Barnes chewed his lip. “You’re right. Herb-you just bought yourself a job.”
“Such as?”
“Take over here.” He explained what he bad been. doing. “As for the press, don’t tip them off until you have to make arrangements for the road blocks and evacuation-maybe you can keep things wrapped up until around midnight. I’m going up into that — ship and — ”
The telephone jangled; he picked it up. “Yes?” It was Bowles.
“Jim-come to the electronics shop.”
“Trouble?”
“Plenty. Ward has run out on us.”
“Oh, oh! I’ll be right over.” He slammed the phone and said, “Take over, Herb!”
“Wilco!”
Outside, he jumped in his car and swung around the circle to the electronics shops. He found Bowles and Corley in Ward’s office. With them was Emmanuel Traub,, Ward’s first assistant. “What happened?”
Corley answered, “Ward is in the hospital-acute appendicitis.”
Bowles snorted. “Acute funk!”
“That’s not fair! Ward wouldn’t run out on me.”
Barnes cut in. “It doesn’t matter either way. The question is: what do we do now?”
Corley looked sick. “We can’t take off.”
“Stow that!” Barnes turned to Bowles. “Red, can you handle the electronics?”
“Hardly! I can turn the knobs on an ordinary twoway-but that ship is all electronics.”
“I’m in the same fix-Doc, you could. Or couldn’t you?”
“Uh, maybe-but I can’t handle radar and power plant both.”
“You could teach me to handle power plant and Red could pilot.”
“Huh? I can’t make a nucleonics technician out of you in something like a matter of hours.”
Barnes seemed to feel the world pressing in on him. He shook off the feeling and turned to Traub. “Mannie, you installed a lot of the electronic gear, didn’t you?”
“Me? I installed all of it; Mr. Ward didn’t like to go up the Gantry crane. He is a nervous type guy.”
Barnes looked at Corley. “Well?”
Corley fidgeted. “I don’t know.”
Bowles said suddenly, “Traub, where did you go to college?”
Traub looked hurt. “I got no fancy degree but I carry a civil service classification of senior electronics engineer-a P-5. I did three years in the Raytheon labs. I had my ham license since I was fifteen, and I was a master sergeant in the Signal Corps. If it makes with electrons, I savvy it.”
Barnes said mildly, “The Admiral didn’t mean any harm, Mannie. What do you weigh?”
Traub shifted — his eyes from one *0 the other. “Mr. Barnes-this is no rehearsal? This is it?”
“This is it, Mannie. We take off — ” He glanced at his watch. ” — in thirteen hours.”
Traub was breathing hard. “You gentlemen are asking me to go to the Moon with you? Tonight?”
Before Barnes could answer, Bowles put in:
“That’s it, Mannie.”
Traub swallowed hard. “Yes,” he said.
“Yes?” Barnes echoed..
“I’ll go.”
Corley said hastily, “Traub, we don’t want to rush you.”
“Director, take a look at my job application. I put down ‘Willing to travel.”
III
The great ship was ringed with floodlights spaced inside the bull pen. It was still framed by the skeleton arch of the Gantry crane, but the temporary anti-radiation shield which had surrounded its lower part down to the jets was gone; instead there were pOsted the trefoil signs used to warn of radioactivity-although the level of radiation had not yet become dangerously high. —
But the power pile was unsealed and the ship was ready to go. Thirteen-fifteenths of its mass was water, ready to be flashed into incandescent steam by the atomic pile, to be thrown away at thirty thousand feet per second. —
High up in the ship was the control room and adjacent airlock. Below the air lock the permanent anti-radiation shield ran across the ship, separating the pressurized crew space from the tanks, the pumps, the pile itself, and auxiliary machinery. Above the control room, the nose of the craft was unpressurized cargo space. —
At its base triangular airfoils spread out like oversize fins-fins they would be as the ship blasted away; glider wings they would become when the ship returned to Earth with her tanks empty.
Jim Barnes was at the foot of the Gantry crane, giving last-minute orders. A telephone had been strung out to the crane; it rang and he turned to answer it.