On the scholastic front I was down to four subjects, the four tough ones. I’d learned there were only nine subjects I’d have to pass examinations in to get that engineering degree and three of them were so easy I didn’t even need refreshing in them. I got those three out of the way the first week. A week’s study took care of the next two. Of the four I had left, two were subjects I knew but hadn’t used for so long I was pretty rusty in them. But I could bone up on them myself and take the exams within another month.
That would get me down to the two, the ones that were going to be toughies for me. Extreme-temperature metallurgy and unified field theory. Neither of them are things I’d ever figured a rocket engineer needed to know. You can take the characteristics of all metals and all common alloys from charts that have been worked out to the tenth decimal; what’s the advantage of being able to calculate them yourself? Unified field theory is even worse; nobody yet has worked out a unified field theory that’s more than a theory or has any practical application to rocket engineering. Besides, it’s got to be approached through relativity, and relativity sets my teeth on edge because it tries to set limits; I don’t believe in limits.
Yes, when I got to those two subjects I’d need tutoring, but there are plenty of Caltech instructors and even professors willing to pick up some money on the side by giving the kind of help I’d need, and with a good salary coming in and no free time to spend any of it, I had money to burn.
Senator Gallagher returned in early April. I met her at the jetport but there were others meeting her too and I didn’t join the entourage that escorted her home; I just managed to talk to her long enough to make an appointment for the first evening she had free. She seemed to be almost completely recovered and told me she expected to go to Washington within another month to take her place in the Senate for the final month or so of the current session.
My appointment was for two evenings later and she promised to hold the whole evening for me so we’d have time to go over the prospectus for the rocket.
«Drink, Max?»
«Woman,» I said. «Show me that prospectus. I’ve been waiting months now to see it.»
Ellen shook her head wonderingly. «Even administrative work doesn’t civilize you, Max. You’re a savage. And you have a strictly one-track mind.»
«Exactly,» I told her. «And it’s on the prospectus. Let’s see it.»
«Not until we’ve had a drink and a minimum of fifteen minutes of civilized conversation. You’ve waited months and a few more minutes won’t kill you.»
I made us drinks. And I made myself be polite and patient, even beyond the time she’d set. I waited twenty-two minutes before I again asked to see the prospectus.
She brought it to me.
I took a quick glance at the sketch of the rocket and I screamed. Not aloud, but inside my mind. I leafed over to the recapitulation of the costs and wanted to tear my hair out by the roots.
My face must have shown how I felt. Ellen asked, «What’s wrong, Max?»
«A step-rocket!» I said. «Shades of nineteen sixty-two, a step-rocket! Ellen, it doesn’t take a step-rocket to go to Jupiter, not with atomics! And the cost—three hundred and ten million! I can send a rocket to Jupiter and back for a tenth that much. Fifty million at the very most. This is crazy.»
«Are you sure, Max? Brad was a rocket engineer, too—and one of the top ones.»
«Sure, but—wait, give me a few minutes to skim through this to see where he went off the beam.»
I skimmed, and shuddered.
I said, «Point one. He’s using a two-man rocket. Why? One man’s plenty. One man can do all the necessary recording and observing and have time on his hands to boot, even while he’s rounding Jupe.»
«Brad and I talked about that. He said that an entire year alone in space is too much for any—»
«Nuts,» I said. «The first trip to Mars, circle and return without landing, was made by Ortman in sixty-five and he was alone in space four hundred and twenty-two days. The living compartment in that rocket was three feet in diameter by six and a half feet long, just a good roomy coffin. And there wasn’t a cadet in space school who didn’t envy him every minute of that trip.
«Woman, this trip to Jupiter is another first, and the first in more years than any spaceman likes to think about. A thousand qualified men will be fighting for the privilege of making that trip, no matter what the conditions are, no matter how tough it’s going to be.»
I looked at the prospectus again. «A ten-foot-diameter living compartment, that’s what Brad figured here. Now even if it had to be a two-man rocket, which it doesn’t, that’s silly for a first. He picked that because it’s standard on a two-man Mars rocket, but Mars is a milk run. One man, a four-foot-diameter compartment, that’s plenty. That’s luxury. And it cuts down the weight of that part of the rocket by about 70 per cent.»
Ellen shuddered. «I know I’d hate to spend a year in a space that size.»
«Sure, but you’re not a spaceman. Spacemen are tough, mentally and physically. They’ve got to be to get into space school, let alone get through it and graduate.
«And one of the first things they psych them for, Ellen, is claustrophobia. And if they’ve got the faintest touch of it they’ve out unless it can be completely cured. They’re trained to be alone with themselves for long periods when necessary. Why, with the psychoanalysis they put them through today a trip like that one is a breeze.»
I grinned. «Ellen, when I entered space school back when, psychoanalysis wasn’t what it is today. Know how they tested us for claustrophobia, our first week in? Each of us would be locked up in a dark closet exactly two feet square—you couldn’t even sit down in it—and each of us had to stay in one of those closets forty-eight hours, and stay awake. There was a button he had to press every hour on the hour—he had a watch with a radium dial so he’d know the time—to prove that he was awake and okay. Or if a guy felt himself getting scared or starting to go crazy, he could give three quick rings on the same button and they’d come and let him out—out of the closet and the school both. That was just one of the cute little mental and physical endurance tests we had to go through in those days, and not the worst one by a long shot.»
«But Max, Brad did try figuring a one-man rocket, and he said it would have to be a step-rocket anyway so the cost would be only slightly more to make it a two-man ship so—»
«Quiet,» I said. «I’m reading some more of this horrible document. Aha—here’s the big joker, Ellen. Here’s why he thought he’d need a step-rocket even for a one-man ship; he’s figuring on carrying the eagle for the whole trip, the round trip!»
«The eagle?»
«Slang for E. G. L., exhaust gas liquid. You see, Ellen, an atomic rocket doesn’t have to carry fuel—unless you count the consumption inside the micropile and that’s negligible weight-wise—in the same sense that an old-type chemical rocket had to carry fuel. But an atomic rocket has to carry tanks of some liquid for the heat pile to turn into gases, the gases that come out of the exhaust vents and drive the rocket.»
«I understand that. But why doesn’t the rocket have to carry exhaust gas liquid for the whole trip? It’s a circle trip.»
I was pacing the floor with that damned prospectus in my hand. I said, «Sure, it’s a circle trip as far as Jupiter is concerned. But Jupiter’s got twelve moons, any one of them easy to land on and take off from because of low gravity. And at least seven of them lousy with frozen ammonia. For free, all you want.»