“Not at all,” said Traveller, “for inside the cupboard is a special suit. The suit is completely sealed, and is fed with air by a hose arrangement from within the ship. Thus a man could live and work in the vacuum of space for several minutes without ill effect.”
I found this difficult to envisage, but—after some minutes of questioning—I grasped the essentials of the arrangement.
And my destiny lay before me, as clear as a road marked on a map. A kind of calmness settled over me, and I said quietly, “Traveler, how long is this connecting air hose?”
“Over forty feet, when fully extended. It was my intention that the intrepid engineer could reach any section of the ship.”
I nodded. “In particular,” I said slowly, “he could make his way to the Bridge area, and to the hatchway which admits entry to the Bridge from the outside.”
Holden’s face filled with wonder and a kind of hope. “Ah. And the suited man could thereby gain access to the Bridge itself.”
Traveller glared thunderously. “Young man, are you suggesting that such an adventure should actually be undertaken?”
I shrugged, still quite calm. “It seems to me to offer a chance, if a slim one, of surviving; while to stay here and do nothing promises only a slow and uncomfortable death.”
“But this is an experimental system!” His arms flapped like the wings of some absurd bird. “I have worn that suit for only a few seconds at a time, and that on the surface of the Earth; I have yet to solve the problems of airflow, of heat loss—”
“What of all that?” I asked. “Let this be the ultimate test, Sir Josiah, the test to destruction. Surely the lessons learned in such a jaunt would be invaluable in the construction of new and better suits in the future.”
That tempted the scientist buried within the old fellow, and I saw naked curiosity surface for a moment in his eyes, but he said, “My young friend, I would not survive such a trip long enough to put any such lessons into practice. Now let us close this compartment up and—”
“I too am sure you would not survive such a trip, sir,” I said frankly. “For you are of advanced years and—forgive me—an asthmatic.” I surveyed the rest of the ship’s company. “Holden is far too rotund to squeeze into this device—and, if he will pardon, is hardly in the physical state to undertake such a strenuous jaunt. And Pocket—” The servant’s eyes were fixed on mine, and were filled with imploring; I only said gently, “Of course we could not ask our faithful friend to undertake such a voyage. Gentlemen, the course is clear.”
“Ned, you can’t mean—”
“Vicars, I absolutely forbid it. This is suicide!”
I let their words cascade around my ears, hardly hearing, for my mind was quite made up. My eyes saw past my shipmates to the hull of the vessel—and then, as if the wall were turned to glass, I seemed to see into the void itself; a place of infinite cold, of vacuum, riddled by speeding bullets of rock…
And a place into which, I knew now, I must soon step.
7
ALONE
I was all for plunging straight on with my adventure, for it was still early in the morning; but Traveller insisted that to propel myself out of the ship without making adequate preparations would reduce my slight chances of success to zero.
So it was that Traveller determined that a full two days should elapse before I was to enter the coffin- shaped air cupboard. Although I was unsure as to the effect of this delay on my fragile courage and mental state, I ceded the position.
Traveller went to work on my physical preparedness. “You are entering an unexplored realm, and it is impossible to be sure what effect the environment of space will have on your body, clothed in its protective suit as it will be,” he said. So he put me on an intensive diet of light meals, with plenty of bread and soup. Traveller insisted on—and enforced—a slow chewing of every mouthful, so as to avoid the possibility of swallowing air. At first I railed against this regime, but Traveller curtly pointed out that a stomach filled with gas is like a balloon; and in the airless vacuum of space there would be no atmosphere to constrain the unlimited expansion of such a balloon under pressure from the air contained within…
He extended this analogy in brutal terms; and I chewed my bread with renewed enthusiasm.
I was fed cod liver oil and various other iron solutions, whose purpose was to enhance my strength, and from a small pharmacy Traveller maintained, doses of senna pods and syrup of figs, in order that I might be cleansed internally of all unwanted baggage. As I strained under the agony of these medicaments I wondered if I had entered a sort of Purgatory, an anteroom to the airless Hell I would face beyond the hull.
Finally Traveller mixed a solution of a bromide salt in my tea. This puzzled me, although I had heard of such potions being fed to infantrymen in the field. At length Traveller took me to one side and explained that the purpose of the bromide was to restrain what he called certain impulses common to young men of my age and temperament, which might have unfortunate consequences for a body locked into an air suit. I was bewildered by this; for, although I thought often of Françoise during those dark days, my thoughts were more in the form of silent prayers for her safety and our eventual reunion than any more excitable speculation; and it was difficult to envisage any such notions distracting me at my moment of greatest peril!
Still, I took Traveller’s bromide with good humor.
The first night was difficult to face, for Traveller expressly forbade any alcohol with my meals; and as I lay in my pallet within the darkened Cabin my heart pounded and sleep seemed impossibly far away. After perhaps an hour of this I rose and complained to Traveller. With many muttered protests he rose—the bobble on his nightcap floated behind him as he glided through the air—and prepared for me a powerful sleeping draft. With this inside me I slept a dreamless sleep; and Traveller repeated the dose on the next evening.
So it was that I awoke on 15 August 1870, somewhere beyond the atmosphere of Earth, with my body purged, cleansed and relaxed, ready to journey alone into the endless void beyond the hull of the Phaeton.
Traveller had me strip naked save for a brief pair of shorts, and he gave me a greasy, sour-smelling oil which he bade me smear over all my skin below my neck. “This is an extract of whale blubber,” he said. “It has three purposes: the first is to nourish the skin; the second is to retain the heat of the body; and the third, and most important, is to provide a seal between your skin and the material of the air suit.”
Holden looked puzzled by this. “Then the air suit will not provide a shell of air around Ned’s body?”
“Such a shell would swell up instantly, like a balloon, under the pressure of the air it contained,” Traveller said. “It would become quite rigid, trapping the space voyager as if crucified in an immovable box.” He held out his arms and legs in the air and waggled his fingers helplessly, miming such a predicament.
I had had no idea that air—invisible, intangible—could exert such forces.
Once I was greased up, Pocket opened up the air cupboard and extracted Traveller’s patent air suit. The suit consisted of undergarments and an outer coverall; the undergarments—combinations, gloves and boot-like stockings—were of india rubber. I was made to squeeze any stray air bubbles out of the space between the rubber and my skin. I was fortunate that my physique was at least roughly comparable to that of Traveller for whom the suit had been tailored, and the undergarments fitted well enough, chafing only around the armpits and knees.
Next a stout band of rubber and leather was affixed around my chest. This corset-like affair was uncomfortably tight, but Traveller explained how the device would assist my chest muscles as I labored to breathe without the assistance of external air pressure.
Now I donned the outer layer, which was a one-piece combination affair with attached mittens and overboots. This coverall was of resined leather. Leather was used, explained Traveller, because of the tendency of india rubber to dry out and become fragile in a vacuum.
The most striking aspect of the coverall was that it was silvered; an ingenious process had permitted its soaking in silver plate so that it looked as if it were woven from spun mercury. This was intended to exclude the direct rays of the sun, Traveller said, and I began to understand the paradoxical complications facing the space engineer; direct sunlight, without the blanket of atmosphere, is violent and must be guarded against, but simultaneously heat leaks from any shadowed area since, again, there is no layer of air to trap it.
The outer suit opened at the front and I clambered awkwardly into it. The suit was fitted at the neck with a collar of copper just wide enough to admit my head. This collar fitted to the inner rubber suit, forming an airtight seal; air was smoothed out of the interface between the outer and inner suits and the outer was sealed up by flaps and straps.
I raised my silvered, mittened hand. “I feel odd. Greased up and encased in this garment, with its mittens and booties, I am like some grotesque infant!”
Traveller grunted impatiently. “Wickers, the outfit is not designed for comic effect. What need do you have, for example, of an infantryman’s heavy boots, since your feet do not have to bear any weight? Now if you’ve quite finished your prattle let us fit the helmet.”
The topping-off of the air suit consisted of a globular helmet of copper; circular windows of thick optical glass were fitted in the metal, and a pair of hoses, bound together, was fitted to the crown of the helmet. These pipes led, Traveller explained, to a pump located inside the air cupboard itself. Traveller floated before me holding this intimidating cage in his long fingers, and said, “Well, Ned, once you are sealed up in this case it will be difficult for us to talk to you.” He clapped one hand on my suited shoulder and said, “I wish you Godspeed, my boy. You were, of course, right; it is no virtue to go down into darkness without a fight.”
I found I had to swallow before I could speak. “Thank you, sir.”
Pocket leaned toward me. “You take my prayers as well, Mr. Vicars.”
“Ned.” Holden’s face was grim, and his deep-sunk eyes appeared on the verge of tears. “I wish I were twenty years younger, and able to take your place.”
“I know you do, George.” As I hovered there encased in my bizarre integuments, I found the steady gaze of all three of my colleagues most distressing. I said, struggling to maintain the composure of my face, “I see no point in further delay, Sir Josiah. The helmet?”
Pocket and Traveller lifted the globe over my head carefully, chafing my ears on its rim only slightly. The rim engaged the copper collar at my neck, and the two gentlemen turned the helmet about. The low grinding of screw threads filled the echoing helmet, and there was a smell of burnished copper, of rubber, resin and the incongruous stink of whale blubber. The four windows of the helmet turned around me, and glimpses of the Cabin slid past my gaze as if I were at the center of some unusual magic lantern.
At last the helmet was fitted into its seat, and one of the windows had come to rest before my face. I was encased in a silence broken only by a steady hissing from above my head—the reassuring signature of the air pipes which circulated air through my helmet, delivering me fresh oxygen and extracting the carbonic acid I expelled.
Traveller loomed before my face window, his features creased with concern and curiosity. His voice came to me only as a distant muffle. “Are you all right? Can you breathe comfortably?” My breathing was shallow, but as much, I suspected, from my nervousness as from the air supply, and I seemed capable—given the corset around my chest—of drawing quite deep breaths in perfect comfort. The only disadvantage of the piped supply was a slightly metallic flavor to the air. And so, at length, I made a “thumbs up” sign to Traveller, and indicated by mittened gestures my impatience to enter the air cupboard and get on with it.
Traveller and Pocket now guided me, one arm each, to the aperture in the lower bulkhead and thence into the air cupboard. They laid me face down, directly over the wheel arrangement which would permit me to open the hull, and sealed closed the hatch behind me. As the light of the Cabin was excluded, and I was encased in copper-tinged darkness with only the sound of my own breathing for company, my heart began to hammer as if it would burst.
I reached through the dark for the wheel before my chest, grasped it with my mittened hands, and twisted it firmly.
At first there was only the grind of metal on metal—and then, with a sudden, shocking explosion, the hatch flew back on its hinges and out of my hands. Sound died with a soft sigh, and a moment of gale pushed me in the back and propelled me forward; I grabbed at the doorframe but my mittened fingers slithered across the metal, and I tumbled helplessly out of the Phaeton and into empty space!
Suddenly there was nothing above, around, below me; and for the next few moments I lost control of my reactions. I cried for help—unheard, of course, in the soundless vacuum of space—and I scrabbled at my suit and air hoses like some animal.
This first reaction passed, however, and by force of will I restored a semblance of rationality.
I closed my eyes and tried to steady my breathing, frightened of overtaxing my supply. I was merely floating, after all, a sensation which was hardly novel after so many days, and I calmed myself with the illusion that I was safe within the aluminum walls of the Phaeton.
I flexed my elbows and knees cautiously. Thanks to trapped air the suit joints were a good deal stiffer than inside the craft, and my fingers and feet tingled, warning me of constrictions in my circulation. But on the whole Traveller’s elaborate precautions had proved successful.
With courage grasped in both hands, I opened my eyes—and found I had been rendered virtually blind by a condensation which had gathered over my helmet windows. Beyond this homely mist there were blurs of white and blue that must be the sun and Earth; and I decided I must be floating in the vacuum some yards from the vessel. I raised my mittens and dabbed at the face plate, but the mist, of course, had gathered inside the helmet. And, I abruptly realized, I had no way of reaching inside the helmet to attend to this matter; my own face was as inaccessible to me as the mountains of the Moon!
Of course, on this realization, I was plagued with a series of itches in nose, ears and eyes; I determinedly put these aside. But my sightlessness was a more serious problem, and I felt baffled. After some moments, though, I suspected the mist was clearing slightly, and I wondered if the pumped air was causing the panes to clear. I resolved to wait for several minutes, a time during which I would control my breathing as far as I could, to see if matters improved.
At length the panes did clear enough for me to see out, but they never cleared entirely, and I grew convinced that this problem of condensation, which had been utterly unanticipated even by the genius of Traveller, would form a major obstacle to the future colonization of space. But the steady breathing which I maintained for some minutes did coincidentally have a calming effect on me.
As soon as my visor had cleared, then, I gazed fearfully out into my new domain.
I floated in a sky that was utterly black; not even stars shone, for the sun—a sphere too bright to study, hanging to my left hand side—rendered other objects invisible. There were no clouds, of course, and, in the absence of atmosphere, not even the faint azure tinge of a dark Earth night.
Ahead of me the Moon hung cold and austere, her seas and mountains picked out in sharp gray tones. I turned to the Earth, which was a wonderful sculpture in blue and white; the Little Moon was a speck of light which crawled low across the sunlit face of the globe. The outlines of the continents could clearly be seen—it was, I saw, noon in North America—and it was as if the planet were some vast timepiece, arranged for my amusement.
It was difficult to believe, from my astonishing height, that even now, as dawn broke over Europe, the armies of France and Prussia were preparing to launch at each other once more. How absurd such horror, such squalor, seemed from this lofty height! Perhaps, I thought with a touch of terrifying pride, I had acquired the perspective of the
gods; perhaps when all men had the chance to study the world from this vantage, war, envy and greed would be banished from our hearts.
I remembered Françoise, and I prayed silently that she, and all the millions of others trapped in that bowl of light, would remain safe through this day.
Ahead of me, hanging before the face of the Moon, was the Phaeton herself. The craft was about thirty feet from me and appeared to lie on her side; her three stubby legs jutted from her base, useless, and in that base I saw the open port through which I had emerged. The whole effect was of some rather absurd, fragile toy, the shadows of the legs and other features as sharp as stencils across her hull; and I had a sudden shock of dislocation as I recalled the last time I had seen the ship from the outside, perched proudly atop the Prince Albert in the soft Belgian sunshine.
The twin hoses looped across space, connecting me to the air cupboard; and I decided that I must have fallen to the full extent of the pipes and then bounced back by some yards.
I reached above my head to the hose which was fixed there and, using both mittened hands, began to haul myself awkwardly along the tubes to the brougham. The exertion caused my breathing to speed up and my face-window steamed over once more; but I was still able to see the vessel and so proceeded. At last I fetched up against the air cupboard hatch; I clung securely to one leg of the craft and waited for some minutes for my faceplate to clear.
I imagined Holden, Pocket and Traveller not ten feet above my head, resting as warm and comfortable as in any living-room.
I pulled my way up the leg and reached the lower skirt of the main hull of the craft. On to the vessel’s curving aluminum skin, Traveller had instructed me, had been fastened many small handles, designed to assist repairmen and other engineers. These and other protuberances made the task of pulling myself along the Phaeton’s hull toward the Bridge quite easy. I proceeded slowly, taking care that my air hoses did not snag. As I worked silver flaked from my leather suit, so that I became surrounded by a cloud of sparkling fragments.
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