The Other Side of the Sky Read online

  Sven was one of our best construction men, and excelled at the tricky and specialised work of collecting assorted girders as they floated around in free fall, making them do the slow-motion, three-dimensional ballet that would get them into their right positions, and fusing the pieces together when they were precisely dovetailed into the intended pattern. I never tired of watching him and his gang as the station grew under their hands like a giant jigsaw puzzle; it was a skilled and difficult job, for a space suit is not the most convenient of garbs in which to work. However, Sven’s team had one great advantage over the construction gangs you see putting up skyscrapers down on Earth. They could step back and admire their handiwork without being abruptly parted from it by gravity …

  Don’t ask me why Sven wanted a pet, or why he chose the one he did. I’m not a psychologist, but I must admit that his selection was very sensible. Claribel weighed practically nothing, her food requirements were infinitesimal – and she was not worried, as most animals would have been, by the absence of gravity.

  I first became aware that Claribel was aboard when I was sitting in the little cubbyhole laughingly called my office, checking through my lists of technical stores to decide what items we’d be running out of next. When I heard the musical whistle beside my ear, I assumed that it had come over the station intercom, and waited for an announcement to follow. It didn’t; instead, there was a long and involved pattern of melody that made me look up with such a start that I forgot all about the angle beam just behind my head. When the stars had ceased to explode before my eyes, I had my first view of Claribel.

  She was a small yellow canary, hanging in the air as motionless as a hummingbird – and with much less effort, for her wings were quietly folded along her sides. We stared at each other for a minute; then, before I had quite recovered my wits, she did a curious kind of backward loop I’m sure no earthbound canary had ever managed, and departed with a few leisurely flicks. It was quite obvious that she’d already learned how to operate in the absence of gravity, and did not believe in doing unnecessary work.

  Sven didn’t confess to her ownership for several days, and by that time it no longer mattered, because Claribel was a general pet. He had smuggled her up on the last ferry from Earth, when he came back from leave – partly, he claimed, out of sheer scientific curiosity. He wanted to see just how a bird would operate when it had no weight but could still use its wings.

  Claribel thrived and grew fat. On the whole, we had little trouble concealing our unauthorised guest when VIPs from Earth came visiting. A space station has more hiding places than you can count; the only problem was that Claribel got rather noisy when she was upset, and we sometimes had to think fast to explain the curious peeps and whistles that came from ventilating shafts and storage bulkheads. There were a couple of narrow escapes – but then who would dream of looking for a canary in a space station?

  We were now on twelve-hour watches, which was not as bad as it sounds, since you need little sleep in space. Though of course there is no ‘day’ and ‘night’ when you are floating in permanent sunlight, it was still convenient to stick to the terms. Certainly when I woke up that ‘morning’ it felt like 6.00 a.m. on Earth. I had a nagging headache, and vague memories of fitful, disturbed dreams. It took me ages to undo my bunk straps, and I was still only half awake when I joined the remainder of the duty crew in the mess. Breakfast was unusually quiet, and there was one seat vacant.

  ‘Where’s Sven?’ I asked, not very much caring.

  ‘He’s looking for Claribel,’ someone answered. ‘Says he can’t find her anywhere. She usually wakes him up.’

  Before I could retort that she usually woke me up, too, Sven came in through the doorway, and we could see at once that something was wrong. He slowly opened his hand, and there lay a tiny bundle of yellow feathers, with two clenched claws sticking pathetically up into the air.

  ‘What happened?’ we asked, all equally distressed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sven mournfully. ‘I just found her like this.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at her,’ said Jock Duncan, our cook-doctor-dietitian. We all waited in hushed silence while he held Claribel against his ear in an attempt to detect any heartbeat.

  Presently he shook his head. ‘I can’t hear anything, but that doesn’t prove she’s dead. I’ve never listened to a canary’s heart,’ he added rather apologetically.

  ‘Give her a shot of oxygen,’ suggested somebody, pointing to the green-banded emergency cylinder in its recess beside the door. Everyone agreed that this was an excellent idea, and Claribel was tucked snugly into a face mask that was large enough to serve as a complete oxygen tent for her.

  To our delighted surprise, she revived at once. Beaming broadly, Sven removed the mask, and she hopped onto his finger. She gave her series of ‘Come to the cookhouse, boys’ trills – then promptly keeled over again.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ lamented Sven. ‘What’s wrong with her? She’s never done this before.’

  For the last few minutes, something had been tugging at my memory. My mind seemed to be very sluggish that morning, as if I was still unable to cast off the burden of sleep. I felt that I could do with some of that oxygen – but before I could reach the mask, understanding exploded in my brain. I whirled on the duty engineer and said urgently:

  ‘Jim! There’s something wrong with the air! That’s why Claribel’s passed out. I’ve just remembered that miners used to carry canaries down to warn them of gas.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Jim. ‘The alarms would have gone off. We’ve got duplicate circuits, operating independently.’

  ‘Er – the second alarm circuit isn’t connected up yet,’ his assistant reminded him. That shook Jim; he left without a word, while we stood arguing and passing the oxygen bottle around like a pipe of peace.

  He came back ten minutes later with a sheepish expression. It was one of those accidents that couldn’t possibly happen; we’d had one of our rare eclipses by Earth’s shadow that night; part of the air purifier had frozen up, and the single alarm in the circuit had failed to go off. Half a million dollars’ worth of chemical and electronic engineering had let us down completely. Without Claribel, we should soon have been slightly dead.

  So now, if you visit any space station, don’t be surprised if you hear an inexplicable snatch of bird song. There’s no need to be alarmed: on the contrary, in fact. It will mean that you’re being doubly safeguarded, at practically no extra expense.

  Take a Deep Breath

  A long time ago I discovered that people who’ve never left Earth have certain fixed ideas about conditions in space. Everyone ‘knows’, for example, that a man dies instantly and horribly when exposed to the vacuum that exists beyond the atmosphere. You’ll find numerous gory descriptions of exploded space travellers in the popular literature, and I won’t spoil your appetite by repeating them here. Many of those tales, indeed, are basically true. I’ve pulled men back through the air lock who were very poor advertisements for space flight.

  Yet, at the same time, there are exceptions to every rule – even this one. I should know, for I learned the hard way.

  We were on the last stages of building Communications Satellite Two; all the main units had been joined together, the living quarters had been pressurised, and the station had been given the slow spin around its axis that had restored the unfamiliar sensation of weight. I say ‘slow’, but at its rim our two-hundred-foot-diameter wheel was turning at thirty miles an hour. We had, of course, no sense of motion, but the centrifugal force caused by this spin gave us about half the weight we would have possessed on Earth. That was enough to stop things from drifting around, yet not enough to make us feel uncomfortably sluggish after our weeks with no weight at all.

  Four of us were sleeping in the small cylindrical cabin known as Bunk-house Number 6 on the night that it happened. The bunkhouse was at the very rim of the station; if you imagine a bicycle wheel, with a string of sausages replacing the tyre, yo
u have a good idea of the layout. Bunkhouse Number 6 was one of these sausages, and we were slumbering peacefully inside it.

  I was awakened by a sudden jolt that was not violent enough to cause me alarm, but which did make me sit up and wonder what had happened. Anything unusual in a space station demands instant attention, so I reached for the intercom switch by my bed. ‘Hello, Central,’ I called. ‘What was that?’

  There was no reply; the line was dead.

  Now thoroughly alarmed, I jumped out of bed – and had an even bigger shock. There was no gravity. I shot up to the ceiling before I was able to grab a stanchion and bring myself to a halt, at the cost of a sprained wrist.

  It was impossible for the entire station to have suddenly stopped rotating. There was only one answer; the failure of the intercom and, as I quickly discovered, of the lighting circuit as well forced us to face the appalling truth. We were no longer part of the station; our little cabin had somehow come adrift, and had been slung off into space like a raindrop falling on a spinning flywheel.

  There were no windows through which we could look out, but we were not in complete darkness for the battery-powered emergency lights had come on. All the main air vents had closed automatically when the pressure dropped. For the time being, we could live in our own private atmosphere, even though it was not being renewed. Unfortunately, a steady whistling told us that the air we did have was escaping through a leak somewhere in the cabin.

  There was no way of telling what had happened to the rest of the station. For all we knew, the whole structure might have come to pieces, and all our colleagues might be dead or in the same predicament as we – drifting through space in leaking cans of air. Our one slim hope was the possibility that we were the only castaways, that the rest of the station was intact and had been able to send a rescue team to find us. After all, we were receding at no more than thirty miles an hour, and one of the rocket scooters could catch up to us in minutes.

  It actually took an hour, though without the evidence of my watch I should never have believed that it was so short a time. We were now gasping for breath, and the gauge on our single emergency oxygen tank had dropped to one division above zero.

  The banging on the wall seemed like a signal from another world. We banged back vigorously, and a moment later a muffled voice called to us through the wall. Someone outside was lying with his space-suit helmet pressed against the metal, and his shouted words were reaching us by direct conduction. Not as clear as radio – but it worked.

  The oxygen gauge crept slowly down to zero while we had our council of war. We would be dead before we could be towed back to the station; yet the rescue ship was only a few feet away from us, with its air lock already open. Our little problem was to cross that few feet – without space suits.

  We made our plans carefully, rehearsing our actions in the full knowledge that there could be no repeat performance. Then we each took a deep, final swig of oxygen, flushing out our lungs. When we were all ready, I banged on the wall to give the signal to our friends waiting outside.

  There was a series of short, staccato raps as the power tools got to work on the thin hull. We clung tightly to the stanchions, as far away as possible from the point of entry, knowing just what would happen. When it came, it was so sudden that the mind couldn’t record the sequence of events. The cabin seemed to explode, and a great wind tugged at me. The last trace of air gushed from my lungs, through my already-opened mouth. And then – utter silence, and the stars shining through the gaping hole that led to life.

  Believe me, I didn’t stop to analyse my sensations. I think – though I can never be sure that it wasn’t imagination – that my eyes were smarting and there was a tingling feeling all over my body. And I felt very cold, perhaps because evaporation was already starting from my skin.

  The only thing I can be certain of is that uncanny silence. It is never completely quiet in a space station, for there is always the sound of machinery or air pumps. But this was the absolute silence of the empty void, where there is no trace of air to carry sound.

  Almost at once we launched ourselves out through the shattered wall, into the full blast of the sun. I was instantly blinded – but that didn’t matter, because the men waiting in space suits grabbed me as soon as I emerged and hustled me into the air lock. And there, sound slowly returned as the air rushed in, and we remembered we could breathe again. The entire rescue, they told us later, had lasted just twenty seconds …

  Well, we were the founding members of the Vacuum-Breathers’ Club. Since then, at least a dozen other men have done the same thing, in similar emergencies. The record time in space is now two minutes; after that, the blood begins to form bubbles as it boils at body temperature, and those bubbles soon get to the heart.

  In my case, there was only one aftereffect. For maybe a quarter of a minute I had been exposed to real sunlight, not the feeble stuff that filters down through the atmosphere of Earth. Breathing space didn’t hurt me at all – but I got the worst dose of sunburn I’ve ever had in my life.

  Freedom of Space

  Not many of you, I suppose, can imagine the time before the satellite relays gave us our present world communications system. When I was a boy, it was impossible to send TV programmes across the oceans, or even to establish reliable radio contact around the curve of the Earth without picking up a fine assortment of crackles and bangs on the way. Yet now we take interference-free circuits for granted, and think nothing of seeing our friends on the other side of the globe as clearly as if we were standing face to face. Indeed, it’s a simple fact that without the satellite relays, the whole structure of world commerce and industry would collapse. Unless we were up here on the space stations to bounce their messages around the globe, how do you think any of the world’s big business organisations could keep their widely scattered electronic brains in touch with each other?

  But all this was still in the future, back in the late seventies, when we were finishing work on the Relay Chain. I’ve already told you about some of our problems and near disasters; they were serious enough at the time, but in the end we overcame them all. The three stations spaced around Earth were no longer piles of girders, air cylinders, and plastic pressure chambers. Their assembly had been completed, we had moved aboard, and could now work in comfort, unhampered by space suits. And we had gravity again, now that the stations had been set slowly spinning. Not real gravity, of course; but centrifugal force feels exactly the same when you’re out in space. It was pleasant being able to pour drinks and to sit down without drifting away on the first air current.

  Once the three stations had been built, there was still a year’s solid work to be done installing all the radio and TV equipment that would lift the world’s communications networks into space. It was a great day when we established the first TV link between England and Australia. The signal was beamed up to us in Relay Two, as we sat above the centre of Africa, we flashed it across to Three – poised over New Guinea – and they shot it down to Earth again, clear and clean after its ninety-thousand-mile journey.

  These, however, were the engineers’ private tests. The official opening of the system would be the biggest event in the history of world communication – an elaborate global telecast, in which every nation would take part. It would be a three-hour show, as for the first time the live TV camera roamed around the world, proclaiming to mankind that the last barrier of distance was down.

  The programme planning, it was cynically believed, had taken as much effort as the building of the space stations in the first place, and of all the problems the planners had to solve, the most difficult was that of choosing a compère or master of ceremonies to introduce the items in the elaborate global show that would be watched by half the human race.

  Heaven knows how much conniving, blackmail, and downright character assassination went on behind the scenes. All we knew was that a week before the great day, a nonscheduled rocket came up to orbit with Gregory Wendell aboard. This was quit
e a surprise, since Gregory wasn’t as big a TV personality as, say, Jeffers Jackson in the US or Vince Clifford in Britain. However, it seemed that the big boys had cancelled each other out, and Gregg had got the coveted job through one of those compromises so well known to politicians.

  Gregg had started his career as a disc jockey on a university radio station in the American Midwest, and had worked his way up through the Hollywood and Manhattan night-club circuits until he had a daily, nationwide programme of his own. Apart from his cynical yet relaxed personality, his biggest asset was his deep velvet voice, for which he could probably thank his Negro blood. Even when you flatly disagreed with what he was saying – even, indeed, when he was tearing you to pieces in an interview – it was still a pleasure to listen to him.

  We gave him the grand tour of the space station, and even (strictly against regulations) took him out through the air lock in a space suit. He loved it all, but there were two things he liked in particular. ‘This air you make,’ he said, ‘it beats the stuff we have to breathe down in New York. This is the first time my sinus trouble has gone since I went into TV.’ He also relished the low gravity; at the station’s rim, a man had half his normal, Earth weight – and at the axis he had no weight at all.