Operation: Outer Space | Page 7

as Cochrane had and were now clamorously demanding of
Bill Holden that he explain what had happened to them.
Cochrane snapped angrily:
"Leave the man alone! He's space-sick! If you get him too much upset
this place will be a mess!"
Holden closed his eyes and said gratefully:
"Shoo them away, Jed, and then come back."
Cochrane waved his hands at them. They went away, stumbling and
holding on to each other in the eerie dream-likeness and nightmarish
situation of no-weight-whatever. There were other passengers from the
moon-rocket in this great central space of the platform. There was a fat
woman looking indignantly at the picture of a weighing-scale painted
on the wall. Somebody had painted it, with a dial-hand pointing to zero
pounds. A sign said, "Honest weight, no gravity." There was the
stewardess from the rocket, off duty here. She smoked a cigarette in the
blast of an electric fan. There was a party of moon-tourists giggling
foolishly and clutching at everything and buying souvenirs to mail back
to Earth.
"All right, Bill," said Cochrane. "They're gone. Now tell me why all the
not inconsiderable genius in the employ of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins
and Fallowe, in my person, has been mobilized and sent up to the
moon?"
Bill Holden swallowed. He stood up with his eyes closed, holding onto
a side-rail in the great central room of the platform.

"I have to keep my eyes shut," he explained, queasily. "It makes me ill
to see people walking on side-walls and across ceilings."
A stout tourist was doing exactly that at the moment. If one could walk
anywhere at all with magnetic-soled shoes, one could walk everywhere.
The stout man did walk up the side-wall. He adventured onto the
ceiling, where he was head-down to the balance of his party. He stood
there looking up--down--at them, and he wore a peculiarly astonished
and half-frightened and wholly foolish grin. His wife squealed for him
to come down: that she couldn't bear looking at him so.
"All right," said Cochrane. "You're keeping your eyes closed. But I'm
supposed to take orders from you. What sort of orders are you going to
give?"
"I'm not sure yet," said Holden thinly. "We are sent up here on a private
job for Hopkins--one of your bosses. Hopkins has a daughter. She's
married to a man named Dabney. He's neurotic. He's made a great
scientific discovery and it isn't properly appreciated. So you and I and
your team of tame scientists--we're on our way to the Moon to save his
reason."
"Why save his reason?" asked Cochrane cynically. "If it makes him
happy to be a crackpot--"
"It doesn't," said Holden, with his eyes still closed. He gulped. "Your
job and a large part of my practice depends on keeping him out of a
looney-bin. It amounts to a public-relations job, a production, with me
merely censoring aspects that might be bad for Dabney's psyche.
Otherwise he'll be frustrated."
"Aren't we all?" demanded Cochrane. "Who in hades does he think he
is? Most of us want appreciation, but we have to be glad when we do
our work and get paid for it! We--"
Then he swore bitterly. He had been taken off the job he'd spent years
learning to do acceptably, to phoney a personal satisfaction for the
son-in-law of one of the partners of the firm he worked for. It was

humiliation to be considered merely a lackey who could be ordered to
perform personal services for his boss, without regard to the damage to
the work he was really responsible for. It was even more humiliating to
know he had to do it because he couldn't afford not to.
Babs appeared, obviously gloating over the mere fact that she was
walking in magnetic-soled slippers on the steel decks of the space
platform. Her eyes were very bright. She said:
"Mr. Cochrane, hadn't you better come look at Earth out of the quartz
Earthside windows?"
"Why?" demanded Cochrane bitterly. "If it wasn't that I'd have to hold
onto something with both hands, in order to do it, I'd be kicking myself.
Why should I want to do tourist stuff?"
"So," said Babs, "so later on you can tell when a writer or a scenic
designer tries to put something over on you in a space platform show."
Cochrane grimaced.
"In theory, I should. But do you realize what all this is about? I just
learned!" When Babs shook her head he said sardonically, "We are on
the way to the Moon to stage a private production out of sheer cruelty.
We're hired to rob a happy man of the luxury of feeling sorry for
himself. We're under Holden's orders to cure a man of being a
crackpot!"
Babs hardly listened. She was too much filled