Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  He looked up abruptly. The door on the other side of the office creaked softly. The frightened young face of Noel Crispin, the blond girl who kept the office files, looked in. Her eyes changed as she looked at Tallentyre and then at DeWitt.

  “Take care of Major DeWitt,” ordered Tallentyre. He slipped something from the desk drawer into his pocket and rose. “I’ve got to persuade the boys in the vestibule.” He crossed the office in three long strides. His steadiness was back entirely when he turned the knob; he stepped into the outer room with an air, almost, of insouciance.

  Four men dressed in the rubberized canvas of spacehands stood together in the middle of the vestibule floor. No doubt they had heard most, if not all, of what had passed in the office. Tallentyre looked at them. Two were huge and burly, tough, hard-shelled men who’d try anything once. Two were of a different breed; two who would do anything, at any risk, for some things, things in which they believed. The biggest, the toughest, wore a golden comet. The skipper.

  He wasn’t afraid now. He’d simply determined the odds were bad, and he wasn’t having any. The other burly figure looked up to him; what the skipper said was right with him.

  The two leaner, wiry men were white-faced. Nerve-shock release was their trouble. Like plane-pilots who’d lived through a crash, they were afraid of their fire-ships. The psychology of the things preyed on them. Nobody had ever been injured in a rocket accident. Nobody, ever. They landed sound—or simply weren’t.

  They’d landed. They couldn’t, now, face the thing again. But, like the plane-pilot who’d survived a crash, once started again they’d be all right.

  “In six minutes,” said Tallentyre, “Sixty-One takes off to Mars.”

  “We’re not going,” said the skipper. “We told DeWitt that.”

  “You volunteered,” reminded Tallentyre.

  “We didn’t know what we were tackling. Only ten ships had tried then, and two had gotten through. Now we do know. The trip from Earth to this hole—not three hundred thousand miles—was enough. It wasn’t carelessness that snapped those other ships. We know. It was rotten tubes and rotten fuel. I drove a nitro-wagon in the oil country and felt safe. But not on this buggy. Nitro’s baby’s milk to this stuff. Atomic hydrogen!

  “Hu-uh. We don’t go.” He looked at Tallentyre coldly. He meant what he said, and meant to stick with it.

  “I suppose there’s no use,” said Tallentyre woodenly, “to say anything about guts and keeping a promise and how much you men mean to this thing. If you don’t go, you know, others won’t.”

  “Guff,” grunted the skipper. “It isn’t any use.”

  “I call this mutiny,” Tallentyre informed him.

  “Call it whatever you damn well like,” growled the skipper. He looked down at the slighter figure of the Spaceport official challengingly. “We don’t blast. And there’s no sense chucking your rank around, either. There’s four of us. And just what in hell do you call it when you klunk out your chief, eh?”

  Tallentyre’s right hand rested easily in the pocket of his tunic. The cold, gray eyes watched the big spaceman steadily. “You think you could get away with violence?”

  The big man took a step forward with a hamlike fist clenched before him. “Think, brother? Hu-uh. I know I can,” he said softly. “You tried it yourself inside there.” Without turning his head, he spoke to the men behind him. “Come on, boys. Grab this guy. And one of you tail for the ship and that gun.”

  Without relaxing his moveless, wooden face, Tallentyre drew his hand from his tunic pocket. Space volunteers have to have a queer, reckless courage. With a bull roar, the giant captain dove forward with outstretched hands, his face twisted with sudden hate.

  Tallentyre shot him between the eyes. The big body fell with exaggerated slowness under Lunar pull.

  The roar of the heavy weapon drowned the sudden, soft cries of the other three. Tallentyre eyed them coldly, his face unchanged. The other burly man looked confused and bewildered, his eyes fixed muddledly on the fallen leader. He looked around toward the lean, white-faced youth with red hair and startling blue eyes. The other spacehand was looking at him, too, for encouragement and decision. He swallowed raggedly.

  A new, terrific tension had built up. It reduplicated, somehow, the tension that had made bearable that trip from Earth. The redhead shrugged, and a wry smile twisted his lips. “I guess I’ll go, sir.”

  Tallentyre’s wooden face relaxed. “Good. She’s your ship then. You’re the skipper. Your name? Joe? All right, you go in five minutes. This man was your rocket expert, I think? You won’t need him, or a replacement. You have a navigator, and a couple of hands. Go to it.”

  Five minutes later, Tallentyre watched Joe seat himself in the pressure chair in Number Sixty-One’s central cabin. He waved once, with a white-faced grin that made it seem he liked but feared this command of his. Then the metal shutters came up over the rocketship’s tough windows. A smooth, metal shape screamed soundless fire into the vacuum that wrapped Luna. The rushing, ruddy gas-streams scoured the pumice of the spaceport field. Number Sixty-One shot out toward Mars.

  Tallentyre sat motionless in his office, his face somehow disconnected from his mind, betraying no hint of what went on behind it. Number Sixty-One. It might get there. Four had, already.

  But if it didn’t? None of the great of rocketry had gotten where they had hoped to land. That other Joe, that great Joseph—Joseph Moessner. He’d sought the rocket fuel that would take him above the stratosphere. He’d recognized the inadequacy of hydrogen-oxygen. It was too heavy. The hydrogen was light enough as fuel. But for every two pounds of hydrogen, sixteen pounds of oxygen had to be used. If only hydrogen would burn alone . . .

  It would; Moessner had known that, and he’d done it. Hydrogen gas is H2—two atoms combined. Monatomic hydrogen—atomic hydrogen, so-called—would burn with itself to produce diatomic hydrogen gas, and enormous heat.

  Old Moessner had been right, and he’d seen the way; stabilize the monatomic form in some solvent. He’d even found the solvent. But he never found the top of the stratosphere. For the solvent didn’t stabilize the frightful stuff sufficiently. He and his two assistants—when they’d made nearly twenty pounds of the saturated fuel—became particles almost as fine as hydrogen atoms themselves.

  No rocketman had ever reached the goal he sought, himself. But others took hold where Moessner so decisively left off. Less disastrous experiments showed that the combustible, oil-like solvent Moessner had used could be modified just a trifle, and made more stable. The saturated stuff generated power eleven times greater, weight for weight, than did the oxy-hydrogen fuel. They had moessnerol. The rest was trial and error—and death.

  The first passenger-carrying rocketship to pass the stratosphere exploded fifty miles above Earth’s surface. The trouble, investigation showed, was in the metal of the tubes. In 1961, Moessner’s younger brother set out for the Moon. He didn’t reach his goal, but astronomers saw the red flash of his explosion a scant one hundred miles from the Lunar peaks. None of the great of rocketry ever quite got there.

  Others, in better craft, survived later landings. At first they didn’t come back, though. Then the World League, having settled decisively the question of international peace and trade, took interest in rocketry.

  Money, now, and Moontrips became regular and generally successful. The new Rocket Service prepared to accept the challenge that must be answered—Mars. The Moon, with one-sixth Earth’s surface gravity and less than one-eightieth Earth’s mass, was obviously the stepping stone and refueling station for Mars.

  In 1996, Luna Spaceport was constructed. In 1997, Major DeWitt was placed in charge—and Tallentyre had been second then.

  Twenty-eight ships that year. All that were left of the thirty that set out from Earth to Moon. Two landed on Mars. Horror crept down the tubes of the telescopes that watched from the airless Moon. Red firecrackers in space, two—three—five had gone. Then one landed. Then another! Then—but
it missed. The rockets blasted in a long, circling trail as the radio signals faded away. The control mechanism was gone. Frantic voices that became thin and died.

  Firecrackers and dancing mice with long red tails. And no sense of direction.

  It was 1998 now. There were to be thirty-five ships this year. Two ships had landed of the first thirty. DeWitt had stood that, silent and moody as ship after ship flashed bright red and vanished or danced its brief, whirling waltz of death. There were fewer dancers now; in that year they’d done a lot with control mechanism. In the last twelve ships, there’d been no wanderers. But they cracked for some reason no man could say. Tubes or fuel? Only the wreckage might have told, and that . . .

  That was shining droplets spattered through space.

  The rebellion this day had finished DeWitt. It had nearly finished Tallentyre; only DeWitt’s failure had forced him to defense. Tallentyre took over.

  He made entries on the log as the dwindling ruby of Number Sixty-One vanished outward in space.

  “What a cinch to run that Luna Port!”

  Five days out in space, Mars bound, the crew of Number Fifty-Nine was exercising the age-old privilege of able workmen to belittle superior officers.

  “DeWitt! Tallentyre!” growled the engineer. “Who are they but a couple of straw-stuffed uniforms in a soft job they got by a hefty pull? They sit back there with their feet on desks, while we’re gunnin’ out here, out where the danger and the work is.” He spat into the waste container.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” temporized a spacehand with an ambition to be an executive. “They’ve probably got worries of their own.”

  “Worries of their own?” echoed the engineer. “On that button-pusher’s work? Say, if either of them ever worried a day of his life, I hope this ship blows apart right now . . .”

  Number Fifty-Nine was rose-red flame and sparklets of incandescent metal in that instant.

  Number Fifty-Nine was one of Tallentyre’s worries.

  Consciousness returned slowly to Major DeWitt after Tallentyre’s blow. He found himself dragged into the record room, and Noel Crispin ministering to him, as Tallentyre had ordered. He sat up, pondered blackly for several minutes, then went into the office. Without addressing his colleague, he sat before the radio, tuned in Earth, and told the secretary of the Rocket Service Board that he was resigning, to take effect immediately. After some time there came back a tentative acceptance, with the additional information that a ship would arrive to carry him away. In the same message, Tallentyre was ordered to take command at Luna Port.

  DeWitt went to his quarters and locked himself in.

  Tallentyre called a pair of men from the machine shop, consigned the body of the dead rocket-skipper to them, with directions that it go back to Earth when the ship arrived for DeWitt. Returning to the administration office, he sat down before the screen that recorded telescopic views. After some correction of angles and focus, he picked up a clear rectangle of black, starry sky. In the center hung a cartridge-shaped hull—the last ship to leave the port.

  Small in the sky beyond, a lesser capsule of metal was visible.

  “A ship heading back?” muttered Tallentyre to himself. “More mutiny?”

  Wearily, he decided to deal with the case as it matured. His present attention must be concentrated on the craft so recently launched.

  Leaning back in his chair, he fumbled the radio into operation. “Hello, hello,” he said. “Ship ahoy, Sixty-One!”

  “Hello, sir,” same back a voice he knew—Joe, whom he had appointed captain.

  “What goes on, Joe?”

  “All well, sir. I’ll drop you a picture postcard from Mars.”

  “See if there are gondolas on the canals.”

  Laughter from the radio—healthy laughter. “This isn’t as bad as I thought it’d be, sir.” Then, in sudden alarm, “Hey! Something’s going bad! Looks like . . .”

  The view on the screen suddenly flashed into white fire, blinding the observer. At the same instant something roared in the radio, then broke off. Silence, while Tallentyre clasped his hands to his tortured eyes. The flare ebbed from them, and his vision returned. The screen showed only sky and stars. The ship was gone.

  “Boom!” said Noel Crispin behind him. “Just like the Fourth of July.” Her voice grew harsh, mocking. “Are you quite satisfied, Major Tallentyre?”

  He turned around and got to his feet. For months he and the girl had been “Nollie” and “Talley” to each other. But that had changed now. Her set face matched the fierce formality of her greeting.

  “Do you feel that you’ve served your gods, whatever they are?” she demanded. “Will that last burnt offering be sweet in their nostrils?”

  Tallentyre gazed at her dumbfounded. “What’s all this?” he asked.

  She laughed, bitterly and humorlessly. “I suppose that you couldn’t help knocking Major DeWitt down—in fact, it brought him to his senses and showed him that he must clear out. As for shooting that captain, I saw through the open door all that led up to it. He had threatened you, and shooting’s a clean death, anyway. He can sleep in a grave, back home on Earth. But those other three fellows!”

  She lashed Tallentyre with her contemptuous gaze. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. On a desk at hand lay a pack of well-thumbed playing cards. He scowled at them as though they were a new and perplexing mechanism. Automatically, he went to the desk, seated himself at it, and picked up the cards. Still automatically, he began to lay them out for a game of patience.

  “Is all this death necessary?” asked Noel Crispin, her voice trembling as if with passionate hatred of him. “Isn’t Earth big enough for humanity? Isn’t it?”

  Tallentyre shook his head without looking up from the cards. “No,” he replied, “it isn’t. Earth never was big enough for humanity, not since the first of our ancestors lifted his eyes to heaven. You understood that once, Nollie.”

  “Don’t call me pet names, if you please, Major Tallentyre.”

  “If you didn’t understand,” he went on, “why did you volunteer for this service?”

  “Because I loved you, that’s why.”

  Tallentyre seemed ready to fall backward, chair and all. His lips moved soundlessly, his face grew pale. “But I—I never dreamed—”

  “Wait a moment. Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t love you anymore, and that’s why I can talk about it as if it had happened to somebody else. But once—oh, I worshipped you as a hero. I thought you were brilliant, brave. I thought you were handsome, in that neat, tight uniform. I signed up so as to be near you. But now!”

  Tallentyre stared at the cards in his hand. “I may as well remind you,” he said, “that every man in every ship is a volunteer. Nobody is obliged to go.”

  “You got the answer to that from the captain in the vestibule, just before you shot him. Men don’t realize what they’re in for when they offer to make the trip. How many do you think would volunteer a second time?” Again she laughed. “If there ever is a second time for any of them, if a single man survives!” She leveled a finger at him, as though it were the muzzle of a gun. “If you’re so full of fervor for this murderous business, why don’t you volunteer to go to Mars yourself?”

  “I’ve done so, half a dozen times.” The statement surprised Noel, and she let him continue. “The Board says that I’m needed here, in an administrative position. But when I leave here, it won’t be for home.” He glanced at the window, whence Mars was discernible. “My home will be out there.”

  She shot him one final glare of almost white heat, whirled around and fled from the room. Tallentyre resumed his game of patience. After a few moments, a slight, stooped figure came through the door. It was Ernie, a white-haired old mechanic.

  “Something wrong with the radio?” he inquired gently. “Seems that way. Let me have a look. I thought I heard it blow out.”

  “It was tuned in on a ship that exploded,” Tallentyre informed him.

  The slender
old man shook his head sadly. “Too bad. Too bad.” He poked into the radio mechanism. “Oh, this isn’t serious. I’ll have everything fixed in a jiffy.”

  “Everything?” echoed Tallentyre.

  Spacehand O’Hara, who should have been watching the jet-gauges of Number Forty-Two scribbled final words on the scrap of grubby paper he held on his knee. Then he surveyed his creation.

  Lost beyond power to follow or seek,

  Slain for their gallant defi—

  Their spirits were strong but their pinions were weak,

  The birds that were lost in the sky.

  Why should the eyes of a man turn aloft?

  The voices of warning chant loudly and oft,

  The fireside is cozy, the armchair is soft,

  Yet danger spells dare to the bold.

  To search after doom as a knight for the Grail,

  With death as a crewmate, abhorrent and pale,

  To perish as small, glowing sparks on the trail—

  Wee stars in the black, empty cold—

  Out of dead darkness and into clear light,

  Marking a pathway on high,

  See how they soar on a happier flight,

  The birds that were lost in the sky.

  O’Hara put his pencil to the second line and substituted “steadfast” for “gallant.”

  “It tells something,” he assured himself. “Perhaps some editor would—”

  His eyes came by chance to the jet-gauge. He had barely time to cry out at what he saw, before the explosion tore him and his poem and all the ship into small, glowing sparks on the trail.

  Something like twenty hours after DeWitt’s resignation by radio, a short-shot rocket came from Earth, made a fairly good landing at Luna Port, and bore away the somber DeWitt, as well as the corpse of the captain. Twenty hours and a few minutes passed before a second craft dropped down on the field, aided by fall-breaking jets of gas directed against its bottom. From it emerged two sturdy men in drab, who came at once to the office.