Prelude to Space Read Free Page B

the sight of it Dirk felt a curious tingling in
     his veins. It seemed out of place, somehow, here in the heart of a great city where
     millions were concerned with the affairs of everyday life. It was as out of place
     as the
Discovery
, lying against the far bank at the end of her long journeying—and it spoke of a longer
     voyage than she or any ship had ever made:
    INTERPLANETARY

Two
    The office was small, and he would have to share it with a couple of junior draftsmen—but
     it overlooked the Thames and when he was tired of his reports and files Dirk could
     always rest his eyes on that great dome floating above Ludgate Hill. From time to
     time Matthews or his chief would drop in for a talk, but usually they left him alone,
     knowing that that was his desire. He was anxious to be left in peace until he had
     burrowed through the hundreds of reports and books which Matthews had obtained for
     him.
    It was a far cry from Renaissance Italy to twentieth-century London, but the techniques
     he had acquired when writing his thesis on Lorenzo the Magnificent served Dirk in
     good stead now. He could tell, almost at a glance, what was unimportant and what must
     be studied carefully. In a few days the outlines of the story were complete and he
     could begin to fill in the details.
    The dream was older than he had imagined. Two thousand years ago the Greeks had guessed
     that the Moon was a world not unlike the Earth, and in the second century A.D. the
     satirist Lucian had written the first of all interplanetary romances. It had taken
     more than seventeen centuries to bridge the gulf between fiction and reality—and almost
     all the progress had been made in the last fifty years.
    The modern era had begun in 1923, when an obscure Transylvanian professor named Hermann
     Oberth had published a pamphlet entitled
The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space
. In this he developed for the first time the mathematics of space flight. Leafing
     through the pages of one of the few copies still in existence, Dirk found it hard
     to believe that so enormous a superstructure had arisen from so small a beginning.
     Oberth—now an old man of 84—had started the chain reaction which was to lead in his
     own lifetime to the crossing of space.
    In the decade before the Second World War, Oberth’s German disciples had perfected
     the liquid-fuelled rocket. At first they too had dreamed of the conquest of space,
     but that dream had been forgotten with the coming of Hitler. The city over which Dirk
     so often gazed still bore the scars from the time, thirty years ago, when the great
     rockets had come falling down from the stratosphere in a tumult of sundered air.
    Less than a year later had come that dreary dawn in the New Mexico desert, when it
     seemed that the River of Time had halted for a moment, then plunged in foam and spray
     into a new channel toward a changed and unknown future. With Hiroshima had come the
     end of a war and the end of an age: the power and the machine had come together at
     last and the road to space lay clear ahead.
    It had been a steep road, and it had taken thirty years to climb—thirty years of triumphs
     and heartbreaking disappointments. As he grew to know the men around him, as he listened
     to their stories and their conversations, Dirk slowly filled in the personal details
     which the reports and summaries could never provide.
    “The television picture wasn’t too clear, but every few seconds it steadied and we
     got a good image. That was the biggest thrill of my life—being the first man to see
     the other side of the Moon. Going there will be a bit of an anti-climax.”
    “—most terrific explosion you ever saw. When we got up, I heard Goering say: ‘If
that’s
the best you can do, I’ll tell the Fuehrer the whole thing’s a waste of money.’ You
     should have seen von Braun’s face—”
    “The KX 14’s still up there: she completes one orbit every three hours, which was
     just what we’d