bathed in floodlights and standing tall and proud.
I looked at my chrono, then watched the blockhouse through binoculars. A white flare
burst from its top, right on time.
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Another flare split into red and green fireball. Five minutes.
That five minutes was at least a half-hour long. I was beginning to think that the
launching was going to abort – and I felt unbearable grief.
White fire lapped out of the base of the ship and slowly, lumberingly, it lifted off
the pad… and climbed faster and faster and faster and the whole landscape, miles
and miles, was suddenly in bright sunlight!
Up, up, and up, to apparent zenith and it seemed to have bent back to the west and I
thought it was falling on us – and then the light was not quite as bright and now we
could see that this `sun’ overhead was moving east… and was a moving bright star.
It seemed to break up and a voice from a radio said, ‘Step five has separated.’ I
remembered to breathe.
And the sound reached us. How many seconds does it take sound to go seven miles?
I’ve forgotten and, anyhow, they weren’t using ordinary seconds that night.
It was ‘white’ noise, almost unbearable even at that distance. It rumbled on and
on… and at last the turbulence reached us, whipping skirts and knocking over
chairs. Someone fell, down, cursed, and said, ‘I’m going to sue somebody!’
Man was on his way to the Moon. His first step to his Only Home –
George died in 1971. He lived to see every cent paid back, Pikes Peak Space Catapult
operational, Luna City a going concern with over six hundred inhabitants, more than
a hundred of them women, and some babies born there – and Harriman Industries richer
than ever. I think he was happy. I know I miss him, still.
I’m not sure Mr Harriman was happy. He was not looking for billions; he simply
wanted to go to the Moon – and Daniel Dixon euchred him out of it.
In the complex manoeuvrings that got a man to the Moon Dixon wound up controlling
more shares of voting stock than Mr Harriman controlled, and Mr Harriman lost
control of Harriman Industries.
On top of that, in lobbying manoeuvres in Washington and in the United Nations, a
Harriman daughter firm, Spaceways Ltd, became the `chosen instrument’ for the early
development of space, with a rule, The Space Precautionary Act, under which the
company controlled who could go into space. I heard that Mr Harriman had been turned
down physically, under this rule. I’m not certain what went on behind the scenes; I
was eased off the board of directors once Mr Dixon was in control. I didn’t mind; I
didn’t like Dixon.
In Boondock, centuries later or about sixty-odd years ago on my personal time line,
I listened to a cube Myths, Legends, and Traditions – The Romantic Side of History.
There was a tale in it concerning time line two that asserted that the legendary D.
D. Harriman had managed, many years later, when he was very old and almost
forgotten, to buy a pirate rocket, in which he finally made it to the Moon… there
to die in a bad landing. But on the Moon, where he longed to be.
I asked Lazarus about this. He said that he did not know. `But it’s possible. God
knows the Old Man was stubborn.’
I hope he made it.
Chapter 24 – Decline and Fall
I am not certain that my situation was improved when these ghouls grabbed me away
from those spooks. I suppose that almost everybody has fantasies about making the
punishment fit the crime or about some scoundrel who would look his best in the
leading role at a funeral. It is a harmless way to kill time during a sleepless
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night.
But these weirdos mean it.
Murder is all they think about. The first night I was here they listed fifty-odd
people who needed to be killed, itemised their crimes, and offered me the honour of