Station in Space

  Station in Space

  James Gunn

  PREFACE

  In 1954 I had written my first two science-fiction novels, This Fortress World and Star Bridge (in collaboration with Jack Williamson). I was writing full-time, living in a house rent-free and working in a basement room I had converted into an office in the house my parents shared with my brother. My wife and son and I even had free medical care from my brother, and still it was difficult to buy groceries and pay our few other bills.

  I spent eight hours a day in my basement office, turning out ten pages a day and rewriting it once. That meant I could write a short story in a week, a novelette in two weeks, a short novel in four weeks, and a novel in three months. I wrote This Fortress World and Star Bridge that way, and both got published by Gnome Press in 1955, but I got a total of $500 ($450 when my agent took his percentage) for This Fortress World and half that (Jack got half) for Star Bridge. Both novels were reprinted later and translated into a number of foreign languages, and provide a good return for my efforts, but I didn't know about those prospects then, and at the time $750 for six months’ work seemed like a poor strategy for a struggling writer.

  I made two decisions: I would place my stories in the near future, and I would write my novels in the form of short stories and novelettes that I could get published first in the magazines and later collect as books. When I became a teacher of fiction writing I passed it along to my students as “Gunn's Law” (Sell it twice!).

  One of the ideas I was turning over in my head was the near future of space flight: how would the public's inertia ever be overcome? Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun had started the process by collaborating on an issue of Collier's dedicated to the construction of a space station, complete with evocative paintings by astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell. It was later reproduced in book form as The Conquest of Space. I sat down to write a story that might be published in the slick magazines (the ultimate aspiration of every pulp writer). I called it “The Cave of Night,” and when it was done I asked my agent to send it to Collier's and, if Collier's rejected it, to the Saturday Evening Post. He sent it to Collier's, and when Collier's rejected it he shipped it over to Horace Gold at Galaxy, who paid me 3 ½ cents a word and published it in the February 1955 issue.

  A couple of good things happened. “The Cave of Night” was dramatized on NBC's “X Minus One” radio program. I got $50 for that. A year or so later Galaxy told my agent it wanted to develop a television program that would broadcast dramatizations from the pages of Galaxy, as “X Minus One” had done on radio. Galaxy wanted “The Cave of Night” for its pilot program and bought the TV rights for $350. Not long afterwards, apparently, that project fell through and the rights were sold to Desilu, which broadcast a version in 1959 on “Desilu Playhouse” under the title of “Man in Orbit” (with Lee Marvin and H. G. Marshall). That was too late to save my full-time writing career (by then I was working in the Chancellor's office at the University of Kansas), but it was good to have something on television, even though somewhere along the line the point of the story had been changed (that would become a familiar feeling).

  Back in 1954, however, I had gone on to write “Hoax.” Horace Gold didn't like it ("Are you going to keep on writing stories about hoaxes?” he wrote), but James Quinn did and published it in IF in December of 1955. I wrote “The Big Wheel” in 1955, and it got published in Fantastic Universe in September 1956. By that time I was editing the alumni publications for the University of Kansas Alumni Association, under an agreement that I could take off one week a month and a month every summer to write. I also enrolled in a writers workshop course from mainstream author and editor Carolyn Gordon, who taught me (among other things) about Flaubert's invention of creating a sense of reality by describing places with appeals to at least three senses. I wrote “Powder Keg” in that class. I suspect that Ms. Gordon was a bit puzzled by it, but she didn't flinch. If published it in April of 1958.

  Before that came out I had written in the summer of 1956 the short novel “Space Is a Lonely Place,” and Bob Mills, who later would become my agent, published it in his innovative magazineVenture in May 1957. By that time Bantam Books had decided to start a science-fiction line, and my then agent, Harry Altshuler, submitted Station in Space. Bantam didn't reply for a several months (Harry would write that submitting a book to Bantam was like dropping it down a well, but eventually they always seemed to come through with an acceptance); then they sent us a contract for the unheard of advance of $2,500.

  So it seemed that my strategy had worked. The book was published in 1958. Meanwhile, however, something else had happened. A man-made satellite had been placed in orbit on October 4, 1957. It was called Sputnik, and the Russians had done it. The U.S. didn't launch one until 1958, and it was the third. Station in Space was out of date before it was published! I discovered that stories could be placed too close to the present.

  Science-fiction writers get reputations as prophets. They aren't really in that business. Their intention is to write plausible scenarios about possible futures. Sometimes, by chance, one of them coincides with reality. I wasn't too good in my foreshadowing of the future of spaceflight. But what about the first American in orbit, John Glenn, on Feb. 20, 1962? What do you call it when the town of Perth, Australia, turned its lights on and off as Glenn's flight passed overhead? Well, maybe somebody had read Station on Space or seen the television adaptation. Or maybe....

  So Station in Space can be read today as historical science fiction like Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. Or as alternate reality. Or as the way it should have been....

  James Gunn

  The Cave of Night

  The phrase was first used by a poet disguised in the cynical hide of a newspaper reporter. It appeared on the first day and was widely reprinted. He wrote:

  "At eight o'clock, after the Sun has set and the sky is darkening, look up! There's a man up there where no man has ever been.

  "He is lost in the cave of night..."

  The headlines demanded something short, vigorous and descriptive. That was it. It was inaccurate, but it stuck.

  If anybody was in a cave, it was the rest of humanity. Painfully, triumphantly, one man had climbed out. Now he couldn't find his way back into the cave with the rest of us.

  What goes up doesn't always come back down.

  That was the first day. After it came twenty-nine days of agonized suspense.

  The cave of night. I wish the phrase had been mine.

  That was it, the tag, the symbol. It was the first thing a man saw when he glanced at the newspaper. It was the way people talked about it: “What's the latest about the cave?” It summed it all up, the drama, the anxiety, the hope.

  Maybe it was the Floyd Collins influence. The papers dug up their files on that old tragedy, reminiscing, comparing, and they remembered the little girl—Kathy Fiscus, wasn't it?—who was trapped in that abandoned, California drain pipe; and a number of others.

  Periodically, it happens, a sequence of events so accidentally dramatic that men lose their hatreds, their terrors, their shynesses, their inadequacies, and the human race momentarily recognizes its kinship.

  The essential ingredients are these: A person must be in unusual and desperate peril. The peril must have duration. There must be proof that the person is still alive. Rescue attempts must be made. Publicity must be widespread.

  One could probably be constructed artificially, but if the world ever discovered the fraud, it would never forgive.

  Like many others, I have tried to analyze what makes a niggling, squabbling, callous race of beings suddenly share that most human emotion of sympathy, and, like them, I have not succeeded. Suddenly a distant stranger will mean more than their own comfo
rt. Every waking moment, they pray: Live, Floyd! Live, Kathy! Live, Rev!

  We pass on the street, we who would not have nodded, and ask, “Will they get there in time?"

  Optimists and pessimists alike, we hope so. We all hope so.

  In a sense, this one was different. This was purposeful.

  Knowing the risk, accepting it because there was no other way to do what had to be done, Rev had gone into the cave of night. The accident was that he could not return.

  The news came out of nowhere—literally—to an unsuspecting world. The earliest mention the historians have been able to locate was an item about a ham radio operator in Davenport, Iowa. He picked up a distress signal on a sticky-hot June evening.

  The message, he said later, seemed to fade in, reach a peak, and fade out:

  “.. and fuel tanks empty—ceiver broke ... transmitting in clear so someone can pick this up, and ... no way to get back ... stuck..."

  A small enough beginning.

  The next message was received by a military base radio watch near Fairbanks, Alaska. That was early in the morning. Half an hour later, a night-shift worker in Boston heard something on his short-wave set that sent him rushing to the telephone.

  That morning, the whole world learned the story. It broke over them, a wave of excitement and concern. Orbiting 1,075 miles above their heads was a man, an officer of the United States Air Force, in a fuelless spaceship.

  All by itself, the spaceship part would have captured the world's attention. It was achievement as monumental as anything Man has ever done and far more spectacular. It was liberation from the tyranny of Earth, this jealous mother who had bound her children tight with the apron strings of gravity.

  Man was free. It was a symbol that nothing is completely and finally impossible if Man wants it hard enough and long enough.

  There are regions that humanity finds peculiarly congenial. Like all Earth's creatures, Man is a product and a victim of environment. His triumph is that the slave became the master. Unlike more specialized animals, he distributed himself across the entire surface of the Earth, from the frozen Antarctic continent to the Arctic icecap.

  Man became an equatorial animal, a temperate zone animal, an arctic animal. He became a plains dweller, a valley dweller, a mountain dweller. The swamp and the desert became equally his home.

  Man made his own environment.

  With his inventive mind and his dexterous hands, he fashioned it, conquered cold and heat, dampness, aridness, land, sea, air. Now, with his science, he had conquered everything. He had become independent of the world that bore him.

  It was a birthday cake for all mankind, celebrating its coming of age.

  Brutally, the disaster was icing on the cake.

  But it was more, too. When everything is considered, perhaps it was the aspect that, for a few, brief days, united humanity and made possible what we did.

  It was a sign: Man is never completely independent of Earth; he carries with him his environment; he is always and forever a part of humanity. It was a conquest mellowed by a confession of mortality and error.

  It was a statement: Man has within him the qualities of greatness that will never accept the restraints of circumstance, and yet he carries, too, the seeds of fallibility that we all recognize in ourselves.

  Rev was one of us. His triumph was our triumph; his peril—more fully and finely—was our peril.

  Reverdy L. McMillen, III, first lieutenant, U.S.A.F. Pilot. Rocket jockey. Man. Rev. He was only a thousand miles away, calling for help, but those miles were straight up. We got to know him as well as any member of our own family.

  The news came as a great personal shock to me. I knew Rev. We had become good friends in college, and fortune had thrown us together in the Air Force, a writer and a pilot. I had got out as soon as possible, but Rev had stayed in. I knew, vaguely, that he had been testing rocket-powered airplanes with Chuck Yeager. But I had no idea that the rocket program was that close to space.

  Nobody did. It was a better-kept secret than the Manhattan Project.

  I remember staring at Rev's picture in the evening newspaper—the straight black hair, the thin, rakish mustache, the Clark Gable ears, the reckless, rueful grin—and I felt again, like a physical thing, his great joy in living. It expressed itself in a hundred ways. He loved widely, but with discrimination. He ate well, drank heartily, reveled in expert jazz and artistic inventiveness, and talked incessantly.

  Now he was alone and soon all that might be extinguished. I told myself that I would help.

  That was a time of wild enthusiasm. Men mobbed the Air Force Proving Grounds at Cocoa, Florida, wildly volunteering their services. But I was no engineer. I wasn't even a welder or a riveter. At best, I was only a poor word mechanic.

  But words, at least, I could contribute.

  I made a hasty verbal agreement with a local paper and caught the first plane to Washington, D. C. For a long time, I liked to think that what I wrote during the next few days had something to do with subsequent events, for many of my articles were picked up for reprint by other newspapers.

  The Washington fiasco was the responsibility of the Senate Investigating Committee. It subpoenaed everybody in sight—which effectively removed them from the vital work they were doing. But within a day, the Committee realized that it had bitten off a bite it could neither swallow nor spit out.

  General Beauregard Finch, head of the research and development program, was the tough morsel the Committee gagged on. Coldly, accurately, he described the development of the project, the scientific and technical research, the tests, the building of the ship, the training of the prospective crewmen, and the winnowing of the volunteers down to one man.

  In words more eloquent because of their clipped precision, he described the takeoff of the giant three-stage ship, shoved upward on a lengthening arm of combining hydrazine and nitric acid. Within fifty-six minutes, the remaining third stage had reached its orbital height of 1,075 miles.

  It had coasted there. In order to maintain that orbit, the motors had to flicker on for fifteen seconds.

  At that moment, disaster laughed at Man's careful calculations.

  Before Rev could override the automatics, the motors had flamed for almost half a minute. The fuel he had depended upon to slow the ship so that it would drop, re-enter the atmosphere and be reclaimed by Earth was almost gone. His efforts to counteract the excess speed resulted only in an approximation of the original orbit.

  The fact was this: Rev was up there. He would stay there until someone came and got him.

  And there was no way to get there.

  The Committee took that as an admission of guilt and incompetence; they tried to lever themselves free with it, but General Finch was not to be intimidated. A manned ship had been sent up because no mechanical or electronic computer could contain the vast possibilities for decision and action built into a human being.

  The original computer was still the best all-purpose computer.

  There had been only one ship built, true. But there was good reason for that, a completely practical reason—money.

  Leaders are, by definition, ahead of the people. But this wasn't a field in which they could show the way and wait for the people to follow. This was no expedition in ancient ships, no light exploring party, no pilot-plant operation. Like a parachute jump, it had to be successful the first time.

  This was an enterprise into new, expensive fields. It demanded money (billions of dollars), brains (the best available), and the hard, dedicated labor of men (thousands of them).

  General Finch became a national hero that afternoon. He said, in bold words, “With the limited funds you gave us, we have done what we set out to do. We have demonstrated that space flight is possible, that a space platform is feasible.

  “If there is any inefficiency, if there is any blame for what has happened, it lies at the door of those who lacked confidence in the courage and ability of their countrymen to fight free of Earth t
o the greatest glory. Senator, how did you vote on that?"

  But I am not writing a history. The shelves are full of them. I will touch on the international repercussions only enough to show that the event had no more respect for national boundaries than Rev's orbiting ship.

  The orbit was almost perpendicular to the equator. The ship traveled as far north as Nome, as far south as Little America on the Antarctic Continent. It completed one giant circle every two hours. Meanwhile, the Earth rotated beneath. If the ship had been equipped with adequate optical instruments, Rev could have observed every spot on Earth within twenty-four hours. He could have seen fleets and their dispositions, aircraft carriers and the planes taking off their decks, troop maneuvers.

  In the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Russian ambassador protested this unwarranted and illegal violation of its national boundaries. He hinted darkly that it would not be allowed to continue. The U.S.S.R. had not been caught unprepared, he said. If the violation went on—"every few hours!"—drastic steps would be taken.

  World opinion reared up in indignation. The U.S.S.R. immediately retreated and pretended, as only it could, that its belligerence had been an unwarranted inference and that it had never said anything of the sort, anyway.

  This was not a military observer above our heads. It was a man who would soon be dead unless help reached him.

  A world offered what it had. Even the U.S.S.R. announced that it was outfitting a rescue ship, since its space program was already on the verge of success. And the American public responded with more than a billion dollars within a week. Congress appropriated another billion. Thousands of men and women volunteered.

  The race began.

  Would the rescue party reach the ship in time? The world prayed.

  And it listened daily to the voice of a man it hoped to buy back from death.

  The problem shaped up like this:

  The trip had been planned to last for only a few days. By careful rationing, the food and water might be stretched out for more than a month, but the oxygen, by cutting down activity to conserve it, couldn't possibly last more than thirty days. That was the absolute outside limit.