Collected Short Fiction, page 538
He sat grinning uncertainly. “The fleet failed to bombard Freedonia,” her hard voice rapped.
“The crews heard that recorded broadcast, and refused to fire.”
His smile widened.
“Grin!” she whipped at him. “But Seetee-Interplanet has gone bankrupt.”
That sobered him briefly. Interplanet had dominated many worlds for two long centuries. Even though she hated its oppressive power, he knew it had not been wholly bad. He could see the girl’s love for the lost splendor of it, and share a little of the tragedy she felt.
“Your own uncle’s ruined,” she added savagely, “along with all the rest of us. He sold the Tor and all that condulloy to support the market, and the break wiped him out. He barely got away with his life.”
“How’s that?”
“The new government ordered his arrest—this insane Fifth Freedom forced governmental changes on all the planets, you see, and a temporary commission has been appointed to. liquidate the Mandate. But your uncle got away, aboard the Adonis.”
Jenkins scarcely heard her, for he was dazed with an overwhelming awe. He sat swaying uncertainly on the bed, wishing he could see the unfolding age of the Fifth Freedom. But the dark fruit of death was ripe in his flesh, and ready to fall.
“See what you’ve done!” Jane Hardin cried bitterly. “I hope you’re happy now.”
She strode away, and Jenkins lowered himself carefully back to the sheets. He clung to the image of her, white and taut with wrath, her bright hair swept back, her eyes almost luminous. He wished, with a bleak agony of longing, that he might live to know her in the different world dawning.
“Congratulations, Nicky!” Brand’s hearty boom, next day, aroused him from heavy sleep.
“They’ve let me come to wish you well in your bright new paradise.”
Brand stood straight and tall at the foot of the bed, two watchful men in Guard uniform at his elbows. A folded jacket on his arm didn’t quite conceal the polished links that held his wrists. Jenkins sat up stiffly in the bed, trying to dislike him.
“Yes, they caught me.” Brand nodded at the handcuffs, almost cheerfully. His angular face looked hollowed, his ruddy color paled, but his fine gray eyes had kept their genial, penetrating shrewdness.
“These new commissioners want my hide,” he rumbled softly. “A symbol, I suppose, of the old order they’re tearing down. I was caught on little Nuevo Jalisco—my men wanted to defend me, but I’ve already caused killing enough.”
His rawboned face turned soberly regretful.
“So they’re taking me back to Pallasport,” he added quietly. “This new government is going to put me on trial for my alleged war crimes, as soon as they get a tribunal set up. I understand they’ll want the death penalty.
“So I may not be seeing you again, Nicky.” The tall man shrugged, almost casually. “Sorry I’ve nothing to bequeath you, but the Fifth Freedom has left me unencumbered. Anyhow, I hope you’ll forget our little differences.” He put out a lean hand, trying awkwardly not to show the handcuffs. “Shake, Nicky?”
Jenkins quit trying to resist his old admiration for Brand’s unquenchable audacity, and took the offered hand.
“Thanks, Nicky.” Brand’s gaunt face lit cheerfully. “You know, I almost regret the haste of these new commissioners. I’d really like to see if the Fifth Freedom can be as splendid as I first expected, twenty years ago.”
One of the guards touched his shoulder.
“So long, Nicky.” He tried to wave his hand, and the bright little chain stopped his wrist awkwardly. “Hope you won’t feel too hard. Personally, I haven’t many regrets. The Tor was quite a place, even if I die for it now.”
The guard tugged at his sleeve.
“Coming,” he rumbled softly. “Luck, Nicky!”
XXII
Jane Hardin didn’t come next day.
Jenkins lay watching the door, wearily hoping for her, when Worringer came stalking in. He tried to find a patient fortitude as the bearded specialist jabbed his flesh and listened at his chest, looked in his throat and probed his eyes with a painful blade of light. He swallowed at last to whisper anxiously:
“Well, doctor? When do I kick off?”
“Don’t ask me.” Worringer glared sternly at a timid-looking nurse swabbing test chemicals on the chest of Jenkins. “You might get too much, next time. But your hemorrhages have stopped. Lesions healing cleanly.”
“Huh?” It came to Jenkins that the soreness was gone from his mouth and his throat. “You mean—I’m not dying?”
“You can leave the clinic tomorrow.”
“But—” Jenkins blinked unbelievingly. “I thought—”
“You were nearly gone when Miss Hardin brought you back,” Worringer said, “but it turns out you had already brought us your own specific—in the veins of Captain Rob McGee.”
Jenkins merely stared.
“Never saw such a case!” Worringer paused to study the stinging test stains, and nodded with a grudging approval. “Thought he was dying, when that fever bit. But every symptom disappeared. He’s naturally immune. Only answer possible is adaptive mutation.” Jenkins shook his head dazedly. “Evolution,” rasped the bearded man. “Biologists and philosophers can squabble forever about mechanism and teleology,; but life does adapt to changed environments. And McGee is shaped to fit an environment which includes hard radiations.”
“But—” Jenkins caught his breath. “What did you do for me?”
“Twenty cubic centimeters of serum prepared from McGee’s blood, injected intravenously. It stimulates regeneration of the injured cells. I’ve already isolated the active agent—a new hormone, apparently formed in the suprarenal cortex. I’m confident of successful synthesis.” He glowered triumphantly at Jenkins. “So we’ve licked seetee shock.”
Jenkins sat awed and voiceless, grasping that.
“The others?” he whispered suddenly. “The Drakes and the rest—can you save them?”
“All but one man, who is already dead.”
Dread shook Jenkins, waiting for that man’s name.
“The one I couldn’t save was Jean Lazarene.”
“Oh!” That taciturn outcast of Earth had surely earned his death, yet Jenkins shivered. “I must have killed him,” he muttered faintly, “with that prospecting gun.”
“Wrong. The man was already dying. Made me listen to his last confession. Seems he was involved in this asterite revolt. Said he stole seetee machines from your Freedonia plant, and tried to install them on another rock. Something went wrong. Tried to get away, but he wasn’t far enough when the blast caught him. Nearly gone when O’Banion brought him here. I tried the serum, but he died last night.”
The nurses let Jenkins get up that afternoon. In robe and loosely flapping slippers, he shuffled down the corridor to look for McGee and the Drakes and the other engineers from Freedonia. He found they had been discharged. He was padding hack to his room, elated but lonely and impatient to be out, when Rick Drake’s red-haired wife arrived.
“Rick got out last night,” she told hint happily. “With a few drops of Cap’ll Rob’s wonderful blood in him, and feeling fit as ever. He wanted to see you, but you were sleeping and the nurses wouldn’t let him in. He started back to Freedonia this morning, with his father and Cap’n Rob, to see about the Brand transmitter.”
Alarm caught hold of him.
“Has anything gone wrong?”
“Open this.” Smiling mysteriously, she gave him a little package. “Ann wanted me to bring flowers, but Rick said you’d like this better. Even if it’s just a toy.” Eagerly, he-opened the box. He found a small light bulb and another tiny gadget made of insulating plastic, sheet copper, and a few turns of wire. Peering at it, he caught his breath.
“A Brand receptor!” he whispered. “Does it work?”
“Try it.”
Anxiously, he twisted the bulb into the gadget. It lit—and its tiny glow was enough to show him the illimitable might of the Brand power field, pervading all the planets of man. It was a searchlight, probing feebly into the misty splendor of a new human era.
Discharged next day, Jenkins started out to look for Jane Hardin. She had been a determined enemy, but he had no reason to hate her now. The Fifth Freedom would dissolve old barriers, heal old conflicts. He wanted to know the person she would be, in the new age dawning.
She met him on the steps of the clinic building.
“So you’re really well again, Nicky!” Her blue eyes smiled at him, delighted, yet uncertainly contrite. “I’ve come hack to say I’m sorry,” she told him softly, “because I’ve been wrong about several things.”
Her fine skin was flushed a little, aglow again with health, her eyes dark with feeling. She was very lovely, Jenkins thought, and paused to rejoice that the dark weed of death had been uprooted from his own flesh.
“Your new Fifth Freedom is something different than I expected.” Her low voice held a breathless eagerness. “I’ve seen it come to the people of this little rock, and I can imagine what it does to people everywhere.”
He saw the bright wonder on her face.
“It lights a new kind of life in their, eyes,” she said. “You can hear something new and glad and good, even in the way the children laugh. Come on, and see what’s happening.”
He stood enjoying the gleam of light on her soft hair and the generous warmth in her eyes.
“Men are already repairing the machinery above that old uranium mine,” she told him. “Fixing it to run from a Brand receptor. Only now they’re going to take out iron and copper and tungsten, that weren’t worth recovering before. They’re going to refine and work the metal with seetee power—and build more terraforming units to reclaim more rocks.”
And she was his enemy no longer; he clung to the bright certainty of that.
“I’ve been staying with old O’Banion’s daughter,” she went on quietly, “the Mrs. Anders, who’s going to have a baby. And she’s wonderful, Nick. I’ve learned from her that these asterites are really—people. I believe they have as much honor and character and integrity, really, as the Interplanet families.”
Her level eyes came to his.
“Can you forgive me, Nick, for being such a snob?”
Nodding happily, Jenkins seized her hand.
“Oh!” Her breath caught. “I almost forgot—did you hear about your uncle?”
“What about him?” Grimly, Jenkins tried again to put out the lingering spark of his old admiration for Martin Brand. He tried hard to feel that Brand ought to die for his expansive crimes. “Has the case come up?”
Jane Hardin nodded, blue eyes gay.
“The verdict?”
“Acquittal,” she said, “at the examining trial. The charges were dismissed when his lawyer pointed out that, he invented the Brand transmitter, and really originated the Fifth Freedom.”
“Huh!” Jenkins couldn’t help a gasp of relief. “How did you find out?”
“He called from Pallasport this morning, to tell me he was free and ask about you. Seems he has made a quick adaptation to the Fifth Freedom. Says he is already organizing a new corporation.”
Jenkins stared, astonished.
“Titan, Inc.” Jane smiled quizzically. “It will be chartered to terraform that large moon of Saturn. He says the new commissioners and the judges who tried him have all signed up to buy stock. He’s holding a block of shares for you.”
“Generous of him.” Jenkins grinned. “But I’ve another job. We still have those stand-by transmitters to build, to guarantee the Fifth Freedom. And, right now, we’ve a new world to see!”
They turned, and paused, and came down the clinic steps together.
THE END
1950
The Moon and Mr. Wick
A man may be barred from his purpose by the stupidity of his superiors, but if he should be clever enough—
THE FBI men have come and gone.
They investigated all of us who know Mr. Maximilian Wick, searching into what we had learned or guessed of his unusual activities. They dynamited the shallow tunnel he had dug on the old Wick farm west of the campus, before they left and there was something they hauled away in an armored truck.
The official reports on Mr. Wick and his tunnel are locked up now in the files at Washington. Wick himself is back with his freshman classes in the math department but he has had twenty years of practise in keeping his own secrets and he answers questions with a squinted, cheerful grin.
Mrs. Juliana Wick, who usually talks enough for two, is keeping equally quiet. She appears queerly uneasy at any mention of the moon, and she tries to change the subject. She must have had a very trying interview with the Federal men and they apparently impressed her.
We on the faculty, however, can piece the story together. Clayborn is a small college and most of us have known Wick since he came here as a freshman himself, thirty years ago. We had almost forgotten the tunnel on the farm—but we all know Harry Thorwald and we all read the papers.
We had to read the papers because most of us have sons of draft age. Black headlines, all that winter, had told of the bold moves forcing America toward war and we were all bitterly aware that even such quiet towns as ours would be battlefronts when the atomic bombs began to fall.
Wick was always an odd little fellow but we had long since ceased to wonder about the way he spent his summers. The efficient Federal men pointed out clues we should have seen. But, after all, you don’t expect anything very remarkable from an assistant math instructor in a college the size of Clayborn.
The greatest puzzle, to our minds, was why he had married Juliana—or, to put the matter the way it seemed, why she married him. We recognized his mathematical genius but Juliana isn’t interested in non-Euclidian geometries. Perhaps, as old Professor Pharr used to say, she caught him while he was dreaming of the moon.
For the moon is the one real passion of Wick’s whole life. It has always been, since he was a boy. Old Thorwald recalls him when he came to register for his freshman year, inquiring eagerly in the physics department about courses in rocketry and nucleonics.
Those were the days just after World War II when captured German V-2 rockets were already soaring out from Earth on trial flights every few weeks at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. Other nations were already scrambling hard to overcame the American lead in atomic science. Like many young men of his day Wick had read the future.
Remember the awed wonder of your first real sight of the moon? Perhaps it was through a street telescope or perhaps only with good eyes and a little understanding—but it takes your breath when that bright spot in the sky becomes suddenly a great mountainous sunlit world.
We all have felt the tremendous challenge of that moment. The difference is that Wick didn’t forget. He didn’t turn away. He wasn’t too busy. He knew the promise of the German rockets and he read the terrible warning of Hiroshima. He made up his mind.
“I’m going to the moon.” He said that very soberly to Dr. Thorwald. “I’d like to be the first man there. I want courses that will help me go there and get back alive.”
Dr. Thorwald didn’t smile. A seasoned faculty adviser, he respected the earnestness of the slight determined boy. Perhaps he recalled some magnificent dream of his own. Clayborn didn’t offer any courses in astronautics but he pointed out gently that space pilots would require a good foundation in math and general physics.
“Sign me up,” the boy told him. “I’ll study anything I need to know. I’m going to the moon.”
AND Wick applied himself. He didn’t care for English literature but his math grades were perfect. He took two degrees in four years and he could soon have had his doctorate if he had wanted that.
“But degrees don’t matter,” he told Dr. Thorwald. “All I want is a chance to help design the first atomic-powered rocket and fly it—wherever it can go.” Wick grinned wistfully. The unbelievers had already made him careful of what he said about his goal.
“The government has a corner on the research, and I’m going to take a Federal job. That looks like the only way.” To the moon, he must have meant—but the job didn’t take him there. He was gone three years before he came back to Clayborn, looking tired and thin and despondent, to accept the modest faculty place he still holds.
He had already learned to keep his secrets. He didn’t talk to anybody about his Federal work. It was years later that young Harry Thorwald became an atomic technician and brought back the inside story of that secret controversy and Wick’s first crushing defeat. “Everybody says he made a brilliant start,” Harry told his father. “If he’d been willing to play ball with the bureaucrats and the “politicians he could have been a big shot on the project. But he was too impatient to get to the moon.
“You can’t blame the men at the top. They’ve had some pretty hard lessons. The money has to come from Congress and the people, and the program has to be announced. You simply can’t get funds to fortify the moon. The taxpayers won’t foot the bill.”
That was years ago, remember, and people can’t quite keep up with science. Only a few military experts had realized that the moon fitted all their definitions of the perfect fortress. Hung beyond a quarter-million miles of dangerous emptiness, it is impregnable to any ordinary attack. Modem weapons based there command all of Earth. The gradient of gravitation makes it easy to fire atomic missiles from the moon to Earth but very difficult for Earth to answer.
Wick knew that. He must have read between the lines of confidential Intelligence reports to guess that the experts of other nations knew it too and were acting on their knowledge. He tried to convince his superiors that America had to win the race to the moon—and he failed. Back on campus Wick seemed to forget his defeat. He must have known, as we all did in the uneasy backs of our minds, that the world was rolling on toward the most dreadful war of all but he took no time to brood about it.
Wick was a small man, thin and quick. His bald head was thrust impetuously forward on a scrawny turtle-neck and preoccupied purpose had carved a frown around his shrewd gray eyes. Always in a hurry to get somewhere, he darted about at a nervous half-trot. He taught his freshman classes and started working on a project for his doctorate.
“The crews heard that recorded broadcast, and refused to fire.”
His smile widened.
“Grin!” she whipped at him. “But Seetee-Interplanet has gone bankrupt.”
That sobered him briefly. Interplanet had dominated many worlds for two long centuries. Even though she hated its oppressive power, he knew it had not been wholly bad. He could see the girl’s love for the lost splendor of it, and share a little of the tragedy she felt.
“Your own uncle’s ruined,” she added savagely, “along with all the rest of us. He sold the Tor and all that condulloy to support the market, and the break wiped him out. He barely got away with his life.”
“How’s that?”
“The new government ordered his arrest—this insane Fifth Freedom forced governmental changes on all the planets, you see, and a temporary commission has been appointed to. liquidate the Mandate. But your uncle got away, aboard the Adonis.”
Jenkins scarcely heard her, for he was dazed with an overwhelming awe. He sat swaying uncertainly on the bed, wishing he could see the unfolding age of the Fifth Freedom. But the dark fruit of death was ripe in his flesh, and ready to fall.
“See what you’ve done!” Jane Hardin cried bitterly. “I hope you’re happy now.”
She strode away, and Jenkins lowered himself carefully back to the sheets. He clung to the image of her, white and taut with wrath, her bright hair swept back, her eyes almost luminous. He wished, with a bleak agony of longing, that he might live to know her in the different world dawning.
“Congratulations, Nicky!” Brand’s hearty boom, next day, aroused him from heavy sleep.
“They’ve let me come to wish you well in your bright new paradise.”
Brand stood straight and tall at the foot of the bed, two watchful men in Guard uniform at his elbows. A folded jacket on his arm didn’t quite conceal the polished links that held his wrists. Jenkins sat up stiffly in the bed, trying to dislike him.
“Yes, they caught me.” Brand nodded at the handcuffs, almost cheerfully. His angular face looked hollowed, his ruddy color paled, but his fine gray eyes had kept their genial, penetrating shrewdness.
“These new commissioners want my hide,” he rumbled softly. “A symbol, I suppose, of the old order they’re tearing down. I was caught on little Nuevo Jalisco—my men wanted to defend me, but I’ve already caused killing enough.”
His rawboned face turned soberly regretful.
“So they’re taking me back to Pallasport,” he added quietly. “This new government is going to put me on trial for my alleged war crimes, as soon as they get a tribunal set up. I understand they’ll want the death penalty.
“So I may not be seeing you again, Nicky.” The tall man shrugged, almost casually. “Sorry I’ve nothing to bequeath you, but the Fifth Freedom has left me unencumbered. Anyhow, I hope you’ll forget our little differences.” He put out a lean hand, trying awkwardly not to show the handcuffs. “Shake, Nicky?”
Jenkins quit trying to resist his old admiration for Brand’s unquenchable audacity, and took the offered hand.
“Thanks, Nicky.” Brand’s gaunt face lit cheerfully. “You know, I almost regret the haste of these new commissioners. I’d really like to see if the Fifth Freedom can be as splendid as I first expected, twenty years ago.”
One of the guards touched his shoulder.
“So long, Nicky.” He tried to wave his hand, and the bright little chain stopped his wrist awkwardly. “Hope you won’t feel too hard. Personally, I haven’t many regrets. The Tor was quite a place, even if I die for it now.”
The guard tugged at his sleeve.
“Coming,” he rumbled softly. “Luck, Nicky!”
XXII
Jane Hardin didn’t come next day.
Jenkins lay watching the door, wearily hoping for her, when Worringer came stalking in. He tried to find a patient fortitude as the bearded specialist jabbed his flesh and listened at his chest, looked in his throat and probed his eyes with a painful blade of light. He swallowed at last to whisper anxiously:
“Well, doctor? When do I kick off?”
“Don’t ask me.” Worringer glared sternly at a timid-looking nurse swabbing test chemicals on the chest of Jenkins. “You might get too much, next time. But your hemorrhages have stopped. Lesions healing cleanly.”
“Huh?” It came to Jenkins that the soreness was gone from his mouth and his throat. “You mean—I’m not dying?”
“You can leave the clinic tomorrow.”
“But—” Jenkins blinked unbelievingly. “I thought—”
“You were nearly gone when Miss Hardin brought you back,” Worringer said, “but it turns out you had already brought us your own specific—in the veins of Captain Rob McGee.”
Jenkins merely stared.
“Never saw such a case!” Worringer paused to study the stinging test stains, and nodded with a grudging approval. “Thought he was dying, when that fever bit. But every symptom disappeared. He’s naturally immune. Only answer possible is adaptive mutation.” Jenkins shook his head dazedly. “Evolution,” rasped the bearded man. “Biologists and philosophers can squabble forever about mechanism and teleology,; but life does adapt to changed environments. And McGee is shaped to fit an environment which includes hard radiations.”
“But—” Jenkins caught his breath. “What did you do for me?”
“Twenty cubic centimeters of serum prepared from McGee’s blood, injected intravenously. It stimulates regeneration of the injured cells. I’ve already isolated the active agent—a new hormone, apparently formed in the suprarenal cortex. I’m confident of successful synthesis.” He glowered triumphantly at Jenkins. “So we’ve licked seetee shock.”
Jenkins sat awed and voiceless, grasping that.
“The others?” he whispered suddenly. “The Drakes and the rest—can you save them?”
“All but one man, who is already dead.”
Dread shook Jenkins, waiting for that man’s name.
“The one I couldn’t save was Jean Lazarene.”
“Oh!” That taciturn outcast of Earth had surely earned his death, yet Jenkins shivered. “I must have killed him,” he muttered faintly, “with that prospecting gun.”
“Wrong. The man was already dying. Made me listen to his last confession. Seems he was involved in this asterite revolt. Said he stole seetee machines from your Freedonia plant, and tried to install them on another rock. Something went wrong. Tried to get away, but he wasn’t far enough when the blast caught him. Nearly gone when O’Banion brought him here. I tried the serum, but he died last night.”
The nurses let Jenkins get up that afternoon. In robe and loosely flapping slippers, he shuffled down the corridor to look for McGee and the Drakes and the other engineers from Freedonia. He found they had been discharged. He was padding hack to his room, elated but lonely and impatient to be out, when Rick Drake’s red-haired wife arrived.
“Rick got out last night,” she told hint happily. “With a few drops of Cap’ll Rob’s wonderful blood in him, and feeling fit as ever. He wanted to see you, but you were sleeping and the nurses wouldn’t let him in. He started back to Freedonia this morning, with his father and Cap’n Rob, to see about the Brand transmitter.”
Alarm caught hold of him.
“Has anything gone wrong?”
“Open this.” Smiling mysteriously, she gave him a little package. “Ann wanted me to bring flowers, but Rick said you’d like this better. Even if it’s just a toy.” Eagerly, he-opened the box. He found a small light bulb and another tiny gadget made of insulating plastic, sheet copper, and a few turns of wire. Peering at it, he caught his breath.
“A Brand receptor!” he whispered. “Does it work?”
“Try it.”
Anxiously, he twisted the bulb into the gadget. It lit—and its tiny glow was enough to show him the illimitable might of the Brand power field, pervading all the planets of man. It was a searchlight, probing feebly into the misty splendor of a new human era.
Discharged next day, Jenkins started out to look for Jane Hardin. She had been a determined enemy, but he had no reason to hate her now. The Fifth Freedom would dissolve old barriers, heal old conflicts. He wanted to know the person she would be, in the new age dawning.
She met him on the steps of the clinic building.
“So you’re really well again, Nicky!” Her blue eyes smiled at him, delighted, yet uncertainly contrite. “I’ve come hack to say I’m sorry,” she told him softly, “because I’ve been wrong about several things.”
Her fine skin was flushed a little, aglow again with health, her eyes dark with feeling. She was very lovely, Jenkins thought, and paused to rejoice that the dark weed of death had been uprooted from his own flesh.
“Your new Fifth Freedom is something different than I expected.” Her low voice held a breathless eagerness. “I’ve seen it come to the people of this little rock, and I can imagine what it does to people everywhere.”
He saw the bright wonder on her face.
“It lights a new kind of life in their, eyes,” she said. “You can hear something new and glad and good, even in the way the children laugh. Come on, and see what’s happening.”
He stood enjoying the gleam of light on her soft hair and the generous warmth in her eyes.
“Men are already repairing the machinery above that old uranium mine,” she told him. “Fixing it to run from a Brand receptor. Only now they’re going to take out iron and copper and tungsten, that weren’t worth recovering before. They’re going to refine and work the metal with seetee power—and build more terraforming units to reclaim more rocks.”
And she was his enemy no longer; he clung to the bright certainty of that.
“I’ve been staying with old O’Banion’s daughter,” she went on quietly, “the Mrs. Anders, who’s going to have a baby. And she’s wonderful, Nick. I’ve learned from her that these asterites are really—people. I believe they have as much honor and character and integrity, really, as the Interplanet families.”
Her level eyes came to his.
“Can you forgive me, Nick, for being such a snob?”
Nodding happily, Jenkins seized her hand.
“Oh!” Her breath caught. “I almost forgot—did you hear about your uncle?”
“What about him?” Grimly, Jenkins tried again to put out the lingering spark of his old admiration for Martin Brand. He tried hard to feel that Brand ought to die for his expansive crimes. “Has the case come up?”
Jane Hardin nodded, blue eyes gay.
“The verdict?”
“Acquittal,” she said, “at the examining trial. The charges were dismissed when his lawyer pointed out that, he invented the Brand transmitter, and really originated the Fifth Freedom.”
“Huh!” Jenkins couldn’t help a gasp of relief. “How did you find out?”
“He called from Pallasport this morning, to tell me he was free and ask about you. Seems he has made a quick adaptation to the Fifth Freedom. Says he is already organizing a new corporation.”
Jenkins stared, astonished.
“Titan, Inc.” Jane smiled quizzically. “It will be chartered to terraform that large moon of Saturn. He says the new commissioners and the judges who tried him have all signed up to buy stock. He’s holding a block of shares for you.”
“Generous of him.” Jenkins grinned. “But I’ve another job. We still have those stand-by transmitters to build, to guarantee the Fifth Freedom. And, right now, we’ve a new world to see!”
They turned, and paused, and came down the clinic steps together.
THE END
1950
The Moon and Mr. Wick
A man may be barred from his purpose by the stupidity of his superiors, but if he should be clever enough—
THE FBI men have come and gone.
They investigated all of us who know Mr. Maximilian Wick, searching into what we had learned or guessed of his unusual activities. They dynamited the shallow tunnel he had dug on the old Wick farm west of the campus, before they left and there was something they hauled away in an armored truck.
The official reports on Mr. Wick and his tunnel are locked up now in the files at Washington. Wick himself is back with his freshman classes in the math department but he has had twenty years of practise in keeping his own secrets and he answers questions with a squinted, cheerful grin.
Mrs. Juliana Wick, who usually talks enough for two, is keeping equally quiet. She appears queerly uneasy at any mention of the moon, and she tries to change the subject. She must have had a very trying interview with the Federal men and they apparently impressed her.
We on the faculty, however, can piece the story together. Clayborn is a small college and most of us have known Wick since he came here as a freshman himself, thirty years ago. We had almost forgotten the tunnel on the farm—but we all know Harry Thorwald and we all read the papers.
We had to read the papers because most of us have sons of draft age. Black headlines, all that winter, had told of the bold moves forcing America toward war and we were all bitterly aware that even such quiet towns as ours would be battlefronts when the atomic bombs began to fall.
Wick was always an odd little fellow but we had long since ceased to wonder about the way he spent his summers. The efficient Federal men pointed out clues we should have seen. But, after all, you don’t expect anything very remarkable from an assistant math instructor in a college the size of Clayborn.
The greatest puzzle, to our minds, was why he had married Juliana—or, to put the matter the way it seemed, why she married him. We recognized his mathematical genius but Juliana isn’t interested in non-Euclidian geometries. Perhaps, as old Professor Pharr used to say, she caught him while he was dreaming of the moon.
For the moon is the one real passion of Wick’s whole life. It has always been, since he was a boy. Old Thorwald recalls him when he came to register for his freshman year, inquiring eagerly in the physics department about courses in rocketry and nucleonics.
Those were the days just after World War II when captured German V-2 rockets were already soaring out from Earth on trial flights every few weeks at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. Other nations were already scrambling hard to overcame the American lead in atomic science. Like many young men of his day Wick had read the future.
Remember the awed wonder of your first real sight of the moon? Perhaps it was through a street telescope or perhaps only with good eyes and a little understanding—but it takes your breath when that bright spot in the sky becomes suddenly a great mountainous sunlit world.
We all have felt the tremendous challenge of that moment. The difference is that Wick didn’t forget. He didn’t turn away. He wasn’t too busy. He knew the promise of the German rockets and he read the terrible warning of Hiroshima. He made up his mind.
“I’m going to the moon.” He said that very soberly to Dr. Thorwald. “I’d like to be the first man there. I want courses that will help me go there and get back alive.”
Dr. Thorwald didn’t smile. A seasoned faculty adviser, he respected the earnestness of the slight determined boy. Perhaps he recalled some magnificent dream of his own. Clayborn didn’t offer any courses in astronautics but he pointed out gently that space pilots would require a good foundation in math and general physics.
“Sign me up,” the boy told him. “I’ll study anything I need to know. I’m going to the moon.”
AND Wick applied himself. He didn’t care for English literature but his math grades were perfect. He took two degrees in four years and he could soon have had his doctorate if he had wanted that.
“But degrees don’t matter,” he told Dr. Thorwald. “All I want is a chance to help design the first atomic-powered rocket and fly it—wherever it can go.” Wick grinned wistfully. The unbelievers had already made him careful of what he said about his goal.
“The government has a corner on the research, and I’m going to take a Federal job. That looks like the only way.” To the moon, he must have meant—but the job didn’t take him there. He was gone three years before he came back to Clayborn, looking tired and thin and despondent, to accept the modest faculty place he still holds.
He had already learned to keep his secrets. He didn’t talk to anybody about his Federal work. It was years later that young Harry Thorwald became an atomic technician and brought back the inside story of that secret controversy and Wick’s first crushing defeat. “Everybody says he made a brilliant start,” Harry told his father. “If he’d been willing to play ball with the bureaucrats and the “politicians he could have been a big shot on the project. But he was too impatient to get to the moon.
“You can’t blame the men at the top. They’ve had some pretty hard lessons. The money has to come from Congress and the people, and the program has to be announced. You simply can’t get funds to fortify the moon. The taxpayers won’t foot the bill.”
That was years ago, remember, and people can’t quite keep up with science. Only a few military experts had realized that the moon fitted all their definitions of the perfect fortress. Hung beyond a quarter-million miles of dangerous emptiness, it is impregnable to any ordinary attack. Modem weapons based there command all of Earth. The gradient of gravitation makes it easy to fire atomic missiles from the moon to Earth but very difficult for Earth to answer.
Wick knew that. He must have read between the lines of confidential Intelligence reports to guess that the experts of other nations knew it too and were acting on their knowledge. He tried to convince his superiors that America had to win the race to the moon—and he failed. Back on campus Wick seemed to forget his defeat. He must have known, as we all did in the uneasy backs of our minds, that the world was rolling on toward the most dreadful war of all but he took no time to brood about it.
Wick was a small man, thin and quick. His bald head was thrust impetuously forward on a scrawny turtle-neck and preoccupied purpose had carved a frown around his shrewd gray eyes. Always in a hurry to get somewhere, he darted about at a nervous half-trot. He taught his freshman classes and started working on a project for his doctorate.
