Prelude to Space Read online

  “The television picture wasn’t too clear, but every few seconds it steadied and we got a good image. That was the biggest thrill of my life—being the first man to see the other side of the Moon. Going there will be a bit of an anticlimax.”

  “—most terrific explosion you ever saw. When we got up, I heard Goering say: ‘If that’s the best you can do, I’ll tell the Fuehrer the whole thing’s a waste of money.’ You should have seen von Braun’s face—”

  “The KX 14’s still up there: she completes one orbit every three hours, which was just what we’d intended. But the blasted radio transmitter failed at take-off, so we never got those instrument readings after all.”

  “I was looking through the twelve-inch reflector when that load of magnesium powder hit the Moon, about fifty kilometers from Aristarchus. You can just see the crater it made, if you have a look around sunset.”

  Sometimes Dirk envied these men. They had a purpose in life, even if it was one he could not fully understand. It must give them a feeling of power to send their great machines thousands of miles out into space. But power was dangerous, and often corrupting. Could they be trusted with the forces they were bringing into the world? Could the world itself be trusted with them?

  Despite his intellectual background, Dirk was not altogether free from the fear of science that had been common ever since the great discoveries of the Victorian era. He felt not only isolated but sometimes a little nervous in his new surroundings. The few people he spoke to were invariably helpful and polite, but a certain shyness and his anxiety to master the background of his subject in the shortest time kept him away from all social entanglements. He liked the atmosphere of the organization, which was almost aggressively democratic, and later on it would be easy enough to meet all the people he wished.

  At the moment, Dirk’s chief contacts with anyone outside the Public Relations Department were at meal-times. Interplanetary’s small canteen was patronized, in relays, by all the staff from the Director General downwards. It was run by a very enterprising committee with a fondness for experimenting, and although there were occasional culinary catastrophes, the food was usually very good. For all that Dirk could tell, Interplanetary’s boast of the best cooking on Southbank might indeed be justified.

  As Dirk’s lunch-time, like Easter, was a movable feast, he usually met a fresh set of faces every day and soon grew to know most of the important members of the organization by sight. No one took any notice of him: the building was full of birds-of-passage from universities and industrial firms all over the world, and he was obviously regarded as just another visiting scientist.

  His college, through the ramifications of the United States Embassy, had managed to find Dirk a small service flat a few hundred yards from Grosvenor Square. Every morning he walked to Bond Street Station and took the Tube to Waterloo. He quickly learned to avoid the early-morning rush, but he was seldom much later than many senior members of Interplanetary’s staff. Eccentric hours were popular at Southbank: though Dirk sometimes remained in the building until midnight, there were always sounds of activity around him—usually from the research sections. Often, in order to clear his head and get a little exercise, he would go for a stroll along the deserted corridors, making mental notes of interesting departments which he might one day visit officially. He learned a great deal more about the place in this way than from the elaborate and much-amended organization charts which Matthews had lent him—and was always borrowing back again.

  Frequently Dirk would come across half-opened doors revealing vistas of untidy labs and machine-shops in which gloomy technicians sat gazing at equipment which was obviously refusing to behave. If the hour was very late, the scene would be softened by a mist of tobacco-smoke and invariably an electric kettle and a battered tea pot would occupy places of honor in the near foreground. Occasionally Dirk would arrive at some moment of technical triumph, and if he was not careful he was likely to be invited to share the ambiguous liquid which the engineers were continually brewing. In this way he became on nodding terms with a great many people, but he knew scarcely a dozen well enough to address them by name.

  At the age of thirty-three, Dirk Alexson was still somewhat nervous of the everyday world around him. He was happier in the past and among his books, and though he had traveled fairly extensively in the United States, he had spent almost all his life in academic circles. His colleagues recognized him as a steady, sound worker with an almost intuitive flair for unraveling complicated situations. No one knew if he would make a great historian, but his study of the Medicis had been acknowledged as outstanding.

  His friends had never been able to understand how anyone of Dirk’s somewhat placid disposition could so accurately have analyzed the motives and behavior of that flamboyant family.

  Pure chance, it seemed, had brought him from Chicago to London, and he was still very much conscious of the fact. A few months ago the influence of Walter Pater had begun to wane: the little, crowded stage of Renaissance Italy was losing its charm—if so mild a word could be applied to that microcosm of intrigues and assassinations. It had not been his first change of interest, and he feared it would not be his last, for Dirk Alexson was still seeking a work to which he could devote his life. In a moment of depression he had remarked to his Dean that probably only the future held a subject which would really appeal to him. That casual and half-serious complaint had coincided with a letter from the Rockefeller Foundation, and before he knew it Dirk had been on the way to London.

  For the first few days he was haunted by the specter of his own incapacity, but he had learned now that this always happened when he started a new job and it had ceased to be more than a nuisance. After about a week he felt that he now had a fairly clear picture of the organization in which he had so unexpectedly found himself. His confidence began to return, and he could relax a little.

  Since undergraduate days he had kept a desultory journal—usually neglected save in occasional crises—and he now began once more to record his impressions and the everyday events of his life.

  These notes, written for his own satisfaction, would enable him to marshal his thoughts and might later serve as a basis for the official history he must one day produce.

  “Today, May 3, 1978, I’ve been in London for exactly a week—and I’ve seen nothing of it except the areas around Bond Street and Waterloo. When it’s fine Matthews and I usually go for a stroll along the river after lunch. We go across the “New” bridge (which has only been built for about forty years!) and walk up or down river as the fancy takes us, crossing again at Charing Cross or Blackfriars. There are quite a number of variations, clockwise and counter-clockwise.

  “Alfred Matthews is about forty, and I’ve found him very helpful. He has an extraordinary sense of humor, but I’ve never seen him smile—he’s absolutely deadpan. He seems to know his job pretty well—a good deal better, I should say, than McAndrews, who is supposed to be his boss. Mac is about ten years older: like Alfred, he graduated through journalism into public relations. He’s a lean, hungry-looking person and usually speaks with a slight Scots accent—which vanishes completely when he’s excited. This should prove something, but I can’t imagine what. He’s not a bad fellow, but I don’t think he’s very bright. Alfred does all the work and there’s not much love lost between them. It’s sometimes a bit difficult keeping on good terms with them both.

  “Next week I hope to start meeting people and going further afield. I particularly want to meet the crew—but I’m keeping out of the scientists’ way until I know a bit more about atomic drives and interplanetary orbits. Alfred is going to teach me all about this next week—so he says. What I also hope to discover is how such an extraordinary hybrid as Interplanetary was ever formed in the first place. It seems a typically British compromise, and there’s very little on paper about its formation and origins. The whole institution is a mass of paradoxes. It exists in a state of chronic bankruptcy, yet it’s responsible for spending something
like ten millions a year (£, not $). The Government has very little say in its administration, and in some ways it seems as autocratic as the B.B.C. But when it’s attacked in Parliament (which happens every other month) some Minister always gets up to defend it. Perhaps, after all, Mac’s a better organizer than I imagine!

  “I called it ‘British,’ but of course it isn’t. About a fifth of the staff are American, and I’ve heard every conceivable accent in the canteen. It’s as international as the United Nations secretariat, though the British certainly provide most of the driving force and the administrative staff. Why this should be, I don’t know: perhaps Matthews can explain.

  “Another query: apart from their accents, it’s very difficult to see any real distinction between the different nationalities here. Is this due to the—to put it mildly—supranational nature of their work? And if I stay here long enough, I suppose I shall get deracinated too.”

  3

  “I was wondering,” said McAndrews, “when you were going to ask that question. The answer’s rather complicated.”

  “I’ll be very much surprised,” Dirk answered dryly, “if it’s quite as involved as the machinations of the Medici family.”

  “Perhaps not; we’ve never used assassination yet, though we’ve often felt like it. Miss Reynolds, will you take any calls while I talk with Dr. Alexson? Thank you.

  “Well, as you know, the foundations of astronautics—the science of space travel—had been pretty well laid at the end of the Second World War. V.2 and atomic energy had convinced most people that space could be crossed, if anyone wanted to do it. There were several societies, in England and the States, actively promulgating the idea that we should go to the Moon and the planets. They made steady but slow progress until the 1950’s, when things really started to get moving.

  “In 1959, as you may—er—just remember, the American Army’s guided missile ‘Orphan Annie’ hit the Moon with twenty-five pounds of flash-powder aboard. From that moment, the public began to realize that space travel wasn’t a thing of the distant future, but might come inside a generation.

  Astronomy began to replace atomic physics as the Number One science, and the rocket societies’ membership lists started to lengthen steadily. But it was one thing to crash an unmanned projectile into the Moon—and quite another to land a full-sized spaceship there and bring it home again. Some pessimists thought the job might still take another hundred years.

  “There were a lot of people in this country who didn’t intend to wait that long. They believed that the crossing of space was as essential for progress as the discovery of the New World had been four hundred years before. It would open up new frontiers and give the human race a goal so challenging that it would overshadow national differences and put the tribal conflicts of the early twentieth century in their true perspective. Energies that might have gone into wars would be fully employed in the colonization of the planets—which could certainly keep us busy for a good many centuries. That was the theory, at any rate.” McAndrews smiled a little.

  “There were, of course, a good many other motives. You know what an unsettled period the early 50’s was. The cynic’s argument for space flight was summed up in the famous remark: ‘Atomic power makes interplanetary travel not only possible but imperative.’ As long as it was confined to Earth, humanity had too many eggs in one rather fragile basket.

  “All this was realized by an oddly assorted group of scientists, writers, astronomers, editors and businessmen in the old Interplanetary Society. With very small capital, they started the publication Spacewards, which was inspired by the success of the American National Geographic Society’s magazine. What the N.G.S had done for the Earth could, it was argued, now be done for the solar system. Spacewards was an attempt to make the public shareholders, as it were, in the conquest of space. It catered to the new interest in astronomy, and those who subscribed to it felt that they were helping to finance the first space flight.

  “The project wouldn’t have succeeded a few years earlier, but the time was now ripe for it. In a few years there were about a quarter of a million subscribers all over the world, and in 1962 Interplanetary’ was founded to carry out full-time research into the problems of space flight. At first it couldn’t offer the salaries of the great government-sponsored rocket establishments, but slowly it attracted the best scientists in the field. They preferred working on a constructive project, even at lower pay, to building missiles for transporting atomic bombs. In the early days, the organization was also helped by one or two financial windfalls. When the last British millionaire died in 1965, he balked the Treasury of almost all his fortune by making it into a Trust Fund for our use.

  “From the first, Interplanetary was a world-wide organization and it’s largely an historical accident that its H.Q. is actually in London. It might very well have been in America, and a lot of your compatriots are still quite annoyed that it isn’t. But for some reason, you Americans have always been a bit conservative about space flight, and didn’t take it seriously until several years after us. Never mind: the Germans beat us both.

  “Also, you must remember that the United States is much too small a country for astronautical research. Yes, I know that sounds odd—but if you look at a population map you’ll see what I mean. There are only two places in the world that are really suitable for long-range rocket research. One’s the Sahara desert, and even that is a little too near the great cities of Europe. The other is the West Australian desert, where the British Government started building its great rocket range in 1947. It’s more than a thousand miles long, and there’s another two thousand miles of ocean beyond it—giving a grand total of over three thousand miles. You won’t find any place in the United States where you can safely fire a rocket even five hundred miles. So it’s partly a geographical accident that things have turned out this way.

  “Where was I? Oh yes, up to 1960 or so. It was about then that we began to get really important, for two reasons which aren’t widely known. By that time a whole section of nuclear physics had come to a full stop. The scientists of the Atomic Development Authority thought they could start the hydrogen-helium reaction—and I don’t mean the tritium reaction of the old H-bomb—but the crucial experiments had been very wisely banned. There’s rather a lot of hydrogen in the sea! So the nuclear physicists were all sitting around chewing their fingernails until we could build them laboratories out in space. It wouldn’t matter, then, if something went wrong. The solar system would merely acquire a second and rather temporary sun. ADA also wanted us to dump the dangerous fission products from the piles, which were too radioactive to keep on Earth but which might be useful some day.

  “The second reason wasn’t so spectacular, but was perhaps even more immediately important. The great radio and telegraph companies had to get out into space—it was the only way they could broadcast television over the whole world and provide a universal communication service. As you know, the very short waves of radar and television won’t bend around the Earth—they travel in practically straight lines, so that one station can send signals only as far as the horizon. Airborne relays had been built to get over this difficulty, but it was realized that the final solution would be reached only when repeater stations could be built thousands of miles above the Earth—artificial moons, probably traveling in twenty-four-hour orbits so that they’d appear stationary in the sky. No doubt you’ve read all about these ideas, so I won’t go into them now.

  “So by about 1970 we had the support of some of the world’s biggest technical organizations, with virtually unlimited funds. They had to come to us, since we had all the experts. In the early days, I’m afraid there was a certain amount of bickering and the Service Departments have never quite forgiven us for stealing back all their best scientists. But on the whole we get along well enough with ADA, Westinghouse, General Electric, Rolls-Royce, Lockheeds, de Havillands, and the rest of them. They’ve all got offices here, as you’ve probably noticed. Although they
make us very substantial grants, the technical services they provide are really beyond price. Without their help, I don’t suppose we’d have reached this stage for another twenty years.”

  There was a brief pause, and Dirk emerged from the torrent of words like a spaniel clambering out of a mountain stream. McAndrews talked much too quickly, obviously repeating phrases and whole paragraphs which he had been using for years. Dirk got the impression that almost everything he had said had probably come from other sources, and wasn’t original at all.

  “I’d no idea,” he replied, “just how extensive your ramifications were.”

  “Believe me, that’s nothing!” McAndrews exclaimed. “I don’t think there are many big industrial firms who haven’t been convinced that we can help them in some way. The cable companies will save hundreds of millions when they can replace their ground stations and land-lines by a few repeaters in space; the chemical industry will—”

  “Oh, I’ll take your word for it! I was wondering where all the money came from, and now I see just how big a thing this is.”

  “Don’t forget,” interjected Matthews, who had hitherto been sitting in resigned silence, “our most important contribution to industry.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The import of high-grade vacuums for filling electric-light bulbs and electronic tubes.”

  “Ignoring Alfred’s usual facetiousness,” said McAndrews severely, “it’s perfectly true that physics in general will make tremendous strides when we can build laboratories in space. And you can guess how the astronomers are looking forward to observatories which will never be bothered by clouds.”

  “I know now,” said Dirk, ticking off the points on his fingers, “just how Interplanetary happened, and also what it hopes to do. But I still find it very hard to define exactly what it is.”