"Engage the ailerons," Bannister ordered. "Point seven degrees, negative."
Dennis came back on. "Harry, what are you doing? The ship is falling apart. The ailerons. It won"t help. Listen, Harry, you"ve got to be careful. The flight configuration is so tenuous, anything can turn this thing into a falling stone. It had to happen, I knew, but I don"t want to believe it now. This sitting here with that noise getting louder. It"s spiraling out at me, getting bigger. Now it"s smaller again. I"m afraid, Harry. The ailerons, Harry, they"re gone. Very tenuous. They"re gone. I can"t see anything. The screens are black. No more shaking. No more noise. It"s quiet and I hear myself breathing, Harry. Harry, the wrist straps on the suits are too tight. And the helmet, when you want to scratch your face, you can go mad. And Harry--"
That was the end of the communications. Something in the transmitter must have gone. They never found out. He didn"t hit until almost a minute later, and n.o.body ever saw it. The tracking screen followed him down very precisely and very silently. There was no retrieving anything, of course. You don"t conduct salvage operations in the middle of the south Atlantic.
I turned in my report after that. No one had asked for it, so it went through unorthodox channels. It took an awfully long time and my suspension did not become effective until after the second shot. I was the pilot on that one, you know. I got them to install the duplicate controls, over the insistence by Bannister that resorting to them, even in the event that it became necessary, would prove nothing. He even went as far as to talk about load redistribution electric control design. As a matter of fact, I thought he had me for a while, but I think in the end they decided to try to avoid the waste of another vehicle. At least, that might be the kind of argument that would carry weight. The vehicles were enormously expensive, you realize.
I made it all right, as I said. It took me nine hours and then some, once they dropped me from orbit. I switched off the automatic controls at the point where the dive brakes were to have been engaged. This time, the brakes had not responded to the auto controls and they did not open at all. I found out readily enough why Lynds was against opening them at that point. Metal fatigue had brought the ship to a point where even a shift in my position could cause it to stop flying.
I came down in Australia and the braking "chute tore right out when I released it. I skidded nine miles. A Royal Australian Air Force helicopter picked me up two hours later.
I learned of the suspension while in the hospital. I didn"t get out until just in time to get to London for the hearing. My evidence and Forrest"s, and Lynds" recorded voice all served to no purpose. You don"t become a hero by proving an expert wrong. It doesn"t work that way. It would not do to have Bannister looked upon as a bad gambit, not after all they went through to stay in power after putting him in.
The reason, after all, was all in the way you looked at it. And a human element could always be overlooked in the cause of human endeavor. Especially when the const.i.tuents never find out about it.
After that, they started experimentation with powered returns. The atmosphere has been conquered, and now there remained the last stage.
They never did it successfully. They couldn"t. But it did not really matter. What it all proved was that they did not really need pilots for what Bannister was after. He had started with a premise of testing man"s reactions to s.p.a.ce probes under actual conditions, but what he was actually doing was testing s.p.a.ce probes alone, with man as a necessary evil to contend with to give the project a reason.
It was all like putting a man in a racing car traveling flat out on the Salts in Bonneville, Utah. He"ll survive, of course. But put the man in the car with no controls for him to operate and then run the thing completely through remote transmission, and you"ve eliminated the purpose for the man. Survival as an afterthought might be a thing to test, if you didn"t care a hoot about man. Survival for its own sake doesn"t mean anything unless I"ve missed the whole point of living, somewhere along the line.
Bannister once described to me the firing of a prototype V-2. The firing took place after sunset. When the rocket had achieved a certain alt.i.tude, it suddenly took on a brilliant yellow glow. It had pa.s.sed beyond the shadow of the earth and risen into the sunlight. Here was Bannister"s pa.s.sion. He was out to establish the feasibility of putting a rocket vehicle on the moon. It could have a man in it, or a monkey. Both were just as useless. Neither could fly the thing back, even if it did get down in one piece. It could tell us nothing about the moon we didn"t already know. Getting it down in one piece, of course, was the reason why they gave Bannister the project to begin with.
So Bannister is now a triumphant hero, despite the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. But n.o.body understood it. Bannister put a vehicle on the moon. We were the first to do it. We proved something by doing nothing. Perhaps the situation of true cla.s.sified information is not too healthy a one, at that. You see, we"ve had rockets with that kind of power for an awfully long time now. Maybe some of them know what he"s up to. When I think about that, I really become frightened.
The monkey, I suppose, is dead. The most we can hope for is that he died fast. It"s very like another kind of miserable hope I felt once, a long time ago, for a lot of people who could be offered little more than hope for a fast death, because of something somebody was trying to prove. There"s some consolation this time. It"s really only a monkey.
This I know, they"ll never publish a picture of the vehicle. Someone might start to wonder why the cabin seems equipped to carry a man.
When you"re out in a clear night in summer, the sky looks very friendly, the moon a big pleasant place where nothing at all can happen to you. The vehicle used in Project Argus had a porthole. I can"t imagine why. The monkey must have been able to see out the porthole. Did he notice, I wonder, whether the earth looks friendly from out there.
THE END