“If there is any inefficiency, if there is any blame for what has happened, it lies at the door of those who lacked confidence in the courage and ability of their countrymen to fight free of Earth to the greatest glory. Senator, how did you vote on that?”
But I am not writing a history. The shelves are full of them. I will touch on the international repercussions only enough to show that the event was no more a respecter of national boundaries than was Rev’s orbiting ship.
The orbit was almost perpendicular to the equator. The ship traveled as far north as Nome, as far south as Little America on the Antarctic Continent. It completed one giant circle every two hours. Meanwhile, the Earth rotated beneath. If the ship had been equipped with adequate optical instruments, Rev could have observed every spot on Earth within twenty-four hours. He could have seen fleets and their dispositions, aircraft carriers and the planes taking off their decks, troop maneuvers.
In the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Russian ambassador protested this unwarranted and illegal violation of its national boundaries. He hinted darkly that it would not be allowed to continue. The U.S.S.R. had not been caught unprepared, he said. If the violation went on—”every few hours!”—drastic steps would be taken.
World opinion reared up in indignation. The U.S.S.R. immediately retreated and pretended, as only it could, that its belligerence had been an unwarranted inference and that it had never said anything of the sort, anyway.
This was not a military observer above our heads. It was a man who would soon be dead unless help reached him.
A world offered what it had. Even the U.S.S.R. announced that it was outfitting a rescue ship, since its space program was already on the verge of success. And the American public responded with more than a billion dollars within a week. Congress appropriated another billion. Thousands of men and women volunteered.
The race began.
Would the rescue party reach the ship in time? The world prayed.
And it listened daily to the voice of a man it hoped to buy back from death.
The problem shaped up like this:
The trip had been planned to last for only a few days. By careful rationing, the food and water might be stretched out for more than a month, but the oxygen, by cutting down activity to conserve it, couldn’t possibly last more than thirty days. That was the absolute outside limit.
I remember reading the carefully detailed calculations in the paper and studying them for some hopeful error. There was-none.
Within a few hours, the discarded first stage of the ship had been located floating in the Atlantic Ocean. It was towed back to Cocoa, Florida. Almost a week was needed to find and return, to the Proving Grounds the second stage, which had landed 906 miles away.
Both sections were practically undamaged; their fall had been cushioned by ribbon parachute. They could be cleaned, repaired and used again. The trouble was the vital third stage—the nose section. A new one had to be designed and built within a month.
Space-madness became a new form of hysteria. We read statistics, we memorized insignificant details, we studied diagrams, we learned the risks and the dangers and how they would be met and conquered. It all became part of us. We watched the slow progress of the second ship and silently, tautly, urged it upward.
The schedule overhead became part of everyone’s daily life. Work stopped while people rushed to windows or outside or to their television sets, hoping for a glimpse, a glint from the high, swift ship, so near, so untouchably far.
And we listened to the voice from the cave of night:
“I’ve been staring out the portholes. I never tire of that. Through the one on the right, I see what looks like a black velvet curtain with a strong light behind it. There are pinpoint holes in the curtain and the light shines through, not winking the way stars do, but steady. There’s no air up here. That’s the reason. The mind can understand and still misinterpret.
“My air is holding out better than I expected. By my figures, it should last twenty-seven days more. I shouldn’t use so much of it talking all the time, but it’s hard to stop. Talking, I feel as if I’m still in touch with Earth, still one of you, even if I am way up here.
“Through the left-hand window is San Francisco Bay, looking like a dark, wandering arm extended by the ocean octopus. The city itself looks like a heap of diamonds with trails scattered from it. It glitters up cheerfully, an old friend. It misses me, it says. Hurry home, it says. It’s gone now, out of sight. Good-bye, Frisco!
“Do you hear me down there? Sometimes I wonder. You can’t see me now. I’m in the Earth’s shadow. You’ll have to wait hours for the dawn. I’ll have mine in a few minutes.
“You’re all busy down there. I know that. If I know you, you’re all worrying about me, working to get me down, forgetting everything else. You don’t know what a feeling that is. I hope to Heaven you never have to, wonderful though it is.
“Too bad the receiver was broken, but if it had to be one or the other, I’m glad it was the transmitter that came through. There’s only one of me. There are billions of you to talk to.
“I wish there were some way I could be sure you were hearing me. Just that one thing might keep me from going crazy.”
Rev, you were one in millions. We read all about your selection, your training. You were our representative, picked with our greatest skill.
Out of a thousand who passed the initial rigid requirements for education, physical and emotional condition and age, only five could qualify for space. They couldn’t be too tall, too stout, too young, too old. Medical and psychiatric tests weeded them out.
One of the training machines—Lord, how we studied this—reproduces the acceleration strains of a blasting rocket. Another trains men for maneuvering in the weightlessnes -of space. A third duplicates the cramped, sealed conditions of a spaceship cabin. Out of the final five, you were the only one who qualified.
No, Rev, if any of us could stay sane, it was you.
There were thousands of suggestions, almost all of them useless. Psychologists suggested self-hypnotism; cultists suggested yoga. One man sent in a detailed sketch of a giant electromagnet with which Rev’s ship could be drawn back to Earth.
General Finch had the only practical idea. He outlined a plan for letting Rev know that we were listening. He picked out Kansas City and set the time. “Midnight,” he said. “On the dot. Not a minute earlier or later. At that moment, he’ll be right overhead.”
And at midnight, every light in the city went out and came back on and went out and came back on again.
For a few awful moments, we wondered if the man up there in the cave of night had seen. Then came the voice we knew now so well that it seemed it had always been with us, a part of us, our dreams and our waking.
The voice was husky with emotion:
“Thanks… Thanks for listening. Thanks, Kansas City. I saw you winking at me. I’m not alone. I know that now. I’ll never forget. Thanks.”
And silence then as the ship fell below the horizon. We pictured it to ourselves sometimes, continually circling the Earth, its trajectory exactly matching the curvature of the globe beneath it. We wondered if it would ever stop.
Like the Moon, would it be a satellite of the Earth forever?
We went through our daily chores like automatons while we watched the third stage of the rocket take shape. We raced against a dwindling air supply, and death raced to catch a ship moving at 15,800 miles per hour.
We watched the ship grow. On our television screens, we saw the construction of the cellular fuel tanks, the; rocket motors, and the fantastic multitude of pumps, valves, gauges, switches, circuits, transistors, and tubes.