Perched there, and summoning up his strength, he looked about him. Under his left foot lay the pearl-like Earth, with the night-shadow beginning to creep across her. The sun blazed high to his right. Up to the left the pallid moon lay in a bed of jet scattered with diamond dust.
Lower to his left, but sliding slowly round towards the front, floated the hulk and the glittering spider-work of girders that would one day be the space-station.
Once more he turned his eyes down, to the great globe creeping past his left foot. He watched it steadily for some moments; then he lifted his right hand, and turned the air supply up a little.
‘Skipper?’ he inquired.
‘Receiving you, Ticker,’ acknowledged the Commander. ‘We’ve just managed to get the glass on you. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’m going to have a shot at disabling the thing, Skip. I think the line is to have a bash at this short, thick rod-thing in front of me. Can you see it?’
‘Yes. I can see it. Might be anything. You’re satisfied it’s part of the radar gear?’
‘Obvious, Skipper.’
‘Ticker, you’re lying. Leave it alone.’
‘Might be able to dent it a bit. Enough to mess it up.’
‘Ticker - ‘
‘I know what I’m doing, Skip. Here goes.’
Ticker hooked his toes under two of the projections, and gripped with his knees, for the best possible purchase. He took up the hand-tubes, one in each hand, and slammed away at the short, thick rod with all his might. Presently he paused, panting.
‘No damned weight. Like hitting with matchsticks,’ he complained. ‘Not a mark on it.’
He turned the air on a little more, and screwed up his eyes to squeeze the sweat out of them. The missile was still coming round in its big curve. Twenty degrees more would bring it on to the line of attack again.
‘Going to try another of them this time,’ he said, lifting the tubes once more.
Through the telescope the Commander watched him start to belabour one of the more slender projections: from the right, from the left, from the right, from the...
There was a flash so brilliant that it stung his eyes.
That was all: a vivid, silent flash shining for its brief moment as brightly as the sun....
Then, where it had been, the glass showed nothing but empty darkness, with small, uncaring stars, thousands of light-years beyond....
The Air Marshal spread the message on his desk, and studied it for several long, thoughtful moments.
His mind went back to the night fifty years ago when the other Ticker had not come back. The same job for grandson as for grandfather. Only it had been easier the first time, with a war on, and the news half-expected. He felt old. He
was
old. Too old, perhaps. If they had not changed the regulations he would have been on the shelf ten years ago at his age....
Still, here he was. And he’d tell her himself. Tell this poor girl - just as he had told the other one, long ago. So piteously little he could tell her. ... Lost on a secret mission ... So cruelly blank...
She would know later on, of course - when Security considered it safe. Oh, yes, she would know. He’d see to that. He would throw all his weight there. ... For sheer cold courage ... Nothing less than a V.C. ... Nothing less...
He looked back at the security report for the previous day.
‘Subject dispatched radio to Troon. Message: “Happy birthday from Laura and Michael.” (N.B. Presumed code reference to subject’s birth of child, male, on previous evening. Supporting this: (a) Troon’s birthday 8 May; (b) his radio reply: ‘‘I love you both.”)’
The Air Marshal sighed, and shook his head.
‘But at least she has the boy,’ he murmured. ‘And she knows he knew about the boy.... I’m glad he did.... The old Ticker never even knew there was to be a child...
‘I hope they meet up there. ... Ought to get on well together....
There was a double knock on the alloy door. The Station-Commander, standing with his back to the room, looking out of the window, appeared for the moment not to hear it. Then he turned, just as the knock was repeated.
‘Come in,’ he said, in a flat unwelcoming tone.
The woman who entered was tall, well-built, and aged about thirty. Her good looks were a trifle austere, but softened slightly by the curls of her short, light-brown hair. Her most striking feature was her soft, blue-grey eyes; they were beautiful, and intelligent too.
‘Good morning, Commander,’ she said, in a brisk, formal voice.
He waited until the door had latched, then:
‘You’ll probably be ostracized,’ he told her.
She shook her head slightly. ‘My official duty,’ she said. ‘Doctors are different. Privileged in some ways, on account of being not quite human in others.’
He watched her come further into the room, wondering, as he had before, whether she had originally joined the service because its silky uniform matched her eyes, for she could certainly have advanced more quickly elsewhere. Anyway the uniform certainly suited her elegant slenderness.
‘Am I not invited to sit?’ she inquired.
‘By all means you are, if you care to. I thought you might prefer not,’ he told her.
She approached a chair with the half-floating step that had become second nature, and let herself sink gently on to it. Without removing her gaze from his face, she pulled out a cigarette-case.
‘Sorry,’ he said, and held the box from the desk towards her. She took one, let him light it for her, and blew the smoke out in a leisurely way.
‘Well, what is it?’ he asked, with a touch of irritation. Still looking at him steadily, she said:
‘You know well enough what it is, Michael. It is that this
will not do
.’
He frowned.
‘Ellen, I’ll be glad if you’ll keep out of it. If there is one person on this station who is not directly involved, it is you.’
‘Nonsense, Michael. There is not one person. But it is just because I am the least involved that I have come to talk to you. Somebody has to talk to you. You can’t afford just to let the pressure go on rising while you stay in here, like Achilles sulking in his tent.’
‘A poor simile, Ellen. I have not quarrelled with my leader. It is the rest who have quarrelled with theirs - with me.’
‘That’s not the way they see it, Michael.’
He turned, and walked over to the window again. Standing there, with his face pale in the bright earth light, he said: ‘I know what they are thinking. They’ve shown it plainly enough. There’s a pane of ice between us. The Station-Commander is now a pariah.
‘All the old scores have come up to the surface. I am Ticker Troon’s son - the man who got there by easy preferment. For the same reason I’m still here, at the age of fifty - five years over the usual grounding age; and keeping younger men from promotion. I’m known to be in bad with half a dozen politicians and much of the top brass in the Space-House. Not to be trusted in my judgement because I’m an enthusiast - i.e. a man with a one-track mind. Would have been thrown out years ago if they had dared to face the outcry - Ticker Troon’s son, again. And now there’s this.’
‘Michael,’ she said calmly. ‘Just why are you letting this get you down? What’s behind it?’
He looked hard at her for a moment before he said, with a touch of suspicion:
‘What do you mean?’
‘Simply what I say - what is behind this uncharacteristic outburst? You are perfectly well aware that if you had not earned your rank you would not be here - you’d have been harmlessly stowed away at a desk somewhere, years ago. As for the rest - well, it’s mostly true. But the self-pity angle isn’t like you. You could simply have cashed in and lain back comfortably for life on the strength of being Ticker Troon’s son, but you didn’t. You took the name he left you into your hand, and you deliberately used it for a weapon. It was a good weapon, and of course it made enemies for you, so of course they maligned you. But you know, and hundreds of thousands of people know, that if you had not used it as you did we should not be here today: there wouldn’t be any British Moon Station: and your father would have sacrificed himself for nothing.’
‘Self-pity - ‘ he began, indignantly.
‘Phony self-pity,’ she corrected, looking at him steadily.
He turned away.
‘Would you like to tell me what the proper feeling is when, at a time of crisis, the men that you have worked with and for - men that you thought had loyalty and respect, even some affection, for you, turn icy cold, and send you to Coventry? It certainly is not the time to feel pride of achievement, is it?’ She let the question hang for a moment, then:
‘Understanding?’ she suggested. ‘A more sympathetic consideration of the other man’s point of view - and the state of his mind, perhaps?’ She paused for several seconds. ‘We are none of us in a normal state of mind,’ she went on. ‘There is far too much emotion compressed in this place for anyone’s judgement to be quite rational. It’s harder for some than for others. And we don’t all have quite the same things uppermost in our minds,’ she added.
Troon made no reply. He continued to stand with his back to her, gazing steadily out of the window. Presently, she walked across to stand beside him.
The view outside was bleak. In the foreground an utterly barren plain; a flatness broken only by various-sized chunks of rock, and occasionally the rim of a small crater. The harshness of it was hard on the eyes; the lit surfaces so bright, the shadows so stygian that, if one looked at any one part too long, it dazzled and seemed to dance about.
Beyond the plain, the mountains stuck up like cardboard cut-outs. Eyes accustomed to the weathered mountains of Earth found the sharpness, the height, the vivid jaggedness of them disturbing. Newcomers were always awed, and usually frightened, by them. ‘A dead world,’ they always said, as they looked on the view for the first time, and they said it in hushed voices, with a feeling that they were seeing the ultimate dreadful place.
Too facile, too earthbound a sensation, Troon often thought. Death implied corruption, decay, and change, but on the moon there was nothing to corrupt, nothing that could change. There was only the impersonal savagery of nature, random, eternal, frozen, and senseless. Something that the Greeks had glimpsed in their conception of Chaos.
Over the horizon to the right hung a fluorescent quarter-segment of the Earth; a wide wedge bounded on one side by the night line, and serrated at the base by the bare teeth of the mountains.
For more than a minute Troon gazed at its cold, misted blue light before he spoke. Then:
‘The idiot’s delight,’ he said.
The doctor nodded slowly.
‘Without doubt,’ she agreed. ‘And there - there we have it, don’t we?’
She turned away from the window and went back to the chair.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘or perhaps I should say, I like to think I know, what this place means to you. You fought to establish it; and then you had to fight to maintain it. It has been your job in life; the purpose of your existence; the second foothold on the outward journey. Your father died for it; you have lived for it. You have mothered, more than fathered, an ideal: and you have to learn, as mothers learn, that there has to be a weaning.
‘Now, up there, there is war. It has been going on for ten days - at God knows what cost: the worst war in history - perhaps even the last. Great cities are holes in the ground; whole countries are black ashes; seas have boiled up in vapour, and fallen as lethal rain. But still new pillars of smoke spring up, new lakes of fire spread out, and more millions of people die.
‘ “The idiot’s delight”, you say. But to what extent are you saying that because you hate it for what it is; and to what extent are you saying it from fear that your work will be ruined - that there may come some turn of events that will drive us off the moon?’
Troon walked slowly back, and seated himself on a corner of the desk.
‘All reasons for hating war are good,’ he said, ‘but some are better than others. If you hate it and want to abolish it simply because it kills people - well, there are a number of popular inventions, the car and the aeroplane, for instance, that you might do well to abolish for the same reason. It is cruel and evil to kill people - but their deaths in war are a symptom, not a cause. I hate war partly because it is stupid - which it has been for a long time - but still more because it has recently become too stupid, and too wasteful, and too dangerous.’
‘I agree. And then, too, of course, much of what it wastes could otherwise be used to further Project Space.’
‘Certainly, and why not? Here we are at last, close to the threshold of the universe, with the greatest adventure of the human race just ahead of us, and still this witless, parochial bickering goes on - getting nearer to race suicide every time it flares up.’
‘And yet,’ she pointed out, ‘if it were not for the requirements of strategy we should not be here now.’
He shook his head.
‘Strategy is the ostensible reason perhaps, but it is not the
only
reason. We are here because the quintessential quality of our age is that of dreams coming true. Just think of it. For centuries we have dreamt of flying; recently we made that come true: we have always hankered for speed; now we have speeds greater than we can stand: we wanted to speak to far parts of the Earth; we can: we wanted to explore the sea bottom; we have: and so on, and so on: and, too, we wanted the power to smash our enemies utterly; we have it. If we had truly wanted peace, we should have had that as well. But true peace has never been one of the genuine dreams - we have got little further than preaching against war in order to appease our consciences. The truly wishful dreams, the many-minded dreams are now irresistible - they become facts.
‘We may reach them deviously, and almost always they have an undesired obverse; we learnt to fly, and carried bombs; we speed, and destroy thousands of our fellow men; we broadcast, and we can lie to the whole world. We can smash our enemies, but if we do we shall smash ourselves. And some of the dreams have pretty queer midwives, but they get born all the same.’