort of kid, always with his face buried in chemistry sets and fantastic novels. One of my earliest recollections is tearing a page out of one of his magazines. He made me suffer for it and I never did it again.
There are maybe a million jobs to do on a farm, even with a hired hand and a tireless tractor. With Pa sickly, we had to start pitching in pretty young. The two of us were great pals. Sure, we’d fight sometimes—but he was just enough bigger and older so the fights never lasted long.
Between chores, Paul still found time for his hobbies. Science was the basis of most of them, and his enthusiasm bubbled over on me. We’d milk cows together and he’d talk about Louis Pasteur. We’d pitch hay and he’d ply me with Isaac Newton.
In North Dakota the stars are almost as clear and bright as out in space . . . In the evenings, on the way home from town, Paul and I would park the pickup in the prairie and sit there looking up at the stars. Paul seemed to know all of them by name—Orion, Vega, Aldebaran, and the Big Dipper spilling around.
Those stars were real, he’d tell me with a funny emphasis. They were big and they were far. He’d point up at Rigel and say, “Five hundred light-years,” and then try to explain how far that was, using the trip from town as a unit. I paid close attention because I was really interested; the stars drew me. But the real scope of the Universe was beyond me. In spite of Paul’s facts and figures, I still felt the stars were up there just for decoration, like the lights on a Christmas tree.
Then something clicked in me.
On a wonderfully clear night in July, Paul was pointing out Antares—a little red spark settling on the horizon. Maybe it was the horizon, and the knowledge that the star was beyond it. Paul told me how the sun, our sun, could be put in the center of Antares, and how the earth could move around in its orbit and still be entirely within that star. I could visualize the entire picture: our earth but a speck of dust beside the sun; the sun itself a lesser speck beside Antares; and all three of them insignificant atoms of a huge galaxy, which itself was but a tiny unit of a vaster cosmos. At that moment I realized the stars were not up there for my sole amusement.
My feelings were confused. I was frightened, depressed. I saw the race of man as something less than the swarming microbes Paul had told me about. And yet the search for truth and knowledge was nobler than wishful self-inflation.
I was ten years old. My philosophy of life was formed on that night.
Astronomy was very much in the news in those days. The first Orbital Space Station had just been shot up in ten sections. Pictures and data from up there started coming in. The newspapers didn’t give much play to the really important stuff—the spectrographic and hard vacuum data—but there was lots of speculation about Mars, Venus, and the moon. Paul and I ate it up.
Alphonse Craig, the Space Station man, was our personal hero. He was somehow far more glamorous than the tall, handsome men who romped around the planets and extra-Solar systems in the video space operas. The fact that he was all alone out there made him even more wonderful. He was closer to the stars than any other man had ever been.
I found out when I grew a little older that the desire to go to the stars is almost an organic condition, like a leaky
heart. Some people don’t have it at all. Those that do can’t escape it.
Paul and I had it! We’d climb up on the roof in our pajamas and watch the August meteor showers. A big one streaking across the sky would send shivers of ecstasy through me. I remember thinking, that little piece of rock wade it, why can’t I?
We looked for the Space Station, of course, but it was too small to be seen . . . Know what I’m driving at, Burns, or am I wasting my breath?
The big man had hardly moved. He was still staring down, twirling the martini glass with thumb and forefinger. He hadn’t been taking any notes. Now he looked up.
“The stars in New Jersey may not be as bright as the ones you’ve seen,” he said slowly, “but they’re the same ones!”
I know (said Lantry).
You’re about my age—you must remember when they shot the parts of the first moon rocket up to the Space Station. Alphonse Craig was putting them together. Greatest single-handed construction job ever done! He had to start from scratch, learning all the null-g and vacuum techniques without another pair of hands nor another brain to help him.
How the videos played him up!
He was too busy to send anything but official signals, and I understand he hated the fuss being made over him. That didn’t stop the popularizers! The public wanted Craig, and Craig it got—by proxy of course—heroically battling the dangers of space . . . Now I know why he stayed up there so long—he was afraid to come down!
Everyone had more or less taken it for granted that Craig would pilot the moonship once it was finished. But all the time somebody else was being groomed for the job—you know—Bob Jessup. When the moonship was about two-thirds done, Craig was ordered down for a rest. As it turned out, the rest was permanent. He never went into space again.
Paul and I took it pretty hard. I guess we had both identified ourselves with Craig in our hero-worship. Paul was pretty well buried under farm work, and it looked like whatever dreams he’d had for himself were going to take root right there. I’d had only a second-hand dream—a hand-me-down from Paul, like the clothes I wore. But losing it hurt. I was an exceptionally puny, pimple-faced kid of fourteen, and even more than Paul I must have longed to fly out to the moon in my imagination with Craig.
Craig had spent almost two years out in space—and now they were sending another man to take his place! We were stunned at the injustice. It never occurred to us Craig might not have wanted to go—we only felt he’d been deprived of the right.
Nights we’d lie awake at the radio, waiting for news. Coming down, Craig’s shuttle-rocket almost cracked up in the Pacific because the weight was doing funny things to his insides. He was in a hospital, but the public demanded him and within a week he was out of there.
The New York reception broke all records. He was all but smothered and cheered to death. The city spent two days digging its way out of ticker tape—worse than the ’57 snowstorm. Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington left Craig barely enough strength to crawl back home to Minnesota to rest. He took a temporary job teaching space kinetics at the University, liked the life, and decided to stay.
The first moonship was a failure, so you don’t hear much about it any more. Jessup was as good a rocketeer as ever lived, but he was tackling a completely new thing. He crashlanded in Imbrium, alive but unable to get back. The information he radioed did more than anything to make the second ship a success . . . I’ve seen the wreck. The air had leaked out slowly, and Jessup was still inside, dried like a mummy. . . .
I’m not boring you, am I, Jeff—telling you all this stuff you already know?
All right, then . . . As I said, Alphonse Craig settled down in Minnesota. Paul and I started talking up the idea of making a pilgrimage—of actually visiting Craig, maybe even talking to him. The idea scared me at first—I felt too inadequate, even for that. But Paul fired me up until I was eager to go. We planned the trip and talked about it for a year, but somehow the necessary time and money never came together. Finally the idea died out, became just another dream, almost as unattainable as space itself.
For obvious reasons, I was never meant to be a farmer—or anything else that I could see. Without encouragement, I’d never have dreamed of college. The encouragement I got—from my teachers, from Paul, but most of all because Craig was there at Minnesota, only a few hundred miles away.
I won’t bore you with what it took. Without Paul’s help I couldn’t have done it . . . But I was on a Minneapolis bus just a day after my nineteenth birthday, scared to death and carrying all my belongings in a small suitcase. And soon I was a Freshman student, sick because they wouldn’t let me take space kinetics till the fourth year. I’d never been more lonely, and my dream had never seemed farther.
I don’t know just how I got up the nerve to call Alphonse Craig on the telephone—but I did just that. He had a reedy, absent-minded sort of voice. What I said that prompted him to invite me to his house I never knew, and you can imagine how I felt.
He came to the door himself, a wiry fellow of medium height with very bright eyes which looked me over speculatively.
“Ah, yes—it’s Lantry, isn’t it? Come in.”
I shivered with something as near to ecstasy as I’ve ever felt. My vision blurred, and I wondered vaguely what the deep thumping was before realizing it was my heart. Dumbly I followed Craig into a room that was littered with books, diagrams and calculations.
“I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Craig,” I managed finally. “I’ve been—uh—interested—”
“Yes, yes,” chuckled Craig. He was still looking me over with those bright, lively eyes. “How old did you say you were, Lantry?”
I told him.
“Grew up on a farm, you said. Your health good—heart, lungs, all that stuff?”
“The Health Service thought so.”
“How about eyesight?”
“Twenty-twenty.”
He stood there awhile as if in deep thought, still looking at me speculatively. Then he sighed and sat down behind the littered desk, motioning me to a chair.
“You said you were interested in space flight, Lantry,” he said. “How interested?”
“All my life—that is—I’ve been studying rocketry and the associated sciences—”
“Yes, yes,” Craig said impatiently. “It might interest you to know that I looked up your grade transcripts and Health Service report after you called—very good, both of them. What I meant was interest of another sort.”
“I’ve followed your—”
“I didn’t mean that either,” he said, reddening a little. “What I meant was, did you ever think of space flight in a personal sense—of trying it yourself?”
My throat was dry and I swallowed trying to loosen it up so I could speak. “I’d—I’d give anything—” I managed finally. Then the old feeling of shame and inferiority locked my tongue.
“Go on,” prompted Craig, leaning forward and looking at me intently.
“I’ve never thought of myself as the type!” I cried, stung to anger. “Look at me! How can I ever—”
“Exactly what I meant,” interrupted Craig. I had the feeling he knew my answers before I uttered them. We sat for awhile in silence, while I cringed inside and wished I hadn’t come.
“Lantry,” he said finally, “you know the second moonship is just off the drafting boards.”
“Yes.”
“It’ll be a couple of years before she’s assembled out at the Station and ready to fly. How would you like to fly that ship out to the moon?”
I thought he was having a cruel joke at my expense. I must have looked about ready to cry, because Craig’s face softened with understanding.
“I’m not joking,” he said softly. “And I know you don’t think of yourself as the heroic type. But space travel is a new thing, and it’s going to need a new kind of hero.
“Let me tell you about myself, Lantry. I was a space-struck kid like you. I pointed my entire life at being a rocket pilot. There were
thousands of others like me, but I was always sure I’d be the one to make it first. I should have known by the time I was fifteen that I wasn’t born for space. Do you know what stopped me? I was too big!”
“But you’re not so—you were on the Station—” I stammered.
“Sure. The Station job requires a little bit of brawn—wrestling with masses takes muscles, even in null-g. But have you ever stopped to think what the payload of a space ship is worth? Even atomic fuel needs exhaust mass, and no one’s been able to make a ship that will land on the moon and take off again with a mass ratio of less than ten to one . . . Lantry, do you know what the ideal space pilot would be? A weightless can of hard vacuum! But that lacks one essential feature, the ability to punch the right buttons. So we must look for the next best thing, the puniest, skinniest human being who still has the brain and the heart to reach for the stars . . . Lantry, how tall are you without those elevator shoes?”
“Around four eleven,” I lied.
“And what do you weigh?” asked Craig, smiling.
“Ninety pounds,” I lied again.
“That’s just 100 pounds less than the average space opera hero. A hundred pounds less of useless, oxygen and food consuming muscles. For every pound we have to provide ten more pounds of fuel, which means bigger tanks, bigger ship, still more fuel . . . Do you still think you’re not the type, Lantry?”
I must have stood for a long time open-mouthed. Like the day I first knew the stars, I discovered myself. A thousand memories of being hemmed in by bigger men, by looming shoulders, tumbled out and vanished. I saw Paul, my big brother, lifting sacks, pitching hay—three to my one. He could make his way on earth. But I was made for space!
Craig must have understood and liked what he saw in my face, because he reached over and grasped my arm.