Men Into Space E-Book

Murray Leinster

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 254

Beschreibung

Men Into Space

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

MEN INTO SPACE, by Murray Leinster

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

MEN INTO SPACE,by Murray Leinster

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2022 by Wildside Press LLC.

Originally published in 1960.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

INTRODUCTION,by John Betancourt

William F. Jenkins (1896–1975)—who wrote science fiction under several names, but primarily “Murray Leinster”—was one of the few early writers of speculative fiction to publish strong, relevant fiction over the course of 7 decades (Jack Williamson was another). Jenkins began publishing science fiction for pulp magazines before the term “science fiction” was even coined.

His success may have been due to his work in multiple genres. I have assembled his novels and stories into a series of collections for Wildside Press’s MEGAPACK® anthology line, and in researching his work, I discovered that he wrote pretty much everything imaginable, from romance to mystery to westerns, as well as science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, his published works number well into in the thousands—Wikipedia has an estimate of at least 1500—and I can easily believe it.

His first science fiction story, “The Runaway Skyscraper,” appeared in the February 22, 1919 issue of one of the leading general-fiction magazines, Argosy, and was reprinted in the June 1926 issue of Hugo Gernsback’s first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. In the 1930s, he published science fiction stories and serials in Amazing and Astounding Stories (the first issue of Astounding included his story “Tanks”). He continued to appear frequently in other genre pulps such as Detective Fiction Weekly and Smashing Western, as well as Collier’s Weekly beginning in 1936 and Esquire starting in 1939.

Jenkins was a pioneer in many now-archetypical science fiction themes. He explored parallel universe stories four years before Jack Williamson’s classic The Legion of Time came out, with “Sidewise in Time” (after which the Sidewise Award is named) in the June 1934 issue of Astounding. He also invented the “universal translator” popularized by Star Trek. And his 1946 short story “A Logic Named Joe” contains one of the first descriptions of a computer (called a “logic”) in fiction. He envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of servers (called “tanks”), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and commerce; one character says that “logics are civilization.” Not so far off from our Internet today!

Truly, he was one of the great visionary writers the field has ever produced.

CHAPTER 1

When Ed McCauley was a very young officer—in fact, a new-made first lieutenant, space travel was restricted to robots. They did good work, for robots, but it wasn’t enough. No man had ever gone up in a rocket. Nobody had ever gone up—let alone land safely. So the time came when somebody had to. And in those very early days McCauley volunteered for the job and managed to get it.

* * * *

First Lieutenant Ed McCauley opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling, wondering drowsily why this morning seemed so much more satisfying and important than any other. He’d had a good sleep, even though he remembered vaguely that he’d had a hard time dropping off. Now the sunlight came through the window blind in slatted streaks, the wall was a pale tan, and he was lying on an iron cot, his uniform neatly draped over a chair. Then he heard voices and the clattering of china, and suddenly he remembered where he was and what was important about today.

Today was the day of the shoot. The rocket shoot. It wasn’t going to be big and spectacular, with a multiple-stage giant looming so high that a man couldn’t see the payload capsule on top without his neck creaking. There’d be no giant gantry crane hovering over a slim but monstrous missile with its hundreds of plugged-in wires recording the performances of some tens of thousands of separate parts, all of which had to work perfectly if one part were to be any good. Even the electric wires had to pull clear perfectly when the gantry crane rolled back a matter of seconds before the end of the count down.

No. This shoot wouldn’t be spectacular. There weren’t even any reporters around. Official Service cameramen would record what happened; and if all went well there’d be plenty of excitement about it later, and if all didn’t go well it wouldn’t matter too much. This time there was no publicity buildup. Nobody’d be disappointed if things went wrong. The only person who’d feel badly was First Lieutenant Ed McCauley, and he wouldn’t feel it too keenly. In fact, he wouldn’t feel anything.

He’d be dead.

He considered the idea for a moment, but when a person is First Lieutenant McCauley’s age, dying is something that happens to somebody else. You can’t imagine it happening to you. It’s a sort of reverse of being born, but you can’t imagine that either, though it happened.

He sat up and kicked his feet over the side of the cot. He felt a little bit relieved. He was excited, now that he remembered what was in the works for today, but it wasn’t a solemn feeling. He got up and looked at himself in the small square mirror over the washstand. He looked exactly as he always did. He felt the same way. Well-l, maybe a little more awake and alive than usual, because he’d been horribly afraid that something would happen and the shoot would be called off. But it hadn’t—so far.

He went down the hall to the showers, trailing a towel over his shoulder. He showered, thinking zestfully about the prospects. There’d be no trouble about the weather. At this base clouds were exceptional and a cloud cover that hindered even visual tracking was almost unknown. Suddenly he wanted to sing, but he restrained himself. As lucky as he felt, it might sound like showing off.

The door of the shower room opened and somebody came in.

“Hi, National Hero. You in there?” It was Randy’s voice, slightly sardonic.

“Ain’t nobody here but us chickens, boss,” McCauley answered cheerfully. “Nary a hero.”

Randy grunted.

“How d’you feel, Ed?”

“Wet,” said McCauley. He turned off the shower and began to towel himself. When he emerged, Randy searched his face, his anxiety showing on his own.

“Nope,” said McCauley, “the condemned man’s got a good appetite for breakfast. Quit worrying about me, Randy!”

“If you’d only slipped on your soap and broken your doggone neck,” Randy complained, “a good guy might’ve gotten a chance to take your place!”

McCauley grinned. Randy would give his eyeteeth to take his place today. Anybody would. McCauley still worried that even now something would spoil things, but he’d been worrying for months. He’d been jumpy ever since the rumor first went around that sometime soon somebody was going up in a rocket and coming down again. Nobody ever had. Up to this morning it was still waiting to be done. But somebody—in fact, he himself—should do it today. This was why today was the most special day of his life.

Back in his quarters he shaved, marveling at the luck of the man he saw in the mirror. Three—four—five months ago he’d been telling himself that he didn’t have a chance of being picked, even though he was sure he’d put in for it as soon as anybody had. He’d hoped he’d been the first to apply, but actually he was one of two hundred. They’d winnowed the applicants, though, and four months ago twenty were left, and then only ten. Now there was only himself in first place, with four other bitterly envious characters—Randy was one of them—wishing he’d break his neck so they could go in his place.

But nothing like that would happen if he could help it. Washing the shaving soap off his face, he found himself praying that everything would go all right. He didn’t think of asking that he come down safely; after all, he could insure his safety by backing out. He just asked that he’d be all right when they checked him over, and that the count down would go all right, and that he’d get up to where the sky turned purple and then black and he saw the stars shining bright, with the sun among them as the nearest and greatest star of all. And he prayed that he’d do the right things while he was up there so the shoot would be a success.

He settled his uniform and went to breakfast. Randy had ordered for him and was waiting. Randy still looked worried. He’d tried hard for the job for himself, but now he was afraid that his friend McCauley might not check out. That the rocket might not check out. That when he got up there something might go wrong. That coming down would be bad.

“Soft-boiled,” said McCauley appreciatively, breaking an egg. “My favorite fruit!”

“Do you really feel okay, Ed?” asked Randy.

McCauley grinned again, which was answer enough. Maybe he felt too good. He probably should tone down a little. After all, this shoot with a man as the payload wasn’t a pleasure trip. It was research. It was an operation to verify other research. The medicos believed they knew what the psychological, physiological, and emotional effects of long-continued weightlessness would be. They needed to know how a normal man like McCauley would react to the unparalleled environment of nearer space. It was high-altitude research, primarily to enable planes to fly faster. A plane could be powered right now so that its wings would melt at sea level because of the heat its speed produced. The only way to reach theoretical top speed in a plane was to fly it away up. There was a thermal barrier to really high-speed flight. The only way around this barrier was over it, and it was necessary to find out how a man would make out in that detour. The Service had a long-established custom of spending a dollar instead of a man; now it had not to spend a man perhaps, but to risk one. And McCauley was the man.

He felt remarkably good, knowing that presently he should be where no man had ever been before, seeing with his own eyes that the earth was round. It struck him suddenly that everybody else in the world had only indirect evidence for believing this. He’d be the first man to know this for a fact simply because he’d gone up to where he would see the earth as a ball.

“No shivers?” asked Randy presently, as if in envy. “Wouldn’t you rather not and say you did? I’ll take over for you!”

“Don’t tempt me!” said McCauley, pushing his cup across the table. “And how about some more coffee?”

Randy grunted. Maybe he’d been ordered to do some kidding, so McCauley wouldn’t get the wind up. But it didn’t matter to Ed. If only everything went all right at the blockhouse everything would have to go all right all along the line. But the chance that things might be fouled up there made him want to keep his fingers crossed. Yes. The blockhouse was the big hurdle. Anything that happened after that wouldn’t be failure on his part. He wanted to pray again, this time about the blockhouse. But he didn’t.

The two men left the officers’-quarters building together. There was a jeep waiting, with Sergeant Hall at its wheel.

“Mornin’, Lieuten’t. How you feeling?”

The sergeant looked at McCauley with the same combination of envy and anxiety that Randy had shown—envy for what McCauley had ahead of him, anxiety for whether he felt all right so that he could go through with it.

“Look!” said McCauley, annoyed. “I’m all right! There’s nothing to worry about! The thing’s been done before with instruments, dummies, monkeys, and now it’s me. I’m just another ape. That’s all! For the love of Saint Aloysius stop worrying!”

Sergeant Hall let in the clutch.

“Okay, Lieuten’t,” he said mildly. “I was just going to wish you good luck.”

“Cross your fingers against the medics,” said McCauley dourly. “I never liked doctors. I’ve got to get by some of them.”

He settled back in the jeep and it went bolting out into the already blazing sunlight beyond the shadow of the building.

The landscape wasn’t pretty—sun-baked clay and sand on the road, and mesquite and more mesquite all around. The sunshine was hotter here than anywhere else in the world. It was still long before noon, but already the horizon shimmered in the heat and occasional little sand-devils rose up half-heartedly and then subsided as if it were too hot even for whirlwinds. Far away there were the mountains. McCauley had gone over there once, and they’d towered impossibly toward the sky. But presently he’d have trouble picking them out because they’d be so small and the ground so nearly flat. Heat beat up from the ground and through the windshield. After a quarter of an hour he could see the spindly launching tower—no gantry cranes here!—above one of the ridges over which the jeep went rolling, kicking up a monstrous cloud of yellow dust behind it.

McCauley didn’t mind the heat. He felt remarkably aware of being alive and breathing, of the sunlight, and of a wrinkle in his pants on the jeep seat. After a little he saw the flat roof of the blockhouse. Then he felt scared. He was afraid of the blockhouse. There’d be a last checkup to make sure he was perfectly all right, perfectly normal, no more tense than the doctors decided was allowable, and so on. His heart began to pound a little and he agonized over it. If they decided it was acting queer....

He found himself praying again. Please, God, don’t let them find anything wrong with me! I want so much to do this!

Randy didn’t look at him. A good guy, Randy. He’d know it was panic over those doggone doctors poking stethoscopes at him and going off to mutter together about what they’d heard.

“Randy, if I look scared, it’s because I am,” McCauley said between his teeth. “There’s a medic in that blockhouse who wanted his brother-in-law to get this job. He’d be just the kind to mess me up now!”

Randy offered a cigarette. McCauley shook his head.

The blockhouse was sunk in the dry earth. It was concrete, yards thick, with nothing visible from this side except a deep-sunk door in the wall. On the other side there was a narrow slit to look out of, and there were periscopes and in a pit over yonder the close-by trackers. There were other trackers in other spots—as far away as the mountains. But there wasn’t much of anything to be seen here.

... No. There was the rocket. One of the new big Aerobees. Nothing fancy about it. The Atlas and the long-distance jobs generally got all the publicity these days. But the Aerobees were solid and workmanlike, veteran performers. Fancy hardware broke the records and was what people meant when they talked about missiles and rockets, but Aerobees were the workhorses that went up without fanfare, got the information they were sent up for, and got it back down again. It was an Aerobee that had proved matter-of-factly that most of the stuff in the textbooks about the upper air simply wasn’t so. Aerobees were the first to disprove the belief that the tropopause was a motionless, featureless calm belt up aloft. Aerobees brought back conclusive evidence of vertical currents in that supposed utter calm, currents that shot upward at three hundred meters per second. And it was Aerobees that brought back proof of ultraviolet light reaching Earth on its dark side, so the theory boys could go quietly mad figuring out where the light came from.

Yes. The pointed nose and sleek shape of the Aerobee was a comfort, standing by its straight-up launching tower. McCauley’d seen dozens of shoots of Aerobees. He felt the affection a man feels for something that does its job competently and casually, day in and day out, when called upon to do it.

The jeep stopped. Randy got out and McCauley followed him. The sergeant opened his mouth but thought better of it. He drove away without saying anything more about luck.

The doorway of the blockhouse was cool. Inside, as the door closed behind him, McCauley felt the air-conditioned chill and the clatter of the place almost as if he’d been struck a blow. There were people everywhere. Practically everybody wore a phone headset and chest microphone and everybody was talking to somebody somewhere else, paying no attention to anyone nearby.

McCauley stood still, waiting to be told where to go. Somebody called to him:

“The docs aren’t ready for you yet, Lieutenant. You’re early.”

“Okay,” McCauley said. “Where’ll I go to get out of the way?”

It didn’t look as if anybody else could possibly wait around in the blockhouse without further fouling up the already-present confusion.

“Let’s go look at the transportation,” Randy suggested.

McCauley shrugged and followed Randy outside. It was comforting that nobody paid any attention to him. At least the people in charge of the shoot weren’t worrying about his not being okayed for the job.

In the sunshine again, he saw familiar things. The close-by trackers in their pits, sunk below ground level in case something blew. The telemeter receivers looked like huge wire bowls, decorated with rolls of toilet tissue, aimed at the sky. They moved back and forth, testing. They’d get back telemetered information and sort it out and make tapes of it, and whoever read those tapes would know more about what was happening than McCauley did. A telemetering system will sample a practically indefinite number of instrument readings three hundred times a second and send back the information in wild banshee howls or else in scratchy noises that sound like all the static in the world coming out of one loud-speaker.

Even so, things were better than they used to be, for there was a time when not nearly so much information got back. For that matter, McCauley’d heard about the tame German scientist—formerly of Peenemünde—who used to stand out in the open behind the blockhouse when those first rockets went up, sweating and squinting and saying, “Goot!” “Goot!” as long as he could see that things were going well, and sputtering despairingly and unintelligibly in German when they went wrong.

They went wrong pretty often in the beginning, back ten years or so ago. There was the time a rocket went up and simply vanished. All the trackers lost it and nobody had the least idea where it’d gone. All the men sat around biting their nails and wondering where in blazes it was. Finally there’d been a telephone call from a woman in Alamogordo. She’d managed to reach someone with authority to route her call though to the blockhouse.

“Ah hear you folks are shootin’ up rockets,” she said in an indignant drawl. “Well, you-all better come an’ get your rocket outa my backyard right now!”

It had landed in her backyard, many miles away, and it had missed her house by no more than twenty feet.

Another time—a long, long while ago—a V-2 tied itself into knots and headed for Mexico. When it came down near Juarez, all the Mexicans for miles around came on the run with hacksaws. After they’d cut off pieces of it for “space souvenirs,” there wasn’t much left to be hauled back to base....

McCauley followed Randy around to the front. They walked over the hot sandy ground to the launching tower. There was a fuel truck there, and the sickly-sweet but bitter smell of hydrazine. The fueling gang wore plastic coveralls with hoods and clear plastic faceplates. McCauley knew this process; he’d helped with it. But today he kept carefully out of the way. The fueling gang was finicky about its work. Each man was extravagantly careful not to spill a drop of hydrazine, because if somebody stepped on a drop that had spilled and then, later on, stepped on a drop of nitric that had spilled, he’d have a hotfoot to end all hotfoots—on that foot, anyhow, because he wouldn’t have it any longer.

The hydrazine topped off. The truck went away, with everything carefully closed up lest a drop of anything spill on to the ground. The fueling gang went to change coveralls, for they wore coveralls of a different color when they were going to load up the nitric acid. Never the twain—hydrazine and nitric—should meet until pumped together into a rocket engine.

The Aerobee was tall and sleek and smooth and streamlined, but now there were ladders leaning against it. Somebody was working through a door in the sidewall. McCauley went around and glanced at the guide rail. The Aerobee used a short-time booster to start up. The booster ran up the rail to the top of the launching tower and then landed somewhere nearby. But the Aerobee would keep on going. By the time it reached the top of the tower and the end of the guide rail, it should be going fast enough for its fins to have some grip on the air. When the air got too thin to be of any use, the steam-jets working from the fin tips should guide it.

The nitric acid truck came slowly into position. It didn’t cross the track the hydrazine truck had taken, and stopped in an entirely different place; the fueling crew reappeared, in their different-colored plastic coveralls. The precautions taken against the premature introduction of hydrazine and nitric acid were remarkable.

McCauley let himself look up once at the nose-cone. He’d tried it on for size before. In it, he was going to have to take the launching jolt of more gees than any jet pilot has to be prepared for. But he felt a serene confidence that he could do it.

Then somebody called:

“Hey! Lieutenant! They want you back at the blockhouse!”

McCauley turned back obediently. The fuel gang was pumping in the nitric as he left. It stank, and he knew that if the smell gets under the faceplate of your hood you throw back the hood and faceplate together and gasp for breath. He realized that he wasn’t breathing too easily. The doctors were going to make their final check on him, and what they said would be it. He felt the familiar panicky conviction that they’d find something wrong with him. For instance, panic would be something wrong.

He caught hold of himself as he and Randy entered the blockhouse. Somehow the confusion and busyness of everybody there were reassuring. On the way to where the doctors waited, he heard people talking into telephones about wind velocities and barometric pressures and how in thunder did that civilian automobile get into the test area? Somebody had to get it out fast, because there was a shoot on, in case nobody’d heard. The last was pure sarcasm.

Anyhow the technical crew thought he was all right. So McCauley submitted himself to the doctors in a sort of truculent readiness to put up an argument if they said anything critical of his condition or his readiness to go where nobody had ever gone before. With everything else all ready, they’d have a nerve to suggest anything but a go-ahead!

They took his blood pressure and did a cardiogram, and they put a tape around his chest and a stylus drew a crazy curve which showed the way he was breathing. Then they took samples of his breath and his blood and other body fluids, and his temperature and the electrical resistance of his skin and forty-seven other things. They’d done all this before. They’d done it while he was resting and while he was taking hard exercise, when he was tired and when he’d just waked up from a good night’s sleep.

They had blown-up pictures of every square inch of his skin, so they could check for sputters at high altitude. A sputter might occur if a cosmic particle at just the right speed happened to hit him. He hadn’t any privacy left. The docs knew everything about him, except that he was absolutely the right person for man’s first ascent in a pure rocket, and his return to Earth in one piece. No rocket had ever landed intact, of course. They smashed. Invariably. But a way had been worked out to get instruments back unshattered. That was the way he’d land.

One of the doctors nodded.

“With that pulse rate your system’s pumping out plenty of adrenalin. That’s good!”

McCauley relaxed a little. He watched as they checked his reflexes. He could tell that they looked all right, anyway. They gave him a pencil and timed him while he did a page of IQ stuff. In the past few weeks they’d established his personal norm for all sorts of things, and now they were checking to see whether anticipation pushed him too far off normal. He began to sweat when he realized that he needed to act exactly as usual, and they knew it, and he sweated more because of it. They checked him over as they would a guinea pig before an experiment, only he was the guinea pig. But he was desperately anxious for all this to be over and for the experiment to start.

Presently they finished and looked at each other and nodded. Then one of them said, “You’ll do,” and McCauley went almost sick with relief. Then, infuriatingly, he knew from their expressions that they’d looked for exactly that reaction. He couldn’t do anything they wouldn’t analyze and think about. And he burned a little, but it was all right. Everything was all right!

When Ed came out to the main part of the blockhouse again, Randy knew from his expression that he’d been checked out for the flight, but he asked politely:

“Mother and child doing well?”

By that time McCauley wanted to hug somebody for sheer joy, but instead he said sedately,

“The doc says I’m a boy.”

But just the same he was almost weak from the reaction to the ending of his fears about what the doctors might decide. He looked at his watch. Just about on schedule. Over in a corner somebody with a headphone and chest mike was marking off items on a list he had before him. He said, “Telemeter circuits,” and paused. A voice evidently sounded in his headphones, because he made a checkmark with his pencil. Then he said, “Tracker circuits,” and waited, and made another checkmark. As McCauley walked on to where his voice was drowned out, he was still saying toneless things into his chest mike and making checkmarks after unhearable replies.

Randy closed the door of the cubicle where McCauley would put on the grav-suit. It was skin-tight and festooned all over with stray bits of equipment. Randy helped him get into it.

“Lucky son-of-a-gun!” he said conversationally. “How do the Irish get all the breaks?”

“Clean living,” McCauley told him, “and a drag with the top brass.”

It wasn’t so, of course. Not the top brass part, anyhow.

His arm caught in the right sleeve and Randy helped him straighten it. There were peculiar tubes built into the fabric. They were all hooked to a grav-valve that would let compressed air into them at a suitable pressure to tighten the suit and fight the tendency of his blood and inner organs to be left behind when his bones and flesh were accelerated by the full thrust of the rocket. A man wasn’t built to stand the acceleration he had to take. But the grav-suit would make up the difference.

He turned slowly around, and Randy inspected everything with the jealous care of somebody who’ll never forgive himself if anything goes wrong. Presently he said:

“Flip it—but be careful!”

McCauley touched the test-stud. The tubes expanded. The suit tightened. It felt as if it were going to try to squeeze his whole body out through the neck. He lifted his hand and the squeezing stopped. Randy screwed up the test-stud so it couldn’t flip on by accident. He felt of the chute-pack that was part of the suit, with the wide straps that went around McCauley’s body and thighs. He checked the four trailing cables—each with a different-shaped plug on its end—that would pass along all the suit-instrumentation news to the telemeter transmitter.

Then Randy nodded worriedly and gave McCauley a cigarette.

“It looks okay,” he said. But he fretted.

“Everything’s okay,” said McCauley.

He puffed contentedly. When the cigarette was half-smoked, somebody tapped on the door.

“You can get aboard, Lieutenant.”

McCauley stood up. Randy opened the door for him and he went ambling clumsily through the blockhouse toward the exit. He heard a toneless voice say: “Crash wagon two”; then the man listened and made a checkmark. Somebody else snapped: “Tell the idiot that we’re trying to keep him out of range of a few tons of hardware that’ll be coming down out of the sky presently. Sit on his head!” That would be the official response to the civilian motorist’s objection to being kept safely off the test site when a shoot was on.

McCauley went on out into the open air. He felt weighty and clumsy and cumbersome. He went around the blockhouse and into the blazing sunshine. The fueling crew was finished, but they hadn’t left. They waited to watch him go aboard. There was a ladder leaning against the Aerobee. McCauley plodded heavily to the foot of it. He put his foot on the first rung and turned to Randy.

“Here I go.”

“Yeah,” said Randy. He didn’t smile. He couldn’t. But he did have a fine air of nonchalance as he said, “See you soon.”

There was no handshake. It would have been too much like saying good-by. McCauley started up the ladder.

It was a long climb; and three-quarters of the way up, with all the assorted gimmicks and the clumsy chute-pack banging against his buttocks, he began to breathe fast. Once he stepped on a trailing cable. He looked down and was annoyed to find that the height bothered him—a man who would presently be up many miles higher than any man had ever been before. And this was only tens of feet, yet he felt giddy! He didn’t look down again.