William F. Temple - Shoot at the Moon, page 1
SHOOT
AT
THE
MOON
WILLIAM F. TEMPLE
SIMON AND SCHUSTER
NEW YORK
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION
IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM
COPYRIGHT © 1966 BY WILLIAM F. TEMPLE
PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.
ROCKEFELLER CENTER, 630 FIFTH AVENUE
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10020
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
For
JOAN
with love
Happily we all shoot at the moon
with ineffectual arrows; our hopes
are set on an inaccessible El Dorado.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Virginibus Puerisque (El Dorado)
chapter one
Someone had painted across the sliding doors, in letters big as saucers and red as arterial blood: KEEP OUT. And below that: NO ADMITANCE. The lettering was better than the painter’s ideas about spelling or courtesy.
Both lapses irritated me.
All through the journey to this place I’d been getting ever more tetchy along with getting ever more scared. I was scared of what I knew lay waiting for me behind these doors. I was even more scared of my ignorance of it.
The security guards at the gate on the perimeter of this onetime airfield had checked me down to my teeth fillings. Yet once I was over that hurdle no one cared even a small curse what I did. It appeared that the mere fact of being within the palisade guaranteed you were “all right.” You and Caesar’s wife were equally above suspicion, even if the pair of you were wearing parachute harness and consulting maps.
This was the only building labeled with warning notices. So that told me that it was the one I was looking for. The sign painter might just as well have completed the job by adding:
THIS BUILDING HOUSES THE TOP SECRET HARWELL
ATOMIC PROPULSION UNIT.
I seized both handles of the doors. Earlier, I’d have imagined this simple act would cause an outbreak of alarms and excursions, peals of bells ringing, red lights flashing, armed motorcyclists converging on me with shrieking sirens. But not now. Not after I had registered the evidences of general ineptitude around here.
I pulled the handles apart, the doors with them. KEEP and NO sped one way and OUT and ADMITANCE the other. Well, at least someone had kept the door runners well oiled.
And there it was, the HAPU, alone in the center of the great concrete floor as though it had been laid there like an egg. A metal egg.
Not that it was an ovoid. Actually it was a truncated cone, twenty feet tall, dwindling upward in diameter from around thirty-five feet to a bit under thirty. What I could see of it from where I stood was smooth and seamless.
All framework had been removed from it. Apart from the fitting of it as a unit in the spaceship Endeavor, work on it was finished.
I walked over to look closely at the thing that had scared me and cost me sleepless nights. Now that I saw it in reality, it was so utterly featureless that my attention soon wandered from it. I gazed around the former hangar, but that was almost as bare.
There was a door in the far wall. From this distance it looked as small as the door to Alice’s enchanted garden. I took a pace toward it. Almost as though I had trodden on a hidden spring, the door opened.
The man in the white laboratory coat who came through looked small, too, at first. As he walked deliberately toward me, he seemed to grow like a magic beanstalk. When he stopped, a couple of paces away, he was looking down at the top of my head. He was all of six-and-a-half feet tall, and thin with it. I was—and still am—five-feet-five-and-a-half inches, and not all that thin.
He had a beak of a nose, darkly notable eyebrows, darkly deep-set eyes. Dark hair receded from a near-islanded tuft that had formerly been a widow’s peak. His expression was dark too. He put me in mind of some Latin-European actor playing Sherlock Holmes, well made up but aware he was miscast and so feeling resentful.
He stared down at me, kept his hands at his sides like a footman, and said in a voice as thin as his body and as deliberate as his gait, “You are … ?”
I rapidly reached some conclusions. One was that I disliked him. His inquiry was unnecessary. He knew who I was. I was expected at this time, and the guard had phoned from the gate to report my arrival.
For some reason he wasn’t overjoyed to see me. Also he regarded me as a waste of his time, someone not worth the bother of knowing because I had no power to pull any strings on his behalf. So I must be put in my place from the outset.
Hence the imperious “You are… ?” with raised eyebrow.
I said quietly, conspiratorially, “I’m Professor Moriarty. Do you have any secret plans for sale? At the usual trade discount, of course.”
His other eyebrow went up to join its mate.
“Please. I do not understand. Your accent. .
I tried not to smile and spoil it. He had a Polish accent a yard thick.
He was, I guessed, Harwell’s boy wonder (only twenty-nine, though he looked forty), originally from Cracow, but now naturalized British. The HAPU was largely his brainchild.
My name is Franz Brunei. My parents came from Alsace-Lorraine, but I was born in London. There’s cockney in my accent—intermittently.
I said, “I’m Captain Brunei, as you’re perfectly well aware. I’m here by appointment to meet Colonel Marley and have my duties explained. Also, to have this power unit explained, presumably by your good self. You sent me a sheet of instructions, together with a letter—I couldn’t decipher the signature.”
He ejaculated something. It sounded like a curse.
“I beg your pardon,” I said coldly.
“My name is—” And he repeated the sound, deliberately.
I still didn’t get it. For that matter, I never really did get it. It sounded like “Zignawitsch,” and in this chronicle, anyhow, Zignawitsch he will have to be.
Here and now, I may as well admit to a long-standing fault of character which has generated trouble enough in my life. I’m supersensitive about courtesy. I can tolerate my own bad manners but not other people’s. I suffered much from snubs when young and—worse—had to watch my father suffer them.
The highhanded are my natural enemies in life.
Early poverty and insecurity bred in me a sense of social inferiority. From this grew an outsize chip on my shoulder. Whistler could paint, in his time. I never could. Whistler had a mother. I never knew mine. But I could always match Whistler in the gentle art of making enemies.
A bad trait, this, in a space pilot. If he can’t control it he should be disqualified. It doesn’t matter on the transatlantic rocket ferry run. That trip doesn’t last an hour and the pilot sits for’ard in his little cabin—alone. But spaceship trips are a deal longer and there’s seldom any segregation.
When the ships start going regularly beyond the moon on the months-long trips to the planets—and those days have become much nearer because of the events in this narrative—social misfits of my sort may find it hard to get a job on them. A crew must be able to hit it off. As Mountbatten said long ago, “A happy ship is an efficient ship.” The converse is also true.
So Zignawitsch’s attitude riled me. I suspected he was responsible for the curt, misspelled notice on the hangar doors. Still, these were pinpricks. The taproot of my antipathy lay much deeper. He was responsible for the HAPU and what it might do to me.
I flicked the smooth side of the thing and asked, “Can you show me the works?”
Zignawitsch said stiffly, “In an atomic reactor there is not much ‘works.’ There are but a few sliding parts, and if they are …”
He fumbled for a word.
“Slid?” I offered.
“Moved,” he said, frowning. “If they are moved, the reactor starts …”
He seemed weak on English verbs and once more sought the mot juste.
“Reacting?”
Again he rejected my help, plainly resenting it. “The reactor starts working, and then it is fatal to be exposed to the radiations.”
“I wasn’t exactly planning to put my head inside the oven,” I said. “I assumed the thing might be opened by remote control and observed, if necessary, by TV. I gather that’s the normal drill. But then, of course, I’m not a technical type. All I know is what
I read in the papers. I could be wrong or—even worse—out of date.”
He stiffened himself so rigorously against the barbs that I feared he’d get a cramp.
Bleak as an east wind, he said, “The HAPU is sealed tight. It can be opened only on these premises and then only by qualified inspectors. And that is not for what I am employed. The mechanism is secret. Also it is a precision job. An amateur attempt at repair might damage it beyond repair.”
I had one of those I-have-been-here-before feelings. Then suddenly, through a dusty corridor of memory, I saw a clear and bright picture of myself as a kid asking the friendly chauffeur of my father’s snooty employer if he would show me the engine of his car.
“Sorry, Franz,” he said. “But it’s a Rolls, you see. All Rolls bonnets are sealed tight and should be opened only by the proper inspectors. The engines are so beautifully made that the makers don’t want any old people tampering with ’em.”
I returned to the present and found myself scowling, which wasn’t unusual.
“What in fact you’re telling me is that if I damage this unit while landing the Endeavor on the moon, I’m not to attempt any running repairs but just tuck it under my arm and bring it back here for one of your inspectors to have a look-see?”
“Something like that,” said Zignawitsch, without humor.
“Very well then, let me have a chat with an inspector.”
“There would be no point, Captain Brunei. He would not be allowed to tell you any more about the Harwell Atomic Propulsion Unit than is contained in that instruction sheet I sent you.”
I retrieved the sheet from an inner pocket.
I read aloud: “‘To start the reaction, press once the button marked Start. Reaction ceases when the adjacent button marked Stop is pressed once. The damping effect is regulated automatically by the earth radar altimeter and the lunar radar altimeter respectively.’ ”
I screwed up the sheet and threw it on the floor.
“That,” I said, “is followed by two paragraphs of similar pointless guff. It adds up to this: apart from starting and stopping the ship, a pilot will be so much dead weight.”
The Harwell prodigy looked past my left ear and said nothing.
“All right, we’ll allow he can use his skill on occasion. At least it’s up to him to judge the right moments to press the buttons. That almost makes his trip worthwhile.”
Zignawitsch continued to look past me. A spasm of malice twisted the comer of his mouth.
He said, “It does not matter whether he judges or misjudges. Nor whether he presses the buttons or not. If they are not pressed within a second of the right moment, a relay… er…”
He reviewed his vocabulary, his lips moving slightly.
“Clicks,” he said suddenly. “A relay clicks over and switches the controls from manual to automatic. We cannot afford to take any chance. This unit is our only prototype and it cost the earth.”
The moment of truth, which I had feared all along, had come.
In all my experience of it I’ve never liked the feeling of “free fall.” Especially the first moment of it, when the rocket motors are switched off, the feeling of weight at once departs, and there’s nothing to get a purchase on.
You can’t help feeling that something’s gone terribly wrong and the ship is falling and you with it. For me that first moment is of panic, always—panic because of insecurity.
But that moment passes. As this one passed. I became suddenly cool and very much aware, the way most space pilots do when danger comes. Those who lose their nerve at such times are likely soon to lose their lives also.
Still, this was no mere split rocket tube or an unexpected, uncharted meteor stream. The danger I smelled was not of losing my life but of losing my livelihood.
And yet—it was my life. For life to me meant having, besides good money, personal significance. To be my own boss, on my little planet ship in space, to explore, to have adventures, to defy airless death.
All over the world now automation was pensioning off people of my age. Some were being educated for leisure. Many were content to laze anyway, with hands folded across their widening waists. The more energetic got their kicks from sport. The more sedate stuck to the gaming tables. The earnest studied modem languages and/or traveled.
For my own type there were few opportunities left for physical exploration on earth—except in amatory directions. The latter held little appeal for me and it was getting a bit late to consider them now. I never wanted any entanglements that could tie me down to earth. I had never known real happiness on earth.
I had no need to sit there and cry for the moon—I had long ago set out to get the moon. When, in time, I got it, there would still be no end to the adventure. There would remain a whole group of new worlds to conquer with the solar system.
Man was really beginning to move along the third dimension, and I was in the vanguard. So I felt significant. Until now.
I stared hard at Zignawitsch. He still refused to meet my eyes. I thought, “Maybe, after all, it isn’t quite so cut and dried as you boffins like to pretend.”
If he’d been putting up a bluff, I decided to call it.
Aloud I said, “I shan’t tamper with your box of tricks. Obviously, it’s so capable of looking after itself that it can find its own way to the moon. Let it, then. I’m clearly redundant. Therefore, I’ll resign from the Service.”
“Resign?” echoed a voice with a crack of authority about it that set my hackles up right away. “Resign? You can’t resign from the Space Service. You’re under contract, my man, as well you know.”
Yes, I knew. I was under contract for two more years. My fear was that the contract wouldn’t be renewed. I had cropped my hair, but the gray filaments still glinted. I limbered up every morning, but my reflexes were losing their former snap.
And these days I stood uneasily in the shadow of this latest offspring of automation, the robot space pilot.
I turned. Through the still parted hangar doors three men had come and were approaching, one behind the other. When they halted they were still more or less in line, consciously or not in order of size—and maybe of importance.
The foremost was nearly as tall as Zignawitsch but broad in proportion, a massive man. He had the shoulders of a champion weight lifter. He was grinning, with a downturned mouth, like
Punch—or a shark. And yet he was frowning too. The effect was formidable.
I'd seen that face somewhere before, probably on TV. I wished it were on TV now, so that I could switch it off.
I’d have said he was sixty years old and had been overbearing for most of them. I disliked him on sight.
That was Colonel Marley.
On the other hand, I liked the look of the young man standing behind him. He was tallish too, and nicely built. He was one of those men you can tell are Scots right away by their eyes. Not merely because their eyes are bright blue and their eyebrows so light as to be almost colorless. The clue is something about the shape of the upper eyelid. It makes their eyes look quizzical and humorous, even when these men have no sense of humor at all and are 90-per-cent-proof Calvinists.
It’s easy to be mistaken about them, and I certainly made a mistake about this specimen.
But he had a sense of humor, did Dr. Thomson—of a kind.
Behind him was a small dried-up chap, mild-eyed and melancholy as a lotus-eater. His skin was the color of milky coffee, cracked, large-pored, and most unhealthy-looking. I gave him a year to live and was wrong again.
He was hunched up as though he were afraid of taking up too much room in this place which was as roomy as a gasometer. His bluish lips were gummed together as though they hadn’t parted in days. Obviously he wasn’t going to speak unless spoken to, and maybe not even then.
He was either an old young man or a young old man. I couldn’t guess at his age, but one thing was certain: Melancholy had marked him for her own.
That was Pettigue.
The authoritative voice cracked again like a whip. It came from the big plug-ugly in the forefront, where it was his nature to be.
“Did you hear what I said, my man?”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “There was distortion from blasting but, yes, I heard. Don’t ‘my man’ me. I’m just not your man.”
Zignawitsch’s eyebrows shot up. He was shocked.
Grinning like a fiend, the big fellow asked, “You’re Captain Franz Brunei?”
“You’re right this time.”
“Then, like it or not, you are my man. I’m Colonel Marley.”
I’d guessed that. Nevertheless, tire confirmation made me feel almost as melancholy as Pettigue looked. It was never my luck to have dealings with anyone I could naturally rub along with. Mar-ley was in charge of this project. Marley was my master. It had to be someone I hated on sight.
“I see,” I said.
The grin remained there like the Cheshire Cat’s, but the rest of the face looked even more unpleasant than before.
“You see what?” asked Marley, dropping his voice to what he hoped was an impressive and dangerous quietness.
“I see that you’re Colonel Marley.”
Tire grin suffered a slow death. Marley said harshly, “Do you never address your superior officers in the Space Service as ‘sir’?” “Always. But you’re not my superior officer in the Space Service. You’re not in the Space Service at all. You’re Army, and retired at that. I’m under your orders, admittedly. I’ll even obey them. But I’m not bound to salute you. Heel-clicking is out. I’ll face a court-martial first.”
