Bagombo Snuff Box Read Free Page A

the playing fields of my short stories,
and my novels, too, were once the boundaries of the soul of my only sister. She
lives on that way.
    Amen.
     
Thanasphere
    At noon, Wednesday, July 26th, windowpanes in the small
mountain towns of Sevier County, Tennessee, were rattled by the shock and faint
thunder of a distant explosion rolling down the northwest slopes of the Great
Smokies. The explosion came from the general direction of the closely guarded
Air Force experimental station in the forest ten miles northwest of Elkmont.
    Said the Air Force Office of Public Information, “No comment.”
That evening, amateur astronomers in Omaha, Nebraska, and Glen-wood, Iowa,
reported independently that a speck had crossed the face of the full moon at
9:57 p.m. There was a flurry of excitement on the news wires. Astronomers at
the major North American observatories denied that they had seen it.
    They lied.
    In Boston, on the morning of Thursday, July 27th, an
enterprising newsman sought out Dr. Bernard Groszinger, youthful rocket
consultant for the Air Force. “Is it possible that what crossed the moon was a
spaceship?” the newsman asked.
    Dr. Groszinger laughed at the question. “My own opinion is
that we’re beginning another cycle of flying-saucer scares,” he said. “This
time everyone’s seeing spaceships between us and the moon. You can tell your
readers this, my friend: No rocket ship will leave the earth for at least another
twenty years.”
    He lied.
    He knew a great deal more than he was saying, but somewhat
less than he himself thought. He did not believe in ghosts, for instance—and
had yet to learn of the Thanasphere.
    Dr. Groszinger rested his long legs on his cluttered
desktop, and watched his secretary conduct the disappointed newsman through the
locked door, past the armed guards. He lit a cigarette and tried to relax before
going back into the stale air and tension of the radio room. IS YOUR SAFE
LOCKED? asked a sign on the wall, tacked there by a diligent security officer.
The sign annoyed him. Security officers, security regulations only served to
slow his work, to make him think about things he had no time to think about.
    The secret papers in the safe weren’t secrets. They said
what had been known for centuries: Given fundamental physics, it follows that a
projectile fired into space in direction x, at y miles per hour, will travel
in the arc z. Dr. Groszinger modified the equation: Given fundamental physics
and one billion dollars.
    Impending war had offered him the opportunity to try the experiment.
The threat of war was an incident, the military men about him an irritating
condition of work—the experiment was the heart of the matter.
    There were no unknowns, he reflected, finding contentment in
the dependability of the physical world. Young Dr. Groszinger smiled, thinking
of Christopher Columbus and his crew, who hadn’t known what lay ahead of them,
who had been scared stiff by sea monsters that didn’t exist. Maybe the average
person of today felt the same way about space. The Age of Superstition still
had a few years to run.
    But the man in the spaceship two thousand miles from earth
had no unknowns to fear. The sullen Major Allen Rice would have nothing surprising
to report in his radio messages. He could only confirm what reason had already
revealed about outer space.
    The major American observatories, working closely with the
project, reported that the ship was now moving around the earth in the
predicted orbit at the predicted velocity. Soon, anytime now, the first message
in history from outer space would be received in the radio room. The broadcast
could be on an ultra-high-frequency band where no one had ever sent or received
messages before.
    The first message was overdue, but nothing had gone wrong—nothing
could go wrong, Dr. Groszinger assured himself again. Machines, not men, were
guiding the flight. The man was a mere observer, piloted to his lonely vantage
point by infallible