He told Arlene about it eventually, when, between sleep periods, she tried to arouse him from his depression.
"It's not a bad trick," he admitted. "They say they're going to see if they can cast a ship, and then figure out a way to land it. That's the problem, of course. It costs as much fuel to land a ship as to take it off. They can let drone-rockets smash on the moon, here, and it's all right. They hit the mares, and are spotted by radar, then a jeep goes out and picks them up. But that couldn't be done on Earth. You couldn't safely drop drone-ships, like meteors, anywhere on Earth—unless you picked the polar icecaps. But it takes three tons of fuel to land one ton of ship gently, and that three tons has to be brought up here—which is as far as ten times around the equator. The fuel to land a ship would cost more than any ship was worth in money, no matter what it was made of."
Arlene wanted to keep him talking—no matter what the subject—rather than brood as he'd been doing. She said interestedly, "Why not drop them on the icecaps? Couldn't they use helicopters instead of jeeps to pick them up?"
"Not in the Arctic," said Kenmore. "That's mostly ocean, and they'd smash through the ice and sink. On Antarctica, the weather's impossible; they melt into the snow and become invisible, anyhow."
"There must be some way," Arlene insisted, though she did not care about the problem at all. "The Sahara?"
"They'd bury themselves in sand . . . Hello!" Kenmore blinked, and said in a surprised voice, "There are places where the ocean is miles deep. A drone could be designed— Look! They could make drones like supersonic ships on Earth! Drop them into the ocean for their fall to be checked, and have them fixed so they'd float back up to the surface . . . They could broadcast their position . . . I've got to see about this!"
He showed animation for the first time in a long while, and Arlene seemed fascinated as he explored new angles of the idea. She went with him to the colony computer and exclaimed admiringly at the results he got. Metal, mined and cast on the moon, could be hauled up to the place where it would begin to fall to Earth-some metals, anyhow. Then mortars turned up as possibly more efficient than rockets for firings in a vacuum. With no air resistance to allow for . . .
He was deep in still further complexities when Moreau and the chief, Haney, and Mike Scandia—Mike was lately recruited into the scheme—came back from a hop-skip-and-jump journey to the solar-heat mine.
We can do it," Moreau miserably. "We can make the ship. But when we began to compute the cost of landing it, we saw that it was idiocy. No ship could pay for its fuel."
"No?" asked Kenmore. "Look at these figures!"
He leaned back, and Arlene was infinitely relieved. She sat very still as Moreau went over the computer tape, exclaimed excitedly, and then the others began to argue about the drone-ship design, talking all at once and tending to outshout each other in their enthusiasm. The chief knew where there was cobalt in quantity. Haney knew of stannous ore. There was a place where silver was to be found, and even more precious metals...
And there were laws—drawn up for window dressing— by which private individuals could claim minerals if quite impossibly they could make use of them. The four companions went garrulously off to comply with formalities nobody had ever bothered with before. And then Kenmore said grimly:
"It'll work. And it's such a natural, for publicity, that there'll be plenty of capital available. So I probably have a job for the future, helping run the operations of Lunar Mines and Metals, Incorporated. Swell, eh?"
But his eyes were devoid of happiness. Arlene patted his hand. It wasn't her fault, but she was sorry that he was disappointed in the future he'd planned.
It was a remarkable coincidence that the specially shielded, refrigerated jeep arrived at Civilian City within an hour. Its journey was a great achievement. It had huge reflectors to cast the heat of the sun away from it. It was even shielded from heat in the moondust over which it rolled. It had refrigeration on a large scale. But even so, it had stopped often to cool off. It brought, however, a civilian named Thurston.
He had come to talk to Joe Kenmore. He was a weedy sort of man and still unaccustomed to moon-gravity. But he spoke with a dry precision.
"Out at the Laboratory," he told Kenmore flatly, "they made a mistake. The poor devils were under a killing strain, and it killed them. D'you know how they worked? Like men in wartime defusing shells and bombs and mines. They'd report they were going to try something, and then try it. If it didn't blow them up, they'd say so, and then report what they were going to try next. Not very soothing as a way of life for months on end."
"That's obvious," agreed Kenmore, "considering what happened."
"They'd been developing a focused, accelerated beam of neutrons," Thurston observed. He added, "I can tell you this, because you already know too much. They could focus the beam absolutely, and accelerate the neutrons to any degree. They found that, at low power, the beam was so dense that it would break down molecules. Nice work in itself! Then they found that with even tighter focus and higher acceleration they could break the heavier atoms—bismuth and up. The power gain was terrific. They had controlled atomic fission. They reported that."
Kenmore said ironically, "Very useful!"
He meant, of course, that the whole reason for the City and the Space Laboratory was that there was a limit to the amount of atomic fission that could be done on Earth. It poisoned the air. There was a time when controlled atomic fission would have seemed occasion for delirious joy. It was so no longer.
But Thurston said mildly, "Quite useful. You see, with a dense enough beam, the released energy couldn't backfire. The release was directional."
Kenmore jumped. Controlled atomic fission with the energy released directionally would solve many problems. All the released energy could be captured and used. All of it! And in space . . .
"So we made a couple of atomic rockets to try it out," said Thurston. "The Lab was to test them. While they waited for the rockets to be made, they started to figure what would happen if the neutron beam hit lighter elements at the speed needed to break them.
"But they'd been under a killing strain. It was inhuman. It was intolerable to work under the strain they were under! So when they came up with figures stating that such a beam would start a chain reaction, one which would destroy the universe—why, they couldn't weigh it calmly. It was an answer to end all research, and they were at the breaking point. So they believed it. They couldn't help themselves!"
"I knew most of this," said Kenmore. "Go on!"
"But they happened to be wrong," Thurston told him.
"They didn't take the structure of neutrons into consideration. They forgot. So I've brought up the rockets. They may detonate, though I don't think so. But I know they won't start a chain reaction. Since the Lab's gone, I want to mount them in the rocket racks of the ship you've got here. The Earthship. Run controls inside, and mount them along with standard rockets. Use the standard ones to get aloft and well out in space—and turn on the reaction that the men in the Lab thought would set off the cosmos. It won't do that Will you pilot the ship?"
Kenmore said hungrily, "What do you think I am? When de we start?"
It would be a matter of hours to clamp on the atomic rockets and install the complex controls inside the ship. But the test had to be made in a civilian vessel. The purpose of the City and the Laboratory had to be accomplished by civilians, or there would be anguish and accusations. If the Laboratory had been destroyed, and its work completed by the military—why, much of the world would accuse the Americans of murdering the geniuses who had achieved so much. So it was necessary, as a matter of politics, to complete the job through the international organization of the moon.