Islands in the Sky Read online

  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 webwork 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 what they were doing, but we were on a different wave length.

  “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 around 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 disk 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 center 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 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 towrope began to tug. Slowly we moved back toward the center of the station, and 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.

  3 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 labs, 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 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 took them only a few months to get rid of the mice.”

  He sighed.

  “The problem then, of course, 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 everybody launched at him simultaneously. He disappeared in the middle of a slowly revolving sphere of bodies that drifted noisily around 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 by Commander Doyle or one of the station’s technical officers. The commander had suggested that I attend these talks, and a suggestion from him was not very different from an order. He thought that 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-lightweight 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 later I learned to be more 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 was bad it would go out at once.”

  He absent-mindedly struck a 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 comfortably, yet now I seemed to be suffocating. I looked at Norman, 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 matchbox 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,” Tim continued. “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 humor.

  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.

  The departure of a spaceship from an orbit is not nearly so spectacular as a take-off from earth. It all happens in utter silence, of course, and it also happens very slowly. Nor is there any flame and smoke. All that I could see was a faint pencil of mist jetting from the drive units. The great radiator fins began to glow cherry red, then white hot, as the waste heat from the power plant flooded away into space. The liner’s thousands of tons were gradually picking up speed, though it would be many hours before she gained enough velocity to escape from earth. The rocket that had carried me up to the station had traveled at a hundred times the acceleration of the Canopus, but the great liner could keep her drive units thrusting gently for weeks on end, to build up a final speed of almost half a million miles an hour.

  After five minutes, she was several miles away and moving at an appreciable velocity, pulling out away from our own orbit into the path leading to Mars. I stared hungrily after her, wondering when I too would travel on such a journey. Norman must have seen my expression, for he chuckled and said:

  “Thinking of stowing away on the next ship? Well, forget it. It can’t be done. Oh, I know it’s a favorite dodge in fiction, but it has never happened in practice. There are too many safeguards. And do you know what they’d do to a stowaway if they did find one?”

  “No,” I said, trying not to show too much interest—for to tell the truth I had been thinking along these lines.

  Norman rubbed his hand ghoulishly. “Well, an extra person on board would mean that much less food and oxygen for everyone else, and it would upset the fuel calculations too. So he’d simply be pushed overboard.”

  “Then it’s just as well that no one ever has stowed away.”

  “It certainly is—but of course a stowaway wouldn’t have a chance. He’d be spotted before the voyage began. There just isn’t room to hide in a spaceship.”

  I filed this information away for future reference. It might come in handy someday.

  Space Station One was a big place, but the apprentices didn’t spend all their time aboard it, as I quickly found out. They had a club room which must have been unique, and it was some time before I was allowed to visit it.

  Not far from the station was a veritable museum of astronautics, a floating graveyard of ships that had seen their day and been withdrawn from service. Most of them had been stripped of their instruments and were no more than skeletons. On earth, of course, they would have rusted away long ago, but here in vacuum they would remain bright and untarnished forever.

  Among these derelicts were some of the great pioneers—the first ship to land on Venus, the first to reach the satellites of Jupiter, the first to circle Saturn. At the end of their long voyages, they had entered the five-hundred-mile orbit round earth and the ferry rockets had come up to take off their crews. They were still here where they had been abandoned, never to be used again.

  All, that is, except the Morning Star. As everyone knows, she made the first circumnavigation of Venus, back in 1985. But very few people know that she was still in an excellent state of repair, for the apprentices had adopted her, made her their private headquarters, and, for their own amusement, had got her into working condition again. Indeed, they believed she was at least as good as new and were always trying to “borrow” enough rocket fuel to make a short trip. They were very hurt because no one would let them have any.

  Commander Doyle, of course, knew all about this and quite approved of it. After all, it was good training. Sometimes he came over to the Morning Star to see how things were getting on, but it was generally understood that the ship was private property. You had to have an invitation before you were allowed aboard. Not until I’d been around for some days, and had become more or less accepted as one of the gang, did I have a chance of making the trip over to the Morning Star.

  It was the longest journey I had made outside the station, for the graveyard was about five miles away, moving in the same orbit as the station but a little ahead of it. I don’t quite know how to describe the curious vehicle in which we made the trip. It had been constructed out of junk salvaged from other ships, and was really nothing more than a pressurized cylinder, large enough to hold a dozen people. A low-powered rocket unit had been bolted to one end, there were a few auxiliary jets for steering, a simple air lock, a radio to keep in touch with the station—and that was all. This peculiar vessel could make the hop across to the Morning Star in about ten minutes, being capable of achieving a top speed of about thirty miles an hour. She had been christened The Skylark of Space, a name apparently taken from a famous old science fiction story.

  The Skylark was usually kept parked at the outer rim of the station, where she wouldn’t get in anybody’s way. When she was needed, a couple of the apprentices would go out in space suits, loosen her mooring lines, and tow her to the nearest air lock. Then she would be coupled up and you could go aboard through the connecting tube, just as if you were entering a real space liner.

  My first trip in the Skylark was a very different experience from the climb up from earth. She looked so ramshackle that I expected her to fall to pieces at any moment, though in fact she had a perfectly adequate margin of safety. With ten of us aboard, her little cabin was distinctly crowded, and when the rocket motor started up, the gentle acceleration made us all drift slowly toward the rear of the ship. The thrust was so feeble that it made me weigh only about a pound, quite a contrast to the takeoff weight from earth, where I could have sworn I weighed a ton! After a minute or so of this leisurely progress, we shut off the drive and drifted freely for another ten minutes, by which time a further brief burst of power brought us neatly to rest at our destination.

  There was plenty of room inside the Morning Star; after all she had been the home of five men for almost two years. Their names were still there, scratched on the paint work in the control cabin, and the sight of th
ose signatures took my imagination back almost a hundred years, to the great pioneering days of spaceflight, when even the moon was a new world and no one had yet reached any of the planets.

  Despite the ship’s age, everything inside the control room still seemed bright and new. The instrument board, as far as I could tell, might have belonged to a ship of my own time. Tim Benton stroked the panel gently. “As good as new!” he said, with obvious pride in his voice. “I’d guarantee to take you to Venus any day!”

  I got to know the Morning Star controls pretty well. It was safe to play with them, of course, since the fuel tanks were empty and all that happened when one pressed the “Main Drive—Fire!” button was that a red light lit up. Still, it was exciting to sit in the pilot’s seat and to daydream with my hands on the controls.

  A little workshop had been fitted up just aft of the main fuel tanks, and a lot of modelmaking went on here, as well as a good deal of serious engineering. Several of the apprentices had designed gadgets they wanted to try out, and were seeing if they worked in practice before they took them any farther. Karl Hasse, our mathematical genius, was trying to build some new form of navigational device, but as he always hid it as soon as anybody came along, no one knew just what it was supposed to do.

  I learned more about spaceships while I was crawling around inside the Morning Star than I ever did from books or lectures. It was true that she was nearly a century old, but although the details have altered, the main principles of spaceship design have changed less than one might expect. You still have to have pumps, fuel tanks, air purifiers, temperature regulators, and so on. The gadgets may change, but the jobs they must do remain the same.

  The information I absorbed aboard the Morning Star was not merely technical by any means. I finished my training in weightlessness here, and I also learned to fight in free-fall. Which brings me to Ronnie Jordan.

  Ronnie was the youngest of the apprentices, about two years older than myself. He was a boisterous, fair-haired Australian—at least, he’d been born in Sydney but had spent most of his life in Europe. As a result, he spoke three or four languages, sometimes accidentally slipping from one to the other.