That made me laugh. “T wouldn’t anyway. I don’t play those games.”

  Alex shut off the light and we returned to the Judsons feeling pretty good about each other. That was the way a sweet guy called Alexander Parks climbed up on the altar of history. When I think of the fundamental ambition that drove him to that conversation, the action of the FLC seems cruel on a scale immeasurably picayune.

  A week later I was flitting about the north woods laying little tarp covered eggs here and there by means of a chart so explicit as to be understandable by the littlest moron in one of his most difficult moments.

  Newspapers caught my eye when I landed in Seattle. Full frontpage spreads of the pictures Alex had showed me, smaller shots of Alex’s small head surrounded by big-browed, white-maned profs from Oxford, Irkutsk and points east.

  “Radar Genius Maps Moon,” they screamed. “Sage of Nevada reveals work of two years. Scientists flock to mesa, claim telescopes now obsolete except as check. Alexander Parks announces he will make mineralogical survey of lunar surface.”

  So he had announced it. Good. I spent a portion of my last pay check investigating any new developments in the gentle art of making whiskey. The liquor, I found, hadn’t changed; unfortunately, I had. Laboring under a diminished capacity, I gamboled from binge to hangover, from bar to hotel room, until I woke up in a hospital surrounded by a straitjacket.

  After the doctor had chased the six-headed snakes away, I sat up and chirruped at the nurses. One luscious little redhead took to reading me the newspapers in a pathetic attempt at self-defense. I was getting the news in jerky flashes, what with her dodging around night tables and behind screens, when I heard something that made me reach out and grab the newspaper. The girl, who had been preparing for a last, all-out effort, looked a little dazed.

  I still have a hazy memory of that nurse standing in a corner and shaking her head while I got clearance. The doc didn’t feel I was cured yet at all, but he decided that as long as I wasn’t talking too loudly about ring-tailed octopi it would be just as well for his hypo house if I took up residence elsewhere.

  Bascomb Rockets were the nearest and I was there a half hour after a starchy clerk had given me my clothes, money and a little white certificate, suitable for framing. I’d gone through every newspaper in reach by the time I arrived; so I was prepared for what I saw.

  A two-by-three experimental house which had been operating on a frayed shoestring of a budget was expanding like a galaxy turned supernova. Far off into the distance, I could see shops and hangars going up, stock piles being built, equipment arriving by the cubic ton.

  Tim Bascomb was checking blueprints in front of the half-finished Parthenon that was to be the company’s main building. I’d met him at an ex-pilots’ convention a year after the war, but I thought I might as well reintroduce myself—some insensitive people manage to forget me.

  The moment he heard my voice, he dropped the blueprints and grabbed my hand. “Dave! You haven’t signed any contracts yet?” he finished anxiously.

  “Nary a clause,” I told him. “Can you use awformer B-29er and accordion player?”

  “Can we use you? Mr. Hennessey—Mr. Hennessey, get me contractual form 16, no, better make that 18. You were in on the early jet and rocket jobs,” he explained. “That puts you into an advanced category.”

  “Hiring a lot of the boys?”

  “Are we? Every backyard gadgeteer in the country is forming a corporation these days and we’re keeping up with the best of them. They say the airlines are using hostesses as co-pilots and candy butchers as radiomen. You’ll find Steve Yancy and Lou Brock of the Canada-Mexico Line in that shack, over there; they’d like to see you.”

  Mr. Hennessey and a stenographer served as witnesses. I started scribbling my name on that contract as soon as I saw the numbers after the dollar sign under “salary.” Bascomb laughed.

  “I’ll back our payroll against any in the world. Not that at least fifty other companies don’t do as well. We’ve got the backing of Radioactive Metals and the Ginnette Mining Corporation as well as a government subsidy of five million.”

  I wiped some blue-black ink off my fingers. “Since when is the government interested?”

  He chuckled. “Since when?” We began walking to a huge structure labeled “Bascomb Rockets Experimental Pilots—No Admittance to Unauthorized Personnel.”

  “Look, Dave boy, when Parks took those radar snapshots of the Moon, the astronomers were interested. When he worked out a spectroscopic table and found there were healthy hunks of gold under the surface, the banks and mines began to sit up. But when that Caltech prof turned Parks’ gimmick along eighty miles of the Moon’s Alpine valley and found alternate layers of radium and uranium, the nations of this planet looked up from atom bomb experiments long enough to harness everybody who knows the Moon is a quarter of a million miles from Earth. It’s no longer a matter of the first extraterrestrial explorer becoming a trillionaire overnight, but of folks cooking atom bombs in their kitchens.”

  I looked at the tractors backing and filling around me; at the cement-sloppy wheelbarrows being: trundled by an army of construction workers; at the bare scaffolding of shops rising on every bare! foot of ground. This scene was being duplicated everywhere in every state, probably in every nation. Slap some sort of a ship together, solve the problems with any kind of jerry-built apparatus—but get to the Moon first!

  “It isn’t only a matter of national defense, either,” Tim was explaining. “We almost have atomic power, in fact, we already have it but not in a commercial form. With the uranium that can be dredged out of the Moon, the old Sunday Supplement dream of crossing the Atlantic with a teaspoonful of sand for fuel will come true. General Atomics is devoting half their budget to spaceship research. They may not be the first outfit to set a job down on Tycho, but they sure will bust a gut trying.”

  He led me into the pilots’ shack where a lecture on astrogation was in progress. And that day the only rockets on the Bascomb lot were still on drawing boards!

  “The Mad Scramble”—isn’t that the name of the definitive history of the period? It was mad. People still remember the first casualties to hit the front pages: Gunnar and Thorgersen getting blown to bits a half-mile up; those six Russian scientists flaming into an incandescence that registered on every astronomical camera pointed at the Moon. Then that wave of reaction sweeping the world toward the end of the decade and laws clamping down on irresponsible corporations and wildcat experimenters.

  Even then, Steve Yancy and his kid brother got knocked off on a simple experimental flight outside Earth’s atmosphere. No fundamental principle overlooked, we were just building carelessly.

  When Parks finally dropped in on us on his way from the Leroy Propulsion Project, we seemed to be getting nowhere fast. That was the Black April, the month of the GA Fleet. Bascomb had discovered I knew Parks personally and begged me to bring him into the firm. “He’s just hopping about giving advice to anyone who wants it from him. With his reputation, if he ever went to work for one organization he could name his own price. Try to get him to name it for us.”

  “I’ll try,” I promised.

  “Of course, I know his basic interest is in radar research. If his machine had stopped with mapping the Moon, every hick college would probably have had an appropriation for a radar telescope or whatever they call it. But since he found uranium in them the craters, kids are being jerked into research projects as fast as they finish elementary physics. That guy from Caltech—what was his name?—who first detected radioactive stuff with Parks’ equipment, they say he has to go up to the mesa every time he wants to survey some more moon. He can’t get the university even vaguely interested in building a toy for him, and Alex P. won’t let anyone near the layout unless he’s on the scene holding their leash.”

  “Yeah.” I grinned wryly, remembering the way Emmanuel Corliss had been sent back to his dictaphone. Even when some scientific journals had attacked the tight control he maintained over the world’s only lunar-surveying radar, he had retorted angrily that the entire apparatus had been developed and built out of his own brain, time and funds and if anyone didn’t like it they could build themselves another. Of course, with every research penny eventually finding its way into spaceship design, he had the only game in town.

  Parks laughed when I gave him Bascomb’s message. He clambered out of the new-smelling, black and silver job that I was to take on a shakedown in a week and sat on the curving metal runway.

  “No, Dave, I like this being advisory expert to big business in rocket research. I get to travel and see all the different things we’re trying. Did you know Garfinkel of Illinois is working on a Cosmoplane—sort of a sailboat sensitive to cosmic rays? I’d rather not get stuck in a job in one corner of this business. After all, anyone may hit it.”

  “But that isn’t like you, Alex,” I argued. “You were always the kind of guy who wanted to do things himself. This work isn’t right up your alley, it is your alley. You’re the one man Bascomb Rockets needs, not as a part-time unpaid specialist who hits us once a month on his look-see circuit, but as the director, the co-ordinator of our research. I’m just a stumblebum who can make with a joystick, but you are the guy who’ll get us there.”

  “Ever mention our working together?”

  “No.” I sighed. He evidently didn’t want in. I helped him change the subject. “Nasty—this GA business.”

  He was staring at the ground. He nodded slowly, then looked up. There were ridges of anguish on his face. “That was Corliss,” he said in a low, earnest voice. “He became president of General Atomics six months ago. The idea of the Fleet probably seemed like a good publicity trick.”

  I disagreed with him. “After all,” I pointed out, “the logic was good. Ten ships setting off for the Moon together. When one of them hit a snag, the others could come up and help. In case of an impending blowup, the crews of the threatened ship could be transferred to safety. It was just plain unfortunate that Fouquelles didn’t discover the deep space Jura rays until a week after they left. From now on everything we build will be insulated against the stuff.”

  “Five hundred men,” Alex brooded. “Five hundred men and women lost without a trace. Nothing in the papers today about a radio signal, about some debris coming down somewhere?”

  “No. They probably got out of control and drifted into the sun. Or maybe the ships—those that are left—are scudding aimlessly out of the system.”

  He was himself again when I left him at the gate. “Maybe I’ll have cracked it the next time I see you,” I said. “We’re moving pretty slowly, though.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.” He shook my hand warmly. “Man has his heart set on getting off this planet. He’ll do it—perhaps sooner than he thinks.”

  Two months later, Captain Ulrich Gall landed the Canadian Flutterer III in Plato Crater, using the double-flow drive. It’s high-school history now how Gall lined his spacesuited crew behind him and prepared to move through the air lock. How he caught his foot on the ramp, and how his Polynesian “boy,” Charles Wau-Neil, hurrying to extricate him, tripped on the lock and shot out onto the lunar surface—thus being the first human to touch another world.

  I was co-pilot of the fifth ship to reach the Moon—“The Ambassador of Albuquerque.” I was also the first man to set insulated foot on the lunar Apennines. So I’ll have a place in some six-volume detailed history of lunar exploration: “An interesting discovery is credited to a minor adventurer named—”

  Well, you know what happened. Toehold, the colony Gall left on the Moon, continued the feverish examination of mineralogical samples. No go. In six months Toehold scientists radioed a complete confirmation of Call’s early suspicions.

  There was no uranium on the Moon. No radium. And there was just enough gold to be detectable in the most delicate analyses.

  Of course they did find some nice beds of iron ore. And someone discovered rocks beneath the surface from which oxygen and the lighter elements could be extracted with ease, making possible Toehold’s present indigenousness. But no uranium!

  I was on Earth when the storm of public opinion broke. Financed and encouraged by hysterical corporations, it broke first around the head of a certain California professor of astronomy and buried him. He, it was, who had first announced the presence of radioactive minerals on the Moon as a result of experiments with Parks’ radar. Then it turned on Parks.

  Remember the headlines that day? “Parks Admits Fraud” in letters as big as the end of the world. “Alexander Parks, Nevada charlatan, explained to the FBI today how he planted transmitters near pitchblende and gold deposits in Canada, co-ordinating his infernal machine with them to make it appear that the impulses were arriving from a given portion of the Moon. ‘I never allowed anyone to investigate the machine too closely,’ Parks leered, ‘and this, with my international reputation as a radar expert, prevented discovery.’ ”

  I scooted for his mesa. There were state police coming out of the woodwork, FBI men being trampled underfoot and what looked like a full infantry regiment marching back and forth. After I’d satisfied everybody that I was a reputable citizen, I was allowed to see Alex. He was evidently a de facto prisoner.

  Alex was sitting at the plain table, his hands clasped easily in front of him. He turned and smiled with pleasure as I walked in. The man walking puffily up and down the small room turned too. With some difficulty I recognized the face above the purple neck as belonging to Emmanuel Corliss. He tore up to me and peering out of red-rimmed eyes began to grunt. After a while, I interpreted the grunts as “You ask him why. Ask him why he did it, why he ruined me!”

  “I’ve told you that at least a dozen times,” Parks said mildly. “There was nothing against you personally, nothing against anybody. I simply felt it was time we had interplanetary travel and that greed was a good incentive. I was right.”

  “Right!” Corliss screeched. “Right! Do you call it right to flimflam me out of three million dollars? I personally invested three million dollars to get what? Iron ore? If I want iron ore, isn’t what we have on this planet good enough?”

  “Your consolation, Mr. Corliss, in your financial bereavement, is that you have helped humanity to take a major historical step. You will recall that I went as far as using a shotgun in an attempt to keep you from getting involved in my . . . my plans. Beyond suggesting that you record it in your income tax under bad investments, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  “Well, I can help you!” The president of General Atomics and the Radar Corporation of America shook a pudgy, quivering finger under Parks’ nose. “I can help you into jail. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying!” He slammed the door behind him so hard that the shack seemed to move three feet.

  “Can he do anything, Alex?” I asked.

  He shrugged. The pinhead looked tired. I suspected there had been a lot of this lately. “Not so far as I know. All the development on my lunar radar was out of my own funds. While I gave advice freely to those who wanted it, I never accepted a penny from any corporation or individual. I benefited in no material way from the fraud. My lawyers tell me it may be a tight squeeze, but there isn’t anything that can be done in the way of punishment. I’m in the clear. Are . . . are you angry at me?”

  “No!” I put my hand on his shoulder. “You’ve made life worth living for hundreds of us. Listen, Alex,” I said softly, “I don’t know what history will say, but there are a lot of sky-jockeys who will never forget you.”

  He grinned up. “Thanks pal. I did try to keep you out of the mess. Name a precipice after me.”

  We can’t go any further than the Moon right now, but I have a dandy little two-man ferrying job—secondhand of course—and as soon as I can scrounge up enough cash, I’m going to fit it with that new triple-flow drive. They say Venus should be in an early geological stage, and that means a lot of whole radium and uranium will be lying about. The first man to get there and stake out a claim would be kinda well-to-do the rest of his life. Yeah, that talk may be just some more sucker bait, but, just think, if it is so—

  Whatever its original impulses, interplanetary transportation is here to stay. But what of the man responsible?

  The Federal Lunar Commission (FLC) has issued a permanent injunction to all its offices against granting Alexander Parks terrestrial clearance. And unless he stows away on some supply ship, or time heals that particular wound, I’m afraid he’ll be a wistful Earth-lubber to his dying day.

  THE END.

  1947

  Child’s Play

  Somebody slipped in the delivery service, and the Christmas present arrived a fete score years earlier than it should have. The Bild-A-Man set might he fine for future kids—but not now.

  After the man from the express company had given the door an untipped slam, Sam Weber decided to move the huge crate under the one light bulb in his room. It was all very well for the messenger to drawl, “I dunno. Wp don’t send ’em: we just deliver ’em, mister”—but there must be some mildly lucid explanation.

  With a grunt that began as an anticipatory reflex and ended on a note of surprised annoyance, Sam shoved the box forward the few feet necessary. It was heavy enough; he wondered how the messenger had carried it up the three flights of stairs.

  He straightened and frowned down at the garish-card which contained his name and address as well as the legend—“Merry Christmas, 2153.”

  A joke? He didn’t know anyone who’d think it funny to send a card dated over two hundred years in the future. Unless one of the comedians in his law school graduating class meant to record his opinion as to when Weber would be trying his first case. Even so—

  The letters were shaped strangely, come to think of it, sort of green streaks instead of lines. And the card was a sheet of gold!