I could tell when this moment came by the sudden slackening of weight. It lasted only a moment: then there was a subtly changed roaring as our rockets started to fire. They would keep up their thunder for another five minutes. At the end of that time, we would be moving so swiftly that the Earth could never drag us back.
The thrust of the rockets was now giving me more than three times my normal weight. As long as I stayed still, there was no real discomfort. As an experiment, I tried to see if I could raise my arm. It was very tiring, but not too difficult. Still, I was glad to let it drop back again. If necessary, I think I could have sat upright: but standing would have been quite impossible.
On the TV screen, the pattern of bright lines seemed unaltered. Now, however, there was a tiny spot creeping slowly upwards—representing, I supposed, the ascending ship. I watched it intently, wondering if the motors would cut out when the spot reached the top of the screen.
Long before that happened, there came a series of short explosions and the ship shuddered slightly. For one anxious moment, I thought that something had gone wrong. Then I realized what had happened: our drop-tanks had been emptied, and the bolts holding them on had been severed. They were falling back behind us, and presently would plunge into the Pacific, somewhere in the great empty wastes between Tahiti and South America.
At last the thunder of the rockets began to lose its power, and the feeling of enormous weight ebbed away. The ship was easing itself into its final orbit, five hundred miles above the Equator. The motors had done their work, and were now merely making the last adjustments to our course.
Silence returned as the rockets cut out completely. I could still feel the faint vibration of the fuel pumps as they idled to rest, but there was no sound whatsoever in the little cabin. I had been partially deafened by the roar of the rockets, and it took some minutes before I could hear properly again.
The pilot finished checking his instruments, and then released himself from his seat. I watched him, fascinated, as he floated across to me.
'It will take you some time to get used to this,' he said, as he unbuckled my safety strap. 'The thing to remember is—always move gently. And never let go of one handhold until you've decided on the next.'
Gingerly, I stood up. I grabbed the couch just in time to stop myself zooming to the ceiling. Only, of course, it wasn't really the ceiling any more. 'Up' and 'down' had vanished completely. Weight had ceased to exist: I had only to give myself a gentle push and I could move any way I wished.
It's a strange thing, but even now there are people who don't understand this business of 'weightlessness'. They seem to think it's something to do with being 'outside the pull of gravity'. That's nonsense, of course: in a space-station or a coasting rocket five hundred miles up gravity is nearly as powerful as it is down on the Earth. The reason why you feel weightless is not because you're outside gravity, but because you're no longer resisting its pull. You could feel weightless, even down on Earth, inside a freely falling elevator—as long as the fall lasted. An orbiting space-station or rocket is in a kind of permanent fall—a 'fall' that can last for ever because it isn't towards the Earth but around it.
'Careful, now!' warned the pilot. 'I don't want you cracking your head against my instrument panel! If you want to have a look out of the window, hang on to this strap.' I obeyed him, and peered through the little porthole whose thick plastic was all that lay between me and nothingness.
Yes, I know that there have been so many films and photographs that everyone knows just what Earth looks like from space. So I won't waste much time describing it. And to tell the truth, there wasn't a great deal to see, as my field of view was almost entirely filled by the Pacific Ocean. Beneath me it was a surprisingly deep azure, which softened into a misty blue at the limits of vision. I asked the pilot how far away the horizon was.
'About two thousand miles,' he replied. 'You can see most of the way down to New Zealand and up to Hawaii. Quite a view, isn't it?'
Now that I had grown accustomed to the scale of things, I was able to pick out some of the Pacific islands, many showing their coral reefs quite clearly. A long way towards what I imagined was the west the colour of the ocean changed quite abruptly from blue to a vivid green. I realized I was looking at the enormous sea-farms that fed the continent of Asia, and which now covered a substantial part of all the oceans in the tropics.
The coast of South America was coming into sight when the pilot began to prepare for the landing on the Inner Station. (I know the word 'landing' sounds peculiar, but it's the expression that's used. Out in space, a lot of ordinary words have quite different meanings.) I was still staring out of the little porthole when I got the order to go back to my seat, so that I wouldn't fall around the cabin during the final manoeuvres.
The TV screen was now a black rectangle, with a tiny double star shining near its centre. We were about a hundred miles away from the Station, slowly overhauling it. The two stars grew brighter and further apart: additional faint satellites appeared sprinkled around them. I was seeing, I knew, the ships that were 'in dock' at the moment, being refuelled or overhauled.
Suddenly one of those faint stars burst into blazing light. A hundred miles ahead of us, one of the ships in that little fleet had started its motors and was pulling away from Earth. I questioned the pilot.
'That would be the Alpha Centauri, bound for Venus,' he replied. 'She's a wonderful old wreck—it's really time they pensioned her off. Now let me get on with my navigating. This is one job the robots can't do.'
The Inner Station was only a few miles away when we started to put on the brakes. There was a high-pitched whistling from the steering jets in the nose, and for a moment a feeble sensation of weight returned. It lasted only a few seconds: then we had matched speeds and had joined the Station's other floating satellites.
Being careful to ask the pilot's permission, I got out of my couch and went to the window again. The Earth was now on the other side of the ship, and I was looking out at the stars—and the space-station. It was such a staggering sight that I had to stare for a minute before it made any sense at all. I understood, now, the purpose of that orientation test the doctors had given me…
My first impression of the Inner Station was one of complete chaos. Floating there in space about a mile away from our ship was a great open lattice-work of spidery girders, in the shape of a flat disc. Here and there on its surface were spherical buildings of varying sizes, connected to each other by tubes wide enough for men to travel through. In the centre of the disc was the largest sphere of all, dotted with tiny eyes of portholes and with dozens of radio antennae jutting from it in all directions.
Several spaceships—some almost completely dismantled—were attached to the great disc at various points. They looked, I thought, very much like flies caught in a spider-web. Men in space-suits were working on them, and sometimes the glare of a welding torch would dazzle my eyes.
Other ships were floating freely, arranged in no particular system that I could discover, in the space around the Station. Some of them were streamlined, winged vessels like the one that had brought me up from Earth. Others were the true ships of space—assembled here outside the atmosphere and designed to ferry loads from world to world without ever landing on any planet. They were weird, flimsy constructions, usually with a pressurized spherical chamber for the crew and passengers, and larger tanks for the fuel. There was no streamlining, of course: the cabins, fuel tanks and motors were simply linked together by thin struts. As I looked at these ships I couldn't help thinking of some very old magazines I'd once seen which showed our grandfathers' ideas of spaceships. They were all sleek, finned projectiles looking rather like bombs. The artists who drew those pictures would have been shocked by the reality: in fact, they would probably not have recognized these queer objects as spaceships at all…
I was wondering how we were going to get aboard the Station when something came sweeping into my field of vision. It was a tiny cylin
der, just big enough to hold a man—and it did hold a man, for I could see his head through the plastic panels covering one end of the device. Long, jointed arms projected from the machine's body and it was trailing a thin cable behind it. I could just make out the faint misty jet of the tiny rocket motor which propelled this miniature spaceship.
The operator must have seen me staring out at him, for he grinned back as he flashed by. A minute later there came an alarming 'clang' from the hull of our ship. The pilot laughed at my obvious fright.
'That's only the towing cable being coupled—it's magnetic, you know. We'll start to move in a minute.'
There was the feeblest of tugs, and our ship slowly rotated until it was parallel to the great disc of the Station. The cable had been attached amidships, and the Station was hauling us in like an angler landing a fish. The pilot pressed a button on the control panel, and there was the whining of motors as our undercarriage lowered itself. That was not something you'd expect to see used in space, but the idea was sensible enough. The shock-absorbers were just the thing to take up the gentle impact on making contact with the Station.
We were wound in so slowly that it took almost ten minutes to make the short journey. Then there was a slight jar as we 'touched down', and the journey was over.
'Well,' grinned the pilot. 'I hope you enjoyed the trip. Or would you have liked some excitement?'
I looked at him cautiously, wondering if he was pulling my leg.
'It was quite exciting enough, thank you. What other sort of excitement could you supply?'
'Well, what about a few meteors, an attack by pirates, an invasion from outer space, or all the other things you read about in the fiction magazines?'
'I only read the serious books, like Richardson's Introduction to Astronautics or Maxwell's Modern Spaceships—not magazine stories.'
'I don't believe you,' he replied promptly. 'I read 'em, anyway, and I'm sure you do. You can't fool me.'
He was right, of course. It was one of the first lessons I learned on the Station. All the people out there have been hand-picked for intelligence as well as technical knowledge. If you weren't on the level, they'd spot it right away.
I was wondering how we were going to get out of the ship when there was a series of bangings and scrapings from the air-lock, followed a moment later by an alarming hiss of air. It slowly died away, and presently, with a soft sucking noise, the inner door of the lock swung open.
'Remember what I told you about moving slowly,' said the pilot, gathering up his log book. 'The best thing is for you to hitch on to my belt and I'll tow you. Ready?'
It wasn't a very dignified entry into the Station, I couldn't help thinking. But it was safest to take no risks, so that was the way I travelled through the flexible, pressurized coupling that had been clamped on to the side of our ship. The pilot launched himself with a powerful kick, and I trailed along behind him. It was rather like learning to swim underwater—so much like it, in fact, that at first I had the panicky feeling that I'd drown if I tried to breathe.
Presently we emerged into a wide, metal tunnel—one of the Station's main passageways, I guessed. Cables and pipes ran along the walls, and at intervals we passed through great double doors with red EMERGENCY notices painted on them. I didn't think this was at all reassuring. We met only two people on our journey: they flashed by us with an effortless ease that filled me with envy—and made me determined to be just as skilful before I left the Station.
'I'm taking you to Commander Doyle,' the pilot explained to me. 'He's in charge of training here and will be keeping an eye on you.'
'What sort of man is he?' I asked anxiously.
'Don't you worry—you'll find out soon enough. Here we are.'
We drifted to a halt in front of a circular door carrying the notice 'Cdr. R. Doyle, i/c Training. Knock and Enter.' The pilot knocked and entered, still towing me behind him like a sack of potatoes. I heard him say:
'Captain Jones reporting, Mr Doyle—with passenger.' Then he shoved me in front of him and I saw the man he had been addressing.
He was sitting at a perfectly ordinary office desk—which was rather surprising in this place where nothing else seemed normal. And he looked like a prize-fighter: I think he was the most powerfully-built man I'd ever seen. Two huge arms covered most of the desk in front of him, and I wondered where he found clothes to fit—his shoulders must have been over four feet across.
At first I didn't see his face clearly, for he was bending over some papers. Then he looked up, and I found myself staring at a huge red beard and two enormous eyebrows. It was some time before I really took in the rest of the face: it's so unusual to see a real beard nowadays that I couldn't help staring at it. Then I realized that Commander Doyle must have had some kind of accident, for there was a faint scar running diagonally right across his forehead. Considering how skilled our plastic surgeons are nowadays, the fact that anything was still visible meant that it must originally have been very bad indeed.
Altogether, as you'll probably have gathered, Commander Doyle wasn't a very handsome man. But he was certainly a striking one—and my biggest surprise was still to come.
'So you're young Malcolm, eh?' he said, in a pleasant, quiet voice that wasn't half as fearsome as his appearance. 'We've heard a lot about you. O.K., Captain Jones—I'll take charge of him now.'
The pilot saluted and glided away. For the next ten minutes Commander Doyle questioned me closely, building up a picture of my life and interest. I told him how I'd been born in New Zealand and had lived for a few years in China, South Africa, Brazil and Switzerland, as my father—who's a journalist—moved from one job to another. We'd just gone to Missouri because Mom was fed up with mountains and wanted a change. As families go these days, we hadn't travelled a great deal, and I'd never visited half the places all our neighbours seemed to know. Perhaps that was one reason why I wanted to go out into space—though I'd never thought of it that way before.
When he had finished writing all this down—and adding a lot of notes I'd have given a good deal to read—Commander Doyle laid aside the old-fashioned fountain-pen he was using and stared at me for a minute as if I were some peculiar animal. He drummed thoughtfully on the desk with his huge fingers, which looked as if they could tear their way through the material without much trouble. I was feeling a bit scared, and to make matters worse I'd drifted away from the floor and was floating helplessly in mid-air again. There was no way I could move anywhere unless I made myself ridiculous by trying to swim—which might or might not work. Then the Commander gave a chuckle and his face crinkled up into a vast grin.
'I think this may be quite amusing,' he said. While I was still wondering if I dared to ask why, he continued, after glancing at some charts on the wall behind him: 'Afternoon classes have just stopped—I'll take you to meet the boys.' Then he grabbed a long metal tube, that must have been slung underneath the desk, and launched himself out of his chair with a single jerk of his huge left arm.
He moved so quickly that it took me completely by surprise. A moment later I just managed to stifle a gasp of amazement. For as he moved clear of the desk, I saw that Commander Doyle had no legs.
When you go to a new school, or move into a strange district, there's always a confusing period so full of new experiences that you can never recall it clearly. My first day on the space-station was like that. So much had never happened to me before in such a short time. It was not merely that I was meeting a lot of new people. I had to learn how to live all over again.
At first I felt as helpless as a baby. I couldn't judge the effort needed to make any movement. Although weight had vanished, momentum remained. It required force to start something moving, and more force to stop it again. That was where the broomsticks came in.
Commander Doyle had invented them, and the name, of course, came from the old idea that once upon a time witches used to ride on broomsticks. We certainly rode around the Station on ours. They consisted of one hollow tube
sliding inside another. The two were connected by a powerful spring, and one tube ended in a hook, the other in a wide rubber pad. That was all there was to it. If you wanted to move, you put the pad against the nearest wall and shoved. The recoil launched you into space, and when you arrived at your destination you let the spring absorb your velocity and so bring you to rest. Trying to stop yourself with your bare hands was liable to result in sprained wrists.
It wasn't quite as easy as it sounds, though, for if you weren't careful you could bounce right back the way you'd come…
It was a long time before I discovered what had happened to the Commander. The scar he'd picked up in an ordinary motor crash when he was a young man—but the more serious accident was a different story, and had occurred when he was on the first expedition to Mercury. He'd been quite an athlete, it seemed, so the loss of his legs must have been an even bigger blow to him than to most men. It was obvious why he had come to the Station—it was the only place where he wouldn't be a cripple. Indeed, thanks to his powerfully developed arms, he was probably the most agile man in the Station. He had lived here for the last ten years and would never return to Earth, where he would be helpless again. He wouldn't even go over to any of the other space-stations where they had gravity, and no one was ever tactless or foolish enough to suggest such a trip to him.
There were about a hundred people on board the Inner Station, ten of them apprentices a few years older than myself. At first they were a bit fed up at having me around, but after I'd had my fight with Ronnie Jordan everything was O.K. and they accepted me as one of the family. I'll tell you about that later.
The senior apprentice was a tall, quiet Canadian named Tim Benton. He never said much, but when he did speak everyone took notice. It was Tim who really taught me my way around the Inner Station, after Commander Doyle had handed me over to him with a few words of explanation.
'I suppose you know what we do up here?' he said doubtfully when the Commander had left us.
The Space Trilogy Page 3
