«That first class, or the half of it that didn’t get washed out, graduated in sixty-two. Ready, just in time, for the rockets that were ready to start putting the space station up there in the sky. But there were still more spacemen than rockets and it looked bad when I graduated in the second class in sixty-three.»
I laughed. «Only the top dozen of the first class had ever actually got off Earth. I was near the top of my class but there were still over a hundred ahead of me. And I was getting old—I was twenty-three! In those chemical rocket days rocketing was so rough that twenty-seven was the top age for active duty and it looked like those other four years might go by before I’d get up there, even on a ferry trip to the space station! Woman, I nearly went nuts worrying.»
«I’ll bet you did. It could have happened.»
I said, «Sure, it could have happened. But something else happened first, thank God. Nineteen sixty-four happened—and the lid blew off. So suddenly that it seemed overnight, although they’d been working on it for years, the Los Alamos boys came up with the micropile and we had atomic energy for rockets.
«Those old chemical fuel rockets were all of a sudden as obsolete as ox carts. Sure, we still needed fuel tanks but because of the high exhaust velocities atomic energy gave us, relatively small ones, and just to carry any inexpensive liquid, even water, for the micropile to turn into exhaust gases. We could go to the moon in one trip, to Mars and. Venus with only an orbital refueling. The space station was obsolete and unnecessary before it was a third finished and we landed on the moon five years ahead of schedule.
«Oh, we finished the space station, but on a smaller scale than planned, and mostly just as an observation station for the meteorologists. And we put the second one, the twenty-four hour one, up there just for telecasting. And meanwhile—»
«Max, I’ve read rocket history. You’re telling me your own experiences and background, remember?»
«Oh, sure. Well, suddenly I wasn’t so far down the line. The atomic rockets were being built in quantity. They really worked, and thirty of them were finished in sixty-five, forty more in sixty-six, and they were getting into the four-man jobs by then and so I was in. I got to the moon in late sixty-six, co-pilot and navigator on a two-man rocket with a five-ton pay load for the observatory that we were starting to build there. Co-piloted once more, to Mars in the next year, and then I was made spaceman first class and full pilot. I was twenty-six, but they’d extended active duty age to thirty, where it is now, so I still had four years ahead of me.
«But damn it, I got retired at twenty-seven just the same. An accident on a routine surface exploration trip to Venus—the eighth trip we’d made there; I never got a first.»
«What kind of an accident, Max?»
«We’d finished our mission; we were checking the rocket for take-off. I was outside, climbing up to check the solars, but the co-pilot thought I was inside and fired a short test burst from the steering jets. I had a leg in front of one of them and that was the end of that leg, from just below the knee. They got me back to Earth alive and I lived, but that was the end of my being a spaceman.»
She said, «Oh,» quietly, and then, «I’m sorry, Max.»
«I’m not,» I said. «I mean, I wouldn’t have the leg back at the expense of not having made the six trips I made into space. A lot of the early spacemen paid with their lives for one trip. I was lucky. Six trips for only a leg.»
«Yes, you’d feel that way. Go on.»
«Go on where? That’s all.»
She laughed a little. «You were only twenty-seven then and you’re fifty-seven now. What happened to you in between?»
«I made myself a rocket mech. I could have had a pension but turned it down in favor of their giving me all the courses they had in atomics and rocket mech work. And I’ve been a rocket mech ever since. That’s all.»
I thought a moment. «No, by God, that isn’t all. If I’m trying to give you the full picture I’ve got no business being modest. I made myself into a good rocket mech, one of the best in the country. And I’ve kept abreast of improvements in them; I know them inside out and I can fix anything that ever went wrong with one. I’m not a nuclear physicist as far as theory goes but I’ve got a thorough working knowledge of applied atomics. I know and have worked on commercial passenger rockets, mail rockets and interplanetaries.
«I haven’t worked on the interplanetaries since I passed the government’s age limit for mechs seven years ago, but I’ve kept up with every change that’s been made in them—and I’ve even had a few minor suggestions of my own for improvements accepted and used.»
I said, «This will sound like I’m bragging, but I’ve worked at every one of the twelve commercial rocket ports in this country and I can work at any one of them again any time I want to, starting at one minute’s notice and whether they’re short of men or not. And even though I’ll never ride a rocket again, I’ve kept up on every new technique in astrogation that’s been tried out or used. I’m a fair amateur astronomer, and not just the star-gazing kind that can tell one celestial object from another. I can calculate orbits and trajectories and eclipses.»
«Do you have an engineering degree?»
«No, just a bachelor of science degree—that came with graduation from space school in those days, and don’t think we didn’t earn it. But as far as knowledge goes, I’m a rocket engineer. Might have to bone up on a few points to get an engineering degree, but I could get one. I just never bothered because I like mech work better. I like to work on rockets themselves, not on pictures of rockets on paper.»
«You’ve never done administrative work, then?»
«No. I don’t like it.»
«But would you do it on Project Jupiter?»
«I’ll sweep floors if I have to, to get on. But I’d rather be head mech.»
«Would you like to be assistant director?»
I took a deep breath. I said, «Yes.»
«Max, I may be able to swing it for you—on a couple of conditions. And it would mean you’d really be running the project. The project director will have to be a political figure; there’s no out on that. But the assistant director won’t have to be, and he’ll be the one who runs things—with the director as a figurehead. Would you like that, Max? To run the project and build and send the rocket?»
«Woman, don’t ask crazy questions. And the two conditions are granted. What are they?»
«You’re not going to like them,» she said. «And I’m not going to tell you now, because it might lead to argument.»
«It won’t,» I said. «I’ll agree to anything, even cutting off my other leg. Or my head, for that matter.»
«You’ll need your head. And as for cutting off your other leg, this may hurt worse. But Max, we’ve talked pretty long and I’m getting tired. Want to come back again tomorrow evening, same time?»
I wanted to.
Back home I started to do some grinding on the reflector for my telescope, but grinding is painstaking and ticklish work so I quit when I found that my hands were trembling.
Not that I could blame them for trembling. They had a chance now, an outside chance, a thousand-to-one-against chance, of going to Jupiter, of piloting a rocket that was going out into space eight times as far as Mars, eight times as far into space as a rocket had ever been before.