Astounding Stories, July, 1931 by Various (thriller book recommendations TXT) 📕

t was night when we stopped and the familiar outlines of Patton Place were around us.

We stood at the cage doorway.

"Good-by," I said to Larry and Tina. "Good luck to you both!"

The girls kissed each other. Such strangely contrasting types! Over a thousand years was between them, yet how alike they were, fundamentally. Both—just girls.

Larry gripped my hand. In times of emotion one is sometimes inarticulate. "Good-by, George," he said. "We—we've said already all there is to say, haven't we?"

There were tears in both the girls' eyes. We four had been so close; we had been through so much together; and now we were parting forever. All four of us were stricken with surprise at how it affected us. We stood gazing at one another.

"No!" I burst out. "I haven't said all there is to say. Don't you destroy that cage! You come back! Guard it as carefully as you can, and come back. Land here, next year in October; say, night of the 15th. Will you? We'll be here waiting."

"Yes," Tina abruptly agreed.

We stood watching them as they slid the door closed. The cage for a moment stood quiescent. Then it began faintly humming. It glowed; faded to a spectre; and was gone.

Mary and I turned away into the New York City of 1935, to begin our life together.

The prediction that man will fly to the moon within the next 100 years was made by John Q. Stewart, associate professor of astronomical physics at Princeton University, in a recent address at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.

The first obstacle to be overcome is that of developing a speed of 25,000 miles an hour, the professor said, which means production of fuels more powerful than coal, gasoline, dynamite or any other source of energy now available. Such remarkable progress has been made in the speed of passenger carrying vehicles in the last century that scientists believe that a speed of 1,000 miles per hour will be reached in 1950 and 50,000 an hour will be surpassed before the year 2030, a century from now.

The one theoretically feasible method of making the journey to the moon, Stewart believes, is a vehicle propelled on the principle of the rocket. He visions a ship built in the form of a large metal sphere—110 feet in diameter, weighing 70,000 metric tons and carrying a crew of sixty and a dozen scientists. A dozen or more cannon would protrude slightly from the surface, shooting material the rate of 200 miles a second.

A half hour or so before noon and about three days before a new moon, Stewart would head his ship toward the sun, expecting it to rise twelve miles in the first six minutes and to soar out of the earth's atmosphere at 200 miles per hour.

Two hours and 29 minutes after the take-off the firing from the lower cannon would be stopped with the ship going upward, the professor estimates, at 190 miles per minute and having reached a height of 13,200 miles. Seventy hours later, crossing the moon's orbit, Stewart would fire the forward cannon and the ship would coast around the moon, becoming the temporary satellite of a satellite.

"The rest would be easy," said Stewart, "owing to the lesser gravity of the moon. The cannon would be fired to cushion the fall to the moon as the ship was gradually sucked toward the satellite.

"The moon is airless, waterless and lifeless, days and nights are two weeks long, temperatures range from that of boiling water at noon down perhaps to that of liquid air at midnight. The men of the ship would walk on the moon clad in diving suits. Gravity being only one-sixth that of the earth, a man would carry several hundred pounds of apparatus for providing air and for regulating the temperature.

"To leave the moon the ship would fire her rear cannon and coast back to earth. By firing its forward cannon it would cushion its landing on the earth, which would have to be made on a desert, because of the tremendous charges the cannon would fire."

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