Leinster was a scientist with rather odd political ideas. When he discovers a new super-efficient rocket projectile, he decides to publish his findings to the entire world. The implications are tremendous. Who-ever reaches the moon first and establishes a base can control the earth... East and West despatch their various expeditions and the space race ends in something like a photo-finish. Almost every Lunar crater in the Sea of Rains becomes a new base for one or other of the great powers, and a new miniature cold-war develops on the moon. Suddenly the leaders of the various expeditions mysteriously disappear. What sinister power is at work? Does life still exist below the dead surface of Lunar? Has out satellite been the target for non-human space expeditions? Can the earth men combine against this weird scientific peril? Or will they remain divided and fall before the terrible alien aggressor?
Release date:
February 27, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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JOHNSON picked up the yellow “Daily” and scanned three-inch banner headlines, “SPACE RACE BEGINS!” screamed the Fleet Street monstrosity. He cast his eye over the thick, dark type underneath. Subconsciously, Johnson deplored its literary style, at the same time as his conscious mind assimilated the racily written details. The article was apparently the fault of the Science reporter, who had been possessed of more imagination than knowledge, by the look of the thing.
Typical, typical, thought Johnson, as he read through it, just another cheap scare. Yet there might be something in it … he decided to get the Times and find out what lay behind the shriek of the gutter Press.
The Times, far more cautious and sedate, and accurate to the nth degree, told its select band of readers that Professor Leinster, who combined the role of nuclear physicist with that of rather misguided idealist, had discovered a new, and singularly horrible—yet, at the same time, devilishly simple atomic device. A sort of do-it-yourself H Bomb, which could be manufactured by a state the size of Monaco, let alone the Big Powers. It went into profound technical details. The gist of the three-column epic was that Leinster, having discovered his weapon, had spent several hours of mental anguish and agony, wrestling with his soul, his conscience, and his national loyalties, and finally decided upon publishing the results in pamphlet form, dispatching the whole lot by air mail, at precisely the same moment to the scientific departments of every government on earth. He also sent copies to every newspaper office. He was now in preventive custody! For security reasons. Johnson could understand that. The Leinster weapon was not new in the sense of exciting novelty, but was a deadlier application of existing principles. The two main points were the chemical propellant, and the actual war-head. With these two factors combined, the Leinster weapon was a small, self-propelling rocket, which could be launched in a back garden. It was only about a metre in length, and a couple of pieces of old scaffold pole would do as a launching ramp.
It could exceed escape velocity, and an even moderate knowledge of mathematics would enable the would-be launcher to plot its course with sufficient accuracy to land within ten square miles of the target. As its devastation range was approximately a thousand square miles, that was sufficiently near to produce the desired result.
The Day of the Moron had arrived, decided Johnson, any crackpot could now assassinate anybody whose face or brand of toothpaste he disagreed with. But, of course, there was an even more important factor, the establishment of a Lunar Base. It was the obvious answer to the Leinster weapon. In order to reach escape velocity one simply aimed the thing, but the calculations required to reach the moon were sufficiently complex as to require electronic computers. That restricted the weapon as an anti-lunar projectile to those would-be launchers who had a computer at their disposal. And that narrowed the field considerably.
So the space projects had now become top military priority. Johnson wondered just how far Britain was behind the other nations. Not quite as far as some of those other nations might like to think, concluded Johnson, who was himself an astronautical engineer.
That engineering had been his pigeon for so long, it was beginning to lose its feathers. Rocket engineering had been his “baby” for so long that it was now a large and problematical adult.
The phone jarred harshly.
“I will bet,” he said to himself, “that this is Project H.Q.”
It was.
Project H.Q. wanted William Johnson and wanted him in a helluva hurry! Project H.Q. had just been apprised of the situation that was already flashing across the world’s Press.
He phoned for his car, and began speeding towards the buildings, where he lived, and moved, and had his being amid piles of concrete launching ramps, computers, and other conglomerata, so dear to the heart of rocket-site architects.
As his powerful saloon sped along the dividing miles, with the appetite of an avaricious carnivore, the engineer allowed his mind to drift as it would over rocketry. Over his life’s work and where it had landed him.
He thought about the extensive use of rockets in the second World War, thirty years ago. He thought of how public attention, and the military attention of the major nations, particularly those involved in that war, had been focused on the large-scale projectile. He thought of the tremendous difference between the modern rocket and the ancient military rocket. His mind went winging away as though equipped with an invisible Time Machine. Over the long, long centuries. Long before our own era, Chinese, Persians, Arabians and Greeks had used rockets for signals and for communication. Even in combat actions, the early military pyrotechnists had taken part at a very early date with their “fire-balls”—rockets which had been thrown into the hostile ranks of the combatants. But more often into their fortresses, or camps that were being besieged, into their posts and buildings with the main idea of setting fire to them. The rocket’s origin is as obscurely lost in Time as the rocket itself is lost to sight when launched into the heights of space. To this day, no name has been put with any certainty to its inventor. It occurred to Bill Johnson that the unknown progenitor of the “whooooshin death” would have much to answer for, on the Day of Judgment, if he had not already been called to account.
One thing about him was certain. He lived long before the beginning of the Christian era … perhaps in that case he would be excused.
It had been known from the earliest time that a powder-like mixture was used to drive arrows forward, or accelerate their flight. “Fire-bolts” are referred to in almost all the literary sources of almost all people; to the Chinese usually goes the credit—or the discredit—of discovering saltpetre and its application in pyrotechny. They mixed that particularly foul chemical with sulphur and charcoal, recognised the power arising from the combustion of the horrible mixture, and made use of it in the preparation of their fire-bolts, or incendiary arrows.
At first they used these saltpetre mixtures for all kinds of displays, later they applied the mixture to arrows, and thus was created the forerunner of the deadliest and most dangerous implement of war that man has yet conceived. The freely rising rocket as a war-projectile was developed by the Chinks in 1225. From China, by way of India, Arabia, Greece and Byzantium, the rocket made its way, and from Byzantium the rest of the Western world came into contact with it.
After this it arrived in Italy, where it was adopted with particular alacrity. It then found its way to Lower Germany, Flanders, France and England, where it was frequently used in wars from the second half of the thirteenth century onwards.
Forli makes the first mention of the rockets used in Italy, which took place in 1281. In the same year the rocket makes its appearance in the Low Countries. There are accounts of it in Ghent in 1314, where the Flemish Burghers made use of it against the pirates who raided their coastal cities.
One of the first Westerners to really go into the thing thoroughly, recalled Bill, was that odd, mysterious, enigmatical character, Marcus Greicus, who during the middle of the thirteenth century made an extract from the books of Albertus Magnus, and the English powder monk, Roger Bacon. This appeared in Greek originally, but the only copy that Bill had ever seen was the Latin translation, with the glorious title, “Leiber ignium ad Comburendum Hostes.”
He also remembered that rockets had been in use as early as 1258 in the old city of Cologne on the Rhine. At Metz in 1324 and in England in 1327, in the Scottish war. Their use in warfare continued for about a century, but as guns came into use, rocket-development became confined to displays and firework shows. Their military purposes, however, went on in the Orient, and the British Expeditionary Forces in India came into contact with the Maharajah’s “Rocket projectiles.” Attempts were once again made to use them for war purposes, but the early attempts were somewhat unsuccessful. ‘Those were the days,’ thought Bill, ‘the good old pioneering days’ His mind, in its invisible Time machine, went flickering on over the years; 1804, a chap called Congreave, William Congreave—Johnson smiled at the similarity of names, there had been some famous Williams—apart from Richmal Crompton’s—he decided … Congreave had resumed rocket experiments in 1804, and by 1806 he had developed a product so satisfactory that Boulogne was assailed by Congreave rockets, fired from small boats of the British Fleet. Results were quite encouraging—apart from the point of view of the Boulognese! The missiles did fairly heavy damage to property and started many fires.
From then on, rockets had an established place as an auxiliary to, and sometimes in lieu of, field artillery, and moderate calibre ships’ guns. They were used with distinction at Copenhagen in 1807, and at Walcherin in the same year. They were also conspicuous at the Passage of Adour, not to mention the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. On August 24th they accomplished their most far-reaching achievement at the Battle of Blaydon’s Burg, during the Anglo-American war. An intensive rocket fire, directed against Stanbul’s United States Brigade, caused the regiments of Schutz and Regan to break and run. This, which was quickly followed by the arrival of British reinforcements, led to the general rout which left the city of Washington unprotected; led to its immediate capture and burning by the British Forces. … An incident which, Johnson reflected, was not one of those things which tend to foster Anglo-American relations. In the following month, Fort MacHenry, in Baltimore Harbour, was assailed with rockets, whose red glare is reported in ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ They were not signal flares, but they carried warheads loaded with explosive. This time, however, they failed to gain success for their users. And several of the vessels which had been specially fitted out for use as rocket-firing ships went down in the harbour. The particular problems of rocket engineering which haunted William Johnson for his entire working day had begun when Congreave’s rockets, with their tangentially attached tail sticks, were found to be hopelessly inaccurate. The stick was located in the centre and the results improved. William Hale made a further improvement in the Congreave rocket by removing the stick altogether and stabilising the trajectory with an auxiliary combustion chamber which caused it to spin while flying. It went through the air almost like an enormous explosive pin wheel. This particular rocket held the field for thirty or forty years. It was even used by the Americans during the Mexican war … if Johson remembered rightly. But periodic tests of rockets left from that war revealed that large numbers of them blew up! So by military order they were all removed from storage and destroyed.
The modern rocket has its origin in the research work carried out by Dr. Robert H. Goddard, head of the Physics Department at Clarke University. Goddard was interested in reaching extremely high altitudes, and demonstrated that this could not be done by a projectile fired from a gun, and that the rocket furnished the ideal means of accomplishing the objective. His first experiment used powder as a propellant, and showed that . . .
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