Part 2 (1/2)

There was still no weight. The stewardess began to unstrap the pa.s.sengers one by one, supplying each with magnetic-soled slippers.

Cochrane heard her giving instructions in their use. He knew the air-lock was being filled with air from the huge, globular platform. In time the door at the back--bottom--base of the pa.s.senger-compartment opened. Somebody said flatly:

”s.p.a.ce platform! The s.h.i.+p will be in this air-lock for some three hours plus for refueling. Warning will be given before departure. Pa.s.sengers have the freedom of the platform and will be given every possible privilege.”

The magnetic-soled slippers did hold one's feet to the spiral ramp, but one had to hold on to a hand-rail to make progress. On the way down to the exit door, Cochrane encountered Babs. She said breathlessly:

”I can't believe I'm really here!”

”I can believe it,” said Cochrane, ”without even liking it particularly.

Babs, who told you to come on this trip? Where'd all the orders come from?”

”Mr. Hopkins' secretary,” said Babs happily. ”She didn't tell me to come. I managed that! She said for me to name two science men and two writers who could work with you. I told her one writer was more than enough for any production job, but you'd need me. I a.s.sumed it was a production job. So she changed the orders and here I am!”

”Fine!” said Cochrane. His sense of the ironic deepened. He'd thought he was an executive and reasonably important. But somebody higher up than he was had disposed of him with absent-minded finality, and that man's secretary and his own had determined all the details, and he didn't count at all. He was a p.a.w.n in the hands of firm-partners and a.s.sorted secretaries. ”Let me know what my job's to be and how to do it, Babs.”

Babs nodded. She didn't catch the sarcasm. But she couldn't think very straight, just now. She was on the s.p.a.ce platform, which was the second most glamorous spot in the universe. The most glamorous spot, of course, was the moon.

Cochrane hobbled ash.o.r.e into the platform, having no weight whatever. He was able to move only by the curious sticky adhesion of his magnetic-soled slippers to the steel floor-plates beneath him. Or--were they beneath? There was a crew member walking upside down on a floor which ought to be a ceiling directly over Cochrane's head. He opened a door in a side-wall and went in, still upside down. Cochrane felt a sudden dizziness, at that.

But he went on, using hand-grips. Then he saw Dr. William Holden looking greenish and ill and trying sickishly to answer questions from West and Jamison and Bell, who had been plucked from their private lives just as Cochrane had and were now clamorously demanding of Bill Holden that he explain what had happened to them.

Cochrane snapped angrily:

”Leave the man alone! He's s.p.a.ce-sick! If you get him too much upset this place will be a mess!”

Holden closed his eyes and said gratefully:

”Shoo them away, Jed, and then come back.”

Cochrane waved his hands at them. They went away, stumbling and holding on to each other in the eerie dream-likeness and nightmarish situation of no-weight-whatever. There were other pa.s.sengers from the moon-rocket in this great central s.p.a.ce of the platform. There was a fat woman looking indignantly at the picture of a weighing-scale painted on the wall. Somebody had painted it, with a dial-hand pointing to zero pounds.

A sign said, ”_Honest weight, no gravity._” There was the stewardess from the rocket, off duty here. She smoked a cigarette in the blast of an electric fan. There was a party of moon-tourists giggling foolishly and clutching at everything and buying souvenirs to mail back to Earth.

”All right, Bill,” said Cochrane. ”They're gone. Now tell me why all the not inconsiderable genius in the employ of Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe, in my person, has been mobilized and sent up to the moon?”

Bill Holden swallowed. He stood up with his eyes closed, holding onto a side-rail in the great central room of the platform.

”I have to keep my eyes shut,” he explained, queasily. ”It makes me ill to see people walking on side-walls and across ceilings.”

A stout tourist was doing exactly that at the moment. If one could walk anywhere at all with magnetic-soled shoes, one could walk everywhere.

The stout man did walk up the side-wall. He adventured onto the ceiling, where he was head-down to the balance of his party. He stood there looking up--down--at them, and he wore a peculiarly astonished and half-frightened and wholly foolish grin. His wife squealed for him to come down: that she couldn't bear looking at him so.

”All right,” said Cochrane. ”You're keeping your eyes closed. But I'm supposed to take orders from you. What sort of orders are you going to give?”

”I'm not sure yet,” said Holden thinly. ”We are sent up here on a private job for Hopkins--one of your bosses. Hopkins has a daughter.

She's married to a man named Dabney. He's neurotic. He's made a great scientific discovery and it isn't properly appreciated. So you and I and your team of tame scientists--we're on our way to the Moon to save his reason.”

”Why save his reason?” asked Cochrane cynically. ”If it makes him happy to be a crackpot--”

”It doesn't,” said Holden, with his eyes still closed. He gulped. ”Your job and a large part of my practice depends on keeping him out of a looney-bin. It amounts to a public-relations job, a production, with me merely censoring aspects that might be bad for Dabney's psyche.

Otherwise he'll be frustrated.”