Prelude to Space (20 page)

Very few people indeed knew that the meticulous Taine could, had he wished, have made
much more money out of fifty-two pieces of card than he was ever likely to from astronomy.
Not that he would do at all badly now, if he came back safely from the Moon….

Sir Robert Derwent lay completely relaxed in his arm-chair, the room in darkness save
for the pool of light from the reading lamp. He was almost sorry that the two or three
days’ margin for last-minute hold-ups had not been required. It was still a night
and a day and a night again before the take-off—and there was nothing to do but wait.

The Director-General did not like waiting. It gave him time to think, and thought
was the enemy of contentment. Now, in the quiet hours of the night, as the greatest
moment of his life approached, he was revisiting the past in search of his youth.

The forty years of struggle, of success and heart break, still lay in the future.
He was a boy again, at the very beginning of his university career, and the Second
World War which had stolen six years of his life was still no more than a threatening
cloud on the horizon. He was lying in a Shropshire wood on one of those spring mornings
that had never come again, and the book he was reading was the one he still held in
his hands. In faded ink upon the fly-leaf were the words, written in a curiously half-formed
hand: “Robert A. Derwent. 22 June 1935.”

The book was the same—but where, now, was the music of the singing words that once
had set his heart on fire? He was too wise and too old; the tricks of alliteration
and repetition could not deceive him now, and the emptiness of thought was all too
clear. Yet ever and again there would come a faint echo from the past, and for a moment
the blood would rush to his cheeks as it had done those forty years ago. Sometimes
a single phrase would be enough:

Sometimes a couplet:

The Director-General stared into space. He himself was loosening such a thunder as
the world had never heard before. Upon the Indian Ocean the sailors would look up
from their ships as those roaring motors stormed across the sky; the tea-planters
of Ceylon would hear them, now faint and thin, going westward into Africa. The Arabian
oilfields would catch the last reverberations as they filtered down from the fringe
of space.

Sir Robert turned the pages idly, halting wherever the flying words caught his mind.

What had he saved from Time? Far more, he knew, than most men. Yet he had been almost
forty before he had found any aim in life. His love for mathematics had always been
with him, but for long it had been a purposeless passion. Even now, it seemed that
chance had made him what he was.

The magic failed and faded. His mind went back to the war years, when he had fought
in that silent battle of the laboratories. While men were dying on land and sea and
air, he had been tracing the paths of electrons through interlocking magnetic fields.
Nothing could have been more remotely academic; yet from the work in which he had
shared had come the greatest tactical weapon of the war.

It had been a small step from radar to celestial mechanics, from electron orbits to
the paths of planets round the sun. The techniques he had applied in the little world
of the magnetron could be used again on the cosmic scale. Perhaps he had been lucky;
after only ten years of work he had made his reputation through his attack on the
three-body problem. Ten years later, somewhat to everyone’s surprise—including his
own—he had been Astronomer Royal.

He might have held that post efficiently and with success for the remainder of his
life, but the
Zeitgeist
of astronautics had been too strong for him. His mind had told him that the crossing
of space was about to come, but how near it was he had not at first recognized. When
that knowledge had finally dawned, he had known at last the purpose of his life, and
the long years of toil had reaped their harvest.

He flicked the yellowing pages a dozen at a time, until his eyes caught the narrow
columns of print for which he had been searching. Here at least the magic lingered;
here nothing had altered, and the words still beat against his brain with the old,
insistent rhythm. There had been a time when the verses, head to tail in an endless
chain, had threaded their way through his mind for hour upon hour until the very words
had lost their meaning:

The eternal night would come, and too soon for Man’s liking. But at least before they
guttered and died, he would have known the stars; before it faded like a dream, the
Universe would have yielded up its secrets to his mind. Or if not to his, then to
the minds that would come after and would finish what he had now begun.

Sir Robert closed the slim volume and placed it back upon the shelf. His voyage into
the past had ended in the future, and it was time to return.

Beside his bed, the telephone began to call for attention in angry, urgent bursts.

No one ever learned a great deal about Jefferson Wilkes, simply because there was
very little indeed to know about him. He had been a junior accountant in a Pittsburgh
factory for almost thirty years, during which time he had been promoted once. He did
his work with a laborious thoroughness that was the despair of his employers. Like
millions of his contemporaries, he had practically no understanding of the civilization
in which he found himself. Twenty-five years ago he had married, and no one was surprised
to discover that his wife had left him in a matter of months.

Not even his friends—though there was no evidence that he had ever possessed any—would
have maintained that Jefferson Wilkes was a profound thinker. Yet there was one matter
to which, after his fashion, he had given very serious thought.

The world would never know what had first turned the pathetic little mind of Jefferson
Wilkes outward toward the stars. It was more than probable that the motive had been
a desire to escape from the drab reality of his everyday life. Whatever the reason,
he had studied the writings of those who predicted the conquest of space. And he had
decided that, at all costs, it must be stopped.

As far as could be gathered, Jefferson Wilkes believed that the attempt to enter space
would bring down upon humanity some stupendous metaphysical doom. There was even evidence
that he considered the Moon to be Hell, or at least Purgatory. Any premature arrival
by mankind in those infernal regions would obviously have incalculable and—to say
the least—unfortunate consequences.

To gain support for his ideas, Jefferson Wilkes did what thousands before him had
done. He sought to convert others to his beliefs by forming an organization to which
he gave the declamatory title: “The Rockets Must Not Rise!” Since any doctrine, however
fantastic, will gain some adherents, Wilkes eventually acquired a few score supporters
among the obscurer religious sects that flourish exotically in the western United
States. Very swiftly, however, the microscopic movement was rent by schism and counter-schism.
At the end of it all, the Founder was left with shattered nerves and depleted finances.
If one wishes to draw so fine a distinction, it may be said that he then became insane.

When the “Prometheus” was built, Wilkes decided that her departure could only be prevented
by his own efforts. A few weeks before the take-off, he liquidated his meager assets
and withdrew his remaining money from the bank. He found that he would still need
one hundred and fifty-five dollars to take him to Australia.

The disappearance of Jefferson Wilkes surprised and pained his employers, but after
a hasty inspection of his books they made no efforts to trace him. One does not call
in the police when, after thirty years of faithful service, a member of the staff
steals one hundred and fifty-five dollars from a safe containing several thousand.

Wilkes had no difficulty in reaching Luna City, and when he was there no one took
any notice of him. Interplanetary’s staff probably thought he was one of the hundreds
of reporters around the base, while the reporters took him for a member of the staff.
He was, in any case, the sort of man who could have walked straight into Buckingham
Palace without attracting the slightest attention—and the sentries would have sworn
that no one had entered.

What thoughts passed through the narrow gateway of Jefferson Wilkes’s mind when he
saw the “Prometheus” lying on her launching cradle, no one will ever know. Perhaps
until that moment he had not realized the magnitude of the task he had set himself.
He could have done great damage with a bomb—but though bombs may be come by in Pittsburgh
as in all great cities, the ways of acquiring them are not common knowledge—particularly
among respectable accountants.

From the rope barriers, whose purpose he could not fully comprehend, he had watched
the stores being loaded and the engineers making their final tests. He had noticed
that, when night came, the great ship was left unattended beneath the floodlights,
and that even these were switched off in the small hours of the morning.

Would it not be far better, he thought, to let the ship leave Earth but to ensure
that it would never return? A damaged ship could be repaired; one that vanished without
explanation would be a far more effective deterrent—a warning that might be heeded.

Jefferson Wilkes’s mind was innocent of science, but he knew that a spaceship must
carry its own air supply, and he knew that air was kept in cylinders. What would be
simpler than to empty them so that the loss would not be discovered until too late?
He did not wish to harm the crew, and was sincerely sorry that they would come to
such an end, but he saw no alternative.

It would be tedious to enumerate the defects in Jefferson Wilkes’s brilliant plan.
The air supply of the “Prometheus” was not even carried in cylinders, and had Wilkes
managed to empty the liquid oxygen tanks he would have had some unpleasantly frigid
surprises. The routine instrument check would, in any case, have told the crew exactly
what had happened before take-off, and even without an oxygen reserve the air-conditioning
plant could have maintained a breathable atmosphere for many hours. There would have
been time to enter one of the emergency return orbits which could be quickly computed
for just such a calamity.

Last, and far from least, Wilkes had to get aboard the ship. He did not doubt that
this could be done, for the gantry was left in position every night, and he had studied
it so carefully that he could climb it even in the dark. When the crowd had been surging
around the head of the ship, he had mingled with it and had seen no sign of locks
on that curious, inward-opening door.

He waited in an empty hangar at the edge of the field until the thin moon had set.
It was very cold, and he had not been prepared for this since it was summertime in
Pennsylvania. But his mission had made him resolute and when at last the blazing floodlights
died he had started to cross that empty sea of concrete toward the black wings spread
beneath the stars.

The rope barrier halted him and he ducked under it. A few minutes later his groping
hands felt a metal framework in the darkness before him, and he made his way around
the base of the gantry. He paused at the foot of the metal steps, listening into the
night. The world was utterly silent; on the horizon he could see the glow of such
lights as were still burning in Luna City. A few hundred yards away he could just
make out the dim silhouettes of buildings and hangars, but they were dark and deserted.
He began to climb the steps.

He paused again, listening, at the first platform twenty feet from the ground, and
again he was reassured. His electric torch and the tools he thought he might need
were heavy in his pockets; he felt a little proud of his foresight and the smoothness
with which he had carried out his plan.

That was the last step: he was on the upper platform. He gripped his torch with one
hand, and a moment later the walls of the spaceship were smooth and cold beneath his
fingers.

Into the building of the “Prometheus” had gone millions of pounds and more millions
still of dollars. The scientists who had obtained such sums from governments and great
industrial undertakings were not exactly fools. To most men—though not to Jefferson
Wilkes—it would have seemed improbable that the fruit of all their labors should be
left unguarded and unprotected in the night.