Synthetic Hero

George Carlin had ruthlessly trampled his way to industrial power. Naturally, to win undying gratitude, he had to buy a one-way ticket to the moon.
Every day people travel great distances to stand in silence before the statue at Southwestern Spaceport. It is a shrine.
The figure stands with arms raised in an upreaching, yearning gesture that invokes thoughts of man's potential greatness, and the face seen beneath the helmet wears an expression of inspired nobility and idealism. In the indestructible impervium alloy image that is his masterpiece, Hayden Brush successfully captured the spirit of enthusiasm and adulation which swept the world. In a strange way it is not so much a statue of an individual as of an idea, for the sculptor worked entirely from photographs taken with a telephoto lens. He never met his subject.
A plaque on the granite base carries numerous words—sacrifice for the Greater Good—advancement of Man's frontiers—conquest of disease and death. And a name, George Carlin. Whenever I read that I recall the ancient witticism about this history being the fabric of accepted lies. In it there is much truth.
On the moon is another shrine, unvisited because the surface of Luna is still a perilous and inhospitable place. No compelling work of art is to be found there. Nothing but a roughly circular blasted area containing scattered fragments of spaceship hull that scorch in the direct sunlight and freeze in the unrelieved darkness, riddled by colonies of creeping moon-lice that penetrate the toughest metal.
That is the real, the veritable shrine.
The idea of building a spaceship did not enter George Carlin's mind until after he contracted the dread—and at that time incurable—Matson's Disease. And then he thought of it only as the most spectacular form of suicide ever devised. That was typical of the man.
George Carlin, owner of Carlin Industries and indubitably the richest and worst spoiled individual on the North American continent, was an irresponsible egocentric who had never done anyone a good turn in all his thirty-six years of life. Bad turns he had done in plenty.