No nation would move against the Mankindists. The Mankindists’s bases could be anywhere, their bomb-control mechanisms scattered across the continents. Even nations not specifically targeted must not cause trouble if they lay beneath a bomb’s orbital path: The bombs could fall not only as programmed, but also at once upon orders. One such bomb could alter the entire world’s climate and drop deadly pollution a continent away. Each nation, to protect itself, must not provoke its neighbor, or both would be destroyed. So politicians and dictators alike were forced to rational behavior. To top it off, if those mechanisms were tampered with in an attempt to disarm…
So what had first been a sense of childlike excitement was replaced by a more adult appreciation for the long, hard, yet also inspiring, path that lay ahead. The world grudgingly accepted the Mankindists’s pledge that they would never actually use their power of “assured destruction” unless it were flouted.
“A move against the Project will be the Armageddon sign,” Goddard told a group of reporters elbowing one another for position near his bed where he lay recovering from a recent bodily failure.
“It will prove that we were hopelessly optimistic in our kind. Then we will have to engage the weapons of doom and clear the way for evolution to lay its magic finger upon another chosen species. This is not a matter of the ends justifying the means; rather, this is a matter of survival.” Fatigue gripped his throat. Could he trust these uncomprehending faces to not cause their own extinction? Terror gripped his soul, but the time was past for this plan to be stopped. Zhukov had assured that, without the Mankindists’s approval.
“If you could simultaneously capture three of our mobile control-centers, the fourth would still be enough to destroy the world as we know it. We cannot bear to contemplate such an action, but we will not hesitate if we must act.
“Now leave me be.” He was as weary as Death.
Tsiolkovsky-5 rose into a cloudless sky, Weaving its thread of cloud toward Destiny, Goddard thought. He smiled at the words he had just put together. He spoke them aloud to Esther, and von Braun, and Ethan, and Korolyov, who had emerged from the bunker.
His old German friend smiled sadly, helping move Goddard to the front of the blockhouse for a better view of humanity’s first launch of a true spaceship. Though Zhukov had been lynched by a Muscovite mob, the Soviet Union had continued to provide the bulk of manpower and material for assembling the space fleet. On the surface of the world, all seemed as it had been before Goddard had dropped the bombshell, only calmer.
“Don’t scratch that surface,” Goddard muttered; “it’s just a skin over a little ball, eh, Ethan? It would pop.”
The world’s first cosmonaut wrinkled his brow at Goddard, but smiled and nodded. Esther knelt beside her husband’s canvas gurney, lacing her strong fingers with his own fragile twigs. Goddard was cast back into 1924, then 1926, then that fateful day only half a year before. A trick of the atmosphere brought back to his ears a last echo of the rocket’s ascent, and then only loudspeaker reports detailed the progress.
He was well aware that covert operations were well underway to eliminate all the Mankindists’s bomb-controls simultaneously. But, by the time those operations were ready, it would not matter what happened to the Mankindists’s control of the world. Permanent human space presence would be established very shortly.
Though open, his eyes seemed just now to carry light to his brain. He was stunned by the array of nations spread across the Cosmodrome’s concrete polygon: Italians and French, Americans and Russians, Japanese and Chinese, Germans and Brits. A spectrum of skin color glowed in the freak afternoon warmth. In the background, really only an arm’s reach away, the forest primeval…
Goddard felt himself carried aloft upon the mighty arms of his—no, the world’s—-rocket, cast into the endless reaches of space. He extended his hands and swam the ether for several orbits of the Moon, the inconstant Moon, then away to Red Mars, oblate Jupiter and its cluster of moons, ringed Saturn, cloaked Neptune and Uranus, then cold Pluto and Charon, the gatekeeper to the underworld.
There he spread sail, his back to mother Sol, and whisked toward Alpha Centauri and its own whirling bundle of planets, those cradles for life. He swooped into alien atmospheres and met strange and wonderful beings who did not comprehend the word, “war.”
Back out to space, dark space, and the cold embrace of the stars. No, he thought, revelling in a bath of starlight, not cold. Warm, warm as a womb…
And, after helping construct a highway to the stars, after having added his sweat to paving humanity’s road to the future, he at last slept.
There can be no thought of finishing, for “aiming at the stars,” both literally and figuratively, is a problem to occupy generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning…
What I find most inspiring is your optimism. It is the best antidote I know for the feeling of depression that comes at times when one contemplates the remarkable capacity for bungling of both men and nature.