«The Nazis and the Japs in the forties—before your time. You know why we developed the A-bomb? To save money. The Nazis we could have licked without it—in fact, we did, because it wasn’t developed in time. But the Japs were set for a long bitter defense of their homeland and it would have cost us more billions than the A-bomb cost us, to defeat them with lesser weapons. Wait, that’s not entirely true—although it worked out that way. When we started developing the A-bomb we weren’t thinking about saving money; we were thinking about saving our way of life and maybe our lives; we were scared to the point where money didn’t matter.
«And it was in the fifties and the early sixties that the Commies gave us an even worse scare—before the rift between Russia and China in sixty-five and the counter-revolutions in the other satellite countries ended our worries about them. But in the late fifties—and I’m old enough to remember them—we were scared spitless of the Commies. They had A-bombs too, so that wasn’t enough. That’s when we really started pouring money into trying for controlled atomic energy, energy that could be used for power and propulsion as well as for sheer destruction.
«And before we’d even got it we were shooting the moon by starting work on the space station, starting to put it up there in the sky with chemical fuel rockets, Ellen, primitive three-stage affairs that stood as tall as a ten-story building, and whose pay load was only a fraction of a per cent of their take-off weight. It took us three years and four or five billions of dollars to get the first ton of pay load up in that orbit. All of that on chemical fuel rockets before the nuclear boys came through and step-rockets were as obsolete as crossbows—and so was the space station, for military purposes, before we had it well started. Why, instead of one space station up there we could have orbited thousands of rockets with H-heads, controlled by radio and ready to blast a whole continent off the earth if we wanted to.
«Only before we put them up there, there wasn’t any need to. Communism came apart at the seams and we weren’t scared.»
«But we went on to the moon and Mars just the same, Max.»
«And Venus,» I said. «Our momentum carried us that far and no farther. We weren’t scared any more, and big spending stopped. An observatory on the moon, a small experimental colony on Mars. A few looks under the clouds of Venus. And there we stopped.»
«Maybe just to catch our breath, Max. That was a big and sudden jump.»
«Forty years is too long a time just to catch your breath in. We’re overdue to push on. Not just to Jupiter and the outer planets, but to the stars. We should be trying for the nearest star anyway.»
«But could we, Max? Right now, I mean, with what we’ve got, with what we know?»
«We could, yes. It would cost plenty—maybe as much as the atom bomb and all our planetary rockets put together. It would have to be a big ship, assembled out in an orbit like the space station was. It would have to be big enough to hold at least half a dozen families, to be practical, because by the time that ship made the four light-years to Proxima Centauri at our present speeds, it would be their descendants several generations later who’d get there.»
«Yes, I remember now reading about how it could be done. But I’m afraid, darling, people aren’t ready for anything like that yet. Spending all that money, all that effort, and then never knowing what the result would be because they’d be a century dead before the results could be known—if they ever were.»
«I know,» I said. «It could be done, but I know it won’t be done. Not for centuries, anyway, if that’s the way it has to be done. I wouldn’t vote for it myself.»
Ellen opened her eyes. «You wouldn’t.»
«No, I’d rather see those billions thrown into developing an ion drive. Why, if the government put the money and effort into that that it put into developing the A-bomb—why, they might find it in a few years! And you and I might be still alive when the first ship came back from a star!»
Ellen’s eyes were bright. «Maybe, if something spectacular comes from the Jupiter trip—»
«What—Wait, something spectacular could come at that, Ellen. Uranium—our resources aren’t too high on that, and if we found a lot of it on one of Jupe’s moons—that could be one thing. Or intelligent life. I think that would be better than uranium. To know there was intelligent life—waiting for us out in the galaxy—Ellen, that would stimulate our curiosity, our drive to get there, more than anything else would.»
«Would it? Mightn’t it work the other way? Make us afraid we might find life more intelligent than ours?»
«I don’t think so. Men may be cowards individually, but collectively maybe that’s just the challenge we need. God, if we’d only found canals on Mars, proof that another race besides ours had lived!
«Just for lack of fuel to feed it on the first few places we reached, are we forgetting our big dream? Are we forgetting where we started to go?
«Jesus, do we have to wait till a matter of survival for us to do it? Until we get scared again? Until a space-ship from some other star system comes here and starts shooting us up so we’ve got to have star ships to fight back? Or until our astronomers tell us that our own sun is going to nova and explode, and give us a deadline date to get away from it? Or—a dozen million years from now—decide our own sun is getting so cold we’d better find another one before we freeze to death? Ellen, do we have to wait for one of those things?»
She didn’t answer and I looked over at her. She was breathing slowly and regularly. Sound asleep.
I turned out the lights and got quietly into bed without waking her.
The second week she felt much better, much less tired. We went out more that week, saw the town. Neither of us cared for dancing but we both liked good modern Cuban music, the quartertone stuff that America had imported in the seventies and discarded in the eighties but that was still going strong in Havana. We liked Cuban dancing, too; I guess we were both old-fashioned.
We took a couple of boat trips on the sunniest days, renting skitterbugs, those little skimmers that are so fast you have to wear bathing suits because of the spray. Out of sight of shore we’d stop and let it rock in the waves while we took off our suits and sunbathed on the flat part of the deck. There aren’t any nudist beaches in Cuba; people of Spanish descent are for some reason awfully prissy about nudity, like Americans used to be.
It was a good vacation and we both felt fine, all rested up, when it ended, as it had to end. Ellen back to Washington, I back to the L.A. Rocket Port.
And to a plenty busy week. Klocky’s last week before his vacation leave, one week to show me the various things I still didn’t know about taking over his job while he was gone. We worked late every evening as he’d remember one thing after another that I should learn about.
It’s a big job, I was learning, running the Los Angeles Rocket Port, plenty of responsibility and a hell of a lot to know about every department under you. Until Klocky got back I was going to be up to my ears in work.
He left for Africa on the first of April. I saw him off in a gray dawn. «Keep in touch with me, Max, so I’ll know when the appointment is set and it’s okay for me to come back. But not sooner than three months, damn it. I want at least that much time off. And—good luck.»
For a while, until I got things licked into shape so I could handle them, I was too busy to worry about my luck. But it was still holding.
I heard from my congressman late in May:
«Hold thumbs, darling. We’re going to run the bill through the House late this week, Thursday or Friday. That’s definite, unless, of course some rocket disaster, interplanetary or local, should happen sooner. We’ll postpone a showdown if that should happen; we don’t want another near thing such as happened in the Senate. We want to be sure; we want at least a sixty per cent majority.