Accept hospital alarm
Goldwasser smiled.Any math majors? Hold me. Reese nodded, pleased. Everything would be all right if he could keep Hitchcock in his office until the boys came from the clinic.Mr. Hitchcock, he said, “in a sense, Im very glad you came.” It was not intentional, I tell myself as I lower my griminess and weariness into the hot water. It was necessary. How else explain why we chose… ?” But it isnt worth a damn. I might as well mumble Tantric formulae. The water feels lukewarm—used. McGivern snapped,Im not interested in your philosophy, criminal. Get to the point. I want my son back. What happened next was magnificent, and almost cleared my mind. Mans first walk in space. (Actually the second, after the USSR.) As usual, I had been called to the Cape to head the decontamination and sterilisation crew, getting Gemini 4 ready for space. The planets must not be a dumping ground for human waste. This was drill— preparation for our coming flight to the moon. After Gemini 4 all my space flights would beetc.— all my systems were go. But I didnt know it then. The ragged hole was too small. H left by the forward port. He ran, on hiswalker, into a ribbon of landscape which became a thicket of fire, a porcupine of fire, a Nessus-shirt to the Earth, as in a dream. Into an unbelievable super-crescendo of sound, light, heat, pressure and impacts he ran, on and on up the now almost invisible slope. At first, he allowed the escalator to take him along at its own mild pace, but he soon grew impatient of this. He found that the exercise of running down the steps three at a time was not so exhausting as runningup. It was refreshing, almost. And, by swimming with the current instead of against it, his progress, if such it can be called, was appreciable. In only minutes he was back at his cache of groceries. 5 Krafft Ehricke, a top space researcher at Convair Astronautics in San Diego, very much doubts it. He believes that any planet originally able to clothe itself in oxygen and to rain down turbulent oceans of water would almost certainly be able to keep those elements in vast supply over geological leaps of time. In the introduction toI Remember Babylon, I made a point of the real-life elements involved in the story. Obviously this is just as true of “Leonard Lockhards” piece. Both authors are trained scientists as well as first-rate storytellers. Both are writing here about the same (genuine) idea of Mr. Clarke’sconcerning the television satellite which has been so much discussed in the past year (and may have become a reality by the time, this reaches print). But it is important to remember that of these two pieces, only one is fact-written-like-fiction. The other is fiction-written-like-fact.* * * * Rational Man inhabited a law-abiding world controlled absolutely by Cold Facts and Logic, Physical Laws and Mechanical Principles. He himself was the inevitable sum of Mendelian Laws, Chemistry, Conditioning, and Reflexes. A minimum of marveling was contained in a Rational Deity—a Great Architect who had (with compass, protractor, and Euclids Axioms) laid out the universe. The new verities were classified, catalogued, and cross-indexed for eternity. The new technique of observing, testing, and labelling was called the scientific method. Baffled but excited by the cryptic JTSAL, Sam, who was then in attendance at a night school in cryptography, showed themessage to his instructor, Bertram Luftmensch, a man who had steeped himself in the lore of code-cracking for the past twenty years. Although Mr. Luftmensch prepares a daily coded column for a local Philadelphia newspaper wherein the crossing out of certain letters reveals some advice for thereader, he nevertheless took time out of his demanding schedule to work on the problem posed by Sam Pirokin. Although Luftmensch tried every trick of the trade, he could not make sense out of the letter sequence, JTSAL. "You have no right to do that. What I write in a notebook is my business. Besides I dont believe you are a police officer." And you were alone at the time. Half an hours too long, Mr. Mines said. Actually, no one man can live long enough to survive the journey from Earth to even the nearest star. Traveling far more slowly than the speed of light, even our fastest rockets may take hundreds of years to reach a single target. Yet once the journey becomes feasible, man will not be able to resist it. The nearest star being a lifetime or more away, we will have to prepare for a trip in which families will bridge the billion-mile gap with leaps of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The abyss will know the burials of astronauts dead and jettisoned while their sons sons move on.* * * * Lately? I didnt think ... "Hows the— playing?" he asked. He was wearing workers overalls and looked as if he had just come out of the yards. I had thought he was older; he couldn’t have been more than fifty. Powerful hands, a wrestler’s shoulders, and a face of brutal splendor whose features seemed to have been chopped out with an axe. But I was immediately struck by the haunted, tortured expression of his eyes. He seemed not only preoccupied but actually obsessed. You saw on his face a real stupor, a kind of astonishment that touched that fine Roman mask of his with a strangely lost, bewildered expression. You could tell, while he was talking to us, that he hadsomething else on his mind, and something much more important to him. But he seemed glad to see Carlos all the same. As for Carlos, he had tears in his eyes. They stood embraced for a minute, gazing at each other affectionately and patting each other on the shoulders. The butler came in with a trayof drinks, and set it down on a table. Carlos drank down his martini, looking around him with obvious disgust..
