The Space Trilogy (4 page)

I climbed into the pneumatic couch, but it wasn't easy to relax. I don't think I was frightened, but I was certainly excited. After all these years of dreaming, I was really aboard a spaceship at last! In a few minutes, more than a hundred million horsepower would be hurtling me into the sky.

I let my eyes roam around the control cabin. Most of its contents were quite familiar from photographs and films, and I knew what all the instruments were supposed to do. The control panel of the spaceship is not really very complicated, because so much is done automatically.

The pilot was talking to the Port Control Tower over the radio, as they went through the pre-take-off routine together. Every so often a time-check broke through the conversation: 'Minus Fifteen Minutes … Minus Ten Minutes … Minus Five Minutes.' Though I'd heard this sort of thing so often before, it never failed to give me a thrill. And this time I wasn't watching it on TV—I was in the middle of it myself.

At last the pilot said, 'Over to Automatic,' and threw a large red switch. He gave a sigh of relief, stretched his arms, and leaned back in his seat.

That's always a nice feeling,' he said. 'No more work for the next hour!'

He didn't
really
mean that, of course. Although the robot controls would handle the ship from now on, he still had to see that everything was going according to plan. In an emergency, or if the robot pilot made an error, he would have to take over again.

The ship began to vibrate as the fuel pumps started to spin. A complicated pattern of intersecting lines had appeared on the TV screen—something to do, I supposed, with the course the rocket was to follow. A row of tiny lights changed, one after another, from red to green. As the last light turned colour, the pilot called to me swiftly: 'Make sure you're lying quite flat.'

I snuggled down into the couch—and then, without any warning, felt as if someone had jumped on top of me. There was a tremendous roaring in my ears, and I seemed to weigh a ton. It required a definite effort to breathe—that was no longer something you could leave to your lungs and forget all about

The feeling of discomfort lasted only a few seconds: then I grew accustomed to it. The ship's own motors had not yet started: we were climbing under the thrust of the booster rockets, which would burn out and drop away after thirty seconds, when we were already many miles above the Earth.

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 cylinder, 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?'