Interstellar travel -- Fiction; Science fiction; Television programs -- Fiction
"I bought West's stock in Spaceways," said Johnny Simms, amusedly,
"because I want to come along. Right?"
"So I heard," said Cochrane, as curtly as before.
"West said," Johnny Simms told him gleefully, "that he was going back to
Earth, punch Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe on their separate
noses, and then go down to South Carolina and raise edible snails for
the rest of his life."
"An understandable ambition," said Cochrane. He frowned, waiting to talk
to Bell, who was taking an infernally long time to focus a camera out of
a side-port.
"It's going to be good when he tries to cash my check," said Johnny
Simms delightedly. "I stopped payment on it when he wouldn't pick up
the tab for some drinks I invited him to have!"
Cochrane forced his face to impassiveness. Johnny Simms was that way, he
understood. He was a psychopathic personality. He was completely
insensitive to notions of ethics. Ideas of right and wrong were as
completely meaningless to him as tones to a tone-deaf person, or pastel
tints to a man who is color-blind. They simply didn't register. His mind
was up to par, and he could be a charming companion. He could experience
the most kindly of emotions and most generous of impulses, which he put
into practice. But he also had a normal person's impulse to less
admirable behavior, and he simply could not understand that there was
any difference between impulses. He put the unpleasing ones into
practice too. He'd been on the moon to avoid extradition because of past
impulses which society called murderous. On this ship it was yet to be
discovered what he would do--but because he was technically sane his
lawyers could have prevented a take off unless he came along. Cochrane,
at the moment, felt an impulse to heave him out an airlock as a probable
danger. But Cochrane was not a psychopathic personality.
He stopped Bell in his picture-taking and looked at the first of the
prints. They were excellent. He went back to the vision-set to transmit
them back to Luna. He sent them off. They would be forwarded to
observatories on Earth and inspected. They literally could not be faked.
There were thousands of stars on each print--with the Milky Way for
background on some--and each of those thousands of stars would be
identified, and each would have changed its relative position from that
seen on earth, with relation to every other star. Astronomers could
detect the spot from which the picture had been taken. But to fake a
single print would have required years of computation and almost
certainly there would have been slip-ups somewhere. These pictures were
unassailable evidence that a human expedition had reached a point in
space that had been beyond all human dreaming.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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