Station in Space Page 7

  Over the applause, somebody cheered. Franklin smiled.

  “Why is C.I.C. such a good investment?” Bradley seemed to pick out each one of us, asking the question. “Because we invest in brainpower and the facilities for supplying it with the data it needs to work on. We invest in basic science and the technology for applying it. We invest in the future.

  “If atomic power had not been discovered, we would be discovering it. Instead, we are adapting it to a multitude of uses, from small power plants to rocket motors. We are tapping the Earth's internal heat, building tidal hydroelectric systems, working on vast reclamation plans like the Sahara Project, and financing a hundred different scientific explorations into the unknown.

  “One of the inescapable facts of this half of the Twentieth Century is that scientific research has grown beyond the resources of the individual scientist, even, sometimes, the individual corporation. Research must be supported by the economy as a whole if we are to provide the essential experimental verification for the insights of our brilliant scientists or new facts about the universe for them to build their theories upon. To supply the means for that research and the climate for that scientific speculation is our job."

  I happened to glance at Kendrix. He was grinning sardonically.

  “Okay,” somebody yelled, “but what are we gonna do?"

  “We're going to build an artificial satellite of a thousand uses. For immediate profit: television relay and weather observation. For future profit: zero-atmosphere, zero-gravity, and zero-temperature laboratories for astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology—"

  “What's the matter with the Doughnut?” somebody shouted.

  The voice was close to me. I looked. It was Kendrix. That surprised me; he had changed his voice.

  Bradley tried to locate the man who had shouted and failed. But he smiled easily. “There's nothing the matter with the Doughnut except that it belongs to the Air Force, and it's too small. Its primary function is military, and the other functions have been crowded out. The satellite we're going to build will have ten times the space and one hundred times the convenience.

  “There was the S.1.1.—the first manned ship into space; it's still there, and Rev McMillen's still there, staring out blindly at the stars for all eternity. In the same orbit is the S.1.2.—the Air Force's Doughnut. I'm going to make a prediction. Inside a year, everybody will be calling it the Little Wheel."

  Bradley let us seize the meaning and make it our own. “Because we're going to build the Big Wheel, the S.2.1.—and the television relay stations, S.2.2. and S.2.3, as well. We're going to build the Big Wheel twenty-two thousand miles high where it will race with the turning of the Earth and hang forever above the center of the United States, a new fixed star. Men will guide their airplanes by it, and their ships and their dreams. And we're going to build it—you and I."

  We stood, cheering, pounding each other on the back.

  Kendrix put his lips close to my ear. “Never trust an economist,” he said softly. “Bradley's an economist. The C.I.C. is riddled with them."

  What was Kendrix trying to do? I wondered. Oh, maybe he was right. The C.I.C. wasn't building a satellite just for profits; profits can be picked up quicker and easier. There was some other motive, and I was afraid of hidden motives. That's why I was afraid of Kendrix. What was he getting out of it?

  I distrusted C.I.C. I distrusted Kendrix, too—not because, like Bradley, he said what he didn't believe, but because he didn't believe in anything.

  Bradley had introduced Captain Kovac, and Kovac was talking about the training ahead, but I wasn't listening.

  I was wondering how Gloria would take it.

  III

  I turned the key in the lock and pushed, but the door stuck. Things warped here in the dry, desert wind: wood and people. The door had been built of cheap green wood.

  It was distinguished from its neighbors in the long row only by the faded numbers painted on it long ago: 313. I put my shoulder against it. It yielded, complaining querulously.

  “Is that you, Bruce?” Gloria called from the kitchen.

  “Who were you expecting?"

  Gloria came toward me, wiping her soapy hands on the apron that draped her abdomen. “The iceman, silly” She kissed me firmly and then leaned back to study my face. “Did you get the job?"

  Her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the kitchen, and she was still pretty to me after five years of marriage. But the desert and pregnancy hadn't been kind to her. Her skin was dry, and her face was still puffy around the eyes. But I loved her because of or in spite of these things. I didn't know, myself, why I loved her.

  “Well?” she asked sharply.

  “Yes,” I said. “I got it. I'm drawing salary again."

  “What is the job?"

  “Building a satellite."

  But it was no surprise to her. Some feminine grapevine or some intuition of tragedy had already warned her.

  “No,” she said flatly. “I won't let you go. You'll have to find something else."

  “Don't be silly.” My voice, as I heard it, was harsh and unpleasant. “There's no choice."

  “Bruce, you can't!” She took a sudden, painful breath. “It would kill me. Stay on here. We don't care about the money—"

  I moved my hands impatiently. “Sit down. Try to understand."

  She sank down slowly onto the shabby davenport and sat stiffly on the edge, her face obstinate and unhearing with the look I knew too well. I had to make her understand.

  “Don't make it any harder for me. It's not the money; it's the job. I can't stay on here.” I sat down in the plastic rocker. “The field is finished. They don't need us here any more."

  “Then you can get a job somewhere else. I hate the desert."

  “Don't make up your mind, Gloria,” I pleaded. I looked down at my hands, clenching and unclenching futilely on my knees. “I can't take the chance. This is three hundred a week. Six months of that is almost eight thousand dollars. With eight thousand dollars we could last out the Depression. We wouldn't have to worry."

  “Worry!” she said as if the word belonged to her. “What do you know about worry? What makes you think you'll come back alive? Lots of you won't. Space will take them."

  “It's dangerous,” I admitted. “That's what they're paying for."

  “How much is a man's life worth?"

  “Not much,” I said bitterly. “Not any more."

  She put her hand to her breast as if it hurt. “Please don't do this to me. Try to find a job somewhere, anywhere. I'll never ask another thing from you, not for the rest of my life."

  “There aren't any jobs. There haven't been any jobs for two years, not since the Crash of Sixty-six. For every job there's a man clinging to it with fear in his eyes. You don't know what insecurity does to a man, how it eats away his courage and dissolves his guts with terror that he'll lose this job, too, that he won't have a roof for his family or food. I've felt the solid ground dissolve beneath me once. I can't ever trust it again.” I stared silently at my white knuckles.

  “We'll get by somehow."

  “Somehow isn't good enough,” I said fiercely. “It's got to be certain. I've got responsibilities. I've got to have security. Don't you understand?” Suddenly she was a stranger. “No, you don't understand.” My voice dwindled thinly. “If you just hadn't got pregnant—"

  “Don't act as if it were all my fault!” she flared.

  “Well? If you hadn't forgotten to take the pill—"

  “I didn't forget,” she shouted, “How many times do I have to tell you? It just didn't work. Accidents happen, still.” Angry tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “If anything should happen to me,” I said softly, “there's a ten thousand dollar company policy. That'll take care of you and the baby."

  “Money!” she said coldly, staring at me. “Is that all you can think about? You think I want money? And what if you did come back? Crippled, blind, and the constant fear that if we had more
children they'd be monsters—"

  “No chance of that,” I said grimly. “There's a compulsory sterilization provision in the contract."

  “If you do this to me,” she said in a voice that was starkly quiet, “if you leave me to go out on this job, I won't be here when you come back."

  “It's no use,” I said, standing up tall. “It's too late. I've already signed the contract."

  She leaned back slowly, staring blindly at my face, tears welling in her eyes and trickling silently down her cheeks.

  For a moment I stared down at her and then I turned and slammed angrily out of the house.

  IV

  Somehow life continued, as it has a habit of doing. Neither of us admitted we were wrong; neither of us changed our minds. We didn't refer to the matter again, but there was a quietness in Gloria that made me uneasy.

  I carried it with me through the examinations that followed: the insidious probings of psychologists, the mauling of the centrifuge and the decompression chamber, and a hundred other torments of mind and body. I gritted my teeth and endured stoically, thinking of the unbearable alternative, and somehow I got through.

  Jock Eckert made it, too, chuckling, laughing, with Gargantuan enjoyment. George Kendrix—the Professor—made it, smiling sardonically, superior to everything they could do to him, a surprising, wiry endurance in his lean body. And Clary Calhoun made it, letting his soft, thin body be twisted and torn beyond endurance while he lived inside his dream.

  But half of us were gone when the real training began.

  It was only distinguishable from the testing by being tougher. Kovac's lean, hard, leathery spaceman's face sneered at us by day, and I carried it into my dreams with me, the eyes speckled with tiny cataracts squinting balefully, the mouth snarling, “This is nothing, you lousy Earthlubbers, nothing to what it's like out there. A cadet has four years to learn this; you've got to have it letter-perfect in three months. You've got to go through these things sailing or space will kill you! Understand? You'll die out there like poor, gasping fish out of water!"

  We sat hour after hour in the giant planetarium and watched the panoramic space films: the unwinking stare of stars, the blazing fierceness of the sun, impossible to look at, the lesser brilliance of the moon, the vast span of Earth, a giant picture framed in a white haze, sunlight glaring from the polar ice or the sea, and everywhere else the deadness of space, a black beyond blackness. It was a place of harsh contrasts and savage glares, and sometimes, when the camera twisted or spun, a place of dizzy discomfort.

  Afterwards I would have a blinding headache.

  “That's nothing!” Kovac shouted. “These films resemble space as a pin-up picture resembles a woman. Space is uglier and deadlier and realer, and the moment you think you know it—you're lost!"

  We floated in a pool whose water was heated to undetectable blood temperature. With the lights out, it was like being disembodied. Once, when they anesthesized our inner ears, it was worse. Many of us almost drowned, and a fifth of the men got nauseated. We didn't see them any more.

  I came upon Clary, white-faced, huddled over a drain in a hidden corner. “You won't tell on me, will you, Bruce?” he whispered fiercely. “They'll kick me out if they learn. Next time I'll know better; I'll take dramamine."

  Slowly I shook my head, recognizing the fear in him that was even greater than my fear of being jobless.

  “Wait until you get out there in zero gravity,” Kovac raged at us, his face dark with an unreadable passion. “Your senses won't be deadened then. They'll be viciously alive—and the information they give you will be all wrong. Your otolith organs will scream that you're falling and if you shake your head, your semi-circular canals will shout that you're spinning madly..."

  He paused. “There's no way of describing it. To describe something you need a comparable experience, and there's nothing like it on Earth. Anybody who's afraid, who has any qualms, any doubts—quit now! Get out! Or you'll get out the hard way!” He turned and strode viciously away.

  Why is he so angry? I wondered.

  * * * *

  The original 512 dwindled to 250, to 200, and dipped below. I endured as I had earlier—because there was no other choice. Jock Eckert went through, flying. Nothing could wipe off George Kendrix's sardonic smile. Clary stuck with grim determination.

  There was too much to learn, too much to experience, too much to remember, but I tried, knowing that my life might depend on it. Those of us who remained were divided into crews: basic construction; electrical, steamfitting, and plumbing, rigging, welding, and shipfitting. Jock Eckert became a foreman; I was a member of his basic construction crew

  We worked in the suits we would need out there. They were complex, jointed metal monsters whose sleeves were equipped with tools instead of gloves. Inside there were fingertip controls to twist the magnetic screwdriver, to tighten and release the pliers and make them turn,, to adjust the wrench ends and rotate them.

  Day after day we hauled the massive suits around and practiced assembling the innumerable plastic-and-nylon sections. When they were assembled, we inflated them and attached the metal skin Kovac called a meteor shield. We installed the shutterlike temperature regulators, the plumbing, the wiring, the solar power plant, and all the compact, ingenious machinery, instruments, furnishings, and fittings.

  We sweated at it until we knew every part by sight and touch, until we had memorized the name and number and location of the smallest section of skin, the most insignificant pipe or wire.

  We tested it at five atmospheres pressure, took it apart a final time, packed it away in labeled crates, and stowed the ones marked first week in the freight compartments of ten third-stage rockets. The remainder we stacked in the warehouse, carefully; our lives depended on their reaching us as we needed them, at the right time, in the right order.

  Three months—that was our training. Three months to become spacemen. Three months to learn how to build the Big Wheel. And then the practice was over.

  One hundred and seventy-eight men waited in the vast gloom of a giant workshed. Here other men had built the ships that would carry us 22,000 miles above the surface of the Earth. The dawn was cold and gray. The men shivered in their thin, one-piece coveralls, tense, quiet, scared and trying not to show it.

  I walked toward them across the broad emptiness, dwarfed by the building above me but not thinking about that, intent upon an agony within. I walked into the drifting clot of men unseeing, uncaring, and then there were 179.

  Clary caught my arm. My eyes focused on him. “Did you get her?” he asked.

  I shook my head slowly. “I can't understand it. She didn't speak to me this morning. She didn't even look at me. It was like I was already gone."

  “You know how women are,” Jock said reassuringly. “They get crazy ideas. Leave them alone and they snap out of it. Gloria'll be all right."

  I went on unheeding. “It didn't worry me at first. I knew it was rough on her. I figured she wanted to make it easier, she wanted to skip the good-bys. But—why doesn't she answer the telephone?"

  “Maybe she went back to bed,” Clary suggested, but his mind wasn't really on it. He was thinking about what would happen to him soon, and his voice broke.

  “Not Gloria,” I said dully. “After she wakes up in the morning, she can't go back to sleep. The kid kicks her, she says. No, she's gone—or she's sitting there in the apartment listening to the phone ring."

  “ZERO MINUS THIRTY MINUTES,” said a great, metallic voice in the dim heights of the shed. “PASSENGERS READY YOURSELVES FOR LOADING."

  “I'm going to try again,” I said suddenly.

  Clary grabbed my arm again. “You can't. You haven't got time. Here come the trucks now."

  Silently they pulled into the shed in single file, drivers black figures of mystery behind the blaze of headlights. The men around me scrambled into the open backs. Slowly I followed, ignoring the hands held down to me.

  “ZERO MINUS TWENYY-FIVE MINUT
ES,” blasted the loudspeaker. “CREW MEMBERS TAKE YOUR POSITIONS. PASSENGERS PREPARE TO BOARD SHIP. ALL COUPLINGS WILL BE DISCONNECTED. WORKING PARTIES WITHDRAW FROM THE FIRING AREA."

  “Maybe she's having the baby,” I said.

  Jock clapped me on the shoulder. “Let the doctors worry. They get paid for it."

  “Why doesn't she answer the phone?” I muttered.

  The trucks rolled out of the shed, one by one, and streamed across the field toward the waiting ships. They stood tall against the sullen, morning sky.

  V

  The third-stages of five of those ships were home to us for two months while the other five shuttled back and forth with supplies. Two months. It seemed like two years. Two years of hell.

  The cramped cabins had been built as control rooms, not living quarters. They had been designed to seat five men and keep them in physical shape to work the ship while it was in flight. They had never been meant to orbit indefinitely in the full blaze of the unveiled sun as a barracks for thirty-seven men.

  We stripped the cabin and hung tiers of aluminum-and-canvas bunks on the walls. We ate our condensed, bulkless rations cold and sipped tepid water and took pills; we had digestive troubles and skin troubles and orientation troubles. The only semblance of gravity was when a man pushed away from one wall or caught himself against another.

  But the worst was the heat and the humidity. The air conditioning system of the ship could have cooled an eight-story building, but it couldn't keep up with the animal heat of thirty-seven men or the radiant heat of the Sun and Earth. The water absorption system was perpetually overloaded; the humidity never dropped much below 100%. The fans worked constantly, but they succeeded in keeping us from stifling in our own exhalations. The air we breathed was hot air, wet air, and foul air, thick with the stench of machinery and thirty-seven unwashed men.