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Operation Interstellar
Example in this ebook
CHAPTER 1
Paul Grayson walked the city street slowly. He was sauntering towards the spaceport, but he was in no hurry. He had allowed himself plenty of time to breathe the fresh spring air, to listen to the myriad of sounds made by his fellow men, and to revel in the grand freedom that being out in the open gave him. Soon enough he would be breathing canned air, pungent with the odor of compressor oil and the tang of the greenery used to replenish the oxygen, unable to walk freely more than a few dozen steps, and unable to see what lies beyond his viewports.
Occasionally his eyes looked along the low southern sky towards Alpha Centauri. Proxima, of course, could not be resolved by the naked eye, much less the stinking little overheated mote that rotated about Proxima. Obviously unfit for human life and patently incapable of spawning life of its own, it was Paul Grayson's destination, and would be his home for a few days or a few weeks depending entirely upon whether things went good or bad.
Only during the last four out of two thousand millions of years of its life had this planet been useful. Man needed a place to stand; not to move the earth with Archimedes's lever but to survey the galaxy. Proxima Centauri I was the only planet in the trinary and as bad as it was, it was useful for a space station.
In an hour, Paul Grayson would be locked in a capsule of metal hurling himself through space towards Proxima I. He was looking forward to ten days cooped up in a spacecraft of the type furnished by the Bureau of Astrogation to its engineers which was a far cry from the sumptuous craft run by the Big Brass. His confines would be lined with functional scientific equipment; his air supply would be medically acceptable but aesthetically horrible; and his vision limited to the cabin, for beyond the viewports would be only the formless, endless, abysmal blackness of absolutely nothing while the ship mounted into multiples of the speed of light.
Then days in a building filled to the dome with power equipment and radio gear; timing mechanism and recorders; and a refrigerator set-up that struggled with the awesome heat poured into Proxima I by its close-by luminary but which succeeded only in lowering the temperature to the point where the potting compound in the transformers did not run out, where the calibrating resistors would not change their values, where the recording machines would still make a record.
And then again more days in the ship before it returned to earth. Call it thirty days and understand why Paul Grayson sauntered along killing time in the fresh air before taking off.
Paul grinned. Four years ago he had arrived a full hour early and wasted the hour in the smelly ship instead of filling his lungs with clean fresh air. Never again. He would arrive a full five minutes before check-in time.
He heard some radio music, its tone stripped of high frequencies from its passage through the slit of a partially-opened window. He sniffed the air and laughed because someone was cooking corned beef and cabbage. Then he was out of the range of the radio music. Paul liked music. He hummed a tune as he walked, and then as the fancy struck him, he started to sing. It was faint singing; it would not have carried more than a few feet, but it sufficed for Paul. It was a refrain from an early atomic-age ballad:
"Round and round and round go the deuterons
Round and round the magnet swings them
Round and round and round go the deuterons
Smack! In the target goes the ion beam!"
Paul stopped his song because the interesting click of high heels on the sidewalk pointed to the approach of someone who might view a cappella singing as an indication of inebriation.
CHAPTER 1
Paul Grayson walked the city street slowly. He was sauntering towards the spaceport, but he was in no hurry. He had allowed himself plenty of time to breathe the fresh spring air, to listen to the myriad of sounds made by his fellow men, and to revel in the grand freedom that being out in the open gave him. Soon enough he would be breathing canned air, pungent with the odor of compressor oil and the tang of the greenery used to replenish the oxygen, unable to walk freely more than a few dozen steps, and unable to see what lies beyond his viewports.
Occasionally his eyes looked along the low southern sky towards Alpha Centauri. Proxima, of course, could not be resolved by the naked eye, much less the stinking little overheated mote that rotated about Proxima. Obviously unfit for human life and patently incapable of spawning life of its own, it was Paul Grayson's destination, and would be his home for a few days or a few weeks depending entirely upon whether things went good or bad.
Only during the last four out of two thousand millions of years of its life had this planet been useful. Man needed a place to stand; not to move the earth with Archimedes's lever but to survey the galaxy. Proxima Centauri I was the only planet in the trinary and as bad as it was, it was useful for a space station.
In an hour, Paul Grayson would be locked in a capsule of metal hurling himself through space towards Proxima I. He was looking forward to ten days cooped up in a spacecraft of the type furnished by the Bureau of Astrogation to its engineers which was a far cry from the sumptuous craft run by the Big Brass. His confines would be lined with functional scientific equipment; his air supply would be medically acceptable but aesthetically horrible; and his vision limited to the cabin, for beyond the viewports would be only the formless, endless, abysmal blackness of absolutely nothing while the ship mounted into multiples of the speed of light.
Then days in a building filled to the dome with power equipment and radio gear; timing mechanism and recorders; and a refrigerator set-up that struggled with the awesome heat poured into Proxima I by its close-by luminary but which succeeded only in lowering the temperature to the point where the potting compound in the transformers did not run out, where the calibrating resistors would not change their values, where the recording machines would still make a record.
And then again more days in the ship before it returned to earth. Call it thirty days and understand why Paul Grayson sauntered along killing time in the fresh air before taking off.
Paul grinned. Four years ago he had arrived a full hour early and wasted the hour in the smelly ship instead of filling his lungs with clean fresh air. Never again. He would arrive a full five minutes before check-in time.
He heard some radio music, its tone stripped of high frequencies from its passage through the slit of a partially-opened window. He sniffed the air and laughed because someone was cooking corned beef and cabbage. Then he was out of the range of the radio music. Paul liked music. He hummed a tune as he walked, and then as the fancy struck him, he started to sing. It was faint singing; it would not have carried more than a few feet, but it sufficed for Paul. It was a refrain from an early atomic-age ballad:
"Round and round and round go the deuterons
Round and round the magnet swings them
Round and round and round go the deuterons
Smack! In the target goes the ion beam!"
Paul stopped his song because the interesting click of high heels on the sidewalk pointed to the approach of someone who might view a cappella singing as an indication of inebriation.
- GenresScience Fiction
212 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1950
4 people are currently reading
22 people want to read
About the author
George O. Smith
215 books11 followersGeorge Oliver Smith (April 9, 1911 - May 27, 1981) (also known as Wesley Long) was an American science fiction author. He is not to be confused with George H. Smith, another American science fiction author.
Smith was an active contributor to Astounding Science Fiction during the Golden Age of Science Fiction in the 1940s. His collaboration with the magazine's editor, John W. Campbell, Jr. was interrupted when Campbell's first wife, Doña, left him in 1949 and married Smith.
Smith continued regularly publishing science fiction novels and stories until 1960. His output greatly diminished in the 1960s and 1970s when he had a job that required his undivided attention. He was given the First Fandom Hall of Fame award in 1980.
He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers.
Smith wrote mainly about outer space, with such works as Operation Interstellar (1950), Lost in Space (1959), and Troubled Star (1957).
He is remembered chiefly for his Venus Equilateral series of short stories about a communications station in outer space. The stories were collected in Venus Equilateral (1947), which was later expanded as The Complete Venus Equilateral (1976).
His novel The Fourth "R" (1959) - re-published as The Brain Machine (1968) - was a digression from his focus on outer space, and provides one of the more interesting examinations of a child prodigy in science fiction.
Smith was an active contributor to Astounding Science Fiction during the Golden Age of Science Fiction in the 1940s. His collaboration with the magazine's editor, John W. Campbell, Jr. was interrupted when Campbell's first wife, Doña, left him in 1949 and married Smith.
Smith continued regularly publishing science fiction novels and stories until 1960. His output greatly diminished in the 1960s and 1970s when he had a job that required his undivided attention. He was given the First Fandom Hall of Fame award in 1980.
He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers.
Smith wrote mainly about outer space, with such works as Operation Interstellar (1950), Lost in Space (1959), and Troubled Star (1957).
He is remembered chiefly for his Venus Equilateral series of short stories about a communications station in outer space. The stories were collected in Venus Equilateral (1947), which was later expanded as The Complete Venus Equilateral (1976).
His novel The Fourth "R" (1959) - re-published as The Brain Machine (1968) - was a digression from his focus on outer space, and provides one of the more interesting examinations of a child prodigy in science fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 22, 2022
George O. Smith is one of the Golden-Age science fiction writers who filled the pages of John Campbell’s Astounding. Smith’s Operation Interstellar (1950) is a good example of what Campbell encouraged his writers to produce. It is a space opera, filled with engineering details, describing a future of boundless technological optimism but surprisingly little social change. Paul Grayson is about to take off on a one-man voyage to Proxima Centauri I, a nearby star system where Grayson wants to test an interstellar communication system. As he walks toward the spaceport, which resembles a shopping mall parking lot for rockets, he is hit on the head and a look-alike thief tries to steal his rocket. Security at the spaceport is absurdly easy to penetrate. Spacecraft stand unlocked and ready to launch and the security guard at the gate does not recognize Grayson when he shows up without an ID. The idea that early star travel would require a large, organized scientific and engineering team is nowhere present. That said, Smith does a good job of explaining the difficulties of astral navigation in an age when computers were in their mainframe infancy. If you liked the Heinlein juveniles like Rocket Ship Galileo, you will probably like this one too. 3.5 stars.
March 15, 2016
Interesting idea, but it desperately needed a good editor!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews