Robert Heinlein - For Us, The Living

His reverie was broken by the insistent ringing of the alarm gong. The robot checked flight and hovered. He glanced out and saw a series of bright red pylons marching over the rolling plateau. Miles beyond was a group of buildings. Just below was a small landing flat and hangars. The field lights flashed the landing signal and they obeyed. They were received by a wizened weather-beaten desert rat, who showed them where to park their car and indicated with a jerk of his thumb the stairway to the trans-tube. They descended and strapped themselves in the cylinder. Olga touched a button on the remote control panel, relays clicked, and they found themselves almost at once at the field station. They emerged from the stairwell into a large room equipped with a few chairs, a televue control station and some benches. It was almost deserted. A young man was talking to a girl dressed in an asbestos coverall. The hood and visor were pushed back, disclosing a tight mass of copper ringlets. She laughed at something he said and answered in a low tone. An elderly man with a preoccupied look entered from a corridor on the right and shuffled quickly into a side room. No one else was in sight. Olga and Perry stood uncertainly for a moment, then Perry advanced, touched the young man on the arm, and spoke.

"Excuse me."

The young man started, and turned around. "Oh, sorry. I didn't see you. May I do you a service?"

"Service," answered Perry. "We'd like to look around, if it's permitted."

"Certainly. Glad to have you. You'll need a guide though. Joe!"

A blond head appeared from behind the back of a couch, a strapping form followed it. "Yeah?"

"A couple of visitors 'ud like to take a gander around the plant. I've got to handle the controls for Vivian on this test run. Can you do it?"

"I guess so." The youth chucked a magazine into a chair and joined them, long arm and hand outstretched.

Perry thanked him. "Sure this won't put you out?"

"Not at all. Glad to have a little excitement. It's pretty dull around here. Come along. What would you like to see first? The rockets? Most everybody does." He led them into a huge gloomy shed. Dominating the interior was a great sleek metal behemoth that towered over their heads. Perry whistled.

"You've gone further than I thought."

Joe followed his glance. "That? You expect too much. That's just an obsolete strato-rocket. Her top speed won't take her over the heaviside layer. We've got her outfitted to simulate space conditions as far as we can. We've got a crew locked up in there now to see if they can take it without going off their heads. They've been in there six weeks now. Every now and then we give 'em a little surprise like bleeding out half their air pressure." He grinned. "There's another little surprise that they don't expect. One of 'em's under secret orders to go crazy and start trouble."

"Can't they get out?"

"Oh yes, if the skipper loses his nerve. Otherwise not."

Olga clenched her fists. "Why must you do that? It isn't human."

Joe fixed her with a sardonic eye. "Sister, if they can't stand that, what chance have they got in space?"

"Why go out in space? Isn't the earth big enough?"

Joe turned his attention back to Perry. "You can't make a man permanently contented in a nice, pretty, upholstered civilization. We've got to, that's all. There's something out there to be seen, and we're gonna have a look." Perry nodded. Olga held her peace. "But these babies here are what we're working on. Messenger rockets." He indicated a number of metal bodies roughly cylindroconical in shape. "These are rejected models but they look a lot like ones we've tried. One like this fellow got into a permanent orbit, we think. At least the data showed it making nearly five kilometers when it left."

Olga's lips moved. "That doesn't seem fast; three hundred kilometers per hour."

"Not three hundred; eighteen thousand. It was going five kilometers per second. That ain't enough though. We need a speed of eleven point three kilometers per second to break out of the earth's field entirely."

"That applies to shots rather than rockets, doesn't it?"

"That's right. You know something about ballistics, don't you, bud ? Any speed at all will do as long as our accelerating force is greater than gravitational force. The distances are enormous though. Without pretty heavy acceleration you'd grow old waiting to get there."

"Not from here to the moon, surely."

"Oh, no. That's no distance. But if we get there, we'll establish a base there and try some long hops. In a thin gravity field like the moon's we ought to be able to take off for any planet in the system."

"How much acceleration do you figure on using?"

"Two g's is about all that's healthy. I've taken that for ten hours in the centrifuge, but then I'm husky. It's uncomfortable though, and it made me sick to my stomach at first. Of course we can take as high as six or seven g's for a short time in a good corset and braces and a water cushion. I pass out at about five and half."

"What's a 'g'?" Olga whispered to Perry.

"Force of gravity at earth seal level. At two g's you'd feel twice as heavy as you do now."

"Now see this baby," continued Joe, indicating a silver grey torpedo-like body about ten feet long. "We've sent off eight like it towards old Luna. Her pay load is a lot of magnesium ribbon to make a flare. One of 'em got across, at least Flagstaff reported a spark in Mare Imbrium. Pick it up." Perry stooped over and prepared to heave. It came up lightly and he almost fell over backwards. "Light, ain't it? It's a tungsten aluminum alloy, lighter than potassium. Inert, too."

"I should think it would be porous," Perry commented.

"It is, but it's got a mirror surface inside about two molecules thick that would stop the breath of scandal. The only hard metal in it otherwise is the jets themselves."

"Look here," put in Olga, "If you've got a little one across, why not build a bigger one and ride it over?"

"Well, you see all this little fellow has to do is to climb up to the change over point—that's where the attraction of the moon and the earth are equal—then fall down. To get to the moon and back means to climb up, then climb down to the moon, using rocket fuel to break your fall, then climb up again and climb back down to earth again, four stages. We can't do that yet. But we do think that we are well on the way to building one that will do two of those stages; go up, swing in an orbit around the moon, then climb back down to earth again. That's what Vivian, the girl you saw in the lobby, is working on. She's going to ride the ground tests on some new fuel."

"What do the ground tests amount to?"

"They are the nearest thing to flight conditions we can manage on the ground. This stuff has been laboratory tested, and fired in ground jets, and a rocket designed for it which should be strong enough and light enough to do the trick. Today it is tested in a dummy rocket with a full control panel and full size jets, but the whole framework is tied down solid. The rocket reaction produces stress and strain instead of acceleration. We measure the stresses by instrument. If it all checks out the way it should, we'll try the real rocket in flight."

Olga interrupted. "If you've made all those preliminary tests, what can you learn by running a rocket that is tied down? You already have the data on what it will do."

Joe shook his head. "No, not quite. We know what we think it ought to do, but we knew that when the equations of synthesis were for it. But this stuff is all new. Suppose it does something different? We've got to know before a ship leaves the ground."

Perry put in a word. "Why is this girl Vivian running the tests? Isn't it a man's job?"

"It's her right to. She's the molecular synthesist who designed the fuel. This is as far as she can take it though, as she's not a rocket pilot."