Temple Hospital is situated in a lonely and outlying district of Jersey City, and on a dark, moonless night I experienced no difficulty at all in invading the grounds unobserved. With a facility that surprised me, I sneaked in through a basement window, slugged a sleepy interne into insensibility and proceeded to Room 15E, which was listed in the books as Harman’s.
“Who’s there?” Harman’s surprised shout was music in my ears.
“Sh! Quiet! It’s I, Cliff McKenny.”
“You! What are you doing here?”
“Trying to get you out. If I don’t, you’re liable to stay here the rest of your life. Come on, let’s go.”
I was hustling him into his clothes while we were speaking, and in no time at all we were sneaking down the corridor. We were out safely and into my waiting car before Harman collected his scattered wits sufficiently to begin asking questions.
“What’s happened since that day?” was the first question. “I don’t remember a thing after starting the rocket blasts until I woke up in the hospital.”
“Didn’t they tell you anything?”
“Not a damn thing,” he swore. “I asked until I was hoarse.”
So I told him the whole story from the explosion on. His eyes were wide with shocked surprise when I told of the dead and wounded, and filled with wild rage when he heard of Shelton’s treachery. The story of the riots and attempted lynching evoked a muffled curse from between set lips.
“Of course, the papers howled ‘murder,’ “ I concluded, “but they couldn’t pin that on you. They tried manslaughter, but there were too many eye-witnesses that had heard your request for the removal of the crowd and the police sergeant’s absolute refusal to do so. That, of course, absolved you from all blame. The police sergeant himself died in the explosion, and they couldn’t make him the goat.
“Still, with Eldredge yelling for your hide, you’re never safe. It would be best to leave while able.”
Harman nodded his head in agreement “Eldredge survived the explosion, did he?”
“Yes, worse luck. He broke both legs, but it takes more than that to shut his mouth.”
Another week had passed before I reached our future haven-my uncle’s farm in Minnesota. There, in a lonely and out-of-the-way rural community, we stayed while the hullabaloo over Harman’s disappearance gradually died down and the perfunctory search for us faded away. The search, by the way, was short indeed, for the authorities seemed more relieved than concerned over the disappearance.
Peace and quiet did wonders with Harman. In six months he seemed a new man-quite ready to consider a second attempt at space travel. Not all the misfortunes in the world could stop him, it seemed, once he had his heart set on something.
“My mistake the first time,” he told me one winter’s day, “lay in announcing the experiment. I should have taken the temper of the people into account, as Winstead said. This time, however”-he rubbed his hands and gazed thoughtfully into the distance-”I’ll steal a march on them. The experiment will he performed in secrecy-absolute secrecy.”
I laughed grimly, “It would have to be. Do you know that all future experiment in rocketry, even entirely theoretical research is a crime punishable by death?”
“Are you afraid, then?”
“Of course not, boss. I’m merely stating a fact. And here’s another plain fact. We two can’t build a ship all by ourselves, you know.”
“I’ve thought of that and figured a way out, Cliff. What’s more, I can take care of the money angle, too. You’ll have to do some traveling, though.
“First, you’ll have to go to Chicago and look up the firm of Roberts amp; Scranton and withdraw everything that’s left of my father’s inheritance, which,” he added in a rueful aside, “is more than half gone on the first ship. Then, locate as many of the old crowd as you can: Harry Jenkins, Joe O’Brien, Neil Stanton-all of them. And get back as quickly as you can. I am tired of delay.”
Two days later, I left for Chicago. Obtaining my uncle’s consent to the entire business was a simple affair. “Might as well be strung up for a herd of sheep as for a lamb,” he grunted, “so go ahead. I’m in enough of a mess now and can afford a bit more, I guess.”
It took quite a bit of travelling and even more smooth talk and persuasion before I managed to get four men to come: the three mentioned by Harman and one other, a Saul Simonoff. With that skeleton force and with the half million’ still left Harman out of the reputed millions left him by his father, we began work.
The building of the New Prometheus is a story in itself-a long story of five years of discouragement and insecurity. Little by little, buying girders in Chicago, beryl-steel plates in New York, a vanadium cell in San Francisco, miscellaneous items in scattered comers of the nation, we constructed the sister ship to the ill-fated Prometheus .
The difficulties in the way were all but insuperable. To prevent drawing suspicion down upon us, we had to spread our purchases over periods of time, and to see to it, as well, that the orders were made out to various places. For this we required the co-operation of various friends, who, to be sure, did not know at the time for exactly what purpose the purchases were being used.
We had to synthesize our own fuel, ten tons of it, and that was perhaps the hardest job of all; certainly it took the most time. And finally, as Harman’s money dwindled, we came up against our biggest problem-the necessity of economizing. From the beginning we had known that we could never make the New Prometheus as large or as elaborate as the first ship had been, but it soon developed that we would have to reduce its equipment to a point perilously close to the danger line. The repulsion screen was barely satisfactory and all attempts at radio communication were perforce abandoned.
And as we labored through the years, there in the backwoods of northern Minnesota, the world moved on, and Winstead’s prophecies proved to have hit amazingly near the mark.
The events of those five years-from 1973 to 1978-are well known to the schoolboys of today, the period being the climax of what we now call the “Neo-Victorian Age.” The happenings of those years seem well-nigh unbelievable as we look back upon them now.
The outlawing of all research on space travel came in the very beginning, but was a bare start compared to the antiscientific measures taken in the ensuing years. The next congressional elections, those of 1974, resulted in a Congress in which Eldredge controlled the House and held the balance of power in the Senate.
Hence, no time was lost. At the first session of the ninety-third Congress, the famous Stonely-Carter bill was passed. It established the Federal Scientific Research Investigatory Bureau-the FSRIB-which was given full power to pass on the legality of all research in the country. Every laboratory, industrial or scholastic, was required to file information, in advance, on all projected research before this new bureau, which could, and did, ban absolutely all such as it disapproved of.
The inevitable appeal to the supreme court came on November 9, 1974, in the case of Westly vs. Simmons, in which Joseph Westly of Stanford upheld his right to continue his investigations on atomic power on the grounds that the StonelyCarter act was unconstitutional.
How we five, isolated amid the snowdrifts of the Middle West, followed that case! We had all the Minneapolis and St. Paul papers sent to us-always reaching us two days late- and devoured every word of print concerning it. For the two months of suspense work ceased entirely on the New Prometheus .
It was rumoured at first that the court would declare the act unconstitutional, and monster parades were held in every large town against this eventuality. The League of the Righteous brought its powerful influence to bear-and even the supreme court submitted. It was five to four for constitutionality. Science strangled by the vote of one man.
And it was strangled beyond a doubt. The members of the bureau were Eldredge men, heart and soul, and nothing that would not have immediate industrial use was passed.
“Science has gone too far,” said Eldredge in a famous speech at about that time. “We must halt it indefinitely, and allow the world to catch up. Only through that and trust in God may we hope to achieve universal and permanent prosperity.”
But this was one of Eldridge’s last statements. He had never fully recovered from the broken legs he received that fateful day in July of ‘73, and his strenuous life since then had strained his constitution past the breaking point. On February 2, 1976, he passed away amid a burst of mourning unequalled since Lincoln’s assassination.
His death had no immediate effect on the course of events. The rules of the FSRIB grew, in fact, in stringency as the years passed. So starved and choked did science become, that once more colleges found themselves forced to reinstate philosophy and the classics as the chief studies-and at that the student body fell to the lowest point since the beginning of the twentieth century.
These conditions prevailed more or less throughout the civilized world, reaching even lower depths in England, and perhaps least depressing in Germany, which was the last to fall under the “Neo-Victorian” influence.
The nadir of science came in the spring of 1978, a bare month before the completion of the New Prometheus, with the passing of the “Easter Edict”-it was issued the day before Easter. By it, all independent research or experimentation was absolutely forbidden. The FSRIB thereafter reserved the right to allow only such research as it specifically requested .