Michael Shaara by Michael Shaara

Author:Michael Shaara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 1950s, mars, michael shaara pulitzer prize short stories science fiction playboy cosmopolitan redbook
Publisher: Antenna Books

Previously Unpublished

Table of Contents

21. The Billion Dollar Grease Job

Now that the historians have finally recorded everything that happened, and most people have stopped laughing, I think it’s time somebody said something for old Doc Kleinschmidt. It wasn’t his fault. After all, the thing worked just like he said it would, it got there and it got back, and what they should have done was build a monument to him. Instead, they laughed him right out of the country. And, doggone it, some mechanic did it, not Kleinschmidt, it was some blame mechanic with a few cents worth of grease…

The day the first rocket took off for the Moon, old Doc Kleinschmidt was in his glory. The fact that most people didn’t think it would get there made no difference to him. He was, you know, not only an expert astrophysicist and mathematician, but one of the world’s top-flight engineers as well; just a good old-fashioned, all-around genius. The rocket was his life work, and he was as sure of it as only an expert can be. And so the gibes of us ordinary people didn’t bother him in the least.

“George,” he said to me that day, grinning happily from his bush of a mustache and pointing upwards at the smoking trail of the rockets, “we are seeing the beginning of the greatest era of Man. This day”—he smote me violently on the back—“we have gone out to the stars! It will be remembered forever in the chronicles of mankind!”

“Right,” I said, and right there I took those words down and made sure they got into the papers, and you’ve probably seen ‘em, at one time or another. Well, that day will certainly be remembered, but not quite the way old Doc Kleinschmidt figured.

Well, while the rocket was gone Kleinschmidt began his well-earned rest, but I worked harder than ever before. It was my job, you see, to handle all the press releases, to publicize the whole business and try to make the trip palatable to the American public. And the job wasn’t as easy as you might think.

In the first place, several billion dollars’ worth of the taxpayers’ money had gone into that rocket, and so naturally we had to make it clear that the money was well spent. That meant coddling Senators, economists, newspapermen, practically everybody.

And then there were the people who would ask: “Well, what’s on the Moon anyway, that we should spent billions to get there?”

By this time I had the answer to that long since learned by heart. First, there was the strategic value of the Moon as a military base; second, there might be uranium there; third, scientific knowledge such as the composition of the Moon’s crush, experiments in a vacuum, and so on; and fourth, there would probably be diamonds all over the Moon—as some scientists had said—due to meteors or something.

That part about the diamonds, that and the military base reason, made most of them happy. I was counting on the actual pictures and things Captain Henderson would bring back to satisfy the rest.

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