OUT OF THE CRADLE, ENDLESSLY ORBITING…

BEFORE WE START, I’d like to point out something that a good many people seem to have overlooked. The twenty-first century does not begin tomorrow; it begins a year later, on January 1, 2001. Even though the calendar reads 2000 from midnight, the old century still has twelve months to run. Every hundred years we astronomers have to explain this all over again, but it makes no difference. The celebrations start just as soon as the two zeros go up… .

So you want to know my most memorable moment in fifty years of space exploration … I suppose you’ve already interviewed von Braun? How is he? Good; I’ve not seen him since that symposium we arranged in Astrograd on his eightieth birthday, the last time he came down from the Moon.

Yes-I’ve been present at some of the biggest moments in the history of space flight, right back to the launching of the first satellite. I was only twenty-five then, and a very junior mathematician at Kapustin Yar-not important enough to be in the control center during the countdown. But I heard the take-off: it was the second most awe-inspiring sound I’ve heard in my entire life. (The first? I’ll come to that later.) When we knew we’d hit orbit, one of the senior scientists called for his Zis, and we drove into Stalingrad for a real party. Only the very top people had cars in the Workers’ Paradise, you know; we made the hundred-kilometer drive in just about the same time the Sputnik took for one circuit of Earth, and that was pretty good going. Someone calculated that the amount of vodka consumed the next day could have launched the satellite the Americans were building, but I don’t think that was quite true.

Most of the history books say that the Space Age began then, on October 4, 1957; I’m not going to argue with them, but I think the really exciting times came later. For sheer drama you can’t beat the U.S. Navy’s race to fish Dimitri Kalinin out of the South Atlantic before his capsule sank. Then there was Jerry Wingate’s radio commentary, with all the adjectives which no network dared to censor, as he rounded the Moon and became the first man to see its hidden face. And, of course, only five years later, that TV broadcast from the cabin of the Hermann Oberth as she touched down on the plateau in the Bay of Rainbows, where she still stands, an eternal monument to the men buried beside her.

Those were the great landmarks on the road to space, but you’re wrong if you think I’m going to talk about them; for what made the greatest impact on me was something very, very different. I’m not even sure if I can share the experience, and if I succeed you won’t be able to make a story out of it. Not a new one, anyway, for the papers were full of it at the time. But most of them missed the point completely; to them it was just good human-interest material, nothing more.

The time was twenty years after the launching of Sputnik I, and by then, with a good many other people, I was on the Moon … and too important, alas, to be a real scientist any more. It had been a dozen years since I’d programmed an electronic computer; now I had the slightly more difficult task of programming human beings, since I was Chief Co-ordinator of Project Ares, the first manned expedition to Mars.

We were starting from the Moon, of course, because of the low gravity; it’s about fifty times easier, in terms of fuel, to take off from there than from the Earth. We’d thought of constructing the ships in a satellite orbit, which would have cut fuel requirements even further, but when we looked into it, the idea wasn’t as good as it seemed. It’s not easy to set up factories and machine shops in space; the absence of gravity is a nuisance rather than an advantage when you want things to stay put. By that time, at the end of the seventies, the First Lunar Base was getting well organized, with chemical processing plants and all kinds of small-scale industrial operations to turn out the things the colony needed. So we decided to use the existing facilities rather than set up new ones, at great difficulty and expense, out in space.

Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, the three ships of the expedition, were being built inside the ramparts of Plato, perhaps the most perfect of all the walled plains on this side of the Moon. It’s so large that if you stand in the middle you could never guess that you were inside a crater; the ring of mountains around you is hidden far below the horizon. The pressure domes of the base were about ten kilometers from the launching site, connected to it by one of those overhead cable systems that the tourists love to ride on, but which have ruined so much of the lunar scenery.

It was a rugged sort of life, in those pioneering days, for we had none of the luxuries everyone now takes for granted. Central Dome, with its parks and lakes, was still a dream on the architects’ drawing boards; even if it had existed, we would have been too busy to enjoy it, for Project Ares devoured all our waking moments. It would be Man’s first great leap into space; by that time we already looked on the Moon as no more than a suburb of Earth, a steppingstone on the way to places that really mattered. Our beliefs were neatly expressed by that famous remark of Tsiolkovsky’s, which I’d hung up for everyone to see as they entered my office:

EARTH IS THE CRADLE OF THE MIND-BUT

YOU CANNOT LIVE IN THE CRADLE FOREVER

(What was that? No-of course I never knew Tsiolkovsky! I was only four years old when he died in 1936!)

After half a lifetime of secrecy, it was good to be able to work freely with men of all nations, on a project that was backed by the entire world. Of my four chief assistants, one was American, one Indian, one Chinese, and one Russian. We often congratulated ourselves on escaping from Security and the worst excesses of nationalism, and though there was plenty of good-natured rivalry between scientists from different countries, it gave a stimulus to our work. I sometimes boasted to visitors who remembered the bad old days, “There are no secrets on the Moon.”

Well, I was wrong; there was a secret, and it was under my very nose—in my own office. Perhaps I might have suspected something if I hadn’t been so immersed in the multitudinous details of Project Ares that I’d no opportunity of taking the wider view. Looking back on it afterward, of course, I knew there were all sorts of hints and warnings, but I never noticed any of them at the time.

True, I was vaguely aware that Jim Hutchins, my young American assistant, was becoming increasingly abstracted, as if he had something on his mind. Once or twice I had to pull him up for some minor inefficiency; each time he looked hurt and promised it wouldn’t happen again. He was one of those typical, clean-cut college boys the United States produces in such quantities-usually very reliable, but not exceptionally brilliant. He’d been on the Moon for three years, and was one of the first to bring his wife up from Earth when the ban on nonessential personnel was lifted. I’d never quite understood how he’d managed that; he must have been able to pull some strings, but certainly he was the last person you’d expect to find at the center of a world-wide conspiracy. World-wide, did I say? No-it was bigger than that, for it extended all the way back to Earth. Dozens of people were involved, right up to the top brass of the Astronautics Authority. It still seems a miracle that they were able to keep the plot from leaking out.

The slow sunrise had been under way for two days, Earth time, and though the needle-sharp shadows were shortening, it was still five days to noon. We were ready to make the first static tests of Alpha’s motors, for the power plant had been installed and the framework of the ship was complete. It stood out there on the plain looking more like a half-built oil refinery than a space ship, but to us it was beautiful, with its promise of the future. It was a tense moment; never before had a thermonuclear engine of such size been operated, and despite all the safety precautions that had been taken, one could never be sure. … If anything went wrong now, it could delay Project Ares by years.

The countdown had already begun when Hutchins, looking rather pale, came hurrying up to me. “I have to report to Base at once,” he said. “It’s very important.” “More important than this?” I retorted sarcastically, for I was mighty annoyed. He hesitated for a moment, as if wanting to tell me something; then he replied, “I think so.” “O.K.,” I said, and he was gone in a flash. I could have questioned him, but one has to trust one’s subordinates. As I went back to the central control panel, in rather a bad temper, I decided that I’d had enough of my temperamental young American and would ask for him to be transferred. It was odd, though-he’d been as keen as anybody on this test, and now he was racing back to Base on the cable car. The blunt cylinder of the shuttle was already halfway to the nearest suspension tower, sliding along its almost invisible wires like some strange bird skimming across the lunar surface.

Five minutes later, my temper was even worse. A group of vital recording instruments had suddenly packed up, and the whole test would have to be postponed for at least three hours. I stormed around the blockhouse telling everyone who would listen (and of course everyone had to) that we used to manage things much better at Kapustin Yar. I’d quietened down a bit and we were on our second round of coffee when the General Attention signal sounded from the speakers. There’s only one call with a higher priority than that-the wail of the emergency alarms, which I’ve heard just twice in all my years in the Lunar Colony, and hope never to hear again.

The voice that echoed through every enclosed space on the Moon, and over the radios of every worker out on the soundless plains, was that of General Moshe Stein, Chairman of the Astronautics Authority. (There were still lots of courtesy titles around in those days, though they didn’t mean anything any more.)

“I’m speaking from Geneva” he said, “and I have an important announcement to make. For the last nine months, a great experiment has been in progress. We have kept it secret for the sake of those directly involved, and because we did not wish to raise false hopes or fears. Not long ago, you will remember, many experts refused to believe that men could survive in space; this time, also, there were pessimists who doubted if we could take the next step in the conquest of the universe. We have proved that they were wrong; for now I would like to introduce you to George Jonathan Hutchins-first Citizen of Space.”

There was a click as the circuit was rerouted, followed by a pause full of indeterminate shufflings and whisperings. And then, over all the Moon and half the Earth, came the noise I promised to tell you about-the most awe-inspiring sound I’ve ever heard in my life.

It was the thin cry of a newborn baby-the first child in all the history of mankind to be brought forth on another world than Earth. We looked at each other, in the suddenly silenced blockhouse, and then at the ships we were building out there on the blazing lunar plain. They had seemed so important, a few minutes ago. They still were-but not as important as what had happened over in Medical Center, and would happen again billions of times on countless worlds down all the ages to come.

For that was the moment, gentlemen, when I knew that Man had really conquered space.

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