There were a few pieces of black rock which could have been basalt from the nearby Rockies. And there were a few chunks of metal allegedly parts of the ship. And, prominently displayed, there was the much-publicized and very familiar picture of Bill O’Neil, clad in a spacesuit and holding aloft the wire-braced flag of the U. N. with Mount Pico in the background. Their shadows were sharp and very dark, the shimmering disk of the Earth hung over the lunar mountain, and in the corner of the picture was a segment of a squat, fat, disklike ship, the Venture.
No tall, slender, silver rocket. Not even the rocket-powered Erector set evisioned by the pioneers of the ’50s. Not even a sign that the lunar rock had been blasted and washed by a jet flame.
Every time he saw that picture, it made him sick at heart. These days, he saw it often—everywhere he went, he seemed to see it. It reminded him more often than was necessary that the thing for which he’d fought and labored all his life had failed, that his dream of rockets climbing on their noisy, fiery tails toward the new frontiers of man had been shattered, that his life and his work had been useless, rendered obsolete by new things which had done in five years what rocket propulsion had failed to do in fifty.
He wanted a drink. Sometimes that helped him forget that his life was a failure. As he started to turn around, he remembered that Martin had cut him off. The last place, too. That left only home. “I think,” he said aloud to himself, “that I’ve still got some of that stuff Big Jack made and was going to throw away.” Terrible stuff, he knew. And the thought of it almost turned his stomach. But it contained alcohol, it was free, and it was palatable if you filtered it through a loaf of bread. He started down the street again and unconsciously picked up his train of black thoughts again.
Try as he would, he still could not make himself believe that there were no more rockets. Why, weren’t they the only means of traveling in the vacuum of space? But that part of his mind which still faced and knew reality told him: “No. Bill O’Neil has found another, better way. Rockets are obsolete. Space travel is here, but there are no rockets.”
When had this happened? Enright was not sure, but he seemed to recall a morning at Devil’s Head long ago when Bill O’Neil had dropped into his office for a cup of coffee and a chat. That morning, O’Neil had had something on his mind. It had been an idea; Enright could never figure out how he knew that O’Neil was on the trail of something different; but every time he was, the engineer could sense it.
“Henry, I’ve got an idea,” O’Neil had said as he poured himself a cup of coffee.
“That’s not unusual for you, Bill,” Enright had replied. “What fantastic money-making scheme have you dreamed up this time?”
Sitting down with his coffee, O’Neil had answered, “I haven’t started worrying about the financial end of it yet. It’s an idea I’ve had for a long time, Henry—ever since we were working on the orbital rocket project. After kicking it around upstairs for years, I think I’m finally starting to get something concrete. I got to thinking about the way we gotta fight gravity all the way up to that satellite, then fight it again coming down. Seemed to me there’s a simpler way to do it. And I’m beginning to get part of an answer. Henry, maybe there’s a way we can use gravity instead of fighting it.”
“Ever hear of maneuvering through a gravity well? Oberth figured that out years ago,” Enright told him.