Station in Space Read online

  “Don't stand there like a fool,” he said. “Come in."

  “Yes, sir.” Amos clenched his teeth and stooped through the doorway.

  The cabin wasn't much bigger than a closet and not much better furnished. Like Pickrell, it was cold, gray, austere, built not for appearance or comfort but for efficiency. The only furniture was a bunk, a thin, one-legged table, and a chair; when folded flat against the wall, they left a walking space of almost six feet square.

  The aluminum table was let down. Pickrell slid behind it into the chair. “It cost over one thousand dollars in propellants alone to get you out here,” he said flatly. “I'm ready to write that off. I'm not even concerned about the five hundred dollars a day it takes to maintain you out here. But you're taking up space a good man might fill. I'm sending you back in the next empty seat."

  “Why?” The word was expelled from Amos.

  “Some men have the equipment for this kind of life. You aren't one of them. You've been sick, haven't you?"

  “Once in a while,” Amos admitted.

  “There's no such thing as spacesickness. It's fear. We don't have room out here for cowards."

  “What have you got against me, Colonel? You had it in for me the moment I stepped aboard the ferry. What is it: hate, fear, jealousy? I'm doing my work. If I had a chance I'd do more. Give me that chance, Colonel! Don't send me back before I—"His hands were wet. He looked down. Blood was trickling from the holes his fingernails had cut into his palms.

  “I'll tell you what I've got against you, Danton: you've got stars in your eyes. This isn't a job to you; it's a game. I know your kind; I've seen too many of you. You want to go on out You gripe about the Air Force marking time on the moon project or the Mars ship or the Venus expedition. I'll tell you something, Danton: this is no glory road. This satellite is out here to look back on Earth, not out at the stars. But you'll never get that through your head. You're dangerous. You'll kill yourself. That I don't care about. But the chances are dangerously great that you'll take the rest of us with you. And that's my business.

  “Get out your nice new spacepack, Danton. You're going in."

  * * * *

  Amos stood stiffly in front of the desk, feeling unreal, looking down at the salt-and-pepper spacecut with the bald spot at the crown. But for Pickrell, Danton had ceased to exist.

  Amos turned and pushed through the airtight door and let it pull shut behind him. This was the way it ended. This was the bursting of the dream. To destroy it took nothing as powerful or as dramatic as a meteor. A word pierced it, and it collapsed.

  But worse than that was the change in Pickrell. This wasn't the man he had idolized. This wasn't the hero, the second man out. This wasn't the man who had stood in the cabin of Rev McMillen's ship and stared down at the frozen body of the man who had led the way out and got lost in the cave of night, his fuel exhausted. This wasn't the man who had broadcast to the world from 1,000 miles up:

  “In accordance with my instructions and his own wishes, his body will be left here in its eternal orbit...

  “From this moment, let this be his shrine, sacred to all the generations of spacemen, inviolate. And let it be a symbol that Man's dreams can be realized, but sometimes the price is steep..."

  Pickrell had changed, surely, not the dream. He had grown old and used up, and the dream was too much for him.

  And in his hands was the future of space flight.

  The dream was betrayed.

  Tears stung Amos's eyes. He blinked rapidly, to keep them back. Tears weren't manly, but there are times when even a man must weep.

  When his eyes cleared, he was inside the Hub, and the idea was complete.

  Pickrell could send him home like a boy who has been naughty at school. Pickrell could break his heart. That was Pickrell's right; he was the Commander. But he couldn't send Amos home until Amos had one chance to do what he had been trained to do.

  It took only seconds to get into a suit. Amos pulled up the zippers, pulled down the helmet, clamped it to the suit. He refilled the oxygen tanks at the petcock against the wall. He selected a hand rocket from the rack and slipped through the air lock and out the turret.

  It was night; the Earth swam nearby, circling around him, giant and dark.

  When he released the landing-berth cage, centrifugal force threw him gently away on a tangent. His stomach sank: he was completely on his own. There were no cords connected to anything: no umbilical cord, no apron string, no safety line.

  He spun slowly. The Doughnut swung into view; the sausage-shaped taxis were hitched along the inner edge of the wheel. He could have reached them by the spoke, but that took time. Time was all he had, and there was little left...

  He was going to miss the rim. He swiveled the hand rocket to one side and gave it a cautious, one-second burst. It shoved him toward the rim, but it made him spin more rapidly.

  Quickly he turned the rocket in the opposite direction and let it push until his spin had stopped. Then he was spinning the other way, faster now. Panic gripped his throat; he couldn't swallow.

  How long did a hand rocket last? He couldn't remember, but once the fuel was exhausted, he had lost all chance of helping himself.

  He closed his eyes to shut out the vast, pancake disk of the Earth flipping crazily over and over; he tried to think. All he could remember was his Academy instructor saying, “Keep it against your belly button! Belly button, I said"

  That was it. All force had to be exerted through his center of gravity—roughly the navel—or it created spin.

  He opened his eyes, swung the rocket to the right, and gave it a flicker of a burst. His spin slowed. Another flicker. His spin almost stopped. That was good enough, because the rim of the giant wheel was only two arm-lengths away. When he was faced away from the Doughnut, he pressed the rocket to his navel and fired briefly.

  As he passed the rim, he caught the line of a taxi with one hook and let himself slide along it until the taxi stopped him. Its hydrazine and nitric acid gauges stood at only half full.

  He took a deep breath and launched himself toward the next taxi in line. This time his reaction flight was perfect. One burst turned him to face the taxi, a second, in the opposite direction, stopped his rotation, a third killed his forward speed.

  This one had just been refueled.

  Amos unsnapped the hitching line and let the taxi drift tangentially away from the Doughnut. He was weightless, but he had a ship under him. He had power. He had a goal.

  Before the chance was gone, he was going to pay a final tribute to a dream. He was going to visit the icy tomb of Rev McMillen.

  The tomb was in the same orbit as the Doughnut, but one hundred miles ahead.

  He had to head in the right direction, where there was no simple method of determining direction. He had to compute distance traveled, where even fully equipped ships found that difficult. He had to increase speed, when every increase in speed meant an increase in altitude.

  And if he strayed off course by just a few minutes of a degree at the start, he would be miles from his goal at the end.

  There were no instruments in the taxi, no built-in octants, no patent logs, no computers ... Taxis were built for short hauls when both ends of the journey were always in view. Two gunsight telescopes were fixed immovably at eye level, one pointing straight forward, the other straight back. The controls were crude: two sticks, one at each side of the pilot's chair, firing the front and the rear rockets, which swiveled within a limited arc in response to the movement of the sticks. The throttles were buttons on top of the sticks.

  The taxi was roughly horizontal and spinning gently. The Earth tipped lazily around the canopy, chased by the flat, black-velvet curtain of the night hung with its small, unblinking lanterns. The stars were alien. Where was he?

  The Earth rolled around him, the continents and oceans sliding down across the disk: the dark, familiar shapes of Cuba and Florida sliding south. That meant the Doughnut was on its northern leg of t
he orbit that reached as far north as Nome, as far south as Little America on the Antarctic continent.

  The stars snapped into place. There was the Big Dipper. And there—indicated most beautifully by the Pointers—was Polaris.

  He drew dividends on his long labor of memorizing the Doughnut's timetable: in five minutes, by the taxi's chronometer, the Pole Star would make an angle with the orbit of—he figured quickly—430.

  Amos killed the taxi's spin and placed his horizontal axis parallel with the Doughnut's orbital plane as near as he could estimate the angle. He could think of only one way to check altitude; he dropped the taxi's nose until the forward sight nicked the Earth's horizon.

  Instead of a pilot's suit with its specialized manipulators, he had a handyman's sleeve-end tools. He held the right-hand control stick firmly in a pair of pliers and poised a screwdriver above the throttle button—and hesitated.

  Rocketing one-hundred miles by the seat of his suit was a desperate gamble: there are no railroad tracks in space. There was sacrilege in it, too, but Amos shrugged that away. No shrine has ever been profaned by an honest worshipper.

  His jaw tightened. The danger didn't matter. The dream was dying; there would be no other chance.

  He pressed the throttle button. The accelerometer climbed quickly to one g; he held it there for ten seconds. When he released the throttle, he had added roughly four miles a minute to his velocity. He had used up—he checked the instrument panel quickly—two-tenths of his fuel supply. The nose of the taxi was still pointed at the horizon.

  At 2103 the sun rose, flashing blindingly on the nose of the taxi.

  At 2116 Amos passed over Nome, his first check point.

  At 2119 Amos checked to see that the forward sight was still bisecting the horizon and pressed the left throttle button for ten seconds after the accelerometer reached one g.

  Given well-matched motors, his increase in speed and altitude were canceled. He should be back in orbit within sight of McMillen's tomb.

  He turned slowly to scan the entire field of vision, ignoring the glare of the sun, fierce against his eyes as he looked back.

  There was no stage-three in view.

  He had failed. There was no use searching a cubic area of space that might be hundreds of miles in volume. Head back, fool! he thought. If you can get back—and I wouldn't bet a used sick-bag on it.

  Cubic, he thought. Cubic.

  Recklessly, he tumbled the taxi over on its back. For a moment the glare from the polar ice cap blinded him, then he saw it.

  To the right, three or four miles away, it gleamed in the sun; highlights ran along one wing and down the cone-shaped hull.

  Expertly, Amos killed the tumbling and centered the stage-three in his front sights; he poured on the fuel. The ship swelled but not as quickly as the exultation that filled his throat, hard, choking. He blasted to a stop, careless of fuel.

  McMillen's tomb hung a few feet away, its air-lock door gaping open to invite him in.

  * * * *

  He didn't move for a moment. He sat quite still for a few seconds, trying to savor the moment, trying to analyze his emotions. They were too complex; he gave it up.

  As he crawled out the port, he snapped his safety line onto the taxi. For an instant, holding himself to the taxi, he studied the opening opposite him. Then he dived for it, kicking the taxi back.

  He hit glancingly against the open door, caught the jamb with one hook, and pulled himself in. As the taxi reached the end of the safety line, it tried to tug him away, but he had a good hold. Bracing his feet on each side of the doorway, he reeled in the taxi until it was tight against the ship. He turned. The inner air-lock door was open.

  He hesitated, thinking about what he would find inside, and reality began to edit his dreams.

  He had thought of McMillen sitting in the captain's chair, staring out through the canopy toward the stars he had brought within man's reach, a rueful smile frozen upon his face, his body perfectly preserved by the chill airlessness of space.

  It wouldn't be like that at all.

  If the ship had ever had a ceramic coating, micro-meteorites had scoured the metal clean years ago. The hull temperature was more than 800°F. That was no deep freeze.

  Amos had seen pictures of explosive decompression. If these air-lock doors had been opened quickly, McMillen wouldn't be in one piece. If, on the other hand, the air had leaked out slowly, his body fluids would have started boiling when the air pressure reached six percent of sea level, the blood in the lungs evaporating, blood ballooning under the skin...

  It was no picture for a dreamer. Amos straightened his shoulders inside his suit, feeling older, as if he had lost something and would lose more. He drifted through the inner doorway and hooked a girder to pull himself toward the nose of the ship.

  Under the canopy, he caught himself by another exposed girder, his eyes puzzled, his face wrinkled in an effort to understand.

  The interior of the ship was only a shell. There were no seats, no instruments, no inside sheathing. There had been no shutters for the canopy; ultraviolet had turned it almost completely opaque; micro-meteorites had etched it.

  There was no pilot, no hero named McMillen. There never had been. No one had ever planned for any.

  The only useful object in the shell was a compact radio transmitter bolted to a girder. Attached to it was a tape recorder with an oversized reel. The tape had run out.

  It had been a hoax. The great epic of man's first flight into space, the magnificence of Earth's response to his plea for help—it had all been false. The contributions that had made the Doughnut possible had been tricked from a credulous American people.

  Amos clung to the girder and grew old. The orange protective coating had never even been painted over. Amos scratched at it until the steel gleamed through: dreams end here.

  Coldly he pushed away. He swung back through the airlock door and crawled into the taxi. His movements sent it floating away from the ship.

  Icily he computed his return. He had spent more than half of his fuel and almost half of his oxygen.

  Ten minutes later Polaris became visible. A ten-second blast from the forward motor slowed the taxi. He waited for the Doughnut to catch up.

  A little over twenty-five minutes later, he speeded up again, and the needle of the fuel gauge tapped against the zero peg. He released the throttle button and looked up.

  The Doughnut hung above him.

  For the first time, he turned on his radio receiver. Immediately, it burst into speech: “Danton! Give us some indication of your position. If your radio is working, answer so that we can get a bearing. We can't send out searching patties until..."

  Amos flipped it off, aimed the taxi at the Doughnut, and touched the throttle of the right-hand stick. The motor coughed; just once. It was enough. The ship floated gently toward the ring. Amos crawled out, caught a line as he passed, and snapped the taxi to it.

  He hit the landing berth with his first try.

  When he came into the Hub, Kovac was climbing into a suit. He stopped, one leg drifting sideways, and stared incredulously at Amos. “Where in the—? My God, man, you've got the whole Doughnut in a—!"

  “Took a joy ride,” Amos said, releasing his helmet and stripping off the suit. He gave a short, mirthless laugh. “Joy ride! The Colonel is sending me in."

  “Sending you in my chilblained foot! You gave him cause!” We drifted closer, glancing at the nearby microphones. “Didn't you understand me? As long as a man obeys instructions and does the work assigned him with any degree of competence, the Fish can't send him in. They took away that power; he was sending in too many men. You had to let him ride you into making a break!"

  “I was a sucker,” Amos agreed flatly. “I guess I always have been."

  He dived for spoke B and pulled himself quickly along the landing net. “I'm back,” he threw at the weight-control officer as he passed. Wide-eyed, the lieutenant spun quickly to his phone.

 
Amos made his way, unhurried, to the cramped communal sleeping quarters for rim B personnel and slipped into his bunk and lay there, his hands under his head, staring at the smooth bulge of the bunk above.

  Two minutes later Colonel Pickrell arrived.

  The low overhead forced him to bend his neck. He glowered at Amos. “Danton—” he began.

  “Excuse my not getting up, Colonel,” Amos said, “but there isn't room for two of us between the bunks. If I'd known you wanted to see me, I'd have come to your room."

  Pickrell tried to straighten up, couldn't. “All right—everybody but Danton, out of here!"

  The bunks emptied swiftly. Men grabbed their clothes and squeezed past Pickrell, glancing backwards curiously. When they were alone, Pickrell sat stiffly on the edge of the bunk across the narrow aisle. Amos didn't look at him.

  “All right, Danton, let's have it."

  “Have what, Colonel?"

  Pickrell stared at him icily. “The explanation for stealing a taxi. For absenting yourself from your post."

  “I borrowed the taxi. It's been returned. You can deduct the cost of the fuel from my pay."

  “Thanks,” Pickrell said sarcastically. “But maybe we should let the courtmartial decide that."

  “As for absenting myself—I was on my off-shift, just as I am now. What I choose to do with my off-time is my own affair."

  “Ridiculous! There are specific instructions against the unauthorized use of equipment for personal reasons. Where did you go?"

  Amos turned his head and met Pickrell's eyes squarely. “I took a little trip,” he said gently. “I visited McMillen's tomb!"

  “You're mad!"

  Amos looked back at the bunk above him.

  “You couldn't possibly get there in a taxi,"Pickrell continued sharply. “Without instruments, without radio bearings! And if you got there, you couldn't possibly get back."

  Amos lay motionless, his hands under his head, uncaring.

  “You're lying,” Pickrell said.

  Amos looked at him again, at the blue-agate eyes in the hard, weathered face. The lenses had several tiny cataracts. “Why did you do it?” he asked. “Why did you do it that way?"