The Outward Urge by John Wyndham Read Free Book Online

I am Ticker Troon’s son - the man who got there by easy preferment. For the same reason I’m still here, at the age of fifty - five years over the usual grounding age; and keeping younger men from promotion. I’m known to be in bad with half a dozen politicians and much of the top brass in the Space-House. Not to be trusted in my judgement because I’m an enthusiast - i.e. a man with a one-track mind. Would have been thrown out years ago if they had dared to face the outcry - Ticker Troon’s son, again. And now there’s this.’
    ‘Michael,’ she said calmly. ‘Just why are you letting this get you down? What’s behind it?’
    He looked hard at her for a moment before he said, with a touch of suspicion:
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Simply what I say - what is behind this uncharacteristic outburst? You are perfectly well aware that if you had not earned your rank you would not be here - you’d have been harmlessly stowed away at a desk somewhere, years ago. As for the rest - well, it’s mostly true. But the self-pity angle isn’t like you. You could simply have cashed in and lain back comfortably for life on the strength of being Ticker Troon’s son, but you didn’t. You took the name he left you into your hand, and you deliberately used it for a weapon. It was a good weapon, and of course it made enemies for you, so of course they maligned you. But you know, and hundreds of thousands of people know, that if you had not used it as you did we should not be here today: there wouldn’t be any British Moon Station: and your father would have sacrificed himself for nothing.’
    ‘Self-pity - ‘ he began, indignantly.
    ‘Phony self-pity,’ she corrected, looking at him steadily.
    He turned away.
    ‘Would you like to tell me what the proper feeling is when, at a time of crisis, the men that you have worked with and for - men that you thought had loyalty and respect, even some affection, for you, turn icy cold, and send you to Coventry? It certainly is not the time to feel pride of achievement, is it?’ She let the question hang for a moment, then:
    ‘Understanding?’ she suggested. ‘A more sympathetic consideration of the other man’s point of view - and the state of his mind, perhaps?’ She paused for several seconds. ‘We are none of us in a normal state of mind,’ she went on. ‘There is far too much emotion compressed in this place for anyone’s judgement to be quite rational. It’s harder for some than for others. And we don’t all have quite the same things uppermost in our minds,’ she added.
    Troon made no reply. He continued to stand with his back to her, gazing steadily out of the window. Presently, she walked across to stand beside him.
    The view outside was bleak. In the foreground an utterly barren plain; a flatness broken only by various-sized chunks of rock, and occasionally the rim of a small crater. The harshness of it was hard on the eyes; the lit surfaces so bright, the shadows so stygian that, if one looked at any one part too long, it dazzled and seemed to dance about.
    Beyond the plain, the mountains stuck up like cardboard cut-outs. Eyes accustomed to the weathered mountains of Earth found the sharpness, the height, the vivid jaggedness of them disturbing. Newcomers were always awed, and usually frightened, by them. ‘A dead world,’ they always said, as they looked on the view for the first time, and they said it in hushed voices, with a feeling that they were seeing the ultimate dreadful place.
    Too facile, too earthbound a sensation, Troon often thought. Death implied corruption, decay, and change, but on the moon there was nothing to corrupt, nothing that could change. There was only the impersonal savagery of nature, random, eternal, frozen, and senseless. Something that the Greeks had glimpsed in their conception of Chaos.
    Over the horizon to the right hung a fluorescent quarter-segment of the Earth; a wide wedge bounded on one side by the night line, and serrated at