Operation Interstellar (1950)
Page 17
He looked up at the wall.
He saw a bronze plaque.
“President Bennington! Speak up!”
Bennington started. It was Madison—Was it Madison or Jackson?—who said that an American could tell the President to Go To Hell, and all the President could do was to argue with him— or go fishing?
Bennington tore his carefully prepared speech down the middle. He stood up and looked at the bronze plaque, and began to read it:
“Fourscore and seven years ago—”
Across space to Latham’s Triplets went the Z-wave, connected at long last by the original Radio Linkage. Across from Grayson’s spacecraft it went to the completed Z-wave link to Neoterra, to come bursting forth from a thousand million loudspeakers across the worlds of NeoSol:
NeoTerra heard it, and NeoVenus listened. The isolated colonists on NeoGanymede cheered and the folks on far NeoPluto nodded their heads knowingly.
‘‘—engaged in a great civil war to determine whether That Nation or any other nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure—”
“Grayson!” came the whispering of the radio—a mundane instrument of no great interest to anyone—“Grayson—we’ve caught him.”
“Who?”
“Your pal Haedaecker. He bombed Alpha IV!”
“But—?”
“We’ll twist his arm, Grayson. Maybe he’ll explain the guy who tried to shoot you to bits on Proxima I. Maybe a lot of other things. Anyway, he’s the joker in this deck.”
Stacey eyed Paul with a glitter, “D’ye mind if I start going home to my wife?”
Paul snapped off the communications panel entirely. “They’ve made it,” he said. “It’ll be complete from now on. And we’ll crisscross this galaxy with radio beacons from star to star and bit by bit until the Z-wave contact is complete between Mother Sol and any of her Colonies.”
“Let’s take Stacey home,” suggested Nora.
Paul turned to the panel and set some switches, adjusted some dials, and threw in the main switch. The floor surged below them and Paul put his eye to the spotting telescope as his ship began to move.
Paul yawned as the minutes passed and the ship gained speed towards Sol, aimed by his watchful eye. Time passed, and Paul, finally released from all of the trouble and worry, began to hum. Eventually he began to sing, in that off-key voice:
“Round and round and round go the deuterons!
Round and round and round the magnet swings ’em!
Round and round and round go the deuterons—”
Nora interrupted Paul with the final line of The Cyclotronist’s Nightmare:
“Aw, let’s turn the damned thing off and go to bed!”
THE END