The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy

THE CAVE OF NIGHT by James E. Gunn

. . . and so we leave behind us the troubled waters of Junior’s native coastal shelf, and with a gentle swish and a graceful swoop we warp through space and time, to find ourselves again on Mother Earth, the last words of our distant friends still ringing in our ears . . .

YOU CAN’T DO THAT!

A new invention is a terrifying thing—on terra firma, underseas, or up above the stratosphere. James Gunn, who has distinguished himself by turning out more good solid “new-idea” stories during the past year than just about any other writer in s-f, here suggests a way to peddle your new product to the old folks at home and make ‘em like it.

The phrase was first used by a poet disguised in the cynical hide of a newspaper reporter. It appeared on the first day and was widely reprinted. He wrote:

“At eight o’clock, after the Sun has set and the sky is darkening, look up! There’s a man up there where no man has ever been.

“He is lost in the cave of night…”

The headlines demanded something short, vigorous and descriptive. That was it. It was inaccurate, but it stuck.

If anybody was in a cave, it was the rest of humanity. Painfully, triumphantly, one man had climbed out. Now he couldn’t find his way back into the cave with the rest of us.

What goes up doesn’t always come back down.

That was the first day. After it came twenty-nine days of agonized suspense.

The cave of night. I wish the phrase had been mine.

That was it, the tag, the symbol. It was the first thing a man saw when he glanced at the newspaper. It was the way people talked about it: “What’s the latest about the cave?” It summed it all up, the drama, the anxiety, the hope.

Maybe it was the Floyd Collins influence. The papers dug up their files on that old tragedy, reminiscing, com­paring; and they remembered the little girl—Kathy Fiscus, wasn’t it?—who was trapped in that abandoned, California drain pipe; and a number of others.

Periodically, it happens, a sequence of events so acci­dentally dramatic that men lose their hatreds, their ter­rors, their shynesses, their inadequacies, and the human race momentarily recognizes its kinship.

The essential ingredients are these: A person must be in unusual and desperate peril. The peril must have dura­tion. There must be proof that the person is still alive. Rescue attempts must be made. Publicity must be wide­spread.

One could probably be constructed artificially, but if the world ever discovered the fraud, it would never for­give.

Like many others, I have tried to analyze what makes a niggling, squabbling, callous race of beings suddenly share that most human emotion of sympathy, and, like them, I have not succeeded. Suddenly a distant stranger will mean more than their own comfort. Every waking mo­ment, they pray: Live, Floyd! Live, Kathy! Live, Rev!

We pass on the street, we who would not have nodded, and ask, “Will they get there in time?”

Optimists and pessimists alike, we hope so. We all hope so.

In a sense, this one was different. This was purposeful. Knowing the risk, accepting it because there was no other way to do what had to be done, Rev had gone into the cave of night. The accident was that he could not return.

The news came out of nowhere—literally—to an unsuspecting world. The earliest mention the historians have been able to locate was an item about a ham radio oper­ator in Davenport, Iowa. He picked up a distress signal on a sticky-hot June evening.

The message, he said later, seemed to fade in, reach a peak, and fade out:

“… and fuel tanks empty. —ceiver broke… transmit­ting in clear so someone can pick this up, and… no way to get back… stuck…”

A small enough beginning.

The next message was received by a military base radio watch near Fairbanks, Alaska. That was early in the morn­ing. Half an hour later, a night-shift worker in Boston heard something on his short-wave set that sent him rush­ing to the telephone.

That morning, the whole world learned the story. It broke over them, a wave of excitement and concern. Or­biting 1,075 miles above their heads was a man, an officer of the United States Air Force, in a fuelless spaceship.

All by itself the spaceship part would have captured the world’s attention. It was achievement as monumental as anything Man has ever done and far more spectacular. It was liberation from the tyranny of Earth, this jealous mother who had bound her children tight with the apron strings of gravity.

Man was free. It was a symbol that nothing is completely and finally impossible if Man wants it hard enough and long enough.

There are regions that humanity finds peculiarly con­genial. Like all Earth’s creatures, Man is a product and a victim of environment. His triumph is that the slave became the master. Unlike more specialized animals, he distributed himself across the entire surface of the Earth, from the frozen Antarctic continent to the Arctic icecap.

Man became an equatorial animal, a temperate zone animal, an arctic animal. He became a plain dweller, a valley dweller, a mountain dweller. The swamp and the desert became equally his home.

Man made his own environment.

With his inventive mind and his dexterous hands, he fashioned it, conquered cold and heat, dampness, aridness, land, sea, air. Now, with his science, he had con­quered everything. He had become independent of the world that bore him.

It was a birthday cake for all mankind, celebrating its coming of age.

Brutally, the disaster was icing on the cake.

But it was more, too. When everything is considered, per­haps it was the aspect that, for a few, brief days, united hu­manity and made possible what we did.

It was a sign: Man is never completely independent of Earth; he carries with him his environment; he is always and forever a part of humanity. It was a conquest mel­lowed by a confession of mortality and error.

It was a statement: Man has within him the qualities of greatness that will never accept the restraints of circum­stance, and yet he carries, too, the seeds of fallibility that we all recognize in ourselves.

Rev was one of us. His triumph was our triumph; his peril—more fully and finely—was our peril.

Reverdy L. McMillen, III, first lieutenant, U.S.A.F. Pilot. Rocket jockey. Man. Rev. He was only a thousand miles away, calling for help, but those miles were straight up. We got to know him as well as any member of our own family.

The news came as a great personal shock to me. I knew Rev. We had become good friends in college, and fortune had thrown us together in the Air Force, a writer and a pilot. I had got out as soon as possible, but Rev had stayed in. I knew, vaguely, that he had been testing rocket-powered airplanes with Chuck Yeager. But I had no idea that the rocket program was that close to space.

Nobody did. It was a better-kept secret than the Man­hattan Project.

I remember staring at Rev’s picture in the evening news­paper—the straight black hair, the thin, rakish mustache, the Clark Gable ears, the reckless, rueful grin—and I felt again, like a physical thing, his great joy in living. It ex­pressed itself in a hundred ways. He loved widely, but with discrimination. He ate well, drank heartily, reveled in expert jazz and artistic inventiveness, and talked inces­santly.

Now he was alone and soon all that might be extin­guished. I told myself that I would help.

That was a time of wild enthusiasm. Men mobbed the Air Force Proving Grounds at Cocoa, Florida, wildly vol­unteering their services. But I was no engineer. I wasn’t even a welder or a riveter. At best, I was only a poor word mechanic.

But words, at least, I could contribute.

I made a hasty verbal agreement with a local paper and caught the first plane to Washington, D. C. For a long time, I liked to think that what I wrote during the next few days had something to do with subsequent events, for many of my articles were picked up for reprint by other newspapers.

The Washington fiasco was the responsibility of the Senate Investigating Committee. It subpoenaed everybody in sight—which effectively removed them from the vital work they were doing. But within a day, the Committee realized that it had bitten off a bite it could neither swal­low nor spit out.

General Beauregard Finch, head of the research and de­velopment program, was the tough morsel the Committee gagged on. Coldly, accurately, he described the develop­ment of the project, the scientific and technical research, the tests, the building of the ship, the training of the pros­pective crewmen, and the winnowing of the volunteers down to one man.

In words more eloquent because of their clipped pre­cision, he described the takeoff of the giant three-stage ship, shoved upward on a lengthening arm of combining hydrazine and nitric acid. Within fifty-six minutes, the remaining third stage had reached its orbital height of 1,075 miles.

It had coasted there. In order to maintain that orbit, the motors had to flicker on for fifteen seconds.

At that moment, disaster laughed at Man’s careful cal­culations.

Before Rev could override the automatics, the motors had flamed for almost half a minute. The fuel he had de­pended upon to slow the ship so that it would drop, re-enter the atmosphere and be reclaimed by Earth was al­most gone. His efforts to counteract the excess speed re­sulted only in an approximation of the original orbit.

The fact was this: Rev was up there. He would stay there until someone came and got him.

And there was no way to get there.

The Committee took that as an admission of guilt and incompetence; they tried to lever themselves free with it, but General Finch was not to be intimidated. A manned ship had been sent up because no mechanical or electronic computer could contain the vast possibilities for decision and action built into a human being.

The original computer was still the best all-purpose computer.

There had been only one ship built, true. But there was good reason for that, a completely practical reason-money.

Leaders are, by definition, ahead of the people. But this wasn’t a field in which they could show the way and wait for the people to follow. This was no expedition in ancient ships, no light exploring party, no pilot-plant operation. Like a parachute jump, it had to be successful the first time.”

This was an enterprise into new, expensive fields. It de­manded money (billions of dollars), brains (the best avail­able), and the hard, dedicated labor of men (thousands of them).

General Finch became a national hero that afternoon. He said, in bold words, “With the limited funds you gave us, we have done what we set out to do. We have demon­strated that space flight is possible, that a space platform is feasible.

“If there is any inefficiency, if there is any blame for what has happened, it lies at the door of those who lacked confidence in the courage and ability of their countrymen to fight free of Earth to the greatest glory. Senator, how did you vote on that?”

But I am not writing a history. The shelves are full of them. I will touch on the international repercussions only enough to show that the event was no more a respecter of national boundaries than was Rev’s orbiting ship.

The orbit was almost perpendicular to the equator. The ship traveled as far north as Nome, as far south as Little America on the Antarctic Continent. It completed one giant circle every two hours. Meanwhile, the Earth rotated beneath. If the ship had been equipped with adequate optical instruments, Rev could have observed every spot on Earth within twenty-four hours. He could have seen fleets and their dispositions, aircraft carriers and the planes taking off their decks, troop maneuvers.

In the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Rus­sian ambassador protested this unwarranted and illegal violation of its national boundaries. He hinted darkly that it would not be allowed to continue. The U.S.S.R. had not been caught unprepared, he said. If the violation went on—”every few hours!”—drastic steps would be taken.

World opinion reared up in indignation. The U.S.S.R. immediately retreated and pretended, as only it could, that its belligerence had been an unwarranted inference and that it had never said anything of the sort, anyway.

This was not a military observer above our heads. It was a man who would soon be dead unless help reached him.

A world offered what it had. Even the U.S.S.R. an­nounced that it was outfitting a rescue ship, since its space program was already on the verge of success. And the American public responded with more than a billion dollars within a week. Congress appropriated another billion. Thousands of men and women volunteered.

The race began.

Would the rescue party reach the ship in time? The world prayed.

And it listened daily to the voice of a man it hoped to buy back from death.

The problem shaped up like this:

The trip had been planned to last for only a few days. By careful rationing, the food and water might be stretched out for more than a month, but the oxygen, by cutting down activity to conserve it, couldn’t possibly last more than thirty days. That was the absolute outside limit.

I remember reading the carefully detailed calculations in the paper and studying them for some hopeful error. There was-none.

Within a few hours, the discarded first stage of the ship had been located floating in the Atlantic Ocean. It was towed back to Cocoa, Florida. Almost a week was needed to find and return, to the Proving Grounds the second stage, which had landed 906 miles away.

Both sections were practically undamaged; their fall had been cushioned by ribbon parachute. They could be cleaned, repaired and used again. The trouble was the vital third stage—the nose section. A new one had to be designed and built within a month.

Space-madness became a new form of hysteria. We read statistics, we memorized insignificant details, we studied diagrams, we learned the risks and the dangers and how they would be met and conquered. It all became part of us. We watched the slow progress of the second ship and silently, tautly, urged it upward.

The schedule overhead became part of everyone’s daily life. Work stopped while people rushed to windows or outside or to their television sets, hoping for a glimpse, a glint from the high, swift ship, so near, so untouchably far.

And we listened to the voice from the cave of night:

“I’ve been staring out the portholes. I never tire of that. Through the one on the right, I see what looks like a black velvet curtain with a strong light behind it. There are pinpoint holes in the curtain and the light shines through, not winking the way stars do, but steady. There’s no air up here. That’s the reason. The mind can under­stand and still misinterpret.

“My air is holding out better than I expected. By my figures, it should last twenty-seven days more. I shouldn’t use so much of it talking all the time, but it’s hard to stop. Talking, I feel as if I’m still in touch with Earth, still one of you, even if I am way up here.

“Through the left-hand window is San Francisco Bay, looking like a dark, wandering arm extended by the ocean octopus. The city itself looks like a heap of diamonds with trails scattered from it. It glitters up cheerfully, an old friend. It misses me, it says. Hurry home, it says. It’s gone now, out of sight. Good-bye, Frisco!

“Do you hear me down there? Sometimes I wonder. You can’t see me now. I’m in the Earth’s shadow. You’ll have to wait hours for the dawn. I’ll have mine in a few minutes.

“You’re all busy down there. I know that. If I know you, you’re all worrying about me, working to get me down, forgetting everything else. You don’t know what a feeling that is. I hope to Heaven you never have to, wonderful though it is.

“Too bad the receiver was broken, but if it had to be one or the other, I’m glad it was the transmitter that came through. There’s only one of me. There are billions of you to talk to.

“I wish there were some way I could be sure you were hearing me. Just that one thing might keep me from going crazy.”

Rev, you were one in millions. We read all about your selection, your training. You were our representative, picked with our greatest skill.

Out of a thousand who passed the initial rigid require­ments for education, physical and emotional condition and age, only five could qualify for space. They couldn’t be too tall, too stout, too young, too old. Medical and psychiatric tests weeded them out.

One of the training machines—Lord, how we studied this—reproduces the acceleration strains of a blasting rocket. Another trains men for maneuvering in the weight­lessnes -of space. A third duplicates the cramped, sealed conditions of a spaceship cabin. Out of the final five, you were the only one who qualified.

No, Rev, if any of us could stay sane, it was you.

There were thousands of suggestions, almost all of them useless. Psychologists suggested self-hypnotism; cultists suggested yoga. One man sent in a detailed sketch of a giant electromagnet with which Rev’s ship could be drawn back to Earth.

General Finch had the only practical idea. He outlined a plan for letting Rev know that we were listening. He picked out Kansas City and set the time. “Midnight,” he said. “On the dot. Not a minute earlier or later. At that moment, he’ll be right overhead.”

And at midnight, every light in the city went out and came back on and went out and came back on again.

For a few awful moments, we wondered if the man up there in the cave of night had seen. Then came the voice we knew now so well that it seemed it had always been with us, a part of us, our dreams and our waking.

The voice was husky with emotion:

“Thanks… Thanks for listening. Thanks, Kansas City. I saw you winking at me. I’m not alone. I know that now. I’ll never forget. Thanks.”

And silence then as the ship fell below the horizon. We pictured it to ourselves sometimes, continually circling the Earth, its trajectory exactly matching the curvature of the globe beneath it. We wondered if it would ever stop.

Like the Moon, would it be a satellite of the Earth for­ever?

We went through our daily chores like automatons while we watched the third stage of the rocket take shape. We raced against a dwindling air supply, and death raced to catch a ship moving at 15,800 miles per hour.

We watched the ship grow. On our television screens, we saw the construction of the cellular fuel tanks, the; rocket motors, and the fantastic multitude of pumps, valves, gauges, switches, circuits, transistors, and tubes.

The personnel space was built to carry five men instead of one man. We watched it develop, a Spartan simplicity in the middle of the great complex, and it was as if we our­selves would live there, would watch those dials and instru­ments, would grip those chair-arm controls for the infin­itesimal sign that the automatic pilot had faltered, would feel the soft flesh and the softer internal organs being wrenched away from the unyielding bone, and would hurtle upward into the cave of night.

We watched the plating wrap itself protectively around the vitals of the nose section. The wings were attached; they would make the ship a huge, metal glider in its un-powered descent to Earth after the job was done.

We met the men who would man the ship. We grew to know them as we watched them train, saw them fighting artificial gravities, testing spacesuits in simulated vacuums, practicing maneuvers in the weightless condition of free fall.

That was what we lived for.

And we listened to the voice that came to us out of the night:

“Twenty-one days. Three weeks. Seems like more. Feel a little sluggish, but there’s no room for exercise in a coffin. The concentrated foods I’ve been eating are fine, but not for a steady diet. Oh, what I’d give for a piece of home-baked apple pie!

“The weightlessness got me at first. Felt I was sitting on a ball that was spinning in all directions at once. Lost my breakfast a couple of times before I learned to stare at one thing. As long as you don’t let your eyes roam, you’re okay.

“There’s Lake Michigan! My God, but it’s blue today! Dazzles the eyes! There’s Milwaukee, and how are the Braves doing? It must be a hot day in Chicago. It’s a little muggy up here, too. The water absorbers must be over-loaded.

“The air smells funny, but I’m not surprised. I must smell funny, too, after twenty-one days without a bath. Wish I could have one. There are an awful lot of things I used to take for granted and suddenly want more than—

“Forget that, will you? Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I know you’re working to get me down. If you don’t suc­ceed, that’s okay with me. My life wouldn’t just be wasted. I’ve done what I’ve always wanted to do. I’d do it again.

“Too bad, though, that we only had the money for one ship.”

And again: “An hour ago, I saw the Sun rise over Russia. It looks like any other land from here, green where it should be green, farther north a sort of mud color, and then white where the snow is still deep.

“Up here, you wonder why we’re so different when the land is the same. You think: we’re all children of the same mother planet. Who says we’re different?

“Think I’m crazy? Maybe you’re right. It doesn’t matter much what I say as long as I say something. This is one time I won’t be interrupted. Did any man ever have such an audience?”

No, Rev. Never.

The voice from above, historical now, preserved:

“I guess the gadgets are all right. You slide-rule mechan­ics! You test-tube artists! You finding what you want? Get­ting the dope on cosmic rays, meteoric dust, those islands you could never map, the cloud formations, wind move­ments, all the weather data? Hope the telemetering gauges are working. They’re more important than my voice.”

I don’t think so, Rev. But we got the data. We built some of it into the new ships. Ships, not ship, for we didn’t stop with one. Before we were finished, we had two complete three-stages and a dozen nose sections.

The voice: “Air’s bad tonight. Can’t seem to get a full breath. Sticks in the lungs. Doesn’t matter, though. I wish you could all see what I have seen, the vast-spreading uni-verse around Earth, like a bride in a soft veil. You’d know, then, that we belong out here.”

We know, Rev. You led us out. You showed us the way.

We listened and we watched. It seems to me now that we held our breath for thirty days.

At last we watched the fuel pumping into the ship-nitric acid and hydrazine. A month ago, we did not know their names; now we recognize them as the very substances of life itself. It flowed through the long special hoses, dan­gerous, cautiously grounded, over half a million dollars’ worth of rocket fuel.

Statisticians estimate that more than a hundred million Americans were watching their television sets that day. Watching and praying.

Suddenly the view switched to the ship fleeing south above us. The technicians were expert now. The telescopes picked it up instantly, the focus perfect the first time, and tracked it across the sky until it dropped beyond the hori­zon. It looked no different now than when we had seen it first.

But the voice that came from our speakers was different. It was weak. It coughed frequently and paused for breath.

“Air very bad. Better hurry. Can’t last much longer… Silly!… Of course you’ll hurry.

“Don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me… I’ve been living fast… Thirty days? I’ve seen 360 sunrises, 360 sunsets… I’ve seen what no man has ever seen before… I was the first. That’s something… worth dying for…

“I’ve seen the stars, clear and undiminished. They look cold, but there’s warmth to them and life. They have fam­ilies of planets like our own sun, some of them… They must. God wouldn’t put them there for no purpose… They can be homes to our future generations. Or, if they have inhabitants, we can trade with them: goods, ideas, the love of creation…

“But—more than this—I have seen the Earth. I have seen it—as no man has ever seen it—turning below me like a fantastic ball, the seas like blue glass in the Sun… or lashed into gray storm-peaks… and the land green with life… the cities of the world in the night, sparkling… and the people…

“I have seen the Earth—there where I have lived and loved… I have known it better than any man and loved it better and known its children better… It has been good…

“Good-bye… I have a better tomb than the greatest conqueror Earth ever bore… Do not disturb…”

We wept. How could we help it?

Rescue was so close and we could not hurry it. We watched impotently. The crew were hoisted far up into the nose section of the three-stage rocket. It stood as tall as a 24-story building. Hurry! we urged. But they could not hurry. The interception of a swiftly moving target is precision business. The takeoff was all calculated and im­pressed on the metal and glass and free electrons of an electronic computer.

The ship was tightened down methodically. The spec­tators scurried back from the base of the ship. We waited. The ship waited. Tall and slim as it was, it seemed to crouch. Someone counted off the seconds to a breathless world: ten—nine—eight… five, four, three… one—fire!

There was no flame, and then we saw it spurting into the air from the exhaust tunnel several hundred feet away. The ship balanced, unmoving, on a squat column of in­candescence; the column stretched itself, grew tall; the huge ship picked up speed and dwindled into a point of brightness.

The telescopic lenses found it, lost it, found it again. It arched over on its side and thrust itself seaward. At the end of 84 seconds, the rear jets faltered, and our hearts faltered with them. Then we saw that the first stage had been dropped. The rest of the ship moved off on a new fiery trail. A ring-shaped ribbon parachute blossomed out of the third stage and slowed it rapidly.

The second stage dropped away 124 seconds later. The nose section, with its human cargo, its rescue equipment, went on alone. At 63 miles altitude, the flaring exhaust cut out. The third stage would coast up the gravitational hill more than a thousand miles.

Our stomachs were knotted with dread as the rescue ship disappeared beyond the horizon of the farthest television camera. By this time, it was on the other side of the world, speeding toward a carefully planned rendezvous with its sister.

Hang on, Rev! Don’t give up!

Fifty-six minutes. That was how long we had to wait. Fifty-six minutes from the takeoff until the ship was in its orbit. After that, the party would need time to match speeds, to send a space-suited crewman drifting across the emptiness between, over the vast, eerily turning sphere of the Earth beneath.

In imagination, we followed them.

Minutes would be lost while the rescuer clung to the ship, opened the airlock cautiously so that none of the precious remnants of air would be lost, and passed into the ship where one man had known utter loneliness.

We waited. We hoped.

Fifty-six minutes. They passed. An hour. Thirty minutes more. We reminded ourselves—and were reminded—that the first concern was Rev. It might be hours before we would get any real news.

The tension mounted unbearably. We waited—a nation, a world—for relief.

At eighteen minutes less than two hours—too soon, we told ourselves, lest we hope too much—we heard the voice of Captain Frank Pickrell, who was later to become the first commander of the Doughnut.

“I have just entered the ship,” he said slowly. “The air­lock was open.” He paused. The implications stunned our emotions; we listened mutely. “Lieutenant McMillen is dead. He died heroically, waiting until all hope was gone, until every oxygen gauge stood at zero. And then—well, the airlock was open when we arrived.

“In accordance with his own wishes, his body will be left here in its eternal orbit. This ship will be his tomb for all men to see when they look up toward the stars. As long as there are men on Earth, it will circle above them, an everlasting reminder of what men have done and what men can do.

“That was Lieutenant McMillen’s hope. This he did not only as an American, but as a man, dying for all humanity, and all humanity can glory for it.

“From this moment, let this be his shrine, sacred to all the generations of spacemen, inviolate. And let it be a sym­bol that Man’s dreams can be realized, but sometimes the price is steep.

“I am going to leave now. My feet will be the last to touch this deck. The oxygen I released is almost used up. Lieutenant McMillen is in his control chair, staring out toward the stars. I will leave the airlock doors open behind me. Let the airless, frigid arms of space protect and pre­serve for all eternity the man they would not let go.”

Good-by, Rev! Farewell! Good night!

Rev was not long alone. He was the first, but not the last to receive a space burial and a hero’s farewell.

This, as I said, is no history of the conquest of space. Every child knows the story as well as I and can identify the make of a spaceship more swiftly.

The story of the combined efforts that built the orbital platform irreverently called the Doughnut has been told by others. We have learned at length the political triumph that placed it under United Nations control.

Its contribution to our daily lives has received the acco­lade of the commonplace. It is an observatory, a laboratory, and a guardian. Startling discoveries have come out of that weightless, airless, heatless place. It has learned how weather is made and predicted it with incredible accuracy. It has observed the stars clear of the veil of the atmosphere. And it has insured our peace…

It has paid its way. No one can question that. It and its smaller relay stations made possible today’s worldwide television and radio network. There is no place on Earth where a free voice cannot be heard or the face of freedom be seen. Sometimes we find ourselves wondering how it could have been any other way.

And we have had adventure. We have traveled to the dead gypsum seas of the Moon with the first exploration party. This year, we will solve the mysteries of Mars. From our armchairs, we will thrill to the discoveries of our pio­neers—our stand-ins, so to speak. It has given us a common heritage, a common goal, and for the first time we are united.

This I mention only for background; no one will argue that the conquest of space was not of incalculable benefit to all mankind.

The whole thing came back to me recently, an over­powering flood of memory. I was skirting Times Square, where every face is a stranger’s, and suddenly I stopped, incredulous.

“Rev!” I shouted.

The man kept on walking. He passed me without a glance. I turned around and stared after him. I started to run. I grabbed him by the arm. “Revl” I said huskily, swinging him around. “Is it really you?”

The man smiled politely. “You must have mistaken me for someone else.” He unclamped my fingers easily and moved away. I realized then that there were two men with him, one on each side. I felt their eyes on my face, mem­orizing it.

Probably it didn’t mean anything. We all have our doubles. I could have been mistaken.

But it started me remembering and thinking.

The first thing the rocket experts had to consider was expense. They didn’t have the money. The second thing was weight. Even a medium-sized man is heavy when rocket payloads are reckoned, and the stores and equipment es­sential to his survival are many times heavier.

If Rev had escaped alive, why had they announced that he was dead? But I knew the question was all wrong.

If my speculations were right, Rev had never been up there at all. The essential payload was only a thirty-day recording and a transmitter. Even if the major feat of sending up a manned rocket was beyond their means and their techniques, they could send up that much.

Then they got the money; they got the volunteers and the techniques.

I suppose the telemetered reports from the rocket helped. But what they accomplished in thirty days was an unparalleled miracle.

The timing of the recording must have taken months of work; but the vital part of the scheme was secrecy. General Finch had to know and Captain—now Colonel—Pickrell. A few others—workmen, administrators—and Rev…

What could they do with him? Disguise him? Yes. And then hide him in the biggest city in the world. They would have done it that way.

It gave me a funny, sick kind of feeling, thinking about it. Like everybody else, I don’t like to be taken in by a phony plea. And this was a fraud perpetrated on all hu­manity.

Yet it had led us to the planets. Perhaps it would lead us.beyond, even to the stars. I asked myself: could they have done it any other way?

I would like to think I was mistaken. This myth has become part of us. We lived through it ourselves, helped make it. Someday, I tell myself, a spaceman whose rever­ence is greater than his obedience will make a pilgrimage to that swift shrine and find only an empty shell.

I shudder then.

This pulled us together. In a sense, it keeps us together. Nothing is more important than that.

I try to convince myself that I was mistaken. The straight black hair was gray at the temples now and cut much shorter. The mustache was gone. The Clark Gable ears were flat to the head; that’s a simple operation, I under­stand.

But grins are hard to change. And anyone who lived through those thirty days will never forget that voice.

I think about Rev and the life he must have now, the things he loved and can never enjoy again, and I realize perhaps he made the greater sacrifice.

I think sometimes he must wish he were really in the cave of night, seated in that icy control chair 1,075 miles above, staring out at the stars.