The Space Trilogy Page 4

  'You refuel spaceships on their way out from Earth, and carry out repairs and overhauls.'

  'Yes, that's our main job. The other stations—those further out—do a lot else as well, but we needn't bother about that now. There's one important point I'd better make clear right away. This Inner Station of ours is really in two parts, with a couple of miles between them. Come and have a look.'

  He pulled me over to a port and I stared out into space. Hanging there against the stars—so close that it seemed I could reach out and touch it—was what seemed to be a giant flywheel. It was slowly turning on its axis, and as it revolved I could see the glitter of sunlight on its observation ports. I could not help comparing its smooth compactness with the flimsy, open girder work of the station in which I was standing—or, rather, floating. The great wheel had an axle, for jutting from its centre was a long, narrow cylinder which ended in a curious structure I couldn't understand. A spaceship was slowly manoeuvring near it.

  'That's the Residential Station,' said Benton disapprovingly. 'It's nothing but an hotel. You've noticed that it's spinning—because of that, it's got normal Earth gravity at the rim, owing to centrifugal force. We hardly ever go over there: once you've got used to weightlessness, gravity's a nuisance. But all incoming passengers from Mars and the Moon are transhipped there. It wouldn't be safe for them to go straight to Earth after living in a much lower gravity field. In the Residential Station they can get acclimatized, as it were. They go in at the centre, where there's no gravity, and work slowly out to the rim, where it's Earth normal.'

  'How do they get aboard if the thing's spinning?' I asked.

  'See that ship moving into position? If you look carefully, you'll see that the axle of the station isn't spinning—it's being driven by a motor against the station's spin so that it actually stands still in space. The ship can couple up to it and transfer passengers. The coupling's free to rotate, and once the axle revs up to match speed with the station, the passengers can go aboard. Sounds complicated, but it works well. And see if you can think of a better way!'

  'Will I have a chance of going over there?' I asked.

  'I expect it could be arranged—though I don't see much point in it. You might just as well be down on Earth—that's the idea of the place, in fact.'

  I didn't press the point, and it wasn't until the very end of my visit that I was able to get over to the Residential Station, floating there only a couple of miles away…

  It must have been quite a bother showing me round the Station, because I had to be pushed or pulled most of the way until I'd found my Space-legs'. Once or twice Tim only just managed to rescue me in time when I'd launched myself too vigorously and was about to plunge headlong into an obstacle. But he was very patient, and finally I got the knack of things and was able to move around fairly confidently.

  It was several days before I really knew my way around the great maze of interconnecting corridors and pressure chambers that was the Inner Station. In that first trip I merely had a quick survey of its workshops, radio equipment, power plant, air-conditioning gear, dormitories, storage tanks and observatory. Sometimes it was hard to believe that all this had been carried up into space and assembled here five hundred miles above the Earth. I didn't know, until Tim mentioned it casually, that most of the material in the Station had actually come from the Moon. The Moon's low gravity made it much more economical to ship equipment from there instead of from the Earth—despite the fact that Earth was so much closer.

  My first tour of inspection ended inside one of the airlocks. We stood in front of the great circular door, resting snugly on its rubber gaskets, that led into the outer emptiness. Clamped to the walls around us were the space-suits, and I looked at them longingly. It had always been one of my ambitions to wear one and to become a tiny, serf-contained world of my own.

  'Do you think I'll have a chance of trying one on while I'm here?' I asked.

  Tim looked thoughtful: then he glanced at his watch.

  'I'm not on duty for half an hour, and I want to collect something I've left out at the rim. We'll go outside.'

  'But…' I gulped, my enthusiasm suddenly waning. 'Will it be safe? Doesn't it take a lot of training to use one of these?'

  He looked at me calmly.

  'Not frightened, are you?'

  'Of course not.'

  'Well, let's get started.'

  Tim answered my question while he was showing me how to get into the suit.

  'It's quite true that it takes a lot of training before you can operate one of these. I'm not going to let you try—you sit tight inside and tag along with me. You'll be as safe there as you are now, as long as you don't meddle with the controls. Just to make sure of that, I'll lock them first.'

  I rather resented this, but didn't say anything. After all, he was the boss.

  To most people, the word 'space-suit' conjures up a picture of something like a diving dress, in which a man can walk and use his arms. Such suits are, of course, used on places like the Moon. But on a space-station, where there's no gravity, your legs aren't much use anyway—outside, you have to blow yourself round with tiny rocket units.

  For this reason, the lower part of the suit was simply a rigid cylinder. When I climbed inside it, I found that I could only use my feet to work some control pedals, which I was careful not to touch. There was a little seat, and a transparent dome covering the top of the cylinder gave me good visibility. I could use my hands and arms. Just below my chin there was a neat little control panel with a tiny keyboard and a few meters. If I wanted to handle anything outside, there were flexible sleeves inside which I could push my arms. They ended in gloves which, although they seemed clumsy, enabled one to carry out quite delicate operations.

  Tim threw some of the switches on my suit and clamped the transparent dome over my head. I felt rather like being inside a coffin with a view. Then he chose a suit for himself and attached it to mine by a thin nylon cord.

  The inner door of the air-lock thudded shut behind us and I could hear the vibration of the pumps as the air was sucked back into the station. The sleeves of my suit began to stiffen slightly. Tim called across at me, his voice distorted after passing through our helmets.

  'I won't switch on the radio yet. You should still be able to hear me. Listen to this.' Then he went over to the familiar radio engineer's routine: 'Testing, One, Two, Three, Four, Five…'

  Around 'Five' his voice began to fade. "When he'd reached 'Nine' I couldn't hear a thing, though his lips were still moving. There was no longer enough air around us to carry sound. The silence was quite uncanny, and I was relieved when the loudspeaker in my suit started to talk.

  'I'm opening the outer door now. Don't make any movements—I'll do all that's necessary.'

  In that eerie silence, the great door slowly opened inwards. I was floating freely now, and I felt a faint 'tug' as the last traces of air puffed out into space. A circle of stars was ahead of me, and I could just glimpse the misty rim of Earth to one side.

  'Ready?' asked Tim.

  'O.K.,' I said, hoping that the microphone wouldn't betray my nervousness. The towing line gave a tug as Tim switched on his jets, and we drifted out of the air-lock. It was a terrifying sensation, yet one I would not have missed for anything. Although, of course, the words 'up' and 'down' had no meaning here, it seemed to me as if I were floating out through a hole in a great metal wall, with the Earth at an immense distance below. My reason told me that I was perfectly safe—but all my instincts shouted, 'You've a five hundred mile fall straight down beneath you!'

  Indeed, when the Earth filled half the sky, it was hard not to think of it as 'down'. "We were in sunlight at the moment, passing across Africa, and I could see Lake Victoria and the great forests of the Congo. What would Livingstone and Stanley have thought, I wondered, if they had known that one day men would flash across the Dark Continent at 18,000 miles an hour? And the day of those great explorers was only two hundred years behind us. It had be
en a crowded couple of centuries…

  Though it was fascinating to look at Earth, I found it was making me giddy, and so I swivelled round in my suit to concentrate on the Station. Tim had now towed us well clear of it, and we were almost out among the halo of floating ships. I tried to forget about the Earth, and now that I could no longer see it, it seemed natural enough to think of 'down' as towards the Station.

  This is a knack everyone has to learn in space. You're liable to get awfully confused unless you pretend that somewhere is down. The important thing is to choose the most convenient direction, according to whatever you happen to be doing at the moment.

  Tim had given us enough speed to make our little trip in a reasonable time, so he cut the jets and pointed out the sights as we drifted along. This bird's-eye view of the Station completed the picture I'd already got from my tour inside, and I began to feel that I was really learning my way about.

  The outer rim of the Station was simply a flat network of girders trailing off into space. Here and there were large cylinders—pressurized workshops big enough to hold two or three men, and intended for any jobs that couldn't be handled in vacuum.

  A spaceship with most of its plating stripped off was floating near the edge of the Station, secured from drifting away by a couple of cords that would hardly have supported a man on Earth. Several mechanics wearing suits like our own were working on the hull. I wished I could overhear their conversation and find out what they were doing, but we were on a different wavelength.

  'I'm going to leave you here a minute,' said Tim, unfastening the towing cord, and clipping it to the nearest girder. 'Don't do anything until I get back.'

  I felt rather foolish, floating round like a captive balloon, and was glad that no one took any notice of me. While waiting, I experimented with the fingers of my suit and tried, unsuccessfully, to tie a simple knot in my towing cable. I found later that one could do this sort of thing, but it took practice. Certainly the men on the spaceship seemed to be handling their tools without any awkwardness, despite their gloves.

  Suddenly it began to grow dark. Until this moment, the Station and the ships floating beside it had been bathed in brilliant light from a sun so fierce that I had not dared to look anywhere near it. But now the Sun was passing behind the Earth as we hurtled across the night side of the planet. I turned my head—and there was a sight so splendid that it completely took away my breath. Earth was now a huge, black disc eclipsing the stars, but all along one edge was a glorious crescent of golden light, shrinking even as I watched. I was looking back upon the line of the sunset, stretching for a thousand miles across Africa. At its centre was a great halo of dazzling gold where a thin sliver of sun was still visible. It dwindled and vanished: the crimson afterglow of the sunset contracted swiftly along the horizon until it too disappeared. The whole thing lasted not more than two minutes, and the men working around me took not the slightest notice of it. After all, in time one gets used even to the most wonderful sights, and the Station circled the Earth so swiftly that sunset occurred every hundred minutes…

  It was not completely dark, for the Moon was half full, looking no brighter or closer than it did from Earth. And the sky was so crowded with millions of stars, all shining quite steadily without a trace of twinkling, that I wondered how anyone could ever have spoken of the 'blackness' of space.

  I was so busy looking for the other planets (and failing to find them) that I never noticed Tim's return until my tow-rope began to tug. Slowly we moved back towards the centre of the Station, in such utter silence that it hardly seemed real. I closed my eyes for a minute—but the scene hadn't changed when I opened them. There was the great black shield of Earth—no, not quite black, for I could see the oceans glimmering in the moonlight. The same light made the slim girders around me gleam like the threads of a ghostly spider's web, a web sprinkled with myriads of stars.

  This was the moment when I really knew that I had reached space at last, and that nothing else could ever be the same again.

  Three

  THE MORNING STAR

  'Now on Station Four, do you know what our biggest trouble used to be?' asked Norman Powell.

  'No,' I replied, which was what I was supposed to say.

  'Mice,' he exclaimed solemnly. 'Believe it or not! Some of them got loose from the biology lab., and before you knew where you were, they were all over the place.'

  'I don't believe a word of it,' interrupted Ronnie Jordan.

  'They were so small they could get into all the air shafts,' continued Norman, unabashed. 'You could hear them scuttling around happily whenever you put your ear to the walls. There was no need for them to make mouse-holes—every room had half a dozen already provided, and you can guess what they did to the ventilation. But we got them in the end, and do you know how we did it?'

  'You borrowed a couple of cats.'

  Norman gave Ronnie a superior look.

  'That was tried, but cats don't like zero gravity. They were no good at all—the mice used to laugh at them. No: we used owls. You should have seen them fly! Their wings worked just as well as ever, of course, and they used to do the most fantastic things. It only took them a few months to get rid of the mice.'

  He sighed.

  'The problem then, was to get rid of the owls. "We did this…'

  I never learned what happened next, for the rest of the gang decided they'd had enough of Norman's tall stories and everyone launched themselves at him simultaneously. He disappeared in the middle of a slowly revolving sphere of bodies, that drifted noisily round the cabin. Only Tim Benton, who never got mixed up in these vulgar brawls, remained quietly studying, which was what everybody else was supposed to be doing.

  Every day all the apprentices met in the classroom to hear a lecture from Commander Doyle or one of the Station's technical officers. The Commander had suggested that I should attend these talks—and a suggestion from him was not very different from an order. He thought I might pick up some useful knowledge, which was true enough. I could understand about a quarter of what was said, and spent the rest of the time reading something from the Station's library of ultra-light-weight books.

  After the classes there was a thirty-minute study period, and from time to time some studying was actually done. These intervals were much more useful to me than the lessons themselves, for the boys were always talking about their jobs and the things they had seen in space. Some of them had been out here for two years, with only a few short trips down to Earth.

  Of course, a lot of the tales they told me were, shall I say, slightly exaggerated. Norman Powell, our prize humorist, was always trying to pull my leg. At first I fell for some of his yarns, but now I'd learned to be cautious…

  There were also, I'd discovered, some interesting tricks and practical jokes that could be played in space. One of the best involved nothing more complicated than an ordinary match. "We were in the classroom one afternoon when Norman suddenly turned to me and said: 'Do you know how to test the air to see if it's breathable?'

  'If it wasn't, I suppose you'd soon know,' I replied.

  'Not at all—you might be knocked out too quickly to do anything about it. But there's a simple test which has been used on Earth for ages, in mines and caves. You just carry a flame ahead of you, and if it goes out—well, you go out too, as quickly as you can!'

  He fumbled in his pocket and extracted a box of matches. I was mildly surprised to see something so old-fashioned aboard the Station.

  'In here, of course,' Norman continued, 'a flame will burn properly. But if the air were bad it would go out at once.'

  He absent-mindedly stroked the match on the box and it burst into light. A flame formed around the head—and I leaned forward to look at it closely. It was a very odd flame, not long and pointed but quite spherical. Even as I watched it dwindled and died.

  It's funny how the mind works, for up to that moment I'd been breathing perfectly comfortably, yet now I seemed to be suffocating. I looked at Nor
man, and said nervously: 'Try it again—there must be something wrong with the match.'

  Obediently he struck another, which expired as quickly as the first.

  'Let's get out of here,' I gasped. 'The air-purifier must have packed up.' Then I saw that the others were grinning at me.

  'Don't panic, Roy,' said Tim. 'There's a simple answer.' He grabbed the match-box from Norman.

  'The air's perfectly O.K. but if you think about it, you'll see that it's impossible for a flame to burn out here. Since there's no gravity and everything stays put, the smoke doesn't rise and the flame just chokes itself. The only way it will keep burning is if you do this.'

  He struck another match, but instead of holding it still, kept it moving slowly through the air. It left a trail of smoke behind it, and kept on burning until only the stump was left.

  'It was entering fresh air all the time, so it didn't choke itself with burnt gases. And if you think this is just an amusing trick of no practical importance, you're wrong. It means we've got to keep the air in the Station on the move, otherwise we'd soon go the same way as that flame. Norman, will you switch on the ventilators again, now that you've had your little joke?'

  Joke or not, it was a very effective lesson. But it made me all the more determined that one of these days I was going to get my own back on Norman. Not that I disliked him, but I was getting a little tired of his sense of humour.

  Someone gave a shout from the other side of the room. 'The Canopus is leaving!'

  We all rushed to the small circular windows and looked out into space. It was some time before I could manage to see anything, but presently I wormed my way to the front and pressed my face against the thick transparent plastic.

  The Canopus was the largest liner on the Mars run, and she had been here for some weeks having her routine overhaul. During the last two days fuel and passengers had been going aboard, and she had now drifted away from the Station until we were separated by a space of several miles. Like the Residential Station, the Canopus slowly revolved to give the passengers a sense of gravity. She was shaped rather like a giant doughnut, the cabins and living quarters forming a ring around the power plant and drive units. During the voyage the ship's spin would be gradually reduced, so that by the time her passengers reached Mars they would already be accustomed to the right gravity. On the homeward journey, just the reverse would happen.