Authentic Science Fiction, December 1951 — page 28: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

26 THE MOON IS HEAVEN You glance at the chronometer. One minute to go. What can one do in a minute? Nothing. You haven’t even got time to get up and leave the ship. Before you’d get half- way down the ladder, the manager would have pressed the remote control release button and the ship would fly up- wards. And you’d be crushed against the metal like a fly under an invisible swat. You glance at the chronometer. The second hand is sweeping round, racing towards zero second. You find you can see it without raising your head. Fifteen seconds. Ten seconds. Five. Three. Two—— Twelve noon exactly! The roar is much less loud than you had expected, but the pressure is worse. A great oppressive giant wants to sieve you through the mattress, and all the time he croons a high whine into your ears. Your head has been caught on the turn. You can’t move it. You can’t even close your eyes. You just have to lie there under that crushing hand and watch the chronometer. Two lines of thought go on at once. One is silly, made up of funny things about the London Circle—because they gave you the chronometer. The other is not funny. It’s all about astronautics. You don’t know. much about it, but you’ve picked up a few details from the technical points in your articles. You know that the rocket will rush straight up under a thrust of four gee to about sixty-two miles. That should take about fifteen seconds. It seems to be taking days. Then it will curve over towards the horizontal and gravity won’t have much effect thereafter, and will very soon fade out altogether, but that won’t stop the crushing. You know that it’s not gravity that’s pushing you down. It’s just the acceleration, and until the rocket’s reached escape velocity that is getting bigger. Through your confused and muddled brain the thought comes that Hermann Oberth did the work on this ‘‘ synergic curve ’’ and found that it enables a big reduction in mass comicbooks.com