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.”