No Approach
Other Worlds – October 1951
(1951)*
Randall Garrett
(as by David Gordon)

Ever been on a train when you pass a crossing? Funny how that warning bell suddenly drops in pitch as you zip by.

-

	FOUR minutes after the Luna XXI settled gently to rest on the spacefield at Theophilus, a blond young man was presenting his papers to the Government Police guard at the tubeway station.

	The guard slid them under the scanner. Somewhere far below them, an electronic brain compared them with their duplicates and decided that the gentleman in question really was James L. Simons, of General Alloys, Inc., especially since his prints matched beautifully.

	"All right, Mr. Simons." The guard shoved back the papers.

	"Thanks. Say, which tube do I take to Peak City?"

	"Either three or four. Three's the express." 

	"Thanks again."

	The blond young man turned and walked toward Tubeway Three, breathing a little better.

	"That," he thought, "is probably the first time that brain has ever made a wrong identification.

	Six minutes after that, he was on the train; the magnetic field coils slammed it along at better than sixty miles an hour. In three more minutes, he was in Peak City, located beneath the crust of the "high" end of the central peak of the lunar crater Theophilus.

	The girl was waiting for him in the station. She didn't see him immediately, and he paused for a moment to look. Light brown hair, smooth warmly-tanned skin and eyes that were—green? No, blue. She was looking straight at him, smiling.

	He smiled back, and they walked toward each other.

	"Jim! Jim, darling!" She threw her arms around him and held him for a moment, then put her face up to be kissed.

	It was not what he would have called an enjoyable kiss; mobile, realistic, and pliable though they are, a plexiskin mask simply does not have any sensory nerves.

	Afterward, he realized that she hadn't gotten anything out of the kiss either. He thought: "I wonder what she really looks like under that mask?"

	Her voice hissed whisperingly in his ear as he held her tight to him: "Alas, alack, and aday—"

	"—we'll all be dead someday," he finished in the same tone. It was a poor couplet, and, he thought, a rather morbid one; but it served its purpose.

	The girl led him out of the station, and into a cab, chattering in a wifely manner all the time. They talked pleasantly all the way to the apartment district—about nothing of importance.

	"Apartment 3312, Corridor 62," was the address she had given the cab. Peak City was not exactly a city in the Earthly sense of the word; it was a series of corridors and compartments hacked and blasted out of the Lunar bedrock.

	They stepped out of the cab and went through a doorway into the narrower pedestrian corridor. The girl unlocked a door numbered 3312; a door exactly similar to hundreds of other doors stretching up and down both ways along the well-lit corridors. She flung it open with a grandiose gesture and said: "Well, darling, this is home!"

	He walked on in and looked around, as he supposed he was expected to do. He heard the door click shut, and turned back to the girl.

	She was pointing a large and very nasty-looking gun straight at his midsection.

-

	"BEFORE you say anything, let me tell you that I will not hesitate to shoot if the answers to the questions I am about to ask are either slow in coming or in any way incorrect."

	Her voice was still calm, with no trace of hardness in it.

	"I understand." For some reason, his voice didn't sound quite as calm.

	"First: your real name."

	"Rupert Lee Corby. I—"

	"Don't volunteer any information; just answer. How were you contacted? Details, please."

	All right, he thought, if you want details, you'll get them.

	"I was arrested four weeks and three days ago by the Government Police—three agents, named Atkins, Baker, and Colvin—who picked me up at approximately six-thirty in the evening just as I was leaving my laboratory. They took me to Police Headquarters on Two Hundred and Sixty-Ninth Street, where I was given an exhaustive robotic lie detector test. The questions were—"

	"Never mind what the questions were, get on with it."

	"After they were completely satisfied as to my loyalty and honesty, they gave me my instructions."

	"And these were?"

	"To report here, on this date and do as I have done. I was shown three photographs of your appearance in your present disguise so that I would be able to recognize you, and I was given the rhyme couplet."

	The gun still hadn't moved one iota. "Do you know why you are here?"

	"No. I was told that it was highly secret and confidential work. Nothing more."

	"All right. Now, take off the mask."

	He did so, peeling it up from his throat and off his forehead. 

	And still the gun did not move.

	Corby frowned. "Aren't you satisfied?"

	"Not quite. All of this information could have been removed from the real Dr. Corby's mind and hypnotically implanted in yours. One more question."

	In quick succession, she fired a string of mathematical symbols at him. Unhesitatingly, Corby fired another set back at her.

	"Dr. Corby," she said, dropping the gun to her side, "there is only one man in the Solar System who could have answered that question. I am very glad to meet you."

	Corby smiled. "And there is only one woman who could have asked it. I am very glad to meet you, Dr. Janice Luise Forbes."

	She frowned slightly. "You accept that in spite of—"

	"In spite of the fact that Dr. Forbes is supposed to have died twelve years ago? Yes. If another woman had, in that time achieved your mathematical brilliance, I would have known about it. Q.E.D.: You are Janice Forbes."

	"I see. Well, I'm afraid I'll have to admit it."

	She was removing her own face mask now, and Corby watched, interestedly.

	It wasn't actually much different from her own face. A little extra thickness here and there, and her own jaw line was more pronounced, firmer. And yet Corby knew he would never have recognized her from the pictures the Police had shown him.

	She was still young and—well, not beautiful, but very attractive. As well as he could recall, she was about eight years younger than he—that would make her sixty-one or two.

	"What next?" Corby asked after she had removed the now-shapeless mass of plastic. "Can you tell me what this is all about?"

	"Better than that, I'll show you." Janice stepped over to the phone and flipped the switch. The screen didn't light, nor could he hear the faint hum that showed the speaker was operating. Nevertheless, she leaned over and said softly: "Ad astra per aspirin." Then, she released the switch.

	Corby looked at her solemnly. "Aren't you sort of misquoting your Latin?"

	"You'd be surprised how true it is," she answered. "Now let's go."

	For the barest fraction of a second, Corby felt startled. A section of the wall had slipped aside to reveal what appeared to be a darkened closet. Then he realized it was an elevator.

-

	THEY went in, and the elevator began to drop at what Corby considered a sickening rate of speed. It stopped at what appeared to be a tubeway station except that there wasn't a soul in sight. A single empty car waited for them.

	Corby followed Janice through the door, and they braced themselves against the backs of the seats. The car began to move, slowly at first, then more rapidly. The lights in the car went out, and they were left in absolute blackness.

	"You see," Janice explained through the darkness, "no one knows exactly where on the Moon Project Aspirin is—except for a few top government officials. This car, and a few others like it are the only ways to get there. In a few minutes, we'll be past the field of the gravity generators under Theophilus Peak, so watch your stomach."

	Even though he was prepared for it, the shock came so suddenly that Corby was almost sick. In a spasm of quick, jerking nausea, Corby's weight dropped to thirty pounds.

	"No wonder," he said, after swallowing, "they use these fields. Imagine growing up under this gravity."

	"Right. There are a million people living in Peak City, a couple of hundred thousand of them children. Imagine that many monstrosities!"

	They were silent for a moment, then Corby said: "Well, come on, what is it? What is all this hush-hush about?"

	Janice Forbes seemed to be choosing her words carefully.

	"We are building one of the greatest spaceships ever dreamed of by man—an interstellar vessel. At top speed, it will reach a velocity nearly ten thousand times that of light."

	Corby felt, mentally, the same shock that the gravity release had given him physically; as before he forced it down, made his voice calm.

	"I see. And what is my part in all this?"

	"Until we get there, this is the last answer I'll give you: You are here to investigate a hunch."

	Corby kept his mouth shut. He knew only too well that this woman would no more answer another question than the nearest wall. But, by God, he could speculate!

	An interstellar ship! It hardly sounded possible. For better than seven centuries, now, man had owned the Solar System, lock, stock, and barrel. He had found no resistance, nothing to fight his control. Life had, in a few instances, existed in lower forms—algae, bacteria, and a few others—but only Earth had spawned animal life; only Earth had bred an intelligent species.

	And now the stars. Maybe somewhere, somehow, out there, they would find other intelligences. For here, somewhere beneath the gray, hard rock of Earth's moon, man was at last building a ship that could reach across those awful distances to other suns, other planets.

	How long had they been building it? Who had evolved the drive that so violently violated known physics? And all this security, this secrecy; all the imprisonment and suffering and headaches its builders must have suffered!

	Suddenly Corby laughed aloud. 

	"What's so funny?" Janice Forbes asked.

	"Headaches! Ad astra per aspirin! 'To the stars through aspirin!' I think I'm going to like this crowd!"

	Her laughter joined his as the car hissed on through the blackness.

-

	EIGHT guards met them at the end of the long tubeway, guns levelled. Evidently no one trusted anyone around here.

	More identification procedure and more questions before they were finally released to go to the construction site.

	"Why all the secrecy?" Corby asked as they walked down another of the seemingly endless corridors. "What in the devil could it possibly hurt to release this stuff?"

	She looked at him oddly. "Ever hear of Solar Atomics?"

	"Sure. So?"

	"So they own, sub rosa, every atomic corporation in the System. The Government can't prove it, of course, but they know it. How would they react if they knew that within a few years other corporations would be opening up far out there, in places they couldn't possibly control? The same goes for half a dozen other interests and lobbies."

	"Mmmh. I see. The same thing that happened on Earth when the first rocket was proposed. A lot of people yelled 'Expense! Higher taxes! Wasted money!' "

	"Right. Well, here we are."

	She slid open the door—and he saw it.

	The cavern was gigantic, reaching up and up until even the brilliant lights showed nothing but a bright, hazy glare. Far across the room, figures could be seen moving about, but what they were doing Corby couldn't see, nor, at that moment, did he care. He was looking at The Monster.

	Dead black and featureless it loomed far above him, higher than he could see up into the foggy light and even then it looked as though there were more and yet more of it.

	Janice's voice was low beside him, as though even she, after twelve years, was awed by its immensity.

	"One mile high. A quarter of a mile in its greatest diameter. Over half of it is filled with the drive mechanism and the auxiliaries. That's why we don't use gravity fields here: normal Earth pull would crush it under the weight. Once it takes off it will never land again; it's not built for it. It carries smaller auxiliary ships for landing purposes, while the monster remains in a free fall orbit around the planet.

	"Crew?" he asked, still staring up.

	"One man could take it anywhere in the Galaxy."

	That didn't startle Corby. He felt that nothing could anymore.

	"When will she be finished?"

	"She's finished now."

	Her voice was still low, and for a moment her words didn't penetrate. Then he turned.

	"Then what in hell am I here for?" If they expect me to test pilot the thing, they're nuts!"

	She laughed. "No, of course not! I told you; you're here to investigate a hunch. Come on, we'll go see some people."

	Wordlessly, he followed her around the wall of the great construction room until they came to another door. Corby followed her in.

	Four men were seated around the big table in the center of the room, evidently discussing the papers that lay scattered before them. They all turned to look at Corby as he and Janice Forbes entered the room.

	"Gentlemen," said the girl, "this is Dr. Rupert Corby. Corby, reading from left to right, we have Lionel Worth, our Chief Engineer; James Hammermill, Project Co-ordinator; Jerry Winfield, Design Engineer and test pilot; and his brother Robert, our troubleshooter."

-

	HELLO'S, glad-to-meet-you's, and general handshaking all around. Worth and the two Winfields were younger men, none over eighty, but Co-ordinator Hammermill was an elderly man, probably creeping up on the two-hundred mark.

	Hammermill smiled at him. "Well, Dr. Corby, what do you think of Project Aspirin?"

	"Frankly, gentlemen, I'm a little befuddled."

	Hammermill, Worth, and Jerry Winfield all swung their eyes toward Bob Winfield, who was holding out one hand, palm upward, looking solemnly expectant.

	"Oh, well," Lionel Worth sighed, "maybe we'll learn not to bet with Bob, someday."

	Each of the men handed Bob a ten-solar bill, which was folded carefully and placed in Bob's tunic pocket.

	"I don't get it." Corby frowned confusedly.

	Worth glared good-humoredly at Corby. "Will you please shut up, Dr. Corby? You're costing us money."

	Another trio of tens passed into Bob Winfield's pocket.

	Co-ordinator Hammermill looked at Bob. "Tell me, my boy, what do you do with all the money you get that way? Really, I'm interested."

	"Simple, sir. I use it to feed a pet Plutonian monster named Ybxib, who feeds on nothing but Earth imported Scotch." He swung his gaze toward Corby. "You may speak now, sir. They won't lose any more money."

	Corby felt very near the explosion point. "Will you please tell me what under the sun this is all about? I haven't been so ungodly fouled up since—I don't know when!"

	Hammermill's lined face grew solemn. "What you just saw illustrates your whole problem, Dr. Corby. We call Robert Winfield our trouble-shooter for the very simple reason that he is, to some extent, prescient. As you just saw, he was able to tell us the first two sentences you would utter after the introductions were over.

	"Just how it is done, none of us knows. Subconscious calculation of factors involved might be one answer. A belief in fate might be another, except that we could have taken steps against your saying what you did, thereby destroying the effectiveness of Bob's prediction. In other words, if Bob can tell us what is coming, we can, if we so desire, prevent it.

	"However, these predictions are not controllable. They come upon him suddenly, randomly. And they are not always complete. The farther in the future they are supposed to occur, the less complete they are. One more thing adds to the complexity of this gift: Bob never gets the same 'hunch' twice. That is, he can never add any more detail once the prediction has come, not even right up to the second before he has it. Do you follow me?"

	"I think so," Corby answered. "If, for instance, his hunch told him that I was going to put my hand in my pocket, but not what I was going to take out, then he would never know what I was going to take out of it. Right?"

	"Not until you actually took it out. Precisely." 

	"And so?"

	Hammermill looked again at Bob Winfield. "Tell him, Bob."

	Winfield leaned earnestly across the table. "Just this, sir: I have a hunch that something catastrophic is going to happen to the ship. I also know that it will not be due to any human agency, but due to a defect in our calculations. Other than that, I know nothing."

	"So you see," Hammermill added, "your job, Dr. Corby, is to find that defect."

-

	WITHIN four days, Corby realized what a really tremendous job he had on his hands. Thousands upon thousands of taped and typed calculations had to be gone over, bit by bit, equation by equation, section by section. Eighteen of the most complex calculators designed by modern cybernetics had to be kept busy. He and Janice Forbes had to work like the tireless "brains" themselves to co-ordinate the work, to check and re-check it.

	The drive itself was simple; nothing but a souped-up version of an ordinary atomic motor. The real secret of that hulking black ship was the mass-time converter.

	Einsteinian physics shows that as a body approaches the velocity of light, its mass approaches infinity, while its time rate approaches zero. The mass-time converter simply changed the added mass into time flow, thereby keeping the total constant, but .permitting the ship to achieve any velocity without there being any difference between objective or Earth time, and subjective or ship time.

	To say that the math was complicated would be one of those well-known masterpieces of understatement.

	During the short periods while he had nothing much to do, that is, when the calculators were loaded with work and he was waiting for the answers, Corby spent his time attempting to clarify the situation into which he had been so cavalierly thrust.

	He was confined, he found, to a rather limited section of the immense caverns that housed Project Aspirin. The mathematical chambers, the Section Cafeteria, and the two room apartment which had been assigned him were his absolute limit. There were Government Police, high-ranking men all, for every section, and no one was permitted to go from one section to the other without a pass from the Project Co-ordinator, not even the Police officers themselves.

	He felt, in a way, that he had usurped Janice Forbe's position as head of Math Division, but she didn't seem to resent it in any way, and worked like the proverbial ant to get the job done. They moved in a whirl of figures, equations, and Greek letters, accompanied by the subtle whirrings of eighteen calculators and the whisperings of the thirty-six technicians required to run them.

	Several times Corby noticed young Bob Winfield standing near the doorway, watching, his boyish face immobile, his eyes watching everything.

	"He is one of the few men here who can come and go as they please," Janice answered his question one day. "In order for him to use that 'hunch factory' in his mind, he has to be able to get as much data as possible."

	"I notice," Corby observed, "that he seems to think you're some sort of goddess incarnate. Is the feeling reciprocated?"

	"In a way, yes. I think he's a wonderful kid, but, after all, he's only twenty-five."

	"So young? I would have thought him a bit older."

	Janice's brows came down in a frown. "It's his brother's influence. Jerry is thirty years older than Bob, and quite an adventurer—been all over the system and in almost every kind of jam—and Bob never saw Jerry until their parents died ten years ago. Jerry's parents were justly proud of their eldest, and eulogized him quite a bit. Bob suffers from acute hero-worship. To him, Jerry is the Perfect Man."

	"And from the look in his eyes, you are the Perfect Woman."

	She frowned at that. "In a way, I suppose he does. I guess I play nursemaid to him a little too much. But this gift of his has made him a little unstable, mentally—not much, you understand, but a little—and he has to get things off his chest once in a while. I suppose that since his parents died I'm his—well, wailing wall."

-

	FOR four months, the great ship stood looking at the distant stars through the rock that covered it, waiting brooding in its untested virginity, while puny men tried to find an unknown flaw in it.

	Finally, the work was done. Corby had to face the Commission. Twenty-two men and women, among them the greatest minds in the System, from Co-ordinator Hammermill on down, sat waiting to hear his report.

	Preliminaries over, Corby stood, looked at them, and began:

	"Before I go into my results, I would like to say that, with Dr. Forbes' aid, this entire formulation has been worked over from end to end. The calculations were done on the computers in sets of three so that any error that might be inherent in the circuits of one machine would be cancelled by the results of the other two. Each entry was checked six times—three by myself, three by Dr. Forbes. We have, we believe, checked the work to the practical limits of human ability, if it is to be done within any reasonable length of time.

	"Our results are quite simply stated: I am satisfied, and Dr. Forbes is satisfied, that there is absolutely no flaw in the mathematics of the mass-time converter, the engineering of the vessel, or the drive mechanism."

	He stopped and swept his eyes across the faces seated around him. There were a few murmurings, and finally Co-ordinator Hammermill asked a question, his lined face showing only a trace of anxiety.

	"Do you have any further suggestions, Dr. Corby?"

	Corby thought a moment. "Only that perhaps the ship's mechanism itself might be at fault. Has that been checked thoroughly?"

	Bob Winfield stood up. "If I may interrupt at this point, I should like to make two statements."

	"Go ahead, Bob," said Hammermill.

	"First, sir, I have a hunch that Dr. Corby's entirely correct—the calculations are perfect. Second, I have a hunch that there is nothing wrong with the ship. Therefore, somehow, in some way, Dr. Corby's work, or his presence here, must have nullified my earlier prediction."

	There was a general stirring among those present. Corby got the impression that each and every one of them had been wearing an invisible strait-jacket, and Winfield's words had somehow cut them loose.

	No one seemed to pay any more attention to Corby. They prodded Bob with questions, smiled among themselves, and made plans for the ship's course to Alpha Centauri.

	Corby left the room after a few minutes and walked slowly back toward Math Section. For some reason, he felt dissatisfied, as though Bob's earlier hunch had somehow taken hold on his own mind and wouldn't leave.

	He heard footsteps behind him and turned.

	"Oh, hello, Bob."

	"I just came to say I'm sorry for all this, Dr. Corby," Winfield said earnestly. "Now that your work is done, you won't have anything to do, and they'll confine you to quarters until the ship is ready to leave. But don't look so downhearted; Jerry is going to leave for Alpha Centauri in less than a week, and you can leave for Earth then." There was pride in his voice as he spoke his brother's name.

	Corby rubbed a finger across his lower lip. "I hate to feel useless around here. I think I'll ask Hammermill if he won't let me help with the astrogation problems. Do you think he'd okay it?"

	"I'm sure he would, Dr. Corby," Bob said levelly. Then he turned on his heel and strode off down the corridor.

	Corby shook his head. Funny kid, he thought.

-

	CORBY didn't sleep well that night, at least for the first hour or two. He kept feeling that somewhere he had missed something, some little gimmick that might be the answer to Bob's hunches.

	When he awoke, his head was uncomfortable, his neck felt twisted, as though he had slept on it wrong. He opened his eyes and tried to shift to a more comfortable position.

	But when he tried to move, he found he couldn't.

	It required several minutes of concentration to get it straight in his mind just what had happened. For some reason his mind didn't seem to work with its usual clarity.

	He was strapped tight, hands, feet, arms, legs, abdomen, chest, and neck, with a broad webbing that was wide enough to hold him tight without cutting into his flesh. Quite obviously, he wasn't strapped to his own bed, nor was he even in the room which had been assigned him at Project Aspirin.

	The walls were a blank, staring white. Over to his left there was a window with the blinds closed tight.

	A window!

	Not on the moon. There simply weren't any windows on Luna.

	That meant—he was back on Earth!

	Wheeeeewhooooo !

	The noise irritated him, somehow, like the grating of teeth on a piece of broken glass. What the devil was it?

	His thoughts were interrupted by the click of a door sliding open. Corby watched silently from under nearly-closed lids as the man came in. He was a tallish fellow, with dark hair and a thin, grey-looking face.

	Not, he realized, that the face meant anything. It would be foolish to suppose that it was anything but a mask.

	"All right, Dr. Corby, the drug has worn off by now. You can quit pretending." The man's voice was faintly buzzy due to the voice-changing mechanism strapped around his throat.

	Wheeeeewhooooo! The almost inaudible rushing sound came again.

	"What do you want?" Corby asked levelly.

	"Nothing, just now. I just wanted to make sure you were in good health." He looked at Corby speculatively for a minute or two, then turned and left. The door slid shut behind him.

	Wheeeeewhoooooo! The noise came again. Corby tried again to analyze it, as though there were something there that would give him the key to everything.

	For the next several hours, he listened to that pitch-changing whistle. It seemed to come from far below—and yet, in a way, it was almost level with him. It—

	He was dozing a little when the truth came. The shock was so great that he attempted to jerk himself out of the bed in which he lay, and he almost strangled because of the pressure on his throat.

	He knew what the unforeseen factor was. And he knew, beyond all shadow of doubt, that he had to stop the ship from taking off.

-

	HIS mind whirled for minutes as he tried to think of some way—any way—to get back to Project Aspirin in time. In time to prevent one of the most monstrous mistakes in human history.

	Time moved on endlessly. Three times the diffused light outside the window dimmed, settling the room into darkness; three times it brightened again as day came.

	Once each day, the gray-faced man came in and fed him, saying nothing, asking no questions, and answering none.

	On the morning of the fourth day, Corby found his chance. Each day, he had strained with all his strength against the straps that were holding him, and finally, one of them gave a little. Cautiously, carefully, he worked at it, tore it strand by strand, until finally one hand was free.

	By the time Gray-face came in for his inspection, Corby was ready for him.

	One hand brushed aside the now loose straps, the other slammed at the plate the other man was homing, smashing it into his face.

	Gray-face lashed out with a foot, catching Corby in the side before he had a chance to get completely off the bed. Instinctively, Corby grabbed at the foot, and it kept on going up. Gray-face fell backward, his back hitting the floor with an agonizing smack.

	But he still wasn't out. Corby, his side a mass of bruised pain, leaped at the man on the floor just in time to keep him from getting a little knockout gun into play.

	His headlong smash wasn't accurate enough to do any real harm, but it knocked all the breath out of Gray-face, and sent the knockout gun sliding across the floor.

	Corby had been exposed to four months of Lunar gravity, and this sudden exposure to full Earth pull left him feeling a little weak. Luckily, Gray-face didn't seem much better off.

	Twist, roll, jab and slam! For the space of two or three minutes, Corby still wasn't quite sure which man would get the best of it, but finally his opponent began to weaken.

	With one last swing of his fist, Corby managed to make Gray-face's head connect loudly with the floor. Gray-face suddenly felt like a suitful of lumpy sawdust in Corby's grasp.

	He didn't even bother to take off the mask; he didn't care who the man was. The thing uppermost in his mind was getting out of there. He grabbed the knockout gun and started toward the door.

	The door was locked.

-

	CORBY ran back across the room toward Gray-face. The key must be somewhere in his pocket. But, search as he might, he could find nothing.

	He lifted the unconscious man off the floor and strapped him securely to the bed, tying down the one hand that had been left free by the broken strap with a strip of the man's clothing.

	Then he felt under the collar until his fingers grasped the edges of the plexiskin mask. He peeled it off, and sat looking at the face dully, his mind spinning with questions.

	Finally, he began to slap the face with a slow back-and-forth motion. Slap! Slap! Slap slap slap!

	Robert Winfield's eyes fluttered open.

	"All right, Bob," Corby said tiredly, "how do I get out of here?"

	"Do you think I'm going to tell you?" the boy mumbled through split lips. "You can rot here for all I care." He tried to put a sneer in his voice, but it didn't come off too well;

	"Why did you do it, Bob?" Corby knew Winfield was ready to tell, ready to lash out with whatever hate was stored within his mind.

	"To keep you away from Janice, you rotten thief! She's mine, and I'm not going to let you have her! I saw you. I saw you half a hundred times, talking to her. Always together, always whispering to each other! But I've got you here, now. And even if you did get out, the Government Police would get you." He laughed, chokingly. "You see, they think you're a spy. They're going to launch the ship today, before anything can happen."

	Then there was pride in his voice as he said: "My brother is going to be the first man to go to the stars!"

	"No, Bob." Corby felt brutal, but it had to be done. "If you don't tell me how to get out of here, Jerry Winfield will be the first man to die in an interstellar ship."

	Carefully, one step at a time, he told Robert Winfield how his hunches had been right.

-

	CORBY moved down the darkened corridor as noiselessly and rapidly as possible. Now that he was away from the little gravity generator the Winfield boy had hidden in the floor of the unused room, it was easy to make time against the moon's light gravity.

	The elaborate hoax of the whole thing was terrifying in its complexity. The false window, with its simulated daylight, the gravity generator, the cot with the straps, all of them prepared so that Corby would think he was on Earth, a victim of some other group of schemers.

	Corby turned the corner into a well-lighted main corridor, and almost ran into a Police guard. He brought up the knockout gun just as the guard turned, and pulled the trigger. The guard dropped, jerking.

	The corridor ended in a door. He flung it open, and stood for a moment, surprise touching the surface of his mind.

	The door led to a balcony overlooking the construction site. Above and below him was the featureless blackness of the great ship, posed and waiting for flight.

	Somewhere in the vast chamber, a loudspeaker boomed out: ATTENTION! ATTENTION, ALL PERSONNEL! CLEAR THE LAUNCHING AREA WITHIN THIRTY MINUTES! THE EVACUATION PUMPS WILL BEGIN REMOVING THE AIR FROM THE LAUNCHING CHAMBER A T THAT TIME, IN ORDER THAT THE EXIT DOOR LEADING TO THE SURFACE MAY BE OPENED. PLEASE HAVE EVERYTHING IN READINESS AT THAT TIME.

	Corby felt a cold chill in spite of the warmth of the room. Thirty minutes! He couldn't possibly make it to the bottom in that time, unfamiliar as he was with the layout of this section of the caverns. Besides, he'd have to dodge guards every inch of the way.

	He looked down, toward the bottom of the pit. They had shut out nearly all the lights up in this sector, but he could see the brightly lit area of the floor nearly a thousand feet below.

	He counted the balconies that were at every level beneath him. Thirty-eight. They were about twenty feet apart and—

	There was a way! He made a few quick mental calculations. Acceleration: one hundred sixty-seven centimeters per second squared. Mass: about ninety kilograms. Distance: a little less than seven hundred centimeters.

	He could make it.

	Quickly, he swung his body over the edge of the rail, hung by his hands, and let go.

	Under Luna's light gravitational pull, he fell slowly toward the next balcony. His hands reached, grabbed the railing, and broke his fall. Then he let go again.

	Down, down, down. Catch, hold drop. Over and over again. Endlessly. Thirty-eight times it had to be done. Once he missed and catching the next railing wrenched his arms agonizingly. His palms were sweaty, and he had to stop once to wipe them, one at a time, on his tunic. Then, down again.

	His shoulders and arms ached, and little pains shot through his body from the beating he had taken from the Winfield boy.

	He thought: Not many people below—hope they don't—look up—probably won't—look at the Monster if they do—

	His mind felt confused. It seemed to take an eternity to go down this way. Was this number twenty or twenty-one?

	Finally, there was only one balcony between him and the floor of the construction chamber. He swung himself inward, and hit the balcony rolling. For some reason, his body didn't seem to have its normal resiliency; it felt numb and stiff:

	For an instant his mind thought crazily of dropping down the side of the Old Empire State Building. It was about the same distance, but he never would have made it under Earth gravity. Then, weakly, he forced his body to move.

	He peered over the edge of the balcony. It didn't seem odd that Janice Forbes should be standing below him; the shock of coincidence was too weak to affect his deadened nerves.

	"Janice!" he called softly. "Janice Forbes! Up here!"

	She swung around. Her eyes widened, and with one smooth, swift motion, she "drew the gun at her side.

	"Don't shoot." He held his hands high. "Let me explain."

-

	CORBY seemed to ache everywhere, even in places he knew hadn't been strained. He lay on the bed, listening disinterestedly to the buzzing of voices around him.

	One of the Police guards was saying: "We found the Winfield boy just where Dr. Corby said he was. We've taken him to the hospital; he thinks he's killed his brother. He's quite insane."

	"I see." It was Hammermill's voice. "Well, Janice, what is the explanation?"

	"I'll let him tell it, but believe me, he's right. If we had launched that ship, we'd have lost it."

	Co-ordinator Hammermill cleared his throat. "Dr. Corby, this whole incident is damned odd, but just on your reputation, and on Dr. Forbes' recommendation, we have postponed the launching. Now—why?"

	Corby opened his eyes. His voice was low. "It's so simple we overlooked it. We never even thought about it. You see, all of Bob Winfield's hunches were right. We had made an error in calculations, but it wasn't the ship, either theoretically or mathematically.

	"It came to me up there in that room. I kept hearing an odd sound—a high note coming toward me that suddenly dropped in pitch and went away. It was a tubeway."

	Hammermill nodded. "Yes, there's a tubeway on that level."

	"The Doppler Effect," Corby continued. "As the car approached, the wave peaks of sound were crowded together, and the pitch sounded higher than it really was. As it left, the wave peaks were stretched apart, making the sound seem lower than it really was. That was the key.

	"The same thing happens with light. As a luminous body recedes, its spectrum is shifted toward the red; if it is approaching, the spectrum is shifted toward the violet.

	"Now, imagine what would happen if a ship, moving at close to the velocity of light, were to approach a sun. Every bit of radiant energy, including heat, would be shifted up high into the spectrum—up, past hard gamma, into the wave lengths of cosmic rays themselves. You can imagine, I think, what would happen if the entire energy of the sun were converted to such hard radiation. The ship would become so violently radioactive that it would become an atomic bomb. Just a flash and a puff of radiation."

	There was a silence, then.

	"Can we lick it?" Hammermill asked, finally, a slight strain in his voice.

	"I don't know, but we can try." Corby lay back, eyes closed. "We can try." His voice faded as he drifted into sleep.

The End