Touch the SKY

                           By ALFRED COPPEL

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                    Startling Stories Summer 1955.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


The sign said: RIDE THE ROCKET! TWICE AROUND THE UNIVERSE FOR 25¢!
Which was cheap enough, Pete Moore thought. Cheap enough at twice the
fare.

Glory giggled and pulled at his arm. "Let's ride, Pete. Let's see what
you're in for."

He smiled down at her thinly, because it wasn't really anything for
her to giggle about, but that was Glory for you. She was young enough,
gay enough, to be able to make a joke of it, and that was good and he
shouldn't spoil it. Not many other wives would feel like that. Not many
other wives would want to spend his last night home on the midway, for
that matter. But then again, that was Glory.

He listened to the tinny carousel music and the babble of the crowd,
the laughter and the mingled drone of barkers. He smelled the tang
of roasting popcorn and the hot-doggy stink of the lunchcounters. He
looked at the ferris wheel and the crazy swoop of lights that was the
scenic railway and the people crowding along the boardwalk with kewpie
dolls and spun-sugar candy cones in their hands.

Question! his mind demanded: Is this reality?

Answer: Of course. What else?

I've been too long away from cities, he thought. Too many silent nights
in the desert, too many high flights in cold blue air. Too long away
from Glory?

He felt guilty and depressed at the thought. It wasn't the way for a
man to feel. Not before the great adventure. Still, he couldn't avoid
an almost homesick longing for the deep darkness of the desert and the
silver ship waiting there.

Soon, he thought. Three days; three days and a few hours.

He felt a tug at his arm.

"Pete!" Glory was smiling up at him, half-aggrieved, half-loving. He
looked again at the garishly painted sign.

RIDE THE ROCKET!

"Let's ride it, Pete," Glory said. "Let's!"

There was something in her smile that touched him. Pride? That, and
love and youth. To her, he was _the_ man. For her, and for all the
world. The one who was going to reach out beyond the far horizon and
touch the sky and bring back a pot of gold for everyone.

She thinks no one else could do it, he told himself. That's love. There
were a dozen qualified men, and yet--

The moonshot was his.

RIDE THE ROCKET!

"All right, baby," he said.

As he paid their fare for the rocket-ride, Pete found himself looking
at the girl in the booth. Tired eyes and stringy hennaed hair. No
dreams there. He had an impulse to tell her that soon he'd really be
riding the rocket and that from then on things would be different.

New frontiers and new dreams for everybody. Up and up.

       *       *       *       *       *

The girl's eyes met his, and it was Pete who looked away. You don't
talk frontiers to pale, worn faces and eyes bleached of color by tinny
music and stinks and men.

They walked up a wooden ramp to where a little metal bullet on rails
waited. The paint, once bright, was all scuffy. A sour-faced attendant
in grayish coveralls stood by a large lever.

"Fasten ya seat belts, Mac."

"We're off to the sky," Glory said.

Somewhere old machinery wheezed.

The little bullet began to move along the rails toward a hinged
trap-door in a wall painted to look like clouds.

"Hold my hand, Pete," Glory said breathlessly.

Glory, Glory, he thought. Young and simple and in love with life. Any
kind of life. Real or unreal. Glory with a bubbling laughter, a zest, a
faith. Maybe it was really for her that he was taking the big flight.
If only he could bring back the pot of gold. If only he could tell
weary Man that the sky was all his. He thought of the strained, unhappy
faces in the streets, the fear-filled eyes. If he could return and say
to them: "Here's your new frontier!" Yes, by God, it was worth the
work, and the risk. Glory was right. It was something to be proud of.

I'm going to the moon!

Me, Pete Moore, to the _moon_!

"There it is, Pete!"

They had bumped through the painted door into a musty semi-darkness.
The walls were perforated with holes for stars, and from somewhere
below a huge yellowish moon was rising.

Off a short way to the right was a glowing papier-mâché globe painted
with broad bands slightly askew, and behind that was another with rings.

A loudspeaker whistled tinnily and overhead, on wire runners, an
electric globe crossed the dim chamber, pieces of yellow and white
crepe paper fluttering feebly behind.

"Oh, Pete! A comet?"

"Sure enough, Glory," he said.

The rumbling little bullet skirted the walls and Pete could see the
electric lights behind the holes. Stars, he thought sardonically. Close
enough to touch. Lucky us.

"There's Mars, Pete," Glory said, squeezing his hand.

I'm getting disenchanted, he thought.

A red ball, all painted with canals and white polar caps far too big.

They should have had a technical advisor on this project, he thought.
Paging Palomar.

The bullet began its second circuit of the papier-mâché universe,
and the moon was high now, projected on the wall by some kind of
lantern-slide lamp. There was a face on the moon.

It began then--just a tiny bead of fear way down inside his belly. But
it grew. He felt suffocated, claustrophobic, oppressed by fakery and
cheapness.

Glory was laughing with delight. "Oh, it's wonderful!"

Shut up! Pete thought savagely. Shut up, _shut up_!

With an effort, he got hold of himself.

I've been working too hard. I'm jittery thinking about the moonshot,
and all this seedy burlesque just irritates me. There's nothing to get
heated up about. Calm down.

But why am I suddenly afraid?

He looked again at the ridiculous moon with its smirking face. He saw
that plaster had fallen from the wall in places, peeling away, leaving
the bare hexagons of wire and laths.

My God, he thought. A chickenwire sky.

He thought again of the girl in the ticket booth, and of the tired,
frightened people all laughing too much and shoving and running outside.

The bullet started down at last, toward the hinged door. On this side
it was painted to look like Earth, with a distorted map of North
America. All wrong, somehow.

Pete felt ill. It was as though someone were making ill-tempered fun
of the dreams and the tall silver ship waiting out on the desert.
Cheapening it. Laughing nastily.

The little bullet bumped through the seedy, scruffy Earth and out
into the night of the midway, out into the crowd-sounds and music and
hot-doggy smells.

"It was fun, Pete," Glory said.

He helped her out onto the rickety platform. He had the insane notion
that the girl in the ticket booth and the lounging attendant were
laughing at him.

"It sure was, honey," he said wearily, still feeling the illogical fear
of he-knew-not-what inside himself. "Real fun."

Glory looked up at him, eyes alight and almost feverishly gay. "I did
what you are going to do. I touched the sky!"

       *       *       *       *       *

New frontiers. New lands in the sky. New hope.

It was quiet. The jet was still and no sound was anywhere in the ship.
Now a soft tick from the timer. A whisper from the questing radarscope.
And again, the stillness.

We've done it, Pete thought. We've really done it. The hard part is
over.

Ride the rocket!

He remembered the pain of the takeoff and the absolute panic that had
welled up in him when the irrevocability of his action came home. He
remembered riding a tail of red fire up out of the hot desert air of
New Mexico into the still blue, and then the silence and the almost
unnerving thrill of the realization that the moonshot was going to
succeed.

The radio hissed at him with the voice of the desert base half around
the world.

"Hello moonshot. This is Base. All's okay. Stage one landed in the
Gulf. Stage two just reported floating off the Azores. Good show."

Pete lifted himself from the acceleration couch and felt a moment of
nausea and panic as he floated toward the ceiling of the tiny cell.
Free flight. He steadied himself and checked the flow of telemetered
information binding the ship to the glowing curve far below. All okay.
Except that--

Except that you're still afraid, he told himself. Not just the normal
fear-of-falling-afraid that the psychs told you about. Afraid like
before--in that silly damn carnival ride thing.

Afraid of the dark?

No, not quite that. More a closed in, cheated feeling.

Premonition? Nonsense.

He clung to the radarscope, trembling. With every rushing mile upward,
outward, his fear was growing. It wasn't right, it didn't make sense.
But he felt as though he were rushing straight at a brick wall, head
down, eyes closed.

He lit the telescreens.

The stars look funny, he thought uneasily.

The timer ticked. The radar whispered, searching. Time passed and his
fear grew thicker, less reasonable.

His fingers dug hard at the metal of the instrument panel as the night
slipped by outside the hull. The ship's orbital ellipse, Kepler's
contribution to the new frontier, was established.

Pete thought, something's wrong. Very wrong. The stars look queer.

The constellations in the telescreens were distorting, and there
was something ahead of the ship where there should be nothing but
emptiness. It showed in the screen for just an instant and was lost. A
ringed sphere.

I must be dreaming, Pete thought. But then, what is reality? That
sphere was Saturn. And it was a hundred yards across.

Reality? _Insanity!_

I'd better check with Base, Pete thought, and tell them I've gone off
my rocker, that I'm suffering hallucinations.

But he did nothing except cling shaking to the panel, watching the
distorted stars in the screen. They were blurring now, streaks of light
that seemed to be very close to the ship.

       *       *       *       *       *

And then came the moon. It came and went very quickly, pocked and
scarred and with only one face. And _small_. Very small and very close.

Pete felt closed in, suffocated. The radar alarm was screaming at him
that something was near, too near.

He clamped down savagely on himself. There was an explanation
somewhere. He had to find it! He had to think!

Item. The stars. Distorted. Blurred.

Item. Saturn. A hundred yards across.

Item. A tiny replica of the moon, like a pimple on the inside of an egg.

Replica? No. _The_ moon. The only moon. Reality.

Hypothesis. Say that space is not as men imagined it. Say that it is an
illusion, without lightyears, without great suns, without huge planets.
Say for the sake of argument that it is a shell with holes in it, and
light outside, and the Sun itself an illusion of heat and power, and--

Say that this hollow shell is man's new frontier; a fraud, a toy for
things outside--

The alarm screamed at him. The ship was plunging toward the blurry
light of the stars.

With an icy hand on his heart, Pete Moore turned to look at the
telescreen behind him. A misty blue ball swam in musty darkness. The
oceans gleamed in the light of the sun, cloud masses whitened it, the
wrinkled face of the land looked unreal--

He began to laugh. Tears streaked his cheeks as he pounded his bloody
fists against the instrument panel in time to the clanging of the alarm.

The Earth, the Earth--

It _did_ rather look like papier-mâché.

He touched the sky.