ille, Utah. He'll survive, of course. But put the
man in the car with no controls for him to operate and then run the
thing completely through remote transmission, and you've eliminated
the purpose for the man. Survival as an afterthought might be a thing
to test, if you didn't care a hoot about man. Survival for its own
sake doesn't mean anything unless I've missed the whole point of
living, somewhere along the line.

Bannister once described to me the firing of a prototype V-2. The
firing took place after sunset. When the rocket had achieved a certain
altitude, it suddenly took on a brilliant yellow glow. It had passed
beyond the shadow of the earth and risen into the sunlight. Here was
Bannister's passion. He was out to establish the feasibility of
putting a rocket vehicle on the moon. It could have a man in it, or a
monkey. Both were just as useless. Neither could fly the thing back,
even if it did get down in one piece. It could tell us nothing about
the moon we didn't already know. Getting it down in one piece, of
course, was the reason why they gave Bannister the project to begin
with.

So Bannister is now a triumphant hero, despite the societies for the
prevention of cruelty to animals. But nobody understood it. Bannister
put a vehicle on the moon. We were the first to do it. We proved
something by doing nothing. Perhaps the situation of true classified
information is not too healthy a one, at that. You see, we've had
rockets with that kind of power for an awfully long time now. Maybe
some of them know what he's up to. When I think about that, I really
become frightened.

* * * * *

The monkey, I suppose, is dead. The most we can hope for is that he
died fast. It's very like another kind of miserable hope I felt once,
a long time ago, for a lot of people who could be offered little more
than hope for a fast death, because of something somebody was trying
to prove. There's some consolation this time. It's really only a
monkey.

This I know, they'll never publish a picture of the vehicle. Someone
might start to wonder why the cabin seems equipped to carry a man.

* * * * *

When you're out in a clear night in summer, the sky looks very
friendly, the moon a big pleasant place where nothing at all can
happen to you. The vehicle used in Project Argus had a porthole. I
can't imagine why. The monkey must have been able to see out the
porthole. Did