"Sleep?" said Art. "Did you say ‘sleep'? I can't sleep; I'm too excited. I don't suppose I'll sleep the whole trip."
"Suit yourself. Me, I'm going to soak up shut-eye just as soon as we've eaten. There's nothing to see now, and won't be until we go into free fall. You've had better views of the moon through a telescope."
"It's not the same thing," Art pointed out.
"No, it's not," Cargraves conceded. "Just the same, I intend to reach the moon rested up instead of worn out. Morrie, where did you stow the can openers?"
"I-" Morrie stopped and a look of utter consternation came over his face. "I think I left them behind. I put them down on the sink shelf and then some female reporter started asking me some fool question and-"
"Yeah, I saw," Ross interrupted him. "You were practically rolling over and playing dead for her. It was cute."
Cargraves whistled tunelessly. "I hope that we find out that we haven't left behind anything really indispensable. Never mind the can openers, Morrie. The way I feel I could open a can with my bare teeth."
"Oh, you won't have to do that, Doc," Morrie said eagerly. "I've got a knife with a gadget for-" He was feeling in his pocket as he talked. His expression changed abruptly and he withdrew his hand. "Here are the can openers, Doc."
Ross looked at him innocently. "Did you get her address, Morrie?"
Supper, or late breakfast, as the case may be, was a simple meal, eaten from ration cans. Thereafter Cargraves got out his bedding roll and spread it on the bulkhead- now a deck -which separated the pilot compartment from the hold. Morrie decided to sleep in his co-pilot's chair. It, with its arm rests, head support, and foot rest, was not unlike an extremely well-padded barber's chair for the purpose, one which had been opened to a semi-reclining position. Cargraves let him try it, cautioning him only to lock his controls before going to sleep.
About an hour later Morrie climbed down and spread his roll beside Cargraves. Art and Ross slept on their acceleration hammocks, which were very well adapted to the purpose, as long as the occupant was not strapped down.
Despite the muted roar of the jet, despite the excitement of being in space, they all were asleep in a few minutes. They were dead tired and needed it.
During the ‘night' Joe the Robot slowly reduced the drive of the jet as the pull of the earth grew less.
Art was first to awaken. He had trouble finding himself for a moment or two and almost fell from his hammock on to the two sleepers below before he recollected his surroundings. When he did it brought him wide awake with a start. Space! He was out in space! -- Headed for the moon!
Moving with unnecessary quiet, since he could hardly have been heard above the noise of the jet in any case and since both Ross and Cargraves were giving very fair imitations of rocket motors themselves, he climbed out of the hammock and monkey-footed up to the pilots' seats. He dropped into Morrie's chair, feeling curiously but pleasantly light under the much reduced acceleration.
The moon, now visibly larger and almost painfully beautiful, hung in the same position in the sky, such that he had to let his gaze drop as he lay in the chair in order to return its stare. This bothered him for a moment—how were they ever to reach the moon if the moon did not draw toward the point where they were aiming?
It would not have bothered Morrie, trained as he was in a pilot's knowledge of collision bearings, interception courses, and the like. But, since it appeared to run contrary to common sense, Art worried about it until he managed to visualize the situation somewhat thus: if a car is speeding for a railroad crossing and a train is approaching from the left, so that their combined speeds will bring about a wreck, then the bearing of the locomotive from the automobile will not change, right up to the moment of the collision.
It was a simple matter of similar triangles, easy to see with a diagram but hard to keep straight in the head. The moon was speeding to their meeting place at about 2000 miles an hour, yet she would never change direction; she would simply grow and grow and grow until she filled the whole sky.
He let his eyes rove over her face, naming the lovely names in his mind, Mare Tranquilitatis, Oceanus Procellarum, the lunar Apennines, LaGrange, Ptolemous, Mare Imbrium, Catharina. Beautiful words, they rolled on the tongue.
He was not too sure of the capitals of all the fifty-one United States and even naming the United Nations might throw him, but the geography- or was it lunography? -of the moon was as familiar to him as the streets of his home town.
This face of the moon, anyway—he wondered what the other face was like, the face the earth has never seen.
The dazzle of the moon was beginning to hurt his eyes; he looked up and rested them on the deep, black velvet of space, blacker by contrast with the sprinkle of stars.
There were few of the really bright stars in the region toward which the Galileo was heading. Aldebaran blazed forth, high and aft, across the port from the moon. The right-hand frame of the port slashed through the Milky Way and a small portion of that incredible river of stars was thereby left visible to him. He picked out the modest lights of Aries, and near mighty Aldebaran hung the ghostly, fairy Pleiades, but dead ahead, straight up, were only faint stars and a black and lonely waste.
He lay back, staring into this remote and solitary depth, vast and remote beyond human comprehension, until he was fascinated by it, drawn into it. He seemed to have left the warmth and safety of the ship and to be plunging deep into the silent blackness ahead.
He blinked his eyes and shivered, and for the first time felt himself wishing that he had never left the safe and customary and friendly scenes of home. He wanted his basement lab, his mother's little shop, and the humdrum talk of ordinary people, people who stayed home and did not worry about the outer universe.
Still, the black depths fascinated him. He fingered the drive control under his right hand. He had only to unlock it, twist it all the way to the right, and they would plunge ahead, nailed down by unthinkable acceleration, and speed on past the moon, too early for their date in space with her. On past the moon, away from the sun and the earth behind them, on an on and out and out, until the thorium burned itself cold or until the zinc had boiled away, but not to stop even then, but to continue forever into the weary years and the bottomless depths.
He blinked his eyes and then closed them tight, and gripped both arms of the chair.
Chapter 10 - THE METHOD OF SCIENCE
"ARE YOU ASLEEP?" THE VOICE in his ear made Art jump; he had still had his eyes closed—it startled him. But it was only Doc, climbing up behind him.
"Oh! Good morning, Doc. Gee, I'm glad to see you. This place was beginning to give me the jim-jams."
"Good morning to you, if it is morning. I suppose it is morning, somewhere." He glanced at his watch. "I'm not surprised that you got the willies, up here by yourself. How would you like to make this trip by yourself?"
"Not me."
"Not me, either. The moon will be just about as lonely but it will feel better to have some solid ground underfoot. But I don't suppose this trip will be really popular until the moon has some nice, noisy night clubs and a bowling alley or two." He settled himself down in his chair.
"That's not very likely, is it?"
"Why not? The moon is bound to be a tourists' stop some day—and have you ever noticed how, when tourists get somewhere new, the first thing they do is to look up the same kind of entertainments they could find just as easily at home?"
Art nodded wisely, while tucking the notion away in his mind. His own experience with tourists and travel was slight—until now! "Say, Uncle, do you suppose I could get a decent picture of the moon through the port?"