Station in Space

by James Gunn

  He was moving. He was alive. By being alive here, by outfacing the eternal enemies—heat, cold, and airlessness, distance, acceleration, and the ever-present missiles of space itself, and even other men—he kept humanity alive.

  Once in his life, if he is lucky, a man finds something worth doing. He had found it.

  The long journey to the stars was the most human thing that men could do. It would keep the whole race human.

  The first trip would fail, he felt sure, and perhaps the second and the third. But one day men would come back from the long trip out, if the men who were born equipped to do the job did not lose faith.

  He was one of them.

  Space Is a Lonely Place

  I

  Terry Phillips watched her husband come out of the bedroom brushing down his graying hair. It wouldn't lie right after it was washed, even though Lloyd tried to tame it with a stocking cap. The one-third gravity did that.

  She studied him with eyes cleared for a moment of ten years’ habit. Those ten years had aged Lloyd more than they should. He looked much older than a man still this side of forty. His face was dark and marred by frown and squint lines. His eyes were flecked with cataracts. He was thinner. But he was still a handsome man, almost as handsome as when he had stood with her in their marriage ceremony.

  There were unpleasant memories, too, but she wouldn't think of those. Not now. Not when her mind was made up.

  Lloyd was worried. She wondered if it was the ship.

  But the first thing he asked about was the children.

  Terry laughed. She could still laugh. “Paul and Carl have been up for hours. It's ten o'clock, sleepy head. They're in the recreation room."

  “Oh. Fine. Fine.” He rubbed his chin absently and stared at the rungs of the metal ladder fixed against the inner wall They mounted toward a square door in the convex ceiling. It was closed. Something thumped against it; they heard muffled laughter.

  Terry said gently, “Breakfast is ready."

  Lloyd started. “Oh. Yes.” He sat down and drained his glass of reconstituted orange juice. He started in on the powdered eggs as if he really enjoyed them. “I got in late last night. After one. Didn't wake you, did I?"

  Terry lied. “No. Were the films bad again?"

  Lloyd nodded, frowning. “Two hundred and fifty-nine days. If they can hold out one day longer, they'll make it. They'll be the first men to complete a successful trip to Mars. They've got to hold out!"

  She said slowly, “I think you must be the most cold-blooded man I've ever known. Those men are friends of yours, and you care more about the success of the trip than whether they live or die."

  Lloyd sipped the instant coffee. “You think I wouldn't have traded places with any of them? They knew what they were doing. They knew that two previous attempts had failed. Horribly. They went out with their eyes open.

  “What do you think it's like to be in the viewing room, watching them walk to the brink of madness and lean over, and know that they're God-knows-how-many million miles away, and you can't do a thing?"

  “I'm sorry. Forget it."

  Lloyd looked at her quickly. “You aren't really sorry, are you?” He paused. “I've decided to get scooters for the kids on their birthdays."

  Terry put down the cup she had been holding in both hands as if to warm them. “Lloyd! Carl's just six, and Paul's only eight."

  “You can't keep them cooped up in these six rooms forever. They're responsible kids. It's perfectly safe."

  Terry said with iron-hard determination, “They'll never use them.” Her lips were compressed into thin, pale lines. “You might as well know. I'm leaving you. I'm taking the children with me. I wasn't going to tell you while you were worried about the Santa Maria, but we can't go on like this any longer."

  “Terry!” Lloyd's eyes were shocked and hurt. “I know I'm hard to live with, but I'm no worse than I ever was. You know I couldn't live without you and the kids. You're my wife—"

  Terry shook her head sadly. “You're married to that Wheel out there. You're mother to those men. You don't need a wife. I don't know why I ever thought I could make it work. I must have been crazy. Everyone said I was crazy to come out here with you.

  “I've been living in this stupid ball for ten years. It stinks, Lloyd, literally stinks. Old sweat and old food and oil. If I fry onions I can smell them for weeks. The air is so wet and thick you can almost feel it like damp cotton in your lungs. I want to feel like a human being again. I'm going Inside, Lloyd. I'm never coming out again.” Her voice was close to hysteria. “Never!"

  Lloyd said quickly, “But there are other women out here now. This is a permanent base. We're space dwellers. You can't expect us to live without families—"

  “Women can't live out here, Lloyd!” Terry tried to control her voice. “The other women are hermits, just like me. How long has it been since you saw one of them, outside her cocoon? When we get together, it's by television. Did you ever try to play bridge by television? I haven't seen another woman in the flesh for a year."

  Lloyd's voice was suddenly sober. “Have you thought about the kids?"

  “That's all I have thought about. Do you know those children have never been on Earth? Never? They're being cheated of their birthright—blue skies and green grass and playing baseball with the other kids. They'll never be human beings.” She was screaming now. “They're growing up into monster! Monsters!"

  Lloyd looked at her, not moving, not saying anything. “I think they're pretty darned nice kids. Don't project your disappointments into them, Terry. Children don't see things the way we do. As long as they have love and security—"

  She was panting with the effort to control herself.

  Lloyd said gently, “Maybe you need a vacation. We can afford it."

  “Another one? Without the children? No, thanks. When I leave it will be for good, and the children will go with me."

  Lloyd's face grew tight. He bit his lower lip the way he did when he tried to suppress his emotion. If he'd only let it out, Terry thought. Just once. So I wouldn't have to guess—

  Lloyd's voice was ragged. “Give me a chance to think about it. Please, Terry?"

  She nodded reluctantly. She couldn't bear to see him hurt. Still.

  “And please don't worry the children,” Lloyd said. “Don't let them feel that we've been arguing—and especially not about them."

  Terry said bitterly, “Always the psychologist!"

  “Perhaps it was the father speaking that time.” Lloyd turned and went up the ladder quickly. The port came open at his touch, swinging upward. The sound of laughter came through clearly now and childish voices shouting, “Daddy! Daddy! Look at me!"

  Terry blinked fast to keep back the tears. “Lloyd! Lloyd!” she said. “If you only loved me!"

  But she said it to herself.

  * * * *

  They were sturdy boys, all brown, long arms and legs and the kind of dark-brown eyes that seem almost black and look down deep inside a man. They floated in the center of the spherical recreation room, their faces laughing, their bodies as graceful as porpoises in the sea.

  Lloyd looked at them and his heart grew cold. What would he be without them? An old man, dying.

  “Hello, kids,” he said. “What is it today?"

  Paul answered. “We're playing Martians. He's playing Martian. I'm an Earthman, and I try to catch him, because he's trying to keep me from getting to Mars. If I catch him in five jumps, I get to Mars, and if he gets away, I'm dead."

  Carl chanted, “Nyah, nyah! You can't catch me!” He stuck out his tongue at Paul and pushed himself away. He hit the opposite wall and bounced back. In the middle, where there was no-gravity, he did a curious kind of flip that sent him twisting in another direction.

  Lloyd had never seen anything like it.

  Paul's hands, outstretched to catch his brother, missed by inches, and the older boy landed on the curved wall, his legs under him, bent and thrusting.

  Llo
yd jumped for the ceiling. Beside these brown, silken creatures he felt old and stiff. He touched the inner airlock door and slowly drifted from a handstand to his feet as the door opened. He slipped through.

  He kept remembering their voices as he zipped himself with the ease of long practice into his suit. Children played like that. In the midst of wars they were soldiers. In the midst of plagues they were doctors and nurses. In the midst of space...

  The other suits hung like decapitated monsters on the walls of the rectangular shaft. Terry's suit hadn't been used for a long time. He would have to check it carefully. If she were going to leave—

  No. He wouldn't think of that.

  He unlocked the outer door and slid through until he caught the hook-on ring. The door clanged shut. Now he could see the cottage from the outside. His home.

  It was a sphere, a miniature world thirty feet in diameter, which is not so small in terms of living area when all of it is usable space. The sphere spun rapidly to give the illusion of one-third gravity in the rooms nearest the surface, diminishing rapidly toward the axis near which he stood. The axis consisted of the airlock, an imaginary cylinder through the recreation room, and the cargo hold at the other end.

  Around the cottage was space—the night was a sooty black scattered with more stars than seemed possible to someone reared inside Earth's filter of air.

  There to the right was the red brilliance of Mars, closer than any of the others he could see, but still very, very far. To the left was Earth, 1,075 miles away, dark now with the sun and the moon both on the other side. It was a huge, black disk, dotted here and there with the reddish spots of cities, blotting out the stars, beneath one moment, hanging like a gigantic weight above him the next.

  A man could do that to his senses out here where there was no up or down, where the only directions were here and away. He could drive himself mad with illusions. What must those poor lost souls out there near Mars be suffering, so far from home that Earth seemed like only another star among millions? He looked at Mars again, but he couldn't possibly glimpse the Santa Maria. Even the best telescope on the Wheel couldn't pick it out now.

  A few hundred feet away was the Wheel, a spinning inner tube crossed by a single spoke, gleaming white in the starlight, against the velvet night. Around the Wheel were the spheres of other cottages—nine of them. Somehow they made the Wheel seem more like home. They humanized it, made it less like a foothold in space and more like a colony of men and women who were there and intended to stay. He couldn't let that be broken up.

  It was hard on a woman. Men can live on dreams, sometimes, but women need solidity. But men need women and children, and always, somehow, they had induced women to go with them to the frontiers and build homes.

  The question was: Had men gone so far that their women couldn't follow?

  He launched himself toward the Wheel and floated effortlessly toward it. As he passed the round Hub at the center, he reached out with the hook of one sleeve-ending and caught the cage into which the taxis slipped with their human cargoes.

  He went through the airlock, removed his suit and hung it on its rack, and clambered down the sagging netting to the weight control room. The air was bad in here—thick and hot and humid and filled with the many odors men make living and working. It was worse than the cottage.

  Colonel Danton was waiting for him outside Celestial Observation. He looked old and haggard and sick. His hair was a thin, pure-white stubble on his head. His eyes were almost blind with cataracts, and his body was bent and thin. He looked eighty years old instead of less than fifty.

  Phillips thought, He won't be able to stand another failure.

  Danton said, “Jim Faust is here.” His voice still carried the firmness and force of authority.

  Lloyd said, “Here? What does he want?"

  “He's worried. He wants to go over the films himself. He doesn't think he can carry us much longer—not if this shot fails."

  Lloyd stared thoughtfully at Danton. “You don't need to go through this again. Take it easy this morning."

  Danton's jaw tightened and then slowly relaxed. “Doctor's orders? Keep him happy, Lloyd. I'll see you at lunch."

  Lloyd turned, opened the airtight door, and went into the darkness of the improvised viewing rooms where Faust was watching films of the fifth day...

  II

  Five days out The Santa Maria was one million miles from Earth. The ship was a child's toy of spheres and cylinders and rocket engines flimsily bolted together with pieces from an Erector set. It was all white; it gleamed like porcelain in the relentless sunlight.

  The top half of the central cylinder was cargo space for equipment that would be needed for the investigation of Mars. Above that was the personnel sphere, dotted with portholes and shutterlike temperature regulators. There were three decks: the supply deck, with its lockers for spacesuits and its cylindrical airlock; the living deck; and the control deck. At the top was the plastic bubble of the astrodome.

  The ship tumbled slowly as it coasted along the seven-hundred-and-thirty-five-million-mile ellipse that would carry it into the orbit of Mars at the instant the red planet would reach that point. The rocket motors had blasted for fifteen minutes; the rest of the two-hundred-and-sixty-day trip would be in utter, inescapable silence.

  Inside the sphere, the predominant impression was bare utility: everything was painted metal, plastic, and rubber tile. Every wall of the ship and much of the nominal walls and ceilings were used for gauges, ducts, lockers, bunks, chairs, tanks, conduits...

  The control deck was a closed universe of grinning gauges and shifting spots of colored light, but the man on watch glanced at them only occasionally. He was staring through the astrodome, watching for the Earth as the ship's slow tumbling brought it past.

  Like all the crew members, Burt Holloway was a short man. He was a slim five feet seven with thin, mobile hands, short, blond hair, and very blue eyes. He was not handsome. Men said he had a monkey face, with his weak mouth and receding chin, but women thought he needed mothering. He was barefooted. His only garment was a pair of shorts.

  Four of the crew were on the living deck, which was reached from either of the other two by concentric holes in the separating partitions bisected by a painted aluminum fireman's pole. Fastened to one curving wall were bunks which could be folded back. The other side of the room belonged to the dining unit: a snack dispenser, a giant freezer that extended into the storage deck, a short-wave range, and a circular table.

  Jack “Iron” Barr, five feet eight of bulging muscles and matted red hair, lay in his bunk, his belt snapped to rings on the framework. He had dark blue eyes and eyebrows that met in a straight line above his crooked nose. He was reading a letter written on pale-blue note paper. Occasionally he brought it close to his face and sniffed, his eyes closed, a slow smile stretching his wide mouth.

  “Hey, now,” he said huskily. “Listen to this: ‘Lover, honey, baby—I'll never forget that night you showed me—’”

  “The Big Dipper,” Ted Craddock finished. He was sitting in the slings of the table, a plastic flask of orange juice in one tanned hand. He was the baby of the group at twenty-five, a beautiful, brown-skinned young man. His hazel eyes squinted into laugh lines at the corners. “That woman must drench her note paper with musk. Put it away, Iron. It's stinking up the place.” He broke off in a brief spell of coughing.

  Barr said irritably, “It's better than the other stinks we breathe all the time. I swear I never knew you guys were so smelly. And you, Ted, spraying the place with germs. Why don't you cover your mouth? Hey, now, listen to this one.” He drew a folded square of pink paper from under the waistband of his shorts. “This was a blond little joy baby—"

  Emil Jelinek said quietly, “Knock it off, Iron.” He was thirtyish to the others’ late twenties, a thin, angular man with sparse black hair and a small, rakish mustache. He was lying in the bunk next to Barr, his hands folded behind his head. “Women are more than two
and a half years away. By the time you get back they'll have two kids apiece."

  “Not these,” Barr boasted. “They'll wait. That's what Ellen says here. She says she'll wait for five years if she has to, or ten. She says there's nobody like me."

  Tony Migliardo laughed from the other side of the deck where he floated beside the snack dispenser. He was a good-looking, dark-skinned young man with liquid brown eyes and blue-black hair. “There are many men like you, Iron, and she will find them—reproductive organs with minor attachments for mobility."

  “You dirty little—” Barr tried to spring out of his bunk, but the belt pulled him back.

  Jelinek turned his head and stared hard at Barr. “Everybody be quiet for ten seconds! If we're like this in five days, what will we be doing in two hundred and sixty? Mig? Do you hear me?"

  “I am very sorry, Iron,” Migliardo apologized. “I should not have said that."

  Barr relaxed. “Okay then."

  “And, Iron,” Jelinek added. “I think it would be best if you didn't enlighten us on the details of your amorous conquests. There are enough natural irritants."

  Barr grumbled, “You guys are missing your chance for the kind of education you don't get in the Academy. Go ahead. Stay stupid."

  Craddock began to cough.

  Barr twisted to stare at him. “What about that? That could get old, too."

  Jelinek said, “I'll see what I can do. Ted?” He opened the locker beside his head and pulled an opthalmoscope down.

  Craddock freed himself from the table slings and floated over beside Jelinek's bunk. He held himself there, with one hand while Jelinek inspected his throat. “The lining is irritated, but that could be just from coughing.” He reached into the locker for a small, metal cylinder. He flicked a small lever on the side. Two smooth, blue pills popped into his hand. “A little penicillin won't hurt. Come back for another in six hours."

  Barr said suddenly, “Hey, now, Emil. That ain't right what you said about five days."