Islands in the Sky Read online

  He was good-natured and lighthearted, 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-humored 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 easy, because if he refused 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, since 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; 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 pinned 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, since 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 traveled a good deal, each 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 become overconfident as well.

  I realized that if I let him get me in a corner I was done for. He could use his favorite “starfish” 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 unfavorable 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 Star’s cabin—the end which was usually regarded as the floor. Ron was opposite me, and we’d been arguing in a good-natured manner for some time. It was obvious that a fight was about 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. Once he’d judged the course I was taking, Ron kicked himself off a fraction of a second after me.

  In free orbit, once you’d 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 get only halfway there. For my foot was tucked in a loop of cord that I’d thoughtfully fastened to the floor. I’d gone only a couple of yards when I jerked to a stop, dragging myself back the way I’d come. Ron couldn’t do anything but sail right on. He was so surprised at seeing me jerk back that he rolled over while 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 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 I.

  Some of our 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 that we didn’t do it very often. You need 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 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 was 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 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 spaceflight many people were nervous about meteors. They didn’t realize just how big space was and thought that leaving the protective blanket of the atmosphere would be like entering a machine-gun barrage. Today we know better; 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 more interested when he began to say what would happen if a meteor ever did hit us.

  “You have 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 vapor. That’s one reason why this station has a double hull: the outer shell provides almost complete protection against any meteors we’re ever likely to meet.

  “But there’s 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 s
tart rushing out, of course, but every room that has a wall toward space is fitted with one of these.”

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

  “This is capable of taking care of 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. Never try to clamp the disk 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 disk down into the class.

  “Have a look at it and pass it around. Any questions?”

  I wanted to ask what would happen if the hole was 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 to puzzle over Tim’s whereabouts. For at that precise moment there was a sudden, sharp explosion, quite deafening in that confined space. 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.

  4 A PLAGUE OF PIRATES

  For a moment, as the outrushing air tore at our clothes and tugged us toward 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 toward 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 millrace, 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.

  For the first time, I turned to see what Commander Doyle had been doing during the crisis. To my astonishment, he was still sitting quietly at his desk. What was more, there was a smile on his face, and a stop-watch in his hand. A dreadful suspicion began to creep into my mind, a suspicion that became a certainty in the next few moments. The others were also staring at him, and there was a long, icy silence. Then Norman coughed, and very ostentatiously rubbed his elbow where he had bruised it against the wall. If he could have managed a limp under zero gravity, I’m sure he’d have done so as he went back to his desk. When he reached there, he relieved his feelings by grabbing the elastic band that held his writing pad in place, pulling it away and letting it go with a “Twack!” The commander continued to grin.

  “Sorry if you’ve hurt yourself, Norman,” he remarked. “I really must congratulate you on the speed with which you acted. It took you only five seconds to get to the wall, which was very good when one allows for the fact that everybody else was getting in the way.”

  “Thank you, sir,” replied Norman, with quite unnecessary emphasis on the “sir.” I could see he still didn’t like the idea of having a practical joke played on him for a change. “But wasn’t it rather a dangerous—er—trick to play?”

  “Not at all. If you want the technical details, there’s a three-inch pipe around that hole, with a stopcock at the end of it. Tim is sitting out there in a space suit, and if we hadn’t sealed the leak inside ten seconds, he’d have closed the tap and cut off the flow.”

  “How was the hole made?” someone asked.

  “Just a small explosive charge, a very small one,” replied the commander. His grin had vanished and he had become quite serious again.

  “I didn’t do this just for fun. One day you may run into a real leak, and this test may make all the difference because you’ll know what to do. As you’ve seen, a puncture this size can make quite a draft and could empty a room in half a minute. But it’s easy enough to deal with if you act quickly and don’t panic.”

  He turned to Karl Hasse, who, like the good student he was, always sat in the front row.

  “Karl, I noticed you were the only one who never moved. Why?”

  In his dry, precise voice, Karl answered without any hesitation.

  “It was simple deduction. The chance of being hit by a large meteor is, as you had explained, inconceivably rare. The chance of being hit by one just when you’d finished talking about them was—well, so rare that it’s nearly impossible. So I knew there was no danger, and that you must be conducting some sort of test. That was why I just sat and waited to see what would happen.”

  We all looked at Karl, feeling a little sheepish. I suppose he was right; he always was. It didn’t help to make him any more popular.

  One of the biggest excitements of life in a space station is the arrival of the mail rocket from earth. The great interplanetary liners can come and go, but they’re not so important as the tiny, bright yellow ships that keep the crews of the station in touch with home. Radio messages are all very well, but they can’t compare with letters and, above all, parcels from earth.

  The station mail department was a cubby-hole near one of the air locks, and a small crowd usually gathered there even before the rocket had coupled up. As soon as the mailbags came aboard, they would be ripped open and some high-speed sorting would take place. Then the crowd would disperse, everyone hugging his correspondence or else saying, “Oh, well, I wasn’t expecting anything this time…”

  The lucky man who got a parcel couldn’t keep it to himself for long. Space mail is expensive, and a parcel usually meant one of those little luxuries you couldn’t normally obtain on the station.

  I was very surprised to find that I had quite a pile of letters waiting for me after the first rocket arrived—most of them from perfect strangers. The great majority were from boys of my own age who’d heard about me, or maybe had seen my TV appearances, and wanted to know all about life on the station. If I’d answered every one, there’d have been no time for anything else. What was worse, I couldn’t possibly afford to acknowledge them, even if I had the time. The postage would have taken all my spare cash.

  I asked Tim what I’d better do about it. He looked at some of the letters and replied:

  “Maybe I’m being cynical, but I think most of them are after space-mail stamps. If you feel you ought to acknowledge them, wait until you get back to earth. It’ll be much cheaper.”

  That was what I did, though I’m afraid a lot of people were disappointed.

  There was also a parcel from home, containing a good assortment of candy and a letter from Mom telling me to be sure to wrap up tight against the cold. I didn’t say anything about the letter, but the rest of the parcel made me very popular for a couple of days.

  There cannot be many people on earth who have never seen the TV serial “Dan Drummond, Space Detective.” Most of them, at some time or another, must have watched Dan tracking down interplanetary smugglers and assorted crooks, or have followed his never-ending battle with Black Jarvis, most diabolical of space pirates.

  When I came to the station, one of my minor surprises was discovering how popular Dan Drummond was among the staff. If they were off duty, and often when they weren’t, they never missed an installment of his adventures. Of course, they all pretended that they tuned in for the laughs, but that wasn’t quite true. For one thing, “Dan Drummond” isn’t half so ridiculous as many of the other TV serials. In fact, on the technical side it’s pretty well done and the producers obviously get expert advice, even if they don’t always use it. There’s more than a suspicion that someone aboard the station helps with the script, but nobody has ever been able to prove this. Even C
ommander Doyle has come under suspicion, though it’s most unlikely that anyone will ever accuse him outright.

  We were all particularly interested in the current episode, as it concerned a space station supposed to be orbiting Venus. Blackie’s marauding cruiser, The Queen of Night, was running short of fuel, so the pirates were planning to raid the station and replenish their tanks. If they could make off with some loot and hostages at the same time, so much the better. When the last installment of the serial had ended, the pirate cruiser, painted jet black, was creeping up on the unsuspecting station, and we were all wondering what was going to happen next.

  There has never been such a thing as piracy in space, and since no one except a multi-million combine can afford to build ships and supply them with fuel, it’s difficult to see how Black Jarvis could hope to make a living. This didn’t spoil our enjoyment of the serial, but it sometimes caused fierce arguments about the prospects for spatial crime. Peter van Holberg, who spent a lot of his time reading lurid magazines and watching the serials, was sure that something could be done if one was really determined. He amused himself by inventing all sorts of ingenious crimes and asking us what was to stop a person from getting away with them. We felt that he had missed his true vocation.

  Black Jarvis’ latest exploit made Peter unusually thoughtful, and for a day or so he went around working out just how valuable the contents of the station would be to an interplanetary desperado. It made an impressive figure, especially when one included the freight charges. If Peter’s mind hadn’t already been working along these lines, he would never have noticed the peculiar behavior of the Cygnus.

  In addition to the spaceships on the regular, scheduled runs, ships on special missions touched at the station about two or three times a month. Usually they were engaged on scientific research projects, occasionally something really exciting like an expedition to the outer planets. Whatever it was they were doing, everyone aboard the station always knew all about it.