The Project Gutenberg eBook of Touch the sky, by Alfred Coppel

Title: Touch the sky

Author: Alfred Coppel

Release Date: October 23, 2022 [eBook #69215]

Language: English

Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.

The sign said: RIDE THE ROCKET! TWICE AROUND THE UNIVERSE FOR 25¢! Which was cheap enough, Pete Moore thought. Cheap enough at twice the fare.

Glory giggled and pulled at his arm. "Let's ride, Pete. Let's see what you're in for."

He smiled down at her thinly, because it wasn't really anything for her to giggle about, but that was Glory for you. She was young enough, gay enough, to be able to make a joke of it, and that was good and he shouldn't spoil it. Not many other wives would feel like that. Not many other wives would want to spend his last night home on the midway, for that matter. But then again, that was Glory.

He listened to the tinny carousel music and the babble of the crowd, the laughter and the mingled drone of barkers. He smelled the tang of roasting popcorn and the hot-doggy stink of the lunchcounters. He looked at the ferris wheel and the crazy swoop of lights that was the scenic railway and the people crowding along the boardwalk with kewpie dolls and spun-sugar candy cones in their hands.

Question! his mind demanded: Is this reality?

Answer: Of course. What else?

I've been too long away from cities, he thought. Too many silent nights in the desert, too many high flights in cold blue air. Too long away from Glory?

He felt guilty and depressed at the thought. It wasn't the way for a man to feel. Not before the great adventure. Still, he couldn't avoid an almost homesick longing for the deep darkness of the desert and the silver ship waiting there.

Soon, he thought. Three days; three days and a few hours.

He felt a tug at his arm.

"Pete!" Glory was smiling up at him, half-aggrieved, half-loving. He looked again at the garishly painted sign.

RIDE THE ROCKET!

"Let's ride it, Pete," Glory said. "Let's!"

There was something in her smile that touched him. Pride? That, and love and youth. To her, he was the man. For her, and for all the world. The one who was going to reach out beyond the far horizon and touch the sky and bring back a pot of gold for everyone.

She thinks no one else could do it, he told himself. That's love. There were a dozen qualified men, and yet—

The moonshot was his.

RIDE THE ROCKET!

"All right, baby," he said.

As he paid their fare for the rocket-ride, Pete found himself looking at the girl in the booth. Tired eyes and stringy hennaed hair. No dreams there. He had an impulse to tell her that soon he'd really be riding the rocket and that from then on things would be different.

New frontiers and new dreams for everybody. Up and up.

The girl's eyes met his, and it was Pete who looked away. You don't talk frontiers to pale, worn faces and eyes bleached of color by tinny music and stinks and men.

They walked up a wooden ramp to where a little metal bullet on rails waited. The paint, once bright, was all scuffy. A sour-faced attendant in grayish coveralls stood by a large lever.

"Fasten ya seat belts, Mac."

"We're off to the sky," Glory said.

Somewhere old machinery wheezed.

The little bullet began to move along the rails toward a hinged trap-door in a wall painted to look like clouds.

"Hold my hand, Pete," Glory said breathlessly.

Glory, Glory, he thought. Young and simple and in love with life. Any kind of life. Real or unreal. Glory with a bubbling laughter, a zest, a faith. Maybe it was really for her that he was taking the big flight. If only he could bring back the pot of gold. If only he could tell weary Man that the sky was all his. He thought of the strained, unhappy faces in the streets, the fear-filled eyes. If he could return and say to them: "Here's your new frontier!" Yes, by God, it was worth the work, and the risk. Glory was right. It was something to be proud of.

I'm going to the moon!

Me, Pete Moore, to the moon!

"There it is, Pete!"

They had bumped through the painted door into a musty semi-darkness. The walls were perforated with holes for stars, and from somewhere below a huge yellowish moon was rising.

Off a short way to the right was a glowing papier-mâché globe painted with broad bands slightly askew, and behind that was another with rings.

A loudspeaker whistled tinnily and overhead, on wire runners, an electric globe crossed the dim chamber, pieces of yellow and white crepe paper fluttering feebly behind.

"Oh, Pete! A comet?"

"Sure enough, Glory," he said.

The rumbling little bullet skirted the walls and Pete could see the electric lights behind the holes. Stars, he thought sardonically. Close enough to touch. Lucky us.

"There's Mars, Pete," Glory said, squeezing his hand.

I'm getting disenchanted, he thought.

A red ball, all painted with canals and white polar caps far too big.

They should have had a technical advisor on this project, he thought. Paging Palomar.

The bullet began its second circuit of the papier-mâché universe, and the moon was high now, projected on the wall by some kind of lantern-slide lamp. There was a face on the moon.

It began then—just a tiny bead of fear way down inside his belly. But it grew. He felt suffocated, claustrophobic, oppressed by fakery and cheapness.

Glory was laughing with delight. "Oh, it's wonderful!"

Shut up! Pete thought savagely. Shut up, shut up!

With an effort, he got hold of himself.

I've been working too hard. I'm jittery thinking about the moonshot, and all this seedy burlesque just irritates me. There's nothing to get heated up about. Calm down.

But why am I suddenly afraid?

He looked again at the ridiculous moon with its smirking face. He saw that plaster had fallen from the wall in places, peeling away, leaving the bare hexagons of wire and laths.

My God, he thought. A chickenwire sky.

He thought again of the girl in the ticket booth, and of the tired, frightened people all laughing too much and shoving and running outside.

The bullet started down at last, toward the hinged door. On this side it was painted to look like Earth, with a distorted map of North America. All wrong, somehow.

Pete felt ill. It was as though someone were making ill-tempered fun of the dreams and the tall silver ship waiting out on the desert. Cheapening it. Laughing nastily.

The little bullet bumped through the seedy, scruffy Earth and out into the night of the midway, out into the crowd-sounds and music and hot-doggy smells.

"It was fun, Pete," Glory said.

He helped her out onto the rickety platform. He had the insane notion that the girl in the ticket booth and the lounging attendant were laughing at him.

"It sure was, honey," he said wearily, still feeling the illogical fear of he-knew-not-what inside himself. "Real fun."

Glory looked up at him, eyes alight and almost feverishly gay. "I did what you are going to do. I touched the sky!"

New frontiers. New lands in the sky. New hope.

It was quiet. The jet was still and no sound was anywhere in the ship. Now a soft tick from the timer. A whisper from the questing radarscope. And again, the stillness.

We've done it, Pete thought. We've really done it. The hard part is over.

Ride the rocket!

He remembered the pain of the takeoff and the absolute panic that had welled up in him when the irrevocability of his action came home. He remembered riding a tail of red fire up out of the hot desert air of New Mexico into the still blue, and then the silence and the almost unnerving thrill of the realization that the moonshot was going to succeed.

The radio hissed at him with the voice of the desert base half around the world.

"Hello moonshot. This is Base. All's okay. Stage one landed in the Gulf. Stage two just reported floating off the Azores. Good show."

Pete lifted himself from the acceleration couch and felt a moment of nausea and panic as he floated toward the ceiling of the tiny cell. Free flight. He steadied himself and checked the flow of telemetered information binding the ship to the glowing curve far below. All okay. Except that—

Except that you're still afraid, he told himself. Not just the normal fear-of-falling-afraid that the psychs told you about. Afraid like before—in that silly damn carnival ride thing.

Afraid of the dark?

No, not quite that. More a closed in, cheated feeling.

Premonition? Nonsense.

He clung to the radarscope, trembling. With every rushing mile upward, outward, his fear was growing. It wasn't right, it didn't make sense. But he felt as though he were rushing straight at a brick wall, head down, eyes closed.

He lit the telescreens.

The stars look funny, he thought uneasily.

The timer ticked. The radar whispered, searching. Time passed and his fear grew thicker, less reasonable.

His fingers dug hard at the metal of the instrument panel as the night slipped by outside the hull. The ship's orbital ellipse, Kepler's contribution to the new frontier, was established.

Pete thought, something's wrong. Very wrong. The stars look queer.

The constellations in the telescreens were distorting, and there was something ahead of the ship where there should be nothing but emptiness. It showed in the screen for just an instant and was lost. A ringed sphere.

I must be dreaming, Pete thought. But then, what is reality? That sphere was Saturn. And it was a hundred yards across.

Reality? Insanity!

I'd better check with Base, Pete thought, and tell them I've gone off my rocker, that I'm suffering hallucinations.

But he did nothing except cling shaking to the panel, watching the distorted stars in the screen. They were blurring now, streaks of light that seemed to be very close to the ship.

And then came the moon. It came and went very quickly, pocked and scarred and with only one face. And small. Very small and very close.

Pete felt closed in, suffocated. The radar alarm was screaming at him that something was near, too near.

He clamped down savagely on himself. There was an explanation somewhere. He had to find it! He had to think!

Item. The stars. Distorted. Blurred.

Item. Saturn. A hundred yards across.

Item. A tiny replica of the moon, like a pimple on the inside of an egg.

Replica? No. The moon. The only moon. Reality.

Hypothesis. Say that space is not as men imagined it. Say that it is an illusion, without lightyears, without great suns, without huge planets. Say for the sake of argument that it is a shell with holes in it, and light outside, and the Sun itself an illusion of heat and power, and—

Say that this hollow shell is man's new frontier; a fraud, a toy for things outside—

The alarm screamed at him. The ship was plunging toward the blurry light of the stars.

With an icy hand on his heart, Pete Moore turned to look at the telescreen behind him. A misty blue ball swam in musty darkness. The oceans gleamed in the light of the sun, cloud masses whitened it, the wrinkled face of the land looked unreal—

He began to laugh. Tears streaked his cheeks as he pounded his bloody fists against the instrument panel in time to the clanging of the alarm.

The Earth, the Earth—

It did rather look like papier-mâché.

He touched the sky.