A large anthology of sci.., p.524
A Large Anthology of Science Fiction, page 524
The captain turned to face the doctor directly. “It was a man, a full grown man.”
The doctor sighed as if letting the pent-up steam of his heart escape. “Yes, it is a man. It breathes, it eats, it has all the attributes of a man. But it is not of our planet.”
“Its speech . . .” the captain began.
“That isn’t speech, Captain,” the doctor broke in, breaking in sharply, “It’s only sound.” The doctor stopped; he examined the label of his bottle of whiskey very carefully. A good brand of whiskey. “He seems quite happy in the storeroom. You know, Captain, what puzzled me at first? He can’t read. He can’t read anything, not even the instruments in that ship. In fact he shows no interest in his rocket at all.”
The captain sat down now. He sat at the desk and faced the doctor. “At least they had the courage to send a man, not a mouse. Doctor, a man.”
The doctor stared at the captain, his hand squeezing and unsqueezing on the whiskey bottle. “A man who can’t read his own instruments?” The doctor laughed. “Perhaps you too have failed to see the point? Like that stupid general who sits out there waiting for the men from somewhere to invade?”
“Don’t you think it’s a possibility?”
The doctor nodded. “A very good possibility, Captain, but they will not be men.” The doctor seemed to pause and lean forward. “That rocket, Captain, is a test rocket. A test rocket just like ours!”
Then the doctor picked up his whiskey bottle at last and poured two glasses.
“Perhaps a drink, Captain?”
The captain was watching the sky outside the window.
THE END
THE DEATH DUST
Frank Harvey
As the first men to reach the moon, they made a fearful and unexpected discovery.
The United States Air Force had named our moon vehicle Super Nova, which means “exploding star.” We weren’t going to explode—we hoped—but we were certainly going to produce one of the loudest roaring sounds heard by anyone in the world up to now.
Now it was four o’clock in the morning at Cape Canaveral, Florida There were three of us: Maj. Dick Rivero, copilot and astrogator: Dr. Charles Ferris, our medical and human-factors specialist; and myself. Maj. Jim Casey, aircraft commander. I say aircraft commander advisedly. The Super Nova was a gleaming metal skyscraper as it stood on the launching pad at the cape. It had five stages, weighed fifteen hundred tons and its rocket engines added up to seventeen million pounds of thrust. But the payload—the top of the skyscraper in which we would ride—was an airplane. It was a bigger and much more sophisticated version of the X-15 rocket plane which Scott Crossfield and Bob White had tested so thoroughly in the Mojave Desert. Major Rivero and I would sit side by side in front. Doctor Ferris would ride in the small cabin be hind us—certainly not an ideal arrangement for a five-hundred-thousand-mile round trip, but let me say this for the Super Nova: It was designed to send three men to the moon and back—not for a rest-and-relaxation junket—and none of us was complaining. Returning from outer space, our X-15F would circle the earth three times, dipping a little deeper into the air blanket each time, before committing itself to a landing at Edwards Flight Test Center, in California. So, in a true sense, the X-15F was an aircraft, and I as its commander.
It was a rigid requirement that each of us be small. You wouldn’t think the engineers would quibble about a pound or two after designing a space ship as high as an office building, but they had. It took twenty pounds of fuel, for example, to carry a fountain pen to the moon and back—so every ounce, even flesh and blood, had to pay its way.
I couldn’t have asked for a better crew. Colonel Burns, of the Aeromedical Laboratory, had wanted very much to go himself, but he was too old and too heavy. He sent Dr. Charles Ferris, a thin-faced, solemn little guy with a dry sense of humor, full of terms like “mean diurnal cycle” and “uncompensated respiratory acidosis.” Don’t let it fool you Chuck was what the USAF calls a “quiet tiger.” When the heat was on, he just wouldn’t quit. Once he had slit the chest of a man whose heart had stopped beating, reached in and massaged the heart—and saved the man’s life. I didn’t hear it from Chuck. I read it in the records.
If you follow the doings of the Strategic Air Command at all, you know Major Rivero. He’s a jet-bombardment expert—one of the slickest boys in SAC when it comes to handling a K-system. He flew jet fighters, too, in Korea, which was where I met him first. We had a nice little group out there: Rivero, Dad Smith, Smoke Hunter, Pete De Flores—you know the roster. I’m an ex-fighter jock myself, and I suppose I’m partial to the breed.
Now, on the launch pad at Canaveral, I looked through the double-paned windscreen at our target, a ghostly lemon-colored disk which hung over the Atlantic in the lilac haze. My mouth was too dry to spit. I was scared. Certainly I was. So were the other guys, even though they weren’t showing it. Doctor Ferris was the coolest, I guess, but he could afford to be. The only person who’d miss Doc, if our bird wandered off toward the sun, was a certain lovely brunette who owned a smelly great Dane and drove a sports car a hundred miles an hour. She’d grieve for Doc at least a week. Then there’d be a new third party in the sports car, and it wouldn’t be the lovely brunette’s mother. She admitted that her favorite toy was boys, and nobody challenged the statement.
With Major Rivero it was different. Dick was married to one of the cutest little gals—and one of the best cooks—in the whole USAF. I’d eaten Jinny Rivero’s Caesar salad and her enchiladas. Angels, sitting down to dinner, should be so lucky! Dick must he thinking of Jinny now, the way I was thinking of Hank. Hank’s my boy. He’s eleven. Since his mother died, we’ve been living out of the same barracks bag, and we kind of like each other.
“Launch Control to Super Nova” a voice said in my headset, “Final check. You ready for lift-off, Major Casey?”
I glanced sideways. Rivero’s thumb was up. I twisted slightly in my contour seat, hampered by the full-pressure suit, and looked at Ferris. He grinned through his face plate. “O.K., Launch Control,” I radioed. “This is Major Casey. We are ready for lift-off.”
“Roger, Major Casey. We are ninety seconds and counting . . .”
Our contour seats had been adjusted so that all of us bent forward at the waist in the attitude which Colonel Burns’ tests had indicated was best in violent forward acceleration. Every inch of our bodies was supported. We did not need that support at once. The cluster of seven rocket F-l engines that gave ten million five hundred thousand pounds of thrust to our first stage lighted off together with a sound that dug through the insulation and twisted in my ears like broken glass. Outside the windscreen, the palmettos and blockhouses on the cape were so blindingly bright in the reflected glare that it hurt to look at them. We seemed to be nailed down. Then our streamlined skyscraper began to lilt, as if it were on hydraulic jacks,
“Go, baby, go,” the launch controller’s voice said, a whisper in the storm of sound. The cape fell away. Our tail flames turned the scattered clouds a furnace white. Still we moved slowly, like a freight elevator. The lilac haw slipped below us. Through the air blanket outer space was a delicate lettuce green and the stars winked peacefully.
“We in a balloon?” Rivero’s voice said, sounding brittle and tiny. “Or are we in a moon rocket?” Then, at last, the speed began to build.
I am not too clear about the stage firings. They were automatic, of course. There were short periods of weightless coasting in between. Each stage fired harder as we grew lighter. Even in our contour seats the G loads got brutal. I blacked out in the middle of the fourth-stage firing. Stage five stayed with us. We would have to use it to escape from the moon on our return trip. A voice was speaking as f came out of the black-out.
“Hello, Super Nova. This is Central Control. We have taken over from Launch. Do you read us, Major Casey?”
“Loud and clear,” I said. “Go ahead.”
“You all right?”
“Fine,” I said. “How do we look on the scopes?”
“Green,” the voice said, excited and happy. “Green as a cotton-picking emerald—straight across the hoard. You’ve got escape velocity now. You can’t possibly fall back. If your moon homer works, you’re in.”
I looked out. We were in the near-horizontal part of our flight path, very high, headed due east. As I watched we shot out of the earth’s shadow into bright sunlight. I did not want to take my eyes from the scene, even for a moment. Over the intercom I asked Dick Rivero to read off our primary-panel indications. Dick’s voice said, “Altitude: nine hundred miles. Speed: thirty-five thousand feet per second. Cabin pressure: normal. Everything’s in the green, skipper,”
I thanked him. The continent of Africa was rising slowly out of the sea and spreading out under us on the curve of the world. As we lifted I could see the whole massive sprawl of the Sahara, like a beige rug beside the swimming-pool glitter of the Mediterranean. My throat ached and there was a prickling hotness behind my eyes. This was a sight no man had seen before. Maybe this was a sight that should be reserved for God. The horizon was no longer flat—or even curved. It was gone altogether, and I was looking at the whole planet earth, a giant cloud-streaked ball of dark ocean and glowing land, floating there, like a dream, against the star blaze of deep space. Out ahead of us, across two hundred forty thousand miles of emptiness, hung our destination, incredibly clean and white, like a globe of glowing ice.
“Brother,” Dick Rivero said softly on the intercom, and it sounded like a prayer. I glanced over at him. “How are you doing Dick?”
He snapped back instantly, and was his old kidding self, “Skipper—you know what the paratrooper said before his first jump?”
“No. What did the paratrooper say’ ?”
“He said. ‘I wish the folks back on the farm could see me now—back on the farm!”
It was good for a laugh. We all had to laugh or cry, and laughing was a lot better. Doctor Ferris said, “I hope Dr. Wernher von Braun is right.”
“Right about what?”
“He wrote a science-fiction story about the moon. Said there was no dust. Not a speck. People ran around with wheelbarrows, gathering rocks. It was a ball.”
“In two and three-tenths days,” Dick Rivero said, “we will know if the good doctor is right. If our moon homer works, that is. If it doesn’t—we are in for a good long trip around the sun.”
“Like eternity?” Ferris said.
“Yeah,” Dick Rivero said. “Like eternity.”
We passed through the Van Allen belt too rapidly for the deadly radiation, trapped by the earth’s magnetic field, to get through our shielding. We were weightless, of course. It was an unpleasant feeling—and dangerous. If any of us became violently nauseated, we could drown in our own stomach fluids, there being no gravity to empty our throats. We’d brought special pumps for this contingency, but we didn’t need them. We were too busy to be sick, and after a while we built up a tolerance to weightlessness, and the queasiness went away.
The X-15F was fitted with a meteor bumper designed to vaporize anything up to the size of a pea and prevent it from reaching our pressure hull, but no impacts were really expected, and none occurred. We did hit very line space dust about eighty thousand miles out. It eroded the observation windows slightly, destroying the lens-bright surface, but did not threaten our cabin integrity at all. The radar and radio reception was good except for bursts of solar static at limes. Those monster antenna dishes on earth were following us with focused beams, and it was working very well. They even sent us hi-fi recordings of Nat King Cole, and at one point we heard a rebroadcast of a Yankee baseball game. Actually, after the excitement of the blast-off wore away, the trip became pretty humdrum. We had our helmets off, but we kept our pressure suits on. We’d need them if and when we reached the moon, and they were the very devil to get into in cramped quarters. Even our meals were no treat. Because of our weightless condition, we had to squeeze our food into our throats out of big plastic tubes—like eating tooth paste.
However, as we left the earth behind and the moon got larger ahead of us, the tension grew steadily. We had all studied the flight profile, and we knew that just a few hundred feet per second in burnout velocity, back near the earth, could make a disastrous difference in our chances of reaching the moon. We also knew that a degree or two of error in path angle could throw us off the target by thousands or miles. We were placing our faith in the infrared homing equipment. I won’t go into detail except to say that the homer was supposed to work somewhat like a magnet. It was supposed to seek out the moon for us, lock onto it and bring us down automatically, firing short bursts of rocket power to correct for deviations.
When we were many hours out, I called earth and checked on our profile. “You’re doing just fine,” they told me. “According to our radar indications, you’re right on the button. No sweat.”
“Thanks,” I said. If I’d been sitting in some air-conditioned radar room on earth, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been sweating either.
“You should transfer from earth gravity to moon gravity very soon now,” the earth radio said. “Watch for it.”
“What’s the guy think we’re doing?” Major Rivero said on the intercom, not taking his eyes off the homer. “Playing tiddlywinks?”
We watched the moon in silence. It was half full. The sunlight, coming in from the side, made furry-looking shadows in the craters. Even the dark side glowed with reflected earthshine. The place looked very beat up, as if a peevish giant had worked on it with a sledge hammer. Rivero said, “Oh, oh—looks like——”
I felt my body sag in the seat.
“There goes a guidance rocket!” Rivero yelled. “We got it made, you guys! Our homer just locked onto the moon!”
We didn’t have it made. We had a chance to make it. There’s a difference. I looked through the windshield. I had made a study of the moon’s surface. We were coming down in one comer of a flat area which the astronomers call Mare Imbrium. It looked like a mud flat after a crowd of kids has tossed a bunch of junk into it. There were strings of tiny holes, such as water droplets would make. There were cozy cups, like the imprints of pebbles. And there were wide pie-crust craters. The whole area was Linked hard and white by the sun.
“Let’s get into our helmets,” I said. “I don’t look for any emergency on the landing, but we have to be ready, just in case,”
When we were all fully suited, I turned the X-15F around, using the hydrogen-peroxide jets in the nose and wings, and we began to drop toward the moon tail-first. There was a large booster stage still fastened to our tail. It would serve two purposes: reverse rocket power for the moon landing and enough solid-fuel energy to blast us back to earth on the return trip. The homer had swiveled automatically us I reversed our heading. It was now firing at intervals to reduce our speed and to keep us on course.
I was now very tense. The homer would carry us close to the moon. Then I would take over manually for the landing. I watched the backdown mirror. The moon’s surface now looked a great deal like the California desert, except that there were no gullies or bushes. The sun’s rays were horizontal, as in late afternoon on earth, and every rock and hummock had a knife-sharp shadow stripe. Those pits which had seemed like water droplets were now hair a mile wide. The piecrust rings were cliffs reaching up toward us.
I said, “Extend landing gear!”
Rivero said, “Gear coming out, sir!”
I saw the steel tripod sprout from its streamlined nest in the booster hull.
“Landing gear down and locked!” Rivero said.
“Very well,” I said. “Now stand by for an emergency lift-off if we strike a hole and start to tilt dangerously.”
As we approached the surface, I saw the white floor of the Mare Imbrium begin to stir nervously, as if it were alive, under the downthrust of the landing rockets, it was white dust, it boiled and churned wildly, and then we settled into it as into an arctic white-out, and I cut the power. There was a bump, a tilting as the tripod legs automatically positioned themselves to keep the moon rocket vertical, pointed back toward earth. The sink meter slowed to zero and stopped, and Dick Rivero’s voice said, “Don’t look now—because you can’t see a thing—but i think we just landed on the moon!”
It was cut and dried from here on out. We were programed to spend exactly fourteen hours on the moon, arid every moment of that time was covered on our check list. First we had to preflight the space vehicle for blast-off. We did not anticipate any difficulties, but it was only sensible to have the back door open and the hinges oiled. We had flipped coins, back on earth, to see who would be the first man to set foot on the moon—in case we reached it—and I had been lucky. I’d go down the ladder first, followed by Doctor Ferris, and Major Rivero would stay inside the ship and monitor the temperatures and pressures on its instruments. It was our home away from home, and we didn’t want anything to go wrong with it while we were outside working. Dick would have his chance to walk around on the moon as soon as we returned.
Getting out of the cramped space lock and positioning the descent ladder in the blinding fog of dust was a slow, irritating job. The stuff was as fine as talcum powder and, since there was no atmosphere and very tittle gravity as compared to earth, it merely hung there, glowing and opaque in the brilliant sunlight. I made a Geiger-counter test on top of the ladder and again at the bottom, standing in what felt like eider down, and there was no dangerous radioactivity. “O.K., Doctor Ferris,” I said on my helmet radio. “Come on down. The coast is dear.”
“Clear?” Chuck Ferris’ voice said. “You call this clear?”
“Of course it’s clear,” Dick Rivero’s voice said from inside the ship. “There’s no dust out there. It’s your imagination.”
Several moments later Ferris loomed dimly beside me, a talcum-powdered ghost in the glowing mist. We joined hands and began moving cautiously out into the fog. We staggered like a couple of drunks at first, being unused to the reduced gravity. But us we left the vicinity of the rocket ship, the dust thinned—there was no wind to scatter it—and walking became easier.
