Mortals and monsters by Lester del Rey

Author:Lester del Rey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ballentine Books
Published: 1964-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

LADY OF SPACE

by Lester del Rey

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman ...

Revelation—12:1

I’ve never seen a sketch begin with a quotation, and I guess this is a lot less story and more sketch than most of what I’ve put down. Maybe I’m just reminding myself I had the kind of upbringing where I’d remember such things, even out here in space. But it seems to fit, though there’s more to the original verse.

If you figure that heaven stands for space above Earth—as it used to mean—then it fits perfectly.

There’s no open, official ruling, but space is supposed to be reserved for men. It was explored by the Services, and they never considered women as much more than necessary nuisances or poor substitutes for clerks, even when they had their Women’s Corps. The Services haven’t changed much since the days when the male Persians fought the male Greeks. A woman in space was unthinkable. She could get there only by stowing away, and you don’t stow away on a rocket based on a modern rocket field. A number of kids tried that once, but it never worked. It could only be done with some pretty high-powered help, and who’d take a risk like that?

All the same, none of us were too surprised the way it all developed after we’d gained velocity on the second Mars expedition. We didn’t expect what happened, but when it did, we knew it had to be that way.

We were still tensed up, all four of us on the lead ship, sore from the bursts of acceleration, still a little dizzy from the lack of gravity now, and with our nerves carrying too big a load of the knowledge of how and why we’d been patched together.

This wasn’t like the meticulously planned first expedition. That had been a Navy project, and could take off from the Navy space platform in its orbit around Earth, using the fifteen thousand miles an hour velocity of that orbit from the start. Ten ships, fifty men—everything made on Earth, shipped up in pieces, and assembled by the biggest crew in space. But in spite of all advantages and after orbiting Mars successfully, it never came back; all we had were garbled accounts from the sentry overhead of trouble of some kind on the surface.

Now, three years later, we were the Army’s only hope to beat the other services to the planets. But the Army had no platform, and had to use its Moon base. That meant an almost impossible drain on the smelting of ores and synthesizing of fuel we’d painfully developed there; it meant salvaging parts from other ships, driving labor that invited mistakes. It meant cutting down to twelve men on three ships and counting on prayer for success.

With less than a hundred men altogether, we’d done it, though. We’d built the ships in the closest, fastest orbit we could around the Moon. We still lacked speed enough, so we took a page out of Oberth’s

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.