Interstellar travel -- Fiction; Science fiction; Television programs -- Fiction
Cochrane couldn't take that way of escape. He lay strapped in his chair
and thought unhappily of many things. He came to feel unclean, as people
used to feel when they traveled for days on end on railroad trains.
There was no possibility of a bath. One could not even change clothes,
because baggage went separately to the moon in a robot freight-rocket,
which was faster and cheaper than a passenger transport, but would kill
anybody who tried to ride it. Fifteen-and twenty-gravity acceleration is
economical of fuel, and six-gravity is not, but nobody can live through
a twenty-gravity lift-off from Earth. So passengers stayed in the
clothes in which they entered the ship, and the only possible concession
to fastidiousness was the disposable underwear one could get and change
to in the rest-rooms.
Babs Deane did not take dozy-pills either, but Cochrane knew better than
to be more than remotely friendly with her outside of office hours. He
did not want to give her any excuse to tell him anything for his own
good. So he spoke pleasantly and kept company only with his own
thoughts. But he did notice that she looked rapt and starry-eyed even
through the long and dreary hours of free flight. She was mentally
tracking the moonship through the void. She'd know when the continents
of Earth were plain to see, and the tints of vegetation on the two
hemispheres--northern and southern--and she'd know when Earth's
ice-caps could be seen, and why.
The stewardess was not too much of a diversion. She was brisk and calm
and soothing, but she became a trifle reluctant to draw too near the
chairs in which her passengers rode. Presently Cochrane made deductions
and maliciously devised a television commercial. In it, a moon-rocket
stewardess, in uniform and looking fresh and charming, would say sweetly
that she went without bathing for days at a time on moon-trips, and did
not offend because she used whoosit's antistinkum. And then he thought
pleasurably of the heads that would roll did such a commercial actually
get on the air.
But he didn't make plans for the production-job he'd been sent to the
moon to do. Psychiatry was specialized, these days, as physical medicine
had been before it. An extremely expensive diagnostician had been sent
to the moon to tap Dabney's reflexes, and he'd gravely diagnosed
frustration and suggested young Dr. Holden for the curative treatment.
Frustration was the typical neurosis of the rich, anyhow, and Bill
Holden had specialized in its cure. His main reliance was on the making
of a dramatic production centering about his patient, which was
expensive enough and effective enough to have made him a quick
reputation. But he couldn't tell Cochrane what was required of him. Not
yet. He knew the disease but not the case. He'd have to see and know
Dabney before he could make use of the extra-special production-crew his
patient's father-in-law had provided from the staff of Kursten, Kasten,
Hopkins and Fallowe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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