Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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to in the rest-rooms.
    Babs Deane did not take dozy-pills either, but Cochrane knew better than
to be more than remotely friendly with her outside of office hours. He
did not want to give her any excuse to tell him anything for his own
good. So he spoke pleasantly and kept company only with his own
thoughts. But he did notice that she looked rapt and starry-eyed even
through the long and dreary hours of free flight. She was mentally
tracking the moonship through the void. She'd know when the continents
of Earth were plain to see, and the tints of vegetation on the two
hemispheres—northern and southern—and she'd know when Earth's
ice-caps could be seen, and why.
    The stewardess was not too much of a diversion. She was brisk and calm
and soothing, but she became a trifle reluctant to draw too near the
chairs in which her passengers rode. Presently Cochrane made deductions
and maliciously devised a television commercial. In it, a moon-rocket
stewardess, in uniform and looking fresh and charming, would say sweetly
that she went without bathing for days at a time on moon-trips, and did
not offend because she used whoosit's antistinkum. And then he thought
pleasurably of the heads that would roll did such a commercial actually
get on the air.
    But he didn't make plans for the production-job he'd been sent to the
moon to do. Psychiatry was specialized, these days, as physical medicine
had been before it. An extremely expensive diagnostician had been sent
to the moon to tap Dabney's reflexes, and he'd gravely diagnosed
frustration and suggested young Dr. Holden for the curative treatment.
Frustration was the typical neurosis of the rich, anyhow, and Bill
Holden had specialized in its cure. His main reliance was on the making
of a dramatic production centering about his patient, which was
expensive enough and effective enough to have made him a quick
reputation. But he couldn't tell Cochrane what was required of him. Not
yet. He knew the disease but not the case. He'd have to see and know
Dabney before he could make use of the extra-special production-crew his
patient's father-in-law had provided from the staff of Kursten, Kasten,
Hopkins and Fallowe.
    Ninety-some hours after blast-off from the space platform, the
rocket-ship turned end for end and began to blast to kill its velocity
toward the moon. It began at half-gravity—the red glowing sign gave
warning of it—and rose to one gravity and then to two. After days of
no-weight, two gravities was punishing.
    Cochrane thought to look at Babs. She was rapt, lost in picturings of
what must be outside the ship, which she could not see. She'd be
imagining what the television screens had shown often enough, from
film-tapes. The great pock marked face of Luna, with its ring-mountains
in incredible numbers and complexity, and the vast open "seas" which
were solidified oceans of lava, would be clear to her mind's eye. She
would be imagining the gradual changes of the moon's face with nearness,
when the colorings appear. From a distance all the moon seems tan or
sandy in tint. When one comes closer, there are tawny reds and
slate-colors in the mountain-cliffs, and even blues and yellows, and
everywhere there is the ashy, whitish-tan color of the moondust.
    Glancing at her, absorbed in her satisfaction, Cochrane suspected that
with only half an excuse she would explain to him how the several
hundreds of degrees difference in the surface-temperature of the moon
between midnight and noon made rocks split and re-split and fracture so
that stuff as fine as talcum powder covered every space not too sharply
tilted for it to rest on.
    The feeling of deceleration increased. For part of a second they had the
sensation of three gravities.
    Then there was a curious, yielding jar—really very slight—and then the
feeling of excess weight ended altogether. But not the feeling of
weight. They still had weight. It was constant. It was steady. But it
was very slight.
    They were on the moon, but