Operation: Outer Space. Murray Leinster
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"In theory, I should. But do you realize what all this is about? I just learned!" When Babs shook her head he said sardonically, "We are on the way to the Moon to stage a private production out of sheer cruelty. We're hired to rob a happy man of the luxury of feeling sorry for himself. We're under Holden's orders to cure a man of being a crackpot!"
Babs hardly listened. She was too much filled with the zest of being where she'd never dared hope to be able to go.
"I wouldn't want to be cured of being a crackpot," protested Cochrane, "if only I could afford such a luxury! I'd—"
Babs said urgently:
"You'll have to hurry, really! They told me it starts in ten minutes, so I came to find you right away."
"What starts?"
"We're in eclipse now," explained Babs, starry-eyed. "We're in the Earth's shadow. In about five minutes we'll be coming out into sunlight again, and we'll see the new Earth!"
"Guarantee that it will be a new Earth," Cochrane said morosely, "and I'll come. I didn't do too well on the old one."
But he followed her in all the embarrassment of walking on magnetic-soled shoes in a total absence of effective gravity. It was quite a job simply to start off. Without precaution, if he merely tried to march away from where he was, his feet would walk out from under him and he'd be left lying on his back in mid-air. Again, to stop without putting one foot out ahead for a prop would mean that after his feet paused, his body would continue onward and he would achieve a full-length face-down flop. And besides, one could not walk with a regular up-and-down motion, or in seconds he would find his feet churning emptiness in complete futility.
Cochrane tried to walk, and then irritably took a hand-rail and hauled himself along it, with his legs trailing behind him like the tail of a swimming mermaid. He thought of the simile and was not impressed by his own dignity.
Presently Babs halted herself in what was plainly a metal blister in the outer skin of the platform. There was a round quartz window, showing the inside of steel-plate windows beyond it. Babs pushed a button marked "Shutter," and the valves of steel drew back.
Cochrane blinked, lifted even out of his irritableness by the sight before him.
He saw the immensity of the heavens, studded with innumerable stars. Some were brighter than others, and they were of every imaginable color. Tiny glintings of lurid tint—through the Earth's atmosphere they would blend into an indefinite faint luminosity—appeared so close together that there seemed no possible interval. However tiny the appearance of a gap, one had but to look at it for an instant to perceive infinitesimal flecks of colored fire there, also.
Each tiniest glimmering was a sun. But that was not what made Cochrane catch his breath.
There was a monstrous space of nothingness immediately before his eyes. It was round and vast and near. It was black with the utter blackness of the Pit. It was Earth, seen from its eight-thousand-mile-wide shadow, unlighted even by the Moon. There was no faintest relief from its absolute darkness. It was as if, in the midst of the splendor of the heavens, there was a chasm through which one glimpsed the unthinkable nothing from which creation was called in the beginning. Until one realized that this was simply the dark side of Earth, the spectacle was one of hair-raising horror.
After a moment Cochrane said with a carefully steadied voice:
"My most disparaging opinions of Earth were never as black as this!"
"Wait," said Babs confidently.
Cochrane waited. He had to hold carefully in his mind that this visible abyss, this enormity of purest dark, was not an opening into nothingness but was simply Earth at night as seen from space.
Then he saw a faint, faint arch of color forming at its edge. It spread swiftly. Immediately, it seemed, there was a pinkish glowing line among the multitudinous stars. It was red. It was very, very bright. It became a complete half-circle. It was the light of the sun refracted around the edge of the world.
Within minutes—it seemed in seconds—the line of light was a glory among the stars. And then, very swiftly, the blazing orb which was the sun appeared from behind Earth. It was intolerably bright, but it did not brighten the firmament. It swam among all the myriads of myriads of suns, burning luridly and in a terrible silence, with visibly writhing prominences rising from the edge of its disk. Cochrane squinted at it with light-dazzled eyes.
Then Babs cried softly:
"Beautiful! Oh, beautiful!"
And Cochrane shielded his eyes and saw the world new-born before him. The arc of light became an arch and then a crescent, and swelled even as he looked. Dawn flowed below the space platform, and it seemed that seas and continents and clouds and beauty poured over the disk of darkness before him.
He stood here, staring, until the steel shutters slowly closed. Babs said in regret:
"You have to keep your hand on the button to keep the shutters open. Else the window might get pitted with dust."
Cochrane said cynically:
"And how much good will it have done me to see that, Babs? How can that be faked in a studio—and how much would a television screen show of it?"
He turned away. Then he added sourly:
"You stay and look if you like, Babs. I've already had my vanity smashed to little bits. If I look at that again I'll want to weep in pure frustration because I can't do anything even faintly as well worth watching. I prefer to cut down my notions of the cosmos to a tolerable size. But you go ahead and look!"
He went back to Holden. Holden was painfully dragging himself back into the rocket-ship. Cochrane went with him. They returned, weightless, to the admirably designed contour-chairs in which they had traveled to this place, and in which they would travel farther. Cochrane settled down to stare numbly at the wall above him. He had been humiliated enough by the actions of one of the heads of an advertising agency. He found himself resenting, even as he experienced, the humbling which had been imposed upon him by the cosmos itself.
Presently the other passengers returned, and the moonship was maneuvered out of the lock and to emptiness again, and again presently rockets roared and there was further feeling of intolerable weight. But it was not as bad as the take-off from Earth.
There followed some ninety-six hours of pure tedium. After the first accelerating blasts, the rockets were silent. There was no weight. There was nothing to hear except the droning murmur of unresting electric fans, stirring the air ceaselessly so that excess moisture from breathing could be extracted by the dehumidifiers. But for them—if the air had been left stagnant—the journey would have been insupportable.
There was nothing to see, because ports opening on outer space were not safe for passengers to look through. Mere humans, untrained to keep their minds on technical matters, could break down at the spectacle of the universe. There could be no activity.
Some of the passengers took dozy-pills. Cochrane did not. It was against the law for dozy-pills to produce a sensation of euphoria, of well-being. The law considered that pleasure might lead to addiction. But if a pill merely made a person drowsy, so that he dozed for hours halfway between sleeping and awake, no harm appeared to be done. Yet there were plenty of dozy-pill addicts. Many people were not especially anxious to feel good. They were quite satisfied not to feel anything at all.
Cochrane couldn't take that way of escape. He lay strapped in his chair and thought unhappily of many things. He came to feel unclean, as people used to feel when they traveled for days on end on railroad trains. There was no possibility of a bath. One could not even change clothes, because baggage went separately to the moon in a robot freight-rocket, which was faster and cheaper than a passenger transport, but would kill anybody who tried to ride it. Fifteen-and twenty-gravity acceleration is economical of fuel, and six-gravity is not, but nobody can live through a twenty-gravity lift-off from Earth. So passengers stayed in the clothes in which they entered the ship, and the only possible concession