The Space Trilogy (24 page)

A shudder passed through Gibson’s tortured frame. But he was rapidly recovering, and already the nightmare of the last hour was fading into the past.

“I’ll be O.K.,” he said. “Let me out of this muffle-furnace before I cook.”

A little unsteadily, he got to his feet. It seemed strange, here in space, to have normal weight again. Then he remembered that Station One was spinning on its axis, and the living quarters were built around the outer walls so that centrifugal force could give the illusion of gravity.

The great adventure, he thought ruefully, hadn’t started at all well. But he was determined not to be sent home in disgrace. It was not merely a question of his own pride: the effect on his public and his reputation would be deplorable. He winced as he visualized the headlines: “GIBSON GROUNDED! SPACE-SICKNESS ROUTS AUTHOR-ASTRONAUT.” Even the staid literary weeklies would pull his leg, and as for
Time
—no, it was unthinkable!

“It’s lucky,” said the M.O., “that we’ve got twelve hours before the ship leaves. I’ll take you into the zero-gravity section and see how you manage there, before I give you a clean bill of health.”

Gibson also thought that was a good idea. He had always regarded himself as fairly fit, and until now it had never seriously occurred to him that this journey might be not merely uncomfortable but actually dangerous. You could laugh at space-sickness—when you’d never experienced it yourself. Afterwards, it seemed a very different matter.

The Inner Station—“Space Station One,” as it was usually called—was just over two thousand kilometres from Earth, circling the planet every two hours. It had been Man’s first stepping-stone to the stars, and though it was no longer technically necessary for spaceflight, its presence had a profound effect on the economics of interplanetary travel. All journeys to the Moon or the planets started from here; the unwieldy atomic ships floated alongside this outpost of Earth while the cargoes from the parent world were loaded into their holds. A ferry service of chemically fuelled rockets linked the station to the planet beneath, for by law no atomic drive unit was allowed to operate within a thousand kilometres of the Earth’s surface. Even this safety margin was felt by many to be inadequate, for the radioactive blast of a nuclear propulsion unit could cover that distance in less than a minute.

Space Station One had grown with the passing years, by a process of accretion, until its original designers would never have recognized it. Around the central spherical core had accumulated observatories, communications labs with fantastic aerial systems, and mazes of scientific equipment which only a specialist could identify. But despite all these additions, the main function of the artificial moon was still that of refuelling the little ships with which Man was challenging the immense loneliness of the Solar System.

“Quite sure you’re feeling O.K. now?” asked the doctor as Gibson experimented with his feet.

“I think so,” he replied, unwilling to commit himself.

“Then come along to the reception room and we’ll get you a drink—a nice hot drink,” he added, to prevent any misunderstanding. “You can sit there and read the paper for half an hour before we decide what to do with you.”

It seemed to Gibson that anticlimax was being piled on anticlimax. He was two thousand kilometres from Earth, with the stars all around him; yet here he was forced to sit sipping sweet tea—tea!—in what might have been an ordinary dentist’s waiting-room. There were no windows, presumably because the sight of the rapidly revolving heavens might have undone the good work of the medical staff. The only way of passing the time was to skim through piles of magazines which he’d already seen, and which were difficult to handle as they were ultra-lightweight editions apparently printed on cigarette paper. Fortunately he found a very old copy of
Argosy
containing a story he had written so long ago that he had completely forgotten the ending, and this kept him happy until the doctor returned.

“Your pulse seems normal,” said the M.O., grudgingly. “We’ll take you along to the zero-gravity chamber. Just follow me and don’t be surprised at anything that happens.”

With this cryptic remark he led Gibson out into a wide, brightly lit corridor that seemed to curve upwards in both directions away from the point at which he was standing. Gibson had no time to examine this phenomenon, for the doctor slid open a side door and started up a flight of metal stairs. Gibson followed automatically for a few paces, then realized just what lay ahead of him and stopped with an involuntary cry of amazement.

Immediately beneath his feet, the slope of the stairway was a reasonable forty-five degrees, but it rapidly became steeper until only a dozen meters ahead the steps were rising vertically. Thereafter—and it was a sight that might have unnerved anyone coming across it for the first time—the increase of gradient continued remorselessly until the steps began to overhang and at last passed out of sight above and
behind
him.

Hearing his exclamation, the doctor looked back and gave a reassuring laugh.

“You mustn’t always believe your eyes,” he said. “Come along and see how easy it is.”

Reluctantly Gibson followed, and as he did so he became aware that two very peculiar things were happening. In the first place he was gradually becoming lighter; in the second, despite the obvious steepening of the stairway, the slope beneath his feet remained at a constant forty-five degrees. The vertical direction itself, in fact, was slowly tilting as he moved forward, so that despite its increasing curvature the gradient of the stairway never altered.

It did not take Gibson long to arrive at the explanation. All the apparent gravity was due to the centrifugal force produced as the station spun slowly on its axis, and as he approached the centre the force was diminishing to zero. The stairway itself was winding in towards the axis along some sort of spiral—once he’d have known its mathematical name—so that despite the radial gravity field the slope underfoot remained constant. It was the sort of thing that people who lived in space stations must get accustomed to quickly enough; presumably when they returned to Earth the sight of a normal stairway would be equally unsettling.

At the end of the stairs there was no longer any real sense of “up” or “down.” They were in a long cylindrical room, criss-crossed with ropes but otherwise empty, and at its far end a shaft of sunlight came blasting through an observation port. As Gibson watched, the beam moved steadily across the metal walls like a questing searchlight, was momentarily eclipsed, then blazed out again from another window. It was the first indication Gibson’s senses had given him of the fact that the station was really spinning on its axis, and he timed the rotation roughly by noting how long the sunlight took to return to its original position. The “day” of this little artificial world was less than ten seconds; that was sufficient to give a sensation of normal gravity at its outer walls.

Gibson felt rather like a spider in its web as he followed the doctor hand-over-hand along the guide ropes, towing himself effortlessly through the air until they came to the observation post. They were, he saw, at the end of a sort of chimney jutting out along the axis of the station, so that they were well clear of its equipment and apparatus and had an almost unrestricted view of the stars.

“I’ll leave you here for a while,” said the doctor. “There’s plenty to look at, and you should be quite happy. If not—well, remember there’s normal gravity at the bottom of those stairs!”

Yes, thought Gibson;
and
a return trip to Earth by the next rocket as well. But he was determined to pass the test and to get a clean bill of health.

It was quite impossible to realize that the space station itself was rotating, and not the framework of sun and stars: to believe otherwise required an act of faith, a conscious effort of will. The stars were moving so quickly that only the brighter ones were clearly visible and the sun, when Gibson allowed himself to glance at it out of the corner of his eye, was a golden comet that crossed the sky every five seconds. With this fantastic speeding up of the natural order of events, it was easy to see how ancient man had refused to believe that his own solid earth was rotating, and had attributed all movement to the turning celestial sphere.

Partly occulted by the bulk of the station, the Earth was a great crescent spanning half the sky. It was slowly waxing as the station raced along on its globe-encircling orbit; in some forty minutes it would be full, and an hour after that would be totally invisible, a black shield eclipsing the sun while the station passed through its cone of shadow. The Earth would go through all its phases—from new to full and back again—in just two hours. The sense of time became distorted as one thought of these things; the familiar divisions of day and night, of months and seasons, had no meaning here.

About a kilometre from the station, moving with it in its orbit but not at the moment connected to it in any way, were the three spaceships that happened to be “in dock” at the moment. One was the tiny arrowhead of the rocket that had brought him, at such expense and such discomfort, up from Earth an hour ago. The second was a lunar-bound freighter of, he guessed, about a thousand tons gross. And the third, of course, was the
Ares,
almost dazzling in the splendour of her new aluminium paint.

Gibson had never become reconciled to the loss of the sleek, streamlined spaceships which had been the dream of the early twentieth century. The glittering dumb-bell hanging against the stars was not
his
idea of a space-liner; though the world had accepted it, he had not. Of course, he knew the familiar arguments—there was no need for streamlining in a ship that never entered an atmosphere, and therefore the design was dictated purely by structural and power-plant considerations. Since the violently radioactive drive-unit had to be as far away from the crew quarters as possible, the double-sphere and long connecting tube was the simplest solution.

It was also, Gibson thought, the ugliest; but that hardly mattered since the
Ares
would spend practically all her life in deep space where the only spectators were the stars. Presumably she was already fuelled and merely waiting for the precisely calculated moment when her motors would burst into life, and she would pull away out of the orbit in which she was circling and had hitherto spent all her existence, to swing into the long hyperbola that led to Mars.

When that happened, he would be aboard, launched at last upon the adventure he had never really believed would come to him.

Two

The captain’s office aboard the
Ares
was not designed to hold more than three men when gravity was acting, but there was plenty of room for six while the ship was in a free orbit and one could stand on walls or ceiling according to taste. All except one of the group clustered at surrealist angles around Captain Norden had been in space before and knew what was expected of them, but this was no ordinary briefing. The maiden flight of a new spaceship is always an occasion, and the
Ares
was the first of her line—the first, indeed, of all spaceships ever to be built primarily for passengers and not for freight. When she was fully commissioned, she would carry a crew of thirty and a hundred and fifty passengers in somewhat spartan comfort. On her first voyage, however, the proportions were almost reversed and at the moment her crew of six was waiting for the single passenger to come aboard.

“I’m still not quite clear,” said Owen Bradley, the electronics officer, “what we are supposed to do with the fellow when we’ve got him. Whose bright idea was this, anyway?”

“I was coming to that,” said Captain Norden, running his hands over where his magnificent blond hair had been only a few days before. (Spaceships seldom carry professional barbers, and though there are always plenty of eager amateurs one prefers to put off the evil day as long as possible.) “You all know of Mr. Gibson, of course.”

This remark produced a chorus of replies, not all of them respectful.

“I think his stories stink,” said Dr. Scott. “The later ones, anyway.
Martian Dust
wasn’t bad, but of course it’s completely dated now.”

“Nonsense!” snorted astrogator Mackay. “The last stories are much the best, now that Gibson’s got interested in fundamentals and has cut out the blood and thunder.”

This outburst from the mild little Scott was most uncharacteristic. Before anyone else could join in, Captain Norden interrupted.

“We’re not here to discuss literary criticism, if you don’t mind. There’ll be plenty of time for that later. But there are one or two points the Corporation wants me to make clear before we begin. Mr. Gibson is a very important man—a distinguished guest—and he’s been invited to come on this trip so that he can write a book about it later. It’s not just a publicity stunt.” (“Of course not!” interjected Bradley, with heavy sarcasm.) “But naturally the Corporation hopes that future clients won’t be—er discouraged by what they read. Apart from that, we
are
making history; our maiden voyage ought to be recorded properly. So try and behave like gentlemen for a while; Gibson’s book will probably sell half a million copies, and your future reputations may depend on your behaviour these next three months!”