Rocket Ship Galileo (17 page)

“Nobody knew how to make an atom bomb a few years ago,” Morrie pointed out.

“That’s true.” Cargraves wanted to change the subject; it was unpleasantly close to horrors that had haunted his dreams since the beginning of World War II. “Ross, how do you feel about the other side of the moon now?”

“We’ll know pretty soon,” Ross chuckled. “Say—this
is
the Other Side!”

And so it was. They had leveled off in their circular orbit near the left limb of the moon as seen from the earth and were coasting over the mysterious other face. Ross scanned it closely. “Looks about the same.”

“Did you expect anything different?”

“No, I guess not. But I had hoped.” Even as he spoke they crossed the sunrise line and the ground below them was dark, not invisible, for it was still illuminated by faint starlight—starlight only, for the earthshine never reached this face. The suncapped peaks receded rapidly in the distance. At the rate they were traveling, a speed of nearly 4000 miles per hour necessary to maintain them in a low-level circular orbit, the complete circuit of the planet would take a little over an hour and a half.

“No more pictures, I guess,” Art said sadly. “I wish it was a different time of the month.”

“Yes,” agreed Ross, still peering out, “it’s a dirty shame to be this close and not see anything.”

“Don’t be impatient,” Cargraves told him; “When we start back in eight or nine days, we swing around again and you can stare and take pictures till you’re cross-eyed.”

“Why only eight or nine days? We’ve got more food than that.”

“Two reasons. The first is, if we take off at new moon we won’t have to stare into the sun on the way back. The second is, I’m homesick and I haven’t even landed yet.” He grinned. In utter seriousness he felt that it was not wise to stretch their luck by sticking around too long.

The trip across the lighted and familiar face of the moon was delightful, but so short that it was like window shopping in a speeding car. The craters and the “seas” were old familiar friends, yet strange and new. It reminded them of the always strange experience of seeing a famous television star on a personal appearance tour—recognition with an odd feeling of unreality.

Art shifted over to the motion-picture camera once used to record the progress of the
Starstruck
series, and got a complete sequence from
Mare Fecunditatis
to the crater Kepler, at which point Cargraves ordered him emphatically to stop at once and strap himself down.

They were coming into their landing trajectory. Cargraves and Morrie had selected a flat, unnamed area beyond
Oceanus Procellarum
for the landing because it was just on the border between the earth side and the unknown side, and thereby fitted two plans: to attempt to establish radio contact with earth, for which direct line-of-sight would be necessary, and to permit them to explore at least a portion of the unknown side.

Joe the Robot was called again and told to consult a second cam concealed in his dark insides, a cam which provided for the necessary braking drive and the final ticklish contact on maneuvering jets and radar. Cargraves carefully leveled the ship at the exact altitude and speed Joe would need for the approach and flipped over to automatic when Morrie signaled that they were at the exact, precalculated distance necessary for the landing.

Joe took over. He flipped the ship over, using the maneuvering rockets, then started backing in to a landing, using the jet in the tail to kill their still tremendous speed. The moon was below them now and Cargraves could see nothing but the stars, the stars and the crescent of the earth—a quarter of a million miles away and no help to him now.

He wondered if he would ever set foot on it again.

Morrie was studying the approach in the radar scope. “Checking out to nine zeros, Captain,” he announced proudly and with considerable exaggeration. “It’s in the bag.”

The ground came up rapidly in the scope. When they were close and no longer, for the moment, dropping at all, Joe cut the main jet and flipped them over.

When he had collected, himself from the wild gyration of the somersault, Cargraves saw the nose jets reach out and splash in front of them and realized that the belly jets were in play, too, as the surge of power pushed the seat of the chair up against him. He felt almost as if he could land it himself, it seemed so much like his first wild landing on the New Mexico desert.

Then for one frantic second he saw the smooth, flat ground ahead of the splash of the plowing nose jets give way to a desolation of rocky ridges, sharp crevasses, loose and dangerous cosmic rubble…soil from which, if they landed without crashing, they could not hope to take off.

The sunlight had fooled them. With the sun behind them the badlands had cast no shadows they could see; the flat plain had appeared to stretch to the mountains ahead. These were no mountains, but they were quite sufficient to wreck the
Galileo
.

The horrible second it took him to size up the situation was followed by frantic action. With one hand he cut the automatic pilot; with the other he twisted violently on the knob controlling the tail jet. He slapped the belly jets on full.

Her nose lifted.

She hung there, ready to fall, kept steady on her jets only by her gyros. Then slowly, slowly, slowly the mighty tail jet reached out—so slowly that he knew at that moment that the logy response of the atomic pile would never serve him for what he had to do next, which was to land her himself.

The
Galileo
pulled away from the surface of the moon.

“That was close,” Morrie said mildly.

Cargraves swiped the sweat from his eyes and shivered.

He knew what was called for now, in all reason. He knew that he should turn the ship away from the moon, head her in the general direction of the earth and work out a return path, a path to a planet with an atmosphere to help a pilot put down his savage ship. He knew right then that he was not the stuff of heroes, that he was getting old and knew it.

But he hated to tell Morrie.

“Going to put her down on manual?” the boy inquired.

“Huh?”

“That’s the only way we’ll get her down on a strange field. I can see that now you’ve got to be able to see your spot at the last half minute—nose jets and no radar.”

“I can’t do it, Morrie.”

The younger man said nothing. He simply sat and stared ahead without expression.

“I’m going to head her back to earth, Morrie.”

The boy gave absolutely no sign of having heard him. There was neither approval nor disapproval on his face, nor any faint suggestion.

Cargraves thought of the scene when Ross, blind and bandaged, had told him off. Of Art, quelling his space sickness to get his pictures. He thought, too, of the hot and tiring days when he and Morrie had qualified for piloting together.

The boy said nothing, neither did he look at him.

These kids, these damn kids! How had he gotten up here, with a rocket under his hand and a cargo of minors to be responsible for? He was a laboratory scientist, not a superman. If it had been Ross, if Ross were a pilot—even where he now was, he shivered at the recollection of Ross’s hair-raising driving. Art was about as bad. Morrie was worse.

He knew he would never be a hot pilot—not by twenty years. These kids, with their casual ignorance, with their hot rod rigs, it was for them; piloting was their kind of a job. They were too young and too ignorant to care and their reflexes were not hobbled by second thoughts. He remembered Ross’s words: “I’ll go to the moon if I have to walk!”

“Land her, Morrie.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

The boy never looked, at him. He flipped her up on her tail, then let her drop slowly by easing off on the tail jet. Purely by the seat of his pants, by some inner calculation—for Cargraves could see nothing through the port but stars, and neither could the boy—he flipped her over again, cutting the tail jet as he did so.

The ground was close to them and coming up fast.

He kicked her once with the belly jets, placing them thereby over a smooth stretch of land, and started taking her down with quick blasts of the nose jets, while sneaking a look between blasts.

When he had her down so close that Cargraves was sure that he was going to land her on her nose, crushing in the port and killing them, he gave her one more blast which made her rise a trifle, kicked her level and brought her down on the belly jets, almost horizontal, and so close to the ground that Cargraves could see it ahead of them, out the port.

Glancing casually out the port, Morrie gave one last squirt with the belly jets and let her settle. They grated heavily and were stopped. The
Galileo
sat on the face of the moon.

“Landed, sir. Time: Oh-eight-three-four.”

Cargraves drew in a breath. “A beautiful, beautiful landing, Morrie.”

“Thanks, Captain.”

“THE BARE BONES—”

• 12 •

ROSS AND ART WERE ALREADY
out of their straps and talking loudly about getting out the space suits when Cargraves climbed shakily out of his chair—and then nearly fell. The lowered gravitation, one-sixth earth-normal, fooled him. He was used to weightlessness by now, and to the chest-binding pressure of high acceleration; the pseudo-normal weight of a one-
g
drive was no trouble, and maneuvering while strapped down was no worse than stunting in an airplane.

This was different and required a little getting used to, he decided. It reminded him a little of walking on rubber, or the curiously light-footed feeling one got after removing snow shoes or heavy boots.

Morrie remained at his post for a few moments longer to complete and sign his log. He hesitated over the space in the log sheet marked ‘position’. They had taught him in school to enter here the latitude and longitude of the port of arrival—but what were the latitude and longitude of this spot?

The moon had its north and south poles just as definitely as the earth, which gave any spot a definite latitude, nor was longitude uncertain once a zero meridian was selected. That had been done; Tycho was to be the Greenwich of the moon.

But his navigation tables were tables for the
earth
.

The problem could be solved; he knew that. By spherical trigonometry the solutions of celestial triangles on which all navigation was based could be converted to the special conditions of Luna, but it would require tedious calculation, not at all like the precalculated short cuts used by all pilots in the age of aircraft and rocket. He would have to go back to the Marc St. Hilaire method, obsolete for twenty years, after converting laboriously each piece of data from earth reference terms to moon reference terms.

Well, he could do it later, he decided, and get Cargraves to check him. The face of the moon called him.

He joined the little group huddled around the port. In front of them stretched a dun and lifeless floor, breaking into jagged hills a few miles beyond them. It was hot, glaring hot, under the oblique rays of the sun, and utterly still. The earth was not in sight; they had dropped over the rim into the unknown side in the last minutes of the impromptu landing.

Instead of the brassy sky one might expect over such a scene of blistering desert desolation, a black dome of night, studded brilliantly with stars, hung over it. At least, thought Morrie, his mind returning to his problem in navigation, it would be hard to get lost here. A man could set a course by the stars with no trouble.

“When are we going out?” demanded Art.

“Keep your shirt on,” Ross told him and turned to Cargraves. “Say, Doc, that was sure a slick landing. Tell me—was that first approach just a look around on manual, or did you feed that into the automatic pilot, too?”

“Neither one, exactly.” He hesitated. It had been evident from their first remarks that neither Ross nor Art had been aware of the danger, nor of his own agonizing indecision. Was it necessary to worry them with it now? He was aware that, if he did not speak, Morrie would never mention it.

That decided him. The man—
man
was the word, he now knew, not “boy”—was entitled to public credit. “Morrie made that landing,” he informed them. “We had to cut out the robot and Morrie put her down.”

Ross whistled.

Art said, “Huh? What did you say? Don’t tell me that radar cut out—I checked it six ways.”

“Your gadgets all stood up,” Cargraves assured him, “but there are some things a man can do that a gadget can’t. This was one of them.” He elaborated what had happened.

Ross looked Morrie up and down until Morrie blushed. “Hot Pilot I said, and Hot Pilot it is,” Ross told him. “But I’m glad I didn’t know.” He walked aft, whistling
Danse Macabre
, off key again, and began to fiddle with his space suit.

“When do we go outside?,” Art persisted.

“Practically at once, I suppose.”

“Whoopee!”

“Don’t get in a hurry. You might be the man with the short straw and have to stay with the ship.”

“But… Look, Uncle, why does anybody have to stay with the ship? Nobody’s going to steal it.”