Station in Space Page 3

  If Rev had escaped alive, why had they announced that he was dead? But I knew the question was all wrong.

  If my speculations were right, Rev had never been up there at all. The essential payload was only a thirty-day recording and a transmitter. Even if the major feat of sending up a manned rocket was beyond their means and their techniques, they could send up that much.

  Then they got the money; they got the volunteers and the techniques.

  I suppose the telemetered reports from the rocket helped. But what they accomplished in thirty days was an unparalleled miracle.

  The timing of the recording must have taken months of work; but the vital part of the scheme was secrecy. General Finch had to know and Captain—now Colonel—Pickrell. A few others—workmen, administrators—and Rev...

  What could they do with him? Disguise him? Yes. And then hide him in the biggest city in the world. They would have done it that way.

  It gave me a funny, sick kind of feeling, thinking about it. Like everybody else, I don't like to be taken in by a phony plea. And this was a fraud perpetrated on all humanity.

  Yet it had led us to the planets. Perhaps it would lead us beyond, even to the stars. I asked myself: could they have done it any other way?

  I would like to think I was mistaken. This myth has become part of us. We lived through it ourselves, helped make it. Someday, I tell myself, a spaceman whose reverence is greater than his obedience will make a pilgrimage to that swift shrine and find only an empty shell.

  I shudder then.

  This pulled us together. In a sense, it keeps us together. Nothing is more important than that.

  I try to convince myself that I was mistaken. The straight black hair was gray at the temples now and cut much shorter. The mustache was gone. The Clark Gable ears were flat to the head; that's a simple operation, I understand.

  But grins are hard to change. And anyone who lived through those thirty days will never forget that voice.

  I think about Rev and the life he must have now, the things he loved and can never enjoy again, and I realize perhaps he made the greater sacrifice.

  I think sometimes he must wish he were really in the cave of night, seated in that icy control chair 1,075 miles above, staring out at the stars.

  Hoax

  By daylight the room was small and shabby. Amos had outgrown it, as he had outgrown the bed.

  But at night it still had its magic.

  When the venetian blinds were closed and the light was off, the stars still came out fluorescently, and the planets, spinning gently in the smallest breath of air, seemed real and close. And the moon—pocked and familiar—a boy could almost reach up and touch it.

  Best of all was the S.1.2.—the Doughnut—glowing right above the bed, and the boy, lying there, was free-falling in space, one of the heroes, one of the spacemen.

  The boy was grown now, and the sun bleached the stars into tiny spots of paint and exposed the black thread that held up the planets and the S.1.2. The time for dreams was over.

  She bustled around the room. The models spun and swayed. “You'll want this,” she said briskly, holding out the book.

  He took it, the thumbed, battered Conquest of Space with the achingly beautiful Bonestells, and put it back on the shelf. “Gosh, Mom,” he pleaded, trying to make her understand. “I don't need that. I'm through with all this. Give this junk to Tommy."

  “The way you talk—a person would think you weren't coming back,” she complained, her voice breaking in the middle.

  “Now, Mom.” He slipped an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. “We've talked this out. I'm grown up; I'm not a boy any more. All these things"—he dismissed them with a careless hand—"I've got to put away. But I'll be back on leaves and Earth-duty and things."

  She's faded, he thought. Since he had been at the Academy. It had been a long time since he had thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. His mother had grown old.

  It had been a sad trip home. Maybe it had been a mistake, coming home. Maybe it would have been better to have refused the leave. He had wanted to. But that wouldn't have been fair, either.

  He folded over the thin, blue nylon of the spacepack and zipped it shut on his few personal belongings. Her eyes misted. Irritation crossed his face. “Now what's the matter?"

  “You're taking so little,” she said and caught her lower lip between her teeth.

  “You know the weight limit,” he said sharply. Then his voice softened. “Ten pounds. To put that on the Doughnut takes sixteen hundred pounds of fuel. Whatever else I need will be there. The Air Force won't let me go naked."

  “I know.” She sighed. She brightened determinedly “If you're packed, come right downstairs. I saved a piece of pie."

  He slung the spacepack over his arm the way spacemen did. As they went down the stairs, he put his left arm clumsily around her waist. “Now, Mom, I don't want anything to eat, honest. I couldn't eat a bite."

  “You aren't going away from home empty, young man!"

  “Sure, Mom. All right. Whatever you say.” He dropped the bag on a chair in the hall and let himself be led into the kitchen.

  She watched him eat, her eyes never leaving his face. He forced down the apple pie, not wanting it, fighting the eagerness to be gone, to be on his way.

  The kitchen was a place peculiarly his mother's. There she was in command of things; there she had the courage to say what she had been wanting to say. “I just can't understand why anyone would want to go flying off into nothing. Seems like there's enough trouble right here on Earth without hunting up more. Every time I turn on the television"—her eyes moved to the repeater screen flat against the kitchen wall—"it seems there's some new crisis or the cold war is colder or hotter..."

  “Oh, Mom! You know I've always wanted—ever since I was a little boy, dreaming, playing rockets..."

  “Little boys I can understand. Grown men are something else again. Like you said upstairs, you expect them to put away childish things. Why?—that's all I want to know..."

  “Because it's there,” he said, knowing that to her this was no reason at all. But it was the reason men had always given their women for chasing a dream, not really able to explain.

  “It's important,” he went on evenly, “tackling something really worth the doing. It's the dream—like the one that led the settlers into the wilderness, that pulled the wagon trains across the prairies. It's where men are making the future, men who really count, men like Rev McMillen and Bo Finch and Frank Pickrell. It's putting something out there where nothing has ever been—the Doughnut. Courage built it out of dreams. Guts holds it up. And that's just the beginning. It's the future out there."

  “It's death out there.” Absently, she brushed a wisp of graying hair back into place. “Like McMillen in his tomb, frozen, going around and around the Earth forever. The first man out; the first man to die. That should have warned us. It used to be war that took our men from us; now it's that.” She looked up at the ceiling as if she were staring through it, as if she could see the little plastic-and-nylon wheel spinning up there in the sun, where the sky is black and death is never far away.

  “Good-by, Mom.” He stood up abruptly, kissed her. Her lips were cold. “Don't worry. I'll be all right."

  He walked quickly through the house, taking his cap from the closet shelf, picking up the spacepack from the chair. He stopped outside, hesitated and looked back.

  Already the house seemed unreal, fading, like everything in it. Even his mother.

  He looked up, not seeing the small, swift glint of the Doughnut, not expecting it. The satellite wasn't visible here until 0319.

  He walked a little, letting the Earth tug at him for the last time, thinking that this was fantasy now, soon it would be all as unreal as fiction.

  Out there was his reality.

  Within a few hours he would step out onto the vast concrete landing strip at Cocoa, Florida.

  It was the beginning of the great adventur
e.

  General Finch was shockingly old and ill. Amos compared the reality with the pictures at the Academy: the General shaking hands with Pickrell, facing the Senate subcommittee, giving a memorial wreath to an anonymous pilot to place in orbit for all those men who had given their lives...

  But then General Beauregard Finch was an old man, four years past retirement age, almost seventy.

  The six years since McMillen's fatal flight had aged the General, but with them he had built his own monument. Above him circled the Doughnut to which he had sacrificed his health, his life—as other men had sacrificed their health and their lives.

  It was worth it. It was the dream.

  In the little waiting room near the platform, the General stood, still straight, still wearing proudly the honorary Doughnut insignia on his shoulder. “You're going out there, Danton, taking with you all our honor, all our pride. We've never sent out a bad one, a coward or a fool. I don't think we've started now. Only a few men have preceded you. Only a few will follow. It will always be a hard, lonely business out there. But there's nothing more worth the doing."

  The General had never been out there. By the time it was possible, he was, too old.

  “What do they call you now—you cadet replacements?"

  “Pick's pick, sir."

  “Good enough. That's what you are—picked men, selected and sorted and pruned, over and over. The best of the best. You've had the finest training we could give you. Remember though: it's never enough—the picking or the training. The job is always bigger than the man. What you've gone through is nothing to what is waiting for you."

  Amos smiled politely. The General could call it nothing, the Academy selection and training program: he had never been through it. Knowing it now, Amos could not have forced himself to go through it again: the unceasing torment of brain and body, the endless tests of physical and psychological endurance, the perpetual cramming of an infinite amount of information into a finite brain...

  Call it nothing. Call it five years of hell.

  Out of 50,000 applications, 1,000 had been accepted. After the intense physical and psychiatric tests, sixty were left.

  They received their reward: five years of training. Five years fighting the books, of taking g's in the centrifuge while trying to function as a stage-three crew member, of working out in the “whirligig,” of living in the “tank” with thirteen other men for weeks without end—knowing that the psychologists were watching...

  And always the growing pressure of failure as classmates dropped out, were culled, disappeared, were mentioned no more.

  Until there were five left to graduate.

  Five out of 50,000. Those were odds you refused to face when you started. The only way to survive was not to think about it, to take each trial as it came, and when the g's built too high, to remember the dream and fight once more and once again.

  There couldn't be anything tougher than that. The reality would be fulfillment.

  “Go on!” the General growled. “Get out there! I talk too much. The ship won't wait, not even for a general."

  He was coughing as Amos, in flight helmet and coveralls with the webbed harness over it, strode across the broad platform toward the tapering spire of the ferry. It was a typical three-stager, gleaming in its white, ceramic coating, its clean lines broken by stabilizer fins and the broad, ungainly wings on which the third stage would glide through the atmosphere to a powerless landing.

  The elevator, part of the giant, hammerhead crane, lifted Amos smoothly up the side of the ship. Across the hull of the third-stage, beside the vast expanse of wing, were painted these black words: McMILLEN'S FOLLY.

  Amos read them and frowned. Service irreverences were unavoidable, but they belonged within the service, not out where the public could share them. To call the S.1.2 the Doughnut was not too bad—he did it himself—but this name left a bad taste in the mouth. The hot hand of air friction could not erase it too soon.

  The thick, square door stood open and empty. Amos shrugged and stooped through the air lock into the familiar cabin of the M-5 stage-three.

  He climbed the rungs of the ladder toward the one unoccupied seat. On this trip he would be radio op.

  The others were in their places—captain, co-pilot, navigator, engineer—their smoothly helmeted heads like bowling balls precariously balanced on seat backs. One of the bowling balls turned, became a face, hard, disinterested. The captain.

  “Cadet-Trainee Danton, sir,” Amos said, saluting crisply, “reporting for transportation."

  “Oh, God!” the captain groaned at the co-pilot. His head twisted back toward Amos. “Where've you been? You think we've got nothing better to do than wait for a lousy cadet? Oh, never mind! Get strapped down! We know—old Bo was giving you speech 12B: ‘Words of advice and encouragement for cadets making their maiden trips: We've never sent out a bad one, a coward or a fool. I don't think we've started now.’”

  Flushing, Amos lifted himself into the vacant chair and clicked his harness straps into place. They'd have been waiting anyway. Takeoff time wasn't for five minutes.

  “What's your specialty?” the captain asked.

  “Pilot, sir."

  “Watch, then. Maybe you'll learn something. Know any radio?"

  “Yes, sir."

  “Then this is an order: Keep your clammy hands off the instruments! Any communication that's necessary, I'll take care of. Understand?"

  “Yes, sir."

  “Plug in your earphones or not as you choose, but don't put on throat mikes. I don't want you fouling up the circuits."

  Amos's face was burning, but he clenched his teeth and said, “Yes, sir."

  The captain reached into an elasticized pocket beside his chair and pulled out a plastic bag. He dropped it to Amos. “Put it on."

  “I've had free fall, sir,” Amos protested. “I won't need, this."

  “You have, eh? How much?"

  “Almost seven minutes."

  “Eighty seconds at a time in a Keplerian orbit! Nuts! This time you'll get four hours just as a starter. Put it on! That's an order."

  Slowly Amos slipped the elastic behind his helmet and fitted the plastic ring over his mouth. It wasn't enough to come through the Academy. He had to prove himself all over again.

  * * * *

  “Engineer?"

  “Engineer check-off complete."

  “Navigator?"

  “Navigator check-off complete."

  “Co-pilot?"

  “Co-pilot check-off complete."

  “Radio op and captain's check-off complete. Thirty seconds to blast-off."

  “You were a little rough on the kid, Skipper,"

  “He can't learn any younger. Or much older, either. Twenty-five seconds."

  Amos twisted his head and looked out the unshielded windows of the canopy. Forget it, he told himself. There is always a Queeg. The services lured them, fed them, made them strong. Nowhere else could they achieve satisfaction so easily.

  “Fifteen seconds."

  The horizon was a gently curving arc of purple-blue above the gray-black of the sea. Within minutes now, the liberated third-stage would fight its way out of the atmosphere that scattered the blue of the sunlight and gave it to the sky. Within less than an hour it would be in orbit, its velocity canceling Earth's gravity. Within a few hours he would be in the Doughnut...

  “Five seconds."

  Anticipation flooded Amos's throat, choking, unbearable. This was what it had been about, the relentless pressures, the endless torment. This was it about to happen...

  “Three—two—one..."

  The cabin began to rumble. Like a torch rising from the ground to light their way, flame shot into the night from the exhaust outlet. Amos could see it reflected from the astronomical dome and the radar saucers and the control tower, etching them into the blackness of the bay.

  “Engineering check—all motors blasting."

  On the captain's control panel, a red eye opened.
“And away we go!” said the captain, exultation in his voice. “Up, beast!"

  The cabin roared. The torch outside the window flamed intolerably. Amos squeezed his eyes shut, and the fine, strong net of acceleration pulled him into the seat cushions, fishhooking his cheeks down, tugging at his eyeballs. When he got his eyelids open again, orange-red dials were spinning in front of him, meaningless, the long hours in the centrifuge mock-up wasted. The net pulled, hard, inexorable.

  Amos tried to breathe, but his chest couldn't lift against the intolerable weight that held it down. Panic surged, cold, in his stomach, up his throat...

  A few seconds later, the net dissolved. The seat cushions, released, shoved Amos forward against the harness. His weight dropped from 1,350 pounds down to a little less than 300. He drew a deep, shuddering breath and another.

  The first-stage had been dropped, its contribution made. Now the second booster was building its pressures, adding its acceleration to a speed that had already reached more than 5,000 miles per hour.

  Slowly the net drew down again. Again Amos's breathing grew difficult. He struggled for one more breath and one more. Then the net was down hard, and there was no more breath.

  Seconds passed. The pressure grew, never quite as hard as the first booster's nine g's but lasting longer. This time Amos went forty seconds without breathing. Then the second stage dropped away, and the pressure relented.

  Amos gasped for breath.

  The sky had turned velvet black. The stars were out: unwinking brilliants set in the velvet. The ship was forty miles high; it was traveling almost 15,000 miles per hour.

  Third-stage pressures were almost unnoticeable. They never climbed above three g's.

  They broke into sunlight. His dazzled eyes squeezed shut against the sudden pain, swifter than the metal covers that slid over the canopy to protect it from the massive, unfiltered irradiation of the sun's ultraviolet that otherwise would soon discolor and cloud it.

  Afterimages danced in front of Amos's eyes, lasted for minutes. Before they faded, the motors cut out. The net released him completely, the seat cushion shoved, the harness caught him again...