PROJECT HUSH
By WILLIAM TENN
Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science FictionFebruary 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that theU.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I guess I'm just a stickler, a perfectionist, but if you do a thing, Ialways say, you might as well do it right. Everything satisfied me aboutthe security measures on our assignment except one—the official Armydesignation.
Project Hush.
I don't know who thought it up, and I certainly would never ask, butwhoever it was, he should have known better. Damn it, when you want aproject kept secret, you don't give it a designation like that! Yougive it something neutral, some name like the Manhattan and Overlordthey used in World War II, which won't excite anybody's curiosity.
But we were stuck with Project Hush and we had to take extra measures toensure secrecy. A couple of times a week, everyone on the project had toreport to Psycho for DD & HA—dream detailing and hypnoanalysis—insteadof the usual monthly visit. Naturally, the commanding general of theheavily fortified research post to which we were attached could not askwhat we were doing, under penalty of court-martial, but he had to begiven further instructions to shut off his imagination like a faucetevery time he heard an explosion. Some idiot in Washington was actuallygoing to list Project Hush in the military budget by name! It took fastaction, I can tell you, to have it entered under Miscellaneous "X"Research.
Well, we'd covered the unforgivable blunder, though not easily, and nowwe could get down to the real business of the project. You know, ofcourse, about the A-bomb, H-bomb and C-bomb because information thatthey existed had been declassified. You don't know about the otherweapons being devised—and neither did we, reasonably enough, since theyweren't our business—but we had been given properly guardednotification that they were in the works. Project Hush was set up tocounter the new weapons.
Our goal was not just to reach the Moon. We had done that on 24 June1967 with an unmanned ship that carried instruments to report back dataon soil, temperature, cosmic rays and so on. Unfortunately, it was putout of commission by a rock slide.
An unmanned rocket would be useless against the new weapons. We had toget to the Moon before any other country did and set up a permanentstation—an armed one—and do it without anybody else knowing about it.
I guess you see now why we on (damn the name!) Project Hush were soconcerned about security. But we felt pretty sure, before we took off,that we had plugged every possible leak.
We had, all right. Nobody even knew we had raised ship.
We landed at the northern tip of Mare Nubium, just off Regiomontanus,and, after planting a flag with appropriate throat-catching ceremony,had swung into the realities of the tasks we had practiced on so manydry runs back on Earth. Major Monroe Gridley prepared the big rocket,with its tiny cubicle of living space, for the return journey to Earthwhich he alone would make.
Lieutenant-colonel Thomas Hawthorne painstakingly examined ourprovisions and portable quarters for any damage that might have beenincurred in landing.
And I, Colonel Benjamin Rice, first commanding officer of Army Base No.1 on the Moon, dragged crate after enormous crate out of the ship on myaching