ANOTHER EARTH
BY DAVID EVANS & AL LANDAU
Whatever it was that had happened in the
test, it badly needed a good explanation.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I
Lieutenant Colonel Philip Snow, Flight Surgeon, USAF, and Test Director of the Aero-Medical Laboratory, was pacing the study floor in his quarters, asking himself for the dozenth time in the past half-hour: What had happened to Richardson during the test that afternoon?
He was no stranger to problems. He had been living with them for the past few years, and they had been problems the like of which had never before challenged the ingenuity of man. For he was the head of a small community of men, scientists like himself—medical specialists of all kinds, psychologists, electronic technicians, physicists, pressure engineers, mathematicians and so on, each one of them an acknowledged expert in his particular field—who had worked together with one end in view: to send a man into space and bring him back safely to Earth again. To put it more excitingly: to enable man to take his first step toward the conquest of the universe.
The result of their labors to date was the Capsule, a bottle-shaped contraption which occupied the center of the laboratory floor.