Read Ebook: Stay off the Moon! by Jones Raymond F Finlay Virgil Illustrator

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Ebook has 320 lines and 14899 words, and 7 pages

Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release date: December 5, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1962

Stay off the MOON!

Illustrated by FINLAY

The real problem, of course, is not quite that simple. You don't literally fill a pipette or use a test tube; you activate metering circuits that force tiny, ground-glass plungers a measured distance into reagent pumps. You send signals that close some valves and open others, and apply heat and adjust temperatures, and filter solutions, and send the product to a spectrometer that determines what you've got and how much.

Then you have to code it and get the information from the moon to earth.

James Cochran had seen the equipment work through hundreds of checkout analyses. But he didn't understand it. He was a chemist, and he had drawn up the specifications for the chemical analyzers of the Prospector, but it had been the electronic boys who dreamed up the remote mechanization and the telemetry equipment that would allow him to sit before a complex panel at the Center and direct his chemical laboratory on the moon to learn what the moon was made of. Some of the light-headed technicians who worked on the project had dubbed it Operation Green Cheese, but Cochran had more respect for the complexity of the effort.

It was Sunday midnight. The beginning of countdown was forty hours away. Cochran's crew had finished the chemical checkout, but in the assembly hangar technicians still swarmed about the Prospector, giving final-check to the power and telemetry components.

Jim Cochran signed off the last of the check reports and dropped them in the slot for delivery to the Project Director. He turned off the lights over his own desk and went out to the hangar. Under the blaze of fluorescent lights the device looked like some monstrous insect. The differential housings over the worm-screw drives gleamed like a red, segmented carapace. The blue appendages of the solar cell boxes were extended as if in some frantic appeal. The radar dish and the helical antenna extended mutely upward. And, like a furious proboscis, the exploratory drill, which would pierce the moon's skin to a depth of five hundred feet, seemed to gnaw at the concrete floor of the hangar.

Sam Jarvis, supervisor of electronic checkout, saw Jim Cochran enter and came over to him with a broad, weary grin. "AOK, so far! This package is going to be perfect. If only the rocket boys will set up a bird that will take it to the moon--"

"They'd better," said Jim. "I don't think I could ever go through this again if they dump the Prospector in the drink."

Sam turned back to look at the robot machine and the swarming technicians. "Yes, you could," he said. "All of us have gone through heartbreak time and again the past five years, watching them blow up, or fall back and burn in the atmosphere because the motors didn't ignite. Or seeing them get all the way to the moon and have some five-dollar transistor conk out. But we always have at it again. You will, too. You're new, but you're one of us now. You never back out when you've come this far."

Watching the Prospector, Jim knew Sam was right. It had taken some persuasion to bring him to this point, however. Until a couple of years ago he had believed he would be content with ivory-tower plastics research for the rest of his life. The persuasion had been applied when Mary's brother, Allan Wright, had made the astronaut team.

Allan and Jim had grown up together. There was no other person Jim felt closer to except Mary and their two children. Allan had dreamed of space when they were kids, and when he was fifteen, he said, "I'm going out there. I don't know how. But, somehow, I'm going out there."

Now, he had been selected to captain the first Apollo voyage. He had been born for that purpose, he said.

But while he was still in the general pool of astronauts he had opened his campaign to get Jim into the space program. "They need the best brains they can get," Allan said. "You haven't got any right to sit in a musty old plastics lab while guys with half your ability try to get us into space. NASA will take you tomorrow!"

Jim didn't try to tell him that his plastics lab wasn't exactly musty, or that he didn't think of himself as one of the best brains in the country. But Mary sided with Allan; she was almost as excited about space as he was. In the end, Jim went to NASA. Within days, he had been assigned to head the development of the Prospector chemical mechanization.

It had been something of a jolt to pull up all the roots he had so carefully put down for him and his family, and move to the hectic, bustling, space-frontier community of the Center. But he wasn't sorry. It put something new in the blood, something men had never known before.

Space!

The great Saturn lifted slowly, on a vast blossom of fire, with snowy lox streaming down its sides. Then it was gone, a twinkle of fire high above, among the stars. That was all.

Mary and Jim Cochran continued to stare at the fading twinkle, and finally they turned away. Allan had obtained permission to be in the blockhouse during the firing. It hadn't been necessary for Jim to be there. He didn't want to know the instant-by-instant telemetry reports which told whether or not the flight was successful. Sam or Allan would call him when they knew. That would be soon enough for him.

"Let's drive down to the beach and watch the moon from there," said Mary. "We can't just turn around and go home, like--like nothing had happened."

Jim smiled in the darkness. Mary was as eager as he was for the success of the flight. And she didn't have his fear of failure, that kept him from wanting to know the maybe-yes, maybe-no indications that the telemetry would first show.

"Sure," he said, "that's a good place to watch it."

The moon.

They watched its reflection thrashing on the water as the breakers rolled across, under, and around it. It was the same image that men had watched and wondered about and feared--for a half million years. The first creatures that had any semblance of manhood had sat on their haunches on this same shore and watched the same moon and the same water.

And felt the same fears, Jim thought.

He didn't know whether it was fear or not, but there was some sense of awesome mystery that filled him when he looked at the moon. It had been that way all his life. He remembered how it was when he was a boy and he walked through the fields at night on his way home. He had to pass Cramer's Pond, and when the moon was up its light from the sky and its reflection from the pond seemed to fill the whole earth with a cold, silver light. He always hurried past the pond on such nights.

Mary felt it, too. "I wonder why the moon makes people feel the way they do."

"How does it make people feel?"

The baying of dogs on a wintery, moonlit night.

The madness called lunacy.

Seeds must be planted just so, in relation to the moon, or the crop will fail.

Men had always felt strange things about the moon. Would a Saturn missile and a mechanical monster in its nose be able to destroy all that?

They were still in the blockhouse, but the tension was relaxed. They were talking and watching the meters and cathode ray tubes without the strain and fear of failure. Jim knew the answer even before Sam and Allan walked up to him and slapped him on the back.

"Where the devil did you go?" said Sam. "I thought you were going to be right behind me when we fired, and you weren't here at all!"

"It's like your first baby, you want to be there, and you don't. Was it a good shot?"

"Was it a good shot?" Allan's face became ecstatic. "We've never had a better one. On course all the way!"

The Project Director, Emil Hennesey was behind them. His face was bleak. "I expected you to be here for the firing, Cochran," he said. "It seems to display little interest in your end of the project that you didn't feel it necessary to show up."

Jim looked at him steadily and shrugged without answer. Hennesey was one guy whose presence on the space team Jim couldn't figure out. He was an ex-Major, and he had no capacity for dreaming. Men, machines, transistors, rockets--they were all the same thing, merely objects to be made to obey.

"You are aware of your next sequence of duties, I trust?" said Hennesey.

Jim nodded curtly. "I'll be ready."

Sixty-six hours to the moon. That's what it takes with marginal escape velocity and free-fall conditions. But it was really five hundred thousand years and sixty-six hours, Jim thought. Surely there hadn't been a single hour in all that time when someone, somewhere on earth had not felt the longing to solve the secret mystery of the moon.

Now they were about to find the answer. But what would they have when they found it? They would know that the surface dust of the moon consisted of certain percentages of silicates and oxides. They would know that the under layers were composed of rocks, maybe of granite or limestone or basalt. They would determine how much of each.

And then it would be over. The quest of the ages would be answered with a few simple statements that could be obtained in any high-school chemistry lab--if the lab were on the moon.

Why do dogs howl at the moon on winter nights?

Why do men say that madness of the mind is lunacy?

Why must planting be done in the right phase of the moon?

Little sleep was had by any of the crew during the next two nights, even though the instrument stage of the ship was now completely inert except for occasional telemetry signals that were fed to the computers for course checking and correction. The ship was simply falling on its own momentum.

Six hours before moonfall, activities in the tracking center accelerated and the tension increased. There was no question of hitting the moon; the landing had to be made safe for the cargo of instruments.

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