Rocketship Galileo

Chapter 9 - INTO THE LONELY DEPTHS

TO ROSS AND ART THE WORLD seemed to rotate dizzily through ninety degrees. They had been standing up, strapped to their upright hammocks, and staring straight forward past Cargraves and Morrie out through the conning port at the moon and the western horizon.

When the rocket took off it was as if they had been suddenly forced backwards, flat on their backs and pushed heavily into the cushions and springs. Which, in a way, was exactly what had happened to them. It was the powerful thrust of the jet which had forced them back against the springs and held them there. The force of the drive made the direction they were traveling "up."

But the moon still stared back at them, dead ahead through the port; "up" was also "west." From where they lay, flat on their backs, Cargraves and Morrie were above them and were kept from falling on them by the heavy steel thrust members which supported the piloting chairs.

The moon shimmered and boiled under the compression waves of air. The scream of the frantic molecules of air against the skin of the craft was louder and even more nerve-racking than steady thunder of the jet below them. The horizon dropped steadily away from the disk of the moon as they shot west and gained altitude. The sky, early morning gray as they took off, turned noonday blue as their flat climb took them higher and higher into the sunlight.

The sky started to turn purple and the stars came out. The scream of the air was less troublesome. Cargraves cut in his gyros and let Joe the Robot correct his initial course; the moon swung gently to the right about half its width and steadied. "Everybody all right?," he called out, his attention free of the controls for a moment.

"Swell!" Art called back.

"Somebody's sitting on my chest," Ross added.

"What's that?"

"I say, somebody's sitting on my chest!" Ross shouted.

"Well, wait a bit. His brother will be along in a minute."

"What did you say?"

"Never mind!" Cargraves shouted. "It wasn't important. Copilot!"

"Yes, Captain!"

"I'm going into full automatic. Get ready to check our course."

"Aye, aye, sir." Morrie clamped his octant near his face and shifted his head a little so that he could see the scope of the belly radar easily. He dug his head into the pads and braced his arms and hands; he knew what was coming. "Astrogator ready!"

The sky was black now and the stars were sharp. The image of the moon had ceased to shake and the unearthly scream of the air had died away, leaving only the tireless thunder of the jet. They were above the atmosphere, high above—free.

Cargraves yelled, "Hang on to your hats, boys! Here we go! He turned full control over to Joe the Robot pilot. That mindless, mechanical-and-electronic worthy figuratively shook his non-existent head and decided he did not like the course. The image of the moon swung "down" and toward the bow, in terms of the ordinary directions in the ship, until the rocket was headed in a direction nearly forty degrees further east than was the image of the moon.

Having turned the ship to head for the point where the moon would be when the Galileo met it, rather than headed for where it now was, Joe turned his attention to the jet. Thee cadmium plates were withdrawn a little farther; the rocket really bit in and began to dig.

Ross found that there was indeed a whole family on his chest. Breathing was hard work and his eyes seemed foggy.

If Joe had had feelings he need have felt no pride in what he had just done, for his decisions had all been made for him before the ship left the ground. Morrie had selected, with Cargraves' approval, one of several three-dimensional cams and had installed it in Joe's innards. The cam "told" Joe what sort of a course to follow to the moon, what course to head first, how fast to gun the rocket and how long to keep it up. Joe could not see the moon- Joe had never heard of the moon -but his electronic senses could perceive how the ship was headed in relation to the steady, unswerving spin of the gyros and then head the ship in the direction called for by the cam in his tummy.

The cam itself had been designed by a remote cousin of Joe's, the gteat "Eniac" computer at the University of Pennsylvania. By means of the small astrogation computer in the ship either Morrie or Cargraves could work out any necessary problem and control the Galileo by hand, but Joe, with the aid of his cousin, could do the same thing better, faster, more accurately and with unsleeping care—provided the human pilot knew what to ask of him and how to ask it.

Joe had not been invented by Cargraves; thousands of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians had contributed to his existence. His grandfathers had guided the Nazi V-2 rockets in the horror-haunted last days of World War II. His fathers had been developed for the deadly, ocean-spanning guidedmissiles of the UN world police force. His brothers and sisters were found in every rocket ship, private and commercial, passenger-carrying or unmanned, that cleft the skies of earth.

Trans-Atlantic hop or trip to the moon, it was all one to Joe. He did what his cam told him to do. He did not care, he did not even know.

Cargrave called out, "How you making out down there?"

"All right, I guess," Ross answered, his voice laboring painfully.

"I feel sick," Art admitted with a groan.

"Breathe through your mouth. Take deep breaths."

"I can't."

"Well, hang on. It won't be long."

In fact it was only fifty-five seconds at full drive until Joe, still advised by his cam, decided that they had had enough of full drive. The cadmium plates slid farther back into the power pile, thwarting the neutrons; the roar of the rocket drive lessened.

The ship did not slow down; it simply ceased to accelerate so rapidly. It maintained all the speed it had gained and the frictionless vacuum of space did nothing to slow its headlong plunge. But the acceleration was reduced to one earth-surface gravity, one g, enough to overcome the powerful tug of the earth's mighty weight and thereby permit the ship to speed ahead unchecked—a little less than one g, in fact, as the grasp of the earth was already loosening and would continue to drop off to the change-over, more than 200,000 miles out in space, where the attraction of the moon and that of the earth are equal.

For the four in the ship the reduction in the force of the jet had returned them to a trifle less than normal weight, under an artificial gravity produced by the drive of the jet.

This false "gravity" had nothing to do with the pull of the earth; the attraction of the earth can be felt only when one is anchored to it and supported by it, its oceans, or it's air.

The attraction of the earth exists out in space but the human body has no senses which can perceive it. If a man were to fall from a tremendous height, say fifty thousand miles, it would not seem to him that he was falling but rather that the earth was rushing up to meet him.

After the tremendous initial drive had eased off, Cargraves called out again to Art. "Feeling any better, kid?"

"I'm all right now," Art replied.

"Fine. Want to come up here where you can see better?"

"Sure!" responded both Art and Ross, with one voice.

"Okay. Watch your step."

"We will." The two unstrapped themselves and climbed up to the control station by means of hand and toe holds welded to the sides of the ship. Once there they squatted on the supporting beams for the pilots' chairs, one on each side. They looked out.

The moon had not been visible to them from their hammock positions after the change in course. From their new positions they could see it, near the "lower" edge of the conning port. It was full, silver white and so dazzling bright that it hurt their eyes, although not sufficiently nearer to produce any apparent increase in size. The stars around it in the coalblack sky were hard bright diamonds, untwinkling.

"Look at that," breathed Ross. "Look at old Tycho shining out like a searchlight. Boy!"

"I wish we could see the earth," said Art. "This bucket ought to have more than one view port."

"What do you expect for a dollar-six-bits?" asked Ross. "Chimes? The Galileo was a freighter."

"I can show it to you in the scope," Morrie offered, and switched on the piloting radar in the belly. The screen lit up after a few seconds but the picture was disappointing. Art could read it well enough- it was his baby -but esthetically it was unsatisfying. It was no more than a circular plot reading in bearing and distance; the earth was simply a vague mass of light on that edge of the circle which represented the astern direction.

"That's not what I want," Art objected. "I want to see it. I want to see it shape up like a globe and see the continents and the oceans."

"You'll have to wait until tomorrow, then, when we cut the drive and swing ship. Then you can see the earth and the sun, too."

"Okay. How fast are we going? Never mind—I see," he went on, peering at the instrument board. "3,300 miles per hour."

"You're looking at it wrong," Ross corrected him. "It says 14,400 miles per hour."

"You're crazy."

"Like fun. Your eyes have gone bad."

"Easy, boys, easy," Cargraves counseled. "You are looking at different instruments. What kind of speed do you want?"

"I want to know how fast we're going," Art persisted.

"Now, Art, I'm surprised at you. After all you've had every one of these instruments apart. Think what you're saying."

Art stared at the instrument board again, then looked sheepish. "Sure, I forgot. Let's see now—we've gained 14,000 and some, close to 15,000 now, miles per hour in free fall—but we're not falling."

"We're always falling," Morrie put in, smug for the moment in his status as a pilot. "You fall all the time from the second you take off, but you drive to beat the fall."

"Yes, yes, I know," Art cut him off. "I was just mixed up for a moment. Thirty-three hundred is the speed I want -- 3310 flow."

‘Speed' in space is a curiously slippery term, as it is relative to whatever point you select as ‘fixed'—but the points in space are never fixed. The speed Art settled for was the speed of the Galileo along a line from the earth to their meeting place with the moon. This speed was arrived at deep inside Joe the Robot by combining by automatic vector addition three very complicated figures: first was the accumulated acceleration put on the ship by its jet drive, second the motions imposed on the ship by its closeness to the earth—its ‘free fall' speed of which Art had spoken. And lastly, there was the spin of the earth itself, considered both in amount and direction for the time of day of the take-off and the latitude of the camp site in New Mexico. The last was subtracted, rather than added, insofar as the terms of ordinary arithmetic apply to this sort of figuring.

The problem could be made vastly more complicated. The Galileo was riding with the earth and the moon in their yearly journey around the sun at a speed of about 19 miles per second or approximately 70,000 miles per hour as seen from outer space. In addition, the earth-moon line was sweeping around the earth once each month as it followed the moon—but Joe the Robot had compensated for that when he set them on a course to where the moon would be rather than where it was.

There were also the complicated motions of the sun and its planets with reference to the giddily whirling ‘fixed' stars, speeds which could be nearly anything you wanted, depending on which types of stars you selected for your reference points, but all of which speeds are measured in many miles per second.

But Joe cared nothing for these matters. His cam and his many circuits told him how to get them from the earth to the moon; he knew how to do that and Doctor Einstein's notions of relativity worried him not. The mass of machinery and wiring which made up his being did not have worry built into it. It was, however, capable of combining the data that came to it to show that the Galileo was now moving somewhat more than 3300 miles per hour along an imaginary line which joined earth to the point where the moon would be when they arrived.

Morrie could check this figure by radar observations for distance, plus a little arithmetic. If the positions as observed did not match what Joe computed them to be, Morrie could feed Joe the corrections and Joe would accept them and work them into his future calculations as placidly and as automatically as a well-behaved stomach changes starch into sugar.

"Thirty-three hundred miles per hour," said Art. "That's not so much. The V-2 rockets in the war made more than that. Let's open her up wide and see what she'll do. How about it, Doc?"

"Sure," agreed Ross, "we've got a clear road and plenty of room. Let's bust some space."

Cargraves sighed. "See here," he answered, "I did not try to keep you darned young speed demons from risking your necks in that pile of bailing wire you call an automobile, even when I jeopardized my own life by keeping quiet. But I'm going to run this rocket my way. I'm in no hurry."

"Okay, okay, just a suggestion," Ross assured him. He was quiet for a moment, then added, "But there's one thing that bothers me..."

"What?"

"Well, if I've read it once, I've read it a thousand times, that you have to go seven miles per second to get away from the earth. Yet here we are going only 3300 miles per hour."

"We're moving, aren't we?"

"Yeah, but-"

"As a matter of fact we are going to build up a lot more speed before we start to coast. We'll make the first part of the trip much faster than the last part. But suppose we just held our present speed—how long would it take to get to the moon?"

Ross did a little fast mental arithmetic concerning the distance of the moon from the earth, rounding the figure off to 240,000 miles. "About three days."

"What's wrong with that? Never mind," Cargraves went on. "I'm not trying to be a smart-Aleck. The misconception is one of the oldest in the book, and it keeps showing up again, every time some non-technical man decides to do a feature story on the future of space travel. It comes from mixing up shooting with rocketry. If you wanted to fire a shot at the moon, the way Jules Verne proposed, it would have to go seven miles per second when it left the gun or it would fall back. But with a rocket you could make the crossing at a slow walk if you had enough power and enough fuel to keep on driving just hard enough to keep from falling back. Of course it would raise Cain with your mass-ratio. But we're doing something of that sort right now. We've got tower to spare; I don't see why we should knock ourselves out with higher acceleration than we have to just to get there a little sooner. The moon will wait. It's waited a long time.

"Anyhow," he added, "no matter what you say and no matter how many physics textbooks are written and studied, people still keep mixing up gunnery and rocketry. It reminds me of that other old chestnut—about how a rocket can't work out in empty space, because it wouldn't have anything to push on."

"Go ahead and laugh!" Cargraves continued, seeing their expressions, "It strikes you as funny as a The-World-Is-Flat theory. But I heard an aeronautical engineer, as late as 1943, say just that."

"No! Not really!"

"I certainly did. He was a man with twenty-five years of professional experience and he had worked for both Wright Field and the Navy. But he said that in it. Next year the Nazis were bombing London with V-2s. Yet according to him it couldn't be done!"

"I'd think any man who had ever felt the kick of a shotgun would understand how a rocket works," Ross commented.

"It doesn't work out that way. Mostly it has no effect on his brain cells; it just gives him a sore shoulder." He started to lift himself out of his semi-reclining position in his pilot's chair. "Come on. Let's eat. Wow! My foot's gone to sleep. I want to stock up and then get some sleep. Breakfast wasn't much good for me—too many people staring down our necks."

"Sleep?" said Art. "Did you say ‘sleep'? I can't sleep; I'm too excited. I don't suppose I'll sleep the whole trip."

"Suit yourself. Me, I'm going to soak up shut-eye just as soon as we've eaten. There's nothing to see now, and won't be until we go into free fall. You've had better views of the moon through a telescope."

"It's not the same thing," Art pointed out.

"No, it's not," Cargraves conceded. "Just the same, I intend to reach the moon rested up instead of worn out. Morrie, where did you stow the can openers?"

"I-" Morrie stopped and a look of utter consternation came over his face. "I think I left them behind. I put them down on the sink shelf and then some female reporter started asking me some fool question and-"

"Yeah, I saw," Ross interrupted him. "You were practically rolling over and playing dead for her. It was cute."

Cargraves whistled tunelessly. "I hope that we find out that we haven't left behind anything really indispensable. Never mind the can openers, Morrie. The way I feel I could open a can with my bare teeth."

"Oh, you won't have to do that, Doc," Morrie said eagerly. "I've got a knife with a gadget for-" He was feeling in his pocket as he talked. His expression changed abruptly and he withdrew his hand. "Here are the can openers, Doc."

Ross looked at him innocently. "Did you get her address, Morrie?"

Supper, or late breakfast, as the case may be, was a simple meal, eaten from ration cans. Thereafter Cargraves got out his bedding roll and spread it on the bulkhead- now a deck -which separated the pilot compartment from the hold. Morrie decided to sleep in his co-pilot's chair. It, with its arm rests, head support, and foot rest, was not unlike an extremely well-padded barber's chair for the purpose, one which had been opened to a semi-reclining position. Cargraves let him try it, cautioning him only to lock his controls before going to sleep.

About an hour later Morrie climbed down and spread his roll beside Cargraves. Art and Ross slept on their acceleration hammocks, which were very well adapted to the purpose, as long as the occupant was not strapped down.

Despite the muted roar of the jet, despite the excitement of being in space, they all were asleep in a few minutes. They were dead tired and needed it.

During the ‘night' Joe the Robot slowly reduced the drive of the jet as the pull of the earth grew less.

Art was first to awaken. He had trouble finding himself for a moment or two and almost fell from his hammock on to the two sleepers below before he recollected his surroundings. When he did it brought him wide awake with a start. Space! He was out in space! -- Headed for the moon!

Moving with unnecessary quiet, since he could hardly have been heard above the noise of the jet in any case and since both Ross and Cargraves were giving very fair imitations of rocket motors themselves, he climbed out of the hammock and monkey-footed up to the pilots' seats. He dropped into Morrie's chair, feeling curiously but pleasantly light under the much reduced acceleration.

The moon, now visibly larger and almost painfully beautiful, hung in the same position in the sky, such that he had to let his gaze drop as he lay in the chair in order to return its stare. This bothered him for a moment—how were they ever to reach the moon if the moon did not draw toward the point where they were aiming?

It would not have bothered Morrie, trained as he was in a pilot's knowledge of collision bearings, interception courses, and the like. But, since it appeared to run contrary to common sense, Art worried about it until he managed to visualize the situation somewhat thus: if a car is speeding for a railroad crossing and a train is approaching from the left, so that their combined speeds will bring about a wreck, then the bearing of the locomotive from the automobile will not change, right up to the moment of the collision.

It was a simple matter of similar triangles, easy to see with a diagram but hard to keep straight in the head. The moon was speeding to their meeting place at about 2000 miles an hour, yet she would never change direction; she would simply grow and grow and grow until she filled the whole sky.

He let his eyes rove over her face, naming the lovely names in his mind, Mare Tranquilitatis, Oceanus Procellarum, the lunar Apennines, LaGrange, Ptolemous, Mare Imbrium, Catharina. Beautiful words, they rolled on the tongue.

He was not too sure of the capitals of all the fifty-one United States and even naming the United Nations might throw him, but the geography- or was it lunography? -of the moon was as familiar to him as the streets of his home town.

This face of the moon, anyway—he wondered what the other face was like, the face the earth has never seen.

The dazzle of the moon was beginning to hurt his eyes; he looked up and rested them on the deep, black velvet of space, blacker by contrast with the sprinkle of stars.

There were few of the really bright stars in the region toward which the Galileo was heading. Aldebaran blazed forth, high and aft, across the port from the moon. The right-hand frame of the port slashed through the Milky Way and a small portion of that incredible river of stars was thereby left visible to him. He picked out the modest lights of Aries, and near mighty Aldebaran hung the ghostly, fairy Pleiades, but dead ahead, straight up, were only faint stars and a black and lonely waste.

He lay back, staring into this remote and solitary depth, vast and remote beyond human comprehension, until he was fascinated by it, drawn into it. He seemed to have left the warmth and safety of the ship and to be plunging deep into the silent blackness ahead.

He blinked his eyes and shivered, and for the first time felt himself wishing that he had never left the safe and customary and friendly scenes of home. He wanted his basement lab, his mother's little shop, and the humdrum talk of ordinary people, people who stayed home and did not worry about the outer universe.

Still, the black depths fascinated him. He fingered the drive control under his right hand. He had only to unlock it, twist it all the way to the right, and they would plunge ahead, nailed down by unthinkable acceleration, and speed on past the moon, too early for their date in space with her. On past the moon, away from the sun and the earth behind them, on an on and out and out, until the thorium burned itself cold or until the zinc had boiled away, but not to stop even then, but to continue forever into the weary years and the bottomless depths.

He blinked his eyes and then closed them tight, and gripped both arms of the chair.