Station in Space

by James Gunn

  But something had gone wrong.

  “What's the delay?” Danton demanded.

  From a cluster of men performing incomprehensible jobs outside the airtight door, a sweaty face turned. Phillips recognized Lieutenant Chapman, the air-control officer.

  “I don't know. They should be out by now. I can't raise anybody. Fred's in there and young Grant. All I can pick up is a low moaning noise. Somebody's alive. I've got two men outside trying to plug the leaks from there. Until then we can't open the door. Hold on!"

  He turned to the crewman beside him who had a self-powered handset to his ear. “Air pressure is climbing. Yes, here comes the report now. The leak is plugged. It'll be a couple of minutes,"

  “Leak?” Danton said softly.

  Chapman looked at him and said, “Yes, sir. One."

  The minutes passed leadenly. “Okay,” Chapman said. “Open it up."

  The door came open. Red fog drifted through. Phillips sniffed at it gingerly, but it was odorless. Within seconds two men were brought into the room, one bareheaded and limp in the arms of a rescuer who carried his one-third normal Earth weight without effort, the other helmeted and stumbling.

  Danton said impatiently, “Well, what are you waiting for?"

  Phillips looked up. Danton was frowning at him. “You're an M.D. Take care of that man.” He pointed to the unconscious man who had been laid gently on the floor.

  “The other one's in shock,” Phillips objected. “He needs help, too."

  Danton said grimly, “He'll live. Not that I care much. But Fred is important.” When Phillips still hesitated, Danton shoved him roughly toward the man on the floor. “Get busy, damn it!"

  Phillips started his examination. Danton, the emotion gone from his voice, said, “You don't understand, do you, Phillips? When that meteor hit and the air began whooshing out, Grant forgot everything he ever learned. He froze. Fred wasted precious seconds getting a helmet onto him. By that time it was too late to get into his own."

  Phillips glanced up. Grant's helmet had been stripped from his head. His young face was no longer animated and open. His nose had bled down over his upper lip and chin. His eyes were wide and unseeing; his lips moved but no sound came out.

  Suddenly Phillips was angry. The only normal man on the Wheel, and Phillips couldn't help him. “He was in shock,” he snapped.

  “Spacemen don't go into shock. We can't afford to. All our lives depend upon the ability of each one of us to be able to act swiftly and correctly in an emergency when other men might go into shock. If men can't do it—every time—they don't belong out here."

  Phillips got up slowly.

  “What are you doing?” Danton demanded roughly.

  “He's dead,” Phillips said.

  Before Phillips could move, Danton's hand slapped viciously against Grant's cheek. The boy's head jerked, but his eyes remained blank as the cheek slowly reddened.

  Danton screamed, “You dirty spy!"

  * * * *

  When Phillips started toward Grant, Danton swung around to glare at him with mad eyes. Phillips stopped. In a moment Danton's breathing had slowed. He said, almost calmly, to Chapman, “Take him to first aid. When he comes around, tell him to get his personal belongings together. He's through."

  “He needs immediate attention,” Phillips said, his teeth clenched. “Serum and—"

  “He'll get them. Come with me."

  Reluctantly Phillips followed Danton's square back to weight control and down on the spoke of the Wheel to Phillips’ cabin. Danton shoved open the door as if it were his own. He went in and put his back against the covered viewport.

  When Phillips had followed and closed the door, Danton said casually, “You think I was hard on the kid."

  Phillips ran his hand behind him under the table and turned on the recorder. “You make hard rules."

  “This is a hard place; we have to be hard to stay out here. I'm not blaming the kid for being foolish. I was a young, foolish kid, too, and I almost got sent in for it. The reason he's going in is that he didn't do the right thing instinctively: he held his breath instead of releasing it—you saw his nosebleed. The expansion of gases in his lungs did that; it could as easily have been his lungs that hemorrhaged. I'm blaming him for not getting into his emergency helmet. I'm blaming him for killing a man, a good man, a man we couldn't afford to lose."

  “You shouldn't have hit him."

  “Did I hit him?” Danton said, surprised. He must have read the answer on Phillips’ face. “I'm sorry I did that."

  “And calling him a spy?"

  “That, too, eh? I shouldn't have done that, either.” Danton grinned but there was no mirth in it. “I don't know why I'm arguing with you about sending a boy in. You're the one who wants to send us all in."

  “Not me. General Ashley."

  “Oh, yes. General Ashley. We're going to have a time with him.” Danton took a pace forward and absently picked up the blob of clay from the table. “We've read your papers up here with a lot of interest."

  “You get the psychological journals?"

  “Microfilms of things that interest us. A lot of us would like to know why we had to come out. But you haven't found the answer with your inquiries into broken homes and insecurity and neuroses."

  “What makes you so certain?"

  “Too easy. Men aren't that simple. It's like Neanderthal noticing a rainbow every time it rains and deciding that the rain makes the rainbow. The rain is part of it, but the sun is more important. It provides the energy. You can't reduce all the impulses to be different—the adventurousness, the criminality, the greatness—into cause and effect. After all the causes are fractionated off, you will still have an indefinable something that makes Man a man—a questioning, seeking animal."

  “You can't argue away the fact that you are children playing explorer, too immature to tackle the everyday problems of life inside."

  Danton didn't take the bait. He grinned. This time he almost meant it. “Is that how we look to you? Well, maybe we are. But it would be a sad commentary on the human race if all its progress had to be traced to the children of the race who ran away and found something new and wonderful beyond the hill.

  “Did you ever ask yourself, Lloyd, why General Ashley picked you to do his field work—a capable officer we will quickly agree, but certainly a minor Air Force captain."

  “I'm a young man. My adjustment rating is good."

  “Could it be,” Danton asked gently, “that he was sure, beforehand, what kind of a report you would bring back, that he knew your reputation and your convictions?"

  Danton let the question die in Phillips’ silence. Finally Phillips shrugged and said, “It doesn't matter. I'm going back on the next shuttle. I've got everything I need. And I'm going back with the same report any competent psychologist would make.” He looked defiantly at Danton.

  Danton chuckled. “Don't worry. We won't stop you. We could, but we won't. Sackcloth would just send up somebody else, and he might not be as easy to get along with. What are you going to tell Ashley?"

  Phillips studied Danton for a moment. The question of paranoia was settled. What he had to decide was whether he had enough evidence or whether he could take the risk of pushing Danton to the cracking point. He took the risk. “The Big Wheel has taken over all your non-military functions: weather observation, scientific research, radio relay—"

  “And is making money at it."

  “If the Little Wheel has no other function than observation and missile guidance,” Phillips continued steadily, “it has no reason for being. It can't do these things satisfactorily, and the very existence of the functions is a constant temptation to fulfill them. I can't guarantee the soundness of the men out here."

  “Whose soundness can you guarantee?” Danton asked, letting his weariness show through. “You've seen General Ashley, and you've seen me. Whose finger would you rather have on the firing button?"

  “The people chose General Ashley."
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  Danton's eyelid jerked. “What people? The only person who chose General Ashley was General Ashley."

  Phillips insisted stubbornly, “He was chosen through the proper functioning of a democratic government. Nobody can be permitted to substitute his personal preferences or his own decisions."

  “Even when ‘the people's choice’ is obviously a megalomaniac afflicted with agoraphobia?” Danton hesitated; when he spoke again his voice was apologetic. “That was unfair. I brought it up only to prove that you would trust General Ashley out here—even if he could endure it—even less than you trust me. Ashley sent you out with a question that had only one answer: no one can be trusted."

  “Well? Isn't that a good reason for bringing you in?"

  “If that were our only purpose out here, and we really could serve that purpose as everyone believes—yes, certainly. But it wouldn't do any good, because there's ten times the firepower stored Inside, waiting for a nervous finger to unleash it."

  Danton looked straight into Phillips’ face, his eyelid twitching. “You know the real reason Ashley doesn't want us up here. He's not afraid that we'll shoot without orders. He's afraid that he'll tell us to fire and we won't obey."

  * * * *

  How much of Danton's argument was truth, how much casuistry? Phillips wondered. And then he remembered “What if he refused to come?” and thought: Yes, Ashley was worried about that.

  That put a new and revealing light on Ashley, but it didn't change the basic premises of the situation: there were still men up here who could destroy the world if they weren't more than men can be expected to be.

  The knock at the door was like punctuation for his thoughts. When Danton opened it, Chapman was there, tossing a slim length of tubing in his hand.

  “Got it, eh?” Danton said, without surprise.

  “Still reeks of gunpowder."

  “No one tried to sneak it away?"

  Chapman shook his head. “Can't figure it."

  Phillips looked from the tube to Chapman to Danton. “What are you trying to say? That the lab wall was pierced by a bullet instead of a meteor?"

  Danton shrugged impatiently. “Of course. A meteor that size would have gone clear through. Two holes. The missile had to come from inside. And where does that knock your theories, Mr. Freud?"

  Phillips didn't pause to think. “It supports my belief that the men up here are unstable—unstable enough to attempt murder—or suicide."

  Danton said mildly, “You think a spaceman did that? Unhunh. We have too great and natural a respect for meteors to create artificial ones. Besides, where would an unstable spaceman get a bullet? No. This was sabotage."

  “Whose?"

  “You figure it out. We've fought it before—for almost six months, as a matter of fact.” Danton looked at Phillips suddenly with hard, frozen eyes. “As a matter of fact, Captain, you were the last one out."

  There was a moment of awkward silence as Phillips leaned forward, incredulous, and Danton's suspicions filled the room. The flat, tinny voice of the wall speaker was loud: “All hands to emergency stations. The taxis are loose. Drifting. All hands—"

  Danton's expression changed instantly. “Maybe I'm wrong.” A wry smile twisted his lips. “Here, Captain, here's your Rorschach blob.” He put the clay gently on the table and was gone.

  Phillips stared at the door through which Danton had vanished. Did Danton seriously suspect him? Or was it only his paranoia peeping through? There were no grounds—

  But there were—the tube smelling of freshly exploded gunpowder. If it did smell of gunpowder, and if it was found in the air-testing lab, and if it had not been planted there by Danton himself.

  The thought had occurred to him when it happened that the timing was perfect. But that would imply an acting ability far beyond the self-limitations of paranoia. If Danton had planted the tube, he was not paranoid. If he had not, then someone was trying to sabotage the Wheel.

  Phillips realized, as he should have realized before, that the whole case against the Wheel rested or fell on the sanity of the commanding officer. He looked down at the table and froze.

  The clay that Danton had put there was no longer a blob.

  It was a figure, the figure of a child standing sturdily on his feet, looking up. Deftly, as he had talked, Danton's fingers had worked, shaping, creating—a work of art. As such it should be judged, not in psychological terms. With a few skillful touches Danton had created what he had been describing—the child who ran away and found something new and wonderful beyond the hill. But there was more than that—there was the concept of greatness here and the questing...

  But Phillips had to judge it on his own terms, and there was where his distress was greatest. Because in this figure was understanding and compassion and belief in mankind—and not a trace of paranoia.

  That meant—it could only mean—that Danton was surrounded by spies. He had a right to be suspicious. His neurosis was functional.

  The difficulty was—Danton knew too much. What was it he had said as he left? Here, Captain, here's your Rorschach blob.

  But that would imply that Danton knew himself so well, and his psychology so well, and was so consummate an artist, that he could create—this!

  It was too much. Phillips’ head whirled. Nausea churned his stomach like a touch of spacesickness.

  Deliberately he picked up the figure and squeezed it back into shapelessness.

  Only moments later did he recall why Danton had hurried away. The taxis were loose. Drifting. And if the taxis were gone, he was marooned.

  Phillips threw himself through the doorway.

  * * * *

  Phillips scrambled down the spoke to the Hub. It was empty. Only two spacesuits were hanging from their supports. He struggled into one that was too large. He squeezed through an airlock and then, carefully snapping the hook of his safety line to a ring just beyond the cagelike entrance, slipped outside.

  He floated slowly out from the Hub, spinning in the black immensity of night, the pinpoint holes of the stars making streaks past his eyes like a poor astronomical plate. With a short tug on his line, working with an instinct he had never known he had, Phillips slowed his spin.

  He saw one—a plump sausage with a plastic window—floating gently away from the gleaming rim of the wheel. Gently—and yet the taxi diminished with alarming swiftness. Then he saw another and another. All drifting away. As far as he could see, there were none left tied to the wheel.

  There should have been chaos here, with suited men pouring out of the Wheel without plan or precedent for an emergency whose scope Phillips could only guess. But there was a crazy kind of order in the silence.

  Men were snapping their safety lines to each other's suits instead of the Wheel. One man, in the lead, was clambering with incredible speed along the spoke until he reached the rim. Then he jumped, his bent legs thrusting him away from the satellite spinning beneath, his safety line trailing behind. As that line almost reached its limit, the man to whom it was attached jumped after him.

  One after another they jumped, forming a living chain of spacesuited men linked together by almost invisible strands of cord, working together as a unit with the social instinct of army ants, reaching toward the stars, throwing a thin bridge across the impassable river of space.

  Flame spurted from the suit at the head of the chain. It curved slowly toward the nearest taxi.

  For Phillips it seemed like a metaphor. Men would die, but others would take their place, and one day men would cross over the bridge their comrades’ courage and sacrifice had made, and reach the stars.

  The taxi was still receding swiftly—swifter, it seemed to Phillips, than the chain that reached toward it. Would the chain be long enough?

  He caught a ring on the spoke of the Wheel and swung himself out toward the rim. Suddenly he was stopped. Something had caught him from behind. He swung his head around inside the helmet to look back. There was a spacesuited man behind him, the hook in his
sleeve-ending caught somewhere in Phillips’ suit beneath his range of vision. With the hook in his other sleeve, the man held himself to a ring on the Hub. Easily he pulled Phillips back toward him.

  Phillips could not see who it was. The helmet viewplates were dark to keep out ultraviolet. Then he recognized a faded eagle on the chest of the suit.

  His helmet bumped gently against the other helmet Transmitted through that contact came the metallic voice, “Where do you think you're going?” It was Danton.

  “It may not be long enough."

  Danton did not have to ask what he meant. “If it isn't, you can't help. That takes teamwork. Something you have to learn. Something you have to live. When everybody's life depends on the actions of everyone else, that comes easily."

  The implication was clear: he wasn't a part of the team, not even a player on anyone's team. “But it's serious—"

  “Of course it is. If they don't reach that taxi, we're stuck. We can't get supplies over from the shuttles. We can't finish our—work."

  “Until they send out replacements?"

  Even through the helmets, Danton's voice was ironic. “And that's something Ashley can veto."

  “You think this is Ashley's doing?"

  “That's for you to decide."

  “We'd better help,” Phillips said, trying to struggle free.

  “How much help would you be?” Danton asked. He let Phillips swing away a little to see his safety line still clipped to a ring on the Hub. Then he pulled him back. “You'd just get in their way. They'll get it."

  The two of them, clasped together like misshapen and amorous starfish, had floated around until the lengthening chain had drifted back into view. The first suit, its rocket jets blazing in brief spurts, was farther ahead of the second link than it should have been. It had cut its safety line, Phillips realized. It was heading out, alone, into the black, bottomless river.