Rocket Ship Galileo

  Cargraves was beside him almost as he fell, having himself approached in great flying leaps.

  First the helmet—no, it was not cracked. But the boy’s eyes stared out sightlessly. His head lolled, his face was gray.

  Cargraves gathered him up in his arms and began to run toward the Galileo. He knew the signs though he had seen it only in the low-pressure chamber used for pilot training—anoxia! Something had gone wrong; Morrie was starved for oxygen. He might die before he could be helped, or, still worse, he might live with his brain permanently damaged, his fine clear intellect gone.

  It had happened before that way, more than once during the brave and dangerous days when man was conquering high-altitude flying.

  The double burden did not slow him down. The two together, with their space suits, weighed less than seventy pounds. It was just enough to give him stability.

  He squeezed them into the lock, holding Morrie close to his chest and waited in agonizing impatience as the air hissed through the valve. All his strength would not suffice to force that door open until the pressure equalized.

  Then he was in and had laid him on the deck. Morrie was still out. He tried to remove the suit with trembling, glove-hampered fingers, then hastily got out of his own suit and un-clamped Morrie’s helmet. No sign of life showed as the fresh air hit the patient.

  Cussing bitterly he tried to give the boy oxygen directly from his suit but found that the valve on Morrie’s suit, for some reason, refused to respond. He turned then to his own suit, disconnected the oxygen line and fed the raw oxygen directly to the boy’s face while pushing rhythmically on his chest.

  Morrie’s eyes flickered and he gasped.

  “What happened? Is he all right?” The other two had come through the lock while he worked.

  “Maybe he is going to be all right. I don’t know.”

  In fact he came around quickly, sat up and blinked his eyes. “Whassa matter?” he wanted to know.

  “Lie down,” Cargraves urged and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “All right…hey! I’m inside.”

  Cargraves explained to him what had happened. Morrie blinked. “Now that’s funny. I was all right, except that I was feeling exceptionally fine—”

  “That’s a symptom.”

  “Yes, I remember. But it didn’t occur to me then. I had just picked up a piece of metal with a hole in it, when—”

  “A what? You mean worked metal? Metal that some one had—”

  “Yes, that’s why I was so ex—” He stopped and looked puzzled. “But it couldn’t have been.”

  “Possible. This planet might have been inhabited…or visited.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that.” Morrie shrugged it off, as if it were of no importance. “I was looking at it, realizing what it meant, when a little bald-headed short guy came up and…but it couldn’t have been.”

  “No,” agreed Cargraves, after a short pause, “it couldn’t have been. I am afraid you were beginning to have anoxia dreams by then. But how about this piece of metal?”

  Morrie shook his head. “I don’t know,” he admitted “I remember holding it and looking at it, just as clearly as I remember anything, ever. But I remember the little guy just as well. He was standing there and there were others behind him and I knew that they were the moon people. There were buildings and trees.” He stopped. “I guess that settles it.”

  Cargraves nodded, and turned his attention to Morrie’s oxygen pack. The valve worked properly now. There was no way to tell what had been wrong, whether it had frosted inside when Morrie walked on into the deeper shadows, whether a bit of elusive dirt had clogged it, or whether Morrie himself had shut it down too far when he had reduced pressure at Cargraves’ suggestion and thereby slowly suffocated himself. But it must not happen again. He turned to Art.

  “See here, Art. I want to rig these gimmicks so that you can’t shut them off below a certain limit. Mmmm…no, that isn’t enough. We need a warning signal too—something to warn the wearer if his supply stops. See what you can dream up.”

  Art got the troubled look on his face that was habitual with him whenever his gadget-conscious mind was working at his top capacity. “I’ve got some peanut bulbs among the instrument spares,” he mused. “Maybe I could mount one on the neck ring and jimmy it up so that when the flow stopped it would—” Cargraves stopped listening; he knew that it was only a matter of time until some unlikely but perfectly practical new circuit would be born.

  “SOMEBODY IS NUTS!”

  • 13 •

  THE TOP OF THE RING OF HILLS showed them the earth, as Morrie had thought. Cargraves, Art, and Ross did the exploring, leaving Morrie back to recuperate and to work on his celestial navigation problem. Cargraves made a point of going along because he did not want the two passengers to play mountain goat on the steep crags—a great temptation under the low gravity conditions.

  Also, he wanted to search over the spot where Morrie had had his mishap. Little bald men, no; a piece of metal with a hole in it—possible. If it existed it might be the first clue to the greatest discovery since man crawled up out of the darkness and became aware of himself.

  But no luck—the spot was easy to find; footprints were new to this loose soil! But search as they might, they found nothing. Their failure was not quite certain, since the gloom of the crater’s rim still hung over the spot. In a few days it would be daylight here; he planned to search again.

  But it seemed possible that Morrie might have flung it away in his anoxia delirium, if it ever existed. It might have carried two hundred yards before it fell, and then buried itself in the loose soil.

  The hill top was more rewarding. Cargraves told Art that they would go ahead with the attempt to try to beam a message back to earth…and then had to restrain him from running back to the ship to get started. Instead they searched for a place to install the “Dog House”.

  The Dog House was a small pre-fab building, now resting in sections fitting snugly to the curving walls of the Galileo. It had been Ross’s idea and was one of the projects he and Art had worked on during the summer while Cargraves and Morrie were training. It was listed as a sheet-metal garage, with a curved roof, not unlike a Quonset hut, but it had the special virtue that each panel could be taken through the door of the Galileo.

  It was not their notion simply to set it up on the face of the moon; such an arrangement would have been alternately too hot and then too cold. Instead it was to be the frame for a sort of tailor-made cave.

  They found a place near the crest, between two pinnacles of rock with a fairly level floor between and of about the right size. The top of one of the crags was easily accessible and had a clear view of earth for line-of-sight, beamed transmission. There being no atmosphere, Art did not have to worry about horizon effects; the waves would go where he headed them. Having settled on the location, they returned for tools and supplies.

  Cargraves and Ross did most of the building of the Dog House. It would not have been fair to Art to require him to help; he was already suffering agonies of indecision through a desire to spend all his time taking pictures and an equally strong desire to get his set assembled with which he hoped to raise earth. Morrie, at Cargraves’ request, stayed on light duty for a few days, cooking, working on his navigation, and refraining from the strain of space-suit work.

  The low gravitational pull made light work of moving the building sections, other materials, and tools to the spot. Each could carry over five hundred pounds, earth-weight, of the total each trip, except on the steeper portions of the trail where sheer bulk and clumsiness required them to split the loads.

  First they shoveled the sandy soil about in the space between the two rocks until the ground was level enough to receive the metal floor, then they assembled the little building in place. The work went fast; wrenches alone were needed for this and the metal seemed light as cardboard. When that was done, they installed the “door,” a steel drum, barrel-sized, with an air-tight gasketed he
ad on each end.

  Once the door was in place they proceeded to shovel many earth-tons of lunar soil down on top of the roof, until the space between the rock walls was filled, some three feet higher than the roof of the structure. When they were finished, nothing showed of the Dog House but the igloo-style door, sticking out between the rocky spires. The loose soil of Luna, itself a poor conductor of heat, and the vacuum spaces in it, would be their insulation.

  But it was not yet air-tight. They installed portable, temporary lights, then dragged in sealed canisters and flat bales. From the canisters came sticky, tacky sheets of a rubbery plastic. This they hung like wallpaper, working as rapidly as possible in order to finish before the volatiles boiled out of the plastic. They covered ceiling, walls and floor, then from the bales they removed aluminum foil, shiny as mirrors, and slapped it on top of the plastic, all except the floor, which was covered with heavier duraluminum sheets.

  It was ready for a pressure test. There were a few leaks to patch and they were ready to move in. The whole job had taken less than two ‘days’.

  The Dog House was to be Art’s radio shack, but that was not all. It was to be also a storeroom for everything they could possibly spare from the ship, everything not necessary to the brief trip back. The cargo space would then be made available for specimens to take back to earth, even if the specimens were no more than country rock, lunar style.

  But to Cargraves and to the three it was more than a storeroom, more than a radio shack. They were moving their personal gear into it, installing the hydroponic tank for the rhubarb plants to make the atmosphere self-refreshing, fitting it out as completely as possible for permanent residence.

  To them it was a symbol of man’s colonization of this planet, his intention to remain permanently, to fit it to his needs, and wrest a living from it.

  Even though circumstances required them to leave it behind them in a few days, they were declaring it to be their new home, they were hanging up their hats.

  They celebrated the completion of it with a ceremony which Cargraves had deliberately delayed until the Dog House was complete. Standing in a semicircle in front of the little door, they were addressed by Cargraves:

  “As commander of this expedition, duly authorized by a commission of the United Nations and proceeding in a vessel of United States registry, I take possession of this planet as a colony, on behalf of the United Nations of earth in accordance with the laws thereof and the laws of the United States. Run ’em up, Ross!”

  On a short and slender staff the banner of the United Nations and the flag of the United States whipped to the top. No breeze disturbed them in that airless waste—but Ross had taken the forethought to stiffen the upper edges of each with wire; they showed their colors.

  Cargraves found himself gulping as he watched the flag and banner hoisted. Privately he thought of this little hole in the ground as the first building of Luna City. He imagined that in a year or so there would be dozens of such cave dwellings, larger and better equipped, clustered around this spot. In them would live prospectors, scientists, and tough construction workers—workers who would be busy building the permanent Luna City down under the floor of the crater, while other workers installed a great rocket port up on the surface.

  Nearby would be the beginnings of the Cargraves Physical Laboratory, the Galileo Lunar Observatory.

  He found that tears were trickling down his cheeks; he tried futilely to wipe them away—through his helmet. He caught Ross’s eye and was embarrassed. “Well, sports,” he said with forced heartiness, “let’s get to work. Funny,” he added, looking at Ross, “what effect a few little symbols can have on a man.”

  Ross looked from Cargraves to the bits of gay bunting. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “A man isn’t a collection of chemical reactions; he is a collection of ideas.”

  Cargraves stared. His “boys” were growing up!

  “When do we start exploring?” Morrie wanted to know. “Any reason why we shouldn’t get going, now that the Dog House is finished?”

  “Before long, I think,” Cargraves answered uncomfortably. He had been stalling Morrie’s impatience for the last couple of days; Morrie was definitely disappointed that the rocket ship was not to be used, as originally planned, for point to point exploration. He felt confident that he could repeat his remarkable performance in making the first landing.

  Cargraves, on the other hand, was convinced that a series of such landings would eventually result in a crash, leaving them marooned to starve or suffocate even if they were not killed in the crash. Consequently he had not budged from his decision to limit exploration to trips on foot, trips which could not be more than a few hours in duration.

  “Let’s see how Art is getting on,” he suggested. “I don’t want to leave him behind—he’ll want to take pictures. On the other hand, he needs to get on with his radio work. Maybe we can rally around and furnish him with some extra hands.”

  “Okay.” They crawled through the air lock and entered the Dog House. Art and Ross had already gone inside.

  “Art,” Cargraves inquired when he had taken off his clumsy suit, “how long will it be until you are ready to try out your Earth sender?”

  “Well, I don’t know, Uncle. I never did think we could get through with the equipment we’ve got. If we had been able to carry the stuff I wanted—”

  “You mean if we had been able to afford it,” put in Ross.

  “Well…anyhow, I’ve got another idea. This place is an electronics man’s dream—all that vacuum! I’m going to try to gimmick up some really big power tubes—only they won’t be tubes. I can just mount the elements out in the open without having to bother with glass. It’s the easiest way to do experimental tube design anybody ever heard of.”

  “But even so,” Morrie pointed out, “that could go on indefinitely. Doc, you’ve got us scheduled to leave in less than ten earth-days. Feel like stretching the stay?” he added hopefully.

  “No, I don’t,” Cargraves stated. “Hmmm… Art, let’s skip the transmitter problem for a moment. After all, there isn’t any law that says we’ve got to establish radio contact with the earth. But how long would it take to get ready to receive from the earth?”

  “Oh, that!” said Art. “They have to do all the hard work for that. Now that I’ve got everything up here I can finish that hook-up in a couple of hours.”

  “Fine! We’ll whip up some lunch.”

  It was nearer three hours when Art announced he was ready to try. “Here goes,” he said. “Stand by.”

  They crowded around. “What do you expect to get?” Ross asked eagerly.

  Art shrugged. “Maybe nothing. NAA, or Berlin Sender, if they are beamed on us. I guess Radio Paris is the best bet, if they are still trying for us.” He adjusted his controls with the vacant stare that always came over him.

  They all kept very quiet. If it worked, it would be a big moment in history, and they all knew it.

  He looked suddenly startled.

  “Got something?”

  He did not answer for a moment. Then he pushed a phone off one ear and said bitterly, “One of you guys left the power on your walky-talky.”

  Cargraves checked the suits himself. “No, Art, they are all dead.”

  Art looked around the little room. “But…but…there’s nothing else it could be. Somebody is nuts!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “What’s the matter? I’m getting a power hum from somewhere and it’s from somewhere around here…close!”

  “NO CHANCE AT ALL!”

  • 14 •

  “ARE YOU SURE?” CARGRAVES demanded.

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “It’s probably Radio Paris,” Ross suggested. “You don’t know how far away it is.”

  Art looked indignant. “Suppose you sit down here and try your luck, Mr. de Forrest. It was close. It couldn’t have been an earth station.”

  “Feed back?”

  “Don??
?t be silly!” He tried fiddling with his dials a bit more. “It’s gone now.”

  “Just a minute,” said Cargraves. “We’ve got to be sure about this. Art, can you get any sort of a transmitter rigged?”

  “Not very eas—yes, I can, too. The homing set is all set to go.” The homing set was a low-power transmitter intended simply for communication between the Dog House and any member of the party outside in a suit.

  “Gimme half a second to hook it up.” It took more than half a second but shortly he was leaning toward the microphone, shouting, “Hello! Hello! Is there anybody there! Hello!”

  “He must have been dreaming,” Morrie said quietly to Cargraves. “There couldn’t be anybody out there.”

  “Shut up,” Art said over his shoulder and went back to calling, “Hello! Hello, hello.”

  His expression suddenly went blank, then he said sharply, “Speak English! Repeat!”

  “What was it?” demanded Cargraves, Ross, and Art.

  “Quiet…please!” Then, to the mike, “Yes, I hear you. Who is this? What? Say that again?… This is the Space Ship Galileo, Arthur Mueller transmitting. Hold on a minute.” Art flipped a switch on the front of the panel. “Now go ahead. Repeat who you are.”

  A heavy, bass voice came out of the transmitter:

  “This is Lunar Expedition Number One,” the voice said. “Will you be pleased to wait one minute while I summon our leader?”

  “Wait a minute,” yelled Art. “Don’t go away!” But the speaker did not answer.

  Ross started whistling to himself. “Stop that whistling,” Art demanded.

  “Sorry,” Ross paused, then added, “I suppose you know what this means?”

  “Huh? I don’t know what anything means!”

  “It means that we are too late for the senior prizes. Somebody has beaten us to it.”

  “Huh? How do you figure that?”

  “Well, it’s not certain, but it’s likely.”