Operation: Outer Space | Page 9

window might get pitted with dust."
Cochrane said cynically:
"And how much good will it have done me to see that, Babs? How can
that be faked in a studio--and how much would a television screen
show of it?"
He turned away. Then he added sourly:
"You stay and look if you like, Babs. I've already had my vanity
smashed to little bits. If I look at that again I'll want to weep in pure
frustration because I can't do anything even faintly as well worth
watching. I prefer to cut down my notions of the cosmos to a tolerable
size. But you go ahead and look!"
He went back to Holden. Holden was painfully dragging himself back
into the rocket-ship. Cochrane went with him. They returned,
weightless, to the admirably designed contour-chairs in which they had
traveled to this place, and in which they would travel farther. Cochrane
settled down to stare numbly at the wall above him. He had been
humiliated enough by the actions of one of the heads of an advertising

agency. He found himself resenting, even as he experienced, the
humbling which had been imposed upon him by the cosmos itself.
Presently the other passengers returned, and the moonship was
maneuvered out of the lock and to emptiness again, and again presently
rockets roared and there was further feeling of intolerable weight. But it
was not as bad as the take-off from Earth.
There followed some ninety-six hours of pure tedium. After the first
accelerating blasts, the rockets were silent. There was no weight. There
was nothing to hear except the droning murmur of unresting electric
fans, stirring the air ceaselessly so that excess moisture from breathing
could be extracted by the dehumidifiers. But for them--if the air had
been left stagnant--the journey would have been insupportable.
There was nothing to see, because ports opening on outer space were
not safe for passengers to look through. Mere humans, untrained to
keep their minds on technical matters, could break down at the
spectacle of the universe. There could be no activity.
Some of the passengers took dozy-pills. Cochrane did not. It was
against the law for dozy-pills to produce a sensation of euphoria, of
well-being. The law considered that pleasure might lead to addiction.
But if a pill merely made a person drowsy, so that he dozed for hours
halfway between sleeping and awake, no harm appeared to be done.
Yet there were plenty of dozy-pill addicts. Many people were not
especially anxious to feel good. They were quite satisfied not to feel
anything at all.
Cochrane couldn't take that way of escape. He lay strapped in his chair
and thought unhappily of many things. He came to feel unclean, as
people used to feel when they traveled for days on end on railroad
trains. There was no possibility of a bath. One could not even change
clothes, because baggage went separately to the moon in a robot
freight-rocket, which was faster and cheaper than a passenger transport,
but would kill anybody who tried to ride it. Fifteen-and twenty-gravity
acceleration is economical of fuel, and six-gravity is not, but nobody
can live through a twenty-gravity lift-off from Earth. So passengers

stayed in the clothes in which they entered the ship, and the only
possible concession to fastidiousness was the disposable underwear one
could get and change to in the rest-rooms.
Babs Deane did not take dozy-pills either, but Cochrane knew better
than to be more than remotely friendly with her outside of office hours.
He did not want to give her any excuse to tell him anything for his own
good. So he spoke pleasantly and kept company only with his own
thoughts. But he did notice that she looked rapt and starry-eyed even
through the long and dreary hours of free flight. She was mentally
tracking the moonship through the void. She'd know when the
continents of Earth were plain to see, and the tints of vegetation on the
two hemispheres--northern and southern--and she'd know when Earth's
ice-caps could be seen, and why.
The stewardess was not too much of a diversion. She was brisk and
calm and soothing, but she became a trifle reluctant to draw too near
the chairs in which her passengers rode. Presently Cochrane made
deductions and maliciously devised a television commercial. In it, a
moon-rocket stewardess, in uniform and looking fresh and charming,
would say sweetly that she went without bathing for days at a time on
moon-trips, and did not offend because she used whoosit's antistinkum.
And then he thought pleasurably of the heads that would roll did such a
commercial actually get on the air.
But he didn't make plans for the production-job he'd been sent to the
moon to do. Psychiatry was specialized, these days, as physical
medicine had