Red Star Tales Page 17

  Weeks passed. Kreuzkopf was highly valued in his new job, and once he even took part in an official race, winning second prize. At last he was summoned by the Commission. The government had given an answer: the funds requested in the estimate would be disbursed in equal payments over two years. The work could begin, and all results from study of the interplanetary route and the Moon would be the property of the government.

  3. A CONSTRUCTION ACCIDENT

  Kreuzkopf was jubilant. He drove out to the boy’s grave and saw that it was now covered with saltbush, that the field was deserted… and that his heart was becoming overgrown with the fat of forgetting. On the road he cried and tore dried heads of grain off their stalks. But having no one close to him, knowing no friends, he instead sent a telegram to Brussels: “Erna, the bomb will be launched in two years. I’m building it.” Erna’s response was: “I’m glad. A hearty handshake.”

  Kreuzkopf had never in his entire life known such success. He could not restrain himself: in his room he sang confused songs in a strange voice, and he went drinking with the other drivers.

  Construction began. At the launch pad, open to the entire sky, a foundation was poured for the 120,000 horsepower electric motor, the transmission mechanism, and the support bearing – the base for the launching disk. At the same time a branch was brought in from the main high-voltage line to power the electrical engine, and a transformer was installed.

  Kreuzkopf was beside himself, with energy seething inside him like steam in an engine. He would have taken just half a year to build the whole system of structures to develop the flying force of life in the Lunar Bomb, but the funding was to be drawn out over two years. The missile itself was being built by the Monte-Monde Machine Building Trust, and it was to be completed within five months.

  But a black cloud followed Kreuzkopf: while they were blasting the foundation pit for the support bearing, forty workers were electrocuted, including five of the best specialists in the country. Such were the findings of the specially-appointed commission. But a technical review clearly established that there was no current at a life-threatening voltage at the work site. Nevertheless, forty bodies were wrapped in rough canvas and shipped to their families in five trucks.

  The work was stopped. Kreuzkopf kept silent and undertook no steps to get the construction back on track. It was physically apparent that his heart was breaking apart inside him. He had unwittingly killed the workers. True, Kreuzkopf had previously tested his method in the mine, with no people present, and the mine rocks were turned to fine dust.

  The method involved sending electromagnetic waves into the material to be turned from mineral to dust at just the right frequency and length to coincide with the natural oscillation of the electrons in the material’s atoms. These artificial waves agitated and magnified the electron pulse in the atoms, and each atom would then burst, part of it converted to an unknown and undetectable gas, and part to a light powder.

  Knowing (with theoretical certainty) that electromagnetic waves with such a structure were harmless to people, Kreuzkopf aimed his machine at the foundation pit and put it into operation, saying not a word. And he sowed death among the people.

  It was strange that the investigator did not see Kreuzkopf as a criminal: his tormented heart was plainly to be seen on his face and in his eyes.

  The work was resumed, but it went slowly and Kreuzkopf did not hurry the workers. But soon another snag was encountered, having nothing to do with Kreuzkopf: large amounts had been embezzled from the project’s funding, and the treasurer and division manager had vanished. Kreuzkopf was accused of administrative negligence and even, in a particularly foul denunciation, of complicity.

  Kreuzkopf made no effort to defend himself. The work was suspended. The government appointed a Special Technical Commission to review the entire project, and Kreuzkopf was convicted and sentenced to solitary confinement for a year.

  4. THE INVENTOR IN PRISON

  Once in his cell, Kreuzkopf began to collect himself. For long weeks he lay on his bunk and thought. Summer burned out, the leaves fell, Erna was in Brussels, Goga Femm was in his grave, and those forty workers had also turned to dust. All he had ahead of him was a dead dream – the lunar mission.

  Kreuzkopf fell ill with some sort of intestinal disease. He was transferred to the prison hospital. Inaudibly, wearing shoes, autumn trod through nature along the fallen leaves.

  As he convalesced, Kreuzkopf took walks along the hallway on the third floor of the hospital. The hall ended at an open window looking out on a quiet park where belated birds were singing.

  Kreuzkopf went up to the open window and looked for a long time at the dwindling twilight air and the agony of the plant life. Then all at once, without a running start, he threw himself out the window. His prison cap flew from his head, and his dressing gown covered both him and the guard on whom Kreuzkopf had fallen. After plunging unexpectedly into a soft body, Kreuzkopf choked on his own blood as it gushed from his broken lungs. But he knew that he was alive. The guard lay dead beneath him, with his feet resting on his own head, broken in half at his pelvis.

  Kreuzkopf was convicted again for his escape attempt and for murdering the guard, and was sentenced to eight years including the time served for his previous crime. Kreuzkopf could not prove that he had been seeking a tight grave, not a free life.

  Time became hazy and inexhaustible: days passed like years, and weeks passed, slowly, like generations. Kreuzkopf was doomed. He developed the art of not thinking, not feeling, not counting time, not hoping, and hardly living: this made it easier by a thread.

  The engineers’ association in his country petitioned the government to consider reducing Kreuzkopf’s sentence in order to finish building the Lunar Bomb. The government was still waiting for the findings of the Special Technical Committee’s review of the project as a whole.

  Snow was on the ground. Kreuzkopf was corroding his brain and growing deadened and savage. The Special Committee completed its work: the design was valid, and as long as the bomb did not encounter any stray meteors on its way to the Moon, the missile would be able to reach the lunar periphery and return, though it would be impossible to foresee all that might occur on the interplanetary route. The Special Committee took the liberty of stating its opinion that Kreuzkopf, as an engineer, had exceptional creative talent and was extremely knowledgeable.

  The government agreed to release Kreuzkopf on bail to the Engineers’ Association. The whole country was pleased with the government’s decision. All believed Kreuzkopf to be a rare genius combined with a fearsome antisocial creature, a murderer and mysterious vagabond, but that regardless he should be given the chance to complete the Lunar Bomb. Public opinion was driven not by compassion but by curiosity.

  Kreuzkopf was freed. He took a long time to adjust and had difficulty recalling that which had once been habitual.

  The work began anew. Kreuzkopf was now in charge of the purely technical and design work. The chief engineer was another person: the electrical engineer Nimt, Erna’s second husband. Nimt had gained the trust of the government and the Engineers’ Association and was now making a career out of Kreuzkopf’s fashionable project.

  Kreuzkopf was incapable of relating to the things around him properly and tactfully. He was indifferent to all the change, interested only in the matter of lunar research, and he performed his work steadily, diligently, and automatically. He had developed a somnolent nature, and he spent all his non-working hours sleeping alone at home. After prison, solitude had become his passion. He found it burdensome to interact with people at work, and he did not go into town. Nimt behaved cordially with him, but remained vague and distant.

  Erna did not visit the construction site once. She lived with Nimt in the city.

  5. IN THE CAPITAL OF METALWORK

  At last the missile was ready. It had taken a long time to get the launching disk installed with exact precision: the disk was to be installed at a particular angle to the geometrical
surface of the earth, and this angle needed to be adhered to with absolute stringency, since the disk’s angle of inclination would determine the Lunar Bomb’s flight path.

  In spring the work was halted for five months to await the new fiscal year and the second half of the funding, as the money for the current year had been used up.

  Nimt went abroad with Erna to Kissingen. Kreuzkopf was given paid leave until the work could be restarted. He went to the famous electrometallurgy plants in Stuasept. He was interested in the plants’ experiments with extraction of deep iron ore in the Aldagan foothills.

  The plant directors gave Kreuzkopf a letter of introduction to the chief engineer in Aldagan, and he set off. It was 4000 kilometers away. Kreuzkopf went by train. The train was pulled not by a steam engine but by a gas engine, which had replaced the short-lived locomotive.

  The gas locomotive consisted of a gas engine on wheels. The whole undercarriage was the same as that of a steam locomotive, but the cylinders used compressed air instead of steam: the energy from the engine’s gas generator was transferred pneumatically to the driving wheels. The gas locomotive was the least expensive engine for transportation: it operated using gas produced by coal, wood, peat, straw, oil shale, brown coal and other poorly burning coals, and any sort of smoldering waste from which combustible gas could be wrung.

  The gas locomotive pulled with it two storage cars containing the strongly compressed gas which the engine used for power. Small gas plants were placed every 300 to 400 kilometers, producing gas from whatever cheap fuel was underfoot nearby. The gas locomotives collected gas from these plants as steam engines used to collect water from water tanks at water stations.

  Compared to a steam engine, the gas locomotive hauled four times cheaper. Kreuzkopf was interested in these machines, entered so quickly into use for transportation, and he happily watched through the window as the gas locomotives took steep slopes without losing any speed at all.

  A year had now passed since Kreuzkopf had first arrived in the capital. It was summer again. Heat hummed in the expanses of fields, and the farmer’s hard work fought fiercely with the heat for the moisture of the plants, for the satiety of the big cities, and for the lunar flight.

  Kreuzkopf had noticeably gone gray, aged, and lost his childlike interest in unnecessary things. He felt as if he were waning, as if he had few years left, and life, the rarest of events, was stealing away from him.

  Kreuzkopf would have liked to have a friend, a quiet heart-to-heart conversation, and that simple warmth that speaks indistinctly of kinship and compassion among people. But he lived in a dusky dream. People respected him and kept him at a distance. He was considered unusual, both for his genius and for his crime, but Kreuzkopf was a normal, simple person. Abstractions and lofty coldness were alien and hateful to him. He liked ardent action, not celestial contemplation.

  On the second day the train entered a country composed of fearful slopes and valleys: the foothills of the great Aldagan range, which arose out of the tropical sea and vanished into the icy abyss of the Arctic Ocean.

  Stuasept Station, and a kilometer away was the capital of metalwork: the directorate of the iron ore industry, the mining academy, the board of the electrometallurgy plants, and a million-kilowatt hydroelectric power facility.

  Kreuzkopf went right to the worksite for extraction of deep ore. The administrators greeted him simply and sincerely. The mining engineers had before them a leading expert from a different field, and nothing more.

  Everyone knows that mining iron ore 300 meters deep is not economically justifiable, but here they were conducting trials to prove otherwise. The hydroelectric station generated a current of hundreds of thousands of horsepower for the electromagnets, whose poles were aimed at underground iron ore deposits.

  Giant chunks of ore, howling and roaring like the thundering of an earthquake, tore through the earth’s shell and flew out to the daylight surface, trying to reach the pole of the electromagnet. When the ore broke through the last layer of soil cover, a special device cut the current in the electromagnet and the electromagnet was moved aside. Then the boulders of ore tore out from the depths with a scorching wind heated by friction against other rocks, flew a hundred meters, and fell to their mother earth, burrowing in slightly.

  A self-propelled hoist lifted the pieces of ore in a pincer-type bucket, dipped them in a pond for cooling, and lifted them onto a conveyor belt. The conveyor belt then delivered the ore to a blast furnace.

  Despite the enormous amount of force needed to extract the ore from below the earth using the electromagnet, this force was only in use for a few moments, and then the electromagnets were charged by current from the energy of water falling through the dam. Thus the deep ore came out costing no more than the shallow ore mined using conventional methods. And there was something monstrous and unnatural in metal that flew out from under the earth, grinding and anguished on the way.

  In the evening Kreuzkopf ate dinner with the supervising engineer for magnetic mining, whose name was Skorb. A calm, middle-aged man and one of the designers of the powerful mining electromagnets, Skorb had a quiet temperament and a fierce capacity for work. Skorb was alone. His family, a wife and two daughters, had drowned in the mountain river’s spring floods twenty years ago. Skorb then took his vengeance on the river: he built regulating structures on it that made any flooding impossible. And since then Skorb had lived alone, not counting the thousand electricians, metalworkers, mechanics, and miners, all good friends of Skorb’s.

  After spending the night with Skorb, Kreuzkopf left for the capital. The gas locomotive once again sputtered into action, and the wheels began to murmur. The lush summer floated in the eternal shining of the sun.

  6. FLIGHT OF THE “LUNAR BOMB”

  After arriving home at the dead construction site, Kreuzkopf did not know what to do: it would still be at least four months until the work could begin again. And so he unwittingly took to reading. Once he bought a book at a tent by an ancient wall, went home, turned on the light, opened the book, and there saw:

  I am kin to grass and beast,

  And to the burning star;

  I believe in your breath

  And the evening heights…

  After that there were some rather dull words, but then once more:

  I am not wise, but am in love,

  I do not hope, but pray.

  I am forgiven for everything,

  I do not know things, but I love.

  Kreuzkopf was entirely gripped by enchantment with this indistinct thought, a thought mixed with ardent and mournful feeling. He read and read, as the room grew yellow from dawn and electricity. That day he bought another dozen and a half books, judging them to be interesting simply by their titles, which included: A Journey in Reeking Gas by Burbar; Blue Roads by Vogulov; Schott’s Time of Zenith; The Anthropomorphic Revolution by Zag-Zagger, Moon Fire by Ferrent, Berkman’s Antisexus; Has History Always Existed, and Will It Continue, and What Is It in the End Anyway?, the philosophy of Gorgond, as well as a few others.

  Kreuzkopf was struck by the world of books. He had never had time for reading. He washed and scoured his brain, which had been oppressed by suffering, monotonous work, and mute anguish. He saw entirely new people, gloomy, burning, moving, roaring with passion and ecstasy, perishing in the expanse of thought, triumphing in a square meter in a stone niche in a wall, seeking a righteous land and finding a desert, wandering the sand and stumbling onto water, leaving for countries of fanatics, trading the warmth of home for the wind of a nighttime road…

  People passed before Kreuzkopf not as a mass, but as wanderers, beggars, vagabonds rambling blindfolded. Kreuzkopf unexpectedly discovered that literature knows no happiness, while happiness itself, wherever it be found, only foretells coming trouble, an earthquake of the soul.

  The harvest was already underway in Kreuzkopf’s country. Straw burned in the furnaces of field engines and threshed the grain. The leaves fell from the trees for
the goats to chew on. Snakes swallowed berries and made the birds flutter in the trees. A multitude of children was born from the harvest, and good writers appeared. Broadcloth mills were built, and fruits and vegetables were prepared in advance for the winter.

  The new fiscal year began. The board of directors for construction of the Lunar Bomb disbursed the second half of the estimated cost of the work. Kreuzkopf, Nimt, and five hundred laborers got to work.

  Week after week passed in exhausting labor, labor that required extraordinary precision, in which the conquest of the Moon depended on every thread of every nut.

  The launching disk was completed. The “Lunar Bomb” had long been ready. The electric motor, the transmission, and all the gauges and breakers were installed. All that remained was to place all the research equipment and the securing hardware on the missile itself.

  This was done quickly. The Construction Board was disbanded and replaced by a Science Office for Lunar Research. It was directed by a famous astrophysicist, Academician Lesuren, with Nimt staying on as his deputy director for technology. Kreuzkopf, as before, was named the design engineer.

  The Science Office set the launch date for 19-20 March precisely at astronomical midnight. This was the time at which the Moon was in the most favorable position for aiming the launch. At midnight on 20 March the missile would be automatically released from the rotating disk and the Lunar Bomb would fly in the direction of our satellite. Then, eighty-one hours later, it would return to Earth and land near the city of Koro-Korotanga.

  In pursuit of a sensation, the newspapers wrote about the mission in such detail that both Lesuren and Nimt were careful at first to send corrections of printed items, but then they gave it up, reasoning that newspapers are not made for news and accurate information, they are a habit, like a smoke for the tired brain.