Prelude to Space (23 page)

From time to time the Director-General made comments into a microphone, and there
were one or two portable transmitters around. Dirk, who had vaguely expected to see
batteries of instruments, was a little disappointed. He realized that all the technical
operations were being carried out elsewhere, and this was merely an observation post.

“Twenty-five minutes to go,” said the loud-speakers. “Launching generators will now
run up to full operating speed. All radar-tracking stations and observations in the
main network should be standing by.”

From the low platform, almost the whole of the launching track could be seen. To the
right were the massed crowds and beyond them the low buildings of the airport. The
“Prometheus” was clearly visible on the horizon, and from time to time the sunlight
caught her sides so that they glittered like mirrors.

“Fifteen minutes to go.”

Leduc and his companions would be lying in those curious seats, waiting for them to
tilt under the first surge of acceleration. Yet it was strange to think that they
would have nothing to do for almost an hour, when the separation of the ships would
take place high above the Earth. All the initial responsibility lay upon the pilot
of “Beta,” who would get very little credit for his share in the proceedings—though
in any case he was merely repeating what he had done a dozen times before.

“Ten minutes to go. All aircraft are reminded of their safety instructions.”

The minutes were ticking past: an age was dying and a new one was being born. And
suddenly the impersonal voice from the loud-speakers recalled to Dirk that morning,
thirty-three years ago, when another group of scientists had stood waiting in another
desert, preparing to unleash the energies that power the suns.

“Five minutes to go. All heavy electrical loads must be shed. Domestic circuits will
be cut immediately.”

A great silence had come over the crowd; all eyes were fixed upon those shining wings
along the skyline Somewhere close at hand a child, frightened by the stillness, began
to cry.

“One minute to go. Warning rockets away.”

There was a great “Swoosh!” from the empty desert over on the left, and a ragged line
of crimson flares began to drift slowly down the sky. Some helicopters which had been
edging forward minute by minute went hastily into reverse.

“Automatic take-off controller now in operation. Synchronized timing signal—
Now!
”

There was a “click” as the circuit was changed, and the faint rushing of long-distance
static came from the speakers. Then there boomed over the desert a sound which, through
its very familiarity, could not have been more unexpected.

In Westminster, half way round the world, Big Ben was preparing to strike the hour.

Dirk glanced at Professor Maxton, and saw that he too was completely taken aback.
But there was a faint smile on the Director-General’s lips, and Dirk remembered that
for a half a century Englishmen all over the world had waited beside their radios
for that sound from the land which they might never see again. He had a sudden vision
of other exiles, in the near or far future, listening upon strange planets to those
same bells ringing out across the deeps of space.

A booming silence seemed to fill the desert as the chimes of the last quarter died
away, echoing in the distance from one loud-speaker to the next. Then the first stroke
of the hour thundered over the desert, and over the waiting world. The speaker circuit
was suddenly cut.

Yet nothing had changed: the “Prometheus” still lay brooding on the horizon like a
great metal moth. Then Dirk saw that the space between her wings and the skyline was
a little less than it had been, and a moment later he could tell quite clearly that
the ship was expanding as it moved toward him. Faster and faster, in an absolute and
uncanny silence, the “Prometheus” came racing down the track. It seemed only a moment
before it was abreast of him, and for the very last time he could see “Alpha,” smooth
and pointed and glittering upon its back. As the ship rushed past to the left out
into the empty desert, he could just hear the “swish!” of the air split by its passage.
Even that was very faint, and the electric catapult made no sound at all. Then the
“Prometheus” was shrinking silently into the distance.

Seconds later, that silence was shattered by a roar as of a thousand waterfalls plunging
down the face of mile-high cliffs. The sky seemed to shake and tremble around them;
the “Prometheus” itself had vanished from sight behind a cloud of whirling dust. In
the heart of that cloud something was burning with an intolerable brilliance that
the eye could not have borne for a moment without the intervening haze.

The dust cloud thinned, and the thunder of the jets was softened by distance. Then
Dirk could see that the fragment of sun he had been watching through half-shut eyes
no longer followed the surface of the Earth, but was lifting, steadily and strongly,
up from the horizon. The “Prometheus” was free from her launching cradle, was climbing
on the world-wide circuit that would lead her into space.

The fierce white flare dwindled and shrank to nothingness against the empty sky. For
a while the mutter of the departing jets rumbled around the heavens until it too was
lost, drowned by the noise of circling aircraft.

Dirk scarcely noticed the shouting of the crowds as life returned to the desert behind
him. Once again there had come into his mind the picture he was never wholly to forget—that
image of the lonely island lost in a boundless and untraveled sea.

Boundless it was, infinite it might be—but it was untraveled no longer. Beyond the
lagoon, past the friendly shelter of the coral reef, the first frail ship was sailing
into the unknown perils and wonders of the open sea.

Dirk Alexson, sometime Professor of Social History at the University of Chicago, opened
the bulky package on his desk with fingers that trembled slightly. For some minutes
he struggled with the elaborate wrappings; then the book lay before him, clean and
bright as it had left the printers three days ago.

He looked at it silently for a few minutes, running his fingers over the binding.
His eyes strayed to the shelf where its five companions rested. They had waited years,
most of them, to be joined by this last volume.

Professor Alexson rose to his feet and walked over to the bookshelf, carrying the
new arrival with him. A careful observer might have noticed something very odd about
his walk: it had a curious springiness that one would not have expected from a man
who was nearing sixty. He placed the book beside its five companions, and stood for
a long time, completely motionless, staring at the little row of volumes.

The binding and lettering were well matched—he had been very particular about that—and
the set was pleasing to the eye. Into those books had gone the greater part of his
working life, and now that the task was ended he was well content. Yet it brought
a great emptiness of spirit to realize that his work was done.

He took down the sixth volume again and walked back to his desk. He had not the heart
to begin at once the search for the misprints, the infelicities which he knew must
exist. In any case, they would be brought to his notice soon enough.

The binding protested stiffly as he opened the volume and glanced down the chapter
headings, wincing slightly as he came to “Errata—Vols. I-V.” Yet he had made few avoidable
mistakes—and above all, he had made no enemies. At times in the last decade that had
been none too easy. Some of the hundreds of men whose names were in the final index
had not been flattered by his words, but no one had ever accused him of undue partiality.
He did not believe that anyone could have guessed which of the men in the long and
intricate story had been his personal friends.

He turned to the frontispiece—and his mind went back through more than twenty years.
There lay the “Prometheus,” waiting for the moment of her destiny. Somewhere in that
crowd away to the left he himself was standing, a young man with his life’s work still
before him. And a young man, though he did not know it then, under sentence of death.

Professor Alexson walked over to the window of his study and stared out into the night.
The view, as yet, was little obstructed by buildings, and he hoped it would remain
that way, so that he could always watch the slow sunrise on the mountains fifteen
miles beyond the city.

It was midnight, but the steady white radiance spilling down those tremendous slopes
made the scene almost as bright as day. Above the mountains, the stars were shining
with that unwavering light that still seemed strange to him. And higher still…

Professor Alexson threw back his head and stared through half-closed eyelids at the
blinding white world on which he could never walk again. It was very brilliant tonight,
for almost all the northern hemisphere was wreathed in dazzling clouds. Only Africa
and the Mediterranean regions were unobscured. He remembered that it was winter beneath
those clouds; though they looked so beautiful and so brilliant across a quarter of
a million miles of space, they would seem a dull and somber gray to the sunless lands
they covered.

Winter, summer, autumn, spring—they meant nothing here. He had taken leave of them
all when he made his bargain. It was a hard bargain, but a fair one. He had parted
from waves and clouds, from winds and rainbows, from the blue skies and the long twilight
of summer evenings. In exchange, he had received an indefinite stay of execution.

He remembered, across the years, those endless arguments with Maxton, Collins and
the rest about the value of space flight to the human race. Some of their predictions
had come true, others had not—but as far as he was concerned, they had proved their
case up to the hilt. Matthews had been speaking the truth when he said, long ago,
that the greatest benefits which the crossing of space would bring were those which
could never have been guessed beforehand.

More than a decade ago the heart specialists had given him three years to live, but
the great medical discoveries made at the lunar base had come just in time to save
him. Under a sixth of a gravity, where a man weighed less than thirty pounds, a heart
which would have failed on Earth could still beat strongly for years. There was even
a possibility—almost terrifying in its social implications—that the span of human
life might be greater on the Moon than upon the Earth.

Far sooner than anyone had dared to hope, astronautics had paid its greatest and most
unexpected dividend. Here within the curve of the Apennines, in the first of all cities
ever to be built outside the Earth, five thousand exiles were living useful and happy
lives, safe from the deadly gravity of their own world. In time they would rebuild
all that they had left behind them; even now the avenue of cedars along Main Street
was a brave symbol of the beauty that would be born in the years to come. Professor
Alexson hoped he would live to see the building of the Park when the second and much
larger Dome was constructed three miles away to the north.

All over the Moon, life was stirring again. It had flickered once, and died, a thousand
million years ago; this time it would not fail, for it was part of a rising flood
that in a few centuries would have surged to the outermost planets.

Professor Alexson ran his fingers, as he had so often done before, over the piece
of Martian sandstone that Victor Hassell had given him years ago. One day, if he wished,
he might go to that strange little world; there would soon be ships that could make
the crossing in three weeks when the planet was at its nearest. He had changed worlds
once; he might do so a second time if he ever became obsessed by the sight of the
unattainable Earth.

Beneath its turban of cloud, Earth was taking leave of the twentieth century. In the
shining cities, as midnight moved around the world, the crowds would be waiting for
the first stroke of the hour which would sunder them forever from the old year and
the old century.

Such a hundred years had never been before, and could scarcely come again. One by
one the dams had burst, the last frontiers of the mind had been swept away. When the
century dawned, Man had been preparing for the conquest of the air; when it died,
he was gathering his strength upon Mars for the leap to the outer planets. Only Venus
still held him at bay, for no ship had yet been built which could descend through
the convection gales raging perpetually between the sunlit hemisphere and the darkness
of the Night Side. From only five hundred miles away, the radar screens had shown
the pattern of continents and seas beneath those racing clouds—and Venus, not Mars,
had become the great enigma of the solar system.

As he saluted the dying century, Professor Alexson felt no regrets: the future was
too full of wonder and promise. Once more the proud ships were sailing for unknown
lands, bearing the seeds of new civilization which in the ages to come would surpass
the old. The rush to the new worlds would destroy the suffocating restraints which
had poisoned almost half the century. The barriers had been broken, and men could
turn their energies outward to the stars instead of striving among themselves.

Out of the fears and miseries of the Second Dark Age, drawing free—oh, might it be
forever!—from the shadows of Belsen and Hiroshima, the world was moving toward its
most splendid sunrise. After five hundred years, the Renaissance had come again. The
dawn that would burst above the Apennines at the end of the long lunar night would
be no more brilliant than the age that had now been born.