“I didn’t say I wasn’t interested.”
“Well, make up your mind. Here’s another thing, Clem—I don’t want to go sticking my nose into your business, but haven’t you had a certain amount of trouble since you lost the use of the power satellite as a relay station?”
“You know the answer; don’t needle me. Expenses have gone out of sight without any improvement in revenue.”
“That wasn’t quite what I meant. How about censorship?”
The television executive threw up his hands. “Don’t say that word! How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over wLhat we can say and can’t say and what we can show and what we can’t show—it’s enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak. If I were able to lay my hands on those confounded, prurient-minded, slimy—”
“Easy! Easy!” Harriman interrupted. “Did it ever occur to you that there is absolutely no way to interfere with a telecast from the Moon—and that boards of censorship on Earth won’t have jurisdiction in any case?”
“What? Say that again.”
“LIFE goes to the Moon.’ LIFE-TIME Inc. is proud to announce that arrangements have been completed to bring LIFE’S readers a personally conducted tour of the first trip to our satellite. In place of the usual weekly feature ‘LIFE Goes to a Party’ there will commence, immediately after the return of the first successful—”
“ASSURANCE FOR THE NEW AGE”
(An excerpt from an advertisement of the North Atlantic Mutual Insurance and Liability Company)
“—the same looking-to-the-future that protected our policy-holders after the Chicago Fire, after the San Francisco Fire, after every disaster since the War of 1812, now reaches out to insure you from unexpected loss even on the Moon—”
“THE UNBOUNDED FRONTIERS OF TECHNOLOGY”
“When the Moon ship Pioneer climbs skyward on a ladder of flame, twenty-seven essential devices in her ‘innards’ will be powered by especiallyengineered DELTA batteries—”
“Mr. Harriman, could you come out to the field?”
“What’s up, Bob?”
“Trouble,” Coster answered briefly.
“What sort of trouble?”
Coster hesitated. “I’d rather not talk about it by screen. If you can’t come, maybe Les and I had better come there.”
“I’ll be there this evening.”
When Harriman got there he saw that LëCroix’s impassive face concealed bitterness, Coster looked stubborn and defensive. He waited until the three were alone in Coster’s workroom before he spoke. “Let’s have it, boys.”
LeCroix looked at Coster. The engineer chewed his lip and said, “Mr. Harriman, you know the stages this design has been through.”
“More or less.”
“We had to give up the catapult idea. Then we had this—” Coster rummaged on his desk, pulled out a perspective treatment of a four-step rocket, large but rather graceful.“Theoretically it was a possibility; practically it cut things too fine. By the time the stress group boys and the auxiliary group and the control group got through adding things we were forced to come to this—” He hauled out another sketch; it was basically like the first, but squattier, almost pyramidal. “We added a fifth stage as a ring around the fourth stage. We even managed to save some weight by using most of the auxiliary and control equipment for the fourth stage to control the fifth stage. And it still had enough sectional density to punch through the atmosphere with no important drag, even if it was clumsy.”
Harriman nodded. “You know, Bob, we’re going to have to get away from the step rocket idea before we set up a schedule run to the Moon.”
“I don’t see how you can avoid it with chem-powered rockets.”
“If you had a decent catapult you could put a single-stage chem-powered rocket into an orbit around the Earth, couldn’t you?”
“Sure.”
“That’s what we’ll do. Then it will refuel in that orbit.”
“The old space-station set-up. I suppose that makes sense-in fact I know it does. Only the ship wouldn’t refuel and continue on to the Moon. The economical thing would be to have special ships that never landed anywhere make the jump from there to another fueling station around the Moon. Then—”