CONSULATE
BY WILLIAM TENN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories June 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CHAPTER I
Sail in the Sloop
I see by the papers where Professor Fronac says that interplanetarytravel will have to go through what he calls a period of incubation. Hesays that after reaching the moon, we now have hit so many new problemsthat we must sit down and puzzle out new theories to fit them before wecan build a ship that will get us to Venus or Mars.
Of course, the Army and Navy are supervising all rocket experimentsthese days, and the professor's remarks are censored by them. Thatmakes his speeches hard to understand.
But you know and I know what Professor Fronac is really saying.
The Second Martian Expedition was a complete flop. Just like the FirstMartian Expedition and the Venusian ones. The ships came back with allthe machinery working fine and all the crews grinning with health.
But they hadn't been to Mars. They couldn't make it.
The professor goes on to say how wonderful it is that science is sowonderful, because no matter how great the obstacles, the good oldscientific approach will eventually overcome them. This, he claims, isthe drawing of unprejudiced conclusions from all the data available.
Well, if that's what Professor Fronac really believes, he sure didn'tact like it last August when I went all the way to Arizona to tell himjust what he'd been doing wrong in those latest rocket experiments.Let me tell you, even if I am only a small-town grocer and he's a bigphysics professor with a Nobel Prize under his belt, he had no call tothreaten me with a jail sentence just because I slipped past the Armyguards at the field and hid in his bedroom! I was there only because Iwanted to tell him he was on the wrong track.
If it hadn't been for poor "Fatty" Myers and that option on theWinthrop store which he's going to lose by Christmas, I'd have walkedout on the whole business right then and kept my mouth shut. After all,it's no skin off my nose if we never go any further than the moon. I'mhappier right here on terra firma, and I do mean terra.But, if I convince scientists, maybe I'll convince Edna.
So, for the last time, Professor Fronac and anybody else who'sinterested—if you really want to go places in the Solar System, youhave to come down here to Massachusetts. You have to take a boat out onCassowary Cove at night, every night, and wait. I'll help if you acthalfway decent—and I'm sure Fatty Myers will do what he can—but it'llstill add up to a whole lot of patience. Shoin wasn't dreefed in a riz.So they say.
Fatty had just told his assistant to take charge of the gas stationthat evening in March and walked slowly past the Winthrop store up tomy grocery window. He waited till my wife was busy with a customer;then he caught my eye and pointed at his watch.
I shucked off my apron and pulled the heavy black sweater over my head.I had my raincoat in one hand and my fishing tackle in the other, andwas just tip-toeing out when Edna saw me.
She came boiling around the counter and blocked the door with her rightarm. "And where do you think you're going and leaving me to do the workof two?" she asked in that special sin-chasing voice she saves for mytip-t