ce attained, has no real end."
He gestured toward the black landscape outside. "There's the frontier.
Space. The one thing that could bring human wars to an end. A vast,
limitless frontier which could drive men's spirits upward and outward
for the rest of time. And that frontier seemed unattainable. It was
blocked off by a wall, by the jaws of a trap. Oh, they tried. After the
first war the work began. The second war contributed unimaginably to the
technical knowledge. But after the second war, they could go no further.
Because it cost money, it required a tremendous effort on the part of
the people of a great nation to do it, and they couldn't see why they
should spend the money to get to space. After all, they had to work up
the atomics and new weapons for the next war--it was a trap, as strong
and treacherous as any the people of the world had ever encountered.

"The answer, of course, was obvious. Each war brought a great surge of
technological development, to build better weapons, to fight bigger
wars. Some developments led to extremely beneficial ends, too--if it
hadn't been for the second war, a certain British biologist might still
be piddling around his understaffed, underpaid laboratory, wishing he
had more money, and wondering why it was that that dirty patch of mold
on his petri dish seemed to keep bacteria from growing--but the second
war created a sudden, frantic, urgent demand for something, anything,
that would _stop infection--fast_. And in no time, penicillin was in
mass production, saving untold thousands of lives. There was no question
of money. Look at the Manhattan project. How many millions went into
that? It gave us atomic power, for war, and for peace. For peaceful
purposes, the money would never have been spent. But if it was for the
sake of war--"

Ingersoll smiled tiredly. "Sounds insane, doesn't it? But look at the
record. I looked at the record, way back at the end of the war with
China. Other men looked at the record, too. We got together, and talked.
We knew that the military advantage of a rocket base on the moon could
be a deciding factor in another major war. Military experts had
recognized that fact back in the 1950's. Another war could give men the
technological kick they needed to get them to space--possibly _in time_.
If men got to space before they destroyed themselves, the trap would be
broken, the frontier would be opened, and men could turn their energies
away from destruction