The Space Trilogy Page 5

  The departure of a spaceship from an orbit is nothing like as 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 of mass 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 travelled 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 that led 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 favourite dodge in fiction, but it's never happened in practice—there are too many safeguards. And do you know what they'd do to a stowaway if they found one?'

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

  Norman rubbed his hands 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 space-ship.'

  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the Station was a veritable Museum of Astronautics, a floating graveyard of ships that had seen their day and had been withdrawn from service.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 for ever.

  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 '85. 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 airlock, 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 towards the rear of the ship. The thrust was so feeble that it only made me weigh about a pound—quite a contrast to the take-off 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 paintwork in the control cabin, and the sight of those signatures took my imagination back almost a hundred years, to the great pioneering days of space-flight, 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 quite 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 model-making 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 further. 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 round 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 time in Europe. As a result, he spoke three or four languages, sometimes accidentally slip
ping from one to the other.

  He was good-natured and light-hearted, and gave the impression that he'd never quite got used to zero gravity but still regarded it as a great joke. At any rate, he was always trying out new tricks, such as making a pair of wings and seeing how well he could fly with them. (The answer was—not very well. But perhaps the wings weren't properly designed.) Because of his high spirits, he was always getting into good-humoured fights with the other boys—and a fight under free-fall conditions is fascinating to watch.

  The first problem, of course, is to catch your opponent, which isn't at all easy if he refuses to cooperate—he can shoot off in so many directions. But even if he decides to play, there are further difficulties. Any kind of boxing is almost impossible: the first blow would send you flying apart. So the only practicable form of combat is wrestling. It usually starts with the two fighters floating in mid-air, as far as possible from any solid object. They grasp wrists, with their arms fully extended—and after that it's difficult to see exactly what happens. The air is full of flying limbs and slowly rotating bodies. By the rules of the game, you've won if you can keep your opponent against any wall for a count of five. This is much more difficult than it sounds, for he only has to give a good heave to send both of you flying out into the room again. Remember that as there's no gravity, you can't just sit on your victim until your weight tires him out.

  My first fight with Ronnie arose out of a political argument. Perhaps it seems funny that, out in space, Earth's politics matter at all. In a way they don't—at least, no one worries whether you're a citizen of the Atlantic Federation, the Panasiatic Union or the Pacific Confederacy. But there were plenty of arguments about which country was the best to live in, and as most of us had travelled a good deal everyone had different ideas.

  When I told Ronnie that he was talking nonsense he said, 'Them's fightin' words,' and before I knew what had happened I was pinned in a corner while Norman Powell lazily counted up to ten—to give me a chance. I couldn't escape, because Ronnie had his feet braced firmly against the other two walls forming the corner of the cabin.

  The next time I did slightly better, but Ronnie still won easily. Not only was he stronger than I was, but I didn't have the technique.

  In the end, however, I did succeed in winning—just once. It took a lot of careful planning, and maybe Ron had got over-confident as well.

  I realized that if I let him get me in a corner I was done for—he could use his favourite 'star-fish' trick and pin me down, by bracing himself against the walls where they came together. On the other hand, if I stayed out in the open his superior strength and skill would soon force me into an unfavourable position. It was necessary, therefore, to think of some way of neutralizing his advantages.

  I thought about the problem a lot before discovering the answer—and then I put in a good deal of practice when nobody else was around, for it needed very careful timing.

  At last I was ready. We were seated round the little table bolted to one end of the Morning Stars' cabin—the end which was usually regarded as the floor. Ron was opposite me, and we'd been arguing in a good-humoured manner for some time. It was obvious that a fight was going to start at any minute. When Ron began to unbuckle his seat straps I knew it was time to take-off…

  He'd just unfastened himself when I shouted, 'Come and get me!' and launched myself straight at the 'ceiling', fifteen feet away. This was the bit that had to be timed carefully. Ron kicked himself off a fraction of a second after me, once he'd judged the course I was taking.

  Now in free orbit, of course, once you've launched yourself on a definite path you can't stop until you bump into something again. Ron expected to meet me on the 'ceiling': what he didn't expect was that I'd only get half-way there. For my foot was tucked in a loop of cord that I'd thoughtfully fastened to the floor. I'd only gone a couple of yards when I jerked to a stop and dragged myself back the way I'd come. Ron, of course, couldn't do anything but sail right on. He was so surprised at seeing me jerk back that he rolled over as he was ascending, to watch what had happened, and hit the ceiling with quite a thud. He hadn't recovered from this when I launched myself again—and this time I didn't hang on to the cord. Ron was still off-balance as I came up like a meteor. He couldn't get out of the way in time and so I knocked all the wind out of him. It was easy to hold him down for the count of five: in fact Norman got to ten before Ron showed any signs of life. I was beginning to get a bit worried when he finally started to stir…

  Perhaps it wasn't a very famous victory, and a number of people thought I'd cheated. Still, there was nothing against this sort of thing in the rules.

  It wasn't a trick I could use twice, and Ron got his own back next time. But, after all, he was older than me…

  Some of our other games weren't quite so rough. We played a lot of chess (with magnetic men), but as I'm no good at this it wasn't much fun for me. About the only game at which I could always win was 'swimming'—not swimming in water, of course, but swimming in air.

  This was so exhausting we didn't do it very often. You wanted a fairly large room, and the competitors had to start floating in a line, well away from the nearest wall. The idea was to reach the winning-post by clawing your way through the air. It was much like swimming through water, but a lot harder—and a lot slower. For some reason I was better at it than the others, which is rather odd because I'm not much good at ordinary swimming.

  Still, I mustn't give the impression that all our time was spent in the Morning Star. There is plenty of work for everyone on a space-station, and perhaps because of this the staff made the most of their time off. And—this is a curious point that isn't very well known—we had more opportunities for amusement than you might think, because we needed very little sleep. That's one of the effects of zero gravity. All the time I was in space, I don't think I ever had more than four hours of continuous sleep.

  I was careful never to miss one of Commander Doyle's lectures, even when there were other things I wanted to do. Tim had advised me, tactfully, that it would make a good impression if I were always there—and the Commander was a good speaker, anyway. Certainly I'm never likely to forget the talk on meteors which he gave to us.

  Looking back on it, that's rather funny, because I thought the lecture was going to be pretty dull. The opening was interesting enough, but it soon bogged down in statistics and tables. You know, of course, what meteors are—tiny particles of matter which whirl through space and burn up through friction when they hit the Earth's atmosphere. The huge majority are much smaller than sand grains, but sometimes quite large ones—weighing many pounds—come tumbling down into the atmosphere. And on very rare occasions hundred—or even thousand-ton giants come crashing to Earth and do considerable local damage.

  In the early days of space-flight many people were nervous of meteors: they didn't realize just how big space was, and thought that leaving the protective blanket of the atmosphere would be rather like entering a machine-gun barrage. Today we know better: yet though meteors are not a serious danger, small ones occasionally puncture stations or ships and it's necessary to do something about them.

  My attention had strayed while Commander Doyle talked about meteor streams and covered the blackboard with calculations showing how little solid matter there really was in the space between the planets. I became rather more interested when he began to say what would happen if a meteor ever did hit us.

  'You've got to remember,' he said, 'that because of its speed a meteor doesn't behave like a slow-moving object such as a rifle bullet, which moves at a mere mile a second. If a small meteor hits a solid object—even a piece of paper—it turns into a cloud of incandescent vapour. That's one reason why this Station has got a double hull: the outer shell provides almost complete protection against any meteors we're ever likely to meet.

  'But there's a still a faint possibility that a big one might go through both walls and make a fairly large hole. Even that needn't be serious. The air would start
rushing out, of course, but every room that has a wall towards space is fitted with one of these.'

  He held up a circular disc, looking very much like a saucepan-cover with a rubber flange around it. I'd often seen these discs, painted a bright yellow, clipped to the walls of the Station, but hadn't given them much thought.

  'This will deal with leaks up to six inches in diameter. All you have to do is to place it against the wall near the hole and slide it along until it covers the leak. Don't try and clamp the disc straight over the hole. Once it's in place, the air pressure will keep it there until a permanent repair can be made.'

  He tossed the disc down into the class.

  'Have a look at it and pass it round. Any questions?'

  I wanted to ask what would happen if the hole were more than six inches across, but was afraid this might be regarded as a facetious question. Glancing around the class to see if anyone else looked like breaking the silence, I noticed that Tim Benton wasn't there. It was unusual for him to be absent and I wondered what had happened to him. Perhaps he was helping someone on an urgent job elsewhere in the Station.

  I had no further chance of puzzling over Tim's whereabouts. For at that precise moment there was a sudden, sharp explosion, quite deafening in this confined space. And it was followed instantly by the terrifying, high-pitched scream of escaping air—air rushing through a hole that had suddenly appeared in the wall of the classroom.

  Four

  A PLAGUE OF PIRATES

  For a moment, as the out-rushing air tore at our clothes and tugged us towards the wall, we were far too surprised to do anything except stare at the ragged puncture scarring the white paint. Everything had happened too quickly for me to be frightened: that came later. Our paralysis lasted for a couple of seconds: then we all moved at once. The sealing plate had been lying on Norman Powell's desk, and everyone made towards it. There was a moment of confused pushing, then Norman shouted above the shriek of air, 'Out of my way!' He launched himself across the room, and the air current caught him like a straw in a mill-race, slamming him into the wall. I watched in helpless fascination as he fought to prevent himself being sucked against the hole. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the whistling roar ceased. Norman had managed to slide the seal into place.