Station in Space Page 10

  The floor was covered from wall to wall by a deep-pile seamless gray carpet. Phillips’ shoes had made no sound as he walked across it and stood at attention in front of the desk. The only noise in the room was the muffled whisper of the air-conditioning as it blew fresh, chilled air through ceiling ducts.

  Phillips wondered if the General had forgotten he was here. Haven Ashley was sitting with his back to the desk—and to Phillips who was sitting beside it. He seemed to be studying the mosaic on the rear wall of his office, the only decorative touch in the room. The other walls were plain battleship gray.

  The mosaic was an authentic art piece. It had been constructed from minute slivers of colored glass, each glued painstakingly into position to form a faithful reproduction of the appearance of Earth from 1,000 miles up. The continents were dull browns and yellows and greens overcast by a faint blue; the oceans were grayish-blue, almost black.

  The mosaic was flat, but it gave the illusion of being a perfect half-sphere. Down here it was always night, but when the sun sank beyond the Potomac for the surface dwellers above, the disk darkened in Ashley's office and became spotted with the reddish patches that were cities and the single stars that were brighter concentrations of light. And in the velvet dark around the planet real stars came out, unwinking brilliants obscured until then by the glow of the day-lit Earth.

  There were no satellites in the sky. The scale was too small for the 24-hour orbit of the Big Wheel and too large for the Little Wheel to be more than a speck. In any case, the Little Wheel would not have appeared; that was where the artist had stood.

  The mosaic was strategically placed. To Phillips, as he had entered through the front wall door, it had looked like a halo around the head of General Haven Ashley. Ashley made the most of it. He was no angel.

  Phillips studied the back of the General's head for the third time. Ashley was not a tall man, but he was big. He filled out the padded desk chair from armrest to armrest, his massive thighs bulging the trouser legs of the Air Force gray uniform, his barrel chest straining the gilt buttons of the jacket.

  But these were things that Phillips had observed as he entered. All he could see now was the stiff, stubborn set of the shoulders, the red neck creased with a roll of fat, the gray hair brushed firmly into place against its natural tendency to bristle, and he thought: What's wrong with the room? It's identical with the room when Pickrell was here, even to the stainless steel model of a three-stage shuttle that stood on the desk as a paperweight. A little neater, perhaps, but I have no fetish for that.

  He had an incipient tendency toward claustrophobia.

  Perhaps it was that. He could feel the weight of five hundred feet of reinforced concrete pressing down upon his shoulders and his chest. Even the air seemed stale, although he knew it was purer than he could breathe on the streets of Washington.

  Perhaps it was the uncertainty of why Ashley had called him here. This was no courtesy call, as the other had been. This was business, and, for some reason, Ashley couldn't talk about it.

  The General hadn't called to his office an obscure Air Force psychologist to discuss the psychologist's opinion of the Air Force. Nor had he summoned help for his neuroses; for Ashley that was impossible.

  It had to be the job.

  Ashley had inherited it six months ago, and it was the most terrible responsibility upon the face of the Earth. On his shoulders, like a modern Atlas, rested the sky. If he weakened, if he stumbled, the sky would fall, and humanity would be obliterated.

  Or perhaps, Phillips thought, it was the uncertainty of the world situation itself, which had worsened, certainly, in recent months.

  As Phillips leaned over the desk to stab out his cigarette in the spotless ash tray, Ashley swiveled in his chair, smacked the desk with the fiat of his hand, and said violently, “Intolerable!"

  Phillips froze, his hand poised above the tray, the cigarette burning close to his fingers."

  “Not you, Captain,” Ashley growled. “Put that thing out. You'll have to give up smoking anyway."

  Phillips stabbed twice and leaned back tensely. “Yes, sir?” What did he mean by that?

  Ashley scowled at the shiny paperweight. “What do you know about the world situation? Never mind; I'll tell you in one word: desperate. It's been desperate for forty years, but now it's worse. Every puny little nation has a stockpile of atomic and hydrogen weapons; every last one of them is ready to blow your head off if you speak to them without the respect they think is their due."

  “We're sitting on a powder keg,” Phillips said boldly, “and everybody has a fuse in one hand and a piece of smoldering punk in the other. If one of us goes, we all go. You'd think they'd decide, eventually, to stamp out the punk and tear out the fuses."

  Ashley's bushy red eyebrows drew closer together, deepening the creases between them, and he asked sourly, “And how can you be sure everyone does it at the same time? Idealist! The last nation with a lighted match is the master of the world."

  Phillips said slowly, “I thought that was the function of the Little Wheel—to keep everyone honest."

  Ashley said gloomily, “It's an edge. But what good is an edge in a situation like this. It's like having a machine-gun when the other guy's got a .45. If the shooting starts, you're just as dead."

  “What about the satellite's inspection facilities? Each two hours every spot on Earth comes within view."

  “That! How do you see under the ground? You don't. And that's where the factories and IBM pits are now."

  “Then there's espionage—"

  “And we're right back where we started twenty-five years ago.” Ashley was solid and impassive in his chair, but his eyes brooded over the rocket-shaped ornament. “Have you ever been up there? Or out there, as the space nuts say."

  “Yes, sir. Training cruises, and a weekend on the Big Wheel"

  “The Little Wheel?"

  “No, sir."

  “No. They won't let you up there. They won't let any psychologist up there.” Ashley's voice dropped to a monotone, and he stared at the front door blindly. “When I took over command of the Air Force, I inherited a standing order that no psychologist would be allowed inside the Little Wheel. Why, Captain?” His voice grew stronger as he went on without waiting for an answer. “They were afraid of what a psychologist would find. They're afraid he'd break up their playhouse.

  “Pickrell tried to get me to go along with his little game. ‘The witch doctors had their shot at my men in the Acadeny,’ he would say. ‘I won't have them messing around with my men on the job.’ Well, I'm in command now, and I'm running things my way."

  Phillips said reassuringly, “There's no doubt that the men out there are stable."

  “Stable how?" Ashley demanded fiercely. “As spaceman, maybe. But are they stable as executioners? They've got their finger on the trigger up there, man, and there's no one to tell them when to shoot except a lunatic. Don't interrupt me! We're in communication, sure—for twenty minutes every two hours. And radio can be jammed. If that's too obvious, any enemy can wait for sunspots. That fouls everything up but good! And astronomers have no nationality.

  “Men have been up there for twenty years with their trigger fingers crooked. Not sensible men, Captain, not men trained in responsibility and careful decisions, but men who must be more than a little cracked in the first place to go up there and stay.” There was an indefinable note of horror in Ashley's deep voice. “Why there's a man up there who hasn't been back for twelve years—who hasn't set foot on Earth since he went up! And he's in command up there!

  “How stable is a man, Captain, who replies to an order from his superior officer: In my opinion this is impractical or We respectfully suggest that you consider possible alternatives?

  “That's all, Captain. Pick up your orders as you go out. You will make a thorough survey of the psychological situation in the Little Wheel and report back when it is completed. When you come back, you will have an answer to this question: Is every man
up there competent to exercise mature, unerring judgment in cases involving the welfare of the entire Earth; is every man up there incapable of cracking under the constant strain of sitting on a powder keg?

  “Oh, yes. Another thing. They're building something up there behind the Wheel where we can't see it. I want to know what it is."

  Phillips looked at the General's hands. The rocket model was between them, and beneath the red hairs the hands were white with strain. The paperweight snapped. The sound was startling in the silence. Ashley looked down at his hands, surprised, and then contemptuously tossed the pieces away.

  “Yes, sir,” Phillips said, thinking about the question he would have to answer when his job was done. There was only one possible answer: no. There was no group of men anywhere uniformly competent to exercise mature, unerring judgment, no man who would not crack under the stress of responsibility, if the responsibility were great enough.

  He could give Ashley his answer now, but that wasn't what the General wanted. He wanted the odor of legality; he wanted evidence to present to the Secretary of Defense or the President or Congress.

  He was determined to break the Little Wheel just as he had broken the rocket model on his desk.

  “What kind of a man is the commander of the Little Wheel?” Phillips asked curiously.

  Ashley stared at him, his eyes large and angry. “I told you. He's a madman. He's utterly insane."

  Phillips took his courage in his hands and said, “Why don't you order him in?"

  Ashley hesitated for a moment and then said in a voice that was almost inaudible, “What if he refused to come?"

  Captain Lloyd Phillips, M.D., U.S.A.F., sat in the leather-and-tile waiting room of the vast concrete spaceport at Cocoa, Florida, and watched Swan Lake on the wide,flat television screen against the far wall. The performance was impossibly graceful, unimaginably beautiful; never had human dancers looked so much like swans as they made long, flowing swoops through air that seemed as buoyant as a crystalline pool.

  The program was coming from the Big Wheel, poised eternally in its 22,000 mile orbit above the United States. The performance was taking place in a low-gravity studio of the fabulous Telecity not far from the commercial satellite, and reception was flawless.

  This was something Phillips could appreciate, something that the conquest of space had given him that repaid, in part, the sacrifices of human life and labor and agony and Earth's resources that could have been expended more profitably and more realistically.

  Phillips had nothing against spaceflight or the Big Wheel or the Little Wheel, either. He was intensely interested in them—as psychological phenomena. They had brought him into the Air Force, and they had kept him there.

  He wanted an answer to his own question: why?

  Why did men join the Air Force's Space Corps? What drove them into a brutal, alien environment where the best they could expect was hardship and a sterile life shortened by the physical damage of bad food, poisoned air, and the destruction of heavy primaries, the cumulative toll of acceleration pressures, and a fifty percent certainty of insanity or violent death?

  And why did a race expend its substance on a grand but futile gesture?

  Spaceflight was impractical; that was certain. It would never return half the investment of thought, sweat, blood, and money put into it.

  One day there would be a thick, scholarly book with Phillips’ name on it. Perhaps he would call it: Those Who Went Out, subtitled, “The Psychological Factors Involved in the Career Decisions of Space Corps Volunteers, with case histories."

  Or maybe: The Influence of the Broken Home on Twenty Space Corps Volunteers...

  Or, more simply: Spaceman—A Study of the Space Corps...

  After that would come the sociological treatise: Why Space?—A Consideration of the Sociological Necessities Behind the Development of Spaceflight.

  Phillips looked around the big waiting room. It was bare and almost antiseptically clean. He was alone except for a second lieutenant asleep in a far corner, his space helmet tilted forward to shade his eyes.

  Phillips looked back at the human swans on the screen, but there were more urgent and immediate demands on his thoughts—for instance General Haven Ashley.

  His orders had included only twenty-four hours delay, but he had put them to good use. There was no one to say good-by to: his mother had died many years ago, his father wouldn't give a damn, and he had played the field too carefully for any girl to wonder why he didn't call. In a locked compartment of Phillips’ blue, nylon spacepack were the results of his 24-hours’ work: microfilms of the service and medical records of the Little Wheel's entire personnel, from a newcomer of five months to an incredible veteran of twelve years, a Colonel Danton whom General Ashley had insisted was “utterly insane."

  Phillips had gone over them several times during the continually delayed take-off of the shuttle, but a thorough analysis would have to wait until he had met each man individually and could correlate his observations with the impersonal details recorded in the emulsions. He did not want to prejudge anyone.

  It was a trait of conscientiousness that was a little annoying under the circumstances. The situation had been prejudged for him. But it was the way he worked, and he would have to endure it again, as he had suffered with it before.

  Phillips had used his orders as authority to dig into a more private file, that of Ashley himself. He knew more about Ashley now than Ashley knew about himself. He would have liked confirmation, absolute certainty; a Rorschach blob test would have provided that. But he was as likely to get that from Ashley as Danton was to get a promotion, and he had enough. He knew why Ashley wanted to destroy the Little Wheel, had to destroy it. He had the key, a small notation on Ashley's service record: Disqualified for space duty, spacesickness.

  Ashley was one of that small minority of men who can not go weightless without complete sensory disorientation and a violent, unrelenting nausea.

  A lesser man would not have cared; a greater man would have forgiven himself. But Ashley could do neither. He had sublimated it, and the defeat had become a driving ambition that had carried him to the top of the Air Force through an incommensurable amount of unrelenting labor, constant politicking, and plain backstabbing.

  He had seen space heroes promoted over his head, and he had waited and worked and plotted through the commands of such space pioneers as Beauregard Finch and the recently invalided Frank Pickrell, through an era when spacemen could do no wrong.

  And he had clawed his way to the top.

  There were published articles in Ashley's file subtly emphasizing the necessity of civilian control and of a balanced attack upon the military problem of defense against aggression.

  Phillips could hear Ashley's voice growling through such phrases as “The tail wagging the dog” and “promotion policies should be influenced by considerations of all-around executive ability rather than spectacular and essentially meaningless feats of personal courage or mere physical agility. The balanced man with his feet planted firmly on the ground and his primary concern for the welfare of all the people must take precedence over visionaries and impractical idealists."

  Ashley would be the first to deny that he harbored any hatred for the Space Corps of his command, and he would be telling the truth. But his subconscious mind had decided long ago that spaceflight was worthless. It was equated with a terrible experience of physical and psychic distress; imprinted on an inaccessible area of Ashley's mind was the article of faith: Men are Earth creatures.

  The combination of genes that had determined Ashley's inability to tolerate no-gravity had doomed the Little Wheel, and perhaps the whole future of spaceflight, almost fifty years ago. Chance. Just as it had been chance that the first man into space had been unable to return, and his plight, capturing the world's sympathy, had fueled the great psychological surge that had put the Little Wheel into space.

  To recognize the subconscious factors behind Ashley's decision, however, w
as not to invalidate the decision itself. Ashley might be correct in spite of his prejudice. Phillips thought it very probably that Ashley was right.

  But it rankled a little that he was going on a fool's errand. No answer he brought back—except an outright and unacceptable lie—could save the Little Wheel. Still, to Ashley and the world the trip was essential.

  The Little Wheel was going to die and spaceflight was going to die, but they had to die for a very good reason and with all due rites and ceremonies or they wouldn't stay dead.

  * * * *

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” the voice repeated.

  Phillips looked up, his thoughts shattered into shards that could never be quite pieced together again. A second lieutenant in the Space Corps stood respectfully in front of him, his blue space helmet dangling from one hand. Phillips glanced quickly at the far corner of the room, but it was empty, and looked back at the lieutenant.

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” said the lieutenant for the third time, “but I was wondering—you don't seem to be watching the screen"—he motioned boyishly toward the far wall—"if you'd mind if I switched channels."

  He was a young man—slim, tall, broad-shouldered, and blond, his hair trimmed almost scalp short in the latest spacecut—and he wore the most delightfully engaging grin. The kind of young man, in fact, for whom a uniform did the most and who did the most for a uniform. His face had sunburned and peeled and sunburned and peeled again until it was a light tan, but he would never develop any real immunity to ultraviolet. His blue eyes looked directly at Philips without wavering. He was a completely normal young man, a Space Corps recruiting poster come to life, and Phillips’ irritation collapsed.

  “Go right ahead,” Phillips said. In a moment the swans gave way to an amazing exhibition of acrobatics in zero gravity, but the young lieutenant, after he had returned and taken a pneumatic, leather chair next to Phillips, gave the performance none of his attention. He turned immediately to the psychologist and said eagerly, “Are you going out, sir?"