Amateur

by Lee Correy

Illustrated by van Dongen

“Fill her up again, Martin.”

Marlin, the bartender, looked coldly at him, pursed his lips, and said slowly, “Sorry, Enright. No more.”

“Put it on the cuff, Martin,” Henry Enright replied in a bluff tone. “My credit’s good.”

“Yeah? You ain’t paid a cent over this bar for two months,” Martin pointed out, wiping his hands on his apron. He then put his hands on the wet bar top in front of Enright and went on indifferently, “The boss just told me no more. Ya see, he just made an agreement with the bank: they don’t sell liquor, and we don’t lend money. We don’t run no hock shop, either; so don’t try to gimme your watch for a drink.”

Enright was just a bit tipsy, but that was not unusual. He had a vague recollection that this had happened before in other bars. In fact, he realized he would not be drinking here in this dark and dirty dive except that, up to now, Martin and his boss had been easy on him.

He pushed back his stool and let it fall to the floor. Looking slowly all around, he addressed the five other patrons, each as shabby as himself. His voice was loud and his words slurred with alcohol. “Did you hear that? Martin just said my credit’s no good! Me, the best rocket engineer in the business! Why I’ve burned up more alcohol in sixty seconds than this lousy joint’s ever poured! Now I can’t even get two ounces! I’ll take my business somewhere else!” He staggered toward the dim outlines of the door and thrust his way out into the murky twilight.

One of the customers jerked his thumb toward the door as it slammed shut. “That guy must be nuts, Mart. They ain’t no such thing as a rocket engineer any more, is they?”

Martin was calmly wiping the bar with a dirty rag around the place where his former customer had been. “Nope. But that guy will always be one.”

The cool air of evening served to clear Henry Enright’s head as he walked down Larimer Street toward the Denver railroad yards. Everything’s going to be all right, he told himself as he walked. Old Hank Enright’s still the best engineer in the business. Wasn’t he the expert and authority on rocket propulsion? O.K., he admitted to himself, the business is in a slump. But it’ll bounce back. It’s got to, he reasoned. There’s too much invested in it. The space station’s still up there, and they’ve got to have rockets to supply it, don’t they? This is only temporary; it can’t last.

But in the back of his mind he knew he was lying to himself. He knew, as he’d known for the last two years, that the science of rocketry was dead.

He looked down Larimer Street, raising his eyes from the dirt and poverty, in time to see a silvery blob of light catch the evening sunlight as it rose. He followed it until it finally faded from sight into the purple sky at the zenith.

“Hey, Mac, get outa the street!” the shout of a cop brought him back as traffic started to stream past him with a roar of motors and a blast of horns. He scrambled out of the middle of the intersection and made it to the curb miraculously unscathed. Then he looked up into the sky again. Venus was shining brightly up there above the Rockies.

He swore loudly and bitterly, partially at the flowing mob of people that pushed and jostled him, but mostly at the silvery blobs of light still rising from South Denver Port toward the moon and planets.

Once there had been tall, sleek rockets climbing up to the satellite, shaking the ground as they reached for the sky. Now, the space craft of the new order were rising silently and easily to the planets themselves.

All this because of Bill O’Neil, Enright thought bitterly. A rocket technician who went and destroyed the science of rocketry, the very thing he worked with!

It was painful to think about. Bill O’Neil had been a good rocket technician in spite of his lack of formal education. In his time, he had known all the little tricks and idiosyncrasies of rocket motors and the fiery pits in which they were tested. But O’Neil had been other things, too.

Enright thought back, letting his memories of the long years keep him company as he walked his solitary way through the crowd.

He’d first met O’Neil… let’s see, when was it? Back at White Sands in ’63. He could never forget the Form 57, Application for Federal Employment, that had landed on his desk that day. There were fifteen sheets listing Bill O’Neil’s experience tacked onto it. He had chuckled as he noticed that O’Neil had been a tractor mechanic, a crop-dusting pilot, a chicken farmer, communications officer on a Pacific tramp steamer, a detective story writer, a trumpet player with three name bands and the New York Philharmonic, a journeyman welder, a news photographer, a rig foreman in the Peruvian oil fields, a summer camp counselor for Indian lore, a special-effects man in Hollywood, overseas computer repairman for IBM in Europe and Arabia, and a machinist for Reaction Motors. Enright had O.K.’d his application because of the last-named job.

O’Neil also claimed in the application to have held a patent on a transistor-switching circuit, an improved trumpet mouthpiece, and a modified color-film process for which he was receiving a small royalty.

Enright, remembered the personal interview with equal clarity. He had been amused at the time. O’Neil had admitted he didn’t have much experience in rocket motor testing, that he wanted to learn it anyway, that he was here because he liked the climate, and that he would most probably stay in rocketry because it was new, changing, and had a lot of promise. What really cinched the job for him was when he told Enright he’d been interested in space travel for a long time and wanted to get in on it now that he had the chance.

Enright put him to jockeying a wrench on Test Stand No. 9. In fourteen months, he was crew chief. Two years after he’d first walked into Enright’s office, he was chief mechanic over all test stands and Enright’s righthand man. Together, the two of them ran the largest testing operation in the country, and there was not an hour during the day when the now-silent Organ Mountains had not echoed back the blast of static firings and splashed the flowing flames from their granite slopes.

White Sands was now slowly blending back into the desert from which it had risen.

Then O’Neil had gone with Enright to help found Propulsion Research in Denver. He had been indispensable to Enright in those days. He was full of new ideas and ways to improve the thundering monsters on which they worked. He was quick to grasp new concepts and eager to simplify, improve, and attempt new things. Enright had to restrain him, for the technician wiped out half a million dollars worth of rocket motor and equipment one day trying out a new and faster starting sequence of his own devising. The stand plumbing and not the sequence itself turned out to be at fault, however, and together the two of them finally got the bugs out of the oxygen-hydrogen motors and developed them to such a pitch of perfection that they started and went to full thrust in less than a second. At the big test stands near Devil’s Head, they evolved the most powerful and efficient motors of the time. Henry Enright and Bill O’Neil were the best team Propulsion Research had; they were Propulsion Research, and the board of directors knew it.

In the meantime, Bill O’Neil took a Denver mine equipment company for about a million dollars because he’d worked out a method of improved flotation processing which gave a better yield. And an offshoot of this, a method of getting germanium out of old mine tailings, started bringing in royalties from RCA and Western Electric. But O’Neil stayed with his babies, the big test stands at Devil’s Head, because the satellite was out there by then and he wanted a bottle of Martian canal water.

The test stands at Devil’s Head were now mute monuments to the past, their concrete walls and flame pits crumbling under the forces of wind and water.

The mere thought of it almost made Enright weep as he trudged along with the night deepening around him. But the darkness seemed almost artificial in the spots where the glare and glow of the neon lights cast shadows into the alleys. A chill wind swept down the street, and there was just a hint that there might be snow before morning. Enright pulled his jacket tighter about him and shivered, wishing he had not pawned his overcoat. And if it did snow, there would be no heat in his shack unless he was able to pick up some driftwood along the Platt River. There was very little lump coal along the railroad tracks any more.

A sign in a pawn shop window, brilliant and garish in fluorescent plastic letters, attracted his attention. He stopped to view the display it heralded.

GENUINE MOON ROCK

Guaranteed to contain uranium, gold, silver, tungsten, and other rare metals.

All Pieces Souvenirs Of The First Moon Expedition!!!

YOUR CHOICE: $1.00 EACH!!!

There were a few pieces of black rock which could have been basalt from the nearby Rockies. And there were a few chunks of metal allegedly parts of the ship. And, prominently displayed, there was the much-publicized and very familiar picture of Bill O’Neil, clad in a spacesuit and holding aloft the wire-braced flag of the U. N. with Mount Pico in the background. Their shadows were sharp and very dark, the shimmering disk of the Earth hung over the lunar mountain, and in the corner of the picture was a segment of a squat, fat, disklike ship, the Venture.

No tall, slender, silver rocket. Not even the rocket-powered Erector set evisioned by the pioneers of the ’50s. Not even a sign that the lunar rock had been blasted and washed by a jet flame.

Every time he saw that picture, it made him sick at heart. These days, he saw it often—everywhere he went, he seemed to see it. It reminded him more often than was necessary that the thing for which he’d fought and labored all his life had failed, that his dream of rockets climbing on their noisy, fiery tails toward the new frontiers of man had been shattered, that his life and his work had been useless, rendered obsolete by new things which had done in five years what rocket propulsion had failed to do in fifty.

He wanted a drink. Sometimes that helped him forget that his life was a failure. As he started to turn around, he remembered that Martin had cut him off. The last place, too. That left only home. “I think,” he said aloud to himself, “that I’ve still got some of that stuff Big Jack made and was going to throw away.” Terrible stuff, he knew. And the thought of it almost turned his stomach. But it contained alcohol, it was free, and it was palatable if you filtered it through a loaf of bread. He started down the street again and unconsciously picked up his train of black thoughts again.

Try as he would, he still could not make himself believe that there were no more rockets. Why, weren’t they the only means of traveling in the vacuum of space? But that part of his mind which still faced and knew reality told him: “No. Bill O’Neil has found another, better way. Rockets are obsolete. Space travel is here, but there are no rockets.”

When had this happened? Enright was not sure, but he seemed to recall a morning at Devil’s Head long ago when Bill O’Neil had dropped into his office for a cup of coffee and a chat. That morning, O’Neil had had something on his mind. It had been an idea; Enright could never figure out how he knew that O’Neil was on the trail of something different; but every time he was, the engineer could sense it.

“Henry, I’ve got an idea,” O’Neil had said as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

“That’s not unusual for you, Bill,” Enright had replied. “What fantastic money-making scheme have you dreamed up this time?”

Sitting down with his coffee, O’Neil had answered, “I haven’t started worrying about the financial end of it yet. It’s an idea I’ve had for a long time, Henry—ever since we were working on the orbital rocket project. After kicking it around upstairs for years, I think I’m finally starting to get something concrete. I got to thinking about the way we gotta fight gravity all the way up to that satellite, then fight it again coming down. Seemed to me there’s a simpler way to do it. And I’m beginning to get part of an answer. Henry, maybe there’s a way we can use gravity instead of fighting it.”

“Ever hear of maneuvering through a gravity well? Oberth figured that out years ago,” Enright told him.

“Sure, but you gotta get out there first, and that’s always been our big problem. Shucks, we take all our big losses just breaking free of the Earth. After you get out there, you can get to Mars with an armload of jatos. Now, Henry, I ain’t no mathematician, but I know Einstein figgered out that gravity was something like electromagnetism. And Hlavaty checked him and proved the old boy wasn’t talking through his hat after all. The only trouble is, nobody’s figgered out a way to prove by experiment that the Generalized Field Equations are the basic law of the universe. Cantor and Gunther developed the math to handle it, and managed to tie matter-physics in with the space-physics of electromagnetism. That multi- and non-dimensional math looks like so many chicken tracks on paper to me, but from what I can get outa the abstracts maybe we can figure out a way to make gravity work for us—like the way electromagnetic fields do in an induction motor and a magnetron. And if gravity is something like a magnet yanking a chunk of steel to it the way Akahito thinks, maybe we can do like in an unduction motor when they throw another magnetic field in to oppose the first one.”

Enright had never managed to follow Einsteinian physics very well, since it was afield from rocketry, but he had remarked to O’Neil, “Bill, in order to do that, you’d have to have a gravity field stronger than the one that’s attracting you. It’ll take a lot of energy.”

“I know that. But we got plenty of energy sources.”

“And in order to overcome gravity, you’ve got to do work, apply a force to move your object a definite distance. Have you ever figured the work required to raise one pound of mass out of the Earth’s gravity field?”

“I ain’t never figgered it, Henry, but I guess it must be plenty. Got a slip stick?”

“Never mind computing it. It’s tremendous. And you’ve got to perform that much work and expend just as much energy whether you fire that object from a gun, push it with a rocket motor, or use some sort of force-field gimmick. You don’t get from here to Mars merely by thinking about it and writing an equation on a blackboard. If you could build an antigravity device, you’d never find a power source for it. Sure, we have a lot of potential available from the atom, but we’ve been trying to harness that to a propulsion system for years without success. The only thing we’ve got on hand that we can harness is chemical energy. And by using this chemical energy in its most efficient form, we’ve already developed an antigravity device.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. A rocket motor.”

“Sure, Henry, but it’s like using a steam-driven piston to fight a magnetic field. We ain’t meeting gravity on its own terms! So it takes a lot of power. But we’ve got big energy sources to tap. Maybe we’ll have to start with atomics and convert back and forth with chemical and mechanical energy three or four times to do it. But I think we can power an antigravity gadget if we sneak up on it the right way.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps you can provide enough energy. But have you the slightest idea what you’re going to sink it into? A lot of really high-powered brains have tangled with antigravity before. They failed. Do you think you can do it?”

O’Neil had scratched his head and replied, “I’ll try anyway. I went down to the Denver Library last night. Marge was working in the darkroom, and I didn’t feel like sitting around by myself. Besides, I didn’t want to clean up the fractionating tower and that pile of plastic in the garage just so she could get the car in. Well, at the library I dug out all they had on unified field theory and picked up some of the progress reports from the MIT labs on the satellite. Boy, they’re doing a lot of stuff on gravity up there! Took the whole pile home and read to four in the morning. Had to sleep on the couch; Marge didn’t like me staying up that late, but she’s the early bird in the family.

“Henry, those MIT reports were downright interesting! Judging from them and a lot of other things going on up there, I think we’re missing the boat. We got some funny notions about physics and engineering down here on account of we’ve always got a gravity field around us and a layer of air that stays pretty well inside a small range of temperature and pressure. You’d be surprised at what happens to a lot of chemical reactions at minus two-seventy-C under no pressure. Even the Earth’s magnetic field sets up one whopping circulating current on the cold side of the satellite because the steel’s a superconductor at them low temperatures. But they’re learning something about gravity, on account of there ain’t none up there. They’ve plotted what they call isogravs, lines of equal-g, and riding parallel to them seems to do funny things. I’m boning on the stuff, Henry, because I’m pretty sure I can build me a gadget that will give antigravity or something like it.”

Enright had sighed and thought to himself that O’Neil wouldn’t be the first one to be fooled by I he notion of antigravity. After all, O’Neil had said what many other men had said, and antigravity was still a science-fiction pipe dream. So he’d told him, “Bill, you’re a smart guy with lots on the ball. You may think you’ve got a good idea, but let me put you wise to something. A lot of people have thought that antigravity was the answer to all our space travel problems ever since H. G. Wells dreamed up his Cavorite. And there have been a lot of electronic nightmares designed—flat plates, weird coils, odd electrodes, and the like. But every one of those antigravity devices were like the perpetual motion machines. The inventors had overlooked a couple of basic physical laws at the outset. The gadgets looked good until an engineer or physicist got hold of them and pointed out where they violated a physical law. And when the inventors tried them anyway, they didn’t work. Why? Because the antigravity concept is not a realistic one in the first place.

“Secondly, there are certain basic physical laws which govern the working of the universe. A new law never causes an old one to become invalid; it may merely extend the limits over which the old law applies. But the new law never breaks an old one. If you’re going to keep your feet on the ground, you’ve got to face the reality of this. We’d like things to be different, all of us. But they aren’t.

“Bill, this is the first time you’ve come into my office without your flaps down and flying straight. Well, come back on the ground. The rocket motor is the only propulsion system that’ll get us to Mars. There are lots of problems, I’ll grant you, but we’re making headway. Let’s keep working on them, eh?”

O’Neil had looked quietly at him and said, “Henry, that’s the same kind of answer I’ve gotten out of a lot of high-powered science-johnnies before. I didn’t think you were that kind. So this ain’t new to me. I’ve had everybody from farming experts to mining engineers to electronic scientists tell me something was impossible. Take my automatic valve for the control of ignition mixture ratio. Evans thought it was a joke, but it worked. Put us in business here, didn’t it? And how about your injector design, and your theories of combustion and flame fronts? Nobody thought they’d work, but they did, and then everyone ran around saying they knew it all the time, didn’t they?”

“Sure, Bill, but those people were sitting back at their desks and in their labs while we were having burn-outs, hard starts, and rough combustion when the mixture ratios went sour. We were building rocket motors; they were building personal empires. We licked our problems and delivered the goods, even if we did have to fight them all the way and listen to them chuckle as they collected their bets on how far out in the desert the chamber would land. But we were fighting people, not the universe. And we never broke a physical law, even when we applied new ones. Bill, you can’t turn against What Is.”

O’Neil had looked pensive and replied, “Sometimes, you gotta… if you’re gonna reach What Can Be. You’ll see I don’t discourage easy, Henry. If I can’t break physical laws, maybe I can find a way to use other ones.”

So Bill O’Neil had gone to work in his garage shop. He had never spoken much to Henry Enright about what he was doing. He showed up bright and early every morning, as usual, full of driving energy. He kept it up all day. He was, as usual, also a sympathetic and understanding slave driver with his testing crews. This puzzled Enright, who had noticed lights burning late at night and far into the morning hours around O’Neil’s house. Sometimes, on week ends, the lights burned all night. O’Neil never asked for advice, nor discussed what he was doing in his off-hours. The man’s constitution seemed fantastic to Enright. And when he asked O’Neil about the garage gadgeteering, Bill had always been noncommunicative. He merely shrugged his shoulders and grinned.

Then had come the day when O’Neil gave his thirty-day notice. Enright had been shocked. “Why, Bill? Great Scott, it’s been eight years! We’re a team! What’s the matter? I can’t believe you’re unhappy here.”

“Well, Henry, I’ve got some hot irons in the fire—and I’ve sort of lost interest in rockets. I liked working with you fine. We did a lot together. In fact, eight years is the longest I’ve ever held one job. But I’ve got a notion to strike out on my own now. I’ve got a couple bankers putting up the cash for me to set up and develop my gadget.”

This wouldn’t be the first time unknowing financiers had been taken by a likely looking gadget they didn’t understand, Enright knew. And it was a hundred-to-one anyway that, providing it did work, O’Neil would be taken to the cleaners by the money boys. “You mean you finally got an antigravity gadget to work?” he’d asked with tongue in cheek.

“Naw, not yet, Henry. I got all the groundwork done and the plans laid out. The patents are being held up until I can show that it works, and I need more equipment and money to do that. If it don’t, work, I’ve got some more ideas that will.”

In three years, Bill O’Neil’s ideas had changed the course of history and put Henry Enright out of a job. But Enright didn’t realize that at the time.

He’d read about the O’Neil Drive when it was first announced by the new Western Space Craft Associates, Inc. He didn’t understand it exactly. In fact, nobody seemed to understand much about it. The theorists were busy regrouping their ideas and concepts of Maxwell’s electromagnetic laws and Einsteinian physics. There were those mathematicians, mostly nondimensional analysts, who took the attitude of having known it all the time.

However, most of the experts and authorities seemed to agree on one point. They could not understand how Bill O’Neil had done it. There was a great tendency among them to feel that O’Neil had stumbled onto it by blind luck. After all, he had had no formal training in the elements of high math, theoretical physics, nuclear and sub-nuclear physics, spatiophysics, electromagnetics, and unified field theory. Yet he had founded the new science of gravities and had put it to practical use.

The O’Neil Drive was just as baffling as the way O’Neil had developed it. It was large and required a tremendous energy source, but it could drive a ship out of the Earth’s powerful gravity field. The power source was extremely complicated and approached an unbelievable ninety-nine per cent efficiency. The actual drive unit itself was as deceptively simple in appearance and construction as an electrical transformer. It didn’t look like it could work, but it did.

And, most amazing of all, Bill O’Neil was in control of his company. He had matched wits with the financial brains of the world and had come out of the game one-up. His patents were so basic and his drive unit so indispensable that he also became “Mister Space Travel.” When he landed the Venture on the Moon, the entire Solar System became his plaything, lock, stock, and barrel. Rockets were no longer the only way, they were not even the best way, so they were abandoned.

It did not happen overnight, but when rocketry collapsed, it did so with a bang. Enright remembered the day with bitterness. He had just successfully completed the development tests at Devil’s Head on the first catalyst monopropellant unit. He had advanced the science of rocketry, and he had been elated that day.

That had also been the day when Propulsion Research common stock dropped from 67½ to 9¼ in four hours on the New York Exchange. The government had dropped three big P-R contracts in favor of the O’Neil Drive. Devil’s Head never got off another run. Propulsion Research went: into receivership five months later. Enright had seen his beloved test stand equipment and machine tools auctioned off. It left him a broken man, his life shattered and sold to the highest bidder.

He turned off at the tracks and wailed while a fast freight passed, its turbine locomotive howling at him with a sound akin to that of his beloved rockets. Beating his way through strings of empty freight cars in the marshaling yards, he wound his way around a smoldering slag heap from a nearby smelter and started down the muddy flats of the Platte River.

There was a light glowing in his shack he noted as he reached it.

He didn’t remember having left it on, but he’d gone out in a hurry for that drink at Marlin’s. He realized he was getting forgetful lately. Have to watch it after this. Shrugging, he pushed open the door and went in.

A stocky, heavy-set man got up from a box in the corner. His pugnacious Irish features were set in a halfsmile. “Hello, Henry. I knew you’d come back if I waited long enough.”

Enright stopped dead, his hand still on the door. He shook his head violently, thinking the alcohol was making him see things again. But the man didn’t disappear. Throwing the door open again, Enright made a quick jerk of his head. “Get out! You’ve got no business here!” he snapped at Bill O’Neil.

“I’ve got something for you, Henry. I spent a week trying to find you to give it to you.” O’Neil’s manner was quiet. He didn’t move from where he was.

“I don’t want anything you’ve got! Get out!” Enright shouted.

O’Neil folded his arms and rocked back on his heels, making no move toward the open door. “Henry, stop thinking you’re the boss. You never were, and you’re not now. You’re just an ordinary Larimer Street bum full of booze.” O’Neil had changed in the last two years. His language had improved somewhat, and he had the assured manner that signifies one has matched wits with the most powerful men in the world on equal ground. “I didn’t come here to help you, because it seems you don’t want to be helped. But I came here to give you something, and I’m not leaving until you get it.”

“I said, get out!”

“Henry, you know I used to slug it out on the circuits as a heavyweight. You couldn’t throw me out. You look like you ain’t had a square meal in a month, besides. So forget it. Shut that door, Henry, and sid-down!” It was an order. Given in the same tone of voice Bill O’Neil had used with his test-stand crews on occasion. There was no arguing with a person who could make the toughest pipe fitter in the business knuckle under.

Enright glared at him for a full minute, then slowly closed the rickety door without taking his eyes from the former rocket technician. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

“I came to give you something you wouldn’t come and get for yourself. I had it splashed all over the newspapers so you’d maybe see it.” O’Neil paused. Enright didn’t say anything, so he went on, “You see, the International Astronautical Federation met in Los Angeles last week and gave out a brand new award. Only men who’ve contributed to the conquest of space get it. It’s the highest honor they give, Henry. Von Braun, Sänger, Bridgeman, Peterson, Eaton, and myself were nominated. They decided on me, hut I didn’t want it. What I did wasn’t the result of a life’s work; I just got an idea and I didn’t have to sweat over it much.

“I asked them to give it to you, Henry. You were the one who got me really interested in space travel, and you were the project engineer for the first satellite.

“We couldn’t find you, though, so I told them I’d deliver it to you. Took me a week to find out where you were.” His hand slipped into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, Hat, blue box. He thrust it toward Henry Enright. “Here it is, Henry. We all thought you deserved it, so you’ve got the first Goddard Medal.”

The engineer slowly put out his hand and took it. Opening the lid, he discovered a gold medallion with a bas relief of one of Dr. Goddard’s little rockets rising out of its tower at Roswell. Good for five bucks at Benny’s.

No. Not this. This was not something to pawn.

His mind was a maelstrom of confused thoughts. Slapping the cover shut, he dropped down into a chair with no back. Somehow, he was touched and humbled by that little piece of gold; it also made him feel ashamed of himself. Finally, he asked, “Why? Everything I’ve worked for is gone. It’s finished. It’s dead.”

O’Neil sat down across the table from him. He seemed puzzled for a moment before he asked, “Yeah? Is it?”

“Certainly it’s dead! You and your force-field killed it all! When does a rocket blast off for the satellite any more? There are no rockets! You killed them!”

O’Neil waved him off. “Aw, you talk like I was a murderer! Rockets aren’t living things; they’re powerful, exciting gadgets, but they’re too inefficient and you know it! I just saw a better way to do it and made it pay off. That’s not important.” He leaned forward over the table.

“Henry, they landed on Ganymede yesterday.”

“Not in a rocket!”

“No, but they landed, Henry. We’ve landed on Mars and Venus, and now we’ve walked on another world where we’ve never been before. Remember at White Sands when you had the picture of Tenzing Norkey at the top of Everest? You told me you were going to hang the picture of the first men on the Moon next to it, because both pictures showed men standing where nobody’d stood before and because both pictures would show that the human race could do everything it wanted to do. That gave me the first inkling of why people were fired-up about space travel, and I caught the bug from that. But you left the picture there at the Sands.”

“I’d forgotten all about that,”

Enright admitted.

“You’ve forgotten more than that, Henry,” O’Neil replied thoughtfully. “You were in rocketry then because you were all hot to be a space cadet and go to the Moon—just for the adventure and the sake of doing it. Everybody used to laugh at you—me included, at first. It was a dream then; we could do it, but there didn’t seem to be any practical reason for doing it. But you pushed it anyway. Remember when we put the first manned job in orbit? You hollered ‘Fire!’ and I pushed the button. There was a fifty-fifty chance of the whole works blowing up on the launcher, but we got it up there with Peterson riding it. Whether you realized it or not, Henry, that was the turning point. Space travel bloomed overnight, because you proved your point and showed it could be done. It didn’t make any difference then if it was impractical; it went ahead because you’d won the big battle.”

“But I lost,” Enright put in bitterly. “I lost to you. Engineers and scientists spent years, decades, to develop the rocket for space flight. It isn’t right for a man like you… an amateur… to hit something on blind luck and make everything we’ve done worthless!”

O’Neil put his elbows on the rough table top and looked levelly at Enright. “Sure, I was an amateur, Henry. But I ain’t the first amateur to do something the pros couldn’t. Ever read anything about the history of science? Let’s take aviation, for example. It runs a pretty close parallel to space travel. ’Way back in 1890, the lighter-than-air ships were the only things they had to fly with. But they were big, unreliable, expensive, inefficient, and hard to handle. A lot of people were working on flying machines on account of the disadvantages of the balloons. But nobody could make them work—except a couple of guys who built bicycles for a living. They were pure amateurs at flying. They did what the brains couldn’t do: built a machine that used the air itself to keep it up there. Do you think that was luck?

“Henry, any jerk can win at craps—but it ain’t luck, or accident of numbers, or the fact that somebody’s gotta win that makes the Wright Brothers. Ever hear of Marconi and the amateur radio hams? How about Henry Ford? Einstein? Was it all dumb luck? How come they whipped the specialists? Could it be on account of mankind is where he is today because he’s an unspecialized animal? It ain’t dumb luck; it’s a lot of things.”

“So you’re proud of being an amateur? Are you proud of having wrecked the lives and works of other men?” Enright shot at him. “Are you proud of it when you sit there and tell me one of your ships landed on Ganymede, knowing as you must that the two of us could have done it with rockets, and knowing you wrecked my life to put that ship there?”

O’Neil sat back and smiled broadly for the first time. “You know, Henry, I haven’t been able to understand your actions in the last two years. I guess it’s always been natural to me to find a new line of work when the old job folded up, so I couldn’t figure out why you got dumped so hard. Now I think I know why. You got a form of occupational disease, Henry, one that’s common in the sciences. They’ve been hollering for specialization. You fell for it. At first, you were tooting the big horn for space travel; when you got space travel, you settled back to being the expert on rocket motors who got us out there. And you lost sight of your real goal. You got so you couldn’t see any answer except the one you were trying to get.

“So, when rocketry collapsed from the big-time, you didn’t try to apply your natural talents to the new field. Instead, you fought it. Remember the dirigibles, Henry? They were hot stuff until the airplane came along. Then the dirigible boys fought the simpler, cheaper, faster airplane right on down the line until the Hindenberg blew up. There ain’t been a dirigible built since, but the smart dirigible boys still got jobs designing blimps to do things planes and copters won’t do. Henry, rocketry ain’t lost. Space travel will always need engineers who know hydraulics, high-pressure systems, thermo, combustion, and a lot of stuff associated with rocketry. We need boosters and jatos and auxiliary power plants. And we’ve got to use taxi rockets at the satellites because the force-field units are too big to put in the little ships. Henry, we’ve still got a lot of problems to solve.”

“If you’re trying to get me to come to work for you, the answer is no!” Enright growled. “If you used this medal to try to soften me up, you can have it back.”

O’Neil took out a cigarette and offered one to Enright. When the engineer turned it down, O’Neil lit up and replied, “Believe me, Henry, the only reason I came was to give you that medal. I respect you as an expert and for what you did.”

“What good did it all do me when the only thing I’ve got to show for it is a medal?” Enright complained.

O’Neil leaped to his feet and leaned over the table. His eyes blazed as he brought his big fist down. “Damn it, Henry, some people don’t even get a medal—much less live to get a single honor! Quit being sorry for yourself! So there’s someone turns out to be smarter than you are; so what? You’ve gotten so stubborn and small-minded that you missed the biggest point of all. You wanted to get to Mars with rockets. Well, to hell with the way to get there! The important thing is: we did it! It was done! We got to Mars! And we’re going to the stars! The method we use is not important! Can’t you get that through your head?”

He sat down and snubbed out his cigarette. Catching his breath, he went on easily, “Come on in, Henry; the water’s fine. There’s still a lot of work to be done. There will always be work to be done. You’ve only got to see old Terra from twenty thousand miles out to know that what we’ve done was worth it, no matter how. The sight of a rocket taking off can’t hold a candle to it. It gives you a feeling of… of—Well, why don’t you find out for yourself?”

A month later, Henry Enright did find out for himself. It took him two weeks to decide to, and even when he boarded ship he had a little trouble suppressing the hatred for the ungraceful ships that he’d allowed to build up within him for years. It was all new to him, this force-field astrogation, and the distrust born of not understanding made him a little hesitant and nervous.

But later, as he gazed through the control-room ports of the Venture IV and saw the Earth as a small sphere set against the innumerable stars of the universe, he suddenly gained a new and sweeping perspective of the vastness of the Universe that mankind had set out to conquer. The sheer emotional impact of it humbled him, and yet exalted him in the knowledge that mankind had done this. The feeling certainly did surpass anything a rocket alone had stirred in him.

And in the face of the tremendous panorama before him, he saw how small and insignificant his troubles and hatreds had been. It was accompanied by that numbing sense of disgust and shame which comes when men see themselves as they were. He had been a weak and inadequate human being—but there would be time to start correcting that now.

But greatest of all was that satisfying, thrilling feeling that this was the sight he’d wanted to see for thirty years, that this was what he’d set out to do with his life, and that what was past didn’t matter any more.

Bill O’Neil quietly pointed toward a pin point of light known to them both as Alpha Centauri.

Enright merely nodded. “Some day. But we’ve got to look around our own backyard first. And we’ve got some work to do, too. Right now, let’s go see those canals.”

Content

Amateur
by Lee Correy