One Against the Moon

by Donald A. Wollheim

Robin stopped, rapidly glanced over the story. He wished he had the time to read the whole story, but he knew he hadn't. Anyway, he could probably borrow a copy during lunch hour from one of the fellows. But it was stories like that which fascinated him.

As he went into the cafeteria at the Y and sat eating a quick breakfast, he thought about the story. He'd always been fascinated by rockets and the stars. Even when still a kid at the orphanage, he'd read everything he could get on the subject. He'd never stopped doing so. Now that he was out of the school, out on his own the past three years, he still had the bug.

The White Sands and Redstone rocket experiments were making headlines more and more. The first dozen little satellites had been thrilling reading—the discussions of the permanent artificial satellite program, now under way, was even more so, for it promised to be the beginning of the long-projected Space Platform, from which in turn would come the first real space flight.

Robin wished he knew more of the things that were going on. Somewhere out there in the West, on the deserts and sands of New Mexico a couple of thousand miles away, history was being made. Many of the fellows working there couldn't be much older than he.

But fate was a grim and arbitrary thing. For others, a college education could bring to a fine point the talent for mathematics and chemistry and physics that was needed for this work. For an orphan boy, however, the world reserved less glamorous and more immediately practical objectives. Oh, sure, he'd had a chance at a scholarship, but somehow he just hadn't made it. The manual training programs stressed at the State Home had just not allowed him the extra time to study for a scholarship. Even though his instructors had given him the chance, he simply hadn't been able to make it.

For him, the study of abstract science was to be a matter of home reading. He'd devoured all the books in the library on the stars. And he still dreamed, even while working in the carpentry shop of the factory here, of flying through space on wings of flame.

Perhaps, if he'd had a mother and father like most fellows, he'd have gone to college, might even now be on his way to help the rocket men conquer the universe. But his folks had died somewhere in the holocaust of war, back during the fall of Hitler's Germany, back when he was just a frightened and helpless kid of seven.

As he had agreed a thousand times since then, Robin reflected, as he spooned cereal to his mouth, he was lucky even so. For somehow the GI's had found a battered, dirty envelope sewn into his worn internment-camp jacket with identification that proved him the American-born son of American parents, who had been interned in the enemy country. But where his parents were ... well, there had been some terrible bombing in those days. There was never any trace of the Carews. Robin had only a vague memory of his people, somewhere lost amid a nightmare of terror.

As most of the kids in the orphanage had, Robin dreamed of someday finding his folks, of finding them rich. But it was, as always, a dream. The American army had brought him home, had sought to trace his folks, and had failed. Well, Robin still was lucky. It was no shame to be a workingman in a democratic country.

Time was passing. Robin hastily gulped down the glass of milk he knew he needed for his daily labors, and, paying his check, dashed out. He caught the bus at the corner, crowding in with others on their way, and rode it for fifteen minutes out to the edge of town where the big plant stood.