Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

As might be expected, most of the population of the Earth paid no attention at all to the broadcasts, being quite unable to realize the situation. The Earth had never been destroyed, therefore it could not be destroyed, and the scientists were crazy as usual. That attitude was typical of the major part of the inhabitants of the globe—the great, average masses.

But there were two other attitudes apparent. On the one side there were those intelligent enough to understand the danger and the measures that were being taken against it. They were the scientists, engineers, and technicians of the world, and the well-educated part of the other classes of the population.

On the other side were the unbalanced, the fanatics, and the extremely ignorant, who were the tools of the first two. They rioted, for no apparent reason, but merely because they were frightened, they tried to make up in two years for the dullness of their lives, not realizing that the dullness of those lives was largely due to the dullness of their intellects. Some of them—and they were less trouble than the others—merely got drunk and remained that way. A few of them actively obstructed the work that had to be done.

One of them, one Obidiah Miller, who had been, it was rumored, a circuit rider in the Tennessee Mountains, was the most virulent. He was an ignorant man, but he possessed a native shrewdness which, combined with his surprising oratorical powers and his religious fanaticism, had a tremendous effect on the more ignorant and weak-minded portions of the population.

Fanatics are always followed by fools, of which there is an inexhaustible supply. When the danger appeared, the intelligent parts of the populace decided that the reasonable thing to do was to cooperate with the scientists who were trying to cope with it. The fanatics proclaimed, and the fools believed, that the approaching calamity was the judgment of God on an impious world. Especially did they protest that the Moon should not be moved. First, because it couldn’t be moved; second, because the Lord hadn’t intended it to move; and third, because, since God had evidently intended that the minus planet should destroy the Earth for its wickedness, it would be an act of impiety even to attempt to avert the collision.

“Would ye seek, brethren, to attempt to stave off the Day of Judgment, as foretold in the Holy Scriptures? Would ye seek”—his hill-billy accent rolled out over the sheep-faced crowd—”to avert the day when the righteous shall be raised to the right hand of God, and the wicked shall be cast down to Hell? Will ye let the wicked meddlers into matters that are best left alone attempt to stave off the almighty hand of God? Wreck the space ports! Smash the rockets! Kill the idolaters!”

There was an answering rumble from the crowd, as Mike and Jimmy slipped away from its outskirts. “The ‘idolaters,’” Mike remarked, as they sidled into a building, “sounds like us. I would recommend, with all due respect to the gentleman’s religious convictions, that steps be taken. With an ax, for choice, before he starts gumming the works.”

“There appears to be something in what you say. Personally, I have no desire to become a martyr to science before it’s absolutely necessary. Let’s get the chief of the Federal police on the wire, and have him gather our friend in and send his congregations home. And some guards with machine guns and things around the space ports might not be amiss. We haven’t any time to be bothered by fools!”

In the next few days there was an epidemic of raids on the pseudo-religious protest meetings, and there was a great gathering-in of the more rabid of the fanatics, including Obidiah Miller, who was planted, gently but firmly, in a lunatic asylum. Guards were placed around the space ports, and assigned to the more important of the scientists who were employed on the gigantic task. There were a few attempts at sabotage and assassination, but all of them failed.

The work was pressed. The astronomical observatory on the Moon was dismantled and carried to the Earth piecemeal, as were many of the valuable fittings of the space port there. Since the development of atomic power, this port was not as necessary as it had been in the old days of combustion rockets. Then, the huge atomic drills, operated by men in space suits, started the excavation of the deep shafts that were to act as rocket tubes. Some fifty of them were drilled, most of them parallel, but a few at divergent angles, to act as the steering mechanism of the huge space ship into which Luna was being converted. At the bases of these shafts the reaction chambers were excavated, and lined with refractory material. The automatic fuel-supply system was installed, whereby millions of tons of the very material of the satellite itself were carried to the reaction chambers.

There, the lighter elements, oxygen, silicon, aluminum, etc., were to be converted into iron vapor, which was to be driven out of the rocket tubes by the atomic energy released in the process. Iron itself, though common on the Moon, was not suitable as a fuel, since, in respect to atomic changes, it is the most stable of all the elements. The whole fuel system was automatically controlled, with all controls in duplicate.

The controlling mechanism, which consisted, in effect, of fifty throttles—one for each rocket tube—was arranged to be controlled by remote radio control from a space ship, which would convoy the huge projectile to its destination. All the rocket tubes, of course, were on one hemisphere of the Moon, since there would be no need of stopping it in its course, once it had been started.

Thousands of men were needed for the construction work—of all types from manual laborers to astrophysicists. And all of them were working at high pressure. Work never stopped for months at a time. Accidents were many—an atomic drill is not the safest instrument in the universe, and working in a space suit is always dangerous.

As a result, the work took a steady toll of lives, and there was a steady inflow of new labor onto the job. But the work went on in spite of accidents. It had to. When a man was killed, if there was anything at all left of him, the body was tossed to one side and another man took his place. The record of the construction would be an epic in itself—one which there is no space to record here.

The plan of operation was simple—in theory. The Moon was to be gradually dragged away from the Earth—gradually, to avoid inducing huge tides and devastating Earthquakes, then driven north “above” the solar system, out of the plane of the ecliptic. It was to be driven into the minus planet at such an angle and at such a velocity that the latter would be deflected away from the Earth, and the residual mass of neutrons would fall directly into the Sun, where they would do no harm. It was calculated that the normal matter of the Moon would a little more than neutralize the negative matter of the minus planet, so that the residue that finally reached the Sun would consist of a small planetoid of normal matter surrounding an extremely massive core of neutrons.

It was July 6, 2157. Carter and Poggenpohl were rechecking the calculations of the course the Moon would have to take on its last voyage. Finally, they finished with the last decimal and leaned back. “And that, my boy, is how it shall be done!” Jimmy threw his pencil at the calculating machine and inserted his face into a liter of beer.

“All you have to do is push the button and save the world. We’ll have to do some reckoning, though, on the initial escape from the Earth. Otherwise, if we’re a little brusque about it, the tides will put New York under fifty feet of water, and the mayor might possibly be annoyed with us. How far behind schedule are those Primates of engineers, who are supposed to be building the rocket tubes on that soon-to-be excompanion of our more romantic moments?”