"Yes," I said, "I was only thinking. So in fact, neither you nor Petifer know where we are?"
"You fooll" he yelled at me. "How do you think I can take observations on stars and suns and moons and planets that appear as nothing but concentric bands of light?"
Then, as everyone tried to comment, the microphones and speakers got out of hand once more. The howl built up, echoing in our space-ship in its vacuum as water-waves echo in a can in air. It rose in volume and up the sonic scale. It rose like a rocket to some ultimate zenith of pure sound, passed it and went out of view. That it was still ringing in a pitch too high for human ears was evidenced when the rest of the light-bulb gave way and showered our compartment with broken glass.
3
WE SORTED ourselves out in time. The falling sensation did not increase, but it is one of those things you never can get used to. We would have acclimatized more quickly to it, only, as the spin died down under the influence of the gyros the weightlessness was distinctly worse.
One man—no need to mention his name, he's dead, poor fellow—could not leave his bunk. He screamed when we tried to loose his straps. We could only leave him there and feed him, putting the food-syringes to his lips and pushing the plunger while he sucked. A pity. It cut him off from all the nicely sticky things that you are able to hold and eat and deal with in the weightless state.
Even before the spin quite stopped, Petifer was able to identify the small green band that appeared in the periscope astern as possibly the earth. Maxwell did a neat calculation on the internal and external diameters of the band and calculated our recession speed. From that and the area of furnace that was the sun he did a rough working of our position that put us somewhere on our course.
It was wonderful, everyone said, when the stars slowed down and you could see them wandering slowly past the window. They spent time up in the control-room, snapping scenes with cameras like tourists. It looked somewhat ludicrous to me, to see them making swimming motions with their bodies as they focused and tried to point their cameras. Maxwell had to stop it in the end and make an arbitrary rule that, however it might seem, what had been the floor was 'down'.
I spent a lot of time working on the gyros, which were running hot. They had not been intended for a solid three-day pull to stop a quite fantastic spin. I was not too happy when, to make a course adjustment, Maxwell gave the rocket motors a two-second blast. We came out of it in a spin again.
We had a solemn conference in the control-room after that, everyone with their feet on the floor and trying to look as though they were standing up. Subject: Holder's motors' left hand thread.
"It's the vertical take-off deflector-plate," I said. "It's either burned out irregularly down one side, or it's out of true."
They discussed various possibilities and eventually came back to where we started. It was the vertical take-off deflector-plate, step two, outside the rocket, about a hundred feet from where we were standing then.
We had an airlock and a self-contained diving suit, but no one was keen to mention them for a little while. We had tried it back on earth. With anything like one atmosphere inside the suit, in excess of the pressure outside, you blew up like a balloon and could not move an arm or leg or finger.
"The point is this," Maxwell said. "It's no use spinning when we're maneuvering near the planet Mars. In the first place the only pictures we'd get would be a lovely coloured blur. In the second it would be impossible to take the observations necessary to set our course for home."
We broke up that meeting. We had, after all, still nearly a hundred days to think about it
In the privacy of our compartment, where the space-diving gear was kept, Bert Hapten and I made experiments with the suit. With four pounds of pressure inside it, in excess of the atmosphere we were using, you could move about with difficulty and even bend your arms, as though against giant springs, to do a little work. But would four pounds pressure, absolute, be enough to keep a man alive in space? I lay on my bunk and read the books. Between a third and a quarter of an atmosphere seemed quite reasonable. Men breathing oxygen had climbed Everest at that and flown aircraft higher.
I was to think of those experiments later. I was to think how, if I had not studied those books so intently, I might not have survived the accident nor lived the next five years.
Still, for the time being there I was, all set to be the hero of the expedition. Hapton looked doubtful when I asked if he wished to contest the honour with me.
I went to Maxwell. I told him I was ready to go out through the airlock and look at that deflector-plate. If it was a simple matter, I might even do a job on it.
I have wondered since if he had a presentiment. I remembered he looked distinctly worried. But I thought it was about me, and I felt fine.
"Don't worry about the pressure," I said. "Well reduce it very slowly in the airlock. When it gets down to a third, 111 close up my suit. Ill remain plugged in with my telephone. If I find I'm immovable when we get down to zero in the lock, 111 tell you and you can fill it up again."
It sounded all right. He had to admit it did. For example, if I was in difficulty, or suffering from anoxia, I would not be able to open the outer airlock door, which was a complicated procedure in itself. If I could overcome that it was a fair bet that I could look after myself when I stepped out in space.
"I'd feel happier if we'd two suits," he said.
"Why?" I asked. "So that if I got into difficulties you could send another man out to get into difficulties too?"
He did not argue too much. He had not worked out how to take observations from or set courses in a spinning rocket-not with the precision required to find those tiny specks in space that were the planets. After all, he must have thought, if anything went wrong he would only lose one man, not the ship.
We set the time for the attempt the following day. In the meantime I got the suit up to the airlock and tried a couple of decompressions. It worked all right. The airlock was only a small steel shell on the skin of the ship, like the escape-hatch in a submarine, and intended to serve much the same kind of purpose. I could turn round in it, with the suit inflated, and face the outer door. That was enough to work on.
We began at ten a.m. by ship's time the following morning. I went into the lock and everyone stood around outside. When I closed the door, I could not see them, only the inside of the lock, which looked singularly like a metal coffin. I turned round early this time, to be ready, facing the other door, when the suit inflated.
It took a long time, a very long time. We took the decompression very slowly, pumping the air back into the ship so as not to waste it.
"Half an atmosphere," they said over the phone.
They did not need to tell me. I had a barometer with me and it was registering five hundred millibars.
At four hundred, I still felt fine, but I knew the insidious nature of anoxia. I closed my helmet and told them: "On oxygen now."
They could draw out quickly after that. Five minutes later, after a running commentary on their pressure needle, they told me: "You're in a standard commercial vacuum now."
beginning to open outer door now. O.K.?"
"Go ahead." It was Maxwell's voice. "Watch it. You've probably enough pressure still inside to throw it open."
To say 'watch it' was all right, but my suit wanted to force my arms out straight, like a scarecrow. It was only the walls of the lock that kept me in some sort of human shape. I fumbled and worked, and eventually heard a faint, faint hiss that was carried through my feet from the slightly open door.
"Opening," I said. With an effort, I gave it a push with my foot and suddenly looked out into space itself.
There were stars out there. Stars had always been in the sky before. So, as far as I was concerned, I was looking up.
I hung on to a handle by the door. It was as well I did. As soon as I let my body go and my arm straighten, I shot out and almost fell clear into space itself.
"What's happening?"
Maxwell said. "What's happening? Give us a running commentary, do you hear?"
"Nothing," I said. "I'm outside, that's all." With an effort I managed to get my feet down to the ship. I stood up, with some sort of security on magnetic soles. The stars were still up, and the ship below me was down. She was floating in a sea which was the universe. It was rather pleasant. Close your eyes a little and you could almost imagine that there was a sea for the ship to float in and that the stars visible round the edge of her were reflections.
I turned round to face the sun, which was astern. That was bad. I could not see a thing. But I walked aft slowly, paying out the telephone as I went Twice, pulling one foot, with its sticky magnets, from the deck, I almost pulled the other up too. I hung on to the telephone as to a lifeline.
I heard laughter over the phone. I felt annoyed. I said: "What the hell?"
"We can see you through the periscope," Maxwell said. "If you knew what you look like, tiptoeing down the rocket with your arms straight out on the end of a telephone."
"You look to your business," I said. "You see that no one pulls the automatic closing lever for the outer door until I come in."
I reached the tail of the rocket. I did not like the look of that Theoretically it was possible for me simply to walk over the edge and stand on the new surface, but I could not rid myself of the feeling that 'down' was the way my feet were pointing. I went over cautiously.
When I stood up again it was clear that the rocket was standing on her nose, and it had been when I was on the sides that I had been in danger of falling off.
"You're out of sight," Maxwell said.
"I'm looking at the main deflector-plate," I said. "It looks as though someone hit it with a heavy hammer. I propose to take it off and either cast it adrift or bring it in. What happens if we're left without one?"
They had a consultation about that. I did not wait for them to finish. There was a spanner on my belt. By exerting my muscles to the full extent I managed to get my arm down to it. I set to work on the bolts of the plate standing at arm's length away from them.
"It doesn't matter about the deflector-plate of step two," Maxwell said. "By the time we come in for a landing we'll be working on step three."
"It's as well you said that," I said. "It's nearly off."
I unfastened the bolts. The thing just stood there. I hit it with my spanner. I felt the clang run up my arm but I could not hear it. The damaged deflector-plate began gently to sail away. I watched it as it started out on a wandering course among the stars, and then I turned round to go back.
It felt even worse, this time, to go over the edge from the tail of the rocket on to the sides. I could not escape the feeling that I would slide down the side and depart, with an increasing velocity, past the rocket's nose.
"What the hell are you doing?" Maxwell said. "You've come into view again. What are you crawling about like that for?"
"It's the constellation of Pisces," I said. "I was born in February. I like to keep it over my left shoulder all the time."
I got up on my feet again. I walked toward the airlock.
On arrival, I looked round sadly. But I could not think of an excuse to remain outside any longer, and I began the business of coming in.
I went down on my hands and knees. It was like lying down in a declivity or climbing into a grave. My arms were the worst part. I had to fold them in, then try to wedge them.
"For God's sake close that outer door again," I yelled. "It's the toughest thing yet, to stay in here."
"Sorry," Maxwell said. "Didn't know you were in."
The outer door began to close, eating its way across the heavens with its jet-black shadow.
I don't know what happened then. It must have been some mistake they made inside. The door closed all right. I am positive of that. And as soon as it closed its spring-loaded catches should have engaged so that no one could open it again without the complicated maneuver I had been through when going out.
So far as I was concerned, the strictures of my suit decreased as they put the pressure on. Instead of billowing out from me and making me a balloon man, it collapsed about me and then began actually to cling to my skin as the pressure outside exceeded that within. I did not attempt to open up my helmet, cramped as I was. I simply opened up my oxygen supply to compensate for the increased pressure outside.
I could hear then. I could hear them working on the inner door, to open up and get me securely inside and back on board.
I was shot out like a cork from a bottle. I must have screamed. I could see all the stars again, and the blazing sun, and the departing shadow that was the ship. My suit became all but completely rigid in an instant.
I was turning end over end in space and I could see the ship about a hundred yards from me, and still departing. It came into my line of sight and out again in successive moments. I had looped the telephone cord around me and it was that which was doing it, spinning me like a top.
For one dreadful instant I was left face towards the ship. I could see the telephone cord, my only lifeline, rigid and tight between myself and the terribly distant rocket's bulk. It was stretching like elastic and I waited for it to snap.
Instead, I began to swing in again. It was then that I found time to think.
I could see the airlock. Inner and outer doors were both wide open. The electric lights were burning in the interior and shining out into space.
I knew even before I hit the ship with the crash that stunned me and made my later movements slower. I knew that, on an instant, there had been no air left inside the ship at all.
I clung to the airlock door as I hit and my suit rebounded. There were wild, insane, and desperate instants as I fought with that intractable suit, which had too much pressure in it. I dragged myself inside, into the ship that had become a coffin. Scarecrow-like, my arms extended, crucified one might say, and mad with a sense of tragedy and terror, I struggled upright on the deck, flung myself forward, and closed the inner door.
It seemed an age before I even heard a sound, the sound of a shrill scream as the automatic air-plants of the ship pumped air into the quarters, refilling that shell, that emptiness, which for quite five minutes had been open to the cold, the outer vacuum of space itself.
4
WHENTHE. pressure was normal enough to allow me some sort of free movement within my suit, I pulled the lever that automatically closed the outer door. Then I remained, holding that handle, stunned. And time went by.
I began to move. I had faced it then. I knew that I too must die. No one man could handle that rocket, turn her, take the observations, and bring her back to earth. But, although I knew I was to die, I had to find some purpose, some object which it was within my period to encompass.
I took off my suit. I looked nervously at the airlock doors. But they were closed and I knew they would remain closed. I could not conceive how the accident had happened. Some premature jubilation, some joking triumph, some omission of the tests. . . . But the floating bodies were the worst thing.
Two of them were left: Petifer and Hapton. Somehow they had not been shot out, like the rest of us, by the escaping air. But I could tell who they were only by the clothes. Nothing could have been guessed from those torn and staring pop-eyed faces. They were the terror of my new environment.
I began to work. Briefly, I laughed and was hysterical. All I had to do was to grab and touch and tow, but it was all I could do to put a hand out to them. When I touched them they moved. They floated towards me as though their icy hands would touch my cheek. I pushed them away and they rebounded and came floating back again after impact or started off on a course of their own, diagonally, towards the ceiling. I could not bear them. I shepherded them like sheep through an open store-room hatch, and slammed the door.
I slammed it so violently that I myself rebounded. I hung, arms and legs all ways, weeping and turning round and round in space.
I quietened. That whole level of the rocket still looked like a
shambles. I went up to Compartment One, the control compartment, and closed the door behind me, shutting myself in as though to escape from an evil dream.
I lay on Maxwell's couch and looked out through the port of armoured glass at the dark universe towards which the rocket was still travelling. Blinding starlight in space of utter black. Away from the sun. I could not even see the planet Mars and did not know where to find it.
I lay there unmoving and wondered if it mattered.
It did matter. We had known we were taking a risk when we had built this rocket at Woomera. If she did not come back there would be no more rockets built for exploration and only inquiries and dismissals among the staff.
Cautiously, lying on Maxwell's couch, I felt the control buttons which had been under his fingers when he lay there even as certain engine controls had been under mine.
I heard the gyros whine in the engine-room as I pressed a button. There was no one in the engine-room now, but the machinery would work without attention for a little time. I continued to press the button. The rocket began to swing, as I knew because the heavens slipped past my window.
I closed my eyes as I neared a hundred and eighty degrees of rum. I felt the blinding power of unstopped sunlight on my face. Cautiously, feeling the sunlight depart again, I opened my eyes again.
I turned the bow of the rocket about the sun, turning the whole ship as I searched for the planet Earth. An inner planet from my point of view, she could not be at a great angle from the sun.
I found her after fifteen minutes' search: the pale green disc that was larger than anything but the sun itself with the pale white moon beside it, both in their second quarters.
My hand tightened on the control that would fire the rockets, blasting me home in this lonely ship to Earth again. With the planet before me, the temptation was almost irresistible. I could set my course exactly. I could fire all the rockets. I could plunge on and on.
My hand fell limply from the switch. Before I reached the position in which I saw the Earth, the planet would be a hundred thousand, a million miles away. If I were so foolish as to try to do the apparently simple, the obvious, my end would be a roasting death as I plunged down not on Earth but into the sun.
Rex Gordon Page 2
