Every writer must seek his own Flowery Kingdom in imagination's widedemesne, and if that search can begin and end on Earth his problem hasbeen greatly simplified. In post-war Japan Walt Sheldon has found not onlyserenity, but complete freedom to write undisturbed about the things hetreasures most. A one-time Air Force officer, he has turned to fantasy inhis lighter moments, to bring us such brightly sparkling little gems as this.
The tiny spaceship had been built for a journey to a star. But itssmall, mischievous pilots had a rendezvous with destiny—on Earth.
I must admit that at first Iwasn't sure I was hearing thosenoises. It was in a park near thenuclear propulsion center—a cool,green spot, with the leaves all tellingeach other to hush, be quiet,and the soft breeze stirring them upagain. I had known precisely sucha secluded little green sanctuary justover the hill from Mr. Riordan'sfarm when I was a boy.
Now it was a place I came towhen I had a problem to thrash out.That morning I had been trying towork out an equation to give thecoefficient of discharge for the matterin combustion. You may call itgas, if you wish, for we treated itlike gas at the center for convenience—asit came from the rockettubes in our engine.
Without this coefficient to giveus control, we would have lacked aworkable equation when we setabout putting the first moon rocketaround those extraordinary enginesof ours, which were still in the undevelopedblueprint stage.
I see I shall have to explain this,although I had hoped to get rightalong with my story. When youstart from scratch, matter dischargedfrom any orifice has a velocity directlyproportional to the squareroot of the pressure-head driving it.But when you actually put thingstogether, contractions or expansionsin the gas, surface roughnessand other factors make the velocitya bit smaller.
At the terrible discharge speedof nuclear explosion—which iswhat the drive amounts to despitethe fact that it is simply water inwhich nuclear salts have been previouslydissolved—this small factormakes quite a difference. I hadto figure everything into it—diameterof the nozzle, sharpness of theedge, the velocity of approach to thepoint of discharge, atomic weightand structure— Oh, there is somuch of this that if you're not anuclear engineer yourself it's certainto weary you.
Perhaps you had better take myword for it that without this equation—correctlystated, mind you—mankindwould be well advised notto make a first trip to the moon.And all this talk of coefficients andequations sits strangely, you mightsay, upon the tongue of a mannamed Kevin Francis Houlihan.But I am, after all, a scientist. If Ihad not been a specialist in my fieldI would hardly have found myselfengaged in vital research at thecenter.
Anyway, I heard these littlenoises in the park. They soundedlike small working sounds, blendingin eerily mysterious fashion with achorus of small voices. I thought atfirst it might be children at play,but then at the time I was a bitabsent-minded. I tiptoed to the edgeof the trees, not wanting to depriveany small scalawags of their pleasure,and peered out between thebranches. And what do you supposeI saw? Not children, but agroup of little people, hard at work.
There was a leader, an older onewith a crank face. He was beatingthe air with his arms and piping:"Over here, now! All right, bringthose electrical connections overhere—and see you're not slow astreacle about it!"
There were perhaps fifty of the