Chapter 3
Some unscrupulous public relations genius attached to Operation Jehad was informed of Gail Loring’s betrothal and, in the remaining four days before the lift-off, the entire world was told the most romantic story since Romeo and Juliet—and it was lies, mostly.
Only the marriage was a fact. But the world was informed that William Drake and Gail Loring, high ranking astronauts, had fallen deeply in love some months before. They had secretly agreed to be married after the completion of Operation Jehad. Drake, brave man that he was, and Gail, self-sacrificing young woman that she was, had pushed their personal desires into the background for science; the cruel, tragic death of Willy Zinder had left a vacancy in the Jehad crew and Gail and Bill had agreed to marry immediately so that both could further this important expedition into the unknown. The fact that inadvertently the trip would also serve as a honeymoon cruise, put the whole project on a more romantic note.
Space officials in Washington, fully apprised of the reasons for the wedding, and sold on the idea by Dr. Spartan, were not only gratified by the world-wide acceptance of these lies, but they announced that the ceremony would be included as part of the countdown proceedings prior to the launching of the big Saturn that would carry us all to the plasma ship, already in orbit around the earth.
The bride and groom and all of the members of the wedding party, with the exception of a federal judge who was to perform the rites, would be wearing spacesuits. The only charitable thing the officials did was to forbid interviews with either the bride-to-be or her intended. There just wasn’t time, they said. Actually they didn’t trust us to conceal the real reason behind the marriage. The project’s publicity team, however, issued handouts of purported interviews, a fictional history of our love affair, and pictures.
On the day before the launching, I received two mail sacks full of letters from the panting shopgirls mentioned by Gail and a United States post-office truck delivered a full cargo of gifts to Gail. I didn’t read the mail, and the gifts were stored in a government warehouse, pending our return from Mars. I don’t know how much mail and parcel post came the fourth day. We were too busy to find out.
I developed a monumental guilty feeling when I realized the magnitude of our deception. I was sick of the whole business. There had been many marriages of convenience, of course, and some had turned out better than marriages for love, but this was pure fraud. The only consolation was that through it we had acquired a full crew. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that a quiet, secret ceremony would have accomplished the same purpose. Why compound a fraud with a spectacle?
Twelve precious minutes were squeezed out of the countdown for the ceremony. We marched in spacesuits, sans helmets, to the launching pad—five male astronauts and one female, accompanied by a federal judge named Lockhart who had no part in the conspiracy but who had been asked to perform the rites because he was a friend of some governor.
No ring was used, since it would have been impossible to slip it over the spacesuit glove Gail wore. We joined hands while the judge spoke into a microphone and the words were carried, via radio and television, to the far reaches of our planet, even to the fur-clad outposts at Thule and Antarctica.
Nearby were photographers to record the lie for posterity.
A conventional bridegroom is in a state of shock and he scarcely realizes what is going on. I heard everything, realizing I was perjuring myself every step of the way. I accepted Gail as my lawful, wedded wife, knowing we would not really be married. She accepted me as her lawful, wedded husband, knowing it was all a lie.
Finally it ended. Judge Lockhart said, “You may kiss the bride.”
This I could do without faking. I took her in my arms and drew her close. As she turned her face to mine, I thought for a moment that this, at least, would be real. But when I started to meet her lips with mine, she quickly turned her cheek.
The kiss, too, turned out to be a fraud.
My four companions also kissed her—on the cheek. Then we stepped into the cherry-picker which would lift us to the nose capsule of the Saturn.
Two technicians rode with us to help adjust our harnesses and to make sure we were snug in our seats before the lift-off.
The seats were backed against the wall in a hexagonal arrangement, with a small instrument panel directly in front of Spartan’s position.
“Sit on my left, Ludson,” said Spartan. “Joel, you sit on my right. I think we can allow the bride and groom to sit side-by-side, since this is to be their honeymoon ride.”
Morrie Grover snickered.
“There’s no cause for mirth,” said Spartan sharply. “There’s going to be nothing funny about this trip.”
Morrie sobered and grew red-faced. I felt sorry for the kid. The laugh had been caused by nervousness. All of us had been in space, of course, but this trip was anything but routine. The lift-off and the re-entry are the most dangerous phases of space flight, any way you look at it.
We put on our helmets and the technicians adjusted them. There was a microphone in each so that we could communicate, but no one, not even Spartan, said anything.
“Sixty minutes!” came the voice from the countdown.
Sixty long minutes of sitting. I wondered how I could stand the strain. Turning my head, I looked at Gail Loring beside me. She stared straight ahead, her lips pressed tight and her eyes glistening. She must have seen my head move, for she turned and looked at me.
“Good luck, Mrs. Drake,” I said.
“The name is Gail Loring, and don’t forget that, Bill Drake,” she said.
I could have slapped her.
But after a time I was glad she had said it. My angry thoughts kept me occupied and that helped pass the time. Almost before I knew it, I heard the voice outside say:
“Fifteen minutes!”
I am a congenital heathen. This is not to say that I’m an atheist or anything of the sort. It’s simply that I’ve never accepted religion the way most people do. In a way, I think I’ve missed something and I envy those who can accept their faiths without question or doubt, and mold their lives accordingly. For the first time, I wished I knew how to pray.
“Ten minutes!” said the voice of doom.
It seemed as if the words were still echoing in my ears when I heard: “Five minutes—four—three—two—sixty seconds—”
And then came the final ten seconds, ticked off one by one, ending in:
“Zero!”
The huge Saturn shuddered as the fuel ignited. It seemed to hesitate, as if unwilling to leave the earth. I held my breath. Then I felt the seat pressing against my buttocks and I knew we were on our way.
With each second the acceleration increased, the pressure grew greater.
I heard Morrie groan, but I knew he was all right. He was merely expressing his reaction to the tension. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Gail, her face contorted, her jaw firmly set. Spartan’s eyes were on the instruments, although his face revealed that he, too, was under strain. Axel Ludson seemed to bear up best, probably because his body was the strongest of all and his rugged frame could absorb the shock. Dr. Warner Joel looked the most frightened and his eyes were fixed on Dr. Spartan as if that man represented all of the security in the universe at that instant.
Although the long wait before the lift-off had seemed unbelievably short—just as the last hour would seem to a condemned criminal in his death cell—the flight to the plasma ship, which had been nicknamed the Jehad, after our own code name, was interminably long. We felt the momentary halt and resurgence of acceleration as each successive stage of the rocket was dropped. Then, after the third stage had burned out, Spartan’s hands grasped the controls, his eyes on a small television screen in front of him.
“Right on the nose,” he said, as if talking to himself. “At least, Operations has done one thing right.”
It was a typical remark, because as a perfectionist, Dr. Spartan was aware of and magnified each minor imperfection in everyone else. So far as I knew the entire operation had gone smoothly and without a hitch.
Spartan continued to operate the controls. I felt slight pressures as the ship adjusted its orbit. We were moving alongside and close to the plasma ship.
Six years, and as many billions of dollars, had been spent to build the Jehad, which was the most revolutionary space craft ever to be put in orbit.
To be accurate, the Jehad never had been put in orbit in one piece. Each part, and all of the equipment needed to put those parts together, had been rocketed into orbit from the ground. A team of highly skilled scientists and construction workers had pieced it together, an amazing job considering they had done this in a state of weightlessness. Eight men had lost their lives as a result of punctured spacesuits.
The strange thing about the Jehad was that it could never have lifted off the earth under its own power. Although the twelve generators which would drive the Jehad to Mars produced fantastic voltage, their force would not have knocked down a child—in fact, the push from a single motor was about equal to the power exerted by a pigeon in flight.
However, it was the most efficient and most economical motor man could use to travel ninety million miles to Mars—which is not the shortest route, but the most practical since it makes use of the earth’s motion and the sun’s gravitational power.
The plasma motor, more correctly the traveling-wave plasma motor, was developed after several years of research at the NASA laboratories near Cleveland, expressly for space propulsion. The first big breakthroughs, which led to the eventual perfection of the machine, were made in 1961. Because the machine was so complicated, involving principles laymen found hard to understand, it had received very little publicity.
In the simplest terms, the plasma engine, like the rocket, makes use of Newton’s law on the conservation of energy—for every action there is a corresponding and opposite reaction. But here the similarity with rockets ends.
In effect, it means that if you throw a ball, as much pressure and force is backward thrust on the hand as forward thrust on the ball. Since the ball has smaller mass, it sails through the air while your hand and body stay put because you are anchored by your weight and gravity. But in space you would go back in proportion to your mass, just as the ball goes forward. And if you continued to throw balls you would accelerate with each toss.
The plasma motor is an electric generator, “spread out.” That is, the rotor—the part that revolves—is removed, the motor opened up and flattened. Then it is coiled into a tube so that the field travels at right angles to its normal direction. This makes the electrical field run down the tube in waves, instead of in a circular motion.
Instead of a rotor, some lightweight element is ionized—heated and vaporized until the electrons and protons of the atoms are torn apart—and the resulting plasma rides down the tube on the waves as circulating systems of positive (protons) and negative (electrons) charges. When they are expelled there is a good-sized kick—kinetic energy. In space, any kick, no matter how small, results in motion, which will continue unless another force is applied to stop it. But in this case the only applied force is more kicks forward, thus there is acceleration.
The chief advantage of the plasma motor is that it can give a very good thrust with a very small amount of fuel. Even the earliest calculations disclosed that the amount of fuel needed to accelerate and decelerate the ship amounted to practically nothing compared to the payload it could push through space. A one-hundred-pound thrust would suffice to drive a 150-ton spaceship to Mars. Compare this with the one thousand pounds of thrust necessary to lift one pound of payload by rocket from the surface of the earth.
The fuel used on the Jehad was lithium, the third-lightest element. It had been used in the first experiments with the plasma engine but, since it had to be heated to 2500 degrees in order to vaporize it, argon—which was a gas to begin with—was experimented with. However, it had been decided to use lithium, for two reasons: one, heat to vaporize it could easily be obtained through high frequency heaters powered by solar batteries; two, lithium is lighter than argon. Thus was gained double advantage.
In theory, the Jehad could travel five-ninth’s the speed of light, or about one hundred thousand miles per second. As yet the Jehad had never attained this velocity, because building up to that speed would take months. In the 12-hour test flight, Spartan, Ludson and Gail Loring reported that the craft behaved according to expectations and there was reason to believe that, in practice, it would not fall short of its theoretical speed.
However, speed was not important, since a good part of the time on the trip would be spent in waiting for the earth and Mars to get into proper positions. It was necessary only to be fairly close to schedule in arriving on Mars.
I had been trained in the operation of the plasma ship and to me it represented the summit of safety in space. That’s why the trip to the Jehad seemed so long. I didn’t feel secure in the Saturn capsule and I knew I’d be much safer on the Jehad.
We were weightless now as we orbited close to the plasma-powered ship. Spartan, Joel and Ludson could see the craft on a small television screen near the control panel. I couldn’t see it from where I sat, but I was familiar with its appearance. It looked something like an elongated sausage with a small glass knob on each end. It was 185 meters long from the center of its forward cabin—an astrogation observatory—to the center of the rear. This base line had been measured to compute distances by parallax during the flight to Mars.
The center section was partitioned to contain motors, control and communications room, storage and living quarters for the crew. There was a difference, however, inasmuch as the entire interior could be utilized as floor. Small rockets in the side would start the cylinder spinning to give a weak but effective artificial gravity so that we could walk, rather than float, during our weightless voyage. This pressure would be equal on all walls, so it was possible for us to be suspended from what earthbound people call the “ceiling,” or to stand out at right angles from the walls, without fear of falling. No matter where we stood, the centrifugal force would always be outward.
“We’re less than fifty yards from the Jehad,” Dr. Spartan announced. “This is about as close as I dare bring us. Drake, you’ll carry a line to the Jehad—make it fast to the door of the locks. We’ll follow you across.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I unbuckled the straps to my harness, taking a great deal of care with my movements. I was weightless, and the slightest exertion might send me spinning away in another demonstration of Newton’s law on the conservation of energy.
Grasping a grab rail, I pulled myself upward to the escape hatch. In a rack were six aluminum tanks filled with oxygen. I slipped the straps over my shoulders, tightened them, brought the flexible tube around to my chest and fastened it into the fitting. Then I disconnected the long air hose that fed oxygen to my helmet from the Saturn’s supply and opened the hatch. A gentle push of my toes on the grab rail sent me floating into the air lock.
A reel of thin, stout copper wire was fastened to the wall near the outside hatch. I slipped the end of this through a ring on my spacesuit and ran out about a dozen feet, leaving a loose end, twice my height, trailing.
Then I opened the hatch. A small amount of air in the locks escaped, sucking me with it into outer space. For the first time I had a glimpse of the universe, unshielded by atmosphere or clouds.
At my feet lay the earth, looking up with a bluish-white countenance. To my left was the half moon, peeking over the dark blue horizon, its craters plainly visible. Above was the sun, too dazzling to look at, and all around were brilliant stars and planets, although I had no time to pick them out, much as I would have liked to spot Mars, our destination.
I was aimed toward the long sausage-shaped Jehad, but my trajectory would take me above it and I had to make immediate adjustment. To do this, I used a petcock on the belt of my spacesuit, which released a very tiny jet of oxygen from the tank on my back. I twisted my body so the force would send me in the right direction.
One little push was all I needed and now I had to somersault quickly, and, at the same time, push out the long loose end of copper wire so that it would strike the side of the Jehad before I did. This was very important, for the electrical potential of the Jehad must be adjusted to that of the Saturn capsule to guard against being struck by a bolt of lightning as I contacted the sides of the craft. Apparently there was not much of a differential for I saw no sparks against the black sky.
My feet struck the sides of the Jehad gently, and magnetic strips in my boots held me fast.
Walking with soft footfalls, because even a slightly heavy push might tear me loose and send me out into space, making it necessary for me to maneuver my way back to ship again, I approached the locks. I opened the outer door and then made my line of copper wire fast to an eye just above the opening.
“A-okay, Dr. Spartan!” I announced into my helmet microphone. “The line’s fast. I’ll stand by to assist you folks aboard.”
“Roger!” Spartan’s voice echoed in my ears.
They came one by one, hand over hand, with safety hasps fastened over the wire. First Morrie, then Gail, then Axel, Joel and Dr. Spartan, playing his role of captain to the hilt, being the last to leave the ship.
I pulled them into the locks. There had been a little danger from meteors, of course, but the experts had figured that the chance of a meteor large enough to penetrate a spacesuit hitting an individual was one in 241 years. So far the estimate had been holding up. The nineteen men who built the Jehad had worked six years in space—a total of 114 man years. We had yet to experience a meteor casualty.
None of my companions seemed afraid. All were a little glad to be aboard the Jehad.
As Spartan came into the locks, he unfastened the wire line that held us to the Saturn capsule. Then he closed the door. He turned a valve, filling the chamber with air, and after a few seconds he opened the inside locks and we all walked into the large, roomy interior of the little planet of our own.