Racing the Moon

by Alan Armstrong

  “It’s Amelia’s plane!” she cried.

  “You bet, just like in the photograph—Aerospace model nine Merrill-type. Made it myself down at the Institute—with Rosy’s help.”

  “Quick, open my present!” Chuck exclaimed. “And I didn’t know about the plane!” He had made Alex a pair of flying goggles—big rounds of tinted glass molded into what looked like a bathing cap. AIR HART was written across the top in Chuck’s blocky letters. “I read about her,” Chuck said. “I bet she crashed because her radio broke, or she didn’t know how to work it.”

  Because it was her birthday Alex was excused from cleaning up, but she helped anyway. “Now we gotta go to Ebbs’s,” she told Chuck. “I promised I’d bring you up.”

  Ebbs must have seen them coming. Before they could knock she opened the door, smiling and holding out her hand.

  “Like a spider lying in wait,” Chuck muttered as Ebbs exclaimed, “Come in! You’re Chuck, right? The Moon Station, weather balloons, steam rockets, and radar brother?”

  “Yeess,” said Chuck slowly, giving Alex a surprised glance.

  “Good!” Ebbs said. “I want to come see your Moon Station.”

  “You can come right now.”

  Ebbs shook her head. “First things first. Have you made the gunpowder yet?”

  “No,” said Chuck, frowning. “The sulfur’s gone. Stuart must have used it up.”

  A flicker crossed Ebbs’s face.

  “Right!” she said, drawing out the word the way she did. “Next question: can you swim?”

  “Yes,” Chuck replied, squinting at her, trying to figure out what she was up to.

  Ebbs turned to Alex. “How about you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good,” said Ebbs. “I’ve got lemonade. Sit down.”

  Alex took her regular chair.

  As Ebbs poured the glasses, Jeep started rattling his dog jewelry.

  “Right, Jeep. More cheese?”

  The dog ducked his head and licked his chops.

  “So,” Ebbs announced once she’d taken care of the dog and handed Chuck a bomber bar and given some graham crackers to Alex. “Since you both can swim, I want you to help me take a space trip.”

  Chuck’s eyebrows went up.

  “Here’s the proposition,” she said. “I’ve got a sailboat and I need crew. You guys go out cruising in the Moon Station all the time, so here’s your chance to go out like you’re really in space—stars, Moon, planets overhead, dark depths below, no land in sight. Save for the water noise it’s just as silent as if you were a thousand miles up, and it’s every bit as dangerous because you can drown in space just like you can drown in water—lack of oxygen, right? It’ll get you ready for your Mars trip.

  “I can sail it alone,” she continued, “but No Name was built to carry a crew of three, and since I’m new around here I don’t have any sailing buddies yet so I’m hoping I can enlist you. It’ll be a paying job. I want to sail down the Potomac and out to Tangier Island, where I’ve got an old army buddy.”

  Chuck looked at Alex. “We don’t know about sailing, but I’m willing to try if Alex is.”

  Alex nodded. “Sure, but that’s a funny name—No Name. How come you call it that?”

  Ebbs leaned against the doorjamb. “For a few weeks during the war I was a CIC agent, Counter Intelligence Corps. Like I told Alex, as things were winding down in Europe, because I knew about nutrition I was sent to help feed the refugees, but going over I ran into the officer who’d been in charge of my high-altitude bomber work. He got my orders changed, got me assigned to help his team collect dope about the Germans’ V-2 missiles and to find Doctor von Braun himself because he and his rocket team were way ahead of everybody.”

  Alex looked over at Chuck. She could tell he was impressed.

  “The Russians had their people out after him too,” Ebbs said. “It was like war, so our officers ordered a ‘no name’ policy: we weren’t allowed to use our names, just numbers, so if one of us got caught, he wouldn’t be able to identify the others.

  “We had luck. We found where the Germans had buried their data, and then we found von Braun—or rather he found us and surrendered. He figured he’d be better off in America than with the Russkies. We got him and most of his dope without firing a shot.

  “When I bought the boat I was going to call her by my team number, G-13—but then I hit on No Name. I liked that better. It’s my personal camouflage. So that’s my story. Now you tell me yours—how you got into radio and rockets and all.”

  Chuck started telling how their dad had taken him to meet Rosy to learn about radio before he got hurt with his experiments.

  “It wasn’t experiments,” Alex interrupted. “Mother’d got a new radio-phonograph for her work with the German music records, and Chuck blew it up trying to find out what made the green tuning light work. He went at it with pliers and a screwdriver until there was a big flash that knocked him down and all the lights went out and Mother screamed and had to take a pill. Dad took the busted Magnavox down to Rosy to get it fixed. Rosy said he’d better teach Chuck about radio before he burned the house down or killed himself—or both!”

  Ebbs’s mouth was open, half-smiling, as Alex went on gleefully: “Rosy’s supposed to be the school’s engineer, but he doesn’t look anything like an engineer. He doesn’t wear a white coat, and he doesn’t shave, and he’s got this half-smoked cigar in his mouth all the time so his pants and shirts have burn holes.”

  Chuck shoved at Alex to shut her up.

  “Rosy knows radio like he invented it,” he said, “and he knows about radar too. He was in the lab in New Jersey when they shot the first radar signal at the Moon. Two and a half seconds later it bounced back—four hundred eighty thousand miles in two and a half seconds!”

  He looked at Ebbs.

  “Sounds about right.”

  “He was working on circuit-testing kits some students had sent back,” Chuck said. “The starter kits. They didn’t work because the students hadn’t put them together right. I watched him until he gave me one to fix. Without even looking at the manual I got it right.”

  Alex piped up. “He didn’t look at the book because he mixes things up when he reads.” Then she blushed, thinking she’d let her brother down by saying it the way she had.

  Ebbs looked at Chuck.

  He shrugged and smiled a little. “I guess she told you I left Tech because of my reading. For radio work it doesn’t matter so much because if I can watch something being done, I can do it.”

  Alex butted back in: “Next thing that happened was, Rosy gave him an old Signal Corps field radio to fix with a box of parts and the manual, and with my help reading it we got it going again.”

  “So when are you going back to school?” Ebbs asked.

  “I don’t need school,” Chuck said. “I’ve got ideas for inventions I can make on my own. What I need is your help. How about a trade for our helping you with the sailing?”

  Ebbs’s eyes narrowed.

  “See, when I got home from Tech, I went down to the Institute to see if I could make some money helping out. Rosy said I could stick around, but he couldn’t pay me. He said the place is going broke with the war over and no more Signal Corps work—but I’ve got this great idea: make a radar kit the Institute can sell to people like me who want to watch for enemy planes and rockets and space aliens and comets and stuff like that. Alex says you know where they’re working with radar, so if you can get me in there so I can study it I’ll make up a radar kit for everyday people.”

  “Hold on!” Ebbs bellowed, straightening up. “Alex got me wrong. I work on space food, not radar.”

  “But you know the radar people,” Chuck insisted. “Alex says you’ve been to Wallops, and you’ve met von Braun. I need you to get me to them, get me started.”

  Ebbs’s face was dark.

  “Let’s go see your Moon Station.”

  9

  THE MOON STATION

  “How
about I come in and meet your mother first?” Ebbs suggested when they got to the house.

  “Right!” said Alex, talking like Ebbs. “I’ve told her a lot about you. She wants to meet you too.”

  They could hear music as they walked in. Alex rushed upstairs and knocked on the door to her mother’s workroom.

  “Mother! Can I bring up Captain Ebbs? She’s come to see the Moon Station.”

  “Oh, lovely!” came a high voice over the music.

  The music stopped and her mother opened the door. “Captain Ebbs! Please come in,” she said, putting out a jeweled hand. “I’m delighted to meet you! I’m Louise Hart.”

  Alex’s mother wore a dark green dress. The gold chain and pill vial hung around her neck. She smelled of perfume. Ebbs towered over her in jeans and a red shirt. She smelled of sweat.

  “Please sit down,” Alex’s mother said, pointing to a delicate carved chair that looked like it belonged in a museum. “Since Alexis met you, our dinner table has been full of news of your space work. We expect to hear about something going up any day now.”

  Ebbs loomed over the little chair, nodding and smiling, but she did not sit down.

  “Charles’s and Alexis’s heads are quite filled with space travel,” their mother went on, “working at I-don’t-know-what up in their Moon Station and making things that burn up and explode. Please, Captain, encourage them to attend to their studies,” she said, looking sternly at Chuck, who was hanging back in the doorway.

  “Right!” said Ebbs. “They can’t get anywhere without the basics.”

  “I’m so glad to have your support,” their mother replied. “Now, Alexis says she’s seen a photograph of you with that terrible V-2 rocket.”

  Mother’s test, Alex thought. She wants to know if I’ve been making stuff up.

  Ebbs must have guessed as much. She smiled and nodded. “Would you like to see it, Louise? I’ll send Alex down with it later. Right now, though, I’ve come to inspect the Moon Station.”

  “Oh, splendid! I’m so glad someone is going to check it. Their father helped them get started, and he assures me that it’s safe, but it looks so precarious, and they spend so much time up there, I’m afraid for them. Do check it, please, and when you get down come back in for tea and give me a full report. They’ve invited me up, you know—said I could ride in Jeep’s device—but I’ve never been at all good at heights,” she said with a slight laugh. “So if you …”

  “Right!” said Ebbs. “I’ll come back in and give a holler if it’s not safe, but lemme have a rain check on the tea, OK?”

  “Certainly,” their mother replied.

  “By the way,” Ebbs continued, “I’ve invited them to go sailing with me on the Potomac. You think that would be all right? I’ve got a sailboat, a twenty-two-footer with all the safety equipment, and they’ll be wearing life vests. I’m an experienced sailor,” she added, “thirty-five years at it. What do you think?”

  “Oh? Well, yes, of course, if they’d like,” their mother replied. “When I lived in Germany, I sailed my own boat, the Little Swan,” she said, half closing her eyes. “It was much smaller than yours, but we had regattas and I won sometimes. I loved it.”

  Ebbs was nodding. “When I get ’em trained,” she said, “we’ll take you out and you’ll teach us some tricks.”

  “Oh, lovely!” their mother said dreamily, turning away. “Lovely.”

  * * *

  Alex led Ebbs out to the big tree. “There!” she said, pointing up.

  From the ground the Moon Station looked like a bloated squirrel’s nest, a silvery roundish lump of what could have been aircraft wreckage snagged in the tree’s crown, parts and struts seeming to have wrapped themselves around the major branches on impact. Its ragged, patched-together, bomber-like nose pointed up, its small guidance rockets pointed down, and green and red running lights ran along the sides. Numbered climbing boards nailed into the tree trunk led up to it.

  Chuck came with the ladder. There was a gap—the top rung didn’t reach the hatch.

  “That’ll do,” Ebbs announced, rubbing her hands together. “I can haul myself up the rest of the way.”

  She clambered up the ladder, balanced for an instant on the top rung, then pulled the hatch cover.

  Too late, Alex remembered the screecher. There was a yowl like a strangled cat.

  Ebbs teetered on the ladder top, steadied herself, then looked down.

  “Sorry! I forgot to silence it!” Chuck yelled. “It’s the theremin. It warns us if there’s an alien breaking in. You broke the invisible beam.”

  Chuck followed Ebbs up the ladder as Alex shinnied up the escape rope.

  Jeep sat at the base waving his tail and barking for his ride, not that he really wanted to go up. He hated the swinging, swaying lift in his harness.

  Alex’s heart sank when she crawled in. Suddenly she saw everything through Ebbs’s eyes. In the afternoon light the Moon Station looked clumsy and amateurish with nailed-up gauges; a maze of dials, knobs, wires, and switches; odd pieces of tubing and pipe fitted with faucets and valves marked ROCKET CONTROL #S 1–5; and the greenish cathode ray tube with RADAR written over it looking like a dead eye. The only going things about it were Alex’s thriving green mossarium and the Radiometer catching sunlight and spinning like mad.

  But Ebbs was delighted. She threw switches, studied the radar tube, pulled levers, cranked the generator, adjusted some rocket-control valves, stomped on the floorboards, shook the pieced-together two-by-fours that supported the shell, pushed at the Plexiglas dome.

  “Spaceworthy!” she announced as Alex wound the string around the gyroscope’s shaft and pulled hard to get it spinning.

  “Good,” said Ebbs. “It works like riding a bicycle: once the wheels get spinning you don’t tip over. So now we’re flying stable. This thing’s gonna stay in orbit all right. You guys are good. And I’m glad you’ve got a Radiometer up here—it works like a solar sail. But tell me how this works,” she said, pointing to Alex’s magnifying glass mounted over her Girl Scout cooking pot.

  Alex could tell something was up. “I’ll put water in it,” she said cautiously, “aim the glass to catch the sunlight, and boil our food.”

  “You’re going to pour water in space? Where will it go? And then you’re going to boil it?” Ebbs asked, her voice rising. “In zero gravity you’re going to get water to boil?”

  Alex looked blank.

  “What happens when mountain climbers try to boil their dinners at high altitudes?” Ebbs asked. “The boiling process requires air pressure. In space, where’s the pressure? It’s a problem we’re working on. How are they going to cook those food tubes I’ve invented?”

  Alex blushed.

  Ebbs picked up on her embarrassment. “Hey! That’s the fun of exploring: discovering what you don’t know and inventing as you go along. What’s the point if you already know all the answers? Just add cooking to your to-do list—another problem to solve.

  “So now, Chuck,” she said, turning to him, “you’re the Moon Station’s commander, right?”

  Chuck nodded.

  “Where’s your logbook, Commander? You keep a log, right?”

  “Lieutenant Alex does that for us,” Chuck replied as Alex handed Ebbs the school notebook she’d decorated with a rocket spitting red, yellow, and blue fire. Her mother’s old fountain pen was attached to it with a cord tied at the hole she’d punched through the cover.

  “What?” Ebbs scoffed. “You use a pen up here? How do you get it to write?”

  “Uh-oh,” said Alex. “I get it. No gravity, so the ink won’t go down?”

  “Right,” snapped Ebbs, all business. “Only pencils in the Moon Station. Now, I’ll come back up here at night to test your navigation with my star bowl. You can adjust it for the seasons. And I’ll bring you some algae bags to replace that mossarium. Moss and ferns in a sealed box won’t do you any good in space, but you can live on algae—it’s nutritious, with protein, minerals, an
d vitamins. It grows fast and it produces oxygen. Essential for a Moon Station!”

  Chuck grimaced as Ebbs went on: “I’m gonna tell VB about this. He’s all about getting into space, but you two are already out there. I think he needs to meet some of the people he’s building rockets for.”

  “We need radar, Ebbs,” Chuck said.

  She gave him a measured look. “Right.”

  “And it’s Alex’s birthday,” Chuck added.

  “Right. I’ve made a space cake to celebrate. So let’s go have some!”

  How did she know? Alex wondered.

  10

  SMITH’S JOURNAL

  “As I told Alex, I’m kin to Captain John Smith,” Ebbs said as she served the space dessert—angel food cake. “What he went through on his trip was probably worse than what you’ll go through. Know much about him?” She looked at Chuck.

  “No.”

  “The man who saved Jamestown? You don’t know about him?”

  “Oh, well, yeah,” Chuck said. “A little.”

  “That’s him over there,” Ebbs said.

  Chuck went over and stared at Smith’s grizzled face like he was sizing him up.

  Ebbs came and stood beside him. “When he started out all he had in mind was getting away. Any idea what made him want to go?”

  Chuck shook his head.

  “To make his name,” Ebbs said. “To prove himself. When he was a boy they teased and snubbed him because he talked big about what he was going to do. ‘I’ll show them!’ he said to himself. That’s what drove him—he was going to make a name for himself, get respect. No matter what it took.”

  Chuck’s eyes were bright.

  “Smith was an explorer,” Ebbs continued, “going out of bounds, escaping the gravity of the known world in a leaky wooden spacecraft they had to pump and caulk to keep afloat on a voyage of six weeks if they were lucky, three months or never depending on pirates and the weather. Going to the New World in his time was as new and risky as going to the Moon is in ours.”