Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (8 page)

Jones set the separate cone on the ground and packed stones around and
under it to brace it. His movements were almost ridiculously deliberate.
Bending over, he bent slowly, or the motion would lift his feet off the
ground. Straightening up, he straightened slowly, or the upward impetus
of his trunk would again lift him beyond contact with solidity. But he
braced the flat cone carefully.

He set the signal-torpedo over that cone. The entire set-up was under
six feet tall, and the coolie-hat cones were no more than eighteen
inches in diameter. He said flatly:

"I'm all ready."

The hand and arm of a space-suited figure lifted, for attention.
Dabney's voice came worriedly from the headphones of every suit:

"I wish it understood," he said in some agitation, "that this first
attempted application of my discovery is made with my consent, but that
I am not aware of the mechanical details. As a scientist, my work has
been in pure science. I have worked for the advancement of human
knowledge, but the technological applications of my discovery are not
mine. Still—if this device does not work, I will take time from my more
important researches to inquire into what part of my discovery has been
inadequately understood and applied. It may be that present technology
is not qualified to apply my discovery—"

Jones said without emotion—but Cochrane could imagine his poker-faced
expression inside his helmet:

"That's right. I consulted Mr. Dabney about the principles, but the
apparatus is my doing, I take the responsibility for that!"

Then Cochrane added with pleasant irony:

"Since all this is recorded, Mr. Dabney can enlarge upon his disinterest
later. Right now, we can go ahead. Mr. Dabney disavows us unless we are
successful. Let us let it go at that." Then he said: "The observatory's
set to track?"

A muffled voice said boredly, by short-wave from the observatory up on
the crater's rim:

"
We're ready. Visual and records, and we've got the timers set to clock
the auto-beacon signals as they come in.
"

The voice was not enthusiastic. Cochrane had had to put up his own money
to have the nearside lunar observatory put a low-power telescope to
watch the rocket's flight. In theory, this distress-rocket should make a
twenty-mile streak of relatively long-burning red sparks. A tiny
auto-beacon in its nose was set to send microwave signals at ten-second
intervals. On the face of it, it had looked like a rather futile
performance.

"Let's go," said Cochrane.

He noted with surprise that his mouth was suddenly dry. This affair was
out of all reason. A producer of television shows should not be the
person to discover in an abstruse scientific development the way to
reach the stars. A neurotic son-in-law of an advertising tycoon should
not be the instrument by which the discovery should come about. A
psychiatrist should not be the means of associating Jones—a very junior
physicist with no money—and Cochrane and the things Cochrane was
prepared to bring about if only this unlikely-looking gadget worked.

"Jones," said Cochrane with a little difficulty, "let's follow an
ancient tradition. Let Babs christen the enterprise by throwing the
switch."

Jones pointed there in the shadow of the crater-wall, and Babs moved to
the switch he indicated. She said absorbedly:

"Five, four, three, two, one—"

She threw the switch. There was a spout of lurid red flame.

The rocket vanished.

It vanished. It did not rise, visibly. It simply went away from where it
was, with all the abruptness of a light going out. There was a flurry of
the most brilliant imaginable carmine flame. That light remained. But
the rocket did not so much rise as disappear.

Cochrane jerked his head up. He was close to the line of the rocket's
ascent. He could see a trail of red sparks which stretched to
invisibility. It was an extraordinarily thin line. The separate flecks
of crimson light which comprised it were distant in space. They were so
far from each other that the signal-rocket was a complete failure as a
device making a streak of light that should be visible.

The muffled voice in the helmet-phones said blankly:

"
Hey! What'd you do to that rocket?
"

The others did not move. They seemed stunned. The vanishing of the
rocket was no way for a rocket to act. In all expectation, it should
have soared skyward with a reasonable velocity, and should have
accelerated rather more swiftly from the moon's surface than it would
have done from Earth. But it should have remained visible during all its
flight. Its trail should have been a thick red line. Instead, the red
sparks were so far separated—the trail was so attenuated that it was
visible only from a spot near its base. The observatory voice said more
blankly still:

"
Hey! I've picked up the trail! I can't see it nearby, but it seems to
start, thin, about fifty miles up and go on away from there! That
rocket shouldn't ha' gone more than twenty miles! What happened?
"

"
Watch for the microwave signals
," said Jones' voice in Cochrane's
headphones.

The voice from the observatory squeaked suddenly. This was not one of
the highly-placed astronomers, but part of the mechanical staff who'd
been willing to do an unreasonable chore for pay.

"
Here's the blip! It's crazy! Nothing can go that fast!
"

And then in the phones there came the relayed signal of the auto-beacon
in the vanished rocket. The signal-sound was that of a radar pulse,
beginning at low pitch and rising three octaves in the tenth of a
second. At middle C—the middle of the range of a piano—there was a
momentary spurt of extra volume. But in the relayed signal that louder
instant had dropped four tones. Cochrane said crisply:

"Jones, what speed would that be?"

"
It'd take a slide-rule to figure it
," said Jones' voice, very calmly,
"
but it's faster than anything ever went before.
"

Cochrane waited for the next beep. It did not come in ten seconds. It
was easily fifteen. Even he could figure out what that meant! A
signal-source that stretched ten seconds of interval at source to
fifteen at reception ...

The voice from the observatory wailed:

"
It's crazy! It can't be going like that!
"

They waited. Fifteen seconds more. Sixteen. Eighteen. Twenty. The beep
sounded. The spurt of sound had dropped a full octave. The
signal-rocket, traveling normally, might have attained a maximum
velocity of some two thousand feet per second. It was now moving at a
speed which was an appreciably large fraction of the speed of light.
Which was starkly impossible. It simply happened to be true.

They heard the signal once more. The observatory's multiple-receptor
receiver had been stepped up to maximum amplification. The signal was
distinct, but very faint indeed. And the rocket was then traveling—so
it was later computed—at seven-eighths of the speed of light. Between
the flat cone on the front of the distress-torpedo, and the flat cone on
the ground, a field of force existed. The field was not on the back
surface of the torpedo's cone, but before the front surface. It went
back to the moon from there, so all the torpedo and its batteries were
in the columnar stressed space. And an amount of rocket-push that should
have sent the four-foot torpedo maybe twenty miles during its period of
burning, had actually extended its flight to more than thirty-seven
hundred miles before the red sparks were too far separated to be traced
any farther, and by then had kicked the torpedo up impossibly close to
light-speed.

In a sense, the Dabney field had an effect similar to the invention of
railways. The same horsepower moved vastly more weight faster, over
steel rails, than it could haul over a rutted dirt road. The same
rocket-thrust moved more weight faster in the Dabney field than in
normal space. There would be a practical limit to the speed at which a
wagon could be drawn over a rough road. The speed of light was a limit
to the speed of matter in normal space. But on a railway the practical
speed at which a vehicle could travel went up from three miles an hour
to a hundred and twenty. In the Dabney field it was yet to be discovered
what the limiting velocity might be. But old formulas for acceleration
and increase-of-mass-with-velocity simply did not apply in a Dabney
field.

Jones rode back to Lunar City with Cochrane and Holden and Babs. His
face was dead-pan.

Babs tried to recover the mien and manner of the perfect secretary.

"Mr. Cochrane," she said professionally, "will you want to read the
publicity releases Mr. Bell turns out from what Mr. West and Mr. Jamison
tell him?"

"I don't think it matters," said Cochrane. "The newsmen will pump West
and Jamison empty, anyhow. It's all right. In fact, it's better than our
own releases would be. They'll contradict each other. It'll sound more
authentic that way. We're building up a customer-demand for
information."

The small moon-jeep rolled and bumped gently down the long, improbable
highway back to Lunar City. Its engine ran smoothly, as steam-engines
always do. It ran on seventy per cent hydrogen peroxide, first developed
as a fuel back in the 1940s for the pumps of the V2 rockets that tried
to win the Second World War for Germany. When hydrogen peroxide comes in
contact with a catalyst, such as permanganate of potash, it breaks down
into oxygen and water. But the water is in the form of high-pressure
steam, which is used in engines. The jeep's fuel supplied steam for
power and its ashes were water to drink and oxygen to breathe. Steam ran
all motorized vehicles on Luna.

"What are you thinking about, Jones?" asked Cochrane suddenly.

Jones said meditatively:

"I'm wondering what sort of field-strength a capacity-storage system
would give me. I boosted the field intensity this time. The results were
pretty good. I'm thinking—suppose I made the field with a strobe-light
power-pack—or maybe a spot-welding unit. Even a portable strobe-light
gives a couple of million watts for the forty-thousandth of a second.
Suppose I fixed up a storage-pack to give me a field with a few billion
watts in it? It might be practically like matter-transmission, though it
would really be only high-speed travel. I think I've got to work on that
idea a little ..."

Cochrane digested the information in silence.

"Far be it from me," he said presently, "to discourage such high-level
contemplation. Bill, what's on your mind?"

Holden said moodily:

"I'm convinced that the thing works. But Jed! You talk as if you hadn't
any more worries! Yet even if you and Jones do have a way to make a ship
travel faster than light, you haven't got a ship or the capital you
need—."

"I've got scenery that looks like a ship," said Cochrane mildly.
"Consider that part settled."

"But there are supplies. Air—water—food—a crew—. We can't pay for
such things! Here on the moon the cost of everything is preposterous!
How can you try out this idea without more capital than you can possibly
raise?"

"I'm going to imitate my old friend Christopher Columbus," said
Cochrane. "I'm going to give the customers what they want. Columbus
didn't try to sell anybody shares in new continents. Who wanted new
continents? Who wanted to move to a new world? Who wants new planets
now? Everybody would like to see their neighbors move away and leave
more room, but nobody wants to move himself. Columbus sold a promise of
something that had an already-established value, that could be sold in
every town and village—that had a merchandising system already set up!
I'm going to offer just such a marketable commodity. I'll have
freight-rockets on the way up here within twenty-four hours, and the
freight and their contents will all be paid for!"

He turned to Babs. He looked more sardonic and cynical than ever before.

"Babs, you've just witnessed one of the moments that ought to be
illustrated in all the grammar-school history-books along with Ben
Franklin flying a kite. What's topmost in your mind?"

She hesitated and then flushed. The moon-jeep crunched and clanked
loudly over the trail that led downhill. There was no sound outside, of
course. There was no air. But the noise inside the moon-vehicle was
notable. The steam-motor, in particular, made a highly individual
racket.

"I'd—rather not say," said Babs awkwardly. "What's your own main
feeling, Mr. Cochrane?"

"Mine?" Cochrane grinned. "I'm thinking what a hell of a funny world
this is, when people like Dabney and Bill and Jones and I are the ones
who have to begin operation outer space!"

Cochrane said kindly into the vision-beam microphone to Earth, "Cancel
section C, paragraph nine. Then section b(1) from paragraph eleven. Then
after you've canceled the entire last section—fourteen—we can sign up
the deal."

There was a four-second pause. About two seconds for his voice to reach
Earth. About two seconds for the beginning of the reply to reach him.
The man at the other end protested wildly.

"We're a long way apart," said Cochrane blandly, "and our talk only
travels at the speed of light. You're not talking from one continent to
another. Save tolls. Yes or no?"

Another four-second pause. The man on Earth profanely agreed. Cochrane
signed the contract before him. The other man signed. Not only the
documents but all conversation was recorded. There were plugged-in
witnesses. The contract was binding.

Cochrane leaned back in his chair. His eyes blinked wearily. He'd spent
hours going over the facsimile-transmitted contract with Joint Networks,
and had weeded out a total of six joker-stipulations. He was very tired.
He yawned.

"You can tell Jones, Babs," he said, "that all the high financing's
done. He can spend money. And you can transmit my resignation to
Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe. And since this is a pretty risky
operation, you'd better send a service message asking what you're to do
with yourself. They'll probably tell you to take the next rocket back
and report to the secretarial pool, I'm afraid. The same fate probably
awaits West and Jamison and Bell."