Synthetic Hero

The story follows George Carlin, a ruthless industrialist who, after contracting a bone-destroying plague, commissions a spectacular one-way spaceship to the moon as an ego-driven suicide. He suppresses medical warnings, crushes opposition, and places engineer Verne Harris to design and build a single-man craft with automatic controls and non-nuclear rockets. Publicity builds around Carlin while the engineer remains uncredited. The narrative contrasts the manufactured shrine on Earth with the blasted, unvisited lunar wreckage, exploring themes of vanity, power, manufactured heroism, and the gap between public myth and private decay.