«If you’re going to miss your place or make a bad landing—well, you’ll have your finger on the button and you push it and you flash back ten miles high again and start over. That’s all there is to it, pal. Got it?»
«I guess so,» Keith said. It sounded simple enough. Anyway he saw a clip on the inside of the airlock door with a book entitled Manual of Instructions under it so he could pick up anything he’d missed or forgotten to ask.
He took out his billfold and counted out the three thousand credits he’d promised Joe. It left him less than two hundred but he probably wasn’t going to need any anyway.
«Okay, pal,» Joe said. «Thanks—and luck. Look me up sometime when you’re back. The place we had the moonjuice.»
After Joe had gone, he reached for the manual of instructions and studied it closely for nearly an hour.
It was even simpler than he’d realized. You aimed at your objective and guessed or roughly estimated the distance—and if you were wrong it didn’t matter because, if you were short, you merely needed to press the button again and, if you were over, it didn’t matter if you had the repulsor set for ten miles short of the object, because it would stop you there.
Gliding in didn’t seem any tougher than making a dead-stick landing in a light plane, with the added advantage that you could flash back up in nothing flat and start over again if it looked as though your landing weren’t going to be good.
He looked up through the glass panel in the top of the space-ship, through the glass roof of the hangar, through the atmosphere of Earth and the nothingness of space—at the stars and the Moon.
Should he go to the Moon first? There was no important reason for it. His almost hopeless destination—Mekky and the fleet near Saturn—wasn’t going to be any more accessible from there than from here. But he knew he stood a good chance of never getting to Mekky alive and he knew too that, if he did get there, he was going to try to get back to his own world.
Before he died or before he went back, one or the other, he wanted just once to set foot on the Moon. He’d skip the planets—but, just once, he wanted to stand on ground that wasn’t that of Earth.
It wouldn’t cost him much time, and there wouldn’t—or shouldn’t—be much risk. The paragraph on the moon in the manual of instruction had told him that the settlements, the fertile lands, were on the far side, where there was water and where the air was thicker. On the near side were only barren rock and a few mines.
He took a deep breath and strapped himself into the seat. He set the dials for two hundred and forty thousand miles and the repulsor dial for ten miles, checked his aim for dead center and pushed the button.
Nothing happened, nothing at all. He must have forgotten to turn a switch somewhere. He realized that he’d closed his eyes when he’d pushed the button and opened them again to look over the instrument panel. Nothing was wrong.
Or was it? There was something different, a sensation of lightness, of falling, of going down in a very fast elevator. He looked upward through the top panel and the Moon wasn’t there any more but the stars were and they looked brighter and closer and more numerous than he’d ever seen them.
But where was the Moon?
He looked down through the glass panel in the floor and saw it rushing up at him, only miles away.
He caught his breath as he set the dials again, ready to flash him back to a point above the atmosphere, then took the stick and put his feet on the pedal controls. The wings seemed to be catching air now and the craft was at the right slant to go into a glide.
But it had been too sudden, too unexpected—he wasn’t ready. He pressed the button and again nothing happened—apparently—except that suddenly the Moon was a little farther away again.
This time he waited it out, going into a glide. He kept his finger on the button until he cleared the edge of a crater and saw he was heading for a flat level plain on which even a dub couldn’t miss making a good landing.
He made one, and rolled to a stop. Slowly he unstrapped himself. He hesitated just a moment with his hand on the latch of the airlock, wondering if there really was air outside. But there had to be. He’d glided down.
He opened the door and stepped out. Yes, there was air, thin and quite cold, like the air atop a high mountain of Earth. He looked around, shivering, and was disappointed. He might have been standing on rocky, barren land on Earth, with mountains in the distance. It didn’t look any different.
It felt, different, though. He felt unbelievably light. How high were you able to jump on the Moon? He took an experimental little hop that wouldn’t have taken him over six inches high on Earth and went several feet into the air. He came down more slowly and lightly than he’d expected. But doing it gave him a queasy feeling at the pit of his stomach and he didn’t try it again.
He looked up, wondering what was wrong in that direction. It looked like an ordinary Earth sky, except that the sun was brighter. But wasn’t that wrong? Weren’t you supposed to be able to see stars in daytime from the Moon? Shouldn’t the sky, except for the bright ball of the sun, be dark?
But that was because scientists thought there wasn’t any air on the Moon. Were they wrong on that—back there in his own universe, too? Or was that just another difference between this universe and his—that the Moon of this universe had air and his didn’t?
He turned around slowly, then caught his breath at sight of what he’d forgotten to look for. The Earth, a monster yellowish ball, hung there in the sky, looking as the moon looks when seen from Earth in daytime but larger. And he could see the outline of continents on it. It looked like a big globe of Earth hanging there.
He stared at it wonderingly for a long minute, until the sharp feel of cold air in his throat and lungs reminded him that he’d freeze if he stood out here much longer. It must be close to zero and he was dressed for summer in New York.
Regretfully he took his eyes off the magnificent sphere in the sky, then got back into the space-ship and closed the airlock. The air inside was thin and cold now, too—but now that the airlock door was closed, the airmaker unit and the heater would bring it back to normal automatically.
He strapped himself back into the pilot’s seat, thinking, «Well, I’ve been on the Moon.»
It hadn’t thrilled him as much as he’d thought and he believed he knew why. It was because—here, in this universe—it didn’t seem completely real, however real this universe was. It was too easy. Much too easy.
Yes, he knew now, definitely, that what he wanted was to get back, back to the world he was born in and on which he belonged. Maybe he was too old to readjust himself to something like this. Maybe if it had happened when he’d been seventeen instead of thirty-one and if he’d been heart-free instead of head-over-heels in love, this universe would have been just what the doctor ordered.
But it wasn’t now. He wanted back and there was only one mind—a mechanical one—that might be able to help him do that.
He set the pointer at Earth and the dial at only a hundred and twenty thousand miles, halfway between Earth and Moon. Out there in space, he could take his time about locating Saturn.
He pushed the button.
CHAPTER XIV
Monster from Arcturus
HE WAS USED to nothing happening when he pressed that button. It didn’t surprise him at all that suddenly the Earth was twice as big as it had been before. But it did surprise him that he himself felt so strange.
It surprised him until he realized that he was almost completely weightless here. What pull there was pulled him away from the straps in the seat, toward Earth overhead. Then the ship itself must have overcome its inertia and started falling in that direction and he felt completely weightless.