The mere thought of it almost made Enright weep as he trudged along with the night deepening around him. But the darkness seemed almost artificial in the spots where the glare and glow of the neon lights cast shadows into the alleys. A chill wind swept down the street, and there was just a hint that there might be snow before morning. Enright pulled his jacket tighter about him and shivered, wishing he had not pawned his overcoat. And if it did snow, there would be no heat in his shack unless he was able to pick up some driftwood along the Platt River. There was very little lump coal along the railroad tracks any more.
A sign in a pawn shop window, brilliant and garish in fluorescent plastic letters, attracted his attention. He stopped to view the display it heralded.
GENUINE MOON ROCK
Guaranteed to contain uranium, gold, silver, tungsten, and other rare metals.
All Pieces Souvenirs Of The First Moon Expedition!!!
YOUR CHOICE: $1.00 EACH!!!
There were a few pieces of black rock which could have been basalt from the nearby Rockies. And there were a few chunks of metal allegedly parts of the ship. And, prominently displayed, there was the much-publicized and very familiar picture of Bill O’Neil, clad in a spacesuit and holding aloft the wire-braced flag of the U. N. with Mount Pico in the background. Their shadows were sharp and very dark, the shimmering disk of the Earth hung over the lunar mountain, and in the corner of the picture was a segment of a squat, fat, disklike ship, the Venture.
No tall, slender, silver rocket. Not even the rocket-powered Erector set evisioned by the pioneers of the ’50s. Not even a sign that the lunar rock had been blasted and washed by a jet flame.
Every time he saw that picture, it made him sick at heart. These days, he saw it often—everywhere he went, he seemed to see it. It reminded him more often than was necessary that the thing for which he’d fought and labored all his life had failed, that his dream of rockets climbing on their noisy, fiery tails toward the new frontiers of man had been shattered, that his life and his work had been useless, rendered obsolete by new things which had done in five years what rocket propulsion had failed to do in fifty.
He wanted a drink. Sometimes that helped him forget that his life was a failure. As he started to turn around, he remembered that Martin had cut him off. The last place, too. That left only home. “I think,” he said aloud to himself, “that I’ve still got some of that stuff Big Jack made and was going to throw away.” Terrible stuff, he knew. And the thought of it almost turned his stomach. But it contained alcohol, it was free, and it was palatable if you filtered it through a loaf of bread. He started down the street again and unconsciously picked up his train of black thoughts again.
Try as he would, he still could not make himself believe that there were no more rockets. Why, weren’t they the only means of traveling in the vacuum of space? But that part of his mind which still faced and knew reality told him: “No. Bill O’Neil has found another, better way. Rockets are obsolete. Space travel is here, but there are no rockets.”
When had this happened? Enright was not sure, but he seemed to recall a morning at Devil’s Head long ago when Bill O’Neil had dropped into his office for a cup of coffee and a chat. That morning, O’Neil had had something on his mind. It had been an idea; Enright could never figure out how he knew that O’Neil was on the trail of something different; but every time he was, the engineer could sense it.
“Henry, I’ve got an idea,” O’Neil had said as he poured himself a cup of coffee.
“That’s not unusual for you, Bill,” Enright had replied. “What fantastic money-making scheme have you dreamed up this time?”
Sitting down with his coffee, O’Neil had answered, “I haven’t started worrying about the financial end of it yet. It’s an idea I’ve had for a long time, Henry—ever since we were working on the orbital rocket project. After kicking it around upstairs for years, I think I’m finally starting to get something concrete. I got to thinking about the way we gotta fight gravity all the way up to that satellite, then fight it again coming down. Seemed to me there’s a simpler way to do it. And I’m beginning to get part of an answer. Henry, maybe there’s a way we can use gravity instead of fighting it.”
“Ever hear of maneuvering through a gravity well? Oberth figured that out years ago,” Enright told him.
“Sure, but you gotta get out there first, and that’s always been our big problem. Shucks, we take all our big losses just breaking free of the Earth. After you get out there, you can get to Mars with an armload of jatos. Now, Henry, I ain’t no mathematician, but I know Einstein figgered out that gravity was something like electromagnetism. And Hlavaty checked him and proved the old boy wasn’t talking through his hat after all. The only trouble is, nobody’s figgered out a way to prove by experiment that the Generalized Field Equations are the basic law of the universe. Cantor and Gunther developed the math to handle it, and managed to tie matter-physics in with the space-physics of electromagnetism. That multi- and non-dimensional math looks like so many chicken tracks on paper to me, but from what I can get outa the abstracts maybe we can figure out a way to make gravity work for us—like the way electromagnetic fields do in an induction motor and a magnetron. And if gravity is something like a magnet yanking a chunk of steel to it the way Akahito thinks, maybe we can do like in an unduction motor when they throw another magnetic field in to oppose the first one.”
Enright had never managed to follow Einsteinian physics very well, since it was afield from rocketry, but he had remarked to O’Neil, “Bill, in order to do that, you’d have to have a gravity field stronger than the one that’s attracting you. It’ll take a lot of energy.”
“I know that. But we got plenty of energy sources.”
“And in order to overcome gravity, you’ve got to do work, apply a force to move your object a definite distance. Have you ever figured the work required to raise one pound of mass out of the Earth’s gravity field?”
“I ain’t never figgered it, Henry, but I guess it must be plenty. Got a slip stick?”
“Never mind computing it. It’s tremendous. And you’ve got to perform that much work and expend just as much energy whether you fire that object from a gun, push it with a rocket motor, or use some sort of force-field gimmick. You don’t get from here to Mars merely by thinking about it and writing an equation on a blackboard. If you could build an antigravity device, you’d never find a power source for it. Sure, we have a lot of potential available from the atom, but we’ve been trying to harness that to a propulsion system for years without success. The only thing we’ve got on hand that we can harness is chemical energy. And by using this chemical energy in its most efficient form, we’ve already developed an antigravity device.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. A rocket motor.”
“Sure, Henry, but it’s like using a steam-driven piston to fight a magnetic field. We ain’t meeting gravity on its own terms! So it takes a lot of power. But we’ve got big energy sources to tap. Maybe we’ll have to start with atomics and convert back and forth with chemical and mechanical energy three or four times to do it. But I think we can power an antigravity gadget if we sneak up on it the right way.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps you can provide enough energy. But have you the slightest idea what you’re going to sink it into? A lot of really high-powered brains have tangled with antigravity before. They failed. Do you think you can do it?”