Two more rules of the internet:

     #946 Start a discussion about movie space-opera spaceships & someone will derail it by invoking hard physics

     #947 Start a discussion about hard-physics spaceships & someone will derail it by invoking movie space-opera physics

Something hitting at 3 km/sec (kips) delivers kinetic energy broadly equal to its mass in TNT.

(ed note: details here)

For every kilogram of handwavium you remove from a setting, you add about 10 cubic meters of impossible to maintain plumbing.

Science fiction fans relate more to human beings than to silicon chips.

Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction. It only matters how long you want to wait for maximum damage.

Interesting is equal to "whatever keeps the readers from getting bored."

Friends Don't Let Friends Use Reactionless Drives In Their Universes

Light is Law

299,792,458 meters per second through vacuum. Round up to 300,000 km/s. Nothing goes faster. (Except, perhaps, monarchy)

Information and radiation travel at light speed. Getting anything made of matter even close to that speed takes a whole lot of energy and is subject to all manner of weird effects like time dilation.

Space is Big

In short:

• Interstellar travel is not a casual affair. Interplanetary travel isn't either, but interstellar travel is always a big deal.
• Interstellar travel takes a long goddamn time. Long enough that cryo, digital storage, or life extension will be more or less required.
• Interplanetary travel can still take days, weeks, months. 
• Rerouting a ship in transit is not a lightly-taken endeavor.
• News travels at light speed. Long-distance communication will have lag.  
• Don't expect big interstellar empires to form. Communication lag and travel time will put hard limits on that quickly. Expect to see a lot of small alliances and confederacies, getting smaller as you go up from habitat to planet to system scale.
• If you use space habitats a lot a single solar system can contain trillions of people and more places to visit than you can actively comprehend.

It's the Great Filter, Charlie Brown!

The apparent discrepancy between the size and age of the universe and the total lack of detectable alien life (for an interstellar civilization would get HUGE in a relatively short amount of time) is called the Fermi Paradox. The reasons offered to explain why this might be are many, ranging from the plain (the physical conditions for life are rare, intelligent life is rare) to the more elaborate (the aliens are all just really, really good at hiding from us) and among all of these proposals are and a category of them are called Great Filters: factors that prevent life from reaching an interplanetary or interstellar civilization.

There are a whole lot of them. The most plain are just that the physical conditions for life as we know it are rare or that intelligent life is rare. Sensible, but less gameable. Other options include but are not limited to:

• They died off from nuclear war / catastrophic climate change / plague / etc.
• They are trapped by high gravity, icy crusts, hyperdense atmospheres, etc.
• They are intelligent, but lack the ability to make tools. 
• They aren't intelligent, and their tools don't have proper analogs to normal technology.
• They're not going to progress past simple tools for a few hundred thousand years.

Skerples  also offers the following: "Planets do not all have 1 earth gravity, a breathable atmosphere, life we can eat or understand, etc." (Check out his full post on the matter), but a solid summary is that the most human aliens are still nothing like us, and the most Earthlike worlds are nothing like Earth. Anything that resembles humans or Earth was probably designed as such (metahumans and space habitats can come into play here.)

Every Gram Counts

Mass needs energy to move it. Fuel and propellant have mass. The more mass you have the more fuel and propellant you need.

Space aboard a ship is at a premium. You've got to balance everything for your specific trip, because you are trying to hit one moving object with another moving object launched from a third moving object all while trying to keep some fragile bags of mostly water and meat from dying. 

It's Not Easy Getting Into Space 

Gravity is fighting you the entire way up and rockets are inefficient. So there are a lot of better ways to get up there. Including but not limited to!

• Space elevators - A hugeass cable stung up to a space station in geosynchronous orbit. 
• Skyhooks - A rotating cable that dangles down into the atmosphere and swings a ship up and around to launch them into orbit.
• Mass drivers - A f*cking huge railgun. Great for launching raw materials off of whatever airless rock you're mining them out of, and if it's long enough you can just make a launch loop.

O'Neill Cylinders are the Sh*t

Imagine a cylinder 20 miles long and 5 miles across. You can make it bigger if you have better materials. Rotate it so that the interior walls have 1 G of gravity, while the caps and central axis will have none. String some together in a chain or cluster, embed them into an asteroid, surround it with all the support systems you might need.

Congratulations, you have just made where most of the population in a space-faring society will live and the easiest way to do a classical space opera. Now you can hop between radically different environments and cultures in a couple hours, in a spaceship that's more like the family RV.

The important thing to remember is that space habitats like these are better for human habitation than planets: you don't need to fight a gravity well to leave, you can tailor the interior environment much more easily, you can churn them out by the dozens or hundreds from single asteroids. 

Stellar Laser Highways are the Sh*t

Imagine a laser. Now imagine that it is so f*cking huge that it can push a spaceship. Build an entire network of them. Now you have a means of accelerating (and slowing) your ships that doesn't require them to spend fuel, thus allowing them to carry more stuff and more people.

It's still slower than light, but it's damn effective. Can be used as communication hubs too.

Spaceships are not Boats

James Cameron's Avatar was not a good movie. But it has one thing going for it: The Venture Star.


This is a proper spaceship. Just look at this beaut, this sheila, this absolute unit. Mwah! Look at those radiators! See that little bit by the debris shield, with the two rotating arms? That tiny thing there? That's the crew capsule.

This thing has a maximum cargo capacity of 350 tons, a max speed of 0.7 C, and can get you to Alpha Centauri in six and three quarters years flat.

What I'm getting at here is that this is what a hard sci-fi ship will end up looking like: a tiny little submarine attached to a whole hell of a lot of propulsion.

You Will Not Explode and or Immediately Freeze in a Vacuum

You can survive in open space for as long as you can hold your breath (get the air out of your lungs first, lack of pressure will make it expand and that's no good at all). Still likely to get a nasty dose of radiation but having no air is the big danger.

In Knowing the Rules, You May Now Break Them

Arguments over the relative hardness / softness of any given science fiction media are both stupid and dumb. You're making a story or running a game, and that's the most important thing. Do what works for you, do what makes sense - I like aliens, so I tend to be looser on them than I am with, say, FTL communication. Tweak what you want, gloss over what bores you. The opposite is also true - if there's something that really gets you interested, embrace it and see where it can take you.

To boil down all the possible reasons, it is because of one or more of the following:

0) It's a business

This is a business venture - you put money in with the expectation that more money will come out. The general audience is historically happier watching space ships woosh by shooting glowing bolts of energy than they are watching a slowly rotating spaceship lazily drift across the screen. If you're putting tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, you go for the shooty-wooshy space ships every time, pure and simple.

1) TPTB (The powers that be) don't care.

If what's on the screen looks good, and the storytelling is sufficient, then scientific accuracy rarely if ever matters. If they don't care that cars don't blow up when shot with bullets, why should they care about the theoretical effects of FTL travel.

2) There isn't time to dissect and fix scientific inaccuracies

Once production on a movie is started, it is an unstoppable steamroller with a tight deadline. If the script says a spaceship wooshes by, the people working on the film don't have time to work out what kind of propulsion it uses — they just make the engine glow, push it across the screen in an interesting way and move on to the next shot.

3) The decisions are made in too many places and it isn't even thought about except by people who aren't in positions to make judgment calls.

A jet fighter shoots missiles at a big space ship hovering above a city. The director tells the visual effects supervisor to make it happen. The visual effects supervisor tells the digital effects supervisor to make a space ship and to make a jet fighter woosh by and shoot some missiles at the space ship while he goes off and directs the on-set pyro effects.

The digital effects supervisor tells the modeling supervisor to have his team make a space ship and jet fighter and tells the FX supervisor to have his team make some missiles shoot, engine effects, vapor trails, smoke trails and whatnot.

The modelers build a jet fighter and give it harpoon missiles. The modeling supervisor says it looks good. The digital effects supervisor says it looks good. The modelers are done with their job and get put on another production.

The FX supervisor hands the model to the FX team who look at the fighter and say "um...that's not really the right kind of missile to do an air-to-air attack..." "Sorry, the modeler is off the show and these have been approved. Can't change it now" is the response. So the FX team launches harpoon missiles at the space ship.

The final shot is shown to the director/visual effects supervisor and it looks cool, but don't pick up on the fact that the wrong missile is being used. It's approved and put into the film.

(You're probably sensing that this is a true story and know what movie I was working on at the time.)

4) The script-reader's gauntlet

Writers use descriptive language to express action in their script. They don't often get into technical details because each page of a script is supposed to represent roughly one minute of screen time. A writer who spends his time describing the intricacies of a space ships propulsion system is a writer who finds his scripts in the script-reader's trash can.

People who write heavily technical novels are almost always terrible script-writers as they have difficulty working within the confines and limitations of that medium. The scripts that pass through the script-reader's gauntlet will likely be of the less technical variety.

5) People in film making have education in film making, they don't usually have PhD's in physics/astrophysics. And people who have PhD's in physics/astrophysics don't usually know how to make a good film.

It's not that they aren't smart enough, it's that their focus of expertise is in other areas. That's why they hire consultants if they're trying to do something with any degree of accuracy, but even then, accuracy is desirable only if it doesn't interfere with the storytelling. Often, things are set in motion that can't be changed after the fact anyway and you just have to shrug your shoulders and say "That's the way it has to be" if you learn too late of some scientific ramification.

6) The power of ego

You know how people fall all over themselves when a famous actor is nearby? Its worse when companies deal with well known directors. Just yesterday we were kicked out of the screening room during our dailies because Michael Bay was parking and MIGHT be needing it. With that sort of hysteria going on, are you going to be the one that walks up to him and say "this is totally unrealistic and you need to change it" knowing that saying so will mean the end of your employment?

What the director says goes, and few people have the will or the power to contradict him. Film making isn't usually done by committee, it is done by imperial decree and if the decree is that cars blow up when shot with bullets, then that is the way it is.

I'm sure there's a few others I've missed but, speaking of unrealism in Hollywood movies, I need to get back to work on a sequence involving bits of LA breaking off and sliding into the ocean because the Earth's magnetic field has collapsed.

I'm not kidding.

• 

(ed note: our hero professor Jennifer Logan has finally earned her tenure. She teaches regular classes in ancient 20th century scifi. What she doesn't know is that tales of her prowess of using scifi to solve problems has spread to other alien races.)

      She got to the podium just as the clock clicked to 0930. “Good morning. I’m Dr. Logan,” she said—she didn’t believe in wasting time. “This is Middle English 217: Twentieth-Century Science Fiction." Someone got up and left in a hurry. In the wrong room, Jennifer thought. Other students tittered.
     “All right. This course is part language, part literature. As you’ll have noticed when you were registering, beginning and intermediate Middle English are prerequisites. Don’t forget, the documents we’ll be reading are a thousand years old. If you think you’ll be able to get through them with just your everyday Spanglish, or even with an ordinary translation program, you can think again."

     She sighed to herself and went on, “That’s not to say you won’t find words—a lot of words—that look familiar. A lot of Spanglish vocabulary can be traced back to roots in Middle English. That’s especially true of Middle English science fiction. Many, in fact most, of our modern terms relating to spaceflight come from those first coined by science-fiction writers. Remarkably, most of those coinages were made before the technology for actual spaceflight existed. I want you to think for a moment of the implications of that, and to think about the leap of imagination those writers were taking.”
     Some of them made the mental effort, she saw. She knew they were doomed to failure. Imagining what humanity had been like before spaceflight was as hard for them as willing oneself into the mind of an ancient Sumerian would have been for an ordinary citizen of the twentieth century.

(ed note: Jennifer is started when three aliens start taking her class. Tall, blue, wolf-like aliens called the Foitani. They turn out to be excellent students.)

     Jennifer spent the first couple of weeks in the course on stories that dealt with alien contact. Experience had taught her that students enjoyed the theme, enjoyed seeing how wildly wrong most ancient speculation was. That some writers came within shouting distance of what the future really looked like also piqued their interest.

     “Remember, science fiction wasn’t supposed to be prophesy,” she said. “Trying to foretell—to guess—the future is a much older set of thought processes. Science fiction was different. Science fiction was a literature of extrapolation, of taking something—some social trend, some new technology, even some ideology—that existed in the writer’s time and pushing it farther and harder than it had yet gone, to see what the world would look like then.
     “Of course, a lot of it became trivial even within a few years after it was written. Social trends, especially, changed so fast that they rarely lasted long enough to be carried to the extremes writers imagined. As humans have always been, in the twentieth century they were sometimes radical, sometimes reactionary, sometimes sexually permissive, sometimes repressive. They’d go through two or three of these cycles in a person’s lifetime, as we do today.

     “Some writers, though, chose harder questions to ask: how humanity would fit into a community of intelligent beings, some quite different from us; how we should treat each other under changed circumstances; what the relationship between government and individual should be. That’s why writers like Anderson, Brin, and Heinlein can still make us think today, even though the worlds they imagined didn’t come true.”

---

(ed note: Then one fine night, Jennifer answers a knock at the door. She discovers the three Foitani, who zap her unconscious with a stunner and kidnap her into deep space.It seems that a twenty-eight thousand years ago there was an original race of Foitani called the "Great Ones." They were thought to have all perished in the legendary Suicide Wars. The current race, the Oderna Foitani, is thought to be survivors of the war. The Foitani have discovered a huge white tower called the Great Unknown, a relic of the Great Ones. They need Jennifer's help to unravel the mystery of the Great Ones.)

     The Foitani explosives expert was taller but thinner than Aissur Aissur Rus. He had a scarred muzzle that made him easy to recognize. All the Foitani seemed predatory to Jennifer, Enfram Enfram Marf seemed predatory even for a Foitan. He all but salivated when Aissur Aissur Rus explained why they were there. “I do not believe it,” he said several times. “How did you persuade Pawasar Pawasar Ras to let us use the power we have? I thought he would just let us sit here forever, doing nothing.”
     “The opinions and suggestions of the human Jennifer aided materially in getting him to modify his previous opinion,” Aissur Aissur Rus said. That made Jennifer like him even better. Plenty of humans wouldn’t have shared credit with a friend from their own species, let alone with an alien they’d hijacked.
     Enfram Enfram Marf turned to stare at her. “This ugly little pink and white and yellow thing?” Jennifer heard through Aissur Aissur Rus’s translator. “Pawasar Pawasar Ras listened to this sub-Foitani blob where he would not hear you? Our sphere’s a strange place, and no mistake.”
     The contempt behind the colorless words made Jennifer realize she really had been dealing with what passed for interspecies diplomats among the Foitani. If Enfram Enfram Marf thought like the average Foitan in the street, no wonder the Great Ones hadn't worried about genocide.
     She smiled sweetly at the ordnance officer—she knew the smile was wasted on him, but used it for her own satisfaction— and said, “I’m female, too. How do you like that?”

     Had Enfram Enfram Marf been human, he would have turned purple. He drew back a leg, as if to kick Jennifer across the room. “Wait,” Aissur Aissur Rus said before the leg could shoot forward. “The human is still of use to us.”
     “Why?” Enfram Enfram Marf retorted. “Now that we have Pawasar Pawasar Ras’s permission to open up the Great Unknown, we don’t need this thing to gather data for us. We can go back to using machines; they’ll be able to bring artifacts out past the radius of doom so we can properly study them.”
     “If all goes well, yes,” Aissur Aissur Rus said. “But all may not go well. Machines are less flexible than intelligent beings, even now. Moreover, we acquired the human Jennifer not so much to gather data as to interpret it. She is expert in a peculiar form of extrapolation by storytelling that humans developed long ago, which may give her unusual insight into the reasons the Great Ones created the Great Unknown as they did.”
     “How could this creature understand the Great Ones when we, their descendants, do not?” Enfram Enfram Marf demanded. But his leg returned to the floor. He bared his teeth, then went on, “Oh, very well, Aissur Aissur Rus, let it be as you say. I shall begin calculating the proper weight, shape, and composition of the charge, based on what we know of the thickness and material of the tower's outer wall.”

---

(ed note: As Jennifer and Bernard Greenberg {master trader and her former boss, also kidnapped by the Foitani} approach the huge white tower of The Great Unknown, a complication arises. The Rof Golan show up in force. They are another group of Foitani who are basically pirates. They want the secrets of the Great Unknown for themselves.

Then the humans manage to penetrate the Great Unknown. Turns out it has a lot of Great Ones who have been in suspended animation since the Suicide Wars. Who immediately wake up and capture the humans. A group of them go to meet delegations of the Foitani and the Rof Golan. Things are OK until they get close enough to smell each other. Then all the aliens become enraged, pull out their guns, and the Foitani/Rof-Golan starts trading gunfire with the Great Ones. This is odd because prior to this, the Foitani practically worshipped the Great Ones. The humans hit the dirt and manage to crawl away without being shot.

As it turns out, the Great Ones are kwopillot, and the Foitani/Rof-Golan are vodranet. The practical point is each can detect the other by scent, and each thinks the other is a hideously evil sexual pervert that should be killed on sight (or scent).

All Foitani are born female, they turn male at age thirty. Kwopillot result from hormone treatments. Pouring the appropriate hormones over the unhatched egg results in a person who is male at hatching. A person who is is properly hatched as female can use hormones to prevent the natural change into male. In both cases it changes how your body smells. "Kwopillot" means being the wrong gender for your age, which they consider a filthy perversion. As is commonly the case, sexual prejudice has the highest anger quotient of all.

Somehow this can be used to sexually enslave the kwopillot, the novel does not go into details. But that doesn't matter. Slaves generally hate being slaves regardless of why they were enslaved, and some will revolt. The Suicide Wars was a revolt of the kwopillot, a civil war which destroyed the Foitani galactic empire and put it into a Long Night for several deca-kilo-years. The Foitani and Rof-Golan gradually pulled out of the dark ages and re-built a pale shadow of their original empire. There are no surviving Great Ones, except for the ones who awoke from suspended animation inside the big white tower The Great Unknown. Which turns out to be a huge combat starship named the Vengence.

Jennifer manages to talk the three sides into diplomatic negotiations, using the hijacked human ship as neutral ground. The talks do not go well, which is putting it mildly.

She also wants something. The Great Ones had visited Terra twenty-eight thousand years ago, and have bio-scans of a mated pair of Cro-Magnons. They can use these scans to create duplicate Cro-Magnons. Jennifer wants a pair of them created, so the species can be reestablished. She also wants the Great Ones to erase their bio-scans, because she doesn't want anything remotely human to be in their alien clutches. Great One Solut Mek Kem want to know what Jennifer can offer valuable enough in exchange for her wish.)

• 

• 

     “What exactly do you want from us?” Greenberg demanded. “I can provide trade goods from Odern, and others of human manufacture. I can also give you information about what this part of the galaxy is like these days. Just how much, of course, is what makes a dicker. ”
     “These things may perhaps buy you copies of your fellow creatures,” Solut Mek Kem said. “They will in no way persuade me to clear our patterns in the matrices. Your kind, evidently, is a part of the galaxy about which we shall require a good deal of information. If you expect us to forgo it, you will have to do better.”
     “I’ve told you what we have,” Greenberg said slowly.
     Jennifer felt her face twist into a scowl. She didn’t want to leave any vestiges of the Cro-Magnons in Foitani hands. “What would it take?” she said. “Do you want us to tell you how to live in peace with all the modem Foitani, who’d like nothing more than seeing every last one of you dead?”
     “If you can tell us how to live in peace with vodranet, creature, you will have earned what you seek.”

     Jennifer looked down at her shoes. If only she were a Middle English SF hero, the answer to that question would have been on the tip of her tongue. Would Miles Vorkosigan or Dominic Flandry just have stood there with nothing to say? “If only …” she said softly, and then, a moment later, more than a little surprised, “Well, maybe I can.”

     “Go ahead, then, creature,” Solut Mek Kem said. “Tell me how I shall leave in peace with beings for whom I have an instinctive antipathy. Instruct me. I shall be fascinated to imbibe of your wisdom." The kwopil used irony like a bludgeon.
     “Actually, I can’t specifically tell you how,” Jennifer said. "But maybe, just maybe, I can tell you a way to go about finding the answer for yourselves, if you really want to.” That was the rub, and she knew it. If kwopillot and vodranet wanted to fight, they would, and good intentions would only get in the way.
     “Say on,” Solut Mek Kem said, not revealing his thoughts.

     “All right. You know by now that the Foitani from Odern brought humans—my people—to Odern because by themselves they couldn’t safely enter what they called the Great Unknown— the area around your ship.”
     “We made sure prying vodranet would not be able to disturb us, yes.”
     “Fine,” Jennifer said. “The reason the Foitani from Odern got me in particular is that I’m an expert in an old form of literature among my people, a form called science fiction. This was a literature that, in its purest form, extrapolated either from possible events deliberately taken to extremes or from premises known to be impossible, and speculated on what might happen if those impossible premises were in fact true.”
     Solut Mek Kem’s ears twitched. “Why should I care if creatures choose to spend their lives deliberately speculating on the impossible? It strikes me as a waste of time, but with sub-Foitani creatures, the waste is minimal.”

     “It’s not the way you're making it sound,” Jennifer said. “Look—you know about military contingency plans, don’t you? ”
     “Certainly,” Solut Mek Kem said.
     “I thought you would. If you’re like humans at all, you make those plans even for cases you don’t expect to happen (e.g., the US being invaded by Canada). Sometimes you can learn things from those improbable plans, too, even if you don’t directly use them. Am I right or wrong?”
     “You are correct. How could you not be, in this instance? Of course data may be relevant in configurations other than the ones in which they are first envisioned. Any race with the minimal intelligence necessary to devise data base software learns the truth of this.”

     “Whatever you say, Solut Mek Kem. Do me one more favor, if you would: give me the connotations of the word this translator program uses to translate the term fiction.”
     The Great One paused before answering, “It means something like, tales for nestlings’ ears. Another synonym might be, nonsense stories."
     Jennifer nodded. A lot of races thought that way. With some, the only translation for fiction was lying. She said, “We use fiction for more things than the Foitani do, Solut Mek Kem. We use tales that we know to be false to entertain, yes, but also to cast light on true aspects of our characters and to help us gain insight into ourselves.”
     “And so?” Solut Mek Kem said. “What possible relevance does a creature’s insight into itself have to the truly serious issue of vodranet?”

     “Bear with me,” Jennifer said. “More than a thousand years ago, back when humans were just starting to develop a technological society, they also developed the subform of fiction called science fiction.”
     “This strikes me as a contradiction in terms,” Solut Mek Kem observed. “How can one have a nonsense story based on science?”
     “Science fiction doesn’t produce nonsense stories,” Jennifer said, reflecting that Solut Mek Kem sounded like some of the contemporary critics of the genre. “It’s sort of a fictional analogue of what you do when you develop a contingency plan. Conceive of it as a method for making thought experiments and projections when you don’t have hard data, but need to substitute imagination instead. You kwopillot don’t have hard data about living with vodranet, for instance; all you know is how to go about killing each other. You need all the imagination you can find, and you need a way to focus it. If imagination is light, think of the techniques of science fiction as a lens."

     “I think of this entire line of talk as a waste of time,” Solut Mek Kem said.
     “Let me tell you this, then,” Jennifer said quickly, before he could irrevocably reject her: “The Foitani from Odern sought me out and brought me here specifically because I’m an expert in this kind of fiction.”
     “The foibles of vodranet are not a recommendation,” Solut Mek Kem said, and she was sure she had lost.

     But Bernard Greenberg said, “Consider results, Solut Mek Kem. Before Jennifer got here, you had been dormant for twenty-eight thousand years. The Foitani from Odern weren't close to getting into the Great Unknown, let alone into the Vengeance by themselves. Look at all that’s happened since Jennifer came to Gilver.”
     Solut Mek Kem opened his mouth, then closed it again. Greenberg had managed to make him thoughtful, at any rate. At last the Great One said, “An argument from results is always the most difficult to confute. Very well; let me examine some samples of this alleged science fiction. If I think expertise in it might prove of some value to the present situation, I shall meet the terms you have set: copies of the creatures of your kind in our data stores, with the originals to be deleted.”

     Jennifer clenched her teeth. Put up or shut up, she thought. While she tried to decide which stories Solut Mek Kem ought to judge, she said, “May I please call Aissur Aissur Rus at the research base of the Foitani from Odern? He has a program that translates between your language and the one in which the stories were composed, one which we humans no longer speak.”
     “First scientific nonsense or nonsense science, I know not which. Now you haul in the vodranet,” Solut Mek Kem grumbled. “Do what you think necessary, creature. Having stooped so low as to negotiate with sub-Foitani, how could vodranet befoul me further? Speak—your words are being transmitted as you require.”
     “Aissur Aissur Rus?” Jennifer mid. “Are you there?”
     The reply came from nowhere. “That is a translators voice, so you must be a human. Which are you, and what do you need?"
     “I’m Jennifer," Jennifer said. “Can you transmit to the Vengeance the program you used back on Saugus to read Middle English science fiction? You thought someone who knew it might be able to give you insights on the Great Unknown. Now the Great Ones hope its techniques may help them figure out how not to fight the next round of the Suicide Wars.” She knew she was exaggerating the Great Ones’ expectations, but no more than she would have in arranging a deal of much smaller magnitude.
     “I will send the program,” Aissur Aissur Rus said. “I would be intrigued to learn the Great Ones’ opinion of this curious human discipline. ”
     “You aren’t the only one,” Jennifer said.

     Solut Mek Kem turned to glance at something—evidently a telltale, for after a moment he said, “Very well. We have received this program. On what material shall we make use of it?”
     “I‘ve been thinking about that,” Jennifer said. “I’m going to give you three pieces. You know or can learn that humans are of two sexes, which we keep throughout life, just as you do. The Left Hand of Darkness speculates on the consequences of discovering a world of humans genetically engineered to be hermaphrodites. ”
     “That is not precisely similar to our case, but I can see how it might be relevant,” Solut Mek Kem said. “It is not the sort of topic about which we would produce fiction.”
     “Species differ, ” Jennifer said. Mentally, she added, You might know more about that if you hadn ’t gone around slaughtering all the aliens you came across.
     “You spoke of three works,” Solut Mek Kem said. “What are the other two?”
     “One is ‘The Marching Morons (adapted into the movie Idiocracy),’ which looks at the possible genetic consequences of some of the social policies in vogue in the author’s day. The events it describes did not happen. Kombluth—the author—didn’t expect them to, I’m certain. He was using them to comment on his own society’s customs, which is something science fiction did very effectively. ”
     She waited for Solut Mek Kem to say something, but he just looked at her with those dark green eyes. She went on, “The third story is called ‘Hawk Among the Sparrows.’ It warns of the problems someone used to a high technology may encounter in a place where that technology cannot be reproduced."

(ed note: The Great One's starship has a much higher technology level than the Oderna Foitari and the Rof-Golan pirates. But the latter have several planetary colonies for supply and maintenance, while the Great One's starship is all alone in the universe. In the story 'Hawk Among the Sparrows', an ultra high-tech fighter jet goes through a time warp into World War I, with fabric biplanes and everything. It is a monumental task for the protagonist to obtain the huge amount of kerosene the jet needs for fuel, and the ammo simply cannot be recreated. There will be no maintenance, either)

     “Yes, that is relevant to us,” Solut Mek Kem said. “Again, it is not a topic we would choose for fiction. I will consider these works. I will consider also the mind-set which informs them, which I gather to be the essence of what you seek to offer me. ”
     "Exactly," Jennifer said, more than a little relieved the Great One understood what she was selling.
     “Enough then. You are dismissed. I shall communicate with you again when I have weighed these documents. You would be well advised to remain in your ship until that time, lest you be destroyed by one of my fellows who has less patience with vermin than I do. The guard here will escort you.”

---

• 

     As it happened, Aissur Aissur Rus called her first. She explained to him the deal she had put to the Great Ones, knowing all the while that Solut Mek Kem or one of his aides was surely listening in. She finished, “You were the one among your people who thought someone used to the ideas of science fiction would be able to help you on Gilver, and you turned out to be right (meaning Rus was the one who figured out that kidnapping Jennifer was a good idea). Do you think that you modern Foitani can apply this same sort of creative extrapolation to the problem of living with kwopillot?"
     “That is—an intriguing question,” Aissur Aissur Rus said slowly. “If the answer proves to be affirmative, its originator would surely derive much credit therefrom.” You would derive that credit, you mean, Jennifer thought. Aissur Aissur Rus continued, “If on the other hand the answer is in the negative, the Suicide Wars begin again shortly afterward, at which point no blame is likely to accrue, for who would survive to lay blame?" (i.e., so there is no actual downside)

     “Then shall I send you the same materials I gave to Solut Mek Kem?“ Jennifer asked. “Maybe you can use them, if not to change Pawasar Pawasar Ras’s mind, then at least to open it a little bit."
     “What materials did you fumish to the Great One?” Aissur Aissur Ras asked. Jennifer told him. He said, “I presently have all of those, I believe, save ‘Hawk Among the Sparrows.’ We kidnapped you before you gained the opportunity to discuss the literary pitfalls of overreliance upon advanced technology. Though alien, I find them most intriguing documents. ‘The Marching Morons’ presents a quite Foitani-like view of what constitutes proper behavior under diflicult circumstances—not that we would ever have permitted culls to breed as they did to establish that story’s background.”

     "Aissur Aissur Rus, I’m convinced you would have gotten an A in my course,” Jermifer said. (except he had kidnapped her before the course was finished)
     “So you have said, human Jennifer. I shall take this for a compliment. My people have said repeatedly, in talks you have heard and in many more conversations where you were not present, that they could not imagine how they were to live with kwopillot. I still cannot imagine how we are to accomplish this. Nevertheless, perhaps you have furnished us a tool wherewith to focus our imagination more sharply on the problem. If this be so, all Foitani will be in your debt."
     “That’s not something you ought to tell a trader, you know,” Jennifer said.

---

     “You have won your wager,” Solut Mek Kem said. “The concept of extrapolation mixed with entertainment is not one we developed for ourselves, yet its uses quickly become obvious as we grow acquainted with it. I wonder how many other interesting concepts we have exterrninated along with the races that created them.” Jennifer had not imagined a Foitan could feel guilt. A moment later, Solut Mek Kem disabused her of her anthropocentrism, for he said, “Well, no matter. They are gone, and I shall not worry about them. The masters of these creatures—” He stuck out his tongue at the Cro-Magnon couple. "—are also now gone from our data store; I keep my bargains. The copies are yours to do with as you will.”

---

     The communicator ignored her. The words that came from it were more like snarls than speech. The translator turned them into flat Spanglish. “Answer me, you pestilential sub-Foitani creatures. When Voskop W Wurd (leader of the Rof-Golan pirates) deigns to speak with you, you are to take it as a privilege.”
     “Oh, shut up for a minute,” Jennifer said, enjoying the license given her by a good many thousand kilometers of empty space between herself and the Rof Golani warleader. “Now, what is it you want, Voskop W Wurd?"
     “Whatever documents you have passed on to the Oderna and the kwopillot,” Voskop W Wurd answered.
     “Oh,” Jennifer said. “Yes, I can do that. I would have done it sooner, but it never occurred to me that you might want them, Voskop W Wurd. You hadn’t shown much use for humans, you know.” You haven't shown much use for anything, you know, she added mentally.
     The warleader said, “If my potential allies and my enemies have these data, I should be privy to them as well. Explain to me why the Oderna and kwopillot are interested in these long effusions by sub-Foitani. ”
     “I love you, too, Voskop W Wurd," Jennifer said sweetly. But the more minds trying to find avoid a new round of Suicide Wars, the better, so she did explain to the warleader the concept of science fiction and its potential application here. Voskop W Wurd was vicious, but not stupid. Jennifer finished, “The books and stories are examples intended to turn your thinking in the appropriate direction.”
     Voskop W Wurd remained silent for some time after she was through. At last, he said, “This new concept will have to be analyzed. We on Rof Golan write and declaim sagas of great warriors of the past, but have nothing to do with the set of organized lies you term fiction, still less with using it as if it were fact. ”
     “Let me know what you think when you’ve looked at the documents,” Jennifer said. “You might also want to talk to Aissur Aissur Rus. He comes fairly close be being able to grasp another race’s point of view.”
     Voskop W Wurd switched off without replying—typical Foitani manners, Jennifer thought. But she remained more cheerful than otherwise. The Rof Golani hadn’t dismissed the concept of trying SF techniques to extrapolate ways in which kwopillot and vodranet could live together in the same galaxy. From him, that was an excellent sign.

---

     The communicator hauled Jennifer and Greenberg back to life after about five hours of sleep—just enough to leave them both painfully aware they needed more. A Foitani voice roared from the speaker. “Answer, humans,” the translator supplied.
     “What is it now, Voskop W Wurd?” Jennifer asked, rubbing her eyes and thinking wistfully of coffee.
     “This is not Voskop W Wurd. This is Yulvot L Reat. The warleader ordered me to evaluate your concept of scientific lying."
     Jennifer wondered whether the translator was hiccuping or whether Voskop W Wurd had given that name to the Middle English literature as he assigned it to his subordinate. That didn’t really matter. “What do you think of it, Yulvot W Reat?”
     “To my surprise, I find myself quite impressed,” the Rof Golani Foitan answered. “It serves to make extrapolation palatable, and by extension even speculates logically about the consequences of propositions known to be false, something I had not imagined possible.”
     “Then you think it might let you find a way to live with the kwopillot aboard the Vengeance?" Jennifer asked hopefully.
     “It might let us look for a way,” Yulvot L Reat said. “I take that for progress. So will the warleader Voskop W Wurd, since we never imagined—”

• 

Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism.

Humans evolved a rare symbolic reasoning ability during our emergence over the last million or so years. As running apes, we lacked the usual evolutionary features such as sharp teeth, claws, spines, poison, and armor. Instead, we deployed social structures and intelligence to bootstrap science and technology from stone tools to synthetic elements.

Symbolic reasoning, and indeed much of scientific progress, is the process of understanding things in terms of other things. By creating abstractions, humans are able to quickly solve new problems, predict the future, and ultimately pass on brainy genes to the next generation.

We’re so good at it, in fact, that we often barely notice these abstractions even with concerted effort. There’s nothing natural about driving or browsing Twitter, but almost all humans can learn to do it very quickly. This is not automatic – other skills are much harder to learn, such as playing violin or performing surgery.

When it comes to modelling the natural world, analogies are powerful mechanisms for reasoning, education, and communication, because they rely on little more than universally common experience and are quick to articulate. As an example, water flow is commonly used as an analogy for electricity, while the rubber sheet is used as an analogy for gravity.

What analogies gain in convenience they lose in precision, so all analogies are, to some extent, wrong. The water electricity analogy is useless for designing radios or transformers, while the rubber sheet doesn’t actually help people understand why gravity mixes space and time.

The alternative to employing analogies is to break down the problem into fundamental concepts and reason by first principles. This process, while relatively formulaic, is tougher to learn and generally much slower, and almost impossible to communicate between people unless they are both already experts in the same thing.

As a halfway measure, it is useful to measure the wrongness of an analogy by trying to break it, either by relaxing an assumption or taking it to some limit. At the least, practicing this skill can help to avoid the more obvious errors and sharpen argumentative abilities! Deep insight is unlikely to result, however, except by thorough first principles derivation.

---

To the topic at hand. Space travel is an unusual combination of exciting and esoteric, so an entire ecosystem of handy analogies has developed to help journalists explain incredibly technical information to interested lay people. This, like other aspects of science communication is a worthwhile goal.

Where it falls down is when the pros resort to analogies instead of first principles reasoning, and get things wrong as a result.

Space travel is esoteric and so different from every day experience that it’s simply not possible to use analogies in a technically useful way. Of course designers employ symbolic abstractions but these are (hopefully) built on a rigorous foundation.

As an example, the process of designing and building a Mars rover employs over 400 engineering subspecialities. There will never be a human with more than an indicial understanding of even a subset of these. Spacecraft are complicated because the problems their designs solve are really tough. Because no-one can specialize in every area, it falls to systems people to define the interfaces and tie it together, and here it can be almost irresistible to use analogies.

What are some examples of popular but uselessly inaccurate analogies in space?

• Rockets as generic transport. The idea that because rockets transport cargo they’re like trucks or planes, but somehow cost 1000x as much. What rockets do is so ridiculously difficult it is hard for non-specialists to grasp. A really good rocket, broken into two stages, can launch about 4% of its launch mass into orbit. Something like 85% of that mass is fuel. That fuel is burned so violently that the engines would melt except that they’re literally made of coolant channels. Most terrestrial vehicles are built with a safety margin of at least 50%. A few bad welds on a car is okay because it’s designed to be stronger than it needs to be. On a rocket, there’s no room for safety margin. Every single part needs to be exactly as strong and heavy as it needs to be, which means every weld might need X-ray inspection. Every panel might need painstaking pockets milled away. Every piece of metal must be tested to ensure it meets material property specifications. Rockets are in a class of their own, and each type should be modeled as an independent vehicle.
  
  
• The moon is a stepping stone, a way station, or gas station in space. This is partly covered in my blog on Lunar water. For conventional travel, stepping stones are useful ways to nimbly cross a stream without getting feet wet. Gas stations are essential for internal combustion vehicles traveling long distances. But neither of these analogies makes any sense in the context of space. The moon is made of rocks, but it’s not in the middle of a stream. Traveling long distances in space requires time but no constant consumption of fuel. The most fuel intensive step is getting from Earth to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The next most is escaping LEO, whether to the Moon or Mars or anywhere else. Landing on the Moon takes just as much effort as launching from the Moon, since it has no atmosphere to slow down in. As a result, the Moon is on the way to nowhere except itself. Indeed, just getting to the Lunar surface to refuel would consume more fuel than going directly to almost anywhere else in the inner solar system.
  
  
• The Lunar gateway as a gas station or stepping stone. Similar to the Moon, there’s no value in stopping somewhere along the way to somewhere else in space. For more detail, see my blogs on Lunar exploration architectures, or the Lunar Gateway specifically. Typically, the injection burn is performed in LEO to exploit the Oberth effect, and the vehicle coasts the rest of the way. The Lunar gateway also doesn’t have its own fuel supply, so any refueling would require dedicated tankers. But since all rockets are hyperfocused specialty machines, the tankers would be well placed to perform the actual mission, without stopping anywhere to refuel. In other words, it makes no sense to build gas station analogs in deep space.
  
  
• Do you know of any others? Let me know and I’ll add them to this list.

---

Reasoning by first principles is a nice idea, but how do we do it? This blog would be incomplete without a recipe for people to follow.

When I did the Physics Olympiad I was taught a powerful problem solving algorithm that is designed for rapid, accurate first principles reasoning, calculation, and importantly, communication. It can be readily adapted for any quantitative problem. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, its steps help the user to overcome our innate software flaws and cognitive biases.

The method was called “the seven Ds and the little s”, comprising (in descending order of importance) Diagram, Directions, Definitions, Diagnosis, Derivation, Determination, Dimensions, and substitution.

In more detail:

A good diagram captures necessary information and consumes about half a page. The process of drawing a diagram activates the brain’s spatial reasoning capacities and prevents hasty or panicked assumptions.

Directions establish the local coordinate system, so that all quantities are defined in a consistent frame of reference.

Definitions unambiguously assign symbols to concepts or quantities such as length or mass, and help expedite algebraic manipulation later.

At the end of the first three steps, the problem has been summarized and read into memory. This may seem pointless or obvious, but asking the right question is often the hardest part of solving open or poorly defined problems. What is the relevant figure of merit? How is optimal defined?

Diagnosis is the fourth step, and consists of a single phrase summary of the physical principle used to solve the problem, such as application of a conserved quantity or a vector algebra bash. Usually, the more fundamental the principle, the better.

Derivation takes fundamental physical equations, of which there are about ten, and transforms them into the necessary form for the problem at hand. For example, rather than memorize the moment of inertia for hundreds of different shapes, one would memorize the general formula and, in the Derivation step, solve an integral to give the desired version.

Determination combines derived equations to produce a formula for the solution of the problem. By convention, this formula is boxed to make it easier to find on the page.

Dimension check ensures the dimensions on each side of the equation match and is a good “check sum” to detect algebraic mistakes. A successful dimension check is notated with a smiley face.

Finally, if necessary, numerical values can be substituted in to get a numerical answer.

By combining this method with intuition and other problem solving tools it’s possible to reliably get the right answer first time, every time. It’s like a super power!

---

The next time you encounter a questionable analogy anywhere, but particularly in space mission design literature, you’ll have the tools to not only recognize its limitations but to get the right answer yourself.

Design for Cause: When a game's design has players follow all of the logical steps and procedures to obtain an outcome; when players experience a methodology and must consider its many facets. This can often lead to systems that are over-engineered. That is, when the players are doing all the work and the designer is having all the fun.

Design for Effect: When a game abstracts complex procedures for simplicity’s sake so that the players can get straight to the "boom." That is, when the designer does all the work so the players can have all the fun.

• 

The Fifth Frontier War is a tabletop wargame simulating interstellar combat.

A critical point is in the scifi universe there is no faster-than-light radio. Information has to be carried by faster-than-light starship couriers. Information propagates at a rate of approximately four parsecs per week. Since the war is across a battlefront 26 parsecs wide, the starship grand admirals are dealing with an information delay of about a month and a half.

---

A game designer who Designs for Cause, they would have to recreate the starship couriers within the game rules. Which would be a nightmare, if not actually impossible. Remember this is a paper-and-cardboard tabletop game, NOT a computer game.

To Design for Cause, one would need the two players isolated in two separate rooms, each with a separate copy of the map and counters. A referee would keep track of all the info couriers and update each player's map with only the information whose courier had arrived at the grand admiral's location. The admirals would issue commands to their warships by couriers.

If hostile warships actually managed to blunder into the same location, the referee would have to secretly fight the battle, and send the results by couriers to the two players.

Personally I think you'd be lucky to get two whole game turns played before the players rage-quit.

---

Luckily the designers of the Fifth Frontier War did a Design for Effect. They found an elegant abstraction that produced much the same effect as courier-based info delay, but was much simpler to produce with game rules.

All the warships on a side are grouped into task forces. All the ships in a given task force move together in a group. Each task force contains a playing token for the admiral commanding that force. On the token is a number, which is that admiral's leadership rating.

Now comes the fun part.

Each player represents a grand admiral. In ordinary wargames, the player would move their warships as they see fit. But in this game, for each task force they command, they have to write down the movement commands several turns in advance. The task forces are bound to their pre-plotted moves, even as the moves become increasingly irrelevant as the situation evolves.

How many turns in advance are each task force's orders to be plotted? Well, the leadership rating of that particular task force's admiral, of course. The better the admiral, the fewer turns in advance that have to be plotted.

So the finely honed ability of an excellent admiral to predict the future movement of enemy fleets is here approximated by the flexibility of not being bound by a lengthy set of pre-plotted moves. An admiral who can foresee far in advance is modeled in the game by a short set of pre-plots, giving a faster reaction time. By the same token, an incompetent admiral who only got command of their task force because they the offspring of a powerful politician would simulated by a large leadership rating. The player would be forced to pre-plot the maladroit admiral's task force many many turns in advance. This gives the effect of a moronic admiral who cannot deal with the courier delay.

By using Design for Effect the game designers got 80% of the desired effect with only 20% of the causing game rules.

Thoughts on how to do Exordium: The Board Game

As a hardcore wargamer, my natural inclination is to try to turn books I like — and which present interesting tactical and strategic situations — into wargames. With Exordium, though, the information propagation problem that makes naval combat interesting to read makes a tactical board or miniatures game based difficult at best. I used to think such a game was impossible; I've recently come to the conclusion that the spirit of the books can be preserved in the board game, even if the exact mechanism of combat can't be repeated in detail. In other words, an approach leaning towards a "Design for Cause" philosophy (which focuses on processes) would be too unwieldy, but a "Design for Effect" approach (which focuses on outcomes) might be feasible. A strategic-level boardgame, possibly using a system similar to Prism's Throneworld or Mark Herman's We the People, would be very feasible.

Why does the "information propogation problem" make the "Design for Cause" approach unworkable? The short answer is that players simply have too much information about where everything is and what is going on, when the essence of Exordium combat is the combatants acting and reacting as they receive info. This might still be manageable if it wasn't for the tactical use of the fiveskip drive. Given a referee, individual ship commanders, a blind setup (so each player has his own map), a willingness to not be too anal retentive about it (perhaps justified by the idea that the combatants all have battle computers to sort these things out) and a lot of sweat, I think that the information propagation problem could be solved if ships were moving at slower-than-light speeds once the battle started. Take, for example, the situations presented in C.J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station and other books. The information propogation effect is very important in her works as well (especially when the attackers first jump in), but as the ships get closer and closer together, it becomes an easier problem to solve. (For more information on this, once again see C.J. Cherryh's essay from The Company War boardgame). Plotting orders several turns in advance can go a long way towards making it playable without a referee, although I have yet to find a good referee-less Design for Cause solution to the problem of ships being different distances from each other, and hence having different length information delays.

Tactical FTL capability, however, makes solving this problem pretty darn close to impossible, at least under a Design for Cause methodology. Every information propogation wave from every turn must be tracked, like a series of expanding waves from an almost infinite numbers of stones thrown sequentially into a pond. In essence, any time a ship moved the board would need to be photographed, and selective portions of the board (based on both location and time) would need to be made available to the different players as they skipped around. Even if we make the not-unreasonable assumption that the combatant's battlecomputers will resolve the odd out-of-temporal-sequence of information reception, an umpired one-on-one ship battle would still be very difficult to make both feasible and enjoyable for all involved.

On the other hand, a Design for Effect approach, focusing on the outcomes and "feel" of the books rather than the exact mechanisms, is more feasible. Exordium combat can be described in terms of targetting solutions, which in turn are affected by range and other factors. If one accounts for these factors, I think it would be possible to create a game which has the flavor of the series, without requiring double-blind play or other hindrances. Not that I am against double-blind play, mind you; it's the time factor, where you have to keep track not only of present but past positions, that make it difficult in this instance.

The important point is to keep the fracture under control. Hack writers will assume that "if we have to break a few theories of physics for FTL, why not just throw all the theories out the window?"

Don't give in. Omitting physics will degrade your setting to a pathetic lack of believability worse than an average Space Ghost cartoon.

Ultimately, the goal in writing good fiction isn't "accuracy", it's believability. The goal is to take the more fantastical elements and give them a sense of verisimilitude. For science fiction, scientific accuracy in anything not hand waved for the good of the story is a good start. If you want to preserve the sense of being real, you have to diverge as little as possible in your hand waving.

For the other, while (this) website is mainly a resource for novelists, I know many people online who employ it as a useful guide for roleplaying games, board games, and just plain intellectual debate.

Throwing out the laws of physics is going to screw up the setting the story occurs in, whether novel, fanfic, game, or thought experiment. and the setting being screwed up is going to be the thing that drags the story down into a farce.

• 

(ed note: Mentor of Arisia is intructing Virgil Samms, who will become the First Lensman)

“And third, you yourself spend highly valuable time and much effort in playing chess. Why do you do it? What do you get out of it?”

“Why, I … uh … mental exercise, I suppose …I like it!”

“Just so. And I am sure that one of your very early philosophers came to the conclusion that a fully competent mind, from a study of one fact or artifact belonging to any given universe, could construct or visualize that universe, from the instant of its creation to its ultimate end?”

“Yes. At least, I have heard the proposition stated, but I have never believed it possible.”

“It is not possible simply because no fully competent mind ever has existed or ever will exist. A mind can become fully competent only by the acquisition of infinite knowledge, which would require infinite time as well as infinite capacity. Our equivalent of your chess, however, is what we call the ‘Visualization of the Cosmic All’. In my visualization a descendant of yours named Clarrissa MacDougall will, in a store called Brenleer’s upon the planet … but no, let us consider a thing nearer at hand and concerning you personally, so that its accuracy will be subject to check. Where you will be and exactly what you will be doing, at some definite time in the future. Five years, let us say?”

“Go ahead. If you can do that you’re good.”

“Five Tellurian calendar years then, from the instant of your passing through the screen of ‘The Hill’ on this present journey, you will be … allow me, please, a moment of thought … you will be in a barber shop not yet built; the address of which is to be fifteen hundred fifteen Twelfth Avenue, Spokane, Washington, North America, Tellus. The barber’s name will be Antonio Carbonero and he will be left-handed. He will be engaged in cutting your hair. Or rather, the actual cutting will have been done and he will be shaving, with a razor trade-marked ‘Jensen-King-Byrd’, the short hairs in front of your left ear. A comparatively small, quadrupedal, grayish-striped entity, of the race called ‘cat’—a young cat, this one will be, and called Thomas, although actually of the female sex—will jump into your lap, addressing you pleasantly in a language with which you yourself are only partially familiar. You call it mewing and purring, I believe?”

“Yes,” the flabbergasted Samms managed to say. “Cats do purr—especially kittens.”

“Ah—very good. Never having met a cat personally, I am gratified at your corroboration of my visualization. This female youth erroneously called Thomas, somewhat careless in computing the elements of her trajectory, will jostle slightly the barber’s elbow with her tail; thus causing him to make a slight incision, approximately three millimeters long, parallel to and just above your left cheekbone. At the precise moment in question, the barber will be applying a styptic pencil to this insignificant wound. This forecast is, I trust, sufficiently detailed so that you will have no difficulty in checking its accuracy or its lack thereof?”

“Detailed! Accuracy!” Samms could scarcely think. “But listen—not that I want to cross you up deliberately, but I’ll tell you now that a man doesn’t like to get sliced by a barber, even such a little nick as that. I’ll remember that address—and the cat—and I’ll never go into the place!”

“Every event does affect the succession of events,” Mentor acknowledged, equably enough. “Except for this interview, you would have been in New Orleans at that time, instead of in Spokane. I have considered every pertinent factor. You will be a busy man. Hence, while you will think of this matter frequently and seriously during the near future, you will have forgotten it in less than five years. You will remember it only at the touch of the astringent, whereupon you will give voice to certain self-derogatory and profane remarks.”

“I ought to,” Samms grinned; a not-too-pleasant grin. He had been appalled by the quality of mind able to do what Mentor had just done; he was now more than appalled by the Arisian’s calm certainty that what he had foretold in such detail would in every detail come to pass. “If, after all this Spokane—let a tiger-striped kitten jump into my lap—let a left-handed Tony Carbonero nick me—uh-uh, Mentor, UH-UH! It I do, I’ll deserve to be called everything I can think of!”

“These that I have mentioned, the gross occurrences, are problems only for inexperienced thinkers.” Mentor paid no attention to Samms’ determination never to enter that shop. “The real difficulties lie in the fine detail, such as the length, mass, and exact place and position of landing, upon apron or floor, of each of your hairs as it is severed. Many factors are involved. Other clients passing by—opening and shutting doors—air currents—sunshine—wind—pressure, temperature, humidity. The exact fashion in which the barber will flick his shears, which in turn depends upon many other factors—what he will have been doing previously, what he will have eaten and drunk, whether or not his home life will have been happy … you little realize, youth, what a priceless opportunity this will be for me to check the accuracy of my visualization. I shall spend many periods upon the problem. I cannot attain perfect accuracy, of course. Ninety nine point nine nines percent, let us say … or perhaps ten nines … is all that I can reasonably expect …”

• 

"But whether or not [the snipers are] using cheat sheets, a shot is not just pulling the trigger — it's factoring in an astronomical number of variables and arriving at a mathematically sound solution, and then using that math to explode somebody else's head."
— Cracked, "5 Weapon Myths You Probably Believe (Thanks to Movies)"

Some people learn by flipping pages. Some people must gain knowledge through pain. Some people study by television. And then there are those who just have to observe...

Most skills take a certain measure of practice to master...unless you are Good with Numbers. Those lucky few can substitute careful examination in place of careful practice, with the same results: success.

Need to make a million-to-one shot to stop the Doomsday Device from exploding the world, but have never even fired a gun? Just run off some mental calculations about your gun's firing speed, friction, gravity, and the slightly-off-kilter scope (how exactly the analyzer knows all those variables is handwaved), and it's a done deal. Need to defeat a jujitsu master? Logically anticipate where his next strike will come from and remain one step ahead. Mental capacity is limitless when the plot is at stake!

If he has time to explain himself, it always sounds something like "If My Calculations Are Correct". Explaining it gives it a chance to fail. Relatedly, two awesomeness analysts don't really need to explain anything to each other, they can do it by Talking Through Technique.

The most common cause of Badass Bookworm, and often results from The Professor having a doctorate in general knowledge rather than any one field. The Clock King can do this thanks to precise attention to detail and patterns. Characters who get to skip the analysis altogether due to some form of copycat power are Power Copying. Exactly What I Aimed At usually comes from this trope. They are most likely screwed if the opponent knows Confusion Fu. The Profiler does this with people. An author may use Super-Detailed Fight Narration to demonstrate that a character possesses this ability.

(ed note: see TV Trope page for list of examples)

• 

A format is a guide for whatever is to come later. It‘s a flight plan for a series. But just like any other kind of flight plan, the slightest error will magnify itself over a period of time if it isn't corrected or compensated for. The errors in a show's original format will repeat themselves until they become so noticeable as to be annoying. Twenty-six repetitions a season make a mistake very hard to live with.

Actually, mistake isn't quite the right word. Let’s say miscalculation instead. That is. something that seems quite workable in the first two or three stories may turn out to be a very rigorous trap by the thirteenth or fourteenth episode.

The transporter room is a good example. It was one of STAR TREK'S best ideas—a teleportation device so that the Captain and crew of the starship could “beam down" to a planet whenever they chose. Thus, the special-effects crew was relieved of the responsibility of having to show either the starship or its shuttlecraft landing on a new planet each week. A golden flicker mixed with a dissolve and an over-dubbed reverberated whine is not only cheaper—it's more versatile and impressive.

Unfortunately the use of the transporter set up conditions of its own that were not foreseen in the initial postulation.

For the transporter to work, the individual had to have a “communicator"—a gold-and-black clamshell device that served as an all-purpose walkie-talkie. The transporter would “lock on” the human being holding the device and “beam” him up.

And that was the miscalculation. If the transporter had been designed for the express purpose (pun intended) of getting our heroes into the story faster, then it also allowed them to get out of it just as quickly.

Any time Captain Kirk got himself into real trouble, all he needed to do was call the Enterprise and holler, “Scotty! Save my ass! and Scotty would beam him up so fast the air would crackle. Knowing that, then there certainly would be no suspense whenever Kirk was captured by the giant Yang-yangs or the Creeping Blorch. Both he and we knew that it wasn't permanent.

Therefore, one of three things had to happen to keep Kirk in a story where he was personally menaced:

He would run into aliens of such superior ability that they could nullify his transporter beam. Thus he got captured.

He would run into aliens of such inferior ability that they would knock him over the head and take his communicator away from him without knowing what it was. Again, he got captured.

Or—contact between the Captain and the Enterprise would be cut off by some arbitrary force created by the writer for this specific purpose, thus trapping Kirk in the story until contact could be restored—usually not until just before the last commercial.

Individually, any one of these alternatives might have been part of a good story—indeed, they all were, as witness “The Squire of Gothos,” “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” and “Errand of Mercy,” respectively.

However, by the time we get to the fifth or sixth repetition—“The Apple," “Bread and Circuses,” “A Private Little War," “The Gamesters of Triskelion," “A Piece of the Action," “The Omega Glory," “Spectre of the Gun." “The Paradise Syndrome," and “Plato's Stepchildren"—the cumulative effect is the focusing of attention on the mechanism used to prevent Kirk from being rescued. We become aware of the format’s degeneration into formula. We begin to realize that “Plato's Stepchildren" is the same story as “The Gamesters of Triskelion"; the only difference is in the details. We've become too familiar with the device for it to be effective as a dramatic tool any more—now it's a cliché.

The extreme use of any device will wear it out (literary or otherwise). The rapid degeneration of this particular element of the STAR TREK format only points up which writers were (at that point in their scripts) creatively bankrupt. Rather than looking for another way to solve the problem, they fell back on old tricks. Pretty soon, that same old trick got boring.

The real answer, of course, was simply to avoid situations or stories that required Kirk to be overpowered. Gene Roddenberry says about writing in general: “Every story starts with a need. A need for something to happen or something not to happen. That need must be closely and deeply associated with the main character. Perhaps he needs a thousand dollars to pay off a gambling debt to keep the mob from killing him. Or perhaps he needs not to have himself placed in the electric chair tonight at 12:01 A.M. and the switch pulled which will execute him for a murder he never committed. Whatever need you propound for the character in your story, it is absolutely necessary that that need get more and more pressing, also more and more difficult to fulfill, as the story progresses. In a good story, you finally get the reader or viewer clawing at the pages or the screen in his anxiety to get fulfillment since he has become the hero and feels all the jeopardy, frustration, and agony which is building and building toward the story climax. When the need is resolved in the story climax, the reader or viewer feels fulfillment."

Now, returning to the contention that the real answer was not to let Captain Kirk be placed in positions where he would be overpowered. To do so once is a valid story. To do so twice might even be valid. To do it more than that, you begin to undermine the character of Captain Kirk—what kind of a Captain is this anyway? He keeps letting himself get clonked on the head and captured. You'd think he'd learn.

The writers that let Captain Kirk continue to be trapped this way were creating an artificial need. Remember the artificial excitement of having the actors fall out of their chairs while the camera was shaken?—this is the same kind of thing, but a little more sophisticated. Oh, it's adventure all right, but it isn't real drama.

Gene said that the need must be “closely and deeply associated with the main character." Trapping a character into a situation and asking him to solve it does not fulfill this requirement—being in a situation does not mean that the character will automatically care about it “closely and deeply.” In such a situation, the hero's primary need is to escape. not to solve the problems of anyone else. But a hasty writer will “solve” this problem by arbitrarily constructing a white rat's puzzle box test: Captain Kirk must solve the problem posed in order to win his reward, i.e., escape.

These white-rat puzzle-box stories are the illegitimate offspring of the forced marriage of two extremely different forms: the hero- in-danger story and the “Mary Worth" story.

You see, as it's set up, the Enterprise IS a cosmic “Mary Worth," meddling her way across the galaxy, solving problems as she goes. But drama—real drama—requires that the hero be forced to make a decision, an important decision. Unfortunately, to many writers that means that the hero must be placed in danger. Period. Thus, in the typical story, the hero is trapped into somebody else's problem (on STAR TREK, a cultural one) and must solve it to escape.

The result is a series of puzzle-box episodes. Unfortunately, these kind of stories are generally unimportant ones. We don't really care about them. We know the hero will escape—that's why he's the hero. Thus our only reason for watching the show is to see how he does it. Ho-hum. Unless the situation is particularly good, or the escape is particularly imaginative (a la “Mission: Impossible") it's just so much chocolate pudding for the mind. Instead of “The End," the film might just as well say, “So what?"

• 

Steampunk is now a familiar SF subgenre, set in a retro-futuristic vision broadly inspired by Verne and Wells. Among other things it requires a special kind of magitech, really magi-science, with things like aether ships.

Surely there is now a place for a retro-future based on the vision of 50 years ago (1957), on the verge of the actual historical space age. I will call this Rocketpunk.*

*I haven't googled it, but surely I'm not the first to have this idea, including the term.

Rocketpunk differs from steampunk in one fundamentally important way — Rocketpunk can use (largely) real science and tech — much of it the basic tech we still assume. The two main differences are:

1) Optimistic performance and operating assumptions, especially cost. The rocketpunk chemful SSTO shuttle, catapult-launched, looks like the never-flown Mach 3 Navaho cruise missile, and flies daily except in hurricane season.

It costs around $10 million to build, and a round-trip ticket to the orbital station costs perhaps $1000 (but pre-inflation dollars; a steak dinner in autoheat package probably costs $1.95).

2) Pessimistic (indeed, negative-handwaved) electronic assumptions, especially cyber-anything. The ship's computer takes up the deck below the astrogation compartment, and combines the power of my old TI-35 programmable calculator with vastly slower processing speed and incredibly cumbersome I/O.

Astrogators use slide rules for their real work; once you've roughed out a course you feed it into the computer and refine your flight plan to the second.

Everyone does not see everything in space, because your tracking telescopes require human watch standers who get tired and miss things. At most you may be able to review photo plates with blink comparators to back-track contacts.

Higher performance ships use fission drive, usually just called atomic drive — the reactor sometimes called a pile. Many smaller military ships are configured for atmosphere — also looking rather like the Navaho — and can fly directly from planet surface to planet surface. These ships typically have crews from about three men (very occasionally women!) to a dozen or so, and are about the size of large aircraft — hence the B-36 in Spaaaaace!

The Solar Guard Cruiser Polaris, on the Worked Example page of Winch's site, is pretty much a classic rocketpunk ship. In fact, his whole Atomic Rockets site — as the name suggests — sort of does double duty as a summary of current best information and a rocketpunk site.

That's the charm of rocketpunk — it's Realistic^tm technology, apart from the negative-handwaved electronics, but wonderfully naive about the devils in the details.

I think rocketpunk done today has to accept the real Solar System — alas, no thalassic or steamy-tropical Venus, or canals on Mars, but the Mars we know today goes perfectly comfortably with domed colonies, surface crawlers, and the first stages of a terraforming project.

And surely rocketpunk can have cool space battles, though tending to be missile-dominant — it's too late for heat rays (1898), and too early for lasers (1960).

• 

(ed note: More than any other story I have read, this captures the essence of what Atomic Rockets means to me. )

      It was a tough day for Garver when Tomaszewski lifted the Timurlane off Canalopolis (Mars) for Ganymede. What made it tougher was the realization that he was not going along this time (because after the accident, the captain did not want a jetman with a prosthetic hand). He loved every sleek line of that ship, and let his eyes take them in as her gantry moved away and left her standing alone and aloof on the pad.
     Garver knew what was going on aboard. Minus-15 minutes, red-green light, crew at flight stations, locks closed.
     At X-2 minutes, the siren on the tower shrieked, and red lights winked around the perimeter of the pad. Aboard the Timurlane, they were strapping down, the control panels were switched to “FLY,” the gyros were locked in.
     He leaned on the rail and went through the entire pre-flight procedure. When he saw the ground tackle drop at X-30 seconds, he began his own count-down. He was slow; when he reached X-6 seconds, he saw flame burst from the stern of the ship.
     She rose, the colorful Martian desert hills falling away from her. The thundering rumble of her departure echoed back from the red sands, and the trail began to twist as winds caught it.

---

     The regular routine of the Canalopolis Spaceport went on. Each day, ships would thunder in from the far planets, bringing heavy metals from the asteroids, chemical products from Venus, machinery and cloth from Terra, minerals from Ganymede and Callisto, and radioactives from Luna. They stood tall in their gantries while cargo lifts and cranes loaded them with Martian steel from her iron-oxide deserts. There was a ceaseless procession of ships, the tall freighters, the rotund liners, the stubby ore ships, and the sleek military vessels of Terra.

---

• 

     “All personnel stand by!” the loud-speaker on the wall cut in. “Approaching ship in emergency!”
     They moved in a hurry. The bar cleared in thirty seconds. Although the League building was a good five miles from the nearest landing area, that meant nothing to a ship dropping out of the sky.
     Picking a spot near a deep irrigation ditch on the edge of the building’s lawn, they turned to watch the sky. People were scurrying everywhere. The non-spacemen were making for the underground shelters. The ground crews and flight crews who had lived around spaceships longer, merely took refuge under trucks, behind walls, or next to holes in the red soil.
     “Who’s due in?” Garver asked.
     “Don’t know,” Angus replied, making cups of his hands and scanning the sky near the zenith.
     Sunlight glinted off something high in the Martian sky. “There!” Garver picked it up with his eyes and followed it.
     A ship took form against the purple background. It grew as it fell. Then her jets fired with a flash of blinding white. When she began to hover about three miles up, McBee exclaimed, “That’s the Fafnir’s paint design! Vanderhoff must be having trouble. No wonder; she’s an old ship.”
     They heard the rumble of her jets a few seconds later, then the bulk of the League building hid the remaining thousand feet of her descent. The fluttery rumble died, and there was no explosion.
     “He got her down,” Garver breathed.
     “Aye, let’s go back to our drinks.”

---

     The League steward merely slipped him a sheet of paper, the standard job-offer form, with its brief message:

     Ship: S. S. Fafnir
     Commander: Captain P. R. Vanderhoff, F. T.
     Location: Landing stage 14, Canalopolis Spaceport
     Job Description: Chief jetman and power officer.

     Thirty minutes later, he was standing at the bottom of a gantry crane and looking up at a two-hundred-forty-foot pencil of power-packed metal. The dorsal fin displayed the words: S. S. Fafnir, Raketenflugplatz für Raumschiffahrt (rocket landing place for space shipping), Deutschland, Terra. One of the Ring Class, Garver thought. Somebody had undoubtedly misspelled her name on the commissioning papers years ago, but that was not uncommon; there was a ship on the Luna shuttle named Jabberwack.

(ed note: actually, no. "Fafner" was the way Wagner misspelled it in Der Ring des Nibelungen, in Norse mythology it is spelled Fáfnir)

     The Ring Class was a group of good ships, sound and well-built with precision parts made only as the Germans can make them, but old. The retracting landing jack on her ventral side dated her as well as the sharp-angled shape of her fins and landing wings. (retractable landing jack because the ship uses aerobraking. Extended jack would ruin aerodynamics and be burnt off by friction) Her hull was pocked and dented slightly, but the black, white, and red paint design had only been scorched once.
     They were unloading cargo from the upper locks. Garver waited for the freight lift to come down, then rode back up.

• 

---

• 

     The power room “down under” was familiar. In this class of ships, the fission pile and jets were below with the pile controls and fuel pumps in the power room. The tanks, holding more than sixty tons of fuel, were above him and “forward.” The layout of the Ring Class power rooms was orderly and functional.
     But the Fafnir’s power room was a mess. Her floor plates were buckled with heat. The pile controls were damaged, out of adjustment, or just out of commission — period. The Number-Four fuel pump was frozen and leaking lubricant. But the tanks were tight as well as the lines, and the electrical system seemed to be in fair shape.
     All the tools needed to put things in working order were racked or around the rack. There was a hoist in the overhead. The ship could not lift in her present condition, but Garver could make her fly again.
     The place was full of smells that Garver didn’t recognize at first. Then, through the reek of oil and lubricants and scorched paint, he smelled something new. It wasn’t pleasant; the smell of cooked flesh was most prevalent around the jetman’s couch.
     Garver knew why Vanderhoff needed a new jetman.
     The blowers still worked, so Garver started clearing the air. He opened the hatches to let in light and air, then proceeded to pick up around the place. He’d just hung the remains of the acceleration pad out the hatch when Vanderhoff called him to come forward.
     The control room was roomy and comfortable. In her earlier days, the Fafnir had been a luxury ship, carrying a full crew of eight as well as passengers. Vanderhoff had converted her to a cargo ship, for Garver had noticed that three of the passenger decks below had been stripped for use as cargo spaces. As a free trader, Vanderhoff had little use for passengers. Cargo was more profitable — providing the planetary markets did not fluctuate too much while the ship was between them.
     There were only two couches. Into the remaining space, the skipper had put a good deal of surplus Space Force gear: a ballistic computer, a prismatic astrostat, a small differential and integral calculator, and a precision novant (??).

(ed note: Michael Hutson says "At least by etymology, a novant in this context would mean a sextant, only designed to read up to ninety degree angles instead of sixty." Makes sense to me. Frame of sextant was 60° angle or 1/6^th of a circle. Latin for "one sixth" is "sextāns". Latin for "ninety" is "nonaginta")

There was a large desk around one quarter of the compartment. Vanderhoff was seated at this, filling paper with figures and noting results in little black notebooks. He finally turned around, slamming a notebook as he did so.
     “How much profit on the load?” Garver inquired.
     “Damn little! Two ships with identical loads were in here three days before me. The demand was yanked down on me,” Vanderhoff complained. He pointed down. “Can you fix this tub up?”

---

     “What happened?”
     There was silence for a moment as Vanderhoff blew smoke. “O’Conner knew, but he’ll never tell us. I heard him yell that there was trouble aft before he went.”
     “Know the cause?”
     “Cause? ” Vanderhoff exploded. “This tub’s fourteen years old! That’s the cause!” He quieted down quickly and took several short puffs on his cigarette. “The only thing that holds this bucket together is the mortgage. In fact, the mortgage is so large it affects the mass-ratio!” He broke off and picked up a sheet of paper. “Still want to sign?”

(ed note: The captain is desperate, no other jetman wants to fly on a space-going junkheap, so even a jetman with a prosthetic hand will be hired)

---

     “Garver, this is Winch Astrabadi — ” Vanderhoff began. )
     “W. Winchell Astrabadi!” Winch corrected him, rolling down his sleeves.

(ed note: That character immediately caught my attention, since he has my name. Which is very rare, "Winchell" is usually a last name, never a first name. Not bad for an atomic rocket story written before I was born. Though I do find it a bit creepy when I read this story and keep seeing my name. I've been told that the same character appears in the semi-sequel story Starship Through Space)

     Vanderhoff merely glowered. “Winch Astrabadi,” he went on. “Sneak-current boy (electronics man) aboard. Winch, this is Rod Garver, our new jetman.”
     Winch stretched out his hand and grinned. “Glad to meetcha!”

---

     Winch climbed the ladder again until his head was in the compartment above. “Come on, Cosmo, boy. Time for chow! Easy now; you’re not in free fall!” He returned with a rangy yellow tomcat in his arms. Petting the mascot, he went on, “Cosmo, meet Jetman Garver.”
     Cosmo merely looked disdainfully at the new member of the crew until Garver reached out and rubbed him under the chin. The cat stuck his jaw out and enjoyed it. Garver was now on temporary probation.
     As Vanderhoff started down the ladder. Garver looked around. “Where’s the rest of the crew?” he asked.
     Winch looked at him impatiently. “You’re thinking we maybe need a bigger crew? The Fafnir ain’t no liner!”
     Which was true. Garver then realized. Vanderhoff, in the interest of cutting costs, had cut the crew to the bone. The skipper probably did his own piloting, all the astrogation, and handled the control room jetman’s job as well. Being “sneak-current” man, Winch undoubtedly took care of communications, dovar (doppler radar) and radar, and electronic control; which left Garver with the job of chief jetman, power officer, air officer, maintenance officer, and ship electrician.

(ed note: larger crews would include a cargomaster and a medic)

     Quite a job. Jetman on the Fafnir called for a jack-of-all-trades. With his experience, he could handle it.

---

     “Did it ever occur to ye, mon, why Vanderhoff signed you on?”
     Garver hadn’t thought about it.
     “I hate to be brutal about it,” Angus sighed, “but I take it you know what happened to O’Conner, his former jetman?”
     Garver told him he’d seen the power room.
     “Mon, you’re the only one he could get for the job. Everyone else turned it down flat in the dispatch room.” Angus lit his pipe, making quite a ceremony of it, then went on, “The Fafnir’s a coffin with jets. O’Conner’s the second jetman Vanderhoff’s lost. Ridin’ the Fafnir’s like sittin’ on an armed fission bomb, mon!”

---

• 

     He went to work on the Fafnir’s power room with a vengeance. It had been years since he’d had his hands dirty in a power room, and he enjoyed it immensely. It was his work, and he liked his work; he always had. Within a week, he had the floor plates back in and the shielding tight. He put a coat of paint over the whole works and installed a new pad on the acceleration cot. When he got to the fuel pumps, he had trouble. His (prosthetic) left hand simply did not have the necessary strength, but he jury-rigged a number of hasty gadgets and got the bad pump unfrozen. The bearings and the impeller were shot, and he couldn’t find new bearings. He got away with makeshift ones by filing and cutting and filling until they worked. Over in the spaceport’s graveyard he scrounged other parts until he had enough to rebuild the entire pump.
     Vanderhoff was surprised one night when he came aboard after some papers to find Garver still in the power room. He dropped through the hatch and looked around. Garver was tightening lug nuts on the pump casing.
     “Say, this looks good, Garv,” the skipper commented.
     Garver grunted a few times as he tightened the last lug, then racked the wrench and sat down at the couch. “Skipper, a neat power room is just as important as a clean control room.”
     “I wish you’d been aboard for the last few years,” Vanderhoff sighed. “A man like you is hard to find on what I can offer.” He looked around. “How’s it coming?”
     “Can’t complain. I couldn’t find a lot of parts, but I made out O.K. anyway”
     “How’d you manage?”
     Garver grinned and wiped his hands on a piece of waste. “You’ve heard of the old jetman’s rules of thumb? If you can’t buy it, borrow it. If you can’t borrow it, steal it. If it doesn’t fit, force it. If you’ve got to hide it, paint it.” He turned to a group of controls over the couch. “You’re just in time to watch me check out the fuel pumps.”
     He kicked a switch. A low whine came from one of the pumps and rose up the scale. The power room throbbed and shook as the other three pumps joined it. As the pump pressure backed up against the injector valves, Garver checked meter readings then turned four knobs. The scream of the pumps changed key as the valves opened and allowed the test fuel, water, to pour down through the cold pile and out through the jet into the splash pit.

---

     In the middle of the third week, Garver had the power room in shape to fly again and turned his efforts to the rest of the ship. In spite of what he said, his heart was in his work and he did not notice the passage of time at all. He ran over every inch of the Fafnir’s two hundred forty feet (author's wooden model was more like 303 feet), checking this and fixing that. He did not frankly see why Angus had called her a flying coffin. For her fourteen years, she was in good shape. She had been well-built by the successors of the hands who had developed the V-2.

---

     On lift day, Garver was up at dawn. He was not sure about the response time of the rod control in the “firebox,” the atomic pile. He checked it carefully, hoping the ship wouldn’t blow when he pulled the rods and opened the valves.

(ed note: in nuclear power reactors, the reactor is powered up by pulling control rods out of the reactor (the atomic pile). The author had no way of knowing that nuclear rockets would be powered up by rotating control drums in place inside the reactor)

• 

     He grew more nervous as the day wore on. Twice he checked the cargo hold to make sure their load of steel was fastened securely. Going outside, he went over the ground tackle, making sure the magnetic clamps would not foul when they were dropped at X-30 seconds.
     It was X-45 minutes when he started up the gantry lift again and met Vanderhoff at the lock. “Secured below?” the stocky little Dutchman asked.
     Garver glanced down at the tarmac two hundred feet below. The splash pit was filling with water, and the ground crews were picking up around the base of the gantry crane. “All secure, skipper.”
     Contemplating the white sides of the ship, Vanderhoff remarked, “Well, will she lift, Garv? ”
     “I hope so.”
     “Aren’t you sure?”
     “I’ve done my best, that’s all I know. It can lift if it feels like it.”
     At minus-30 minutes, Garver saluted the jets in accordance with old tradition, then stepped into the lock ahead of Vanderhoff. Inside, the skipper turned to him. “Seal her up, Garv. Let’s take our flight stations.”
     Down in his power room, Garver made a series of hasty, last-minute inspections. He was nervous with that gritting tension of anxiety. His stomach was somewhere between his neck and lower ribs, and it was hard and mighty uncomfortable. Minutes ticked away slowly, each dragging into the next.
     At minus-15, he saw the red-green light wink on his board — prepare for lifting. Outside, he heard the siren shriek, clearing the ground crew from the area. There was a rumble as the gantry began to move out of the way.
     In control, Vanderhoff started the gyros at minus-12 on the button, and Garver began to change the ship’s atmosphere to the oxy-helium space mix.
     “All stations report!” Vanderhoff’s voice bellowed over the bull horn. Garver climbed onto his cot and picked up his throat mike. “Engineering secure! ”
     “ Electronics secure!” came Winch’s voice from the electronics compartment where he would remain until taking his couch in the control room at minus-2.
     “Preliminary circuit checks!” the skipper ordered.
     Putting his board on TEST, Garver ran a quick check of his power-room circuits. “Power room! Circuits clear and secure!”
     “ Electronics ready!”
     “Power room, energize your firebox!” Vanderhoff snapped.
     Carefully, very carefully, Garver manipulated the pile controls, withdrawing the rods a bit at a time until the pile had come up to pre-lift heat. “Firebox hot!”
     He heard nothing more as he watched his indicators. The power room was filled with small noises which were amplified by Garver in his tension. The temperature reached a plateau and leveled; the neutron count held steady.
     “Minus-5 minutes! All hands to lift stations! ”
     Graver adjusted his straps and laid his head back on its rest, his eyes on the panel overhead.
     “All boards clear to FLY!”
     Garver felt out the switch on his panel and threw it without looking, knowing by feel that it was the one to put his board onto the active circuits. His left hand felt out the pump switches. The adrenalin in his blood stream made his heart pound against his ribs.
     The green light on his board winked out, leaving only the red. Minus-2 minutes. “Stand by for lift!”
     The room was cool, but the sweat stood out on his forehead. He steadied his hands over the board. He kept thinking of what had happened in this power room before he took over.
     “Minus-1 minute! Start the pumps!”
     He nudged four switches, and the power room was filled with the incredible noise of the pumps. He checked back-pressures as the needles climbed out of the red segments of the dials.
     “Forty-five seconds!” The pumps were up to speed and the fuel pressure normal.
     “Minus-30 seconds!” The flick of a switch dropped the magnetic clamps of the ground tackle. The Fafnir was now free to lift.
     “Steady, now ... steady,” Garver soothed over the scream of the pumps.
     “Minus-20 ... 19 ... 18 ... 17 . . . 16—”
     “Come on, baby! We’re going home!” he whispered to the heart of the Fafnir.
     “10 ... 9 ... 8 ... 7—”
     He didn’t pray; it seemed useless against the radioactive fire below him. The ship was suddenly a straining entity of its own instead of a complacent fabrication of metal.
     “Five!” He threw a switch. A relay whacked closed.
     “Four!” Automatic controls, now out of Garver’s jurisdiction, raised the firebox temperature.
     “Three!” Another relay threw. The tank valves snapped open.
     “Two!” The pumps took up the load and shifted into main stage.
     “One!” Lights winked solid green across his board.
     “UP SHIP!”
     Final valves flipped open. The pumps forced the fuel. The Fafnir strained and broke ground, balancing incredulously on a slim pillar of fire.
     It was lifting; Garver could feel it, and he knew by feel. He was flattened into his cushions, and the skin of his face was drawn and tight across his nose. It was a labor to breathe. Vanderhoff was using an economical high-g lift.
     It felt good. He was going back into space again, back to Terra. He was going to miss this.
     The thundering subsonics of the jet faded out after a painfully long time, and Garver felt better although he was still pinned down by acceleration. The subsonics always made him feel queasy and light-headed.
     Everything suddenly stopped. Garver’s stomach hit his ribs. A green light announced, “Cut-off.” The power room returned to quiet as Garver felt his weight drop to nothing. It made him whoozy for a moment; he was going to have to take a bit to get his space legs back.
     “Hello, power room!”
     “O.K., control!”
     “Ship is in free flight. Secure your power room.”
     Garver grinned. “Roger!” A swipe of his hand across the panel knocked the switches to “OFF.” From the port, he could see that the landing jack had retracted all right. He checked at all four bulging ports, floating to each in turn to see if the external assemblies on the ship were all right.
     Abaft, the ruddy bulge of Mars was receding slowly. Her canals stood out like inked lines. He could pick out Strymon, Cocytus, Triton, and Lethes as they rounded the girth of the planet. Hellas was brilliant orange while the north polar cap gleamed pure white. In the midst of the red sands, Syrtis Major’s splotch of green stood out in stark contrast. Mars was pretty, all right, but Terra is the prettiest sight to any spaceman.
     He checked the power room once more, set the air temperature, checked the line voltage on the ship’s generator, and put the smoke filter on the control room blowers. Then he went forward.
     Vanderhoff was running trajectory fixes from dovar data. Garver lit up a cigarette and waited, knowing better than to interrupt a skipper in the middle of a trajectory problem.

---

• 

     Distances are big in space, and it takes a long time to get anywhere. Once a spaceship is in orbit, it is like a shell in flight; it will arrive at the other end of its trajectory with no further application of force necessary. So there is nothing for a crew to do but eat, sleep, make occasional checks of the equipment and course, and do routine maintenance. None of this takes much time, which is one reason why interplanetary travel is not for the man who gets bored easily.
     The crew of the Fafnir was used to it. They were spacemen, not tourists. They cat-napped off and on during the ship’s “day,” ate when they felt like it, talked, played cards, worked over their equipment, and spent a short time each day exercising with sets of springs to keep their muscles in shape. Two hundred forty-nine days in free fall will cause muscles to deteriorate, and they didn’t want to learn how to walk in a g-field all over again. (249 days is 8.3 months, which is approximately the duration of a Mars-Terra Hohmann transfer)
     Two months out from Mars, they were all getting well into the rut. Garver had read a lot of the books in the ship’s microfilm library, but went back and read them again just for something to do. Vanderhoff was writing up the log one “day” in the wardroom aft of control as Garver was finishing up “Men and Space,” by Groswald, for the third time. His arm around a safety line anchored to a bulkhead cleat, Winch was trying to get some sleep hanging in midair.
     Garver had just projected the last page when Cosmo, who was prowling around, found his rubber ball. A cat playing with a rubber ball is amusing to begin with, but put both the cat and bail in a zero-g field, and it becomes hysterical. Cat and ball went sailing about in all directions, rebounding off overhead, deck, and bulkheads. Cosmo turned flips in midair to get his feet “down” for landing. At times, the ball would hover in the center of the wardroom, spinning lazily on an axis, only to be disturbed by the flying handful of fur and claws. Cosmo was good; he had the knack of impaling the soft ball on his claws, thus preventing it from sailing off in some direction dictated by the vectors of a slashing cat’s paw.
     Garver and the skipper momen- tarily forgot what they were doing and watched Cosmo in his act. It was a welcome break in the monotony. The cat kept it up until he tired, then curled up in a ball about a stanchion to give itself a bath.
     “Cats are fine people,” Vanderhoff remarked, closing the log and lighting a cigarette.
     Garver gave up too and snapped off the viewer. He took the cigarette the skipper offered him. “You know, skipper, that display of Cosmo’s helps prove my theory about cats being an extraterrestrial race.”
     “You don’t think they’re native to Terra?” Vanderhoff asked in bewilderment.
     “Right. Look, they’re too well-adapted to spaceships, free-fall, and changing accelerations. They never get their directions mixed up; they always know which way is ‘down,’ ” Garver explained with a smile. “I think Cosmo’s ancestors either conquered space, or were symbiotes of a race who did.”
     “Tigers and leopards as well?” Vanderhoff asked. “ Same family.”
     “Yeah, but they’re merely mutations of the original strain, Felis domestica," the jetman went on, tongue in cheek.
     “I don’t agree with you,” the skipper said, watching Cosmo give himself a cleaning job. “I will admit they’re perfectly adapted for space travel. Cosmo keeps himself clean and does a good job keeping the ship the same way. Why, I remember once when we lifted from Terra with a load of wheat for Luna. Had rats. Space knows how they got aboard, but Cosmo —”

---

     “You could fix the landing dovar,” the skipper suggested. “It hunts.”
     “That’s my fault when the line voltage wanders with a load on it?” Winch asked in a complaining tone. “That’s out of my jurisdiction. Chew out Garver. The generator’s his plaything!”
     “What’s the matter?” Garver cut in. “Don’t you have any voltage regulators? ”
     “Certainly! You think I am not on the stick? My job begins where I take the juice off the line, chum. The fact that it’s four-hundred-cycle stuff is bad enough, but ninety jolts where I should be getting one hundred seventeen is too much!”
     “You’re smart,” Garver told him. “You’re an electronics man. Figure out a way to get what you want. I do the best I can, and the generator’s just not up to it.”

---

     Garver had flipped on the microfilm projector again, but Vanderhoff interrupted his reading. “What’s wrong with the generator, Garv?”
     Flipping off the projector to save juice, Garver sighed.
     “It’s a Red Queen’s race — just like the rest of the ship.”
     “What’s Lewis Carroll got to do with it? Don’t tell me he’s aboard, too?”
     The captain’s sense of humor was going early on this trip, Garver noted. “You’ve got to run like hell to keep this ship in spacing shape at all, and you’ve got to run twice that fast to make any improvements,” the jetman explained. “Lousy parody, but the generator’s too small. It was adequate once, like some other things aboard, but you’ve put a lot of electronic gear in this bucket. The generator can’t handle the demand.”
     “Can you do anything about it?” Vanderhoff wondered.
     “Nope.” Cosmo’s ball drifted in front of Garver, so he pocketed it, adding, “I’d suggest a new and bigger one when we get Earthside.”
     The skipper heaved a sigh. “ Can’t do it.”
     “How come?” Garver asked. “I can find one cheap. You’ll be able to afford it if you make a fair profit on this load, won’t you? ”
     Nodding, the skipper replied sadly, “Yes, I’ll make a profit, but it won’t pull me out of debt. I’ve been caught too many times by falling markets, and I’m just too far in to ever think about getting out. Always an hour late and a solar short.” Vanderhoff thought back to the many times he’d been forced to sell his cargo at a loss because of a falling market. Whereas being a free trader, picking your own cargo, going where you want, commanding your own ship, all had their points, the chance that you might lose your shirt at the end of the trip was extremely sobering.

---

     It was a welcome sight when Terra grew close enough to appear as a disk in the ports. Garver grew impatient as the days seemed to stretch out. Winch had no trouble locating Terra five times daily now, and within a week, he was picking up the dovar beacons. The Fafnir finally streaked across the orbit of Luna, gaining speed as Terra’s field began to take effect. Luna was in opposition to the ship at the time, so Winch did not try to raise Diana Spaceport for astrogational information. But the dovar beacon on Asgard, Terra’s space station, came back strong when the electronics man triggered it, and the astrographical section there furnished him with the latest meteor counts and ionosphere data.
     The dovar beat began to climb up the scale as Terra’s field deepened and they picked up speed. Dovar, sometimes known as doppler radar, used radar’s principle of bouncing high-frequency radio waves off an object. But dovar, as it was adapted for spaceships, had one very important difference. Radar waves from a spaceship moving at very high velocities return to the radar set with a different frequency. Since it is nothing more than a standard doppler effect, the relative velocities of the spaceship and the body can be computed, just as it is possible to figure the speed of a passing train by the difference in the sound of the whistle. Thus, Doppler Velocity and Ranging, or dovar for short, could give velocity data as well as range by the mere expedient of comparing or “beating” the frequency of the returning wave against that of the transmitted original.
     During the initial phases of the approach, Garver spent his time in the power room. He was worried about those pumps, but he could do nothing until he had parts. He checked and re-checked. With Terra’s tremendously powerful gravitational field, going in and out of the planet was real work for any drive system. He just wanted to make sure the ship could fight its way down through that field and land in one piece.
     When the time came for the landing briefing, Garver went forward to control. Winch was calmly perched on the ladder to his compartment with Cosmo curled up in his lap. Garver didn’t say anything as the skipper was working with the astrogational computers again. When Vanderhoff straightened up and went to write in the log, Garver knew it was all right to speak. “How close are we now?”
     “Thirty- thousand miles, more or less,” Winch shrugged. “Close enough to see, at any rate. That I like.”

---

     “Sure does,” Winch observed, nodding, “Lemme bum a weed.” Garver fished one out and pitched it at him. The electronics man struck a match, waved it to keep it going, managed to light the cigarette, then held the match still. It went out; there can be no convection currents where there is no gravity.

---

• 

     “ All right,” Vanderhoff sighed and turned around. “How about it, Garv? Power plant ready?”
     Garver decided not to worry the skipper by mentioning the pumps. There was a good chance they’d hold, anyway, but Garver didn’t know for how long. “Secure below, skipper.”
     “How about the gyros? The gears looked pretty dry three days ago.”
     “I helped Garv put some oil on them yesterday,” Winch remarked.
     “Is all your gear in shape?” Vanderhoff asked. When Winch and Garver nodded, he went on, “O.K., we’ll go in with four normal braking ellipses. First pass at one hundred fifty miles. Take us about ten hours to kill enough velocity to get into the atmosphere proper. I’ll make a stall-and-fire landing. Garv, I want you to have those pumps up to speed when she pays-off.
     That was old stuff to Garver. “Right, skipper.”
     From the power room port, Garver watched Terra approach on the first pass. The bulge of the planet seemed to flatten out. The sunset line was right below, cutting through Siberia, across Japan, then south through the Pacific Ocean. Just the eastern tip of Australia was in sunlight. As he watched, the terminator disappeared around the bulge of the planet. They were having a typhoon around the Marshall Islands below. The clouds were piled up like cotton in the big low-pressure area. The Fafnir was in a trajectory canted about fifty degrees to the equator, swinging southeast across the Pacific. The perigee of her first pass would occur at the high-noon meridian over the South Pacific.
     There was a creak in the hull. The wings were beginning to gain a little lift in the rarefied upper atmosphere. Garver checked the skin temperature. It was high, but not bad.
     The ship was suddenly parallel to the surface below and tearing along at a terrific clip. The wings were really lifting now; Garver could feel himself being pulled toward the section of the power room which was “down” with respect to Terra.
     Then the surface began to drop away slowly, and he knew the ship had passed perigee. She was on her way out now along an elliptical trajectory, but her velocity was far below that of escape. She’d swing back for another pass in a few hours.
     He watched the coast of South America come into view, then went back and checked the fuel-line connections. He was far too worried about getting the ship down to be aesthetic and watch Terra go by. It was beautiful, sure, but he wished he were down on the ground now instead of tearing around in the upper atmosphere.
     Anybody can get a spaceship off the ground, but it takes an incredible combination of guts, co-ordination, fast reflexes, and high math to get one back — at a specific place. Berthing a spaceship on a planet is somewhat like riding around a merry-go-round on a coaster bike. The problem is to get on the merry-go-round with a load of eggs at one particular, predesignated place. This is merely a two-dimensional problem involving the essential vectors; bringing the Fafnir in was a three-dimensional problem of the same general type — with a few more variables.
     The ground dovar stations at Congreve Field, Ryhnin Spaceport, White Sands Spaceport, and Santa Barbara Spaceport in Brazil were tracking her. Their electronic eyes watched her as she went around and around the globe. The Asgard space station was also following the Fafnir’s beacon. All the information was being collected at White Sands and fed into the computers there. In the ship, Astrabadi was making pin-point fixes by bouncing dovar off Asgard’s beacon as well as the various spaceport beacons. It was a double-check system working from both ends.
     Hitting a thousand square-feet of concrete gently and precisely from several hundred miles in outer space is no mean trick. Human reactions are too slow and too inaccurate. The great-great-grandson of the GCA aircraft landing system was getting set to take over the final phase. As the Fafnir came in on her approach, five stations around White Sands picked her up on their long-range screens and began bouncing their microwaves off her hull. Their individual azimuth, elevation, range, and doppler beat data were going into the master computer and landing control system at White Sands.
     In case of failure of the ship’s automatic equipment, White Sands was relaying the information from the computer up to the ship by telemetering. Vanderhoff had presentations on his control panel showing the ship’s altitude, approach speed, and drift.
     “Winch! Let’s go!” Vanderhoff yelled up the hatch. As Winch sailed through it, the skipper stretched out on his cot and strapped in. He swung the switch panel over him and depressed the intercom button. “Power room! Stand by to bring her down! ”
     “Roger,” Garver’s voice came back. “Firebox hot! Standing by to start pumps on command!”
     Winch finished strapping down, put on his earphones, and threw a switch. “White Sands Control, White Sands Control, this is Spaceship Fafnir on landing approach. By for you. Over.” The loud-speaker in the bulkhead rasped, “Fafnir, this is White Sands Control. Two-degrees drift north of the groove. Your beacon is S-9 and your path is cleared. White Sands by.”
     Vanderhoff lay back and watched the scopes and meters in the panel above his head. There was nothing he could do about the drift until he fired. The Fafnir was now about fifty-five miles up, ripping horizontally through the upper atmosphere and losing altitude. It was Vanderhoff’s job to judge all factors correctly, navigate by White Sands’ instructions, pull the nose up, and stall out over White Sands, killing the ship’s kinetic energy.
     He gave the crew the red light. “Fafnir, this is White Sands Control. Give us a count down so we can check our switching circuits. Over.”
     “ Roger,” Winch replied and turned his head so he could see the chronometer. “Five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... woof! Over.”
     “Thank you, Fafnir. Stand by to synch dovar.”
     Winch closed his dovar gating circuits and waited for the pulse from the ground to put his system in synchronization. The little pip finally danced momentarily on the face of a scope. “White Sands, Fafnir’s dovar system in synch. By for you.”
     It was all a matter of waiting now. The red second hand crept around the clock dial as Vanderhoff watched. He was flying the ship by the seat of his pants. He began to sweat, although the control room was cool.
     He watched the pip of light which marked the White Sands’ beacon creep across the face of his scope. As it moved closer to the cross hairs, he thumbed a small wheel slightly and felt the nose come up a little as the hydraulic system worked the flaps in the tail assembly. Their velocity was down to about a mile per second now, but he had to kill it all without entering a high-speed stall.
     “Power room, stand by to fire!”
     “Ready here!” Garver came back. “Starting pumps!”
     He brought the nose up a little bit more. The air at thirty miles provided plenty of lift at the Fafnir’s speed, and she began to flatten out and climb.
     “Pumps to speed!” Garver reported. “Ready to fire!”
     The power room light winked green on the skipper’s panel.
     Sweat stood out in beads on Vanderhoff’s forehead as he brought the nose up a bit at a time. The beacon pip crept closer to the cross hairs on the screen.
     The spot touched the lateral cross hair — then matched them both. Vanderhoff swung the nose all the way up, strained as his straps cut into him, and waited for the ship to “pay-off.”
     The gyros cut in automatically as the velocity dropped. The Fafnir climbed on momentum, stalled, then hung there balanced by her gyros, her kinetic energy zero.
     But her potential energy was still enormous; she was seventy-four miles up.
     She dropped, tail first, sixteen feet the first second, forty-eight feet the next second, eighty feet the third. He didn’t dare let her fall too far; the fins would try to flip her over if they managed to take hold in the atmosphere.
     On the dovar screen, he watched the velocity of her fall mount. Checking the drift and setting in the proper corrections, he got ready to fire.
     Garner, he thought, I wish you’d told me about those pumps instead of letting me find out for myself. He’d inspected the power room a few days ago while Garver was forward and asleep. By removing an inspection plate, he’d seen that the pump bearings were badly scored.
     Then, the time came. The Fafnir’s nose began to wobble slightly as the air pressure against her fins fought the gyros.
     “Winch, notify.”
     “White Sands Control, Fafnir ready to fire. Over.”
     “Roger, Fafnir. You are clear and in the groove. Fire at will. Over and by.”
     Vanderhoff poised his hand over the red button and kicked on the auto pilot.
     “Four ... three ... two ... one ... FIRE!"
     He couldn’t hear the thunder of the jets, but he felt the push. Those pumps had to hold for another minute at least. He might get the ship into a glide if the jets did fail, but it was tricky and very risky.
     The auto pilot took its data direct from the dovar and telemetered computer data, figured how long it would have to blast at how many g’s to bring the ship down gently, and started correcting so the Fafnir would land gently and precisely where she should; in the middle of the concrete pad miles below.
     Vanderhoff watched the horizon through the control bubble, fighting the acceleration which changed slightly as the auto pilot recomputed its data. He saw the horizon lose its curve. It did so with alarming speed. What he could see of the surface changed from convex to planar, then became a bowl. The Organ Mountains and Las Cruces came into view. He felt and saw the gentle oscillations of the ship as the auto pilot went on making successive corrections of drift.
     The Organs reared up against the sky, then were obscured in a cloud of dust.
     The Fafnir settled slowly, her white jet splash spraying over the concrete and down into the splash pit. There was a slight jar as her jack-legs touched and compressed under her weight.
     The jets gave a mighty belch, then died.
     The control room settled down with a chattering of relays. Lights winked. Micro-switches clicked. The auto pilot flashed a green light, then turned itself off. There was a whine as the gyros shut off.
     “White Sands control, this is Fafnir” Winch addressed the mike. “On the ground and clear. Thank you. Out.”
     “Roger, Fafnir. White Sands control off and clear ! ”
     Vanderhoff was snapping switches. He was wringing wet with sweat. “All hands report and secure!”
     Winch sighed. “Electronics secured.” He flipped a few switches and lifted Cosmo from his lap; the cat had ridden out the landing with the electronics man as an added cushion. “ How does it feel, chum, to have a floor under you again? Don’t like it, huh? ”
     “Power room! Report!” Vanderhoff snapped into the intercom.
     There was silence.
     “Garv! Report! Are you all right?” the skipper snapped again.
     Winch unstrapped quickly and sat up, silently watching the skipper.
     Vanderhoff strode across the compartment and threw the lower hatch open. “ Grab the First Aid kit and let’s get down there! I thought there was something funny about that landing!” Piling out of his bunk, Winch groaned as he struck the deck, his leg muscles not used to it. Vanderhoff dropped through the hatch. Grabbing the medical kit from its wall brackets. Winch hit the ladder right behind the skipper, leaving Cosmo sitting baffled on the cot.
     Vanderhoff saw oil all over the floor of the power room as he swung the hatch open. Garver was lying on his cot, his eyes closed, breathing heavily. The skipper went quickly to him. “Garv! Are you all right?”
     Sighing deeply, the jetman opened his eyes. Vanderhoff noticed he was shaking. Garver shut his eyes again, saying, “Yeah.”
     “Starfire! What happened?
     “Give me a cigarette,” Garver said. Lighting up, he went on, “The impeller blades on Number Four pump came loose just after you fired the jets, I had to shut it off to keep it from shaking loose from the deck. The auto pilot couldn’t handle the loss of the jet, so I took over manually to keep the unbalanced thrust from flipping the ship.”
     “You brought this ship down manually? ” Winch asked incredulously.
     “Why didn’t you call me?” Vanderhbff asked. “I could have done the job with the dovar data to help me.”
     “I didn’t bring it down manually,” Garver explained. “I just overrode the auto pilot. We were on auto all the time, all right. I was just putting in corrections to make up for the loss of thrust and the resulting cockeyed thrust vectors. You couldn’t have done that in control.” He put his hand over his eyes and shook his head. The skipper could see he was exhausted from his effort. “Let’s get out of this coffin! I’m worn out.”

---

     Vanderhoff paused and looked up at the fading stars. Jupiter was riding high at the zenith, bright and steady. Venus was the morning star at the time and hung a few degrees over the eastern horizon. Mars, their starting point, was far below the craggy spires of the Organ Mountains. The skipper yawned. “Well, we might as well go in and get a cup of coffee. No use trying to take care of business until this part of the planet wakes up.”
     On the way down the gantry lift, Garver noted the oil streaking the sides of the Fafnir, marring the white paint. He’d opened the hatch to drain the pump lubricant off the power room floor. Reaching the ground. Vanderhoff and Winch waited while he checked the ground tackle connections supplying power to the berthed ship. He rejoined them as they walked across the pitted apron past the splash pit with its pools of grimy, rust-covered water.
     “How does it feel to be back?” the skipper asked.
     “Cosmo don’t like it,” Winch remarked. “Too much g-field.” He fondled the cat in his arms.

• 

• 

---

     “Sell the load O.K.?”
     “Yes,” Vanderhoff sighed as he dialed his order into the autowaiter, “but not for what it was worth. These gonophs here are worse than the ore traders in the asteroids!”
     Garver snubbed his cigarette out and asked, “How much did we clear?”
     “I can meet the immediate payments on the ship. You’ve got about nine thousand solars coming as soon as I get paid for the load. They’re coming to pick it up tomorrow.”
     “ Want me to be on hand? ”
     “Yes. Sort of supervise. After that, notify the government boys to come over and take their ‘bricks’ out of the pile. I want to get my heart back out of their vault.”
     The decommissioning of a spaceship really takes place when the technicians of the Bureau of Space Commerce come aboard her and remove the “bricks” of fissionable material from her atomic pile. The bricks are the only part of a spaceship not possessed by the owner. There is no ceremony of decommissioning; with her pile “cold,” a spaceship is on the ground to stay.
     Mixed emotions played through Garver’s mind as he watched the BSC boys go through their ritual with the Geigers and gingerly remove the shiny bricks to heavy lead boxes. Those small units were the prime source of the motive power which had enabled this hulk of fabricated steel and titanium to venture out to other worlds.
     He was a little sad and sorry for the Fafnir, In spite of all the grief he’d had with her in the last ten months, he knew she was basically a good ship. With minor changes, she could fly the spaceways for scores of years yet.
     But those minor changes would cost money. One hundred thousand solars would put her in top shape, would give her the new pre-heating pressure-differential fuel pumps with their lack of moving parts, a factor which made present-day rockets the most efficient of all machines, pumps which would increase her exhaust velocity and enable her to carry more; would give her new brains and nerves of wiring and calculating machinery which reduced human error to an absolute minimum; would give her the new, lighter, molar-transfer air system; would give her, in toto, a fresh start.
     That was her next skipper’s worry. Garver was happy. She’d served him well; she’d gotten him home.
     The only thing that really fretted him was the fact that this trip was probably the Fafnir’s last also. Nobody wants to put one hundred thousand solars into a newly-purchased ship before he can get it to lift. Vanderhoff’s only customer would probably be the junk dealer.
     He hated to see any ship scrapped, even one which had nearly killed him. Spaceships were individuals to him; no one likes to see an old friend destroyed because he is no longer of any use. He was attached to the Fafnir, and he hated to see her go.

---

     Garver sat and took it all in. Somehow, he was a little sorry he’d left, but he was settled now. He wouldn’t have to worry about cash the way business was growing. But he grew nostalgic. His mind’s eye saw New Dallas (on Ganymede) again with its wide open bars and wild frontier life. He remembered the sparkling of the dovar screens as the ship rode with the drift through the asteroids. He could almost see the cold, dark sky of Luna and feel the powerful, bone-crushing, body-flattening push of high-g.
     He wouldn’t admit to himself that he missed it all.
     It got too much for him, though. He couldn’t sit around and attend to the routine of running the restaurant any longer. On the pretense of dropping up to see Vanderhoff in Las Cruces, he stopped by White Sands.
     The desert was flat and the sun was hot. Traffic on the roads was heavy with the bustling activity of the big port. Hundreds upon hundreds of tall ships and orange gantrys reared up out of the flatness of the Basin. In the main port building, he noted by the board that the Scopas was lifting shortly. He went out to watch her.
     She was a big ship, four hundred feet of beautiful, sleek metal symmetry. Too high for a gantry, she was serviced by four tall towers with large cable cars running like bosun’s chairs to her locks and hatches. Her crew had already cast all but one of these loose by the time he got there. Taking up a position on the ramp of the control building a mile away, he watched her get ready to go.
     There was power in every inch of her lines, from the pointed nose down along her slim sides to the gaping orifices of her jets. She was one of the most efficient machines ever devised by man, a machine which allowed him to defy the gravity holding him to his world and allowed him to exercise dominion over the tiny dust-motes in space around a small star. To mankind, it was a tremendous achievement.
     Garver had once been part of that.
     The bull horn on the tower boomed, “Minus-15 minutes! All hands clear the areal” The siren began to howl. Men and machines scurried away from the ship, looking like insects in comparison with her huge bulk. Red-green lights winked on around the area.
     The minutes dragged by. Garver felt the old excitement welling within him. Then, the green lights winked out, leaving only a circle of red ones about the ship and on the tower.
     The Scopas suddenly came alive. Fire burst from her stern, lifting the desert sands in swirling eddies. It took her a moment to move. Then she balanced on a solid pillar of fire so white it hurt his eyes. She was as high as her own length.
     He cupped his hands over his eyes to see her better in the bright sun. The noise struck him. It was a solid wall of sound. He doubled over instinctively, as though he’d been punched hard in the stomach by a monster fist. As he watched, that tremendous thing as high as a forty-story building climbed up into the blue with gaming speed, leaving a hundred-foot trail of flame behind it.
     He had spent years in space. He’d watched hundreds of them go up. But he never got over the awesome feeling of the horrible power of those ships. No one ever does. It is an emotional experience that cannot be equalled by anything else.
     She was gone. The rippling thunder of her departure finally died, leaving nothing but the vapor trail to show where she had been.

---

     On the way back in, the road led him by the original blockhouse and launching area of White Sands. It stood now as a monument and museum of those days when men longed for the planets and sought them with the pitifully small chemical-fuelled rockets. He stopped for a look. He hadn’t seen the place for years. The old blockhouse was just the way it had been the day the first rocket had left from Luna, leaving her boosters and steps in the desert and the Gulf of Mexico. The racks of electronic gear in the firing room were ancient, bulky, and long outmoded. Through the small slit windows with their ten-inches of glass he could see only a portion of the launching area, although the periscopes offered a somewhat better view. He wondered what the men had been like who’d sat in here and fired those old blowtorches. He wondered what they’d thought as they fired that first one at Luna with a barely adequate load of fuel. Had any of them known what they were ushering in and what a tremendous boon to mankind the frontier in the sky would be? In the communications room he looked at the plotting board where they had watched the boosters and steps fall Earthward in streaks of red grease pencil.
     Outside, the little gantry still stood over the firing pit. Sitting on the firing table beneath it was Betsy, the old V-2 war rocket which had never gone up. They painted her each year now to keep her from rusting.
     On her south fin was a small brass plate:

GERMAN V-2 ROCKET
as fired at White Sands Proving Ground
1946-1951 A. D.
The first rocket with pumps and
the ancestor of the spaceship.
Ad Astra per Aspera.

     He turned and walked away. A mile ahead of him was an orange gantry crane and the Fafnir. Her sides were streaking with rust now, but she stood tall and straight and proud, rearing high over the desert boondocks.
     Then he knew he belonged here. This was his life and always would be. Somehow, some way, he must live it. He had to go back into space — had to. He couldn’t live his life cooped up on this tiny planet, eternally chained to her by her gravity. He’d been kidding himself all along. He’d thought he could change. He couldn’t. He knew he never would. This is what he’d always wanted to do.
     Thousands of men had lived for the very thing he’d done, had given their lives to put a rocket on the Moon, had sweated on the hot, dry desert of New Mexico to throw a V-2 a hundred miles into the sky, had been laughed at as fanatics, had lived and breathed and talked and dreamed rockets all their lives. Men like Oberth, Ley, Winkler, Goddard, and those who had followed in their footsteps, sharing the dream, believing — knowing it could be done and would be done.
     He didn’t bother to wipe the tears from his eyes. He had to go back.

---

     “I’ll make you a deal,” Garver put in quickly. “You were complaining that you were going stir-crazy for lack of something to do, right?” “Right.”
     “I have an answer. You’ve got the Fafnir, and I've got the Traveler’s Tavern. Want to swap?”

---

     “All right, Garv, you want to go back.” The old free trader pointed his cigar at him. “But tell me this: how are you going to make it pay? That was the main reason I had to leave. I’d have kept going otherwise until I dropped dead on the deck. My family have been traders and merchants and merchantmen skippers ever since the Fifteenth Century. I grew up with the ledgers and warehouses and exchanges all around me — and I couldn’t make it pay! How do you propose to do it as a free trader? ”
     “You made a mistake,” Garver pointed out bluntly. “You grew up with the businessmen who had been chained to Terra for centuries. They had no more conception of interplanetary trade than the average man on the street does today. I grew up with the ships that ply the routes between the planets. I know interplanetary commerce from all its varied angles. Sure, a ferryboat skipper can’t see how transoceanic steamers can make a profit with their tremendous investment, long voyages, and changing markets. With the same token, the terrestrial businessman has trouble visualizing a profit when he can’t ship forty tons by sky freight and get it there in a matter of hours. It’s all a matter of viewpoint. Van, I’ve shipped for years with free traders who could and did make it pay! ”

---

     The Fafnir was ready to go again. She stood out starkly white in contrast to her gantry. Gone were the streaks of rust; her skin was welded and hammered out and painted. Her insides were clean and re-organized. The jets had been lined with R-26, the new refractory material, and were fed by pre-heating pressure-differential fuel pumps. Winch Astrabadi, whom Garver had hauled off the Asgard shuttle, had put in the new dovar which was hidden in the radomes bulging out from the hull, and had helped Harvey Bemotte rewire the entire ship.

---

     Thirty-three minutes later, Vanderhoff stood statuelike outside the control tower and watched the Fafnir lift. This time the old Fire-breathing Dragon lifted true, straight, and fast.
     Up and out the Fafnir drove, her steel heart singing with the sounds of well-functioning machinery, carrying Rod Carver out to his destiny. Every man has only one destiny, and he shapes that during his life by the things he likes and the things he does and the places he goes.
     Carver vaguely remembered the words written by another man in another century:
     “... And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by ...”
     He had his ship and he had all the stars in the universe shining through that porthole as the Fafnir reached cut-off.

• 

     In every age, in every time, there have been those who are not content to settle down. They miss the kick of the wheel, the wail of the wind in the rigging, the exotic sights and smells of a harbor half across the world, the roar of engines cutting through the slipstream, and the powerful, body-shaking thunder of the jets. It is to these restless men with the wanderlust that the human race owes a priceless debt as the wanderers push the horizons out to the stars—

(ed note: story can be found online here)

• 

(ed note: in the year 2050, our heros are members of the Southwestern Rocket Society (SRS) fan club. The fans want to travel in space in the worst way, but civilians are not allowed to fly in their own ships.

On a field trip to Luna Louis' rocket junkyard they are stunned to find the space ship Absyrtis sitting in the lot. As it turns out that ship was Mr. Louis' last command when he was in the UN Space Force, and when the ship was decommissioned he managed to obtain it at scrap metal prices.

Club president Chubb Delany has an insane idea. He tells Mr. Louis that the club would love to refurbish the old ship, and fly it on a short hop to Luna. With Mr. Louis as captain.

Mr. Louis says if the club will promise that, he will give the ship to them free, along with any used rocket parts in the lot needed for the refurbishing.)

THE SPACE SHIP ABSYRTIS

UN Space Force interplanetary cruiser, missile launching, universal type, Argonaut Class

The space ship Absyrtis of the Argonaut Class saw twenty-two years of service as a ship of the UN Space Force line fleet, and an additional five years in support and reserve capacity. She was a member of the fleet which put down the Asgard Space Station Rebellion. After her modification to an express cargo vessel, she was instrumental in the sustenance of the outposts and colony on Venus. Subsequent modifications enabled her to serve the Jovian moons. She operated as a support ship in the Titan expedition to Saturn, but obsolescence forced her to confine her operations to the Earth-Luna area in which she served in many capacities until being mothballed and placed in circum-terrestrial orbit. She was finally returned to White Sands Spaceport, sealed, decommissioned, and left to stand for two years before being sold to a local salvage yard.

She was the first ship to bear the name and the last of her class to be decommissioned and removed from the Big Book. Her reliability earned for herself and her crews three ratings of excellence, two efficiency awards, a UN citation, numerous national commendations, and the International Astronautical Federation plaque in connection with her work in the Jovian moons area.

• Manufacturer: Hueco Spacecraft Inc., White Sands Spaceport, America, Terra.
• Commissioned: May 2018

---

     “Have you, now?” Louis said quizzically. “And how do you like the farce space flight is now?”
     “Farce?” Chubb echoed.
     “Farce, son. They’re too sloppy these days. It’s too easy. Automatic controls. Nuclear drives. There was a time when space flight was an art! Yes, sir An art! Not button pushing! Used to load her up with thermo-propellants, hit the firing button when the clock said so, and fly her by the seat of your pants and the astrostat! All the time wondering if she was going to blow! … That was space flight! Pilots, they call themselves! Bah! Bus drivers is what they arel” He settled back in his chair and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Now, in the good old days, it was different. Take the old Absyrtis back there on my lot …”
     The junk yard was old stuff to Chubb, but LeRoy was utterly amazed at the terrific amounts of junk of all types. As the old skipper led them out to where the Absyrtis towered seventy meters over the low sheds, the real estate man found himself making mental estimates of the combined worth of this desert land and the tremendous inventory on it. It was plain to see that Luna Louis was not a down-and-out old spacebum. “Captain, there seems to be a little bit of everything here. How’d you come by it all?”
     “Ships are scrapped all the time, mate,” Louis replied.
     “Why? Do they wear out?”
     “No, sir! They just get obsolete,,and it becomes cheaper to build a new ship than to modify the old one,” Luna Louis explained. “The Bureau of Space Commerce has some pretty strict rules about the condition of space craft; when a ship reaches a certain age, they usually down-check it on principle …”
     “How’s that?”
“They figure it’s old enough that if something hasn’t happened to it yet, it will. But with a little decent maintenance and repair, a space ship’s good for over a hundred years … and a power plant’s good for a lot longer than that because its operating time is only a fraction of that of its ship.” Louis paused for a moment. “Of course, we get a good deal of equipment from wrecked or damaged ships. Got one lad who does nothing but sit up on the roof with a pair of binoculars watching for ships that don’t make the grade …” He let it drop at that because they had reached the boat-tail of the Absyrtis.     Chubb stopped to catch his breath and looked up. In addition to the rust streaking her sides, there was no doubt that this ship was old. The tall, slim, almost regal lines were not those of a modern ship. Modern ships looked efficient; they were. The Absyrtis was merely beautiful, a work of art, the result of a designer with a sense of line and sweep and proportion who had labored over his drawing boards doing work which he must have loved. It was reflected starting from the parabola of revolution of her nose cone down her sleek, unbroken sides to the graceful curve of her boat-tail with its six gaping thrust chambers, and in the swallow-like profile of her drooping wings. It belonged to another day of space flight.
     “Shipped many a ton of lunar ore in this bucket,” Louis said in recollection. “But she was a bitch to handle under thrust. Shake? Man, she’d shake your teeth right out! And the center of pressure would tend to wander forward of the center of gravity if you didn’t watch the mass distribution. Let’s go aboard.” He grabbed a rope ladder hanging down the side of the ship and clambered spryly aloft with an agility which amazed Chubb and LeRoy.
     LeRoy followed and Chubb waited until the other had gained the lock high on the ship before he entrusted his full weight to the ropes. He didn’t look down; if he had, he would have frozen to the ladder with vertigo. He kept his eyes aloft and climbed steadily, hand-foot-hand-foot. He was out of breath when he stepped through the air lock and looked around.
     The tour of the old ship was fascinating. Chubb’s eyes were alight the entire time. It was like a childhood dream come true. It brought up memories entombed by the years and Chubb remembered the toy spaceships which looked like the Absyrtis and the drawings he had hopefully sent to the Space Force at White Sands, crude sketches of a “Sooper Space Combat Rocket”. And there were forgotten memories of a chubby little boy playing spaceman in that pile of boxes in the back yard, dreaming of a space ship the image of which was the Absyrtis.
     Just being in her gave him a feeling of satisfaction he had not experienced for years. Feeling the cold metal of her companionways and smelling the ancient, musty odors of far-off worlds which still lingered in her made him suddenly realize with a pang of sorrow and regret that this could have been his—could have, if he had had a different gene makeup (Chubb's genetic makeup predisposes him to be overweight, not allowed in space crews).
     The Absyrtis was far from a complete space ship. Most of the power plant essentials were missing, the electronics had been stripped, and there were no astrogation instruments. The Absyrtis had seen hand tools, but not a cutting torch.
     “Give her just a few essentials and she’s ready to lift,” Louis remarked, sitting down on an acceleration couch in the barren, echoing control room far forward in the nose. “Many’s the time I’ve sweated it out on this couch, mates. But this old bucket never failed me. A taut, reliable old ship she was. After we converted her to thermo-juice, she saw Mars and Venus and Ganymede. Bailey took her out to Titan once after I got stuck on dirt for keeps. But she knows her way into Dianaport by heart; hardly have to lay a finger on the board for a landing. She just sniffs her way in.”
     “What are you going to do with her, skipper?” Chubb ventured to ask.
     “She’s the last of her kind, mate. The pure-nuclear ships have taken over now. And a new kind of spaceman is flying them. We’re both obsolete, so she stays here with me. Oh, maybe one of these days I’ll get me a red-hot crew together. We may not get high enough to crash, but we’ll still get oft the ground again. The regulation hounds will try to stop us, but to hell with them! It’s a sad thing, mates, when the laws won’t let a man do what he wants or even kill himself as long as he doesn’t hurt anybody else in the process.” The old man’s eyes were on the empty holes in the control panels where instruments, lights, and switches should have been.

---

(ed note: Mr. Louis takes them up on their offer. In exchange for refurbishing the Absyrtis and keeping Louis as captain, he will give them the ship for free)

     Refitting the Absyrtis turned out to be quite a task. The old ship lacked more than was apparent on a cursory inspection. As a result, Chubb closed the doors to his consulting office in order to devote his full energies to the project.
     So he moved in with Luna Louis, sharing the old bachelor’s quarters with him. It was far from being luxurious, but Chubb was having the time of his life. He didn’t really care where he slept or when he ate; he had his hands on a space ship at last.
     Louis turned out to be less senile than any of them expected. He seemed to snap out of his dreamy moods. The transition was strange to behold. Once again, he stood straight and his voice carried the tone of authority and casual competence. His eyes became alert, and his mind sharpened like a rusty knife edge that has been put to the whetstone at long last.
     The youngsters of the SRS were by far the most persistent at the work site. They came in droves on Friday afternoon and stayed on the job until Monday morning when they dragged back across the desert to classes or to their jobs. Many of them came out during the week to perform the many tasks at hand.
     Their first job was a complete and minute inspection of the ship as she stood. No manuals on the Argonaut Class could be found, but Luna Louis turned out to be a man of remarkable memory.
     “Hey, skipper, this valve seat mikes a tenth of a millimeter less than the blade. What gives here?” LeRoy called from the power room on the temporary intercom Bert Eggstrom had rigged.
     Louis answered from the forward radar blister, “Where did it come from?”
     “The feed heater just abaft of the forward tank bay.”
     “That sounds about right, Mister Finch. What’s the condition of the seat and gland packing?”
     “Packing’s shot. But how can this valve seal?”
     “Don’t worry about it. It gets hot in that forward feed heater. Thermal expansion of the seat causes that valve to seal tighter than your old britches. Get the part number off that valve, and we’ll see if maybe I’ve got some packing for it. Pull the whole valve and take it down to the shop.”
     “Right-o, skipper!”
     “Hey, skipper?” Chubb’s voce echoed up the main ship well. “Got a minute?”
     Louis turned to the youngster who was working in the blister with him. “Yank that sweep selsyn, Jimmy. The rotor’s shot. I think maybe one of the units from that old Mark Fourteen radar out in the yard will fit. Don’t bother with those cap screws; knock it loose with a hammer, because you’ll have to drill and tap new holes anyway."
     “How about these waveguide junctions, skipper?”
     “Put the torque wrench to them. They’ll warp back,” the old skipper told him, handing him his tools and crawling out of the little hatch into the main portion of the ship. Wiping the sweat from his neck with a piece of waste, he yelled down the well, “Up here, mate!”
     Chubb came puffing up the ladder from below. “Here’s a survey of the equipment in the boat-tail, skipper.”
     Leafing slowly through the sheaf of papers handed to him, Louis mused, “Not as bad as I expected.”
     “What do you mean, skipper? Half the structural members back there are bent, broken, or missing! Engineering-wise, it’s flimsy as a paper bag!”
     “And just what do you know about space ship structures, Mister Delany?” Louis asked sarcastically. “The tail of this bucket was grossly over-designed. We ripped out those members years ago to make room for the thermo-juice drive.” He handed the papers back to Chubb and told him, “Take them down and give them to that gal who’s doing the consolidation. I’ve got most of these missing parts—or something that will do the job.”
     “Check, skipper. Tank bays and radars are the only lists we need now. Maybe we’d better start thinking about moving the ship out to a launching pad.”
     “Why move her?”
     “Huh?”
     “A fine “engineer you are! What would the costs be? I've got the parts, the shops, and the tools right here.”
     Chubb thought about this. “You mean refit and lift from here?”
     “Is there a better place?”
     “But it’ll wreck your yard when we lift, skipper.”
     “So it will. But once we raise ship, mate, I’ll not be needing this yard any longer.”
     Chubb stared at him for a moment, then quietly went out the hatch and clambered down the hastily-rigged servicing tower. A month ago, he would have paled at the thought of hanging on a slender ladder fifty meters up. He had in fact done so. But it didn’t bother him now, and he was in much better physical shape. It was a matter of pride to him that he had managed to lose five kilos.
     Wandering back through the yard toward the hut they were using for an office, he noticed the change in Luna Louis’ junk yard. Old tools had been ressurected from the heaps, cleaned up, and placed in sheds. Under a ragged tarpoline, three youths were hydrostating valves and pressure vessels; beside them was a jury-rigged flow bench. Farther down the line, he passed a leaning shack in which Bert and several other men were working over old radar gear. A sign over the door proudly announced, “Department of Witchcraft and Sorcery. Slightly Used Pentacles and Klystrons For Sale.”

---

     “What’s that part number again?” the clerk behind the supply counter asked, turning his head to catch Chubb’s words.
     Chubb repeated the list of numbers.
     With an efficient flip of his wrist, the clerk swung the top off the locator keyboard and punched the numbers into the system with practiced, easy speed. When the machine failed to deliver a card indicating the availability and location of the parts in the bins, his bored look changed to one of surprise. He punched again, using a different code. This time, the card flopped out announcing “Unavailable in present stock. Part numbers unknown. Check visual catalogue.” With a wrinkled brow, the clerk did so, flipping quickly through a large bound volume on the desk. He finally looked up and exclaimed, “Great Scott, mister! We haven’t stocked that servo unit for years!”
     “Got any ideas where I can get it?”
     Looking puzzled, the clerk browsed through his tremendous catalogue, then looked up and said, “It was made by Midwest Electronics. They folded up shop five years ago; the dies were probably scrapped. A boneyard is your best bet. Have you tried, Luna Louis down by Soledad Canyon?”
     “He hasn’t got it.”
     “Then you’re just beating your gums, friend.”
     “Anything I can substitute that’ll meet the specs?”
     “Buddy, that stuff was four-hundred-cycle gear. Nobody makes it any more; they’ve all gone to pulsed-power.”

---

     "Mate, where did you get those draftsmen?” Luna Louis asked, indicating the drawing he held in his hand. “They’d make better cartoonists! How do you expect the boys in the shop to make those obsolete parts from drawings like this?”
     “Look, skipper,” Chubb came back on the defense, “those boys are just college kids. They’re doing design engineering on parts and equipment that’s been out-of-date for years. The original parts aren’t even around for them to get dimensions and tolerances from! How’d you like to by making working drawings for an old reciprocating automobile engine after being told only how it worked?”

---

     It took five long months filled with scrounging for old parts, digging around in junk yards all over North America, and draining of funds. Chubb’s savings were long gone. Luna Louis had converted everything he could to cash. Al Olson, being independently wealthy, kept the project on its feet.
     Everybody worked their hearts out. There were long hours. There were the inevitable minor accidents. There were daily crises which threatened to wreck the whole thing. Louis had his hands more that full working with a very green crew. Everybody made mistakes—but nobody made the same one twice. But the day finally arrived when they could start making dry runs of the ship and her equipment.
     The old Absyrtis didn’t look the same at all, Sporting a new coat of brown and yellow paint—a purposely difierent color and marking scheme than that used anywhere else —she was practically a new ship inside and out.
     Chubb stood surveying her in the late afternoon sunlight, taking a break in his schedule for a cigarette. Yes, every one of the hundreds of men and boys who had worked on her could take real pride in her now, he knew. A few more checks, radioactive bricks for her reactor, and propellants were all she needed—plus a trained crew.
     Olson was out pulling the legal strings for the reactor bricks. Chubb had no idea how they were going to be pried loose from the Bureaus of Nuclear Energy, but Al had assured him that there would be no trouble.
     The propellants? Well, Chubb was expecting ten tank cars into El Paso any day. There was no problem there. The “go-juice” for which the Absyrtis had been designed was a commercially-available chemical which would release its energy by thermo-catalytic action. It was cheap, but it was no longer used for space flight.
     The rocket engine is a basically useful device. Rocket engineers found this out many, many years before when they became aware that the military subsidies following the Second World War might not last forever. A rocket can do more than push. It can generate tremendous volumes of gas. It is an essential device for high-speed, high-temperature chemistry. And the jet of hot gases man dig holes. In the open-pit copper and iron mines all over the world, the snarl of rocket engines was a common thing as their exhausts dug holes faster and more economically than the best carbide bits.
     The crew was his only real worry. He knew they were still green as grass, himself included. Space Commander McLaughlin had been right on one point: you don’t learn it all out of the books. Some people had picked up Louis’ training with little effort; others just couldn’t understand the difference between a fitting and a flange or between a selsyn and a klystron, no matter how high their enthusiasm had been.
     “All hands clear the ship!” Louis’ voice came from a portable megaphone from the lock high on the side of the ship. “Stand clear for pressurizing and water-flow checks!”
     Chubb was joined by Bert, who was handling the electronics and had no part in this check of the propulsion system. “Ran the final checks on the radar today, Chubb. That doppler system is all hot to go. Same with the guidance and control.”
     “Good! Did you get the running rabbits off the surveilance screens?”
     “Yeah, found a mis-matched waveguide in the antenna system. How’s Greg doing with the air system?”
     “Had chlorogel all over Deck D the last I saw him,” Chuhb replied. “Sprung a leak in the irradiation chambers.”
     “Tough luck.”
     “He’ll get it fixed. He’s good.” Chubb watched the silent ship for a moment, then asked, “Say, Bert, maybe it’s none of my business, but how come a sharp electronic engineer like you never got into space in the first place?”
     “Oh,” Bert said offhandedly, “eyes for one thing. Plus the fact I’m a lunger.”
     “T-B? You don’t look like it!”
     “Hell, man, I’ve only got one lung—and that’s full of calcification. Why do you think I came to this country? Same reason as Greg: climate.”
     Great space! Chubb thought. What a crew this ship’s got! Greg with arthritis, Bert with one lung, LeRoy with a heart, and the skipper ripe for the grave! And me, twenty kilos overweight!
     “Stand by to pressurize!” came the call from the ship. Through the thick hull of the Absyrtis the two men on the ground heard the slam of valves and the high-pitched, ringing hiss of pressurized gas filling the propellant tanks.
     Nothing ruptured; the tanks held their pressure.
     “What are they doing?” Bert wanted to know.
     “We’ve got a dummy propellant load of water in the tanks,” Chuhb explained, rocking back on his heels with his arms on his hips. “They’ve pressurized to detect leaks and to see if the system will hold pressure. Next they’ll pop the main propellant valves and run the water out through the rocket nozzles to check flow rates and pressure drops.”
     “How can they run the propellant pumps without the reactor to drive them?”
     “They won't need the pumps. LeRoy and the skipper just want flow characteristics. They know what effect the pumps will have and they … Hold it! There they go!”
     It was quite a show. A terrific roar came from the stem of the ship, but no flame lashed out. Instead, the rocket nozzles sprayed solid streams of water which ran off onto the desert sands in a small flood. Thousand of gallons of water spewed out before the flood suddenly ceased with a bang and a hammering sound.
     “Wow! I’ll bet that shut-down opened a dozen joints!” Chubb took off across the desert like a huge ballon being driven before a gale.
     The power room was a mess when he climbed into it. LeRoy and his crew were trying to tighten fittings and stem the gush of water. There was still considerable water remaining in the tanks. Everybody was soaking wet. Chubb grabbed a box wrench, snugged up a leaking fitting, and shouted to LeRoy “Vents open?”
     “Hell, yes! Get that flange tight before we drown!”
     “Open your dump valves and drain those tanks! You’ll never get these fitting tight with ten meters of hydraulic head on them”
     LeRoy leaped for the jetman’s couch and threw switches. “Electrical system’s shorted out by water! Open that hand valve next to you, Chubb!”
     Once the situation was under control, Chubb—looking like a water-loogged whale—sat down on an auxiliary generator and observed. “I thought you guys knew this power room. What a sad show! What would you have done in a real emergency?”
     “Run like hell,” LeRoy returned sarcarstically, implying that Chubb would have done no better with the flow-checks. He opened the power room lock and uncapped the scuppers to allow the water to drain out. Then he suddenly sat down in a puddle on the floor.
     “What’s wrong, chum?” Chubb asked anxiously.
     “The old ticker,” LeRoy gasped. “Too much excitement.”
     Chubb lifted him under the armpits and deposited him on the jetman’s couch. “You stay put. I’ll clean up this mess. When you feel better, go home for the rest of the day.”
     “I’ll be all right,” LeRoy objected.
     “They all say that. Take care of yourself or you won’t be in any shape to make the jump.”
     It took Chubb and the crew of young college kids a good hour to clean up and get started on the loose fittings and flanges. They were hard at it when Luna Louis dropped cat-like through the hatch.
     “Mate, better heave-to and seal ship,” he cracked. ‘Weather coming up.”
     Dropping his Wrench, Chubb stepped to the hatch and looked out. Far across the Tularosa Basin a tremendous thunderhead had a torrent of rain streaming out of it like a skirt. And rolling across the sandy wastes, obscuring space ships and buildings, was a huge, turbulent wall of sand and dust kicked up by the thundersquall.
     “We’ll get winds out of that,” Louis warned, peering at the brown wall and the rain behind it. "I want everybody out of the ship. Empty as it is, it just may take a notion’ to topple”
     “Bring me some cable, skipper,” Chubb broke in. “I’ll throw some guy lines on the ship and anchor it.”
     “We haven’t got time! And they might not hold anyway if the ship started to go,” Louis snapped. “Shake a leg here!” He disappeared upward through the hatch.
     It took Chubb less than five minutes to get the locks and hatches closed. Ignoring Chubb’s orders, LeRoy climbed down into the boat-tail and installed a sealing diaphram in each nozzle throat.
     The wind and dust hit them ten minutes later. It howled and screamed around the ship and loading tower. Then it rained.
     It rained like Chubb had never seen it rain before. It was almost impossible to walk through it. Sheet after sheet of water hammered against the galvinized side of the hut in which they’d taken refuge. The rocky sand became rocky mud, and the water began to run in racing rivulets across the desert.
     It rained for two hours—a solid, wind-driven rain. The rivulets grew to flowing streams of water and then to raging flash floods.
     “Louis!” Chubb pointed out, yelling over the roar of the rain thundering against the shed. “The ship’s right in the middle of it!”
     “The water’s undercutting the concrete slab! She'll topple!” LeRoy yelled.
     A bolt of lightning arched down outyof the storm with a sharp crack, spearing the conical nose of the Absyrtis. Radar and communications antennas sparkled with glow discharge.
     “LeRoy, round up some men!” Chubb shouted. “Skipper, where do you keep those long lengths of two-centimeter cable? Can you dig up some railroad rail we can drive into the ground to anchor guy lines to?”
     “Stay off that ship, mate! She’s being hit!”
     "To hell with it! We’ll lose the ship otherwise! Get me that cable! I’ll anchor it topside!”
     “You crazy hoot-owl! Stay here!” Luna Louis roared.
     “Skipper, don’t you understand? We'll lose the ship! The water’s undercutting the slab! She’ll topple!”
     “Let it topple! I’d rather lose the ship than lose lives! Stay here!”
     But Chubb was gone.

---

(ed note: The ship is saved, but...)

     The Absyrtis was canted over at a five-degree angle, and that was that. Chubb and Luna Louis surveyed the situation the next morning and came to the conclusion that any attempt to right the ship might cause her to fall even farther. The only answer was to secure the ship in its present position and proceed. Taking LeRoy’s suggestion, they fastened quick-release clamps on the guys, then promptly safetied them against accidental release.
     The rest of the check-outs on the “Leaning Tower of White Sands”—the name hung on the ship by Greg Shearer —went off more or less as scheduled. They weren’t all successful at first. Bert Eggstrom was the only one who didn’t have more than his share of troubles, but he had them nonetheless. The communication gear worked like a charm, and Bert was very proud the night he logged his first contact with Asgard Space Station as it went over. The computer and the autopilot finally made four consecutively successful dry runs. He had trouble with the radar; instead of tracking the high-flying evening antipodal rocket as intended, it locked onto a flight of ducks migrating south. But it tracked.
     LeRoy kept on finding leaks, sticky valves, broken welds, and loose nuts everywhere. Most of his trouble was with a very green crew. The college students working for him did extremely well, but he had trouble with other kinds of people. Imagine trying to teach a dry-goods salesman how to run a smooth weld.

---

     Greg Shearer was having trouble with the air system, the water recovery system, and the hatches and locks. Being a bachelor like Chubb, he didn’t have the same kind of trouble LeRoy was having, but he had trouble enough nonetheless.
     He had recruited every member of the SRS who would work and who had, like himself, a green thumb and a knowledge of organic and catalytic chemistry. On the first pressure test, gaskets leaked all over the place, but the worst part came when Greg replaced the standard air with the oxy-helium space mix from the air system. It drove everybody choking from the ship. The ship air from the blowers smelled something like a cross between a garbage dump, a stable, and a locker room. In disgust, he and his crew had to replace every bit of chlorogel solution in the system—while wearing respirators.
     In addition, the ship’s water came out a putrid brown for five days while he fiddled with the old and finnicky water recovery system.
     He was still working with it when Luna Louis came around with Chubb for a final inspection on the refitting. Louis inspected the ship with a critical eye, finding things that nobody expected. He suggested here, corrected there, bawled out ninety-percent of the crew for blunders and oversights, but finally pronounced the ship as ready as it ever would be for final checks, provisioning, and space.
     It should have been a day of rejoicing, but for Chubb it was one of anxiety. During the quiet evening hours after supper when everybody sat around listening to Luna Louis spin old space tales of faraway worlds, Chubb could not keep his mind off the subject.
     The final check of the ship would require that the reactor be activated. This meant heavy water (moderator) and thorium, and as far as he was concerned that might take an act of God to get. The Bureau of Nuclear Power didn’t pass that kind of stuff around like tin pennies.

---

     They went in the personnel hatch. The interior of the ship was considerably different than it had been the day they had first walked her decks. New paint glistened on the bulkheads, and the smell of oil and solvents and men was in her again. After going up the main ship well, they emerged into the control room. The new pastahide cushions on the couches shone in the light of the resurrected flouro-units, and the gaping holes in the panels had been filled with instruments, gauges, switches, and winking lights. The computer rack now held a small electronic brain which was capable of flying the ship; Bert had managed to pick it up from Space Force surplus and had rebuilt it. It was capable of reading-in data in any number of ways: from sensing elements in the ship, from ground radio commands, from control panel commands, and from a self-programming keyboard. Its read-out was equally as versatile. Bert regarded it as being several grades smarter than any of the SRS men working on the ship.
     “About time you showed up,” Louis remarked caustically. “Grab a cup of joe and sit down. You might favor me by pouring me another cup while you’re at it. Can’t operate without coffee.” Luna Louis, true to Space Force tradition, had set up three indispensable things immediately on the Absyrtis; in order they were a coffee mess, a loudspeaker system, and a wardroom of division officers who really ran things.

---

     “It has to be that way, Mister Olson,” Louis pointed out. He took a long swig of coffee and went on, “And now we have a slight logistics problem: thorium and heavy water. What do you have to report on that, Mister Olson?”
     “It’s on its way. Be here tomorrow.”
     Chubb sat up and knocked his head against the bottom of the couch above. “Along with the BSC boys who will promptly hang a red tag on the lock?”
     Al Olson smiled knowingly. “Not yet. It seems the UN once passed a Nuclear Energy Act which has been on the books since 2005. It guarantees the delivery of available radioactive substances to non-profit organizations utilizing it for other than commercial purposes. After a little talk with the BNP (Bureau of Nuclear Power) Regional Director in Albuquerque, the way was paved.”
     “What did it cost?” Bert wanted to know.
     “It’s still BNP property under consignment lease to us,” Al replied.

---

     Luna Louis had to supervise the installation of the thorium and heavy water. The current BNP manuals possessed by the two men did not include the procedure for the Argonaut Class, the reactor being a long-obsolete model. This caused Chubb to ask Louis anxiously, “Skipper, are you sure this old reactor has enough soup to lift this ship?”
     “Mate,” Louis said huffily, “if the engineers hadn’t decided to go to the pure nuclear drive, they’d still be using this type of reactor. This old Mark Seven’s a damn-sight more reliable and efiicient per kilogram of mass and has a lower operating count so the ship shielding is lighter. What licked this type of drive years ago was the propellant mass you have to carry … and thermo-juice was more expensive then. The nuclear stuff cost less when they changed over, but this bucket’s flown for twenty years with that fish bowl, and it hasn’t had so much as a pin-hole leak in the heat exchanger. The Baja California power pile can't boast that record, mate!”
     At last, they were ready for the final checks. LeBoy, who had hand-picked his engineering gang, treated the reactor with a great deal of respect now. The power crew started using the particle counters which had been racked at the ready on the power room bulkhead for months. They raised the temperature to a stable plateau capable of running the ship’s generators and of charging the batteries, although ground power was still available to help them out. The other divisions began a gradual phase-over to reactor power but only as an emergency measure.

---

     The day dawned bright and clear, the New Mexico sun coming up in all its splendor over the Guadalupe Mountains to the east. But the crew of the Absyrtis didn’t notice it; they had been up all night, working in the artificial daylight of floodlamps, checking and re-checking. Some of them noticed it was getting light outside, but it made no impression on them.
     The air around the ship and Luna Louis’ junk yard rang with the tension which was mounting by the minute. There were a million last-minute checks and calibrations to be made, dozens of critical items which had to be taken care of, and scores of temperamental, precise gadgets which had to be watched and watched closely.
     No one was conscious of time save for a moment in the near future that was rushing closer with every tick of the clock and announced in a booming voice over a loud-speaker.
     Luna Louis seemed calm; he wasn’t. Chubb had no time to be nervous; he was kept busy checking on the progress of the division chiefs, and the division chiefs in turn were kept busy seeing to it that every little item was taken care of as stipulated on Louis’ pre-lift check sheet. The old spaceman had compiled a complete manual—the ship’s “cook book” and the crewman’s bible—entirely from memory. No one had grounds to doubt Luna Louis’ memory; he had not been wrong in the past.
     At X-minus one hour, the passengers and their baggage were loaded. Members of the SRS who were not assigned to the crew drew straws among themselves for the berths available on this shake-down cruise. They did not make up the full load the Absyrtis was able to carry; Louis wanted to run light and put extra mass into propellants in case of trouble. And he didn’t want non-working people under foot in what was essentially a new ship.
     The brown and yellow Absyrtis—deliberately painted in those colors to be a striking contrast to the white or silver of the commercial and military vessels—could be seen for miles. No registry number appeared on her spreading, swallow-like wings. This caused a great number of curious passerbys to stop.
     “No, it isn’t that,” Al corrected him. “I expect to go on the next one, which means I trust you’ll get to Dianaport and back without killing yourselves. Besides, I’ve got to stick around and watch the legal end.”
     “Huh? I thought we had that pretty well covered,” Chubb remarked.
     “Is it? Who’s going to look out for the interests of the private spaceman when the issue comes up before the UN? I intend to stick around because the fight isn’t really over yet. I want a private space yacht of my own after I’ve learned the ropes in this ship; but, more important, I want to see space opened up to private exploitation.
     “I’ve got to lay some groundwork, but the next move is up to you. You’ve got to make a successful flight to prove that space travel techniques have progressed to the point where an ordinary person with a limited amount of training can do something that up to now has been the private stomping ground of a bunch of experts.”
     Greg Shearer accompanied the lawyer down to the lock, and then Luna Louis got down to businessn The final briefing was short. “I’m lifting at 5-g. I want to get out of here in a hurry to economize propellant We may need later. Don’t let the noise bother you, and don’t worry about the vibration. This bucket has a resonant structure frequency of twenty-eight cycles.
     “When you hit free fall, remember: don’t panic! If something goes wrong, you’re dead so don’t worry about it. Take your shots when we hit free fall; you must do it in case some of your men need help. Don’t use the emergency procedures unless its absolutely necessary. I trust you on that, but some of your men may get scared; that’s why each of you has a billy club under your couch pads. One man—just one man—can kill us all.”
     He stopped and look around. His eyes were now cold and hard under the visor of his brilliant red baseball cap. “We’ll sweat this first lift, all of us. But remember that the boys who really know how to do it are out there behind that fence watching us. They don't think we have a chance; I think we’ll do all right. Any questions?” There weren’t.

---

• 

     Gone was the glory. Gone was the thrill. Gone was Chubb’s enthusiasm as he lay there on the co-pilot’s couch chanting off the minutes left until zero time. Sweat was rolling off him in tiny streams although Greg had long since changed to space mix which was cool as it came out of the blower duct.
     Six months ago, a space ship lift had been a wonderful thing to watch. Now, Chubb was beginning to realize it was a terribly deadly game. So much depended on so many little things, and once they were under way, there was no backing out.
     Was that stubborn solenoid valve going to stick? Had he checked that sequence circuit thoroughly enough. Suppose there was an ignition delay which could blow the tail off? Should they have gone to the time and expense of static testing the propulsion system?
     The little relays, the pieces of wire, the lengths of tubing, the bolts and nuts which he had put into this ship Without really thinking about it were now the things which stood between him and death. They had seemed so insignificant and common when he had installed them; they were something more than that now. He had known this feeling before; every engineer is inwardly stupified at the tremendous strength and power of his achievements.
     He was almost ready to call it quits, admit he was a coward, and step out of the lock. But he recalled those agonizing months of hard work refitting this old hulk of a space ship and the terrible moments when they thought they would never make it at all. And he thought of the men in the ship with him, men who had put their hearts and souls into this great adventure, had neglected then professions and deserted their friends. And there were those outside that fence who would give anything they possessed to be inside the Absyrtis at that moment.
     There was LeRoy Finch who didn’t know if his heart could stand the high accelerations. And Greg Shearer, ridden with arthritis, who forced his stiff fingers to do things that were painful to him. And there was Luna Louis.
     “Ten minutes to zero, captain!” he snapped resolutely.
     “Roger, mate! Call all hands to lift stations and report!”
     “All hands, prepare for lift! All divisions report!”
     “Electronics standing by.”
     “Power room ready!”
     “Shipmaster secure!”
     “And co-pilot and astrogation ready! All hands to lift stations and ready for lift, captain!”
     “Very well. Final checks, please. Clear our lift with Traffic!”
     “All boards, Test-Fly to TEST! Perform final checks and report compliance! Electronics, clear with Traffic Control and secure your radar contacts!”
     “Roger!”
     “Check!”
     “Right-o!”
     For the last time, Louis and Chubh ran their final checks. Item by item, they went down the list. Then Chubb said, “Final checks complete in control room, skipper!”
     “Roger,mate!” Louis switched off his intercom and spoke privately to Chubb, “It looks good, mate; it looks good. I think we might make it after all.”
     “Sure, we’ll make it, skipper,” Chubb reassured him as he started the autopilot. He watched the chronometer.
     “Five minutes to zero! Five minutes to zero! Divisions report compliance on checks”
     “Roger from power room!”
     “Roger from electronics!”
     “Roger from shipmaster!”
     “Final checks complete, skipper.”
     Louis’ voice was sharp and raspy as he spoke from his couch, flipping up the safety guards over the switches and carefully adjusting knobs, “Stand by for lift! Red light condition!"
     “Condition red, all hands! All boards, Test-Fly to FLY! Four and one-half minutes to zero!” Chubb snapped.
     “Electronics to FLY!”
     “Power room to FLY!”
     “Shipmaster to FLY!”
     “Ready, captain!”
     Louis flipped a switch. “Key your board!”
     Slipping the key from around his wrist, Chubb inserted it in his board and turned it. “Power room, you may un-lock!”
     “Un-locked in power room! Tanks pressurizing! Reactor heat coming up!”
     “Three and one-half minutes to zero!”
     “Electronics reporting! Radar forward is hunting! Green light from Traffic!”
     “If you can’t fix it, let it hunt!” Louis ordered.
     Chubb took a deep breath and threw a switch, anxiously watching tell-tale lights on the board. “Gyros uncaged and tracking! Autopilot tracking!” he reported with relief. For five hours he had babied those gyros up to speed and held them steady; it had been no easy task to erect and orient them with the ship at a tilt, and even more difficult to adjust their speed precisely so they would not precess.
     “Two minutes to zero!”
     “Steady as she goes, mate,” Louis’ voice came back levelly. “Give me thirty-second counts.” The skipper, the mastermind of the ship operation inside and out, was calm but tense. He held the reins over everything; he was the absolute master at this point, a god in a steel and titanium hull.
     “Ninety seconds to zero!”
     “Reactor to heat! Tanks pressurized! Pumps coming up!”
     “Call up your shaft speeds!” Louis requested.
     “All coming up in synch!” LeRoy’s voice boomed over the interphone. The scream of the pumps could be heard in the background. “Four thousand r-p-m—five thousand— six thousand—seven—eight—steadying—nine thousand… peaked at ninety-four hundred… They’re holding!”
     “Bearing temps and outlet pressures?” Louis was vitally interested in the performance of the pumps. They were the only mechanically moving parts in the propulsion system.
     “Normal!—Pump Five just dropped a hundred!—There it comes back!”
     They could feel it in the control room now. Those six large staged-centrifigal pumps turning over as they would shake the most solid of structures. The vibration was a piercing, pulsing scream from the deck plates, bulkheads, and overheads.
     “Sixty seconds to zero!”
     “Give me aft view on the tv monitor!” the skipper ordered. It was Bert who complied from the electronics compartment below.
     “Forty-five seconds to zero!” Chubb smoothed his coveralls under him, adjusted his panel slightly, and pulled his astrostat hood down to where he could look through its eyepiece while still keeping the panel in view.
     The pumps were shaking the ship in every member.
     “Thirty seconds!”
     “Plugs away! Ship power!” came LeRoy’s high-pitched voice. “Whoa! Port generator just quit!”
     “Switch to emergency!”
     “Emergency batteries on! The inverter’s getting hot!”
     “Fifteen seconds!”
     Chubb felt the skipper should call a hold as he said this last. If the inverter went out, the radar would lose its source of pulsed power, and a ship without radar was blind. But Louis said nothing.
     “Autopilot in command! Seven—six—five—four—”
     His voice was drowned out by a snarling, thundering, rippling, beating universe of noise.

---

     Chubb never knew there could be so much noise.
     It shook the bulkheads and rattled the deck plates. It bounced Chubb up and down on the couch pads. The mighty thrust of the Absyrtis’ rocket engines hammered at the structure of the ship.
     “Ship is away!” somebody screamed.
     There was a sudden, backsnapping jolt and Chubb knew that the breakaways on the guy lines holding the ship had failed. The lines had merely parted, but two-centimeter steel cable does not give way easily.
     He sneaked a quick glance at the tv monitor, but all he saw was a malestrom of sand, flaming gases, and the litter and sheds of Luna Louis’ junk yard being scattered all over the desert.
     Then the ship really began to shake as the combustion vibration of the rocket engines reinforced and excited the natural resonance of the hull. It jarred Chubb’s teeth even though he Was being compressed into his pads by the force of five gravities of acceleration. Instrument needles were bouncing wildly, so he quit looking at them; he couldn’t see them anyway because he was being shaken so hard.
     He lost all sense of time. After seeming hours, he felt the vibration build up to the point where he had to shut his eyes and hold on with all he had. The increased vibration told him that the ship was passing sonic speed, and that in turn would bring blessed relief from the flooding noise.
     Then there was no sound except the rattle and shake of the ship’s old plates and the thunderous whine of the pumps in the tail. He could hear the scream of the dyna- motors in the electronics compartment aft and the Whistling note of the doppler radar as is climbed up—and up—and up the musical scale until it Was an ear-splitting screech. All of this he heard through a gray haze. He couldn’t breathe; he was pinned to his couch, his heart racing and his anns flattened against their rests. And he knew why high body mass was a disqualifying factor in space flight. His body muscles were no stronger than a lighter man’s, yet they had to support more apparent mass under acceleration.
     The take-offs of the antipodal rockets had been nothing like this! He could feel this in his face, in his bones, in his entrails. With the noise and the acceleration, he felt nearer death than he had ever been. If this doesn’t stop, he thought wildly and dismally, if it doesn’t stop, I’ll die! I can’t stand this much longer! I can’t stand it!
     Whang! Clank! Slam!
     “Cut-off” LeRoy’s voice screamed breathlessly over the interphone.
     There were three more rough jolts, and the force holding him to his couch suddenly disappeared completely. His stomach made a violent attempt to eject itself through his throat, and he convulsed involuntarily. Then his eyes came into focus and a sensation akin to dizziness overcame him. The control room was suddenly over on its side, then upside-down, then right-side-up again. Then his astrostat hood swam upwards in front of him, the panel following it. It began to spin to the right, then stopped and sank toward him.
     But something has gone wrong! was his thought. He still felt weight! They couldn’t be in free-fall!
     Chubb had had limited experience in sub-gravity on the antipodal rocket trips; it was not entirely new to him. It was diiferent, but not new. Before his autonomic nervous system could build up a “storm”, he got a hold of himself. It took a moment for the nystagmus of his eyes to stop. Then he remembered the injection. With practiced movement, he tried to bring his hand to the pocket in the arm rest—and over-shot the mark by a foot. On the second try, he got his fingers firmly around the ampule and gave himself his shot right through his coveralls into his thigh muscles.
     It helped. He gripped the arm rests and shouted into the interphone, “Al! divisions report!”
     “Power room here!” LeRoy’s voice came back.
     Good old LeRoy! Maybe his heart isn't as bad as everybody thought!
     “Power plant in cut-off!” LeRoy Went on. “Pumps running down! Tanks holding pressure! But the reactor heat-exchanger is running too hot! We can’t get it down!”
     “Louis told me that might be normal! Keep your pumps running if you have to! How’s that generator?”
     “Out like a light! But the inverter’s holding! We’re okay. But, buddy, that was rough!”
     “Shipmaster reporting,” Greg called in. “My baliwick’s running. I’ve got a lot of sick passengers and I’m not feeling too chipper myself. Doc Barcarez is giving drop-shots or knock-outs as the case requires.”
     “Electronics Report!” Chubb snapped after a few seconds’ silence. “Bert! Report!”
     Bert’s head appeared instead in the aft hatch. His face was pale and drawn, his dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses giving him a ghostly appearance. There was a cut under his left eye with blood streaming in all directions over his face. “I’ve got a busted intercom,” he reported, “but one of my boys has a busted jaw. Thanks for the billy!”
     Chubb nodded and gulped, moving his hand slowly over to press against his stomach. He salivated freely for a second, then decided he wasn’t going to lose everything after all.
     “Bert Eggstrom will relinquish the command of his division to his senior engineer and report to the control room to assume the duties of the executive officer. Power officer, secure your power room from lift and proceed with underway activities. Electronics, notify White Sands Traffic Control of the situation and have them stand by for my formal report later. We’ll also need some radar fixes very shortly.” He switched off the interphone and turned to Bert. “Set up Program Number Two on the computer and get ready to process data. Move, while I get this star fix!” He pulled the astrostat hood down over his eyes while Bert seated himself before the computer console by the chart desk and began to program the computer.
     He scribbled the star angles on a pad attached to the astrostat and started making a preliminary determination. Actually, it was no star fix, but a sight on Venus, Jupiter, Luna, and Sol for Euler angles of ship attitude. On the short jump to Luna, he would rely heavily on the precision of radar and doppler data. The trajectory was too short and too simple for him to bother with stellar methods.
     He finished his calculations to find Bert hovering near him. “Does is check?” the new first mate asked.
     “Looks good. I think we can live with it.”
     “Computer’s ready. Bob Danforth's taken over below for me and has the radar data ready.”
     When they all showed up-some of them looking half-dead—Chubb was still running the computer. He checked the answer and satisfied himself with it, then set the device up to run a continuous program of trajectory by presenting x-, y-, and z-plots on three chart recorders.

---

(ed note: sadly Mr. Louis dies on the way up. But with a smile on his face as he finally goes home.)

     He took a swig of the hot coffee from the bag Greg had brought up and turned to face his officers.
     “I assumed command,” he began, "because Luna Louis appointed me executive officer with the knowledge I might have to do it. I have no better qualifications for the job than any of you. But three thousand years of naval tradition, reinforced by recent precedents in space, are in point here. So my assumption of command is not subject to vote—until we hit dirt at any rate. Then the Society can kick me out if they like.
     “But I’ll still have to rely on your support until then. We’ve lost Louis, but I’ll try to run things as I think he might have done. At this point, co-operation is the only thing that will save us.”

     “Just a minute, Chubb,” LeRoy out in. “We’ve all worked together for months. Why not run the ship with each division chief in joint control—a democratic system?”
     “Because a space ship is operated from the control room,” Chubb told him.
     “But, look, Chubb…” LeRoy persisted.

     “Gentlemen,” the new skipper cut in, “I don’t think some of you realize the position we’re in. We’re used to looking to one man for leadership; our group habits can’t be changed on the spur of the moment. We’re neophytes, we’re in trajectory to Luna in a slightly marginal ship, and we’ve just lost the only man aboard who was experienced. Down below on dirt, a democratic system may work at times. But here, one man and one man alone must correlate the data, co-ordinate efforts, and make the decision.
     “I don’t relish this job. The responsibility scares me a little. But I’m by-God going to see that this ship and the people in it get down on Luna safely! Then—and not before—each one of you is entitled to a swift kick at my fanny if you want. Do we understand each other?”

     There was silence. Chubb looked at each of them in turn, meeting their eyes. He knew they had accepted Louis’ leadership and had respected him because of his age and experience; it was a bit difficult for them to do the same toward one of their own group. But behind the doubt and reluctance in some eyes, he saw the reassuring fact that each man realized that the Absyrtis had to have a captain and that committee system rule was too slow and cumbersome.
     “Well, we’re with you, skipper,” Greg Shearer spoke up. “What are your orders?”

---

     And the baffling, trifling problems with the ship’s equipment started. Taking a figurative hitch in his belt, each man put down his fear and called up all his reserve of knowledge, determination, and skill—no matter how small each may have been.
     The vent valve on the forward tank bay jammed, and LeRoy lost all tank pressure. Since it was a sure bet they would lose precious propellant through an open vent and since the tanks had to have a suppression head on them for the pumps, LeRoy was in a quandry.
     “Pull the valve and cap the line,” Chubb told him.
     “But I’m liable to rupture the tanks!” LeRoy objected. “That valve acted as a relief valve as well!”
     “You’ll just have to watch your pressures, boy. And watch ’em close!”
     Then the drive on the forward radar antennas quit cold. Bob Danforth crawled into the nose cone with Bert, and they came back shaking their heads.
     “Can it be fixed?” Chubb asked.
     “No.”
     “Why?”
     “Some goof on the ground crew tightened the gear-retaining nuts with a straight wrench instead of a torque wrench. Must have been when I wasn’t looking. He got them too tight. All the gears are stripped. Those that didn’t grind themselves to bits got chunks of other gears in them and chewed themselves to pieces or jammed up tight,” Bert said in a tired voice. “It's locked up and the selsyns are smoldering messes.”
     “It’ll take a whole new antenna system,” Danforth remarked. “And it happened in about twenty seconds flat.”
     “Can we use it for fixed forward sights?” Chubb wondered.
     Bert shook his head. “The dish is canted fifteen degrees to the starboard.” He started through the aft hatch. “So we’re blind forward—staggering blind!”
     This was followed fifteen minutes later by the utter failure of the water recovery system. The tangle of coils in the vacuum still plugged up—somewhere—with something. Greg did his best, but finding a plug in three hundred meters of tubing was beyond him. The air system was still removing water from the air, but it wasn’t enough. Everyone went on very short water rations.
     “I’m not too sure about the purity of what we’ve got,” Greg reported. “The purification took place in the still.”
     Chubb took a look at the running-time clocks over the chart desk. Over twenty-six hours left until touch-down at Dianaport. He reached out, touched the interphone switch, and called for Doc Barcarez.
     “Doc, how much medicinal alky have you got?”
     Doc told him. “I … ah … I’ve also got a couple of jugs of Mexican rum I smuggled aboard in my baggage.”
     “You have any thiamine?”
     “Some. I have to take it.”
     “Okay. Greg’s having trouble with the water. Can you hit it with enough alcohol so we can stay sober and yet keep from coming down with the galloping crud? You may have to push thiamine to anybody who gets tight.”
     “Bueno! Can do!”

     Greg went aft and Chubb finished up checking the position fix. It looked good so far. “Take the deck, Bert,” he told his exec. “I’m going down and see if We can’t raise Al on the radio. I want to keep him plugged in on what’s going on.”
     “You want to speak to who?” the ham operator in El Paso asked. Chubb repeated Al’s name. “Oh, he’s your lawyer, isn’t he? Well, he isn’t here. I haven’t seen him at all.”
     There was a sharp snap, a pop, and the smell of smoldering insulation. The voice on the speaker quit. Half the sets in the electronics compartment went dead. The lights flickered. With a jerk, Bob Danforth reached over and pulled the main power switch.
     “Overload somewhere!” the new electronics officer re- marked hastily. “No, that wasn’t it; line voltage soared.” He reached for the intercom switch. The squawk box was still operative. “Hello, power room! This is electronics! Our line voltage went wild! What’s wrong?"
     “Wait one! Electrical fire in the power room!”
     Chubb reached the handle on a red box and yanked it down. A horn squawked throughout the ship. He muscled Bob away from the intercom and pushed the all-call. “All hands, general alarm! Fire in the power room! Greg, cut their blowers and stand by to seal-off! Bert, proceed with an emergency party to the power room. Damage and disaster plan number two is in operation!”
     He almost collided with Bert coming aft as he went forward to his own post in the control room. The desire to get back there and see what was going on couldn’t overcome his sense of responsibility as skipper. Chubb had to be in the control room right then. He just barely got into his couch before LeRoy passed the word, “Stand by, control room! We’ve got it under control!”
     “Bert’s coming back, LeRoy,” Chubb told him.
     “We won’t need him. We’ve almost got it out. Just some insulation on the port generator.”
     Chubb breathed a sigh of relief. Had it been bad, the entire tail might have gone. A fire in space is not serious; it can alWays—or nearly always—be extinguished by evacuating the compartment where it is. But in a power room, it can get out of hand in a hurry. He knew of one case, the SS Mirmidon, where an electrical fire had gotten to the reactor control circuits; no pieces of the ship had ever been reported (at least no pieces larger than two atoms sticking together).
     “Hello, Chubb, this is Bert. It’s secure back here. I just got here, and it’s out. Smoky, though. How about some blowers?”
     Chubb sounded the word to secure, then asked, “What’s the damage?”
     “The voltage regulator on the one remaining generator’s conked out. LeRoy got a terrific voltage surge on the line. The regulator itself is a sooty mess right now. We can write it off. Better find out what it did elsewhere.”
     The news was not encouraging. The lighting units on two decks were gone, the microwave oven in the galley was washed-up, and—most important—nearly half the communications gear was finished.
     “We still have radar and doppler,” Danforth reported. “And the low-power UHF stuff is okay; it was off. We can talk to Dianaport when we get close enough. But we can't even listen to anything else—not even Sammy in El Paso.”
     LeRoy and his crew started running continuous shifts on the power boards, regulating the ship’s electrical voltage by hand.
     “Well—how do things stand?”
     “We’ll make it. We’ve got plenty of scotch tape and glue.”
     “And the generator?”
     “As long as We keep heavy loads off it, We’re all right. I’ve asked everybody to call the power room before they so much as turn on a light. We could actually run the reset of the way on the emergency batteries…”
     “Don’t. Save them. We may need them yet.”

---

     “All divisions stand by to commence pre-landing checks at will! Executive officer report to the control room. It is now approximately ten hours to zero on landing at Dianaport!”
     Chubb left the details of the ship up to Bert and concentrated on the mechanics of their landing at Dianaport. He knew it was a critical test of the ship and crew. Lift was mere button-pushing. It takes considerably more skill to bring a space craft to rest with another object—considerably more skill indeed. He planned for a straight-in approach. An involute would have been better, but he did not want to stretch his luck in that complex a maneuver. With the Moon’s slow rotation, he did not have to allow for much of a drift angle. But because of Dianaport's position in Mare Nubium, he would have to correct quite a bit to get a truly radial approach.
     He had it worked down to one application of thrust for correction of trajectory and another for landing and was about to set up a prob to see if it could be done with one prolonged acceleration period when Bert interrupted him.
     “My checks don’t look so good, skipper,” the first mate told him. “Servo systems on the guidance nozzles are wild. We’ve apparently lost the dither on the transfer valves, and the system’s become critically damped.”
     “Oh, great balls of fire! Can it be fixed?” Chubb exploded.
     “I don’t know. I’ll have to check.”
     “Well, check—and fix it! How am I going to get this crate down without guidance nozzles?”
“I’ll try, skipper …”     “Try, hell! Do it! If you need help, I’ll lend a hand. I’m familiar with that lash-up.”
     “Okay. But brace yourself for something else …”
     “Break it gently,” Chubb moaned.
     “Danforth's got running rabbits on the approach radar, and the range tracking element's gone out of calibration.”
     Chubb looked dismayed. “One more failure, and we can forget about trying to land; we’ll be lucky to get close enough to crash.”
     “How about going into circum-lunar orbit, skipper?”
     “That’s not a bad idea, but I don’t know if it can be done.” He scratched his head. “Let me feed it to Isaac Newton here. Get busy on that guidance and radar—and don’t Waste my time telling me it can’t be fixed. Get the lead out and use that time to figure out how it can be fixed —then let me know how you did it. And move! We haven’t got six months to play around this time!”
     Thirty minutes later, Chubb had determined that the Absyrtis could not make circum-lunar orbit. The mechanics of the maneuver were too expensive and too complex to be attempted. He told Bert, “It’s Dianaport or nothing, chum. Can I give you a hand with that servo problem?”
     LeRoy was almost at his wit’s end. The million little troubles he was havingin the power room were almost beyond him. He called Bert to report it. Chubb overheard. He muscled Bert away from the intercom and told LeRoy, “Look, you spent six months with that tangle of plumbing! Don’t tell me you can’t make it work now! Get out those spares you made! Get on the stick, man!”
     “But, skipper, this rusty old …”
     “If you want to gripe, join the Space Marines!” Chubb paused and went on in a quieter tone of voice, “What’s the trouble, LeRoy? Can I help?”
     Chubb could. He was a trained hydaulic engineer. LeRoy wasn’t the only one he helped in those long hours before turn-over. He wasn't doing the job Louis could have done; but it didn’t worry him because he was doing the best he could. He cajoled, cursed, encouraged, reassured, and bawled out his division chiefs, but he was always ready to help them. The crew responded. At turn-over time, there were still troubles, but the crew was of the state of mind where they would have gotten out and pushed if that would have done any good.
     The men of the Absyrtis were no longer the South-western Rocket Society; they were the crew of the space ship Absyrtis, a rusty, obsolete old bucket but still their pride and joy. Amateurs they were and would admit the fact—but unqualified, no. Heaven help the man who had the temerity to say they were not competent. Hadn’t they taken a piece of rotting junk and remade it into a space ship which was able to break free of the Earth’s stubborn gravity?
     They were not thoroughly satisfied with that, however. There was a matter of landing, the final portion of the examination. When they landed—not if—they would not have to take the ridicule of the seasoned spacemen. The landing would be their accolade.
     There are no adequate adjectives to describe their utter determination to get that ship down on Luna and eventually back to White Sands.
     It was reflected in the manner in which they performed turn-over, swinging the ship around so that the rocket nozzles pointed toward Luna. The radar was still jumping, but Danforth was reading it; the servos had no dither, but Bert was working the guidance nozzles by direct coupling, hoping that the hydraulic lines would hold; and the power plant—well, it looked good, but only the actual operation would tell the story.
     They came in boldly but carefully on their approach.
     “Dianaport Traffic reports that we are in the groove,” came the report from Bob Danforth.
     “Do they sound worried?" Bert asked.
     “No. Doubtful, perhaps. They’re going to hold traffic when we get in the final approach leg—and the meat wagons are standing by.”
     “Tell them we won’t need them,” Chubb remarked from under the astrostat hood.
     “How about some radar and doppler data?” Bert asked the electronics officer.
     “In half a shake. I’m having a little trouble reading the scopes and getting the aft radar locked in. We’re still a little far out; I’m getting a double trace on my scopes, but you’ll have data shortly.”
     “Well, start pushing doppler difference frequencies up to the computer as soon as you can.” The ballistic computer was standing by, its memory banks loaded with all the information Chubb and Bert could give it. The program data was also inside it. It was merely waiting patiently for final position data in order to swing into action.
     “Line up looks good,” Chubb said, pushing his astrostat hood up. “Give or take a half r-c-h, I think we can live with it. What’s the minus time for correction maneuver?”
     “I won’t know exactly until we get some radar. Wup!”
     “Electronics to control! Do you read that radar data okay?” Danforth’s voice came over the phones.
     Chubb and Bert checked the winking tell-tale lights and swinging dials on their boards.
     “It looks rough, but the computer’s taking it,” Bert told him. He looked over at Chubb. “Computer and autopilot tracking, skipper. Minus five minutes to correction time.”
     “Okay, Bert. All hands to acceleration stations and strapped. Get the power plant hot and ready to go. Give me thirty-second counts.”
     “Aye, sir. Do you want all hand in pressure suits?”
     “Negative. We don’t have enough to go around. Have Greg seal all compartments in case we spring a leak under thrust.”
     It was, as usual, a long wait.
     After making one final adjustment on the autopilot panel, Chubb floated over to his couch and started strapping in. He studied the data presentations on his panel as he did so, trying to get the feel of this landing. He had studied the techniques of landing in texts, but realized it was more of an arcane art than a science. It took What they called “touch”, and he didn’t have any. He would have to feel his way down by inches, but he didn’t dare waste any time about it. The Absyrtis had only so much propellant left in her tanks, and he didn’t want to waste it by needless maneuvering or fighting gravity too long.
     “All hands ready, sir,” Bert reported, jostling him from his concentration. “Ninety seconds to zero!”
     “Let’s have pumps!”
     “Roger! Power room, stand by to fire!”
     “Power room here! Pumps coming up! Tank pressures coming up! Reactor at pre-fire heat!” LeRoy’s voice replied. “I think she’ll hold! I think she’ll hold!”
     “Read-back check on parameters!” Chubb ordered.
     Bert consulted his panel. “Set for all units one-third thrust—Three degrees pitch positive and seven degrees yaw left on the guidance nozzles for five seconds thrust duration. Do you concur?”
     “Concur.”
     “Sixty seconds to zero!”
     In theory, the Absyrtis could have made the Earth-Luna jump with two applications of thrust: one at lift and one at landing. However, it would have required accuracy far beyond practical engineering ability. Instruments could not be read that closely, neither by man nor machine. And the instruments could not possibly be expected to have that sort of accuracy. It was much cheaper, both in terms of all-up ship mass and sheer complexity of machinery, to allow for deviations and carry along a meneuvering margin in the propellant tanks.
     “Thirty seconds to zero!”
     “Power plant hot!” The pumps were shaking the ship again.
     Chubb stared at the pin-point stars in his astrostat, making a last check. Pushing a switch, he changed the mirror angles to show three separate stars which would coincide in the eyepiece once the correction had been made.
     “—fifteen—fourteen—thirteen—” Bert was chanting in a monotone.
     Chubb braced himself, relaxing and at the same time preparing himself for the push that was coming. “Fire on autopilot!”
     “—four—three—two—one—”
     It was a hard start, even at reduced thrust. The ship bucked violently, then settled down to shaking. But it didn’t last long. The motors shut down with their usual clamoring and bellowing, a wet, sloppy blubber that was heard even in the control room.
     Chubb squinted through the astrostat
.     “Looks good here,”“Bert remarked.
     “Power plant in cut-off!” LeRoy called. “She works smooth!”
     “Smooth, my foot!” Greg’s voice snapped. “What are you burning for go-juice?”
     “Shut up!” Chubb roared. The three stars were perfectly aligned and holding their positions. “Steady as she goes, Bert. Give me some ranges and bearings?”
     “Dianaport or Divana Space Station?”
     “Both.”
     He lay silent as the data flowed into the computer. Watching, he saw it was assimilating the data continuously and was holding to program. It was a reliable piece of equipment, but with the fouled-up radar, Chubb felt he would probably have to make part of the landing either on manual control or manual over-ride.
     The Absyrtis was in quite close and falling toward the Moon’s surface at a little better than a kilometer per second. Bert was reading Moon-relative vectors now, using his own astrostat as a drift indicator.
     So far, so good, thought Chubb. He was just beginning to correlate all the data into a fair mental picture when LeRoy’s voice screamed over the interphone, “Control room, we’ve lost a pump! Number Four has seized her bearings! Chambers three and five are out!”
     That was almost too much for Chubb. He hesitated for a split-second, then saw the approach rate indicator. “Bert! All available chambers stand by for full thrust! Program the computer for four-g by chambers one, two, four, and six! Guidance corrections accordingly! Move! I want to know if we can do it with what we’ve got!”
     So near, he thought disparingly, and yet so far. Three- hundred and eighty-three thousand kilometers behind them and less than a thousand to go. A half-year of work, hours of sweat and worry, a man’s life—and a failure with the goal in sight.
     Bert had the keyboard console swung over his couch and was setting up the new prob. LeRoy called up, “Skipper, can we make it on four chambers?”
     “Pipe down and keep your britches on!”
     “Whew!” Bert breathed. “We can make it! Four and a half minutes to zero!”
     “LeRoy,” Chubb called the power man, speaking in a firm but quiet tone, “we’re going to have to mash it in under high-g. Can the plant take it? How does it look?”
     "I've got my fingers crossed. We’ll have to do something about the vibration at high thrust; it shakes everything loose.”
     Chubb thought back, trying to remember his theory of combustion. “Look, are your pumps running fast enough? Try increasing the injector pressures.” He was shooting in the dark, but it might work.
     “It may bust the chambers.”
     “Not those iron maidens it won’t.” The Absyrtis had been built long before the thin-walled, light-weight modern rocket engines had become standard equipment. They were such an integral part of the ship’s structure that they had never been torn out during the many modifications; the ship-yards had merely modified the injectors.
     "We'll have to cut the over-speed trips on the turbines!”
     “Do it! Let ‘em run hot! Those turb buckets will stand it for a couple minutes! Just hang on, LeRoy, and twist her tail hard!—Or there’ll be a new lunar crater called Absyrtis!”
     “Two minutes to zero, skipper!” Bert armounced. “Doppler indicates our approach rate is within one-percent of calculated. Dianaport and Divana have confirmed. Autopilot is tracking. Dianaport Traffic says we’re eight degrees north of the groove and to correct. They’re holding traffic and have cleared the vicinity of Landing Pad Twenty-three for us.”
     “I’ll bet they’re standing by. Meat wagons for us and cops for LeRoy.” Chubb growled. “Okay,” he went on, then paused before giving the long-awaited order. “Bert, stand by to take her down;”
     “All hands Stand by for landing! Ninety seconds to zero!”
     “All boards Test-Fly to FLY!”
     “Boards to FLY!”
     “Power room here! Pumps coming up!—Up!—Up!—Up!—Good Lord!—Up!”
     The sound was a scream in the deck plates.
     “Hold it, LeRoy! Hold her, boy!”
     “Seventy-five seconds to zero!”
     “Autopilot?”
     “Tracking, skipper! Corrections noted and ready for compensation!”
     “Radar?”
     “Locked on Dianaport beacons!”
     The rocky craters lining Mare Nubium were plainly visible through the conning blister now. There was no doubt that the Absyrtis was falling toward the Moon.
     “Bert,” Chubb said privately to his exec, “I don’t know what’s going to happen after we hit dirt down there—but whatever it is, so help me if we get out of the sky safely I’ll figure it was worth it.”
     “Sure, it was worth it! Sixty seconds to zero!”
     “We’!l make it—We’ve got to make it!”
     “Control, these pumps may not hold up much longer at this speed!” LeRoy yelled over the interphone.
     “Electronics reporting! Divana just went into our blind spot toward!”
     “We go down on one radar, then!”
     “Skipper, that’s suicide!”
     “Shut up and do as you’re told!”
     “Forty-five seconds!”
     “Control room, these pumps are shaking everything! We’ve got a leak!”
     “Where? How bad?”
     “Squirting out around a fitting!”
     “Tighten that fitting or seal it! Hurry!”
     “Thirty seconds to zero”
     “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want …”
     “Shut up, Greg! I can’t hear LeRoy!” Chubb yelled.
     “Twenty-five!”
     “We’ll let it leak, Chubb. We’ll just get a little wet, that’s all”
     “Twenty!”
     “All hands brace for landing!”
     “Fifteen!” Bert screamed. “All green! Autopilot in command!”
     “Like hell! I’m on manual over-ride.”
     “Ten!—Nine—eight—.”
     It looked—well, they might make it—if the radar didn’t fizzle out—if the computer didn’t go wild—if the guidance system didn’t jitter—if the propulsion system worked. There were too many “if’s” for Chubb. He braced his fingers over the manual controls, not sure of whether he could land the ship or not, but willing to make a try.
     “Three—two—one—.”
     This time one chamber lit off before the rest. He felt the ship start to swing under the unbalanced thrust. Then all chambers were lit and correction was possible. The Absyrtis gyrated wildly, then settled down to a bone-crushing four-g's of acceleration.
     She hammered and rattled. Chubb clamped his jaws tight to keep from biting his tongue. He alternated his glances between the panel with the meters blurred by vibration and the conning blister.
     They were falling too fast! No, that was his imagination. He couldn’t read the approach rate indicator clearly enough. View aft on the tv monitor was useless; the vibration in the boat-tail had thrown the camera unit out of synch.
     But that couldn’t be Mare Nubium below them! It was much too rugged! Mountain peaks were spearing toward the ship.
     There was a weak voice in his headphones. “They’re holding! They’re holding!” LeRoy was screaming.
     The acceleration increased slightly, then slacked off as the autopilot felt its way down, the ground clutter on the radar confusing it to some extent.
     Then the ship cocked over at a ten-degree angle. Chubb almost over-rode it then, but it righted itself before he could move against the acceleration. Almost immediately, he was glad; through the brilliant orange haze of the jet aft, he could see the tiny checkerboard of Dianaport.
     What had Luna Louis once said? Why, he had been right! The old bucket did know her way into Dianaport by heart!
     The autopiot slacked off and let them fall at a half-g. The lunar soil rushed up at the ship. Chubb panicked invountarily, the old, ingrained fear of falling taking over. He tried to grope for switches. Something must be wrong! He got his hand over the panel, and a sudden burst of acceleration slammed his hand down on another switch.
     “What did I hit? What did I hit?” he screamed to himself.
     But it happened too quickly. Another burst of acceleration, a fall of about, a second’s duration, and then a back-wrenching jolt. The rocket nozzles blubbered and the dust swirled up around the conning blister.
     They were down on the Moon.
     And Chubb discovered what switch he had accidentally hit. He found himself staring at a luminous light panel on the overhead which said plainly:
     “You have just hit the panic switch, provided by the electronics division for your convenience in times of stress.”
     He started to laugh." “Jack down,” he managed to get out. “Secure all in-flight operations. Prepare to …” He couldn’t go on. He was laughing so hard that tears were running down his cheeks, pulled by the feeble lunar gravity. It was not hilarious laughter; there were sobs mingled in.
     Bert was a bit quieter, but he was doing the same thing. They lay there together on their couches, having trouble believing that they had made it at last.

---

     Chubb and Bert finally got the ship secured as the big loading towers were pulling up to the ship. The skipper of the Absyrtis would have liked to have seen the lunar landscape outside, but by the time things had quieted down to the point where he was able to take a look, the pressurized towers had cut off the view.
     “Electronics,” Chubb called, “give Dianaport Traffic a yelp and tell them we’re down and secured—and find out when the quarantine crew will be out …”
     “Wait one, skipper! I’m talking with them right now!” Danforth’s voice came back, strangely excited.
     “How about it, Bert? Have we got ground power yet?” Chubb asked his exec, checking.
     “Ready to switch now.”
     “Okay, all hands unstrap at will and stand by for …”
     “Chubb! Uh—Control, this is electronics! Skipper! We’ve got a reception waiting for us!…”
     “I’ll bet”
     “No, not what you’re thinking! We’re heroes, skipper! The mayor of Dianaport and all the colonial officials are waiting to greet us as soon as we get our locks open! This whole place is going nuts!”

• 

(ed note: keep in mind that this was written in 1968)

      It has been said that history never repeats itself, but that historical situations recur. To anyone who, like myself, has been involved in astronautical activities for over thirty years, there must be a feeling of familiarity, of “I have been here before,” in some of the present arguments about the exploration of space.

     Like all revolutionary new ideas, the subject has had to pass through three stages, which may be summed up by these reactions: (1) “It’s crazy—don’t waste my time.” (2) “It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing.” (3) “I always said it was a good idea.”

     As far as orbital flights, and even journeys to the Moon, are concerned, we have made good progress through all these stages, though it will be a few years yet before everyone is in category 3. But where flights to the planets are involved, we are still almost where we were thirty years ago. True, there is much less complete skepticism—to that extent, history has not repeated itself—but there remains, despite all the events of the past decade, a widespread misunderstanding of the possible scale, importance, and ultimate implications of travel to the planets.

     Let us start by looking at some fundamentals, which are not as well known as they should be, even to space scientists. Forgetting all about rockets and today‘s astronautical techniques, consider the basic problem of lifting a man away from the Earth, purely in terms of the work done to move him against gravity.

     For a man of average mass, the energy requirement is about 1000 kilowatt-hours, which customers with a favorable tariff can purchase for $10 from their electric utility company. What may be called the basic cost of a one-way ticket to space is thus the modest sum of $10.

(ed note: In 2021 in the US, the average rate is about US$0.20 per KWH. So nowadays 1,000 KWH would be about US$200 )

     For the smaller planets and all satellites—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Pluto, Moon, Titan, Ganymede, etc.—the exit fee is even less; you need only 50 cents worth of energy to escape from the Moon (50 KWH). Giant planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are naturally much more expensive propositions. If you are ever stranded on Jupiter, you'll have to buy almost $300 of energy to get home. Make sure you have enough traveler’s checks…

     Of course, the planetary fields are only part of the story; work also has to be done traveling from orbit to orbit, and thus moving up or down the enormous gravitational field of the Sun. But by great good luck the Solar System appears to have been designed for the convenience of space travelers: all the planets lie far out on the gentle slope of the solar field where it merges into the endless plain of interstellar space (see solar system gravity well map). In this respect, the conventional map of the Solar System, showing the planets clustering around the Sun, is wholly misleading. {insert link to gravity well map}

     We can say, in fact, that the planets are 99 percent free of the Sun’s gravitational field, so that the energy required for orbital transfers is quite small; usually it is considerably less than that needed to escape from the planets themselves (once you achieve escape velocity you are halfway to anywhere). In dollars and cents, the energy cost of transferring a man from the surface of the Earth to that of Mars is less than $20. Even for the worst possible case (surface of Jupiter to surface of Saturn), the pure energy cost is less than $1,000!

     Hardheaded rocket engineers may well consider that the above arguments, purporting to prove that space travel should be about a billion times cheaper than it is, have no relevance to the practical case—since even today the cost of the fuel is trivial compared with the cost of the hardware. Most of the mountainous Saturn 5 standing on the pad can be bought for, quite literally, a few cents a pound; that is all that kerosene and liquid oxygen cost. The expensive items are the precision-shaped pieces of high-grade metals, and all the little black boxes that are sold by the carat.

     Although this is true, it is also to a large extent a consequence of our present immature, no-margin-for-error technology. Just ask yourself how expensive driving would be, if a momentary engine failure was liable to write off your car—and yourself—and the fuel supply was so nicely calculated that you couldn’t complete a mission if the parking meter you'd aimed at happened to be already occupied. This is roughly the situation for planetary travel today.

     To imagine what it may one day become, let us look at the record of the past, and see what lessons we can draw from the early history of aeronautics. Soon after the failure of Langley’s “Aerodrome” in 1903, the great astronomer Simon Newcomb wrote a famous essay, well worth rereading, which proved that heavier-than-air flight was impossible by means of known technology. The ink was hardly dry on the paper when a pair of bicycle mechanics irreverently threw grave doubt on the professor’s conclusions. When informed of the embarrassing fact that the Wright brothers had just flown, Newcomb gamely replied, “Well, maybe a flying machine can be built. But it certainly couldn’t carry a passenger as well as a pilot.”

     Now I am not trying to poke fun at one of the greatest of American scientists. When you look at the Wright biplane, hanging up there in the Smithsonian Institution, Newcomb’s attitude seems very reasonable indeed; I wonder how many of us would have been prepared to dispute it in 1903.

     Yet—and this is the really extraordinary point—there is a smooth line of development, without any major technological breakthrough, from the Wright “Flyer” to the last of the great piston-engined aircraft such as the DC-6 (which were hot stuff back in 1968, but are obsolete in 2021). All the many-orders-of-magnitude improvement in performance came as a result of engineering advances which in retrospect seem completely straightforward, and sometimes even trivial. Let us list the more important ones: variable-pitch airscrews; slots and flaps; retractable undercarriages; concrete runways; streamlining; supercharging.

     Not very spectacular, are they? Yet these things, together with steady improvements in materials and design, lifted much of the commerce of mankind into the air. For they had a synergistic effect on performance; their cumulative effect was much greater than could have been predicted by considering them individually. They did not merely add; they multiplied.

     All this took about forty years; and then there was the second technological breakthrough—the advent of the jet engine—and a new cycle of development started.

     Unless the record of the past is wholly misleading, we are going to see much the same sequence of events in space. As far as can be judged at the moment, the equivalent items on the table of aerospace progress may be: refueling in orbit; air-breathing boosters; reusuable boosters; refueling on (or from) the Moon; lightweight materials (e.g., composites and fibers).

     Probably the exploitation of these relatively conventional ideas will take somewhat less than the forty years needed in the case of aircraft; their full impact should be felt by the turn of the century. Well before then, moreover, the next breakthrough or quantum jump in space technology should also have occurred, with the development of new propulsion systems—presumably fission-powered but perhaps even using fusion as well.

     And with these, the Solar System will become an extension of the Earth—if we wish it to be so.

     It is at this point, however, that all analogy with the past breaks down; we can no longer draw meaningful parallels between aeronautics and astronautics. As soon as aircraft were shown to be practical, there were obvious and immensely important uses for them: military, commercial, scientific. They could be used to provide swifter connections between already highly developed communities —a state of affairs which almost certainly does not exist in the Solar System, and may not do so for centuries to come.

     It seems, therefore, that we may be involved in a peculiarly vicious circle. Planetary exploration will not be really practical until we have developed a mature spaceship technology, but we won’t have good spaceships until we have worthwhile places to send them. Places, above all, with those adequate refueling and servicing facilities now sadly lacking elsewhere in the Solar System.

     How can we escape from this dilemma? Fortunately, there is one encouraging factor.

     Almost the whole of the technology needed for long-range space travel will, inevitably and automatically, be developed during the exploitation of near space. Even if we set our sights no higher than a thousand miles above the Earth, we would find that by the time we had perfected the high-thrust, high-performance surface-to-surface transports, the low-acceleration interorbital shuttles, the reliable, closed-cycle space-station ecologies, we would have proved out at least 90 percent of the technology needed for the exploration of the Solar System. And the most expensive 90 percent at that…

     Perhaps I had better spend a few moments here on those strange characters who think that space is the exclusive province of automatic robot probes and that we should stay at home and watch TV, as God intended us to. This whole man-machine controversy will seem, in another couple of decades, to be a baffling mental aberration of the Early Space Age.

     I won’t waste any time arguing with this viewpoint, as I hold these truths to be self-evident: (1) unmanned spacecraft should be used whenever they can do a job more efficiently, cheaply, and safely than manned vehicles; (2) until we have automatons superior to human beings (by which time all bets will be off), all really sophisticated space operations will demand human participation. I refer to such activities as assembling and servicing the giant applications satellites of the next decade; running orbital observatories, laboratories, hospitals, factories—projects for which there will be such obvious and overwhelming commercial and scientific benefits that no one will dispute them.

     In particular, the impact on Solar System studies of medium-sized telescopes outside the atmosphere—a mere couple of hundred miles above the Earth!—will be overwhelming. Until the advent of radar and space probes, everything we knew about the planets ‘had been painfully gathered, over a period of about a century and a half, by astronomers with inadequate instruments, hastily sketching details on a tiny trembling disk glimpsed during moments of good visibility. Such moments—when the atmosphere is stable and the image undistorted—may add up to only a few hours in an entire lifetime of observing.

     In these circumstances, it would be amazing if we had acquired any reliable knowledge about planetary conditions; it is safest to -assume that we have not. We are still in the same position as the medieval cartographers with their large areas of “Terra Incognita” and their “Here Be Dragons,” except that we may have gone too far in the other direction—“Here Be No Dragons.” Our ignorance is so great that we have no right to make either assumption.

     As proof of this, let me remind you of some horrid shocks the astronomers have received recently, when things of which they were quite sure turned out to be simply not true. The most embarrassing example is the rotation of Mercury: until a couple of years ago, everyone was perfectly certain that it always kept the same face toward the Sun, so that one side was eternally dark, the other eternally baked. But now, radar observations indicate that it turns on its axis every fifty-nine days; it has sunrise and sunset like any respectable world. Nature seems to have played a dirty trick on several generations of patient astronomers.

     Einstein once said, “The good Lord is subtle, but He is not malicious.” The case of Mercury casts some doubt on this dictum. And what about Venus? You can find, in the various reference books, rotation periods for Venus ranging all the way from twenty-four hours up to the full value of the year, 225 days. But, as far as I know, not one astronomer ever suggested that Venus would present the extraordinary case of a planet with a day longer than its year! And, of course, it would be the one example we had no way of checking, until the advent of radar. Is this subtlety—or malice?

     And look at the Moon. Five years ago, everyone was certain that its surface was either soft dust or hard lava. If the two schools of thought had been on speaking terms, they would at least have agreed that there were no alternatives. But then Luna 9 and Surveyor 1 landed and what did they find? Good honest dirt…

     These are by no means the only examples of recent shocks and surprises. There's the unexpectedly high temperature beneath the clouds of Venus; the craters of Mars; the gigantic radio emissions from Jupiter; the complex organic chemicals in certain meteors; the clear signs of extensive activity on the surface of the Moon. And now Mars seems to be turning inside out. The ancient, dried-up sea beds may be as much a myth as Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium; for it looks as if the dark maria are actually highlands, not lowlands, as we had always thought.

     The negative point I am making is that we really know nothing about the planets. The positive one is that a tremendous amount of reconnaissance—the essential prelude to manned exploration—can be carried out from Earth orbit. It is probably no exaggeration to say that a good orbiting telescope could give us a view of Mars at least as clear as did Mariner 4. And it would be a view infinitely more valuable—a continuous coverage of the whole visible face, not a single snapshot of a small percentage.

     Nevertheless, there are many tasks which can best be carried out by unmanned spacecraft. Among these is one which, though of great scientific value, is of even more profound psychological importance. I refer to the production of low-altitude oblique photographs.

     It is no disparagement of the wonderful Ranger, Luna, and Surveyor coverage to remind you that what suddenly made the Moon a real place, and not merely an astronomical body up there in the sky, was the famous photograph of Copernicus from Lunar Orbiter 2. When the newspapers called it the picture of the century, they were expressing a universally felt truth. This was the photograph that first proved to our emotions what our minds already knew but had never really believed—that Earth is not the only world. The first high-definition, oblique photos of Mars, Mercury, and the satellites of the giant planets will have a similar impact, bringing our mental images of these places into sharp focus for the first time.

     The old astronomical writers had a phrase that has gone out of fashion but which may well be revived: the plurality of worlds. Yet, of course, every world is itself a plurality. To realize this, one has only to ask oneself: How long will it be before we have learned everything that can be known about the planet Earth? It will be quite a few centuries yet before terrestrial geology, oceanography, and geophysics are closed, “surprise-free” subjects.

     Consider the multitude of environments that exists here on Earth, from the summit of Everest to the depths of the Marianas Trench—from high noon in Death Valley to midnight at the South Pole. We may have equal variety on the other planets, with all that this implies for the existence of life. It is amazing how often this elementary fact is overlooked and how often a single observation or even a single extrapolation from la preliminary observation based on a provisional theory has been promptly applied to a whole world.

     It is possible, of course, that the Earth has a greater variety of more complex environments than any other planet. Like a jet-age tourist “doing Europe” in a week, we may be able to wrap up Mars or Venus with a relatively small number of “landers." But I doubt it, if only for the reason that the whole history of astronomy teaches us to be cautious of any theory purporting to show that there is something special about the Earth. In their various ways, the other planets may have orders of complexity as great as ours. Even the Moon—which seemed a promising candidate for geophysical simplicity less than a decade ago—has already begun an avalanche of surprises.

     The late Professor J. B. S. Haldane once remarked—and this should be called Haldane’s Law—“The Universe is not only queerer than we imagine; it is queerer than we can imagine.” We will encounter the operation of this law more and more frequently, as we move away from home. And as we prepare for this move, it is high time that we face up to one of the more shattering realities of the astronomical situation. For all practical purposes, we are still as geocentrically minded as if Copernicus had never been born; to all of us, the Earth is the center, if not of the Universe, at least of the Solar System.

     Well, I have news for you. There is really only one planet that matters, and that planet is not Earth, but Jupiter. My esteemed colleague Isaac Asimov summed it up very well when he remarked, “The Solar System consists of Jupiter plus debris.” Even spectacular Saturn doesn’t count; he has less than a third of Jupiter’s enormous mass—and Earth is a hundred times smaller than Saturn! Our planet is an unconsidered trifle, left over after the main building operations were completed.

     This is quite a blow to our pride, but there may be much worse to come, and it is well to get ready for it. Jupiter may also be the biological, as well as the physical, center of gravity of the Solar System.

     This, of course, represents a complete reversal of views in a couple of decades. Not long ago, it was customary to laugh at the naive ideas of the early astronomers—Sir John Herschel, for example—who took it for granted that all the planets were teeming with life. This attitude is certainly over-optimistic, but it no longer seems as simple-minded as the opinion, to be found in the popular writings of the 1930s, that ours might be the only solar system, and, hence, the only abode of life in the entire Galaxy.

     The pendulum has indeed swung—perhaps for the last time, for in another few decades we should know the truth. The discovery that Jupiter is quite warm, and has precisely the type of atmosphere in which life is believed to have arisen on Earth, may be the prelude to the most significant biological findings of this century. Carl Sagan and Jack Leonard put it well in their book, Planets: “Recent work on the origin of life and the environment of Jupiter suggests that it may be more favorable to life than any other planet, not excepting the Earth.” (My italics.)

     The extraordinary color changes in the Jovian atmosphere—in particular, the behavior of that Earth-sized, drifting apparition the Great Red Spot—hint at the production of organic materials in enormous quantities. Where this happens, life may follow inevitably, given a sufficient lapse of time. To quote Isaac Asimov again, “If there are seas on Jupiter …think of the fishing.”

     Dr. James Edson, late of NASA, once remarked, “Jupiter is a problem for my grandchildren.” I suspect that he may have been wildly optimistic. The zoology of a world out-weighing three hundred Earths could be the full-time occupation of mankind for the next thousand years.

     On the other hand, it is also possible that we shall discover no trace of extraterrestrial life, past or present, on any of the planets. This will be a great disappointment, but even such a negative finding would give us a much sounder understanding of the conditions in which living creatures are likely to evolve, and this in turn would clarify our views on the distribution of life in the universe as a whole. However, it seems much more probable that long before we can certify the Solar System as sterile, the communications engineers will have settled this ancient question—in the affirmative.

     For that is what the exploration of space is really all about, and this is why many people are afraid of it, though they may give other reasons, even to themselves. It may be just as well that there are no contemporary higher civilizations in our immediate vicinity; the cultural shock of direct contact might be too great for us to survive. But by the time we have cut our teeth on the Solar System, we should be ready for such encounters. The challenge, in the Toynbeean sense of the word, should then bring forth the appropriate response.

     Do not for a moment doubt that we will one day head out for the stars—if, of course, the stars do not reach us first. I think I have read most of the arguments proving that interstellar travel is impossible; they are latter-day echoes of Professor Newcomb’s paper on heavier-than-air flight. The logic and the mathematics are impeccable; the premises wholly invalid. The more sophisticated are roughly equivalent to proving that dirigibles cannot break the sound barrier.

     In the opening years of this century, the pioneers of astronautics were demonstrating that flight to the Moon and nearer planets was possible, though with great difficulty and expense, by means of chemical propellants. But even then, they were aware of the promise of nuclear energy and hoped that it would be the ultimate solution. They were right.

     Today, it can likewise be shown that various conceivable, though currently quite impracticable, applications of nuclear and medical techniques could bring at least the closer stars within the range of exploration. And I would warn any skeptics who may point out the marginal nature of these techniques that at this very moment there are appearing simultaneously, on the twin horizons of the infinitely large and the infinitely small, unmistakable signs of a breakthrough into a new order of creation…To quote some remarks made recently in my adopted country, Ceylon, by a Nobel Laureate in Physics, Professor C. F. Powell, “It seems to me that the evidence from astronomy and particle physics which I have described makes it possible that we are on the threshold of great and far-reaching discoveries. I have spoken of processes which, mass for mass, would be at least a thousand times more productive of energy than nuclear energy…it seems that there are prodigious sources of energy in the interior regions of some galaxies, and possibly in the ‘quasars,’ far greater than those produced by the carbon cycle occurring in the stars…And we may one day learn how to employ them.”

     And if Professor Powell’s surmise is correct, others may already have learned, on older worlds than ours. So it would be foolish indeed to assert that the stars must be forever beyond our reach.

     More than half a century ago, the great Russian pioneer space scientist Tsiolkovski wrote these moving and prophetic words: “The Earth is the cradle of the mind—but you cannot Live in the cradle forever.” Now, as we enter the second decade of the Age of Space, we can look still further into the future.

     The Earth is indeed our cradle, which we are about to leave.

     And the Solar System will be our kindergarten.

All you young whipper-snappers who think that science fiction was invented in 1977 with the first Star Wars movie, I have to inform you that you are sadly mistaken. SF was old when your great-great-grandfather was born. Get a load of this: