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MORLEY'S WEAPON
It was comfortably cool in the functional, little control room, but Morley was sweating, gently and steadily. His palms were wet, and the thin thoughtful face, shining in the glow of the instrument panel light, was wrinkled in an agony of concentration and doubt. He was trying to choose between the Scylla of waking Madsen with a corollary of biting contempt involved, and the Charybdis of attempting to land single handed on Japetus, less than five hundred miles below. Neither course was appealing.
For the hundredth time he pondered miserably over the sad condition of what had been a reasonably well ordered existence. The worst of it was that he had only himself to blame, and he knew it. No one had forced him to leave a comfortable, if poorly paid position with General Plastics, and fill out an employment card at Satellites, Inc.
He could not explain the obscure compulsion that sparked his little personal rebellion.
He didn't know, or need to know that other generations of Morleys had fought in revolutions, or sailed in square riggers, or clawed gold from mountainsides. When he went to the spaceline, the puzzlement of his few friends was profound, but hardly more so than his own. And now, after almost a year of upheaval and change, he was piloting a spaceboat along an involute curve ending on the surface of Saturn's eighth moon. And he was still puzzled.
It was those who fought the compulsion who sometimes turned down dark pathways of the mind.
They blasted off from Chicago Spaceport on a raw March midnight. Just another rocket take-off, routine stuff, now. But have you ever seen it? The night, the wind, the distant city glow in the sky? On the strip squats the massive bulk of the rocket, loading hatches closed, sealed port holes gleaming through the gusts of rain that sweep the field. In the sound proofed spaceport control tower the officials are relaxed over coffee and cigarettes; their part is over; they sit watching.
Somewhere in the mighty shell on the field, chronometer hands reach the calculated second, a circuit closes, relays chatter briefly. The rocket igniters are firing, flame billows over the field, a low rumble from the tubes builds to a throbbing roar. Twenty miles away a housewife looks up, a question on her face. Her husband listens and smiles. "It's the Saturn rocket. It's here in the paper, under Departures."
On the field the roar rises to an insane bellow of sound. Under the mighty jets, the ten feet of concrete and the solid earth beneath it are shaking. In the insulated control tower a water glass dances in its holder. The watchers are not relaxed now; they lean forward.
It's old stuff, routine, precalculated to a fraction of a second, but--watch. There--a stir--movement. Slowly at first, with a deliberate and awful majesty, then faster and faster.
Straight toward the zenith the ship rises, trailing fire. Faster yet, hurling herself upward, under full power, through the last threads of atmosphere. Upward and onward, out past Roches limit, out where gravity dwindles toward zero, into the empyrean where the shades of dead spacemen cruise the cosmos in their phantom craft, spaceborne in the night.
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