'Stop yelling, everybody! Now, Peter, tell us exactly what you've found.'
I could hear Peter give a sort of gulp as he collected his breath.
'This ship is full of guns!' he gasped. 'Honest—I'm not fooling! I can see about twenty of them, clipped to the walls. And they're not like any guns I've ever seen before. They've got funny nozzles and there are red and green cylinders fixed beneath them. I can't imagine what they're supposed—'
'Karl!' Tim ordered. 'Is Peter pulling our legs?'
'No,' came the reply. 'It's perfectly true. I don't like to say this, but if there are such things as ray-guns, we're looking at them now.'
'What shall we do?' wailed Peter. He didn't seem at all happy at finding this support for his theories.
'Don't touch anything!' ordered Tim. 'Give us a detailed description of everything you can see, and then come straight back.'
But before Peter could obey, we all had a second and much worse shock. For suddenly we heard Karl gasp: 'What's that?' There was silence for a moment: then a voice I could hardly recognize as Peter's whispered: 'There's a ship outside. It's connecting up. What shall we do?'
'Make a run for it,' whispered Tim urgently—as if whispering made any difference. 'Shoot out of the lock as quickly as you can and come back to the Station by different routes. It's dark for another ten minutes—they probably won't see you.'
'Too late,' said Karl, still hanging on to the last shreds of his composure. 'They're already coming aboard. There goes the outer door now.'
Five
STAR TURN
For a moment no one could think of anything to say. Then Tim, still whispering, breathed into the microphone: 'Keep calm! If you tell them that you're in radio contact with us, they won't dare touch you.'
This, I couldn't help thinking, was being rather optimistic. Still, it might be good for our companions' morale, which was probably at a pretty low ebb.
'I'm going to grab one of those guns,' Peter called. 'I don't know how they work, but it may scare them. Karl, you take one as well.'
'For heaven's sake be careful!' warned Tim, now looking very worried. He turned to Ronnie.
'Ron, call the Commander and tell him what's happening—quickly! And get a telescope on the Cygnus to see what ship's over there.'
We should have thought of this before, of course, but it had been forgotten in the general excitement.
They're in the control room now,' reported Peter, 'I can see them. They're not wearing space-suits, and they aren't carrying guns. That gives us quite an advantage.'
I suspected that Peter was beginning to feel a little happier, wondering if he might yet be a hero.
'I'm going out to meet them,' he announced suddenly. 'It's better than waiting in here, where they're bound to find us. Come on, Karl.'
We waited breathlessly. I don't know what we expected—anything, I imagine, from a salvo of shots to the hissing or crackling of whatever mysterious weapons our friends were carrying. The one thing we didn't anticipate was what actually happened.
We heard Peter say (and I give him full credit for sounding quite calm): 'What are you doing here, and who are you?'
There was silence for what seemed an age. I could picture the scene as clearly as if I'd been present—Peter and Karl standing at bay behind their weapons, the men they had challenged wondering whether to surrender or to make a fight for it.
Then, unbelievably, someone laughed. There were a few words we couldn't catch, in what seemed to be English, but they were swept away by a roar of merriment. It sounded as if three or four people were all laughing simultaneously, at the tops of their voices.
We could do nothing but wait and wonder until the tumult had finished. Then a new voice, sounding amused and quite friendly, came from the speaker.
'O.K., boys—you might as well put those gadgets down. You couldn't kill a mouse with them unless you swatted it over the head. I guess you're from the Station. If you want to know who we are, this is Twenty-First Century Films, at your service. I'm Lee Thomson, assistant producer. And those ferocious weapons you've got are the ones that Props made for our new interstellar epic. I'm glad to know they've convinced somebody—they always looked quite phoney to me.'
No doubt the reaction had something to do with it, for we all dissolved in laughter then. When the Commander arrived, it was quite a while before anyone could tell him just what had happened.
The funny thing was that, though Peter and Karl had made such fools of themselves, they really had the last laugh. The film people made quite a fuss of them and took them over to their ship, where they had a good deal to eat and drink that wasn't on the Station's normal menu.
When we got to the bottom of it, the whole mystery had an absurdly simple explanation. Twenty-First Century were going all out to make a real epic—the first interstellar and not merely interplanetary film. And it was going to be the first feature film to be shot entirely in space, without any studio faking.
All this explained the secrecy. As soon as the other companies knew what was going on, they'd all be climbing aboard the bandwagon. Twenty-First Century wanted to get as big a start as possible. They'd shipped up one load of props to await the arrival of the main unit with its cameras and equipment. Besides the 'ray-guns' that Peter and Karl had encountered, the crates in the hold contained some weird four-legged space-suits for the beings who were supposed to live on the planets of Alpha Centauri. Twenty-First Century were doing the thing in style, and we gathered that they had another unit at work on the Moon.
The actual shooting was not going to start for another two days, when the actors would be coming up in a third ship. There was much excitement at the news that the star was none other than Linda Lorelli—though we wondered how much of her glamour would be able to get through a space-suit. Playing opposite her in one of his usual tough, he-man roles would be Tex Duncan. This was great news to Norman Powell, who had a vast admiration for Tex and had a photograph of him stuck on his locker.
All these preparations next door to us were rather distracting, and whenever they were off-duty the Station staff would jump into suits and go across to see how the film technicians were getting on. They had unloaded their cameras, which were fixed to little rocket units so that they could move slowly around. The second spaceship was now being elaborately disguised by the addition of blisters, turrets and fake gun-housings to make it look (so Twenty-First Century hoped) like a battleship from another Solar System. It was really quite impressive.
We were at one of Commander Doyle's lectures when the stars came aboard. The first we knew of their arrival was when the door opened and a small procession drifted in. The Station Commander came first, then his deputy—and then Linda Lorelli. She was wearing a rather worried smile and it was quite obvious that she found the absence of gravity very confusing. Remembering my own early struggles, I sympathized with her. She was escorted by an elderly woman who seemed to be quite at home under zero 'g' and gave Linda a helpful push when she showed signs of being stuck.
Tex Duncan followed closely behind: he was trying to manage without an escort, and not succeeding very well. He was a good deal older than I'd guessed from his films—probably at least thirty-five. And you could see through his hair in any direction you cared to look. I glanced at Norman, wondering how he'd reacted to the appearance of his hero. He looked just a shade disappointed.
It seemed that everyone had heard about Peter and Karl's adventure, for Miss Lorelli was introduced to them and they all shook hands very politely. She asked several quite sensible questions about their work, shuddered at the equations Commander Doyle had written on the blackboard, and invited us all across to the Company's largest ship, the Orson Welles, for tea. I thought she was very nice—much better than Tex, who looked bored stiff with the whole business.
After this, I'm afraid, the Morning Star was quite deserted—particularly when we found that we could make some money giving a hand on the sets. The fact that we were all used to wei
ghtlessness made us very useful, for though most of the film technicians had been into space before they were not very happy under zero 'g' and so moved slowly and cautiously. We could manage things much more efficiently, once we had been told what to do.
A good deal of the film was being shot on sets inside the Orson Welles, which had been fitted up as a sort of flying studio. All the scenes which were supposed to take place inside a spaceship were being shot here against suitable backgrounds of machinery, control boards, and so on. The really interesting sequences, however, were those which had to be filmed out in space.
There was one episode, we gathered, in which Tex Duncan would have to save Miss Lorelli from falling helplessly through space into the path of an approaching planet. As it was one of Twenty-First Century's proudest boasts that Tex never used stand-ins but actually carried out even the most dangerous feats himself, we were all looking forward to this. We thought it might be worth seeing, and as it turned out we were quite right…
I had now been on the Station a fortnight, and considered myself an old hand. It seemed perfectly natural to have no weight, and I had almost forgotten the meaning of the words 'up' and 'down'. Such matters as sucking liquids through tubes instead of drinking them from cups or glasses were no longer novelties but part of everyday life.
I think there was only one thing I really missed on the Station. It was impossible to have a bath, the way you could on Earth. I'm very fond of lying in a hot tub until someone comes banging on the door to make certain I haven't fallen asleep. On the Station you could only have a shower, and even this meant standing inside a fabric cylinder and lacing it tight round your neck to prevent the spray escaping. Any large volume of water simply formed a big globe which would float around until it hit a wall. When that happened, some of it would break up into smaller drops which would go on wandering off on their own—but most of it would spread all over the surface it had touched, making a horrid mess.
Over in the Residential Station, where there was gravity, they had baths and even a small swimming-pool. Everyone thought that this last idea was simply showing off.
The rest of the staff, as well as the apprentices, had come to take me for granted and sometimes I was able to help in odd jobs. I'd learned as much as I could, without bothering people by asking too many questions, and had filled four thick notebooks with information and sketches. When I got back to Earth, I'd be able to write a book about the Station if I wanted to.
As long as I kept in touch with Tim Benton or the Commander, I was now allowed to go more or less anywhere I liked. The place that fascinated me most was the observatory, where they had a small but powerful telescope that I could play with when no one else was using it.
I never grew tired of looking at the Earth as it waxed and waned below. Usually the countries beneath us were clear of cloud, and I could get wonderfully distinct views of the lands over which we were hurtling. Because of our speed, the ground beneath was rolling back five miles every second. But as we were five hundred miles up, if the telescope was kept tracking correctly you could keep an object in the field of view for quite a long time, before it got lost in the mists near the horizon. There was a neat automatic gadget on the telescope mounting that took care of this: once you'd set the instrument on anything, it kept swinging at just the right speed.
As we swept round the world, I could survey in each hundred minutes a belt stretching as far north as Japan, the Gulf of Mexico and the Red Sea. To the south I could see as far as Rio de Janeiro, Madagascar and Australia. It was a wonderful way of learning geography, though because of the Earth's curvature the more distant countries were very much distorted and it was hard to recognize them from ordinary maps.
Lying as it did above the Equator, the orbit of the Station passed directly above two of the world's greatest rivers—the Congo and the Amazon. With my telescope I could see right into the jungles and had no difficulty at all in picking out individual trees and the larger animals. The great African Reservation was a wonderful place to watch, because if I hunted around I could find almost any animal I cared to name.
I also spent a lot of time looking outwards, away from Earth. Although I was, for all practical purposes, no nearer the Moon and planets than I had been down at home, now that I was outside the atmosphere I could get infinitely clearer views. The great lunar mountains seemed so close that I wanted to reach out and run my finger along their ragged crests. Where it was night on the Moon I could see some of the lunar colonies shining away like stars in the darkness. But the most wonderful sight of all was the take-off of a space-ship. When I had a chance, I'd listen to the radio and make a note of departure times. Then I'd go to the telescope, aim it at the right part of the Moon, and wait.
All I'd see at first would be a circle of darkness. Suddenly there'd be a tiny spark that would grow brighter and brighter. At the same time it would begin to expand as the rocket rose higher and the glare of its exhausts lit up more and more of the lunar landscape. In that brilliant blue-white illumination I could see the mountains and plains of the Moon, shining as brightly as they ever did in daylight. As the rocket climbed, the circle of light would grow wider and fainter, until presently it was too dim to reveal any more details of the land beneath. The ascending spaceship would become a brilliant, tiny star moving swiftly across the Moon's dark face. A few minutes later, the star would wink out of existence almost as suddenly as it had been born. The ship had escaped from the Moon, and was safely launched on its journey. In thirty or forty hours, it would be sweeping into the orbit of the Station and I would be watching its crew come aboard as unconcernedly as if they'd just taken a 'copter-ride to the next town.
I think I wrote more letters while I was on the Station than I did in a year at home. They were all very short, and they all ended: 'P.S. Please send this cover back to me for my collection.' That was one way of making sure I'd have a set of Space-mail stamps that would be the envy of everyone in our district. I only stopped when I ran out of money, and a lot of distant aunts and uncles were probably surprised to hear from me.
I also did one TV interview—a two-way affair with my questioner down on Earth. It seems there'd been a good deal of interest roused by my trip up to the Station and everyone wanted to know how I was getting on. I told them I was having a fine time and didn't want to come back—for a while, at any rate. There were still plenty of things to do and see—and the Twenty-First Century film unit was now getting into its stride.
While the technicians were making their final preparations Tex Duncan had been learning how to use a space-suit. One of the engineers had got the job of teaching him, and we learned that he didn't think much of his pupil. Mr Duncan was too sure that he knew all the answers, and because he could fly a jet he thought handling a suit would be easy.
I got a ringside seat the day they started the free-space shots. The unit was operating about fifty miles away from the Station and we'd gone over in the Skylark—our private yacht, as we sometimes called her.
Twenty-First Century had had to make this move for a rather amusing reason. One would have thought that now they had, at great trouble and expense, got their actors and cameras out into space they would have only had to go ahead and start shooting. But they found that it didn't work out that way. For one thing, the lighting was all wrong…
Above the atmosphere, when you're in direct sunshine, it's as if you had a single, intense spotlight playing on you. The sunward side of any object is brilliantly illuminated, the dark side utterly black. As a result, when you look at an object in space you can see only part of it: you may have to wait until it's revolved and been fully illuminated before you can get a picture of it as a whole.
One gets used to this sort of thing in time, but Twenty-First Century decided that it would upset audiences down on Earth. So they decided to get some additional lighting to fill in the shadows. For a while they even considered dragging out extra floodlights and floating them in space around the actors, but the power needed to c
ompete with the Sun was so tremendous that they gave up the idea. Then someone said: 'Why not use mirrors?' That idea would probably have fallen through as well—if somebody else hadn't remembered that the biggest mirror ever built was floating in space only a few miles away.
The old solar power station had been out of use for over thirty years, but its giant reflector was still as good as new. It had been built in the early days of astronautics to tap the flood of energy pouring from the Sun, and to convert it into useful electric power. The main reflector was a great bowl almost three hundred feet across, shaped just like a searchlight mirror. Sunlight falling upon it was concentrated on to heating coils at the focus, where it flashed water into steam and so drove turbines and generators.
The mirror itself was a very flimsy structure of curved girders, supporting incredibly thin sheets of metallic sodium. Sodium had been used because it was light, and formed a good reflector. All these thousands of facets collected the sunlight and beamed it at one spot, where the heating coils had been when the station was operating. However, the generating gear had been removed long ago, and only the great mirror was left, floating aimlessly in space. No one minded Twenty-First Century using it for their own purpose if they wanted to. They asked permission nicely, were charged a nominal rent and told to go ahead.
What happened then was one of those things that seems very obvious afterwards, but which nobody thinks of beforehand. When we arrived on the scene the camera crews were in place about five hundred feet from the great mirror, some distance off the line between it and the Sun. Anything on this line was now illuminated on both sides—from one direction by direct sunlight, from the other by light which had fallen on the mirror, been brought to a focus, and spread out again. I'm sorry if this all sounds a bit complicated, but it's important that you understand the set-up.
The Orson Welles was floating behind the cameramen, who were playing round with a dummy to get the right angles when we arrived. When everything was perfect, the dummy would be hauled in and Tex Duncan would take its place. Everyone would have to work quickly, because they wanted the crescent Earth in the background. Unfortunately, because of our swift orbital movement, Earth waxed and waned so quickly that only ten minutes in every hour were suitable for filming.
The Space Trilogy Page 7
