Operation: Outer Space | Page 3

led the way up, and stopped.
"This is your seat, Mr. Cochrane," she said professionally. "I'll strap
you in this first time. You'll do it later."
Cochrane lay down in a contour-chair with an eight-inch mattress of
foam rubber. The stewardess adjusted straps. He thought bitter, ironic
thoughts. A voice said:
"Mr. Cochrane!"
He turned his head. There was Babs Deane, his secretary, with her eyes
very bright. She regarded him from a contour-chair exactly opposite his.
She said happily:
"Mr. West and Mr. Jamison are the science men, Mr. Cochrane. I got
Mr. Bell as the writer."

"A great triumph!" Cochrane told her. "Did you get any idea what all
this is about? Why we're going up?"
"No," admitted Babs cheerfully. "I haven't the least idea. But I'm going
to the moon! It's the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me!"
Cochrane shrugged his shoulders. Shrugging was not comfortable in
the straps that held him. Babs was a good secretary. She was the only
one Cochrane had ever had who did not try to make use of her position
as secretary to the producer of the Dikkipatti Hour on television. Other
secretaries had used their nearness to him to wangle acting or dancing
or singing assignments on other and lesser shows. As a rule they lasted
just four public appearances before they were back at desks, spoiled for
further secretarial use by their taste of fame. But Babs hadn't tried that.
Yet she'd jumped at a chance for a trip to the moon.
A panel up toward the nose of the rocket--the upper end of this
passenger compartment--glowed suddenly. Flaming red letters said,
"Take-off, ninety seconds."
Cochrane found an ironic flavor in the thought that splendid daring and
incredible technology had made his coming journey possible. Heroes
had ventured magnificently into the emptiness beyond Earth's
atmosphere. Uncountable millions of dollars had been spent. Enormous
intelligence and infinite pains had been devoted to making possible a
journey of two hundred thirty-six thousand miles through sheer
nothingness. This was the most splendid achievement of human
science--the reaching of a satellite of Earth and the building of a human
city there.
And for what? Undoubtedly so that one Jed Cochrane could be ordered
by telephone, by somebody's secretary, to go and get on a
passenger-rocket and get to the moon. Go--having failed to make a
protest because his boss wouldn't interrupt dinner to listen--so he could
keep his job by obeying. For this splendid purpose, scientists had
labored and dedicated men had risked their lives.
Of course, Cochrane reminded himself with conscious justice, of course

there was the very great value of moon-mail cachets to devotees of
philately. There was the value of the tourist facilities to anybody who
could spend that much money for something to brag about afterward.
There were the solar-heat mines--running at a slight loss--and various
other fine achievements. There was even a nightclub in Lunar City
where one highball cost the equivalent of--say--a week's pay for a
secretary like Babs. And--
The panel changed its red glowing sign. It said: "Take-off forty-five
seconds."
Somewhere down below a door closed with a cushioned soft
definiteness. The inside of the rocket suddenly seemed extraordinarily
still. The silence was oppressive. It was dead. Then there came the
whirring of very many electric fans, stirring up the air.
The stewardess' voice came matter-of-factly from below him in the
upended cylinder which was the passenger-space.
"We take off in forty-five seconds. You will find yourself feeling very
heavy. There is no cause to be alarmed. If you observe that breathing is
oppressive, the oxygen content of the air in this ship is well above
earth-level, and you will not need to breathe so deeply. Simply relax in
your chair. Everything has been thought of. Everything has been tested
repeatedly. You need not disturb yourself at all. Simply relax."
Silence. Two heart-beats. Three.
There was a roar. It was a deep, booming, numbing roar that came from
somewhere outside the rocket's hull. Simultaneously, something thrust
Cochrane deep into the foam-cushions of his contour-chair. He felt the
cushion piling up on all sides of his body so that it literally surrounded
him. It resisted the tendency of his arms and legs and abdomen to
flatten out and flow sidewise, to spread him in a thin layer over the
chair in which he rested.
He felt his cheeks dragged back. He was unduly conscious of the
weight of objects in his pockets. His stomach pressed hard against his

backbone. His sensations were those of someone being struck a hard,
prolonged blow all over his body.
It was so startling a sensation, though he'd read about it, that he simply
stayed still and blankly submitted to it. Presently he felt himself gasp.
Presently, again, he noticed that one