by Jerry
“But mostly they humor us, huh?” Moncrief said and grinned. It was a tight grin, private and personal, and like the canted head seemed a little sardonic. “You’re certainly philosophical tonight, Bozy,” he said and started to walk again.
Left behind, Bozemann took a little skip and caught up. He was a friendly man and had hoped that now they had been inside the rocket there would be a feeling of complete rapport between them; it stung him to be held off and treated as though he had said something rather foolish. “Go ahead and laugh,” he said, and gestured toward the low line of lights they were heading for across the field. “You probably won’t be doing much more laughing after we get back there and find out why they encouraged us to come out here and look at the rocket by ourselves.”
“It was a little unusual, wasn’t at?” Moncrief asked. “A delicate attention. You know as well as I do why they did it. They wanted to give us a chance to size up all those new control devices and wonder why they were there and then realize in decent privacy that maybe we won’t be coming back.”
Bozemann was silent for a long moment as they walked. “Yes,” he said finally and gave a halfaudible sigh. “It sounds like that’s it.”
“And now you feel dubious about being a hero?”
“No,” Bozemann said. “I volunteered and I want to go.”
“I thought I beard a regretful sigh.”
“I met a girl not long ago,” Bozemann said quietly, “and learned that I’d never really met a girl before.”
“So,” Moncrief said. He started to say something else, glanced at Bozemann in the gloom and felt rather than saw something about him that made him check himself. He changed the subject. “I was thinking of a different sort of thing,” he went on. “More on the line of your rockets that get unconventional notions, like faithful old dogs that have behaved themselves for years suddenly getting ideas of their own and upsetting the applecart. My grandfather was one of those characters back at Cape Canaveral in the ’Fifties, when they first began to work out on rockets, and they decided to send off a few mice. They didn’t know anything in those days; there was a great uproar about getting men on the moon before our friends the Russians did it, and they wanted to see if they could find out about belts of radiation and so on. Whether the mice would get back alive, and what the effects on them would be. That kind of thing. They were in a hurry and pretty ignorant, like curious monkeys that didn’t know what they were doing—and God knows whether they caused any trouble somewhere out in space. Later on they sterilized their payloads, as you may recall, to avoid the chance of contaminating anything.
“Anyhow, these jokers decided they wanted two laboratory mice and two wild mice, and my grandfather elected me to catch the wild ones. I was only a kid, of course, and I was flattered at being a partner in the great enterprise. I knocked myself out to catch the nasty little things and finally I got a pair of them. I was pretty proud of them and I thought they ought to be grateful to me for giving them the chance to be the first mice in space, but they weren’t. One of them even bit me. I wasn’t so proud of them after that. I got mad at them. I gave them electric shocks to get even and finally cut half an inch off their tails.”
“Why?” Bozemann said in a startled tone. “That was a cruel thing to do.”
“Sure, so it was a cruel thing to do,” Moncrief said. He said it rather absent-mindedly, for he recalled now, after all these years, that he hadn’t caught the mice himself. A neighbor’s boy, with whom he used to play, had caught them and he had got them away from the other boy and taken all the credit himself. That had been the first time, he remembered, that he realized what suckers people were; it had been a very useful discovery, and he had used it ever since. He pulled his mind back. “At any rate,” he said, “up the mice went in the rocket, but they never came down. There was an elaborate setup to recover them but [hey didn’t re-enter. That rocket had ideas of its own, and nobody knew where it went. Odd you reminded me of that, isn’t it?”
Bozemann didn’t reply. He turned his head and looked at Moncrief in a puzzled way, frowning a little, and then looked to the front again. They were almost to the low building now; the lights, shining softly through the windows, revealed their faces to each other, and Moncrief saw Bozemann’s expression.
“We seem a little far apart in our meditations,” he said, “but it won’t make any difference in a few minutes, when we get inside and they give us the word.”
“I suppose not,” Bozemann said, still thinking about the mice, “but I’d rather have my mental baggage than yours. I’ll admit it’s softer, but it doesn’t seem so lonely.”
Moncrief grinned again with his faintly sardonic air and didn’t reply. He reached the door first and pulled it open and held it. “After you, friend,” he said in a mocking tone. “In you go. I’ll trail along behind, upheld and comforted by your invisible cloak of illusions.”
Bozemann went through the door, and Moncrief followed him. There was a lanky soldier standing there waiting for them. He saluted, “The C.O. wants you in his office right away, sirs,” he said. “Please follow me.”
The soldier started out; Moncrief looked at Bozemann and raised his eyebrows, and they fell in behind the soldier. There weren’t many people about in the bare, green-tinted corridors at that hour of the night; they all nodded at the two men with a. careful casualness and after they had passed turned to look after t hem. They somehow built up an atmosphere of tension that the two men became aware of; soon they fell into step with the soldier and held it until Moncrief, realizing that they were doing it, deliberately broke the cadence.
They came to General Blunt’s door and the soldier knocked, pushed the door open and stood aside. They went in. The general was sitting behind his desk, pokerfaced, ruddy and rumpled as usual; another man, a stocky stranger with shining glasses and red hair, dressed in a coverall, sat off to the right.
“Morning,” the general said. “Major Moncrief, Major Bozemann . . . Doctor Kost.” The three men shook hands. “Doctor Kost will fill you in. Sit down.”
The two rocket men took chairs, looking at Kost with that veiled quizzical and superior look of men of action when they are confronted with the sedentary egghead who invents the devices in which they risk their necks.
“I will be brief,” Kost said with a shadow of an accent when they had taken chairs. “There is no need to elaborate upon the details, which are very technical.” He sounded a little pedantic and smiled slightly as though to apologize that he was a scientist and they were not. “We think there is a planet in our system that was unknown until recently. This seems impossible to you, but we think it is so. It cannot be seen by optical telescopes and is only suspected by radioastronomy, on which it gives only occasionally what we call a ‘ghost,’ which we often thought perhaps was a malfunction. But of late we have devised a new spectroscope. a very secret device so Far unknown to others, and with this spectroscope we get from this planet a new line which indicates that there is on this planet an element not known to us.”
He paused, and Moncrief and Bozemann stared at him. For a long moment there was a silence in the room. Suddenly Kost moved forward in his chair and his glasses glittered; a cool, forensic enthusiasm took hold of him. “Why could it not be so?” he asked. He raised one hand and cupped it before his face. “There is still much we have not found out. It is as if this element acts upon light, repels it or bends it.” He dropped his hand. “Perhaps other particles as well. This would seem to confirm why we cannot see it by optical telescopes and it gives only the occasional ghost by radioastronomy. We are not sure; we have only the hypothesis. But this planet, we think it is not too far. There was no guidance system to reach it, but now we have devised one to use the new spectroscope.”
He ceased speaking and leaned back in his chair. The silence fell again, but this time it was different. Moncrief and Bozemann knew where they were going now: far out across the terrible gulfs of lonely space toward a thing unknown and mysterious, uncerta
in, only guessed at, and possibly very lethal. Bozemann, after a startled look at Kost, had dropped his glance and was now contemplating the floor. Moncrief looked at the general, who looked back at him.
“So that’s it,” Moncrief said.
“That’s it,” the general said. “We need this stuff, if it’s there. And, crowded and edgy as the world is, we need it first. If it repels light, as they think it might, there isn’t any other rocket propellant that could touch it. Or——” He shrugged; there were too many other intangible and unimagined possibilities. “If it’s there,” he said, “if it is a planet and not a cloud of radioactive particles or dust or devil knows whatnot.” He picked up a pencil lying on the desk and tapped it softly on its unsharpened end. “Now,” he said, “this is a good rocket, well supplied with everything we think you’ll need. So far as we can foresee, if there’s a planet and it isn’t too far you’ll land on it and be able to get back. If there isn’t, the conventional guidance system will take over and bring you home. You know as well as I do how chancy it is; the imponderables run very high; this is a puzzle, as some old joker said once, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Do either one of you want to pull out now?”
“No,” Moncrief said quickly. “No, sir.”
“How will we know what to look for, general?” Bozemann asked. “We wouldn’t know this new element.”
“Doctor Kost is going with you.”
They both turned and looked at Kost with a new and rather reluctant approbation. He flushed slightly and dropped his glance.
“Doctor,” Bozemann said, “you found this thing. If you’d give us a due what to look for you wouldn’t have to go.”
“Might turn out to be uncomfortable,” Moncrief said, suddenly getting his faintly sardonic air back again.
Kost raised his head, looked at Moncrief and smiled. “It might, major,” he said. “Possibly I am the only one who knows how uncomfortable. Thank you for your kindness, but I will go.”
The general, who had been listening to all this, said, “You will all be ready to go within the hour?”
They all straightened involuntarily in their chairs, and rather self-consciously relaxed again, nodding as the general’s eye moved to each of them in turn. He picked up the phone and said, “Give me Macauley. Macauley? General Blunt. Start your countdown. They’ll be at the pad in about an hour.” He hung up, gave each of them a long, searching look, and arose like a man with a weight on his back, slowly. They jumped to their feet, and he shook hands with each of them. “Be at the front entrance in forty-five minutes. Suits and all that. You’ll have time to write a short note or two if you hurry. Don’t worry about your dependents.” For an instant he lost his poker face, swallowed, and got it back again. “Good luck,” he said and turned away as they filed out.
After he’d got into his suit. Bozemann looked at the girl’s picture on the bureau for a long moment and opened the top bureau drawer and took out several sheets of paper and a pen. He looked at the picture again, touched it gently, and put the paper back and dosed the drawer.
In the next room Moncrief finished zipping himself into his suit, stretched to settle himself, and looked at the photograph on his own bureau. It was a cracked and faded picture of his grandfather. His parents had liked neither him nor each other, and the sardonic defenses he had built against them and after them against the rest of the human race didn’t extend to the old man, whom he had loved. Hampered by the suit, he saluted the picture. “Good-by, old boy,” he said. “Maybe I’ll find your mice for you.” Then he went out the door.
Doctor Kost was waiting for them, and a car took them across the field. The first wan streaks of dawn were in the sky, and in the dim and chilly light technicians were swarming about the gleaming rocket. The crew chief went up in the elevator with the three of them and into the capsule crammed with gear, checking their fastenings for them, seeing that their food tubes were within reach, his eyes moving rapidly about over the improbable multiplicity of dual banks of dials and gauges, TV screens and control knobs within reach of Moncrief and Bozemann. Then he backed toward the door. “Happy landings, you all,” he said diffidently in a soft Alabama drawl. “If the light turns red, put your masks on. The jets are about warm enough, and I reckon you’ll take off in about twelve minutes. ’Bye, now.” The airlock door closed behind him, and they heard the locks click.
They lay silently and withdrawn into themselves on the cushioning plastic foam, not speaking, setting their teeth and their muscles and bones, and then the noise began with a click that immediately swept into a roar that filled the world and howled up beyond belief. In the shattering cataclysm of sound the foam fought to crush them flat, and then blackness took them for a time.
At first, after the final blast and jar of landing, they lay still and listened to the faint crackling of the cooling jets in the silence, like swimmers who have crossed a wild welter and chop of tide rips and currents to a shore they did not really think could be achieved. Moncrief was the first to move. He folded back the control for the rocket’s landing legs, unstrapped himself, sat up and looked at Bozemann. “Well. Bozy.” he said. “Well, Argonaut. It looks as though you’ll make it back after all.”
“Congratulations, major,” Bozemann said, letting out his breath in a long exhalation. “’You’re a sterling pilot. You’ll be promoted for this Are you all right, doctor?”
“Yes,” Kost said, sitting up. “Yes, l am fine. It is astonishing, is it not? How long does the ringing in the head last?”
‘“A day or so,” Moncrief said. “There are God knows how many million decibels to shake out. Maybe we’d better look outside and see what we’ve bought.”
Like children coming downstairs on Christmas morning they moved to the airlock. The inside door had a panel of heavy unbreakable glass, and they gathered before it. Moncrief touched a switch and the outside door swung open. The widening aperture was flooded with pinkish light; and as the door swung wide and locked, a section of their new world was before them; a long calm meadow ending in a wood, sloping uphill, of gigantic trees bigger than the oldest redwoods of earth. The trees were pinkish too. like the meadow, but a little darker than the light, and they couldn’t see the hill’s top; a mist lay over it, or what seemed to be a mist—a crepuscular diffusion that appeared to absorb light rather than blot it out. All within their view was strange to them because of the color of the light, but calm and untroubled and beautiful, like a happily remembered afternoon on earth bathed by the rosy glow of early sunset. It caught at their throats like the nostalgic memory of a perfect thing that was a little melancholy because the mind had known it couldn’t last or be repeated.
They all stared spellbound at it until Moncrief moved and looked at the instrument panel beside the door. “No harmful radiation,” he said. “And there’s air out there. A little high in carbon dioxide, but not too high. We’ll have to take it easy when we go out. Temperature, seventy degrees. It looks like a place to retire to, Bozy.” He turned to Bozemann and saw tears in his eyes, and turned away again. He felt close to tears himself, and fought the feeling down. The place was so still, so dreamlike in its cleanliness and calm after the uproar and bustle and confusion of the overcrowded earth that it brought to him with terrible force the realization that Bozemann had memories and a goal and he had neither, that he had missed or misused too many things in his life.
He let this realization wash over him for a moment and then set it aside with a muttered curse. There was no use, he thought, or crying over spilled milk; the thing to do, now that they had landed upon this planet which no one had ever thought they would even find, much less make a landing on, was to get the credit. Not part of the credit, but all of it: the credit, the promotion and the acclaim. He gave his two companions a quick glance. From under his eyebrows and thought of all the others who had been outmaneuvered; simple fellows who had gone down as he had come up. Kost meant nothing to him; he had liked Bozemann, but that was beside the point now. “If you’v
e looked at the scenery long enough.” he said, “we’ll have a council of war and get to work.”
Bozemann and Kost looked at him without speaking and they went back and sat down on their couches. “Doctor,” he said to Kost, “we’ve got you here. What do you want to do first?”
Kost looked at him for a long moment, with a little frown. “There are more things than I can count.” he said, “and many of them are not practical. I did not think I would ever feel this way. However, when I see the fog, the strange mist on the hill that swallows the light, I think perhaps the element is there. Perhaps there are rocks up there, with the clement. I will go up there. If we are in a hurry——”
“We are in a hurry,” Moncrief said, “according to the general. The next time you come you can stay as long as you please. I’d better report.” He got up and moved to the corner where the ultrashort-wave radio was installed, switched on the power, and put on the headset, “Base Seven,” he said. “Base Seven. Argonaut here, Argonaut here. All’s well.” He shut off the power and took off the headset and came back to his couch, “They wanted it kept short,” he said, “in case our energetic friends happened to suspect or had this channel. They’ll monitor us until we get back, but I doubt we’ll send again. Now, doctor, we’ll fit you out.”
They all stood up and moved to the cabinet on the wall and took out Kost’s gear: a Geiger counter, a machine pistol, a hammer and metallic bag for samples and a belt radio with its light headset. They helped him stow it all, loaded the pistol’s magazine and showed him how it worked.
“Hadn’t I better go with him?” Bozemann asked.
“I was coming to that. Go to the edge of the woods, but don’t go in. Stay in the open where I can see you and you can see all around you. If Doctor Kost shoots or yells ‘Mayday!’ don’t go in. Signal me or fire a burst and come back here fast. Not,” he said, turning to Kost, “that I want to desert you, doctor, but I think it better we get together if you have trouble. You should come out or make contact with Bozy in two hours at the outside. Is everything clear?”