Carlin was annoyed at their first personal interview. Harris appeared fascinated by the technical problems presented and insufficiently impressed by George himself. Carlin felt slighted, but Harris possessed the ability. The only stipulations upon which Carlin insisted were that work be rushed and that all major arrangements should be made through him personally. It pleased him to keep the reins in his own hands.
And so the spaceship went into design and then production, with all other projects of Carlin Industries postponed or cancelled outright. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was allowed to interfere, and money was no object.
Once Harris recommended that three particular specialists be hired to work on the navigation equipment. When Carlin discovered that the men were under exclusive contract to American Calculator Company, which did not wish to release them, he issued orders backed by eighty million dollars. When the flurry of reorganization was over he owned majority control of American Calculator and took revenge for the slight delay by instituting policies that soon forced the other directors into bankruptcy.
Seven months later the ship lay in its launching rack on the Arizona desert. It was sleek and relatively small, built to carry a single man and fuel for a one-way trip to the moon, with oxygen and supplies to last five weeks. Harris had performed miracles of design, including several intricate devices intended to insure a not-too-rough landing, and in the nose compartment was stored a huge folding reflector and high-intensity light which could be set up and operated from the ship's electron-displacement power packs. Trajectory and power settings had been worked out and set up in the automatic control equipment.
The ship was intended to land in the dark of the moon, as Harris had calculated it would be easier to generate heat than to dissipate it on an airless surface.
Harris tried to explain to Carlin why he had not used the almost unlimited power of nuclear fission in the driving rockets. No shield against the deadly radiations had been devised and a human would have lived less than five minutes. But Carlin had not been interested. He lacked a technical education, and he was quite content that the ship was incapable of a round trip. It was more spectacular that way.
There had been a tremendous barrage of publicity throughout the construction period, but all of it dealt with Carlin Industries or George Carlin himself. Not a single public mention of Verne Harris had been made.
Carlin had spent those seven months alternating between prolonged drinking bouts and periods of flogging his organization to ever more frantic activity. Anything to avoid thinking. And it required increasingly clever and time-consuming use of cosmetics to hide the progress of his disease. Concealment was a compulsive psychological necessity, for Matson's Disease was so common, so plebian, that he felt deeply ashamed. More and more he insisted upon being entirely alone, afraid his secret might be discovered, conducting his affairs by telephone and radio.
Then one evening, with the ship awaiting only final loading, Harris drove over from the technicians' camp to the luxurious desert villa which Carlin had caused to be built near the launching site. The two men had come face to face only half a dozen times.