Alexander Lazarevich - The Moon Dream

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THE MOON DREAM

AlexanderLazarevich

A legend is an imaginative work of fiction that purports to

betrue.

Definition from a dictionary

All his life was one long road to the Moon. All hislife he

was racingagainst time to reach it. Sometimes itseemed to him

thathe would be too late, the span of human life being short for

someone who had had to start virtually from scratch, from a

fragile glider, a plaything of winds, to gradually build up and

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enhancehis design into a spaceship capable of taking man to the

Moon. He hadbuilt the glider when he was still very young, but

even backthen he was longing for greater things than just flying

inthe air, remaining a prisoner of the Earth's atmosphere.

Even backthen, he saw the Moon in his dreams. Therehe was ,

opening thehatch, climbing down a short ladder in his cumbersome

spacesuit, to put his foot on the rocky surface. The rocks flooded

with adazzling Sun set against the inky blackness of sky. A land

ofsilent, dazzling, and dead beauty. The only relief for the eyes

being a small blue sickle of Earth in the black sky. And,

surroundedwith all this boundless lifeless Nature, there She was

- The Machine, The Ship, the material manifestation of human

thought, a particle that had absorbed all the achievements of many

millenniaof the Earth's civilization, a small fragment of Home,

thatcan shelter the cosmonaut from the abyss of Space...

The firsttime he experienced that feeling had been when he

was tryingout his glider - the vast emptiness of the sky might

have beenoverpowering, but he was inside the womb of his Machine

- andthat made him invincible. His life in those moments totally

depended on his Machine, and he loved her for that feeling of

Salvation thatShe gave him. He loved his Machines andthat love

wasan unending source of happiness to him. But in the moon dreams

everything waseven more vivid, even more delicious.The feeling

ofhappiness was hundreds, thousands of times more intense ...

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At firsthe himself did not believe that this dream could be

transformed into reality. The distance from a glider to a

spaceshipwas too great. To build a spaceship onewould need the

laborof hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people. And the

people thatwere living around him did not know any moon dreams.

There was nobody to build the ship with. "A dream, just a

dream..." - thought he ...

But then, the wars came. First, the second world war,then a

"cold" one. People suddenly needed rockets to hurl atomic bombs at

each other.From one continent to another. Far enough notto see

the millionsone would kill. A nod of the Great Leader was enough

to maketens of thousands of people start building rockets - not

formoon dreams, for a crust of stale bread.

He was appointed Chief designer and he constructed a rocket.

It could hurl a hydrogen bomb all the way toAmerica , and that was

what the generals demanded. The generals were quite happy. They

did not know that the rocket could do something else as well,

something which was not in the specifications.That " something"

was onlyknown to the "Chief" (as his subordinates came to call

him). What he knew was that after a certain modification that

rocketcould put a satellite into orbit around the Earth, and even

a manned spacecraft. It could even deliver a cargo tothe Moon ,

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albeit a small one (a man with a life support system and an

additionalrocket to bring him back from the Moon would have been

a load far beyond its capacity), but he felt that he had already

traveledhalf way to his Moon Dream. Now, the criticalfactor was

time. He was no longer young. He had to make it in time...

It wasabout that time that the Great Leader died, and to

the power in the country rose a new ruler, who was known as a

great liberaland who proclaimed peaceful co-existence with the

other nationsof the world. The Chief realized thatto make his

Moon dream come true, he would now have to become not only an

engineer, not only an industrial manager, but a politician as

well. "Let us," - he proposed to the new ruler - "demonstrate to

the entire world our power, but also our peaceful intentions.

Let's launchthe most powerful rocket in the world, but without

the bomb, for a purely scientific purpose - let it put into Earth

orbit a satellite, and later, perhaps, a satellite with a man

onboard." The newruler took a fancy to the idea, regardless of

the fact that he had a very vague notion of what a satellite

really was. The most important thing for him was to cut Americans

downto size. For several years thoseguys had been boasting about

theirplans to launch a satellite - without any visible result.

To spite the Americans, the new ruler gave his go-ahead for

launching thefirst satellite, and then, the first man in space.

What thenew ruler especially liked about the latter was the fact

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that the cosmonaut did not see any trace of God in heaven while

visitingthere, which, beyond any reasonable doubt, was to him a

final proofof atheism and historical materialism, which, in its

turn, augured well for the expected speedy arrival of the bright

communistfuture.

Meantime, the "cursed capitalists" turned green with envy.

The handsomest and the youngest of American presidents summoned to

theWhite House all his scientific advisors and told them:

"We, therichest and freest nation in the world, are lagging

in space behind Russia, a country bled dry by its totalitarian

regime! How canAmerica ever wipe off this national disgrace? How

- that's what I want to hear from you."

And oneof his advisors said: "It's 1961 now. If weget down

to workimmediately, before the 60s are out we can land a man on

themoon.Hopefully, the first in the world."

- "Let's do it!" - said the Handsome President.

- "But whatabout the enormous appropriations that will be

need..."

- "I'll bring the Congress around." And hedid bring them

around...

Two yearslater the Handsome President was assassinated, when

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he wasgoing around the city ofDallas in a beautiful automobile,

sitting nextto a beautiful woman, his wife, who then beautifully

mourned him in front of a world-wide television audiences (the

funeralof the Handsome President turned out to be the first world-

wide TV broadcast in history transmitted via a communications

satellite), but soon thereafter recomposed herself and married a

Greek multimillionaire.

One more year passed, and the Soviet Ruler, known as a

Liberal and a Peacemaker, who liberally gave away the Soviet

taxpayers' money for cutting Americans down to size and for anti-

religiouspropaganda, was deposed by his former deputy, who used

to holdmedal boxes while his boss was awarding the Gold Stars of

theHeroes of theSoviet Union to the cosmonauts.

But althoughthe Handsome President and the Liberal Ruler had

bothleft the stage of history, the process that they had started,

by that time, was already unstoppable, and became known as The

Space Race.The prestige of the two Superpowers was at stake. The

fundingunlimited.

Here is your chance, Chief. The only thing now was tomake it

on time.And it wasn't even the race with the Americans. He was

racing against Time itself, the time that was left for him to

live. How much time had he left? For the last fewmonths he had

beenfeeling a strange pain in his stomach.And the Moon Dream was

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soclose...

The preparationsfor the Soviet lunar mission were conducted

in greatsecrecy. Work was under way on the giant rocket that was

to deliver to the Moon everything, including cosmonauts with a

smaller rocket that was to be launched from the Moon to return

them to Earth. But in parallel with this project,which was so

similar tothe American Apollo program, in even greater secrecy,

one more lunar mission project was being worked upon - the

simplified project, just in case we are not on time. Even in a

country which had not long before that passed through a gory

ordeal ofwar and terror, even in that savage country, the mere

thoughtof that back-up project made most of those few people let

on the secret feel uneasy. The project was breathinga chilling

breathof Death down their spines.

That project was a one-way manned mission to the Moon.Such a

mission wouldnot need a smaller rocket to be launched from the

Moon to return to Earth, it would not need a heavy heat shield for

re-entryinto the Earth's atmosphere. Such a mission does not need

manythings, it carries along very little cargo, and that's why it

could be launched on a relatively small rocket. It could be

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THEMOONDREAM AlexanderLazarevich Alegendisanimaginativeworkoffictionthatpurportsto betrue. ...

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