Mission to the Moon

by Lester Del Rey

  mercifully, and there was little news, beyond the fact that the second big station was proceeding rapidly. Most of Jim's worries involved young Freddy Halpern. The boy's father had consented to let him learn to use the taxi, and Jim had been teaching him to pilot, with the help of some of the microfilms. But keeping an eye on him was more of a job than it should have been.

  Freddy was curious about everything, and he had to try anything the others were doing. Sometimes, when Jim's back was turned, the boy would disappear among the men, trying to appear part of the crew. Thorndyke didn't seem to mind, but Jim was worried. There were too many chances for carelessness to result in death here; it took only a small hole in a suit to kill a man. And Freddy was far too unconcerned with danger.

  But they got along well enough, on the whole.

  It was Freddy who told Jim the next news of the relations between the Combine and the United States. Mark Emmett's ship was just pulling up from Earth, bound for the station, and Jim was getting ready to meet it when the boy joined him.

  "Ill bet it's that foreign spy," he said. "Dad got word he was coming up today. Right on the ship, as if he belonged here!"

  On the trip to the rocket Jim got most of what the boy knew out of him. It seemed that the Combine and the United States had reached an agreement to exchange scientists, just as ambassadors had been exchanged of old. The two nations were operating on a level of good relations, on the surface. It was logical enough for them to exchange scientists in the stations, at that, and probably the best way to quiet some of the fears below.

  But Jim shared some of Freddy's worries, even after he delivered the man who had come up on the rocket. Halpern was in the hub to greet the short, dark-skinned man who pulled off the odd-looking space suit, and he made the introductions. "Dr. Charkejian, tills is Jim Stanley. You may have heard of him."

  The scientist smiled, and his voice was low and pleasant as he replied in perfect English. "Indeed I have. I was told to look you up, Jim. In fact, Director Chiam sent his personal regards and a small token of his esteem."

  He opened the small bag he carried and drew out a book, which he passed over. Jim stared at it unbelievingly. It was a first-edition copy of Hermann Oberth's The Rocket into Interplanetary Space. Since the success of space flight, it had become one of the most valuable books in existence, and this was something any rocketman could appreciate. Inside was an inscription from Peter Chiam, expressing his gratitude for his rescue and the hope that someday he and Jim might meet under happier circumstances.

  Halpern studied it, frowning. If word of it got out, Jim could see that it might mean more rumors about too much fraternizing here. He wondered briefly if that were what was intended. But then pleasure in in the gift overcame his doubts.

  Surprisingly, the scientists aboard the station accepted Charkejian without much question. Apparently the man was one of the world's greatest astrophysicists, and they considered it perfectly proper that he would want to be up here, where the seeing was always perfect without the haze of atmosphere.

  Jim couldn't feel quite as happy. "It still doesn't mean he isn't a spy," he told Nora. "Oh, I know Freddy was just romanticizing things. But Charkejian could be more than he seems."

  "You've got problems enough without taking on the whole world," she chided him. "Let the screening boards down on Earth take care of a few things, Jim. You've got enough to do to keep your own eyes on Freddy!"

  Jim nodded. But he was growing used to the boy, and quite pleased with what Freddy was learning. He had the makings of a good pilot, and a surprisingly keen mind for the mathematics of plotting a course. By now Freddy could probably handle the trip up to the relay station alone, without trouble.

  Then the next day Freddy found out that Jim was supposed to watch him. He overheard a bit of conversation between Jim and the colonel and guessed the rest. From then on, he seemed to take his greatest delight in slipping away from Jim's care. It kept Jim hopping, but he was less worried now, since the boy seemed to be learning to handle himself in space.

  The ships were coming along rapidly. The big girders were being put together and the solar mirrors were already functioning, concentrating the heat on a tube of mercury that boiled and drove a turbine generator. It made work easier, since there was now full power for the construction work.

  The cargo ship was Jim's pet. He had found that it was the ship which he'd probably pilot, and he went over it again and again as it was assembled, working on it every free moment. Its big silo-hull was just taking form, leaving huge storage bins for the supplies. The cylinder would serve a double purpose. It would hold food, water, oxygen and everything else the men would need on the Moon. And after the landing, it could be split into two sections, like big Quonset huts, and set up on the surface as living quarters.

  Ten men would go with the cargo ship and twenty with each of the other ships. In addition to the men, the passenger ships would have fourteen tanks of fuel for the return trip and for the landing on the Moon, located where the supply hull was on the cargo ship.

  Materials continued to come up, and there were times when Jim worked long hours overtime, stacking them in the supply dump. At that, his constant striving for perfection was useful. The men had taken it for granted that supplies would be dumped hither and thither, but they appreciated it when they found he was careful to line up girders in such a way that matching sections caught the sun in the same manner. And they were even more pleased when they saw that he kept a careful eye on construction progress and made sure the material they needed first would be closest to them.

  He was working with Bill Carr on one occasion when the taxi was idle, welding together the girders that connected the passenger sphere to the rocket motor platform. It was then that he caught the first feeling of their complete acceptance of him. Bill glanced at Thorndyke's back, where the foreman was laying out the next day's work, and jerked a heavy-mittened hand toward him.

  "Good guy," Bill said over his phones. "But you're making his work a snap, the way you pile things, Jim. Wish we'd had a man like you at the relay station. Coming to the dance?"

  "Dance?" Jim asked. It was the first he'd heard of it.

  "Sure. Something we invented at the relay. Come on over to our section of the shack tonight and bring Nora along."

  Nora was eager to go and filled with curiosity. She knew as well as Jim that dancing was impossible without gravity, but a party was a party. From Jim's view, he was glad it couldn't be a real dance; dancing was one of the social graces he'd never had a chance to learn.

  It turned out to be one of the best evenings for a long time. They had a tiny tape player and some music for it. Men and women paired off, a few starting the activity. They let themselves drift across a part of the shack from which they had cleared the cloth partitions, trying to time their flight to the music. As others joined, it became a game of jostling from couple to couple. It was sort of a cross between square dancing and jitterbugging, as it turned out. And they'd even evolved a few maneuvers that could be done in patterns.

  Jim was awkward at first when those started. But the boy doing the calling came sailing over to help, and Nora caught on quickly. Jim watched her go sailing from partner to partner before the maneuvers brought her back to him, laughing as she went.

  Jonas had come to watch, along with Halpern, but they kept in the background, and left early. They apparently knew that officials couldn't really mix too freely with the crew. But before they left, Jonas motioned Jim to him.

  "Find out who started all this, will you, Jim? It's the best idea we've had up here. I'd like that kind of man on the Moon trip, even if I have to leave out some scientist the government has chosen to send."

  Jim was tired but happier than he'd been for a long time when the evening broke up, and more determined than ever to get along with the men around him. He had long since learned that keeping to himself didn't pay—and now maybe he was learning how to get along with the others. The fact that he'd been invited made
it seem that way.

  There was more work accomplished the next day, too, he noticed. Apparently the relaxation had been good in every way. He finished his ferrying early, looked up the rocket schedule, and found that bad weather would ground the ships for the next twenty-four hours. The station hadn't solved all the problems of long-range weather predicting yet, but it was well on the way. The scientists could already read the movement of the cloud masses below well enough to be pretty sure of the weather for a few days ahead.

  Jim wondered how many farmers would realize the warnings that saved their crops had come from space. It was easy to take things for granted. Then he forgot it as he put on his working suit and prepared to go out to join the crew.

  Freddy was already out there, about equally helpful and a nuisance, but Thorndyke liked the boy, and seemed to get on well with him. Freddy was busy with the job of moving small sections of piping across

  to where the men working the crude cranes could line up the pipe for welding, and he obviously considered himself a man among men.

  Jim grinned, but let the boy alone, as he knew Freddy wanted. He saw that Bill was working one of the torsion bars into place further along the ship, but the man already had a helper. It didn't matter. There was still the job of bolting down sections of the rocket platform, and there he could be fully useful.

  Jim collected the tools and the belt that would hold him in place, and began bolting down. It was monotonous work, but it gave him a good feeling to see plate after plate drop into place as he moved along.

  The shift was almost over before he knew it. He finished the final plate, stowed his tools away, and began unfastening his belt.

  Then a yell went up in his phones. He jerked around, instinctively catching a handhold to keep from overturning, and stared. The yell had come from Thorndyke.

  "Timber! Timber! Fred, get out of there!"

  The cry of "timber" had been carried over from other work, and it meant something heavy heading for someone. Jim jerked his eyes around. Nothing was moving except the big torsion bar Bill was working on. It had apparently been fastened to its pivot at one end, and Bill was now using the crane engine to swing it into place.

  Then Jim saw the small figure of Freddy near it. The boy had a load of plates and was rocketing along with his hand motor, not looking. He must have either forgotten to renew his radio battery or had it turned off, because he gave no sign of having heard Thorn-dyke's yell.

  Bill was frantically trying to kill the momentum of the big bar, but that took time, and there wasn't enough time left. In a second, Freddy would strike the end of the bar. The fabric of the space suits wasn't designed to take that kind of punishment.

  Jim's legs bent under him, while his arms forced his body down to hold contact with the platform. Then he took quick aim and leaped.

  Freddy glanced at him, and suddenly swiveled his head toward the bar lunging toward him. It would be close, Jim knew, but if he could hit the boy in time and knock him out of the way . . .

  Freddy's mouth opened as if he were screaming, and the pile of plates sailed from his arms. With a jerk, he had his hand rocket out and began blasting away from the coming danger.

  Jim saw him clear the end of the bar by inches and breathed a quick sigh of relief. Then Thorndyke's voice yelled again. "Jim! TIMBER!"

  But it was too late for Jim to do anything. He sailed by the place where Freddy would have been, straight toward the big bar. At the last second, he managed

  to flip partway over, trying to take the impact on the thick soles of his boots.

  He didn't quite make it. Something hit with agony against his shin, and he could hear the bone snap! Then the leg went numb as he sailed toward Thorn-dyke, who was leaping out to catch him.

  There was still air in his suit, so it hadn't been punctured. But his leg was completely useless.

  Chapter 8 washout

  ora brought out the taxi and ferried Jim back to the station infirmary, careful not to disturb his leg until Dr. Perez could look at it. The numbness was wearing off by the time they reached the station, and pain was shooting up Jim's leg with every slight movement.

  He saw Nora's white face as she stripped from her suit and joined the doctor in cutting the cloth away from the injured leg. Jim looked down, seeing the ugly discoloration. The leg seemed to dangle.

  "Simple fracture. Green-splint, I guess," Perez reported after a quick examination. "It could be worse. Of course, we'll know better when we make a gamma picture of the bone. But I think you're lucky, Jim. Hurt?"

  It hurt more than he could say, but he tried to grin. "A little."

  "We'll fix that," Perez told him. There was a hypo

  in the doctor's hand, and he injected something quickly. The pain began to go away, and Jim's mind seemed to disconnect itself. He tried to tell Nora not to worry about him, but it was too much effort. He made no attempt to fight against the sleepiness, however, knowing that it was best for him. Within minutes he was unconscious.

  When he came to again, he was lying by himself, with the leg bound up and braced carefully on the hammock. He could see metal braces. The drug had saved him any feeling of the agony of having the bone set. The worst was already over, and he was lucky to have escaped so lightly.

  Then he sobered, as his thoughts began exploring what it would mean. It took time to realize he was a cripple! He wouldn't be able to work the taxi or to help with the building of the ships. Worse than that, he certainly couldn't do any piloting with a bad leg. And if the trip to the Moon went on schedule . . .

  Nora came in then, back in her nurse's uniform. She seemed surprised to see him awake, but she looked cheerful. "It was a simple fracture, Jim. Perez says it'll mend so well that you'll never realize it was broken. So cheer up!"

  "I'm all right," he told her.

  But when she left to take over his job with the taxi, he lay in a dark cloud of gloom. He would probably be sent back to Earth now. He was no use in space, and he was taking up room and attention that would have been better used for workers. He'd made a complete fool of himself.

  He hadn't stopped to think. When Freddy first reached for his hand rocket, Jim should have known that the boy could avoid the bar, and have reached for his own. There would have been time enough, but he had been so busy watching Freddy that he hadn't paid enough attention to his own situation. The very thing for which he'd so often lectured Freddy!

  He had a stream of visitors, among them Freddy, who was full of contrition at first. But he recovered quickly enough when he found Jim wasn't angry at him, his mind full of the latest developments. "They've started work on the survey ship, Jim! And Dad was talking with Mr. Jonas about it, so I got the whole picture. They'll be starting in two weeks!"

  Jim hadn't thought of the survey ship, but the news jolted him. He'd known about it, but had overlooked it in the haste to finish the main ships.

  The little survey rocket would be something like the ferry to the relay station, though a little bigger and more powerful. It wasn't designed to land on the Moon, but to circle around it and back, taking pictures and making a survey of the surface to help in determining the best spot for the final landing.

  And the man who piloted it would be the first human being to see the other side of the Moon!

  After Freddy left, Jim lay speculating bitterly about that. He was pretty sure Jonas would have let him be the pilot, under normal conditions. His familiarity with the ferry and taxi would be in his favor.

  Now he was a washup, and all that was impossible! In two weeks, he was sure, he wouldn't be permitted to leave. When he questioned Perez, the doctor confirmed it. Jim would be practically useless for longer than that. On Earth, he could have been moving around on a crutch by now, but Perez had forbidden him to get up for a few days. Men were less conscious of their legs where the gravity was lower, and the doctor couldn't be responsible for what might happen.

  Jim fretted and fumed to himself, though he tried to keep up a good act when there w
ere others around. Bill and Thorndyke dropped around, and even Dr. Charkejian came to express his sympathies. But Jim didn't want sympathy. He wanted a chance to be on the survey ship. He was torn between pleasure and envy when he heard how quickly the work on it was being done.

  The fourth day they moved him to a stretcher, and Nora and Dr. Perez carried him up into the hub, where a sling had been prepared for him.

  "It's Nora's idea," Dr. Perez said. "She's been studying the work being done on cell growth without gravity, and she thinks your bone may knit faster here where there's no spin. Besides, you're less apt to hurt yourself if you keep twisting and turning."

  "How much faster could it heal?" Jim asked.

  "We don't know. This is just an experiment," the doctor answered. "But if you're so impatient, you might try being more cheerful. It usually promotes healing."

  Jim thought he'd acted as cheerful as he could, but he made no protest.

  It was in the hub that Jonas visited him. The man came in, staring down at Jim and shaking his head. There was no optimistic nonsense about him. He studied Jim, and then snorted. "You're a problem, boy!"

  "I don't want to be," Jim told him. "But if I'm in the way . . ."

  "I didn't mean that. I meant your attitude. You act as if a broken leg is the end of the world. I'm afraid you're one of the pioneer types we keep hearing about. You won't be content to plod along like the average man. And you can't turn adventure into a game. You're no hero—as I suspect Mark Emmett is. No, you have to be the type who stays at the frontiers where the adventure is, but takes it all as seriously as death and taxation."