First on the Moon, Jeff Sutton [most read books in the world of all time TXT] 📗

to him, meant capable performance in the face of fear. He had never known fear in any type of aircraft, hence never before had courage been a requisite of his job. It was that simple to him. His thorough knowledge of the Aztec's theoretical flight characteristics had given him extreme confidence, thus the feeling of tension was distracting. He held his hand out. It seemed steady enough.

Prochaska caught the gesture and said, "I'm a little shaky myself."

Crag grinned. "They tell me the first thousand miles are the hardest."

"Amen. After that I won't worry."

The countdown had begun. Crag looked out the side port. Tiny figures were withdrawing from the base of the rocket. The engine of a fuel truck sounded faintly, then died away. Everything seemed unhurried, routine. He found himself admiring the men who went so matter-of-factly about the job of hurling a rocket into the gulfs between planets. Once, during his indoctrination, he had watched a Thor firing ... had seen the missile climb into the sky, building up to orbital speed. Its launchers had been the same sort of men—unhurried, methodical, checking the minutiae that went into such an effort. Only this time there was a difference. The missile contained men.

Off to one side he saw the launch crew moving into an instrumented dugout. Colonel Gotch would be there, puffing on his pipe, his face expressionless, watching the work of many years come to ... what?

He looked around the cabin for the hundredth time. Larkwell and Nagel were strapped in their seats, backs horizontal to the floor, looking up at him. The tremendous forces of acceleration applied at right angles to the spine—transverse g—was far more tolerable than in any other position. Or so the space medicine men said. He hoped they were right, that in this position the body could withstand the hell ahead. He gave a last look at the two men behind him. Larkwell wore an owlish expression. His teeth were clamped tight, cording his jaws. Nagel's face was intent, its lines rigid. It gave Crag the odd impression of an alabaster sculpture. Prochaska, who occupied the seat next to him facing the control panels, was testing his safety belts.

Crag gave him a quick sidelong glance. Prochaska's job was in many respects as difficult as his own. Perhaps more so. The sallow-faced electronics chief bore the responsibility of monitoring the drones—shepherding, first Drone Able, then its sisters to follow—across the vacuum gulfs and, finally, into Arzachel, a pinpoint cavity in the rocky wastelands of the moon. In addition, he was charged with monitoring, repairing and installing all the communication and electronic equipment, no small job in itself. Yes, a lot depended on the almost fragile man sitting alongside him. He looked at his own harnessing, testing its fit.

Colonel Gotch came on the communicator. "Pickering's in orbit," he said briefly. "No details yet."

Crag sighed in relief. Somehow Pickering's success augured well for their own attempt. He gave a last check of the communication gear. The main speaker was set just above the instrument panel, between him and Prochaska. In addition, both he and the Chief—the title he had conferred on Prochaska as his special assistant—were supplied with insert earphones and lip microphones for use during high noise spectrums, or when privacy was desired. Crag, as Commander, could limit all communications to his own personal headgear by merely flipping a switch. Gotch had been the architect of that one. He was a man who liked private lines.

"Five minutes to zero, Commander."

Commander! Crag liked that. He struggled against his harnessing to glance back over his shoulder. Nagel's body, scrunched deep into his bucket seat, seemed pitifully thin under the heavy harnessing. His face was bloodless, taut. Crag momentarily wondered what strange course of events had brought him to the rocket. He didn't look like Crag's picture of a spaceman. Not at all. But then, none of them looked like supermen. Still, courage wasn't a matter of looks, he told himself. It was a matter of action.

He swiveled his head around farther. Larkwell reclined next to Nagel with eyes closed. Only the fast rise and fall of his chest told of his inner tensions—that and the hawk-like grip of his fingers around the arm rests. Worried, Crag thought. But we're all worried. He cast a sidelong glance at Prochaska. The man's face held enormous calm. He reached over and picked up the console mike, then sat for what seemed an eternity before the countdown reached minus one minute. He plugged in his ear-insert microphone.

"Thirty seconds...." The voice over the speaker boomed. Prochaska suddenly became busy checking his instruments. Jittery despite his seeming calm, Crag thought.

"Twenty seconds...." He caught himself checking his controls, as if he could gain some last moment's knowledge from the banks of levers and dials and knobs.

"Ten ... nine ... eight...." He experimentally pulled at his harnessing, feeling somewhat hypnotized by the magic of the numbers coming over the communicator.

"Three ... two...."

Crag said, "Ready on one."

He punched a button. A muted roar drifted up from the stem. He listened for a moment. Satisfied, he moved the cut-in switch. The roar increased, becoming almost deafening in the cabin despite its soundproofing. He tested the radio and steering rockets and gave a last sidelong glance at Prochaska. The Chief winked. The act made him feel better. I should be nervous, he thought, or just plain damned scared. But things were happening too fast. He adjusted his lip mike and reached for the controls, studying his hand as he did so. Still steady. He stirred the controls a bit and the roar became hellish. He chewed his lip and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly.

He said, "Off to the moon."

Prochaska nodded. Crag moved the controls. The cabin seemed to bob, wobble, vibrate. A high hum came from somewhere. He glanced downward through the side port. The Aztec seemed to be hanging in mid-air just above the desert floor. Off to one side he could see the concrete controls dugout. The tiny figures had vanished.

He thought: Gotch is sweating it out now. In the past rockets had burned on the pad ... blown up in mid-air ... plunged off course and had to be destroyed. The idea brought his head up with a snap. Was there a safety officer down there with a finger on a button ... prepared to destroy the Aztec if it wavered in flight?

He cut the thought off and moved the main power switch, bringing the control full over. The ship bucked, and the desert dropped away with a suddenness that brought a siege of nausea. He tightened his stomach muscles like the space medicine doctors had instructed.

The first moment was bad. There was unbelievable thunder, a fraction of a second when his brain seemed to blank, a quick surge of fear. Up ... up. The Aztec's rate of acceleration climbed sharply. At a prescribed point in time the nose of the rocket moved slightly toward the east. It climbed at an impossibly steep slant, rushing up from the earth. Crag swept his eyes over the banks of instruments, noted the positions of the controls, tried to follow what the faint voice in his earphone was telling him. Dials with wavering needles ... knobs with blurry numerals ... a cacophony of noise, light and movement—all this and more was crowded into seconds.

The rocket hurtled upward, driven by the tidal kinetic energy generated by the combustion of high velocity exhaust, born in an inferno of thousands of degrees. Behind him giant thrust chambers hungrily consumed the volatile fuel, spewing the high-pressure gases forth at more than nine thousand miles per hour. The crushing increased, driving him against the back of his seat. His heart began laboring ... became a sledge hammer inside his chest wall.

He lost all sense of motion. Only the almost unendurable weight crushing his body downward mattered. He managed a glimpse of the desert through the side port. It lay far below, its salient details erased. The roar of the giant motors became muted. There was a singing in his ears, a high whine he didn't like.

The Aztec began to tilt, falling off to the right.

He cast a quick glance at the engine instruments. A red light blinked. Number three was delivering slightly less thrust than the others. Somewhere in the complex of machinery a mechanical sensing device reacted. Engines one and two were throttled back and the rocket straightened. A second device shifted the mix on engine three, bringing thrust into balance. All three engines resumed full power.

"Twenty-five thousand feet," Prochaska chattered. His voice was tinny over the small insert earphone provided for communications, especially for those first few hellish moments when the whole universe seemed collapsed into one huge noise spectrum. Noise and pressure.

"Forty-five thousand...."

They were moving up fast now—three g, four g, five g. Crag's body weight was equal to 680 pounds. The dense reaches of the troposphere—the weather belt where storms are born—dropped below them. They hurtled through the rarefied, bitterly cold and utterly calm stratosphere.

"Eighty thousand feet...."

Crag struggled to move his body. His hand was leaden on the controls, as if all life had been choked from it. A hot metal ball filled his chest. He couldn't breathe. Panic ... until he remembered to breathe at the top of his lungs.

At eighteen miles a gale of wind drove west. Rudders on the Aztec compensated, she leaned slightly into the blast, negating its drift. The winds ceased ... rudders shifted ... the rocket slanted skyward. Faster ... faster.

Prochaska called off altitudes almost continuously, the chattering gone from his voice. Crag was still struggling against the pinning weight when it decreased, vanished. The firestream from the tail pipe gave a burst of smoke and died. Brennschluss—burnout.

The Aztec hurtled toward the cosmic-ray laden ionosphere, driven only by the inertial forces generated in the now silent thrust chambers. The hard components of cosmic rays—fast mesons, high energy protons and neutrons—would rip through the ship. If dogs and monkeys can take it, so can man. That's what Gotch had said. He hoped Gotch was right. Somewhere, now, the first stage would fall away. It would follow them, at ever greater distances, until finally its trajectory would send it plunging homeward.

"Cut in." Prochaska's voice was a loud boom in the silence. A strident voice from the communicator was trying to tell them they were right on the button. Crag moved a second switch. The resultant acceleration drove him against the back of his seat, violently expelling the air from his lungs. He fought against the increasing gravities, conscious of pressure and noise in his ears; pressure and noise mixed with fragments of voice. His lips pulled tight against his teeth. The thudding was his heart. He tightened his stomach muscles, trying to ease the weight on his chest. A mighty hand was gripped around his lungs, squeezing out the air. But it wasn't as bad as the first time. They were piercing the thermosphere where the outside temperature gradient would zoom upward toward the 2,000 degree mark.

Prochaska spoke matter-of-factly into his lip mike, "Fifty miles."

Crag marveled at his control ... his calm. No, he didn't have to worry about the Chief. The little runt had it. Crag tried to grin. The effort was a pain.

The Aztec gave a lurch, altering the direction of forces on their bodies again as a servo control kicked the ship into the long shallow spiral of escape. It moved upward and more easterly, its nose slanted toward the stars, seeking its new course. Crag became momentarily dizzy. His vision blurred ... the instrument panel became a kaleidoscope of dancing, merging patterns. Then it was past, all except the three g force nailing him to the seat.

He spoke into the communicator. "How we doing?"

"Fine, Commander, just fine," Gotch rasped. "The toughest part's over."

Over like hell, Crag thought. A one-way rocket to the moon and he tells me the toughest part's over. Lord, I should work in a drugstore!

"Seventy-five miles and two hundred miles east," the Chief intoned. Crag made a visual instrument check. Everything looked okay. No red lights. Just greens. Wonderful greens that meant everything was hunky-dory. He liked green. He wanted to see how Larkwell and Nagel were making out but couldn't turn his head. It's rougher on them, he thought. They can't see the instruments, can't hear the small voice from Alpine. They just have to sit and take it. Sit and feel the unearthly pressures and weights and hope everything's okay.

"Ninety-six miles ... speed 3.1 miles per second," Prochaska chanted a short while later.

It's as easy as that, Crag thought. Years and years of planning and training; then you just step in and go. Not that they were there yet. He remembered the rockets that had burned ... exploded ... the drifting hulks that still orbited around the earth. No, it wasn't over yet. Not by a long shot.

The quiet came again. The earth, seen through the side port, seemed tremendously far