We stood there beside it on its launching platform, Hooker Hartley and I, in that stupendous moment before its take-off into the distances of ultimate space, while Nivea prepared to christen it with champagne, and the dazed and uncomprehending workmen, who had trucked it forth and set it there, clustered bewilderedly on the ground a hundred feet below. It was a ship capable of accomplishing the great thing that Hartley had conceived and I had planned, I knew without a doubt. It was the greatest of all my inventions, the most stupendously conceived, the most perfectly wrought in every detail. I put my hand on it and stroked its welded sides as if it had been a living bird. A thing of midnight blue and silver, shaped like a great tear, ready for the stars.
“Will it do it, really?” said Hartley, standing there bareheaded with me, hunched and shivering, with his hands jammed in his topcoat pockets, staring at it with his great luminous eyes. “Beyond the orbit, Helver?”
“Beyond the orbit?” I said. “Beyond the drift! Beyond the galaxy!”
“Beyond the galaxy!” he said. “To the outer-galactic void?”
“Beyond! Beyond the utmost nebula!” I said. “To the ultimate limits of space, Hooker!”
He shivered beside me on the launching platform, standing there, soft, plump, and delicately boned, with his head pulled down between his shoulders, the black curly hair growing thin on top of the great skull above the mighty brain. His full lips were pursed together and a little twisted, with one eye half shut. His topcoat collar was pulled up around his ears, and still he shivered a little in the cold thin dawn. The elevation of the platform perhaps affected him. He had always been a little squeamish about heights.
And even he was awed.
“I made it,” I told him. “I am Helver Gunderson. If I say that it will do it, it will do it.”
Perhaps I was a little irritated. Every nerve in my body was a hot wire. There was burning sand upon my brain. I looked down at him with my red glaring eyes, and he seemed to shrink away from me a little. He had not really doubted me, of course. He knew that I was Helver Gunderson. He knew that if I had made it, it would do it. His question had just been a demand for reiteration of a true but astonishing fact.
“I use atomic energy for the take-off, Hooker,” I explained to him more patiently. “And plenty of it. An adaptation of the neutron-deutron principle, stepped up to the ratio of omega-pi. We take off with an initial speed of five thousand m.p.m., accelerating with geometric progression. She travels by cosmic energy after the first nine minutes, by which time we should be well beyond Mare, I think.
“The problem of power was not too hard to solve, you see—the problem of shape was somewhat more difficult. It is probably that which stumps you. The hull’s apparent contour is obvious, of course, but it is merely for the minimum of friction in the atmosphere. Atmospheric pressure keeps it up. Beyond a hundred miles, in half a second, she collapses into her true shape of a ten-pointed star, the only conceivable one, naturally, for maximum efficiency in interstellar space. The way I worked the mechanical problem of the change of shape was this—”
But he was paying no attention, I realized; he was immersed in those vaster, more splendid thoughts of his own. Shivering, with pursed lips, and with one eye blinking.
“But mechanics bore you,” I said a little lamely. “The point is, it will do it. It will work. Do you want to look inside?”
“What?” he said. “Oh, no. No, thanks. I’ll take your word for it. I wouldn’t understand it, anyway.”
I felt a little baffled by him. A little humiliated and regretful that he should not find sufficiently interesting the mechanical problems which I had faced and conquered. But who was he to waste his mind on things like engines?
“To the ultimate limits of space!” he repeated, catching his breath.
He had a picture of it, I knew, in his mind. “And back,” I said.
But he did not hear me. His teeth chittered, while he shivered. Suddenly he began to laugh, with the breathless gasping laughter which some men get in moments of intense excitement. All his formulae, all his dreams!
The ship I had made that would prove them all. That picture of infinity which he could see. Shivering and laughing, with tight lips, with a gasping in his throat, as if he were strangling from something deep inside him, and for his life he could not stop.
“I knew that you could make it,” he gasped. “To ultimate space! My God, what a man you are!”
It rested there beside us in its lofty cradle, the great rocket, silver and midnight blue. “I christen thee Viking!” said Nivea in her cold clear ringing voice, breaking the bottle of champagne across its nose.
Nivea! The dawn light shone on her smooth brushed golden hair, upon her eyes like the sparkle of beautiful blue ice, upon her small clear-cut face, so cold and proud. She wore silver fox furs around her soft white throat. There was a bunch of violets at her slender supple waist, which no motherhood had ever spoiled. “I christen thee Viking!” she said, Nivea. “May you beach on the ultimate stars!”
There were only the three of us there and the uncomprehending workmen staring up from below. No newsreel men or photographers. They would not have believed it if they saw it. The dawn wind was cold. The blue Sound sparkled. The moon was a pale ghost. The remnants of the wine bottle had dropped to the ground below. Nivea turned to me with her proud eyes. I polished my goggles and put on my helmet, and I got into the ship after a last handshake with Hartley and a kiss on Nivea’s cheek.
“Good-by, old man!” said Hartley.
“Good-by, darling!” said Nivea. “Good luck!”
I battened down the hatch, waved a farewell through the porthole, flipped my controls a couple of times, and took off.
So it was launched without fanfare that morning (said Gunderson), the greatest invention of my career, the culmination of all my mechanical genius and adaptability, upon its course into outer space according to the formulae of Hartley.
I shall never forget—though for years I did let myself forget in Mara’s arms—the sight of Nivea there upon the platform, with a last wave and cry to me as my swift cruiser of galactic space took off. How many years ago! What day is this? May 7, 1968—yes, of course, that must be right. It was this year, this day, and this moment, at six o’clock in the morning. The same hour as when I left . . .
CHAPTER TWO
You wonder (said Gunderson) why a man like me should have been interested at all in a project so theoretical, a quest so unrelated to any practical value or prospect of commercial profit, so unearthly and so abstract. You see in me no more than a super-mechanic—oh, a man with an inexplicable and unparalleled genius for machines, and with a pragmatic grasp and understanding of matter in every form, which has enabled me to produce those various inventions which have changed in the course of a few years the whole aspect of man’s civilization. But still only a mechanic underneath, for all of that—a big-shouldered, heavy-faced fellow, with big broken-nailed hands a little grimy with engine oil, with low brow and unkempt hair, with dull eyes and no dreams behind them—a man with a cogwheel brain. A big apelike lout of a man for all his millions, not quick of wit or speech in any way, a man whose very handclasp is curved to the clutch of a wrench. A man who but for the accident of half a dozen incomprehensible brain cells might be lying with his shoulder blades on the floor of any garage draining out the oil from your car at twenty-two dollars a week. A man, at the best, whose every purpose and accomplishment has been practical and commercially profitable, an unimaginative hard-headed, realistic man, with his feet upon the earth, his eye to the dollar. And that is true, no doubt.
It is true, like everything else, in part. I was born to the bitterest poverty; I knew terrific toil as a boy; acute hunger was a daily and constant companion to me for the first twenty years of my life; and I have had to keep my feet on the earth, to think of profit and values and commercial utility in everything in order to climb up out of that slough which otherwise would have swallowed me.
I w
anted millions, and I made them. At first, to keep away from me the specter of starvation which I had known too well. After I had married Nivea, to take care of her, to maintain for her the background of great houses, jewels, clothes, society, travel, yachts, servants that she needed and deserved— to make her ever more proud and loving of me, because of the power of money that I could shower on her.
And to such a need of money it takes a long time to reach an end. For years there had been no time for me to taste the pleasures of pure science and abstract thinking, no time for dreams. But that did not mean that the dreams were not there. I, Helver Gunderson, super-mechanic, engineer, multimillionaire industrialist, Swedish wizard, cogwheel freak, I too had my dreams. Of outer space. Of infinity. Of the vast dark blue voids which lie between the nebulae. Of adventures in those realms of pure and immaculate mathematics which lie beyond space and time, wherein Hartley’s great mind ranged as mine did among my electrons and differential gears.
It was the racial adventuresomeness of my blood, perhaps, that was aroused and stirred when Hartley first broached his magnificent proposition to me. The Norse blood. The old seafarers who were my ancestors, driven by an unappeasable urge in their quest for the unknown. By a thing within their hearts which cried, Go on! Go on, till the last shore is reached and the world’s rim!
The days of the dragon boats and the thin frail sails and the howl and lash of the spindrift in a man’s teeth and the glorious lightning wrack and the chartless seas are done. But if a man has that thing in his blood, this earth will not suffice him. And the sons of those men will be faring till the world shall end. Education, civilization—but still the call of the blood is there— and still I must always be aware of that adventure-cry. It was that thing in me, born in my blood, which no doubt was one of the impulses which drew me on.
A second, no doubt, was Nivea. For she, too, felt the great splendor of that quest. The time had come when there was no more money I could make, since taxes on increased gains would actually decrease my revenue, while what was already flowing in from royalties and contracts was more than even she could spend. So that I was free from pressure and Nivea’s future was forever secured, as far as money could do it.
The thought of that unprecedented voyage into the void, that great quest conceived by Hartley, inspired her intellect with a lofty enthusiasm such as I had never known her to show before, and she spurred me on with her cold and passionless fire.
Nivea, my wife—you know her, gentlemen. She was a Saltonstall of Boston, highborn, with a lofty mind, cold, but beautiful as ice. And God knows that I loved her, humbly and worshipfully, with all the power of my soul and brain. Yes, I loved her, and wanted her respect and admiration.
She had never thought a great deal of the inventions, you understand— those things had always seemed a little dirty and beneath her, and though she endured them because of the money they brought in, in her heart she had always despised them. Dirt and machines, test tubes and stinking chemicals, she often told me, curling the edges of her thin fine nostrils as she drew back from me; I had only wheels in my brain; there was a stink about me which would not wash off. Who could blame her? She was so highborn, you see. She had married far beneath her; there was no secret in that. Her father had been a gentleman; he had never worked in his life. Me—me, Gunderson, the Swede, with my great awkward hands, my uncouth manners; an ignorant miner’s son, born in the dirt—it could be understood how much she had sacrificed, how much she had lowered herself, by marrying me. What had I ever done to make her proud of me? But this was a project perhaps not unworthy of her, this great forthfaring into outer space.
This was something of pure science, such as even a gentleman might be honored to attempt, and to which, if successful, sufficient honor would be attached. So to warm her cold proud eyes, to do something great and splendidly worthy of her—that was another reason that I undertook the venture, gentlemen.
And yet beyond the Viking blood, and beyond the desire I had to glorify Nivea, there was most of all the necessity I had to carry through the quest, because Hartley had brought it to me. Hartley, the greatest scientific intelligence that ever lived! In my far humbler sphere of endeavor and achievement I had always looked up to him as the man of hands must always look up, I suppose, to the man of mind. Ever since I had first known him Hartley had been my god, since I had none other. And so he had come to me with this great conception of investigating outer space, with the formulae which he had worked out to the ultimate decimal of perfection. He had called on me for help, had Hartley, as to an equal. And I tell you, it made me proud. Only that stupendous brain of his could have worked out the ineffable equation. And yet only these hands of mine could have made the ship.
I shall always swagger a little through the eternities of hell because of that, gentlemen. He came to me, Hooker Hartley, and he said that never before in the world’s history had there been two men such as he and I, and likely there would never be again. He said it was time the thing be done. To make a ship to fly beyond the orbit, and beyond the galaxy, if possible. And he said, “Can you, Helver?” And I said, “I can.” And he said, “Will you, Helver?” And I said, “I will.” And so I did.
With these hands . . .
I first knew Hartley (said Gunderson) in college ten years ago. I knew him, but there was no reason he should know me. Even as a sophomore he was by far the most famous man in college, the leader in everything. Not merely because of his intellect—though even then, at nineteen years old, he was already confounding all the professors and had started work on his epochal thesis destroying the speculations of Einstein—but also because of the other things which he represented: Groton prep-school training, Newport family, wealth, breeding, generations of gentlemen behind him. A member of the best clubs, the quarterback and captain of the football team, handsome as a faun, with dark curly hair and the tilt of his head, his amazingly attractive smile, his elegant manner of wearing clothes. He knew art, wine, clothes, literature. The best restaurants to go to, how to order a dinner for a chorus girl, and how to treat a servant.
He had everything; he knew everything; he was all the things that a man envies and wishes he might be. Picture me, on the other hand, clumsy, uncouth, badly dressed, friendless and poor. I was only Gunderson, the big dumb ugly Swede, taciturn and alone, who lived in a little attic room up on the fourth floor. A grind, working his way through by waiting on table, by tending furnaces, and by running a shoeshine stand for the rich men’s sons. I was twenty-six, too, much older than the rest, for it had taken me time to save to go to college at all.
There was nothing to recommend me. I didn’t even have an overcoat to my name. My only shoes, a pair of cheap work-brogans, had holes in their soles as big as a dollar, and I remember how the fellows used to laugh behind my back as I went clumping through the Yard from class to class, with the mud and water squishing between my toes like the sound of an elephant in muck, with the rain or snow falling on me, and my big red-knuckled hands clutching my books.
I wasn’t even brilliant in studies, for while I might know the answers in most courses, still I had to plug for them, and if I did one or two things with atoms in the lab that made the professors lift their brows, why, that was only a kind of trick, and no one could mistake me for an intellectual. I was just one of those queer shabby earnest nondescript bugs that crawl out from behind cracks in the plaster at a big college, that don’t really belong at all and never will, whose names nobody ever knows.
I was in my back room after supper one night when the door opened, and there was Hartley. I dropped everything and stood up. I didn’t know he knew I was alive. I couldn’t swallow. My brain was a blank at sight of him.
“Sit down,” he said easily, dropping into a chair. He looked at me through cigarette smoke. “Gunderson,” he said, “you and I are the greatest minds in our class, without a question, and in all college. I suspect, in fact, that we are the greatest minds in all the world. There should be a confraternity of geniu
s. I think we should get acquainted.”
“Mr. Hartley,” I managed to say—I found it was all I could do to speak— “Mr. Hartley, do not make fun of me, please. I am not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with you by anyone, nor by you at all. And you know it very well. I have no intelligence at all. Or at the best, a very slow and heavy intelligence. I have only a cogwheel brain. Beside you, I am only a mechanic.”
His bright little faun’s eyes danced in approval.
“I know,” he said, nodding negligently. “I know. You are a grind. Still, there is something in you, Gunderson. Don’t be too modest. The way you made that atom bounce like a jumping bean in lab the other day rather amused me. There’s no one before who’s ever done it. It was near.”
“Merely a pragmatic experiment in augmenting the molecular cohesion of air,” I hastened to tell him, “to be used by planes in flight to build themselves a solid roadway under wing, and so obviate the greatest present handicap to air flight, which is the risk of falling. A mechanical invention purely, and of no theoretical scientific importance.”
“There you are, damn it,” said Hartley, nodding. “An invention for practical use. I can do rings around you theoretically, Gunderson. But you have a hard practicality in your mind that I lack. You can see the application, where I can see only the idea. You will be a millionaire someday, while after I’ve lost in the market what’s left to me, I shan’t know how to make an honest dime. You’ve got the money-making gift, Gunderson, as sure as fate, and I’m not such a fool as not to see it. So I say there’s something in you. You ought to be developed. I think that I am going to take you under my wing.”
“Under your wing, Mr. Hartley?” I said.
“Socially. Bring out your better points, my boy. Teach you the art of knowing how to live and spend the money when you make it. I’ll bet you don’t even know what a woman is. I’ll bet you never even had a drink.”
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