“Yes. You said it was strictly against the rules.”
Norden seemed embarrassed, which was somewhat unlike him.
“Well, it is in a way, but this isn’t a normal trip and you aren’t technically a passenger. I think we can manage it after all.”
Gibson was delighted. He had always wondered what it was like to wear a spacesuit, and to stand in nothingness with the stars all around one. It never even occurred to him to ask Norden why he had changed his mind, and for this Norden was very thankful.
The plot had been brewing for about a week. Every morning a little ritual took place in Norden’s room when Hilton arrived with the daily maintenance schedules, summarizing the ship’s performance and the behavior of all its multidinous machines during the past twenty-four hours. Usually there was nothing of any importance, and Norden signed the reports and filed them away with the log book. Variety was the last thing he wanted here, but sometimes he got it.
“Listen, Johnnie,” said Hilton (he was the only one who called Norden by his first name; to the rest of the crew he was always “Skipper”). “It’s quite definite now about our air-pressure. The drop’s practically constant; in about ten days we’ll be outside tolerance limits.”
“Confound it! That means we’ll have to do something. I was hoping it wouldn’t matter till we dock.”
“I’m afraid we can’t wait until then; the records have to be turned over to the Space Safety Commission when we get home, and some nervous old woman is sure to start yelling if pressure drops below limits.”
“Where do you think the trouble is?”
“In the hull, almost certainly.”
“That pet leak of yours up round the North Pole?”
“I doubt it; this is too sudden. I think we’ve been holed again.”
Norden looked mildly annoyed. Punctures due to meteoric dust happened two or three times a year on a ship of this size. One usually let them accumulate until they were worth bothering about, but this one seemed a little too big to be ignored.
“How long will it take to find the leak?”
“That’s the trouble,” said Hilton in tones of some disgust. “We’ve only one leak detector, and fifty thousand square meters of hull. It may take a couple of days to go over it. Now if it had only been a nice big hole, the automatic bulkheads would have gone into operation and located it for us.”
“I’m mighty glad they didn’t!” grinned Norden. “That would have taken some explaining away!”
Jimmy Spencer, who as usual got the job that no one else wanted to do, found the puncture three days later, after only a dozen circuits of the ship. The blurred little crater was scarcely visible to the eye, but the supersensitive leak detector had registered the fact that the vacuum near this part of the hull was not as perfect as it should have been. Jimmy had marked the place with chalk and gone thankfully back into the airlock.
Norden dug out the ship’s plans and located the approximate position from Jimmy’s report. Then he whistled softly and his eyebrows climbed towards the ceiling.
“Jimmy,” he said, “does Mr. Gibson know what you’ve been up to?”
“No,” said Jimmy. “I’ve not missed giving him his astronautics classes, though it’s been quite a job to manage it as well as——”
“All right, all right! You don’t think anyone else would have told him about the leak?”
“I don’t know, but I think he’d have mentioned it if they had.”
“Well, listen carefully. This blasted puncture is smack in the middle of his cabin wall, and if you breathe a word about it to him, I’ll skin you. Understand?”
“Yes,” gulped Jimmy, and fled precipitately.
“Now what?” said Hilton, in tones of resignation.
“We’ve got to get Martin out of the way on some pretext and plug the hole as quickly as we can.”
“It’s funny he never noticed the impact. It would have made quite a din.”
“He was probably out at the time. I’m surprised he never noticed the air current; it must be fairly considerable.”
“Probably masked by the normal circulation. But anyway, why all the fuss? Why not come clean about it and explain what’s happened to Martin? There’s no need for all this melodrama.”
“Oh, isn’t there? Suppose Martin tells his public that a 12th magnitude meteor has holed the ship— and then goes on to say that this sort of thing happens every other voyage? How many of his readers will understand not only that it’s no real danger, but that we don’t usually bother to do anything even when it does happen? I’ll tell you what the popular reaction would be: ‘If it was a little one, it might just as well be a big ‘un.’ The public’s never trusted statistics. And can’t you see the headlines: ‘Ares Holed by Meteor!’ That would be bad for trade!”
“Then why not simply tell Martin and ask him to keep quiet?”
“It wouldn’t be fair on the poor chap. He’s had no news to hang his articles on to for weeks. It would be kinder to say nothing.”
“O.K.,” sighed Hilton. “It’s your idea. Don’t blame me if it backfires.”
“It won’t. I think I’ve got a watertight plan.”
“I don’t give a damn if it’s watertight. Is it airtight?”
All his life Gibson had been fascinated by gadgets, and the spacesuit was yet another to add to the collection of mechanisms he had investigated and mastered. Bradley had been detailed to make sure that he understood the drill correctly, to take him out into space, and to see that he didn’t get lost.
Gibson had forgotten that the suits on the Ares had no legs, and that one simply sat inside them. That was sensible enough, since they were built for use under zero gravity, and not for walking on airless planets. The absence of flexible leg-joints greatly simplified the designs of the suits, which were nothing more than perspex-topped cylinders sprouting articulated arms at their upper ends. Along the sides were mysterious flutings and bulges concerned with the air conditioning, radio, heat regulators, and the low-powered propulsion system. There was considerable freedom of movement inside them: one could withdraw one’s arms to get at the internal controls, and even take a meal without too many acrobatics.
Bradley had spent almost an hour in the airlock, making certain that Gibson understood all the main controls and catechizing him on their operation. Gibson appreciated his thoroughness, but began to get a little impatient when the lesson showed no sign of ending. He eventually mutinied when Bradley started to explain the suit’s primitive sanitary arrangements.
“Hang it all!” he protested, “we aren’t going to be outside that long!”
Bradley grinned.
“You’d be surprised,” he said darkly, “just how many people make that mistake.”
He opened a compartment in the airlock wall and took out two spools of line, for all the world like fishermen’s reels. They locked firmly into the mountings on the suits so that they could not be accidentally dislodged.
“Number One safety precaution,” he said. “Always have a lifeline anchoring you to the ship. Rules are made to be broken— but not this one. To make doubly sure, I’ll tie your suit to mine with another ten meters of cord. Now we’re ready to ascend the Matterhorn.”
The outer door slid aside. Gibson felt the last trace of air tugging at him as it escaped. The feeble impulse set him moving towards the exit, and he drifted slowly out into the stars.
The slowness of motion and the utter silence combined to make the moment deeply impressive. The Ares was receding behind him with a terribly inevitability. He was plunging into space— at last— his only link with safety that tenuous thread unreeling at his side. Yet the experience, though so novel, awoke faint echoes of familiarity in his mind.
His brain must have been working with unusual swiftness, for he recalled the parallel almost immediately. This was like the moment in his childhood— a moment, he could have sworn until now, forgotten beyond recall— when he had been taught to swim by being dropped into ten meters of water.
Once again he was plunging headlong into a new and unknown element.
The friction of the reel had checked his momentum when the cord attaching him to Bradley gave a jerk. He had almost forgotten his companion, who was now blasting away from the ship with the little gas jets at the base of his suit, towing Gibson behind him.
Gibson was quite startled when the other’s voice, echoing metallically from the speaker in his suit, shattered the silence.
“Don’t use your jets unless I tell you. We don’t want to build up too much speed, and we must be careful not to get our lines tangled.”
“All right,” said Gibson, vaguely annoyed at the intrusion into his privacy. He looked back at the ship. It was already several hundred meters away, and shrinking rapidly.
“How much line have we got?” he asked anxiously. There was no reply, and he had a moment of mild panic before remembering to press the “TRANSMIT” switch.
“About a kilometer,” Bradley answered when he repeated the question. “That’s enough to make one feel nice and lonely.”
“Suppose it broke?” asked Gibson, only half joking.
“It won’t. It could support your full weight, back on Earth. Even if it did, we could get back perfectly easily with our jets.”
“And if they ran out?”
“This is a very cheerful conversation. I can’t imagine that happening except through gross carelessness or about three simultaneous mechanical failures. Remember, there’s a spare propulsion unit for just such emergencies— and you’ve got warning indicators in the suit which let you know well before the main tank’s empty.”
“But just supposing,” insisted Gibson.
“In that case the only thing to do would be to switch on the suit’s S.O.S. beacon, and wait until someone came out to haul you back. I doubt if they’d hurry, in such circumstances. Anyone who got himself in a mess like that wouldn’t receive much sympathy.”
There was a sudden jerk; they had come to the end of the line. Bradley killed the rebound with his jets.
“We’re a long way from home now,” he said quietly.
It took Gibson several seconds to locate the Ares. They were on the night side of the ship so that it was almost wholly in shadow; the two spheres were thin, distant crescents that might easily have been taken for Earth and Moon, seen from perhaps a million kilometers away. There was no real sense of contact: the ship was too small and frail a thing to be regarded as a sanctuary any more. Gibson was alone with the stars at last.
He was always grateful that Bradley left him in silence and did not intrude upon his thoughts. Perhaps the other was equally overwhelmed by the splendid solemnity of the moment. The stars were so brilliant and so numerous that at first Gibson could not locate even the most familiar constellations. Then he found Mars, the brightest object in the sky next to the Sun itself, and so determined the plane of the ecliptic. Very gently, with cautious bursts from his gas jets, he swung the suit round so that his head pointed roughly towards the Pole Star. He was “the right way up” again, and the star patterns were recognizable once more.
Slowly he made his way along the Zodiac, wondering how many other men in history had so far shared this experience. (Soon, of course, it would be common enough, and the magic would be dimmed by familiarity.) Presently he found Jupiter, and later Saturn— or so he imagined. The planets could no longer be distinguished from the stars by the steady, unwinking light that was such a useful, though sometimes treacherous, guide to amateur astronomers. Gibson did not search for Earth or Venus, for the glare of the sun would have dazzled him in a moment if he had turned his eyes in that direction.
A pale band of light welding the two hemispheres of the sky together, the whole ring of the Milky Way was visible. Gibson could see quite clearly the vents and tears along its edge, where entire continents of stars seemed trying to break away and go voyaging alone into the abyss. In the Southern Hemisphere, the black chasm of the Coal Sack gaped like a tunnel drilled through the stars into another universe.
The thought made Gibson turn towards Andromeda. There lay the great Nebula— a ghostly lens of light. He could cover it with his thumbnail, yet it was a whole galaxy as vast as the sky-spanning ring of stars in whose heart he was floating now. That misty specter was a million times farther away than the stars— and they were a million times more distant than the planets. How pitiful were all men’s voyagings and adventures when seen against this background!
Gibson was looking for Alpha Centauri, among the unknown constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, when he caught sight of something which, for a moment, his mind failed to identify. At an immense distance, a white rectangular object was floating against the stars. That, at least, was Gibson’s first impression; then he realized that his sense of perspective was at fault and that, in fact, he was really seeing something quite small, only a few meters away. Even then it was some time before he recognized this interplanetary wanderer for what it was— a perfectly ordinary sheet of quarto manuscript paper, very slowly revolving in space. Nothing could have been more commonplace— or more unexpected here.
Gibson stared at the apparition for some time before he convinced himself that it was no illusion. Then he switched on his transmitter and spoke to Bradley.
The other was not in the least surprised.
“There’s nothing very remarkable about that,” he replied, rather impatiently. “We’ve been throwing out waste every day for weeks, and as we haven’t any acceleration some of it may still be hanging round. As soon as we start braking, of course, we’ll drop back from it and all our junk will go shooting out of the Solar System.”
How perfectly obvious, thought Gibson, feeling a little foolish, for nothing is more disconcerting than a mystery which suddenly evaporates. It was probably a rough draft of one of his own articles. If it had been a little closer, it would be amusing to retrieve it as a souvenir, and to see what effects its stay in space had produced. Unfortunately it was just out of reach, and there was no way of capturing it without slipping the cord that linked him with the Ares.
When he had been dead for ages, that piece of paper would still be carrying its message out among the stars; and what it was, he would never know.
Norden met them when they returned to the airlock. He seemed rather pleased with himself, though Gibson was in no condition to notice such details. He was still lost among the stars and it would be some time before he returned to normal— before his typewriter began to patter softly as he tried to recapture his emotions.
“You managed the job in time?” asked Bradley, when Gibson was out of hearing.
“Yes, with fifteen minutes to spare. We shut off the ventilators and found the leak right away with the good old smoky-candle technique. A blind rivet and a spot of quick-drying paint did the rest; we can plug the outer hull when we’re in dock, if it’s worth it. Mac did a pretty neat job— he’s wasting his talents as a navigator.”
CHAPTER
6
For Martin Gibson, the voyage was running smoothly and pleasantly enough. As he always did, he had now managed to organize his surroundings (by which he meant not only his material environment but also the human beings who shared it with him) to his maximum comfort. He had done a satisfactory amount of writing, some of it quite good and most of it passable, though he would not get properly into his stride until he had reached Mars.
The flight was now entering upon its closing weeks, and there was an inevitable sense of anticlimax and slackening interest, which would last until they entered the orbit of Mars. Nothing would happen until then; for the time being all of the excitements of the voyage were over.
The last high-light, for Gibson, had been the morning when he finally lost the Earth. Day by day it had come closer to the vast pearly wings of the corona, as though about to immolate all its millions in the funeral pyre of the Sun. One evening it had still been visible through the telescope— a tiny spark glittering bravely against the splendor that was soon to overwhelm it. Gibson
had thought it might still be visible in the morning, but overnight some colossal explosion had thrown the corona half a million kilometers farther into space, and Earth was lost against that incandescent curtain. It would be a week before it reappeared, and by then Gibson’s world would have changed more than he would have believed possible in so short a time.
If anyone had asked Jimmy Spencer just what he thought of Gibson, that young man would have given rather different replies at various stages of the voyage. At first he had been quite overawed by his distinguished shipmate, but that stage had worn off very quickly. To do Gibson credit, he was completely free from snobbery, and he never made unreasonable use of his privileged position on board the Ares. Thus from Jimmy’s point of view he was more approachable than the rest of the liner’s inhabitants— all of whom were in some degree his superior officers.
When Gibson had started taking a serious interest in astronautics, Jimmy had seen him at close quarters once or twice a week and had made several efforts to weigh him up. This had not been at all easy, for Gibson never seemed to be the same person for very long. There were times when he was considerate and thoughtful and generally good company. Yet there were other occasions when he was so grumpy and morose that he easily qualified as the person on the Ares most to be avoided.
What Gibson thought of him Jimmy wasn’t at all sure. He sometimes had an uncomfortable feeling that the author regarded him purely as raw material that might or might not be of value some day. Most people who knew Gibson slightly had that impression, and most of them were right. Yet as he had tried to pump Jimmy directly there seemed no real grounds for these suspicions.
Another puzzling thing about Gibson was his technical background. When Jimmy had started his evening classes, as everyone called them, he had assumed that Gibson was merely anxious to avoid glaring errors in the material he radioed back to Earth, and had no very deep interest in astronautics for its own sake. It soon became clear that this was far from being the case. Gibson had an almost pathetic anxiety to master quite abstruse branches of the science, and to demand mathematical proofs, some of which Jimmy was hard put to provide. The older man must once have had a good deal of technical knowledge, fragments of which still remained with him. How he had acquired it he never explained; nor did he give any reason for his almost obsessive attempts, doomed though they were to repeated failures, to come to grips with scientific ideas far too advanced for him. Gibson’s disappointment after these failures was so obvious that Jimmy found himself very sorry for him— except on those occasions when his pupil became bad-tempered and showed a tendency to blame his instructor. Then there would be a brief exchange of discourtesies, Jimmy would pack up his books and the lesson would not be resumed until Gibson had apologized.