A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the disarray and débris of its construction, it looked more like some sort of war memorial, solid, unmoving and unmovable, rather than a device that its inventors promised would be able to fly away from the planet like some monstrous bullet. Not for the first time Bronwyn thought that Wittenoom and his scientists were mad and it was only the almost unqualified trust she had in them, or at least in Wittenoom, that kept her from allowing her excitement from dissolving into doubting faithlessness. It was that her trust was only almost unqualified that maintained an actively wary skepticism she did her best not to allow the professor to perceive.
    Bronwyn turned from the window. The professor was still talking, his disembodied voice lending an uncannily anthropomorphic effect to the mechanism, and Bronwyn lazily picked up the thread of his monologue. She had long since learned that it was not at all necessary to listen to every word the scientist said, and she could instead dip in and sample at will and at random from the almost unending stream of words and not lose the sense of what was being said.
    “ . . . had despaired,” the professor was saying, “of obtaining sufficient funds to complete the interplanetary vehicle. A frustrating prospect to face at this late date. However, the Academy’s astronomers pointed out to your uncle that not only is the breakup of the moon interesting, from a purely abstract point of view, but that it presents a clear and present danger . . . ”
    “Danger? What danger? Danger of what?”
    “Pieces of the moon falling onto the earth. You forget, Bronwyn, how big even the small moon is. It only appears little because it’s so far away and because the other moon is so much bigger. In reality, what you think of as the ‘little’ moon is quite a large object. Although it only subtends an angle of something less than a quarter of a degree in the sky . . . less than the size of a pfennig held at arm’s length . . . you must not forget that it is also some 350,000 miles away. That quarter degree therefore translates into an object 1,500 miles in diameter. That’s one-fifth the diameter of the earth, representing a sphere composed of 1,167,150,000 cubic miles of solid rock. Not, I dare say, something that we’d want falling around our heads.”
    “No, I don’t imagine so.”
    “Well, it’s already begun. There have been reports of increased numbers of aerolites and just this morning I received a telegram reporting the fall of a monster meteorite in the middle of Ibraila.”
    “Good,” said Bronwyn, who had no love for that particular nation. “It didn’t happen to drop on Spondula, I suppose?”
    “No, I don’t believe so. It narrowly missed a small village, though.”
    “Too bad.”
    “That it missed the village?”
    “That it missed Spondula. Anyway, I suppose you think that these meteors are pieces of the moon?”
    “Exactly! And we can expect a lot more of them if it does indeed break up.”
    “I can see where the possibility of a rock the size of a small mountain falling on one would give one pause for reflection on the arbitrariness of nature.”
    “It would indeed, and the possibility is not all that remote. Fortunately, we’ve just been promised not only the funds necessary for finishing the rocket, but enough more to enable us to complete it well ahead of our original schedule.”
    “But, Professor, even if you succeed in discovering why the moon is falling apart, what could you conceivably do about it?”
    “How would I know? That’s entirely outside my field.”

    Bronwyn strolled to the pond that lay on the periphery of the park, where she often enjoyed watching the swans whose home it was. There was one black swan that drifted among his snowy compatriots like a lone storm cloud in a sunny sky; like a gunboat among a flotilla of yachts. The Academy’s scientists had named him Blackie, which they had thought enormously clever.
    The day was a bright one in