THE BIG LEAP

BY CHARLES E. FRITCH

The Moon is green cheese and the stars are eyes and we're all fleas on a big space animal! But don't let it worry you—unless you take the first trip out into space—all alone!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

It did not terrify Cantrell to know he was up so high and going so fast, going higher and faster than any human before him. He would be up even higher the next day, he remembered, going so high and so fast he would not come down again.

It would be a shame to leave Earth, he knew. There was security in her firmness, with no great space underfoot through which to drop down, down, down. Up here there was emptiness all around. Emptiness and, except for the dull throb of the rocket engines, silence. Out there—he looked up—there would be a greater emptiness, a greater silence, an infinity of nothingness in all directions.

He felt suddenly cold at the thought, and then shame swept over him, forcing the paralysis aside. Fear of the unknown again, he thought distastefully. No matter how much the psychologists tried, they could not erase that icy prickling sensation that came with its contemplation. They were all children when it came to space, kids frightened by the dark alleys of the universe, fearing the bogey man that waited lurking in the velvet depths through which no one had passed before. Probably they would find nothing out there to fear, nothing at all, and yet the feeling would go on and on, whenever men had to face the unknown, whenever they had to force themselves whistling past silent graveyards that contained only the fear of fear.

With swift precision he pressed studs on the control panel before him, and a bank of jets on the side of his rocket flared into sudden life, pushing, turning, pulsing flame into the thin air of the outside. His gyro-chair made an effortless compensation for the altered direction. The ship banked, leveled, then leaped forward on a new course. Cantrell smiled. He could handle the ship now as though it were a part of him. On the big leap he expected no trouble.

Not so the planners, who refused to leave the minutest stone unturned in their search for flaws in man or rocket. Physical checkups were made as often as twice a day. Psychiatrists had 

  P 1/10 next