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Progress Report By: Alex Apostolides |
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Progress Report By Mark Clifton and Alex Apostolides Illustrated by PAUL ORBAN
It seemed to Colonel Jennings that the air conditioning unit merely
washed the hot air around him without lowering the temperature from that
outside. He knew it was partly psychosomatic, compounded of the view of
the silvery spire of the test ship through the heatwaves of the Nevada
landscape and the knowledge that this was the day, the hour, and the
minutes. The final test was at hand. The instrument ship was to be sent out into
space, controlled from this sunken concrete bunker, to find out if the
flimsy bodies of men could endure there. Jennings visualized other bunkers scattered through the area,
observation posts, and farther away the field headquarters with open
telephone lines to the Pentagon, and beyond that a world waiting for
news of the test and not everyone wishing it well. The monotonous buzz of the field phone pulled him away from his
fascinated gaze at the periscope slit. He glanced at his two assistants,
Professor Stein and Major Eddy. They were seated in front of their
control boards, staring at the blank eyes of their radar screens,
patiently enduring the beads of sweat on their faces and necks and
hands, the odor of it arising from their bodies. They too were feeling
the moment. He picked up the phone. "Jennings," he said crisply. "Zero minus one half hour, Colonel. We start alert count in fifteen
minutes." "Right," Colonel Jennings spoke softly, showing none of the excitement
he felt. He replaced the field phone on its hook and spoke to the two
men in front of him. "This is it. Apparently this time we'll go through with it." Major Eddy's shoulders hunched a trifle, as if he were getting set to
have a load placed upon them. [Illustration] Professor Stein gave no indication that he had heard. His thin body was
stooped over his instrument bank, intense, alert, as if he were a runner
crouched at the starting mark, as if he were young again. Colonel Jennings walked over to the periscope slit again and peered
through the shimmer of heat to where the silvery ship lay arrowed in her
cradle. The last few moments of waiting, with a brassy taste in his
mouth, with the vision of the test ship before him; these were the
worst. Everything had been done, checked and rechecked hours and days ago. He
found himself wishing there were some little thing, some desperate
little error which must be corrected hurriedly, just something to break
the tension of waiting. "You're all right, Sam, Prof?" he asked the major and professor
unnecessarily. "A little nervous," Major Eddy answered without moving. "Of course," Professor Stein said. There was a too heavy stress on the
sibilant sound, as if the last traces of accent had not yet been
removed. "I expect everyone is nervous, not just the hundreds involved in this,
but everywhere," Jennings commented. And then ruefully, "Except
Professor Stein there. I thought surely I'd see some nerves at this
point, Prof." He was attempting to make light conversation, something to
break the strain of mounting buck fever. "If I let even one nerve tendril slack, Colonel, I would go to pieces
entirely," Stein said precisely, in the way a man speaks who has learned
the language from text books. "So I do not think of our ship at all. I
think of mankind. I wonder if mankind is as ready as our ship. I wonder
if man will do any better on the planets than he has done here." "Well, of course," Colonel Jennings answered with sympathy in his voice,
"under Hitler and all the things you went through, I don't blame you for
being a little bitter. But not all mankind is like that, you know. As
long as you've been in our country, Professor, you've never looked
around you. You've been working on this, never lifting your head...." He jerked in annoyance as a red light blinked over the emergency
circuit, and a buzzing, sharp and repeated, broke into this moment when
he felt he was actually reaching, touching Stein, as no one had before... Continue reading book >>
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