Station in Space Read online

  And then there was the work, hard, painful, dangerous labor outside in the burning night. We built the Big Wheel in an environment as new and deadly as that suffered by the first sea-creatures left stranded on a primeval shore. There was no venturesomeness about it, no planned assault, no purposeful conquest.

  But we were selected by our environment, and we adjusted to it—most of us. Perhaps that is our basic talent: we adjust, and what we can't adjust to, we change.

  One of those who did not adjust was Clary Calhoun.

  Day after endless day he lay in his bunk, his eyes fixed unmoving on the canvas of the bunk above, his fingers, like white spiders, picking at the webbed belts that kept him from drifting away on the jet propulsion of his uneven breathing. He looked pale and shrunken as I came to him, pulling myself wearily along the metal ladder, and clung to the tubular aluminum framework of his bunk.

  “Hello, kid,” I said cheerily. “We finished section eighteen today. Only eighty-two more to go."

  Clary turned his head toward me, his eyes brightening. “Really?” But as he said it, his mouth tightened, his eyes glazed sickly, his hands clutched at the bunk's frame.

  “No better?"

  Clary held his head rigid. “No.” Slowly he unlocked the prison of his muscles; it was a conquest of will that deserved a greater reward. “Every time I move my head, my semicircular canals scream that I'm spinning madly. It's the Weber-Fechner law, I guess. The less my sense organs are stimulated, the more sensitive they become to changes of stimulation. But the worst part is when I fall asleep—the nightmares, the long, screaming falls through the night—” He stopped and smiled determinedly. “I kept down some soup today."

  “That's wonderful, kid,” I said proudly. “In a few days you'll be out there with us."

  Clary's face quivered before he got it back under control. “No. No. There's no use kidding myself. I've got chronic spacesickness. Kovac is sending me in on the next ship."

  “Maybe if I talked to him—"

  “What's the use? He's right. I'm just occupying the space an able-bodied man should have, breathing his air, eating his food."

  “It's a lousy break. I know what it meant to you."

  He stared at my face, seeing it not sunburnt and weary and familiar but eternally alien. “No, you don't You can't. No one can. To the rest of you this is just a job, a hard, unpleasant, dangerous job. To me it's the only thing in life worth doing. And I'm the one who's the Earthlubber, who can never be a spaceman. Isn't that a laugh?"

  “Nobody's laughing,” I said gently. “Wait till you've been down a while. Things will look different. Maybe later, when they get spin on the Wheel, you can come back out."

  “I'll never come back.” For a moment, he had the eyes of a prophet. “This is all of it, all I'll ever have.” He tried to smile. “Section eighteen all done, eh? And it hasn't been quite a week. You'll have the Wheel finished inside three months.” He laughed weakly. “Don't work too fast or you'll be out of a job again."

  “It can't be too fast."

  “You haven't heard from Gloria?” he asked quickly.

  “Not a line. Not a word. Nothing."

  “No news is good news,” Clary said, reassuringly banal. “Anything happened to her, they'd have told you."

  “Yeah.” I stared past Clary into one of the darker corners, unseeing. I could feel the sweat oozing through my pores and standing out on my face in perfect little spheres. When I shook my head, they would fly away in meteor-straight paths until they hit something and shattered or spread into a thin film on wetable surfaces. Most things in the ship were clammy.

  “Any casualties today?” Clary asked.

  “Only two—neither of them fatal. One guy was working at the dark side and glanced toward the sun. He's still blind, but the medic thinks it's only temporary. The other moron forgot to rotate out of the sunlight, and his suit couldn't handle the heat. He passed out. The medic called it heat exhaustion.” I shook my head; the sweat droplets flew. “They won't learn. This guy, he roasted out there for ten minutes or so before anybody noticed him."

  “That's bad. They ought to do something."

  “They've got us organized on the buddy principle now. Then every five minutes they call the roll over the ship-to-suit circuit. But no matter what they do, it's a miserable, lousy business. What do they want another satellite for? They got the Doughnut. This thing's a death trap. There's nine men dead already. Twice that many injured."

  “The Doughnut isn't enough,” Clary said softly. “Not just because it's too small. The Doughnut is Air Force; and the Air Force has got what it wants: command of the Earth. What good to the Air Force are the Moon, Mars, Venus...?"

  “What good to anybody?” I said violently.

  “The human spirit—that's what they're good for. Through all the ages-of-human awareness, they have been there, waiting, an eternal challenge: riddle my meaning, come to me, seize me if you can! Now we have the power and we must accept the challenge—if only because a challenge refused is the beginning of decay. But the challenge accepted is life renewed, life reaffirmed, and the obstacle conquered strengthens Man for the next one, the bigger one.

  “But there are more important reasons,” Clary went on, his voice scarcely above a whisper. “Man needs a broader viewpoint, a wider horizon. Let him go to meet the universe, and he will find himself reflected in it—not an Earthman with all the narrowness and prejudice of the village mentality, but a Spaceman, a citizen of the universe.

  “Wherever Man goes, he meets himself. Out here he will meet a better man, because he can't bring his hatreds and prejudices out with him. They weigh too much. All he can bring is his dreams, the ones that soar. And out here he may find the answers he has sought too long and in vain below."

  Clary's voice had faded away to a voiceless whisper. It stopped, and the vision in his eyes died like the glow of sunset before the coming of night. His eyes closed like purple shades.

  “Go away, Bruce,” he whispered. “I want to dream."

  Dream, Spaceman! Your dreams are better than my reality. Farewell.

  VI

  First we built the Hub, with its landing-berth turrets at either end to receive the sausage-shaped space taxis, and then we built the four spokes out from the Hub. They would provide the only convenient means of moving from one arc of the wheel to another. At the end of each spoke, the plastic-and-nylon sections of the rim began to grow.

  The available working area was multiplied by eight Where at first we could only work a few at a time, there was soon room for everyone, and we could have used more. After the first month replacements began flowing up for the sick, the injured, and the dead. Our construction pace swiftened.

  Oddly enough, it was the replacements who complained about the crowded cabins, the monotonous, unpalatable food, the eternal discomfort. They reinfected us, we who had been selected by our environment, who had grown hard and unfeeling to match it.

  Kovac had driven us hard. He had driven himself twice as hard, but few of us considered that. He sensed our unrest and called suddenly for a change in the schedule. Whether there was disagreement below I never knew, but the shipments began arriving in a different order.

  The plumbers, the electricians, and the steamfitters turned to their trade. The riggers, the welders, and the shipfitters began sheathing the plastic-and-nylon in thin aluminum plate with a ceramic coating and installing the temperature regulators.

  The rest of us worked inside, fixing temporary bunks to the walls and installing the permanent air-conditioning and water-recovery system, although the algae, oxygen-producing, sewage-disposal complex would have to wait until later. Then we put up what we could of the solar power plant.

  Two months after we reached space, we moved into the relative comfort of the partially completed Wheel. At this stage it looked more like a pinwheel waiting to be touched off. In a sense, that was what it was. A big glorified pinwheel.

  Such is the nature of men that we loo
ked on our new quarters as very near to heaven. We spread out luxuriously in our assigned eight feet by four feet by four feet—to be shared, of course, with two other men when they were off duty. We crowed, “This is living! Soft, man, mighty soft!"

  Expertly, Jock Eckert flipped himself over in the air and growled, “The guys who'll live here when we get it built—they'll have it foamy!"

  It wasn't just the extra space, either. The air was better, fresher, less poisonous, most of the water wrung out of it. The heat-control problem was almost licked and there was even a stall, later to be used as a shower, in which we could take sponge baths.

  But such is the nature of men that we soon began to complain again. We had reasons. Beside Earth, the Wheel was only a slightly more comfortable circle of Hell.

  “Tomorrow,” Kovac announced over the makeshift public-address system, and he paused as if he were weighing the consequences, “tomorrow we will apply spin. Foremen will report to my office for instructions."

  It was a ticklish job. We all knew it, but we cheered anyway. Spin would mean a return of weight, a simulation of gravity.

  But the Wheel hadn't been designed to spin until the rim was completed. The spokes would have to take stresses they were never meant to endure, stresses no designer could have dreamed of.

  The plan was to anchor a space taxi at each of the four rim segments. In each taxi an experienced Air Force pilot would apply power slowly, simultaneously, until the rim was rotating once every thirty-two seconds. That would simulate a gravity of one-third Earth-normal at the outermost level of the rim.

  Everyone except the coordinators was ordered out of the Wheel during the operation. Unassigned workers hung in space at the end of safety lines snapped to nearby third-stages, watching, At five minute intervals, with unthinking habit, they hauled themselves into the radiant heat of the flaming circle of the Sun or into the absorptive blackness of shade to help their suits equalize the temperature.

  I drifted at the end of a line attached to the Hub. On one side was the Earth a giant, rounded picture framed in white haze, colorful, dotted with fleecy clouds. On the other, if I shaded my eyes from the Sun and the dazzle along the Wheel, I could make the stars come out of the wavering, black swells of afterimage, unwinking, many colored. But my gaze was on Jock Eckert.

  Clinging to a hook-on ring, Jock was tying down a taxi. He tested each of the three lines individually and then the snap catches, yanking the taxi around unmercifully.

  “Come on, Jock!” the pilot complained over the ship-to-suit circuit. “Have a heart!"

  “If something goes wrong,” Eckert growled, “it ain't gonna be in my sector."

  But soon there was nothing left to test. The hooks were snapped to the rings, which were integral parts of the aluminum meteor shield, and Eckert let go. He drifted gently toward me, his safety line curving.

  Out of the background mumble of the roll call, a name came clear. “Eckert?"

  “Here,” Jock said carelessly and flipped on the weak suit-to-suit walkie-talkie circuit. “I hear the mail came while I was in with Kovac."

  “Yeah,” I said. “Nothing for you."

  “Can you beat those skirts!” Jock said in amazement. “Couldn't be faithful if their lives depended on it. When I get back I'll teach ’em a thing or two.” He chuckled. “A thing, anyway. Say! Did you hear from Gloria?"

  “No, but I submitted my resignation yesterday."

  “What did Kovac say?"

  “He said C.I.C. had spent twenty thousand dollars on me, and he was holding me to my contract."

  “The ugly son!"

  “Patterson?” It was the roll call again. “Yeah."

  “Can the chatter out there. Roll call suspended. This will go out on ship-to-suit, too, but that circuit won't be guarded. Everybody ready? Let's go. Taxis will assume the attitude."

  A wisp of vapor steamed from our taxi's rear jet. The lines, coiled snakily, straightened behind. On thin, brief jets, the taxi maneuvered into position.

  Jock tugged at his safety line easily, turning his suit around so that he could scan the other sectors, guarding his eyes. As he completed the circle, he stopped his spin and muttered. “Okay, okay!"

  “At the count, now,” said the coordinator, “one-two-three—” The taxi was at the end of three taut lines. Vapor streamed from its rear jet, became tinged with flame. It strained at the weightless but still massive structure. I looked at Jock. Through the dark glass of his faceplate, I could see his eyes intent upon the taxi some thirty long feet away.

  Slowly the distance lengthened. The Wheel began to move—

  “That lead line,” Jock said suddenly. “It's too short. It's putting too much strain on that front plate."

  The flame ate deeper into the vapor at the taxi's stern.

  “The plate's loosening!” Jock said urgently, “If it goes, the others will go, too. God knows what that would do to the Wheel! Hold everything!” he shouted. “Cut off power"

  “It's no use,” I said quickly. “Everybody's on the TBS circuit. They can't hear you."

  “They ain't gonna foul up on my sector,” Jock growled. He yanked viciously at his safety line and dived toward the incomplete section of rim.

  I watched one corner of the plate pull free of its rivets. “Jock!” I yelled. “Don't! You can't do anything!"

  “If I can get my line around that hook-on ring, I can lash it to the next one and equalize the strain."

  It happened with appalling suddenness. The plate jerked free, snapping malignantly at the end of the line.

  It cut into Jock's suit like a hot knife through butter.

  VII

  Captain Max Kovac stood just inside the narrow doorway to our compartment, his legs spread against the unaccustomed sensation of weight, his dark face and speckled eyes unreadable. He said without inflection, “Eckert himself was untouched, but he was minutes dead before help could reach him."

  “What killed him?” someone asked sullenly.

  “No air. His brain cells starved for oxygen,” Kovac said explicitly, as if there were a kind of expiation in stressing the details. “His body fluids evaporated in the near vacuum."

  I lay in my bunk, feeling weight like an ache in my bones, and the funny part was that the canvas and aluminum below seemed to be pushing me upward.

  “He's dead,” I said wearily. “What's the use of talking about it?"

  Kovac looked at me coldly. “Luckily the Wheel took little damage. We can get back to work on the next shift."

  “This satellite of yours has killed twenty-three of us already,” I said. “Aren't you satisfied?"

  His eyes burned at me. “You think I haven't died with each one of them? I tried to make you understand—” He broke off. “It's not my satellite. It's yours. My job is to help you build it, and I'll never be satisfied until it's built."

  “This damn killer ain't worth the life of one man like Jock Eckert!” someone shouted behind me.

  There was a low grumble of agreement.

  “Suppose we should decide we don't want to finish this contraption?” a sly voice chimed in.

  “You signed up to do a job.” Kovac's voice was harsh and metallic. “You're going to do it!"

  “Make us!” someone yelled. “We got a right to quit if we want to. That's in the Constitution!"

  “It isn't. And if it were—the Constitution ends with the atmosphere. Up here you'll work or else!"

  “Or else what, Captain?” asked the sly voice.

  “Or else you won't eat"

  “That's silly, Captain. There's only five of you rocket boys. You can't make us work or keep us from eating, not two hundred of us."

  “Don't talk like a fool!” Kovac said contemptuously. “You aren't on Earth, and you can't get back in without a perfectly functioning piece of machinery under you. You're here until your job is finished or I send you in."

  “Now, Captain,” the sly voice continued, “who's talking like a fool? If we should take over and rad
io in for help, how long could C.I.C. hold out?"

  “You've got contracts. Break them and you'll be sued."

  “All of us? Nuts! How far would C.I.C. get when a jury heard what we went through?"

  Kovac looked at us as if he had turned over a rock and we had crawled out. “If you'd read those contracts,” he said softly, “you'd realize that any organized disobedience above the one hundred twenty mile limit is mutiny. It will be treated as such. You said that there were only five of us. Right. But we're armed, and we'll shoot.

  “I want you to think what a few bullets would do to this glorified balloon. And you might consider this: you've lost twenty-three men, but the worst is behind you and the casualties will be light from here in. Mutiny and there'll be more than twenty-three of you dead before it's over."

  He faced us barehanded, as if it was beneath him to draw a gun, and stared us down. We moved restlessly under that unrelenting pressure. And then he turned quickly, stepped through the doorway, and slammed the airtight door.

  No one moved for a moment, and then a big steamfitter rushed to the door. He jerked at the handle. He spun, rage and fear struggling for the battlefield of his face.

  “It's locked,” he said hoarsely.

  “He can't do that!” someone shouted.

  “We might get holed by a meteor!” another voice suggested. “We'd die in here, trapped!"

  “Let's break through!"

  A clot of them surged toward the bulkhead. I sat up.

  “Wait a minute!” George Kendrix said. Everyone heard his low, trained voice. They stopped, not because they liked him, not because they respected him, but caught by his voice and the warning implicit in it. “You'll die quicker if you break that bulkhead. By now Kovac has evacuated the air from the next compartment."

  They stared at Kendrix's lean, sardonic face and slowly drifted back. “What are we gonna do?” one of them asked helplessly.